How to make $10M and still love your life - Dickie Bush

COVID hit 3 months later. I might get fired from this job. I have no clue if they're going to keep me. Markets are all over the place. That was when I understood I have no ownership in this thing. I could be let go tomorrow and then I'm done. I lived in a 3-1 when I was in New York. 3 guys, 1 bathroom, and 1 of the bedrooms had no windows. I was very determined to make sure that I didn't go back there. I had a rule. You don't leave until take-home income from your side hustle is 2 times the income of your full-time job. I'm sitting there making $60 grand in a month on a cohort-based course launch. I had the number in my mind that I need to personally take home half a million dollars from this business. And we did that in 2021. Going to actively recruit sales reps a lot over the next year or two. There are like 7 or 8 popular trainers that if I see they've associated with at all, I will not hire them. But someone like you where I know if they have any kind of conversation with you based on the work you did with us, like, of course I'm going to have that conversation. I'm going into next year with 3 goals. I want to improve all of my health metrics by 10%. 2, I want to have 75 things at the end of the year that I look back on and can list that were positive memory dividend experiences. And then 3rd, we want to do $10 million at at least 40% margin this year.

So I actually have been thinking a lot about whether or not to try and do some of that this year. And so I have an ability to transfer it to another year or to another person. So like, I'm, I'm still not 100% committed because I've kind of done the thing. And so there's not like diminishing returns outside of just like my own, right, masochism or whatever you want to call it. So like, I'm seeing— because this is something more conservative, like, uh, yeah, or, or anything, you know, like, or a different goal. So like, I think, um, I've been thinking a lot about discipline and how, um, discipline is doing the things that you don't want to do. Not the things that you love doing. And so like for me, running wasn't a discipline thing. We live.

Cool.

Cool. All right.

Keep going.

But yeah, running wasn't like a discipline thing for me because I fell in love with it. And so it's like, what am I avoiding by signing up for something like this? Right. And it's probably like the hard, you know, productive work in the morning that I need to do in front of a computer or getting my thoughts out online. So I've been weighing, you know, you can only do so many of those big bucket things. So we'll see where we go.

No 300-miler?

We'll see. I'm— for right now, I'm committed to it.

OK. So what if you just did like a marathon that you actually try to run fast? Like switch something

up. Yeah, I need to— one thing that I keep running into with my training on that is that I'll try to get going and apply the same type of work ethic to running a fast marathon, but then I'll end up hurting myself because it's so different. So it'll take me a long time to be able to try to adjust it. And so I'm actually doing the Austin Marathon in mid-February.

But it's just like a fucking warm-up.

It's just— well, actually, I'm hosting it, and I'm doing an event around it. And so I've got 30 guys signed up.

For their first one?

Uh-huh. First marathon. They're all sales professionals. There's like 5 or 6 founders.

No way.

Yeah, man. So it's going to be like my first marathon, Masogi-flavored thing. I'm really pumped for that. So I just actually sold my first ticket yesterday. Like, because I actually paid for the people's marathon. So I just went and closed them in person. I'm like, run a marathon, I'll sponsor for you, like, et cetera. Um, and I'll do it for free even if I lost. Like, I'm down like $5,000 right now on it. But, uh—

You know your floor.

Yeah. Even if I, um, don't monetize it or materialize it in that way, like, I'll enjoy it so much because I love helping people run their first marathon. And it's more about a mechanism of breaking limiting beliefs. So it's not like doing do a fast one. It's just do a marathon.

Okay.

Um, and so what I'm gonna do is it's on a Sunday, so I'm gonna host an event around it, probably like a Friday evening dinner and then like a Saturday, like couple panels. Not like business, just like back to back, but like some health and wellness stuff, breathwork, cold plunge. I've got my really good friend Kayla who's the spot— like, she's like the face of Ghost Energy. Oh. So I'm gonna have her like sponsor the whole thing and like we're gonna spin some stuff up. So that's gonna be a lot of fun and there's a world where I could, you know, try to bring that to life even more. But one thing that I've done recently is I've taken on a couple more top sales guys that aren't on my sales team and help them with copywriting. And so I've got the guy who— he works at selfpublishing.com. And so not publishing, but self-publishing. They do a lot of cool stuff. They're, they're doing like, I think, 8 figures plus, like 10 to 12. And the top sales rep, Mike, he's a, he's a killer. And we were talking at a Christmas event, and he was saying how he was trying to hit his income goals and stuff. And he was the top rep, and he needed a little bit of a push. And so I was like, well, I can give you the, the or die mindset, you know, the end of the month projections thing, which I've found to be super valuable for the top sales rep who's really good at their skill set. They just—

They haven't brought—

They need to die. Yeah, they need to apply that

climb the treadmill or StairMaster it. 10:30 PM on the last day of the month for 4 hours texting everyone they know.

And closing 10 deals, right? We could probably get into that too. But I wrote him an email. So I told him, I was like, it's something like the marathon mindset applied to sales. And so for the longest time, and you know this, I've been trying to like put those 2 things together, or at least those are the only 2 things that I really think about is like running and now running sales teams. And so what I did with him was try to convey the fact that the people that are closable, that you close on the one call, they are the now people, right? Like, they're at some capacity, they're willing to move forward now. But then you have the not now people. And you know this, and I learned this from being at PGA. Like, I remember the stat that we send, like, it takes 17 emails for someone to buy something. Mm-hmm. from us. Like, that stuck with me. And so I was like, okay, well, the people that I don't close, I'm just gonna send them 17 emails and see what happens. And so like, when we look at the numbers, right, like, for PGA, I was— I actually had the same amount of one-call closes as Connor, but double the same week, and then triple the long-term, 7-day plus. And the reason is just because I followed up with people. And so that's what I want to give people. And I want to take a counterposition to the sales content that's being posted and published right now, where there's a lot of objection handling videos. And that's awesome, you know, like what Johnny's doing and some of the other guys in that format's working.

Yeah.

Um, but I want to take a counterposition, which is like, yeah, everybody says fuck the follow-up, but it's like, how about—

Who says that?

Well, you'd be surprised. You'd be really surprised. Like, people are always like— what I've seen right now in the sales content space is like these like bully sales sales reps that just ruin the lead, and they do or die on the call. Where I took a different approach where it's like, if you're not going to enroll now, I will get you.

Just build the relationship.

Yep. And so that's what I'm trying to give. And some of the top guys that are— they have high agency, they're willing to do the things. Like, I'm not going to have to babysit them on CRM basics, the basics. And they want to add that extra layer. It's like, just learn copywriting. And just send an email every week that resonates, and take a client win, and do that. So that's been a lot of fun. And there's probably a world where I create content that has to do with selling people on the long-term marathon mindset of doing the boring thing.

Accumulating pipeline.

Correct, yeah.

Increasing probability of each person.

100%, man.

Yeah, that's what I think a lot of people will get wrong is that they don't understand that their overall throughput is just the sum sum of how many people they can get closer to buying. And so if you take 1,000 calls and you increase the probability of everyone— I need to think more about that. But it's some factor of a lot of the guys on the calls send the probability of a deal to 0 more often than they send a probability of a deal to 100%. 100%. It's like, what if you actually took all the people that were willing to go to 100% to 100%, but the people who weren't from 0 to 20? 0 to 25. Yep. It's— if you sum that, and you'd have to like do the actual equation of this, but the expected value of all of your deals goes up tremendously.

Yeah. And to make it like simpler in the sense that how I think about it, right, is like a lot of people don't track their follow-up show rate or their follow-up closes. And that's one thing going into the new year that I want to really build out. And like—

Oh yeah, we built that in like '23 with you guys because I, I didn't know. It's like, all right, we're counting closes as just enrollments over shows, right? But what is the actual one-call close rate versus pipeline close rate?

And so if you take— let's say you have a 30% close rate, right? And the way I think about it is that means you have a 70% no-close rate. And if you can just— we talk a lot about this, where if you want to raise the scheduled calls, you can do that. Raise the calls that show up so you can increase the show rate to increase the throughput. You increase the offers, you increase the closes. And how do you increase the closes? You either get better on call or you do that discretionary effort afterwards and you can net an extra 2 to 3 deals per month, which is thousands of dollars. And for the company, it's a ton of revenue just by doing this. And the thing that makes me excited about the high-ticket space and coaching in general is that it's so easy to win. And I don't mean easy to win in the sense that like getting to these higher revenue thresholds is easy, but compared to the layperson that's in the industry, like, they're just super lazy, entitled, etc. So like, despite people, you know, whatever thoughts they have on the industry itself, like, I just know that the— it's there for the taking for the person who's willing to work hard.

Yeah, the ironic part is, as someone who is going to actively recruit sales reps a lot over the next year or two, there are like 7 or 8 popular trainers that if I see they've associated with at all, I will not hire them.

Really?

But someone like you where I know if, if they have any kind of conversation with you based on the work you did with us, like, of course I'm gonna have that conversation. But I know there's a handful of traits that will come with the people who've been trained by certain individuals where it's like they're gonna expect that they do zero outbound, they're gonna expect that they do zero follow-up, they're gonna expect that we do extreme amounts of vetting on the front end so they only talk to layups. It's like, yeah, entitlement,

Oh my

gosh. Just illegitimate.

Yeah, yeah. It's, uh, it's so funny. And, and we can move on from this, but one thought I had is, um, I was talking to one of my guys and, you know, he's, he's great. Yeah. But, um, like, he didn't text his leads for like 10 days while I was on vacation. And I'm like, I'm— he's like complaining about his paycheck and this and that. And I'm like, well, let's look at it. Let's look at the pipeline. Let's look at the activity. What have you done? It's

like, I had no new calls. I'm like, OK. What would you do if you were the CEO?

Yep.

And that one-person mindset of you are running a one-person sales business, and you've outsourced your marketing and your success. You should probably pick intelligently who you outsource that to. And I should tell you that, of like, you've outsourced your marketing and success to me and Cole. Like, pretty good trade, you know?

Well, people don't think about it that way. And I really like— I refer to myself— Even when I was a sales rep, I referred to myself in my mind as a business owner because you're self-employed.

And partner.

And you're a partner, right? And you've been given a book of business to do with what you will. And so there is a great opportunity for the ones who are willing to do the work. And like you said, it's just a matter of reminding people what the actual deal is. And if you look at any other industry, like outbound, et cetera, like tech sales, Anything else, it's like, dude, are you out of your fucking mind? Right. So I'm excited for the future ahead. And I think one of the biggest takeaways that I've had from the other people that do really well in the sales coaching or sales team building space is that I look at a few of the guys, and I have a lot of respect for all of them. And part of the reason why I started this podcast was actually to build and nurture relationships with the top people in the space such that there's an alignment and a— um, collaboration, right? Like, that's why, like, my first podcast was with Johnny, and I was like, hey man, let's do an interview. Like, there's a bunch of people that are probably thinking about you and how your winning means they're losing. But I— and there might have been an inclination of me to think that, you know, as a knee-jerk reaction. But, um, I wanted to flip that very quickly and just say, hey, I'll give you a platform. I'd love to share my alpha with you. Yeah. I'd love to hear about what you're doing and One of the guys who I want to give a shout out to, Tristan Steckler, who I did a podcast with, he's big in this space. And he's running a team. He's running a couple offers right now, one of which is Budget Dog. So they do financial literacy and network. They're doing $1 million. I think they did $1.2 million this month. Maybe that was as of yesterday, so they'll probably hit—

Is the owner of that Brian Schlongschmaltz?

Something like that? I can't remember. But his Instagram is Budget Dog. And they're doing really well. The sales agency, Jake and Dylan, they have a bunch of accounts. And one of theirs is Budget Dog. Nice. And he's the manager. And he has just been shipping and smashing content out of the park. And my point was that when I look at the guys in the space that are ahead of me, the real difference is that they just have a personal brand. And whenever he does an application for a closer role, he gets 100 applications. the biggest bottleneck that I've thought about this year from a, like, how do I make my life less stressful standpoint, um, is I just find better talent. Yeah. And, um, not have to come behind people and do the babysitting thing. And so, like, talent acquisition is a big one for me. And Hormozi talked about, um, how he's hiring a bunch of, like, C-suite executives and how, um, it's just a volume game when it comes to the front end of getting that talent density. So that's what I'm thinking about a lot, but I know we kind of jumped into things, man. I'd love to kick it off. So Dickie Bush, I had thought about how to intro you. There's a couple of things. My big brother, my mentor. I've been in the field with you for 5,000 hours working together over the last 2 and a half years. And you are the person that has done the most for me when it comes to business and arguably in my personal life too. We've had probably 50 direct one-on-one, you know, mentorship sessions and daily sales meetings for 2 years. And I just want to give you your flowers by saying thank you so much for everything you've done for me. And like, I've went and worked with a bunch of other people now, because I left the company in March, and we're getting ready to partner back up going into 2026. But I have yet to find someone as a founder who is As obsessed and willing to do the things that are required. And what I mean by that is like your systems thinking, and we can talk about bottleneck analysis and all that. Like I just I have yet to find anyone else who comes close to that level, and it just makes me excited to to get back in the field with you, man. So thanks for coming on the pod.

