The Gently Mad

I'm excited to give a shoutout to some great podcasts in today's episode. I find that I listen to very few "entrepreneurial" podcasts. So here are some of my favorites. And I'd love to know your favorites. Shoot me an email and let me know.

I had the opportunity to sit down with Chris Brogan for a minutes several months ago while I was preparing for a new show that eventually evolved into The Gently Mad. 

It was great to talk to him and find out dive a little deeper into what he's all about.

My favorite part of the discussion revolved around the idea of life/work balance and/or separation. It was great to hear Chris' somewhat contrarian take on that (since I happen to agree with him). We also talked about failure, the importance of "mission" and lots of other great stuff.

Here are some of my favorite bits from the show:

“A lot of times people are under this weird pretense that they leave home at home when they head off to work and we all know that’s not true.”

“It’s interesting to me that we even try to separate [life and business], because even when I’ve been brought into really big companies, a lot of times it ends up feeling like a personal therapy session. To me it’s not that different.”

“Don’t fear failure. We learn from failure. Everything we do that’s worth doing in life involves failure.”

“We don’t win all the time and the more we lose, the more we learn how to do better.”

“There are a lot of system’s that are there just because you had to have something. Those are the systems we can most work with.”

“There’s a difference between quitting and giving up.”

"There’s a difference between bering pretty good at guitar or writing fiction etc. and creating a business with mission."

"Everything to do with being helpful usually is the best way to parse out if you’re doing what you should be doing."

As always, I had a great time talking to Chris. Enjoy the show!

@chrisbrogan
ChrisBrogan.com

I'll be honest. Lately, I've been in a funk. It's like self-doubt central over here. So, instead of the normal Monday guest episode, I decided to talk about it. Also, I read an excerpt from this week's book giveaway, The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield.

If you want to make a business out of your podcast, I've got some great news for you. It's totally possible. 

This episode is a response to The Fizzle Show episode 89 in which Chase, Corbett and Barrett answered a question I submitted about podcasting vs blogging.

They totally nailed it and I had some thoughts I wanted to add. Briefly, I touch on four things you must do if you want to make a living from a podcast:

My wife used to sell coffee.  I used to be a journalist.  A friend of mine used to be a audio engineer.  We all used to be something. And now we’re something different. Maybe you used to be single, but now have a family.

We all used to be something. And now we’re something different. Maybe you used to be single, but now have a family to support. Maybe you used to be too afraid of risk or filled with self-doubt or unable to step into the unknown and do something remarkable.

If there’s one constant in our little breath of an existence, it’s change. Life is an ever-continuing series of seasons. If we obsess over our “future” we’ll miss the beauty and opportunities of the season we’re in.

Don’t do that.

Don’t fear picking the wrong thing or “wasting” your time. Instead, focus on getting better. Embrace the season you’re in and take advantage of the opportunities it affords you to make small, consistent progress.

If you improve 1 percent each week, how much better will you be in a year?

Change is inevitable. Excellence is not.

But if you choose, you can make a habit of the latter.

James Clear. Where the hell do you begin with a guy like this? He’s an entrepreneur, weightlifter, travel photographer, author and regular writer at JamesClear.com.

It was my honor to talk to him for an hour. I loved his perceptive on following one’s “passion” and what it really means to do creative work.

According to James, the Muse can be scheduled. I tend to believe him and I think you will too after listen to this episode.

We even geeked out about camera gear for few minutes toward the end.

In his own words, “I’m just a country boy trying to make a difference.”

Here are some of my favorite bits from the show:

“The truth is that most of the articles I write get written that day. I don’t write every day. I tried to do that and totally burned. The important thing is to have a schedule you can stick to.”

“This is the difference between professionals and amateurs. Professionals to do things on a schedule. Amateurs do things when it’s easy for them or when they feel motivated or inspired to do it.”

“Having a pace you can sustain is huge.”

“I’ve realized I’m a terrible judge of my work. If you show up enough times to get the average ideas out of the way, genius will reveal itself.”

“The default for me is hitting publish and feeling like the post is lacking. The rare thing feeling good.”

“It is true that sometimes you just have that great moment and it just flows out of you and the creative muse strikes and it just feels right. What I find, tough, is that that moment can often be trigged by doing the work for a little while, rather than sitting around passively and letting it hit you just at random.”

“The only way to increase your odds of creating something that [is] compelling and useful and important in your field is to do more. To produce on a consistent basis.”

