Entrepreneurial Burnout, Sabbaticals, and Business Goals - The Climb Episode 7

It's been seven months since I did an update about where I'm at as an entrepreneur. I call this series the Climb. And it's my opportunity to document what's going on in my journey. And seven months ago, I was expecting things to go the exact opposite way than they actually did when revisiting what we set out to do last year. Seven months ago, we had just expanded the team, I was working on new projects, and we were in a position that I thought to grow really quickly. And the opposite happened because. And I have this pattern as an entrepreneur and I've been told this is very common where I expand really fast and then I have to cut around what's not working in order to simplify again, and only then do I have the capacity to grow again. And that's exactly what happened. We took on too many people, too many ideas, went in too many different directions, trying to build the entire vision all at once. I've made this mistake in the past and I had to make it again in order to get it. And so where I'm at right now is the complete opposite place that I was seven months ago, which is that I am more focused on simplicity, cutting projects, coming back to very high profitability, not starting new things, eliminating projects, taking focus away from things so that we can build the core of the business. And it just so happens that every time we do that, things grow again, and when they grow again, we start investing in new projects and hiring new people and it just becomes a cycle of growing and then cutting and growing and culling. And in this case, I just finished. That's not done yet. I'm in the middle of a very painful culling, a very painful trimming of the business of eliminating projects and focus. I even backed out of some projects that I really wanted to do. There was a business I wanted to purchase and invest in that I really wanted and backed out because I just need capacity. And all that has been really hard. And it's been also very good on the other side of it, still in the middle of some of it, but very good to recapture the capacity in order to focus on the next stage of growth since my last climb. Update. I turned 34, and for some reason 34 felt like a big birthday to me. I think in some ways my brain now identifies as like middle aged or like an adult at 34. I think subconsciously I also compare myself to one of my heroes, Gary Vaynerchuk, who started over again at 34 with nothing. That's when he started Vaynermedia that's honestly where I feel like I am right now. I'm not starting completely over, but I feel like this last seven months or so was when I actually got clear about my message. The dreams I want to pursue, the people I want to help, and how our business is going to be structured. I think up until middle to end of last year, I've been just throwing money and attention at projects and ideas and events like whatever would get us quarter to quarter. And that's not really building a business. So getting that clarity and that focus, which was hard work, is really the first time that I feel like I know what I'm building@capitalism.com so when we look at my where I am in my career, I honestly feel like this is a new beginning. It's a new start. It's day one for me in a sense. I'm in the grind, if you will. We're cash flow positive, we're making a big difference in our students lives. But we're rebuilding a lot of things now that we're focused on that core person and that is scary and exciting. The grind is the best part because every inch forward feels huge. That's where we feel right now. We just had our best month ever in January of 2022. From a revenue and profit standpoint, it was our best month we've ever had in three or four years as a company. It's a big deal and we did a launch and we did some promotions that we may not be able to replicate, but we did them in order to build the systems for us to sustain and grow that over time. So that's a big deal for us to have a record month while also doing it in a way that builds our systems long term. Couldn't have done that a year ago, couldn't have done that without the clarity that we have now. So I feel like I'm at the beginning and that everything I've done up to this point has been R and D, research and development. I also however, have come to the realization that I need a sabbatical. And a sabbatical to me is three or four weeks. There's going to be a time probably at the end of this quarter where I will schedule three weeks of no email, no tech, no distractions. My brain needs it. My brain needs a little bit of a reset and I need that for myself in order to see that next step stage. So I will be planning on going to my team today or tomorrow actually. Hopefully this video doesn't get posted before that and I'M going to tell them, hey, I need a sabbatical. Like, we need to work towards me being able to take three weeks of being uninterrupted. Now, some people think sabbatical is six months. Like three weeks will be fine for me. Three weeks of just being with my kids, taking them to school, not checking email. And I made a list of everything that needs to happen in the company in order for me to be able to do that. You know what the funny thing was, as soon as I made that list, I was like, oh, this isn't hard like this. Now that I have this goal in mind, there's just very simple systems that need to be developed in order for me to walk away for three weeks. It doesn't mean Ryan's going anywhere. It just means Ryan. Ryan needs like, I've never taken that much time off ever, ever. So to be able to do that so that I can see clearly the next step stage is going to be really important and big for our business and the process of building towards it will be really big for our business too. Exactly one year ago, I posted a video about 1000 day goals where I was setting out to spend the next thousand days working on specific goals and looking at my progress for them. I'm really disappointed short term and I'm really encouraged looking at the macro. So I follow a process that I call the tribe 5t r I b E T is time, R is relationships, I is income, B is body, and E is expansion. And I set one goal for each of these categories to practice for the next thousand days. Thousand days is almost three years. It's short enough to be able to work into regular habits, but long enough to see unbelievable progress with time. I wanted my focus to be getting really good at YouTube. I give us