Stop Wasting Your Life: A Guide To Unlocking Your Full Potential I Entrepreneur Jodie Cook
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By the way, in case you haven't heard, my brand new book, Feel Good Productivity, is now out. It is available everywhere books are sold. And it's actually hit the New York Times and also the Sunday Times bestseller list. So thank you to everyone who's already got a copy of the book. If you've read the book already, I would love a review on Amazon. And if you haven't yet checked it out, you may like to check it out. It's available in physical format and also ebook and also audiobook everywhere books are sold.

So many of us are operating so far under our potential that it's just like embarrassing. And so this is why it's like cool bullshit on your life. Look at your schedule, look at what you're doing, look at what you're trying to achieve and just be like, how do I stop doing all these average, mediocre, normal things so I can free up my time and just be world-class at a few things.

What you're about to hear is a conversation between me and Jodie Cook. Jodie is an award-winning entrepreneur, author, and actually professional power lifter as well. She's built and sold her first business completely from scratch. She's now working on a software company and she just does professional power lifting on the side alongside traveling the world as a digital nomad with her husband. She's also the author of the book of the 10-year career, Reimagine Business: Design Your Life, Fast Track Your Freedom. My dad had told me this.

phrase that was knowledge instills confidence, confidence instills enthusiasm, and enthusiasm sells cars and vans. I was selling social media management, but it's no different. It's still the same thing. We talk a lot about what personal success means to different people.

And we talk about how you can build your own personal success system for yourself. And we talk a lot about how to achieve that version of success for you in multiple areas of life at the same time. We're being conditioned to believe that we need to get a job, settle down, all those normal lifestyle choices. We don't realize that we're kind of being led along the path that might not be right for us. Something different might be right for you.

This episode is very kindly brought to you by none other than Huel. Now, I've been a paying customer of Huel since 2017. I first discovered it in my fifth year of medical school. And if you haven't heard of it, it's basically a meal in a bottle. And in that meal, you get a balanced mixture of carbohydrates and fats and proteins and fiber. And it also contains 26 different vitamins and minerals. And each meal has around 400 calories and 22 grams of protein. So it's pretty reasonable in terms of protein count. And because I tend to be

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This episode is sponsored by Kajabi, and they've actually got something really valuable for all of our deep dive listeners. Now, if you haven't heard of Kajabi, it's basically a platform that helps creators diversify their revenue with courses and membership sites and communities and podcasts and coaching tools. So it's one of the best places for creators and entrepreneurs to build a sustainable business. We started using Kajabi earlier this year, and as soon as we started using it, we were like, oh my God, why haven't we been using this product for the last three years? It's got everything you'd possibly need for running an online course or hosting an online community or building an online coaching business.

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which gives you access to me and my team. And Kajabi does not take any cut of what you earn. Creators keep and own everything. The way Kajabi makes money is through the monthly subscription fee. And even though we generate like literally millions of dollars every year from Kajabi, we're still only paying them a couple of hundred dollars a year. And actually in their lifetime, Kajabi have paid out over $6 billion to creators, that's billion with a B, and over a thousand creators have become millionaires through products on the platform.

Now, back in May 2023, I did a keynote at a Kajabi in real life, Kajabi Heroes event in Austin, Texas. And in that keynote, I talked about the exact steps that I use to grow my business from zero to over two and a half million dollars per year from course revenue alone. Now, people paid for the pretty expensive tickets to watch this keynote at the Kajabi Hero live event. But as an exclusive deal for deep dive listeners, Kajabi have very kindly offered to provide the recording of that keynote completely for free to anyone who listens to this podcast.

So if you're interested in getting completely free access to that keynote, just head over to kajabi.com forward slash Ali. That's kajabi.com forward slash A-L-I. And that'll be linked in the show notes and the video description as well. You just enter your email address and then you will get the recording of that keynote completely for free, whether or not you ever become a Kajabi customer. So thank you so much to Kajabi for sponsoring this episode.

This season is once again being sponsored very kindly by Trading212. Now, people ask me all the time for investment advice because they see that I've made money and I've made videos talking about where I'm investing that money. The thing that Warren Buffett and basically everyone who's sensible in the space recommends, which is to invest in broad stock market index funds, which you can do completely for free using Trading212. Trading212 is a fantastic app that lets you invest in stocks and shares and funds in a commission-free fashion.

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So, Jodie, thank you for coming. Thank you so much for having me. My understanding is that you started your first business straight out of university. I did. What was the story of the first business? The story of the first business was that I started it at the age of 22 with no real business plan at all other than two words, get clients. And...

how I went about doing that is I started rocking up to networking events, standing up and saying, Hey everyone, my name's Jodie and I'm a social media manager. And so this was 2011. There were hardly any social media managers around because social media wasn't really a thing. It was like a few people who were famous had Twitter and that was kind of it. So I

At my company, which wasn't even a company at the time, it was just me pretending to know what I was doing. We started or I started meeting people, setting them up on social media after I'd convinced them that they should be on social media and then running their accounts for them. And I remember at my first ever prospect meeting and I'd never had one before. I didn't really know what to do. I just remember my dad had told me this phrase that was

knowledge instills confidence confidence instills enthusiasm and enthusiasm sells cars and vans and so in his line of work he sold cars and vans but I was selling social media management but it's no different it's still the same thing so I just went with all these ideas from all this research I'd done and then probably exploded all my ideas onto the prospect and then they were like okay I'm

And then they signed up and then I had a client. And then I figured that once I had one, I not only had the confidence that I could sign up clients, but I also had this case study. And so I used that to get client number two and client number three, and then gradually started building a business from there. And what prompted you, you know, you've just graduated from university, you could do anything. Why did you decide to start your own business? And then why specifically in social media? Before I was 21, I had had

15 jobs and that was in restaurants, in shops. I'd done mystery shopping. I'd done mystery dining. I had worked at a football ground. Um, and I,

I didn't see finding a job as this thing I really wanted to do. I saw finding a job as a last resort. So when all my friends were trying to get on different kind of graduate schemes and get different jobs at Deloitte and PwC and everywhere else like that, that was just, that was kind of the expected role. That was the expected path that everyone went into. But I just thought, why are we all trying to get jobs? It's really easy to get a job.

They're everywhere. People will just have you. Like, why don't we try and start businesses? And so that was just what I tried to do because I figured I have nothing to lose. I'm 22. I think I was living with my parents at the time. I gave myself a deadline of three months and I thought, I'm going to work this out. I'm going to figure out how I pay my own rent, look after myself, and then I'm going to move out and then I'm just going to run my own business forever. So...

That sounds very matter of fact. So like, I know a lot of people, you know, a lot of our listeners might be in a similar position where they're in their early 20s, they've graduated uni, they've got a normal job. And, you know, from the surveys that we've done, a lot of them are pretty...

You know, it's not like they're homeless on the streets. Like they've got parents that they can live with. And yet the pressure is still there to start climbing the ladder. There's this worry that I don't want to fall behind in my 20s because your 20s are for hustling and setting yourself up so that your 30s can be more chill. And like you see your friends getting the job and getting the promotion and getting the bonuses and stuff at PwC and Deloitte and things.

And it's so easy for people to think I have to get on the ladder because if I don't, then I'm falling behind. Yeah. It's a trap. Yeah. It's all a trap. How do you approach that? I think we are conditioned to do that. I think that the first conveyor belt that we get on is the education conveyor belt. And that's where I know you'll have been through the same one. It's like you do your GCSEs, you do your next exams, you go to college, university, you get on a graduate scheme. And that's just this

This path that you probably don't really question. You just do what's expected of you next. And then after that, it's the career conveyor belt. And that's where you just get a job and then you climb the ladder and everything else. But I think it doesn't,

It's not so clear at the start that you're doing the right thing. It's only clear when you're 10 years on and you realize that you've got all this freedom and all this stuff under your belt that you just believed you could get to right at the start. But it involves just being happy to be different, being happy to make the different decisions and look stupid and look like you might fail, but kind of be okay with that. I feel like where I got to with it was

being really hungry to find just role models, other people who'd done it. So for me, I was lucky because my mom had started a business when I think I was about 15. So when I was living in

at home when I was a teenager, I just had this knowledge of all these different business terms that I wouldn't have picked up otherwise. So she got clients and she sent invoices and she went networking. And it's like three words that you wouldn't know that unless you had entrepreneurial parents, really. So if I didn't have entrepreneurial parents, it would be like, go and get role models of people who've done it and then figure out how they do it and like shadow them or do work experience with them or just copy what they do. And

Soak up. It's almost like become an entrepreneur by osmosis because that's how I'd start if I was doing it now. Nice, nice. To what extent do you think that everyone can be an entrepreneur versus is it like, I guess what sort of traits should someone have if they're thinking of starting their own business? Someone recently described entrepreneurship to me as a game of constant reframing. And I think I agree with them because entrepreneurs

More stuff gets thrown at you in entrepreneurship than in anything else. So like clients come, clients go, team members do. You're probably putting out mini fires every single day, but all of it is a game of,

How can I be okay with this fire that's taking place around me? And how can I just get better at putting the fires out, but then dealing with bigger fires after that? So I think it develops a mental toughness that not everyone realizes comes with it. And I feel like you have to be ready for it. But once you're ready for it, it's really good. When I was running my agency, I started watching Mad Men.

And because that's all about advertising agencies of the 60s, 50s, 60s. And there's one scene in it where one of the partners at their, what's it called? Sterling Cooper Draper Price or just Sterling Cooper to start with. And then, so there's one scene where one of the partners is in his office and someone marches up the hall towards him and says, oh no, we've lost Cadbury. Like they've lost this massive client and it's such a big deal. And he goes, are you gonna

walk up the hall every time we lose a client. Like you'll wear the carpet out. Like it's not that much of a big deal. And just putting those things into perspective and being able to constantly reframe is like what entrepreneurship is all about. And then you find that less bothers you. And a quote I actually heard recently from, it was Justine Musk, Elon Musk's ex-wife. And she said, to be a successful entrepreneur, you need to get

You need to get comfortable with dealing with a level of stress that would break most people. And once you get good at it, it doesn't really feel like stress. It just feels like what you do. But then you're so far ahead of what other people can deal with that you just kind of keep going from there. Okay. So it sounds like you feel like sort of if someone wants to get into the game of entrepreneurship, they should have a pretty thick skin to be able to deal with the stress and the pressure of it. Or do you think it's something that you can just develop over time? Like, yeah. Yeah.

