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You’re listening to the My Wife, Quit or Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and dig deep into what strategies they use to grow their businesses. Today I have a very special guest on the show, Michael Hyatt. And as many of you know, Michael is a New York Times bestselling author and he actually used to run a multi-million dollar publishing company as well. So I was lucky to chat with him, especially on the eve of launching my brand new book, The Family First Entrepreneur. But don’t worry, we’re not talking about publishing books today. Instead, we’re gonna talk about something way more important and that’s how to get out of the way of your own mind.

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This is a great episode, trust me. But before we begin, I want to you know that tickets for the 2023 Seller Summit are now on sale over at SellersSummit.com. In fact, the price is going up this Wednesday. It is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And you probably know me well enough to know that my event has zero fluff. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business and not high level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people and it’s a very intimate event.

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Everyone eats together and everyone parties together every single night. Personally, I love smaller events and tickets always sell out far in advance. Now, if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250K or $1 million per year, we also offer a special mastermind experience where we break up into small groups, lock ourselves in a room and help each other with our businesses. The Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 23rd to May 25th. Go to sellersummit.com for more information. I also want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode.

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Now if you run an ecommerce business of any kind, you know how important it is to own your own customer contact list. And this is why I focus a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing. SMS, or text message marketing, is already a top 5-room resource for my ecommerce store, and I couldn’t have done that without Postscript, which is my text message provider. Now, why did I choose Postscript? It’s because they specialize in ecommerce stores, and ecommerce is their primary focus. Not only is it easy to use, but you can quickly segment your audience based on your exact sales data,

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and implement automated flows like an abandoned cart at the push of a button. Not only that, but it’s price well too and SMS is the perfect way to engage with your audience. So head on over to postcook.io slash Steve and try for free. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. And then finally, I wanted to mention my other podcast that I released with my partner Tony. And unlike this one, where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the Profitable Audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience.

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No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and 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, Quirter Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Michael Hyatt on the show. Michael is the founder of Full Focus, formerly Michael Hyatt & Co. And what I personally love about his company is that he works with his daughter, which is actually one of my dreams. He has scaled multiple companies over the years, including a $250 million publishing company with over 700 employees. His companies have been featured in the Inc 5000 list of one of the fastest growing companies in America.

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for many years in a row and he was actually named one of Inc’s best workplaces. He’s also the author of several books that have made the New York Times, Wall Street Journal bestseller list and the USA Today bestselling books, including Platform, Living Forward, Your Best Year Ever, Free to Focus and his latest book, Mind Your Mindset. Now I could go on and on about Michael, but that would probably take the entire duration of the podcast. There’s a lot we can learn, but today what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna focus on mindset.

03:36
and the key to breaking through your mental barriers. And with that, welcome to show, Michael. How you doing? Thanks, Steve. Appreciate you having me on. Yeah, I mean, it’s my honor. And I have to ask this upfront before I forget to ask, how are you so lucky to be working with your daughter in your business? Like, how did you get her to be actually interested in what you do for a living? That’s a great question. I’m not sure anybody’s ever asked me that specific question, but we’ve worked together for a long time. So.

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The first time we ever worked together on an actual project. Well, I take this back. When she was eight years old and I was in the book publishing industry, she went with me to the book trade show. And so she went to all my author meetings, all my vendor meetings, a little bit of everything. And she was so poised and did such a great job. So then I’d started taking her to things. And I have five daughters. So Megan is the oldest and my youngest daughter, Marissa also works for the company. But,

04:33
I just basically included them in my work. So when she was 17, at that time I was a literary agent and I had an author, one of my clients who was out on a book tour. This was back in the days when we literally traveled to different cities. And in this case, it was a big tour bus and we would go, we went to 15 different cities and she was with me and at 17, she was responsible for all merchandise sales. So it was a big job and she did great, but you know,

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We’ve just all gotten along great. all my daughters, in fact, all my daughters live within 30 minutes of me. Three of them, including Megan, but the three of them that have kids, and I have 10 grandkids, they all live within five minutes of me. So we’re pretty close-knit family. Yeah, I mean, that’s the dream right there. I’m very tight with my family, and that’s one of the reasons why I went into business in the first place, so I could spend more time with them.

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I think it’s amazing that you guys work together. I’m not sure if my daughter has any interest in what I do, but I’m hoping to kind of steer her that way, because I would love to have what you have. Well, I think you got to kind of set it up. You know, you’ve got to include her in things so she can get familiar with it. Talk to her a lot about why it matters and what’s important about it. And it’s funny how so much of that is caught, not taught.

05:55
Definitely. I’ve actually tried to include her in a lot of things. We filmed a lot of videos together. It’s been a good time. That’s good. Good, good. I want to start with a quick story. I’ve been teaching an online class about e-commerce for over a decade now. And for the longest time, I thought that the most important aspect of the class was to teach the strategy because that’s kind of how I was brought up. Like, tell me what to do and I’ll suck it up and I’ll do it. But over the years, I’ve chatted one-on-one with many students in my class.

06:26
And I’ve come to realize that what’s holding them back is what is in their heads. And I’m curious, you’ve worked with many high powered CEOs and executives, and I want to make the listeners first feel like they’re at home. Can you just give me some examples of your own personal experiences where either you or one of your clients have been in their heads?

06:45
Yeah, well, I think the first time this came home to roost for me was I had an executive coach by the name of Eileen. And back during the great recession, this would have been about 2009, August of 2009, she flew in to spend the day with me and she came in once a month for a full day. And it was about 75 % psychotherapy and about 25 % business coaching. But she plopped out in the chair, opened her notepad and she said, so tell me how it lasts.

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month with and this would have been July of 2009 that she was talking about. And I said, well, it didn’t go that great. She said, well, what happened? I said, well, we missed the top line. Our revenue numbers by about 10%. We missed our profit number so bad that we lost money. And she said, well, gosh, that is kind of shocking because when I sat here last month, you were so upbeat, so confident that you were not only going to hit the budget, but that you had a pretty good chance of beating the budget.

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What happened? And I said, well, you know, we’re in the middle of a big recession. know, inflation is high, foot traffic at retail is down, consumer confidence is down. So the economy, like that was the first reason I gave her. And I’d been rehearsing these, what I would look back on now as excuses for my board, because I was going to have to meet with them to report on the same numbers. And so she was kind of serving as a proxy for that. I said, the second reason is the book publishing industry itself,

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is an enormous turmoil because we’re in the midst of this digital conversion and nobody knows where it’s going to end up, but it’s created a lot of chaos in our industry. Third, social media has changed everything we thought we knew about marketing and we haven’t quite figured out how to use it to sell books yet, but nothing that we used to do seems to be working like it used to work. So I said, that’s why those three reasons.

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And she just kind of paused for a second and she said, okay, but what was it about your leadership that caused this result? Which really took me back. I was kind of offended, definitely felt defensive. And I said to her, said, this has nothing to do with my leadership. This has everything to do with the economy, my industry, the state of marketing. She said, okay, I get that those are factors, but what is it about your leadership? Well,

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She quickly saw that I wasn’t getting it. So she said, let me ask the question another way. If you could go back 30 days and you knew then what you know now, would you have done anything differently? And I said, yes. She said, like what? I said, well, I would have met with my sales team every day just to make sure that they were on track and we were pacing to at least hit the budget if not exceeded. She said, okay, great. What else? I said, I would have gone on that sales call to Walmart.

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Because I think that just having my presence there as a CEO would have caused them to buy more books and would have been a better result. She said, great, what else? So I gave her, I don’t know, three to five things. And she kind of smiled and she said, so what you’re telling me is that it was about your leadership. And she was exactly right. Because I saw the problem as out there. Beyond my control, I was just a victim. All this stuff was happening to me.

10:09
What she helped me realize, Steve, is that the problem was in here between my ears. It was the way I was thinking about the problem and that I had way more agency, but I’d given it away. And so in the one sense, when I took ownership of the results, the good news was that now I got my agency back and all of a sudden I had the power. Like I could do something differently. And we went on to do something very different that next month.

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The bad news was it took away my excuses. But I saw the distinction between sort of the problems out there and the problems in here in my thinking. I love that because my dad was just like your coach. Like we lost a volleyball game once and he was like, why did you lose? And I’m like, ah, I’m not tall enough. You know, I deflected it towards like just things I couldn’t change. And he was like, well, you can jump, can’t you? You can work on your jump, can’t you?

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I didn’t see you practicing after school. And my dad did this with every time I did better at a test, that’s what he would say to me to the point where I just stopped making excuses after a while. So I know a lot of people out there listening have limiting beliefs. And the question is, how do you get over it? And is there a process for doing so? Because it’s not really like a switch that you can just.

11:33
Well, there is. And in this book, Mind Your Mindset, which I did write with my oldest daughter, Megan, the CEO of Full Focus, we talk about a three-step process. And so the first step of the process is basically to identify the story that you’re telling yourself. Now, the subtitle of the book is the science that shows success starts with your thinking. So we did a deep dive into the brain science.

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showing how our brains work. And one of the things that we discovered early on is that our brains cannot exist without constantly pursuing meaning. In other words, there are things that happen to us, and then there’s the interpretation that our brain provides of what that means. So what happened? And then the interpretation. Those are two totally different things.

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So for example, I heard a story a couple of weeks ago about two identical twins, grew up in the same family. They had alcoholic parents, both of them. And they asked the successful brother, who was very, very successful from a financial standpoint and almost every aspect of his life, said, well, what do you attribute your success to? And he thought for a second, he said, well, I grew up in a family of alcoholics.

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And I didn’t want to end up like that. So I worked my butt off to avoid that. And he said that it was kind of inevitable, you know, just the background I had, the circumstances I had, it was kind of inevitable that I would succeed. So they asked the second brother who was basically broke, almost homeless, had not made anything of himself. They said, why aren’t you successful? And he said, well, what would you expect? My parents were alcoholics.

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It was inevitable that I would turn out like them. So the facts were the same. They both grew up in a family of alcoholics, but the meaning that they assigned to that fact or those sets of facts were completely different. And so I think making the distinction, and this is in that first step of identify the story, is that our brains are compelled to create stories.

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We have these cells in our brains. It’s almost like if you go into a container store, you know, where they sell all different size boxes to store different kinds of things. Your brain is like that. There are brain cells that store the names of people that store locations that store historical facts and all that. But as those different neurons connect through synapses and begin to fire, and this is Hebb’s law.

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is the neurons that fire together, wire together, and that’s the brain knitting together a story from these facts. The problem is, is that once you get that story, it’s easy to confuse the story with the truth. Because whenever you have the trigger, something that reminds you of that story, your brain automatically sends the signal down that neural pathway, and the challenge is to create a different neural pathway.

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And we certainly don’t need to do this with every story because some stories are actually very helpful. But one of the things we realized in the brain science too is that up to 20 % of our memories are false, as in they didn’t happen. Up to 70 % of our memories are distorted in some significant way. whenever we find ourselves frustrated, stuck, not getting the results we want,

15:23
We need to identify the story. We need to ask ourselves the question, wait a second, what is the story I’m telling myself right now? And in the book, we talk about this, if there’s a villain in the book, it’s somebody we call the narrator. And this is, it’s a personification of our thinking process, but it’s like we have this person who lives inside our head and is offering nonstop color commentary.

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on everything that happens. Now the brain’s goal, the reason the brain does this, is the brain’s number one job is to keep us safe. And so it’s constantly taking the experiences of the past and trying to predict the future and keep us safe. But the narrator is talking nonstop, much like if you watch a football game, you there’s what’s happening on the field, those are the facts. And then there’s the commentators, usually at least two, sometimes three.

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who are talking nonstop about what it all means and where it’s going. And that’s the narrator. But it’s difficult to think about our thinking. And yet, as you pointed out, like that’s the major thing that changes the results. Because our thinking and our stories are what cause us to select the strategies that we select. And those strategies are what delivers the results we get.

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So if we want better results, extraordinary results, biggie sized results, the best way to do that is to change our thinking, to change the story. But first we got to identify it. I have a perfect example of this. When I first started in business, I used to be an electrical engineer. And I remember the first thing I tried to sell, I wasn’t very good at it. And what I told myself is, I’m just an engineer. I program and I write code all day.

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This isn’t my thing and that’s why it failed. Is that an example of what you’re talking about? Identifying the narrative. Yeah, it’s perfect. Like here’s another example. I use this in the book. I went to an industry trade show and there was the CEO of one of the larger companies in our industry who was about to speak, about to deliver a keynote. And so our language reveals our thinking. The words that we use reveal what we’re thinking. So as a business coach, which is our primary business at Full Focus,

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I’m listening very intently and very carefully to the language that my clients use when they’re talking about a problem or talking about their role or what they’re capable of or whatever. So this keynote speaker stands up and he says, hey, I’m not a very gifted speaker. And he kind of laughed. And then he spent the next hour approving it. So he rambled. There was no organization. It was terrible. I looked around the room and probably 80 % of the people had their nose in their phone. They just weren’t paying attention.

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because he had it in his thought that he wasn’t a very good speaker, he wasn’t a gifted speaker. So, you know, honestly, why even try? You know, if you really believe that, kind like your engineer story, if you believe that you’re only X, then you may not even try. My youngest daughter, Marissa, who works for our company too, she will often say when somebody says like that, you know, I’m not a very gifted speaker, she would say, well, if you say so, our words shape

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our thinking, and our thinking shapes our words. There’s this reciprocal relationship between our language and our thinking. So part of this identifying the story, step one in the process is to pay attention to our language and particularly pay attention to the language that the narrator inside of our head hears. We may never give voice to it and yet may just be rattling around our head, but what are the exact sentences that the narrator uses for years?

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I had the narrator saying to me, you know, you’re not very good with money. Watch out. You’re not very good with money. Are you sure you want to do that? Because you’re not very good with money. That all went back to an experience where I had a business that went bankrupt back in early nineties. And I had a friend a couple of years later that said to me on an airplane, he said to me, as he kind of listened to some of my story, he said, wow, it sounds to me like you’re not very good with money.

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And it didn’t occur to me to question that as, as though it were an opinion. I respected him as a mentor and I just ingested that as though it were the truth. And guess what? For the next 10 years, I set out to prove the truth of that statement. You know, I made bad financial decisions. I wasn’t very good with money and it wasn’t until I began to change that story. And frankly was meeting Dave Ramsey and

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having a session with him, they began to change my story about money, which changed my actions, which led to different results. But it all begins with identifying that story.

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My first book, The Family First Entrepreneur, is now available for pre-order at your favorite online retailer. Now this is a book about entrepreneurship, but not the kind that they tell you about in business school or that you often hear about online. Now if you can relate to my wife and I story, you probably don’t seek to become world famous or ridiculously rich. Now you might not say no to these things, but we probably have similar priorities. You want a good life and the freedom to enjoy it. But here’s the problem with 99 % of the business and entrepreneurship advice out there.

20:59
They all preach that you need to work 80 hours a week and hustle your butt off just to get ahead. And in fact, a popular saying is that entrepreneurs are willing to work 80 hours a week to avoid working 40 hours a week for someone else. Well, I’m calling BS on this. If you follow this advice, then you’ll end up sacrificing your time and your freedom for the promise of riches, work yourself to the bone and lose what precious time you had to spend with your loved ones. Now on this podcast, which I’ve run since 2014, I’ve interviewed over 450 successful entrepreneurs

21:26
who are absolutely killing it with their multi-million dollar businesses. But what you don’t hear about publicly is that they don’t see their family much or that they’re totally burned out or stressed out. You don’t hear about the huge sacrifices that they had to make in order to get there. So in this book, I’ll share with you an alternative to the hustle culture nonsense we so often hear about in relation to achieving financial success. You can in fact achieve financial success without being a stranger to your kids. You can make good money and have the freedom to enjoy it.

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and you don’t have to work 80 hours a week and be a slave to your business just to make it all work. So if you’re tired of hearing from a bunch of single men or women or 20 something kids who drive fancy cars and brag about how hard they work or how much they make, I will give you a different perspective from a father who makes both business and family work. So join me in my book launch and get access to a bunch of freebies. Go to mywifecooderjob.com slash book and I’ll send you bonuses, invitations to book parties that I’ll be throwing all over the country and special offers.

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MyWifeQuitterJob.com slash book. Now back to the show.

22:30
Just want to tell all the listeners out there, especially the ones who are in my class, the number one narrative that I get is I’m not tech savvy enough to do this. I get that too. Yeah. And I point them to like 99 % of the students who put up beautiful websites. I mean, it can be done. No one’s tech savvy from the start. would say 99 % of the people are not tech savvy, but you can learn. And that’s what it takes. Same thing with money. Same thing with nearly everything. You know, you can learn it. And that’s a much more empowering thought to have.

22:59
You know, instead of me saying I’m not very good with money or I’m not very tech savvy, I could say I’m learning to become tech savvy or I’m learning to be good with money. And that was the thing that dawned on me is like literally almost anything could be learned. And the only difference between, you know, me and some financial guru is the financial guru spend a lot of time and probably made a lot of mistakes to get where he is. But we’ve got to identify that, that story. It’s easy to think about, you know, the thoughts that other people have.

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about other people. It’s easy to sometimes see what other people are thinking and see how that’s not serving them. But it’s more difficult to see our own thinking. But that’s where we have to begin. Seems like we actually have to just take a make a conscious effort to maybe write these down then. Right? Yes. Okay. Well, literally we have to and this is step two in the process that we outline in the book, Mind Your Mindset, is we have to interrogate the story.

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In other words, we have to ask ourselves the question, is this true? And so we get, we go through several questions in the book about how to interrogate the story and how to just challenge that narrative because so often it’s not true or it’s not accurate. And again, I think we just have to realize that a story is a story. It’s not the truth. That’s hard for a lot of people to get. And a lot of people become defensive when you start to interrogate their story.

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because that story, again, it’s designed to keep them safe. So I had a story about myself that also involves my executive coach, Eileen, but this is another incident. Sounds like a great coach, the way. Yeah, she was amazing. So we were talking about introversion and extroversion. I don’t know how we got into the conversation, but we were talking about the Myers-Briggs assessment, and I was an introvert on Myers-Briggs.

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And so she said, well, what does that mean to you? And I said, well, it means that I really don’t like people. You know, I’m much more, I really much more enjoy being alone and people wear me out and I don’t like to meet new people. I’d much rather stay with the same people. And she said, okay, she said, well, you’re the CEO of a public company where you have to meet a lot of new people. So how does that construct of introversion serving you?

25:25
And first of all, it never occurred to me until that moment that that was a story I was telling myself. Now, could you objectively verify it? Possibly. But what she helped me to see is that I could change the story to get different results. Because she said to me, are there ever situations where extraversion would actually serve you better? And I thought, wow, yes, definitely.

25:54
Like when I’m public speaking, you know, if I could actually meet the audience, I go out into the crowd and shake hands and talk to people before I spoke, I would probably, they would be more sympathetic to what I had to say. And she said, well, why don’t you try it? Cause maybe most of this is just a way of thinking. She said, do you think you could think like an extrovert? And I said, well, I probably could. She said, well, what would that be like? And I said, well, I’d have to be telling myself,

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that I enjoy meeting new people, that I’m curious about their lives, that I wanna learn about new people. She said, perfect, give it a try. And so what I realized is that, and I would still self identify as an introvert, but I can turn that on or off. Sometimes it serves me, sometimes it doesn’t. But again, it’s a story primarily and it’s flexible. And so we gotta interrogate the story.

26:53
and not see that as something fixed that we can’t change because we use this all the time. know, people try to lose weight. They say, well, I can’t lose weight because I’m big boned or, you know, I, I’d like to have a better marriage, but I’m married to a narcissist. You know, that the problem is always out there somewhere instead of in, in here. And there are objective facts that we can’t change, but we have a lot more control than we think, but we got to interrogate the story. That’s step two.

27:22
I recall a story in your book where you had to give a speech and you were tired and not looking forward to it. And you were like, I just have to get this over with or something like that. And then was it your coach who, who? No, that, that was, that was a great story about sort of the connection between language and how that can affect our thinking. But, yeah, I just had literally boarded the plane. sat down. We were still at the gate. My phone rings and it’s one of my best friends. And he said, Hey, what’s up?

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And I said, well, I’m sitting on a plane because I have to go to San Diego to give a speech. And he kind of paused and then he kind of started laughing. said, he said, first of all, dude, you’re going to San Diego, best climate on the planet, awesome fish tacos. And he said, and you’re, you’re, you’re speaking to like a thousand people. And this has been your dream for years. And he said, you don’t have to do anything. Nobody’s holding a gun to your head. He said, you.

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get to do that. And that was the difference. One little tweak between the word have to and get to is a total mind shift. And so ever since then, whenever I have to do anything, you know, I wake up in the morning and maybe there’s some things that are not particularly my favorite, but I just say I get to. And that changes kind of the way that I’m thinking. Because again, there’s this reciprocal relationship.

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between our thinking and our speaking. And if we can learn to listen to our own language, we can kind of catch ourselves and self-correct in our thinking. But if you can’t do that yourself, and it’s hard at the beginning, give the people that are around you, whether it’s your family or the people that you work with, give them permission to just check your language. Tell them what you’re trying to do and just say, like, if you hear me expressing a limiting belief,

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or saying something that’s not serving what I’m trying to create in the world, call me out. And that’s very helpful. It’s the same thing with me. For the longest time, I hated lifting weights. But then now I tell myself, well, you’re going to feel a lot better about yourself. And then I start looking forward to it because I think about how it makes me feel after I’m done with the workout. Yes. And so now I look forward to doing it. It’s weird. Just whatever story you’re telling yourself.

29:45
really makes a huge difference in your attitude. It so does. And that kind of leads us to step three, which is to imagine a better story. And I had an experience, it wasn’t about working out, although I’ve had that same thoughts. I don’t particularly enjoy working out. I did it this morning, but for me, it’s I get to listen to a book or a podcast. And so it’s my opportunity and I love learning. So it’s my opportunity to learn.

30:14
But I had another public speaking story where, um, I used to dread public speaking. And I thought, like most people do that if I get up on the stage, I’m going to die. You know, it’s like the number one or number two fears that, uh, most people say, you know, they’re more afraid of that than death generally. So

30:36
One of the things I noticed was that whenever I had to step up on stage and speak for something, I would dread it. I would not look forward to it. And I would be really nervous. So my hands would start sweating profusely and I hated to shake hands with somebody before I spoke because I felt like it sort of betrayed, you know, my fear. And then I would sweat like under my arms so that this not proud to admit this, but I would wear two t-shirts under a dress shirt.

31:05
hoping that I didn’t sweat through the t-shirts and give myself away. And my voice would get kind of shaky and all this stuff. But for me, imagining a better story was getting the focus off me and focusing on the audience and saying, what are their needs? What do they hope to hear today? How can I be of service? And then when I would get those nervous feelings, which I do to this very day, I would say, oh,

31:35
That’s how my body prepares itself for peak performance. Because all those effects I was experiencing were the result of adrenaline. And adrenaline is one of the most powerful drugs on the planet. It gives you superpowers. You think faster, you think sharper, you’re hyper-focused, you’re very alert, your brain does better on adrenaline. You don’t want it for long periods of time, but…

32:04
You know, if you’re running from a T-Rex or you’re getting up to speak, it’s very helpful. So imagine a bigger, better story is to kind of reframe, you know, what you’re experiencing, what your thinking is to something that’s going to better serve you. And I, and I find that when I repeat that mantra of, this is how my body prepares itself for peak performance. That that really does. It causes me to relax. I’ll still have the butterflies and all that, but I welcome them. I want that adrenaline.

32:32
Cause I know I’m gonna perform better if I’ve got it. Interesting. I mean, I had a similar fright with public speaking and now when I’m up there, I actually really enjoy it because I feel powerful up there. Yeah. But it took me a while to get to that point. I’m not sure if I changed any narratives, but I love just seeing people smile or laugh at something I said and it’s kind of addictive. Well, it is. And one of the things I noticed that I love too is when I’m up on stage,

33:01
Stories will occur to me that I didn’t think of when I was preparing. And I’m always trying to manage that against the clock. Right? I don’t want to tell so much that I go over time, but I’m also hyper-focused on the audience. And I feel like, you know, like you were talking about people smiling and all that. I almost feel like I can read their minds. I’m like really trying to look in their eyes and really try to connect with them personally and emotionally. But I feel like there’s almost a intuitive superpower. And a lot of speakers report this that they have in the moment.

33:29
they know whether stuff’s connecting or not. If you don’t, you know, that’s something to work on. But I think for most people that speak, they see that. Yeah. I know for me, when it comes to changing the narrative, it always helps to just talk to someone who’s already done what you’re trying to do. Because I know for me, at least, I have limiting thoughts where, oh, I could never do that. Right? I could never make my…

33:57
create a seven figure business without like a large staff or whatever but then I met someone who did it and then all of a sudden I was like oh okay well this guy does did it then that means I can

34:08
Yeah, that’s, that’s powerful, Steve in chapter nine of mind, your mindset. talk about the importance of community and who you hang out with matters because thinking is contagious. And this is why corporate culture is such a difficult thing to fix because once the thinking is negative, it becomes contagious. And then everybody’s thinking that way. And it’s hard to turn.

34:38
things around, who you hang with matters. Jim Rohn says, we’ve all heard this, that you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And I don’t know if that’s empirically verifiable or not, but I think the principle is absolutely true. And, you know, one of the things you can do if you want to change your story is hang out, be intentional about your friendships, about your associations, and hang out with people that think different than you.

35:08
Like if you want to make a lot of money, if you want to make more money than you’re making now, hang out. doesn’t mean you have to avoid all broke people. Some of those people you can’t afford to avoid because they’re in your family. But if you want to make more money, for example, hang out with people that are making a lot of money and just see how they think. If you want to be a better public speaker, hang out with professional speakers. How do they think? I promise you, if you take a guy like Elon Musk,

35:38
or Mark Cuban or some other billionaire, it’s not that they’re that much smarter than you, although both of them are wicked smart. It’s not that they have a better Rolodex or network of contacts than you do, although they probably have that too. But the most fundamental thing is that they think differently than you do. The way they think about money, for Elon Musk, I’m sure, and I’ve heard a lot of rich people say this, hey, it’s just another zero.

36:08
more money, just a way of keeping score. But if you could do something that generates 100,000 for your business, why couldn’t you do a million dollars or $10 million or $100 million? I mean, what’s the difference? Most of it is in our thinking, how we think about the issue. I’m actually really glad I’m talking to you, because I currently actually have this limiting belief right now. I told you earlier before we hit record that my book is coming out May 16th. And I have this mental block.

36:37
about hitting the New York Times bestseller list. And right now I’m, like I’ve been trying to rewrite this narrative, like, because I’ve talked to various book launch coaches and they’re like, ah, you know, it’s like single digit percentage or whatnot. And what people have been telling me is like, you’re just not gonna hit it. You’re just not gonna hit it. And I’ve been trying to rewrite that narrative. And I know you’ve hit it multiple times, right? What was the narrative that you told yourself?

37:04
Well, that’s an interesting question because let’s just kind of deconstruct this. First of all, there are the facts. And the facts are that there more books being published than ever before. Another fact, and I’m now speaking as a publishing professional that’s been in the book publishing industry for decades, is that the most difficult list to make is the New York Times because it’s not a simple matter of sales.

37:34
Like there’s this thing called book scan and basically they scan the number of books that are sold at retail. And that’s what USA Today uses. That’s what Publishers Weekly uses. That’s what the Wall Street Journal uses. And so the top selling nonfiction book in any given week is going to be number one. The second top selling is going to be number two and so forth. So that’s kind of internal logic that we understand and makes sense. The New York Times.

38:04
has a more complex algorithm and nobody knows what it is. And you can have a book that sells tens of thousands of copies in a week and doesn’t make the list because the people at the New York Times decide that it’s not worthy for whatever reason. Okay, so those are the facts. Now, the story that you might be tempted to delay on that is that there’s no way I can make it. You know, it’s not even worth trying.

38:35
And the story I’ve chosen to tell myself is that while it’s not guaranteed, there’s a lot that I can do to influence it. So I may not make it, you know, at the end of the day, there’s somebody else pulling the lever about that. That truly is an outside thing. But internally, I can give myself a fighting chance. But if I’m telling myself a story that says there’s no way, I won’t even try.

39:04
But the cool thing about the New York Times list is that even if you don’t make it, just the effort of trying will probably get you on every other list. So here’s a question, we talk about this in the book, but here’s a question that’s a better question to ask yourself whenever you feel like something’s impossible. What would have to be true for me to hit the New York Times list? And so you might think, for example, one of the best things I could do is get endorsements.

39:33
because that’s kind of the thing that the average reader uses as a proxy for knowing whether or not to spend their money on the book. So I spent a lot of time doing that. This particular book, I had Tony Robbins and Don Maxwell and Dave Ramsey and about 50 different people endorse it because I’m trying to get myself a fighting chance to get onto the New York Times list. Then you might say to yourself, okay, I know I’ve got to get visibility and I need to get

40:01
Entree into as many on audiences as I can so I’m gonna get on as I’m gonna book as many podcast interviews as I can and So maybe set yourself a goal you say I’m gonna do a hundred podcast interviews And I’m just gonna go crazy on that because that’s gonna introduce me to people. don’t currently have a relationship with So, know, I’m create a an amazing sales page I’m gonna create pre publication bonuses so that people are really incentivized

40:30
to come buy the book before it launches, and then maybe even have a different set of bonuses during launch week, whatever. But that kind of question, what would have to be true, that sets into motion a completely different way of thinking and a completely different way of acting that better doesn’t guarantee, but it makes it more likely that you’re going to hit the list than if you didn’t do anything. Makes sense? Absolutely. Basically, put your best foot forward.

41:00
whatever happens happens. And this is actually what my dad used to tell me to. So that’s the attitude I’m taking with it right now. I’m going to do everything in my power, whatever happens happens. And I really appreciated your endorsement of my book as well. I really appreciated that. You’re welcome. And I mean, I have your book right here. I recommend that everyone go out and pick it up. I, as I mentioned before, anyone who’s listening here, I’ve just come to realize, and maybe this is because I’m an engineer.

41:29
But I used to just think that the facts and the strategies would get you where you want to be. But really, just after just talking with so many students in my class, it’s all in their heads. Like there’s, you’re smart enough to do whatever you want to do. It’s just a matter of telling yourself the right thing. So you actually take action on it. Totally. I mean, I meet so many people that are so smart, have so much life experience, have so much to say.

41:59
But the only thing that’s keeping them from doing that is the story that’s in their head. And I think speaking of engineering, we’ve got to be engineers of our own thinking. And this is one of the things that really separates humans from every other species is we have the ability, so far as we know, we’re the only species that has the ability to think about our thinking. And that self-awareness is a big gift.

42:29
but we’ve got to cultivate it. And the more we do it, the better we get at it. So I would just recommend to people, if you’re feeling stuck, if you’re feeling frustrated, if you’re not making the progress you want, sit down with a blank piece of paper. And literally, the first thing I would do is start writing the sentences that are in my head as I think about that problem. And then you can objectify it. And sometimes when you just get it out on paper, you go, well, that’s stupid or whatever. And you just like dismiss it.

42:58
And you never think those thoughts again, because once you externalized them, it became obvious that they weren’t serving you. In some cases though, we get them on paper and we go, well, yeah, that looks true. And we have to interrogate it. And again, that’s step two in the book. But then you can also begin to re-engineer those sentences. And like if my thinking is, I’m not very good with money and that’s a sentence that’s in my head.

43:26
What if I transformed that, modified it to, know, every day I’m learning more and more about money.

