What are We Working for?

Business Brain, episode 668 for Wednesday, July 23rd. International Yada Yada Yada Day for you Seinfeld fans. 2025. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Business Brain, the show where we take an idea or three, we dissect it, we analyze it, we crunch it, we use it to tune our business brains so that each and every one of us can keep on living our charmed lives. Our sponsor for this episode is openphone.com businessbrain. That's where you can go to get 20% off your first six months of the number one business phone system. We'll talk about why that is and why you want to do that in a little bit. For now, back here for a minute in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And still out in Northern California, I'm Shannon Jean. How you doing? I was up in the mountain. I was up in the mountains. Now I'm back. So that's, you know, a little closer.

Traveling and all that. Crazy.

Yes.

Yeah, man.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Good to have everybody back.

It is good you don't be here. I like. I like. I like podcasting from my normal environment. It's fine when I'm traveling. Like, totally workable, but preferred here.

Yep, I got it. Me too. Same thing. Yeah, I'm, you know, you bring it. I have my travel kit and gets. Gets it done. But I do enjoy having it. Having it up here. One of the things I. I wanted to. Well, let me. Let me back up. So I have this. This. And I've talked about. Maybe I've talked about it before here or not, but I have certainly talked about it. I have this. This metaphor in my head that I think of success and what one of the best parts of my life is sitting around campfire.

Right.

And so I use this campfire metaphor as something that really draws me forward as, oh, I'm building. Because, you know, we work really hard. You're getting ready to get back on the road. It's like constant. Constant. I mean, hard is relative. Right. I always say, you know, carrying bags of cement is hard. Digging holes in the earth is very hard.

Yes.

So when I say hard, it's just. It can be a grind getting stuff done, and you're. You're doing things. So that's. Let's put first. Put that perspective.

Some perspective. But yes. I mean, it's. It's the. We are extremely fortunate.

Yes.

Some of that fortune is opportunities that we take advantage of, and some of it is just opportunities that land in our laps different ways.

Yeah, yeah. And so as I've leaned into this idea, I was like, okay, well what is it about this campfire idea that has drawn me for so many years? And I realized that it's that connection with people and you know, putting your. And putting myself in situations that keeps moving me forward. What I really love and I had. We had family up at our river house this weekend and I shared a picture with you, Dave. And for those of you watching the live stream or watching. Yeah, well. Or looking at later on YouTube, which you can do that. I took a photo. I often find myself getting up from the campfire and, and walking away so I can observe it. Ah. And I thought of it especially here. I walked out. If you, you know, you know, if you're listening to us, you don't get the visual, but I'll describe it a little bit.

Yeah, please.

This camp, the campfire is kind of up. Raised up on a hillside down below where our house is on the river. And I walked down to this meadow lawn area that we have and I look back up and I was like, man, this here's my nephew. My wife helping my nephew, one of my nephews, make us more. My brother in law sitting there, you know, having a beer. My other nephew putting wood on the fire with this big thing. And you know, we had dogs running around all around me and stuff. And I was like, man, this is why I work. It's, this is it. I'm observing all the effort and hard work because it's no small amount of work to make this happen. This picture looks very.

Oh, it's very natural. But that's the thing. Yeah. Is it is natural because you've been able to create this opportunity for this natural thing to happen. But it, none of it happened by accident. I mean, none of it. You, you know, working, working backwards. I'm sure you had to level some ground to, to put the fire pit in, to put the meadow in where you're standing. Someone else leveled ground to put the house in the house that you bought. And you were able to buy that house because you had earned the, the money and lending opportunity. I don't know how you bought it. Right. But you'd earned the financial ability to buy this house regardless of how that came together because of the work that you'd done for, you know, maybe the 10 years prior and the 10 years prior to that, you did the work that allowed you to then do the following work that. Right. Like we can just keep going backwards.

And back, keep going back.

And this is, you know, people say overnight success takes 20 years. And. And that's what you're describing here.

Yes. And I have the luxury of.

Of.

Well, all of us have. I have the luxury of enjoying it, but you have the luxury as a listener of, you know, take that from me as someone that. That's probably. Maybe older than you, that has worked for this 25 years or whatever, to, you know, find the thing that pulls you forward.

Yes.

That. That's the takeaway here. I've thought about this my whole life. I want to build. I want to sit around the campfire with the people I love. I want to build this thing. I want to have a place I can invite my friends. I want to have. You know, and these kids, I love seeing that. They're driving dirt bikes around, and we had my polari. My Ranger. They're driving the ATVs and just having a great time, swimming in the river and doing all this crazy stuff, eating Ho Ho's for breakfast, and, you know, this just great, you know, amazing things that I've wanted forever, and I have them. And it made me think as I was driving home yesterday, back to my house, and I was like, man, this is what I work for.

Yes.

And I want to. I want that connection with people. I want to watch their experience. I want to observe them enjoying the fruits of my labor.

Right.

That's very rewarding.

It is rewarding. It. It. I know that that kind of statement can sound egotistical, and in a sense, it is, but. But not in. But. But the word egotistical is not always a negative. It doesn't need to be. Have a negative connotation. Yeah.

