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In this episode, Toni and I are tackling a big one: New Year’s resolutions. Every January, millions of people make them, and by February, most of those goals are already abandoned. Why do they fail, and what’s a better way to achieve the life you want? Here are strategies to actually follow through.
What You’ll Learn
- Understand why traditional resolutions often fail and how habits can make a real difference in your life
- Discover simple tricks to make positive changes feel enjoyable, so they stick around for the long haul
- Get tips on staying motivated and celebrating your progress
Sponsors
SellersSummit.com – The Sellers Summit is the ecommerce conference that I’ve run for the past 8 years. It’s small and intimate and you’ll learn a ton! Click Here To Grab The Recordings.
The Family First Entrepreneur – Purchase my Wall Street Journal Bestselling book and receive $690 in free bonuses! Click here to redeem the bonuses
Transcript
Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all of the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. In this episode, Tony and I are tackling a big one, New Year’s resolutions. Every January, millions of people make them, and by February, most of those goals are already abandoned. Why do they fail? And what’s a better way to achieve the life you want? In this episode, we’ll explore why New Year’s resolutions don’t work and share smarter, more effective strategies to create habits that stick. But before we begin,
00:29
I wanted to let you know that tickets are now on sale for Seller Summit 2025 over at SellersSummit.com. The Seller Summit is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. Unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level advice, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business
00:58
entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods, and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. I personally hate large events, so the seller’s summit is always small and intimate. Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets sell out fast, and we’ve sold out every single year for the past eight years. If you are an e-commerce entrepreneur making more than $250,000 or $1 million per year,
01:26
We also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller’s Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 6th to May 8th. Right now, this is the cheapest the tickets will ever be. So head on over to sellerssummit.com and grab your ticket. Now onto the show.
01:48
Welcome to the My Wife, Quit Her Job podcast. It’s the beginning of the year. Everyone loves to talk about resolutions, but Tony and I are actually anti-resolution. And we’re going to talk about resolutions today and what we do instead of them. Yeah. So I keep seeing, of course, everyone’s posting resolutions and there’s all these like challenges going on. And I’m guilty of the, I’m the, I’m in the challenge trap, right? Like I’ve run challenges many years with my website. Your favorite one, the No Sugar Challenge.
02:18
I didn’t launch it this year. The other one that you love is the wake up earlier challenge. So yes, I do love a good challenge and motivating factor, but I keep seeing in everything that I look at is that most people fail at their resolutions by the second Friday in January. You know what’s funny is my friends, we have this WhatsApp group and they’re just talking about resolutions. And then it comes to my turn. I’m like,
02:48
I’m not changing a thing or like I don’t have any resolutions. They’re like, what? You know, are you are you perfect or something? I was like, no, I just I just don’t believe them. But I do want to clarify that because that does not imply that you’re not going to change or anything. Yes, yes. In fact, actually, I stumbled into bar trivia the other night. Not stumbled, literally. We went to go watch a football game and it was a trivia night as well. And so our our team name was striving for mediocrity. And that’s definitely not not what we’re talking about today.
03:18
But we’re talking more about why getting better on a daily basis or improving on a daily basis beats these big audacious goals that people set at the beginning of the year and most people fail at the goals. And do you know why people fail? I imagine it’s just too much. Their goals are too high, too lofty. They’re like, they can’t be that if they can’t improve that much. They’re terrible people.
03:47
So I don’t know if there’s a scientific reason behind this, but my theory on this is that most people set goals without a strategy to reach them. So speaking of goals and resolutions, I’m really into pink, as you guys know. I’m trying to reach over here. I’m getting away from the mic. someone gave me this notebook. It’s pink with gold. So it’s like my jam. So it says, happy on the front of it.
04:16
I realized over the Christmas break, because we took a break from recording and office hours and things like that, that in order for me to make a small improvement, I needed to do things that motivated me to make the improvement. And one of the things that I realized, and we were joking about this before I started recording, was that I need really pretty things. So I bought pink pencils that write in pencil color, but the actual color of the casing of the pencil is pink.
