Daily Content Machine

We all process things differently. Most of us fall into one of two categories: we either talk to think or we think before we talk.

There’s no wrong way or right way to go about it, we just process things differently. Some of us think out loud and some of us think internally before we talk.

I’m the latter. I tend to think before I speak and if you’re the same, you may not see as much of a benefit to sharing your ideas or plans with other people.

People who think out loud often use other people as a sounding board for their ideas and it’s a way of processing the things that are going on in their mind.

If you process internally, you may not be as naturally inclined to share ideas or to think out loud. When you’re in your own bubble, you feel like you’ve thought through everything conclusively.

You’re exhaustive in your thinking and no one else can change your mind, but people can spark a new idea by giving you fresh perspective.

If you love what you do, should you start a business? I don't think the answer is very straight forward.

A lot of the most successful entrepreneurs will say passion is the most important thing. I agree that passion is very important. However, I don't think that passion is the only thing.

You can't just start with passion and build a successful business. You also have to have solid business chops. You need to know how to grow a business.

If you start a business on passion, you'll very quickly find that 80% of your time is working on the business and not in the business.

You have a big goal and you want to accomplish it, but you’re feeling overwhelmed by it. It seems kind of daunting. However, you don’t want to lower your standards.

You don’t want to dream small, you want to dream big.

How do you dream big, set big goals, and accomplish them without feeling overwhelmed? A lot of people take this big goal and they assume accomplishing it means doing big things.

But the way to accomplish a big goal is to do a bunch of small steps over time—it’s repetition and the consistency of those small steps.

Today I want to give you 8 ways to be constantly improving. The first one is to read books.

You can read from people who lived thousands of years ago. That’s amazing.

There’s more books in the world than you can read in your entire lifetime. That’s both overwhelming and amazing at the same time.

That knowledge is available in the library or just an Amazon Prime click away from being on your doorstep. A lot of it is available for free.

Some of the most successful people in the world attribute their knowledge to reading—we’re talking billionaires here. They’re voracious readers. They’re hungrily consuming, trying to glean wisdom and knowledge from people who have gone before them. Certainly they had different circumstances and challenges, and they also used different tools, but they’re timeless principles you can distill down, and reuse again and again—these are available in books!

Watch the video to see the other 7!

Do you really need a website? Do you really need your own domain and a place to call home?

With platforms like Facebook trying to be your home and creating systems and services that basically fulfill all of your business needs, why should you have your own website? Well, let’s first talk about what platforms like Facebook are offering and will be offering in the future.

Facebook is going to be much more than just a platform where you deliver a message to your customer or your audience.

It’s going to be an ecommerce platform, meaning you can sell your products right there on your Facebook page and people can buy them in a single click. It’s going to be just like Amazon.

They’re going to provide those systems and the platform to you, which means you get to sell things without doing any of the work. It sounds really enticing, but why would you not want to do this?

First of all, you lose a cut to Facebook. That’s part of the reality. The other thing is: where do people go to find you?

I have some good news: self-discipline is not an innate trait. Meaning it’s not something you either have or you don’t; it’s a skill that you can develop.

Tell me if this happens to you: you want to do something but you just don’t feel like doing it a lot of the time.

Disciplined people have learned one thing others haven’t: don’t wait until you “feel like it.” A common misconception is that disciplined people must somehow feel like doing things more than others do and it simply isn’t true.

In this episode, I share 6 practical ways you can develop self-discipline.

Be honest. Have you ever posted a photo to Instagram and then noticed that it didn’t get as many likes as you wanted?

It didn’t get as many likes as you expected in the amount of time that you hoped. What did you do? Maybe you were sad. Maybe you were wondering, “What did I do wrong?” or, “What’s wrong with this photo?” Maybe you even deleted it. Why do we do this?

How many likes is enough? Is 500 a lot of likes? Well, 500 is neither small nor big. 500 is just a number. It’s only small or big when you compare it to another number.

What are you comparing to?

Like counts open us up to comparison, either with ourselves or with others and it’s the same with any numbers, whether it’s views, subscribers, followers, or likes. We’re always comparing and the thing is it doesn’t ever end. It only scales.

What do you do when you’ve tried but fallen short? What do you do when things just don’t seem to be working out?

Where does natural ability and acquired skill separate from hard work and deliberate practice? Can anyone with enough time, passion, patience, and determination truly follow their passion full-time?

First, we need to define “good enough”. “Good enough” for who? “Good enough” for what? What have you been trying? How long have you been trying? Who are you comparing yourself to?

It’s really easy to feel like you’re not good enough. It’s a common feeling, especially when you’re just getting into an industry because you see the very best work. The very best work out there—the cream—rises to the top and that’s what you notice.

You don’t notice all the bad work, you notice the great work.

It’s easy to feel like that’s all that’s out there. You don’t compare to that and you’re not good enough.

What you need to do is spend less time seeing and more time doing. You have to focus on creating.

I’m focused on teaching people entrepreneurship. I want to encourage people to pursue their own path, do their own thing, and build their own business. For this reason, I get a lot of people asking me, “Sean, if you’re so big on entrepreneurship, why do you have employees?”

I tell them: if you enjoy what you do, don’t start a business.

When you start a business, 80% of your time is going to be spent working on the business not in the business. If you start a business, you’ll spent the vast amount of your time working on the business and not the thing that got you into the game. I had no idea. I was naive. I didn’t know any of this.

Fortunately, I fell in love with business. I feel in love with the act of growing the business.

Not everyone wants to be the #1 guy and that’s understandable. Being the #1 guy requires working 18 hour days for 5 years and investing $300,000 of your own money into building the infrastructure before you even get to do the work. Not everyone wants to do that.

Some people are a really good #2 or #3 guy and that’s valuable.

You have two audience: your existing audience and your potential audience.

Your existing audience is already on board with what you have to say. They’re going to open your emails no matter what. They’re all about supporting you and they believe in what you have to say.

Your potential audience has never heard of you. They’re not familiar with your materials, they don’t know the inside jokes or references, your principles, or your past episodes. They’re brand new to your material.

When creating content, you have to serve people in both your existing and potential audiences if you want to grow.