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This is The Art of Charm.
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Learn everything you need to know to crush it in business, love, and life.
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Welcome to The Art of Charm.
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I m Jordan Harbinger.
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The Art of Charm brings together the best thought leaders, teachers, and exceptional individuals to teach you how to be a top performer in life, love, and at work.
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Imagine having a mix of experienced mentors teaching you their expertise
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packing decades of research, testing, and tough lessons into a curriculum.
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We may not have all the answers, but we definitely have all the questions.
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Make sure to stay up to date with the Art of Charm and get some great stuff that we don t or can t share on the show by signing up at theartofcharm.com.
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That s where we ll email you our Fundamentals Toolkit.
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It covers topics like body language and nonverbal communication, persuasion, business networking,
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public speaking, negotiation, and a whole lot more.
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I m also doing regular videos with drills and exercises to help you move forward every single week.
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We ve got live programs running every single week here in Los Angeles, California.
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Guys come from all over the world, which shows that no matter where you are,
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You can make it here if you want to learn and grow.
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And I want to encourage you to join our social capital challenge at theartofcharm.com slash challenge.
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This challenge will make you a better networker and a better connector.
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Oh, and if you want to have accountability or want to invite a friend or two, go to theartofcharm.com slash challenge or have them text charmed to 33444 and they can join the challenge too.
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Today we re talking with my friend John Acuff.
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He wrote a book called Do Over.
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It is a great book.
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We re gonna talk a few topics from that book.
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We re gonna bring out our bingeification, why it s ruining your hustle, why hustle is an overused buzzword, and why you should focus and not frenzy when you do hustle, why most people shouldn t be entrepreneurs, and some practical exercises to find out not only who s in your network, but what skills you already know to help narrow down your career path and help you find meaningful work.
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So enjoy this one with John Acuff.
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So your book came out a while ago, huh?
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Yeah, it came out in April.
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How did it do, or how is it doing, or how s it going?
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It did great.
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I mean, I m fascinated about the publishing industry and that I think it s five years behind the recording industry.
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Oh, I m sure.
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And so in Nashville, I ve had to watch every musician friend of mine completely reinvent themselves like four or five times.
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And I think authors are headed that way too.
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It sold more last week than it did in the fourth week, and so we ve seen consistent sales.
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So I m excited about that, but I m continually learning how hard it is to sell books and how you have to actually do that.
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Oh, did they not tell you that writing and publishing a book was not a great way to make money?
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Did you not get that memo?
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Well, this is number five, so I ve known that.
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You re a slow learner, John.
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That s the problem.
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Yeah, I m a slow learner.
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Well, this is the first I ve done as a pure entrepreneur, where it s just me out of my own.
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And I worked with Penguin, so I had a huge publisher.
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But it s just you learn all these lessons about just how to sell things and the expectations of an online consumer.
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It s been a crash course in that.
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I ve loved it, but it s definitely been a cold water of like, oh boy, I have to do a lot of stuff.
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Yeah, no kidding.
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I was talking to a friend of mine who s got a handful of bestsellers under his belt, which is great.
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I mean, not many people can really say that, actually.
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And I said, what s your advice?
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Because he was trying to encourage me to write a book, which may or may not ever happen.
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And he goes, but here s the thing.
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just write one, don t write five.
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You just need one, and then you re the best seller, and then you can do the speaking, and you got this, and you got that.
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You don t need to write five different books.
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He s like, I kind of regret doing it, which I thought was surprising.
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That is surprising.
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What I regret is, and I m getting smarter about how long it takes me to write a good book.
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It s easy to write a bad book and have it be 80 pages and say what authors do, where they go,
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You re too busy to read a long book, so I made it short for you, which is code for I m lazy.
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And I have an idea that was really a magazine article that I tried to turn into a book.
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And so I m learning that I can t do an amazing book every year.
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I just haven t lived enough life for that.
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It s not, you know, we talked about that in our pre kind of phone call about the idea of instant experts and actually creating value.
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And, and that s what I really like about your show.
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Like I really like even the first three or four sentences you say at the beginning of the show reflects such hard work and such brevity and on purpose words.
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Like I just, I absolutely love that.
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Like you can see the craft you put into the show.
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And I think that s a great example of how to do a podcast.
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Well, thank you very much.
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You know what you re good at?
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Giving compliments, and I like that about you.
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Well, I was just listening to the Hugh episode the other day, Antarctica, you know.
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Oh, yeah.
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Hugh Culver.
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Yeah.
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And it was just fascinating to hear the way you ask questions and the way you re thinking about stuff.
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And I don t know, you won t let guests say things that are just make them up stuff where like they act like it s normal.
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It s not like when he said, yeah, I was sleeping at my office every night and then their employees would come in and I d be jealous.
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And you re like, well, so like, did you not have access to a bed?
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Like you kind of said, you pulled at the thread a little bit, which got more information.
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I really appreciate podcasts that do stuff like that, because I don t think everyone does.
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Oh yeah, one of the things that you talk about a lot online, from the research that I ve done, and that I gleaned from our pre-interview call as well, is that not only are you kind of anti-make-stuff-up,
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if you will, but you put a lot of work, surprise, surprise, into the craft that you create as well, and you ve put a lot of work into figuring out what it is that you re good at, which most people never actually do.
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Yeah, and I was even thinking about that.
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I went back through our pre-notes and, you know, in the form I filled out and you said, I want you to describe yourself in one sentence.
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And I read the sentence and I was like, that s gross.
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That s not what I do.
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I wrote, I share intuitive ideas and counterintuitive ways to help generate life change.
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Like anyone could say that.
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And that s the sentence.
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Like when you do a podcast interview, you have to get behind the sentence because they re going to give you that, like, here s a sentence I say, and it comes out naturally.
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Yeah, the soundbite.
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PR people, they get so lathered up, that s my PC version of what you know what I mean, they get so lathered up when people have soundbites, but then if you think about it for like five seconds, which is the whole point is you re not supposed to, you go, wait, that doesn t mean anything at all.
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And 80% of motivational stuff, if you pull the thread, you go, wait a second, like I saw somebody selling an online copywriting course the other day, they have a million Instagram followers, they probably bought a lot of them.
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But there were typos in the first sentence.
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And it was I ll teach you how to get into your copywriter.
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And I was like, that makes no sense.
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Here s the way I look at it, because my background s in advertising.
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My favorite thing was the thumb test.
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And the whole idea is if somebody put their thumb over your logo, would every other part of the ad shout out who you were?
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So when I put my thumb over a Nike swoosh, the rest of the ad goes, this is Nike.
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The photography, the intensity of the headline, whatever.
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So I d say the same thing about your podcast.
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If I put my thumb over your face or the name Art of Charm, would the topics, would the type of questions, would the type of interviews, would they shout out, this is something Jordan s created?
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They would.
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And so when I gave you that sentence, I share intuitive ways and counterintuitive way, whatever, anyone could have said that.
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Like you could put the thumb over John Acuff and that could be anybody where I think what I really do is I use humor to put handles on ideas so that people can use them to change their lives.
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Like that s what I like to do.
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That s cool, I like that, because it provides a cool visual, putting a handle on an idea, because man, I might have to steal some part of that, because I really do dig that.
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Most people who provide ideas, one of the chief issues that I have with it, and you can hear this in the shows if you ve been listening for a while,
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is that they don t put the proverbial handle on it.
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So it s like, you know what, you just need to find your passion and then just focus and just hustle.
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And you re like, cool, that s a bunch of really vague stuff.
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There s no handle.
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I can t grip on it and can t grab it, hold of it, and do anything with it because it s platitude or because the idea might be really good and it might be really specific, but there s no action step.
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Yeah, it s the, you know, when you dream, the universe will open up its arms and embrace your dream.
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And you go, Oh, that sounds like a great ad for a candle.
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But that doesn t do anything for me on a Tuesday.
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How do I actually use that to get a job promotion?
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Like, and so that s what I like to do.
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So like, when somebody, you know, I would never say, Hey, if you watch a lot of TV,
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You won t be able to progress because people would tune that out.
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The way the brain s wired, there s this part of it called Broca, and Broca s whole job is to filter out ideas it s already heard and bucket them.
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So when you go to a New Mexican restaurant, you immediately go, this reminds me of Tito s back home, and you bucket it and your brain can stop thinking about it.
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So, there s this concept called surprising broca that this guy Roy H. Williams has where you ve got to present stuff in fresh ways or people won t engage with it.