Correct.

I agree. Yeah. No, this is. So I'm curious, folks, as you're listening here, Shannon's metaphor, the goal, if you will. And I know we don't like goals, but, you know, you know, the. The. The. The. The thing that drives you. One of the things. It's certainly the one we're talking about here is this campfire.

Yep.

What I'm curious about for you listening is what is your metaphor? What is the thing that matters to you? And metaphor might not even be the right word, because this is a reality. Yeah. Like, it was a. It was a vision that it's an ideal that you realized, intentionally realized. This is. None of this is an accident. And so.

Yeah. And what is yours?

What's yours? What is feedbackusinessbrain show? I want to know, like, what is your ideal idea? Metaphor? Reality? What is it? Because it's different for all of us. And that I Mean, that's one.

You should have one. This is the. This is the takeaway here by having something that you're this. This purposeful, you know, call it your noble cause. Whatever it is. Yeah. It. It helps you create beyond just the daily grind of I got to make money, I got to pay my bills, I got to do my mortgage, I got to do this for my kids. Yeah, yeah, of course. We all have that.

Yes.

But if there, you know, having this thing hanging out of how I wanted, this ideal setting has helped me tremendously, and I highly recommend it.

Yeah, for sure. We have some more to talk about. The next thing that I want to talk about is our sponsor for this episode because you know that moment when your phone rings and it's either a new client or your cousin Carl calling to ask if you still have his ladder from 2017. Yeah. That is why I love our sponsor, OpenPhone. OpenPhone is the number one business phone system built for folks like us, the entrepreneurs grinding it out, creating opportunities, and yes, trying to live that charmed life. With OpenPhone, you don't need to carry two phones or a dusty old landline. Just fire up the app on your computer or your phone and you're all set. You and your team can share one number and handle calls and texts like it's a group chat with superpowers. Someone starts a convo, somebody else finishes it. Your customers get seamless service. You get more time to build your empire or alphabetize your snack drawer, your call, whatever you like. And after hours, their AI answers calls, fields questions, and even captures leads while you sleep or while you binge reality shows. Again, no judgment. See why over 60,000 businesses trust OpenPhone. And OpenPhone is offering our listeners 20% off your first six months@openphone.com businessbrain. That's O P N P H O-N E.com businessbrain. And if you have existing numbers with another service, Open Phone will port them over at no extra charge. Open Phone, no missed calls, no missed customers. And Our thanks to OpenPhone for sponsoring this episode. So I mentioned last week that I was not feeling well and. And talked about kind of how I was sort of processing that. I've learned a lot more since then. We. There's. It's rare to get a positive test for Lyme disease, but that is symptom. It is, and therefore it is often diagnosed symptomatically. That is the current diagnosis I'm operating under. They started me on antibiotics, Doxycycline, which is sort of the classic one for Lyme disease. And instantly my fevers went away.

Like, yeah, your energy level is back to normal.

Well, so a few things have happened, but my fevers went away. It took a few more days for other things to start, kind of like coming back. And then in parallel to that, I also figured out how to sleep because I was only getting like two or three hours of sleep because of these. One of the weird symptoms was, in a sense still is this migrating muscle pain. It started in one leg, next day it was in the next leg. And it would wake me up at night when. And not being able to sleep sucks. Right. So I've been on doxycycline for a little while. Hopefully it. It's not just keeping it at bay. Hopefully it's actually like eradicating this thing, but we'll find out. So all is progressing and glad to hear. Yeah, my energy level is it. I'm probably to 80% now, you know, but certainly not 100. But way better than where I was. And I've been traveling while I've been recovering from this. And in a sense that has been good for me because if I were here in my office, I probably would have spent more time working or at least trying to work than I did did while I was traveling. Traveling sort of naturally gives me, I'll say excuse, but it. But it's more just the pattern of traveling. I am expecting to not be as proactive with work as. As I would be if I were here, you know, in my normal environment. And so that it gave me the opportunity, slash, excuse to. I was taking two naps a day while I was traveling at this conference.

Because I needed it.

Right. I had more downtime and it afforded me at least the idea of accepting taking more downtime, which I think was extremely helpful for my, you know, recovery from. From whatever this thing is.

Yeah. You know, yeah.

Obviously, you know, you overdo it and, you know, your body will let you know. But what it did was it forced me to prioritize things and only do the highest of priorities. And the rest of the stuff, I just had to kind of let fall by the wayside that I either will never get to or. Yeah, you know, like, I did a bunch of work. We're recording this on Monday. I did a bunch of work on Saturday and Sunday mornings after I got up just to kind of catch up. Right. You know, but again, that was like B level priorities. The A level priorities I was handling while I was gone. And that was it. And then the B level priorities I took care of this weekend and there was like three weeks worth of those that had piled up. It was a lot, like, scary. Way more than I ever have let go before. And while the repercussions of this will certainly they aren't over. Right. Like, you know, I will see next quarter what the, the impact is of me not being quite as proactive in July as I normally would have been. Right. But I also have a good team around me with all of my businesses. Everything is being handled. It's all moving forward. You know, everybody did what they needed to do, and it's kind of all fine. And so learning this, having the opportunity to experience this forced prioritization, I think is going to be. Is going to change things for me.

