Peter Shallard: The Shrink For Entrepreneurs

Foreigners. Ryan, Daniel Moran here. Today, I'm going to be joined by the shrink for entrepreneurs, my personal mindset coach, Peter Shallard. Hey, if you're an entrepreneur, you probably got into the business that you're in because you wanted a better life for yourself and your family. But have you ever noticed that when you start a business, sometimes you're less.

Happy happy than before you started your business? I know I've experienced that in my.

Life where I'm doing well, I'm seeing success, but I'm becoming a workaholic. I'm not doing the things I enjoy because I'm working all of the time. And for whatever reason, I'm less happy as a result. Why is it that as entrepreneurs, we sometimes get exactly what we wanted and yet we're not happy? Well, we're gonna figure that out today with my coach, Peter Shallard. Peter works with a great number of entrepreneurs with both his personal practice and his business, which is called Commit Action. And he works on entrepreneurs with entrepreneurs in order to address this problem. Because what he has discovered through his background is that entrepreneurs are really good at delaying gratification. In fact, so good that we make ourselves miserable. So Peter addresses this. He talks about the psychology of this and why it's so important for us to make the correlation between making more money and having more fun, rather than.

Making more money and working harder or grinding even more.

If you've ever doubted yourself, if you have ever wondered if you were cut out for this entrepreneurial thing, you. You're in good company. And you are about to be shrinked by Peter Shallard.

Peter Shallard, welcome to Freedom Fast lane. Thanks for hanging out with us.

Yeah, thanks for having me, man. I'm stoked to be on here.

So Peter is my personal coach. I call him my mindset coach. He calls himself the shrink for entrepreneurs. And that is a very specific title to call oneself. Peter.

It is.

And you have. You have identified a lot of roadblocks or mental noise in me that I didn't even know was going on. And I want to go into that in a bit. But first of all, why the very specific shrink for entrepreneurs name? Why do you call yourself that?

It's a little pretentious. My background, my background is in therapy. My first business was actually a psychotherapy practice, like old school brick and mortar. And I learned about business through all of the problems that that was, you know, trying to build that business actually created. So when I started working with entrepreneurs, it was actually more or less as an accident. And I had that that kind of background in the hardcore therapy world had built a huge network in that space and knew all the stuff and all the people, and it's still a real big passion of mine. I was lucky enough to be able to kind of synthesize that with the whole entrepreneurship thing when I started working with business owners and also just getting really interested in kind of business myself, which was. Feels like so long ago now, but it was a revelation because I was one of those people who sort of almost thought of themselves like an artist. I was all about the therapy and the psychology, and the business was an afterthought. And I don't know if anyone listening can relate to that, but trying to think and operate that way was itself a huge roadblock to building a successful business that I had to get over. So, yeah, I basically figured out eventually this niche for myself and started blogging about it. And. And that was when it really took off and the brand resonated with a ton of people. And I don't know if you're one of them, but I think that I stuck with it, sort of picked it up and ran with it because people were like, wow, like a specialist who just works with entrepreneurs. That's exactly what I need to this day. I go to a cocktail party or whatever, and people are like, oh, man, I know so many people who need your services. So that's it. It's some good hustle, I think.

Well, I resonated with some. Something that I heard you say once where you basically stated that the only work an entrepreneur needs to focus on is maintaining a state of flow in which work is easy. I might be butchering your quote, but would you explain what you meant by that?

Yeah, I think that 90% of what most business owners do is sort of fight themselves, is play the game of internal struggle and just generally make life more difficult for themselves. And that when people get into this sort of state, like what you call a flow, state of flow, there's this incredible thing that happens where usually the biggest strides are made in business, like the big kind of breakthroughs in thinking that lead to entrepreneurs realizing, wow, if I just do this, it's actually easy. And then they do it, and it is. And I think that. Yeah, I think that that's a really interesting. Almost.

The fact that so many people will struggle. Like, if you look at the average year for an entrepreneur, they'll spend like 11 and a half months of it in a state of just total struggle and anxiety. But the actual growth, their bottom line results all happen because of the actions they took in those two weeks where suddenly the climate, the clouds parted and, and they're able to just take this kind of easy and effortless action. I think you personally know very much what that's like.