43:35
And that becomes the thing that you use to reprogram your thinking. I think engineering, computer science, those are good metaphors for what we’re trying to do. Because from a brain science perspective, what we’re trying to do is to take those neural pathways that our brain created to keep us safe, and we’re trying to rewire our brain so that there are new neural pathways. So that whenever we’re confronted with that, those same set of facts,

44:03
that instead of just going down that neural pathway that’s cut in our brain, we decided to take the road less traveled until we can wear a path and that becomes our natural thinking, something that’s more empowering. It’s funny for the people who tell me that they’re not tech savvy. I just tell them that being tech savvy is really about following directions and just learning where to click the mouse. It’s all it is, right? And not giving up after the first

44:33
Try. Exactly. Keep hacking. So Michael, where can people get your book and are there any pre-launch bonus goodies that you got? There are and go to mindyourmindsetbook.com and what you’re going to find there is a couple of different goodies. First of all, if you buy the book from any retailer and we have links to them all on that page mindyourmindsetbook.com

45:02
If you go there, go to a retailer, let’s say Amazon, then come back with your receipt to claim your bonuses. You’re going to get the audio book. So don’t buy the audio book. You’ll get the audio book from us for free. You also get a self coaching tool that’s amazing. So that enables you to go through that three step process and deconstruct your thinking in a little worksheet format so that you can solve the problem.

45:32
And then there’s a third thing that I can’t remember that you get. Oh, it’s a reading guide to the book. So those are the bonuses. Okay, nice. And it’s on sale right now. Is that correct? It is. Yep. And then I’ve always just been curious since your service is over at Full Focus, what do you offer there as well? Yeah, there’s two. We have a lot of things that we offer, but we consider ourselves and describe ourselves as a goal achievement.

46:02
So we help particularly leaders, achievers, small business owners achieve their goals. That’s different than goal setting, goal achievement, goal setting, two different things. But half of our business is a business coaching program called Business Accelerator. And you can find out more about that at businessaccelerator.com. And we have about 400 plus business owners that are in that program that we coach. have about 30 coaches on staff that work with them.

46:32
And then the other half of our business, like that’s the major, that is probably 40 % of our business. Then 40 % of our business is our full focus planner, which is a physical planner designed to help you accomplish your goals. takes all the stuff that I write about in goal setting, and then it helps people apply it and also be more productive. So it’s also got links. know, the other 20 % of our business is my books and we have a lot of courses that are built.

47:02
around those books that take a deeper dive. Nice. Well, Michael, I really appreciate you coming on. Yeah, I really appreciate your time. This is an honor to have you. Thanks, Steve. Thanks for having me on.

47:17
Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now it took me years to realize that being successful in business is mostly mental and I hope that the strategies in this episode help you out. more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 444. Once again, I 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. SMS is the next big own marketing platform and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash Steve.

47:46
That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to hang out with you this year in person in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. So grab a ticket to Seller Summit and let’s meet up. Go to SellerSummit.com. That’s S-E-L-L-E-R-S-S-U-M-M-I-T dot com. Now I talk about how I these tools on my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:00
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. And today I’m doing a solo episode to talk about the single most impactful thing that I ever did to grow my businesses. And this is something that you all can do right now as well. But before we begin, I want to let you know that tickets for the 2023 Seller Summit are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. It is a conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online.

00:29
Now this event has zero fluff. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business and not high level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people and we all eat together, we all party together every night, and I personally love smaller events and tickets always sell out far in advance. By the way, tickets are going up in price in just a week as well. Now if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250K or $1 million per year, we also offer a special mastermind experience.

00:58
where we break up into small groups, lock ourselves in a room, and help each other with your businesses. The Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 23rd to May 25th. And as I mentioned before, tickets are going up in price next week. I also want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. 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.

01:28
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. And finally, I wanted to mention my other podcast that I released with my partner Tony. And unlike this one, where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the Profitable Audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience.

01:56
No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the Profitable Audience Podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

02:12
Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. In this episode, I’m gonna share with you the one single most impactful thing that I did, kind of by accident, I have to admit, that allowed my online store over at bumblebulinus.com to hit seven figures, my blog over at mywifequitterjob.com to grow over a million dollars per year, and my YouTube channel to make over $300,000 per year. Now this is, my opinion, the most important thing that you can do to propel your business forward.

02:39
In fact, what I’m going to tell you today in this episode doesn’t just apply to business. It pretty much applies to everything in life, whether you want to make more money or to achieve financial freedom. So to begin this episode, I’m going to tell you three separate stories about my own experiences and then kind of tie it all together for you at the end so that you can do the same. Now, as I mentioned before, discovering this for myself was an accident, but it doesn’t have to be an accident for you. So the first story I’m going to tell

03:09
happened around a decade ago. My e-commerce store was doing multiple six figures in revenue, but I think at the time I was kind of at a plateau. The prior couple of years, I was growing in the double and triple digits, but things started to stagnate and we weren’t growing as fast. Meanwhile, at this time, my wife and I, were arguing a lot more because we were both trying to juggle running a business and taking care of two very young kids. And if I remember correctly at the time,

03:38
we were kind of at an in-between phase of our business where we were reluctant to hire more people because we didn’t feel like we made enough to justify hiring more people. But at the same time, we probably need to hire more people. Anyway, my buddy, Andrew Udarian, invited me to Montana for a mastermind group meeting along with nine other entrepreneurs. And many of these entrepreneurs actually have been on the podcast. Now, in case you guys don’t know what a mastermind is, it’s basically where a group of people

04:07
Entrepreneurs in this case get together and help each other with their businesses and typically you go around the room and Everyone takes turns asking questions they have on how they can prove their business and whoever’s turn it is to ask questions Is in what is called the hot seat? Anyway, when it was my turn to get on the hot seat, I proudly showed everyone my website Told them how much I was making and asked for feedback now at the time. I actually thought I was doing pretty well

04:35
So I actually wasn’t expecting much negative feedback. Maybe a couple tidbits here and there, but I was basically expecting praise and for people to tell me how good of a job I was doing. So I was appalled when everyone in the room took turns ripping my website to total shreds. By the way, the rules of the mastermind in general is that you give the honest truth and you don’t hold back. And trust me on this, no one held back that day. Here were some of the comments I got.

05:03
This website looks like it was designed in the 90s. You need to redesign your website right now. You run an online course that teaches this stuff? I would not take your class if I saw your website. And then another fellow mastermind told me, hey Steve, these are the types of sites I like to buy, fix up, and then resell at a massive profit. Now hearing these comments, I’m not gonna lie. They really hurt my pride. And I tried my best not to be defensive, but man.

05:32
Was it painful to hear every single person in the room basically destroy my business? Anyway, as soon as I got back from the mastermind, I immediately contacted my designer, whipped up a quick mock-up in Photoshop based on the feedback in the group, and started cranking on the redesign. And my process for the implementation was pretty straightforward. Basically went through, plowed through each and every page myself, laid it out roughly how I wanted it to look based on the feedback from the mastermind.

06:01
and had a designer pick up the pieces to make it look better. And I budgeted about six weeks to get the redesign done with me contributing about 40 hours of my own time. And basically every single page on the site was completely redone. And overall, the project ended up taking seven weeks and cost me about $1,800. But immediately I saw the results. My desktop conversion rates increased by 46%. My mobile conversion rates increased by 21%.

06:28
and my tablet conversion rates increased by 25%. And just in case you guys don’t understand the jargon, the conversion rate is basically the percentage chance that a customer makes a purchase when they land on your site. And with these changes, my sales went up nearly 30%. And I remember that year, my online store had the best year of growth that had experienced in a while. And it was all thanks to getting beat up in a mastermind meeting.

06:55
All right, so hold on to that story because I’m gonna tie everything together at the end, I promise. Okay, so this next story was with my friend Lars and you probably recognize him. He’s been on the podcast a couple of times and he was instantly a member of that same Montana mastermind. Now this was a few years later after that mastermind. Lars and I, we’re good friends now, we keep in touch. And since that meeting, I can’t remember the exact year when this happened, but I’m guessing it was 2015.

07:24
And one day out of the blue, he messages me and tells me, hey, yo, Steve, you got to get on Amazon right now. And I remember my first reaction was, hey, know, Bumblebee Lynn is doing just fine. Why would I want to complicate my life with another platform or another marketplace? And Lars was like, you know, right now it’s super easy. Think of Amazon. It’s almost like an ATM machine. You just feed it products and money comes out.

07:52
And at the time, we were already making enough. We replaced my wife’s salary. It was all good. We were still growing pretty well. So I didn’t do anything. I didn’t do anything for months. And to be honest, I had major problems motivating myself to start selling on Amazon. Like I mentioned before, we were already doing pretty well, growing in the double digits. I didn’t really see a strong need to sell on a platform where I didn’t have any control.

08:19
And back then, Amazon wasn’t nearly as cutthroat as it is today. Anyway, so months passed. Lars noticed that I hadn’t done anything yet. So that’s when he decided to go on the offensive. Every single week, he started sending me emails politely reminding me to list my items on Amazon. Then he started telling me how much money he was making off of just a small set of products. And then I kept dragging my feet. And when that didn’t do the trick,

08:47
He started telling me about all these cool strategies that he was using to make his Amazon listings more visible, strategies that very few people were using. And he might’ve mentioned that this would been excellent material for my online store course because at the time I wasn’t covering Amazon. Here’s the thing about these conversations. Lars had nothing to gain from urging me to get on Amazon. He was just looking out for me. Anyway, after weeks of hounding, I finally broke down and decided to list a couple of items on Amazon on a whim.

09:17
and the results were immediate. Within eight days, we sold out of our initial inventory of 60 units as a completely brand new seller and sales continued to rise. In our very first month of selling on Amazon, we made almost $3,000 selling just three products. A month later, we were doing over 5K a month, and today Amazon represents about 15 to 20 % of our business revenue. Now, while these numbers are still a relatively small fraction of what we make with our own online store, it’s definitely on the radar screen. And what’s surprising,

09:47
is that our online store sales are up for the exact same products that we have on Amazon. Clearly there’s a halo effect going on here. Anyway, it just goes to show that sometimes you need a bit of external pressure to get yourself off your butt, which is why it’s extremely important to associate yourself with like-minded people on your entrepreneurship journey. All right, one more story and I promise to tie everything together. This last story involves my friend Grant Baldwin. Grant runs a speakerlab.com where he teaches other people how to do public speaking.

10:16
And what he does for a living isn’t important. What is important is how he helped double my revenue. Now I want to say the year was 2015. Again, my memory is a little fuzzy, but that year I think I made around $400,000 a year selling my online course. And for all of you who don’t know this, I run a class that teaches people how to sell online over at profitableonlinestore.com. Anyway, I was chatting with Grant one day and our conversation started gravitating towards business.

10:43
So we shared with each other how much we were making and how, and basically our business strategies. How are we selling our courses? And at the time, again, I was super proud of how I was selling my online course on autopilot. Sales were coming in every day on autopilot through my email mini course. And many of you guys listening are probably on this mini course. In case you aren’t, go over to mywaifkudojob.com slash free. Anyway, I kind of boasted that my free six day mini course was better than some people’s paid classes.

11:13
And Grant, you know, he patiently listened to my story, congratulated me for my sales numbers that year, and then he dropped an atomic bomb. He was making 5X what I was making, selling a more obscure course that cost nearly 50 % less than mine did. And his email list was much smaller than mine as well. Right. So how did he do it? He was giving live webinars or presentations every single week and making like 30 to 50 K a pop.

11:41
every time he presented something online and I was flabbergasted. Not only did Grant tell me his numbers, but he emailed me his spreadsheets outlining exactly how much revenue each webinar made and how we tweaked his presentations each time to improve his conversion rate. And when he told me this, he basically gave me his entire playbook. And when he gave all this to me, I was intrigued, but I was also terrified at the same time because at the time,

12:12
I was deathly afraid of giving live presentations online. I was afraid that I’d hit the live button, go live with nothing to say. In fact, I still sometimes feel that way today. But once again, like Lars, Grant emailed me to check up on me. And it wasn’t anything major, like it’s not like he called me or anything. He just dropped a quick text, like, hey Steve, did you go live yet? Or, hey Steve, try this, I guarantee you it’ll work. And you know,

12:41
Again, I dragged my feet. And so I think that final text that broke the camel’s back was he sent a text that said, hey, Steve, I just made 35K in 60 minutes. Do you want 35K in 60 minutes? And it finally worked. Now, as an engineer, I wanted to be prepared. So I watched all of Grant’s webinars and other presentations from top influencers online. Basically, I studied in excruciating detail over 15 webinars in the span of a week.

13:08
and picked and chose which elements to incorporate into my own performance. And I also consulted with my friend Tony, who you all pretty much know, who was instrumental in helping me get my performance down pat. Now, everyone has a different style and a different strategy. Some people talk about themselves for 45 minutes, building up their authority and credibility, and only provide 15 minutes of useful content. Other people talk about their success stories for the bulk of their talk and tease their audience in a whine to learn more about how they did it.

13:38
And some people just give one long motivational speech, get the crowd super excited about their program. And to be honest with you, all these strategies work, but you know, I’m not good at any of that stuff. I hate talking about myself. I’m not good at teasing people about offers and I’m not exactly a motivational speaker here. So for my webinar, I decided to just give away as much information as possible in a 60 minute span. And it didn’t hold back at all and taught some of my best strategies in my talk. And it worked.

14:08
In the course of just 90 minutes, I made over $60,000 in my very first webinar. And once I added webinars into my mix, I hit the million dollar mark with my business just one year later. So you’re probably thinking to yourself right now, where can you meet your Andrew Udarian, your Lars Hunley or your Grant Baldwin? Now I met each and every one of these people at a live event. And here’s the thing, chances are your local friends are not doing the same things as you want to do.

14:38
When I started my online store, none of my friends were in e-commerce. All of my close friends here in California are doctors, lawyers, engineers, and they couldn’t relate to anything that I was doing at all. So I I felt kind of lonely. But when you attend a conference, everyone is doing the same thing as you. And when you get that experience, it’s magical. All of a sudden, you don’t feel crazy anymore. All of a sudden, you can talk freely about marketing and sales without worrying about boring anyone.

15:07
And this is exactly the reason why I started my own event, The Seller Summit, back in 2016, and I’ve been running it ever since. Seller Summit’s a conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And you’ve been listening to my podcast long enough now to know that I don’t tolerate any fluff. Unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level BS, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business.

15:36
I also keep my events small and intimate because, you know, personally, I hate large events. If you’re anything like me, you probably feel massive anxiety walking into a large group of people you don’t know, but it’s not like that in my event. Every year we cut off ticket sales at 200 people and we always sell out way in advance. Now remember that first mastermind where I grew my online store by 30 %? Well, we also run masterminds at seller summit as well. We split up into groups of 10, lock ourselves in a room and cater in food and just let the magic happen.

16:07
Anyway, I don’t want to turn this episode into a sales pitch for Seller Summit, but I do want to say that meeting other like-minded entrepreneurs face to face is guaranteed to change your life. I have friends and attendees like Natalie Mounter, who met her mastermind group at Seller Summit 2017, and she’s been meeting with them ever since, and they’re now all good friends. I met Lars, Andrew, and Grant, and my business partner, Tony, at events, and to be upfront, I would not be where I am today without them.

16:37
There’s this cliche that you’re the sum of your five closest friends and cliches exist for a reason because they’re 100 % true. In any case, my next event is in Fort Lauderdale, Florida on May 23rd to the 25th over at SellersSummit.com. Let’s hang out in person and I can 100 % guarantee you that you’ll learn a lot and you’ll make a bunch of new friends who may become your future Andrew Udarians, your future Lars Hunleys or your future Grant Baldwins.

17:05
Hope you enjoyed that episode and I was serious. Starting any business is a lonely process and having others around you doing the same things as you is liberating. For more information about this episode, go to mywebcoderjob.com slash episode 443. And once again, I want to remind you that my annual e-commerce conference will be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida on May 23rd to May 25th of 2023. I really want to hang out with you in person this year, so let’s meet up. Go to sellersummit.com. That’s S-E-L-L-E-R-S-S-U-M-M-I-T.com.

17:35
I also want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for ecommerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform, and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash dv. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash dv. Now, I talk about how I these tools on my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own ecommerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course.

18:03
Just type in your email and it’ll send the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:00
You’re listening to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and dig deep into what strategies they use to grow their businesses. Now today, I have a very special guest on the show, Daniel Dupiazza. Now one of the reasons why I love Daniel is because he’s such a passionate guy and he’s great to talk to if you want to get out of the way of your own head. So in this episode, we’re going to talk about how to get past your own mental hurdles and make forward progress with whatever you want to achieve in life. But before we begin, I want to let you know that tickets for the 2023 Seller Summit

00:29
are now on sale over at SellersSummit.com. It is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And you all probably know me well enough by now to know that my event has zero fluff. Every speaker that I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business and not high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people and it’s a very intimate event. Everyone eats together and everyone parties together every single night.

00:58
And I personally love smaller events and tickets always sell out far in advance. Now, if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250k or $1 million per year, we also offer a special mastermind experience where we break up into small groups, lock ourselves in a room, cater in food and help each other with our businesses. Now, the Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 23rd to May 25th. Go to SellersSummit.com. I also want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. Now, if you run an e-commerce business of any kind,

01:27
You know how important it is to own your own customer contact list. And this is why I focus a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing. SMS or text message marketing is already a top five revenue source from my e-commerce store. And I couldn’t have done it without Postscript, which is my text message provider. Now, why did I choose Postscript? It’s because they specialize in e-commerce stores and e-commerce is their primary focus. Not only is it easy to use, but you can quickly segment your audience based on your exact sales data and implement automated flows like an abandoned cart at the push of a button.

01:57
Not only that, but it’s price well too and SMS is the perfect way to engage with your customers. So head on over to postcook.io slash Steve and try it for free. That’s P O S T S C R I P T dot IO slash Steve. And then finally, I want to mention my other podcasts that are released with my partner, Tony. And unlike this one where I interview 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 it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way.

02:26
So be sure to check out the Profitable Audience Podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

02:38
Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. Today I have my buddy Daniel De Piazza back on the show. Now, if you do not remember Daniel, I had him on the podcast back on episode 103 and 161, I want to say four years ago, where we talked about how to ditch your average job and start an Epic business, but it’s been a long time since we’ve spoken at length. Last time, Daniel was running Rich 20 something and he had just acquired under 30 CEO.com.

03:05
but he’s moved on to a site called Alpha mentorship.com covering web three O and crypto. And he has a new podcast called the new wave entrepreneur. And he actually just released a brand new book called the true artifact 33 lessons on creativity, purpose and life and love. And the reason why I wanted to have Daniel back on the show is not to talk about crypto, but how to grow as an individual and an entrepreneur and make forward progress with whatever that you aim to achieve. In other words,

03:33
This episode is going to be about how to get out of your mind. So welcome back to the show, Daniel, for the third time. What’s up, man? Thank you, Steve. I appreciate it. So, hey, man, catch me up. I know we’ve already had you on the show twice already. So there’s no need to start from the very beginning, but I am curious what you’ve been up to in the last four years. It seems like Rich 20 something is no more. Well, I’m 34. I’m 34. I mean, it had a shelf life on it. People say, bring Rich 20 back. said, guys, I physically can’t. I can’t. It’s over. Deal with it.

04:05
And most of the stuff from Mitch 20 were things that I started thinking about in my late teens and early 20s. I rode that pony and I got off and I got onto another horse. That’s okay. You can do that. But you know, the way you did it though, I’m just, cause it had a lot of SEO value also. Yeah. was getting all this traffic. It’s gone. don’t I don’t care. Life is ephemeral. Okay. Move on. Okay. Realistically, yes, I could have done it. I could have done it more.

04:31
I have done a better job of migrating all the SEO and doing all that stuff. if you want to know the truth of it, when I started that site, was lucky in a way to have started that at the right time, at the right place. And I’m good at writing, so that’s not a problem. But it was more like I wasn’t really intending to create this big thing. I was just writing for me on a personal level, and it kind of blew up because of the confluence of events. And so…

04:58
I didn’t have a master plan for how I was going to migrate it because I, I, I got a book deal for this thing. And by the time I got the book, I said, Oh God, now I’m responsible for, for managing this thing. And it was never really my intention. And so it wasn’t, I didn’t feel too emotionally scarred to leave it behind. Interesting. There was so much good content on there. And then the book came out of it. Yeah, that’s okay. Okay. I I admire that actually. What should I have done? I mean,

05:25
Would I keep running? Because I thought about this, I played it off my head into my 40s. How would I run it? Like, would get someone else to run it, I guess I could sell it, I guess, but I don’t know, like, you know, I mean, you could just left it up and just let the leads continue to come in, I guess, or sell it even. I don’t know. could. got the main value out of it, which was the email list and the subscribers and I talked to them all the time. So that’s really what I care about. Are you still running under 30 CEO then? No, I sold that in 2019. Oh, okay. Yeah.

05:53
I mean, cause also I turn 30 is that yeah, it’s like, doing this. Like, know, I mean, you’re one career job, but if she gets another job, you’re kind of being disingenuous by running the show, but I’m not going to judge you for it. You know, me, I had to be completely honest. I’m not under 30 and I’m not a rich 20. had to move. Okay. Interesting. All right. So, all right, well let’s move on from that then. So you sell that you, you, you change rich 20 something into alpha mentorship.

06:21
How did that all lead you to like the true artifact and writing a personal development book? I have been writing for my whole life. And when you write online, one of the things about writing online is that you get immediate feedback usually. And that feedback trains you to write certain things because then you get the response like you get a cookie. And so you write the thing that gets you the best response and then you write more of that. And then over time, sometimes you’ll push yourself in the direction of you getting the greatest response.

06:50
And that’s a great way to get SEO and traffic and to build leads. And it’s a great business tactic and it’s, it’s fun too. But what I found over the years is that, you know, if you look at just the idea of rich 20, that was me writing from one avatar of myself, which is just a way of talking about business and a way of talking about motivation in a way. And that’s fun. But as I started to progress over the years, I realized that what I was getting the most praise for.

07:19
and the stuff that I was writing about the most wasn’t the stuff that I was really writing in my personal time, the things that I enjoyed writing the most, the things that were most meaningful to me. And over time, there became a greater gulf, a great gulf between what I was putting out and what I thought was important. And so that’s another reason why I kind of, I felt a need to separate myself from the original brand. And I went to my agent and my publisher over a period of years, like this is between maybe

07:49
2018, 2019, I said, I have these new ideas. These are the things I like to write about. have a deep interest in deep personal development, psychology, spirituality, things like that, things of that nature. they never said no, but they basically said in so many words, we don’t want that. We’re into business. We know business sells. We know how to look at those books and try again. And I said, well, maybe I’ll publish some stuff independently. They said, oh.

08:18
If you publish them independently, that’s going to affect your the next advance that you get because we’re going to judge your independent book sales as a metric of a recent release and we’re going to pay you based on whatever those book sales are. That sounds like a threat almost. It is a threat. But you know, it’s the same in the music industry. That’s why a lot of musicians will release mixtapes, not albums, because mixtapes aren’t counted against their official stats in a lot of ways. So when they go to a big label, you can’t say that you’ve released an official studio album before.

08:48
And that’s just a way of naming it. But, you know, that just got me thinking. I didn’t really have much reason to stay with a publisher or with an agent. And I don’t have any ill will against them. had a good experience working with them for the first time, but it set me off my own way. And over a period of years, I started to develop my own philosophy around life. And what I wrote between 2016 and 2021 ended up becoming the first of what’s going to be a series.

09:15
these very different books that explore these deeper areas of life. And by giving myself the permission to write this work and not have to be dependent on a publisher to put me out or an agent to get me a deal. It’s given me a lot of creative freedom and it’s really opened the floodgates on me. mean, people were asking for a while, why don’t you write Wealthy 30 something or the Rich 20 something follow-up? And I was at a writer’s block, which doesn’t really exist. But I’m like, I can’t think of anything else to say. I’ve already told you this stuff. I don’t have anything else to say.

09:44
But as soon as I gave myself permission to write this next book, which is really just a collection of things that I had been writing personally for myself for about five years, I have behind me 11 books planned out. like, you know, all I can do is just produce them fast enough to be able to fulfill at this point. And so really, that’s how know I’m on the right track. You know, it’s funny, I used to enjoy writing a lot more.

10:10
And then I got slapped by Google and I had to write a certain way to get in the rankings. And now it’s not fun for me anymore. So I’ve actually outsourced the writing of like that stuff. But, but I do write like the, more personal development stuff myself. And I started doing video where you can be a lot more creative, where SEO doesn’t matter as much.

10:31
Totally. Well, you know, Google has pretty getting pretty sick with their SEO now they can they’re like reading lips and doing transcriptions and but yes, yes, you’re right. Exactly. Yeah. But in YouTube land, like SEO doesn’t matter nearly as much. No, no, it’s just what it’s just what catches organically with people. But I admire what you’ve done. It sounds like you’ve, you know, neglected SEO and you’re just writing about what you want, which is awesome. Well, you know, SEO is only one tool. And I think that also I’m looking at more of a long term perspective, when you own your IP. So when you are

11:01
when you’re beholden to like, and this is for any creative, you you have this idea, and especially before the internet, this idea of like having a big publishing house or a big label or big studio, give you the spotlight and that will build your career. And that was how I went into my, the interstages of my career. But what I realized was I don’t actually like, I have my old book here. I don’t, I don’t actually own this. I don’t actually own this IP. So I can’t, I can’t even give it away if I want to. can’t even technically, I’m not even allowed to, you know,

11:30
still use the use the words in my in my promotions for stuff because I don’t even own the publishing to this. I don’t really own it. I own the copyright to it, but I don’t own the publishing to it. And every time this book gets a sale, I barely get anything from it. You know, it’s it’s so it’s not a very good economic model for me. But what I’ve learned over the years is that when you start to develop your own catalog and you own the masters, essentially to that every time you release a new work, your whole catalog gets a bump.

12:00
release one book and if you have nine books that you published before that, every other book usually gets sales because people look through your whole catalog and buy stuff. And so my vision now is creating not just this individual book, this is the new one, but also developing merchandise around it, concerts around it, other products around it, digital things around it that support the philosophy of the book. And then also allow me to extend it into other books as well so that there’s an entire

12:30
universe around it that I own the entirety of, rather than just trying to get a piece of royalty from what the publisher owns the majority of. Interesting. So if you were to start back all over again, would you have self-published your first book then or no? I wouldn’t have changed anything because I think everything has worked out the way it should. But I’m just a little bit smarter now. Right. And I guess that’s where the crypto stuff comes in too with your ecosystem later on. guess ownership.

12:58
Yeah, I don’t even have a direct, I don’t even have the crypto piece of this planned yet. I’m sure we’ll do some NFTs and things like that. mean, right now, my main thing is I just opened up the pre-orders of the hardcover version for this book. The book drops in December and October 25th, but I just opened up a hardcover pre-sale and I’m only releasing 250 of these and they’re signed and limited and numbered and each one comes with two concert tickets. So I’m going to do two concerts in 2023, which will just be me.

13:27
important pieces from the book, bringing in other elements, having a creative fun time with people just for my super fans. And you know, it’s 100 bucks each and people are like, why would I pay $100 for a book? Well, you’re paying for the experience. And it’s just a way of me creating something fun out of my material. And I have complete control over the distribution of it. Love it. Love it. Yeah. So I did get a chance to read a couple chapters. And I just had some questions for you. And I thought because it’s pretty interesting. Sure. I want to talk about

13:55
like the slow boil of three, what the hell does that mean? Slow boil of 3D. Yeah. There’s a disconnect between the you thinking about something and it happening in life, but it doesn’t mean that there’s not progress going on underneath the surface. And some of that comes down to patience. And another part of it comes down to understanding how the nature of reality and how the nature of reality actually functions versus how we wish it would function. Sure. mean, a lot of people don’t make forward progress.

14:24
I would imagine because of this principle. What’s the 3D part of it actually is what I wanted to know. Well, just being in this plane of existence, we exist in a world where it’s like a cause and effect world. There’s action reaction. You could think of it as a Newtonian situation or you could think of it as quantum, but either way, we live in a world where when you do something, there’s a change on the other end. Sometimes you see the change as a result of your actions.

14:54
A lot of times you don’t see the change. Most of the time you don’t see the change. And what we have to realize is that the example that I give in this particular chapter is just that there is a boiling process. you think about like example of chemistry, physical sciences, when you boil water up to what, 100 degrees Celsius is where water boils. Every degree up to that point,

15:22
is a chemical change that’s making a physical change. And through that entire process, you’re getting to the point of the result that you want, which is the water boiling, but you don’t see that bubble. You don’t see that actual boil, the effervescence until you get to the point where you’re at the boiling point and every liquid has different boiling point. But it doesn’t mean that the changes aren’t happening. And if you shut the burner off before that complete chemical and physical change has been created, then you lose all the progress.

15:50
I think that we create that scenario for ourselves a lot in life where we’re stopping and starting, or we’re constantly checking to see if it’s boiling, constantly checking, letting out the heat. And there’s just a way of being aware that when you’re creating through your work, direct, intentional, you know, focus energy on a project or an idea that you have to allow it to create those changes. It’s like, you can’t just think Ferrari and the Ferrari rolls over your foot the next day. Like you have to be able to allow that thing to happen.

16:18
And I think that in the hustle culture, we have forgotten that there’s an element of patience. And there’s also like a mystery of the way that things work, because there’s still this black box element of living in the world where we’d like to think that we know how everything’s working behind the scenes. And it makes our intellect feel good to think that we know, well, when I do this with my business, and I press this button, I do this funnel, this thing’s going to happen. But that’s not always the case. We’re hoping that’s the case.

16:47
But we have to allow for that mystery and we have to allow for that space for the changes to happen. And then we can observe. that’s something that’s important for humans to remember.

16:58
It’s taking me over three years, but my first book, The Family First Entrepreneur will be out in stores on May 16th. Now this is a book about entrepreneurship, but not the kind they tell you about in business school or that you often hear about online. Now I know for a fact that most of you listening to this podcast don’t want to become world famous or ridiculously rich. Now certainly you might not say no to these things, but when you really ask yourself what your priorities are, it’s almost always the same. You want a good life and the freedom to enjoy it. So in this book,

17:27
I’ll share with you an alternative to the hustle culture nonsense we so often hear about in relation to starting a business. You can, in fact, succeed at business without being a stranger to your kids. You can make good money and have the freedom to enjoy it, and you don’t have to work 80 hours a week and be a slave to your business just to make it all work. So if you’re tired of hearing from 20-something kids who drive fancy cars and brag about how hard they work or how much they make, I will give you a different perspective from a father who makes both business and family work.

17:56
So join me in my book launch. Go to mywifequitterjob.com slash book and I’ll send you bonuses, invitations to book parties that I’ll be throwing all over the country and special offers. That’s mywifequitterjob.com slash book. Now back to the show.

18:13
You know, what’s funny is I use that analogy, not the boiling water. I use the melting ice cube, which is, which is more or less the same thing. It’s the reverse. All your efforts are trying to melt the ice cube, but then it doesn’t start melting until the freezing point. Yeah. What’s funny about all this is how do you know how long it’s going to take? And, I get this question a lot, like how long is it going to take for my business to be successful?

18:40
And they always ask me like, what is the secret to do all this stuff? And what I always tell them is like, half the time, like, I don’t know what the hell is going on. I just know in the end, it works. And then in hindsight, you can figure out some of the things that you’ve done. But as you’re doing it, oftentimes, you have no idea what’s working and what’s not. Totally. There’s also really defining what success is at each stage. Like I gave you an example today, was, I was doing like a weightlifting class before this, and I’m getting back into doing

19:07
CrossFit style workout to turn more like Olympic style lifts. And have you ever tried an Olympic style lift before? I have not. Like, you know, they have snatches. Yeah. They have cleans and things like that. They’re pretty hard. And because it’s very technical. It’s like your body is doing these explosive motions. So I was talking to the coach today. I’m like pretty strong on certain lifts because I used to do like power lifting and bodybuilding. And so I have certain motor patterns. It’s really, like the muscles are strong, but it’s also, know, your motor patterns know how to do it. So that’s mostly what it is.

19:37
So like, for instance, I can deadlift over 400, which is a lot for my body weight, but then with a, with a, um, with a clean or something, or with a, with a snatch, which were, which is where I’m like deadlifting up and putting it over my head. I can barely get like 150. It’s really, really heavy for me. And so was talking to the coach and I was like, what is the, what, like, what would be a good, what, what’s considered heavy with this lift for someone of my body weight? What is it? What are we looking for? What’s the goal here? And it’s like, well, you know, at this stage.