I think you can develop it over time, but I think it's not going to be easy. And I think expecting it to be easy makes it harder. I'd rather that someone went in expecting for it to be really, really, really difficult, but then they were like, whoa, how much growth I'm accessing from this and then really enjoyed it. Um, and then carried on going. I don't think that you need to have it to start with. I think you just need to expect that you're going to have to work. Yeah. I think that's a really good point. Um,

I think that's what I speak to a lot of people who start off YouTube channels and then, you know, they started off thinking it's not really going to go anywhere, but then it goes somewhere and they're like, oh my goodness, like this thing has gone somewhere. And then when they start to treat it as a business, it starts to be hard and they start to think, oh my God, I must be bad. I must be an idiot because I'm finding this hard.

and almost trying to be like no it's like this is business it's it's supposed to be hard yeah something you said that just reminded me that I actually think a lot of people think they're scared of failure but I think a lot of people are actually scared of success what do you mean because I think they're scared that they'll reach a level of success like you said building a youtube channel and it's suddenly taking off and I think they'll believe that they won't be able to handle it and they'll have to cope with new things that they don't know they can cope with and you

They have to change as well. And if they change, other people who are in their safe, secure bubble right now might reject them or might not like them or might think that they've got too big for their boots or something like that. I think that people are more scared of success than they actually realize. And then that leads to self-sabotage and that leads to not doing the things that you know would work because there's something in there.

Have you had that? Like where you've sort of your, I guess, success in entrepreneurship and stuff has meant you've lost touch with the people that you used to hang out with? I think that when I sold my agency, I realized that the existential crisis that I was facing was not relatable at all. Yeah. What do you mean? So...

It's like I sold the agency that I started when I was 22 at 32. And all of a sudden, I didn't have an identity in a work sense. And so people would ask me what I did. And I'd be like, I don't know what to say. And sometimes I'd be like, oh, well, I sold an agency. And then I figured that was in the past. But how far in the past can it be before it starts to not be relevant at all? And so I think there was some element of...

feeling like I needed to find what it was to define that work side of me. But because it was like, it was a really good exit because I had a, like I had a good time and because I had all this, all this space, it was like, there's not really, it's not really a difficult problem. So

So it's very hard to get people to actually feel sorry for you because you don't want people to feel sorry for you. You just want to somehow figure it out. So I think I probably spoke to fewer people than I would normally about challenges because it was so unrelatable. So you started the company at 22. You sold it at 32. Are you allowed to say how much you sold it for?

I normally don't go into the exact details, but I can tell you that it was a seven-figure exit and I was really happy with how it went. And also, it was off the back of a really interesting time because there was a week in March 2020 when my company shrank by 25% in one week.

And that was because we had all these clients in hospitality, travel, events. They were all having a horrible, horrible time because of COVID. And the horrible time that they were having then passed on to us. So it was a week of just the phone ringing nonstop, my email going off nonstop with just clients cancelling. And I just remember thinking, what is going on? What are we going to do? And I think that probably the most important question just in life is how...

How can I use this? And I'm so happy that I had this lucid moment of using that question at that exact time and figuring out a plan. So what I did was...

Got all the team together, rallied them all up and figured out how we would use this. And I think I was very inspired by other people in my network who had pivoted so fast. So there was a friend, there was a friend called Rob and he was going all over the world teaching people how to present and how to pitch.

And in about three days after lockdown, after the first lockdown, he changed his entire company. He renamed it Presenting Virtually. And he started teaching people how to present virtually on Zoom and set up their Zoom zone. And he was doing videos on LinkedIn every single day and just getting new clients. And I was like, oh my God, people are pivoting so fast. We need to do something. And I just didn't want our company to get any smaller. I didn't want to have to lay people off. I was like really scared. And so...

Rallying the team and thinking about how can we use this led to us using all our spare capacity, of which we had absolutely loads, to create courses and to talk to our clients and to almost develop the middle of our funnel. So before then, we'd done a lot of networking, meeting people, and we'd done a lot of Google ads, lead generation, but we almost didn't have this like actually nurturing people and keeping in touch with people.

So we started really doubling down on that, went from hardly emailing our database at all. It was like once a year to once a day and running webinars every single day, talking to them, creating courses. They chatted to other people about us and we managed to grow the company back to normal.

Another 20%, this is in five months, and we still had all our clients who had gone to come back. So it was at that point where it had been the craziest summer ever where I thought, I feel like I'm not the leader for this company anymore. I feel like it's ready to go to new hands and someone else is ready to take it on. And then probably the main reason for that is because I'd been running it as very much a lifestyle company. So I'd been...

leaving someone else to run it, leaving people to it as much as possible, trying to create as much freedom as possible within my role as a agency owner. And I was faced with this reality of

either having to get so back involved and grow it to the next level or risk being tapped on the shoulder again when another pandemic hit and I had to do the same kind of thing and I didn't want to do that so that was the moment I was ready to sell and because you're on that growth trajectory that's when selling made sense and that's why it was a good exit how did it feel when all the money landed in your account and you just look at your account you're like whoa I'm rich um

It felt pretty cool. I think the main thing was not even that, the money side of things. The main thing was the actual freedom, that real, I cannot be tapped on the shoulder. Because even though I had a really amazing team, a really awesome general manager who looked after everything and she saw it as her personal responsibility to make sure that I didn't get bothered with anything. We actually called it deploying Jodie. When you needed me, I would be deployed immediately.

And if not, other people would take care of it. And it's like, if anyone's thinking about hiring a general manager, that is who you need. Someone who sees it as their personal responsibility to protect your time and put you out of a job. So the main thing was the freedom. And that made such a difference. And that was very cool. And that was cool, but also strange, but overall positive. Nice. So...

Starting a social media marketing agency is like one of those things that has become the equivalent of do paid surveys or start affiliate marketing. It's like a very, like these days, if you watch a YouTube video about how to make money on the internet, a lot of people will say, oh my God, just start an SMMA, a social media marketing agency. Mm-hmm.

As someone who has built and sold a SMMA over a 10-year period, to what extent would you recommend someone start a social media marketing agency if they're looking to start a business? So great question. It's a really good business to start because it's super simple to start because you barely need any startup costs. You need knowledge and you need enthusiasm and you need confidence and you need to work out a way of getting in front of clients and them saying yes.

When I started in 2011, it was such a niche area. It sounds crazy that social media was niche, but it really was. So I almost didn't need to niche down. So we didn't work with a specific type of client. We worked with all clients. We didn't work on a specific platform. We worked on all platforms. If I was starting it now, I would niche down so much. I would be like LinkedIn for dentists or...

for carpet cleaners or like something where it was so niche that it's like, that is my person. That's who's going to help me. So I think it's still a viable business. I think people still need the help. I would just really double down on this one area, this one platform and just be known as the experts in that. Okay. And to what extent is running an agency? Okay. So I basically never met an agency owner who actually enjoys running an agency business. Um,

I feel like in your case, you became the owner rather than the operator. So you probably had a more chill time of it. But my understanding of agencies is that you have to scale headcount as you scale clients. And therefore, there comes a point where you're like, if we want to grow anymore, we have to hire more people. And then it becomes a total nightmare. Is that fair to say? Or how was your experience of it? Yeah, that's very fair to say. And mainly they do work like that.

And if they don't work like that, it's because you're not necessarily scaling headcount, you're scaling the ad spend, and then you're taking a higher percentage of that. But that has problems as well, because as the ad spend goes up, you're taking a bigger percentage. And at some point, the client goes, hang on, we're paying like 50k a month. We don't need to pay 50k a month. So you lose, you almost become a victim of your own success.

And then that has problems at the other end of the chain as well. But with my agency, it was definitely that every time we added 30 hours a week of client work, we'd add a new team member. And then we kept growing like that. And if you don't like hiring people, if you don't like managing people, definitely don't start an agency. Now I've started a software business. I've got the whole agency versus software thing, which is quite interesting in how different they are. But

It can be really fun. It can be a really good way of making money. You get to work with a lot of interesting people and it's so simple to start. Some of the best stories I've heard of agency to software especially is where someone starts an agency

They aim to get to a certain monthly amount in revenue. And then they use that to develop products or to develop software products, especially. And then they keep going with the software products. They know how to market it because they've got an agency. And then the goal is to replace their agency's income with the income from the product. Okay. So you run a software company now. What are the key differences between agency and software? So...

In agency, you can make something up and you can sell it straight away and then you can start delivering it. In software, you probably shouldn't do that because if you make something up and then you sell it, at some point you have to build it and that takes longer. So it's very front end loaded in software. It's like you build the product and then you sell it and then people buy it from there. One of the main differences that I found, which I think is a

a good thing, but it could not be a good thing at some point if I take it too far, is that in our agency, our clients are worth thousands. In our software business, our clients are worth $99 a month. And so it's a very different type of relationship, but I'm still conditioned to think of everyone as being an agency client. So now if a software client cancels, I'm like, no, what have we done? Come back.

back. We can work this out. Like, you know, we can, we can change things. And they're like, okay, needy. And so there's just no need to be like that. But I think what we're trying to do is apply the agency care to software clients without it going too far and without losing sleep over it. What does the software company do? We create artificially intelligent coaches and mentors based on thought leaders. So it's called Coachbox AI. We, you

have creators who sign up, they configure an AI model to coach and mentor in their style. So we've got these little style sliders where they choose whether they're more coaching style or they're more mentoring style, whether they are funny or serious, whether they are informal or formal, and then they upload their content. And then that AI model is like them. And so they use it as a lead generation tool. So people in their audience sign up,

chat to it, ask it questions, get help and get guidance based on their content and their frameworks. Oh, that's very cool. So could I do something like that? Yeah, you would be, I mean, you would be absolutely perfect. And it would be so perfect for productivity as well, because you're not there, but your content is working on your behalf. Yeah. Ali Abdul AI. Yeah. We also have, because we've got, we always get questions for our YouTuber Academy students, where it's always the same sort of stuff.

And I've got like 80 hours of me talking about how to grow on YouTube and answering a load of questions.

I always kind of think like, people are asking all these questions and if they had just watched episode number 67, the 67th hour, they would have known the answer to that. But obviously they don't, they haven't got time to do that. Yeah. So could I just like upload everything I've ever said about how to grow on YouTube and turn that into a how to grow on YouTube, like chatbot kind of thing? Yeah. So we are on a massive vendetta against dusty content. So, you know, it's on episode 600 and whatever you said, but no one else necessarily does, but it's,

It's like, you've already done the work. You've already put all the hard effort in. Once you train an AI model on your content and your frameworks and your personality, it's like, it's not just doing the work for you that someone might not have found even if they went digging through archives, but it makes your content about them. So it's like...

what's your problem? How can I help you? Not necessarily, oh, read this and figure out your own way of applying it to your life. So it's very, yeah, it's very focused on your audience. And a lot of our creators are using it as a lead generation tool on their website, but the ones who aren't are either charging for access. So people are paying like $10 a month to access an AI coach version of a creator.