Very much, yes. So what does that look like? I mean, I asked this in the context of I think most people know that sometimes they're way more productive and sometimes they're way more energized about what they're doing than others. And I would love to bottle that and take that into 52 weeks a year. And that doesn't seem to happen. And I think that's probably the greatest frustration of all entrepreneurs. How do I maintain that state? So when you're working with me or another client, what are you doing to peel back the things that are keeping them from that state of ease and flow?

Yeah, this question, I'm gonna try and answer it. There's 101 different answers. Because I could look at my career as basically figuring out all of the different answers that suit all the different unique and beautiful snowflake clients that I've worked with who have this problem and need to fix it from a sort of a different angle. But I think that one of the biggest ones and something that you and I talked about is basically this idea of.

Being fascinated and curiously engaged with the business as a pathway to flow. There's this thing, thing that people do, and it's much more common in childhood where we develop this literally childlike sense of wonder for what it is that we're working on. And in entrepreneurs, like in the startup world, when we look at people like Mark Zuckerberg, we have these movies about these folks with this maniacal focus, right? They have this. There's this certain something that any entrepreneur can recognize from 100ft away where they're just like, they're just drilled in. And it's not because they. They're telling themselves they have to do this. It's not because they're saying, this is a really good long term investment of my time and focus. It's because they can't help themselves. And I think that there's something really cool going on with our psychological relationship with this unconscious part of ourselves that some psychologists call the inner child. I think that's kind of a fun metaphor and a useful label. It's not too sciency, but it really reflects.

It's a cool concept because it reflects the truth that there's a part of us that just cares about feeling good. It's very interested in instant, gratification it's very interested in fun. And so often entrepreneurs find themselves in a position in business where whatever it is they're working on is divergent from that goal of fun, from that goal of feeling good. It doesn't feel like play, it doesn't feel like enjoyment. And so that's the nature of one of the primary internal conflicts. You're trying to make yourself work hard on this delayed gratification grind. You're trying to hustle, but there's a part of you that just wants to really feel good and have a great time. And on the other hand, when those two parts kind of align and you're working on something in your business that feels kind of playful and fun, not necessarily like you're throwing a Frisbee round, but maybe if you're a kid who played with Legos and you got really focused on building the ultimate whatever it was, right? Like the castle or the spaceship or something, sometimes business can feel that way for people as well. And when that happens, we get this extraordinary maniacal focus, right? We get this. This form of motivation that doesn't seem to need to be ignited. It just. It's just there. It doesn't need to be worked on. It. You don't need to wake up in the morning and think about how your morning ritual with your meditation and your green shake is going to get you supercharged for the day. Like, I'm talking about flow, where you wake up and you're already working in your mind and you're just like, get out of my way. I need to get to the computer. I need to get this idea into action.

That's when that inner child part of us is playing with the work. And it just happens that those business goals also feel like play.

Now, you mentioned something very quickly, and that was work doesn't always feel that way.

You want to progress, but it doesn't feel like you're getting anywhere. It doesn't feel fun. I mean, I could probably go into a room of 500 of our listeners or the entrepreneurs we teach and pull 300 of them and say, how many of you are happy in your business and. And see no hands go up? Or how many of you are actually enjoying life more now than before you had a business? It's this weird mind warp where we think we're gonna have this business that gives us all this free time and lifestyle and fun. And then three years down the road, it's like, man, what am I doing with my life? Or you spend 10 years of your life building this company and then you sell it and somehow there's like this depression on the other end of I've got everything I wanted and my life doesn't feel all that different.

Yeah, I have a whole specialization, like a sort of a half of my consulting business where I work with those people. So I'm very familiar with that problem too.

So tell us about the problem and how the hell we solve it.

The first world problem of like selling a company and then feeling all empty inside.

Well, more I just mean the fact that we have this projection that it's kind of going to make our life so much better and then we get into it and life is actually worse.