04:45
So I like pink. like to wear black all the time, but I like pink as far as everything else. And so I was like, you know what? I bought a pink file cabinet. I bought all that. I spent like 110 dollars on Amazon to achieve all of my 2025 goals. Your resolution is to go shopping. Is that? So anyway, I bought this little notebook that’s pink and I thought, you know what? We’re talking about this resolution goal stuff. And there’s things that I definitely want to achieve this year. Right. But like, how do I break it down?
05:13
in a way that I can actually achieve it. one of the things that like, we don’t talk about this on the podcast, but my hormones have been like all out of whack because I’m old. And if this doesn’t apply to you, just stop listening. Yes. So anyway, I’ve been wanting to make some like physical and personal changes, right? Like to get sort of off some of the medication I’ve had to be on and all this stuff. Right. So I was like, I can’t just put like lose 10 pounds.
05:39
Right on, and that’s what people do. I think when they make a resolution is like, want to lose 50 pounds. It’s like, well, great. How are you going to do that? Right. So, and so when I was thinking about like in my little pink notebook, I was like, well, I want to write some of these like personal things that I want to achieve this year. I was like, you know what? I’m not going to put that. I want to lose 10 pounds. I’m going to put that. I want it hit on a 10,000 steps a day. Right. Because especially during the weekdays, I sit on my butt all day long. I have a treadmill. I have a treadmill desk. I have a new one sitting in a box that I need to set up.
06:10
But if I just say lose 10 pounds, I’m never gonna achieve that, right? But if I say I wanna walk 10,000 steps a day minimum, then that’s pretty easy to achieve, right? Because that’s something that you can easily track and you can track your progress. Now, if I hit 10,000 steps every day or an average of that a week, right? And I don’t lose 10 pounds at the end of the year, then that’s okay.
06:36
Right? Because I’ve done the things that I need to do to like hit that goal. Right? Just like thinking about YouTube, because we were talking about that earlier, you know, I would never say like, let’s set a goal of I want 10,000 subscribers on YouTube. Right? Because you really can’t affect that. But what you can say is I’m going to film and edit and release one long form video a week. And we actually had this with one of our students in our class, Melissa, who hit her goal of releasing a long form video every single week for all of 2024.
07:06
Which is amazing. Yeah, absolutely. Yes. there are her videos are about feet, so I can’t watch most of them because I get so grossed out. No, her last one was was didn’t have. Yeah. But so I think that’s why people make these big resolutions and then fail at them, right? Because they get discouraged or like they want to lose 50 pounds and they step on the scale January 28th and they’ve gained half a pound. Right. So like, oh, screw it. Like, I’m not even going to try.
07:31
So I think today let’s talk about ways that you can improve without setting these like big resolutions that probably you won’t achieve anyway. Here’s the other thing I don’t like about resolutions and I’ve done them in the past is that if you hit your goal, let’s say you hit your goal. You’re like, all right, I’m done. Like let’s you lose your 10 pounds. You’re like, okay, I’m done. I lost my 10 pounds. You’re probably gonna gain it back. Yeah, because then you’re like, well, whatever you did to lose the 10 pounds, might,
08:00
stop doing. Like if you’re like, I’m only gonna have, let’s just say you’re in the habit of like having a glass of wine every day, which that’s not me. I’m just using that as an example. And then you’re like, you know what? I’m only gonna have a glass of wine on the weekends, right? Like I’m not gonna drink Monday through Friday. And then like you hit your goal, cause you’re like, maybe you’re doing that for like, you know, you’re sleeping better, whatever. Then you hit that goal of sleeping better. You hit that goal of losing weight. And then you’re like, oh, I guess I’ll just have my Tuesday night beer, right? Like.
08:26
And then you find yourself falling back into that same trap of whatever the behavior was. Yeah. mean, achieving your resolution doesn’t guarantee long-term success of whatever your actual goal is. And in fact, often leads to complacency. That’s just a problem that I have. I don’t know. And I know this always sounds extreme when I say it, but everything that I plan on doing, I feel like I’m going to maintain forever. That’s my mindset.