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So, instead, I do an idea about binge-watching TV.
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I d point out, you know, 20 years ago, the word binge was an insult.
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It was a bad word with a negative connotation.
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Now, you go to Best Buy and the aisles say binge-worthy TV.
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And like, you know, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, if you went to Blockbuster and rented nine movies, even the guy
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at the counter would go, is everything all right at home, dude?
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Are you okay?
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But now when you binge watch House of Cards all Saturday and come in on Monday at work and go, hey, I binge watched House of Cards, people recommend other shows.
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So I ll back into the idea of, hey, part of the reason you re not getting where you want to go is because you re giving Netflix all your time.
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Or I ll say, you know, I m not against fantasy football, but don t tell me you can t hustle on your business, and then show me your intense research you did on a third string backup punter and the wind coming out of Chicago this weekend.
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Like, you have time and you have hustle, you re just not applying it to things that matter.
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That s interesting.
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Have you actually found people like that?
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Because I get that they re passionate about the football thing, but it s almost kind of sad if they don t also have a really awesome job that uses those same skills.
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Oh, yeah.
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I mean, I think there s a lot of people like that.
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Gallup s latest poll is 90% of Americans are disengaged from work.
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You meet the same people I do where you go, what do you want to do?
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And they tell you and then you go, what actions are you currently doing about that?
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And they go, Oh, man, someday I m really gonna, you know, like, Oh, I m just too busy.
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Yeah, so I meet people that have ideas about what they do, but aren t doing any actions around them.
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If I said, how much TV do you watch in a week?
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Because the average American watches 35, according to Nielsen, they won t have a number for me.
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So we love to not know the numbers so that we can live in denial and then go, oh, if I wasn t so busy.
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Where if we actually did a calendar diet, we would go, oh, no.
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I guess I use humor to say hard things in easy ways.
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So when I go talk at a college, I ll tell them,
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hey, you re not gonna get your dream job when you graduate.
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You know what, as a matter of fact, I hope you don t, because you won t even know how to understand it or appreciate it.
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I don t want you to peak at 23.
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Your first job s job is to teach you how to have a job, because you re gonna trade three months of vacation for eight days a year.
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That s a sharp curve.
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Let s talk about how you do that.
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Yeah, no kidding.
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In retrospect, I should have had many more first jobs than I had, because I deserve to get fired a lot.
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It took me 15 years to understand I m unemployable.
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I was meant to help other people be career-focused.
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I needed to be an entrepreneur and I needed to be growing something.
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I love big companies.
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We tend to glorify the entrepreneur in our culture right now, where people are like, if you re not a full-time entrepreneur, you re not chasing a dream.
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I love big companies.
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I don t have a problem with that at all.
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But yeah, now that I m my own boss and know how to work a little bit more, and I just want to write them apology notes and be like, hey, remember that time in the meeting where I ignored everybody and was super aloof and acted like I was doing you a favor by showing up for the job you were paying me money for?
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Sorry.
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Yeah, I know.
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I wouldn t even know who to apologize to.
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I don t have enough cards to reach everybody I failed.
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Oh, just like a bullhorn.
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Just like one episode, it could be like Jordan apologizes, and it could just be like you going through a list.
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Yeah, yeah, be the most boring show ever, and be really long as well.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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I like what you said about disagreeing with the whole entrepreneur, everybody s chasing a dream thing.
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I have mentioned this, and me and Jason have mentioned this before on the show, we really disagree with that, because I think most people should not be entrepreneurs.
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It s tougher than getting a regular job, it s not as stable, there s a lot more stress involved, and you ve gotta do this
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weird thing where you actually build value in yourself.
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I think Cal Newport calls it career capital, where you bring something that s unique, you put it with something else that s kind of unique, or at least developed, and you create some value in yourself that people are willing to pay for.
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And that s a very deliberate, very difficult process that most people shouldn t really have to do in order to create their own business.
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Most people are really good enough working really hard and developing one or two skills that make them valuable to a bigger company.
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They don t need to start their own thing.
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or they re wasting their life s potential.
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I really disagree with the trendiness of entrepreneurship.
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I think it s kind of just a rejection of having a boss or working for someone else.
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I feel almost like it s been made famous by people who are doing really amazing stuff, the Elon Musks of the world, which is great, but I think it s been hijacked by internet marketers to sell people crap.
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Yeah, and I think we share the same belief about the idea that if you ve only done it once and it was for your life, you shouldn t sell a course indicating it ll happen for everyone.
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Oh, yeah.
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That s part of the ego to me of like, if your test case is one person, and it was you and then you go, and we often go back and create these steps we didn t actually take.
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Because we go, hey, we re going to sell a course, and I made X amount of dollars, or I did this thing, and if you ll follow these steps, you ll do it too.
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And that misses so much of the uniqueness of your story, so much of it that was outside of your control, the things that happened.
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Yeah, that s where I kind of get stuck on that.
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And I get stuck on the idea that anyone can do anything.
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Like, I ll never be in the NFL, Jordan.
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That wasn t a lack of, you know, skill on my part.
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I saw a picture of The Rock the other day.
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It was when he was eight, and it was he and his dad, and his dad was like 6 4 , like 280, and was a gigantic wrestler.
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Like, it s crazy to think, you know what, if I had just read enough positive affirmations, if I had done enough push-ups and wanted it enough, I d probably be just like The Rock.
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No, like he had opportunities that were different than the ones I had.
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And that s not a bad thing.
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That s a great thing.
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And so, yeah, I don t know.
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You and I, I think we could talk forever about the dangers and what happens when people buy into something that promises something that can t deliver.
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And they feel like I ve got to be an entrepreneur or I ve got to write a book.
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Some people ask me, should I write a book or should everyone write a book?
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And I always say no.
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And I think they re insulted by that.
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But what I mean is
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I shouldn t record an album.
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I shouldn t sculpt.
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But with books, it s this weird thing where everybody feels like, I should have a book.
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I saw this entrepreneur that has a book, and you go, do you like writing?
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No.
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Have you ever wanted to write?
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No.
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Do you think you ll write something good?
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then don t write a book.
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But I really want that blue check mark on Facebook.
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No, that s a terrible reason to write a book.
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Whenever somebody says a book is a great way to build authority, I think it s also a great way to write a terrible book.
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If that s your motivation, I do agree that a book is a business card in some ways, like having a book open some doors, but I don t know if it s the best start to a book to approach it from that way.
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I think you create really thin books that ultimately don t do a lot of good.
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Yeah, there s a lot of that out here now.
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It s kind of the internet marketer plan.
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One, start email list, put out content, video, written, whatever.
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Two, publish book, e-book, do webinars.
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Then three, create best seller using list to prop yourself up in the list for speaking career.
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No, and five is teach people how to do what you just did.
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Right.
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Yes.
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Yeah.
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Rinse and repeat.
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So like, and then like six is teach people how to teach people to do what you just did.
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And then seven, you know, and it just kind of it onions on itself.
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I think for me, like I m trying my first like foray into kind of a 30 day like challenge.
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And I did it first with 10,000 people.
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people for free because I wanted to see if it was worth anything.
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I ve spent 18 months on figuring out, okay, what really works?
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How do people really change their lives?
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And then I ll do it.
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So I think there s ways.
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I don t think either one of us is saying throw out the bait with the bathwater.
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I think there s ways to do it right and there s ways to do it quick and easy.
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And I always tell people if there s no shortcut and if someone tells you there s a shortcut, they re usually trying to sell you that shortcut.
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Of course, that s always how it goes.
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And again, I wanna be super clear.
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We re not saying that everybody out there teaching stuff on the web is full of crap.
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It s just that usually people that come on this show talk about how much work goes into everything.
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And the reason we do the long format show like this is because people can t just get three quick tips from somebody who s been through a lot of stuff without getting the full backstory.
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Otherwise, we re doing the whole story an injustice.
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I mean, you spent 17 years in the regular workforce, working for regular companies,
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building career capital, learning valuable lessons, making a lot of mistakes.
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Now your goal is to digest some of that and bring it back to us in a way where we don t have to maybe spend 17 years doing it, but it doesn t mean you don t have to spend zero years.
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It means we might need a half a decade or just a decade.
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Yeah, and you re always going to keep learning.
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That s what s interesting about life.
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I ll turn 40 this year, and I know when I turn 50, I ll look back on some of these ideas I thought I knew and say, wow, the things I thought I knew at 40.
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That s how you want it to go.
