How To Simplify Your Life Through Entrepreneurship With Yaro Starak

Welcome to beyond you'd why Podcast, where we go beyond just talking about your why and actually help you discover and then live your why. You see, we believe that knowing your why, that driving force behind every decision you make and every action you take, is the essential first step to really knowing yourself. It allows you to move forward faster and have a bigger impact. If you're already a fan of the show, then you know that every week we talk about one of the nine whys, and then we introduce you to somebody with that why so you can see how their why has played out in their life. This show will be more powerful for you if you've already discovered your why. If you still need to do that, head over to whyinstitute.com and discover your why today. It'll only take you about five minutes. Now let's meet today's guest.

Welcome to beyond you'd why Podcast, where we go beyond just talking about your why and actually helping you discover and then live your why. And so if you're a regular listener, you know that every week we talk about one of the nine whys and then we bring on somebody with that why so you can see how their why has played out in their life. And so this week we're talking about the why of simplify. Now, this is a very Rare why. Only 5% of the population has this why. So if this is your why, you are one of the people that makes everyone else's life easier. You break things down to their essence, which allows others to understand them better and see things from the same perspective. You are constantly looking for ways to simplify, from recipes you are making at home to business systems you are implementing at work. You feel successful when you eliminate complexity and remove unnecessary steps. And today I have got a great guest for you. His name is Yarrow. Yarrow is the co founder of inboxdone.com an email management company with a team of 25 plus serving clients including restaurant owners, venture capitalists, accountants, doctors, lawyers, real estate agents, car retailers, online coaches and more. Yarrow has made 30 plus angel investments in tech startups including Steezy, Lead, IQ, Fluent, Forever Fitbod and Nutrisense, has property investments in Canada and Ukraine and in partnership built a 3.6 megawatt solar farm. During the mid 2000s, Yarrow sold his first company, betteredit.com then built an online education company, blogmastermind.com selling over $2 million of his books and online courses. Yarrow, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you for having me, Gary. You read my full Intro. I really appreciate that.

Well, I guess I was a little bit worried about saying your last name, so I'll let you. How do you say your name?

Well, you know, I generally go with my first name. I'm trying to Oprah Madonna. Yarrow is just the way I go out there. It's Yarrow Starak if you do want to pronounce the second half. But it's unique enough that you don't meet many Yarrows in the world. So I've been able to pretty much own that one in Google search results for most of my online career. And I can tell you to like spread the word of one name.

I love that. Okay, so bring our audience up to speed on you. Tell us a little bit about your story. Where were you born? How did you get into business? How did you end up building the blogging organization mastermind that you have now?

