126: Fueling Your Passion with Your Day Job with Sean McCabe

In this episode, we are talking to Sean McCabe about how to grow a sustainable, profitable, audience driven business in your area of passion and expertise. Hey everybody, this is Bjork Ostrom and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. We have a really awesome interview Today with Sean McCabe. And Sean has a site called SeanWest.com and some other ventures as well that he's going to be talking about. But one of the things that I love about this interview with Sean is that he shares a lot of really pointed and actionable advice that aligns with how we view building online businesses. As a matter of fact, on Sean's about page, you can get there by going to SeanWest.com about he shares an image of a little drawing that he did or lettering that is titled show up every day for two Years. And before we get to the interview, I wanted to share what this screenshot shows or what this image shows because it's so important to understand this. And for those of you, especially in the early stages, but even for those of you that have been doing this for a while and want to take it to the next level, this is an important thing to understand. So here it is. I'll read it and kind of describe it. So the header is show up every day for two years. And Sean says that's the golden answer right there. Then there's a list here. It will make you money. It will build an audience. It will solve most of your problems. It will develop the tenacity you need to survive. It will teach you that those who are successful aren't successful because of some condensed version of their story they gave on a podcast interview, but because they made a commitment to show up every single day when it was hard, when it sucked, and when it looked like nothing would come of it. But no one will hear this advice because, quote, show up every day for two years, end quote, isn't microwavable. And that right there is so important to understand and it's so important to talk about that, especially on a podcast like this where we spend a half an hour, an hour with people hearing about their condensed story. But it's important to remember this is two, three, four, five years in the making for a lot of the people that we interview. So I wanted to point that out. I wanted to spend some time with it before we jump into the interview with Sean. But he's going to talk about some more of these things in depth and he's also going to talk about his story and how you can apply some of the things that he's learned to your story and he's going to talk about this concept of overlapping, which I think is awesome and a really, really incredible thing to keep in mind as you are growing your business and making some of those really significant and important transitions. So let's go ahead and jump into the interview. Sean, welcome to the podcast.

Hey, thanks for having me.

Yeah, it's going to be really fun to chat here because like I said before we press record here, I was scrolling through your Instagram account, which I would recommend everybody do. It is Sean West W E S and looking at some of the quotes from your book overlap and there's so many concepts that you talk about that are spot on and I want to dig into some of those. But before we do, I want to hear this. This is one of my favorite questions to ask people that come on the show. When people ask you what you do, Sean, maybe you meet him in a coffee shop or you're going up the elevator, kind of the typical elevator pitch, what do you tell them that you do?

I basically say I help people build and grow an audience driven business. So for the most part that ends up being helping people who feel stuck in a job that they hate, maybe their soul's getting sucked away. I want to help them start a business while they're working a full time job.

And I think that's a lot of the people that are listening to this podcast, not necessarily people that, you know, entirely hate their job. I would assume that's not everybody, but I would assume there are people that kind of like their job but then really love their passion as well. And so for the people that are listening to this, I think they're gonna be able to take a lot away because you've done this. You yourself. So before focusing on helping people do this, you yourself were building an audience focused business on a creative pursuit. So can you talk a little bit about what you were doing kind of before this phase that you're in right now?

Yeah, so I was running a web firm and I was enjoying the work, but I still felt this kind of creative void in my life. And I think a lot of us feel this type of thing when like you said, maybe we're at a job that we don't necessarily hate, but it's not the thing that we're totally passionate about. And there's this, there's this emptiness, you know, and we, we want to fill that with some kind of creative pursuit. And for me that was hand lettering. So I, I, I would draw letters by Hand. And, you know, you've probably seen hand lettering on, you know, Pinterest and Instagram and things like that. A lot of people drawing popular quotes and phrases. But for me, I usually wrote my own messages rather than take a super popular phrase, which I did at. Sometimes I would share a message that I had with the world. So that was kind of the first thing. Now I've written a book, I do courses, I have a podcast and a community. Now I've found all these other ways to share my message, but this was the very first place that I found that I had a voice. And it started out with just creating work. I would share it online and no one really seemed to notice. I was showing up every single day, no joke, in my nights and weekends. I was spending about six to eight hours a day drawing letters. This is outside of my day job. I was just doing it because I loved doing it. I really enjoyed it. And I showed up every single day for two years. I was posting, posting work every single day, and nobody seemed to care, which in one sense is kind of disheartening. But honestly, I just enjoyed doing it so much, I wasn't even concerned. I was doing it really just for me. But for some reason, two years in, people started asking, hey, can I hire you for some work? Can I get that design you made on a T shirt? And it kind of just started to flourish from there.

