#218: Brewing Online Success With Billy Broas

Hey, thank you so much for having me, Adam. Pumped to be here.

Yeah, way cool. So what's not written in that bio? What's one thing that's not a part of that bio that you would love for people to know about you?

That's a good question. Well, I have an enormous family. I have— Like, what do you mean

enormous? Like

35 first cousins, the largest family.

Wow.

Yeah, my dad had— he was the first of 9, and all of them had 3 or 4 kids. And then my mom had 5 kids in her family. Now let's just say that our Thanksgivings were very eventful.

Well, my wife and I, we We're lucky enough to have 4 healthy kids and we know how important that is, that your kids are doing, are just healthy and well, but man, we, between my brother and I, each of us have 4, so.

Oh wow.

Yeah, my mom and dad are both still alive and knock on wood, doing really well. They got 8 grandkids. 2 sons, they end up with 8 grandkids. So I think if we just do the math of this thing, at some point somebody's gonna be like you, Billy, and they're gonna get on somebody's show and they're gonna say, yeah, The thing you don't know about me is I come from an enormous family.

Yeah, right? It's working. The math is working out that way for you. Absolutely.

Yeah, I think the, you know, it gets exponential over time, right?

Well, you know, and it's been interesting too in this COVID environment too, you know, we're going back to the basics. I know at least for me and for a lot of people I know, family has become even more important and I've reconnected with a lot of, 'cause that's a lot of people and it's a lot to stay in touch with over the years. But I've gone back and said to a lot of my cousins, hey, how you doing? I haven't checked in in a while. What's going on with you? And I've just found a lot of gratefulness for that, you know, a new appreciation for this large family that I have.

It's one of those things that we are not necessarily, or we don't sort of talk about each day what the opportunities are or what the sort of the way that you might even leverage, I mean, it's a strong word, but how it is that you would leverage uncertainty. How do you look at these uncertain times that we're living in where things are changing and not just changing in a way that you kind of go, okay, that was a catastrophe, like we catastrophize things. We know that we do that just sort of as human nature. We look at something and say, that was a serious challenge, but now I'm adjusting to it. I'm adapting to it. So once you get past all the phases of the grieving process, I suppose, that your business has changed and life has changed and so many things, you get you move into that phase of I adapt. But because we're not quite even at a place that you would say has settled yet, there's this perpetual state of uncertainty. Uncertainty with the virus, uncertainty with kids going back to school, not going, being able to be in space proximity to other people, not being able to do that. Things with our economy, things some people doing super well. Other people still collecting unemployment and wondering, you know, what's going to become of me? You know, my job, my career, so many things. So I'm curious, what's your sort of your beat on that, on how it is that you leverage the power of uncertainty, if that even makes sense to you?

Yeah, and it goes back to what I was saying about the family and even beyond that, our support network.

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Network is so important, and especially now, and we just have to be talking to people. We have to be talking about the issues that we're dealing with because we're all dealing with them. I know that I had a tendency in the past to kind of retreat, to not reach out for help. I can handle it. I'll just suck it up. I'll be okay. I'll be very stoic. Since COVID I've really realized the value of reaching out to the people close to me and saying, hey, this is what I'm dealing with. It's been amazing to hear them say, oh my God, I'm dealing with that too. And it's so cathartic also to just talk about what's going on, you know. And so that's, that's what I've really seen has been a big, the big eye-opener from this whole thing.

So more connection at a deeper level perhaps, and with people like you said that maybe you've even lost track of. That's an opportunity, the opportunity to be more real, more real about what's going on in your life, what's going on in your emotional state.

More vulnerable. Yeah, absolutely. Which has been something again that I've had to learn. That did not come naturally to me.