08:55
And it sounds intimidating, so maybe I shouldn’t even put it that way, you know, if I’m trying to motivate people. I think that’s the way it’s got to be. So. Well, and I think that’s that’s part of the trap that people fall in. Right. Is they set like, you know, they set this huge goal, whether it’s business, personal, like I want to have, let’s just say I want to do, you know, ten thousand dollars every month on my e-commerce store. Well, if you don’t hit it in January or you’re like, let’s just say you you’re at
09:24
you’re at $2,000 a month in January, right? And so your goal is $10,000 a month. Well, if at the end of January, you’ve like just done everything that you know how to do all through the month of January, you’re like, you’re going as hard as you possibly can. And at January 31st, you’re at $3,100, right, a month. So you’re like, I’m nowhere near $10,000. Like it’s very easy to burn out with, you know, having like something like that, right? As opposed to like saying every day I’m gonna do this,
09:53
to help move my business forward or like, you know, every week I’m going to revise one of my email flows, right, to help build my business or I’m going to, every week I’m gonna look at one product listing or one blog post or one video or I’m gonna watch three other videos on YouTube to see what other creators are doing. And I think that’s the big, that’s the first trap that people fall into is they like go all in all hard, like it’s why the gym is packed on like January 5th, right? Like everybody’s at the gym, like,
10:23
And by January 31st, they’re like, I can’t maintain this schedule. I can’t go to the gym every day a week. That’s not realistic. But you could go three days a week. That’s pretty realistic. Or just one day a week in the beginning, whatever is easily doable. So we’re talking about small, consistent changes. So let me give you an example. This is just someone I’ve been working with with Facebook ads recently. And
10:48
The predominant thought with Facebook ads is you got to constantly be putting out creative and all that stuff and it’s overwhelming, right? Yeah. But just set a goal of just refreshing your Facebook creatives once a week. Yeah. Like three creatives a week and just launch a new ad set every week. That is completely doable and you’re still, you know, iterating over your Facebook ads. And then maybe later, once you’re used to that flow, you can go more. Yeah. Some people call it like the compound marketing effect.
11:16
where if you do one or two things consistently over time, you reap the benefits. Just like Melissa with the one video a week, right? She’s going to reap the benefits of that. Having that like slow and steady improvement, you see it with everything. I mean, honestly, like I’ve seen it with my house, right? I bought this house that needed a complete gut. In the first six weeks, we literally nonstop morning to night renovating, right?
11:43
And then it was like, we hit this like massive level of burnout where it’s like, can’t, as soon as the kitchen was done and like we had a place to eat, it was like, I can’t keep this schedule up anymore. And so then we went and like stuff’s been getting done the whole time, but you go through this lull and it’s easy once you get back into the lull to like not want to pick it back up again. Right. So it’s like, if you’re like, I’m going all in on Facebook and you spend like every day doing Facebook stuff for like three or four weeks.
12:09
And one, you don’t see like a huge gain right away. So then you’re just like, you want to give up. But if you just say, hey, I’m going to do make a little improvement every day or every week, you’re much likely to one, be able to keep it up. And then two, you’re much likely to see improvements because you’re not just like throttling inconsistently. And one of my goals this year is to work out five days a week. And that was really easy for me before because I was playing ultimate.
12:36
And you know, there’s a bunch of people that were like, hey, you know, you can’t miss today and whatever. And they pushed me to go. And so I was in great shape, but all those guys are old now. We’re all injured. We can’t play that ultimate game anymore. So I had to find something else because if I had to go run five days a week or whatever, there’s no way that would happen. I just, I just know myself. And I think I mentioned this in the last podcast, there’s this video game, a fitness video game for Nintendo that I just started playing and I can just fire that up any time of day. It’s not.
