Daily Content Machine

I know you have big goals. I know you have ambitions and things you want to accomplish.

This episode is for you if you have a significant other or someday plan to.

Successful people know what they want, they know what they're going for, and they invest all of their energy in getting there. You need clarity and you need concentrated efforts.

If your spouse is not on board, you will not be successful.

Read that sentence again. I'm serious. You cannot make progress when the very person who is your other half is not on board. If someone is not helping you get closer to your goal, they are taking you away from it.

You must get your spouse on board with your vision. You have to be completely on the same page.

It's going to take time. It's going to take a tremendous amount of time and investment, but you absolutely have to do it. It means spending time with them, it means having conversations with them, it means doing the things they enjoy, it means making sacrifices.

You have no business spending a single second pursuing your dream if your spouse is not on board. It's wasted time. If they're not on board, you need to make it your full-time effort to invest in them. Your full-time job is now to invest in your spouse and make sure you are both on the same page.

I'm starting to write a book instead of an excerpt, so just do yourself a favor and listen to this episode if you have big aspirations and a significant other (or plan to one day)!

Most people are not taking action on your content.

There's always something you're wanting people to do. Maybe you want someone to reply, buy, share, or subscribe. For instance, today, I want you to listen to this podcast episode.

The problem is you're giving people too many calls to action (CTA). If you want people to do something, tell them to do less!

The hardest thing is getting people to take any action at all. When you're so busy setting out an array of options for people, you're not addressing the primary reasons most of your audience isn't taking any action at all.

Today, we talk about moving people from inaction to action by focusing your message.

Being old is not an age thing. It's a mindset thing.

You know what I'm talking about. You know people who, despite their age, seem just as youthful as ever. It's as if they missed the memo on how you're supposed to act once you reach a certain age.

I think you can be 50 and be young. I think you can be 70 and be young. I think you can be 105 and be young. Old is when you lose your plasticity and willingness to adapt or change.

There is only one thing that is constant: change. It's all you can count on. You can be sure that change will continue to happen and you can be sure that change will continue to be uncomfortable.

New technologies come that seem strange. Suddenly everyone is talking about a new device or new app. What's with all the emojis everywhere? Why are the photos disappearing? How are these people spending hours by themselves with virtual reality gear on their head?

Our initial reaction will be to reject these things. These things are foreign. They're unfamiliar. We resist because it's different or we don't understand the appeal.

But if you want to win in business, you have to learn to adapt. You have to learn to go where the attention is. The traditional media industry quickly learned this with the onset of the internet (some not quick enough to survive).

The only way to avoid getting left behind is to embrace change and discomfort. That's what we talk about today.

If someone has money to spend, they're doing something right.

If you want to get hired by high-value clients, you need to remember that they don't have time to waste.

Unlike bottom-of-the-barrel clients that treat you like a commodity, micromanage, and demand revision after revision after revision, high-value clients value their time. They will actually pay more to get results in less time.

You have to act like the opposite of a commodity. A commoditized technician is someone who performs tasks and gets paid by the hour. They're incentivized to make a job take longer, because they'll get paid more. Of course, this also means that the kind of clients they attract want to pay them as little as possible.

High-value clients will pay more to get results in a shorter amount of time. That means if you have the experience to produce great results in a short amount of time, you actually get paid more to work less!

But to attract these clients, you must operate differently. You need to stop making them do work. What does that mean? That means stop providing OPTIONS. Start providing SOLUTIONS.

Cheap clients demand many options. They have all the time in the world to waste on picking between many options. High-value clients demand solutions. They want you to do the work and apply your expertise towards picking the best concept and presenting only that solution. They don't want you to waste their time.

That's exactly what you're doing when you provide multiple options instead of one solution: you are wasting the client's time and you are making them do your job.

Only amateurs make the client do their job.

Talking about yourself is difficult.

Most of us don't like doing it and it feels awkward. That's why writing your About page can be so difficult.

But here's the secret: your About page isn't really about you. Ok, it is about you, but it's not for you. The purpose is to provide value. The reason you're writing it is for your reader. This actually changes the way you approach it. It changes the way you structure it.

People are looking for a story on your About page. They're looking for a story they can see themselves in and they're also looking for an outcome. This is an opportunity.

Learn to write an About page even if you hate talking about yourself!

I have a special guest today.

Aaron Dowd joins me to talk about his really interesting method of planning a successful day in advance.

Aaron works at seanwes full time as podcast editor for the seanwes network. He also has his own show on the network, The Podcast Dude.

Aaron regularly wakes up as early as 4 AM and even 3 AM! He creates a hand-written schedule every single day in a basic journal. He writes, he edits shows, he rides his bike, he's working on a book and a course called Successful Podcasting, he works out almost every day, and plays in a band.

Tune in to hear Aaron share how he plans his day for success.

I get very real in this episode. I share some information about my situation that I wasn't planning on sharing.

We talk about how prevalent scarcity mindset is and how it affects your mindset and performance in all areas of life. This is a very real thing that many people deal with and have trouble getting ahead of.

Getting enough resources is also not a cure for scarcity mindset. This has to be dealt with at every level and it must be consistently fought off.

But understand that scarcity mindset is a way you choose to operate. It's a mindset that you feed. Your circumstances do not determine it. You do.

I share in today's episode how I'm able to keep my mindset in a place of abundance regardless of the external circumstances.

A recent conversation in the Community chat inspired today's episode. Someone mentioned that there were a lot of people who couldn't afford a certain product in their market and they saw that as an opportunity for them to enter the market with something cheap to sell at scale.

But when you sell a cheap product, your margins aren't going to be very good. That means for it to be sustainable, you have to mass produce. To mass produce, you need a ton of up-front capital!

So first, you need a lot of resources to sell cheap in a sustainable way, but second, you're limiting your potential. Selling cheap affects your brand. When you have a cheap brand, you can't very easily sell higher-ticket products. When you start with premium or high quality, you always have the option of coming down, but when you start cheap, it's an uphill battle to do anything else.

How do you resist the temptation to price match with others in your market? How do you find the confidence to charge more? Primarily, it's positioning and selectivity. If you want to charge more, you can't target everyone. You must narrow your focus and come up with a different value proposition. That's what we get into with today's episode.

Oh, and we talk about the even higher end market you're missing out on by making assumptions.

My brother, Ryan, was in town to visit.

We were sitting on the couch having this great conversation when I asked him, "How would you feel about having this conversation on the microphones and sharing it?"

He chuckled and said he thought I'd ask that.

It's a very serious conversation about who your friends are, who you hang out with, and who is worthy of your time. You can't be close friends with everyone.

It's also a conversation about the power of your words.

Here's how Ryan puts it: "Everywhere I go, the relationships I have, the people I speak to, I have an opportunity to make a lasting impact on the way that they see life and the way they treat other people."

On today's sabbatical episode, I'm joined by Ben. This was an "after show" conversation that I thought I'd share as a mini episode.

Now, we don't expect the internet to go away, but as a thought exercise, we talked about what would happen if it did. What would you have left? What would people do? How would they find you? What kinds of businesses could survive?

This really highlights the importance of your name and investing in that name. It also underscores the importance of building your own platform.

The relationships you've built are what remain. If you have an email newsletter, that can be a way to build a relationship with people, but only if you're speaking to people as you would one person!

Many people address their newsletter as if they're speaking to a crowd of thousands. But an email is just one person opening one email from one other person. The more you treat it that way, the more of a relationship you build.

I hope you enjoy the episode (it's just a few minutes long). It definitely got us thinking.