Well, yeah, sometimes it forces change and it forces you to drop things that you thought were important.

Exactly.

That are. That are not.

Yes.

And that you're like, wow, I was spending time doing these things. When I stopped, nothing. Nothing happened.

It didn't. Right, right.

Nothing bad happened.

Exactly, exactly. And even, you know, delaying three weeks to do kind of the B level priorities, the things that, that definitely needed to be done eventually it's like, okay, well, wait a minute, huh? And then I started thinking, okay, these B level priorities, if they can wait three weeks for me to do it, that that 80% rule starts to kick in. And the 80% rule being if I can hire somebody to do something 80% as well as I believe I do it. Right. Like, and most of the time you hire somebody and they do it better than you, but that's a whole other thing. You got to get to that. You got to get over the hump. So to get over the hump, you do this 80% trick in your brain. You say, hey, if I can hire somebody and they do it 80% as well as me, it frees up my time to do other things. And it's like, well, if I could just delegate those, all of those B level priorities to somebody who's going to do it 80% as well and faster than me taking three weeks to do it, which naturally erodes the effectiveness of.

It and it gives you more time to focus on the A priorities.

That's what I'm saying. Yes. So it's been really, it's been informative in a, in, in what I think is, Is going to be a productive way. Like I said, I'm, I'm sure there'll be some fallout from, from this. There's already been a little bit, but not. Nothing terrible because the A level priorities were still happening. Like Thankfully I wasn't completely just down for the count and, you know, out of it for two weeks. You know, I was still able. And I'm very thankful to modern medicine and antibiotics for and my team of doctors and like, like, I, I can't sing the praises of living in 2025 enough, of course, because if this was 100 years ago. No, like, I, I don't want to have that. Yeah, it wouldn't be good, would be very bad.

But it, it, yeah, that. The things that when you change up how things work, you know, ideally you don't, you don't get sick. Medical issue.

But sometimes that's what it takes.

Sometimes. Or you go away on vacation or something, you take a trip and disconnect and you come back and you're like, wow, all this thing, I thought that was just going to be a nightmare. Or you know what? Everybody did handle everything they were supposed to handle all these kinds of, you know, things. It's. And they both have one thing in common. You removed yourself from the situation. And we are often the, the barrier, the logjam to get things done. You know, it's just, it's tough to give up. Especially you have this entrepreneurial, you know, I don't think the control freakishness and superhero complexity, it's got to be me. I can make this work so much better, yada, yada, yada. But most of the time, you know, that's, that's not the case.

So it's a fallacy. The entrepreneur fallacy.

Yep. Yep. But I'm glad you're feeling better and I'm glad you picked up that. And hopefully you'll be able to offload those things. And I'll bet. And we're going to talk about this more on our Friday I show. I'll bet the new chat GPT agents can help. Will be able to help you with some of those.

I want to talk about that. Those agents quite a bit. Yep. Well, thank you for listening, folks. I, I was thinking, Shannon, you know, going back to the, you know, what's your noble cause? What's your campfire metaphor? And as I'm sitting here in my studio doing this show, like this is actually part of my, I mean, really what we're asking people is how do you define your charmed life? What, What.

Yeah.

What realities are signs of your charmed life? Right. For you, it's the campfire is one of them. And, and I realized that, you know, being able to sit here in the studio with all kinds of fun gear and be able to do what you and I are doing. And I realize that this is part of what allows me to live the charmed life, but it is also like the being able to do this work and have this be the thing that affords me all the other pieces of my charmed life in and of itself. This is part of my charm.

Yeah, it's great.

It's amazing.

Yeah. And I think we should talk about those things more. I agree on the show because I will tell you, you know, just, just examples of being, you know, talking about the things that we've been able to do or the things that, how we live our lives and do those things. I think, I think it connects with people and I think it's important to share.

Yeah.

And it, especially if you're just starting out or you're at whatever part of your journey you're at, it oftentimes can just feel like a slog, you know, and you're just grinding day in and.

Day out most of the time.

Yeah. So it, I think it's, it's important to hold up examples of, hey, you, you know, this, you're going to get there. And these are the, the opportunities that are in your future and the things that you can do to create that charmed life. And so, yeah, we'll be, we'll be pointing that stuff out a little bit.

More in the future. And help us, please, feedbackusinessbrain Show. Tell us what the kind of metrics are for you, the things that exist in your, in how you live your life that are signs to you that you are living that charmed life because it's different for all of us. And, and yet there are some things that are going to be, that are going to resonate. So, you know, you hearing about Shannon's campfire or me in my podcast, podcast studio, I like, you know, does that resonate with you and remind you of things in your life? Because if. The more we share, the easier it is for us all to do that. So, yeah, thanks for, thanks for hanging out. Like I said, Feedback. BusinessBrain Show. Please visit our sponsor, openphone.com BusinessBrain and also go to BusinessBrain Show Review and give us a review, would you? We'd love that. Thanks. See you next time.

See you.