Yeah. It's interesting. I've not even had thought about it till just this second. You kind of sort of sparked this in me. A book that I wrote came out about 3 years ago called Pivot. Now at the time, pivot was a principle that I was working with this idea of in basketball, how you pivot and how that is a very assertive thing that you can do when you're otherwise in a defensive place. So, how do you pivot in your career, in your life, in areas of your business, etc.? But, at the time, that word was kind of negative in the sense that it meant you made a mistake. Usually, it was a business error, a model in a Silicon Valley startup, for example, crashed and burned. They ran out of runway, then they pivoted. And there were lots of successful pivots that we could point to in the tech sector like YouTube, which started out as a video dating site. Lo and behold, that model didn't work, so they kept the video, got rid of the dating piece, right? Lots of successful pivot stories, but I think people were really not keen to say, hey, I'm pivoting. Yet, right now, the vulnerability of that word has sort of changed quite a bit. I think a lot of people are leaning into the idea that pivoting is not only a thing you have to do. But it's a thing that takes you to a place of whether it's greater prosperity or greater peace or greater something, but that it's actually really useful as a tool. And so I think it's very powerful that we are able to be more— in a time like this, we can be more real about what's real and true versus trying to contain and maintain the facade.

Yeah. You know, one of the phrases I hate from all this is social distancing.

Yeah.

I wish they would have gone with physical distancing, because that's really what it is. We should not be social distancing, because we're not social distancing right now. We're— you and I, we're physical distancing. We're not social distancing. And now more than ever, we need to have these types of open, honest, and vulnerable conversations.

Yes. Tell me about your sort of the pivot that led to what you're currently doing, or if you wanted to start at some other place, feel free to. I said right before we even started this thing that our community, they love the real serious story of someone making a change, and whether that was by choice or by default. Because in addition to this drama, and obviously we're interested in, you know, how it all turns out kind of thing, it really connects us to each other because we're privately dealing with those things so often.

Yeah.

And don't necessarily know how we'll get out of something or how something will turn out for the best. So when we hear how someone else might have been in some similar situation and how they landed on their feet, or Or how it was the case that it didn't even seem like they were on their feet and then they look back and go, yeah, no, that's what I needed. That's what had to happen to be where I am today. It's really helpful. So, wherever you want to start that conversation, please.

Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, growing up, I took the traditional path. I did very well in school, did all my homework, did very well on exams, that whole thing. Got into a great college, got a great career after that. And thought that that was the end-all be-all. I said, okay, I made it. This is it. This is what I worked so hard for, 18 years, whatever it was, of schooling, working my butt off, and I finally achieved it. But then in that career, I sort of panicked and said, is this all there is? And I remember sitting down my very first day of work, and don't get me wrong, I spent almost 7 years there, so it's not like I hated what I was doing. I was working in a really interesting field. I was working in the clean energy field.

So

I was working on big industrial and commercial scale solar, wind, and biomass projects, which really I was very curious about, very interested in. So that was good, but it was a small company and there were only 15 employees there and my growth was really limited. And I'm very, I'm very much about growth. I'm always trying to take things to the next level. I'm not very competitive. I'm more competitive with myself. I like to just be better today than I was yesterday. And when I sat down at that desk the first day, I said, man, is this what I worked so hard for? Is this— because I could see my future playing out. And I said, am I going to be here for the next 30, 40 years, whatever it is? And that hit me really hard. And so what wound up happening was I said, okay, well, let me control what I can control here. I need some kind of an outlet for this. this drive that I have for this entrepreneurial itch. And then that's when I started the beer website. So it was something I was passionate about at the time. I was fresh out of college, so I was very familiar with beer. And it was something that I got into. I got into the whole craft beer scene. This was around 2008, 2009. Started homebrewing a lot, getting really into that. And that eventually became the thing that freed me from that career. So after so many years, I was making enough money from that beer website that I was able to jump ship and do my own thing, but that brought a whole new host of challenges that we could get into.

Yeah, because you became an entrepreneur.

Yes.

Which is a whole different world entirely.

And I thought it would be way easier than it has been.

Yeah, I think if there's one statement that probably everybody who's ever started a business and operated a business for any length of time will attest to, it's what you just said. Yeah, yeah. It always seems way easier than it is. Oh

yeah, becoming an entrepreneur is the best personal development you could possibly do.

So tell me, what's your best personal development lesson from being an entrepreneur?

You know, it's funny. So one of the books that caused me to do this, to take this path, was The 4-Hour Workweek.

Ah, that book.