13:05
too strenuous, although I couldn’t walk for two days after my last session. Did I tell you that? No. I did 200 air squats with no weight or anything. When you do that many reps of something. Anyway, the game makes it fun and it works and I know I can maintain that indefinitely until I finish the game, I guess, then I need to get a new one. Is there an ending to the game or does it just keep going? There is, but it’s like you beat the final boss.
13:33
I’m to sound like such a geek. It’s like a role-playing game for fitness. There’s five other levels so you can play it over over over again. It gets progressively harder. I feel like also with most video games, they’ll probably release another level. Don’t they do that? I don’t play video games so I could be not- They probably will, but I can just go back and play the same thing anyway. I have my whole strategy set out on how to do this.
14:03
Right. So I lift weights and I play tennis. That’s already two days. And then ring fit. That’s the game. It’s called ring fit. I do that twice a week. And then the last day is just going to be pull-ups and natural body weight exercises. Can you video yourself doing the ring fit? just found this. so ridiculous. Okay. This is what’s funny. One of the exercises, there’s like a million exercises, but the ones that I happen to be on right now.
14:27
It’s thigh master. Do you remember? Yes, I love the thigh master. think my sister had one. If anyone were to film me, I would die. Can imagine doing like 150 reps of thigh master? My thighs were killing me. Yeah, I believe it. Just to beat this stupid monster. I’d be like, just kill me. It’s not worth it. But OK, but anyone who who wants to start a business, you can’t just.
14:54
I’m just thinking real examples here of people who sign up for my class. You just can’t go and try to do everything. Instead, you just pick one thing and you bite off something that you can chew and maintain consistency over time. And then you slowly add on to it. I remember when I first started my blog and I was chatting with Rami Tsetiyev, I will teach you to be rich. And at the time I was sending out emails where it was just automated. It just grabbed from your RSS feed and just said. Yes, the RSS feed.
15:24
And he told me that, oh, he handwrites all of his weekly emails and he emails twice a week. And I was like, whoa, I don’t think I can handle writing a blog post and an email every week or two emails, which sounds ridiculous now. Yeah. Well, at the time I was serious. was like, I don’t think I have the brain power to write a full blog post and do that. But I just started out with just one email a week. Yeah. You know, kind of tailored to whatever I was writing.
15:54
And then that felt easy and then I added more onto it. Like today, like there’s a bunch of stuff going on behind the scenes. Yeah. So kind of piggybacking on that, one of the other concepts that I like is basically setting up systems over goals. Yes. So basically, which is basically you’re you’ve been doing this for years where and it’s could be systems, it could be processes, it could be schedule. Like you can kind of call it whatever you want. But basically setting up
16:23
things, putting things in place so that you can achieve the next level. So just like you were saying, I don’t think I can send one email a week. It’s just like, oh, I want to get 10,000 email subscribers. Right. Well, rather than saying that, saying I want to send one one good quality email a week and and I want to find, you know, I was reading something that, you know, find ways to get my email list promoted. Right. Whether it’s working with other content creators or
16:52
doing a collab with another brand. But doing that is much better than saying, I need to get to this number by this date. Because if you’re doing that, you’re not really telling yourself how to get there. You’re just setting some random, and it’s random. We know people with very small email lists that do well, and we know people with huge email lists that make less money. Because it’s like, you’re just getting subscribers for subscribers sake.
17:21
isn’t really that valuable. Well, let’s talk about just even getting to 10,000 subs since you brought it up. You could tell yourself, okay, my goal is to reach 10,000 subs or your goal could be I will produce one YouTube video every single week with a lead magnet embedded within the video and just let it ride. Yeah. And that’s the process. That’s the system. And the goal matters less than what you’ve built up in the system because it will probably happen. Yeah.
17:51
But it’s unpredictable how many people are actually going to subscribe. But the underlying foundation is what’s important. Well, and this is the other thing to think about. When you set up a system, it becomes second nature. So you were just talking about how you were like, I can’t send one email a week. Well, now it would be absurd not to, right? Like it’s such a part of your regular routine that I don’t think you could imagine like removing that.