20:06
It’s not really even a measure of your strength. It’s mostly a measure of technique because you’re not, um, you’re not even fully activating all the muscles that you will be using neurologically when you get proficient at this exercise, when you get very, very good at it. So I wouldn’t think of it as strength. I think of it as more of just getting your technique down and that got me thinking. It’s like, how am I measuring success here? Cause if I measure success based on my dead lift, then I think that this is a very weak lift. If I measure success based on the fact that

20:33
I can actually complete all the movements of this lift, then I would say, well, that was a very successful lift. And just the way that you frame success versus failure changes how you feel about it. I was also thinking too, like when you’re doing these exercises, just from a physical, like an exercise perspective, failure is something that you seek out because you have to know where your limitation is. Like today I did, I went up to failure on snatches and I was like, oh yeah, like

21:02
my failure point is at X weight, but I wasn’t upset that I failed. had to know that was my failure point. So I can judge next time. Did I hit it? Did I go past it? Did I fall below it? The failure just becomes a marker and a milestone rather than like an emotionally charged significant event. Yeah, I like that. I mean, there’s this phrase that I heard recently was your happiness is the status quo minus your expectations, right?

21:32
So I guess in your so how would people who are struggling right now listening to this with their business? How do you set the proper failure points? And how do you how do you stay focused through that entire time until like the water starts boiling? Well, I would say the one thing is one of the things I think that in some ways personal development and business advice gets wrong is I this is a Tony Robbins thing, the idea of modeling.

21:59
see a model your success off of other people who have been successful. But sometimes I find that that’s a poor heuristic for success because you’re comparing yourself to someone else. And I get why you’d want to do that because you’re looking to get the same results as them. But the mantra in the Tony Robbins school has always been, someone else has done it, you can do it. That’s, think, only partially true because you have to consider there are so many factors in someone else’s

22:28
whole experience of life, who they are, where they’re born, what their background is, their mind state is, all these different factors that go into them creating a certain result. So if you’re trying to copy just what they’re doing, you can’t copy who they are. And so sometimes we, I think we sometimes miss the mark by trying to compare our success or our milestones or our markers to other people’s when really we need to, we can set our goals, set our attention for our goal. And we can even,

22:58
look at best practices and follow a path to a point, but there has to be an awareness of at the end of the day, you’re going to have to do it your way, which means that you’re going to have to define success based on where you are now. If you’re just starting, then you wouldn’t judge your success based on someone who’s been doing it for a lot longer, for someone who has a different skill set, from someone who has a different life experience. You’d have to be able to

23:26
have the presence of mind to say, okay, I’m going to follow some of these instructions, some of these rule books, but ultimately every success is a completely unique success. There’s no one who copies someone else and says, oh, you know, I did it just like them and I got the same result. even when I was first getting my teeth, cutting my teeth, you know, I was working with this guy named Ramit and Ramit runs this company called I will teach you to be rich. And so I learned a lot of copywriting from him and from his work.

23:54
but I’m not Rameet, I don’t wanna be Rameet. And it was a detriment for me to try to fit too deeply into that mold because I would put myself into a model that wasn’t unique to me. So I was modeling my success after that and I was modeling my ideas after that. And there’s a certain point where you can take what you’ve learned and you can adapt it and you can adapt what someone else has done.

24:22
But ultimately, you always have to create your own unique thing. And I think that’s something where beginning entrepreneurs go wrong. I think they’re going to completely be able to copy someone else or use someone else as a measuring stick when you really have to find it on your own. And that’s scary because ultimately there is no map and no one wants to hear that. You know, it’s funny is any time I’ve personally tried to copy someone else directly, it’s actually never worked for me. Never works. And in fact, I remember when I

24:48
when I was working my day job, I used to think that all of my bosses had all the answers until one day I figured out like everyone is just winging it. Yeah, actually. Yeah. And you just got to figure out the way you do it. I guess the next question, the follow up question is how do you figure out what what you’re good at, what your hidden strengths are to to make the necessary adaptations? The best way to do that is to think about the things that come naturally to you that do not come naturally to others.

25:15
or things that are fun for you that are certainly not fun for others. So there are a lot of people who are, like I have friends who are accountants and they really like numbers. And I say, what is wrong with you? Like you enjoy this? Why? But in a business, having a strong number sense and a strong accounting sense is a great skill to have. And you can lean into that. You can create a leaner business and a smarter business, a more efficient business. Whereas they would say, I hate writing. I hate it with a passion and I run from it. And I say, oh, this is my playground.

25:44
And so you have to lean into those strengths, but you also have to think about the things that are so natural to you that you take them for granted. And I wrote about this in the book as well, these gifts and these talents that you take for granted, these are the things, these are like the forgotten children. These are the things that we stuff in a corner and we don’t respect these talents because they seem so easy to us. And those are the things that you need to be paying attention to. And a lot of times they won’t be things that I’ve got, sometimes they’ll be things I’ve gotten praise. Other times there are things that maybe people have

26:14
have even ridiculed you for, but you have to be able to identify those. And some people don’t want to identify them their whole lives, you know? Give me some examples. Like, how do you figure this out? Okay. Because you’re not thinking of them clearly because you probably do them every day and don’t even realize you don’t like okay, and some of of it will come through a lot of trial and error. So it’s not like you just like I just meditated for 20 minutes and figured it out. You know, it will come through trial and error. So like I’ll give you an example in my life. I have learned over

26:41
Okay, first of all, I’ll say you can try some things that are like different personal assessments. So there’s lots of ways to look at yourself. So if you’ve heard of Myers-Briggs before, that’s an example. I don’t put too much stock into any personal assessment, but there are ways of knowing yourself. Myers-Briggs, Enneagram, there’s something called human design. These are all different ways. And if you study those things, you realize there is validity to some of these things. Getting off on a slight tangent, one of my clients gave me a bracelet.

27:11
because I said I was an ENTP. I battled between ENTJ and ENTP. Someone got me an ENTP bracelet. Literally, it had the letters ENTP and I thought, I’m not going to wear this because I’m not going to brand myself as a certain personality. I want to get myself licensed to change if I want. I want to be introverted if I want to be introverted that day. So I never think of them as cast in stone. Like my friend Manish, he thinks that’s cast in stone, baby. He’s like, ENTJs, that’s who you are. You’ll never change. I’m like, I don’t believe that.

27:41
Um, we’re talking about Manisha Ramees, brother. Yeah. Okay. Nice. Okay. The cooler Senti, the cooler. Um, and so, so you can learn, you can use personality tests to learn a bit about yourself. Um, but ultimately it comes down to looking how, looking at how your life experience goes and, and, and paying attention to who you are. So in my life, what I’ve realized is that like a few things, one,

28:10
I, my biggest, my greatest wealth is my, are my relationships. So like, I am good at business to a certain extent. Like I know how to do, I can do e-commerce and I’m decent with numbers and you know, I’m pretty good at branding. Like all that stuff I have a, a proficiency in, but where I really excel is in relationships. So there are tons of people who I can call to help me with something. I know how to connect people to get them to work together. I’m really good.

28:38
at interpersonal stuff, know, interviews or talking on camera or things like that, things of that nature. Some of that’s come from skill training, others I can look back at my past, my childhood and say, I was doing this since I was a kid. You know, I was the kid who in fourth grade was eating a school lunch, decided I didn’t like it and set up a petition across the entire elementary school and got like 300 signatures and then took it to the principal’s Very interpersonal.

29:06
And I said, we demand, we don’t like these green hot dogs. They’re clearly spoiled. We don’t like them. And it’s just like things like that. I think back and said, oh, that’s a very highly, entirely indicative of someone who has interpersonal skills. Another thing too would be like, I’ve always been skilled at writing. I can look at my career as a student and say, my best grades and my most enjoyment has always been out of writing. And then it makes sense that when I,

29:35
graduated to my career, it started through writing. And I can say, okay, I should lean into that. For a while, when I was in that rich 20 phase, and I was just writing for the SEO and writing for the accolades, essentially, writing for that direct lead generation, I kind of got away from expressing the core skill. And even for a while, between like 2018 and 2020, like almost two years, almost maybe even three years,

30:03
I actively stopped writing. Like I didn’t open up my computer and write. didn’t publish anything new really. And I noticed that my business started to go down and my life happiness started to go down big time. Cause I wasn’t focusing on what my core gifts are. And it took a while to acknowledge that because I wanted to be like other people. I wanted to have, you know, skills I saw other people have. And thought, well, if I just had this funnel skill or if I just had, of course you can build these skills.

30:32
But if I just, if I could just do it like this person or that person, that’s when I’ll be successful. But I’m like, yeah, but they can’t do it like me. You know, I gotta be me. And it wasn’t until I really like was able to sit with that, that I was able to pull myself out of my own ass, pull my head on my own ass. And, also just become a lot happier, you know? Here’s the struggle. And I’ve had this too. How do you decide between doing something that works and is moving the legal, let’s say in business?

31:01
versus doing what actually makes you feel alive and creative. Why do they have to be separate? Oftentimes they do, in a way, right? Like my SEO example earlier, right? In order to rank in search, you have to write in such a way that there’s no fluff, you just deliver the answer, right? And that’s how you get traffic. Yes. As soon as you start being a little bit more creative, telling stories, that stuff’s probably not going to rank because you’re confusing Google. But that’s a great way to get traffic.

31:31
Well, it’s almost like, um, like I was writing a sales page. You ever seen this thing called the Hemingway app? You know about this? Yeah. It’s a pretty good app, but this app will tell you to make your shit so dumb. It will tell you to dumb it down. It’ll be like, Oh, this is too high level. The sentence is too long. This is too much of a college level. And I’m like, yeah, but that’s how I talk. And there’s a line between knowing how to make it simple for people, but also saying, I don’t have to who’s making up the Hemingway app. Who’s making up.

32:00
You know, it’s like you have to be able to not be afraid to lose a little bit in order to express yourself. That’s how I feel. And that hasn’t served me the best when it comes to business. So I know that that’s not the best advice if you want to maximize SEO, maximize lifetime value. I just don’t think there’s a better way to do it long-term because otherwise I’m going to hate doing this and not want to do it anyway. know, like even with this most recent book, one of the things that’s been frustrating for me is that

32:29
I don’t get as good of a response off of talking about

32:34
Carl Jung is I, as I do about starting a hundred thousand dollars side hustle, you know, and I know that and I my business around the hundred thousand dollars side hustle. So I understand why people they’re not there for that, but I’ve also been saying to my audience, said, guys, listen, I still do business programming and we can talk about that, but shouldn’t we all be evolving here? Shouldn’t we want to talk about new stuff? Like you can’t expect me to do this, the same shtick for my entire life. And I don’t expect you to do that too. I’ve gotten so much value from learning.

33:02
deeply about myself and it all trickles down to business. So let’s talk about some of that stuff too, because otherwise why are we doing this? You know, and I, it’s been frustrating to me because I’ll like write a post where I’m explaining the fabric of the universe and I’ll get like 32 likes and then I’ll put up a meme and I’ll get a thousand. I’m like, I fucking hate you guys. You know, I love you. Thank you for being here. And I fucking hate you because I know that you’re here because, and I tested, I know that you’re here because I put up a tons of likes and shares and engagement.

33:32
The next one I put up is like something from the deepest reservoir of my mind and my heart. And it will get like 20 likes. And I’m like, I know that you scrolled right past this. Wake up. is what I mean by the trade-offs, Daniel. Yeah, I know. Yeah. Okay. So my next question is, let’s say you’re doing something that you really love and being creative. Like, how do you stay focused until the water starts boiling? Or do you just know that at some point, all this stuff is going to resonate and all come together?

34:02
I don’t think you ever know that. The best thing I can say is we’re all going to die and how are you going to feel? Are you going to give a crap about your SEO on your deathbed? I don’t know. mean, I know you got to make money and everything, but I also just feel like, okay, when I look at the best… So a lot of times art and business are seen as separate, but that’s not always the case.

34:30
And I think that you can use your business skills intelligently to support yourself as a creative, you know? So you have like, like one of the things, one of the examples I’ll give is like recently I was in this bookstore, this is a bookstore in Portland called Powell’s, which is supposedly the biggest independent bookstore in the world. And I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were telling the truth because it’s freaking huge. I love it. I love it. It’s like brain orgasm. God, I love it. And I’ll go through that. And one of the things I love looking at is, um, I don’t know if you read, do you read

34:59
pleasure? you read anything with pleasure? do, yes. You’re one of the few these days. I read for pleasure a lot and even fiction, not just how-to books, but even fiction. And if you go to the science fiction or the fantasy section of a book, of a bookstore, what you’ll find is that a lot of these writers, have tons of books, dude. They have tons. Like, you know, I just mentioned George R.R. Martin earlier and all these different, you know, all these different sci-fi novelists, even Stephen King.

35:27
and they just produce so much work. And that tells me a couple of things. One, it really shows me the value of consistency over time because they’re just dropping, dropping, dropping, dropping, dropping. It also shows me that like they’re writing these books are so long, especially a lot of these fantasy and sci-fi books that obviously they have editors, but they’re not like…

35:52
They’re not thinking, oh, I just, should take this out. This doesn’t quite, this isn’t working. Like maybe some of that, but they’re releasing a lot of material and they’re not being as discerning. They’re not like trying to get the perfect book. They’re just releasing it. And it also shows me too, that the value of their work isn’t in one individual piece. It’s in the collection. It’s in the collection of their intellectual property, which I think also still applies in a business sense. Now they might not be the, the, the business minds that you would look to.

36:22
But what inspired me about, you know, looking through these sections of the bookstores, you see that there’s a lot of value in the consistent production of work over time. And you can’t always see that value with each individual release. And so I think it’s less about just hoping that it all works out in the end and just knowing that the snowball over time does gradually build. And once you’re kind of locked into what your genius is,

36:50
Then I think it’s less about worrying whether it’s going to be successful and more about pouring as much of your direct intention into that work as you can, because direct intention is like a prism. And when all the light goes into the prism, it creates a very strong and powerful force where you might not have, you you don’t, you’re not going to be Tim Ferriss. You don’t want to be Tim Ferriss and you’re not going to repeat what he did again. But you can see the direct intention of his work over time has created things that even he couldn’t have imagined.

37:19
But what has happened is his energy has created an entire universe of his own. And I think you can do that in your own way too. And so you have to have faith that the intention is what’s creating over time that value. And people will start to see your stuff. If what you’re doing sucks, if you’re not really playing in your zone of genius and you’re not being consistent with it, you can’t expect to see that success. But once you truly lock into it, I have no doubt that once I’m on book 10 of my self-released stuff, it’s going to be popping, baby.

37:48
But it just takes a minute to get to that point. Yeah. You know, one thing I always tell people who’ve sounded from my class is that you got to be willing to put at least three to five years commitment into this before you even get started. And then I also say when it comes to content, it’s like a stock that can only go up, right? Yeah. One piece people might not see, but over time, as you build your portfolio, one piece will resonate with someone and then word of mouth will spread. So it’s just a matter of keeping at it.

38:16
People, so another thing too is like going back to the, why aren’t you guys liking my stuff on social media? Cause I’m just having a little Kanye West moment this week. The people don’t have to necessarily engage with it to be retaining it. You know, even just this morning, I got someone from just one of my people who read myself for like almost 10 years from South Africa. And he wrote me like a multi-page email on these things that I had done that.

38:43
deeply affected him from like 2018. And I remember when you did this story where you would go up on your rooftop in LA and you would show the sun and you would talk about how we’re all coming from this great universal energy. And that really affected me. it’s done this, this, this, this, this in my life. And he might not have ever left a comment or engaged with that social media posts, but I was putting it out there. He was receiving it. So you never, that’s what I’m saying with the slow boil. Things are happening and there’s a cause and effect to everything, but you can’t always see it.

39:09
And just the interaction on social media, think is a poor barometer. I’m coaching myself right now. It’s a poor barometer of if it’s being received. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so what are the important questions you got to ask yourself then if you’re on the right track? Number one, does it feel good? Because if it doesn’t feel good, you’re not going to keep doing it. Number two, is it something that you can see doing for an extended period of time?

39:36
Um, because I think that you have to be able to change with the times, grow and evolve. Uh, number three. And obviously you want to have, I will prioritize audience response over algorithmic response. So what I mean by that is like, if you put out a piece of content on any platform, it’s not necessarily as important how many people engage with it as the people who do do engage with it, what they’re saying. Um, to a certain extent, you can’t control.

40:05
how many people are exposed to your work because the platforms have their own design. And you can learn how to play with those designs so that you can have a better chance of going viral, better chance of spreading. But that’s a different skillset than having it resonate. Because you can have something that goes viral but doesn’t really create a strong relationship with the audience. And you can have something that creates a strong relationship but that doesn’t actually spread. And I would go for the relationship over the spreading because, I mean, TikTok is a great example.

40:34
platform is built for virality, but it’s not really built for relationship. can make relationship out of it, but it’s not built for that. Whereas I feel like our earlier forms of social media were built more for relationship than virality because virality wasn’t as big of a thing then. So you’ll have like an email list, which is not going to go viral necessarily because emails don’t really go viral like that, but it will create a deeper relationship or a podcast. Podcasts don’t really go viral. can. Um, it’s kind of more of a steady, steady build. So that I would prioritize.

41:03
the engagement with the people who do care about your work. And when I talked to Seth Godin about this years ago, because I had a peace goal viral for the first time in 2012. And I emailed Seth, I was like, Seth, how do I do this again? Like, how do I make it happen again? said, no, no, no, young grasshopper, you’re asking the wrong question. The question you want to ask is how do you write something so impactful that a person who reads it can’t go to sleep tonight without telling at least one other person? And that to me was like the aha moment. I’m like, oh, I just have to write it like I’m talking to a friend.

41:30
or produce like I’m talking to friends, speak on the video like I’m talking to a friend. And if someone gets that message, then they’ll do the work for me of making it go wherever it needs to go. I don’t need to try to game it. Right. Here’s been my philosophy because I kind of started out this interview by asking you how you kind of balance the two things. And it sounds like, you know, your priorities are what you said. For me, it’s like you have to go algorithmic in order to even get the your ideas out in front of people. But

41:58
I’ve decided that SEO is just not a good way to build like a lasting audience. People just want answers, right? But if you can get them on your email list, that’s when you can get actually more creative with your work. And then I mentioned YouTube as another outlet and the podcast as well. So I tend to play in both pots. So looking at the priorities that you just specified, I think I would have an equal balance between algorithmic versus people’s responses because if they don’t, if they’re not going to see in the first place, they’re not going to get a chance to respond. Yeah.

42:28
Well, and I would also say, uh, find your game and play it well. So like you might find someone like, uh, you know, James clear and he’s been very good at, um, creating both visibility and relationship with his audience over the years. James, his original strategy, I don’t know what it is now, but his original strategy wasn’t as much SEO as it was syndication. It was like getting his pieces on different platforms. He was like the master of that. And so I guess that is SEO, but it’s like SEO on other people’s platforms. And, um,

42:57
That’s more relationships, I would say. That is relationships though. Whenever I publish something on Entrepreneur or Fortune or Forbes, they’d always be like, you can’t publish your exact same piece. I’m like, James Clear just did it. He just published his exact same piece. What’s the difference? They said, well, he’s bald and he looks better. said, okay. So I don’t know. But that’s an example of, I don’t really see James as writing for the algorithm. I see him as writing exactly what he wants to write. But he has a strategy for visibility.

43:26
So yeah, you can, like for me, you my strategy with the, for visibility right now, I already have the benefit of having built an audience. It’s not the world’s biggest audience, but it is an audience. So I’m less concerned with trying to get more people right now. I want to just develop the relationship with the ones that I have on a deeper level. And over the next 10 years, I’ll continue to work on bringing more people in. my hope for this,

43:53
Maybe it’s a hope and a prayer, but my hope for this is that as I continue to put out more books, it will start to do some of its own work, you know, because I, man, like I started up a TikTok and I just can’t, like, I just can’t. I can’t, I mean, I’m going to, but I’m an older millennial now. I’m not a Gen Z and I just, I’ve already built my platform and I know it sounds stubborn and maybe I’m sounding old right now, but I can’t do it again.

44:22
can’t put up another channel right now. It’s just the amount of effort it takes. And I’m glad effort, you know, maybe I’ll have to do it anyway. Well, let me ask you this. If your goal is to get the ideas out, why are you selling this book and not just putting all this stuff out to the masses? I am actually. when the book drops on October 25th, it’s going to be completely free for digital and audio versions. Okay. I’m just doing the limited edition pre-order of the hardcover. And I actually have a whole sequence, which I’ll even share with you. have

44:52
The so the book is dropping officially on October 25th and we’ll put out like the digital version and the audio. I’m even going to put the audio on like Spotify. I’m going to make it its own podcast and iTunes. You can access it digitally. And then in November, we’re going to do a like a, like a fall collection of merch line related to concepts in the book, imagery and words from the book, which is going to be like sweaters, jackets and different pieces of clothing related to the line. It’s going to be our fall line. When December comes around, we’ll do the official Amazon drop. So it’ll be like,

45:23
Kindle, ebook, the paperback and the audible. And guess what? People are still gonna buy the audible even though it’s on Spotify, because people want it on whatever platform they like it on. so we’ll do that. In January, we’re going to do the digital course version of the book, which is me teaching concepts from the book. In February, we’re gonna do the extended artwork version of the book. So we’re gonna do like a coffee table size version of the book.

45:50
with all AI generated artwork and a different layout for the text, but a bigger version of it, all hardcover. February, we’re gonna do, I think I have planned the spring collection is gonna launch in February. So I think that’s what I have, spring collection for the merchandise. And then March and April, I’m gonna be doing the pre-launch essentially for, or I’ll do like another book preview for the next book in the series, which is called OverSoul. And that will come out in May. And it will be part of the true artifact series.

46:18
So every time I put out a book of this type of genre, will be in the series. And then when you go to Amazon and say, oh, there’s this book and there’s that book. And then there’s merchandise for it and there’s a course for it. And by the time there’s five of these shits out, it’s all, you know, there’s a whole series of it. Right. And I’m sure Amazon will have this button that says buy it all together. Yeah. Even on Amazon now you can create series and I’ll tell you, this is the first book. I did my first book was traditionally published. So I didn’t really have any creative control over it. I couldn’t even.

46:48
They didn’t even pick the cover that I wanted. mean, if you guys can see it, this is the Empire State Building. I’m not from New York and I have no connection to New York. And I said, guys, I don’t want this. don’t, this is not what I’m choosing. They’re like, yeah, but we know what’s going to sell well at Barnes and Noble. So you’re getting this cover. said, great, fuck off. So that happened. And then I did a second book. really, actually have a second book that’s out. This is, this is actually just, I can’t there’s more of a product, but it is a book. I coauthored this with my business partner. This is a,

47:16
strength of seduction, is our fitness brand. We did a book, it’s actually a really nice book. And this is like a book for couples to create intimacy through fitness. so like couples intimacy, exercises, physical stuff. And we actually published this through scribe, which used to be called book in a box. Oh, yeah. Tucker Max is, yeah, actually no longer is affiliated with them. But I did not know that. I don’t think it’s a bad thing. And so we so we paid and got God bless and they did a great job with it. They they pretty much handled it.

47:46
So we technically self-published that and I think we paid like, so, okay, I’ll tell you the numbers. So for my first book deal, I got all in 165 K. was 150 from Penguin and 15 K from Audible to do the book, which like, it sounds kind of like a lot, but it’s not really cause they broke it up over two years. goes to your agent also. 15 % of the agent. And they didn’t do any of the marketing work for me. It’s like, I came in there with the platform already myself and they’re like, great.

48:16
go market it. I’m like, can you help me? Can you get me some stuff? Like, I know that my agent has the same. I know that my agent shares a bunch of different famous clients. Can you get me on Trevor Noah? I know he’s on your roster. Like, what can you do for me? You know, but like, we gave you money, go promote it. I’m like, you should be, that’s for me to, to, produce the work. You guys should be paying to promote this. You guys should be helping me to get it out there. Wasn’t that much of a help. Yeah. So then we did the second book. This is like a 2020, we published this and we did this with Scribe. And I think we paid like,

48:46
40 grand for them to compile it. And they did a great job because I had this book, started writing this. This is like this company, which is a totally different conversation. I came up with this idea for this company in 2010. So it’s an old idea and we refreshed it and we actually did very well with it. We now have like over 42,000 customers and books and we sell DVDs, surprise names, sell DVDs and app and all this stuff. And so we put out this book and I had maybe like 15,000 words of this book already compiled.

49:15
So then Scribe brought in another writer and then we did illustrations. They organized, they put all together. couldn’t have done it without them because I wasn’t going to, it was way too much work to do it myself, but still 40 grand is kind of steep. And I was happy with the product, but then now this is the first book I’ve done where it’s completely on my own. I did the whole design myself. did the whole, I did, I did the editing myself. had some, had a trusted friend to help me with the copy edit, but you know, design, edit.

49:42
production, everything from the interior design to the exterior, to the layout of the pages, all that stuff myself. And I realized it’s not actually that hard to do. It only cost me like, man, it cost me like 1500 bucks to produce and design and publish this whole, not like less than two grand, two grand or less. And I’m like, wow, that was really cost effective. And now, and it’s like, I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but Amazon’s hard covers are.

50:11
Oh yeah, I know, know. I mean, I think they used to be crappier, but this is nice. Cause you know, I have a book from a publishing house that is supposed to be the best in the world. And I’m like, this one’s nicer. So I’m a little confused. And, um, and so now I kind of see what the whole process is. And, uh, and that’s allowed me to have a lot more confidence in my ability to be able to produce it as a high level consistently now. Cause I thought I needed all this help. I thought I needed a publisher. I thought I needed a scribe. I thought I needed this stuff. like, no, no, no, no, no.

50:40
I can do it all. And that’s been like a huge weight off my shoulders. mean, having gone through this entire process recently, I think the main advantage of having a publisher is, that you can get into the bookstore easier, right? But then again, there aren’t that many bookstores anymore. So and that then that makes me very sad as an author. But at the end of the day, I don’t actually think book sales are down. I just think it’s retail bookstores. Yes, think book sales are still doing quite well. And Amazon is just Amazon such an a hole, like they’ll kill

51:10
Barnes and Noble and they put their own bookstores in place of that. And it’s like, Ooh, that’s such a harsh move. But they have nice bookstores. Um, but yeah, I mean, so, so yes, you can get into bookstores earlier, easier. And for the most part, you’re not really going to be able to get on the bestseller lists without having a publisher. But again, it’s like, what’s your metric of success? Because when you have a major book that’s being published, they really are pushing for first week numbers so that they can show.

51:38
from their side that our book has been successful. So for this first book, Rich 20, you know, we put all of our energy into that first week, you know, the lead up before that. And I missed New York times bestseller by one spot. Like we had number, we got number 11 and before, before that year it was top 15. And then the year that I published, was top 10. So then I hit number 11. You know, man, there were things I could have done to.

52:04
Like I was mad at myself for years about like, knew there’s one call I could have made or like one thing I was lazy with and I could have pushed it through. But ultimately that, that ranking, which would have been the equivalent of a sticker on the cover of the book, would it have made a diff, a material difference in anything about where I am now? It would have been nice to say that, but it wouldn’t have made a material difference. And, um, and, and my metric of success was like, what list am I getting? How high am I on Amazon? Uh, you know, but, but now I’m like,

52:32
I don’t really care what my first week numbers are. I’m giving it away for free and I’m selling some, some stuff and I have a whole extended plan and I have a whole, I just told you about a plan all the way through next year. I look at it more like, um, like when an artist releases an album, when they go on tour, they’re on tour for sometimes two years promoting that album, you know, so I have to look at it like that. And so that’s another way of how I’ve changed my metric of success. If people come in and say, well, you know, I got to hit these numbers and you know, I got to hit New York times, best seller, wall street journal. And it’s like,

53:00
that’s someone else’s ranking for your, and also by the way, plenty of people get book ranking the first week and it just drops the next week. So, it’s like, it’s not necessarily the best metric. But it’s a ego metric. It’s a good ego metric and my ego was hurt because I didn’t get it. But I think it’s okay, it wouldn’t have changed my life position now.

53:29
So Daniel, where can people find out more about your book? Well, that’s a great question. See if you can go to the true artifact dot com. This is right now where you can find the preview of the book because the official drop is on 10, 25, 22. When that book releases, you’ll be able to get it for free via my website and via Spotify, Spotify, iTunes, and wherever podcasts are streamed. I’m going to put it out as independent podcast. And on that list, you can sign up for the preview, the promo. And then once you sign up,

53:57
You’ll get access to the whole world of the true artifact, which will be all the things we’re talking about from the different pieces of the IP I’m releasing to things that only VIPs and insiders are going to get. There’s also an account on Instagram at the true artifact. And it’s just the, uh, it’s just the first piece of this puzzle. And I’m not going to let myself go off this podcast without reading a piece from the book. Go for it. I’m going to end because it’s you. And by the way, just so everyone knows this verifies what I was thinking about relationships and

54:27
also probably data. Because the reason you texted me was because I sent out a mass text. That’s true. I sent out a mass text and I almost never push that button. Usually I don’t send out because there’s like a segment. I try not to text my friends with it because I the problem, the thing here is the thing. I accidentally imported my personal phone numbers into my marketing system and I can’t take them all out. So I’ve had to segment my audience versus my friends and people that I know from like business development. And

54:56
But for this, was like, fuck it. I’m just texting everyone. And so this is what came out of that. But I’m going to read you a piece. because you were the first person to respond for immediate appearance from this book, I am going to read you my favorite piece from this book. Sweet. This is called The Gradient of Now. The world moves in a continuous gradient that humans have to break into discrete units to measure.

55:25
But there are no specific points in time or space. There are no specific colors. There are no specific people. We use minutes to break down the endless flow of time into neat little building blocks so that our brains can decipher them. Time’s true form is shaped more like a psychic Mobius strip than a continuous line from the past to the future. The past and the future are interwoven

55:53
and in constant relationship to each other, creating one infinite edge that folds back onto itself. For an event to have happened in the past, it would have needed to occur at a discrete time. But the more you examine time, the more it slips through your fingers like sand. St. Augustine said, I know what time is, but when you ask me, I don’t. Every moment only exists in relation to other moments. We use personal and collective history to create mental hooks

56:23
that compress the vast calculus of time into a manageable file. When exactly does a moment in time begin or end? Is a child born the moment she leaves the birth canal and is breathing oxygen on our side of the womb? Is she born when the sperm fertilizes the egg or when the cells of the egg are created? Maybe she’s born at the exact moment that her father and mother are born because without those events, her existence would be impossible.

56:51
Or was she born when the first single-celled organism finally became multicellular and its ancestor crawled out of the sea? The more closely you look at time, the more you notice there’s nothing to see. There are no boundaries around when events start and stop. There are no discrete units to measure a moment, only a continuous flow in causation of itself. There is only now and now and now.

57:19
The more you look at matter, the more you realize it is not solid. The body we experience as hard and dense is actually more air than land. We’re completely porous on a microscopic level, constituted of trillions of cells surrounded by constellations of empty space. Inside each nucleus, even more particles vibrating with cellular energy. You extend to infinity in both directions. There is no difference between you and the room you are

57:48
Your cells create a field of electrical energy which touches and interacts with everything around you, including other people. There is no separation between anything or anybody. There was only the gradient of infinite change from one moment to the next. Last night, I watched the sky flex and bloom in the mountains of Santa Monica. The sun pulsed an infinite bouquet of colors for two hours as it set over the valley. Every instant, a different color.

58:18
Deep crimson to brilliant blue and green. Every shade, every moment, a barely perceptible variation of the one just a second before. I wonder if our lives are much like the pulsing colors over the night sky. Every moment, no separation, only a gradient of experiences. Only now and now and now. It’s like poetry, It is. You are a great writer. Thank you, sir. Thank you.