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If you re going to grow, you want to constantly be able to look back and go, okay, these three things are right, but I had no idea about these other five because I hadn t experienced them, or I had a really small sample.
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Like, I wrote a book called Quitter that talked about the side hustle and how you should always do something on the side until it becomes large enough to become your full-time thing, if that s the path you re going to take.
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And then I started to meet people that would say, hey, you know what, I want to be a cattle rancher.
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And I can t get one head of cattle in my apartment complex and grow it slowly on the side.
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That s an all or nothing where I have to go work at a cattle ranch during the summers, and here s that process.
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And it changed my opinion of going, oh, you know what?
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I can see some gray in this black and white thing I presented.
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That s a really good pushback.
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And so, if I ever did an update on that, I d incorporate that.
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And so, yeah, my hope is you keep learning.
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But yeah, neither one of us are saying that classes are bad.
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I think they can be awesome.
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I just think like anything that s going to be great is going to take great time.
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And I was thinking about that.
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I just did a book tour.
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I did 15 cities.
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We had like 4,000 people sign up for it.
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And I have this photo of the first time I did an event.
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The first time I did my own event, it was a meetup.
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It was the cockiest thing to think I needed a meetup.
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All I had was a blog.
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I didn t even have a book.
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I don t know why I thought people were going to come be in a room to see me.
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And I thought there would be a ton of people, again, super cocky, naive, whatever word.
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And I convinced my in-laws that it d be huge.
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They printed a thousand stickers, like I brought all these Skittles.
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And then I got there and two people came.
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And one person was my friend who came to encourage me and the other guy who came was just this father who walked in and said, my daughter reads your blog.
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I don t call her.
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And he put me on the phone with her and we had like an awkward 30 second conversation and he left.
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And I had a friend take a photo of the event of me and all these chairs and I posted it because it was this huge failure.
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And it became this huge post for me about being honest.
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But then I was thinking about doing a post comparing it to what happened with the 4,000.
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But I want to be honest about it.
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Because what you usually do if you re a motivational guy is you go, look how far I ve come.
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And you can too if you do these exact steps.
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But the truth of it is, Jordan, I worked with this guy Dave Ramsey for three years who has a huge platform, gigantic platform.
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And a big part of why I get to do what I do now, I haven t worked there for two years, is that he exposed me to millions of people.
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And so it would be really unfair for me and that story to leave that out and go, hey, and the second step is work for a guy who has a radio station with seven million listeners.
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Right, because you can t sell that.
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Yeah, you can t sell that.
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But that s the honest truth.
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So I think life is curvier than we want to admit sometimes.
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And I love when people will say,
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Hey, this is how it worked for me, and here s how it s worked for some other people, and I think you should look at it through the filter of you.
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That s what I always tell people.
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When you listen to a podcast, when you read one of my books, read it through the filter of you.
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That s what I don t like about productivity books.
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A lot of times, they re written by people who are naturally good at that, and they go, I get up at 3 a.m., and I have a kale smoothie that s 4.7 ounces, and I don t eat anything but fruit until 2 in the afternoon, and then I run for a triathlon.
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Just do that.
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and you go, duh, and you go, well, okay, that s not exactly how I m naturally wired, and I have five kids, and you know, so I try to be kind of open about that.
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I think that s, you have to be open about that, otherwise you become so unrelatable, nobody can learn anything from you.
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I want to also back up and highlight the Dave Ramsey experience that you had, because I think what it could accidentally teach us is that, oh, well, you need a big break.
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Everybody needs a big break.
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And I think a lot of times big breaks can be overrated, but I think other times, like building a platform, it was a very necessary part of development.
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A lot of people will write in and say, well, you know, your show s huge, it makes sense, you were on Sirius XM Satellite Radio for three and a half years in New York City, that went all over the US and Canada.
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We didn t get that many fans from that.
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So I m very open about that, because I don t want people who are also starting their own thing to go, well, then I have to get on this radio show, and I gotta do this, and this has to be big.
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There s nothing wrong with incremental growth if it s actually possible.
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That s where it s the mix.
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It s the mix of moments like that, but then really hard work for incremental growth.
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You know, just like I do, if you had, after that show ended, not done anything for six months, maybe even three months, it s gone.
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The vapor of that fades really quickly.
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I heard Louis C.K.
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said that.
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Louis C.K.
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said fame resets every year.
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And I love that.
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I think momentum does, too, maybe even shorter than that.
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And so, yeah, you don t need a break.
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And the things I thought were breaks didn t end up being breaks.
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Like hitting the New York Times list was amazing.
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And I ve done it twice and I loved it.
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But it s not like after that, like just money shows up in your driveway and opportunities are just like, hey, now there s a secret coat you get to wear.
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and you smoke pipes, because it did some things, but it didn t make it easy.
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Yeah, I m with you.
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I try to balance that, where you don t need this break, and if you wait for this break, it never ends up coming.
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The things that have changed my life the most, I didn t know in the moment.
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Like what?
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Okay, so a friend of mine that I worked with at Autotrader, I was a senior content designer.
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This is back in the day where everybody had the word designer in their title.
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I was a copywriter essentially.
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And a friend of mine said, Hey, I think you should blog.
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I think you should write a blog.
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And his name was Ryan Sweet.
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And I was like, Oh, you think?
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And so I started this blog, and that launched this whole experience.
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But again, it was one conversation with him in a cubicle one day as we were viewing work, and it was a conversation, and it pushed me down this path.
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At the moment, I didn t go back and call my wife and say, Ryan just said something that s going to launch me down the craziest 10-year path of my life.
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But it s little things like that that kind of pushed me in the direction.
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The reason I got to go work with Dave Ramsey is one of his employees read my blog, and they always have speakers come every Wednesday.
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And he said, we should have this guy come speak here.
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It was the second time I ve ever spoken professionally.
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And they just took a shot on me.
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And that s what started that.
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So it was little things that at the moment I didn t predict.
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But now I can look back on and go, oh, here s a great example.
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So with Penguin.
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We went through like 40 iterations with the book cover when we were trying to design it.
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And there was this really talented designer named Zoe who designed it.
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And when I went up to New York to meet with them, I said, Hey, can I tour the design department?
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I d love to meet Zoe.
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Like she did such a great job.
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And I genuinely was interested, you know, and I took photos of the design she had done and I posted online.
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And after the book came out, she ended up leaving the company and said, Hey, I m having my own do over.
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And I posted about her on Instagram and said, hey, if you ever want to hire a great designer, here s Zoe.
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And I had a senior editor at Penguin later tell me, hey, the reason I kind of looked at you differently, the reason I thought about you differently, the moment it changed for me was when I saw you celebrate Zoe.
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And she said, authors that come in don t go tour the design department.
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They don t see the Zoes.
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And that meant a lot to me.
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And I didn t do it as a play.
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I wasn t like, okay, if I do this thing, somebody, I don t know who s important.
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We ll see it.
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I did it because it was fun.
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And I ve been Zoe where somebody else supported me, you know, on a bigger platform than I had.
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And again, that was a little thing that changed my relationship with a big publisher.
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And so that s what I mean by the little things you don t see coming.
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Yeah, I think that s important to note.
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It goes in line a lot with what we teach at AOC about creating relationships and for the sake of creating relationships and not looking at what you can get out of things.
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Yeah.
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And people know that they feel the difference immediately.
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If they feel like you re creating a transaction versus a relationship, they can tell.
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And, you know, you ve had to deal with this too.
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It s interesting when you get a platform, the stuff you get asked to do, it s, you know, I always tell people, friends help friends, you know, friends do favors for friends, not strangers.
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And so, you know, never start a friendship asking for a favor, start with friendship.
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And it s little things like that, especially on the internet that makes such a big difference.
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I know a lot of people write in and tweet and Facebook and just complain because they don t know what to do.
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in their career or even what they want to do with their career, they don t really know what the relationships are that they have, speaking of creating friendships versus transactions.
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And you ve got a pretty good exercise that we can use to figure out who we really know and how those people might come into play in our career path.
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Yeah, you re dead right.
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The reality is most people don t know who they know.
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So if I sat down with one of your listeners at coffee and said, hey, who do you know that could help you with your career?
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They can maybe rattle off four or five people, but most of us, we just haven t thought about it much.
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So I have some really simple questions I like to ask people and I always encourage them to do a note card exercise.
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tons of research about why writing something down physically is better than typing it into a computer or a device.
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But I always say, grab a stack of note cards and put one person s name per card.