Yeah. When you look back at that, and I think there's a couple things that are really important to pull from that. Number one, when we hear two years, in the context of our life or just in general, when people say two years, it doesn't seem like that much. But when you talk about working on something six to eight hours a day for two years, that's a ton of time. And especially when you aren't having that traction that you want to have. And there's two pieces that I think are important for that first part. One is that you said, I loved doing it. So it was possible for you to do that six to eight hours. I think sometimes people can have this idea of, I really want to grow this thing and then transition out of my job. And so I'm going to do that as quickly as possible. And it's may they're maybe working on something they don't really enjoy, and so they get burnt out after a year and say, I'm not going to do this. But it takes a long time. For us, it was, you know, three, four, five years until we started to see some traction with what we do. And the other thing that I think is really important with that is that you had gotten to the point where you had gotten in a. In a rhythm with that. You had shown up every day and you were creating that content. And as we dig into interviews, one of the things that we find with people is that that's a really common theme, that they're showing up every day. So can you talk a little bit about how you were able to do that? Was it strictly passion related? Were you so passionate about what you were doing that it made it easier to show up? Or did you have kind of this light at the end of the tunnel that you knew eventually if you kept with it, something would happen?

No, in fact, probably the opposite. I always thought this could never be a job. This could never be something that could sustain me. And in fact, that's what kept me from doing it for many, many years. I used to draw letters in middle school. I was fascinated with it before I even knew there was such a thing as typography. I just thought I was a weirdo because all of my other artistic friends were illustrators and here I am drawing letters. But I kind of just put it on the back burner. I didn't touch it for a long time because I thought, well, I don't know, I just felt like I got this message that if you're going to do something, it needs to be something viable, something that could sustain you. And it wasn't until I met a friend who came in town. It was actually the first time I met him in person. I knew him online. He. He was a hand lettering artist. And he said, hey, if you enjoy it, just. Just create because you enjoy creating. And it was like he gave me permission and I just started doing it and I started doing it thinking, this is no way, that there's no way I can make money from this. Little did I know that, you know, some years later I would make half a million dollars from it. But it was, it was really just like you said, the passion was the seed. The love for doing it was the seed. The. But when I look back, I've kind of figured out that there's four parts to this, like four parts to the audience that I ended up being able to grow, which is curation, consistency, quality and time. So by curation, what I mean is I was doing all kinds of things in the web firm. You know, I was doing user interface design, illustration, screencasts, you know, just all kinds of stuff, icon design. And I was publishing everything, every single thing that I Made, I shared it. Whatever kind of random bit of design or artwork that I made or work or business related, I just shared it all. And it was this random assortment. No one could. They couldn't tell you what I did right. No one could clearly say, this is what this guy is about. But once I started to curate and that word curate, I mean, to selectively project, single focused thing, I decided I'm just going to post lettering because this is what I want to do. This is what I want to be known for. Behind the scenes, I was doing all kinds of stuff, but I'm only going to put forth the lettering and over a period of time, not very long actually. This was kind of the inflection point. People started to associate me with lettering. They started to say, hey, he's that lettering guy. And it kind of started to kick things off. So it's that curation that selectively, the consistency, you know, showing up every day for two years, the quality, really pouring myself into this, you know, spending three, four, five, six hours on a single piece. And then honestly, it's that time, you know, even if you do everything right, you've got the perfect formula. It takes time for this stuff to kick in.

Yeah, man. I. The idea of picking and curating something, picking a niche, maybe some people would say, I think is such an important concept and such an important thing to apply to what we do. How did you land on lettering? So for those that are in our space, a lot of times they'll say, you know, I'm really interested in food or I'm really interested in publishing recipes. But maybe they're a little bit nervous to really claim a niche because they don't want to restrict themselves to just something really, you know, a small, narrow focus. So was that an intentional decision for you? Did you say, I want to do this or did you start to see some traction with lettering and say, hey, it makes sense for me to go this way because the door continually opens here.