Or they're putting it in a membership site. So like as a value add to save them answering all these questions every single week that they've already asked before. Hmm.

And do customers get annoyed if they know that it's an AI model that's replying? They know it's an AI model. It's very clear. Actually, we did have an inquiry to say, it was from a teacher actually, who said, so I know it says AI at the top, but can you remove the AI? And I know that your chatbots respond straight away, but can you make it respond like at random intervals? And she actually wanted to pretend that it was real so that she could just, I don't know. How do you feel about that? Oh.

We are. So we're not in that business. But I mean, I'm sure it will happen one day. But ours are very much, this is an AI version of this person. And that's quite important when you're training it as well. Because if someone says, hey, AliAbdolAI, what are you wearing? You want it to say...

Well, I'm not actually him. I'm an AI model based on him. Like stop asking me weird questions. Let's get back to productivity now or something like that because it's not actually you. And so having that separation is quite important. You mentioned you were running the agency as a lifestyle company. Yes. What do you mean by that? So I think there are four games that you can play.

In business. Oh, love it. What are they? I think one of the games is the artist game. And that's where you are, you're the talent, you've got this art, you've got this craft, you've got something you do that's different to how anyone else does it and it's magical. And the goal of this game is for you to do as much of your art as possible and everyone you hire...

Their goal is to take away the friction and do all the admin so that all you need, all you can do is rock up and do what you do and they take care of everything else. So that's the artist game. You could do that forever. Yeah, pretty good game. The other game is the lifestyle game. So this is the one that I was definitely playing for most of my agency's life. And this is where your goal is to make a certain monthly amount, say, but...

Try and do that as passively as possible. So you work as little as possible and that money comes in and you spend your time doing whatever you want. So for me, it was traveling and it was competing in powerlifting and doing kind of other stuff other than running the business because the goal of the business is to fund your lifestyle. And then I think there's the performance game. And that's what I'm definitely playing now. And this is about seeing what you're capable of.

So in this game, you are probably prepared to forgo elements of your lifestyle because it doesn't matter quite as much. So whether you get to the beach...

one day a week or five days a week doesn't matter as much as growing your business to be really impressive or make the most impact possible or make the most money possible or whatever your goal is. And then I think those three games can all be infinite games. You could play all of those forever because you could always tend towards being a world-class artist or you could keep going with the lifestyle game and just make your lifestyle amazing. Or you could just see what you could reach in terms of performance and become a billionaire. But then the fourth game is the build it and sell it game.

Not an infinite game. Has a probably like a three year lifespan or however long you're going to do it. But that is your goal. You're going to get in and you're going to get out. And that is the game. That's cool. Let's explore. Okay. I'd love to dive more into these because I think I'm playing some combination of the artist game and the lifestyle game. And I am currently in a bit of a dilemma where about a year ago, Dan Priestley, our mutual friend, came over and he was like, you know, told us the difference between lifestyle and performance. I was like, cool, lifestyle all the way.

But now I'm starting to feel like I also want impact. And if I could wave a magic wand and 10X our revenue and our impact and our profits, I wouldn't say no to that. So it's like...

I'm not sure if I want to play the lifestyle game, but I definitely want to keep doing the artist thing because if I free up my time, I'm not going to travel and do powerlifting. I'm just going to make more videos because I just love the artist side of things. But I also want a chill lifestyle, but I also want impact. And so like I kind of want to have all three slices of this cake. How would you go about like, yeah, this is a struggle I'm having right now. I think the wave of magic wand question is the exact right question to ask.

Because that will help you decide which one comes first. I feel like you're not playing the lifestyle game. I think you are. But I think...

If someone said to you, you can get all your dream guests that we've just talked about on your podcast and it would mean that you couldn't go on holiday for a year, you'd be like, yeah, I'd do that. Yeah, I don't really care about going on holiday. Yeah, or whatever, like whatever comes as part of your dream lifestyle. I feel like you would forego that. But I feel that's because you've got the artist identity at the same time. You know you're on something, you're on an upward trajectory, you're seeing what you're capable of at the same time. I don't think you're playing the lifestyle game.

I think I might be playing the artist game then. Because as you were saying that, like, the goal is... For me, the goal is to get everyone on the team to deal with everything other than reading, learning and making videos. Yep. Which is the thing that I love doing. Yeah. And I would just do more and more of that. Yep. If I had 100 million in the bank, I would still read, learn and make videos and do podcasts because it's just fun. Okay. So just for you, we're going to invent this fifth category. Oh, nice. And it's called the artist performance game. Okay. And that's just both. That's where...

Maybe you're an artist of like next level where you can treat it as a performance game at the same time because you know what you're good at. You've subtracted the stuff you're not good at. You know what you can double down on. Like if I said to you, okay, how do you 10X your business? You could probably tell me.

Because you've thought about it as a performance business at the same time. So you've almost, you are the artist, but you're not like, you're not like the starving artist. You're the artist who can zoom out, see themselves and then go, how do I turn this artist into a performance business? That's interesting. That's the first time I've thought about it in that way.

Because I guess I thought I wanted a lifestyle business because but what I actually wanted was to free up my time to focus on the art. Yeah. Of making videos and writing books and stuff. I don't want the lifestyle business so that I can work four hours a week and chill on a beach and travel around and stuff. Yeah. And if I do do traveling around and stuff, I'm like, great, let me chill in a library all day in like a different country so I can do more reading and make more stuff. Yeah.

I mean, there's an argument to say that that's because you know how you're motivated and you've also found your purpose. Because I think part of the reason I wanted to do the lifestyle business was because I wasn't, I liked my business, but I wasn't so, like right now I'm like, oh my God, this is going to take over the world. And I don't know if the business I was running then, I almost was outgrowing it as I was building it. And therefore the lifestyle thing sounded more exciting because we go with whatever is going to give us the most sense of progress or the most dopamine.

And maybe it wasn't the business itself. It was more the lifestyle side. So that's what I tended towards. Interesting. So if you'd won the lottery, you wouldn't continue running a social media marketing agency. You'd be like, great, sorted. Yeah, I think so. Whereas now, if you won the lottery, you'd continue doing the software stuff. Yeah, I think that's a really good question. If you win the lottery, would your life change? And if it's a yes, then it's like you're probably not living your dream life right now. Hmm.

If you won the lottery, would your life change? I wouldn't make any courses. Okay. And I wouldn't do any sponsorships. Yes. Okay. And I would reduce the frequency of uploads. Because currently our frequency of uploads is like based on growth and metrics and like sponsors and stuff. But my calendar would not change very much. I would still do the same stuff. So this is interesting as well, because another side of...

Being a, I call it like a high performer or being world-class in like one or two areas. Yeah. I think a really big part of it is subtraction. And so there's a bias. I know you love biases. I think we've geeked out on these before, but there's one called addition bias. And it's where whenever you're faced with like a problem or a challenge, the bias or the tendency is just to add stuff. So I once knew a guy who had seven VAs.

And so every time a VA got full, he just added another one and he kept going until he had seven. And he didn't ever stop to think like, why the hell do I need seven VAs? Because in theory, like he really didn't. And then you've got like, I don't know, if you're sad, you might feel like, okay, I'm going to go shopping. Or if you want to, if you've got a problem in your business, you might think, okay, we need to hire someone or we need to add a report or we need to add something else. And it's just always add, add, add. But the...

The actual thing to do is probably to subtract. And it's probably to subtract the things that are the six and sevens out of 10, like courses, like sponsorship, like the stuff that doesn't really light you up. Because then you get all this free time and this free space to think, how do I get more tens? But we never, we're not going to get to the tens without removing the sixes or the sevens.

So what I would do is perform this giant audit of your whole life. I really like doing this exercise. I do this every time I'm feeling a little bit out of kilter and it's a blank piece of paper and there's a vertical line and there's a horizontal line and it just says start, stop, more, less. Okay. And you completely ignore start and more.

So a stop box, a stop box, a more box and a less box. Yeah. And you're going to make it come up on the screen beautifully. Yes. We'll animate this.

So start and more are what addition bias is telling you to do. It's telling you to put stuff in there. It's like, it's saying, no, you need to add stuff. Like you need to hire people. You need to add reports. You need to add products, but we're going to like cross them out. You can violently cross those boxes out. That's good. Does that feel good? And then you focus on stop and you focus on less and you think, what am I doing? How am I filling my week in things that just

don't matter. They might be habits that you're just doing without questioning. They might be things that suit a previous version of you, but don't suit current version of you. Or they might just be things that, you know, deep down you either don't really enjoy or don't move the needle and then you remove them. I think the hardest thing is identifying them. And then after that, it's like removing them. And I think it can be a really tough challenge because I

When everything's working just a little bit. So say if I said to you, how do you grow your YouTube channel? And you said, well...

10% of people come from here, 10% come from here. You're going to list me all these different places and you're going to say, so I should stay active on all these different platforms. I should keep doing all of these things because, you know, if I stop, then we'll lose those people. But that's not the case. If you stopped, you would free up time, you would free up space and you would be able to repurpose that into fewer things in the theme of less but better. And those things would compound and they would get bigger and they would get better. And then weirdly, they'd probably grow the other things.

I've been doubling down on, I've got a column in Forbes on, I write about entrepreneurship and AI. I write a lot about chat GPT prompts. And in the five years I've had the column, I've had 5 million views, 5 million paid views. But 1 million of those have been in the last month. And it's because I stopped doing everything else.

I stopped like, I don't log into Twitter anymore. I don't log into Instagram anymore. I just write for Forbes and do that all the time because it sends people to CoachVox AI. And that doubling down and that like fully geeking out on this one thing that you do has meant that that one's exploded. And it then passes on to the other things as well. Like my LinkedIn's grown more than like ever before. Now I don't even focus on it because the other thing's grown so much.

So it's like subtracting, doubling down, less but better. I think it's the way. This thing around social media platforms is vibing, but we are trying to be on all the social media platforms because of...

you know, trying to be a thought leader and stuff. It's good to be on all the platforms. Primarily my focus is on the YouTube channel and on the podcast. And we do, and when we film shorts for the YouTube channel, which is good because it grows YouTube, we also copy and paste them onto Instagram and on TikTok. When we film videos for the YouTube channel, someone in the team repurposes them into tweet threads and LinkedIn posts and stuff. And so like those things are happening through the team, but they're not taking up my own time and my own headspace. Yeah.

Is that okay? Or is that still, would you still say that that's a bit dangerous? I think it's fine. I think when I said to you, if you win the lottery, what would change? You said courses and sponsorship. So I don't think social media is the beef.

I think there are other things that are your six and sevens. Of course, and sponsorships bring in the revenue. Yes. Which is the problem. Yeah. But then they bring in the revenue right now. Like this is almost why people stick in jobs and don't start their own businesses. Shit, you're right. Okay, gone. Continue. They're bringing the revenue right now. So we get used to this level of comfort that we can't break away from. And so we just, we keep going with it. We just settle.