18:19
Right? It’s like, probably, and also the fact that you’ve been sending one email a week for 15 years or however long it’s been, it doesn’t take you very long. Like that’s the other thing is when you set up a system, all of a sudden it gets a lot easier, right? Like when you, the first YouTube video you make is a huge pain in the butt. The hundredth YouTube video you make is a lot easier. The first script you write is tough. The hundredth is easier. Like everything gets easier. And when it just becomes part of your like habit and routine,
18:47
all of the stress, not all the stress, stuff can still be stressful, but like the unknown is really, it’s minimized, right? Like, perfect example, I logged, I don’t write a lot of blog content, right? Like I write almost none. And so I went in to go fix something the other day and I was like, I don’t even recognize this.
19:10
back end, right? Because like there’s been so many changes that have happened and I’m just not in the back end a whole lot. I’m because I have so much content. I just focus on the promotion side of it, right? Like how do I get the information out? And I go in there I’m like I had to relearn stuff. And so if I was in there every single day, I wouldn’t be relearning anything. It would just be, you know, part of the part of the course. But when you when you’re only making one YouTube video every three months,
19:35
then getting out the teleprompter, setting it up, remembering what program you use, remembering your settings, getting your microphones hooked up becomes a huge pain in the butt. But if it’s something you’re doing every single week, you’re on autopilot when you get it done.
19:50
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 attained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free.
20:19
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.
20:30
And I have to bring up that AI has just made all this a whole lot easier to create these systems. And I encourage you, if you haven’t fired up Claude.ai or ChatGBT or any of the free ones, like I was actually playing around with Google Gemini the other day. It’s actually pretty good now to the point where if I just started in the beginning with these three, like ChatGBT had, you know, first mover advantage. But if I were to just use all three of them from the start, you know, they’re all just
20:59
kind of all starting to blend together now. The point is, is that a lot of things that you used to do manually can now be automated if you just kind of take the time to learn how to do it. So I gave this example in the last episode where I wanted to launch like hundreds of new products last year for our print business, our custom printing business. And at the time, you know, I was Photoshopping, you know, the image onto our product and then uploading to our site, creating a
21:29
product description and all that stuff. And one of my big wins for last year was just automating all that with AI actually. So now, you know, with the script at the push of a button, it automatically creates a product, AI generates a product description and the title and then automatically uploads it to the website. That’s just an example. Likewise, you know, you can use AI to help you with your emails. We were just talking about email earlier. I think we’re at this age right now where it’s prime for just creating these systems really easily.
21:59
It takes you a little while to probably set up the system, but then once it’s set up, it’s the reason why a lot of these bigger YouTube creators just have a place where they film in their house. They’re not resetting it up every single day or week or however often they’re filming. I think that’s just another way to make things a lot easier and then accomplish whatever goals you have. You just have to find a pace that you can maintain. I remember when I was
22:28
first starting on my channel, I was editing my own videos. And for me, it takes about two hours per five minutes of video, I would say. And I knew that wasn’t sustainable, especially as my kids got older. So, I mean, I guess the system there was to outsource that. But you have to know what your limits are mentally and what you’re capable of. And otherwise, you’re just not gonna be able to maintain that, the willpower, I should say, to go forward.
22:58
Here’s another good example with Bumblebee linens. Back to the print products. Like over the holidays, we had a bunch of these print orders, right? And the way that the printer works is you got to lay all the images out onto this film and then print it out and then, you know, actually hand press all of the stuff onto the lens. Yeah. But the manual process of looking at the web orders, finding the image, laying it out on this film.
23:25
in an efficient way so you’re not wasting the film, which is expensive, takes a lot of time. And if we, there’s no way we would have been able to go through the holidays manually doing all that stuff with our small staff. The system was, now it just pulls everything off. Again, you can code all this stuff with AI or automate all this stuff with AI, but now you push a button, all the stuff gets taken directly from the website, laid out in the film, you just hit the print button, essentially. These are things that you need to just think about
23:55
in terms of what you do, the goal isn’t important, less important than what you have in place to allow yourself to grow. Yeah. I think another benefit of just setting up systems and small changes that you can implement is that it allows you to evaluate them quicker. Let’s just take the 10,000 step example.