And this is a scary thing. So at my other company, Commit Action, we actually collect all sorts of statistics and work with some pretty crazy researchers. And we found that like it's, it is terrifying. The number of entrepreneurs who self identify as basically being miserable and totally dissatisfied with their business. It's higher than 95% of small business owners. And this is the other angle. Like you and I have talked a lot about trying to make your life and your work more playful and engaging that inner child for that natural, organic feeling flow state.

This is a totally different angle of what I think is the same big problem, which is that most entrepreneurs who are building businesses now are putting them like in today in the prison, are putting themselves in a psychological environment that the human brain is just absolutely not geared for. And what that looks like has a lot to do. It's not your fault if you're feeling that way a lot of the time. It has a lot to do with the sort of technology digital revolution that has happened. It's now possible to build a business in your PJs, in your basement, on your laptop. And you can actually build a really cool business doing that. And there's a lot of people telling you you should build a business doing that because that's like total freedom to be able to in your basement and your PJs, right. And make money while you sleep or whatever it might be. The problem with that is you're waking up. Like if you quit your 9 to 5 Fortune 500 office job and you wake up on Monday morning and go and do that, you're going to sit down in a totally psychologically isolated environment. You're going to have to use whatever's going on inside of your mind to drive you to take action on what is a very difficult like steep learning curve. And you're just going to have to fight that all by yourself. And you're also more surrounded by juicy distractions because of technology, because of the Internet, because Facebook is like an alt tab button, push away. And your brain is just having to wrestle with this. And we just act like it's normal. Like you're trying to build a business in an environment that your grandfather couldn't possibly have imagined. And we're working with like mental hardware that's billions of years old. And it's basically designed to make sure that the other monkeys leave enough fruit on the tree for us or whatever. Right. Like we're these crazy social animals. And then there's all these lifestyle designing digital entrepreneurs who are trying to do this thing and they're wondering, why the hell aren't I doing the things I know that I should? Why am I just sitting here day after day kind of feeling overwhelmed and not really taking a ton of action and feeling like it's really hard work and like I'm beating myself up and yeah, they just get miserable as a result of it.

So you're saying that distractions can play a big piece of that mental overwhelm, and I can attest to that. But there's also this piece that I feel like you're starting to touch on, which is the idea of the way I interpret it was isolated, being alone with. Alone with your thoughts. You can build a business and it's marketed to you as this great thing, but in reality, it doesn't give our brains what we need in order to be happy.

That's how I interpret it in my context. Yeah. The journey that we sign up for, like, the building part of it just puts us in an environment that we would be crazy to think that we would be either successful or happy in. I'll give you a real practical example here. Right. Right now, there's somebody listening to this interview. There's somebody in your tribe who's trying to build a business similar to one of yours. And they're working on it all alone in their basement on their laptop, and they're thinking, why can't I be in the zone? Like Ryan. Right. Like, why he. This guy's crushing it. How do I do what he does? Here's another way that you get into a flow state when you're not doing the whole inner child play thing. You have this amazing team. I know you have this amazing team. You sometimes show up and that team demand of you that you be amazing. They come at you with. With needs, with questions, with whatever. When you go into your office and you get to kind of reactively, just kind of let them take that stuff out of you. In the exact same way that when Mark Zuckerberg shows up to his executive meeting on Monday morning, his direct report team demand that he be the very best version of himself. They need him to provide that leadership and vision. Now, the way that we're motivated and the way that human beings perform when we are drawn from, when we are required to step requires much less drain of willpower than trying to make ourselves perform in an isolated environment. Like a practical example is if someone on your team says, ryan, we need a really high performing piece of copy written right now. And here you are in the office. Can you help us out with this? You're going to sit down, absolutely crush that, right? But if you wake up on Monday morning, you have nothing scheduled, no real plans, no one really making any demands of you, and you think, you know, I really should write a piece of copy, like, write some really cool sales letter for something I've been thinking about doing. It's important, but it's not really urgent. You have to use like 100x more willpower to get that done. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah, that makes total sense. So is it the group think or the group activity that helps drive that sense of flow, or is it the urgency or something else?