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And the questions I tell people to ask are, number one, who do I know that is wise about career issues?
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And I m talking about in your circle of friends.
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I mean, the people you know, it can be somebody at work, somebody that you play basketball with in the morning, somebody you re actually connected to.
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Who s wise when it comes to career?
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Number two, who have I worked with?
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I think it s important to say, OK, here s 10 people I ve worked with.
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And you can go to LinkedIn and say, OK, I actually have some relationships with these people.
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And I m not saying everyone who s been employed by that company.
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I mean, that if I said, OK, who did I work with that I had a great relationship with?
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at Autotrader.
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Okay, Mark Sutton, he was one of the designers.
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Ryan Sweet, I just mentioned him.
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Justine, she was somebody in my department.
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I could probably come up with 10 people from that one job that I ve worked with.
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Number three, I d say, who do I know that is influential?
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Who in my life actually has some influence?
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And it doesn t have to be who s famous.
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I don t mean that.
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I mean, okay, if I was going to try to become a plumber, maybe I had been a plumber in another town, I just moved to Nashville where I live.
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It wouldn t be bad to ask at Home Depot and say, Hey, I just moved here.
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You re in the plumbing department.
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Who are the big, you know, plumbing firms in town that you do the most business with?
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Or, you know, who s coming in constantly that it d be great for me to be connected to.
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It s just getting, you know, exploring who, you know, it s influential.
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Number four, who do I know that owns a business?
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I love this one because business owners know other business owners.
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My favorite example of that is we ve got a guy in town that owns a smoothie shop named Nine Fruits.
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His name is Dan Banks, and he knows everyone in this town.
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It s this waterhole where people come together, and I know that I might not be in the smoothie business, but if I had a business need, I could talk to Dan Banks and say, hey, I m really thinking about trying this.
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Who do you know?
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The fifth question is
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Who do I follow online that is in my desired career space?
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We have access to people like no other generation.
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I don t know how people wrote motivational books in the 40s where they d say, you can be connected to anyone.
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How?
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If you wanted to meet other nurses, would you put an ad in the newspaper and say, hey, I ll be down here on 5th and Main.
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Please don t stab me when you show up.
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but you have access to other people that are in your space.
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And the thing I always say is ask them one question.
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You get the same emails I do where somebody sends you a 10,000 word email and they go, I know you re busy, but, and then they ask you this question, like, will you be my mentor forever?
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Like, I want to have coffee every day until we both die.
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We buried in the cemetery together and I ll give you presents that I hand make.
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And you go, Whoa, I don t, I can t like, no, the hand make thing is, uh,
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That s the clincher on that joke.
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Exactly, and so what I say is ask that person one question, what s one book you d recommend I read?
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And then when they recommend it, read it and a week later send them the two things or three things you learned from that book.
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Actually do the work like it s a great way to get connected somebody in the last question is what casual relationships Am I forgetting that might have a career impact?
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I try to get the net really wide because sometimes when we think about our relationships We think about the two or three people we know the best but so many opportunities come from casual relationships so what happens every time I ve done this exercise with people and I ve had thousands of people do it is they always get this big pile of note cards and
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this huge pile of note cards, and immediately said to them, oh, wait a second, I have some options I didn t know I have.
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Look at all the people I know.
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And so I love to do stuff like that with people.
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That s actually really good.
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So the cards are to illustrate visually, because the way that I ve done this exercise in the past, and I probably will take a page from your book here,
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forgive the pun, is I have people make a list of everybody that they know from starting in a chronological order, and the idea is it s impossible, and you make it, and you get exhausted doing it, and you re like, oh my God, I know so many people, but I think this is cool because it s more focused, and then when you re done, you ve run out of index cards, and you ve got this huge stack, and you go, wow, I know a crap load of people that have impact or potential impact in my career path, not just my mom s hairdresser.
3
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Yeah, I did this exercise with somebody just the other day.
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He s 48 years old.
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And sometimes fear tells you like at 42, you re past new opportunities.
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But you and I both know that there s not an expiration date on trying something new.
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So he s 48, took this really intense aptitude test that said, you look like you re really skilled at computer science, that s an industry you should explore.
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He hasn t done it for his entire life, but he said, okay, what do I know about life?
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I know right now I have two kids.
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I have a mortgage.
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I can t just go back to school full time.
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That s not the path.
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But then he realized, you know, I know five people in my neighborhood that are in the computer science, computer industry.
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Maybe I could just go to coffee with them and ask them some questions.
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And I guarantee I d get a next step out of that conversation.
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So he texted me today, like an hour before I got on this call, he texted me and said, Hey, quick update.
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Here s the four meetings I ve set up.
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You know, I m working on that hustle.
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And so, I love the note cards because it gives you the visual, and then if you want to, you can put them up on a board, put them up on a white board, put them up on a cork board, and you ll start to see patterns.
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You ll start to see, wow, these four people are all in this one space.
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I wonder if I should explore that space, or I haven t touched base with this person in a while, maybe I should figure out a way to touch base with them.
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And I think it just gives you a lot of encouragement and a lot of momentum.
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You know, that s interesting, the arranging it on a pin board idea is really good because
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If you re gonna reach out to each of these people, one side of the pin board is for people you reached out to, one section is for people who replied, one section is for people who haven t replied yet, that you haven t reached out to yet or whatever, and you can sort of workflow it.
3
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Yeah, it takes a lot of the fear out of it.
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You know, whenever we don t want to do something, we try to pretend it s complicated.
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Go, it s too complicated.
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And we overcomplicate things.
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And so I m all about how do we simplify it and actually do it.
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So I wouldn t say, Hey, you got to contact 100 people because instantly people get paralyzed by that.
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I d say
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Okay, look at your whiteboard, go to coffee with one person if you like coffee or like go on a walk with somebody if you like to walk.
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Here s how to do that and then you start to build it slowly.
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One of the things I love to do with people is I ll ask them to cut their goal in half.
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So many people I work with do too big of a goal, they haven t written in 10 years, and then they go, I got excited, I read a motivational book, I m gonna write a book this weekend.
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And I ll go, oh, so zero pages previously, whole book by the end of this three day, like Martin Luther King weekend, okay.
3
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And they get discouraged.
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So what I ll tell people and I did this when I took those 10,000 people through this challenge was I said, hey, cut the goal in half.
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And I did it like day 12.
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And what happens is if you want to lose 10 pounds in a month, and you cut it down to five, when you end up losing seven, you re encouraged and you try it another month.
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That s my goal is for you to try it another month.
3
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What happens if you set out for 10 and you do seven, you missed your goal by three and you feel like a failure and your odds of not doing it again go down dramatically.
3
SPEAKER_01
Right, yeah, of course.
3
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So set yourself up for the wins, even if the wins are smaller than you might like.
3
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Yeah, and build on them, because I think part of the internet contributes to that, where people are kind of showcasing all the things they ve won on, and then you feel like, go big or go home.
3
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For long-term sustained growth, sustained change, if you ll put your ego aside and your pride aside, and actually build it in a slow way, it matters so much more.
3
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The challenge is, we ve always had
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the idea of comparing ourselves or the idea of like the grass is greener on the other side of the fence.
3
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It s just now we have access to a million backyards and that makes it hard for people.
3
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Now, this obviously requires a lot of effort, regardless, but the way that we ve done it with the cards, for example, is an act of focus.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I d like, especially somebody in your position, who s obviously accomplished and done a whole lot, set a lot of goals, and accomplished a lot of goals, can we talk about yet another buzzword, now that we re on that train?
3
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Hustle.
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People are all about the hustle, and it seems like they re doing it in this weird, sort of frenzied way, like, I m gonna write a book this weekend, oh my God,
3
SPEAKER_01
get a pot of coffee going and keep it coming, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
As opposed to figuring out a plan to create a focused hustle and put their energy into that pipeline, they re kind of like shotgun blasting it all over the place and it fizzles out.
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Yeah, I always tell people hustle is an act of focus, not frenzy.
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We often think it s about addition, like getting a new to-do list of additional things to do, but it s equally about subtraction, about going, okay, I m not going to do these five things.
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I m not going to do these three things.
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SPEAKER_00
And hustle has a terrible reputation on the internet right now, because like the
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over promotional people that are showing like photos of their watches and their rented Ferraris on Instagram are saying like every day I m hustling, you know, Abraham Lincoln and you re like pretty sure that was Rick Ross.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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And so it does have a bad reputation, but for me, it s just a fuel.
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It s just hard work.
