Lessons - Why Learning Everything Is Killing Your Business | Pat Flynn - Smart Passive Income Founder

In this lessons episode, uncover how just-in-time information transforms productivity by shifting your focus from passive learning to purposeful action. Learn why fear often disguises itself as preparation, how time-blocking protects your focus, and why consistent effort beats perfect timing when building lasting success. This is the perfect example of just-in-time information. Like, you lived it. And that's it's such a powerful idea. I feel like-I feel like I haven't been the perfect proponent of this my entire career, my entire entrepreneurial journey, but I can tell you that when I- when I sort of have realized that everything I want is on the other side of action, I spend way less time learning and way more time doing. And I've actually even listened. There's nothing wrong with podcasts. I can never tell you not to listen to podcasts. I'd be shooting myself in the foot. But there's a point where you have to stop listening to podcasts and you have to start doing shit. Tim Ferriss is so good. I love that. If this were easy, what would it look like? Another thing that I think entrepreneurs get in their head about is- or the reason why they accumulate so much knowledge is because they're scared of taking action, or they're scared of a negative result. Tim Ferriss has another idea that actually fixes that it's fear-setting. It's understanding what's the worst possible outcome that could ever happen. And actually understanding is it likely that it's going to take place and more often than not the answer is no. Like you go to the extreme, right? I'm sure you know this concept, but it's like, okay, if the business doesn't work out and I can't afford rent, you know, the worst worst worst is I'm homeless, my wife leaves me, that's never going to happen. And then when you start to realize that the worst case scenario is never really going to happen, then it's a lot easier to take action, which is really what you have to do. We sort of spoken about how just in time information is very different from the way most of us were taught to learn. But if you were going to look back and see how you made the transition from just in case information to just in time information, if you're going to give the most useful idea, so somebody can start to shift the way that they think and the way that they learn and the way that they do, what would that idea be for somebody that is right now stuck in this knowledge hoarding mode of their life? And again, I mentioned before who listen to this show. It's people that are in businesses, are building their first business, or their executives, but a lot of executives that listen to this show, they would love to start their thing, but they're scared shitless to do it for a variety of reasons like we just discussed. So how do you switch your thinking? I think thinking about the why behind the draw to learn so much for everybody. It's different, but in general, it typically comes down to FOMO. We don't want to miss out on that next thing that everybody's talking about. And so we get drawn to it. And now we have squirrel syndrome and we're kind of running all over the place. We have this fear that if by saying no to that thing that's coming across our plate, even though we might not need it right now that we're going to miss out on something. And just we as humans, we don't want to miss out. We don't want to be left behind or or or not be a part of the crowd. It's just it's just human nature, whether you know you're doing it or not. So there was a strategy that was put into place a while back called JOMO that what there was even a book, I think called JOMO, which is joy of missing out, but I don't like that. Like that's just kidding ourselves. You don't feel joy because you're missing out on stuff. You're just kind of pretending. So I have a different strategy and that is the joy of opting out by you saying I see that there. I recognize it, but I'm going to say no, not yet. I'll get to that later because this thing I've already said yes to or this project that I'm working on is the thing that I'm focusing on right now. That is what's important to me. It almost reups the energy to the thing you've already said yes to. And one strategy is to get around that because you'll still have FOMO create your own digital shoebox for those things or maybe a natural shoebox, meaning if you come across something it's not relevant to what it is you're learning next, put it in a notion folder, put it in every note, put it in a notepad, whatever it might be. Now it's out of your brain, but you still know you could go back to it if you wanted to 98% of the time you will never ever ever go back to that thing. It's simply a strategy for you to finally move forward into that into that thing that you're doing. The second component of making progress is giving yourself time to do this. And there's a strategy in the book I call time blocking. You may have heard of time blocking before it's where you literally put a block of time in your calendar and you say what you're going to do there. And that's fine. But I want to use time blocking as like a shield. Like you're literally blocking out other things that could happen during that time. And doing everything in your power to within that time, just focus on that thing to get into that flow state where you're starting to challenge yourself a little bit more and get a little bit deeper into that thing because you are literally shielding everything else from around that time. And