It's the fact that the top 1% of successful entrepreneurs have created for themselves, for better or for worse, this environment of accountability, right? There's this web of people in their life that are putting them regularly in a situation where they can kind of just sit back and do their job, just sit back and perform. Right? Like. And that is actually really helping their company grow. And the point I'm trying to make is that when, when a new entrepreneur quits their Fortune 500 job, starts day one on Monday morning, all by themselves, they're beating themselves up going, why can't I perform? Why am I having so much, you know, so much of a hard time writing this copy or doing this thing? But they're trying. They have to. They have to make themselves do everything. They have to pull the willpower out from inside of themselves. They don't have any. They don't have anything or anybody in their life who is basically making them step up and be the best version of themselves. And I think that the reason that I wanted to share this kind of phenomenon and this sort of ab contrast is because so many people are miserable. What we've found is that so many small business owners are miserable because they're asking the question, what the hell is wrong with me. And my point here is there's actually nothing wrong with you if you're a solopreneur, you're trying to get started and you're struggling to be motivated, you're struggling to get into the flow state. These other guys, the Zuckerbergs, the Ryan's of the world, they have the stuff in place that puts them into that state whether they like it or not. You know what I mean? Have you ever had that experience of kind of like, I don't know, feeling a little drowsy or whatever, but then someone in your team needs something and you just step up and deliver it?

Yeah, that's totally. But I've also experienced where my team needs me to perform. And as a result, at the end of the day, I'm completely drained and exhausted because I feel like I've been pulled in a bunch of different directions. How is that different?

Yeah, there's definitely, there is definitely a downside to it, right? Like if you do too much of that, if you just become, if you get into kind of a habit as a high performing entrepreneur where you just show up at your office and wait for people to ask you to do stuff, you're living in a state of 100% urgency driven, reactive work. You're going to be drained. You're going to start to feel like your business isn't giving you any freedom. So this is definitely a very double edged sword. But if you can find the right balance of it, you'll actually kind of get to the point where you can use the team to motivate you when your natural motivation runs out.

And then have your freedom too. And I think that that's why you and I have talked about working from home or working from elsewhere and kind of finding that right level of balance. But I think that for the folks who are newcomers to entrepreneurship, who are miserable, who are dissatisfied with their business, they have to understand that just the environment that they're operating in is actually really against them. It's not optimized for motivational success. It's not optimized for a flow state at all.

So let's go into that, of what we can actually do about it. Because half of the people listening are solopreneurs who probably are sitting in their basement working on a laptop alone. And one of my favorite books is called the Primal Connection. We had Mark Sisson here on the podcast talking about how our genes need certain inputs in order to have the gene expression to make us happy and healthy. And I feel like you're touching on some of that, absolutely. But yet our natural environment, not our natural environment, but the environment we've created for ourselves is so not in alignment with our. What our genes need to be happy. And in this flow state. So what can we start to do now in order to both satisfy the inner child that wants to be happy and feel good, but also create a place in which we feel like work is easy and effortless?

Right, Right. So the inner child stuff. And you're teeing me up here with a beautiful question because I know you know the answer to this. It really has a lot to do with the concept of play. And this is the hilarious conversation I have with these type a Silicon Valley CEOs who are on my client roster, where I tell them, you need to throw a ball around every now. And let me explain this for the skeptical listeners. If you can create a psychological conditioned loop, kind of like Pavlov ringing his bell with his salivating dogs, between your work, you really grinding it out and putting in good hard work on your business, and a state of playful joy, if you can make those two kind of tightly connected, you're going to really build a strong inclination, a strong unconscious desire to work like crazy in your business. And one of the best ways that you can do that is to make sure that every time you really burn the midnight oil, you really kick ass in your business. You follow that experience up with some kind of a reward that really engages your inner child that really would make you, if you were 7 years old, laugh and cackle and grin like a maniac. And so many entrepreneurs actually shun this stuff out of their lives. Like, so many people start their business, kind of realize how difficult it is, and you know, they want freedom, but they're like, I'm really going to work on this thing. So they double down on productivity. They start managing their calendar and their schedule in like 15 minute increments of time. They start using the Pomodoro technique. They start, like doing all sorts of crazy structured stuff, trying to dial in their morning ritual so that they can work for like 16 hours so that they can make money while they sleep. The problem is that you get this unconscious part of you, this inner child, this part of your mind that cares about basically making you feel good. It starts to get really burnt out. And you have to make sure that that doesn't happen. Because if you unconsciously start believing that the more you work on your business, the more miserable your life becomes, and that belief is present in so many people, then you're screwed. Because I have entrepreneurs come to me and they're like, listen, my goal is to double my business. Reasonable enough goal for an entrepreneur. But then when we really get into it and we find out what doubling the business actually means to them, it would also mean doubling their misery because they haven't got a business where this statement is true and this is everything. This is the formula. The more my business grows, the more fun my life becomes. If that isn't already true for you and you're feeling stuck when it comes to growth, you've got to look into the psychological conflict stuff. That's what's going on.