“There is some kind of quality bar, but after that, it comes down to consistency.”

“I looked back on the first 18 months of articles that I had created and I found out that pretty much 90 percent of the most popular articles all started with a story.”

“It’s not just entertaining people. The other thing I think is really important about it, is that it provides a mental model for the idea in practice. And that is very useful when it comes to behavior change or helping to improve their lives in some way.”

“It can be really easy to talk about theory or share some type of scientific research and not do the hard work of showing people how to bridge the gap between that and practical every day life. And stories help do that in really great way.”

“It’s more about doing great work than figure out all the things you don’t know.”

“You can start with the thing you really like, but I think the conversation should probably be adjusted. The conversation most people have is something around, is this what I’m passionate about, do I really care bout this, does this project light me on fire, all that type of stuff. And those things are great, but I think what the conversation should be is, what skills do I need to succeed and what am I doing to develop that skill set.”

“No matter what project you’re working on, there’s some skill associated with it and you need to figure out what that skill is and how you can build it.”

“The conversation should be about how do I develop skills, how do I move toward mastery, rather than how d

Dan Martell has one of the most unique stories I’ve ever heard. I tried my hardest not be inspired, but just couldn’t help it. ;)

Dan is an award-winning Canadian entrepreneur and founder of Clarity, a venture backed startup that makes it easy to connect with top business minds over the phone. He's also invested in 33 other companies as an angel investor.

We talked about all of that as well as the amazing story of how jail time saved his life and lead to all those accomplishments.

It was truly an honor to talk to Dan and I’m really excited about this one.

Here are some of my favorite bits from the show:

“I think traveling could solve a lot of the problems in the world if we just get everybody to go travel and understand what they’re talking about.”

“Most people could be very easily more productive, they just never strive for it. Once they’re 20 and they have a working structure, they never revisit it. And I just think that if everybody just started asking questions about everything in there life, what they change or what would they try.”

“Everything from physically how we live or where we live, or how we work or interact and communicate, those are all things that are always up for experimentation and kind of moving forward in some small way.”

“Try to break it down and chunk it down. You don’t have to be all in or nothing. Try something once and then at least you’ve tried it.”

“I had a very challenging childhood, so when I was younger risk meant life or death. The worst case today is I lose it all and I’m sleeping on my brother’s couch for a month and half until I build it back.”

“You want to do these small failures so it doesn’t cripple you, but know that you’re doing them and they’re really just ways to move forward.”

“I’m only this earth for a small number of years and I just want to make sure it’s impactful.”

“I took everything I had in savings and put into the company Spheric Technologies and that company is really when I changed the way I approached work. I realized I didn’t know anything about business, I read every business book I could get my hands on, I got business mentors and over a four year period we grew it to about 30 employees, about $4 million in revenue and ended up getting acquired.”

“I realized I don’t have to know all the answers. I just need to learn in real-time. In other words if you’re starting a business, then you read three books on starting a business.

“If you’re not ready to apply, then learning now is actually a very wasteful activity.”

“[With mentors] you start learning at a capacity and speed that would never be possible your own, because you have all these people going out into the world and experimenting and bringing you back the results. I just think everybody can be a mentor to somebody else. It doesn’t matter where you are in your life, there’s somebody that’s trying to get there and would love to talk to somebody that’s been there.”

“I don’t do anything in life without talking to somebody that’s done it before. I just think that’s slow and irresponsible and not very fun. If everybody just started working that way little by little, I think they’d be surprised how much faster they could move in the world and how much better their relationships would be, because everybody loves to give a

A professional gets up every day, goes to work and dances with the fear.

Seth Godin said this to me in a recent episode of The Gently Mad and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head.

Dancing with the fear is what we do when we leave our comfort zone and do the work that scares us. Which is the only kind of work that has the potential to be meaningful and impactful.

When I dance with the fear, I mostly fail. I stumble and flounder and knock over everything in search of the light switch.

But there’s a worse kind of failing. The kind that happens when we play it safe.

Staying in my comfort zone can feel like a win because I know my way around that room and can get through it without banging my knees into everything.

But the only way to get better, the only way to discover just how much we can really achieve is to struggle and writhe out of the chrysalis and step into the unknown.

Only then do we fight The Resistance. Only then do we have the potential to create work that matters. Only then can we change the world.

If I'm going to be completely honest, I had no idea what to expect from this conversation. I had (stupidly) labeled John as a certain kind of guy. Someone very different from me. 

