How I Get All My Best Business Ideas

I get my best ideas when I am around other people having fun. The thing that I am procrastinating all of a sudden feels easy. The sales copy that I'm trying to write all of a sudden starts to flow. And what I've noticed is that we as entrepreneurs will go through this balance of having a full cup when we're having fun, when we're in the presence of other people, and then spending that cup when we're behind computers and we're isolating ourselves from the rest of the world. Now, I've gone back and forth on this for a long time trying to figure out, like, why do I get my best ideas when I'm not working? Why do I get my best ideas when I'm just out connecting with other people? Why is that the case? And I've come to the conclusion that when we have our cup full, then everything else just feels easier. And we as entrepreneurs are constantly draining the cup, trying to be in a position to fill the cup up later. We say when we have the money or the exit or whatever it is, then our cup will be full and then we'll be able to focus on those things. But I think it's only by filling the cup first that we have the energy to be able to do our best work. This is why recently, for our last mastermind, we decided to do things way differently. Instead of being in a stuffy hotel room, we rented a 10,000 square foot mansion on 15 acres and we played pickleball and we brought in chefs to make amazing meals three times a day. And we played games and we had a pool. And then after 24 hours of being together and connecting and getting to know one another, then we got into a mastermind and we helped each other with business. And by then we had seen past the facade. By then we had had some fun together. By then we really started to come out as ourselves and we were able to actually be present with one another, to make introductions for one another, to give each other advice based on what we've seen in the other person, not just what they say about their business. You know, something I've experienced in my own life that has been a point of frustration is I feel the pressure to make a lot of decisions when I feel stressed. Meaning when I'm in a low energy place, that's when I feel the most like I have to have everything all figured out. When I'm worried about money or I'm worried about business growth, that's when I'm most likely to just try a bunch of things and start a bunch of new things to get something going. But the truth is, when I'm in a high energy place because I've been around other people, because I am being good to my body, because I am focused on things that I enjoy, then all of the hard decisions all of a sudden feel light and easy and clear. When I'm not worried, when I'm not stressed, when I am not angry or frustrated, this is when all the best ideas come to me and I get clarity about what I really want to do or how I really need to attack that situation. Now, this is not to say that we always need to be in a good place. Obviously we're not. And obviously we can use fun and activity as distraction from doing hard work. But what I've noticed about myself is that I tend to stay in the grind mode for way too long until a point where I have to like, throw the computer out the window and go recharge. But if I make recharging the priority, it's the unlock to everything that I want in life. Oftentimes as entrepreneurs, we start businesses because we're stressed about money. And starting a business because you want to fix a money problem is kind of like having a baby so that you can have more free time. It doesn't work like that. But when you're in a stressed place, particularly about money, and you bring that over into business, how are you going to operate that business? You're going to be trying to take money out of it as fast as possible, which doesn't give it the fuel to grow. But if you contrast out with you coming up with your idea when you're on vacation, when you're around other people, when it's just because it's a fun idea that you would like to see exist in the world, well, now naturally you have the energy to put focus and attention and nurturing into that business. That is what actually makes it grow. So I've started to ask myself the question of how do I build a life in which I get to prioritize those high energy things? Because let's face it, I work behind a computer a lot. I create content on the Internet. And I don't see a lot of you until you come to one of our events. That's there's a lot of people that I meet at our events and they're like, I built a $2 million business as a result of your free content. And I'm like, why have we never met before? This happens all the time. So I definitely have A tendency to isolate myself and to work behind a computer and forget that there's somebody else on the other side of this. Well, could I change that? Could I stack the deck so that I have more opportunities to have a full cup? And some of that comes down to just my basic habits. Do I have a consistent wake up time? Do I get to the gym? Do I eat well? Do I stop working at a certain time and go be with friends? Do I schedule the guy night once a week? Do I do that kind of stuff? Those are all just good for my mental health. But could I do it in business as well? Could I have masterminds and meetups that weren't in a stuffy hotel room where we talk about serious business? But could we actually make them hella fun? Could we make them so that it was like a reunion of friends playing games and just dare to support one another? Because those are when the best ideas come. Those are when the best relationships are built. So I've been prioritizing that more in our masterminds and meetups. A good example of this is for the next Capitalism conference. We booked a venue where almost everyone, not everyone, but almost everyone, can stay on site. So we have the ballroom and then we have hotel rooms all around the property and it's on a lake where we'll do all kinds of really fun activities and everyone will be staying in the same spot. So it feels like a big reunion. And you'll be able to go really deep with everybody who is there. And it's going to feel like a small event even though there's going to be 200 or so people there. So we're starting to identify where can we bring more of that energy into the way that we do the business. And I am not perfect at this. I'm not even good at this. But when I remember to do this, all of my best work happens. And sometimes I just need to close the fucking laptop and get out and go have fun. Before I have the clarity to go address that situation with a team member or go write that copy or think about how I want to sell this thing. I know that I need to get out of my element. When I have this long to do list of things that don't actually matter and I don't have the energy to to do it. That's when I know that I'm in a really low place. One of the ways that I've found that I can shift this a little bit in my life is if I prioritize what I would consider high Energy activities. So high energy activities for me are