I would almost argue that that's the majority of people who are building businesses right now. That that is, that that's probably the case. That building my business, the more I build my business, the more miserable my life becomes. And it feels like a muscle that's hard to ungrow. It almost feels like you're stuck in that.

And, and it isn't just big, it isn't just beginners. Like we're talking about people with seven figure businesses, you know, but they hit like any time an entrepreneur hits a plateau and their business just flatlines, this is almost always what's going on is that unconsciously they've got this belief they're kind of performing the same year after year, month after month, just no growth. Maybe they're staying in the same place, treading water. And it's because, yeah, there's this part of them that just thinks if we get any busier, life's really going to suck. And so motivationally, they find themselves sitting down at their desk and kind of staring at the computer and watching Netflix on their lunch break and spending a lot of time reading articles and checking out Facebook and whatever. It's because their unconscious mind is just trying to squeeze any fun that it can out of the day because it knows that the future is probably going to be really stressful and really miserable. Right? Like, that's why we gravitate towards like cat pictures on BuzzFeed because it's engaging to our inner child who is grasping for anything that'll feel good. Because it's terrified that the future is going to be this dark and grindy miserable place.

Wow, you have taken all the fun out of cat photos for the rest of my life, Peter. So let me ask you this. I sometimes feel like there is so much to do. There is, there is, there are more ideas and there's more problems and there's more a longer to do list of things that I have to accomplish. And at the end of the day, I'm just completely exhausted. Having a team has helped with this, but I still experience it, even to the point of when I have a team that can implement a good majority of it, I fill up the rest of the time with things I have to to do.

So I'm sure this is the universal law of entrepreneur psychology. I'm sure an entrepreneur fills all available time. Any vacuum in the schedule gets filled with work. That's cool.

And I'm sure I'm not alone on this, so would you please address that? This.

So just for the record, this is Ryan trying to get me to fix all the problems for free right here.

I think that, yeah, I think that.

The thing about productivity is that you've really got to ask yourself what it is that you're optimizing for. If we look at the most successful entrepreneurs in the world, none of them got there by being busier than you. No matter who you are, no matter what level that you're at. I love to kind of do the napkin math on Bill Gates and people with, I don't know, a six figure income. Bill Gates is worth like 80 billion these days or something. 70, 80 billion. He's not 800,000 times more productive than you are. Right. That's not how he got there. At a certain level, the relationship between the founding entrepreneurs of a business, the founding entrepreneurs output, doesn't have a relationship with the bottom line. At a certain point your job is to do something kind of bigger than that, bigger than actually just moving the ball forward and kind of grinding out the value yourself. Now I know this is easier said than done for someone who's just starting out. They do have to do everything. It's a one man band. But this is the thing, is that you've got to really focus on what it is that you're aiming for with your productivity goals. Because the point isn't to just fill every available hour with work. You don't want to be working 16 hours a day. And if you do, you will plateau. You will get to a point where your business can't grow anymore because there just isn't any more time in the day or you don't have enough energy to drive the thing to the next level. So I think that the key to fixing this and to allowing yourself to, to go and play, to do the stuff that rewards your inner child, that makes business feel fun, that makes it feel like you're actually creating some freedom in your life in a real way. The key is to Basically figure out what it is that you're optimizing for. And I love the model that you and I have talked about. It's the three priorities that are ubiquitous in the best technology companies, the best startups, the three priorities of a founder, which are, number one, hire the absolute, very best people. Number two, make sure the company doesn't run out of money. And number three, set the overall vision and direction for the company. Now again, this advice sounds nice to beginners. It's not exactly easy to implement, but once you get to a certain level, you can just do those three jobs and you'll create potentially a billion dollar business.