On the ramp up. And I, I woke up— I went to bed last night just thinking of how excited I was to chat with you on a non-personal one-on-one basis. Because yeah, like you said, 50 one-on-one calls. Are you still recording those? Because

I've got them all. I'll probably do some sort of like analysis. And I had thought like maybe I could have done that ahead of time and like shared some of the insights, but it doesn't matter. I'll write a thread on it and, uh, we can give that to the world too. But a lot of it is just me being frantically overwhelmed and you coaching me upwards. Well,

we've come a long way from your, your Loom video. You're the story of Tristan being hired. We were hiring our first sales reps. I put what? I put a story out or I put something. No, I think I talked about it in Dan Coe's podcast.

Yeah, Dan Coe's podcast.

2 hours into a podcast that I wasn't even talking about business publicly that much at that point. I was just talking about what I was working on. And then I get an Instagram DM from someone who's like, I am your guy. And I think you've showed— you showed a couple of people that Loom video. You should send that to anyone that's applying for it because right away it was like, oh, okay, this was not a generic video. This was not a, I've sent this to 50 people. This was not, I did 2 seconds of research on your company. It was like, we knew right away, dude. I was like, let's just make sure that this dude's not— we had to do our general QC that he's not just a wild bronco. Turns out you are in the best way. So yeah, dude, it's been, uh, it's been a hell of a journey. That was right, what, almost 3 years ago now?

Yeah, March 2023. So funny enough, like, to give some backstory, I had built a construction company with 2 of my friends in Tennessee. And before that, I went to school for finance and I realized, like, I don't want to do the thing, you know, that you came to realize as well. Yeah. And I got into sales and quickly realized, like, I'm good at this. And I had been told by some people, they're like, oh yeah, this guy's got it. And so I knew that that was my pathway and that was my superpower that I could apply. to catapult myself. Mm-hmm. Um, but quickly realized with construction that, um, the fulfillment was just so annoying. Like, I don't like things, I like people. And, um, you know, having to build a roof or whatever was just like painstakingly terrible, and you having to depend on all these people. So I jumped into the remote sales space, got on a few different offers, and, um, a lot of which, uh, were just complete shams, meaning like super uncompliant, lying to people, etc. And so there was a 6-month period where I had generated a couple million dollars in revenue, but quickly realized I felt as if I had like blood on my hands because the fulfillment wasn't there and whatnot. So I went through— that was at the end of 2022. And then going into 2023, I basically just said, hey, I can't do this. Like, keep the paycheck. I don't even want you to pay me the rest of the money that you owe me. 'Cause I don't feel right about it. And if anything comes back, I don't want anything to do with it. So I left. I quit my job at the time, and I had racked up a bunch of debt over the next 2 months because I just didn't have any income. And I was like, I refuse to sell out just to— I'm gonna have to figure out another way. Yeah. And so I was like thinking, how could I be so naive? You know, I'm not— I thought I was a great judge of character, blah, blah, blah. So I was going through this crisis of meaning, which, you know, led into our first few months of working together. Um, but then I, I was at my mom's house and it was like 2 in the morning and I had— I kept coming back home from Tennessee to my mom's house just because I needed some sort of like stability in, in the sense of, uh, you know, finding my footing. And, um, I was watching the Danko podcast with you and you, you had the slick back going on, you know, and, uh, I was like, who the fuck is this guy? Like, is he one of the, one of the shamers or is he legit? Yeah. And the more I dove into the podcast, I was like, okay, there's just notes of competence for the most part. And, and then you mentioned like, yeah, green flags. And you're like, we're building a sales team, we're about to do this beta thing. And talk about timing, man. I think so much we can deduce to just right timing. Mm-hmm. And that's a good reminder that optimizing for good timing should be looked into. And I guess how you do that is just, you know, preparation. It's kind of like the whole, like, luck meets— luck is where preparation meets opportunity. But, um, luckily I had some skill set behind me and I just stumbled upon it. So, like, I just got lucky with finding that. But I took action and DM'd you, sent the Loom video that was like, I will stab somebody. Like, just—

I'm your guy.

Yeah, I'm your guy. I was like, I'll give you a 100-to-1 return like you do for your clients if you just give me the platform to succeed. And so We got into it and, you know, $5 or $6 million of me generating revenue for the company later, here we are. So

what a ride. 39% lifetime close rate, something like that.

On live calls, 46%.

OK, 46%. Yeah, I got the numbers. Half the people that you talked to during your time ended up enrolling. That's absurd.

Yeah. And I think like it was just over like close to 800 enrollments. So what are you guys at now, like 2,000?

Yeah, something like that.

So like still almost still got 40% of the—

Still got the record for upfront cash in a month. And that was without any financing, without any 3-day webinar, 3-day challenges going into it.

Yeah, talk about the trenches, man. I mean, still benefited off of you guys having an awesome brand, but—

Big time.

Yeah, what a ride. So I'd love to dive into your journey. And we could go all the way back, but for those who want to do more after this podcast, they can go and find— you've kind of told that story here and there. But you've had a track record of becoming number one at things for a long time, right, whether it was— Rubik's Cube or Call of Duty or whatever. So maybe if you can just give me like the, the 2-minute clinic on just going up until starting your company. And then I'd like to specifically dive into where you were at when you started writing online. You went through that month of— or that 9 months of not a lot of traction, and then you hit it big and you stumbled upon something that later turned into a company that you probably didn't even imagine at that point. So yeah, give me the runway for that.

I'll start with what you referenced about Rubik's Cube, Call of Duty. I had a handful of things from the age of 5 to now, but that all had about 2 or 3 years of that was the only thing I thought about basically the entire day. And so that started as when I was 5 years old, I was easily the number one Tampa Bay Rays fan in the entire world, where I could name every single stat of every single player at 5 years old. I was the Radio Disney kidcaster for the team. Sure. Because I went in for an interview, everyone else went in and read these pre-written speeches to try to interview or to audition for being the announcer for the kids' version of it. I brought my own speech that that I wrote this long talking about every single raised player in detail all the way down. And it was— it wasn't even a competition. And I think that theme has, has played out quite a bit across all the way till now.

Quick one. Um, with, with that, right, like, um, you know, I'd love to, you know, ask, like, did you find that from someone? Like, was your dad that way? Was your mom that way? Like, did you have that, or was it just like a function of nurture or nature? Where do you think that might have come from?

I think they enabled it. There was never a period in my life where my parents didn't allow me to pursue the thing I was most excited about.

Relentlessly.

Just—

To an autistic level.

I had very few rules and limitations, and it was get good grades in school, and then pretty much nothing else mattered. And I'm like, well, that came very easily to me. I could easily do that. And so whether that was the raise or speedcubing or being the best Call of Duty player in Florida or being one of the highest-ranked RuneScape players in the entire game, all of those were just a manic number of hours where my parents, they kind of liked it. They were unbothered in that way. And not in that they didn't want to talk to me or anything, but they're like, there's a lot worse things that a kid could be doing than just obsessing over one thing and getting quite good at it.

Well, it's interesting because there's a world where your parents or someone else's parents might have discouraged that behavior or, oh my God, you're ADHD. I've got this weirdo son. But thank God for them allowing that. Right. So you started off with the Tampa Bay race.

Yeah. And then there's a handful more. But I think jumping forward, that theme played out into playing football in high school and college. Went to Princeton and graduated with a degree in financial engineering, computer science. Made apps in college, graduated, started working at BlackRock, hedge fund trader, thought it was gonna be the absolute dream job. And to be honest, it was for the first 6 to 8 months because that was my thing in college. And my thing in the first 2 years was like, I'm gonna learn how to understand how the global economy works, macroeconomics. I was just, I was fully in on it. But I looked forward at what it would look like to make that the thing I obsessed over for the next 50 years. And I knew that the next 20 would be not a 20-year period that I wanted to live. And so from the age of 24 to 44, I likely would've been working for someone else the entire time, kind of having to fit my life into their schedule, no uncapped upside for a long time if I wanted to play the game where you kind of bet on a manager above you going and seeing success, and then you get to go be with them as they start something new. So I just wasn't real— was not willing to forego the life that I wanted to live for 20 years with the hope of maybe getting it at the end. Yeah. And so that was the impetus for everything that came after that, was realizing that if I applied the trait that has served me so well in this current vehicle, I might not see the benefits of it.

Sure. I think it's important to recognize that some people might be wired to be more inclined to take a salary or to have that type of stability where, I mean, if you think about it, like, that's why people go to school for X amount of years to achieve a median salary of whatever the number is, because there's a bet, like there's a guarantee. Do you think it's just that, you know, internally that you're willing to outwork and outlast everyone so that you can unlock that upside?

I don't think necessarily. I think I took that path because studying finance, I understood I wanted optionality and uncapped upside rather than capped upside and capped downside. So I'm not talking to the people who— a lot of people who want the stability of a salary don't want the associated accountability that comes with either betting on yourself or taking something where your output is directly tied to your input. Sales is a great example of that.

Yeah.

There's nothing guaranteed about— so sales, whether that's sales or entrepreneurship or intrapreneurship where you're working within a business and you have a rev share, profit share on a certain vertical, those are very different accountability mechanisms. And so to the people that you say are more, quote unquote, wired for a salary, that's fine. But I think it's— understand that is a choice likely shrouding or shrouded by hiding from the accountability. Yeah, it's interesting.

It's interesting you say that because for me personally, for the whole time that I've earned income outside of like my first job that was hourly, like I was a waiter. And so like I took a bet on myself knowing that I could do the uncapped, even though there might have been a bit of a ceiling. Like, I was working those tables. It's uncapped, though. Yeah, yeah. And, um, I think, like, you make a great point, which is the accountability mechanism is there. And for me, I've always been able to bet on myself just because I know that if I don't perform, I'm out. Um, and I like that back against the wall thing because it forces you to choose. It's like win or lose. There's really— it's I wouldn't say it's binary, but it's like you said, it's just a matter of accountability. So you've developed this obsession, right? And you plug it into these things. What did that look like whenever you realized you weren't going to do the 40 years at the finance company at BlackRock? Like, what shape did that take?

Well, it started with a little bit of an existential crisis when I got home after realizing that.

And when was that exactly?

When I saw someone on my floor ask for permission to go to their son's Little League game, and I just knew that that was not putting myself— because he's a relatively successful person, right? Thinking that if I did all the right things, that might happen to me in 15 years, I was like, that's just absolutely not.

Do you remember like the date or like the month?

It was probably late 2019.

Okay.

Because I started working there in June of 2018, and I brought it for the first year and a half there. I was accelerating quickly. I had a newsletter within the company that a lot of high-up people were reading. I was working. I'd get to my desk by 7:00 AM, so I was up at 4:30 on the 5:06 AM bus every single day, 5 days a week. And I would sometimes go in on Saturday. At the gym by 5:30, showered and out the door from the gym at 6:30, at my desk by 6:55. And I would leave at 7:30, 8:00. And I actually genuinely enjoyed that entire process.

Yeah.

But when I realised that that was not gonna serve me to the extent that I wanted it to yet, it was a little bit— I got home, I was like, okay, I'm not gonna quit immediately because that would be silly. There's— going back to the salary thing, I could dramatically scale down the amount of work that I was doing while still maintaining status

quo,

the salary, and the idea that I was doing a good job. I could understand, okay, what are the things that if I do, they will think that I'm producing at whatever level?

Sure.

So this was 2019, this was pre-COVID. I was still working in an office. And when 2020 came around, I was like, okay, what can I do that would potentially expose me to new opportunities without necessarily pursuing them? And so I went on to start a newsletter. I'm reading all these personal development books. I have started this internal newsletter in the company that I didn't even really know there was this big industry and world around of writing on the internet and gaining distribution and things like that. There was someone at the firm who was doing it that I didn't think they were doing a great job. They were sending a morning update, and I was like, this could be better. What if it included a link to a cool podcast or a link to a cool article or summarized the data from the month? And so I started sending that out, and I added everyone in my company that started at the same time of me. I just looked up everyone's email and bulk added them, sent it, and was like, hey, if you want to stay on, reply, and I'll keep you on. And then I kept everyone on that replied. That started to grow by word of mouth. And then I realized, why am I doing this and finding new opportunities within this company when I could do this to the entire scale of the internet? And then see all the opportunities that came from that.

Yeah. Real quick, so I am not going to ask you for your best books, right? But What were some of those early light bulb moments? Were there any books? I mean, I know you're a big Tim Ferriss fan and like, I've been really enjoying his stuff as of late. Mm-hmm. But like, walk me through anything that stuck up above the median that kind of like motivated you in that way. Like, were there creators or anybody that was like, kind of exposed you to that even more? Like, for me, there was a book, The Compound Effect, where it talks about like, turn your car into a university and how there's like the guy who does this little thing, and then 18 months later he's fat and divorced. And then that was a big shift for me, and I started taking things a lot more seriously. Were there any assets or things that kind of sparked a light bulb?