Yeah, sure. So it's funny because obviously I'm new to your breakdown of these nine concepts. But simplify, as I've just discovered I am really does resonate, I think, especially if I look back in my early motivation as a young man in terms of what to do with my life. I do Recall I was 18, the.com boom was happening. I was born and raised in Brisbane, Australia to Canadian parents. So I've always had the kind of connection with both countries, Canada and Australia. But one thing that was very clearly different from my own personality compared to pretty much everyone I knew at the time was I didn't want a job and I wanted to be an entrepreneur. But it wasn't for becoming crazy rich, another billionaire out there, or even hundreds of millions. It was more because I saw that as the pathway, to use your terminology, for a simpler life. It basically meant I could create a business that was a vehicle to financially support myself. I'd have a very fun, fulfilling role within that company. It would be very simple. I didn't see myself being one of those entrepreneurs, 14 hour days, wearing all the hats. I wanted to find, build a system and find a function that I could perform that it was creatively stimulating but also generated a good return for my effort. I didn't know what that was. I'm saying all this now, in hindsight at 18, that was kind of like I just need to pay my rent and move out of my parents house and all that. But I did go to university. Only because everyone else went to university. It was sort of what else can I do? I didn't want a job. I studied business management. But to be honest, the Main breakthrough was the fact that I got access to the Internet on a high speed connection for the very first time at university. And because everyone was building online businesses around the world, it was when all the crazy pets.com things were happening. I gravitated to doing something online. I did build a website, sort of a hobby website that eventually did make a little bit of money at the time. And that's kind of where I got the start. And I have to kind of marry that with reading a few key books, certainly around money. There was the usual ones like Think and Grow Rich and the Richest man in Babylon, One Minute Millionaire. And then there was, in terms of the business side, the E Myth. Michael Gerber. I think that's a great book for looking for the simplest role. If you want to move yourself up from being the technician in a company to actually just owning the company and having your team and the systems run for you, that to me seemed like the ultimate goal. I wasn't sure what business that would be, but reading those books got me really jazzed and excited. And then eventually it was actually towards the end of my degree I started that first company you mentioned called BetteredIt, which was really the first time I implemented, I guess, a simple business model. Just. I'll go over it in brief. It was an essay and thesis editing service. I had contract editors and I had a website. I built the website myself. And basically a student would come in with a paper and you know, students are last minute, they want it to be just proofread and edited, give them some feedback. I'd get the job, pass it off to the contractor, the contractor would pass it back to the student, I'd take a cut of that transaction and. And that was the business model. So very simple. Grew that to my first full time income after graduating university. And that's where I really tasted what today we call a four hour workweek. Tim Ferriss has really dominated that phrase. But before I even wrote that book, that's what I was really going for. And you needed a simple business model to make that realistic. So that was my goal and I achieved it around maybe 24, 25 years old. So it took me about five years from being in university and afterwards to kind of create that lifestyle that I was looking for. And everything since then was kind of born from that motivation. Obviously bigger numbers since then, but really that was the first time where I tasted that freedom and that experience and built a simple lifestyle for following my personality type.

Yeah, so let's talk about that for a minute. I know you did a lot of traveling, right? Weren't you building businesses as you were traveling?

Yeah, so I was running everything. I mean, the essay editing company was the first one where I got to experience the functioning of, I guess a remote CEO or digital nomad as I preferred to call it at the time. It was funny because it's so common now. It doesn't sound as special as it felt the first time I got to do it, but the very first time where I was somewhere else on the planet, I left Australia. I actually did a full circle trip around the world in 2008. That was the first time I really traveled as an independent adult. I went 12 months the entire year. I went from Brisbane all the way through basically America, then Europe and then back through Asia and Middle east and back into Australia. Lived in 26 different cities. Airbnb wasn't quite available, but there was VRBO. So I lived in a lot of apartments and sort of was a local and basically ran my business. Like I remember actually launching a course. This is when my education business was starting as well. And I had sort of a partner in one of the courses. He was back in Brisbane. I was sitting in a rented apartment in a city called Vulgmeni, it's just an hour outside of Athens, Greece. And we were sitting there. I was just writing emails to sell a digital product. So in some ways, again, in a very simple business model, you sell a digital course, you create it, once you can keep selling it. And I had an email list, a newsletter, and that's the predominant source of new customers we had. So my job was a writer. That was as we go back to my kind of goal as an 18 year old. I didn't realize it at the time, but I eventually realized I was a content producer. And that's what I enjoyed. And that was that core skill that I developed. And I looked for business models that could leverage that skillset. So when it came to digital education, I could create courses I could sell with an email newsletter. I could reach an audience by writing blog posts. So I did all that. This is after I exited that essay editing company and focused 100% on my education business. And that was really the tool that allowed me to make more money while traveling than I spent, which to me was a little bit of like a mind blown experience, because most people Certainly in my 20s then, they were in jobs and they would save whatever it was, $10,000 of their salary to go on that two week holiday that they might have. And I was comparing it to the lifestyle I was leading, coming home with more money than I spent, spent probably about $50,000 on that round the world trip, all said and done, with the flights and accommodation and food and so forth. And that was really validating because I'll be honest, before that, when I was in my late teens and early twenties, I was not making that kind of money. I didn't have that kind of freedom yet. So I wasn't sure if I was on the right path. So that round the world trip was a very validating experience.