You can simply focus on only those three things. And the crazy thing about those three things is that none of them really take a ton of time, but they all require an incredible level of intellect, an incredible clarity of thinking, like an incredible clarity of vision. And so that becomes what you have to optimize for. And that's how Bill Gates got to where he is. That's how all these guys did it.

By focusing on those three or by focusing on a core set of objectives that freed them up from, from all the other distractions that prevented them from moving forward.

Yeah, I would say that there's a what, right? Like they had like all of these huge entrepreneurs had like a big goal, like a big sort of thing that they were aiming for, you know, get the personal computer into everyone's home. But, but I'm talking day to day in terms of productivity. Those are the three objectives. Hire the best people, make sure the company doesn't run out of money, and just set the overall vision and strategy. Because if you follow, if you miss one of those, the whole thing comes tumbling down. Right? Like if you're, if any one of those three things is missing, but if you do all of them, that is literally the formula for success. But the thing I love about that model is that nowhere does it say and be the first one in the office and the last one to go home at night.

Amen to that. How do you coach someone out of that?

I don't just mean an entrepreneur. I mean, I have team members that I feel like in, in that they need to show that they're the first one in and the last one out. And that doesn't necessarily mean that they're the most productive. So how do you coach it? Just an individual out of that mindset of I have to do everything and I have to grind and hustle and switch them over to somebody who's focusing more on those high level Things that are really driving the business, right?

Good question. First thing I'll do is retrospectively look at, like, analyze their activity over the last six months, 12 months, whatever it is, and look at what were the things that they did that had an extraordinary payoff that just had this exponential. Basically, we're looking for what activity offered up a totally asymmetric reward where they put a little bit of effort in, and this extraordinary awesomeness came out the other side. Whether that's revenue or some other measure of opportunity doesn't really matter. It's sometimes fun to put a dollar figure on it. Then we simply ask the question, what if you just did more of that and less of this other stuff that doesn't matter so much? And suddenly people's eyes light up and you can really. This is the plateau buster for every entrepreneur. Because I think people get so caught up in the weeds of their business, they start to think that all of the small stuff matters and everything does matter. Especially when you're a small business owner. You're one person, you're five people, whatever. Everything feels like it matters and it's urgent. But then when you look back over the past, you can see like, oh, yeah, when I went to this conference, I met three people there who ended up turning into these amazing joint venture opportunities. And each one of Those people drove $50,000 of revenue into the business and became. It turned into whatever it was, and it's this big deal, right? And then you realize.

The year after that, you made the decision to stay home and work harder and not attend so many conferences. And I see people doing this kind of stuff all the time. The thing we lack a clarity of thinking, I think when we're on our own and isolated and we get really caught up telling ourselves these stories about what matters and what's working. But that's really the first step to bust ourselves out of it is to take a good, long and radically honest look at where the value is that we offer in the business, and then just ask the question, like, what if I just increased? What if I just doubled that? And usually to double that, you have to get rid of something else. And that's where the productivity shifts. Suddenly you realize it's not about working harder, it's about prioritizing this important stuff more.

You said something to me fairly recently, actually, which was, if I prioritize that, if I had an uninterrupted time to do those things that drove it forward, that there would be an immediate shift in the rest of the business, right? And I have been kind of putting one foot in on that and starting to shift over to making that more priority. And I have seen a dramatic shift in both the revenues and in the way that my team has responded. Because all of a sudden, I feel like I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing. Whereas before just making myself available and not blocking out preserved time to do those things, then it felt like we were always in reactive mode.