58:46
And thank you for that. Thank you for that reading the custom reading. I assume you’re going to be narrating your own audiobook. Oh, yeah, no, I’m gonna get some I’m gonna get some British guy off fiber to do. You know, so weird. It’s like Joe dispenser has an Australian guy do his, his audible work. And I’m like, this doesn’t work. If you know what his voice sounds like, it’s totally throwing me off. Yeah, yeah. Cool. Daniel. Hey, man. Appreciate you coming back on the show. It’s been a while. Thanks to you. been my pleasure.

59:16
Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now I love Daniel’s writing and you should definitely check out his book which is actually out right now. For more information about this episode, go to mywebquitterjob.com slash episode 441. And once again, I 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. SMS is next big own marketing platform and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash d.

59:43
That’s P-O-S-T-S-U-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to hang out with you in person this year in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. So grab a ticket to Seller Summit and let’s meet up. Go to SellerSummit.com. That’s S-E-L-L-E-R-S-S-U-M-M-I-T dot com. Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog. And if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:00
You’re listening to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and dig deep into what strategies they use to grow their businesses. Now today I have a very special guest on the show and I’m going to say this right now. This is perhaps the most meaningful episode that I’ve ever recorded and it impacted me tremendously. Now as entrepreneurs and human beings, we all take things for granted and often lose sight of what’s important. Today I have my friend Chad Vanigs on the show, a very successful entrepreneur in e-commerce.

00:30
and he recently got diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. He’s never smoked in his life and doctors say that he has a limited time to live. So in this episode, we’re to talk about regrets, gratitude and perspectives from a successful entrepreneur. But before we begin, I want to let you know that tickets for the 2023 Seller Summit are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. It is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online.

00:58
Now you all probably know me well enough by now to know that my event has zero fluff. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business and not high level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people and it’s a very intimate event. Everyone eats together and everyone parties together every single night. Now personally, I love smaller events and tickets always sell out far in advance. And if you are an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250K or $1 million per year,

01:27
We also offer a special mastermind experience where we break up into small groups, lock ourselves in a room, cater in food, and help each other with our businesses. The Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 23rd to May 25th. Hope to see you there. I also want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. Now, if you run an e-commerce business of any kind, you know how important it is to own your own customer contact list. And this is why I focus a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing.

01:52
SMS or text message marketing is already a top five revenue source from my ecommerce store and I couldn’t have done it without Postscript which is my text message provider. Now why did I choose Postscript? It’s because they specialize in ecommerce stores and ecommerce is their primary focus. Not only is the tool easy to use but you can quickly segment your audience based on your exact sales data and implement automated flows like an abandoned cart at the push of a button. Not only that but it’s price well too and SMS is the perfect way to engage with your customers.

02:19
So head on over to postscript.io slash Steve and try it for free. That’s P O S T S T R I P T dot IO slash Steve. And finally, I wanted to mention my other podcasts that released 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 it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the profitable audience podcast on your favorite podcast app.

02:49
Now onto the show.

02:56
Welcome to the My Wife Could Have Job podcast. Today I’m honored to have my friend Chad Vanigs on the show. Now, the last time I had Chad on was back in 2015 in episode 65, where we talked about email autoresponders of all things. Now that actually means that I’ve known Chad for seven years now. He is the former cohost of the eCommerce Influence podcast. He’s the co-founder of Revflow, a payment processing service for SaaS companies. He’s also helping to run a B2B SaaS company with their sales training.

03:26
He also runs a tequila farm, believe. So basically this guy has got his hands in a lot of pots. Now here’s why Chad is special to me. During one of the e-commerce fuel events, I can’t remember exactly which one, Chad introduced me to custom audiences in Klaviyo, specifically the ability for Klaviyo to automatically export people to Facebook for my ads, which actually made a huge difference to my sales on my store. And

03:55
Anyway, recently Chad was diagnosed with stage four cancer and I wanted to bring him on the show to talk about how his perspectives have changed and to inspire all of you. Chad is a ball fire and we can all learn from him. And with that, welcome back to show Chad after seven years. What’s going on, man? Hey Steve, how’s it going? Yeah, it’s been a while. It’s definitely been a while. You know, well, I’m trying to think if I spoke to you within those seven years,

04:24
Maybe a couple emails here and there, but that’s about it. Yeah. We, was on the podcast long time ago, obviously. And then when I went to Klaviyo, so I built the partner program at Klaviyo and that’s probably where we corresponded a little bit more because I was trying to figure out how to get the right partners, you know, like you and Ezra and then like BVXL and like just trying to put everybody together into this, this partner program, which is now massive, apparently.

04:53
It is man, you created a great thing and it’s a, I want to say though, there’s a lot of red tape now. Back in the day, I just send you an email. That’s what happens when something scales up. You’re like, you could just talk to Chad and now it’s like, I got to go through all the system in process. And that’s what happens when, you know, companies like Clavio scale up.

05:17
Yeah, I mean, for the podcast sponsorship, took me like almost two months just to get in their system with I had to fill out these forms for like lawyers and everything. I was like, oh my goodness. Give me Chad back, man. Give me Chad back. Those are the fun, scrappy days for me. That was fun. anyway, yeah. Well, catch me up real quick. Since we haven’t since we haven’t spoken in so long, what have you been doing with your time and what you got out of e-commerce kind of, right? Yeah, I mean,

05:47
I mean, the short version, the fast version is simply was an e commerce went to Klaviyo built the program got offered a chief marketing officer gig at a payment processing company took the title and the salary and ditched Klaviyo might have been a bad idea. I didn’t realize it was gonna go that far that fast. So oops. And then I was Chief Marketing Officer of this payments company for four years. And it was a turnaround, right? It was supposed to be

06:17
supposed to be a technology company, they were like, Oh, we got this great technology. And, and so I was like, Yeah, cool. I’ll come down and you know, I was another tech firm. So I was like, this is great. I’m gonna be CMO of a great tech company only to find out that the private equity firm screwed it up and vetted it poorly. And then they cold stacked the tech so they like just put it in a freezer essentially said, here you go. We’ll see if it works later. And then I was stuck working on a turnaround company that

06:45
was brutal. So anyway, that’s what I was doing. And I finally, I just I gutted it out through the pandemic so that I could buy this property in California. And we started remodeling it for a year and turning it into a urban farm. And then I was like, I’ll do my own payment processing company. So that’s what I was doing. And then, yeah, I think then I got diagnosed and everything changed. So I’ve been

07:12
basically working at Winning by Design as a contracted sales trainer where I train sales reps at like Dropbox and Calendly and managers how to sell more and manage better. That’s pretty much what I’ve been doing. Nice man. Tequila Farm and Uncharted Spirits. Those are the two I care about. Yeah, the Tequila Farm. Actually, you know, of all the spirits actually Tequila is my favorite. That’s it’s called Tequila Farm. So, Chad,

07:40
Here’s the thing, man. You’ve been very open about your diagnosis. And I mean, we’ve hung out on several occasions. And I remember like you’re in shape. You don’t eat poorly. You’re a pretty healthy guy, man. What?

07:57
it just seemed like out of the blue and you’re not a smoker or anything either, right? No, no. So for those like to stage four lung cancer, I have a certain type of mutation. To give you a little context, like, I thought it was a COVID cough. So I let it go for a couple months thinking it was long COVID found out that I tumors in both lungs, my lymph nodes, my bones and then my brain. So the tumor my lung was five times the average and then I have 30 lesions in my brain.

08:26
And so obviously doesn’t doesn’t sit great. So how did I get it? It’s hard to, you really can’t pinpoint it, right? No radon in the house, all these things, but I will go probably more on a philosophical side of things. Cause I obviously, when it first happened, it’s just a matter of trying to come to grips with it. My first 45 days were pretty bad. Like when I say bad, mean, psychologically. And so I started reading books. There’s a book called

08:55
book called cured, this one right there. And so this guy talks about how to heal and spontaneous remission and it’s heal the heal your diet, heal your immune system, heal your stress response, and then heal your identity. And so when you look at those, because he did the science, the research on like, how do people with terminal diagnosis, spontaneous, spontaneously heal.

09:24
And it’s those four components. And he says, that’s not only the way to heal, but those are the guardrails to prevent. So when I look at those four things, for me personally, it’s probably a little bit of each of those four things that what I call open the door to one cell mutation that led to all the tumors. And if I look at it, again, I don’t have answers, but if I look back on my life, I was fine with.

09:50
I was fine. I was okay with diet, but maybe I went a little too far. The issue here is I had a lot I was adding a lot of stress and I was adding a lot there was there was some identity issues. I’m just gonna say it upfront. Like, yeah, I was doing things that I didn’t give to. I didn’t care about. Are we allowed to cuss on this or not? You do it, man. Do whatever you want. Yeah. Basically, I was doing things I didn’t give two shits about. Right? Okay.

10:17
And basically, I was always doing the thing in order I was I was doing things to do eventually do the thing. And so what I’ll be easiest way to sum that up is I was not authentically living out the life I had imagined for myself. And when you’re not authentically living out who you are, you hold that in and your body actually responds to that. And so the combination of that plus

10:46
some stress stuff, right? It over overwhelms the immune system. And when the immune system is overwhelmed, trying to just deal with stress identity, you know, all that stuff, it doesn’t notice the mutating cells. Everybody has cancer cells in their body. The difference is your immune system is working to fight it. But when your immune system is shutting down or focusing elsewhere, those cells can sneak out and then mutate. So

11:15
Long story short, combination of somewhere I screwed up on diet, somewhere my immune system wasn’t working, somewhere the stress response was not great, and my identity of who I am and where I was going all played a part in that. Can we talk about the identity portion? I imagine some of that relates to business, right? 100%. Okay. 100%. So when you left Klaviyo and you went to this payment processing company, and this is just for the listeners out there who are…

11:41
pursuing these things as well. I ran into that trap too, where I was just chasing revenue and it was just causing a lot of stress with my wife and I. We didn’t even need the money, but like ego wise, I felt like I wanted to grow stuff. I’m just curious what your story was in that regard. Yeah, man, it goes all the way back to the days when I was in real estate. I left college and I went into real estate because I wanted to make a

12:08
shit ton of money in order to go and build a world excursion company for lack of a better term still working on that term. But like, think about a world excursion company. I was like, well, first, I’m going to go make all this money in real estate and then do that. Well, I started making a ton of money in 2005. And then I don’t know if you remember 2008. Yeah, I went straight up with it and straight down with it and fail. Then it was

12:33
moving into moving to LA and getting into e commerce, right, where I was doing e commerce influence, I was working there to, you know, build something great. And we started that process. And then for me, I had to get out, I had to get out. And like, there’s another one that I was like, well, that didn’t work well. Then I started getting into like, I’m going to build this thing called the scoopini. I came up with this thing for a catler scoop. And it’s like, I started doing all that. But the entire time it was, I don’t really care about these things. I was just using it to build a world excursion company.

13:02
And the entire time it was like I was driving down a highway, but looking at the road on the other side, like that’s the real road I want to be on. But here I am. I don’t keep going down this road because someday I’ll get to the other road. And that to me is the identity issue. And I did that for up until, you know, I don’t know, the last three months. And when you the way I describe it to people is like,

13:27
I was, if anybody drives stick, not many people drive stick anymore, but I drive stick. And if you drive your car at a hundred miles per hour in third gear, you are going to blow the engine quick. Yep. So not only was I driving in third gear because I was everything. was going to bed late, getting up early as an entrepreneur, trying to make things work. Right. At the same time, I’m driving on the wrong road. I’m driving on the wrong road. I’m looking at a different road the entire time.

13:53
So my body finally had enough and it like pulled the parking brake hard. And it’s like, I started, I’m just giving you this metaphor, but I started fishtailing my life starts fishtailing and my car’s rolling. And it’s like, it’s like the worst wreck of my life. That’s what it felt like. But as I sat on the side of the road, I could tell I just wanted to get going again, but I couldn’t get going. literally could not get going. Cause my body was like, you’re no, you got to stop. And as I had that time to reflect, that’s when I realized I was driving on the wrong road the entire time.

14:23
And I was never authentically me being me. So my identity was wrapped up in become a successful entrepreneur in e-commerce or in real estate or in payments, things I never gave two shits about. And so that to me is the identity part. And now when I’m looking at these other things, right. And I’m looking at these other things, or when I’m starting to work on the things I cared about, can already feel my happiness because happiness is what you need to optimize for not

14:53
Is my product gonna generate $10 million in revenue in six months? You know, it’s funny, Chad, I’ve interviewed probably 450 entrepreneurs. And what’s funny is the conversations that we have when the recording has stopped are a lot more profound than when they are on. It’s obviously not the case with you. But what I actually found is that a lot of these entrepreneurs who are killing it that I interview, they’re actually not happy or

15:22
there’s something missing. And I remember chatting with an entrepreneur who I won’t name publicly, but they were asking me about relationship advice afterwards with marriage and stuff. And I think this all kind of ties in maybe not directly correlated to what you’re going through, but people are unhappy because they’re chasing something and it’s not the source of their happiness. I think you use the word chase and that whenever you feel like you’re chasing

15:52
That’s when in my mind, you’re being, you’re not being your authentic self. And I say that because you think about some of the people out there that you can just tell are happy. They’re not chasing anything. They’re just living every day knowing that they love and I’d so cliche, but they love the process. When you’re chasing something, you’re not, you’re not really loving the process. You’re, you’re chasing. I mean, I think as somebody like, I don’t know if you know who Kai Lenny is, Kai.

16:20
I want to, I want to go surf Mavericks someday. It’s a big wave off Santa Cruz, like 30, 60 feet. Like I’m not in the shape to do that yet. But Kai Lenny surfs it like it’s like, you know, like it’s a two footer, you know, it’s like, it’s easy for him, you know, but he’s not chasing anything, man. He’s out there just practicing every day. He’s cause he loves it and he’s happy with it. Yeah. He’s, he’s a pro now, but I just realized how much I was just chasing every single day so that I could.

16:50
have a feather in my cap and more revenue or this or that. It’s just like, I was unhappy. I was I’m a happy person. But like I was, I was always like, I’m happier now. Let me put it this way, I got stage four lung cancer, I was told I had like six to 12 months if medicine doesn’t work. And yet I’m finding that I’m becoming happier now with a diagnosis like that than I was previously. And that’s kind of saying something. That’s crazy. Well, let me ask you this, Chad.

17:19
For everyone listening, how do you get out of that rut without something catastrophic happening? Great. I’ve been trying to figure that out, right? Because, you know, I want people to have this, this now new sense of clarity that I have. But it’s like, I don’t want everybody to go through this shit. You know, it’s like, yeah, I think that if this is all reflective, so looking back, like, what would be different? Let me just put it this way.

17:48
It’s optimizing for happiness. But how do know you’re happy? Right? How do know you’re happy? And to me, it’s like, I am happiest. And I wrote down what is my ideal day look like? What is my ideal day look like? That was where I started because that’s where I had to see it’s getting up. It’s writing on something I care about. I like to write. So I’ll write some things I care about. Then I go outside and I work on my little urban farm that we’re building.

18:16
and I’m outside working on that stuff. I’m going to start learning how to weld soon. I like working with my hands. Right. And then I like being super athletic, like working out, etc. So I wrote out what the ideal Dave looks like. Now you have to what you have to do is like if you’re an entrepreneur, you’re like, I got to go do this and this and this I got to optimize my ads and like, look, I’ve run a couple email

18:40
email marketing, email agencies, and I just will never forget, like, I don’t give a shit about email. Like, I don’t care. Right? I didn’t want to be the next email guy. Never did. And so if you find yourself going down that route, like, I don’t care to be that and stop like, literally, that’s all I’m gonna say. It’s like, write out your ideal day. If your ideal day is not where you’re going, you’re on the wrong road, and you need to actually pull off to the side, don’t let your body or your life

19:10
pull the parking brake. I don’t know if that’s helpful, but it’s like right the ideal day. If the ideal day is different than what your day is now, that’s when you need to do something else. You know, it’s funny, uh, growing up with two, I don’t want to say tiger, but let’s say they were aggressive parents. Uh, we were always taught to have to pay our dues, right? Uh, we can’t always just do what makes us happy.

19:38
I agree with that to a certain respect. I guess from my perspective, what I try to do is not every day can obviously be a perfect day. But I would say as long as I have one or two of those days per week, I think I’m good. What’s your perspective on that? Yeah, I use the 80-20 rule. You’re gonna have 20 % of the bullshit you don’t want to deal with. Like you just got to deal with it. Right? So it’s like, that’s how I look at it. I’m looking to get to 80-20. The problem is I was the complete opposite. I was 20-80.

20:09
right? Even 5050 would have been better, you know? Yeah. So right out, like that’s what I so that’s good. That’s a good clarifying point, right? It’s like right out that ideal day. This is if every day was perfect, but know that it’s not but you’re you should be working towards 8020. And I was the opposite. I’ll never forget this. I wrote him. I always wanted to build this thing called Uncharted Spirits. What we do is we basically that’s the World Excursion Company.

20:35
Right. go around the world and like, for example, I did a boat race down the coast of Tanzania. I rode motorcycles through Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Russia. Right. And I’ll never forget when I was working towards building that route through Mongolia, Russia and Kazakhstan. My wife looks at me and goes, Hey, do you feel like you’re, you know, living what you should be doing? I said, well, I’m not on that trip right now. So no, so right now it’s like 3 % of my life is what I’m actually doing. And I’d never forget when I said that.

21:04
I go, but when I’m on the trip, it’ll be like 80 % of what I want to do. And so if I die on that trip, I’m going to die doing what I should have been doing. The problem is I got back from the trip and I went back to 3%, 3 % working on the things I enjoy. So it’s like, and I wasn’t, I wasn’t moving that number to the 80 20. I was still at the three and 97. And so that’s, I agree with the take, you’re never going to have a perfect day, but

21:34
If you’re not working towards that, that feeling of this is who I am and who I should be, then you’re, you’re in a, you’re gonna be in a bad spot.

21:46
I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six day mini course on how to get started in ecommerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be obtained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free.

22:15
just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show.

22:26
Let me ask you this. What stopped you from pursuing that world excursion company? Was it money? Yeah, that’s a big part of it, Money was a big part of it. always thought I had that I thought I had to make thought I had to make money to build the thing, right? I thought I had to make money to build the thing, which is true in some sense. Okay, right.

22:50
The problem is, I live in California. I’m increasing my living expenses. And so I look at somebody like, there’s two people I think about. Alex Arnold, I don’t know if you know who that is. And then there’s a guy named Chris Picard. So Alex Arnold is the guy that free soloed that big one in Yosemite. I can’t remember. The Half Dome? Okay. He free soloed Half Dome, right? Yeah.

23:19
And I’ll never like his story is simply, I just love climbing. I just love climbing. And he would just be lived in a van and he just would climb all the time because that’s what he loved. He didn’t care about material possessions. And now he’s considered the one of the greatest, if not the greatest climber of all time. Right. It takes people days to scale half to him. He did it without ropes in three hours because he loved it. He got to the top. He got to the top and the filmmaker, Jimmy Chin goes, how do you want to celebrate?

23:49
Because I mean, this is a world class feat. And Alex looks at him and goes, I don’t know, probably just going to go back to the van and do a do a hangboard session. No, hangboarding is where you just hold your fingers here and you just hang so you can make your fingers tight. The dude just did the most incredible thing in the world. And he’s like, I’m just going to go back and practice hangboarding. And in my head, I’m like, I’ve been measuring myself based on like building a business versus

24:17
why didn’t you just go and like maybe lower the expenses, work with your wife to find something that, you know, would work for us financially, because we’ve still got to do things and build this thing, you know, with less stressful components. Like if I were to go back and do it again, I probably would have just taken a sales job where I can make a ton of money, but not be super involved and do that sales job, get my money saved and keep investing. Instead, I was like,

24:45
put my money into building e-commerce inputs, put my money into building this, put my money into this. And it was all the things I should have been putting money into. And when I say money, I’m talking time too, right? Money into the same thing. This is hilarious. You know what’s funny is now that I’m in my forties and I’m speaking to a lot of my friends who are Asian, I have a lot of Asian friends, and a lot of them are, and I think it’s just parental pressure really, but they’re stuck in these jobs that they don’t like.

25:15
The problem is that they’re getting paid so much. Like we’re talking about getting 500,000 to a million dollars a year in their profession, right? It can be hard to give that up, to pursue something that you really want to do. I mean, it’s easy for us to talk about this, but I’m thinking to myself even, like how would I even be able to do that? Yeah. So that’s a great question, right? Or a great point. Like, I mean, the version of the golden handcuffs, you know? Here’s the simple thing.

25:45
And like, I, it’s weird for me to say this, I got the benefit of being diagnosed and really having my life. Right? See, I can laugh now. Yeah, two, three weeks ago, three, four weeks ago, like I wasn’t laughing. But now, you know, this is this is the hand I’m being dealt. Right? The easiest way for me to say this, because I was I was given a timeline on my life. Literally, the doctor signed an insurance thing that says less six months, about six months to live if medicine doesn’t work.

26:13
And I’m like, Oh my God, Oh, my life actually has a, has a, has an expiration date. And I said to myself, Holy shit, you’re going to die. We’re all going to die. The problem is we don’t think about death enough. And I guarantee if we thought about death more, and we thought about the, the, the finite, the finite component of our lives, you might actually say, is that money worth it? The problem is, like, I mean, here’s the simple thing. You’re going to die.

26:43
I don’t know what to say. Like, and no one’s gonna remember you. Like, I hate to, I’m just gonna be honest, like, 10 years after you’re dead, no one is gonna really care. Like, they’re gonna be like, I miss Chad, or I miss Steve. And like, you have kids, right? That that may go on a little longer. But at the end of the day, like, what are you here to do? So you making half a million to a million dollars a year, and unhappy? I don’t know, that’s gonna be really, it’s gonna be really problematic when it’s time.

27:13
So the answer is this, it’s like if you’re not happy making that half million, just remember you’re gonna die. And the question is, was it worth it? You know, it’s funny, for me, it’s less about the money than it is for like the lost times. I remember when I was growing up, my parents worked hard so they could put me through school. I ended up going through college without any debt. My dad took a second job so I could go to college. And I don’t want that to be the case with my kids.

27:42
I remember at ball games, I used to play volleyball and sometimes I’d look over at the sideline and I’d see that, you know, they weren’t there. And I remember those. It’s not like they missed all my games, but the they missed, I remember. And so that’s why I don’t want to miss anything of my kids. And so that’s my why. And if I have to suffer a little bit, maybe I guess this all goes back to your perfect day analogy, right? The 80 20. yeah, look, I mean, at the end of the day, everybody has their why. Like Steve, you, if you have a family,

28:13
then you know that like if 80 % of your time is given to your family and so the 20 % working on a business that may not be amazing, but it gives you that time with your family, I’d rather all day, like that makes a ton of sense, right? The minute it takes away from your family and the thing that you you want to be doing, that’s where it’s probably a problem. But in your case, yeah, like, look, my parents were both teachers, they showed up to every game because they were teachers.

28:41
Right. Because they got out the same time I did, they had all the same times off. But if they were in, if they were doing the things I would do, if my dad was a chief marketing officer somewhere, guarantee he’d miss a lot of my things. Yeah. And like, I guarantee you, I know this looking back, he’d be super unhappy with that because he cherished those moments. So the 80 20 rule, it’s like, yeah, maybe your business is that 20%, but it gives you the 80 % of the ideal day being with your family, going to the events and spending time.

29:11
So that’s where you have to really think about that. Yeah. So now have you essentially dropped all the things that you don’t want to be doing? Yeah, I’m getting like, it’s there’s still like, it’s like a transition, right? Okay. Yeah. I’m straddling. I told somebody the other day for the first 45, 60 days, I was just trying to keep the wheels on the bus. Like just keep the wheels on the bus physically, mentally, emotionally, and like financially, cause like dude, medical bills are starting to just

29:40
go right through the roof, right? Yeah. And now but because everything I’ve started to stabilize like those tumors in my brain have reduced in size by 50%. The medicine is working, but combination with all the things I’m doing, right. And so now I can start like I have space to think about the future. But now the future is like, I don’t know, is it six months? Is it two years? Could I live another 60? Like I don’t, I don’t know. So it’s like

30:07
I haven’t stopped everything because I’m in that transition year period, but I can tell you this much that I’m starting to shut down like Red Flow. You mentioned Red Flow. Yeah, I’m actually going to shut it down. I’m like, that’s not interest. That’s no longer important to me. And I’m just going to focus on tequila farm and uncharted spirits. And I got time to do that. You know, we have money saved. got insurance payouts. So it’s like, can go for a little while winning by design. I’m only doing things that I like now. Now, again, there’s the 20 % of

30:37
junk. But the point is I’m now able to cut most of the stuff that I don’t like. just like, I’m going to die someday. It could be soon. So I might as well do the things I love. Can we talk a little bit about health? I know for me, like, early on in my business, I used to neglect it, right? Sometimes I would skip meals. Sometimes I would just eat like whatever was there just so I could continue on. And I know health is huge, but people just don’t realize it.

31:06
What were you, you always struck me as a really healthy guy. That’s the thing. What would you have changed in that regard? Yeah, man. I, that’s why it’s been hard because I was generally, I mean, I surf two hours at a time. I surf decent size waves. I’m like, I’m working out, you know, the security guard at my, I had to go do a bronchoscopy at UCLA medical center and the security guards 400 pounds eating McDonald’s. I’m like, that guy’s healthier than me. That’s, that’s messed up. Yeah. So when it comes to that,

31:33
That’s why I’m saying at the beginning, it was those four components. It’s diet, immune system, stress and identity. And that’s why it’s like, I had the probably the food side, the diet side pretty well dialed, stress and identity side that probably opened it up. And so when my food was even just a bit off, it just piles it on. So I can tell you right now, 90 % I’m making that number up, but 90 % of health is what we eat.

32:00
And if you literally, I’m much more cognizant. I thought I was pretty cognizant of this now, but now I’m even more cognizant of like what’s in our food. America’s food system is totally destroyed. It is just a, it’s just bad, right? It’s bad. If you get anything from a box or a bag and you look at what’s in there, that’s, that’s, it’s not good. And I can tell you that sugar is the number one culprit. saw a stat the other day, 200 years ago, the average human consumed three

32:30
pounds of sugar in a year. Three pounds of sugar in a year. Now it’s 156 pounds a year. And sugar is the number one problem. Okay, so yeah, sugar, carbs, alcohol, even though we’re called tequila farm, because we love tequila. It’s gotta be careful on the boobs, know? Sure. It seems like the four things it seems like stress and identity are related, right? Very much so. If you don’t have your identity, right, you’re

32:59
probably stressed out. Yeah. And what was the fourth one? immune system. yeah, diet, immune system, stress, diet, immune system, and identity. Yeah. Okay. I just want you to share what you’re doing in all four categories. So identity, kind of have covered. Yep. Stress. I would imagine you’re a lot less stressed, especially once you drop some of these things that you don’t want to be doing. Yeah. What are you doing to change your diet?

33:26
And I’m assuming your diet was pretty good before, but what are you doing now? Yeah, so on the diet side, like, everything’s based the lack of just a summer. It’s basically all organic. Right? Okay. I love peanut butter. But the only peanut butter I get is peanuts. The ingredients are peanuts and salt. That’s it. But if you look at a Jif jar, it’s going to be loaded. Anything like that. Can’t do it. So on the diet side, I create what I call a ZFG.

33:53
which is basically me blending in a Vitamix all the all the vegetables I need to get and I call it ZFG because it’s called excuse my language but it’s called zero fucks given I don’t care what’s in it don’t care how it tastes I just got to get it down right and so all plants be spinach all that good stuff then I do I have a nutritionist I have a cancer nutritionist and she just tells me what to what to do and I got a meal service that they make it according to that so that’s like

34:22
That’s kind like the food side. Then exercise, high intensity training for me is big. So I started a CrossFit gym with a trainer and he’s getting these things going, right? Okay, I’m probably in some of the best shape I’ve ever been in. And it’s like, except for that one little thing, you know, before we started recording, you mentioned you cut out meat is meat bad, per se? That’s a loaded question because okay, I love meat. I would say there’s two schools of thought.

34:51
especially in this cancer world, there’s plant based only no dairy, no meat. And like, that’s the only way to go. Right? Not vegan, because vegan has a lot of crap in it, too. Right? Interesting. Okay, like, oh, I’m vegan. I’m like, that doesn’t mean you’re healthy. Okay. Yeah, the plant based, that’s the way to call it versus, you know, me. So right is me unhealthy. You’re gonna depends on who you talk to. But I can tell you right now that

35:20
when they look at meat as being unhealthy, it’s the processed stuff from stores like Vons or Ralph’s or Publix or whatever. So cold cuts basically. like that. Okay. You want the grass fed stuff at the very most with the least amount of whore bones and all that stuff. I know I’m talking to you right now, but this is what I eat every day and what my kids eat every day. The meat? Just in general, processed stuff like you know, we do what’s easy.

35:49
I know my kids a sandwich with cold cuts, right? But here’s the deal. Let’s look at that cold cut. Well, you got it. This is where you know, the financial ability comes into play. Like when I get bread, like I eat bread. So there’s a lot of wheat and gluten, all that problem in there. But that’s from the bread on the shelves. If you go to the bread in the freezer section where it’s sprouted grains, right, where it’s actual grains, like they’re in the freezer section because there’s nothing in there to preserve them. It’s like mostly

36:19
the actual grains that you need themselves. So like Ezekiel bread, right? That’s the good stuff. So just change the bread to that. Right? Of course, they’re gonna think it tastes like sawdust if you’re giving them something else. But yeah, but then the meat, right? If you can get you can get cold cuts that are like, non processed cold cuts. That’s that’s the hard part, though. Right? Yeah, I think I kind of understand how this all goes together. So these four aspects, really all it takes is it’s like a chain, right?

36:49
If one of those things goes down, then maybe the whole thing collapses. I would say for the listeners of this podcast, identity probably is the one that’s most related. I’m just trying, having gone through what you’ve gone through in the past somewhat, you know, on the, on the business side, it’s just really hard to make those changes. I’ll tell you what happened with us, with my wife and I, I was the crazy one.

37:15
I was always the one like, hey, we need to hit a million bucks because I just wanted a seven figure business for ego purposes, right? So I remember we were close one year and I was like, okay, let’s hit it. And so I started blasting emails. I started running ads that weren’t that profitable and driving my wife crazy because we weren’t staffed to handle all those orders. And then we hit it and then we were like, okay, great. We went out to dinner and I was like, okay.

37:42
let’s do another 20 % next year. And then my wife flipped and we got in this huge fight. And then it was actually, she was the one responsible for putting things in perspective, right? We make enough money. We spend all our time with the kids. Why are we stressing out for some more money that we’re not even going to spend? Like I’m cheap. Like I’m talking to you on a shared Zoom account. We were joking about this earlier. Zoom is only like 10 bucks. So.

38:12
Is there any way to figure this out with something catastrophic not happening? I mean, what advice you got? Yeah, that’s that. That’s the thing I’m trying to figure out. Like I my my my mission moving forward is like, how do I help people avoid what I got to but get the same realizations? Like that’s literally what I’m trying to figure out. And I think it comes back to just like, it’s, it’s so cliche, but it’s like, often optimizing happiness, I need to put this out there.

38:41
You’re gonna die, Steve. You’re gonna die. The thing is, is you’re assuming you’re going to keep going for the next 20, 30, 40 years. Yeah. But it could happen today. Right? The problem is, is like, you somehow have to put an artificial timeline on yourself. Right? It’s so cliche live for today. But here’s the problem. I’m living for today. But like, what if I end up do live in another 10 years? Oh, shit, I’ve a plan for that a little bit.

39:09
You know, I can’t just go out and do whatever. Right. So I have to say here and I say, if I live another 10 years, right? Am I doing the 80 20? Am I going to be living 80 % of like who I am the authentic self and if you answer that question and say, I’m not I’m not working towards who I want to become.