So many of us are operating so far under our potential that it's just like embarrassing. And so this is why it's like cool bullshit on your life. Look at your schedule. Look at what you're doing. Look at what you're trying to achieve and just be like, how do I stop doing all these average, mediocre, normal things so I can free up my time and just be world class at a few things? That's good. Yeah.

This was a thought process that led to us canceling our YouTuber Academy because it was like a life cohort course. Nice. Okay. After like two and a half years of being like, kind of like too much money to let go of. I had this realization of like, no, screw that. We can still generate revenue from it by it being a passive evergreen product. It's going to be less revenue than as a life cohort, but it means it frees up three months of my life a year. And that was a price worth paying. And how did you feel after you did it?

Pretty good. It was scary initially because I was like, well, I don't know if we're going to manage to make the revenue that we need to this year. But I was like, I will figure it out. Yeah. I'm sure we can. Yeah. Yeah. There's a phrase I really love and it's jump and the net will appear. And it does all the time, every time. You have mentioned in the past a personal success system. What is a personal success system?

I think everyone on the planet has a personal success system. They just might not know exactly what it is. And some friends who popped to mind are, there's a friend called Shona who has a business called Perfect English Grammar and her personal success system is going to events because what she finds is that every single time she goes to an event,

she'll meet someone, she'll get an idea, something will happen. And in the six months after her business doubles, and that's happened like three times now. So because she knows what it is, what her personal success system is, she can apply this going forward. And she can just go to bigger and better events. And she can kind of take the crux of this system and just keep applying it. And everyone's

Second favorite billionaire, Jeff Bezos, has a very similar thing where he will think of an idea. He will write a one-page press release about it. He will see how that goes down with a very small group of people. And then he'll just build it. And then he knows that a few of them are going to take off. Some of them aren't. Amazon's got like...

157 businesses that it started that didn't go anywhere. Like you remember the dash buttons and the fire phone and like random stuff. And it's like, yeah, we'll give it a go. Might work, might not. That's like his success system is coming up with the idea, writing the press release, releasing it and seeing what happens. And I realized that I had one too where...

If I look back at anything that I'm like proud of or anything I've achieved, I pretty much followed the exact same system to achieve it. And so this is going to be different for everyone. But mine is set the intention, speak to someone who's done it, ask them how they did it.

find out a method and then split that method into something that I do every single day for about half an hour and just keep going until it happens. That's just, that's just my success system. And so when I worked this out, I was like, I need to test this with other things. So the next thing I had in mind was to write a book and get a publisher. So I followed the exact same process and it just worked. And there's almost something in like

When you figure out what your unique resources are, what your unfair advantage is, what you're like somehow weirdly placed to do with your resources or the things around you, you can figure it out and then apply it going forward. And I think you can kind of achieve anything. So I don't know if you know what yours is. Like the top three, like the top one thing that you've ever achieved that you're just super proud of, it probably had a method from the start to the finish of how you got there.

As you were saying that, I was thinking about the very first cohort of our YouTuber Academy, which was like the first product we released and just completely exploded the business overnight, basically. And that was, I had the idea while I was sitting in a Starbucks in Cambridge, journaling in a physical pen and paper. I was like, this would be a good idea.

I banged it out over the next several weeks nonstop. And then three weeks later, the course was live and made 350k. And that was more money than I'd ever seen before in my life. Have you replicated that since with other things?

I remember the first business I started that was successful, again, zero to MVP in about three weeks. I had the idea while I was at the mosque of like, let me build a company that sells medical admissions courses. And boom, we were up and accepting payments within three weeks because I was just like, I was like, cool, I'm just going to do the thing. Not overthinking it, not worrying too much about what people will think and just having that sort of iterative kind of mentality. So the initial idea comes from you not being in front of your laptop.

Yes, that's very true. The initial idea comes from you having the space, being somewhere different, having a pen and paper. And then after that, what made, with each of those ideas, did you have the conviction that they would work straight away? I had the conviction that it might work. And so it was like a lot of, this could work, let's just give it a go. How many of the ideas that you write down in your journal do you think, oh, that won't work, I'm not gonna do that one?

Quite a lot. So there's something about those ones that made you think this is worth doing. Yes. So I'd find almost the metrics around that because that's probably a system as well. You've probably got like all the ones that I've written down that I found out or that I've thought would work had these characteristics that they probably all got in common. And then the next thing you did was...

banged it out over the next few weeks with a team I'm guessing that probably followed the exact same process as well yeah solo initially and then the second one was with a team of just like alright scrappy let's just bang stuff together let's not overthink it let's just whack it up you know and in both cases and actually I think in all cases I got my hands quite dirty with it it wasn't like I'll just sketch out the vision and let the team execute it was like

I'm in making the landing pages myself and doing the copywriting myself. Okay. And like in the nuts and bolts of it. So getting scrappy, boots on the ground, taking imperfect action and then launching. Yeah. To current network, current audience. Yeah. I mean, the first time around I didn't have an audience, so I had to post on the student room and hope for the best. Second time around I had Twitter. Yes. And so Twitter was where I was and sort of building in public as well. Second time around.

So this is your system. This is exactly your system. Coffee shop idea.

set of criteria that it matches taking scrappy action and then just doing it you could apply this to anything going forward your next thing that you want to achieve yeah this is the thing so it's like i i'm also thinking you know when i was writing the book most of the progress was made in like very short bursts of time there was this week where we were at a team retreat in wales and some nice airbnb and i was like cool my job for this whole week is just write one chapter a day and from morning to evening which is like i'm just gonna write the chapter

And I wrote like 50,000 words that week. Yeah. And I've never, like, that's by far the most productive I've ever been in my life in terms of like word count. Whereas it took like two years to write 10,000 because I was just like overthinking and outlining. Yeah. All this sort of stuff. I wonder if some kind of magic sauce that works for you is this

taking away the pressure of it being good and being okay with it being like this is a disgusting first draft but like it doesn't matter because it's gonna be like it's gonna be fine because you there's probably something in there that means you trust where it's gonna go so you will accept a level of imperfection because you know it's kind of part of the story but you know I quite like to think about like the movie of your life like if this was a movie of your life right now

Then you there in your cabin in Wales writing the book, like that would be there and it would be a really fun scene. And it would be like, there's like rain outside and there's like sheep barring in the distance. And it's like, it's this glorious kind of thing. And you're there like, and like scrunching it up and going like that. And like, it would be cool. So there's maybe something that's like, you know, it's part of the story. You know, it's ultimately going to lead to success that lets you,

Kind of get out your own way and just put words on the paper, which is powerful because loads of people can't do that because of the writer's block thing. Yeah, I think recently we've not followed the system because of

We now have a head of product who's responsible. I've been wanting to make a productivity course for a while. If I'd followed the system, I would just bang it out in three weeks and it would be done. But now we're like, well, we've got a head of product and we've got a big audience now. It's kind of a big deal. We should do this properly. And therefore, we should do the competitor analysis and we should figure out what the offer is and we should follow the methods and all this kind of stuff. And I can see the value in that. But I'm also kind of like feeling the sense of like,

I just want to make it in a weekend. Yeah. Because I think I can make it in a weekend. Yeah. Rather than a six month period of like back and forth with our head of product. I think it's a really valid point. And I think it's almost why startups will always do well because they don't have this sense of, oh, we need to do it properly. Whereas like businesses that have been going a very long time, they've got like polyamory

policy and hr and procedures and stuff they have to do so they almost they almost become irrelevant because they are following so many different procedures when the startups are like we're just going to do we're just going to execute i'm going to get on with it so maybe getting back to the the scrappier the scrappier you might be the way so i guess just thinking about this out loud i could do the scrappy version 0.1 soft launch it to like twitter in the email list see what happens

And then at that point, I lose interest in it. And then I can hand it over to a team member to take it from 0.1 to like 100. Yeah, because you're the visionary. Yeah. Are you an ENTJ? Yeah. Yeah, we're the same. But yeah, that's exactly it. The E means you're super...

The N means the, it's like the visionary, the I've got these great ideas, but then you need someone else to go. And the T means very, very logical. The J means that you can plan it all out. But ultimately you don't, even though you know what the plan should be, you don't want to execute the plan. So that's where your team comes in and goes, hey, there's all these cool stuff, cool things in mind and they do it. Sick. So how would someone go about finding their own personal success system? Think about...

The things that you've done that you're most proud of and not the things that you think you should be the most proud of, but the things you're really secretly the most proud of, and then figure out what you did from start to finish to make them happen and do that with multiple things and then find patterns, whatever they are, however weird the patterns are. It might be that...

everything that you've ever achieved on a really cool level has always involved this one person or has always involved this one coffee shop in Cambridge or whatever it might be. Find those patterns and then go to those people, go to those places again and try and replicate it. That's good. That's very good. Okay, so my action point from this so far. I love that you've got homework from this. Yeah, no, I've started doing this recently because I realized that I do these interviews and if I don't have a piece of paper in front of me to write shit down,

I just forget what happened. And then it'll be released on the channel a few months from now. And I'll be listening to it as if I've listened to it. But I'm like, I had the conversation. Like, how do I just forget literally everything that we talked about? Yeah. So now I like make a point to write action points. Yeah. So my action point is the stop and less and also to sort of make a MVP of my personal success system. PSS MVP. Do you keep a personal CRM? I've always, I've dabbled. Yeah. But I've never managed to make it work.

So something I've started doing, which I quite enjoy and it feels very effortless is after I've hung out with someone, I'll open up the voice notes app on my phone and I'll just, when I'm onto the next place or when I'm leaving, I'll record just like a five minute voice note of like what we talked about, how I feel, um, the kind of stuff we covered, like what was really good to cover and, um, what they helped me with all the action points and stuff like that. And then, um,

I save them. And then firstly, it's good for the next time you meet them, listen to it back while you're on the way there. And then you remember like, oh, they were going to do that thing. And then you ask them about the thing. But then also you really get to understand who in your life gives you energy. Mm-hmm.

Because you just know how you feel after you're hanging out with them. And then that can help you work out the people in your life who are the nines and the tens compared to like the six and the sevens. Because you imagine like, oh my God, I just left that meeting. I feel terrible. And then it's like, don't hang out with that person again. They are not good for you.