All right, so for selfish reasons, I have to ask this question because I'm kind of going the opposite direction, which, you know, I was a dentist for 32 years, where I was tied down to an office where I couldn't leave. I can't be a dentist and live in Greece. What is it really like? Because I'm sure there's a lot of people listening that are thinking, you know, what he did. What I want to do. Me too. I mean, here, coming up, that's really what I want to do, is be able to work from the road, work from different parts of the world. What is that really like? Take us through picking your next spot, finding your place there, getting acclimated, meeting the people. What is that like?

It's wonderful and amazing and then at times incredibly lonely and can be quite lost. So there really is a dichotomy there initially. If you're taking with you the thing that you are passionate about. And this, I think, was really the insight. For me, the work that I did was and still remained the thing I was most focused on. So I could sit in a cafe and write that blog post or that newsletter or coach a student in. Remember doing that in Rome? I remember doing that in Paris. I remember doing that in Dubai. My function didn't change. And that was amazing to look at a different scenery, be traveling all the time while doing the same work that I always enjoy. It's a blessing to have that experience the same time, especially doing that perhaps in my 20s. A lot of it was while I was single as well. Where I went next was entirely up to me. It wasn't a financial choice like so many people's decisions about traveling. It's like, where can I afford and how long can I go? This was. I could travel in perpetuity to any place in the world, roughly. And that is like a massive amount of opportunity, which can be somewhat overwhelming for me. And I'll be very transparent here, too. I was dealing with a fear of flying a lot of this time too. So I was kind of forcing myself. I said, I'm not going to be held back by that. I want to see the world. And it's amazing when you travel for an entire year, you go on a lot of flights and that kind of helps deal with that fear of flying. Immersion therapy. So I tended to make decisions based on a little mix of I might know someone, I've got family in Toronto, I know people in Vancouver, I've been to Hawaii. When I was younger and traveling with family, I loved it. I wanted to go back. Huge fan of Japanese animation. I always wanted to go to Japan. And then you look what's closer. I was afraid of flying. So traveling by a train in Europe for a while was good too. A little easier on the anxiety. So it's a little bit random, I guess. I also, as I got older, made the decisions based on like you and I were talking about off air conferences and events to go to as well. So that would become an excuse, you know, I want to go to this city because this event is running Mastermind Conference or whatever. But really it is a completely open book. Like that year, especially that first time I did this, it was just places I wanted to see, opening up, sometimes a map and just seeing what's close by. And what would I like to do? Obviously things like what's the accommodation like? You want to make sure you have good Internet connection. You look at your schedule, like, are you about to do a lot of maybe podcasts or things where you might need a setup and you might want to stay in one city for a month, really do some serious work. Good example of that is I created one of my courses while I was traveling and that's difficult to do if you're constantly having travel days. So for one time I created half a course while spending a month in Vancouver and I just had one apartment. I didn't move around and I sat there and had my studio at home and made video content. But before that I traveled from San Francisco, I think Japan before that and Hong Kong. And that was in rapid succession, one week here, one week there, one week there. So making a course during that time would have been very challenging. But it's amazing, Gary. I strongly recommend it if you get a chance to do it. If you're moving towards it, you're not a dentist practicing every day anymore. Assuming so you could be recording this podcast with me anywhere in the world, no doubt, right?

Yeah, just as easily. Now tell me about the lonely aspect of it. I mean, you weren't married at the Time or. I don't know if you're married now.

But not married now. I have a steady girlfriend now, but didn't have it for a lot of those travels.

Yeah. So you were there by yourself, which could be lonely.

Right.

I mean, being in a big city by yourself is. With millions of people around is still a pretty lonely experience.