24:23
Let’s just say I get to February 15th and like 10,000 steps I’m hitting by 10 a.m. Right, let’s just say have my routine. So then it’s like, okay, maybe I wanna go to 15, right? Maybe I know that I can easily modify my goal, right, to 15 as opposed to, or maybe it’s like, there’s no way in heck I’m getting to 10, right? I can’t work, like, because it took me a good three to four months to get used to working on a treadmill.
24:52
I felt like I was gonna fall off the treadmill all the time. So maybe you’re like, you know what, 10,000 steps is not something that I’m gonna be able to do realistically, but maybe I’m gonna say that I’m gonna set aside an hour a morning just to walk around my neighborhood, whatever it is, right? Like you can readjust it really quickly because you aren’t like trying to readjust in this big audacious like.
25:12
Well, now I don’t want to hit a million dollars. I, I, this is like, can make really small adjustments and realize that like, Hey, this isn’t something that I can continue or this is really easy. I should make it harder on myself. Here’s another example that actually just came to mind. Uh, it was based on a question that a student asked about selling on Amazon and getting reviews. So this, this student launched a new product and they were like, how am going to get to like a hundred reviews or a thousand reviews on this product? It just seems.
25:42
Overwhelming right or even even on their own Shopify store, know how reviews are very important. Yes for social proof How am I gonna get all these reviews? Well, she was like I can I could start by asking friends to get the first couple and that’s great But what’s the long-term strategy? The long-term strategy is to have an email flow in place that automatically asks for these reviews and automatically post them, right? Yeah, so Getting a hundred reviews is less important than what you have in place so that you’ll eventually reach it
26:13
It might not even happen this year, but at least you’ll have this system in place that will just automatically do it so you don’t have to think about it anymore. The key thing here is to not have to think about something. Right. And it’s really easy if you have a system in place, like if you have an automated email system and you’re like, you know what, I’m still not getting reviews, right? Like this is not working. If that’s a system, then you go in and find the breakdown in the system, right? Well, like this one email just doesn’t get opened.
26:38
So like I need to change the title of one email, which is a lot easier than changing your entire strategy of doing something, right? To just say, let me do an A-B test on this one email or let me make a button instead of a text link. Like there’s a lot of small things you can do in process to help you get to that point as opposed to like, oh, I have to revamp everything to meet this goal that I set. This is something that I just recently implemented literally like a few days ago. It turns out,
27:08
And I didn’t realize this was true until I talked to someone. Google business reviews are actually kind of a big deal. So, and what’s confusing about all this is there’s difference. There’s Google product reviews or customer reviews, and there’s Google business reviews, which is completely different. And I was only doing one and not the other. So, you know, I didn’t know. It’s just very confusing. And so I put that email flow in places along with the text based flow to get people to leave reviews.
27:38
and incentivize them. You mentioned earlier, if something’s not working, in this case, the reviews weren’t, the product reviews that I implemented a long time ago were not working as well until I gave people an incentive to actually lead the reviews. Now we give them discounts and gift cards for them to relieve reviews. Well, and that’s the other nice thing about the process side of it is that
27:59
You can always start at point A, but end up at point C, right? You start by not incentivizing them. And for some people, it might work. It might be that you have like a goodwill type product where people are so excited and loyal about the brand. There are brands out there that don’t need to incentivize people to do anything, right? Like they’ll just do it. But there are other brands where like, yeah, yeah, I need to like sweeten the pot a little bit. Let me offer people a gift card or a discount or, you know, free shipping on their next door, whatever it is, right? A sticker, who cares?