I'll name one that I don't think a lot of people will guess, and it's a book by Wall Street Playboys back in the day called Efficiency. And in terms of niching down and finding an avatar, they spoke to one person. It was the 20 to 25-year-old that just started working on Wall Street, that they needed to understand that Wall Street was not the endgame. That was the thing that lets you play the other endgames, which their entire thing was around e-commerce and copywriting. And back in the day, it was affiliate marketing and things like that. And I read that book like it was my Bible, where it talked about, here's how you need to work out, here's how you need to segment your day to work on your full-time thing, and then come home and immediately work on your side thing, and have the side thing in the morning, and then— Mm-hmm. how to disguise your computer at work so you could read about the thing you were really interested in, but have always an Excel sheet up on the right-hand side that always made it look like you were working. They had prescriptive stuff for me. That's a great book. And that was a foundational book that then led me down the rabbit holes of, all right, let me make sure I'm taking care of myself. And so certain health and fitness ones, and we don't need to go super in-depth in that, but that was an entire part of my journey was going from weighing 280 pounds in college down to 185 at my low and like 200 now.

Well, so if we can just take a quick stop on that, right? Like, one of the things I, I was thinking about kind of shedding some light on was the fact that you were overweight, drinking beers, and like not the Dickie that we see today.

Yeah.

Um, that book gave you a model for that, and I'm sure other things too, right? But like, um, when you were applying this I need to change my situation thing to your career. I think a lot about how if you're going to 10x one part of your life, you can't not 10x some of the other things. And so the existential crisis happened. Was it a parallel where you were working on yourself and your fitness and your health while trying to create a pathway out of Wall Street?

No, the sequence happen in reverse. So let's just put a pin in— let's talk the weight loss stuff, how that was connected back to the books, back to the aha moment, so we can make sure we're keeping track of the stack here. The fitness thing happened right when I stopped playing football. And I was like, I'm 280 pounds, I'm a senior in college, I'm 18 years old. I'm either going to 380 or I'm going to 180. And there's no in between here because I'm either going to stop eating the amount I was doing to maintain this weight, and also stop working out, or I need to fix both those things. Luckily, I went the right direction. That started the momentum of taking ownership of my life and going down self-improvement rabbit holes and understanding that I eventually needed to bet on myself. And they all were a sequence of things. But by the time I had that existential, what am I gonna do, I was in pretty good shape.

Got it.

Wasn't in the best shape of what I ended up getting to, but I was in great shape. That then said, okay, start the personal newsletter, the content of my personal newsletter was summarising all of the books and podcasts and things I was reading at the time. Okay. Because in the year prior, I'd done all that learning, read tons of books, listened to tons of podcasts, understood how different areas of life worked, but I was just writing notes to myself. So all I did was go, okay, I'm actually just going to publish the notes that I'm putting out. That's what led to the newsletter. And then it was lucky for me that I started that In January 2020. COVID hit 3 months later. I'm like, OK, I might get fired from this job. I have no clue if they're going to keep me. Markets are all over the place. I literally— that was when I understood that I have no say. I have no ownership in this thing. I could be let go tomorrow, and then I'm done. Not done, but I'm significantly cut down in terms of what I have.

And that's the false— like, you talk about the stability or the uncapped downside.

The turkey problem. Have you seen the turkey chart?

Yeah.

Where it's like the quality of life, this is Nassim Taleb, and it plots the quality of life of a turkey for 365 days or whatever heading into Thanksgiving. And it's a straight line up and then straight down on the day of Thanksgiving. It's like the entire life the turkey is given, it's massaged, it's fed well, it's let outside, it thinks it has this incredible life until it's over. And I think that's For a lot of people, they find out the hard way that they were turkeys the entire time.

Okay. So you realized you could be a turkey.

I could be a turkey. Exactly. I didn't end up getting fired or anything, but I had no clue if I would.

Sure.

And so that led to writing every single day for the entire year in 2020, gaining a little bit of progress, but that became my thing. It's like, I'm going to understand how to write on social media. I'm going to understand how I can package up this library of knowledge that I've found and exposed myself to and that I'm trying to learn. And I'm going to put those ideas, my own spin on them, and also other people's ideas out in the public on Twitter. And that was the thing that I kind of sunk my teeth into for all of 2020.

And then what happens?

Everything since then has been— I can point every good thing that's happened over the past 5 years back to starting that newsletter and then realizing, why am I publishing weekly when I could publish daily? Started writing every day on Twitter in July of 2020, had some success, had some success. 3 or 4 went viral in a row. That immediately set me kind of accelerating follower growth and impressions and things like that. That led to Ship 30, which was a 30-day writing challenge, which was, I want to keep writing every day, But I don't have the accountability myself to keep doing it. So why don't I surround myself with a community of other people? That was a $49 challenge. You got your money back if you wrote all 30 days. I handled every email, every landing page, every marketing asset, every single thing during that time. 50 people on a Slack channel. A handful of them actually did write every day. And then I just asked them, do you wanna roll forward your $49 to the next one? So I just kept that going, kept that going from there. We can dive into where things went from that, partnering with Cole and Ship 30 accelerating and all that. But the summary of that lesson is I was still working at BlackRock during that entire time.

Yeah.

So 2020, full-time, I was remote, which was nice because I could work for 4 hours a day on that thing, but I had to be on ready basically all day. But I wasn't working on that finance stuff the entire day. I was doing whatever the highest leverage thing was for me to Improve my situation.

With your mindset, right? Like, obviously, you left New York and you went back home. But where was your inner dialogue at? Meaning, you were busting your ass doing all this stuff and kind of working double time. And I'm sure at first, the catalyst was, I don't want this future situation. I don't want to have this exposure. But like, what was the— like, when you were waking up in the morning, Having to maintain the status quo of the job, plus all this stuff, and you're just relentlessly chipping away at what you didn't know would become this big thing, but you were praying for an out, or you were working towards that. Like, what was the dialogue like in your mind?

It was likely fear-based. Yeah, that I got to go home. I'm spending time with my mom. I'm taking care of my mom. I'm playing a bigger role in her life. And then around August of 2020, November, really it was September, November of 2020, there was rumors that we would be brought back into the office. So I'm like, dang, this business is starting to accelerate. I'm seeing some success here. We did in the December cohort into January, I did 50 or 60 grand from Ship 30. So first paying cohort, $199, December of 2020, 300 people joined the January one. And I'm sitting there making 60 grand in a month on a cohort-based course launch, which blew my mind at the time. Because when I started to think about this internet world, I wanted to make $1,000 per month because that would pay half my rent. Storm past that, right? But so 2020 ends, going into 2021, all I could think about was, I do not want to go back to New York. I'm back in Florida. It's warm. I have a lot of space. I'm near my family. I lived in a 3-1 when I was in New York, 3 guys, 1 bathroom, and 1 of the bedrooms had no windows. And so that was 2 grand a month. It's 6 grand total, 2 grand a month for me. And that's probably 4 or 5 grand a month now, that exact spot. So anyway, I was very determined to make sure that I didn't go back there. However, I had a rule, and this came from the book Efficiency. It's you don't leave until your take-home income from your side hustle is 2 times the income of your full-time job, because that is going to be a much more volatile thing, and you need to be twice that amount before you even start to think about it. Mm-hmm. So I had in my head, okay, I partnered with Cole for 2021, I had the number in my mind that I need to personally take home half a million dollars from this business in this year, because I knew my BlackRock take-home would be $200,000, $220,000. So I'm like, all right, that's my goal. I have to go hit that. And that was a guiding light of, if I didn't hit that, I don't think I would've had the juice or courage to leave the full-time thing. Sure. Because Came from very little growing up. Relationship with money was very scarce. I needed— I'm a relatively risk-averse person. I was not ready to forego what most people would consider a dream job without almost their certainty that it was the right choice.

Yeah.

And so 2021, it was like, I need to get this thing to $1 million because split it into roughly 95% margin during that time because we were the ones doing all the work. we got to go get there. In 2021, it was wake up at 4:30, work as long as I could until the first call at BlackRock, which I can't remember what the exact time was, but I had to switch to that for an hour and then I'd switch back and I had to be reachable the entire day. And then the second 4 o'clock came around, they said no meetings after 4 o'clock because it was the beginning of work from home, work remote, and they needed to set some boundaries. It's like 4:00 PM, I knew I could never get called or never get texted, and I would immediately jump back into Ship 30. And then Fridays, they set a rule where you couldn't have meetings past 12:00. And so every live cohort of Ship 30, the first call of the week was Friday at 12:00, because I knew that was the only time where I could be 100% present on that call without any risk of getting a phone call from my full-time job, something like that. So anyway, that was the motivation, was get to a point where I make twice as much, from my side hustle than my main thing. And we did that in 2021.

And in that 2021 season, did you forego some of the exercise stuff and deprioritize other things? Because you're taking care of your mom, you're context switching a little bit with both of the things going on, and you're really trying to push for that million-dollar mark, which I'm sure took up all of the bandwidth.

I mean, socially, I don't think I left the house very much. I definitely wasn't dating. I definitely wasn't thinking— I exercised because I think it was a net value add on all the other things, but it was an hour of it, and I would do it first thing within 30 minutes of being awake, and then I'd work the entire day from there.

Yeah.

But no, there was— I didn't travel. I didn't go anywhere else during 2021. I guess I did one 4-day trip to Austin and then California, and then I came back. But when I got back from that, I was like, that was the dumbest thing ever because I'm working 2 jobs basically, trying to travel. Let's have some prioritization here. Came back. But no, there is no world where I was going to be actively doing a bunch socially and breaking out of that in the speed that I did it. If I wanted to take that and make it over 3 or 4 years, yeah, I could have paid attention to these other areas, but not in a year.

No. And Was your— there was an accelerated deadline because of the fact that there was so much ambiguity with what was gonna happen and the whole we're gonna have to return home thing. So that just allowed you to take the bet of, I'm gonna forego all this other stuff and just go all in on this. Right. And then there comes the obsessive, you know, nature of how you approach things. I think a lot of people forget, and this is basically just a lesson to myself, where it's like, you can have anything, but you can't have everything. And, uh, for a long time I've tried to, um, put deposits in all the buckets. When going into next year, like this year, I've— I created some leverage for myself, and so I had the freedom to move around a bit. And I certainly took advantage of that because I had come out of the trenches of, of 50, 60-hour weeks and, um, got to move around a little bit. And so that was nice, but, um, I'm— my cup is full on that. Yeah. Like, I don't think about like the amount of travel I've done this year came at a cost. Um, and for going into next year, like, I'm excited, and this might change, but right now the excitement for me is staying in one place and really just focusing for once on something. And that's why I was talking about like whether I do the big like, uh, ultra marathon stuff is like, it depends. And so I guess the Amount that I'd love to ask about. Where was your estimation? Right. Meaning, like, did you underestimate how much it was going to take? Because a lot of people do. And this is a you theme and a Hormozi-ism where it's like, you're probably going to— it's probably going to take way longer than you think. It's going to be way harder and there's going to be more sacrifice. Like, where was your estimation compared to how it actually played out? And for a lot of it, I'm sure you were surprised pleasantly by how well it did, and you caught fire, and you had the timing and all those things. So you got lucky in some of those areas, but you capitalized. So like, where was your mind at as far as the estimation goes?

Certainly naive, in that I had no clue how much effort it would take, and I had no clue what the potential reward was. And I think that was a massive benefit, where if you had told me at any year of business, at the end of the year, if you stacked up every single task that I did at the beginning of the year, or fast forward to the end, for example, this year, or the year prior, or the year prior, take every task that I ever put in my to-do list, every meeting, and you just stacked it on a list, and it was like, here's your mountain of work for the year, and here's what you're gonna feel throughout that. I don't think I'd— I would not wade into that ocean. I would look at that mountain, or I would not try to climb that mountain. Mm-hmm. I would look at that and go, No, just no way. Yeah. And that's been true of every single season. So I've actually just fully embraced that now, of you cannot try to, one, plan that far in advance, or two, think about the amount of effort it's going to take. It's probably better to just overestimate and say it's going to be very difficult. Yeah. But I don't know what it's going to be. So what do I know? Well, I know what I can work on today.

Yep.

And I know I can probably work for about 4 legitimate focused hours today.

Yep.

And I can probably do the highest leverage thing during those 4 hours today. And everything else, you can— you could fixate on how much effort that's going to take, or you can just think about today.

I think for me, like, the ultramarathon thing is a really good analogy to the way that business plays out, where it's like people that want to run 100 miles don't fucking understand how hard it is at mile 60.

Yeah.