But, I was totally blown away by our conversation. First of all, labeling people is stupid. Second, I found that we had so much in common it was almost freaky.

John is a brilliant guy and we both share a common inability to half-ass something. It’s all or nothing. And I love that about him.

John is certainly everywhere these days, but I think I can honestly say you haven’t heard a conversation like this.

Here are some of my favorite bits from the show:

“Success and happiness is the gradual realization of a worthy ideal. And the keys there are gradual and worthy. So it’s not getting to whatever you think that journey end point is. It is the journey itself. But it’s not just any ideal like money or fame or fortune, it’s of a worthy ideal. So when we can find how to combine those two, things really get better.”

“Show me any entrepreneur at a high level who wasn’t irresponsible, not only at some point in their journey, but multiple times in their journey. You can’t find one. Sometimes you’ve got to the on the job training.”

“My first 50 episodes of Entrepreneur on Fire are horrible. I was really really bad. I had zero experience and it showed in every way, shape and form. But if I had waited until I was good, I never ever would have started because the only way to actually get good at something is to do badly a number of times.”

“Give yourself permission to wake up everyday and say, ‘Today, I’m going to do something good.’”

“I could have packed it up and walked away many times and right now Entrepreneur on Fire would be a footnote, but instead I persevered. It’s going to take persistence and perseverance to get to the point of turning it into a viable business.”

“So many people quite days or weeks before success.”

“If you want to be, do.”

“If there’s something you really do want to do, you have to do it 1000 times.”

“The way I came a better podcaster was to podcast. Just do it over and over and hone your craft.”

“One inch wide and one mile deep is so important if you want to be successful.”

“I was a really terrible podcaster, but I was the best seven-day-a-week podcaster, because I was the only one.”

As always, I had a great time talking to John. Enjoy the show!

A special edition episode of TGM where I talk about some important shifts in thought that have been going on lately.  

It’s not as big or grandiose as an epiphany. It’s more like solving a puzzle. After an hour or so of trying and failing to connect one piece to another, your mind is able to grasp the edges of the picture and very quickly each piece drops into place.

Monday was my birthday. I’m 35 years old. And most of those years have been spent engaged in The Search. Sometimes I knew what I was looking for, sometimes I thought I knew what I was looking for, but mostly it was aimless.

It was a reactionary searching, born not of a desire for something in particular, but merely something more or different than what I had. It’s as if meaning and purpose have always been slightly out of reach.

I still don’t have an answer. But it feels as if I’ve reached an altitude where I can look out over the landscape of my life and begin to see, if only faintly, the edges of the puzzle.

And those faint edges have changed my thinking in a few key ways.

The first is that The Search will never provide what we’re looking for. Searching implies there is something to be found. It’s finite. Eventually, it ends.

But life doesn’t work that way. We don’t stumble upon our unlived life. We create it. Every single day.

It’s not that I’ve abandoned The Search, I’ve merely reframed it. Instead of The Search, it’s now The Journey.

The Journey is also finite. It also involves discovery. But where The Search results in “I have become”, The Journey result in “I am becoming.”

It’s a subtle difference. But the most powerful changes in my life always seem to come from the most subtle shifts in thought.

The second thing revealed in my glimpse of the edges, is this whole concept of reframing. Rarely, if ever, do we encounter a hard right turn, that changes our whole life. Most of the time, it’s a slight course correction that, over time, puts us a thousand miles away from where we would have been.

Most of my life has been spent asking me-centric questions. When will I find someone that will make me happy? What kind of work will make me feel complete? What knowledge or experience will make me successful?

It’s a very myopic existence. Make me happy. Make me complete. Make me successful.

But what if I reframed those questions and, instead, asked, What has kept me from being happy? Why haven’t I started that business? What am I doing or not doing that kept success out of reach?

Do you see the difference? The attitude of the first is, “The world owes me something.” The attitude of the second is, “What can I make of the world I have?”

The first is The Search. The second is The Journey.

I’m not big on reflecting. I don’t make resolutions. But as I turn 35, I can’t help but look back, at least a little, and realize how much arrogance and self has been at the heart of all this existential angst and continual searching.

I’m trading expectations for opportunity, thinking for doing, talking for practicing, whining for getting better.

I don’t know if this year will be different than the last. But I know it can be, if I wake up every morning and make a choice.

Am I going to continue with The Search or embrace The Journey?