for different people that means different things that might mean asking your secretary or assistant to say like, Hey, for the next two hours, like no calls, like I have to be in here by myself for the next two hours to learn this thing. It might mean asking your spouse or people around the house to just kind of understand that during this time, you're going to be all in on the thing you're going all in. And however, you want to balance that with time that you're all in with your family as well. That's one important thing I've learned as a parent and a husband as an entrepreneur is like, I used to blur those lines between personal and business all the time. And it was not fair to either of those parts of my life. And so to compartmentalize and go all in on my family as much as I'm compartmentalizing and going all in on my business is really key. And just see those things on the calendar month by month. I can make sure that I'm balancing it as well as I can. One strategy I have for a lot of high performers that if they want to fit in something, but they're also so busy is similar to how when you receive a paycheck, you pay yourself first, right? You grow your nest egg. You pay yourself first before you pay anybody else or any bills. You take a little chunk out of that paycheck and put it into something that grows and grows and grows over time. You could do the same thing with your time on these separate projects or inspirations you have. So perhaps it might mean for a period of time waking up a little bit earlier. I did that when I was writing the book because I knew that I would not have any distractions before the kids got up. And I could just wake up for me before I wake up for somebody else or some other things and tasks that I have to do. And that's really important as well. I mean, I could go on and on and on. It's got about different strategies. I mean, there's the idea of giving yourself an allocated amount of time to have that focus on one specific thing, right? You might give yourself if you're going to experiment with going on YouTube and doing shorts or reels or TikToks and you're like, OK, I wanted to give this a shot. Instead of just going like, OK, I'm going to try it for a couple days and see what happens if nothing happens. And then I guess I'm not good. You need to give it a shot. So what I did recently, this was 300 days ago, about 300 days ago. I said, I'm going to experiment on YouTube shorts. I have a Pokemon YouTube channel that's at one and a half million subs. It's killing it, dude. I saw that. That's incredible. Thank you. It's a separate story. But I decided to start a shorts channel separate from that still Pokemon. I open a pack every day and it's either a good hit or a bad hit. And I just wanted to see if I could get some momentum on the algorithm there. I didn't link to it or mention it at all. And I said, I'm going to do this for 60 days. And if I get to the end of 60 days, I go daily for 60 days, then I've won. It doesn't matter what the results are. I've given it a shot. And I'm going to base my win and my happiness, my joy about this on the fact that I showed up every day for 60 days. And that's going to be the win. Not if I get a lot of use or not because you can't always control that, but you can control you showing up every day. And so what happened in the beginning, went live daily on TikTok. And I also repurposed it for shorts and reels. And it would take me like 45 minutes, but I found the time I woke up a little bit earlier or stayed up a little bit later. Started to batch process some of them to do multiple of them in one time or in one sitting. And after 30 days, I only had about 200 or 300 views per video. And old me would have said, by then, man, it's been a month, like I'm not seeing any momentum here, like I'm a failure. I'm bad at this. But I was only halfway through the experiment. 60 days no matter what was going to be the win for me. But not only that, I did see improvement in my editing by putting the reps in. I went from 45 minutes per video to 10. And so even if I moved on to something else, I will have gained some skills and have acquired some ways to get better at other things that would have involved my business and other things that I have going on. Now day 35 comes around. One of those videos hits 750,000 views. And I'm like, oh my gosh, and all the videos start to surge up. And today that channel that was started just about 300 days ago that I didn't link to from any of my other properties has now just recently crossed cumulatively to billion views where at 1.6 million subscribers, it is a five figure income on its own from ads and all those kinds of things. It's allowed for opportunities like the Detroit Lions football team invited me to come and open a pack on their field because they open a pack their social media guy opens a pack before every game for good luck. He reached out to me and we connected and I was able to fly out to Detroit and open a pack of Pokemon and get to know people who work for the Detroit Lions and build a relationship with them. And that's just one of many things and people that I've connected with just as a result of showing up getting the reps in knowing that it wasn't going to be forever because there was a stopping point. And that's important too. Like nothing else mattered during those 60 days other than the work I was already committed to. I wasn't allowing new projects to insert themselves. This was a this was like a Petri dish that I was able to focus on. And it worked. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.