Yeah, that's a good system. I've had various iterations of this where I have like an Apple Notes folder called People. And after I've hung out with someone, I'll just like open up their note and then just add some stuff at the top to be like, talked about XYZ, they're planning to go to Malaysia next week, all this kind of stuff. And I would do that for a few weeks and then I would forget. And it's like, it would drop off as a habit. Yeah. And I've tried finding various, I think if someone made that, what you just described, plus AI. Yes. To be able to automatically update a personal CRM

using a voice note to be like, here are the highlights from your conversation. That would be cool. This is a call to the internet. Please can someone out there make an app, call it Better Friend and have it where you can just upload the voice note and it does stuff. And the next time you meet them, it puts it in your calendar. Ask them about this. Like tell them about that. Follow up this. Tell them that you put into practice that tip that they gave you and just do it. Mate, this is betterfriend.ai. Betterfriend.ai. Betterfriend.ai.

I'm going to message a friend of mine straight after this to be like... To make it. Yeah. So he's recently quit his job in management consulting and is trying to build AI software. And so he built a Premiere Pro plugin that helps cut out pauses and stuff using like ChatGPT, Whisper and all that crap.

And he's looking for ideas for products to build. And this would be a very cool one. Yeah, it'd be really good. Because I think friendships progress when you don't have to tell the same stories twice because people remember them.

So, you know, if like you've got someone who you maybe see twice a year, you want the conversation and the relationship to progress each time. But it's not going to happen if you don't remember things because they'll just tell you the same stuff and you won't remember. So you'll be like, oh, brand new information when it's not brand new information. So the gap that you fill is forgetting those little nuances that help progress relationships. That's good. I really suck at keeping in touch with people because, I mean, I guess you're an ENT agent. Like, I don't know if this is just a thing, but like.

I have like five zillion unread WhatsApps and like friends will message and I'll not see the message or it'll just be buried in the inbox. And then looking at just scrolling through my WhatsApp and being like, oh God, it's all this stuff. It starts to feel very overwhelming. And then I feel bad because I'm like, well, like I'm just not replying to my friends. Do you get this at all? Have you tried inbox zero for WhatsApp?

No. So you can go on WhatsApp and you can configure it so that all your chats are archived and only new messages come into your WhatsApp inbox. And then it means that you treat your WhatsApp like...

A to-do list almost. Yeah. So you could batch it. So you could have like a respond to WhatsApp messages every other day for however long. And then once you've responded to someone and the ball's in their court, you swipe, you click archive and then it disappears. Yeah. And then you've only got like however many at the top. Nice. But sometimes it becomes, if you gamify it. Yeah, I'm sure I can find a way to...

Yeah, I can definitely find a way to gamify this. I'm just looking at it now. It becomes a game that can take over, but at least you know that everything that's in there is in your court. And if you've said something last and it's up to them, you're not going to see it. Nice. Okay, that's good. This is all about creating blank space. Like everything is just remove stuff from like your inbox, your schedule, your life so that you can just double down on fewer things. Yeah, that's very cool. What was the story behind the 10-year career book?

10-year career book was all about when my agency's exit was going through, I was very impatient. And I was impatient because there was due diligence, there were lawyers, there were things that had to be sorted out. And there was just no point in me hurrying the process up because nothing was going to move anything faster. So it was like an acceptance of having to be patient and just having to do nothing. And so I wrote a book. That's when I wrote a book. Okay.

So for the first, I followed my personal success system. I got up, went straight to my laptop each morning and for the first 90 minutes of each day, wrote a book before my agency completed. And the idea behind all of it is this ethos of do cool stuff and then help other people do the same cool stuff. And I think that kind of serves two purposes. One is that

You never really feel like a imposter. And the reason you don't is because you're only ever teaching people stuff that you have already done yourself. So you never feel like, oh, I don't know anything about this because you've done it. And secondly, I think it really hammers home the importance of only asking advice from people who have done the stuff. Because everyone wants to give you advice all the time, but most of it's completely irrelevant. But if you always ask people who've done the stuff, then you'll get real guidance that matters.

And so the point of the book was to take all the lessons from 10 years of running a business between the ages of 22 and 32. And I guess it's running it, it's setting it up, being the artist, trying to run it as a performance business, realizing I wanted to run it as a lifestyle business and then selling it. Yeah.

It's to take all the lessons and pass it on to someone else so that they can do it too. So they have the potential to start a business, run it, sell it, and then maybe never have to work again. Everything is sales. What do you mean everything is sales? That's chapter six. Everything is sales because if you don't make sales, then you don't have clients. And if you don't have clients, you're not self-employed, you're unemployed.

And also making lots of sales has the tendency to make other problems go away because now you've got sales. So if you're in an agency, you're going to have problems with your team. You're going to have problems with your office, your systems, your everything, everything, everything. But as long as you've got enough clients, you can just figure out everything else. But the moment you have to find clients as well as deal with all the other problems, then you've got lots of problems.

I've definitely seen this with our team, with loads of other business owners I know as well, where actually just having loads of money coming in solves a lot of, like, in a way it hides a lot of problems. Yes. And it also somewhat solves a lot of problems. Some people would say it's a bad thing because you don't realize that there are problems because the money keeps on coming in. Yeah. But others would say, well, you'd rather the money come in than not. So, yeah. I think that having sales can mask everything.

problems that could then escalate.

because you're not paying them attention because you're like, what do you mean? There's no problems. We're making sales. But if you can make sales and grow your company and also be creating systems and processes, and so much of that book is about systems and processes and the kind of what I went through to mean that it wasn't me that ran it. If you can do those at the same time, you can create something that is scalable and saleable and isn't a headache to run at the same time. Nice. Chapter one is called The Lies We Live. It's about questioning limiting beliefs.

How would you advise someone to go about that? Yeah, this is about questioning limiting beliefs. It's also about that education and career conveyor belt that we discussed at the start. But then talked about in the first chapter is something that absolutely fascinates me and it's menu psychology.

And this is when you go to a restaurant, the menu that you see in front of you is very deliberate. The stuff on there that is like psychologically primed to make you spend more. And I learned this when I used to work in an Italian restaurant and we had a soundtrack that we put on in the evenings and it was called Music to Watch Customers Buy. And buy was B-U-Y.

And the idea of this soundtrack was that it rewired the customer's brains to a channel that made them want to spend more. So it was all about like being lavish and treating your lady and like looking nice and being like kind of showy. And it was like, it was so strange. Like I'd find after work, I'd be like, hey, let's hang out.

round for a drink. Like, let's enjoy the place. It's a really nice, like it was, it was making me do it as well, even though I just worked there. And so I looked into this a bit more when I was researching the book and I found that

On a menu in a restaurant, normally the most expensive item goes in the top right because that's where your eyes go first. The purpose of that item is to make everything else look cheap. So it's like that's where the mixed grill goes and that's where like the lobster Thermador goes or whatever. And if some idiot buys it, that's fine. It's like if some idiot goes for your keynote price, then that's fine. Great.

But the idea is that it makes everything else look cheap. And there should never be any currency symbols because once you see a currency symbol, you think of money and you're like, oh no, and you tie it up. So we don't want currency symbols. We want things, ideally, no decimal places, but one maybe, never two, never a pound sign, never a dollar sign. You don't want the numbers lining up because if they line up, you can compare. So someone can just pick the cheapest, cheapest whatever. Yeah.

The wines, people won't go for the top because they won't go for the cheapest one because they don't want to look cheap. They'll go for the second one. So that one's got the biggest profit margins. And there's all these little things. And really, it's not just about menu psychology. It's about the psychology of everything around us. Like we're being conditioned to believe that we need to get a job, settle down, whatever. All those normal lifestyle choices. We don't realize that we're kind of being led along the path that might not be right for us.

something different might be right for you. One thought on this. So I was at a Tony Robbins event a couple of weeks ago, business mastery. It was about how to tax your business and stuff. Did you walk through fire? No, that's unleashing the power within, which is a different one. This was more vanilla than that. But one of the things that was interesting was there was a lot of,

a lot of stuff around, you know, close your eyes and imagine the financial abundance you can have in your life and with your business. And imagine how great it would be if you could 10X your business. And imagine how it would feel if you could, you know, fly your family private and, you know, this sort of stuff. And before that, I'd never once vaguely entertained the notion of ever flying private. Cause I was like, I mean, I just really love that I can fly business class most times. But now I'm like, huh, maybe I do want to 100X my business so I can start flying private.

And conveniently, kind of the upsells and stuff to the stuff that he was selling came sort of fairly straight, fairly soon after that whole, like, imagine this financial abundance that you could have. And when I got back home, I was thinking a lot around kind of aspirations to grow the business in that before I was like, I'm pretty happy, you know, we're doing a few million profit a year. It's fine. Like, life's good. And then afterwards, I was like, but it would be cool to 10x that. That would be really cool. And...

I wonder for you, having gone from lifestyle to performance business, to what extent do you think your desire to grow the performance business is a case of buying into the more is better narrative? Because we are also fed the capitalist narrative of like, well, a bigger business means you're more legit and you're a better business owner and like you're worth more and all this stuff. Yeah. Is that something that you struggle with at all?

Yes, definitely. So firstly, on visualization at your event, visualization is super powerful. And thinking about stuff before it happens. I love the idea of that. And I did it with my agency sale. I wrote myself a pretend check. And it was for the exact amount we sold for. And it had the date that was like two weeks later.

away from when I actually met the buyer and I signed it like the perfect buyer and all that kind of stuff and I stared at it and I like watched it and I wanted it to come true and I do it with every single training session like I visualize my deadlifts before I deadlift and then they just happen and they feel easier because it almost feels like it almost feels like you've already done it in reality even though you haven't and then you're stepping into the version of yourself that you've already imagined in your head it's like it's weird however it works um but on the whole

fulfilling a kind of version of you that has these goals that other people are telling you. I think that comes so much down to mimetic desire and copying what other people want without necessarily questioning it.

And I think you were actually the person who first told me about Mimetic Desire. And it was when we spoke the very first time. And I am sure I left that call being like, oh, I want a YouTube channel. Why don't I have a YouTube channel? Because it's like, you were so like happy with your channel. Like everything was going really well. You were telling me about it. And it's so easy to be like, oh, maybe I want that too. And that was literally like an hour's conversation. Yeah.

So it's like that's happening all the time. And I think for me, the whole lifestyle business and performance business, I'm part of a membership group that's all lifestyle businesses.

And so that's quite interesting because I spend a lot of time with people who are in that game. And so when you're having conversations and when you're kind of in different masterminds and talking to each other about your businesses, you really do get the chance to question yourself and to say, is this what I want? Or do I believe it's what I want? Because all these people around me who are very, very happy are selling me the version of their life that they think I should have too. So yeah.

I think it matters who you hang out with because you could easily fall for a mimetic desire even from an hour's conversation. There's something like you pick up someone's accent within 10 minutes of speaking to them. Hmm.