Well, this was about seven years ago. So at the time, I feel like lettering, hand lettering itself was pretty niche. Right now it's kind of. It's exploded quite a bit. I actually didn't realize that I was at the beginning of this resurgent interest. From I think 2007 to 2011, somewhere in there or thereabouts, searches for the phrase hand lettering went up 1,000%. It just exploded. I don't really know why, but it did. And I was kind of in the middle of that. Nowadays, I would say hand lettering, if you were to focus on that food blogging, if you were to focus on that, I would probably pick something even more specific within that to really differentiate yourself. And the reason people feel scared is because they're like, well, I don't know anyone who does this very specific thing, like, you know, food styling for editorials and magazines. You know, like, that seems so niche. Why would I pick that? Well, we're thinking in terms of the first level of relationships that we have, like one level deep of the people that we know. And we're saying, I don't know anyone who does that. I don't know anyone who wants me to do that for them. But really, we should be thinking about that set. Second level, who do the people that you know know? And if you are something very generic, I'm a designer, I'm an artist, I'm a food blogger. If it's very generic, you're not going to be at the forefront of their mind when that topic comes up. What that means is you haven't given them the ammunition to spread the word about you. You need to go as specific as you need to until you can be the best at that thing. And don't worry that. That the people you know aren't the perfect audience. They know a lot of other people. Like, I was looking for an editor for my book, which is a nonfiction book. And when I found a nonfiction editor, I thought, oh, that's exactly what I need, a nonfiction editor. You know, when I was looking for a typesetter, someone who said, I am a typesetter for nonfiction authors. Oh, my gosh, I have to have this person. And when you get that specific, you give everyone, you know, the ability to spread the word about you.

Yeah, it's similar in some ways to what we do with this podcast. It's the Food Blogger Pro podcast. And so, and we have a membership site, it's Food Blogger Pro. And somebody asked me just the other day, they said, do you think you'll ever expand out and do just general blogging? And I said, I think one of the most powerful things is how niche we are. I think once we go to kind of the generic blogging category, while would there be huge reach, I think there'd be less, like you said, ammunition for people to say, hey, you should really check out this podcast, or you should really check out this site if you are interested in starting a food blog. And what you're saying there speaks to kind of this general idea that we had of, like, I think it makes sense for us to stay within this niche. So eventually you moved out of lettering specifically, you had some success there and you started to expand into other areas. So, you know, you had mentioned there was a point where you had made a half a million dollars. That's a lot of money and that's a lot of proof that this is something that's working. So can you talk about what that transition was like into moving out of lettering as a business and why you did that?

Yeah, so I was actually getting to the point where I made great money as a hand lettering artist. I left the web firm, we hibernated that firm. I started taking on jobs with the lettering, you know, doing work for magazines, an ad campaign for the city of Las Vegas, like good paying Stu, making great money for myself. But people were asking me how I was able to do what I was doing. And I put up a little guide on the website and over the course of the next year, a couple hundred thousand people read that guide. And I'm thinking there's room to go deeper here. I could definitely share some more. And I ended up producing this course called Learn Lettering. And that course ended up making six figures in just a few days. And you know, I'm really just responding to the demand that I see was there. You know, the first T shirt I made, I made it because so many people commented on this one illustration I did asking for a T shirt. And so when I made it in response to the demand, it sold out and then it sold out again and it happened half a dozen more times. And so the course was also in response to demand and it did really well. But when, when there's a story of hand lettering, artist makes six figures in three days, you start to get on the radar of people that are outside of the art world because a lot of people would like to do that. And so I started getting more general questions from people saying, how are you able to do this? And I just started sharing different marketing tactics, business things, and started podcasting. This was about four years ago. Just kind of sharing what I learned and just teaching what I knew as I went along. I was just iterating in public and you know, that kind of just led to getting a bunch of emails from listeners and like, oh man, I'm having these life changing conversations over email with listeners, but they aren't able to talk to each other. So you know, that brings about the community and then like the conference and so it kind of just spiraled from there.

Yeah. So can you talk about the. You had mentioned this a couple times, how intentional you were with documenting the process. And I've heard other influencers and, and thought leaders talk about that. Gary Vaynerchuk uses this mantra. He talks about document over create and the idea that you are publicly sharing your journey. And we've done kind of pieces of that. But I think we could be more intentional about how we do that. And I also think that other people that are listening to this could be really intentional about that. What does that look like for you? And like, really specifically, what does it look like to document and then publish what you're doing?

Well, for me, I know that when I look back over my story, when I look back at the past, I see the past through rose colored glasses. I don't really see it for what it was. And I find myself wanting to retell the story, rework the story. Like, when I started writing my book, I actually set out to write not just one book in a month, but three books in a month. And the process was very messy. I ended up deciding on day four that I wanted to combine all three books into one. And I was so frustrated because that just complicates the story. And I would have told the story differently had I had the opportunity, but because I was documenting, as I went along, I was journaling the process of writing the book. There it was, the raw story was out in the open. This is how it happened. It's written. I can't go back and change it. And it may seem like, oh, this is boring. Nobody cares about this stuff. But it's not so much about what you did this day or this week. It's everything in aggregate. It shows that, hey, your early work wasn't perfect. It shows that the journey is not a straight line. And it shows that getting where you are today, it wasn't magic. And Gary talks about this. There's a lot of people who don't so much care about a particular person or celebrity, but they would care about the story of how they got there, because that's what everyone wants, that's what everyone relates to.