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And so I always talk to people about the tension of yes and no when it comes to hustle.
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And that you have to say yes to some opportunities and you have to say no to some opportunities.
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And I m honestly not very good at that.
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I have to be really deliberate in order to work hard.
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My wife calls me the laziest hardworking person she knows.
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So it s a work in progress for me.
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SPEAKER_00
Like I d rather binge watch Netflix.
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SPEAKER_00
It s a lot easier than doing hard work.
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SPEAKER_00
I found it to be a lot easier than doing hard work.
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SPEAKER_00
So, when I do the notecard exercise, when I have something I have to focus on, I have to turn everything else off.
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SPEAKER_00
I have to turn off Wi-Fi.
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SPEAKER_00
If Wi-Fi is on, I ll get lost in Twitter.
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SPEAKER_00
I ll go somewhere.
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SPEAKER_00
A lot of times, my ability to hustle is that.
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SPEAKER_00
I brought the three things I needed to work on and I went to the library where there was no other distractions and I only had three things with me and I did those three things.
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SPEAKER_00
I really have to set up kind of like gamify my situation to actually hustle.
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SPEAKER_00
So, I do some specific things about that.
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SPEAKER_01
Basically, you ve figured out your own psychological weaknesses, and you use psychology to beat that, to beat yourself.
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SPEAKER_01
You know you re gonna get distracted, so you turn off Wi-Fi.
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SPEAKER_01
For me, I can t have things in my visual sphere, because, for example, going out to eat, if there s a TV behind the person that s across from me, I have to switch seats with them.
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SPEAKER_01
Because otherwise, I m watching friggin  Fox News over their shoulder with no audio.
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SPEAKER_00
It won t matter, too, what s on.
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SPEAKER_00
For me, it could be like the German World Cup of dog grooming.
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SPEAKER_00
And I m like, oh, what are they going to do with that poodle?
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SPEAKER_00
Where are they going?
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SPEAKER_00
And yeah, it doesn t matter.
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As long as it s shiny and in motion, I m out.
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SPEAKER_00
No, I think it s, I don t love hack.
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SPEAKER_00
That s such an overused term.
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SPEAKER_00
But for me, simple things like I can t write to music that has words.
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I can t even do most things in music that has words, because I get focused on the words.
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So I have to write to Segar Ross.
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But when it comes to editing, and I have to edit angry, because writing, you have to love it enough to create it, but then hate it enough to edit it.
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SPEAKER_00
That s the tension.
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And so I ll edit to hardcore rap or old school rap.
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SPEAKER_00
I ll put on Run DMC.
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I m like, OK, here we go.
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SPEAKER_00
I have to amp myself up.
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But that s one of those little, OK, I know my psychology.
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SPEAKER_00
I just think that so often we move so quickly, we don t learn the lessons that our lives are trying to teach us.
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And we act like it s a surprise.
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SPEAKER_00
And we go, I had no idea that s how I did things.
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SPEAKER_00
Really?
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Because you have 10 years of proof that s how you do things.
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Every time you ve done that, this has been the result.
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SPEAKER_00
And that s why, again, like we talked about relationships, that s part of why you need relationships.
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SPEAKER_00
When somebody says to me, I want to change my job, or I want to grow my business, I want to do this decision, I ll always say this question.
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SPEAKER_00
I ll say, what s your team telling you right now?
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And 99 times out of 100, they don t have a team.
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SPEAKER_00
And by team, I mean two or three people that can ask you honest questions, and can say like, hey, this thing you re doing, I think it s ego driven.
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SPEAKER_00
Like, I think you need to be really careful about that.
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SPEAKER_00
Like for me, having somebody, you know, it can be my wife, it can be somebody else that ll go, hey, I know it was really fun to go to that city and do that book signing because you got to Instagram that you re important and
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SPEAKER_00
Look at me, I m on the road, I m hustling.
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SPEAKER_00
But if it only sold X amount of books and it took you 32 hours, then you have to admit it s not a great way to sell a book.
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SPEAKER_00
You have to do something else.
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And so I think that s what we need.
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It s great to have those people around you and it is very hard.
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I mean, I ve got Jenny who helps with a lot of this stuff.
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She lives with me and is my assistant and is my significant other.
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It s kind of a tough relationship.
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SPEAKER_01
And I got producer Jason who s sitting over there quietly right now and he s the guy who s like, you just made that up.
4
SPEAKER_01
That joke sucked.
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SPEAKER_01
It s not all negative.
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SPEAKER_01
A lot of it s great.
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SPEAKER_01
it can be hard to hear, you know?
4
SPEAKER_01
You re just like, oh, this is so great.
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SPEAKER_01
And he s like, no, this was a terrible show.
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SPEAKER_01
We can t even do anything with this.
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SPEAKER_01
You re just happy you got so-and-so on the podcast.
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SPEAKER_01
And I m like, damn it, you re right.
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SPEAKER_01
You know?
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SPEAKER_00
No, let s be honest.
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SPEAKER_00
It s not easy.
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SPEAKER_00
That s a great point.
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SPEAKER_00
Whenever I say that, I wanna make sure that people don t think that, like I have a friend who calls me up and says, hey, this thing you did wasn t good or is ego-driven.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I immediately go, hey, man, thanks for those word vitamins.
4
SPEAKER_00
Those were like, that was so good for my heart.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, truth bomb that I ve received hashtag blessed like no usually what I say in that moment is some form of screw you Yeah, and I don t say it that boldly right, but it takes me like three grumpy hours to come back and admit They were right.
4
SPEAKER_00
Oh, yeah, so don t hear like this deep maturity where I m sitting in a rocking chair going No, no, tell me some other things I suck at
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SPEAKER_00
Oh, this is refreshing.
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SPEAKER_00
Please, I want to grow.
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SPEAKER_00
It s taken time.
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SPEAKER_00
My wife and I, we ve been married for 14 years.
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SPEAKER_00
First couple of years of marriage, if she would criticize something I wrote, I was just blown away.
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SPEAKER_00
I thought marriage was like, you say rah-rah, and I really had an understanding of marriage that was broken.
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SPEAKER_00
Now when she goes, hey, this thing you said in Do-Over isn t true, you need to take it out.
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SPEAKER_00
She read Do-Over nine times, cover to cover.
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SPEAKER_00
She now hates it.
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SPEAKER_00
Oh, she hasn t read it since.
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SPEAKER_00
No, she sees Bright Yellow, she s like, I don t wanna see that book again.
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SPEAKER_00
But she would tell me things that I needed to take out and then I would leave for like three or four grumpy hours and be like, you re wrong, you don t know books.
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SPEAKER_00
And then I d come back and be like, that s a pretty good idea, thank you.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, thanks for that.
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SPEAKER_01
Thanks for that fresh eyes from a caring perspective.
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SPEAKER_01
Sorry I made the rest of your afternoon a living hell.
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SPEAKER_00
Sorry, I told you you were a horrible person.
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SPEAKER_00
That was not my intention.
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SPEAKER_01
Exactly.
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SPEAKER_01
It s kind of funny because you re editing your own writing and by the way, I m imagining you sitting there blasting straight out of Copland being like,
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SPEAKER_01
Just send my colon out of here.
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SPEAKER_00
Exactly, that s what I do.
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SPEAKER_00
I m like, it s not an in-dash, Eazy-E hates in-dashes.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, exactly.
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SPEAKER_01
You need your team to edit your stuff, your thoughts and your life, or whatever you re doing, your work, but you can only edit the finer details because you re not attached to it.
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SPEAKER_01
But the greater project, you re too attached to it.
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SPEAKER_01
Somebody else has to help you edit that.
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SPEAKER_00
Oh, you re in love with it, and you can t, you know, everybody thinks their baby s cute.
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SPEAKER_00
And a lot of times, it s kind of like, you re so close to the painting, you can t really see what it is.
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SPEAKER_00
And so it s like being in a bad dating relationship where you break up and you tell your friends, like, wow, she was a monster, and they go, yeah, we all knew.
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SPEAKER_00
We were all very aware of that.
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SPEAKER_00
We tried to tell you that, but you were so close into it, you couldn t see the truth of it.
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SPEAKER_01
You just threw three metaphors in rapid fire.
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SPEAKER_00
I have so many.
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SPEAKER_00
I have a big bucket I pull out of.
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SPEAKER_00
It s next to my analogy bucket.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, there was another one right there, by the way, for those of you who want to get really meta.
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SPEAKER_00
I created a metaphor talking about metaphors, oh my gosh.