That one, yeah. So I drank the Kool-Aid on that.

The carnage that that book has caused.

I know.

I'm just kidding.

Oh man. No, it's a great book and I love Tim Ferriss, but let's put it this way. The 4-Hour Workweek is not all it's cracked up to be. And it's funny because there's this image of you're a digital nomad, you're traveling the world, you have a business that runs itself, everything's delegated.

Sure.

And I find myself now going back to the routine, at least of that 9-to-5 job that I had, where I have the structure, where I'm looking for the security. I've done the digital nomad thing. It's really not for me. I like to travel, but I can't just couchsurf around the world for 6 months and not have something anchoring me down. So it's really interesting how it came full circle. The thing that I thought I was leaving, that structure of the 9-to-5 job and the desk and everything, is exactly what I came back to. Took a different form, but that's where I wound up.

Yeah, it's so interesting, as you say, you know, we crave certain things. I was a lawyer. You may not know my background, but I was a lawyer for 18 years and then didn't jump ship like Josh Shipp wrote that book, Jump Ship. That's not my process at all. I wrote a book, Pivot. It was about 2.5 years of creating a plan B and building a second bridge before I dismantled the first bridge kind of thing. What I realized many years since then is that, yeah, I didn't even need to leave the practice of law. I'm very happy that I did, and I speak to a lot of lawyers who are just so itching to figure out how to regain their sanity. I mean, it can be quite a misery-creating profession, honestly. There are ways to navigate that profession or any profession that are healthy. I just didn't have the tools. I didn't have the resources personally. I wasn't good enough at the personal development end of it to manage The business that was really kind of dragging me into the mud, or I was dragging myself into the mud. But, the fact of the matter is that much of what I gravitated to in the law, I've gravitated to now. I love structure, and I never thought that would ever be the case. In fact, I resisted it for such a long time. I don't handle my own calendar. I'm not good at managing a calendar. Yeah. I'm good at managing my priorities, but managing time is not my thing. my expertise at all. So, I haven't handled my calendar in years, which is a wonderful thing. Someone else does it. I don't get involved in that, but I know where I'm supposed to be. And what's great about having a calendar that governs my life is that when I don't have something scheduled, I don't have to worry about it. I don't have any anxiety about what I should be doing now. I can go do what I want to do— walk, swim, spend time with my wife, whatever it is, right? So, there's a certain freedom that comes from that structure. Now, not everybody who's listening to this is going to resonate with that. In fact, an earlier version of me in my early 20s, I would have been like, are you kidding me? I don't even want to wear a watch.

Yeah.

So, being a lawyer at that time, it's so ironic because it's so structured. So, I was in a profession that required all that structure and I was kind of constantly resisting it the whole way through. And now, what I've What I find later on is that the structure actually gives me great freedom and it's a healthy environment for me to do what I do for a living and for loving. So, it's really interesting that way. What would you say in your becoming an entrepreneur has been the toughest, the toughest part of that for

you? Well, it was really lonely and it still is to a large extent. Well, you know, we're in interesting times now, so a lot of that is unavoidable. But when I first left, so I was working, I loved my employees. You know, it's not the typical story where I hated my job. I hated all my employees. No, there were just, and that's why I stuck around so long. There were just certain things that I didn't enjoy and I wanted to evolve, to do something else. But one thing I did really enjoy was working with all these really interesting, really kind, compassionate people. And I went from that, from going into this office and being around those people, to just being by myself. Yeah. Being a solopreneur and then running this beer website. And although I love my readers a whole lot, all the homebrewers and beer drinkers, you know, they're great. I wasn't collaborating with them. They were my customers. So it was really just me running the show. And so then what I started to do was, and I tend to really geek out on things and go deep into certain things like homebrewing. I mean, I don't just go a little bit in, I don't go an inch, I go a mile.

Yeah.