Yeah, it was fun to watch your. You had this kind of mini documentary on writing the book and the process. And it was that exact thing where I was researching for the podcast and I just kind of. This is the danger with researching interesting content is suddenly 20 minutes later, I'm still just watching this video because it was so interesting to observe your story. And the thing about it that drew me in was the imperfections of it. Meaning you are at this point where you're like, I've just realized today, I'm not going to. It doesn't make sense to do three books. And so you're explaining this change in this pivot, and it would be a lot cleaner to get to the end and then retell the story, which I think a lot of people do. And I think that can be discouraging for others because we observe this kind of perfect highlight reel of what it's been like for other people. But one of the beauties of something. And we'll link to this in the show notes, like your little documentary is that. Or short documentary, that it shows the process that you go through. And like you said, it's not this straight line. It's up and it's down. And. But. But in general, you're showing up, you're consistently creating, and it. The overall arc is up and to the right. So as we keep that in mind, let's go a layer deeper and say, how do you do that? How do you continually show up every day and document on a really specific level? So are you recording video? Are you publishing blog posts? Along with actually creating the content, you're also documenting. And I think that's a really difficult thing to do.

Well, this is what Gary is trying to simplify for people, because it gets difficult when you think of it in terms of creation, when you think, I need to make a video, I need to write a post, I need to publish a newsletter or record a podcast. Instead, he's kind of encouraging you to flip that around and just say, you know what? I'm just going to document. It's going to be raw, it's going to be real. This is the tough part for me because I like really polished things, really produced things. It might mean pulling out your phone and just recording a little Instagram story. Sharing that process, sharing the unpolished and raw process. People will appreciate the human behind the work. So the message is, don't overthink it. What's your motivation today? Why is this thing that you're working on interesting? Why is it dull? Your take on why something's dull might actually be interesting. Yeah, exactly. There's no such thing as too real, because it's all relatable. It's all the human element. And if you're not sharing the low points, then the highs are not going to be real. So the question I would have you ask is, how bright do you want the brightest points of your story to be? Because they will be as bright as the darkest points you share?

Yep. Yeah, that's a great takeaway and encouraging for people to hear that it doesn't have to just be a highlight reel. It can also be the things that are hard or difficult or like you said, maybe a little bit dull. But leaning into those and saying, here's why this didn't work, I think that's great. So you wrote a book, Overlap, and you gave yourself a restricted amount of time to do this. Can you talk about what the thinking was behind that, why you place those restrictions on yourself and what you learned in the process?

Well, so I wrote the book. I ended up writing this book. It's 75,000 words in 15 days. And my brother was actually so fascinated by this idea, this challenge, that he asked if he could record me and make a documentary of the whole process, which I said, knock yourself out. He did. And if you want to watch that documentary, it's@overlapbook.com but the reason I set this aside is not to do some crazy challenge or whatever. I'd been working on the idea of this book for three or four years. I got about 20,000 words in, and I scrapped it because I was just. I was writing the book that I wanted to write and not the book that people needed to read. And I went back to the drawing board. I had hundreds of conversations over the next three years at conferences, meetups and events, just trying to learn what is it that's keeping people stuck. People that want to start something, people that want to create a business, but don't feel like they don't know what the thing is, Right? And I'm trying to write this practical business book because I like breaking down complex things and simplifying it for people. But I found out that it's not the business principles, it's not the practical business stuff that's holding people back. It's things like I come home from my day job and I'm not feeling motivated or my. My spouse doesn't support me or my family doesn't believe in me. And I'm realizing it's all these, like, real deep things. And so I went back to, you know, write the book and essentially reverse engineered it. Like, I'm going to first help people get unstuck from these real problems, and then I'm going to lay out the practical business stuff. So I said, back in 2015, I'm going to take off a month in 2016 and write this book. Mainly because I had so many other projects. I knew it was never going to get done unless I set aside the time. So it was really like I felt like I didn't have time to to write this book. And so I just said, I'm going to carve out time and just get it done.