And they talk about like this— there's a concept like the scary 40. where it's like the last 40 miles of 100, it's like, it's, it's unbelievable. Like, you feel like you're walking in a frying pan. Oh. Um, and, and so, like, luckily I've able— I've, I've had that playground to develop some of those skill sets and mannerisms and beliefs, uh, and break a lot of them that I, that I was naive to as well, um, that allowed me to, to do the mundane boring stuff over and over and over and over again. Um, thank God I've got that playground because I think you know, even like with the 240 race that I did, like, if you look at it from an outside perspective, like, it's 5 hours in a car, right? Like, how are you gonna go that far, right? And if you look at it all at once, it's like, um, what's the concept? It's like, you know, you can't eat an elephant without slicing it up, right? It's just too unbearable. Yeah. And so I think, um, with business and anybody who's trying to pursue any sort of skill acquisition, entrepreneurship, or just greatness in any area, it's really important to just focus on the day. And I remember when we were about 6 months into working together, I— you'd ask me like, hey, man, what do you got going on this weekend? And I was like, yeah, I'm gonna do my 5-year plan. And I'm gonna really just map out what it looks like from 24 to 30 for me. And you're like, you got a second? Let me give you a ring. And we basically talked like 30 minutes about how 3 years ago, getting here, you had no idea. No. And the next 3 years, like so much can happen in a 36-month time period. And so whether it's a 12-month, 24, 36, and especially like 5 years, some people like to think about where their life should or could be. And that's, I think, helpful. But from a, you can, concoct the, the actual thing versus like what it'll turn out to be is just— it's preposterous, right? So like—

Anytime I've ever made a plan beyond 3 months, it feels really good to make, and then I never look at it again. And then I find it in an old note, and I may have achieved some of those things, I may have failed at some of those things, but it was ultimately a useless exercise. Yeah. Even last year, I just filmed my end-of-year video. I set 10 goals at the end of last year. I could, in rewatching it, name like 3 of the goals, let alone if I achieved any of them. And I was like, so that was a feel-good in-the-moment exercise that actually didn't change my behavior whatsoever. And you and I talked about this throughout your time working together. You can focus on no more than 3 things. Oh, that's right. If you cannot rattle off the 3 things you're most focused on, you are unfocused. And so anytime you have Whether that's 3 habits, whether that's 3 values, whether that's 3 non-negotiables, whether that's 3 things you want to achieve over the long term. Human brain can only keep track of 3 things to rattle off quickly.

Yeah. Well, let's dive into that, right? Because when we did this exercise last year, my 3 commitments, which that was the most dialed I've ever been in my life, it was make $20,000 in a month for the first time. Hit that. Run the mile in 2:40. Hit that. And take care of my mom. Hit that. Which is an ongoing thing. But this year, I didn't— I failed to have 3 initiatives. And, you know, I still did well, but I was not focused. Like, if I look back at this year, the word is certainly not focused. And so for the people that are listening, if we know that— and you talk a lot about this in your content where planning is basically bullshit, like it's procrastination, right? Like, how would you break down either tactics or strategies to try to create that focus? Like— Like, where do you go when you try to create those initiatives for your company, for yourself, and how do you actually like implement that?

Well, I just did this at the end of the year. And so I'm going into next year with 3 goals. I wanna improve all of my health metrics from my end of year test this year by 10%. Okay. That's an extremely achievable, if I'm sitting here in a year at age 30, 10% better than I was on my resting heart rate, my HRV, my mile time, my 10-mile time, all of those. Not so intimidating that there's no way I can do it, and not so low that it's gonna cause me to slack off. So that's one. 2, I wanna have 75 things at the end of the year that I look back on and can list that were positive memory dividend experiences. Mm-hmm. So this is gonna be one of them, right? I know that at the end of the year when I look back, If I make a bullet point of filmed podcasts with Tristan, that's going to spark a positive memory for me. Why I picked that number is at the end of this year when I was in Costa Rica doing my end-of-year review, the first 6 months of this year were extremely challenging emotionally, financially, physically, everything for me during that time, relationship. I was not on my game at all. And there's a lot of reasons for that, but Putting that as the— sorry, I just got taken back to the beginning of the year. It's not easy to say that for the beginning of the year not being a good thing. But I started journaling on those 6 months, and I got into this negative headspace, and you just saw that kind of flash before my eyes for a second. Right, right. I then broke out of the cafe that I was working in, in Costa Rica, and went on the beach and was like, let's take this in a different direction. different direction and list from the top of my head all of the positive, fun experience and memories that I have from the year. And I came up with 46. I was like, all right, I got 46. That's about one a week, whether that was trips, whether that was dinners. Like when you, Casper, and Thomas came, I like remembered that and said, yeah, I had dinner with those guys and stuff like that. So anyway, why I picked the number 75, it's like a little bit more than one a week, right? And I, I could come up with 46 last year. I want to get to 75 this year, and that's going to guide my behavior in the year ahead. Sure. And it's extremely quantifiable. Where it's like, I know that that means I need to do on average 1.5 a week. Cool. What do I have lined up this week? Well, yep, I'm going there. So it allows me to proactively plan and kind of gamify just having fun. And as someone that has struggled to set goals of doing things like that, doing novel experiences rather than— I've traveled a ton and done all that, but not in a way that felt like I was accomplishing something.

Sure.

So those are the first 2. And then third, we want to do $10 million at least 40% margin this year.

Yep.

And that is a single company-wide goal that aligns every decision we make, every person we hire, every marketing initiative we have. It's like, let's zero in on that. And it has a constraint where we don't just chase revenue so I can talk about revenue. It's like, no, we wanna do it. So the ultimate goal here is to build a business that helps a lot of people and helps us generate wealth. So having those 3 things, it's like, okay, is that simple enough that I can keep track of them every single day? Yep. Every morning, I just think about them during a morning meditation. It's like, I'm going to remember those 3 things, because any more than that, I wouldn't be able to. And I think if it's health, business, and then some kind of lifestyle goal,

sure,

that's

it. So it's 10% better on your health metrics, 75 bullet points to think back to as far as memory dividends, $10 million at 40%. And that's the guiding force,

right? And last year, and the way I think about this, I actually— I'm calling them quests instead of goals. RuneScape. Yeah, it just takes me back to the— if this was a quest, I'd find it way more fun than this anxiety-inducing goal.

Sure.

What it also allows you to have is side quests. So I have 3 main quests and then an unlimited list of side quests, which are completely optional, challenging but fun, and pure upside if I do them. So at the end of the year, I will not evaluate that list for did I complete them or not.

Yep.

Just— so one of them, for example, I want to do a day where I take 100,000 steps for no other reason than I've never done it, and I think it'd be fun to just wake up. It's like you kind of have to walk for 16 hours.

It's hard,

right? You kind of got to walk for 16 hours, but it's not so challenging where I'm like, I'm going to shape my whole year around it and evaluate my progress whether I hit that or not.

Yep.

So I have a list of a lot of those things. I can't think of too many more right now, but when I think of something fun or I think of something challenging, I just throw it on there. And then I can pull from that list as needed, but there's 3 main things I'm focused on, and that's going to guide my daily behavior.

Yeah. Well, let's zoom in on a couple of those things. I think about the concept of memory dividends quite a bit because you kind of instilled that into me, and you helped me set up my Chase Bank to where I got the 10% fund. Give me a few bits on that and how you came to find that and how it served you.

It's from Bill Perkins, Die With Zero. Yep. And it's the idea that just like if you own a stock and it pays you a dividend, you own the stock and you get constant returns in the future. A memory dividend is you have an experience that pays you right now because it's fun in the moment, and then it pays you in the future with all the times you think about it or tell someone about it or see an example of it. So the best example I have is 2021, the Bucs go to the Super Bowl. It's in Tampa. It's the only time in the last 50 years that a team is playing in their home stadium for the Super Bowl. It's Tom Brady's potentially last Super Bowl. It's during COVID so only 25,000 tickets are sold. So it's the most exclusive Super Bowl that they've ever had. Wow. It's during a legendary season. I probably had $40,000 total at the time. I can't remember the exact number, I knew that Super Bowl tickets were going to run at least 5 grand each. Probably 10. More than likely 10. And I faced a choice as I thought about going to that game. And I luckily had read the book around that time. And so I kind of looked at my future earnings and said, okay, I think those will continue to accelerate. I ran the math of like, is this going to change my day-to-day behaviour tomorrow if I do this thing? No. And so I took 10 grand in cash out. I went with my buddy Chandler. We went to the game. We scalped tickets at the game in cash, and I ended up paying like $5,800 for it or something like that. So I spent like 15% of all the money I had on a Super Bowl ticket. Tom Brady, last Super Bowl, he won. Only time in history that a team has won the Super Bowl at their home stadium. So how this is a memory dividend for me is One, I just got paid a memory dividend by telling you that story. So I just got an added benefit. Every single Super Bowl that comes by, I think about going. Every time the Bucs play, I think about that I've been there. Every time I see Tom Brady, I think about it. And so I bought something for $5,800 that has paid me every couple days for the last chunk of years.

Yeah.

And there's a ton of examples where I now think about investing in a trip or an experience with someone or with a group, as buying an asset, and that asset's going to pay me forever. And I think a lot of people will underinvest in their memory dividend account and overinvest in things like their stock account. Where if you have $100,000 sitting in an investment account, but you're afraid to take a $5,000, $10,000 trip, both of those are assets. And so what you talked about with the bank account is for the last 4 or 5 years, I have rules set up automatically where 10% of every dollar that comes in goes to this memory dividend account. I don't track it. I don't know how much is in there right now, but I know when an experience presents itself, I'm going to pull from that account and buy it. And why that works psychologically is if you track your personal finance and the amount of money you have, and you only look at the total amount, and then something expensive pops up, you're going to see the chart go down, and that's psychologically challenging. And so I set that aside in advance where it's like I'm prepaying for all those things so I don't think about them. And then when I buy the $10,000 trip and it's incredible, we fly business, we stay in a cool place, whatever it is, I don't feel that come down. And so that's how I've hacked my psychology with it. And then I just think about it like that money's either going to sit and compound in its own account to buy the thing when the opportunity presents itself, or It's going to cash out and I'm going to buy that thing now and that's going to pay me for the future. Hmm.

I think it's, it's really valuable for the people who are so— what would you call it? They have that one-track mindset with the stock account or material assets, right? Like things that you end up owning that end up owning you. And I think, I think it was Graham Stephan who talked about how he'd rather buy a Rolex compared to a trip because he can hold on to it forever. But you just challenged that idea with the fact that you can hold on to that memory dividend and it can pay you. I guess you could think about the same time, like if you look down or something like, you know, but—

Yeah, kind of. But you're not going to tell that many stories about your—

Yeah, exactly. And I think for me, like thinking about the big ones that I have, like one of them is the 240 race where it was like it cost me $10,000, $12,000 for all the logistics. You

flew the whole crew out. You had the camper van.

Yeah. And I think like at the time it was— Yeah, about 20% of my liquidity. And as I was forking off all the money, I was like, God Almighty, this is adding up. But the amount of times that I think back to that— For the rest of your life. For the rest of my life. So I would encourage anybody who's, who's gotten above the, the range of where you can afford to do that, which is a privilege, to, to get ahead of that.

But even before that, you know, if you get to a place where you have any kind of savings, put that 10% because it scales with whether you take home a lot or you take home a little, as long as you're positive. So get positive first. If anyone's watching this like, I don't have any money, okay, get positive first and then just start to pre-allocate it because it served me tremendously well. Sure. I visited 20 countries or so over the last 4 years. It's where I met my girlfriend. That's where I've just seen the world, expanded my horizons a lot from that. And I think had I maintained the relationship with money that I had when I started to earn it, which is you can't spend it, you need to hold onto it, it's going to go away, that would not have served me very well. And I wouldn't have enjoyed the way up. I think I've been good at enjoying the money that I've earned on the way up while also not— you've never seen me flex a car. Right. You've never seen me flex a watch. This is a $5,000 watch-ish. that Cole got me for my birthday. I've never bought a super nice thing in that way, because that doesn't serve me the same way that I can say, OK, flying my family out to go to the Rose Bowl last year. Oh my gosh. That's tomorrow, another example of it, right? So lots of— I think more of how can I buy something that's going to pay me a ton in the future?

Well, one of the things I remember just as you were sharing is whenever I started making money with you, I was climbing from $10,000 to $15,000 to $20,000 a month. You were like, hey, start going on white tablecloth dinners because they're not as expensive as you might think, and you'll start to create some of those deposits. And so that was a big unlock for me where I might have went a little too far with it where I'm eating good. And food is certainly one of the things that I haven't thought about the percentage or the number as much as just doing the thing and getting the tab, which I love to do. Mm-hmm. But that has— I need to do a better job of reflecting on it. And I'm glad that I asked you that because I haven't completed my end of the year reflections, in part because it's a bit anxiety-inducing. So the hack is to just think about the bullet points. So you ended up going from the cafe to, oh my gosh, like, this is kind of taxing to relive, to let me just dump every awesome thing that has happened and then try to increase that number by 50%, 60% going into 2026.

And I still— I filmed the video yesterday. I talked through the first 6 months of the year challenges of that, the mistakes I made along the way. But I did that in bullet point form where I was like, all right, let me summarize my year in 8 bullets. Cool. I'm gonna talk on all those. What did I learn this year? Let me summarize that in 8 bullets. And then I did that for the business side. And that served me very well for the last few years where I can go look at 2022 me before PGA, before anything. And I got a 100-minute video on YouTube where I talked about my travels for the year. It was like I went to 5 cities in the US.

And you ran a half marathon.

Uh, 5-miler. 5-miler. Yeah. So I was running a Tundra in that time, and those kind of assets are another thing that pay you for a long time.

Sure.

I know when I'm 85, I'm like, what was 28-year-old me doing? Let's go watch, you know?

Yeah. And, and to add to that, right, like a lot of the things that you're caught up in are not going to matter. You got any thoughts on that?