Yeah. And even recently, I'll be honest with you, three years ago, I was in Ukraine for the first time and I decided to stay a little longer because I was building. You mentioned the solar plant. It was a bit of a random decision. I won't go into that story, but I need to stay a little longer. Three months for that. And I remember sitting in this Airbnb that had no living room. It was a bedroom and a kitchen and bathroom, very kind of Eastern European style. And I'm thinking, I don't speak the language I barely know. I've just kind of made new contacts, new friends that I really don't know that well. But they're part of this solar project. So I'm kind of completely isolated and I'm doing the same thing a little bit over and over again. Going to the same coffee shop, writing something. Rinse and repeat. And I was like. There was this moment where I'm like, oh, my God. Like, if I died in the apartment, I don't know if anyone would come and look for me. It's a bit of a morbid thought, but how long would it take for them to find me? You know? So that is a fear you go through. But I think especially in my early 20s and maybe even late 20s, it was a sense of loneliness because I was also looking for companionship around my interests in a city, and that was harder to find anywhere. Now it's a little easier because I feel like more people are online entrepreneurs we're interested in. Whenever you're an influencer or an e commerce marketer, we all have that connection of doing something online. When I was doing this was sort of early in the mid 2000s. It was rarer, and it wouldn't be easy for me to sort of land in a city and send out a tweet and potentially go and find events and meet people. So there was a lot of that sense of I'm very different from everyone else. And when you say the 5%, my personality type, I certainly felt that before. There's been other personality profiles I've done. I've often been in the 2 to 3 to 4% version. That's quite rare, which just makes you feel Very different from other people. But that's a limiting belief. I feel too like, if anything, if I was pushing myself to integrate more locally, I would certainly make more friends. The challenge, and this is a real catch I think with perpetual travel, is friendships, like most relationships, are built over time. So if you're even just a month in one city and then you move to the next, you might have met someone and had one coffee session or one meetup event, maybe another second or third time, but then you're gone again. So you haven't really built any kind of real solid relationships there with anyone. Friends romantically. There's a real sense of being this vessel moving with all these other people living normal lives and you're just kind of experiencing a little bit of their culture, little interactions. I wouldn't want to do that forever, but it was and is an amazing experience. I really do cherish and I benefit from being an introvert in this sense too, where I'm quite self contained. My girlfriend right now is extremely extroverted, so she would need to be with people all the time. The way I've traveled in the past would have been like super depressing for her. Where I've been super fine sitting in a cafe. I would go like four or five days without having a conversation with anyone other than the person I was ordering my tea or my baked good than something new I was trying at a restaurant. So that lends itself to solo travel, I think really well. But you push yourself as much as you want to. If you want to meet lots of people, you stay at a backpackers and then you can really integrate with more people that way. But as I said, for me it was more about finding people like me. And that, I think has become a lot easier with the Internet.

What was the motivation you had for perpetual travel? Why did you go on that trip?

It might be a cliche that people born in Australia are travelers because there's nowhere else to go other than Australia and New Zealand. It's close by, so they're known as travelers. Everywhere you go, there's Aussies out and about. That being said, I think it's more to it than that. You look at why you even have a business and why you're trying to get financial freedom. I benefited early on from creating a business that did grant me a lot of time. So I got to ask myself the question. If I'm not driven entirely by paying my bills and rent each day and having to work 9 to 5 to do that, I've opened up the door to all this extra time, what do I actually want to do with it? What do I value beyond just meeting my basic needs and travel and seeing the world and just even experiencing cultures necessarily from a distance. Sometimes living in the city, but not being of the city was a high and still is a high priority. So it kind of depresses me sometimes when I think about how big the world is and you never really get to see even a tiny, tiny percentage of what is really out just on our planet. So I love the traveling, I love the nature aspect of it, I love the food. Just the idea of you've never walked down the street and discovering something unique. The cultural aspect, like going to Japan and just even reading the Wikipedia page about the place you're in and learning about the history and what's interesting to the culture compared to your culture. So all of that geography, history, cultural elements, all are fascinating and interesting to me. And like I said, I think most people would agree that they are the same. Well, maybe not most people. A good chunk of us, they just don't get the chance to do that. So as an entrepreneur, we are lucky in that way. Hopefully most of us can travel. Besides that, just maybe it's a product of my upbringing as well. I have immigrant parents who talked a lot about my father, native during World War II in Ukraine, but then Venezuela as a refugee and then to Canada and then later to Australia and then talking a lot about different cultures and races and histories. My mother similar coming from Eastern European and then Israeli and then Canada, then Australia. So I always found like. And perhaps because I've been a Canadian living in Australia, though I was born there, I still always felt like that I didn't identify with any one country as this is my country. I sort of saw myself as a citizen of the world. Not necessarily 100% nationalistic towards a country. So that made it more, you know, I've just felt comfortable being somewhere else and observing other cultures. Yeah.