And I did the same thing with running an online business too. So I had a formal business education. I got my MBA and everything, but that's very different than running an online business and selling beer brewing courses over the internet. It didn't prepare me for that. So I said, man, I gotta, I gotta learn this thing. And so I discovered all these online communities and people a lot like myself, and I really gravitated towards those and I developed those relationships. And they eventually started asking me for help with their businesses, even businesses that were much larger than mine, because I had a skill set that could help them out. And so that's when I started working with clients, which is still what I do today. And that filled that gap that I had. So now I have these, again, these very smart, interesting, kind people around me who I'm collaborating with. Yes. Even if they're not right next to me, I'm still working with them. And that has been a big game changer for me.

I gotta say, it's interesting to hear you say what you just said because that's probably one of the things that would distinguish the difference between my life and what I do today and what I was doing as an attorney. Because I've always been sort of a mentor. I mentor people to this day. We mentor people to speak publicly, deliver TED Talks, develop their paid keynote platform, that kind of thing. And I was working with clients on their commercial case or their litigation or whatever it was. And I was always mentoring, coaching, counseling them, but it was in the worst of circumstances. So, where they were is as a litigant, defendant or plaintiff, or even in common real estate closing situations, I would see sort of the worst parts of their personality show up. Because they were very emotional and often angry and stuff like that. Whereas today, in the counseling and the mentoring that I do, I'm working with kind people, people that want to make a difference in the world and want to share a message or want to deliver a service or product that will be a benefit to others. And they're in business. They're concerned about money. They're concerned about all those things, but it's just a different arena to be kind of doing a sort of a similar thing. I've considered myself a teacher more recently, kind of going back to early, early roots in my life when I actually was a middle school English teacher for a couple of years. And I thought, geez, I'm not a teacher, but that's kind of the common denominator in all these things is this idea that this being able to educate, inform, teach, train, that kind of thing. It sounds to me like you, in developing these courses and working with these home Brewers, you were able to find that simpatico relationship and conversation. And since then, you've now been working with other products. So you're a digital marketer? Am I off or on about that?

Yeah, fair way to describe me. Yeah, so I actually sold the beer brewing business about 3 years ago in 2017 because, again, I hit a ceiling. It wasn't firing me up anymore.

Yeah.

And I know, and I left that job because it wasn't firing me up anymore. And I left it to do something that did fire me up, something I could get excited about. And so I have pretty good self-awareness. And when I saw myself resisting writing those emails to my home beer brewing list, I knew that something was off.

Yep.

And I never really—

Wow. The pace of change over the last couple of years has been rapid. And if you're a leader, a business owner, an entrepreneur, Or you know exactly what I'm talking about. Every day it's something different, something new. But the one thing that I've learned in performing at the height of all of those roles has been that we must be resilient. In fact, it's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And it's the reason why my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilient leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are.

Intended to be the beer guy my whole life and live that life. And it's also probably not too surprising, not the healthiest business to run. Maybe. Like my beer consumption, you know, doing all the research.

All the research.

Yeah, first world problems, right? But eventually it does add up and it's like, all right, come on, I'm trying to get in shape here. This is not easy. So I knew that it was time to move on and I built that bridge that you were talking about because I had this client work That was going on and I love the businesses that they were building and I loved helping them out. I like adding fuel to people's fire and I love the impact that they were making. So it was the same move. It was a different industry, but it's the same move. I closed that chapter and I started a new one.

Tell me a little bit about the work that your company does these days.

Yeah. So I work with— I got great clients and they're really at the cutting edge of online education. I love what it's become. The product of online education has gotten so much better over the past 3 years, but especially since COVID started.

No kidding.

You know, online courses— I've probably been in this a while too— online courses back in the day were not very good.

No.

What they called an online course was not really an online course, was not really education. It was an ebook, or in some cases just a zip file of documents, of Word documents and some videos.

Right.

So what my clients are doing now is they're really taking a very hands-on approach to providing a phenomenal student experience. And that's a word that we say a lot that you didn't hear much a few years ago. No one cared about the student experience. They just cared about building funnels and split testing and all those things, right?

Yep.

And look, that's important, but—

The nice word for the mousetrap.

Right. Yes, exactly. You know, one thing I say is it's about conversations, not about click funnels. Everyone's very funnel obsessed, but if you focus on just getting your students phenomenal results, then everything else becomes easier.