If you read through, or if I read through any of my journals from the last 10 years, And I want to do this exercise. I haven't done it, but if I put 2015, '16, '17, '18, '19 on a page, and then I asked myself, write down the 3 things that you were most caught up in or concerned about during that time. One, I can't really remember. Mm-hmm. Two, the things I do remember, if I cross-reference that with my actual journal, there will be no overlap, where if you zoom in on a random July in 2017, I couldn't tell you what I was worried about. And if I tried to guess, I'd go in and it'd be something so unbelievably insignificant that taking that into the present moment, I can understand most of the things current me is caught up in. Future me is like, dude, I cannot believe you were worried about that. It did not matter at all.

Mmhmm.

And I'm not perfect with that, but I think I could have done a better job this year of recognizing that 5-year-in-the-future me, even 1-year-in-the-future me. And I think the more anxious you get or the more stressed you get, the less time off you take, the more just in the weeds that you are, your ability to see that you're caught up in something that doesn't matter diminishes dramatically.

Yeah, I've certainly felt that over the last little bit. So Definitely something for me to work on going into the new year. To jump back to where we were on the journey, you had started building up this million-dollar goal and then you eventually went on to leave BlackRock and go all in on business. Walk me through— again, we talked a little bit about how hard it was and how if you put it and stacked it up to the ceiling, you might not have taken that bet. Mm-hmm. But whenever you finally did jump into entrepreneurship completely, what were some of the themes now that you've exposed yourself to more downside that you were thinking about into that first and second year? Because the overlap is there, but then you went all in, right? Where was your head at when you were all in on the business and building it?

So I quit in March of 2022, and because in 2021 doubled my income, felt good about it. It was now a bigger financial risk for me to stay. and not work on this thing full-time than it was to leave. And so I saw the runway, I saw the trajectory. In the first 3 months, I did nothing more than the amount of output I was doing when I had the full-time job. And that happened because I had created such efficient systems to be able to execute at the level I was while also having a full-time job. Mm-hmm. I thought magically when I quit, I'd have all this extra time and I'd go do all this extra good stuff. And we talked to a lot of people within PGA who were like, oh, I'm making this amount, and I want to quit my job because I think it'll free up a ton more time. And I'm like, get to that double range because you overestimate how much more productive you're going to be if you didn't have that full-time thing.

Well, I think a lot about the— I think— I can't recall the exact analogy, but it's like the college sports player gets more done, and he does his homework more than the person— In season. Their

grades are always better in season than out of season. And that was, that was actually not true for me because I think I took a lot of harder classes when I knew I didn't have to play football. But anyway, that's usually true, which is if you want something done, give it to a busy person. Same thing, right? When you have that constraint, you're more likely to.

Yeah, it's a funny belief because now that I've had more free time, I haven't actually gotten more done.

You just create more either distractions or you stress about the things that you have to do and because you don't have as much time to stress about them, right?

Yeah, it just opens up for more worry. Right, exactly. And

so that I definitely fell for that. that for the first 2 or 3 months, but then I moved to Miami. So in 2022, I moved here with Cole. And that was, in terms of the rocky cutscene of us accelerating the business, I think that period from June of 2022 to really May of 2023, the next year, which is when we hired you, is where the majority of the acceleration of this business happened. because Cole moved here as well. Right up the road here, there's a WeWork that we met in every day at 8:00 AM for 4 months in a row throughout the thick of summer in Miami. So June, July, August, September, every day we met up there. June of 2022, over the last 4 years to date, that is our worst month in business in terms of revenue. So lowest. If you look at Stripe on that and you cut the chart there, it looks like the business died the month we moved in together, not physically, but moved to the same city. And then boom, that chart explodes over the next 3 years. Yeah. And that was the— I needed to get myself out of the environment that had served me to get to working a full-time job and being able to break out of it to, all right, let's go expand the horizon. Let's go to Miami. It's not like I lived the Miami life while I was here during that year. I went to WeWork, I went home, I worked out, and that was it. And I continued that that path. Now, I did expand in 2023, and we can talk about all those different things, but that was the next step of the journey was going from being at home with my mom, taking care of her, to let's go get in person with Cole and take this thing to the next level because we did. We've grown revenue every single year of the business. This was the first year that profit went down, but that was intentional through scaling. not intentional, I'll say, but somewhat expected. It's a byproduct. A byproduct of it, and then sets the foundation to do significantly more over 3 years that follow. And I think that's— we could go into the nitty-gritty of that. But '21, '22, '23, '24, it was up, up, up, up, up.

And so you hit that low month, and you guys just da-na-na-na-na-na-na-na, locked in all the way. Was it still fear-based? Was there excitement that started bleeding into things? Like, what was the— the theme.

Yeah, I think I got to a point financially where I saw a number that was like, okay, you've reached a point where you can start to invest in yourself. You can spend money on yourself. You can think a little bit differently. That doesn't go away. I think I've had to continue to work on it. But around December of 2022, we did $450K in December '22. That was the best month ever. June of '21, we did our first $100K month. And then in June '22, that worst month, it was like $75K. It's like, what did something break? What happened? And then no, we got together. I forgot the question that you asked.

Yeah, just the theme of still being fear-based.

Was it fear-based? No, I don't think so, because I think Cole, he had so much experience entrepreneurially from his ghostwriting agency and things like that that I could really rely on him for mentorship around, you've seen this type of pattern before. He's taught me an incredible amount. He still does. But during that time, especially where it's like, okay, let's hire a team member, we're scaling to a revenue level. While his take-home income during that time was still significantly more than when he was running his agency, but he had seen the patterns of business and things like that that I did not have.

Yeah. I guess to just spend a quick second on that, with Cole being there, I'm sure what a blessing that was, right? Like, was it kind of similar to how you had to coach me up on the belief side? Definitely. Um, and he was just kind of reminding you, like, to calm down?

That's why he bought me this watch, because I was so afraid to spend money on anything. He's like, I'm gonna buy you something that you'd be uncomfortable to buy yourself. And it worked, because then I was like, okay, cool, like, what else could I buy or spend things on? And it, you know, you got to calibrate and recalibrate as you learn these things. But no, on the on how big the business could eventually get, on how many people we could eventually reach. He's always been a bigger thinker in that way, whereas I'm far more risk-averse, and I've had to untrain that. But I think those both serve each other in a good way.

Yeah, I remember one time, I think it was March of 2024, May, I had been with you guys for about a year. I had built up my net worth a bit. I had relentlessly relied on that 9 Steps to Get Dialed In booklet that you wrote for me. And I was talking to him and it was when Connor and Josh moved in and I had assembled the Avengers and did the whole Closer Compound thing, which I wish I would have documented a little bit more during that time. But I had done a one-on-one with him and I was asking him, how do you preserve the good times when they're so good? Mm-hmm. You know, because I had just come off this big high and bought my mom a car and paid off her debt and all this other stuff. And He was like, well, you know, to preserve it kind of assumes that it's going to go down versus what if the question is, what if this is just the beginning?

Mm-hmm.

And that like really opened up a container for me to, I guess, allow the abundance to kind of flow in. And so that was really a helpful unlock for me. And it did start to get better. Right. And of course, you know, the road, it's not up and to the right. I think a lot of times when you are in that optimistic mindset, you think it's just going to go like this when in fact it's a zigzag. And you talk about how sometimes the graph goes down and you feel the pain. But whenever the graph goes down, it's actually— or I guess I should say when the graph is going up on the dashboard, it's actually a byproduct of the work that you put in from the leading indicators beforehand.

Never in the moment. Now there's like 5 points on our $22 million chart in Stripe that if you cut the chart there, it looks like the business would have died. There's 5 of them, and I can usually name the months because they were the most challenging months.

Well, I just went through one, and you got to consult me a little bit on this, and it was as if the whole entire plane was falling out of the sky. And I'm just now, thankfully, ahead of this conversation, there's been like, you know, 8 proof of life things that have come about. And I'm like, oh, the world's not over. No. But God, did it feel like that in the moment. And I think it's interesting to remind people how whenever you're going on this type of trajectory, the zigzag is important. And I talked a lot about this with Daniel because he kind of rode the same line, of course. Yeah. How like you have to remind yourself that even if it's going down, that's par for the course and

Expand your measurement horizon too. So if you've had a bad month, look at your last 3. If you had a bad last 3, obviously take the actions necessary to improve it, but zoom out a little bit. And we've talked plenty about usually if you're stressed about something small, you need to zoom out. And if you're stressed about something big, you zoom in.

Sure.

And whatever that is, just flip it.

Yeah. So you were doing this with Cole and you guys had a lean team, right? And then we go into 2023 and you bring Connor and I on. And then what I'd really like to spend time on is the fact that you might have had the vision and Cole helped with where things could go. Yeah. But one of the things I think you do so well is just in time, not just in case, and bottleneck analysis, and just relentlessly attacking the thing that is the constraint. And that might have to do with some of your finance background or wherever that is pulled from, but maybe And you already did a talk on this, which I'm not sure if it's public or not.

It's on my YouTube. Yeah. It's called like the Goal Achieving Hack I Wish I Knew or something, but I might rename it. But yeah, it's a big keynote.

Yeah. So with that, maybe just give me a couple bits on how you think about solving the problems as they arise and what that took shape in when it went into 2023 and 2024. Like scale, scale, scale, hire, delegate, things like that. Like how do you think about bottleneck analysis now that you've had a couple of years of management and allocation under your belt more so than just a 2-man crew?

There's a couple of points on that. So when you have a leaner team, it's far easier to attack the bottleneck because the number of people you have to communicate the priority to is far smaller. And so as we've gone to 30 people now, when I spot a bottleneck, I have to be extremely certain that that's the right thing to deploy effort onto because the opportunity cost of deploying that many people on the wrong thing is massive.

Mm-hmm.

And the opportunity cost of doing that in a way that you then have to backtrack is massive, right? Versus, hey, if I make a mistake in my analysis with a team of 4, it's like I come in tomorrow and it's like, hey guys, sorry, it's actually this thing. But now if I pick the wrong marketing initiative or the wrong price change or whatever thing that I think is the current constraint of the business and attack it, I have to spend far more time thinking about what that is and making sure it's right before I rally the troops around it. The benefit of that is when you pick the right thing and you deploy a ton of leverage onto it, your good judgment is magnified tremendously.

Sure.

So it's a double-edged sword. If I do it on the wrong thing, and I was wrong on plenty of things this year in terms of my hypothesis on what the thing we needed to build or build or do to get us to the next level. Yeah. And how that connects to my end-of-year review is I had significantly less time where I zoomed out completely, got away from the day-to-day in Slack, the day-to-day managing a sales team, the day-to-day having whatever emotional conversation of the day with a team member, that my judgment was not as clear as in years past. And one of my big lessons on the business front this year is as you scale, your job changes from purely how to a lot more what, where you need to figure out what to work on more than how to do something.

Yeah. Hormozi, I, I watched some of his end of the year review and it was a lot about how for the first time in his life, he has kind of met a lot of the financial goals and he can zoom out a bit where he's going to build his life and let the business fill the cracks. And he talks about how— and you, you can— I was As you were listing some of the beginning stuff out, I was thinking about how you've been rewarded for the obsession. You've been rewarded for the 14-hour day, right? And that's actually reinforced the behavior, and therefore strengthens the feedback loop. And you're actually perfectly capable of tapping into that. Yeah. When I think maybe now, as a founder, like you said, it's the what, not the how, right? And so— It's interesting because whenever we were shipping things, it was just like violently picking something, allocation, execution, overstepping a lot, right? And there's plenty of examples of that. But it's interesting to see how at scale the double-edged sword becomes a lot more sharp. Mm-hmm. And I'd love to maybe unpack some of the journey from that to now where some of the things top of mind for you, like, What have you— and, you know, we started working together. We did a bunch of awesome stuff, which, you know, was so much fun, man. Oh my gosh, how fun was it to build from the ground? And I think Temple, who mentored me through Eight Figure Boardroom for a while, reminded me constantly about not taking that time period for granted because it was so simple. Yeah. And I remember one of our powerful one-on-ones was where at the end of last year, you had actually had a very taxing season where you had the big house and it was difficult to manage and the family stuff, and you were taking care of everybody. And you were like— we just logged on and, um, for the very first time I thought this might actually be a session about you instead of me. And you're like, man, you probably don't believe it when I say it, but I would kill to just have your, uh, setup, you know, and just worry about the things that you're worried about versus all this like grandiose like— Yeah. Allocation and stuff. And so, um, like, what are some of the things top of mind for you that you've emerged with after this hibernation period? What are the big ones?