And so you were able to develop multiple different businesses in different areas that all became obviously probably not all of them, but many of them worked out well for you so that you could have this freedom. So what is it that you would do? Tell us about your email business right now.

Yeah. Inbox. Done. It's funny, I came up as a simplify personality type. My what there? Inboxdone.com is the name of the company. It's actually born from me simplifying that editing business. All those years I talked about how I finally was able to travel. The truth was before I took Some of those early trips I couldn't travel at all because I was trapped to my inbox. This was also before we had BlackBerry was just on the horizon. So that was the first mobile phone with email. So the first experiences I had of traveling with this essay company was I went to Sydney for one of my trips and I was in and out of Internet cafes all day because I had to go check the email. If there was a rush job from a student, we had to process it to get it back on time. So I didn't really have a holiday. I kind of lived in the Internet cafe for long chunks of time. And I was like, this doesn't work. And that forced me to go, I need to outsource and delegate this customer service email management role. And I did. I hired a friend at the time who was just about to have her first baby, trained her on the role. It was an experiment. I didn't know whether I could hand over something as personal as email that I felt was my baby. It was what I was doing for my business since day one. But it turned out to be quite a very. Not as hard as I thought. And so life changing because it took about three weeks, four weeks to actually fully train her on the role. But there was a Monday where I woke up and and my default was to roll out of bed, turn on the computer and check the inbox. And I did that, but the inbox was empty. And for a moment I was like, something broken? No, I forgot. She's cleared it before. I've woken up. I'm a late riser. And that was like, wow, what do I do with the rest of my day? There's a miracle. There were sales coming in, I was making an income, she was processing the jobs, the contract editors were doing the work. So I effectively built this simple system that had removed me from the process of running this business. Now fast forward my education company. I had someone do my email virtually from day one. Once there was enough cash flow to justify that, it's like going first class. I could never go back to managing my own email. It'd be too painful. So that education business grew. We eventually had like three people doing 24 hour email support and managing most of that email. And then finally about 5ish years ago, I'm like, I want to start a new business. For the longest time it's been in the back of my mind that this is a service other entrepreneurs need. They tend to use their email as to do list. Massive time suck. It's two hours in the Morning, it's hours at night before they go to bed. You know, they kiss the kids to sleep, and then they do another two hours before they go to sleep. So I always thought there was a need for this. It wasn't until actually I was at a networking event in Vancouver and the entrepreneur next to me, we were all sharing kind of like what we're spending the most time on. And she was talking about how email was such a big waste of time for her, but the most amount of hours she would spend is on email. And I turned to her and said, I actually only do my email once a month. I just go into this Yarrow folder and there's maybe five or 10 messages that are specifically for me, and I answer them. All the other messages are handled by someone else. And she was like, how is that even possible? That shouldn't work. So that was when I finally said, okay, I need to test this business idea. And very simple mv. I call it mvs Minimum Viable Service Test. So I had inbox managers for my education company. One of them, her name is Claire. I said to her, listen, I want to launch this new company. I think you should be my co founder because you have the skillset to deliver email management. I have an audience. We can just test the idea if we can get one or two test customers, figure out a business model and see if they like the service, and we can scale from there if it works. She agreed to be the first inbox manager, although she knew over time we'd hire more people to do that. And that's what we did. So we went to my customer database and said, would anyone here interested in the same people who manage my email? To manage your email, a couple of people put up their hands and say, yes, we're interested. We did some calls with them, some discovery calls, and two of them became customers. And that was about four years ago. Now they're both still with us, which is amazing. And basically, we took over managing email for one person who's in a mental health disorder business and another one who's in a political podcast and information product business around that space and very different to my topic. So it was a validation that everyone has email and everyone would benefit from not doing it. And we scaled from there. So the simple answer, it's a very similar business model to my essay editing company. We have a team of specialist contractors that we train up on how to manage email. They're very good with English, very good with attention to detail. We teach them systems for managing email and working with a client. And since then, we've just been basically all full growth mode, trying to get the word out there to as many people as we can. And what I've loved about it is the type of clients that have come our way. It's been bizarre to get from like a candy store owner to car retail. You mentioned the intro to venture capitalists, angel investors, dentists, doctors, lawyers. You know, your typical. What you used to be. I'm assuming when you were a dentist, you had a lot of email too, Gary. Probably so, yep.