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SPEAKER_01
That was ninja, metaphor inception.
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SPEAKER_01
Speaking of having a team, you said you got a simple idea from an NFL player that changed not only the way you packed for trips, but how you approached learning new skills.
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SPEAKER_01
I have to know what that could possibly be.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so I did a speaking event, and it was me, two NFL players, and a professional wrestler, Jerry the King Lawler, and then me.
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SPEAKER_00
So the poster was three real men with muscles and then a skinny writer.
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SPEAKER_01
Kind of like that picture you referenced with the rock standing next to his dad.
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SPEAKER_00
Exactly, and I even did the thing where guys put their hands behind their biceps to try to look a little bigger.
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SPEAKER_00
Right, oh yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
Didn t work.
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SPEAKER_00
Welcome to every photograph of me on the internet.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, well I mean that s what s on my book cover.
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If you look at the back of Do-Over, that s the photo I m describing.
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And so I was talking to him about how he d been in the NFL.
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His name was Bernard Pollard.
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He d been in the NFL for eight years at that point, won a Super Bowl.
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And I said, you know, the average NFL span is our career is 3.2 years.
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SPEAKER_00
How have you lasted?
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Like, what s the secret?
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What s the thought behind that?
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And he said, most of the guys have the hardest time with the discipline.
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He said, it s the repetition, it s the mental stuff you have to repeatedly do.
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SPEAKER_00
And he said, especially when you add money to it.
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Like if you add a bunch of money, if you add a bunch of success, he said, it s the mental game that breaks down first.
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SPEAKER_00
And I thought that was really interesting.
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SPEAKER_00
And he further explained, you know, I have to know during the season and the off season, okay, on Tuesdays, these are the five drills I do.
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SPEAKER_00
And on Wednesdays, I always do this ice bath here.
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SPEAKER_00
And on Thursdays, this is what I eat.
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SPEAKER_00
And he said, I had to get really disciplined with that.
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SPEAKER_00
And it really convicted me about other areas of my life where I was kind of learning things for the first time every time.
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SPEAKER_00
Like I always talk about the first time you do something should be the worst time because you ve never done it.
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SPEAKER_00
Like one thing I say to podcasters is, you know, I d love to do your podcast the second year you have a podcast.
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because you learn so much.
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I m sure you can go back to your first episodes and go, wow, I learned so much.
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SPEAKER_00
I do things so differently now, but a lot of times we repeat that first experience over and over and over.
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SPEAKER_00
And so the packing one for me was, I was traveling, you know, a hundred times a year and I didn t have a packing list.
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SPEAKER_00
So every night before I traveled, I acted like it was the first time I ever traveled and I was like, Oh, what do I need to bring?
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SPEAKER_00
I ve never traveled.
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SPEAKER_00
And it would take me like an hour to pack until finally after talking to that NFL player and getting really specific, I spent an hour, like I paid an upfront hour to save, you know, hundreds of hours over the next five years.
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SPEAKER_00
And I opened up an Evernote file and I made a packing list.
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SPEAKER_00
And so now every time I travel, the
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The first thing I do is I print out that packing list and it feels silly sometimes, like I m an adult, do I really need to check things off a box?
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SPEAKER_00
I do, like I have enough evidence in my life that I do.
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SPEAKER_00
And so, I print that out and I start checking it off, it cuts my time in half.
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SPEAKER_00
And so, my challenge for my own life and other people s lives are...
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Where are the things that you have to do repeatedly?
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And how do you put them on what I call autopilot?
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SPEAKER_00
Because there s really two types of things you do.
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You do fighter pilot stuff and autopilot.
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SPEAKER_00
Like fighter pilot, they have their processes, but a lot of their stuff is new and different every time they re in a battle.
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SPEAKER_00
So, there s things you do in your life that are fight or pilot, where it s an opportunity you ve never had before, it s a legitimate first time and you ve got to have some skills for that.
5
SPEAKER_00
But there s a lot of things that if we were honest and took the upfront time, we could go, wow, these are autopilot.
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SPEAKER_00
These are things that I have to do more than once.
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SPEAKER_00
So, I should get better at them every time I do them.
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SPEAKER_00
That was what we did with the book tour.
5
SPEAKER_00
In the spring when I did a book tour, I was kind of lazy about it.
5
SPEAKER_00
And I would just go, Oh, wait a second.
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SPEAKER_00
We re going to be at the city in like nine days.
5
SPEAKER_00
We should do an event.
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SPEAKER_00
Bright and like throw together something.
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SPEAKER_00
And I reinvented it.
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SPEAKER_00
And a lot less people came because I didn t have my information in order.
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SPEAKER_00
I didn t do it early enough.
5
SPEAKER_00
And then finally with this fall tour, I said, okay, you know what?
5
SPEAKER_00
I m going to get ahead of it.
5
SPEAKER_00
I m going to create a checklist of things we do, and this is what I m going to do. 
5
SPEAKER_00
And so, that s how I ve started to live a large part of my life.
5
SPEAKER_00
The background sheet, the bio sheet sets a tone.
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SPEAKER_00
It sets a tone, and right out of the gate goes, this is going to be awesome.
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SPEAKER_00
It s going to be an awesome experience, and this is the information I need, because I m serious about the quality that this is going to be.
5
SPEAKER_00
I guarantee Jason isn t rewriting that bio sheet or that checklist, hopefully.
5
SPEAKER_00
No.
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SPEAKER_00
You guys aren t having a meeting every week where you re like, hey, let s pretend we ve never interviewed somebody.
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SPEAKER_00
What should we say?
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SPEAKER_00
No, you figured out how to put that on autopilot and it serves the purpose.
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SPEAKER_00
So that s how I look at a lot of my life.
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SPEAKER_01
No, it s very true.
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I think what I ve seen from a lot of entrepreneurs, just because I work with
5
SPEAKER_01
those types a lot, and coincidentally, people who are not at all entrepreneurs but just want to know what to do with their life, I see this constant sort of phenomenon.
5
SPEAKER_01
Let s say they re starting a show of their own or they re writing something or they re creating video or something like that.
5
SPEAKER_01
The first three videos, they ve got them outlined, they know where the shots are gonna be, they ve got all the equipment checklist lined up, they know who s gonna do what, they know how they re gonna promote it and everything.
5
SPEAKER_01
and then they do three, five, 10, I don t know, 50, or even 100 of these, and then that checklist, they don t look at it anymore, and they don t need to do it anymore, and they re like, listen, man, I m a pro now, I got it down.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then what happens is they start to plateau, and they don t really know why, and they start to stagnate in their work, whatever it is, whether they re an engineer or a videographer,
5
SPEAKER_01
and what it always seems to come back to, or I should say, what it often seems to come back to is I say, okay, well, what s your system for doing this?
5
SPEAKER_01
And they go, I ve been doing this for so long that I don t really write it down.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I go, well, you know, if I m coaching you, for example, or consulting or whatever, write it down for me.
5
SPEAKER_01
And they write it down, and the first thing they do, they don t just email it and go, here s that list, let me know what you think.
5
SPEAKER_01
They go, oh my God, I haven t written this down for three years.
5
SPEAKER_01
Just writing this down.
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SPEAKER_01
changed the way that I m gonna do everything moving forward.
5
SPEAKER_01
And it was the same thing for me.
5
SPEAKER_01
You listen to the first few episodes of The Art of Charm, they re terrible.
5
SPEAKER_01
And not because the content s bad, it s just because I didn t know what the hell was going on.
5
SPEAKER_01
And they should be.
5
SPEAKER_01
You hadn t done it long.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, exactly.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then when I got to episode 100, I was like, ah, finally, episode 100, I m a seasoned veteran.
5
SPEAKER_01
I look at those now and I go, ugh.
5
SPEAKER_01
and I remember around episode 250, I interviewed Robert Greene.
5
SPEAKER_01
I remember it really clearly.
5
SPEAKER_01
I was sitting in L.A.
5
SPEAKER_01
in what was my studio then, and I had just upgraded a bunch of equipment, and Robert Greene was a big deal.
5
SPEAKER_01
He was a friend of mine, so I was really stoked on it, and I outlined the whole thing, and I don t follow outlines for interviews.
5
SPEAKER_01
I diagrammed things that I wanted to get in there, tracks where I might go down that road.
5
SPEAKER_01
Not scripts, but plans, and I made sure he had those, and I remember at the end of that interview, it went really well, and I went,
5
SPEAKER_01
I m finally starting to get the hang of this.