2 or 3 days in, I realized the number one thing I need to emerge from this time off with is preventing the feeling of needing this much time off ever again. Mm-hmm. So in the first 2 or 3 days there, I pulled up a giant calendar on the year and I was like, what am I going to block right now such that I never have to make the decision again? Do I have time on the calendar to recharge, to zoom out, to think, to let my brain rest? Whatever it is I need, I'm going to block that time in advance. And I spent the whole first day like, all right, well, if we do challenges during this time and a webinar on this day and Team meetings on this day, how can I communicate with this person? And I put birthdays on the calendar. I was like, I will not go another year. So I had 345 days this year of Slack desktop usage. So I went into the charts, it was like 14,000 Slack messages, which is on average like 100, no, 50 a day, something like that. Whew. 50 Slack messages per day over 350 days. So that's including weekends. desktop, not just on my phone, like logged in on the computer, checking dashboards, things like that. That was a symptom of the travel I did at the beginning of the year where I dealt with so many logistics. I dealt with so many new habits and routines I had to go form, figure out how Mexico worked, figure out how Argentina worked. When I moved to Miami and I bought a condo, I had to figure out how— where I was going to live, what I was going to do. Then we went to Amsterdam. Too many— too much time spent on— non-work things that I compensated with, when I am working, I'm just going to sit here and make sure I'm on, I'm doing these things, I'm moving something forward in some way. That ultimately meant I spent too much time with too many different people working on potentially the wrong thing, or not taking the skill of relentless focus and bottleneck analysis and actually working on the most important thing. So that was my first step when I got there. It was like, I will not make this mistake again. So in the new year, it's like at least one Friday a month completely off Slack, completely— it's blocked, everyone knows it. I have another 3-day weekend at some point where I maybe go travel somewhere or reset my perspective. One 10-day trip per quarter where it's from a Tuesday all the way to the following Sunday. So one week and then another week I'm off the grid. I'm just reviewing things that we're doing because that That work becomes far more important with 30 employees doing upwards of $1 million a month. And whether or not I spend that whole time working will be a function of how I'm feeling at the time, but I'm going to block that in advance. And that was like, I achieved that outcome of clarity on the year ahead, or at least the quarter ahead of how I was going to do that. And my nervous system just came down in a huge way because I didn't do that in December of last year when we had that one-on-one, and I was like, dude, yeah, I'm feeling it. I am feeling it at a level. And that carried me— that carried with me through the first 4 or 5 months of the year, which ultimately kind of led to some decisions that were not in the best interest of peace and progress and all those other things. So

sure,

that was number one, and everything else is secondary to that.

That's the big domino. So It's interesting because, like you said, when you're in the weeds, the ability to kind of detect whether you're in the weeds or not is so low.

Yep.

And I don't think at scale for me, it's gonna be like that as much. But one thing I am thinking about too, where I moved around so much this year, and I still kept my laptop with me, and I kept Slack with me. And even though I was on a flight every other week, it was like, when I was on, I was on, and it was just, mumble jumbled, and it's like I think I confused motion with progress quite a bit. Um,

yeah, I put a second one, which was travel is a tool, not a default lifestyle. And so if the— I have a tweet that I'm kind of— it's marinating in the back of my head. It's like being a digital nomad or slow-mad is you're gonna have less fun than you would if you just traveled and worked separately. You're gonna make less money You're going to meet and enjoy deeper relationships with fewer people. And I need to craft that in a way that kind of reinforces my point. But trying to work and scale a business while traveling that much is extremely challenging because that point you just said of you try to compensate for deep down knowing that this travel is costing you in some way on the success of the business. So you compensate by, I'm there, I'm logging in, I'm here. Yeah. What does everyone need? What am I like? What are we doing? What are we working on? When in reality, you'd be far, far better taking 2 weeks completely off your laptop, and then being completely dialed in when you come back. And it took me 6 months of doing that at the beginning of this year to understand that. And then I had to repay a mountain of debt that I'd borrowed from the future, to then go build that stability. And so I put this in my video, but I was in Argentina, the bottom of the earth, literally at the bottom in Patagonia, where if you pull up Google Maps, you cannot go any further down, realizing that I didn't have my own apartment. I was a 12-hour flight away from the United States. I was with my girlfriend and dog, and she didn't have a place with me with any kind of stability. And so at like the bottom of the year in terms of my emotional feeling, I realized that this was the beginning of a lot more effort and shit that I was going to have to claw my way back out of to get the stability that I needed. That took another 3 or 4 months. And we had coffee this morning and I'm like, yeah, for the first time my, my nervous system feels like we've undone a lot of that. Yeah. So that was another thing that I will take into this year. It's like if I'm going to a new city, I will take those 2 days completely off. synchronous Slack work and not feel like I have to stay on because I know that the times that I'm not doing that, I'm so much more dialed in that I'm not trying to compensate.

Yeah, I think my inclination— and again, it's a bit different, right? And I want to note that. But my inclination is, is I can still feel it like, but what if I can just, just slam it all, you know, and like go 12 hours and just do the dang thing and tell everybody I'm here, I'm there, put me on the call, put me on the meeting, like I'm, I'm here. Um, when in fact, I haven't even done much thinking outside of this last little bit of time where I had a chance to unplug. Um, it was, it was more just like trying to— there was no leverage in the sense that you just had to jump back in and overcompensate, like you said. So, um, going into the new year, $10 million, 40% margins. Tell me, let's talk about numbers and data as far as like you know, the theme of 2025, like what have you learned after increasing the marketing spend and increasing the labor? Because I know where you were at in 2024 was like $6 million at 60-some-odd percent or whatever. What were some of the themes there and what were the big takeaways?

Yeah, we grew revenue by 18% this year, a little over 8%. And after ad spend and labor, that number was around 4%. And so that was a function of our labor costs going up about 75%. We pay very well. We have an extremely talented team. We reward high performance. And our ad spend went from $550,000 to about $1.1 million. So you have a hypothesis that adding team members and increasing ad spend will lead to net more profit from the business. Otherwise you wouldn't do it, right?

Right.

And so we might just be measuring the time horizon incorrectly such that, yes, that might have been down for a year, but my hypothesis is it will be significantly more over 3 to 5 years because of the investments we've made in skill acquisition on paid traffic and adding department heads within each business line, and then having individual operators within each vertical that are incentivized on their profit from that specific vertical. Mm-hmm. Why I share all that is it took us this year to kind of understand what that would look like, how to simplify things where rather than having 10 different products, it's 10 different products within the same vertical that all hit on different price points that maximize overall cash collected per lead. So let's talk numbers on this kind of stuff, 'cause this is— I spent more time thinking about the business review than I did the personal review. So this— Sure. This will be fun. And I think of the 2 lessons that, so I put 7 or 8 in the video and I'll start to list some of them. But the big one is there's no difference. It's not organic versus paid, it's blended. You will make more if you have both. And there's one ratio that I'm obsessed with for the year ahead, and it's marketing efficiency ratio, where this is a number that is total revenue over total marketing spend, not total ad spend and not just the marketing team, it's combined.

Meaning, is that including employees and organic writers? Everything.

Okay. So why that's important is I'll talk to paid people and they'll ask me what my ROAS is, and I'll talk to organic-only people and they'll just ask me what my revenue, because they don't think that they have marketing spend. When you have organic, we have organic team members and we have ad spend and we have software that does that. The overall health of the acquisition system of the business is MER, and that comes from the e-commerce world because every e-commerce business has paid and organic. They don't think about them as like, oh, what's your percent from paid? It's like, no, every person sees an ad and they see something organically. Sure. And it took me this year to figure that out. It's like, okay, well, what is a healthy MER? Let's make sure that we're in line with that. What is a healthy MER as you scale such that if our MER is 2 on $1 million in marketing spend and $2 million in revenue, that's $1 million net, right? That's $1 million that you can pay your team, $1 million you can pay yourselves, whatever, versus a 5-to-1 MER, but you did $500K in revenue with $100K in marketing spend. You want the second business.

Yeah.

Right? Because it nets out more. And I think I fell a lot this year thinking like, oh, I have to keep this perfect ratio, and then measure everything to a granular level where I can see exact ROAS on this funnel in this way, And that kept us from spending the amount necessary to break through the scaling trough that we were in from the investment in the team that we made. So long-winded way of saying, perfect attribution is the enemy of scaling. And when I instead zoomed out and said, what is the overall cost per call of this particular business? And what is our overall cash per call from this business? That was a far lower down the list lesson, but I'll just bring it up now. And it's, you only need to look at how much it costs you to get something and how much you make from it. And so I never quoted cash per call with you guys. Right. Right? Ever. I didn't know it was a thing. And we weren't really spending money on paid, so cost per call wasn't really a thing either. So now I look, okay, well, if we're trying to scale this call funnel within this business, there's only 2 numbers that matter. Total marketing spend to get someone on the calendar, and then average amount collected per call. Why that's important is when you focus on just those 2 numbers, you can either drive the cost down or increase the cash up.

Yep.

And one of those, actually both of those could be totally fine, and then you just need to increase the overall throughput into it. And I think why I mentioned that point is our metrics were in fine shape Throughout the whole year. We just didn't spend enough to drive the amount of traffic necessary to break through from here.

And it was because you were trying to get into the weeds on the particulars.

Yes.

Like you said, with the attribution, it's just like—

It's like, oh, OK, did this person click on a webinar ad? And if they didn't, that means I shouldn't count it for a webinar sale. But if they came from our email list, but they watched a YouTube video, and I'm doing all this math, I'm like, OK, what are we actually trying to do here? We're trying to drive more cash per person that we have come to this event. and know how much it costs us to get 'em to go.

Yep.

And in looking at our numbers from the year, all of those ratios were fine. We just didn't build the skill of taking enough risk and stomaching the risk and trusting the numbers on it, or to enough creative production on the advertising front to allow us to spend enough to drive that much through. Because if you're not creating enough new ads or you're not advertising at a higher, high enough quality, you pay for it when you start to scale that up and your cost per goes way up. And then, okay, you're no longer profitable on this particular thing. So long-winded way of saying that I didn't have the skill at the beginning of the year to understand that the business was in fine shape to scale. And we were trying to have this perfect attribution when in reality— so let's get a little bit more in the weeds here because I'm on one with this. Yeah, I'm here. So there's another concept that I learned about, and I've been spending a lot of time with a couple of mentors of mine who who own billion-dollar private equity firms, multiple hundreds of millions, high amount. And listening to them talk about business and then looking at the gurus in our space, it's like night and day. It's night and day. These guys running very legitimate operations. And he says, what's your contribution margin? And I'm like, I don't know what that means. So I have no clue what that means. And I'd wager that a large chunk of people here in this side of the space—

I've never even heard of that.

Right. And it's basically, and I might even say this wrong, but it is the margin of an additional sale. And so fixed costs aside, when you sell a service, you pay fulfillment and you pay your sales team, basically. So if you sell an e-commerce product, your contribution margin is pretty much your gross margin of your product. Meaning if I sold another $10 thing that cost me $2 to make, contribution is 80%, right? Mm-hmm. Your contribution margin is how these connect with scaling and fixed costs. When we increase our fixed costs, let's say we had a team of $100K, and then we doubled it to $200K. That's our fixed costs. Our marginal cost with any kind of service-based business is pretty much just the amount you pay your sales team.

Got it.

For an additional sale, if they generated $10,000 more up until the constraint of your ability to fulfil, it's 80%, roughly, because 10%, 5% to setters, 5% to a manager, whatever it is. Why that number is important for us is when we double the team, you go from $100K to $200K in fixed, and your contribution margin is still 80%. Right. You can run the breakeven of the business, as fixed cost over contribution margin. OK? So track with me for a second.

Yeah.

When you're at 100—

So $100K over 8—

Would be $250K. And $100K over 0.8 would be $125K, right? You would think that, OK, I doubled the size of my team. Now my break-even, where I start to take money out of the business, has doubled, right? That's what people would think. And that's what I would think, right?

Yeah.

OK, I increased my team. I just now have to make that much more. That's not how it works at all. Because when you scale your team in that way, the number of people that you have to send through the system increases, right? To fulfill—

Customers.

Customers, right?

Yeah.

As you increase the number of customers, the amount you pay per customer will always go up.

Okay.

So when you scale your fixed costs, your contribution margin on an advertising transactional-based business goes down.

Decreases.

Right? And so really what happens is you double your team size from $100K to $200K in fixed, right? Your contribution margin goes from 80% to 65% because you got to pay your sales guys more because they take out— you got to bring on more talent and you got to pay the meta marketing machine even more to bring that many people through, right? So I do the math in my video, but if you double your fixed costs, you actually triple the amount that you have to do to break even on that much revenue.

And so would that be that if you were to try to take, let's say PGA, for example, to $2 million a month, it becomes that more risky.

Correct. Well, it becomes that much harder because your contribution margin will continue to go down. Now, how these are connected is the total max capacity of a $100K team might be $500K in revenue.

Got it.

The total max capacity of a $200K team might be—

$1.5.

Exactly, right? So your goal is when you add that capacity, you should more than outpace the increase in fixed costs, right?

Compensation for the—

And so why that's important is if I model out the max capacity of a $100K team at 80% contribution margin versus a $200K team, it's like 3 times more profit. Meaning I have set the foundation. Now I can actually do the math of what the max—

Breaks the capacity.

What the constraint of this business if everyone was maxed out success team-wise, sales team was fully allocated, and I've raised the price to the level that I think we will see a decrease in throughput overall. I did not understand that math that I just explained. And if someone needs to rewatch this part of the video, go ahead, because I should have had a whiteboard doing this kind of stuff. Because this was— if I'd have known this at the beginning of the year, I could have modelled things out so much more effectively. Where now I know, okay, I know our exact fixed costs, I know our exact contribution margin, I know going into next year, the first lever that you can pull on all this is raise the price. And then from there, it all comes back into, can we drive enough traffic through our different webinars and challenges to maintain this level of monthly output? Because if not, if we find that we can't market in a way, which I firmly don't think will be the case, but if you test that and you go, okay, I actually don't think we could maintain the contribution margin necessary to get this team fully allocated, You would scale back down.