39:32
Right? And we can, here’s the problem. We can justify it all day long. When I was doing all those other things, I was justifying it all day long. was like, well, I’m just going to keep doing this in order to get the money so I can become that. So I guess the final component here is like one, you’re going to die. You got to tell yourself that you got to think about that. I contemplate death every night. Now I go to lay in bed and I just lay there and I think about dying because now it’s real contemplate it. Second, right. If your day isn’t optimizing towards that 80 20 where it’s 80 % of

40:02
your authentic self, right? You really got to have secondary, you got to have, you got to be hard on yourself and say, I don’t know if this is it. Right. And then third, it’s like, in that same component, those four pillars of life, right? Diet, immune system, stress and identity, and they all go hand in hand, they interlock, but start on one, start with food, right? And to me, that’s like,

40:31
That’s probably the best way I can say it. Well, let me ask you this question. How do you figure that stuff out? Like, how do you figure out what you should be doing or what your authentic self even is? I mean, for the longest time, I had no idea. That’s a really good question that I don’t mean you kind of knew on that trip, right? I knew. Here’s the thing I knew for like 1015 years. Oh, my God. Okay, I knew for a long time. Right? I knew for a long time. I think if you don’t know yet, the thing is, is

41:00
you probably do know you just haven’t sat down and really, you just you, it’s there, I can promise you it’s there in the back of your mind. It’s just not not illuminated yet, because you haven’t probably allowed it to come out. I knew for a long time what exactly who I was. But I just never did it. So how do you find that? I mean, I guess the question you’re gonna die. So what do you want to do before you die? And like, it’s not like I want to go travel, but like,

41:28
What is the thing you want to give back to the world? How do you want to leave it better than you found it? And if you’re not doing it, leaving you like, am I going to leave this better than I found it? Then you’re probably not maybe not doing the thing that you want to want to do. I’m working on that still. No, I mean, for me, I think this podcast is going to be profound for a lot of people. I mean, traditionally, we talk about business tactics and strategy on this podcast, but this is very important, which is why I wanted to have you on. There’s just so many entrepreneurs that I know that

41:58
on the surface are killing it, but there’s something missing inside. And it’s just, for me, it’s always been ego. I’ll just full on admit saying like saying stuff, right? the money, because I’m cheap. Like, I don’t need that much money. We don’t spend that much money because I’m cheap. the ego is always got even today, like, I have all these friends from Stanford that are running or have exited hundreds of millions of dollars. And here I am selling handkeeps, right? So I’ve always had that ego problem. Yeah. But

42:28
Well, let me ask you this, Steve. Yeah. You’re gonna die. Right? We’ve established that chat. I know. I’ve repeated it. I’ve repeated it multiple times. And I tell you why. Because you these things need to be repeated. I can’t say it once you got to say it multiple. So I’m glad it’s I think it’s finally hit. It’s hitting me. It’s hitting me. Yeah. So yeah, will your Stanford buddies care about your hankies when you’re gone or vice versa? Right? Like or reverse it? That’s my point.

42:57
No one’s gonna give a shit. Yep. Chad, I’m gonna make sure everyone listens to this interview. This interview for me has probably been my favorite one. And I don’t have as far as as long as I can remember, man. Okay. No, I’m serious. I really appreciate you coming on. Yeah, man. I appreciate you having me. It’s good to catch up for sure. Yeah. And I know if anyone has any questions about this. I mean, where can they get ahold of you? Or if you don’t want any correspondence, that’s fine, too.

43:26
No, I like I said, I’m finally getting to the point where I’m this is right now how I give back. So people have given back to me in this process. And now it’s time for me to, I’m here to put guardrails up. I’m at the bottom of the cliff in the ambulance right now. Right. But I’d rather put the guardrails up so you don’t get to this place. The best place is, is probably LinkedIn. I’m actually, you know, that’s where I write a lot of my stuff on LinkedIn. So it’s simple. It’s just Chad Van Ainks, right? So LinkedIn.

43:55
whatever that URL is, slash Chad Vannings. You hit me up there and then can give you some email address stuff and go from there. Awesome. Cool. Well, thanks a lot, Chad, man. It was great catching up. Yeah, you too, man.

44:11
Hope you enjoy that episode. Now my heart goes out to Chad and his family. And all I can say is that of everyone I know, I have faith that Chad can beat this. And I encourage all of you to follow his story because you’ll be inspired and grateful. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 439. And once again, I 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.

44:40
SMS is the next big own marketing platform and you can sign up for free over at post group.io slash Steve. That’s P O S T S E R I P T dot IO slash Steve. Now I also want to hang out with you in person this year in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, grab a ticket to seller summit and let’s meet up. Go to seller summit.com. That’s S E L L E R S S U M M I T.com. Now we 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 my wife, quitter job.com.

45:10
and sign up for my free 6 day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:00
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. Now it’s the holiday season and I’m currently on break. And can you believe that there are over 400 plus episodes on the podcast? Now there’s no way that you’d listen to them all, so I picked a couple of classics for you to review. Enjoy.

00:23
Welcome to the My Wife Quarter Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have my buddy James Clear back on the show. And in case you missed him last time, James is on the podcast back in episode 202, where we broke down his strategies on how to build a blog that gets millions of visits per month. But in today’s episode, we’re going to take it up a level and discuss how to build good habits and break bad ones, tactics that James has uncovered over the years from studying the habits and routines of entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, and high-powered individuals. And I’m proud to say,

00:53
James’s most recent book atomic habits has hit the New York Times bestseller list and at one point I think he was the number eight best-selling book on all of Amazon and With that welcome the show James. How are doing today? Hey, yeah, I’m doing well. Thanks so much for having me back It’s gonna talk to you. Yeah, so first off congrats on the book Thank you. I’m actually just curious what it takes to hit the New York Times bestseller list these days It’s like is there a strategy for doing so is there a way to game it?

01:23
So there are two answers here. So the first answer, what does it take? I can only tell you what it took for me. So the kind of high level was I wrote two articles a week on JamesClear.com starting in 2012. I did that for like three years and built my platform up and got an audience of, I think it was around 200, 250,000 email subscribers around that point after about three years.

01:49
And I leveraged that the size of that platform, that audience to get introduced to agents and publishers. And we put together a book proposal that took about three months and pitched it to, I think, 17 or 19 publishers. And then I think it was 19. And I think we got meetings with seven. So I flew to New York for a week, went and met with all these publishers with my agent. We were lucky. We had a good amount of interest. So we got bids from four.

02:19
and then ended up selecting our favorite one out of the bunch. then I signed the contract to write the book in a year. It became very apparent that I needed more time than that. And so I went back and asked for an additional year, and they very kindly gave it to me. So it took me two years of writing and research. That was easily the hardest part, the most suffering. I felt like…

02:46
I was really hard to write under contract. felt like there were a lot of expectations to produce something great. I was really worried that people wouldn’t enjoy it or that the publisher wouldn’t think it was good enough. Um, handed that in actually three months late from the extended deadline. So two years and three months of writing. And then we spent nine months planning the launch and, uh, marketing and prepping and doing interviews and all that stuff, getting the book, you know, on the publisher side, they were getting it typeset and printed and all that type of thing. And,

03:16
Then the book released. The three months before launch, I did 85 interviews in like 10 weeks or 12 weeks, something crazy like that. A bunch of blog posts, emails to my own audience. Basically any and every favor I could call in. I was like working on that. And that culminated with a bunch of exposure on launch day. I was on CBS this morning. I did a TV segment. So just like a ton of marketing.

03:43
push in addition to trying to write like a really fantastic book. And all of that came together and we had a really great launch week and then ended up hitting the New York Times bestseller list and then we hit it again. So the first time was we were number five in advice and how to and then the second time and still right now it’s number three in business. And so yeah, the book, the launch has done really well, but that’s what it looked like for me.

04:12
So that’s the it really and I like give that whole process because it was definitely not like a one-week thing I mean it was like a so yeah, I know that I was just kind of curious how many books you actually have to sell it’s in like the first week, right? Yeah, so they have two different types of lists. The first one is calculated weekly so And the second one is calculated monthly and so we we ended up hitting both So one is based on weekly sales one is based on monthly sales

04:42
For weekly sales, it does depend on what category you’re in. So some categories like general nonfiction, like memoirs and things like that. I’m not sure what the numbers are for that. I think they’re actually a little bit lower from what I’ve heard from people, but I don’t know for sure. Then what you need in like advice and how to, which is the category I was in.

05:04
And this gets a little bit to your question of like, is there a way to game it or not? Certainly many people have tried. I was not really interested in doing some of those things that are, I guess you would say like on the margin of like, oh, is this, you know, allowed or not? Like some people, some speakers will try to do things like buy, I won’t name any names, but there are people who have bought like, you know, 10,000 or 20,000 copies and then have them sitting in their garage. And so they’re like,

05:34
They bought the books so that it would look like that number of sales came through during the first week and they could get on the list, but they didn’t actually go to readers or anything like that. So I was like really adamant about every copy we sell needs to go to an actual person. you know, or stuff like you’ll see a lot of speakers will trade their fee for books.

05:54
So, you know, they’ll say like I’ll come talk but in you if you do it in these three months when I’m prepping for launch then you won’t have to pay me you can just buy, you know 500 books instead or something like that. So people will try to do stuff like that. There are some really weird services that you could hire. I don’t actually know if they still exist because I think the New York Times like became savvy to them but for a while people would pay like

06:21
They would pay a service, I don’t know, 10, 20, $30,000. I don’t know how much it was. It was definitely in the tens of thousands. And they would, that company would have like a bunch of little, uh, they would have people go out to different stores and like buy individual copies of books or place individual orders on Amazon. Now you were really buying like 10,000 copies through that company, but they would have their employees like place them all as individual orders. So they all looked like they were individual people buying and they would spread them out across the country and stuff.

06:50
And all of that stuff is just like a lot. mean, first of all, I just don’t know if it’s a good way to spend your time, whether it’s ethical or not. But also just it’s all just an effort to try to get on the list. Yeah. Now, some of the bestseller lists like I think USA Today, we hit the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, bestseller list, the USA Today list, Publishers Weekly, the Independent Booksellers list.

07:19
And some of them are strictly based on sales. Like I’m pretty sure the publishers weekly list and the USA Today list are like whatever book sells in most copies. That’s the number one book. Now the New York Times list is a little bit of a black box. I mean, it’s the most elite list to be on and nobody quite knows how it works. But from what I can tell you, you asked earlier how many copies you need to sell. I think 10,000 is roughly

07:49
The the minimum like kind of rule of thumb you’ll hear people throw out now that doesn’t guarantee you’re gonna get on because it depends on what week you’re launching and how many copies other books are selling that week but as a rule of thumb if you do 10,000 in a week then that’s kind of the beer in the game now just because you have that money sell does not mean that you’re gonna get on the list and The New York Times will sometimes make an editorial decision and say, you know this is not the kind of book that we want to have on here or

08:18
We think that the way you got these sales looks a little suspicious. so like I’ve heard from people who I heard from one author who sold 4,000 individual copies and then they had one company that purchased 6,000 copies. So they thought, Hey, I sold my 10. Like I should be, uh, you know, I should be in the running here. But I think the New York times looks at that and they think, well, really you sold like 4,001, um, because you just had like one big customer that said, yes. Um,

08:46
And so if they’re comparing, that person to somebody else who sold 10,000 individual orders, I think they tend to give the nod to the person who has the more individual readers. so, you know, authors love to complain about it because there are a lot of authors that think they should have been on because they had a certain number of sales. They, you know, they got like taken off or whatever. And whether that was true or not, who knows? Because, you know, nobody knows exactly what numbers the New York Times is getting each week and how many sales other books made.

09:16
But once you make it, now I’m like, yeah, that’s great. I love it there. But I think it’s awesome. So it’s funny to be on the other side. I felt comfortable asking that question because I knew you’re not the type of person to game the system. I thought like a lot of people do it. And I guess you could make an argument for it if you were like, well, if I get on the list, then my main thing is speaking like for me, speaking is a small portion of my business. I don’t really do that much of it.

09:45
But I guess if you were like a full time one, people find ways to rationalize it. They’re like, Oh, well, I’ll just buy my way on the list for 20 grand. And then, you know, I’ll be able to charge more at every speaking event for, you know, into the future. Cause I can say I’m a New York Times with a seller. So I think people rationalize it that way. Um, but for me, I, again, separate from the ethical considerations, which I think are questionable in themselves, but like, could you really be proud of it?

10:11
I don’t know. I, you know, I mean, I just spent six years building an audience and three years writing a book and planning this launch. I mean, I put everything I possibly had into it and it felt great to hit the list because there was so much sacrifice before it. But if I knew that I’d just got on there cause I wrote a check, I feel like it would be a totally different experience. And so, um, I hear you in a sense, I, I like, wouldn’t have wanted to do it anyway, even if I had a good business reason.

10:40
Which I don’t but you know, even if I did I I feel like it would have taken away from it. So anyway, I’m kind of going on about it It’s it’s it’s a little bit of a black box and But I can say that it feels fantastic with it if it works out in your favor so let’s switch gears a little bit and talk about habits and What I wanted to do actually was frame our talk in the context of starting or growing a successful business because a lot of my readers and listeners

11:08
They start out strong, but they kind of fizzle out in the long run if they don’t see immediate gains And so what I was hoping to do actually is maybe use your book as a framework How does one develop the proper habits to follow through on a business idea until things finally start taking off? Yeah, it’s a great question. So I mean first of all just from a high level I like to think about habits is what I call like the compound interest of self-improvement and

11:33
The reason I like that phrase habits are the same way that like money multiplies through compound interest. You know, you save up a little bit. It doesn’t feel like much in the beginning. Uh, in many cases that curve, that compound interest curves, like really flat, almost like a plateau. And then the hockey stick portion is only years or decades down the line. Um, so it doesn’t feel like much at first, but then you turn around two or five or 10 years later and it’s like, wow, this really added up.

11:58
I think habits are kind of like that as well. The same way that money multiplies their compound interest, the effects of your habits can multiply as you repeat them over time. And on any given day, you know, the same way that like saving 10 bucks doesn’t really feel like much. Making a choice that’s like 1 % better, 1 % worse, a little bit improved, a little bit better habit or a little bit worse habit doesn’t, it doesn’t really feel like much. You know, what’s the difference between

12:26
Eating a burger and fries for lunch or eating a salad It’s not really a whole lot on any given day like your body looks the same in the mirror at the end of the night The scale doesn’t really change but it’s only when you look back five or ten years later that you’re like oh wow that choice of what I ate for lunch really does matter and So this is one of the core philosophies of atomic habits one of the core ideas in the book this idea of how can we try to find ways to get 1 % better each day?

12:52
And if you can capture those small advantages, if you can master those little habits, stay in and day out, then you can end up with a really remarkable or powerful result in the long run. And I think that not only applies to our lives, but it certainly applies to our businesses. If you can just try to find a way to get a little bit of a 1 % margin for improvement daily in something you do or monthly in the financial state of your business, I mean, that can really add up over the broad span of time. And what does that look like in the context of

13:20
Like what is like a 1 % gain or something that you might do we can talk about your blog or how you built up an audience for sure Yeah, so I think the the first thing is You don’t need to do something more than what you’re already doing You just need to find a way to show up more consistently than you have before so like in other words You don’t need to increase the intensity like I’m not saying for then. This is I’m focusing on the very beginning now What’s the first thing I do? Like I’m not saying well you need to write a radically better blog post

13:49
or you need to become massively better at sales calls, or you need to massively improve your skills at writing a sales page. What I am saying though is, let’s find a way to make it easy to show up and do those things more consistently than you’ve done before. So it’s kind of like, yeah, you could do the same workout at the gym, but let’s just make sure you miss fewer workouts. that’s the first piece. So in the context of my business, I wrote a new article every Monday and Thursday.

14:18
for the first three years. And it was really that consistency, it was really that writing habit that set me on a different trajectory as a writer and an entrepreneur. And that was the thing that made it possible for me to build this audience and get the book deal and so on. Okay, so I mean, it’s easy to say that, right? But how do you make sure you stay on that schedule? How do you have self-control to do that? Okay, so I wanna answer this in two ways. I wanna come back to the self-control piece.

14:47
So the first part is I like to suggest people utilize what I call the two minute rule. So you take whatever habit you’re trying to build, whatever habit is relevant for your business, whether it’s writing blog posts or making podcasts or making sales calls or whatever, and scale it down to just the first two minutes. read 40 books a year becomes read one page, or call 20 clients every month becomes make one sales call, or do yoga four days a week becomes take out my yoga mat.

15:16
So, you whatever the habit is, you scale it down to just the first two minutes. Now, sometimes it sounds silly to people because especially with like health examples, you know, I’ll say something like, um, there’s a reader of mine, he ended up losing over a hundred pounds. And one of the things he did was he, uh, went to the gym, but he didn’t allow himself to stay for longer than five minutes. So we were like, well, that sounds ridiculous. Like going to the gym for five minutes, isn’t going to get you in shape. Um, but what you realize is that he was mastering the art of showing up.

15:46
And this is a crucial thing about any habit, business related or otherwise, a habit must be established before it can be improved. And so like, if you don’t become the type of person who goes to the gym for five minutes, you don’t have a chance to be the type of person who works out for 45 minutes, four days a week. Or if you don’t become the type of person who makes one sales call, you don’t have the chance to be the person who makes 20 sales calls every month, month in and month out. And so we’re trying to scale it down to that, like, I guess we’d call it a gateway habit.

16:15
the thing that initiates the response. And let me give you another example here. So I like to refer to these moments as decisive moments, these two minutes that determine the next chunk of time or get you moving in the right direction, a little bit of momentum. So for me, there’s a moment every morning where I’ll sit down at my computer and either I open up Evernote and I start working on the next article I’m going to write or

16:44
I go to ESPN and I check the latest sports news. And what happens in the next hour of my day is really determined by what happens in those like 45 seconds. It’s like if I can master that decisive moment of opening up Evernote and starting to write, then I’ve got a productive hour in front of me. And I think that no matter what your business looks like, there are going to be four or five, maybe eight or 10 of those decisive moments throughout each day. And if you can just pour your energy into mastering that,

17:14
then you can live a productive day. You can have a more effective time working on your business. So that’s the first lesson, master those decisive moments. The second piece comes back to your question about self-control. And this is, think, the common narrative for habits, for productivity, for effectiveness, is you just need to want it more. You need to try harder. You need grit and perseverance. You need to work smarter.

17:41
You need to make sure that you try to optimize things. certainly working hard is valuable and it’s an important skill. But if you look at some of the research on self-control, and I cover this more in chapter seven of Atomic Habits, a lot of the research will show that the people who exhibit the highest self-control, who you look at from the outside and you’re like, wow, they must have a lot of willpower. Actually, the thing that distinguishes them from most other folks is that they operate

18:11
live and work in an environment that has fewer temptations. So they are able to exhibit more willpower simply because they’re being tempted less. And I think that that is the lesson to take away from this is what’s the best way to improve my willpower? What’s the best way to make it more likely that I’ll show up and do the right thing each day? It’s not to push harder or to just try harder or to say work more. The solution, the best lever to pull is to redesign your environment.

18:40
so that you’re tempted less. Put the objects that prompt your good behaviors in more obvious locations, reduce the friction of taking a good task, and put the objects that derail you or distract you in less obvious locations, and reduce the, or increase the friction of doing something unproductive. And we can talk more about that, but I’ll just pop It’s funny because I’m just thinking about all this in the context of raising my kids right now. And we’re kind of picking and choosing our kids as friends based on like both their personality and their work ethic.

19:10
Because we want our kids to hang out with those other kids who are trying really hard hoping that it’ll Just kind of rub off on them. Really. I mean, it’s the it’s the environment that they’re in that’s actually a brilliant strategy because Children are our master imitators, which you know anybody who has like a two-year-old can tell you that right? Like you say a cuss word and then they pick it up instantly even if you don’t want them to or like, you know They imitate whatever you do But as children age they tend to they continue to imitate

19:39
but they tend to stop in imitating their parents as much and start imitating their peers much more. so there’s a great book called the nurture assumption by Judith, rich Harris that talks about the influence of peer groups on how children grow up. parents have a significant influence too, but that influence is largely genetic. It’s largely passed down through the genes. But, but the way that parents can influence one of the best levers they can use to influence their children is by

20:08
Choosing, you know, what city you live in, where you go to school, what extracurriculars you’re a part of. In other words, choosing like what other kids they get exposed to. And so your strategy there of trying to pick their friends by what their friends’ are is a smart one. We pick up all kinds of habits from the people around us and often we want to do the things that our peers are doing. And so that’s a good way for parents to subtly shape or at least influence in a little way.

20:34
The the habits of their kids can’t control it totally but that’s actually probably more effective than like Trying to force them to do something you want but you’re not always gonna be in the ideal environment, right? So there’s got to be a little bit more to this Yeah, absolutely. So In the book I offer four different strategies for building good habits and breaking bad ones and I’ll just go over them real quickly here they’re

20:58
tons of examples in the book, of course, but we can go over a few of them as they relate to business in this conversation. before I do, I’ll just say that not all four of these will always be working for you. And so you can really look at them as like a toolbox or a set of strategies that you can rely on. And when one thing isn’t working in your favor, maybe you pull on the other three levers, and that’s enough to get you to do the more productive or more effective action. So let me guide us a little bit.

21:27
One common thing at least that I have a problem with is procrastination. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, let me give you all let me give these four and I’ll give you some examples related to procrastination and procrastination is a really broad topic, right? Like there’s a million ways you could procrastinate, but I’ll just go over some common ones. So the four stages that I like to break a habit into and again, this is all in detail in the book, but just real quickly, I break a habit. I heard it from you, the man himself.

21:56
Sure, yeah, yeah. Well, so cue, craving, response, reward. These are the four stages. So there’s some kind of cue that precedes the habit, which is like a prompt that gets you to pay attention to what’s going on, something that’s happening in your environment. There’s a cue that picks up your attention. I’ll give you an example in a second. Second, there’s a craving. There’s some kind of interpretation of that cue, what it means.

22:20
And based on what you think it means, you take a particular action. So that’s the response, which is the third stage. And then finally, your action delivers some kind of result. There’s some type of reward or consequence that comes after that. So for example, let’s say you walk into the kitchen and you see a loaf of bread on the counter. It’s in the morning. So the loaf of bread, visual cue. So that’s first stage. Your prediction is, oh, I want to make some toast or that would be tasty. And so you take out a piece of bread, put it in the toaster. That’s the response.

22:50
pops up a minute later, you get the toast, you get to eat it, that’s the reward. Okay, so cue, craving, response, reward. But you can just as easily imagine that at a different time, say, you know, 10 minutes later after you’ve eaten breakfast, you walk back into the kitchen and you see that loaf of bread. And now the cue has a different meaning. Your state has changed, you’re full instead of hungry. And so you interpret that cue in a different way. Now your craving is not there, it’s non-existing, you interpret it as, there’s the bread, but I’m not hungry now.

23:19
and so you don’t take the same response. So this type of thing is happening all day long. We’re taking in cues, we’re making predictions about what to do next, we’re taking action, and then getting some kind of outcome or result. So from those four stages, we can have a step for each stage for making it easier to build good habits and harder to fall into bad ones. So I call these the four laws of behavior change.

23:47
The first law is to make it obvious. So you want the cues of your good habits to be obvious and available and visible. The second law is to make it attractive. The more attractive a habit is, the more likely you’ll fall into it and perform it. The third law is make it easy. So the more easy, frictionless, convenient a behavior is, the more likely you are to do it. And the fourth law related to reward is make it satisfying.

24:13
The more satisfying and enjoyable an experience is, the more you want to repeat it again in the future. if you want to, so those four, make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying, explain how to build a good habit. And if you want to break a bad habit, you just invert them. So rather than make the cues obvious, you want to make it invisible, make it unattractive, make it difficult, make it unsatisfying. And so let’s go through a couple of examples of what this looks like for procrastination since you mentioned that.

24:43
Real quick though, making something attractive, the thing here is a lot of what’s involved in creating a business kind of sucks, right? It’s boring. So I’m kind of curious, maybe once you address the procrastination question, how do you make something that’s really mundane and boring attractive? Yeah, it’s a great question. Well, so I’ll just answer that right now when we come back to procrastination as a larger topic. So make it attractive. There are a couple different things that influence this.

25:12
First of all, let me answer just a, I’ll give you a quick tactic before I talk about the kind of the overarching thought here. So quick tactic for making something more attractive, you can use a strategy that’s called temptation bundling. And so the idea is you stack something you want to do, something you enjoy doing with the thing that you know you need to do. So one of the examples I give in the book, there’s this guy, he was an engineering student.

25:39
And he knew that he needed to be exercising more, but he also knew that he liked watching Netflix and probably liked it too much. And so he linked up his computer to a stationary bike so that Netflix would pause if the bike was not running. So he had to be cycling the whole time if he wanted to watch, you know, a 30 minute show or something. And that’s a good way of forcing yourself to do the unattractive thing or making the unattractive thing, which in this case was cycling.

26:08
more attractive because it meant, hey, now I get to watch Netflix. And you can do that with a bunch of things. Like if you are really bad with your email inbox and you feel like you never focus on that. I heard of a woman who she only gets a pedicure if she works on overdue emails while she’s getting it. So just like that, reward yourself by doing the thing you don’t want to do.

26:32
Another one, Katie Milkman, who’s the researcher at the Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania. She was the one who came up with this name, Temptation Bundling. And she realized that she really wanted to read The Hunger Games. She got like really obsessed with the book series when it came out. And so she made a rule for herself where she was only allowed to read The Hunger Games while she was on the treadmill at the gym. And so those kinds of strategies are ways to make the unattractive thing more attractive.

27:01
And you can do that in different ways. Like there’s a one that’s real. I think some habits that are really good. This is really good for or what I would call habits of avoidance. So things like don’t drink alcohol for 30 days or don’t spend money on Amazon or don’t go out to eat and stay at home and make a meal instead. And habits like that are like inherently difficult because you’re just resisting temptation. It’s like all you’re doing is not doing something. And so that doesn’t feel good. You just have to sit with this craving.

27:30
But you can flip it on its head a little bit. so one of my readers, he and his wife, they wanted to eat out less and save money by cooking more. so normally they’re just resisting the temptation to go to dinner, to go out to eat at the restaurant. But instead what they did was they set up a little savings account and they labeled it trip to Europe. And then anytime they stayed home and cooked dinner instead of going out to the restaurant, they would transfer $50 over to the savings account.

28:00
And so they still had to put the work in of cooking the meal, but they got the immediate enjoyment of seeing the savings account grow. And that’s really the ultimate lesson that I’m sharing here with this temptation bundling strategy is how can you give yourself a little bit of an immediate enjoyment from something else while you’re doing the difficult thing? And so there, you obviously this depends on what you, what is enjoyable to you, but like from a business standpoint, there was someone that I worked with who

28:28
uh… he hated taking these meetings these calls and he really just didn’t like being inside all day like he didn’t like being hunched over his desk and so he changes so that he only took meetings while going on a walk through the park that was near his office and so taking a meeting that he got to go outside and go for a walk and uh… it can be in large or small ways but anytime you get an immediate bit of satisfaction enjoyment with it suddenly the unattractive thing becomes a little more attractive you know i’m just looking back at my childhood right now and i think my mom did this to me uh… i really hated

28:58
I like I hated it, but she would take me to ice cream after every single piano lesson and after a while I started looking forward to them just for the ice cream mmm Yeah, playing piano meant getting ice cream. Yes. It’s like we framed what that that cue or what that habit meant in your mind That’s really smart Yeah, so that’s so that’s one way to think about how to make it attractive But there’s a there’s a broader conversation here, which I think is really important for entrepreneurs certainly was very important in my

29:27
business kind of narrative and story Which is that the social environment really changes what habits are attractive to us and which ones are unattractive You know like when I was a kid and I don’t know that any kid grows up thinking Wow I’d really like to think more about email funnels and like, know workflows You know, like no kid is thinking that you know But now it’s kind of exciting and interesting to me and part of that is because my skills have improved but another big part of it is that

29:57
I get rewarded for having a big email list. And not just like, you know, financially with the business, but also, you know, people will praise you for it or congratulate you on it or ask you, how did you do that? That’s interesting. How did you grow that? And all of those social signals increase the attractiveness of thinking about the conversion rate and how I design forms and, know, like, how could I improve this a little bit more? And so my point is the thing that we’re rewarded for, the thing that we

30:27
get little markers of social status for or respect from others for naturally becomes more attractive. And that is dependent not only on your results, but also on the group or tribe that you’re a part of. Like I could be around a bunch of people, people I went to, some of my friends from college or things like that. They don’t think about email lists, they don’t know about it, they don’t care about it. And so, like in that group, I can throw out a number and they’re like, well, you

30:55
Great, I guess that’s good for you, but like it doesn’t mean anything doesn’t have any status associated with it and so It would be less attractive for me to work on those things when I’m hanging around that group You know we hang out for other reasons, but it’s not as it’s not as important there because I’m not as rewarded for it and so So that kind of just circles back to your environment point that you made earlier Yes, but earlier when I was giving examples I was talking mostly about the physical environment and this I would say is mostly about the social environment

31:25
And both are crucial factors for building better habits. so I’ll talk, let me come back to the procrastination question you asked and I’ll give some physical environment examples. But just to wrap up the social environment idea, we are all part of multiple tribes. Some of those tribes are large, like what it means to be American or what it means to be French or Australian. And some of them are small, like what it means to be a neighbor on your street or a member of your local CrossFit gym.

31:53
or a volunteer at the local school. And all of those tribes, large and small, have a set of shared expectations for how you act as a member of that tribe. And you can see this in people’s habits all day long. you walk onto an elevator, and you’re in this little tribe of three people. And the expectation is you turn around to face the front. If you face the back of the elevator, it’s a little weird. It’s not what people are expecting.

32:23
Or you go to a job interview and maybe there are four people interviewing you and you’re sitting there and the expectation is you’re going to wear a suit and a tie or a dress or something nice. Now it doesn’t have to be that way. Like you could face the back of the elevator or you could wear a bathing suit to a job interview, but we don’t do that because it violates the shared expectations of the group. And so the point here is that when habits go with the grain of the tribe that you’re in, they’re very attractive.

32:52
And when they go against the grain of the tribe that you’re in, they’re very unattractive. And so one way to kind of hack your habits or to increase the odds that you’ll do the thing you want to do is to join a group where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. Because if it’s normal in that group, then it will become attractive for you to do it because doing so helps you fit in. And this was huge for me as an entrepreneur because I did not have any entrepreneurs in my family.

33:20
and really didn’t have any close friends who were entrepreneurs either. I kind of vaguely knew that like some people run businesses, but I didn’t have anybody to look to. And so for the first like three to six months that I started out, I just emailed a ton of people, well over a hundred that were already doing the kind of thing that I wanted to do, but they were already full time. And I just asked if they wanted to chat on Skype and most of them said no, but I would say like maybe 30 or so said yes.

33:48
And so by the time I got six months in, now I had a few dozen people that if I had a problem or if I was dealing with, had an idea, I could go to them with the questions that had. And I could also see what, like, what are they doing normally? You know, what are their habits daily? And I didn’t have to like consciously ask that question, right? You just kind of soak it up as you’re part of a tribe, as you’re part of a group, you see what everybody else around you is doing. And then you start to imitate and do those things because that’s the normal thing to do there.

34:17
You know, you see this all the time, people join like a CrossFit gym and then they start to eat paleo and they buy a certain type of knee sleeves and a certain brand of workout shoes and like, you know, they’re picking up all these other habits that they never really thought about doing, but that’s just what people do in that particular tribe. Yeah, in the context of business then, that’s why it’s key to go to conferences and events where you can meet other like-minded entrepreneurs. At least that’s how I started taking off in my business. It started when I started going to events.

34:46
100 % and I, you know, so I did those Skype calls. Then I went to my first conference about six months in and what was really nice for me in that case was that I already knew like maybe 10 people from those Skype chats and those emails that were going to be there. And so I didn’t go in cold. I had like a couple of people I could hang out with or talk to at least, which was nice. And then of course I met a bunch of other people from those conferences. So I did, I did some conferences for the first two or three years.