Yes. What's their journey? What's the client path look like? What's that experience? Which is a much deeper inquiry and has a lot less to do about how it is that you tripwire somebody. Or clickbait them, or whatever the process becomes to get someone to—

Those tactics, yeah.

Say yes, right? I mean, and we all get it's a business, so I'm not being naive in saying this. We sell products online as well. I think in some ways there's a question of ethics, there's a question of just what is, how do you rate something? What's the efficacy? If we were talking about a drug and it was the FDA that was sort of evaluating whether this drug could be on market or not. There's nothing that really looks at education, at least this kind of form of adult education or digital, now online education, and kind of rates it. There's really no way to— I haven't seen anybody that's sort of evaluated it.

Well, I actually have a colleague who, this is her main mission, is to increase one of these metrics that is out there, which is course completion rates. And course completion rates historically have been abysmal.

Really bad.

I mean, 3 to 5%, that kind of a range.

Yep. Interesting. It'll be interesting to see what it looks like sort of 12 months from now. As you said, now that more focus has been put on both the experience as well as being able to distinguish yourself in the sea of sameness in that market and that being a metric to measure Success or not. I think it's good. That's as good a measurement as I can think of.

Absolutely, yeah. And my clients are obsessed with this. I have one, David Perell, and he teaches a writing course of all things. It's not exactly revolutionary, it's a writing course, but he is crushing it. I mean, it's a very successful business. The price point on this course is now, I believe, $5,000. So a very high-end course. He's getting CEOs into there, he's getting VCs into there. And he is obsessed with quality and getting results. And so he has a staff, he has a course manager, they do onboarding calls, they have mentors who come back and they form small groups for all their students. So it's a very, very VIP experience for the students and it shows in his results. It shows in the business results. And so, yes, that is the key. If you wanna make more revenue, it's not— Either or. A lot of people wanna build these very passive businesses, these passive lifestyles where everything's automated.

Yeah.

But it's counterintuitive. By putting more into it, you actually achieve more freedom. 'Cause he, tell you what, he has a great lifestyle.

I've got a book that's gonna come out in the next year called Clean Money. That's in many ways about how it is. And you already know kinda what that looks like, right, if you've been in business. Because we have a digital program That we put so much time and effort into. I mean, it goes on for sort of 3 months to help somebody to go from no idea what their TED Talk would be like to actually standing on the stage delivering it, being recorded, and that kind of— and doing it all virtually using Prezi and Zoom and some other technology. And we get so much freedom out of delivering that high quality because I never lose a minute's sleep over it. I never think about we're not serving our clients or that our clients are not going to be happy or that it's not worth the investment. Mm-hmm. None of that, which is so different than when you're selling something that you have to deal with people's— either their outright feedback that's not great or, like you said, that they don't actually use. Then somebody is just buying something that you've sort of led them, even if it's ethically, that you've led somebody to make a snap decision to spend a few hundred or a few thousand bucks that they don't actually use. I don't know that I sleep great scaling that model. And the only way, you know, the only reason to do that is to ultimately achieve some scale. And so it's like, well, there's a cost to that earning. It's not really what I would call clean money and, you know, therefore not a business model I think that ultimately will make people feel great about what they're doing.

Yeah, and just to add to that too, because it's a great point, people in business know that most of the profit comes from what we call the backend, from repeat sales, from existing And you've got to think, of course, if that's true, and of course completion rates are at 3%, how many of them are going to buy an additional product from you when you go to offer it?

Yep. Well, everything is a numbers game anyway. I mean, business is a numbers game. Sales is a numbers game. But when you think about the model of, I'll just acquire new clients, as opposed to actually taking such great care of the clients you've got, because the cost of acquiring a new client is Whatever it is, everybody listening to this ought to know that number. You should know that number. If you don't know that number, find out that number. But, as you said, the money, or at least the wisdom in that space, has been that the aggravation's in the front end and the profit's in the back end. Yeah. And so, those repeat sales, that repeat business is so important. And again, if you take that to be true, You've got to really take care of that client. Seriously, don't sell them something that they won't use or that's just mediocre because what's the likelihood, just logically speaking, what's the likelihood that that person will be so impressed with how unimpressive that first product was that they'll want to be buying something else from you? So it is a little counterintuitive. Yeah.