5
SPEAKER_01
And it was no coincidence that it was the amount of prep and the amount of outlining and diagramming and making sure I had the salient points together, it was no coincidence that that made that interview that much better.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I had this realization where I went, oh my gosh.
5
SPEAKER_01
People who are really good at this stuff, they know that they do need the prep.
5
SPEAKER_01
They went through the first bit where they needed the prep to get by, they went through that second phase where they were cocky enough to think they didn t need it, and they circle on back to doing that prep, going through that system, making sure those boxes are checked, because that s what professionals do who are really good at what they do, and they modify, it s a living document.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and I absolutely love that.
5
SPEAKER_00
I think you re right.
5
SPEAKER_00
I think it s because you get casual or you get enough success to trick you into plateauing.
5
SPEAKER_00
I think another thing is you add too many things to what you re doing.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, there s that.
5
SPEAKER_00
Sometimes I ll see young entrepreneurs that started out working 40 hours a week on these three things and then as they get bigger, they add five other things as if they can create the previous three things with only 10 hours now.
5
SPEAKER_00
To jump on that, my example would be, because I know that a lot of your listeners want to be public speakers, are public speakers, are exploring that.
5
SPEAKER_00
A specific example of where you need a list is you should always ask as many times as you can of as many people as you can when you go to speak in an event, how much time you have on stage.
5
SPEAKER_00
Like, that s one of those, right before you go up, you need to understand that question.
5
SPEAKER_00
And I saw somebody at an event once, and all they did was they asked the sound guy, the guy who was running the sound stage, they said, hey, how much time do I have?
5
SPEAKER_00
And the guy, he didn t know, but he just said, well, you got like 90 minutes, I ll give you 95.
5
SPEAKER_00
And during the guy s speech, from the back of the room, the host of the event raised his hand up for five, because the guy was going too long.
5
SPEAKER_00
And the guy on stage had to stop his speech and say,
5
SPEAKER_00
Hey, how much, you know, I can t see your hand.
5
SPEAKER_00
What does it say?
5
SPEAKER_00
And the guy in the back said, five minutes.
5
SPEAKER_00
The guy on stage said, but, but the clock says I have 27 left.
5
SPEAKER_00
And the guy in the back said, no.
5
SPEAKER_00
And it just wrecked the whole speech for the guy.
5
SPEAKER_00
And it was just a small thing of, he asked the wrong person and not enough people.
5
SPEAKER_00
Hey, just to double check, I know you told me three weeks ago that I had this amount of time, but a lot happens in three weeks, a lot happens on the day of the event.
5
SPEAKER_00
How much time do I really have?
5
SPEAKER_00
And so that was one that I put on my list of here s the things you do when you show up to do a speech.
5
SPEAKER_01
The prep is the mark of the professional.
5
SPEAKER_01
And you might even do the prep document and never even need to look at it, but the fact is it needs to go in there.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I used to think this was just my OCD type kicking in, but the more I talk to really high-performing individuals,
5
SPEAKER_01
the more I see that, and some of it gets outsourced, but when you look at people who are true masters of their craft, and whether or not you like them or hate them, look at a guy like Howard Stern.
5
SPEAKER_01
I see these podcasters who don t put in the prep, and they don t have this, and they don t have that, but then you look at a guy like Howard Stern, and that guy prepares more than anybody.
5
SPEAKER_01
When he gets a guest, he s read the book, and then somebody else has read the other three books, and he knows the latest work.
5
SPEAKER_01
He s not looking at a one-sheet when he drives to the studio.
5
SPEAKER_01
He s been preparing for that for a really long time.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and it comes through.
5
SPEAKER_01
It comes through, yeah.
5
SPEAKER_00
He s one of our generation s best interviewers.
5
SPEAKER_00
Easily.
5
SPEAKER_00
You hear him with Louis C.K., his interviews with Seinfeld.
5
SPEAKER_00
You hear, there s nuance there, and you hear people talking about things they never get to talk about in ways they never thought they d talk about them.
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And the only way that you can do that is by digging deep beforehand.
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No matter how much talent you have, or how much practice you have, winging it is not going to do the trick.
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It will not.
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No, I m learning, I ve recently learned the difference between talent and craft.
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So I was giving a speech, it was a speech I d done probably 14 times.
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And during it, I said a joke I d never said before, and it was the biggest joke of the moment.
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the entire speech.
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And so that s talent.
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Like in the moment, saying something, thinking on your feet, that s talent.
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Craft is remembering that joke and doing it a second time and a third time and bringing it forward.
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A lot of times we live out of talent where we let stuff happen, but we never bring them forward, which to me is what craft is.
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I think that s brilliant.
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Nobody ever really goes through that, and I think the problem is you have to have both to be able to recognize it, so it s something we don t think about a lot, especially when we re focused on our own stuff.
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You ve got sort of a five-question arsenal that you can use to figure out what skills you really have, and I think that s huge.
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I know a lot of people, young and old, seem to be consistently asking me what they should do when really they should be asking themselves, and the reason they can t get the right answer is because they re not asking the right questions.
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Yeah, I think it s a popular question.
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And again, I try to create a simple way that draws you into the exercise and creates more results than you expected.
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And so similar to the relationship exercise we talked about, I love to use notecards for this.
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I d love for you to put one skill per notecard.
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And the five questions I ask, and they start really simply, are number one, what are you good at?
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Like forget humility, this is not the time to be humble.
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We have a culture that kind of shames you when you tweet about something you re excited about, and we ll tell you humble brag.
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And so this isn t that time.
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This is for you to sit down and go, okay, I was great at on time delivery at all my projects, or here s things I ve received promotions for, here s things I m actually good at.
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Number two, what comes naturally?
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What comes naturally to you?
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Derek Seavers talks about that, about how, you know, it s ordinary to
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us and extraordinary to everybody else.
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We sometimes, we denigrate the things we re naturally good at because we assume other people are good at them too and we assume they don t have value.
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We look at everybody else s skills and go that s a skill that s worth something.
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The things that come naturally to me, that s just something I do.
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So that s the second question.
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The third question is what do people pay me to do?
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So you ve had a job career at some point where somebody s paid you money to perform some service.
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So if you are in charge of quality assurance for software launches, write that down.
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Write quality assurance.
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What are the skills that somebody pays you to do?
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Number four is what are you afraid of?
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What s something you re actually afraid of?
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And sometimes we go about this the wrong way.
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We have this culture right now that tries to tell you you re going to have a perfect job.
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I saw another author the other day say, if you don t love 90% of what it takes to be in your industry, you re in the wrong industry.
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And I thought, that s just garbage advice.
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Because what that says in a 40-hour work week is there s only four hours that aren t magical.
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Like there s only, you know, 36 hours are unicorn moments and four are difficult.
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That s not true at all.
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Most people have longer than a four-hour commute every week.
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You re going to have to do some uncomfortable things that aren t easy.
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So, I love to ask the question, what are you afraid of?
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Because a lot of times, we ll run from the things we really care about.
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You know, we ve always wanted to be a writer and we re afraid to do that.
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Or we ve always wanted to have a podcast and share ideas, but we re afraid to do that.
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Number five, which gets more specific, is if you wrote an e-book, what would the topic be?
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If I said to you, hey, you ve got to generate $1,000 in the next month by writing an e-book that teaches somebody else how to do something, what would the topic be?
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What s something that you have enough expertise to create an e-book on?
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Or maybe what s three books that you could do after that?
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And so you end up with all these note cards and then again, you start to look for patterns.
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You ll start to be able to see, okay, wow, five of the skills I wrote down are related to people.
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And I m really naturally skilled at working with people and I m really passionate about that.
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And my current job doesn t involve people.
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That might be part of the reason I m really unhappy at my current job.
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Everything I m naturally wired for, I don t get to do during the week.
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So now it s on me to figure that out.
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Like I always tell people, it s not your company s job for you to have a good job.
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It s your job.
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It s not your boss s job for you to have a good job.
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It s your job.
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When I felt stuck at a company in Atlanta, and I wanted to do more leadership, I applied to every leadership program they had.
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And I got into some that had nothing to do with my job.
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I was the only person who wasn t in customer service that was on the customer service experience team.
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But I learned a ton about relating to people.
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I got exposed to a whole new department in our company and I formed all these new relationships.
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So that s where you start to see the patterns and you start to go like, I don t like the question, what s your calling?
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Because I think that s a rabbit trail.
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A lot of people get lost down and they, or what s my perfect purpose.