35:11
And then the last couple of years, I’ve started to host my own events, which are small, usually like eight people or so. But, you know, it’s a really great high touch way to see, you know, soak up all of that kind of implicit knowledge that everybody else has about what they do and why they do it and all that type of thing. But the overarching point there is no matter what habit you’re trying to build, the habits that are normal within your tribe will be attractive to you because they help you fit in, they help you belong.

35:39
and we all have a deep desire to belong. So James, I don’t mean to skip around, but I said this question just kind of popped into my mind also. One thing that I see among people who just kind of starting out in business is they’re looking for quick wins and oftentimes the payoff is like many years later, but it’s painful for those many years, right? And you gotta, you gotta get used to what I call like the suck. So how, if you’re not getting immediate gratification,

36:08
How do you train yourself to kind of persist? Yeah, it’s such a great question and it’s really it’s not just business. I mean central to all habits, right? There’s kind of this like plateau in the beginning so the the analogy that I like to use or the metaphor that I like to bring up is the story of an ice cube So, you know say you’re in a room and the room is cold it’s like 25 degrees ice cubes sitting on the table and you can like see your breath and Slowly the temperature starts to increase 26 27 28 29

36:37
still this ice cube is sitting there like nothing’s changed, 30, 31. And then all of sudden you get to 32 degrees and you hit this phase transition, the ice cube begins to melt. This is like this one degree shift, no different than all the other one degree shifts that came before it, but suddenly something new happens. And I think that in many cases, the process of achieving a change or building a business, it’s like that because you’re…

37:04
you’re stuck on this plateau of latent potential early on. You’re putting work in, you’re banking reps and effort and time and energy, and you don’t really have anything to show for it. The ice cube still hasn’t melted. But if you’re willing to stick with it, then you hit this phase transition. And so the question that you had is like, well, how do you get through that period? I think first of all, just knowing that it happens is helpful. It helps reset your expectations a little bit because a lot of the time we think that

37:32
Progress should be linear that we put a little bit of work in and we get a little bit of results. So if we put a lot of work in, we’ll get a lot of results. But actually it’s not this like 45 degree angle linear progression. It’s more like that hockey stick or compound curve that I mentioned before, where you’re kind of stuck on this plateau for a while and all the greatest gains are delayed. So that’s the first thing. The second thing though, I think that this is

37:59
One of the reasons that small habits really matter, perhaps the deeper purpose why they matter, which is they reinforce a particular type of identity. They’re reinforced being a certain kind of person. so, like in the book, I use this phrase of, you know, the goal is not to run a marathon. The goal is to become a runner. The goal is not to write a book. The goal is to become a writer. And I think we could say that about entrepreneurship as well. Like the goal is not to build a business. The goal is to become an entrepreneur, to be that kind of person.

38:28
to be a creator or to be financially independent or to have that identity and I think the way to foster that identity is through small wins through small habits on a daily basis and so in a sense Every action you take is kind of like a vote for the type of person you want to become it’s like You’re these little habits or how you embody a being a particular type of person or having a particular type of identity. So

38:57
Every day that you make your bed, you embody the identity of someone who is clean and organized, or each time that you write one sentence, you embody the identity of someone who is a writer, or every time you make a sales call, you embody the identity of someone who is good at selling. And so on any given day, those little actions don’t count for very much, but each time you do them, it’s like casting a vote, building up a little mound of evidence that this is who I am. And I think that.

39:26
Ultimately true behavior change is identity change because it’s like it’s one thing to say I want this I want a million dollar business. I want to have a best-selling book I want to have a popular blog, but it’s something very different to say I am this I am an author I am a blogger I am an entrepreneur because once you believe that about yourself You really aren’t even pursuing behavior change anymore you’re just acting in alignment with the type of person that you already believe that you are and So I think the way to get through those

39:56
that get through the suck as you call it to get through those periods where it’s really difficult and you don’t have the results that you want is to focus on fostering that identity. Even if you’re not happy with how your body looks and you still want to lose weight and all you could do after a long day of travel was five pushups before you collapsed on the bed, well, maybe that’s not the result you want. Maybe you’re still in the suck from that standpoint, but.

40:22
you did those five pushups and at least you’re the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts. At least you’re the type of person who fostered that identity. And I think that on the hard days in business, that’s what I tried to remind myself of. Like how can I show up and cast a vote for the desired identity, even if the results are still long in the future? So it means you just try to show up, even if it showing up in this particular case isn’t spending a lot of time or whatever. You’re just, you’re just out of habit.

40:52
Working on your business, even if it’s not a whole lot at that given moment You’re trying to cast a vote for being the type of person that you want to be rather than worrying about what the results are in that moment and I think that you know There are all kinds of ways that you can show up in small ways and we I think we all either have done this or know someone who does this where you Waste time on frivolous things, you know You just like putter around and do a bunch of little things that don’t make much difference and that’s that’s different than what I’m talking about that that feels like a waste of time, but I’m

41:22
What I’m talking about is taking a small action that reinforces your desired identity, the long-term identity of you or your business that you want to foster and the type of person you want to become. It sounds like step one is to actually figure out what that is, right? I think so. And that’s why I talk about in chapter two of the book. I think it’s a very central question to ask yourself. Now, the good news is I don’t think it needs to be that hard. I think most people know

41:47
They may not, questions like what identity do you want or what are your values? Those are like big questions and sometimes they’re hard to answer. But I think most people do know what kind of results they want. So you can just say, you know, what do you wanna, maybe you lose 40 pounds in six months or maybe you want to double your income this year or something like that. And once you get a pretty clear picture of the result that you want, then you can sort of reverse engineer it and ask yourself, well, who is the type of person?

42:13
that could lose 40 pounds? Well, maybe it’s the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts or who’s the type of person that could double their income? Well, maybe it’s the type of person who creates one new product each month or something like that. And once you reverse engineer the outcome and ask yourself that question, who is the type of person that could achieve that? Then you become a little more clear on what that identity might be. Like if I want to become a New York Times bestselling author,

42:42
I would probably follow in your footsteps and then write set aside time to write two days a week and be consistent about that for three years, for example. That’s a great example of scaling it down. It’s like who’s the type of person that could write a New York Times bestseller? Well, it might be the type of person that has a really big email list, like hundreds of thousands of people that they could tell about the book when it comes out. Okay, well, who is the type of person that could have an email list of 500,000 people? Well, maybe it’s the type of person that writes every week. And so then that becomes the identity that you’re trying to build. I just want to be the type of person who writes every week.

43:12
And that line of questioning, I think, leads you more, it leads you a little bit away. What it does is it clarifies the fact that your outcomes in life are a lagging measure of your habits, right? Like, the number of email subscribers I have is a lagging measure of my writing habit. And your weight is a lagging measure of your reading habits, your bank account is a lagging measure of your financial habits. You’re really just trying to figure out how do I need to show up each day to get that long-term outcome that I’m looking for.

43:42
Right. And then adopting the little detailed habits of that individual to get where you want. in the case of writing a book, the writing part is just one little habit. And all these little habits that you do, if we were to delve deeply into your life, James, all add up to where you are today. Right. And the things that we were talking about earlier, like optimizing your environment or choosing the right tribe or tweaking little elements of that, the two minute rule and scaling it down,

44:10
Like all of those are strategies for building those habits that surround that core identity of I want to be the type of person who writes every week. Right. James, I think that’s actually a good point to to conclude this interview because we’ve already been chatting for quite a while. Where can people find more about your book? Where can they get it? Yeah, thanks so much for chatting. I enjoyed the conversation. So the book is called Atomic Habits and you can get it at Atomic Habits dot com.

44:38
And on that page, I have a couple bonus downloads and stuff too. There’s a guide on how to apply the ideas to parenting, a guide on how to apply the ideas to business. There’s a cheat sheet for the core ideas in the book and just a one-pager you can look at and review, a template for tracking your habits. Anyway, so all of that is at atomichabits.com. What’s funny about this is just our little chat today has kind of reinforced my parenting style a little bit.

45:07
because I’ve been pushing my kids hard because I want to get into the habit of feeling like they’re smart and at the top of their class. And I talk to certain people and they think I’m crazy, but maybe that just means I need to change my environment a little bit. Nice. Well, congratulations. I’m glad that habits are on the top of mind and important for you. think they’re, something all parents should think about deeply and, and really all people. mean, they, they impact all of our lives.

45:35
And just for the benefit of the listeners here, I have actually read James’ book and it’s excellent. And I was just kind of playing dumb in the interview today because I wanted to highlight some of the key points that resonated with me. But thanks a lot, James, for coming to the show. I really appreciate your time. Wonderful. Thanks, dude. All right. Take care.

00:00
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 a solo episode and I’m going to be talking about AI and chat GPT. But this episode is not going to be about gushing about the features and how powerful it is. Instead, I’m going to talk about what you need to start doing right now in order to not go obsolete yourself. People are going to lose jobs because of chat GPT and companies are going to go out of business because of this and you need to prepare yourself now.

00:30
But before we begin, want to let you know that tickets for the 2023 Seller Summit are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. It is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And you all probably know me well enough by now to know that my event has zero fluff. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business and not high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people and this is a small intimate event.

00:58
Everyone eats together and everyone parties together every single night. I love smaller events and tickets always sell out far in advance. Now, if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250k or $1 million per year, we also offer a special mastermind experience where we break up into small groups, lock ourselves in a room and help each other with our businesses. Now, the Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 23rd to May 25th. Go to sellersummit.com for more info. I also want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode.

01:26
Postscript is my SMS or text messaging provider that I use for ecommerce and it’s crushing it for me. I never thought that people will 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. Postscript specializes in text message marketing for ecom 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-G-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve.

01:56
And then finally, I wanted to mention my other podcast that I released with my partner Tony. And unlike this one, 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 it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the Profitable Audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

02:23
Welcome to the My Wife, Quitter, Job podcast. In this episode, I’m gonna talk about AI, chat GPT, and my thoughts on how AI is gonna disrupt this world. But specifically, I’m gonna talk about how AI can disrupt your business, your career, everything that you do to make money if you do not take these steps right now. Now, by now, you’ve probably all heard about chat GPT, and in case you haven’t, chat GPT is an artificial intelligence chat bot developed by OpenAI. Now, if you’re anything like my wife, you’re probably skeptical.

02:54
But after playing with it for the past week, I can say wholeheartedly that ChatGPT is gonna disrupt major industries and possibly even upend Google in the coming years. It’s seriously that big. It’s literally as big as when the internet got started or when Google got started or when the iPhone came out. No joke. Here are just some practical applications that I’ve tried using it for this past week. Now, first off, ChatGPT just puts out amazingly well-written content.

03:22
I actually recently used it to draft an email for my autoresponder sequence for Bumblebee linens and here’s what I asked it to do. I told it to write a brand story for Bumblebee linens, which is my online store that sells handkerchiefs and linens. And then I told Chad GPT to just mention that we started it because my wife cries a lot and we couldn’t find high quality hankies for our wedding anywhere. And then I told it that our value props so that you can add a monogram and a personal message and that we have the largest selection and we embroider everything in house. Now it took a couple of iterations of me teaching the robot.

03:53
But for example, I told it to write it in first person. I told it to make it a little bit more heartfelt. I told it to make the language a little bit more casual and informal. And this is what it came up with. Hi, my name is Jennifer, the owner of Bumble Bee Linens. And I started this store out of my passion for creating meaningful keepsakes and gifts. Now, the original idea behind Bumble Bee Linens began when I was engaged to be married. Now I’m the type of gal who cries all the time. So I wanted something to drive my tears of joy at the altar. As a young bride to be,

04:22
I spent countless hours searching for the perfect handkerchiefs for my own wedding, but no matter where I looked, I just couldn’t find anything that met my high standards for quality and design. That’s when I decided to take matters into my own hands and create my own collection of handkerchiefs. I poured my heart and soul into sourcing each one using the best fabrics and the most intricate embroidery techniques. I also learned how to embroider in order to add monograms and personal messages to our linens. At Bumble Bee Linens, we offer the largest selection of handkerchiefs and linens on the internet. Our collection includes a wide variety of styles and designs,

04:51
from traditional embroidery to modern prints. And you can customize our linens with a monogram or text of your choice. Because we embroider everything in-house in the US, we can offer fast turnaround times on personalized orders. I am truly grateful for the opportunity to share my passion for beautiful linens with others. I invite you to visit Bumblebee Linens and discover the beauty and significance of these special items for yourself. Thank you, Jennifer.

05:16
Pretty amazing, right? Here’s what’s even more amazing. ChatGPT can even write code. Now, I was recently writing code for my website, and it had this weird compilation error where it wasn’t really obvious what the problem was. So what I did is I cut and pasted the code into ChatGPT, asked it what was wrong, and it told me the answer. And in fact, you can even use ChatGPT to write your code for you. I had it code up something quick and dirty that would make images spin on the screen, and it actually output code that worked.

05:46
In fact, I saw a video on YouTube, I think, where a programmer had ChatGPT write code to track faces on video. This is nothing short of amazing. Anyway, so now that you have an idea of what ChatGPT can do, let’s talk about the implications and why it’s going to disrupt major industries. Right now, freelance writers are up in arms because ChatGPT does a pretty good job of writing articles. You know, and as a content creator who has writers, why pay 10 cents per word when you can have a robot write the post for you?

06:16
Here are some nefarious ways that ChatGPT is being used right now in the content space. Some people are taking an existing blog post written by a human, copying and pasting it into ChatGPT, and simply asking it to just rewrite the article in a different tone. For example, you could just take a New York Times post, ask ChatGPT to break it down into bullet points, and then ask it to generate an entire article covering these exact points in an authoritative tone. And this works surprisingly well.

06:46
Is this plagiarism? It’s definitely a gray area, but you can see why authors are furious over this. And it’s only a matter time before the web becomes cluttered with just a bunch of regurgitated junk. And in fact, arguably it already is. And Google has put out a statement saying that all AI content will be penalized. Artists all over the world are also angry because AI-generated images are being generated from the techniques of human artists. Recently, someone submitted an AI-generated piece of art

07:13
that actually won an art contest against humans. So is AI-generated art plagiarism, since it mimics techniques that were invented by humans? Again, this is another gray area. This past week, I used ChatGPD to write jokes, write scripts for certain sections of my YouTube videos. I even had it draft a heartfelt note to my wife, just for fun. And it takes a while to get it right, but the AI eventually outputs something that is pretty darn good. And what’s scary is that you can even have it create content in the style

07:43
of someone else. So for example, you can ask to write a joke about math in the style of Louis CK and it does a pretty good job. In terms of code, millions of people have been uploading code snippets and answering questions on the popular tech site Stack Overflow, which has flooded that site with regurgitated junk. Now are the lives of content creators, artists and software engineers in trouble of becoming obsolete? Well, the answer is yes and no.

08:11
So first off, AI is still a ways away from replacing humans. The content that it spits out is often inaccurate. So for example, in a post on strategicre.com, the author used ChatGPT for fun to help his daughter with her term paper on Thomas Hobbes. Now, even though the essay created by ChatGPT was written very well and in an authoritative tone, it was actually completely factually incorrect. And incidentally, education is honestly where I’m most scared about ChatGPT right now.

08:40
What if every kid starts using chat GPT to write essays and term papers? It is literally going to make our next generation incapable of thinking for themselves. Anyway, that’s a topic for another podcast probably. And the reason I think about it is because, you know, I have two kids and myself, but let’s fast forward five years when this technology becomes much better and more accurate. Are we all destined to become couch potatoes with screens over our eyes hanging out in the metaverse? Now to give you my point of view,

09:10
I want to tell you a couple stories based on my own experiences. Now, in the early part of my career, I was an electrical engineer in the Silicon Valley. And during the early part of the 21st century, there was actually a huge movement towards outsourcing engineering work to India, where you could literally say between five and five to 10 X on your costs. Now slowly, but surely companies in the Silicon Valley started moving their entire teams to India, entire engineering teams, I should say. And my company,

09:38
we nearly stopped hiring people in the US at that time. And we focused our efforts in building a team in Pune and Bangalore. Now people at my company were worried that we’d all be outsourced to cheaper labor overseas. But me, I was actually never worried about getting outsourced. And here’s why. Even though the engineers in India could do some of the work on my plate, I had the knowledge and the relationships in my company to get things done far faster than anyone in India. Now in the engineering world,

10:06
I’m pretty sure not many of you guys listening to this are engineers, but it’s actually rare that you can lock yourself in a room, code, and develop in silence. To get things done, you often have to communicate with your peers, work together, and a lot of times it’s give and take. So for example, I might say something like, hey man, I’ll get this part done for you quickly, but I need you to do this for me. Plus, because I was at headquarters, I could actually move much quicker than anyone in India. And furthermore, and this is not really to brag, but I simply put out better work.

10:36
Not because I was necessarily smarter, but because the communication was better. Now, when I started Bumblebee Linens back in 2007, it was extremely difficult to start an online store. There was no Shopify, no BigCommerce, no Amazon. If you wanted to shop, you had to jump through some hoops, be familiar with code to a certain extent, and integrate all of your own apps. Now today, companies like Shopify and Amazon make it way easier to get started. And today, you’ll find hundreds of…

11:03
thousands of independent shops selling random things online. Sellers from China routinely copy and rip off products and sell them at lower prices and there’s rampant competition. I’ve even had people start competing sites to Bumblebee linens. The one I can think of right off hand is called Hummingbird linens where they knocked off our site completely. But am I worried about the competition? Now the answer is yes to a certain extent, but I have confidence that I can adjust quickly and be a step ahead of the competition.

11:32
After all, I have a couple of things that my competitors do not. I have a strong following and a solid customer list to market to and people who are loyal to the brand. So what is the point in me telling you all this? After all, outsourcing to India and Chinese knockoffs isn’t exactly like AI, but it’s actually pretty close. The key point is that we are all humans and AI can’t take that away. And as humans, we all feel the need to connect with one another.

12:01
Now, at my day job as an engineering director, I wasn’t worried about getting replaced because I developed real human relationships with the people at my company. I had the necessary people skills to get things done far faster than employee tens of thousands of miles away. Now, even if the engineering staff over there could code better than me, which was possibly the case, they would never be able to replace the human aspects of my job. Now, how do you get a whole bunch of disparate groups in a company to work together? You got to take them out to eat, you got to do them favors.

12:29
You get them to like you and you kinda have to grease the wheels. Now in terms of e-commerce, it’s extremely difficult to replace your brand and the community that you’ve created. So for example, the other day I was looking at buying wireless microphones. am I gonna buy the cheap Chinese knockoffs that are half the price or am I gonna go with a Rode or a Schanheiser? I ended up spending 2X the cost to get the Rode microphone and not the cheap Chinese knockoffs. So overall,

12:59
Chat GPT is going to disrupt people who are either not great at their work to begin with, or people who aren’t making connections with real people. My buddy Jim Wang recently introduced me to the blog, strategery.com, which is a blog that I highly recommend that everyone check out. And if you read this guy’s writing, there’s no way in a million years that an AI robot will be able to replace his writing. Now for myself, I think I’m going to be okay. Not necessarily because my content is better than anyone else’s in particular.

13:27
but because of the real relationships that I’ve developed over the years with all of you who are listening to this podcast and all of you guys who read my blog or watch my YouTube videos. Everyone who I personally met at the Seller Summit, which my annual e-commerce event or every event that I’ve ever attended will continue to follow me because of our connection. So whether you’re a coder, a writer or a podcaster, it doesn’t really matter what you do. You’re a human with connections. And even if AI were to copy you,

13:56
They can’t copy the community that you’ve built up over time. All right, so how do you compete with AI as an e-commerce store owner or a content creator? Number one, you need to establish real human connections with your audience. If you run an e-commerce store, start taking phone calls, provide great customer service, put out videos, TikToks and blog posts to get people to follow you. And I would say of the three videos, probably the best medium, you know, out of blogging and podcasting.

14:26
Number two, don’t hide behind your computer all day. Actually go out and talk to people. Build a community. Recently, I’ve actually started going down my phone book and randomly texting people to reconnect. Take Zoom calls with people who follow you or buy from you. Create a group, whether it be Facebook, Discord, or Forum, where people can hang out and chat. So bottom line, in order to succeed in the AI world, you have to leverage your strengths as a human.

14:54
And since humans are the ones programming the bots, you’ll technically always be one step ahead, but you must adapt to the circumstances as they change. Recently, I was in a mastermind group meeting, and we were talking about AI. And one person was like, ah, you know, I’m always going to be one step ahead, and I know how to rank in Google compared to other people, so I’ll be OK. And my response to that was, what if Chat GPT replaces Google, and all of a sudden, people are just getting their answers without having to click on any links?

15:23
You’re going to be completely disrupted at that point. Anyway, I started out in my own journey as a blogger, but I’ve evolved to podcasting and YouTube because I feel that those mediums are better for establishing connections with others. Now in the world of e-commerce, I focus all my efforts on building an email and an SMS list. Your customer data is the lifeblood and the secret to longevity for any business. And for those of you guys selling on Amazon,

15:51
Selling on Amazon is just a short-term fix and just a place to generate cash flow. And in fact, the best comparison that I can think of for AI is how Amazon disrupted e-commerce in the past decade or so. Focus on being a real person and you’ll never go obsolete. By the way, this entire episode was written by AI. I’m just kidding. Anyway, now that you know what you need to know to stay ahead, make sure you start getting yourself out there, putting yourself out there.

16:20
And if you can, and if you had the courage, use video. Hope you enjoyed that episode, and I hope it provided you with some clarity on where the world is going and what you need to do to prepare. Next year is going to be crazy as this tech proliferates to different applications. For more information about this episode, go to mywebcuderjob.com slash episode 436. And once again, I want to remind you that my annual e-commerce conference will be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida on May 23rd to the 25th of 2023. I really want to hang out with you guys in person next year.

16:50
and this is kind of in the vein of this episode, so let’s meet up. Go to Sellersummit.com. That’s S-E-L-L-E-R-S-S-U-M-M-I-T.com. 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. 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-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. Now, when I talk about how I these tools on my blog,

17:19
And if you are interested in starting your own ecommerce store, head on over to mywifequaterjob.com and sign up for my free 16 mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:00
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. And today I have my friend Mike Jackness back on the show for like the fifth or sixth time. And most of you know who he is already, but in this episode, we recorded this before Mike and I spoke at the Helium 10 event sale in Skull in Las Vegas. And the topic in a nutshell is can successful people live balanced lives? Or do you need to go all in in order to be successful?

00:27
Now Mike and I are polar opposites in terms of personality here, so it’s an interesting debate. But before we begin, I want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. 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.

00:54
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-U-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Always excited to talk about Klaviyo because they’re the email marketing platform that I use for my e-commerce store, and I depend on them for over 30 % of my revenue. Now you’re probably wondering why Klaviyo and not another provider. Well Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for e-commerce stores, and here’s why it’s so powerful.

01:21
Klaviyo can track every single customer who’s shopping in your store and exactly what they bought. So let’s say I want to send out an email to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the last week. Easy. Let’s say I want to set up a special autoresponder sequence to my customers depending on what they bought, piece of cake, and there’s full revenue tracking on every email sent. Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used, and you can try them for free over at klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife. And then finally, I wanted to mention my other podcasts that I released with my partner Tony

01:51
And unlike this one, where I interview 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 it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the Profitable Audience Podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now on to the show.

02:16
Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. Today I got Mike Jackness. We’re hanging out at his home in Vegas, prepping our talk for Sellin’ Scale, the Helium 10 event. And I thought we’d give you guys a little preview about what we’re talking about, even though this episode is going to take place after we actually give the actual talk. since most of you guys cannot attend the conference, I thought we’d give you a little preview. And what we’re talking about, the title of the talk is The Brutal Truth About Success in Business. And can you have it all, basically?

02:46
So let’s give an intro, Mike. Who are you, Mike? You’ve been on the episode, you’ve been on the show like multiple times, but just in case people don’t know who you are. My name is Mike Jackness. I would consider you to be a friend, but you might not think the same. We’ve hung out quite a bit between e-commerce field events and Selvish Summit and just other things in e-commerce. And yeah, I’ve always enjoyed you and your family and look forward to hanging out whenever you come to Vegas or pass cross.

03:17
When I was first talking to the organizer of this conference, I was discussing just, I’m kind of sick of talking about the same old thing. When you go speak at these conferences, you and I speak at a lot of events and it’s kind of the same stuff where you’re you’re talking about building a listing for Amazon or inventory logistics or PPC advertising. the thing that I was talking to her about, she’s like, what would you go see at these events and what is it that intrigued you? I’m like, look, honestly,

03:47
You don’t have to sound egotistical in any way because I don’t feel like I know everything by any stretch of the imagination, but allow the same basic to intermediate stuff as covered. And when you’re running a business for seven years in this space, it’s hard to find the real gold nuggets that are going to really make a difference. And I was like, why don’t we talk about something that is outside all the basics, the things that people never talk about, the actual struggles that entrepreneurs go through because there’s a lot of, think,

04:15
the population that thinks of being an entrepreneur is glamorous and it comes with all these benefits. And it does in a lot of ways. I certainly wouldn’t have it any other way, but there are a lot of struggles that come along with being an entrepreneur as well. And we start talking about that. And I don’t know exactly how the conversation led to it, but the Ford-Burner theory came up. when she, excuse me, when she agreed to do that topic, I thought to ask you to come to do it with me, because you’re the one that actually introduced me to it in the first place. And it’s…

04:45
been instrumental in kind of changing the trajectory of my life. So it’s funny about this is she asked me to talk initially and I thought I was gonna do a singular talk and then you emailed me and say, hey, you wanna do this talk? And I was like, I don’t wanna do two talks. And so we’ll see how interesting it is actually. We haven’t actually gone on stage yet. I think it’s gonna be difficult. It’s what I hope will happen if it changes even just like one person’s life or their perception of something or helps somebody.

05:14
in any way, then I think it’ll be worth it versus trying to cater to the whole room. Like I typically do want to talk, you stress a lot about, again, trying to make sure the tactics or the material is beneficial to everybody. You everyone that will be in that room will be coming to it with a different perspective and a different part of their journey in life. some people approach entrepreneurship way different. You and I are actually quite different, which is interesting. We’re like opposite. Yeah. Yeah. And so I think that

05:43
Having that kind co-talk with the two different perspectives is good. But there’s some particular struggles with being an entrepreneur. It’s a lonely island at the top. Everyone comes to you to answer every question, but you don’t have that same resource. And one of the things that’s been helpful for me is I’ve worked on meeting people like you and being a mastermind, making sure that I am surrounded by those people.

06:13
first getting started, you’re not gonna have any of that. It’s impossible. You’re just trying to figure out how to keep the lights on and keep the wheels on the bus. And so it’s taken me many years to develop those friendships. And then even when you know people, it’s years and years before you really feel comfortable confiding in them and talking about the things that really matter. I think there’s other things that kinda come along with it as well. I think that, we talked about this a bit, it’s gonna be in our talk, that society kinda

06:44
helps shine a light on this problem or magnify the problem even more because if you’re working hard, you’re deemed to be successful. If you’re an entrepreneur, you’re making money. Those things come with this badge of success. But it can be just as toxic as other bad diseases that we have in society from alcoholism to drug addiction to gambling or other things that normally people would never group.

07:10
entrepreneurs are working hard in that same group. I think, least from my perspective, the thing that’s been hard for me to learn is that it can be equally as toxic. Yeah. So the public knows Mike as seven figure entrepreneur, host of the Econ Group podcast. You’ve had successful exits in the past. I thought I’d just ask you about some of the stuff that we’ve discussed together in private that we don’t really share publicly. I’ll share my story after you share yours, but

07:39
And for the people that don’t know you that well, like you are like an all or nothing type of guy. am. am. Like when you do something, it’s pedal to the metal and you don’t do anything else. And I sometimes look at you and I’m like, man, like I could not do that. It looks miserable actually. Well, it is. And that’s the problem, you know, but I think, um, you know, you’re because it’s an addictive type of personality or thing that comes along with it. You know, it kind of builds on itself and makes you want to do more of it. It’s kind of the environment that I grew up in.

08:09
And when we talked about the Fort Burner theory, like I always kind of knew that it was hurting my life in other ways, but I didn’t really fully understand it or have the aha moment. We were having a conversation one day. was… Maybe we should define what the Fort Burner theory is. Yeah, let’s do that. So you want to do No, go for it. for it. Well, I’ll set up what the hell it kind of came to be then. So mean, you and me and Scott Volker and Greg Mercer were doing a five minute pitch and we…

08:37
we’re getting ready to do the finale and we were just kind of sitting around drinking a couple of beers, talking about life and you brought up the four burner theory and just kind of, know, non-strollingly casually we’re talking about this thing of like the ideas that there’s four burners in life. You have your work burner, which is kind of the first one we always talk about since it’s an entrepreneurial podcast. You have your health, you have your family and your friends. And those are kind of the four burners in life. Obviously there’s other like anecdotal things that happen, but like these are the four main.

09:05
And it’s really a solid thing. you think about it, it’s hard to even come up with a fifth burner or other thing if you think about it. Like almost everything falls in those four categories. And the theory basically is that it has to equal 100%. So the burners, whatever total, has to equal 100%. And entrepreneurs tend to start to crank up that work burner, which means you crank up the work burner 10 degrees. You have to take 10 degrees off of the other ones in some capacity.

09:34
everybody will start to degrade one of the burners first. Everyone’s different, right? So for me, it’s health. It’s always health is the first one because it affects me and only me. And I tend to think about other people before myself and will continue to fuel the friends or family burner and degrade my health first. That makes me sound terrible because I degrade the friends, which means that I think about myself first before my friends.

10:02
I mean, I don’t know that that makes you terrible in any way. mean, in a lot of ways, you know, just talking to other people. mean, think that thinking about yourself first is important. You know, you can think about yourself to a point where you’re yourself first to where it’s selfish and you’re just a bad person. But I’ve known you for a long time. That’s the furthest way that I would define you as. Right. I mean, think that thinking about yourself is important. And oftentimes one doesn’t think about themselves enough or put themselves first, especially

10:31
like a busy mother or something like that where like you’re constantly thinking about your kids first and They come last I see this a lot, know It’s it amazes me like just to see what parents especially moms in particular can can do you know? where they come up with this bandwidth to do all this stuff And so at some point it’s important to think about yourself You got to think about your health and you got to think about your well-being because if you don’t then you know at some point You’re just not going to be here and you’re not doing any of those people that you care about a favor

11:01
if you’re sick or dead. I think it’s important to talk about the second part of that theory, which is in order to be successful in any discipline, you got to turn off at least one burner. And if you want to be super successful, you turn off two. And if you want to be like Elon Musk, you turn off three, basically. I mean, there is some credibility to this, no doubt. This is something I’ve thought a lot about certainly since we’ve discussed this theory and just in general, because there was a time in my life

11:31
where I I come from background, like I know I’m not gonna be the smartest person in the room. I didn’t go to college. I barely even really made it of high school. It was very much like I’m going to win because I’m going to work harder than you. It was kind of my theory, right? It’s just like I’m gonna be more intense, I’m gonna work harder. And again, because I think society kind of looks at that as success. And certainly that was the household that I grew up in, entrepreneur type household.

11:59
that was kind of ingrained. so I was able to be quote unquote more successful, at least my day job and all the things that I did, than people that were way smarter than me. And so I think that there is something to that. Like I do think, if you’re in an early stage of a startup or you’re doing certain types of businesses, you have to devote that kind of energy into it to be successful. I think it’s hard to imagine some of the things that I’ve done, some of the things that became ultimately very successful.

12:29
becoming successful in any other way. But you have to also be aware that you can’t fly that close to the sun and work that hard for unlimited amounts of time. At some point it catches up with you. You can only ignore your health for so long before you’re sick or you’re fat or you’re out of shape or whatever. You can only ignore your family for so long before your wife wants a divorce or your kids don’t even know who you are anymore. You can only ignore your friends so long

12:59
and tell them you’re not going to come over for dinner or go to a game or a concert for so long before they stop calling you. I mean, at some point this stuff adds up. And any short amount of time for a month or two, you’ll barely notice the bump on the road. Your friends will still call you. Your family will still love you. But you do this for a decade and eventually there’s going to be repercussions. And so there are repercussions in Eli’s life. I he has a reputation of…

13:28
you not being around, you know, and yeah, you know, first kids are doing work while the kids are there. So, you know, I enjoy driving his cars and I probably will get his internet at some point and probably his solar panels. And I appreciate the contributions that he’s made to the world. But at some point, you know, I think that there’s there’s repercussions to that. Oh, absolutely. And here’s the thing, at least that I got caught up in is you hear all these people in the media like killing it.