Totally. Totally. And I think that's it. It's about finding out what your superpower is. And if you have a team, every single member of that team should know exactly what their superpower is and what they can like, what they should be focusing on delivering more than anything else. Because it's not even like an 8020 principle. Right. Like, I'm trying to think of a practical example that I actually did have a client.

Who told me that their business got. Their business got 70% of its leads from two different podcasts.

That they had been featured on. And then they were spending like a year messing around with different kind of traffic sources and pay per click and all this kind of fun stuff. And I was like, well, how long did it take you to make those connections, to get 70% of your revenue, 70% of your customers? And they really did the analysis and looked back, and it was basically 10 hours of FaceTime per person that they built a relationship with these people who drove this phenomenal amount of traffic and this. So it's so crazy that an entrepreneur can spend 365 days, like, they can take a full year grinding it away with something difficult while just ignoring this sort of this money, this potential sitting on the table where, like, you just have to ask, hey, remember you did that thing that effortlessly, like, quadrupled your business, and it was just really easy and awesome. Can you. Could you. Could you. If you harvested every scrap of your creativity and potential, could you see yourself doing that one more time? Right. That's all it takes.

Yeah. That's actually really fascinating. And I. And I feel like you just gave me a brain gasm. Thank you for that. Those effortless things that we tend to think of them as accidents. Right. Jeff Olson in the Slight Edge calls them quantum leaps that every once in a while you kind of slip into this thing that just up levels you. And if you were to really put all of your energy into making that your focus, could you do it more often?

And it's just a question of probability. Right. In that example I was talking about, I should think of another one. But let's run with this one. These connections were made by attending events.

If that entrepreneur just says, all right, I'm going to go to an event where these people might be and I'm going to do that every month for the next year, that's a really hell of a good dice roll, right? We don't know. It's not a formula. We can't conclusively say, like, yes, you're guaranteed to have these breakthrough connections and meet these incredible people who can drive incredible traffic to your thing and blow you up, but you can sure as hell increase the probability of it. And it doesn't take that much to roll the dice. It's a very tiny, it's actually kind of a lot of fun. And I think in that specific example, this person I'm talking about, they were actually shying away from going to these events. They had really decided, I'm going to say no to that. I'm going to buckle down and focus on building this business. Why? Because the events felt too much like fun. They felt too much like screwing off. They were too rewarding to the inner child. And business has to be hard and miserable and a grind. So you see how it all comes together into this. Like it's a clusterfuck. It's crazy.

Well, the thing that I'm thinking of is I have probably a very large percentage of my audience and my customers have come from a few pieces of content that I put out that have gone somewhat viral.

Right?

And the, the ones that had the biggest impact were also the ones where I was having the most fun, where I'm either on stage or I'm really passionate about a topic. And yet I feel the need to do all of these other things rather than just focus on.

Really delivering what I want to deliver. So I just, I'm just being transparent to those of you who are listening of like this demon, I have that demon in my head too, of the idea of there's got to be grind rather than fun all the time. And you, that's the brain gasm you've given me today, Peter.

Thank you. Well, that's great. This is the question that I would ask you, right, if the creation of those semi viral content, as you call it, has had such a major impact on your business, what would it take? Do you think it would be possible if you say, did something radical, something crazy like taking one day out of the week, 1/5 of your work schedule and just doing nothing on that day but sitting there staring at a blank wall, trying to think up how to recreate that because you're a smart guy. And if you really applied yourself to that as a challenge, if you were like, let's make this happen, I have a feeling that you might not nail it every time because virality is difficult. But I have a feeling that you would have a pretty good dice roll. You'd probably figure it out eventually.

I think the probability of you being right is very high.

And just as a final thought, I have kind of experimented with this, with. I realized recently, partially through this process of realizing that certain pieces of content drive a large growth of the audience. And I wasn't making regular content habit. It was more like a maintenance thing. And when I started doing it more regularly, one out of three has some virality.

Right.

And the other two are kind of duds. And it's not like they didn't serve a purpose. It was just that they. They didn't have that exponential growth. But the time it took to make that a priority and regularly do it was far less than I would have imagined. And.