And so let's say if you raise the price by $1,000, in theory, does that just go to the bottom line?

Correct. Exactly. Right? Because it takes no additional effort to fulfill. So my max revenue capacity goes up by the exact amount there.

So the first question is, can I raise this price?

And you should do that more than you think. And can you collect more of that money on day 1? than you currently are, right? Both of those are extremely—

Contributing to the upfront cash per call, thus increasing the marketing efficiency ratio.

So exactly. So why this all comes full circle is what we spent a lot of this year doing was we added— we dramatically improved our backend retention, so our product quality and just the sales ability of our success team to retain people into our backend. We added in things like— having a course and community option only so they could downsell if someone wasn't interested in paying full price. It's like, okay, that actually costs nothing to fulfil. Big lift for them. Right? Nothing to fulfil. They just get to attend these group events, right? We then have a further low-ticket thing that they could downsell if someone's extremely new, and it's like, hey, do you want to just get in the ecosystem? All of those directly tie to cash per call, because if you arm your salespeople with the ability to charge more or charge less, In theory, you're giving them more things to sell at more price points, and the talented ones will collect more per call.

Meaning instead of trying to do a payment plan across 7 months, you— and then you get, you know, or we were even doing further than that, let's say $500 to $1,000 on that front end. Instead of that, you could do a $2,000 option flat out, no additional monthly.

Correct.

But the cash per call raises, therefore increasing the MER. Which gives you the confidence to then invest more in the front end.

Correct.

And hit that double to then triple capacity.

And so side tangent on that, we eliminated $500 and $1,000 plans that we were doing in-house without any financing. Close rate did nothing. Cash collected per call went up 25%.

Boom.

So basically, just cutting off the ability to sell the cheapest thing, Immediately raised every metric and didn't lead to fewer overall enrollments. So the idea that, oh, these people, they need a lower payment plan. It's like, no, you're just selling them the lowest payment plan too often.

Because it's easy.

Because it's easy. And if you cut those 2 things out, you close the same exact number of people, so it actually didn't matter. And so we made 10 little upgrades like that throughout the year, where now I'm just going into the year, it's like, all right, I know roughly how much I want to pay per call blended across organic, Our marketing, our webinars, our low-ticket funnel, our VSL funnel, all these different things. Mm-hmm. I'm going to maestro that overview with our marketing team. And then the goal is you just deploy the next dollar in the place that you think will have the best return. And if I know that I'm paying $200 per call on average across the whole portfolio, and then I want to scale that up, I would just look at every vertical, Where then you can model individual throughput within each one.

Get back to the attribution.

Right.

Right? And so for example, if you looked at this analysis and you're confident with the blended ratio, how do you then go back into the weeds of the attribution where you can pick out the winners? So is it exploring which—

Yeah. Basically, every platform works. It will just break at a certain level of spend. And that has been a big lesson for me this year. If I spend $10 per day on Meta, that will probably be a positive thing because it's only going to show to who it thinks is the highest intent person. And it has to fail a remarkable number of times for me to not make any money. But if I spent $100,000 per day tomorrow, I'd almost verifiably lose money. And recognizing that, it's like, okay, well, within each platform, I can scale up to a level where I'm roughly confident that it is still contributing around $200 per call. Now, where this is challenging is if you only go, OK, I'm just going to measure Meta, right? I'm just going to say, what is our cost per call from Meta? What does that actually mean? Is it people who saw an ad at all? Exactly. Or is it people who only clicked on an ad? Or is it people who only saw an ad in the last 10 days? What if they saw an ad 6 months ago and then watched a YouTube video? Do I credit that?

It's not worth it to get that.

No. And so it's so— that's the point I made of getting crazy with it. So it's like, why don't we just pick the most conservative one where I'm just gonna say if they saw an ad at any point, or if they engaged with this platform at all, I'm gonna give this platform credit and take that approach where it's like, okay, That's one approach you could take. You could actually go the— I used the wrong word there. The most conservative way would be looking at people who only engaged on Meta. And I could look at cost per call, and it's like, I know that they opted in here and immediately booked a call. That's always going to be the floor of the profitability of that channel, because it doesn't count all the people who saw an ad, then Googled you. It doesn't count all the people who saw an ad 6 months ago and then opted in via organic.

Assuming you have more presence otherwise.

Correct. Correct. Correct. Yeah, if you run one funnel with one thing, that sure is easy, but I find it very challenging to scale to the level that we've ultimately gotten to with that. Yeah. So back to how I started this point of, I will now look at all of our platforms and make sure we are spending something on all of them, because I know it will show to the people most likely to convert. Which means Twitter retargeting ads, we're going to turn back on. LinkedIn retargeting ads, we're going to turn back on. Newsletter ads, we're going to start at a low level.

So despite, let's say for example, LinkedIn ads, like I know when we were doing this, they were more expensive, right? And one could argue or debate the quality versus someone that comes from Meta. But you're saying that the overall throughput based on MER alone will increase if you distribute horizontally to a certain degree, but there is a cap in terms of the risk.

That's assuming that I've maxed out all the other places. So the first thing, I'll always go with more. First, I'll want to spend more on whatever's working. However, I think the more positive— it's the return of spending more on something like Meta to promote our challenge versus spending more to promote from 0 to 1 on the other platforms, I think we've reached a point where it's marginally better to turn on new platforms at lower levels for the next 1,000 and find out where those break, rather than pump more into the one that has probably reached a level of— when we promoted our last challenge, we were at like $15,000 a day. It's going to be challenging, not challenging to run a challenge, but whatever. It's going to be challenging to scale past that, With our current level of creative output, and just in general, I think most offers will struggle around that price point, around that much ad spend.

Can you expand on that last point?

Just from the pure number of impressions that you're gonna have spending $15K a day, that's like almost a million impressions a day, roughly, if I'm doing that math right. And so that's just a lot of people seeing it that Meta's gotta go find. And I don't know if we're gonna reach a million freelance writers every single day consistently. And so it has to reach people that are less likely than if we spent $10 million.

So you're not saying it's a function of the company. You're saying it's a function of the TAM?

I think it's a function of the ability to— TAM, yes, but really TAM is a function of your offer. And so your offer will not be able to profitably acquire someone at lower levels of awareness in the current market. Now, you could go do a big campaign where you actually go, I'm not going to try to convert someone on day 1. I'm going to try to convert someone on day 30, and go very, very unaware marketing. And that's what anyone— Agora and all these other companies that have scaled to significantly higher levels— build the skill of creating desire versus—

Meaning they're reaching someone at stage 1.

Right.

Sales cycle is going to be longer.

Exactly.

But they're willing to bet that because of— how much allocation they can give to the long term. And there's plenty of—

Exactly, right. I'm unable to do that. So I'm not skilled enough to do that by any means. So I will focus more on what is the number of people that are currently in the market to do something like this? How can I tap into that as much as possible? Then how can I reach those same people on more platforms at lower levels of spend such that I feel good about every channel that we're on is contributing positively in some way? The overall health of the business MER looks good. I want to get to a point where I know that if we're spending $200K a month on that across all these channels, that it's a very predictable amount that comes out from there.

Yeah.

And then that caps out our team. And do I want to scale, double the sales team, double the success team again? I don't know. We'll see.

So, OK, that makes sense. And I was putting together the pieces of now that you've got the capacity from a talent and just ability to do that type of throughput, you can then look at MER to be what you would call the health of the business. And so for you, what is that ratio? 5?

I'd like to keep it around 5. But I mean, I could pull from last— it's certainly not 5 right now. It's probably more like 3.5 to 4.

For the audience, um, you guys have crushed it with organic and you've been through a few years of pulling those levers now. And I would assume obviously that you are still maxing out those verticals. Could you maybe shed some light on what that looks like and compared to when you built up all the goodwill with Ship 30 and then leverage that into our beginning of doing PGA and stuff? I'm sure there's been waves and you've probably had to see what the upside is and there's probably a limit to what you can do organically. Like, what is going on over there outside of the paid traffic stuff that you're keeping tabs on? And like, are there things you're paying attention to from that perspective?

Yeah, LinkedIn was by far our best channel this year and they had a significant algorithm change in October. that tanked everyone's impressions.

I remember texting you.

Everyone's leads, everyone. And so I run our marketing team, and I look at brand and paid, so both of them. And if you chart our leads from LinkedIn as color-coded, it's like from the beginning of this year, light green, middle of the year, super dark green, 3,000 leads a month coming from LinkedIn. And then October, like 1,500, November, 1,100, December, like 900. It's gone down 3 months in a row.

Yeah.

And I think we've done a great job of recognizing when there is a supply-demand mismatch on a platform and maxing that out.

Capitalizing.

And I think—

You did that with Twitter.

Right, did that with Twitter, did that with LinkedIn. I think Substack Notes is very interesting to go tackle next because I think that is one where the supply and demand mismatch is in your favour if you have something and then you can promote it in a good way.

Yeah.

But we're still gonna double down on LinkedIn, keep it going. We think we can go figure out that new algorithm. X and Twitter, I've, I've seen ups and downs-wise. I think that one's just so volatile that I'm not gonna try to crack an algorithm that changes a lot. I'm just gonna keep posting and hope that people click on my profile and use that as the funnel. We will spend significantly more this year investing in high-quality YouTube because we know that the single best thing that ever happened to our business was Cole going on Ali Abdaal's podcast because of the number of people that reached that. I remember July of '24 when he went on the second time. To this day, still our best overall profit month because it was pure organic and we did $400,000 or $500,000 just on front end from that.

Hey, I'm here from Ali's.

I'm going to pay. Exactly, right? Great times. And so that's what's going on, on organic. We will try to improve Instagram at the same time because I think of all these things, we haven't done Instagram and YouTube at the level that I think we ultimately can.

Interestingly, watching from the outside looking in, uh, or excuse me, watching from the outside, um, and in the inside.

Yeah.

Um, what I've noticed with you guys is that the Instagram opportunity and YouTube has been the one where you haven't deployed as much, and therefore it might be next on the list, like you said. So walk me through how you are approaching YouTube and Instagram from an allocation perspective, because now it's all blended, right? Like, at first it was just organic and we post everywhere and people come along. Yeah. But, um, when you're thinking about attacking a new vertical, for anybody who's a business owner, um, specifically, who's trying to do this, like, what are your thoughts going into these new platforms being that they are least experienced? Like, is it just the same— is it the same process?

Yeah, I would start to immediately model out the cost of taking that initiative on, right? So for our YouTube, we're spending, you know, $15K a month to have a head of media that handles all the editing and the filming and the setup and all that, right?

Does that include the business, Cole, you, all of it?

Just on Cole's. Just on mostly Cole's. Like mine, I use, uh, Smaller agency that's a couple grand a month. But that number aside, like I would instead look at what is the cost of deploying more effort on that vertical, right? So let's say you want to grow on Instagram. You're probably going to need someone to edit your videos. You might need an Instagram agency, right? There's lots of different, or you could just do it all yourself, but that would cost you your time. And then it goes back to the MER thing. If you're going to increase your cost to go deploy employee effort on this platform, you don't want to think about like, oh, I just need to make— if I have $5,000 from an agency and I just need to make $5,000 and I break even, that's not actually what happens. Because you need— if you only think in that way, you're not going to generate enough profit as that starts to go up. Because if you want to do Instagram at a higher level, you're probably going to have a bigger team, and that's going to send the numbers—

Short-term thinking, and it doesn't account for the contribution margin going down as you scale.

Exactly. So I instead would look, okay, can I generate $25 grand a month from this platform? Well, what would need to be true for that to happen? Okay, so if I wanna generate $25 grand a month from Instagram, how many leads do I likely need to generate from there? Okay, can I model that out? Can I model the likelihood of that happening out, right? That's just the math we do on any platform. If I'm gonna go take on a new platform, I wanna know how much attention do I need to generate from this to see the return that I want? And most people will not do the math on that. They'll assume it will work because, to be honest, most of the time at that level it will.

It will.

Like, you will hit $25 grand a month from that if you have an offer already existing and you can say things in a high-quality way. But I think transparently, Instagram and YouTube are just such a different level of effort compared to what we specialize in, which is writing.

Yeah.

That it's not that I spend more time writing and then I can put things out and then They just happen. It's like, I got to write that, and then I got to go sit in front of the camera for 2 hours, and then I got to edit it. It's just far more. And that's probably why we've underinvested in there going forward, or in the past. But going forward, we're just going to gut through that and say, to get to where we want to go, all our problems would be solved if Cole had 10 times the reach on YouTube that he currently has. Sure. If we only did that, what's going to work better? every single ad we have, every single challenge we run, every single— everything that we run will do much better if we had 10,000 to 25,000 views per video versus 5,000. And that's the bet we're taking this year.