13:58
And there’s this perception that if you do something well and fast, then you’re like amazing. And I thought I’d just use my own example here with the CNBC thing. I know a lot of you guys listening saw my CNBC special. And what’s funny about that is we filmed that special right after one of the most stressful points in our business. It was 2020. Our revenue wasn’t even that good because we sell wedding stuff. No one was getting married.

14:27
hotels and airlines are our second actual biggest customer. No one was flying, no one was staying in hotels. And then CNBC wanted us to do the special and they wanted to use the 2020 numbers because it was 2021. And we’re like, that’s like our worst year ever. Not to mention our most stressful year. Like Jen and I were like, oh my God, know, we lost like 60 % of our business overnight. It was in March, March 23rd or something crazy like that. And what was also funny about filming that was there’s this one scene.

14:56
where we’re all sitting around the breakfast table and then like my kids have waffles and like, and then we call them down. They kind of marched down all happy and have breakfast. I mean, that was like totally staged. I mean, you could tell it was staged, but this is really staged because in the mornings, like I’m yelling at them, like get, get up, get down, make your own breakfast and then get out of there, get ready. And I’m just constantly yelling at them until they get out the door. But anyways, my point is, that.

15:21
A lot of these stories that you hear online about like even entrepreneurs killing it, whatever, there’s always another story. There’s this other story of someone who was in my mastermind group hit like $10 million by scaling. And then if you read the article, it was amazing, but they suffered so much profit in order to hit that point. And he was like, it wasn’t reflecting the article, but when we were talking about in the mastermind, he was like, that was the most stressful period. I will never do that again. We ended up only making like $90,000 out of that.

15:49
But we hit that number because I wanted to hit the $10 million mark, right? And it’s all ego. Yeah. mean, my partner, Dave, that I do the podcast with has this saying of revenue is vanity and profit is sanity. Pretty similar thought process. I mean, it’s hard to run a business. It’s hard to make money. It’s hard to have a very profitable business. It’s hard to do it. It’s even more difficult in the field that we’ve chosen.

16:17
as time goes by because there’s more and more people getting into it. There is margin erosion from every angle. This is just a typical life cycle. I’ve seen this story before. I’m in my mid-40s. I’ve been an entrepreneur for 20 years. I’ve been in multiple businesses and in different niches and things. And I’ve seen this life cycle play out. And it’s something that I’m pretty hyper aware of. The first time around, you don’t realize that, again, because I just didn’t really

16:46
kind of go to college and think about or read about these market cycles and understand me. I know what’s there, but like it just wasn’t really as obvious to me as- You don’t learn that stuff in college, by the way. I figured you learned something there. I don’t know. You don’t learn anything in college, except you make a lot of friends. I do think I learned how to bridge the becoming an adult, which I think is also important. But yeah, anyway, I I think that it’s, and I don’t want to-

17:14
sound ridiculous, but it’s actually easy to put up numbers in the space that we’re in. You can just lose money and overspend on ads. can pull any lever you want and start, you can be a seven figure seller, can be an eight figure seller. What’s hard is being a six figure profit business or seven figure profit business, this is where the real challenge and nuance in running a business comes in. And it’s difficult because things are moving all over the place at all times.

17:43
You’re running your business kind of where the puck is, like the whole Green Gwiche thing and like not where the puck necessarily is going, because you don’t know what the unknowns are of where the puck is going. But like you talk about COVID, like how do you anticipate something like that? You can’t just plan for sales being lower. You have to have the proper amount of inventory based on the previous facts that you had. You have to do it based on what shipping rates were at that time and what Amazon’s fees are at that time or what your 3PL’s fees were or what your cost of goods were or what the terrorists were at that time, all these different things.

18:13
A lot of things in e-commerce have a three, six, or even 12-month kind of lag because you’re buying inventory and making decisions way far in advance. And a lot of time, the decisions that you made under a really solid basis of facts at the time turn out to be improper decisions by time the inventory is actually sold. And so there’s just a lot of challenges that kind of creep into that. I think it’s important to not chase these revenue numbers just to say, hey, I’m a seven-figure seller or eight-figure seller.

18:42
It’s easy for me to say that now. I feel like a bit of a hypocrite because I certainly went through those same thought processes. that too, actually. I think it’s easier to get sucked into. It’s interesting because a lot of the communities that we aspire to be a part of, something like you have a class in the community, we have one ourselves. The way that we met each other was through a mutual community e-commerce field. These all have these target numbers you have to hit to be a part of, right? Like e-commerce field is a seven figure seller thing.

19:12
You want to hit it to be in these communities and then feel like you belong and not like that you’re an imposter syndrome business or whatever. There’s just a lot of moving parts of this. I it’s kind of is away from the Fort Burner theory conversation, but important nonetheless. And so the thing that I’ve really thought about a lot lately is doing things for me and living the life that I want to live and not just looking to hit the ego strings that are

19:41
I’ve never really been a big ego type person, it’s never been a part of my thing, but it’s also very difficult, almost impossible in society to completely avoid. Because you’re still around people, you’re still around peers and you still want to feel like you belong there, even if you aren’t necessarily bragging about your numbers, you still want to feel like you belong in the room. And it’s difficult to deal with Being in a mastermind group is especially challenging, especially if you’re in one where everyone’s just killing it all around you, And you’re like, hey, why am not?

20:09
Why am I not achieving those same numbers? And then you start going a little nuts. What’s happened to me? I mean, it is difficult.

20:23
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20:53
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21:21
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21:34
Luckily, I learned some of these lessons earlier on. I certainly in my past life, doing some of affiliate marketing stuff where people are making tons of money, there’s always someone that’s going to make more than you, right? And I’ve been fortunate enough to be around people that have introduced me to things to read that have really helped with this. One was a study that’s really fascinating about, you know, there’s a certain point where all you worry about is money, right? Like if you’re not making enough money, like all you’re worried about is money. You’re just trying to pay your…

22:02
electric bill, your gas bill, your car payment, your mortgage payment, medical bills, put food on the table, whatever it is. But once you’re above that certain number, in different areas it’s a different number, but somewhere between $80,000 and let’s just say $150,000, depending on geographically where you are in the United States or other parts of the world, every dollar past that has a very quick diminishing return in terms of happiness. Because now you’re no longer worried about money, you’re worried about

22:30
like keeping up with the Joneses type stuff, right? mean, like, and it just becomes, it can become very toxic. And so, and no matter what, no matter who, unless you’re Elon Musk, there’s literally one person in the world that is the richest person. Everybody else is like, but he lives like a pauper. He does. And actually a lot of these guys do like, I mean, Warren Buffett’s similar. Yeah.

22:53
I think Elon, I’ve read some stuff recently where he like saw a stuff and he’s like living in like a tiny house or something. is, that’s correct. Yeah, I read that really interesting. Like actually at the SpaceX facility, because he like basically lives on property. And so, I mean, the thing that I’ve really come to realize is that, you know, we’ve just become minimalist. And so like we’ve downsized our home, we’ve downsized, like when I travel, I travel with just the backpack. My wife and I traveled in a…

23:20
in a van around the country for a couple of years. I find that actually by having less things, I’m just happier. But I think it’s difficult to read a lot of the stuff in a book. think you have to experience a lot of these things yourself. when I first, I grew up relatively poor. I don’t want to make it ridiculous. I there’s people that had it way worse than I did, but utilities got turned off.

23:49
several times as a kid, know, my parents are always struggling to kind of deal with things. It was always like right on the edge. And there were times where things were better because they mean they were entrepreneurs as well. So there was like good years and bad years. But we didn’t take lavish vacations or have things, right? It was just kind of, we had just enough. And so like, I think it’s human nature when you first run into money to want to go spend it and go do these things that you think are going to be the things that are going to make the difference and making you happy.

24:19
But the reality is it doesn’t. I you can go on a $2,000 vacation and have just as much joy and happiness as a $20,000 vacation. Or you can just go camping. Or you can just go camping, which I also have done quite a bit of, and that’s free. But again, I think you have to experience these different things. mean, again, what ends up happening is like, the difference between the $2,000 and $20,000 vacation is not 10 times better.

24:48
1.6 times better or whatever. There’s diminishing returns on the dollars you get on your return for what you’re spending. And so, you know, we manage to spend a lot less money by like, I don’t wear any jewelry. I don’t have any, I have an Apple watch, which rarely gets used. I have a wedding ring and that’s like basically it. My wife and I share one car. You know, we don’t have a lot of expensive things laying around and we don’t have multiple homes and all the things that get people in trouble.

25:18
And again, you’re just showing off. You don’t need seven cars in the driveway. You don’t need 10 vacation homes. I found that, because we actually did buy some rental properties at one point, which we’ve gotten rid of, because I’ve tried to shed stuff. It’s just way easier and more convenient to just go Airbnb when you want to go on vacation. I mean, here’s always been my philosophy in life. I avoid lifestyle creep wherever possible. Like, I don’t fly first class, even though I could.

25:45
Actually, I didn’t tell you this, my wife actually booked me on First Class back from FinCon. Just experience it, just experience it. It actually was nothing, it was domestic First Class, it was nothing. In fact, it was definitely not worth the points. But anyway, my point is like, I lose sleep at night when I think that in a catastrophe, how am I gonna make ends meet and that sort of thing. So every less dollar that I spend actually makes me sleep better at 100%. Yeah, everyone has like their little thing, it’s funny you mentioned First Class.

26:13
haven’t flown and coached on a flight that’s more than three hours in a long time. But one of the things that we get as e-commerce entrepreneurs is like buckets of airline miles. miles, that’s great. Yeah. So we just flew to Europe in first class for three of us and lay flat awesome seats. I don’t know, there’s interesting things in life that bring me outsized joy. And that actually is one of them. Of flying? Flying in first class. really is just like a disproportional.

26:42
I would never pay for it with cash, but with the points, it’s a disproportional enjoyment for me. There’s two components of it. Number one, I don’t sit still very well. know that’s just familiar to me. It’s very difficult. I have a legitimately very difficult time sitting just on an airplane crunched in in a coach seat. It’s just a physical thing. It’s very, very difficult for me.

27:09
And as you said, like the domestic first class, like I don’t want to downplay it because it’s better. I’d rather be in that seat than in a coach seat and feeling more cramped. But the next level up, like the experience stuff, I love. Like there’s been some things that I bought with points. My favorite one is Singapore Airlines. They have these like suites on the plane where like you have your own And it’s amazing.

27:31
And so like that thing, that type of thing for me, like that’s an experience more than just… Well, as long as it’s not the norm. It’s not the norm. It’s like I’m using miles and it’s certainly not the norm. Like, I mean, it’s, I try to make it the norm when I fly to Asia once a year, but like I’m not paying $30,000 or whatever the hell that seat is in cash. I just have the points, right? I mean, and you could argue that those are worth money too. And, you know, could fly in business or in premium economy and, and, have more points for future, you know, but…

28:00
The thing that I’ve realized, about your limos is they become actually worth less money over time. They’re slowly making them worth less. And again, for me, I look forward to the flight than the actual being at the I’m not downplaying first guy. For me, that was just the first example that came to my head. But I’ll give you another example. All of our friends right now are remodeling their house and their kitchens. Jen’s like, hey, we should remodel actually. You don’t even cook. Right?

28:26
And then I talked to my kids, hey, are you happy with the house? Oh, hey, we’re really happy with the house. Like we had memories in this house and whatever. So anyway, I just try not, like even my equipment actually isn’t that great for everything that I do. I just tend not to upgrade things. It’s just, I don’t want to get used to luxury. Cause then that elevates the amount of money I have to spend every single I, again, just feel fortunate to have learned some of these lessons earlier in life. I mean, in the affiliate industry that I was in,

28:56
If people were making hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, in some cases a million dollars a month. And I have this story this one time where this guy drove a Ferrari or a Lamborghini into a pool, like just to show that they could like, it was like Brewster’s millions. Like it was like literally living in the, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this movie. I did, yeah, yeah. He’s gotta spend. He’s gotta spend the money. was like literally like that’s how these guys work. Like everything that we did. And some of it was neat just to be around, cause like I got to go to some.

29:23
events or parties like I got a trip to the Super Bowl one year on them and you’re just being around it. It’s like it’s kind of neat just seeing like how people party at that level and just being a fly on the wall almost but also like disgusting to me in so many ways because it’s just like it’s just gross excessiveness. know, it’s like it just at some point, you know, I remember like walking out of the I mean, I was really drunk this this one particular night at the Super Bowl party shocking. Yeah, I know shocking.

29:51
And I’m like, I gotta go, buddy. he’s like, we have a, I forgot the number, but it was like some six figure minimum spend we have to make at this bar. And it was like 20 of us. I’m like, this blew my mind. I’m like, what? like, yeah, it’s like each bottle of champagne’s like, you know, five, $6,000. come in with like sparklers and stuff and J.Lo’s there. And I was just like, what is happening right now? And like, this is like how, again, people wanna be seen there. And you know, this was before social media at the time and I have it once. But like, it’s a very slippery slope to like.

30:21
you’re around these people, you wanna show off to them, and the excess never ends. There is literally no upper limit to it. You’ll never be happy. And so at some point if you can just be happy with what you got and live a life way below your means, you’ll probably be happier. I think the secret to that is making new friends.

30:47
who are the same level as you. Because I always do stuff that my friends do. If I hang out with people who eat like crap, I eat like crap. If I’m hanging around someone motivated like you, every time you tell me what you’re working on, I’m like, oh crap, I gotta go back and do this now too. Because it’s motivating. It’s who you hang out with. There’s a saying about the sum of the 10 people, closest people you hang out with or whatever that is. And I do think that there’s a lot to that. I have some friends who are lazy that make me kind of lazy when I’m hanging out with them and some that are

31:17
But then there’s days where I’m like, you thinking about that lazy friend, know, quote unquote lazy friend who isn’t working as many hours or whatever. He’s just way happier. You know, it’s just you see the, a wide variety of it. And so I don’t know, like I think that, you know, there’s like anything in life, there isn’t any one exact right answer or any, and there’s a different, you know, set of things for different circumstances in your life and things going on and, know, whatever. But in general, I’m…

31:45
much happier with less and trying to like not show off. It’s why I just like stop posting on social media. You know, don’t, people don’t need to see and know about everything that I’m doing. Every meal that I’m eating, every vacation I go on, every thing I go do. Cause like the tenants, when you do that, like then you want to do more of it. Cause like there’s a dopamine hit when you get likes or comments or whatever. Right. And so like just trying to avoid the things that do that. There’s also a really good book that I read called the psychology of money that talks about a lot of the stuff in there that I really wish that somebody would hand to me.

32:15
10 years earlier, when I read the book, a mutual friend actually gave me the book and I was reading through it just thinking, man, these are all the things I learned the hard way. But a lot of people never learn a lot of these lessons, which is, again, because it’s in your day-to-day life, the tendency is to want to, especially someone competitive like me, to one up somebody and show off. But I think the reason, ultimately, even though we are very different, we talked about in business, you and I are very similar in that neither one of us is a show off type of person.

32:44
We’re never bragging about how much money we’ve made or trying to go do the most ridiculous thing. We’re just happy hanging out and doing stuff or whatever. I think that that’s probably the thing that we actually have in common that makes us friends. Can we circle back to the four burners? Why did you find that conversation so profound? I’ve always wanted to know. Yeah, I think that I was struggling in a lot of things in my life at that moment. I wasn’t super healthy.

33:12
My relationship with my wife wasn’t as strong as I’d like it to be. I was really stressed out and just never, again, just couldn’t quite put my finger on it. It’s just one of these things you go through life and go, every day you wake up and you just kind of do the same thing. It’s like you’re the hamster on the wheel. Just living life the way that you, the only way that you know how. And certainly had lived that way for a long time. But again, knew that there were some, some extrinsic issues that were happening.

33:42
And when you mentioned it, I was just like, I was about to use the F-bomb there. was like, heck, you’re right. And this is obvious, like that I have cranked this work burner to an extreme and it’s affected these other three areas. And I need to consciously go do something about this. And I did. mean, there was some pretty, you can’t make massive changes like overnight.

34:09
that are things that you’ve laid your life out in this manner that’s taken years to get to. You can’t just snap your fingers and the next day have everything be different. But when I went home, I was like, this is what I need to do over the next six, 12, 18, 24 months to make some big changes. And I did. And happier that I’ve been in a very long time because of lot of this. I I still work. Business is still very important to me. I do find stress in work, but I also find time to make sure that

34:39
We go on vacations, I spend time with my wife, that I am taking better care of myself, that I spend time with my friends and have a more rounded life. And I found that my business actually benefits more than anything from those set of circumstances than just working longer. Because like, yeah, you can be sitting at the computer, quote unquote, working. It doesn’t mean you’re super productive. Right. That’s true. Fourteen hours a day.

35:09
I set up systems and things to make my time leverage way better and make every hour that I work as productive as it can be. And I found through that that I need fewer hours total. Okay, now you got me curious. What are these systems? Well, mean, just hiring the right people, putting in SOPs.

35:33
I just want to let you know that tickets for the 2023 Seller Summit are now on sale over at SellersSummit.com. Now, what is the Seller Summit? It is the conference that I hold every single year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level BS, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. And in fact, every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business.

36:02
entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods, and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. The other thing I can assure you is that the seller summit will be small and intimate. Every year, we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets always sell out fast, and in fact, we sell out every single year many months in advance. Now, if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over $250,000 or $1 million per year, we are also offering an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers.

36:30
Now the Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 23rd to May 25th. For more information, go to sellersummit.com. Once again, that’s S-E-L-L-E-R-S-S-U-M-M-I-T.com, or just Google it. Now back to the show.

36:47
I think it’s things like hiring the right people, having systems. I do everything that I can on a daily basis to only be working on things that only I can work on. That’s probably the biggest thing. I’ve really tried… You can’t do this for everything, but I’ve tried to stop doing… As a friend, I’m not answering customer support emails. That’s probably a good thing. It is a good thing. That’s another whole story. You probably know the background to some of these.

37:16
That’s just a for instance, right? And so, you know, I try to hire people, put them in place, let them have the autonomy to just do the job. You know, there’s a lot of things in your business, the task has to get done. It might literally have a thousand different ways to get to the same outcome. Only one of those is the way that you would have done it. The other 999 are just as acceptable. Let them just go do one of those other ways. Or maybe they’ll only do it.

37:45
80 or 90 % as good as you. It’s still better than you trying to do everything. But here’s the thing, there’s a lot of things that people will do that’ll be 150 % better than you or 200 % better than you because their expertise is better. They might be a better graphic designer, a better accountant, or a better number cruncher or whatever it might be. And so you can put people in place that actually will do a better job than you in a lot of aspects of your business. You just gotta learn to let go. And so a lot of it was learning to let go and letting people just do their thing.

38:16
And so it’s helped quite a bit. And we just were recording this on the eve basically of me coming back from a three week trip where I barely touched my work. I never charged my laptop. I brought my laptop with me. I was gonna not bring it just as a point of not bringing it. At the last second I brought it because my CPA was like, need you to sign these tax forms while you’re gone. He couldn’t get them done before we left because there were…

38:46
business we own mutually. were some hiccups. He’s like, you’re going to have to sign these while you’re gone. And so I brought the laptop actually mostly just for that. But I was like, you know what? I’m not going to charge this damn thing. I’m going to only have one charge. And I came back and it was still like 50 something percent. I barely touched the laptop. I had a 150 minute internet package on the cruise, a 10 day cruise, and that was it. The last cruise we went on, I had unlimited minutes.

39:16
you’re working like in every, you know, between like every opportunity between meals or on sea days or whatever, I just let it go. You know, I just mean, again, it’s not that it’s not important to me. It’s important to me to make sure that I recharge my battery so it’s actually, you know, it’s healthier for the business. So those are things that I’ve done since that conversation to, you know, it’s been four years. Has it been that long now? Yeah, I guess it has. Three, four years.

39:44
You always forget that I I think things are wildly different in my life since that conversation. And again, it didn’t happen overnight, but I came back, I’m like, know what, first of we got to sell at least one thing, get something off our plate. And now I’m really going to take it to the extreme. I’ve been thinking even more about it. Over and above the four burner theory, just some of the other things that you’ll read about, like the one thing or essentialism or just getting involved in too much crap is…

40:12
know, a site is another problem besides just working too much as being involved in too many things. You do a bunch of things okay, never doing anything as good as it can be. I know you got a pretty big team. Like for me, it’s always been a struggle because I don’t actually want a team. I find that humans in the long run tend to be unreliable. And so I resort to computers, which is why I like to code all these little things. There’s a lot to be said for doing that as well, right? mean, like any…

40:41
Anything that makes it more efficient, hell of a people about doing that. I’ve been forced into hiring people because of just the scope. Like I said, I got too many things. Yeah, you got a lot of things. That’s When I came back after that conversation, like how am I going to solve this problem? There’s no piece of software that was going to solve the situation that I was in. Yeah.

41:04
Yeah, it’s funny because you got all these things going on. I’ve always only had like a couple things, although it’s kind of gotten a little bit out of control lately because we were just talking about this. Yeah. And so I got to cut back. I tend not to have shiny object syndrome, but whenever I take something on, I plan on sticking with it for at least three to five years and I make sure there’s room in my schedule for that. But I also like to look at my calendar and say, oh, I got nothing for the next couple of days. So it’s been a struggle in that respect.

41:34
There’s other things that I’ve learned about where like just having nothing in your calendar is super healthy. know, just deep, deep work is a great book about this where you’re just having time to sit down with a notebook with nobody around, quiet time, scheduled planning time. Like that’s the thing that like, these are the things that I’m going to work on moving forward. You know, this is now separate from the four burner theory, but just other things where you know, life hack type stuff where, you know, I really come to realize like,

42:02
my life and the business kind of runs me, I don’t run it because there’s so much going on. And so like, I’m just going from meeting to meeting to meeting. And even though, again, I’m not over cranking the work burner, and I feel like I’m working efficiently, like I’ve never really had the time to think and do the things I think that have made me the most successful in the past. like usually, the things that I’ve had a couple of really, what I would consider to be very successful businesses, and those all were born in a moment.

42:32
or in moments of having lots of time to think about it. You’re sitting down, you’re tinkering with an idea, doing lots of research, playing out what you wanna do. It’s just you in a room kind of tinker and then you kind of realize you have something. And I haven’t had time to do any of that type of work or thinking for years, like literally years. It’s just because again, there’s just so much going on and I’m going to work every day and…

43:00
checking the boxes and removing the needle and we’re progressing and things are going well, but I think that we could have outsized returns if I can reduce the number of things and have more time to think about how to innovate more and how to really hit the next big success. I never read that book that you’re talking about, but those are my Fridays essentially. I actually don’t do anything except think and just have lunch with my wife. It’s actually my favorite day of the week.

43:31
I’ve been doing that becoming that for us as well. We’ve been, and I have been talking about kind of like having a three-day weekend moving forward. I’m going to try, we tried a little bit before we went on this trip and I didn’t block off the next few Fridays. I’ve been gone for a while. I just feel like I need to catch up. But the way that my schedule works, Monday through Thursday are my busiest days because of our Filipino team. Like that’s where we have most of our employees. Right. And so my Friday is their Saturday.

44:01
And so there’s really nothing that really scheduled. And a lot of the other means that gets stuck on my Friday or just like a random podcast recording or this time or the other. And so I think what I’m gonna do intentionally starting mid delayed October again through the rest of the year is just block off Friday. It doesn’t mean that I won’t work or do anything. just, you know, the opportunity to go out and have lunch or like we went and got like foot massages one day and got dumplings and just kind of like, know, but like.

44:29
In those moments, I’m thinking about things that actually, on the surface, again, this is where society is kind of weird. It’s like, you’re being lazy, took the day off or whatever. But actually, it might be the most productive thing for you. It might be the best thing for you and your business. Again, one of the hard lessons for me to really realize is that there’s a saying, busy is the new stoop, but think that was a Warren Buffett quote as well, which is- Oh, is that right? Okay.

44:58
I like that quote. Or maybe that’s Bill Gates. It’s someone at that level. you’re just sitting there being busy. It’s like the new stupid. you’re just sitting there. Are you really, again, are you really being productive? It’s impossible. The answer is no. There’s no human being that can be 100 % productive in front of a computer for 12, 14, 16 hours a day. Like you might be sitting there and being busy and, you know.

45:24
And so these are just the other things that’ll be fun to do a follow-up, maybe the next talk of two years from now. We’ll some of these things and see how these progress. But the four burner theory really helped because again, now I feel like we’re more focused on our health. We’ve been eating better. COVID really kind of screwed up some of the exercise. I was playing a lot of tennis before COVID. You and I both were playing a lot. And that screwed some of that up. certainly spent more time with my wife, spent more time going on vacation.

45:53
having a proper vacation, spending more time with friends. I feel like we have a very well-rounded life now. I turn off the computer at six or seven o’clock at night, and that’s it. And it’s a little bit later because of time change with the Philippines. So I tend to start a little bit later in the morning and work till six or seven because that’s there five or six o’clock at night, sorry, seven to 10 o’clock in the morning, so I apologize. But then, you know, I…

46:22
turn off my computer, turn off my phone for the most part, and then we’re out at friends doing things, at dinner doing things, and not just sitting at home working more at night. Like having a second, I used to joke back in the days when we owned Color, we had like two shifts. We would like work all darn day at the office, come home and eat dinner. We didn’t really go out and do much of anything, but friends or anything, because we were working so much, have dinner and then like start with the China team and the Philippines team and work a second job.

46:50
basically at night in the same business. like, again, it led to burnout and a lot of other things. And so it’s it’s not sustainable. know, it just, and maybe again, if you’re just starting and you know, or you are like, there’s lot of people listening to podcasts and maybe are looking for a side hustle right now. You know, they’re working a full-time job. They’re looking to be like your wife and eventually quit the job. Yeah. For those periods of time, you might have to really crank up the work burner and sacrifice those other things in the short term because you still have a full-time job commitment and you’re trying to start a business that’s going to…

47:18
eventually supplement your income and allow you to leave that, if you’re in that situation, yeah, you’re probably going have to go through that for a while. But I think the danger is to continue that for a long period of time or not being on the same page as the other people in your life about it. Because oftentimes it might be something that’s a goal or a desire for you and you don’t think about all the repercussions of the people, how it’s going to affect everyone around you. My wife is certainly not the entrepreneur that I am.

47:46
You know, like she works in the business and does a great job and we have a great relationship. But like, I can’t project and make her want to work 12, 16 hours a day for money or for a business, right? I mean, so you gotta make sure that, you know, everyone around you understands the repercussions as well. And if you got kids, they’re certainly never gonna understand it. Yeah, definitely. I mean, that’s been my biggest problem. I have an ego and I have all these successful friends. Whenever I talk to them, I want to do more.

48:16
And then I just got to remember like, don’t even, like I’m so cheap that I don’t even spend like half the money that I make. So I just have to sit back and remember why I did all this stuff in the first place. And then usually my wife helps me dial it down. But you’re right for a while, my ambitions, I was placing on Jen and she was miserable. Right. So. And your wife, you your spouse or whatever will, you know, I think that’s a part of, you’re in love with somebody and you care for them.

48:44
And so there’s a lot of things that you do in marriage or in a long-term relationship that you may not want to do, right? I mean, it’s just to make the other person happy. And you can do some of these things some of the time. Like you might go see a movie that you don’t like or go to a concert or something or whatever, endure short amounts of things. like a business is like another level. if the other person really isn’t fully committed and that’s something that’s more your ambition and your goal.

49:15
they can really hurt your relationship, which certainly was something that took me a long time to kind of figure out. Yeah, so I just want to end this episode just by saying, like, if you go into business, just make sure going into it that you know what you want to get out of it. And anything more is just gravy, but you should just stick to your core and not let things get out of hand. It’s going to be hard to do that, I think, at a practical level.

49:41
But if you just keep in mind what your original goal was, it makes things a hell of a lot easier. Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now I’m trying to track down the replay of our sell and scale talk, if it even exists, but I hope you found our conversation useful. For more information about this episode, go to mywebquaterjob.com slash episode 432. And once again, I want to thank Klaviyo, 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.

50:11
So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIYO. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIYO. I also want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for eCommerce merchants. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is 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-U-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog,

50:41
And if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free 16 mini course. Just type in your email and ascended the course right away. Thanks for listening.

00:00
You’re listening to the My Wife, Critter Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and dig deep into what strategies they use to grow their businesses. Today, I have my friend Jada Selner on the show. And in this episode, we’re going to talk about the dark side of entrepreneurship, how to know when to move on and how to create a business that suits your life. But before we begin, I want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Always excited to talk about Klaviyo because they’re the email marketing platform that I use for my e-commerce store and it depend on them for over 30 % of my revenue.

00:28
Now you’re probably wondering why Klaviyo and not another provider. Well Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for e-commerce stores and here’s why it’s so powerful. Klaviyo can track every single customer who is shopping in your store and exactly what they bought. So let’s say I want to send out an email to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the last week. Easy. Let’s say I want to set up a special autoresponder sequence to my customers to pay on what they bought, piece of cake and there’s full revenue tracking on every email sent.

00:53
Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used and you can try them for free over at klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife. I also want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. Now if you run an e-commerce business of any kind, you know how important it is to own your own customer contact list. And this is why I focus a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing. SMS or text message marketing is already a top five revenue source for my e-commerce store and I couldn’t have done it without Postscript which is my text message provider.

01:23
Now why did I choose Postscript? It’s because they specialize in ecommerce stores, and ecommerce is their primary focus. Not only is it easy to use, but you can quickly segment your audience based on your exact sales data and implement automated flows like an abandoned cart at the push of a button. Not only that, but it’s price well too and SMS is the perfect way to engage with your customers. So head on over to postscript.io slash Steve and try it for free. That’s P-O-S-T-S-U-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve.

01:50
And then finally, I wanted to mention my other podcast that I released with my partner Tony. And unlike this podcast where I interview 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 it 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.

02:19
Welcome to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast. Today I’m really happy to have my friend Jada Sellner back on the show. Jada was last on episode 90, back in 2015, when we talked about her business, Simple Green Smoothies, which was a crazy popular site teaching people how to eat healthier. But she’s since sold that business in 2016, I believe, for a seven figure sum and is now an accomplished author, mentor, speaker, podcaster, and business coach. And she’s spoken on large stages like TED and the World Domination Summit.

02:49
and her business was even featured in Oprah Magazine. in our last interview, we actually didn’t talk too much about Jada’s early entrepreneurial career because we had her partner on, but she’s had it rough trying to juggle business, young children while being in debt at the same time. But she was resilient, overcame it all, and now she’s on a mission to help others build sustainable small businesses without burning out using her love method, which I believe we’ll probably be talking

03:16
this interview. So welcome back to the show, Jada. How are doing today? I’m happy to be here, Steve. And I love that we just realized we both live in the San Francisco Bay area, which is amazing. You’re about probably 50 minutes away. Hey, Jada, catch us up from the first interview. I am very curious why you decided to sell Simple Green Smoothies because it was wildly successful. Yeah. So I think that’s a really great question. And there’s something that I’ve been defining as

03:44
entrepreneurial golden handcuffs. You know, we have the golden handcuffs within our nine to five, but then also we can create that within our own businesses. And something for me, when we had our first big launch in 2013, we had $86,000 in 10 days, life-changing. My husband quit his job during that time. And it was very pivotal moment, but I have always considered myself a walking billboard for good.