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Like there s two things we care about.
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We get obsessed about purpose and then we get obsessed
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about legacy.
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And legacy is a funny one because I always tell people, like, what did your great-grandfather do for a job?
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What was his name?
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Most people can t answer that.
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So sometimes chasing purpose, chasing legacy are things that you can use to hide from actually doing the work you know you re supposed to do.
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You know what?
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I found out what my great-grandfather did and it s not that great.
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What did he do?
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You know what a union breaker is?
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Yeah, it involves like a club, doesn t it?
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Yeah, he basically was like, so he couldn t get a job in the auto industry because he was Jewish?
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Which seems really fair, by the way.
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I can see how the two are related.
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I definitely see the link here.
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Yeah, so what ended up happening was he got hired by the auto companies to beat up the workers that were forming unions so that they wouldn t organize.
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So ironically, he did get a job with the auto company, just not on the assembly line, more on the disassembly line.
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Typically,
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Jewish men in their 40s aren t exactly like these giant muscle-bound dudes.
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He was probably like five foot one.
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I m sure he figured it out.
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He probably got those Popeye forearms.
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I m sure he made it work, but he was the guy beating up the newsies.
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Yeah, I don t think he rolled solo, but there s a picture of him in this old newspaper.
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My mom has it, and there he is with one of those black fedora-looking hats and a black trench coat beating someone up in the street, and that s the only picture that exists of this man.
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There s his legacy!
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Yeah, very proud family history there.
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That s hilarious.
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With the five questions we have, what are the skills that someone has paid you to do in the past?
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What are you actually afraid of?
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What s something you have enough expertise on to write a book about or an e-book about?
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Yeah, it s what are you good at?
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What comes naturally?
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What do people pay me to do?
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And you can expand that to what would people pay me to do?
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The answer is almost anything.
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What are you afraid of?
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And if you wrote an e-book, what would the topic be?
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Or even, maybe that sounds so intimidating, if you wrote a three-page document explaining something to somebody, that s an expertise you have, what would that expertise be?
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A lot of times when I start this exercise with people, they go, nothing, I don t know.
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It s like relationships, we don t know the skills we have and often we ve never sat down and really thought about it.
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And what happens is you ll start to see gaps too.
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You ll start to see areas where you go, wow, I really thought I had more in this one area.
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I d like to learn more about that.
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Because what happens is I feel like right now industries are changing so quickly that if you don t continue to grow your skills, you become a dinosaur.
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You know, we saw that happen to graphic designers who refused to learn how to design for the internet.
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We saw that, you know, photographers that wouldn t make the digital jump.
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And so that s the goal, the skill exercise, to show you how many you have and encourage you that way, but to also help you see which ones you want to develop.
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Because I think a lot of people don t really, won t really know what comes naturally.
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They might just pick something that they re good at and then we end up in this weird circle chasing our tail.
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Yeah, so I think what comes naturally is something you don t have to make yourself do.
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My wife really challenged me on this.
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I was like, sometimes when I write first drafts of books, I get really serious author.
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The first thing I sent you was me writing a serious author.
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I share intuitive ideas and counterintuitive ways.
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They help generate life change.
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What comes naturally to me is humor.
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At dinner parties, when I m in my most natural environment, I m not telling people, hey, you know what?
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Here s the seven ways to change your life in some intuitive ways.
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That s not what I m doing.
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I m saying jokes or I m doing the – like we wouldn t watch nine videos at Blockbuster.
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What s happened to us?
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I m pulling at threads in a funny way.
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That s what comes naturally to me.
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What I m good at is something that takes work.
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I have to work hard at something.
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So you can be good at something you re not natural at.
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Right, so it s something where you ve built the skill over time, right?
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So I would say what s natural to you is what s the stuff that if you start doing it, you look up and it s an hour later?
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Because you ll never have to force yourself to do stuff you re naturally good at.
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But you will have to do it for things you don t like.
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I ll never accidentally find myself in my email just answering emails like, oh my gosh, look at me scheduling stuff.
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I just stumbled on here.
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But I will stumble into other situations, like writing.
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I ll write stuff and go, wow, time s really passed in a different way.
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I naturally enjoy this.
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It doesn t mean it s always easy.
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Of course not.
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A lot of times it s hard.
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But to me, that s the difference.
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That s good, so yeah, what comes naturally is something you don t have to make yourself do where the time flies.
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What are you good at?
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Can be something you love or even that you don t necessarily love, but something that you ve built the skill, right, over time.
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100%, I mean, you could be an amazing account manager and say, you know, I met somebody the other day, I said, why d you get good at organization?
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And he said, well, I wanted to play at a level my natural skills wouldn t allow.
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And that s a great way to understand, okay, if you re an entrepreneur, there s things you re going to have to get good at that you might not naturally do.
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I m not a naturally organized person.
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A lot of the stuff we talked about today was me being deliberate.
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I can be pretty introverted, like I m not good naturally at relationships.
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So a lot of the stuff I share is me saying, wow, I recognize this had tremendous value.
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I recognize I wasn t naturally good at it.
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What was I going to do about it?
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Like I recognize I don t get to be an entrepreneur for very long if I m not good at relationships, if I m not constantly building my skills, and those things might not be natural to me.
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How do I actually work at them?
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Excellent, well this has been phenomenal.
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We ll leave those questions in those exercises in the show notes as well.
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So people can go to acuff.me slash Art of Charm.
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We ll have that linked in the show notes.
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If you re driving, don t be all like, I gotta write this down, and then crash, and then we lose a fan, because we need them where we can get them.
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Is there any concept, principle, or anything that I have not explored that you want to make sure you deliver to the AOC audience?
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Yeah, here s the last thing I d say.
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I know two things.
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I know you re capable of more than you think, and I know it s going to be harder than you think.
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And my hope is that if I can get you to believe that first one, if I can get you to get the hope and the joy and the belief that you re capable of more than you think, I can actually talk to you about the hard work that it s going to take.
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I think a lot of times, people like me, motivational guys, talk about the first part, but there s nothing practical on the backside to do anything, and you fizzle out.
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You read a book, you get excited, and nothing happens.
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Or they give you the second part, all the hard work, and you don t have that fuel of hope.
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to push through and so you get discouraged.
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is to give you both sides of that conversation.
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And I think that s where you really start to see life change and a lot of fun things happen.
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Great, John Acuff, Do Over, available now.
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We ll link it up in the show notes.
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Thanks so much, John.
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Thanks, Jordan, this was fun.
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All right, good stuff from John.
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He s a fun guy.
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I knew right when we did the pre-interview that this was gonna be a good show, and he delivered a lot here.
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Jason, I don t know, you were pretty quiet on this one.
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Were you just tired?
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No, I wasn t.
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Well, I was tired because we did it at six thirty in the morning, but I was also engaged.
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I really enjoyed this one.
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Yeah, I think he s a great speaker.
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And I think his his putting handles on ideas theory and using the humor is obviously not only what he s naturally good at, but is really, really a gift that that he brings to everyone else.
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So I think he s really found it only took him.
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17 years in the workforce and however many years before that so I think it s great to see some of the How the sausage is made on the inside of some of the journey and to debunk some of the traditional self-help Garbage that we d like to debunk here on the show show feedback and guest suggestions the shows of fanarchy.
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It s run by you
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we rely on you to help keep our finger on the pulse.
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So if you know someone who s a good fit, let us know, guests at theartofcharm.com.
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And if you enjoyed this, don t forget to thank John on Twitter.
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We ll have his Twitter linked in the show notes, as well as the other resources mentioned on the show.
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Obviously his book will be there in the free stuff that he mentioned.
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You can tap our album art in most mobile podcast players to see the show notes right on your phone.
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I also post a lot on Twitter, stuff that never makes it to the show, articles, insights, and I m at The Art of Charm on Twitter.
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Bootcamp details for our live programs, bootcamp.theartofcharm.com.
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Remember, we re sold out a few months in advance, so if you re a little interested, you can get in touch now and plan ahead.
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Subscribe on iTunes, write a nice review.
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We ve got our iPhone apps, we ve got our Android apps.
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and special thanks to the Jasons for their help in production of the Art of Charm podcast.
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Go ahead, tell your friends, because the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to someone else, either in person or shared on the web.
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Now have a great week, and leave everything and everyone better than you found them.
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Thanks for listening to the Art of Charm.
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Get more confidence, relationship skills, life hacks, and more at theartofcharmpodcast.com.