Yeah, well, it's like you go to a restaurant and have a bad first experience, what's the likelihood that you go back? It's very low.

Such a good point.

Yeah, the same thing in any industry, in any business.

So when you think about what it takes to succeed today, to me, longevity is the key. I mean, you've got to be around long enough. You tell me if you agree with this or not, but I think you got to be around long enough to figure out both what you want and you got to figure out what actually works and what works for you. As we started this discussion, in many ways, that's a product of the lifestyle that you want, what you will and will not tolerate. If you've got to be in bed at 9 o'clock at night, there are certain businesses that just aren't going to work for you. And I'm not suggesting that you should be up till 1 because I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all answer to this. We've really got to explore that ourselves. The one skill that I would apply across the board to any business or entrepreneur would be that they've got to become resilient. That is the most important skill I can think of. It's a soft skill on some levels. It's a hard skill on others. But, to me, it is what's required. If I was training a group of young, new entrepreneurs or even kids, I would tell them that. Yeah. be training them on this is how you establish, you create resilience for yourself. So what's your definition? Let's just begin there. What's the definition of resilience for you?

Yeah, for me it's putting one foot in front of the other because it's so easy, especially for entrepreneurs. We're usually big vision people and we think far ahead. We paint this amazing picture of what we want the future to look like, but we just know Life is tough. There's going to be setbacks. There's a lot of things that you can't control, and you can't get too caught up in those things when they happen. And you just really need to put one foot in front of the other and say, okay, what's one thing that I can do today to move my business forward? Not a week from now, not a month from now, not 6 months from now— today. And when you string together all those steps, then that's when you get that compound interest effect that kicks in. But you need to have faith that those little steps are going to add up and you need to actually take them.

Exactly. In fact, it's the compounding effect that I think Einstein called the greatest miracle. When you look at your money investing at simple interest rates, what happens over time, you see that hockey stick. I think the challenge in the chart, because the funny— the compounding chart is very similar to the COVID chart. You see the way the COVID virus just went from sort of dozens of people to then thousands and then hundreds of thousands and on and on and on. It's very similar to what a compound interest chart looks like. If an entrepreneur needs to simply take that next step, if that's all you do each day is simply move forward in some way, that you'll at some point see that hockey stick effect. I think the toughest part is the time. lag, meaning there's this— you see the chart when you look back at the stock market, the real estate market, or even a business's success. In our studies, we've done a lot of research on resilience and studied other people's research. We were even looking recently at a McKinsey study of resilient companies coming out of the 2008 financial crisis, resilient and less resilient companies. The chart for resilient companies looks like this, and they really recovered quickly and kept just increasing the gap, the distance between themselves and anyone else. That's the way the chart looks. It's always up and to the right. But when you look closer at it, obviously, it's a much more jagged chart. And it's this time between the— if you look at a compound interest chart, there's not a lot going on for a period of time. Right. It's really quiet. You could very easily be convinced that nothing good is happening, that my money isn't growing, that my stocks and my real estate aren't growing, that my business isn't growing. And all the while, you're just kind of putting one step, one foot in front of the other, as you said. And at a certain point, it hockey sticks. But what do you do? I mean, I'm kind of asking you how you handle this, really. What do you do when you look at that chart and you see that the time— Before it hockey sticks is kind of like this, this Death Valley that can feel like you're, you're just dying of thirst for something good to happen. And I think a lot of people have a hard time dealing with that, and often they quit or they pivot too soon even because they just aren't seeing the signs of something good happening. What's your, your recipe for dealing with that?

Yeah, so what I do is I change the chart that I'm looking at. So have you heard the story behind Jerry Seinfeld and how he writes jokes?

You know, please remind me because I think I have, but it's totally fascinating.

Yeah, so the phrase here is don't break the chain. So what Jerry Seinfeld did, I don't know if he still does it, is he would write a joke every single day.

Every single day, that's right, yeah.

Every single day, and he would have a wall calendar and he would make an X every single day that he wrote a joke. And his mantra was, don't break the chain.