28:27
And doing it progressively is nice because you didn’t roll out this, like we’re giving everybody 20 % off and you realize you could have done it with a bookmark or a sticker or 5 % off. So much of this actually, for some reason, when I think about all this stuff with goals, I think about email marketing and Klaviyo specifically, right? There’s all these automated flows and I…
28:51
I apologize if you guys aren’t into e-commerce, this might go over your head, but in Klaviyo there’s all these automated things that you can do. Like if someone starts checkout but doesn’t complete the process, there’s a flow in there that tries to recover that. If someone’s bought for you before but hasn’t bought in a long time, there’s a flow for that. These are all systems that you need to have in place if you’re running an online store or whatever business or whatever goal that you’re trying to achieve.
29:16
So switching gears a little bit because I think this is actually really important and maybe it’s just really important to me, but we get to talk about it because I’m on the podcast. That’s one of the benefits of owning the microphone, right? So one of the things that I think the problem with resolutions are is you’re not managing your energy with a resolution because resolutions tend to be like, I’m at zero and I need to be at 100 tomorrow, right? And most people are not set up to do that.
29:45
on a grand scale, which is why people fail, right? Like if you’ve never been to the gym, showing up at the gym every day or five days a week is like really a lot. Not just like on your body, like your body’s gonna be like, what the heck are you doing to me? But like even like, I don’t know how to work this machine or this is weird or I don’t know anybody here. Like there’s all these things that go into it, right? So I think when you don’t set these huge resolutions and you just work on like these systems and small improvements, you manage your energy so much better.
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One of the things that I realized because I’m a person that’s like I will set huge ideas and like I’m just gonna do this and I will burn myself to the ground trying to do it and that’s my personality. I’ve had to like work on this stuff. One of my energy management things that I said for this year is I was like, know what? One day a month, I’m gonna go stay at a hotel in my town and just be completely away from everybody in my family who I love dearly.
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Because I realized that like, I don’t have any downtime, right? Like my downtime is just a different bucket of people, which is fine. Like obviously most of us have families, we have responsibilities, things like that. But I needed like this like full mental break from like responsibility. And so one of the ways that I was like, when I started thinking about like, how can I achieve sort of this like complete like silence?
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for even like a 12 hour period every month. And I was like, I can just go down the road and check into a hotel and not talk to anybody for 18 hours. And so I did it this weekend. Best thing I’ve done, like I came back on Saturday afternoon, I was like raring to go, I’ve had more energy and literally all I did was sleep in a different bed. With like, but no one wakes, no one waking me up, no one like needing anything, no dogs, right? Like just complete.
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And so I think you have to figure out how you manage your own energy. Not everybody needs to do this, right? This could look a variety of different ways, but for me, I realized that I need one day a month where no one needs me. And that for me is, I think, gonna be enough, but then it allows me to then jump right back into my systems and my processes to get more accomplished throughout the week.
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That reminds me of a lot of my do nothing Fridays or thinking. Yes. Yes. I do. For all of you guys who are new, usually what I do is I take one day out of the week. Usually it’s on Fridays actually to just think about what needs to get done. Like I don’t usually do anything active on those days. I just kind of plan out what’s wrong and what I should be focusing on. And that allows me to just look at the business from a higher level or whatever I need to get done. Actually, it doesn’t have to be business.
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at 50,000 feet because oftentimes if you’re just in your business day to day, you’re just sitting there putting out fires and doing these tasks that need to be done immediately. And if you’re always like that and you’re not looking at the big picture, a lot of times your efforts or your energy, as you put it, is used on activities that won’t necessarily push the needle going forward.
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And I think my problem was I could never get a do nothing Friday because I’m surrounded by needs. Whether it’s people needs, project needs, dog needs. So to me, the only way I could get to the do nothing status was to leave my environment. I’m not that like, I don’t know if we’ve ever talked about this, I cannot go to a coffee shop and work. I already know that. Yes. I would die in a co-working space.