a C at this. We've hired consultants. We have gotten a lot better at our systems. Our thumbnails look great. Our watch time and our average view count is way up. We've got the systems pretty good. At this point, I think my content has just been okay. I think for the next 600 days or whatever it is, my focus needs to be more on planning content than it needs to be on just showing up and recording. And that's what will take us to the promised land. For the end goal of YouTube. There have been times when we've seen hockey stick growth and there have been times where it came all the way down and we've been flat. But overall, for the year, our average time is up. We crossed 100,000 subscribers. We have much more engagement on these videos than we did a year ago. The next step, we have much better thumbnails, higher click through rates. Next step is actually planning out content to be more thoughtful so that we're bringing the most value possible. The second one is R relationships. And my goal for that was to spend three years practicing giving. Instead of having a transactional relationship, I give myself a B minus on this one. So I have learned what my selfish tendencies are and when I get into them, and I've learned what it really looks like and feels like to give. And honestly, the biggest lesson was realizing it's not that hard. Giving comes from a place of when I'm feeling really great, when I've slept well, when I am doing things I enjoy. I'm a natural giver, and I think we all are. So focusing on giving and relationships, getting giving to customers is much more about managing my own internal state than anything external, than anything that I need to do. More often, being generous is more of a state rather than a habit. And so what I need to work on for the next 600 days is to just stay in a really good place. Because when I'm in that place, I naturally give. And when I naturally give, I also naturally get. And there's a beautiful flow that happens in that. And the only times that you feel scarce are when you step out of that flow. And so my job is to stay happy and staying generous. I is income and for income. I wanted to think and operate more like an investor. I wanted to be less active in projects and more of a passive investor in projects. I'm going to give myself a big B minus on this one, maybe a C plus on this one. What I've realized is that I have a tendency to avoid projects by like acting as an investor and walking away from them. That's not investing. Investing is being very strategic about what you pick, picking it and then letting it ride. I was doing a lot more, oh, I'm an investor, so I'll invest in this and this and this and this and this. So I spent the last year trying to be an investor, but not really being an investor. And I learned that the hard way by investing in all of these things that I really had no way of evaluating. I got my head kicked in on a few investments. The real way to change this and operate moving forward is for me to be much more researched, much more selective, much more thoughtful about where I put my money and then I can let it ride. B was Body. And my goals for Body were to stay Lean and to be very mobile in my body. So work on flexibility and work on staying lean. I give myself a solid B for this one. I have made huge progress in my flexibility. My hips open really well now. I can almost twerk. I can do like a half a twerk. Like, like. I'm no Miley Cyrus, but my hips don't lie. I've made great progress there. And that's come down to a daily stretching routine. Really working on opening all this shiz up. Cause man, does this get crunched when you are sitting at a computer all day. I just spill coffee on my foot that burns. And the second one was staying lean. And I give myself a B here too. So I've much better dialed in my diet and my habits to be able to stay lean and also just have a really good supplement stack at this point that I think really helps with metabolism and with staying lean. And that's things like berberine and spermidine and a couple other cool things that I think genuinely help with that sometimes. Intermittent fasting can really help with that too. So all of those things combined have, have been really great for this one. And finally, E expansion. My goal here was to have a calm mind. I can't decide if I should give myself an A or an F on this one because I had huge breakthroughs here. Huge breakthroughs. But my day to day experience has been anything but calm. And I realize how chaotic I allow my life to be and how chaotic my mind is. And my habit is to avoid, avoid dealing with that chaos by starting new chaos. It's terrible. So I saw that I've been an F in this area of my life. But that breakthrough is exactly what I will need over the next two years to be able to operate from a calm mind. Also, I would have never done things like set a goal of taking a three week sabbatical. I would never set that that if it wasn't important to me to have a calm mind. Day to day. I don't feel like my mind is calm, but when I look in the macro, I've made really good progress here. Mostly because I've realized how chaotic my mind is. I tell entrepreneurs all the time that the best asset they have is their brain space. And I just didn't realize how little brain space I had. So now that I've had that realization, I can begin the process of clearing more room in my chaotic brain so they can operate moving forward from a really calm place. I'm really thankful that I set thousand day goals because if these were 90 day goals, I would get Fs on all of them. The reason I set out to do thousand day goals was because I knew that things take time and I was tired of like hustling to the next thing and I wanted to get do things and do them well. If I set out to master YouTube in 90 days, it's unsustainable. But to do over a thousand days, you can have a long slow burn of something that will last for decades. That's my goal. I want to stay lean and mobile for decades. I want to have a great YouTube presence for decades. I want to have a calm mind for decades, not for 90 days. So being able to set those longer term goals and come back and revisit them has allowed me to see the macro changes and project out how that's going to play out over the final three years. Alright, this is the climb. This is where I rant about myself for 15 minutes. If you actually watch the whole thing, let me know in the comments so I can say thank you. Hit the subscribe button. I like you. Bye.