Don't break the chain.

So what you would call that— there's a term for this, or terms for this— a lead indicator.

I really hope you're enjoying this episode of the Change Proof Podcast. If you've not yet gone out and gotten your own copy of Change Proof, it's not too late. You can get your copy right now by going to changeproof.com. And not only getting the book and all the bonuses there, but getting access to our proprietary resilience assessment tool. It'll just take you 3 minutes to do, and it's something that will really help you to utilize the book even more effectively to create practices and rituals and habits that will increase your mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual resilience for the long term. Again, go to changeproof.com to get your copy today.

Indicators and lag indicators. So the other chart that you're talking about for him with that, the results-based chart with the hockey stick-shaped growth would be the amount of money he's making, the gigs that he gets, the Netflix specials he gets and all that. But he wasn't looking at that chart. He was looking at his wall calendar. So that results chart, that's your lag indicator. And those things are a result of your input, what they call your lead indicator, which for him was writing the jokes. So he focused on writing the jokes, on not breaking the chain, and the lag indicators— there was the money that he made, the gigs that he got— that was a natural byproduct of him putting one foot in front of the other every day consistently.

Indeed. There's a book that's coming to mind that I wanted to shout out to. It's called Atomic Habits.

I'm

trying to recall the name of the author. Do you remember the guy's name who wrote that book?

James Clear.

Thank you. Awesome. So, that's a good book for people that are interested, even fascinated about what we're talking about now. He covers that pretty well in Atomic Habits as well. So, when it comes to resilience, putting that one step and one foot in front of the other, are there things that you do on a ritual basis, Billy, that that help you to do that? Because again, to me, there's so many things that can interfere, get in the way of a person. They start out with that intention, oh, that makes sense. They just listen to this podcast, go, hey man, I'm going to be like Jerry Seinfeld. Every day I'm going to knock off this one thing. But at some point, they end the streak. The streak ends. I mean, people make these resolutions at the beginning of the year, end of the year, right? New Year's Eve, they make these resolutions and 3 weeks later, they stop. being in the gym at 5:00 AM like they said, or they said they're not going to drink soda and come February they got a can of soda in their hands. I mean, we're all human, so I'm not calling it out that that's a bad thing. It's just— but it is habitual to break habits. That is itself a habit.

Right.

So, my own answer to that is that I create rituals, consciously created habits that ultimately— so I believe that you habitualize to ritualize. Sorry, you ritualize to habitualize. And it's those consciously created rituals that ultimately lead to how it is that you brush your teeth without thinking about it with the same hand kind of stuff. So what do you do on a ritual basis to maintain that resilience, that ability to take that one step each and every day?

Yeah, so one thing I do, I realize that we really do live in the moment and a lot of things that we think we're looking for It's really, at least for me, it's a feeling that we're looking for. And I often get that feeling before reaching that place that I think I need to go. So they often call this the when-then trap. When I get to this point, then I'll be happy. When I achieve X, when I have X amount of money, or when I live in X location, then I'm happy. So I've really learned to pay attention to those little moments throughout the day, because that's all we really have is the moment where I just feel great, right? Just where I'm feeling a lot of enjoyment. And what I do is my habit is I write those down. I have a note on my phone, Apple Notes app, and it's called What Works, just What Works. And when I get that feeling, when I'm like, this is pretty good, I write it on there. And what I've discovered is that it's typically not, you know, I don't know, like racing a car or going skydiving or something like that. These, these big things, right? It's little things. Like just going down to the waterfront here because I live in San Diego.

Yes.

And just taking a walk along there, something that's completely free. And that's a really nice thing to realize, is that, is that these things that really matter, like these special moments, often they're right in front of us already or they're very easy to achieve.