I find myself doing that quite a lot. Yeah, because I think it's an evolutionary thing because we don't want to get excluded from groups. So we just try and be like other people so we don't get rejected from them. That's deep. But it's the same because first of all, it's like, what do I really want? Knowing yourself. I think there's a chapter in that book called Know Yourself. And then choosing...

who you hang out with so you make sure that if you know you do want to start a YouTube channel, you're hanging out with successful YouTubers, but it is really what you want to do. Have you come across that book Wanting by Luke Burgess? No. It's really good. It's about...

Mimetic Desire. And it's like a whole book about sort of exploring like René Girard's philosophy on mimetic desire and stuff. I was just writing down that I just remembered that I'd read, I've read this book like twice and I should do a video about it because it's really good. Yeah. But that book always really, really makes me think whenever I come across a highlight from it. So he talks about like thick desires and thin desires. And thick desires tend to be the ones that have sort of built up over a very long period of time and you feel like they're true to you and all that kind of stuff. Thin desires are like my desire to grow my business, which is like,

depending on whether I've been to the US recently and hung out with eight figure entrepreneurs will immediately change the way that I think, maybe I want growth. And then what the team has started saying is that whenever Ali comes back from a trip, we're just going to ignore everything he says for at least three days, because chances are he's going to reconsider and be like, actually, I don't mind being chill. I don't, you know, I like the fact that, you know, our business is at this size and it's manageable and

But then part of me is like, I'm not sure how much I'm holding myself back because I'm just like, I don't know, scared of hard work or some shit like that, you know? It's just deep introspection. It's figuring out how you are motivated and then following that and just not being sent off track by other people who probably put forward a very compelling case because they are happy. So if you imagine if you're kind of, if you're here just...

going along thinking of your goals and then you go to an event and then you kind of go like this for a bit and then you turn back to normal where your normal is is probably still a bit higher you've probably still had some impact from it but the challenge as a fellow ENTJ is not getting so carried away that you try and overhaul everything it's trying to get the nuggets and get those little things that people have said that do make the difference without just completely changing who you are because

probably the consistency of who you are and your message is what's got you here so far. It's like doing it without losing that. Yeah, that's a good point. Like figuring out what's the nugget that I can take away from here. Because I think the temptation is, let's just overhaul the business. That's usually not a good idea.

So something I quite like thinking about as well is the single line or the single phrase that describes how you are motivated. Okay. What do you mean? So I hadn't really thought about this before until a friend who has a, he's got an Amazon affiliate site and his big goal was to get to number one in terms of monthly hits. Okay.

And he told me that this was his big goal. He told me that he was doing hermit mode for like a year to get there until he was number one. And he showed me this thing that he'd made on Photoshop that was like a leaderboard of his website, which was currently, I think, I think it was like number four. Yeah.

And all these like competitors, like rivals, enemies, I think he called them. And he'd set it up like a video game. And it was a video game. It was a leaderboard. And all the ones below him, he'd struck through and he'd written killed.

So it was like a very violent, it was a very violent leaderboard. And his goal was to get to number one. And what he knew is that leaderboards motivated him. The idea of killing the competition motivates him. The idea of like being right at the top, having put the work in, it's like his real thing. And I tried to do it with my business. I tried to do it with Coachbox AI. I said to him, so how do I replicate this?

And he kind of showed me what kind of leaderboard I could make. He had a look on Google to see who had monthly traffic similar to ours, et cetera, et cetera. And I looked at this leaderboard and it did nothing for me.

I was not motivated at all to do that because that's just not my success. That's not my main motivating factor. So it's like finding yours and in a similar way to how we came up with your success system, go back through your biggest achievements and figure out why it meant so much and why it really meant so much. So like,

setting up a bit, setting up your own business might not be because of the financial stuff. It might because the freedom stuff, like having kids or getting married or like any, anything that you ever think like, yes, this meant a lot. It might not be because of the reason that other people think it should mean a lot. There might be something in it for you.

And mine, I know because a friend of a friend who I had a chat with sent me a personality test. I think it was the insights personality test. And it's so long. You answer all these questions. And I think I had like 24 pages. Whoa. But one of the lines in it was, is motivated by the idea of succeeding against all odds. And when I look back at stuff, the main thing that makes the difference and stands out in anything is when someone says to me, like,

there's hardly any chance of you doing that. Or, oh, this is like only one in a million people do this. Or I remember at my company's third birthday party and our lawyer came and said, oh, well done. You've got in the 10% of businesses who make it past three years. And I was like, yeah, of course we have. But I quite like, I like this idea that there are really, really, really slim odds

and that we're going to smash them. That's interesting. Because that does nothing for me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. As you were saying that, I was like, that's never once. Yes, it's so interesting. And I speak to so many people who are like, oh, you know, someone told me I couldn't do it. And then I thought, fuck,

fuck it, I'm going to do it. And I'm like, really? That's motivating? I was on a podcast called Built to Sell and John Worrello, the host, said something like, we've done 300 episodes and of all these 300 episodes, you're the only one who sold without having to do an earn out. And in my head, it was like 300-1. And I was like, that's me. That's the one. And that's like the thing. That's the real thing. Whereas the leaderboard, yeah, nothing. Yeah.

But there's other things. So it's like find yours and then use that again going forward and kind of fabricate situations that will mean that you are motivated because you can think of it in that way. Just like my friend Richard with his leaderboard and killing all the competition. Sick. Adding an action point. I want to reflect on this and figure out what is my single phrase when it comes to motivating.

Because, and going back to your point about meeting seven and eight figure entrepreneurs and then believing that that's what you want to do too. Yeah. They, if you talk to them about what really motivates you, one of them might be, I want an eight figure business because something that happened in my childhood meant I see that eight figure business as success. I'm motivated to do that. And then it's pointless you going after their goal because it's not your goal because you're motivated by something else, but you need to find yours out first. Hmm. Nice. That's good stuff. Yeah.

One of the things you wrote about is using your default mode network. I've written about this in my book a little bit, but I'm curious, like, how do you think, what is the default mode network and how should one use it? So your default mode network is how your mind figures out information when you're not actively thinking about it. And

It can only really be used when your brainwaves are in theta, not beta. And one of the stories I love is Thomas Edison. Do you know this story? Thomas Edison used to take naps to access his theta brainwaves. And he used to go for a nap and he would hold like a ball that was like made of metal.

And so he'd be, he'd like kind of think, okay, I want to solve this problem. And then he'd like try and nap and try and doze off. And then the moment he did doze off, the ball would drop and it would wake him up. And then he'd start writing down the amazing ideas he had. And you know, when you have, like you go in the shower and then all of a sudden you get this idea or you go for a walk and

And the writer, Julia Cameron, who wrote The Artist's Way, she used to say that she went for this walk every day and she went up the hill. And at the top of the hill, that's where that day's inspiration would just find her. And then she'd know what she was going to write for the rest of the day. And I love the idea that you can use your default mode network to actively not think about something and let it sit in there, let it wear away. And then all of a sudden the answers then find you.

That's good. And I do it very deliberately between work and sport. So one of the rules is...

after I've done five great hours of deep work that day and I go train when I'm training from the moment I start warming up to the moment I finish I don't I don't go on my phone at all it's in airplane mode and I don't use it and it's because I want my default mode network to be so focused on power lifting that it's wearing away on all the work things and that when I go back to my laptop after I

answers just arrive and somehow it always does. But I think because we are never really bored and because we're never really not doing stuff, we are always in those beta brainwaves. And therefore we're just always like always on it, always going from thing to thing and looking at notifications and actively thinking. And then we don't get a chance to use probably the most powerful part of our brains. How do you use yours? I'm so legit.

I started doing a thing where I would, back when I was filming, I was trying to film like one video a day. I was like, the first thing I'm going to do is going to film a video and then I've got the rest of the day free.

And so I would figure out what is the topic, what's the title, and then I'd go for a walk around Hyde Park. And during the walk, I would sort of be half thinking about the video and half not, and sometimes my mind would wander. And usually by the time I was back, I was like, cool, I've got it. And then I'd sketch it out on like an A3 pad or something, and I'd film the video. That felt like quite a fun way of making stuff. I was also sort of indulging the inner kind of Julia Cameron artist kind of vibes, which

And there was a good interview I did with a guy called Sheehan yesterday. He's got a Twitter account called The Cultural Tutor, and he's grown from zero to 1.5 million followers on Twitter in like a year. He was working at McDonald's and he decided, you know, I'm going to quit my job at McDonald's and start writing on Twitter and just writing a thread a day for the last 500 days.

And his thing is that he wakes up at like 5 p.m. He has a pack of cigarettes. He irons his shirt and tie and trousers. And then he just goes for a walk. And he'll walk for however many hours it takes for inspiration to strike. And then he'll run back home on his laptop, write the thread. Nice. And then he would sleep.

And I mean, he's now one of the most famous writers on Twitter. So, yeah. So good. And it probably feels effortless as well. Yeah. Because your mind's just doing all the stuff while you're doing other things. And then all of a sudden it's like, here it is. Like Julia Cameron, especially, she'll talk about, she doesn't write, like she doesn't actively write. She talks about like a muse coming through the pen and she describes it in this really like beautiful way. But it's because she's given her mind the chance to just think.

um i've been i've been feeling very over over scheduled recently yeah yeah how do you how do you think about that um also in mad men the um don draper used to just sometimes say to his pa cancel everything clear my schedule and i think remember that you've always got the power to do that

Because you can. So keep that there as like a freeing thing. Remember that everything's a choice because it should be a choice. I think before you book stuff in your schedule, it's probably quite good to think,

How would I feel if this was tomorrow? Because when you book stuff that was three months ago, it's so easy to say yes. And you might have people in your life who are very good at getting you to agree to things three months in the future. And you'll say yes because it seems so far away. And then all of a sudden that's tomorrow. And then you're like, oh, I have to do that thing. One tactic I've heard someone use is to not schedule anything on Mondays and Fridays because

because then it means that it squishes their week down and it means that if they ever want to go away for the weekend, it's very easy to do so. That's nice. I quite like the maker-manager schedule where you think about the morning as being when you're a maker. You do all your deep work. You don't book any work.

calls whatsoever I do that like I I will like guard my morning time so fiercely like if I got a delivery I wouldn't open it until after I'd been to the gym it's like it's very it's like sacred time um and then it means in the afternoon you can do your manager work which is like the admin the schedules the calls everything else so especially if you're a performance slash artist then it's like when are you the artist hmm

You mentioned five hours of deep work and then gym. Where did the five hours come from and what does that look like? Just made it up. It looks like getting up in the morning and doing some element of exercise

like a walk or cardio or something. And that'll be before looking at a phone, checking email, doing anything at all. And then the most intense work I can possibly do that I've probably thought about the day before. And then I know what I'm doing and stuff that is in my success system. So it's like a arrive at the laptop, do it, do it, do it, hammer it out. Know that you're working on something that you really believe in. So it doesn't feel like work. I think like getting into flow in, in,

Getting into flow on stuff that you really believe in is just magical. And then when that's done, go train for powerlifting and don't look at my phone at all. And then when I get back to my laptop, then there's answers. That's when they just arrive. That's that Julia Cameron, like they just find me.