Sure. Well, I'm pumped to see where it goes, man. And, uh, I'd like to maybe kind of wrap things up by— I really appreciate going in the weeds because I, I could just nut out on this. I'm sure everybody else can too. Um, but outside of that, Going forward into the, the new year, you've got again $10 million, 40%. We talked a bit about that just now. You've got your health stuff and, and you've got the positive bullet points. So with your health and just to kind of go like the Tim Ferriss route, which is like, let's dive into the routine. Like, what does your day look like? How are you structuring it to try to compensate for these things? I know you mentioned a little bit about the calendar and how you're doing that. Mm-hmm. But outside of just the blocking of time for the leaving the desktop, walk me through kind of how you're putting all this together.

Yeah, I have 3 non-negotiables per day, right? Can't have any more than 3. Only 3 things I think about: meditate first thing, train in some way, stop eating by 7 PM. If I do those 3 things, I have evidence now over the last year that the number of days I did all 3 of those, very low. The number of days where I did all 3 of those, the result over the next day, 3 days, 5 days, significantly better, right? So just in the last 6 days since Christmas, I made a little tracker, very simple. I can write those down first thing. I can design my day around doing them.

Is that a Google Sheet?

Um, I'm starting manually, just like I literally made a piece of paper and was like, for the first 14 days I'm doing it manually because I'm not going to go get the productive procrastination dopamine of looking at the whole year, and it's like, oh, this automation. It's like, no, just do them every day for 14 days until it works. Because of all the different habits that I found, I found if I was going to design a day to make me feel maximally the worst, I would eat as much as possible right before bed and then fall asleep.

Meat sweats.

Right? I'm going to sleep poorly. I'm going to wake up angry. Then I'm not going to meditate because I don't want to sit down and sit with my thoughts. I'm going to have lower willpower throughout the day. I'm going to have lower energy levels throughout the day. It actually doesn't even matter what I eat quite as much as when I eat. And if I'm done by 7:00 and I go to bed around 9:30, 10:00, my sleep quality just skyrockets. And so that is— of the 50 things I could do, if I did nothing else this year except that, I think every area of my life improves. Mm. And so rather than think about the— I also got to do my 10,000 steps and I got to read my 10 pages and my gallon of water. It's like, no, almost none of those matter if you eat right before bed and then you sleep poorly. So I'm focused on that as the primary thing. Training every day. I work with a one-on-one coach who does all my programming, so that's out of my mind. He does my nutrition. I have a meal prep chef who cooks everything for me now. So it's like I know that they can communicate and he can send what my meal plan is to her. So I don't think about that a lot.

How much are you investing into that? On a personal level?

Oh, I mean, the meal prep is cheap. It's like $600 a month. It's like $20 a day for 2 or 3 meals.

Because when someone hears this, they're like, oh no, no, no, must be nice.

Yeah, and it must be nice. No, it— I'm spending way more trying to make food myself, and I did that for years.

Well, you went through the meal prep, back to doing everything.

Every single day. Like, I've done it all. But no, I found someone here in Miami that she's like $10 a meal, cooks them home locally. high-quality meat, 2 veggies, 3 times a day. And I work with a one-on-one coach remotely for like $600 a month, $500 a month. Yeah, those 2 things. I mean, sure, I sleep on an Eight Sleep mattress. Like, that's— Yeah. That was out of my reach. But before I made any money, I put $400 into buying a ChiliPad, which was the OG Eight Sleep. And I bought that before I had any money because I was like, I'm going to sleep on something cold because I think it's going to be good. Sure. Um, but no, wake up 5:36, straight into meditation within the first 20, 30 minutes being awake, because I know that everything else becomes better in my day when I do that. And sure, there are people that will say get to work right away.

Yeah.

And that is true if your level of output is the same despite what you do. And where I— my pushback on people who are like, wake up and immediately get to work because you want to maximize the amount of time working, I was like, okay, well,

before your first meeting,

with that logic, why would you sleep? Because you're actually trading time that you could be working for sleeping. Their answer to that will be, well, the quality of my work improves when I sleep well. And so my knock-on of that is like, okay, well, if the quality of my work improves with a 30-minute meditation before, your logic of getting straight to work falls apart.

Right.

So that's what works for me is there— I'm not an 8-hour morning routine guy, but I'm gonna get an hour where it's I hydrate, Take a cold shower and meditate for 20, 30 minutes. And then I just feel so much more at peace with every decision that I'm about to make.

And when you're meditating, is it silence? Is it guided?

That's silence. It's clear my mind until, you know, I feel 5 or 6 times of like it running off, and then I bring it back, running off, bring it back. And then I end with, what are my 3 non-negotiables for the day? I'm doing number one right now. I gotta train and stop eating by 7. Cool, I can remember those. What are my 3 goals for the year? 10% better, 75 memory dividends, $10 million, 40%. I can easily rattle those off, and that's the last 2 minutes of my meditation. Finish it, dive right in the first thing.

Sure. That's it. So going forward, if you're on the move or you're doing these things, are you still going to try to be as regimented while you're traveling and moving around?

Yeah, the nice thing is those aren't very regimented things. Those are extremely unregimented things, actually. Do I have the ability to meditate for 1 to 5 minutes if I'm traveling, no matter what? Absolutely. The eating before— by 7, that'll be a purely discipline and willpower thing because there will always be an excuse not to. Like, Ohio State plays tonight against Miami. I love the Buckeyes. Mom went there. I'm gonna watch the game, right? I already hear the voice in my head that's like, ah, but you're not gonna have any popcorn during 7:30 game. Like, come on, it's one— it's one thing, right? Um, and so that'll be by far the most challenging. But like training, I'm gonna train wherever I go.

Yeah.

Meditate, I can do in the first couple minutes. And so what I do not have is a color-coded calendar of all the tasks that I'm gonna do every day, time-blocked in advance. I have almost a completely blank calendar at this point where meetings I try to batch all on Monday. I have all the department head meetings, the one-on-ones, the chats with my co-founder. We'll do our webinars on Tuesdays for the most part this year, and then no meetings any other day because that's what maximizes my ability to write. my ability to film, my ability to take long walks and just think about things if I need to, the ability to throw meetings on the calendar with anyone that needs immediate attention. So I don't have too much scheduled in advance. But I think that's the, that's the formula.

And one thing I appreciated, you wrote a thread about like sobriety and kind of where you fall within that. Yeah. Maybe if you could just expand on that a bit for those watching, because I'll give you some context too, like I— when we worked together, I went, you know, almost 2 years without a drink, and you did the same thing. And that served me a ton. Um, since then, I've kind of wrestled with like, where do I fall on this line? And I had built up a bit of an identity. And so now I've done like a 4 and a 6 and an 8-month period where I don't drink, and then I'll kind of like do it, but then I deal with a little bit of guilt. And then I saw the thread that you wrote, which resonated pretty highly. So I'm figuring out my stance with that. Yeah. Um, but walk me through kind of where you came to that conclusion.

Yeah, the greatest period of wealth acceleration for me in terms of percentage happened in the 500 days where I didn't drink any alcohol. So that was from October 2021 to June 2023. So roughly 500 days went from, you know, under $50,000 to over $1 million liquid, like during that time. So I always preface that of depending on the season you're in, there are certain things that if you cut out will be strictly beneficial for for you. And so during all of 2021, for the most part, and all of 2022, as I accelerated here, I moved to Miami and I didn't drink anything. When I, when I would start dating, just, it was non-negotiable. I was like, I'm, I'm gonna do this because it's what's serving me best at the time. Now, once I broke that, I broke it because I've shared that with you, of it was no longer— I didn't like this identity of like, oh, it's been 500 days, 501 days, 502. It's like I was so tired of people asking me that, so I was like, I'm just going to have a drink tonight and then restart the clock. And alcohol has just played a significantly lower role in my life since then, where my thesis right now, and this isn't as— the thread you're mentioning, I said it's Michelin star dinners, weddings, and that's pretty much it, where those are the 2 things that I think are worth drinking on the whole thing.

For a unique special occasion.

Yeah, exactly. I came up with that because there were 2 or 3 weddings that I went to where I didn't drink anything. I was like, this is objectively worse for everyone involved that I'm not drinking right now because I'm going to be up late anyway. I'm going to fly home tomorrow anyway and not get anything done. It's not like I'm saving a bunch of time and energy over the next week by doing this. I'm just actually making my life worse. And so I cut that rule where it's like, all right, weddings, nice dinners or like special occasions. But I'm not perfect with it. I think that I drank on Christmas this year and I drank the 2 days before that. But what I do have are the accountability mechanisms with like a sleep tracker where I wake up 3, 4 days later, I'm like, damn, my numbers are still off. Like, I'm still affected by this clearly, you know? And so I then have that negative reinforcement of like, it better be worth it for you to have 2 or 3 days now where you are. Sure. You know?

Yeah, I think better be worth it is the frame because I was at home for the holiday And all my close friends, not like my hometown regular friends, but like my intimately close friends were together and established that they were going to go out and have a night on the town. And I was like, should I do it? Should I not? And they're like, dude, like, we'll remember this. Yeah. So we sent it and it was a lot of fun. And like you said, you know, there is a cost for sure. But I think just running the— everything is like a cost-benefit analysis, right? And so going into the new year, I'm thinking like, I'll probably be in more of a season of not rigid, not regimented, because my temptation is to try to overcompensate for that. But that ends up just setting me up for failure, because then I fall short and then feel guilty, and it creates the other cycle. So that's a helpful frame to take, where it's really just like, you can analyze it to death, or you can just—

Yeah, define what makes it worth it for you.

Yeah, that makes

sense. And do that in advance, where it's like, OK, I think that these 2 or 3 things will be strictly overall positive experiences for my life. Is a random Thursday drinking 4 beers watching Thursday Night Football on the couch a net positive thing? No, right? But is your friend's 30th birthday party that only comes around once that he invited 10 people out to and they're all going to spend the weekend in this villa? Yeah, that's probably worth drinking for. So that's my thesis on it.

Yeah, man. Well, It's been a fun ride. What I'd like to maybe part with is just going into the new year. Mm-hmm. You've, you've learned a lot in the last few, obviously, and it's compounding. And this year is going to be filled with challenges and things that come up that you had no idea were going to come up. And there's going to be other milestone moments that are great and challenging nonetheless. But if you could maybe jump to the end of 2026 or going into 2027, What are some things that you would try to remind yourself of or give to that future self currently?

What I thought you were going to ask is, what do I think future me is saying to current me?

Okay. What am I—

what am I not seeing? And I think future me needs to recognize the handful of very small moments where you've done things correctly, just as you said you were going to do, and relish in the immediate improvements those have made. And don't lose sight of those as life starts to become crazy again. Right. Because it's very easy to make change at the end of the year. During this quiet period, there's not a lot going on. I'm not talking to a lot of people. There's there's not a lot of new initiatives, right? I'm talking about my sleep being dialed in and I stopped eating before 7:00. It's like, what are you going to do the first day that someone comes to you on January 5th and it's like, hey, actually, I don't want to continue working here because it's not working for me? Okay, that's going to throw every single thing that you've just put this nice, pretty little plan together about how you're going to treat yourself well and how you're feeling so good, it's going to test it. And so really, it's not doing these things on the days that are easy. It's doing anything on the 5 to 10 days throughout the year where it's going to be very challenging to do so. And I think that's consistency with anything. It's not, oh, I got up at 5:30 for 365 days. It's like, how many of those days did you not immediately want to get up? And if you would then say, I'm actually going to try to shoot for 90% on just the days where I find it extremely challenging to do so, that's what real discipline looks like. And so I think a lot of people will go, they'll feel really good about their consistency on something being 85%, but really, if you said, okay, what's your consistency on the days you didn't want to do it? It's like, that's all 15% there. All the 15% that you missed were just the days where you actually needed discipline.

And that's where the actual discipline—

Everything else is not discipline.

Right. You know, that's what we talked about in the very beginning where it's like discipline is actually the things that you do when you really, really don't want to do them. And funny enough, those times that you win actually benefit you way more than the accumulation of the just— Big streak.

And it's extremely empowering to think about that, that the difference between a disciplined person and an undisciplined person is not 365 days. It's like 10. And you go, okay, at the end of the year, the version of me that was more disciplined on all these things versus not is 10 little decisions. Yeah. You can gamify that. It's like, all right, I'm going to find out the things where I think I'm going to fall short on whatever it is I'm trying to accomplish. And I know that it's 10 positive choices on that is probably the difference between where I am and where I want to go. Those aren't going to happen every day, but spaced out over a year, there are going to be a handful of moments where the things you said you're going to do will be tested. And I think that's what '26— end of '26 me is saying to current me. It's like, you got this beautiful plan, man. You got this beautiful— look at you, you cute little making progress. But like, what happens when you get punched in the mouth?

That's exactly it.

Are these systems going to fold? And I don't foresee that. Whereas if I had said that about my last year's plan and my last year's end of year with 10 goals and travel and all this shit, it's like, no, you're going to get punched in the mouth and it's going to fold. But I think I'm entering into this year far calmer, with a much better foundation, with much more clarity, with much more simplicity than any year before. So hopefully we're sitting here at the end of '26, man. We'll do this again.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, dude, it's been a pleasure. I love you, bro. Thank you so much for everything. I'm excited for what the year ahead holds, and I can't wait for the next one.

Heck yeah.

All right, let's do it. All right. That's the pod.