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My problem is I am so invested in everything that’s happening around me. I will, and I don’t talk, don’t talk, you know, I don’t talk to anybody, but I will go to a coffee shop and I will know 16 people’s entire life story by the time I leave. Like I just can’t, like that’s not a, that’s not a disconnect for me. That is an absolute connect. Like I am like so invested. I want to people to quit their jobs and break up with their boyfriends. And like I’m all in, in the Starbucks. I’ve been there for 25 minutes. So.
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For me, realized just like completely not having to talk to anybody was the only solution for me. I don’t know if you remember this story, but once at FinCon, I was like, hey, do you want to just go down? Yes. Like in the lobby or whatever. And the whole time you just look so pissed off. Yes. And I was like, well, why the hell are you down here then? Why did you agree to this? Because I’m a people pleaser. You were so pissed.
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I could just tell him to look in your face. I’m like, what are we doing here? I was working fine. just yes, you were like, I ignored you and oh, I was so awful. Oh, yeah, because I can’t I can’t tune out very well. Yeah, that’s why I like working on airplanes, because that’s because it really like you. You can’t hear any airplane in the coffee shop. I can’t hear anybody on an airplane because I’m deaf in one ear. So like the noise of the airplane, plus my hearing loss is like.
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I don’t hear anything around me, but yes, when I can see people like movement and people talking and you hear a name that you know and you’re like, I’m all in, can’t do it. Yes. Anyway, I just remember that. like, I’m never asking you to do that again. Yes, I know. I can’t. Hats off to you. If you can go to a coffee shop and work, good for you. The background noise is just white noise.
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No, the background noise to me is everybody’s problem. I was in a Chick-fil-A the other day and there was a dad being a jerk to his kid and it was like, don’t want to get shot because I live in Florida, but it was all I could do not to say something. I was just like, I’m so invested in this little problem. That’s not for me. Do what you got to do.
35:44
Once again, I’m very surprised that we could talk for 30 minutes about this or even 40 minutes about this topic. But I would like to just kind of sum it up and maybe whether you agree with me or not. For me, the goal, the overarching goal doesn’t matter as much as the fact that, you know, you’re just constantly improving yourself. I think the goals will happen. might not happen as soon as you would like, but as long as you have a system and a goal in place, it will eventually happen.
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And I think putting a timeframe on anything, especially something that’s not under your control, is just a recipe for failure. Yeah, that’s where I think that’s the biggest thing that I think people should take away from this is we think improvement is very important, right? Self-improvement, business improvement. We want everybody to see growth in their personal lives and in their business. But so often people put their
36:41
put their growth on things that they can’t control. And when you start doing that, you’re destined to be disappointed and you’re destined to fail or quit. And so when you put your growth on things that you and only you can control, you’re basically destined for success, right? If you fail at that, it’s because you did fail. Like you didn’t do the work. If you don’t put up a video a week or you don’t do this, like that’s pretty much on you.
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the most. But know, unless you have some catastrophic thing and we’re obviously not talking about that kind of stuff. But I think just committing to like that 1 % improvement, what you like to say, forward progress, if you can commit to that, then I think you can actually achieve anything that you want to achieve in 2025. And I just want to add, I think that everything that I’ve ever done in business or in life for that matter, whether it be playing sports or whatnot, I’ve had that mentality. I remember when I first started out blogging,
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I was looking at other people just shooting up in the ranks. And I wanted, I used to look for these quick strategies or quick tactics to help me get there. And that just didn’t work for me. So instead I just put my head down, focused on myself and just getting a little bit better and being consistent with everything. And a lot of those people who shot up in the early days of blogging, they’re not doing it anymore. Or same goes with YouTube, right? When I first started, there was other people doing YouTube channels.
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I’m still making videos, however many years later now, and a lot of those peers who started out really strong, they’re no longer making videos, right? So there’s something to be said about being consistent and just lasting the test of time.
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Hope you enjoyed this episode. What are some of the habits that you plan on developing this year? Let us know via email. For more information and resources, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 573. Once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2025 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you want to hang out in person in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event. Go to sellersummit.com.
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And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to my wife, quitherjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send the course right away via email.
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