Right. And that's the thing. If I handed you a three sided dice, if that could possibly exist, and just said to you, Ryan, every time you get the one on this dice, not the two or the three, but the one, I give you $10,000. You would roll that dice all day long.

Indeed I would.

And that's the point. That's the crazy thing about this, about entrepreneurial psychology, about the inner child, about the misery that people wrestle with. The internal conflict is that so many entrepreneurs have actually figured out their business's formula for success, but they don't know that they haven't. They've moved on to other stuff, they've lost it in the past, and they feel thwarted, they feel overwhelmed, they've had a little bit of success and they don't know. They feel like it's kind of slipping through their fingers. They're like, it was working and now I'm doing the stuff and what's going on. Right. And it's just this. It all boils down to optimizing the right things.

Peter, I feel so jazzed after this chat, so thank you for this. Talk a little bit about commit action. I know you take on some one on one clients, myself included. I think you're probably fully booked on that. You usually are. But talk a little bit about commit action and what that does for entrepreneurs.

Yeah, thanks for asking. Commit action is my other great project besides my very busy client roster as the shrink for entrepreneurs.

I basically set out to kind of ask the question, why is it that this tiny percentage of entrepreneurs seem to be able to effortlessly hit home run after home run while the vast majority of people are struggling. There isn't a line between the two groups. There's a gulf, it's a chasm. And what the hell is causing it? What the hell is going on? We've teamed up with the professor of positive psychology at nyu. We work with a Harvard neuroscience professor. We have all these crazy folks. We've had over 10,001 to one conversations with small business owners to try and figure this piece out what we actually do. I invite you to come and find out about. In a nutshell, it's basically personal training for productivity. We help entrepreneurs put into their life all of the missing pieces of the puzzle. The things that you don't get that you naturally don't have in the environment when you go out and start a business and you're all alone in your PJs in your basement. We have a really cool video training program that's absolutely free that people can check out. I kind of just believe in giving away all of our best stuff is the best way for people to find out about what we do. All the results of the last couple of years of research that we've done that basically explain why it is that these superhuman entrepreneurs are able to succeed easier, faster and more often than everybody else. You can go grab all of that video training. It's absolutely free. So just, yeah, go check it out. We'll. We'll set up a page@commitaction.com Ryan and throw you guys some extra bonus content. I actually just put together yesterday a really cool video on some of the. Some of them not quite safe enough for the public science that will really leave your jaw on the floor. We'll hook you up with that video if you go to come inaction.comryan and sign up there.

Well, Peter, I'm totally jazzed. I feel when I get this way, I feel the need to pull out a journal and write some things down. So thank you for hanging out with us. This was impactful for me. It makes me all jazzed for our next session together too. And I know impactful for everybody who listened too. If you liked this episode, please head over to the Show Notes. Leave Peter some hashtags and some thank yous. Peter, keep on changing the world. Thanks for hanging out with us.

Yeah, man, thanks for having me. I'll talk to you next week.

You know, I work with Peter on a weekly basis, but I so enjoyed having him on here to talk about that. Main point of we got into this.

To have more fun and we so often forget that.

And it's a challenge for me to reward that inner child, as Peter put it, that part of us that just wants to feel good and to enjoy life. And I know for me, I sometimes struggle to practice that on a regular basis. And making fun a common behavior in the way that I set up my life and in my employees lives and in my partner's lives is so important not just for our own health, but.

I think for our growth, for our.

Productivity, for our revenues. Because I find that the more fun I have, the more creative I am, the more that I'm able to produce.

And that's what really drives business.

So I hope you found value out of this chat with Peter.

If you know an entrepreneur who is.

Working harder than ever and still not experiencing the success in terms of life happiness, and you know that they would benefit from this episode, please send this to them. This world needs more productive entrepreneurs who.

Are solving problems, and we can't do that if we're bummed out about what we're doing.

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It helps us spread our message of freedom because I think that free, empowered people are how we solve all of the world's major problems.

Thanks for listening to Freedom Fast Lane.

I'll see you on the next show.