And in the process, you have these other things that you're doing and you have to give those things up. So can you talk about what that was like to cut the things out that you usually do in a day? Because I'm guessing your days are pretty full and now they have to be full with something else. So what did that look like?

That was intense. I mean, I prepared for this for weeks, if not months, leading up, just building a routine that would allow me to crank out 8, 9, 10,000 words a day. And that started with, okay, it involves waking up early. But the reason we say it's hard to wake up early is because we go to sleep late. And we go to sleep late because we're like, well, I finished my work late and we finished our work late because there's always more work to be done. Well, let's look at that part right there. There's always more work to be done. That's always going to be the case. So let's not let that dictate our lives. Let's build the life that we want. And so the first step for me to this whole thing was deciding to stop the work, stop my work for the day when there's more work to be done. That was actually the first piece. It was like, I'm going to stop at 5, even though there's more work to be done. I'm going to have dinner, I'm going to have this nighttime routine, lights off by 9, you know, get up at 4:30, go on a run. But I had this big idea of like, this is my perfect day, my perfect morning, the most optimal routine. And it was too overwhelming. It was this one big mess, like spaghetti. It was just this big glob of intertangled things. And I'm like, okay, I can't take all that at once. I have to break this down. So I would say, if I have lights out by 9pm, today's a success. It doesn't even matter if I wake up early. Doesn't matter if I write today's success if I go to bed. And I did that for a couple weeks. And then I started defining success by when I woke up. And then I shifted it to defining success by did I go on a run? Did I write today? And I just kind of chained together these little habits one at a time. And I spent weeks, one at a time, just nailing down each one of those until it became natural like right now I'm actually trying to build up a habit of flossing because it's always one of those things that like, ah, it goes off to the side. But like, I just started. I made myself accountable with someone. And this sounds super silly, but I.

Love stuff like this. It's. It's, yeah. So interesting for me to talk about. I'm. I'm right over here.

We literally, like, me and a friend, we take a screenshot of a calendar and we just mark it up on our iPhone with a little X. And like, the fact that he's going to beat me if he has more X's than I do gets me to do it. Right. But it's like the little. Like my, My wife actually said she wants to write a post called How How Flossing Helped Me Run a Half Marathon. Like, it's the little, the little habits, you know, that become chain reactions.

Yeah. And the idea of layering habits, I think is so important too, because so often we can. And I'm. I do this all the time where I'm like, I'm going to do a complete life overhaul. I'm going to start getting up early. I'm going to start running every day. I'm going to clean off my desktop on my computer and not have any dust on my desk. And it's like. And then it just is overwhelming. But if you can take that one thing and apply. Can really build up over time. One of the things we talk about a lot on this podcast is a concept called 1% infinity. And it's this idea of getting a little bit better every day forever. And I think it takes the weight off of people of saying, like, I need to go full time with my business and only be working on this in a year. And it's so much. It's so overwhelming that it becomes counterproductive as opposed to saying, what's the one thing I can do today to get a little bit better with the mindset that I'm going to be doing this for a really long period of time? And I think the flossing analogy is a perfect analogy for that. I want to go back to two different things that you said, and it was a little bit further back. But I think it would be important to talk about these just because they were the things that you mentioned. So I would assume that they are also the things that are most common or at least decently common. One of the things that you said is, you know, your book overlap. You talk about this idea of people making the transition from doing into working into passionate work as a solopreneur entrepreneur. And out of, you know, a typical 9 to 5 job or whatever it'd be. And you said one of the things that people often struggle with is coming home at the end of the day and not feeling motivated. And it's such a real human thing. And it's not business strategy. It's not, you know, here's a tip for how to optimize your website. It's like, I just don't feel motivated. So in a situation like that, what would your advice be to people that for people that come home and they don't feel motivated at the end of the day.

So this is a tough one. It's tough. But what I've identified is when your day job, the industry of your day job is the same as the industry of your passion, that's where you're gonna end up coming home feeling exhausted. When you're spending that kind of creative energy that you need for your passion at the day job, it's gonna deplete you of the kind of energy you need to do your thing on the side. And so in the overlap process, what I recommend is getting a day job outside of the industry of your passion, because it's essentially, it's. It's not the right. It's not fertile grounds for growing your passion. Like, that's where your passion can often go to, to die, because it's, it's not the right environment for it. So, you know, it's not a hard and fast rule that says it has to be in a different industry, but this is the litmus test. If you come home from your day job at the end of the day and you're not feeling motivated to work on your side passion, you're using the kind of energy you need at the day job. That's what has to be addressed. Because the right day job, this is going to blow some people's minds because they're so used to just being drained and exhausted, the right day job will charge you for your passion.