04:13
So the same thing with green smoothies, I started drinking green smoothies, feeling really like a proud mama, getting my kid to drink spinach and kale. I knew that I had to tell everyone about it. And then once I got to that place of reaching the masses, you we were able to serve over a million people and getting them to fall in love with kale and spinach. We were building also a profitable business and I wanted to tell everyone about that. Like being a walking billboard for good, I got more excited about talking about

04:42
behind the scenes of business growth and how do you build a business doing something that you love while also being able to raise a family at the same time, which is not always easy, kind of balancing those as well as with your health. And so that year when we had that big launch, I already had my eyes set on wanting to help other entrepreneurs. So, I think when we get certain levels of success, we wanna help other people behind us.

05:11
And so I became very torn because I was doing a lot of speaking. I was on a lot of podcasts, interviews, and I just wanted to help more and more people in sharing the behind the scenes strategies of how we were able to build from a place of love. But I was straddling between one foot in the simple green smoothies world, one foot in the business world. And I remember in that year writing a future vision, which is this is, I have actually had these questions inside my upcoming book.

05:37
but being able to answer these questions about what do I really want for my company, for my personal life, my relationships, the contribution I wanna make in the world. And I wrote that in 2013 and then I just put it away, like put it where I couldn’t see it. But as I was getting ready to sell my half of the company and I wasn’t sure, cause everyone was like, what are you doing? You’re crazy. Don’t do this. And I was like, but my heart was just calling me in a new direction where my passion was.

06:06
It didn’t feel like a lot of work. And I pulled that out at the beginning of 2016 and I actually read it to my business partner, Jen Hansard. And I think in that moment, she really got it. And I remembered of like, right, it had nothing to do with growing simple green smoothies. was about helping women entrepreneurs build world-changing businesses with their kids by their side. And so I was kind of dabbling with coaching on the side. And that’s when I knew when I read that of, Oh,

06:36
this is where I’m being called to go next. And it didn’t make sense on paper, but for me, it made sense inside my heart. My husband was like, what are you doing? Well, know, my friend who helped me actually start an Instagram account with Simple Green Smoothies like, no, don’t do it. And I remember asking my friend and business mentor, Jonathan Fields, the host of Good Life Project. I was like, am I crazy for leaving? And he was like, you’re

07:05
asking the wrong question. And the question is, can magic strike twice? And the answer is yes. And in that moment, I got chills and I was like, this is about me. This isn’t about the company. It isn’t about, you know, we had a traditionally published book. We had another second book deal on the table that I co-wrote that book proposal. So I felt like I was shopping for a house with my soon to be ex-husband. Like, okay, we’re going to buy this house and I’m not going to live in it.

07:34
And I knew it, like I knew when I was writing that book proposal that I didn’t want to write a book about the thing that I didn’t want to be known for anymore. So it was definitely a lot of identity crisis and how do I do both? And my heart was just really calling me in another direction. And it was really challenging and hard to make that leap and that exit for sure. I’m just kind of curious, did the business have anything to do with your relationship with your ex-husband during that period?

08:04
Did it, oh wait, not my ex-husband. Wait. I’m like. thought you said ex-husband, sorry. I was using an analogy of like shopping as if I was going to be, you know, like if I, I’m not, we’ve been married for 17 years. Got it, okay. I love you baby. All right, so here’s one thing that I found interesting about what you just told me. In 2013, you wrote down your intentions for the business. I think that’s rare. Like how did you know to do that?

08:32
and actually put it down on paper for later. Yeah. So I participated in a two day mastermind actually with Jonathan Fields and he shared these prompts and questions with us to write it down. And I remember even in my mastermind hot seat, I’m like, I want to write about how to help mom entrepreneurs. But I was also like, I need to grow simple green smoothies business and take this, you everyone’s like, you’re sitting on a golden egg. They just put all of your attention here. So I think that that’s something that’s very helpful is being

09:01
part of structured experiences where you can step away from your day-to-day responsibilities and actually think about what it is you really want. Because oftentimes as business owners, we get so caught in the weeds of the day-to-day that we’re just laser focused what’s right in front of us. And that’s what I think is so powerful about having coaches or mentors or people in our lives to help us kind of look at the bigger picture. And I always say, you you can’t read the label from inside the jar.

09:29
So it was one of those moments of just carving out dedicated time to do that. Of course you can do this on your own, but if you’re like me, I’m a bit of a button seat learner, where sometimes I have to pay to like show up to do the deeper work that is not so strategic or so growth oriented or, you know, making more money. So that stuff that we think is a little bit more.

09:52
intentional, a little bit, maybe it feels a little in the clouds, a little woo. You’re like, this is not going to help me grow my business, but having clarity about what you want in your life and in your business is one of the most important things that you can do, especially that you’re growing and building on a strong foundation of like, this is actually what I want to do instead of building a business on something you feel I have to do or I should do. And that was where I was torn in my own business of like,

10:19
I should do this. This is the smart thing to do, but it’s not always like the most loving thing to do for yourself and your own evolution in life. That’s actually similar to my story. When the business started taking off, I just wanted to grow, grow and grow it, but it caused a lot of stress. And then one day my wife came to me and said, Hey, we don’t even spend this money that we’re making. Why are we stressing out trying to make more of it when everything is all good? And then things changed after that. I did not have the foresight to jot down everything on a piece of paper.

10:49
Yeah, well, I’m curious about that for you. What was your answer to that of having that stress when she asked you that question? Well, for some reason, I remember this one year we were about to hit seven figures. It was so close, but it would be a stretch. So we like strained ourselves sending out emails and whatnot. We didn’t even have the capacity to handle that volume of orders. So we ended up just staying up late night, you know, packing orders and doing all this stuff. And we hit the goal.

11:19
And then the next year, we’re like, okay, what’s our new goal? And it just didn’t make any sense. And it was really all for ego. think. Right? In the Yes. This is exactly what I talk about in my book. is that right? Okay. Which is that we are constantly moving the goalpost. And we, know, one of the reasons why we build such meaningful businesses is we’re showing up to serve our community. And then all of a sudden we start focusing on the metrics of, okay,

11:48
six figures, that’ll be enough. And then my wife can quit her job, my husband can quit his job and then we’ll be happy. And then we just keep adding more and kind of letting that carrot stick dangle. And that’s kind of part of the hustle culture where we’re going, going, we’re pushing, we’re compromising our health, our relationships at the cost of reaching this metric, this goal. And for me, what I’ve learned is to extend the timeline. It’s like, yes, we’ll do that, but burnout is not an option. So what do we need to do?

12:18
oh, we want to make seven figures by this year, but based on our capacity, based on our health and our relationships, we actually need to slow down. And that’s something I’m like, give yourself permission to be a slow cooker and not a pressure cooker. You you get the same results. It just takes eight hours instead of an hour. And so I think that piece is really important for us to look at how we’re kind of looking at metrics and our goals and what’s the cost or the expense for that.

12:45
not just from a numbers perspective, but from our well-being too. I actually don’t set monetary goals at all anymore. That’s awesome. Everything is just, if I do something this way, eventually it’ll happen. I know it will. I have confidence. Just kind of like my YouTube channel. It just recently hit 100K and I knew even in the early going when it wasn’t getting any viewers, I knew if I just consistently put stuff out without any pressure, it would eventually happen. Yeah. would happen after two and a half years. That’s amazing. Did you have an original?

13:14
100k goal for YouTube at one point because I want the plaque again. It’s ego. But what was the timeline that you gave yourself originally? Well, see, I don’t start anything these days unless I’m going to follow through with it for at least three to five years. Yeah, I love that. And I, I’ve adopted that same mentality of like the three to five years. It’s with the future vision. It’s always three years in the future because they say you, you overestimate

13:42
what you underestimate what you can accomplish in three years, but you overestimate what you can accomplish in a year. So we’re trying to put three years, three plus years of work into one year. And it’s, you can do it, but there’s a cost to that versus extending that timeline. And for me, I’m like, don’t put a timeline on your dreams. We can just do that at a pace that works for us and that is sustainable. So I’m curious with Simple Green Smoothies, when you sold it, was that life changing money where you didn’t have to work anymore?

14:11
No, no, it wasn’t life changing money. And I can’t just do two contracts and things I can’t share. I’m curious what your mentality was, right? Yeah, yeah, it was definitely a good sum of money that allowed me to kind of reposition and realign and build my business, my next business up. The thing is, I already had my personal brand was already like a multiple six figure business. So I was kind of building that. Okay, on the side.

14:38
as I was building Simple Green Smoothies, I still showed up for my responsibilities, but I talk about heart projects and cash projects where your cast project for me, that was Simple Green Smoothies at the time. And I would use the money that I was getting from there to reinvest into this, at that time, my side project, my heart project. And I would, every Monday from two to 4 p.m., this is when I’ll work on this business. And every quarter, I would just test different things.

15:04
to see what do I actually wanna do on the other side of leaving this company? What am I actually excited about? What do people wanna learn from me? And so that, so that definitely gave us a great cushion to rebuild, but I was already making money from my, at that time it was just a heart project, but now it is my cash project and also a heart project at the same time. I love that. We have similar stories. So my day job was actually my cash project.

15:30
Yeah, yeah. Everything else was was the passion project. Yeah, that’s cool. So what are you up to right now? So how does jada Selnar.com? How do you generate money? Yeah, so all of for me, I do coaching and retreats and masterminds. And I always say I coach mostly women and a few good men behind the scenes are really aligned with building a business in a sustainable way and thinking about how does their whole life

15:57
integrate with their business growth, too. So we’re talking about our wellbeing, our mental health, our relationships with our kids and with our partners and those pieces. But everything I do comes into those categories of I do one-on-one coaching, I do group coaching, I lead retreats to step away from your day to day. And then also masterminds, which I know I’m sure you know about masterminds.

16:22
And I remember having my first mastermind partner before even Simple Green Smoothies was a business. It’s like one of those things that I think is so important and one of the most affordable ways that you can actually grow into the next level of what you’re building and creating. So I’ve been teaching this class for 11 years now. And one thing that I’ve just come to learn is that business is all mental for a lot of beginners. So I’m just curious about your love method and

16:51
how you teach like the mindset stuff. Yeah, so I completely agree with a lot of the things that get in the way are ourselves and how we’re thinking about growing and a big thing for women especially is navigating how to take care of their family as well as their business growth and redefining their ambition. I have one client who says that she’s a blogger or a mom first and a blogger second, even though she has a highly profitable blog and so

17:19
kind of looking at that mindset from that perspective and inside the love method. So it’s L-O-V-E. So there’s four categories in there. L is for lead, which is about leading from the inside out, getting clear on what it is that you want to create and build and building from that place. So taking care of yourself, your loved ones, your community, your customers, your clients and that. Then there’s optimize. And this is about really leveraging your time and your energy and your capacity and really thinking about,

17:49
based on the amount of hours I have in a day, what can I actually accomplish? And also what are the energizing things that I can be doing? And what are the more draining things I can get off my plate and being able to have that support in place. And then V is visualize. And that’s about bringing what it is you want into fruition. How do we bring our visions, our dreams, our ideas into implementation, into actually action and building a quarterly plan and being able to take visionary action from that place.

18:17
And then E is expand. And this is about next level growth. And the next level growth is coming from the inside out. For us, I think when we are ambitious people, we always want to grow, but it doesn’t always have to be tangible growth. It can also be from the inside as well. And so that’s kind of how I organize the love method for us to really think about team leadership, as well as optimizing our time and energy and how do we deepen and build a strong foundation so we don’t.

18:46
burnout in the process. So I know there’s probably a lot of people listening who are kind of on the sidelines. They want to start something and I’m just curious how you deal with like the the people who have that definitely have the talent and the drive to do so but they’re a little bit afraid to get started. They’re worried about burning out of being too much work and that sort of thing. How do you start with these people? Yeah, I think if we go back to having the support, so there’s a chapter in my book called Gather Your Support Squad, which includes masterminds,

19:16
with peers, but also mentors and coaches. So, and a mentor can be something that’s affordable and accessible. It could be a podcast like this podcast that you’re listening to right now. It can be a book that you’re reading. And then also there’s one extra layer of support that I think a lot of people don’t talk about in entrepreneurship, but is actually having life coaches or a therapist. So a lot of our blocks, we think that it’s strategy, like I need the right strategy. I need the blueprint. I need the step-by-step.

19:45
but it’s actually usually emotional blocks. When we’re procrastinating or we’re avoiding something, it’s usually actually an emotional block in what you’re talking about, the mindset to get through. And so instead of thinking, I don’t have the right strategy, it’s like, oh, what emotion am I feeling? Am I afraid? Am I overwhelmed? Or really getting clear on what is the emotion that has not been fully processed or witnessed or heard or seen? And soon as we name it,

20:14
Like I’m scared. And then what are you scared of? All right. Then we kind of get into that. And then we let fear sit in the passenger seat, but not in the driver’s seat of us taking action on things. In all my programs, I always have a life coach who has that emotional capacity to really get through those blocks. Cause I just, as many people as I’ve coached and guided, it’s usually emotional stuff. It’s childhood trauma that could be holding us back or we’re repeating patterns.

20:41
whether you’re not growing or maybe you’re growing too fast, that chase for the ego that’s like, I’ve got to do more, I’ve got to prove more, I’m not doing enough. A lot of that stuff can actually stem from our relationship with our parents from growing up. And so I think it’s just something that we don’t acknowledge enough and we can bypass that. And I think we’re getting a little bit more hip and aware that we have emotions that need to be processed and not suppressed.

21:10
If you’re looking to start an online store, you’re probably deciding which e-commerce platform to go with. And the problem is that there’s hundreds of choices out there and they all start to blend together after a while. So I want to save you time today and tell you about BigCommerce, which is one of the platforms that I recommend. And here’s why. BigCommerce does not nickel and dime you with apps like other platforms. Once you sign up, you get a fully featured shopping cart with the features you need built right in. If you want to run a WordPress blog and an online store on the same exact domain for search engine optimization,

21:40
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22:08
go to mywifequitterjob.com slash BC and check it out for free for 30 days. That’s mywifequitterjob.com slash BC. Now back to the show.

22:20
funny you should be teaching this to guys guys have a lot of problems with this more so than women in my opinion right right well you know it’s yeah but I’ve practiced with my husband and I’m like you need your own part like I can’t I’m curious what has been your trauma and I’ll share mine after this yeah what did you have to get over

22:43
Yeah. So, and I think it’s not a getting over, right? That we still face it. We just know how to be in relationship with it more or more aware of our triggers. Something that I call my inner mean girl. My friend Amy Ehlers has like reform your inner mean girl. And I call her patronizing Polly. And she’s the one that’s like, you’re not doing it right. So there’s this, this, that constant trauma for me is I’m, doing it wrong, but I don’t want to get it wrong. And that can paralyze me from taking action or

23:12
get caught in the perfectionism spiral because I want to do it right. We were just talking about our books before we started recording and the perfectionism of wanting to get it right, do it right, really slowed me down in the process because I’m doubting my decisions. I’m overthinking. I’m like this one or that one. And really either answer would be right. But in my head, I’m thinking that I’m not doing it right. I’m not doing it good enough. And so

23:41
Those are the things that I have to be aware of. And I named that with my life coach and I cry. She’ll like, when’s the last time you had a good cry? And I’m like, okay, I’m to go watch This Is Us or The Notebook or because sometimes the emotions don’t even have to come up specific to that thing. But we need to move those emotions through through our body. So for me, it’s like, you’re not doing it right. Is the that’s the thing that’s constantly going through my head that I have to be aware of and be like, wait a minute.

24:11
this is like, this is good enough. Like, let’s get this, this, can ship it, we can let it go and release it. My problems were always my peer group. So a lot of my friends here and I was in this entrepreneurship program with VCs and they were all off building like, you know, a hundred million dollar companies. And here I was like selling handkerchiefs and doing this stuff that none of my peers were doing. And I always felt inferior to them. Right. Because we’d go to these yearly retreats.

24:38
And everyone would be sharing, my company just sold for $400 million and whatnot. And he, Hey, Steve, what are you up to? Oh, you know, I’m just selling stuff online. Selling handkerchiefs. Oh, great. It’s nice. So I had to get over that. And then there’s all these things with my upbringing too, you know, with, with Asian parents, know, always saying that you’re not, you know, you can do better. can do better. Lots of trauma there, John. What, what did you do?

25:05
Or is does it still sit with you with your peers? Do you feel like you still face that or how have you gotten over that? I actually just don’t hang out with them as much. hang out with my own time. Right? Yeah. What you said mastermind groups and everything so important. Yeah, it’s just like having parallel playmates that are on a similar journey. I also want to say because sometimes in masterminds, there can be people I have friends who have eight figure businesses and I’m like,

25:31
do you care how much money people make that you’re in a mat? And they’re like, no, it’s interesting that we create these stories for ourselves that we don’t belong. And that’s another one for me, belonging, like feeling safe. And I think it’s important for us to figure out where our value is. So even if it’s not necessarily monetary that we have gifts and ways of adding value or, I grew my YouTube channel to 100K, you might be working with someone who may be.

25:59
making more money, but they’ve never grown a YouTube channel and they’re at 100 subscribers. You can add value in that way. So paying attention of how you can be of service, not just to the community and the customers that you serve, but also to your peers and being able to add value. That’s something for me, how I’ve always been able to get into rooms. I’ve hung out with Justin Timberlake. I’ve hung out with different, but like being able to figure out.

26:24
I belong here too, and here’s what I have to offer so that we’re not always in this place of taking, like how can I get something from this person, but also how can I add value and be of service and figuring out those ways to be helpful to other people. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I will say that for me, at least I’m vindicated with my mom. She’s been like shocked the entire time. I’m like, yeah, see people are watching me. Yeah, yeah.

26:51
I am curious, I know you’ve spoken on a lot of stages, Ted and WDS. I’m just kind of curious why you decided to become a speaker also and how did you even get those gigs in the first place? Yeah, I think that’s a really great question. And I studied theater, I went to performing arts high school in Las Vegas. And then I took some college theater classes. I don’t have a college degree. That was one of my things of not feeling worthy or valuable, but I have since gotten over that.

27:19
So I love performing and I would do spoken word poetry slams and those type of things. So I love performing on stages. So I remember WDS was in front of 3000 people and it was actually my very first keynote. Like I had done panels or Q and A’s or things like that. And it actually links back to my mentor, Jonathan Fields. And I went to his two day event. So I got to meet one of my mentors from afar in person.

27:47
And I was adding value and I said, if you ever need anyone to talk about how to build a community online, because we had grown, you know, simple green smoothies to over 400,000 followers on Instagram. had 355,000 email subscribers. I was like, I can share about community building. And I just kind of threw my hat in the ring and that was it. And then several weeks, months later, he invited me to speak at his event, but it wasn’t like a keynote. was kind of more of a, a panel Q and a, but he saw me and he saw me share my story. And from there.

28:18
few months later, he said, Hey, would you like to actually before that, I remember kind of planting the seed of I would love to speak at WDS. And I was like, I need to go there first and see what it’s all about. You know, I’ve never been. So I kind of just planted that seed setting that intent and not really knowing how it was going to happen. And then Jonathan Fields, a few months later, sent me an email and said, Hey, would you like to speak at WDS?

28:44
Chris Gilbo, I’m friends with him. I can make the introduction. And I was like, H E double hockey sticks. Yes, yes, yes. I had never gone to the event. And so that was my first time speaking there. But what I want to share is I put my hat in the ring and just said, here’s how I can be of value. I would do it for free. I’m not asking you to pay me for a speaking fee. I showed up. I did really well in front of Jonathan. And then he introduced me to someone else. And then once I met WDS, there are other people who host events than Dan.

29:11
Darren Rouse from Pro Blogger paid for me to speak in Australia, like full expenses paid. And so that’s kind of where it happened is that word of mouth when you deliver and show up and do something really well, then people start to invite you. that’s really, but for me, was like putting my hat in the ring. And I call this 10 seconds of bravery because obviously we’re not always feeling that confident, but I was just like, okay, let me just send this email really quick and see what happens.

29:39
And that would be my invitation for listeners and viewers to really think about what is that bold ask that you want to put out there? And can you just have your 10 seconds of bravery to just go up to that person in the room and say, hi, my name is, and I would love to help you with this or give them a compliment or send that email. And sometimes you need a friend standing behind your shoulder to like, okay, the email’s written, but I haven’t hit send. And you just need someone standing behind you to hit send. that’s where.

30:07
the momentum starts to happen is actually putting yourself out there and asking for the thing that you want. I’ve also submitted myself for things, think, South by Southwest, no one ever responded, I submitted, or someone did respond, but they’re like, hey, you didn’t get this thing, but I do this thing over here on CreativeLive and invited me to be on that. So sometimes putting yourself out there is also just putting yourself in the right room or in front of the right people. And it’s not always about getting that thing that’s right in front of you. It might be something that’s

30:37
on the side. that’s, does that answer your question around that? It does. Yes. I was actually at your first WDS. I didn’t realize that was your first keynote. Yeah. That was amazing. Thank you. I want to talk about your book. So first of all, why write a book? I was asking myself that question early on, like, and I’m curious what your reasons were. Okay. And I definitely want to know your reason too. So for me, I knew that I wanted to write

31:06
a book about being able to do what you love. This was a message that I got when I was young, my father who’s since passed away, he would say, do work you love and marry someone who does work that they love. And I feel like I followed those two things really well. And actually at WDS in 2014, Chris Gilbo’s literary agent came up to me, introduced me to editors and was like, your keynote is a book. And I was like, oh my gosh. And then what I realized is

31:35
we need to write Simple Green Smoothies book first. So I actually paused it, put it on the shelf and knew that I needed to write the book for Simple Green Smoothies first. So we kind of went down this path and it wasn’t until maybe 2018 where I reached out to the same lit agent, Dave Fugate and said, hey, I’m ready to write that book. I’m out of Simple Green Smoothies. I’m ready to really write about the entrepreneurial journey and

31:58
it still took me a million years to get the book proposal. So I didn’t have a book proposal until the end of 2020. We needed the pandemic. It took me a year and a half to get the book proposal. How long did take you? I mean, 2018 was when I was supposed to work on it, but I didn’t really start working on it until 2020. but I was working with a coach in 2019, like, help me. But I didn’t know what I really wanted to say. didn’t.

32:25
I didn’t want to write a book again about the thing that I didn’t want to be known for or the thing that people are expecting from me, like building your email list on challenges. You know, there’s just something that I was like, I need to write what’s on my soul because I’m going to be with this book for a very long time. And so I actually wrote an SFDA, can I, or, you know, stinky first draft is what my daughter calls it. I had to get all my words out just to see what was there. And once I did that, I think I wrote 30,

32:53
thousand words in three days for this like online writing retreat. had an outline and I just followed that. And I was part of this retreat where we were just writing, writing all day. And I was like, wow, okay, now I know I’m capable of, but that helped me see that I have something to say. It gave me the confidence to see that. And then I was able to build the book proposal from there, but I still struggled. Like I was trying to work with all these different people. So it’s, it’s a long arduous process. And I think the book proposal is actually harder than writing the book.

33:22
because you need to know what the book is. I agree. I agree. You’re like, but I haven’t. I don’t know. I don’t know. And the chapters, I don’t know how many TOC variations I had, but I, once I got through the book proposal process, then it felt like I was riding the bike down the hill with a few tiny hill uphills. It wasn’t as bad as the book proposal, but that was, that was the hardest, hardest part. So, but my big why for writing a book is, you know, I’m black, Chinese and white.

33:52
And the books that I was reading coming up were written by mostly Ivy League college educated single white men. And I was just like, I am not that I am a woman. I am a mother. I am a wife. I’m a woman of color. And so I just, I really wanted to see myself in those books and I didn’t. And Toni Morrison says, like, if you don’t see the book that you want to read, then you need to write it. Um, and that’s not the exact quote, but in those terms. And so.

34:20
For me, this is a book about proof of possibility for women who don’t have college degrees, for people who are people of color, just marginalized communities to be able to see themselves. I was like, okay, I can build business. I can build it differently and build it my way. So I just wanted to speak against the hustle culture of there. That’s not the only way to build a business. It is a way and it’s a fast track.

34:45
you know, there’s a lot of success, but we can do it in a more sustainable way that works for our lives too. So we’re not ignoring our families, ignoring our health in the process. Amazing. Actually, our books are very parallel, actually. I’m sure they’re going to be completely different. I actually haven’t really announced mine yet, but I will tell you why I’m writing mine. One thing that I wanted to do and I’ve always wanted to do is take my kids to the bookstore and have them see my book on the shelf. know that sounds weird or not weird, but

35:13
kind of selfish, but I just I just want them to show, hey, I can put a book on the shelf because both my kids, they love books, all they do is read all day. Yeah. And then the second part of it was I wanted to write a book because it’s kind of in the same sentiment, anti household culture and part of the story that I told you earlier in this interview, people start businesses and grow them for like the wrong reasons. Right. And

35:36
No one really talks about family and that sort of thing. Especially guys, actually. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Oh, I love that. And it’s interesting that you say that it feels selfish to have your kids go into bookstore. Because to me, I’m like, that’s not selfish. That feels like legacy. That feels like proof of possibility to your kids to be a walking role model for them. And my daughter just held the ARC copy, which is like the early printed copy. It’s not the hardcover, but I’m just

36:04
She loves books as well, like super bookworm. She’s 15 now and she wants to be an author in a different space. She’s a way better writer than I am. I’m like, I want to be even I grew up. She’s, mean, because she storytelling and character development. we geek out when we watch shows of like watching characters evolve and she’s, she watches video essays about just storytelling and it’s just really cool. But to me, I’m like,

36:30
I’m not just proof of possibility for all those people out there of being able to write a book or to build a business, but I’m proof of possibility inside my own home. Like there’s nothing closer than you being in the home and your kids being able to see like, wow, if my dad can do it, if my mom can do it, I can do it too. So I think that’s very beautiful. And I think it’s okay to be selfish in the way that it’s okay to want what you want.

36:57
as well as being of service to other people. And I think that’s the walk that you’re walking in the world is, hey, wanna, this is something I wanna do for me. And we are all deserving of that. And I wanna be able to help people at the same time. So I think both can coexist. Like, why do I wanna write this book for me? And why is it going to help other people too?

37:17
I just want to let you know that tickets for the 2023 Seller Summit are now on sale over at Sellersummit.com. Now, what is the Seller Summit? It is the conference that I hold every single year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level BS, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. And in fact, every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business

37:45
entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods, and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. The other thing I can assure you is that the seller summit will be small and intimate. Every year, we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets always sell out fast, and in fact, we sell out every single year many months in advance. Now, if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over $250,000 or $1 million per year, we are also offering an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers.

38:14
Now the Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 23rd to May 25th. For more information, go to sellersummit.com. Once again, that’s S-E-L-L-E-R-S-S-U-M-M-I-T.com, or just Google it. Now back to the show.

38:30
Now by the time this episode comes out, your book should be out. But what is the title? She builds. Okay. And it’s the anti hustle guide to grow your business and nourish your life. And really, what for women she builds differently. She builds with love. Interesting. I whenever like there’s a book title that targets a certain gender, I’m always very curious. So what about she builds with what that does it apply to men as well? yeah, or some? Yeah, so I think that’s a great question. And

38:59
It’s interesting because men, I’ve coached men behind the scenes and they do all the exercises that I include in this book. So any man could definitely read this book and get a lot from the tools and strategies that I share. I titled it She Builds because I wanted to center women’s stories. So often as women who’ve been

39:22
you know, identify as female or socialize as female. We’ve all had to read all these books about men’s stories. And it’s like, hey, guys, it’s your turn. You can read stories about how women navigate this and being allies and supportive of what women, not just from a logistical perspective, but also from a psychological perspective of all the open tabs that we are holding in our lives, even though things have shifted so much, you know, that men are able to be caretakers at home as well.

39:50
but we still have some of that discomfort of the 1950s housewife. it’s so a woman could be growing a seven figure business and also still responsible for volunteering and contributing cookies at some type of event at school. Or for me, I’m still even having to be emotionally available for my daughter. She’s in high school now and those things where it’s like, I’ve got to take my energy away from my business to be present as she’s navigating those different things that are happening in school too.

40:20
So men could definitely benefit. highly invite them to, there’s so many great strategies in here and also to just be able to see women being centered in business stories as well. But I was definitely torn like, ooh, is this too specific? But I love working with women. I love leading retreats. And it’s just for me, those are the people that I feel most excited to serve.

40:42
I really get them. I get what we have to go through and what we’re juggling. And so it just it comes with a lot of ease for me. So I know I may be excluding people with that title, but it is anyone could read it, whatever gender identity you have. But I really wanted to center women in this story. You know, it’s funny, because my blog is named My Wife Quit Her Job, actually most of my audience is actually women over the age of 35. And what’s funny is

41:08
I always find their stories of adversity more interesting than a guy’s. Ooh, tell me why. Tell me why. It’s because, and this is a little bit of stereotype, I guess, but women, like they have to worry about the family that that’s first in addition to juggling all these other things. Like I know in like my household, my wife takes care of, you know, like the lesson plans for my kids, making sure like she, she volunteers at the school and that sort of thing.

41:34
I focus more on like the business and making money and that sort of thing. But I’m always present for my kids because I’m always at home. Yeah. And it just seems a lot more difficult to juggle the emotional aspects of parenting with the business. and again, I’m stereotyping here, but guys, like if we’re just focused on just bringing in money, which has been a traditional role of a guy.

41:58
in a lot of respects, that’s easier, right? Because it’s more of like a focus on one thing as opposed to dealing with like the emotional aspect. it’s emotional, psychological, logistical, it’s all the things, but then adding in that we’re also bringing in the money too, as well. And there’s a lot of, I hope more books will be written about this. I don’t go so deep into it in mind, but there’s a shift in that when the woman becomes the primary breadwinner and also still holding on to

42:25
the family, know, my husband has been, runs his own business, a music program now, but he’s also been very 50 50 at home with supporting our daughter pick up drop offs from school and just navigating the shift in revenue contribution to that’s a whole, it’s just, it’s a lot for guys to deal with that too. Like, Oh what’s happening here? Like I need to be responsible and contribute. And he thought he wanted to be a full time stay at home dad. And then realized

42:54
no, I need to do something outside the home too. And that’s, think is happening a lot for a lot of entrepreneurial families of how do we contribute, be of service outside the world and then also still be a contributor at home too and being able to balance that between two partners if that’s your layout of your family dynamic. Yeah, I mean, it’s also hard if like the spouse makes more than you also as a guy also, right? These are all things that I guess need books written about.

43:22
Yeah, no, really. I mean, those are the conversations that come up in couples therapy and all the things of navigating that, you know. So Jada, where can we find this book? And when does it come out? Yes. So November 15th, 2022, which I’m super excited. And you can go to she builds.com to to get the book and anything else around my coaching, my masterminds, my retreats at Jada Selner.

43:48
and there’ll be lots of like free goodies and resources that people can also access if they’re not quite ready to buy the book. But I highly recommend that you just have that little companion, book your own, you know, retreat for your business, for your life and being able to prioritize that time to think about the big picture of what you’re wanting to build and create next. What is your heart calling you to next? Awesome, Jada. I’m so glad that you came back on the show and really excited.

44:14
for this book Thank you. Thank you for having me. It was so much fun. I’m sure we’ll have another edition that’s just about our book babies getting out into the world. Yes, that would be a great episode because I know a lot of people out there have been asking me about writing books and I honestly I just tell them I know nothing because I’m just going through it right now for the first time. Yeah, yeah. Super exciting. Thanks, Steve. All right. Thanks a lot.

44:36
Hope you enjoyed that episode. Najata’s book, She Builds, should be in stores today, so go check it out on Amazon. It’s a great read for those who want to build a business that they love. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 431. And once again, I 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. SMS is the next big own marketing platform, and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash dv.

45:06
That’s P-O-S-T-S-U-I-P-T.I-O slash D-U. I also want to thank Clevio, 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 mywifecoupterjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Once again, that’s mywifecoupterjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Now we’ll talk about how you use these tools on my blog. And if you are interested in starting your own e-commerce store,

45:36
Head on over to mywifecoderjob.com and sign up for my free 16 mini course. Just type in your email and it’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.