Between patients, you run in there and you file through it and delete, delete, delete, delete, answer, delete, delete, delete.

Yeah. And that's everyone's story. It's amazing how we're all driven by it. So it's been a fun business to run and to talk about because for a lot of people, they don't even think about outsourcing this part of their life. And it simplifies people's lives. I love doing that.

But take us through that. Let's say I was your client. I call you and I say, yarrow man, I hate my email. I need to get some help with this. What do you do? How do you teach someone to answer in my voice or how does that work?

So we have a process. We called it a handover period. Because as you can imagine, there is a need to learn how to manage your email. You need to get comfortable with the human being who's not. You going in there now? More often than not, we're not actually writing as you. We are coming in as your email assistant. So we're like a receptionist or part of your team executive assistant who specializes in email. We do try and match your voice. So there is a kind of. We call it building a knowledge base. So we'll go in, we'll learn what are your most common situations that come through email? How do you currently reply to them? We'll build templates from that, we'll build rules, we'll build systems. Often, as you probably aware, an email comes in and it triggers an action like this email from this client needs this customer record to be updated or this information passed to them, or maybe even something simple like email comes in, needs to go to the webmaster to update the website. So you seriously shouldn't be the person who's forwarding those emails back and forth between the staff or updating the task management software. So we do that too. So we kind of try and close the loop of email and all tasks associated with email and only the Most important things that you need to be involved with or you need to know about is presented to you. And that can be simply a Slack or Microsoft Teams message or a WhatsApp message, a phone call, however you like to be updated basically on what's going on or what's urgent for you. But we try and take 95% or more ideally of your email off your plate. Obviously, it's different for every person. And what we find is, I guess the most challenging part of this process is letting go. So most people who are in their inbox, they can't stop going back to their inbox to just see what's happening there. So we have to sort of train our clients to not be that kind of, you know, doing the pinching the email before we even get there to do it for you. And then there's just a trust aspect, as you can imagine, especially certain businesses. You know, doctors with health information, venture capitalists with financial information, lawyers with legal information. We always have to build a system that sometimes it's about siloing information so it's kept secure and separate and private. And then some businesses are very easy, like a candy store owner. There's not much secret information going on there. Just a case of making sure that emails are answered quickly and the appropriate information is given. And also people are followed up with. It could be a potential customer. You don't want to miss out on them if you don't send them enough emails to lead, nurturing and that sort of thing, and away you go. That's kind of how it works in a nutshell.

So now are you comfortable talking about cost? Just so we have some idea? Because I'm wondering myself.