Yeah, it reminds me of a book that John Acuff wrote. We interviewed John on the podcast and we'll link to that in the show notes as well. But he wrote a book that talks about the idea. With the book, I'm trying to remember what it is offhand, I don't remember the name of it, but it's this idea that the best way to become a really good entrepreneur or to build your own thing outside of your job is to do a really good job. With the job that you currently have, like, it's dissonant to show up and be kind of lazy and not really do anything at your job and then expect to go home and then turn it on and be really awesome. And it's interesting to hear you talk about kind of another version of that and saying, hey, what you do in your nine to five really is important for making the transition into doing your own thing and making sure that in that nine to five that you have the ability to as much as possible come home and be excited about or passionate about the work that you're doing or, you know, kind of that overlap transition. So I think that. Great takeaway there. The other thing that you talked about as a really common scenario, and we hear this every once in a while with emails and people following up, is my spouse or my significant other just doesn't really get what I'm doing. And. And you know, Sean, when you and I talk, we're. We're on. We get it, we're excited about it. But for some people that aren't in the industry, that don't understand this world, it's like, it seems weird and strange and a lot of times that might be a spouse or a significant other. So if somebody has a person like that in their life that maybe isn't necessarily really supportive, how do they go about approaching that?

Oh, man. So we're going straight to the deep stuff, right? It's another one of those, hey, this is a tough problem. I recognize that. So the solution is also going to be somewhat involved. And just to touch on the last thing, I'm not saying your day job has to be in a different industry from your passion because I'm just sadistic and I want you to hate your life. The reason for it is because I want you to protect the passion, you know, in the overlap, the day job is the foundation, right? It covers 100% of your bills so that you can make objective decisions so that you don't feel like you're in scarcity, so that you don't take on opportunities that are not good, that end up having you hate what you do that you once loved. And similarly here, like, what I'm going to, you know, prescribe is not because I want you to feel like, ah, this is gonna take forever. Like, I want you to enjoy the process and I want you to actually have a spouse at the end of this thing. Because, like, in all reality, like, people end up breaking up over this stuff. They break up over money, they break up over businesses, they Break up because they're not on the same page. You have to realize, like, you are two parts of a whole unit. You know, as you know, someone who is married, someone with a significant other. So if your spouse is like, you know, I don't really get your thing, the reason they don't get your thing is because you haven't taken the time to communicate it to them. And you're going to say, you know, yes, I have. Yes, I have. But there's a difference between communicating and broadcasting. If you broadcast radio signals into space and no one picks them up, they're not actually received. You're not communicating, you're just broadcasting. Communication is both the sending and receipt a message. So to know that you've communicated, you have to make sure that you were heard. And the only way to know that you were heard is when you hear your message out of the other person's mouth. So it takes communicating to them, why this is important. But realize that even the time it takes to communicate, asking for them, asking of them for the time to set aside to talk about this thing that matters to you is. Is a cost to them. Yeah, right. You're asking for something of them. To earn the right to do that, you have to invest in them. So if they're not supporting you, believe it or not, it actually starts with you. You have to invest in them. Because if you invest in them and what they care about and listen to their hopes and dreams and desires and support them, it's the rule of reciprocity. They're going to come around. They're going to support you. Because it's a natural intrinsic human desire to reciprocate. So it starts with you, and you're thinking, well, okay, but my spouse. It's not like they're tearing me down. It's not like they're saying, I can't do it. They just don't really care. They're just not really helping me. They're not really supporting me. So it's not a big deal. Right. This is where I would use an analogy of a Flintstones car. So a Flintstones car has an open bottom and you pedal with your feet. That's how the car moves. And the people in your life that are close to you, especially your significant other, they're like people in the Flintstones car with you. And yeah, you know, they may not be pedaling forward, but, you know, as long as they're not pedaling backwards, back pedaling, then it's fine. Right. Well, it's making your job really hard because essentially they're dead weight in this Flintstones car. It's making it really hard to make progress. It would actually be much more. You'd be much more successful if you took a moment to get them on board. And then, you know what? Now they're helping you move forward. Because here's the thing. If everything works out in your plan, you make the millions of dollars, your business is successful, it's not going to matter to them in the end. You're going to reach that point, and either they're going to be gone because you never paid attention to them, you didn't take the time to communicate with them, or they're going to hate the whole thing because they're not just going to remember the result. They're going to remember the journey, the process on the way to getting there.