It's so true, Billy. And this is interesting because my ritual for the last sort of 12 years has been to in the morning, look at the states, the sort of feeling states that I want to experience for the day. And I wrote— I started with a list, original list of 13 experiences, which I start, I say, I experience gratitude today. And then I sit and feel gratitude. And this is very, very early in the day. And then I move on from I experience gratitude today to the next thing that's either written on my list or the thing that I just feel inspired in the moment to want to feel. Like, I want to experience faith today. I want to experience having faith in my faith, not falling off the faith truck today. Right. And so, I start with that list so that I'm activating what I think is this sort of self-fulfilling prophecy and the law that what we intend is often what we get. And then, I check in at night and go, okay, so how many of those felt states that I actually experienced today. And it's remarkable how often it is that what I set out to feel in the day is exactly how I experience myself being when I check back at night, which is a pretty telling thing because it's really, in essence, what you're doing. You're cataloging these successes of feeling a certain way during the day and then noting it so you don't forget it. Yeah. You can properly go, oh yeah, that's actually pretty cool.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I was just conducting a workshop earlier today with some clients, and one of them was telling me the story about how they were taking a road trip with their family, and they had the kids in the backseat, and like kids do, like I did in my family, what do the kids ask? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? And he turned around and said, this is it. Look out the window, look at this amazing landscape. Yeah. This is— it's about the journey, not the destination. So I think it's a really good metaphor for life.

Very cool, Billy. All right, well listen, we're gonna have full show notes and our folks are pretty familiar with going there to find out more about you, what you're doing, the company that you're running, and the way that you're helping other people, other entrepreneurs. I think people will feel, if I'm not mistaken, strongly called to want to know how it is that you might help them if they're entrepreneurs and they are selling products or services digitally, which is pretty much everybody these days. So, you get—

Right.

I think a pretty wide berth there. I will remind myself as I say this out loud, it's always a reminder to me and to anybody else that's listening for the first time. I have one particular ritual that is sort of the most important one for me is the waking ritual. Other people, it could be the ritual of what they eat first in the day or the exercise component of their day or how they go to bed. For me, it's how I wake up. As my grandmother once told me, I want to start my day on the right foot, and that's with the first thought I actually have of the day. So, my TED Talk a couple of years ago was just about this one thing, this question, what if I decided to love my life? no matter what? Even in the midst of transition, upheaval, getting fired from a job or a business going bust or a relationship ending or some health issue that we face at times, can you love your life no matter what? And my theory is that you can, but you got to want to. Right. You really got to want to. And so, for me, when I wake up, more than anything, I want to love my life not knowing exactly what the day is going to look like. I want to be grateful to be alive. I want to be in love with living my life and to be just in and around other people that are loving life. So, that was my intention for doing that talk, to sort of see how that might spread. But it doesn't matter what you say in the morning, as long as, to me, you sort of wake up A, that's like the first piece, and it's not guaranteed either. So, when you realize, hey, I'm getting another day, but I didn't have a contract for that when I went to bed last night, I think it's not too difficult to just appreciate, have some appreciation in that moment. Yeah. And then, to put your feet on the floor and say something. What are the first words out of your mouth that reflect sort of those first early waking thoughts even? And it could be, I am resilient. It could be, I am forever blessed. I mean, it could be just anything, really. Mine are, I love my life. Those are my 4 words. Yes. So, Billy, any sense—

I love it. Can I add something to that?

Yeah, I was just going to ask you, any sense of what you might be saying tomorrow?

Yeah, and I learned this from— and I love that. How can I love my life no matter what? And if I can add to that, because I think that's a great sentence. And I learned this from a mentor named Joe Hudson. It's also, how can I love myself no matter what? Because a lot of us— look, my hand is raised here— we— if you tune into that inner voice, that self-critic, and the things that we say to ourselves, you would never say that to someone who you really love. You would never say that to a small child. And so why do we say it to ourselves? And that's something that I've

Yeah, so important. I've been thinking recently that if we just recorded everything that came out of our mouth in a day and we had to listen to it at night, we'd cringe. If we had to sort of listen to or read what our thoughts were from moment to moment during the day, we would say if they came to us in a transcript, we'd say lock that person up. Right. They would never—

Well, and speaking of habits, that is one that I've done. That's an exercise that I've done before, to write that down, and yes, it is shocking.

Yeah. Well, on that note, it's been a blast. I love the conversation. Really appreciate you making the time to be with us today. So thank you, Billy.

Yeah, thank you for having me, Adam.

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