That's a good system. Yeah, I think it works. And I do it every day. I call it my perfect repeatable day. Like I try not to think in terms of weekends and weekdays because it's kind of a bullshit social structure that we don't really need and is probably not that applicable to lots of people in the world. And I think once you stop thinking in terms of weekends and weekdays, it gives you a better sense of freedom.

And also, I think it lets you plan life on your terms quite a bit more because you realize that you don't have to do everything when everyone else is doing it. So you can get what I kind of call, this is in the book as well. There's a whole section on lifestyle design, but you can access like the first class experience by just switching your timings.

So don't go to things that are really popular on the weekend when it's popular. Go at like 5 p.m. on a weekday or go to the gym. Like I train at 2 p.m. because like no one's in there and it's perfect. But you could do that with everything in your schedule so that you get the first class experience and then just work when everyone else is doing other stuff.

How does... So you do a lot of things at a very high level. How does like spontaneity and chilling out fit into your perfect repeatable day? So it all fits into...

a structure that is a Venn diagram. And so it's like profession, obsession, decompression. And I think about everything I do in terms of those three things. And so to define each one, profession is like your work, how you make money. I don't mean side projects. I mean like how you make money, the main thing that you're focused on, the stuff that only you can do. So like you as the artist or you as the business owner, not you as the

the admin assistant that you shouldn't really be doing yourself that kind of thing so that's profession

And then obsession is the main thing that you do outside your profession that you're trying to get as good as possible at. So for me, it's powerlifting because I compete in powerlifting and because I put a lot of energy into making sure I'm really, really good at it. But for someone else, that might be another serious hobby. It might be like gaming if they do it. You know, like it can't just be something that you're like, oh yeah, I'll go to the tennis court and hit a few balls around. It's got to be more like I'm doing this with a mission. I'm doing this because I'm going to get really good at it.

And then your decompression for me is like traveling and hanging out with friends. And it's where you just completely switch off. And so normally in a Venn diagram, you've got areas of crossover. But the beauty of this framework is that the main reason it works is that there is no multitasking to be done at all. So the idea is that multitasking is like the enemy. Because multitasking is like responding to emails in between bench press or like thinking about...

my later session while I'm writing an article or like doing something that's meant to be completely relaxing, but not being able to switch off from work stuff. So yeah,

The idea is that everything that you do in your whole entire life fits into these three areas. There's no, there's no like gray areas at all. And then it means that your default mode network can work on your profession while you're doing your obsession and vice versa. And then you're applying the same success system to both as well. So all of a sudden it sounds like this magic, like it kind of sounds like a magic thing, but I really think that is exactly how you become world-class in more than one area.

It's very intentional. So it's a Venn diagram, but it doesn't have any crossover. It has a crossover, but they're like colored in. So it's like, don't go in these areas. Don't go in that zone. They are no-go zones. Oh, okay. Because that is where... So if you're trying to do your work in like a chilled out fashion, you'd be like, you're sort of half-assing both things. Yes. Like on a Saturday when I'm like, oh, I should be doing some work. I spend the whole day doing fuck all because I haven't intentionally committed to either working or decompressing. Yeah.

Just do one or the other. Because I think it can probably happen quite a lot as well with like high powered individuals who are always like, go, go, go. You don't see the decompressing as being a thing. You see it as like something that you feel guilty doing. Yeah.

But making it intentional means that it's like, no, it's okay. I'm not working now. I'm not training now. I'm intentionally like exploring the city or sitting in this coffee shop doing nothing or chilling out on the sofa. And it's like, I'm doing this so that I can be better in the gym or so I can be better as like a parent or so I can be better at my work. Or I'm doing it because that's part of a life well lived. Yeah, exactly. Oh, yeah. And that too. Yeah.

So for you, it sounds like powerlifting is an obsession rather than a hobby. Yes. I'm not sure I have any obsessions outside of work in that sense. I talked about this framework in a talk for the network with the lifestyle entrepreneurs. And someone actually came back to me afterwards and she said, have you got a list of approved obsessions that we can follow? Because it was exactly the same. It was like she wasn't totally sure. But there will be something...

that you do outside work that you probably could be really, really good at if you just applied the same intensity as you did to work. And if you just applied that like logical analytical brain, came up with a plan, you could probably get really, really good at like a sport or a hobby, or even just being a good boyfriend, even just being a good tourist, even just there's something that you could turn into a system where you focus on performance in it. Yeah.

I love the idea of getting really good at art. That would just be so cool. I took art lessons at one point during lockdown. But at the same time, I was also trying to take guitar lessons, piano lessons and singing lessons alongside growing the business. And I thought when I left my job as a doctor, I'd have way more free time. And then just I ended up working on the business like way longer than I'd ever worked as a doctor. And just everything just got so squeezed. Can you think? I dabble, yeah.

Okay. Do you think? No, not at all. Really, really badly. But I like that you could. And maybe that's your obsession. It has to be something that actually lights you up though. It has to be something where you're like, I would really like to geek out on this. Because it's about applying the way that you can think about performance to something else other than work. Yeah. And is that important?

I think it's important because I think it's what means that you get in your default mode network. It means that it works because you've got two things. I think it helps create boundaries as well because when I didn't have an obsession, work would just expand faster.

And work would just happen all day. And I think now I get more done because I know it's going to get to 1.30 and I need to leave to go train. And I'm not going to compromise on that. Yeah. Parents say this as well. They're like, oh yeah, like I've become more productive since having kids because I know that I have to pick them up from school at half three. Therefore, I don't screw around during the daytime and just like get my shit done. Yeah. I've talked to lots of parents about this framework and what they seem to like

is the idea that it's not just, okay, here's my work and it has to stop. But it's also, I'm being a parent now. Like it lets go of that guilt that they feel like they do need to be checking stuff on their phones or like just respond to this email or do something. It's like, no, this is my obsession. Here are my kids. I'm going to do this and I'm not going to be like a iPhone parent. Yeah. Yeah.

There's a book I want to write at some point around productive relationships, sort of like applying the principles of productivity and systemizing two relationships and friendships and romantic relationships and stuff. I think that would be a fun thing to do. How do you have a productive? How do you do that?

I don't know yet, but I enjoy reading books about it. And I did an interview with John and Julie Gottman, who are like these world famous relationship therapists and researchers. And they're all about like systems and rituals and having a regular date night where you are having a monthly review of your relationship where you ask specific questions and stuff.

So me and my girlfriend for the last two years have been doing regular relationship reviews. We have like a little notion page with templates and stuff and it sort of spans back for the last two years and we can, we take notes on like what we learned from our relationship reviews. Nice. And I think there's stuff, cool stuff like that where

I like it because it applies the principles of productivity and systems and sort of my very logical brain to this area of life, relationships, which is ridiculously important, but which if left to my own devices, it would be very secondary to work. And I kind of want to start doing this with health and fitness as well. Yeah. Like understanding what are the most effective, productive, enjoyable ways of working out in the gym, for example. Yeah.

So maybe that's like the obsession side of things. Yeah. Finding a way to apply like the performance principles to these other different spheres. One of the Dr. John Gottman studies, he's Dr. Love, right? He's known as Dr. Love. Oh, he might be. Yeah. His lab is the Love Lab. So maybe that, yeah. So he did a really cool study that I think about loads and it's about the biggest indicator of relationship longevity. Do you know what it is?

I'm familiar with the four horsemen, like contempt and criticism and stuff. Oh, yeah. Okay. So it probably, it's probably all part of the same research, but he got a bunch of different couples into the Gottman lab, like the love lab. And he hooked them all up to different like things on their body to tell all their different like vitals. And he got them to just talk normally and answer questions about their lives together.

And then he sent them away and he assessed how they'd kind of performed and the different metrics that had come out. And he labeled these couples masters or disasters. And I don't remember exactly how long the study was. I think it was quite a while. I feel like it was like 10 years. And I don't know how many couples he did it with, but I feel like it was at least 30. But he was like 99% accurate on who would stay together and who would not stay together. Yeah.

And the biggest indicator of relationship longevity was resting heart rate when you're around each other.

And it's all to do with fight or flight. And it's like, if you're around someone who is putting you on edge, who's getting you like to go into that, like, oh, and because you feel like you're going to be attacked or you feel like something's going to happen or you feel like you're hiding something or something. Ultimately, there's too much cortisol running around your body and it just can't work out in the long term. And I think about this so much with my team members and I did at my agency as well because I

hot-headed founders or like entrepreneurs are just crazy, erratic, visionary. I've gone to this event. Someone's told me something that's going to change everything. And it's like, we're like this, but not all our team members are. But if we put them into fight or flight all the time, then we're just causing the same thing that ultimately causes relationships to break down. So it's like, how do I take all the really good things of being a hot-headed founder and having that impulsiveness, ambitious, ambitious,

And then, and not make it impact my team in a really bad way. So I quite like how it could be applied to work relationships as well. That's cool. Yeah. We found that since, you know, one of my team members, Angus is our general manager and sort of promoted him to CEO recently, which I mean, he was basically doing that anyway, but I've had a bunch of feedback from team, from the team being like, oh, the business feels so much more calm now that Angus is leading meetings. Yeah. And I'm like, I'm so glad that is exactly what we want. This is good. Yeah.

Have you read Principles, Ray Dalio? I flicked through it. It's just too long. Yeah. Is it worth reading? Yeah, it's really worth reading. So it's in three parts. The first part is all about him and his, I guess it's almost like his credibility to write the book. So it's like, why should I listen to these principles? And the second half is Life Principles. Sorry, the second third is Life Principles. And then the third third is Work Principles.

But why it's so interesting is because he's all about playing to everyone's strengths and he's all about how everyone's wired in a different way. And inspired by his book, we created for my team what we've called user manuals. Okay, yeah. The idea that...

My name's Jodie. I'm an ENTJ. This means this. This is how I communicate. This is what really matters to me. So like one of my like highest values is integrity. And if someone says to me like, oh yeah, I'll do that. And then they don't, I find it really hard to trust them again, even though they might have really flippantly said like, yeah, yeah, I'll do it. And they don't think like, oh, she's holding me to this. But in my head, it's like, but you said you'd do it. Why haven't you done it? Yeah.