Yeah. And the journey could either be one in which they are involved in a part of it, or potentially it could be one in which they view it as they had something taken from them, like time together or your attention. If you were completely dedicating that to a business or this side hustle, it could potentially be a negative thing in the short term. And the long term.

Yeah, 100%. You've got to get them on board. Nothing else matters. This whole thing falls apart and it has zero meaning to you. You will lose everything that matters if you don't get them on board. And so if you want to get them on board, it starts with you, and it starts with you investing in them. What can you do to make them feel loved? What can you do to make them feel like you support them no matter what, in whatever they want to do? Like, how can you put your money where your mouth is there?

And you're saying that from the perspective of the person that wants to convince the other person, like, exactly. Yeah. Which is a big mindset shift for a lot of people to instead think about, how can I convince somebody else of what I want to do? It's kind of saying, how can I be the person that is supportive and encourages this other person in my life to do what they want to do or to serve them, which it feels backwards. But I can totally understand how you start with that in order to have it be a productive conversation.

I mean, an analogy just came to mind when you were saying that. It's like a pendulum, but you can push one way, they can push the other, and you're trying to pull them in a direction they don't want to go, help them get where they want to go. Push, push. The ball in what seems like the opposite direction of what you want to do. You know what, I really want it to go this way. I want them to support my thing. Well, you know what, how about spend. Consider all the spare time you have after your day job. All of that time is allocated to investing in them until they're on board. Because if you push the pendulum in their direction, the rule of reciprocity is going to dictate that it comes back in your direction. Now you've actually got a partnership here. Right. Instead of just a dictatorship.

That's great. And hard questions. So thanks for going there.

Yeah.

So, you know, in overlap, you talk about this idea of building a community and you actually yourself have a community of entrepreneurs and people that are building businesses. And anytime that people have a community and multiple, you know, hundreds, or in your case, thousands of touch points with people that are in, in the industry and doing it, whatever doing it looks like, you know, could be just starting out, could be mid level, could be at a really high level. You have a really good picture of some trends that you see and some common characteristics of people that have found success with it. So when you look at your community, Sean, and the people that have either started and grown a successful business or have come in and had a successful business that continue to be able to build that, what are some common characteristics.

Of those individuals and these individuals? Are you talking about the community organizers or the members?

Yeah. So these would be in your community? These would be the community members. And I would assume that some of those people are also they themselves community organizers, is that right?

Yeah, well, that's definitely true.

Yeah.

I think what you're going to find is It's a typical 80, 20, but you know, that, that keeps going. You know, there's the 80, 20 of the 80, 20 of the 80 20, and there's just going to be those few individuals who are just hyper engaged, like the superfans, you know, just the commenting on everything, you know, they're helping out the new people. I honestly don't know if it's possible to convert people into super fans or, you know, the most engaged members. All I know is that there happens to be a small percentage of them. And the best thing you can do is invest in those people, elevate those people, you know, essentially like promote those people. Like, how can you give them a position in the community? How can you give them an opportunity? A lot of times those people have become, you know, I end up hiring them full time, they end up running the community for Me or working at the company.

Yeah. And, and so that, so I think that would speak really well to people that are, let's say, building a food blog, building a recipe blog. People are coming. You have those people, and I think people know these, that respond to the emails, they comment on Instagram, they, you know, engage with the videos that you're creating. How can you then further the access that they have or the responsibility that they have within the community? And maybe a follow up question and to clarify a little bit is, so within your membership, the Sean west membership, the people that you work with are oftentimes people that are building something, is that right? Like a following or are building a business online?

Yes, a hundred percent. So they're building their own business. Some of them already have businesses, some of them have employees and they're doing a lot of revenue. Others are still in the day job and they're still trying to figure out that whole transition.

Got it. And so for the people that are in your community, what have you noticed? For those that have come in and had a lot of traction and had a lot of success, what are the common parts of the equation that they are focusing in on that equal success for them?