things like selling, creating content, going to masterminds, and having coaching calls. These are all things that have me talking because that's a higher energy activity for me. And a lot of times it's has to do with other people. These are things that charge me up. I have more energy at the end of doing one of those activities than the opposite. And so if I prioritize those things, then either I have the energy to be able to attack that problem, or I realized that that problem didn't really matter all that much anyway. A lot of the game of entrepreneurship is energy management. We think it's about strategy and it's about who you know and having enough capital. And all those things matter. But none of them come into play. If we're in a low energy state, we won't have the energy to be able to go raise the capital. And if even if we did, our pitch would suck. And this is when people get really into their heads into optimizing for exactly how things are supposed to be. When really what you need to do is turn your brain off for a minute and let your body come online and for you to feel the energy richness that you want out of life and let that guide the brain into saying more of this. Let's do more of this. This is the advice that I give to a lot of early entrepreneurs who are trying to figure out exactly who they're going to serve and what their product's going to be and what their launch plan is going to be. And they spend six to nine months just thinking about what their perfect plan is. I have a lot of sympathy for this because I spent a good amount of my career trying to perfect all of the different things about my business. But what I've discovered just accidentally is that all of the best things for my businesses come when I'm not trying to figure it all out. All of the worst things that kill my business or kill my revenue or distract me come when I make decisions from a low energy place. The secret then is to go charge up first and then come back to that thing. Now, of course, we still need to make hard decisions. We still need to do hard things. And doing hard things actually gives us the strength to be able to continue to run at a high energy place. But sometimes as entrepreneurs, especially new entrepreneurs, they obsess in their head about doing things perfect from the get go because they're in a low energy place. But when you step away from it and you go get charged up and you Think about what you actually want to create. Those are the best ideas. Those are when the best relationships happen. Those are when the best breakthroughs and strategies happen. There was a member of one of our communities once who was really in her head trying to figure out exactly what she should do with the next step in her business. And I said, go to the beach and then come back and ask me again. And that was because I could tell that she had been in her house for, for several days working on this problem and that she needed to go be happy for just a minute so that she could come back and see not just what the right thing to do was, but the thing that she actually wanted. It is very hard for us to see what we want when we're living a life that we don't want. And so sometimes we have to play a cheat code, which means go do something that charges us up, step away from our environment for a minute, and then we have the clarity to be able to go create the life and the business that allows us to stay there on a more regular basis. Entrepreneurship is a grind. There are 18 hour days, there are 24 hour days sometimes. And we have mistaken the 18 hour days as being something that is supposed to be depleting. But 18 hour work days, or hitting the grind or the hustle, that has never been meant to be something that is just absolutely soul sucking. The only reason why 18 to 24 hour work days are possible are when you feel fueled up by what it is that you're doing. Like you genuinely feel like you're building something that matters. If that is not what you have, the grind's not possible for you.

It's not possible for you to go through a 90 day process of launching something new if your body doesn't want it. And your body is trying to avoid the situation it's in, not creating what it wants. It's almost like it doesn't have a reference point for what it wants. And so it's just trying to milk the almond a little bit more, trying to squeeze a dry lemon for a little bit more juice. It doesn't work like that. Now I'm only giving advice that I need to hear myself. So this is not a judgment on entrepreneurs burning the candle at both ends. This is more me giving a warning to many of you who are early in your journey about what can happen if you don't realize that your body's driving the show. Mark Manson, in his book Everything is a Book About Hope, talks about how there is a mental brain and there is an emotional brain. And we all think that the mental brain runs the show. But a better analogy is like both of those are in a car and the mental brain is reading the map. It knows where to go and it knows where the turns are. But the emotional brain has its hands on the steering wheel. And if the emotional brain is not happy, it will say fuck you to the mental brain and it will make a left turn when it's supposed to make a right turn. And the mental brain will recalculate and say, okay, now I need to turn around to go in this direction. And the emotional brain, depending on what kind of a mood it's in, will really determine where the car goes. When those two things are not connected, it's very hard to make decisions where you will take consistent action. Eventually, the emotional body is going to win. And so we have to find a way to tap into the things that make us feel energy rich and fueled up if we're going to allow our mental brain to make clear decisions. For me, that has meant changing the way that I do masterminds, changing the way that we do events, and stacking my calendar with more things that fuel me up. I'm not always going to feel awesome at work. I'm not always going to feel awesome with my kids. And there is something to be said about having the discipline to show up as you want to show up regardless. But eventually the emotional body wins and there has to be room for us to refuel and stack the deck for us to get clarity about what it is that we actually want. If you found value in this podcast and you're ready to go Deeper, here are three resources where we can help you. One, you can grab my book 12 months to 1 million on Audible or Amazon. It has over a thousand reviews and it's the playbook to building a seven figure business. Second, you can join our community of entrepreneurs who are following a plan to build a 1% net worth by building businesses and investing the profits. You can get plugged in@capitalism.com 1. And third, if you're looking to go deeper and build a seven figure business that you can sell, you can work closely with us inside the capitalism incubator and you can get on the waiting list and find out what we do over@capitalism.com inc. That's capitalism.com incident.