And I know it's a weakness of mine, but it's like, it's there in the user manual to say, don't tell me you're going to do something unless you are actually going to do it. And it's just so helpful, other people knowing that. And then I read everyone else's with such just like interest because I want to know how other people think so that I can best play to their strengths. But that's been super useful in our team, understanding that

Someone does want the erraticness and someone is like, I hate conflict. I hate confrontation. I hate everything else because it does help you to realize how different everyone is. That's a good idea. We recently had a good conversation with Ramit Sethi's general manager,

And she was also like, have a user manual for everyone. Yeah. In particular for Ramit, because it's like, then people know what his like weirdnesses and quirks are. And I was like, this is a good idea. Yeah. Because we are all weird and quirky. Yeah. But it's okay. If you think of the team members that you have now, the team members that you've worked with in the past, and you imagine like the absolute star performers, like the ones that you would love to clone if you could wave a magic wand and clone them.

What are the characteristics of like the ultimate clonable team member? You just gave me a really good idea to clone with Coach Rock's AI, the general manager at my agency. I almost want to clone her so that you could ask, so that I could ask her stuff and she could help me sort stuff out, but I wouldn't have to bug her for that. So yeah, I might try that. But I think the clonable characteristics I think are ownership,

And closing loops, the ability to not just put something out there as an idea, but then to follow it through all the way. Or the ability to not just say, oh yeah, we should do that. But like actually doing it and then saying, I've done this. This is what I need from you. This loop is now closed. I like the tidiness of that. And then in the people who I've hired, because I probably, I must have done over like,

I've probably interviewed like 300 people or something like that, quite a lot. And a lot of the time, I think the ones who stand out, stand out because they're playing the long game. Even in that interview, even what they talk to you about your company, they're not asking you about what their salary is going to be in the next month. They're asking you about their plans for like

your company's plans for the next five years or something like that. And they're kind of bigger picture because I feel like that bigger picture will be applied to your company in such a better way. Nice. As a boss, what are some questions that if a team member asked you this question, you would think, whoa, that was a great question. Oh, I would love it if I came to someone with an idea that I thought was really, really, really, really good. And they said, so where does this fit in our priorities? Yeah.

So rather than just going with it, they're like, hang on, hold back. There's a CEO who I know who is quite an interesting character because he says that he should never have to write anything down.

Because as a CEO, it should be someone else taking the meeting notes. It should be someone else taking the actions and anything that he needs to do, they're going to follow him up later and they're going to tell him. So he just doesn't, he makes a point of not ever writing anything down. But one of the ways that he is managed by his team, because he's like a crazy visionary founder, is that someone will say to him, huh, Dave, that's a really, really good idea. But

If we do this idea, it's going to mean we can't do this idea. What do you want us to do? And then he's like, oh, yeah. Yeah. And it works all the time. So someone's ability to manage a crazy visionary would be very good. Nice.

Imagine someone finds your email because they contact you on your website and you probably get a bunch of random cold emails and stuff. What's the sort of cold email that you would get that would make you think, oh my God, this is incredible?

I quite like it when people ask me questions that they have tried to Google. They've tried to Google in my answers. So I've had very specific ones before where someone said, I've read your tweet about this and I'm wondering how I apply that to this very specific situation. Or, hey, you've said about your process for this, but how do I apply that to this? And they just want more applied to them and they...

probably tell me how they've tried to go about thinking about it, but they want it like verified. I think getting a second opinion on a conclusion that they have come to is nice. I like that. I get quite a few of those. And then a lot of times I get emails from people who want to be featured in Forbes, but I really like the ones who come to me with a very definite, we should write this title.

And I think it would do well because of this search volume. And there's, there have been people who've done that. They've like given me charts of things on Google and how they're going up and who they are as a credible source for contributing to an article on that. They're brilliant. Just very researched. Hmm.

Because anyone can just start an email and ask some random questions. But when they're so thought out, then they definitely do stand out. Yeah. So it sounds like something that in the Forbes case, something that makes it very easy for you to say yes to that. Yeah. Yeah. Hmm.

What about if someone's listening to this, they really vibe with you and they're like, oh, I really want to work for Jodie. Like what's the sort of cold email that would make you think I need to interview this person? Oh, interesting. Work for me. So on coachfox.ai, we do actually have a, like a careers thing for people to just stay on our radar for roles that we will probably hire in the future. What we used to do at my agency was we,

we got people to jump through a lot of hoops to join our team and have you read Influence? I'm guessing you've read Influence. Yeah, ages ago, yeah. It's all to do with how the harder it is to get into like a club or a team or something, the more you value being in it. So, yeah,

It's like with fraternities and sororities and how they have those crazy initiations and like getting into the Navy SEALs. It's like they go through that really famous hell week. And it's like the harder it is to get into somewhere, the more you'll be like, oh, I earned this. I value it. I'm going to make the most of it. So one thing that we used to do is we used to just say to people like impress us.

And then they would put together all sorts of incredible things. Like someone made a video, like PowerPoint thing. Someone kind of was a graphic designer and they made little characters of all our team and then they got them talking and they copied our brand. It was a bit like, oh my God, do you already work for us? So something that really makes someone stand out with how much effort they put in, I think. Yeah.

like the thing that you did for um our mutual friend derek sivers when you turned his blog post into a cool youtube video that kind of thing because it's like whoa this is cool nice that's good um yeah i'm i'm always curious like i want to ask more people these sorts of questions because i think you know if i if i look at the emails i get most of them are absolute trash and it's so tragic because i know that these people watch my videos and i know that they listen to the podcast and it's just like dear sir please give me some ideas on passive income and i'm like oh for

Come on. And then occasionally there is an email that's just such a breath of fresh air that's like, wow, I have to reply to this and invite you to grab breakfast with me like tomorrow morning because it's just so incredible. And you've just blown me away by the amount of effort that's gone into this. Yeah. And I wish more people would understand what it takes to send an email like that. Yep. Which often seems to be just going above and beyond in terms of effort. I really like your point around being impressive because you can, you know, one thing, you

You know, there's a friend of mine who's recently applying to a bunch of jobs and he was doing the thing of just like sending a CV out to like 5,000 different places. And I was like, dude, come on, like find the two or three companies that you really want to work at and just like make a video. I guarantee no one else will make a video. It's not that hard. You can take my Skillshare class on editing, make a video and I guarantee they're going to send it around in their Slack channels and then you'll get in front of the right people because no one else is going to do that. And he was like, no, that would be weird. Like I'm going to apply through the traditional channels. It's like, you know, they've got an application job page on the website and

I was like, okay, fair enough. You want to queue up with the 5,000 other people, then that's fine. So, I mean, a lot of it comes down to less but better. Taking the shotgun approach compared to the scattergun approach. The sniper approach, I guess. The sniper approach. Yeah, taking the sniper approach and not the scattergun approach. But maybe it also comes down to being scared of success.

If someone writes you a really, really good email, then you're going to invite them to go to breakfast with you. And then they have to meet you. And then they're like, they don't know how they're going to handle that. And then everyone's going to be like, oh my God, now you've got this famous friend. People that they know are going to like feel like they've gone out of touch with them. Maybe they're scared of success. Maybe they're sending you really bad emails because they actually don't really want a response. Because then they can say, oh, I emailed him and he didn't respond. Poor me. Yeah, maybe. Yeah.

Ask them. Send that back. Are you scared of success? Is that why you sent such a bawdy word to me? Because I've been thinking really hard about why you sent me such a bad email. And this is the only explanation. I think it's maybe also a slight lack of empathy. Because empathy matters a lot. Because if you really put your mind to what do you... Like if I picture you in front of your inbox, it's like you can...

The email almost writes itself because you can think about what kind of thing is going to make you go, huh, yeah, that resonates. There have been a few emails that I've gotten where it's been like, hey, Ali, you're probably reading this on the toilet right now, in which case, happy pooing or something. I'm just like, you're absolutely right. I now have to read the rest of the email because they would have... They know you too well. They know me too well. Where are you? Where are the cameras? Yeah, exactly. Are there any, changing gears slightly, are there any sort of systems or frameworks that you apply to your relationship that have been helpful?

Every Saturday morning, my husband and I go for coffee and pastries. Oh, cute. Yeah, it's really good. The pastries, we go to a different place and it's like a, yeah, it's a nice ritual. And that is where we...

debrief the week and we've got it's very structured but it's kind of fun structure so we have a um a google form and it's got like a kind of updates and progress on these different things and it's like his sport my sport our business um different stuff and also travel plans because we both we live out our suitcase we um have been kind of nomading for about two years now and we we normally know where we are about 10 weeks ahead but no further okay so um

So sometimes we think we're going to be somewhere for a certain month and then it's like, oh no, we don't really fancy that place anymore. So we'll kind of update that. But it's really nice because it's such a way to reflect on the week, think about improvements, but also just hear from each other because we spend a lot of time...

doing the stuff, but not necessarily taking that step back and then being like, well, did I enjoy doing this stuff? Or do I want to do more of this? Or how can I help you become better at CrossFit? How can you help me become better at powerlifting and everything else? So yeah, that's a big, that's a big part of it. And I think going back to the Dr. Love, John Gottman thing, really making sure that we don't put each other on edge. And part of that is like,

I think not bringing someone else your drama and being very clear to not bring someone else your drama is like a thing. Because I think with, if you look at films, TV shows about like husband and wife couples, often husbands are just portrayed as these like useless characters. Yeah.

And I feel like that might have impacted me at some point, or I might have started to almost have this impression of what a husband is. You know, like someone who is a bit rubbish and they...

they don't shut drawers and they don't plan stuff and they forget your birthday and all that stuff. And if you believe what the films tell you, then you could, you could slip into that and you could just think, oh, mine's useless. But then you're like, well, actually mine's not useless. So I don't want to treat him like that just because the films tell me I should. So it's more self-awareness and trying to, trying to not put someone else on edge with my drama.

Nice. Jodie, I think that's a great place to end this. Thank you so much. If someone has gotten to the end of the nearly two hours that we've been talking, where can they find more about you and your work? So the main place to find me is on Twitter. So I mentioned that I think success is all about

doing really cool stuff and then teaching other people how to do that same cool stuff. And so I constantly share what I've learned, what I'm passing on. And at the moment, it's a lot of chat GPT prompts. It's a lot of how to build an AI business. If you want to find me on Twitter, I am at Jodie Cook. So J-O-D-I-E underscore Cook. And tell me that you found me on here and I will happily send you my latest video.

course blog whatever it might be um at the moment actually there's a 250 chat gpt prompts for entrepreneurs about productivity and growing a business but depending on when you listen to this watch this it might be something else amazing um but yeah definitely find me there say hey be really good to hear from anyone who this is vibe with brilliant and we'll put links to all of the things in the video description in the show notes thank you so much thank you

All right, so that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are gonna be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the iTunes store. It really helps other people discover the podcast. Or if you're watching this in full HD or 4K on YouTube, then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode. That would be awesome. And if you enjoyed this episode, you might like to check out this episode here as well, which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode. So thanks for watching.

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