Well, they're willing to learn. We all need to be experts in our own domain. We have clients, we have audiences, and we need to be confident in the things that we're confident in. And we all deal with imposter syndrome, but it makes sense. You have to be confident about things, but you have to make sure that everyone who has succeeded that I've seen is willing to put themselves in the mind of the student, of the mentee. They're willing to learn in areas that they don't know. And it's this mindset of every person I meet has something to teach me so that they're teachable, they're coachable, they're willing to learn. And it's a mindset of, I'm gonna show up every day, I'm gonna trust the process. It's not always gonna be easy, but I understand this is not an overnight success thing. The other thing I'd say on a more practical level is they start with where the money's at. Which, like some of us, you know, me, definitely, I've kind of stumbled into money accidentally and I've kind of had to learn a lot of foundational business principles after the fact. And there have been some problems that's caused. And I try and I try and share the things that I'm learning, the mistakes I've made To help other people avoid that. But, you know, there are easier ways to make money than others. For instance, there are things that you can do that make money for people. And there's things that you can do that are more nice to have. And then as far as the people who are buying from you, there's people who have money and there's people who don't have money. So you need to think about this space spectrum. There's people and there's products. So people who have money and don't, Products that make money and don't. Now there's like cross sections between this. You know, you can draw the lines between each of them. The easiest way to make money is to do something that makes money for people who have money. And the cool thing is if you focus there first, you put yourself in a position to eventually help the people who don't have money. Maybe give to them, maybe do pro bono. Maybe you're able to be generous. Right. But first you're taking care of the core business needs by solving valuable problems.

Yeah, I was having a conversation with a friend over lunch the other day who's thinking of starting a business in the music industry. And one of the things he said was he thought about starting a non profit, which I think is awesome. And then he had some other ideas for some profitable profit revenue producing businesses that wouldn't be nonprofit. And I said, I think my belief would be that it would be easier to start with that. So you have that as a foundation. And then to use that foundational, you know, strong ground to then look back and say, okay, now, now that I have this, how can I dig into doing work that helps people? And obviously there's different instances where it would make more sense to do, you know, non profit work before profit work. But I think that a lot of times having that revenue allows you to more freely serve the people that you want to serve because you're not having to worry about getting revenue in, whether that be through donations or some low price service offering.

Oh yeah. It's nothing more frustrating than being unable to do the work that you really believe in because you simply don't have the resources.

Yes, yeah, 100%. Well, I'm always interested to hear about that just with anybody that works with the community, to hear some of those common traits that you see with people that are finding success. Last question that I'll ask Sean, with what you're doing right now, what are some of the things that have been most helpful? What are the things that you would recommend people like Here are some things that are really working well for me right now.

I got a hammer on it. It's curating what you share, deciding what you want to be known for and then projecting that thing. And the implicit part here is not projecting everything else. It's okay to still do those things. But I'm talking about curating what you share. Like a magazine you subscribe to. Why do you subscribe to that magazine? Well, you know the next issue is going to have more of what you're seeking. The people are asking themselves that same question when they're deciding whether or not to follow you, to subscribe to you. What is it that I'm going to get? What is he or she about? And you can answer that question by being selective about what you're sharing because people are going to put you in a box. That's, that's just the reality of it. We're all, we're cognitively limited. You know, Dunbar's number 150 close relationships. People have to simplify out of pure survival. So if they're already going to put you in a box and you can't do anything about that, at least define the box they're going to put you in.

That's great. Sean. We had mentioned a couple different things. We'll be sure to link to those in the show notes, but I want to make sure that you get platform a chance to talk about your book Overlap. I have it sitting next to me right here. It's an awesome, super high quality book and it's been fun to start to read that. But I know you have some other things as well. So can you talk about your book a little bit and then where people can find you online?

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much. The book is@overlapbook.com this is for anyone who wants to start a business while working for working a full time job. But also if you're kind of in that transition, if you're kind of starting out in the business, you're having trouble figuring out the money stuff. Very practical book. Go from feeling stuck to getting clarity and creating financial freedom. I think you'll really like that. It's also delivered as an audiobook in the form of a podcast. So if you made it this far in the episode, I'm assuming you like podcasts and you can either listen to it that way or you can check out the Sean west podcast, basically a show I do that's the intersection between creativity and business.

That's great. My last question, Sean west versus Sean McCabe. Can you explain the difference with those.

Yeah, sorry about the confusion there. There were a lot of Sean McCabe. That's my full name, when I got online, and a lot of them in creative industries. So rather than try and compete, I just took my middle name, which is Wesley, and just combine my first and middle name into something unique that didn't exist.

Perfect.

And so that's the brand name Sean Wes, even though my full name is Sean McCabe.

Yeah. Makes perfect sense. Cool. So we'll link to all of those in the show notes. Sean, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Oh, thank you. I appreciate the opportunity.

One more big thank you to Sean from Seanwest.com for coming on the podcast today. I think this will be one that I will go back and revisit just to be reminded of some of those important, important things and considerations to remember as I'm building a business. And I hope that you found the same value that I did out of this interview with Sean. That's a wrap for this episode. Thanks so much for tuning in. Make it a great week.

Sam.