Yeah, yeah, no, Our pricing page is pretty transparent. So it's 1495 for that first. It's a handover period. I say a month, but some people might need five or six weeks. And that basically does the transition process. So we basically bring on two inbox managers from our team. We'd introduce them to you. Gary, you'd pay $14.95 for that first handover month. We need a bit of your time to answer questions, build those systems. We need you to review draft emails before we start sending them out. As you. We don't want to, you know, we want your permission to reply. You give us that feedback and away you go. Pricing. Then it's month to month and it scales up and down. So if you're the kind of person, or even a full business that has multiple inboxes and you might need three or Four people managing email, we can scale up and it just goes up in $500 increments. So 1495, 1995, 24.95, all the way down to 995 for the smallest inboxes, where you might only need an hour a day, five days a week just to clear your inbox. But most people, we'd assign two. So you have redundancy. You have two people working in the inbox, and if one gets sick or has a holiday, which they will, you don't have to have that horrible experience of someone coming back to you and saying, listen, we need you to do your email again for a month while we find someone else, because that's not what we want for you. So we always have that backup with two people working your inbox. Yeah, that's pretty much it. So most Inboxes, it's about $14.95 a month, ongoing. That tends to cover it.

Awesome. Well, I can see how that would free up a ton of time.

Yeah. This is how you can travel. It's that sense of if you did take a break or didn't work for two weeks or even if you want to travel for six months or 12 months, you need those team members in place so you're not like landing in New city and rushing straight home to work on your laptop to answer the emails. That's what you don't want.

Yeah. So it sounds like you designed your lifestyle and then you created businesses around your lifestyle.

I think I saw problems that hindered me from the lifestyle I wanted and then realized that other people also will have these problems. So, yes. And then inboxdone is certainly a reflection of that. Yeah.

Well, Yaro, thank you so much for spending time with us today. Now, if people are here and they want to get a hold of you, they say, you know what? I love those ideas. I love to have somebody help me with my inbox. Give me some freedom. What's the best way for them to get in touch with you?

Inboxdone.com and then just book a discovery call. You'll see the link on there and you'll actually get to speak to me. I'm on discovery call. That's my one job for this company is to talk to potential new clients. So you would get to speak to me.

Ah, that's awesome. Okay, last question. What is the best piece of advice you've ever received or the best piece of advice you have ever given?

You know, it's a big question, and I really go back to that. Early 20s period for me, because I was the most lost, confused, self doubt, depression about direction in life, financial independence, all the usual things you're worried about in the early 20s. And there was one piece of advice that really helped me, which I've seen repeated from pretty much every self help, nlp, Tony Robbins, wherever you want to go, it's advice repeated. But it was very simple when I first discovered it and ironically it doesn't work anymore. When I first discovered this, I googled for what is the meaning of life? And this is how this piece of advice came up. If you google that now, the same resource doesn't show up, unfortunately. But anyway, the answer to the question was to basically realize that you're in control of interpreting your emotional response to events in your life. And for me, in that early 20s period, I was very much obviously choosing a negative reaction, seeing the negative interpretation of whatever was happening. If a friend was succeeding in business or in relationships, it reflected on me failing. And I would think about the negative aspect of that. If I launched something new with a business and it didn't work really well, it meant the business was just doomed and wasn't going anywhere. So there's a lot of negative self talk, a lot of negative interpretations of events, and just spending this one night, late at night reading this whole guide, starting with that one piece of advice is that no one else controls the decision of how you interpret things. It's only up to you. I was like, wow, I should make the choice to always see the better side of this event and the opportunity it brings, or the potential for change. And even if it's not what I want, the stepping stone that it might be for something that I want. And it's been the bedrock, I think ever since then. I've seen it repeated from philosophical documents, religion, personal development, trainers, spirituality and so on. It's always that you control how you interpret. And to me that's been huge. And yeah, I can't say there's ever been any other piece of advice more impactful than that.

Say it one more time. You control your response to say it again.

Yeah, you control the interpretation of events and the emotional response you give it basically. Or simply put, when I first read it was you choose to be happy or you choose to be sad, depending on what happens. But no one else is telling you you have to choose to be happy or sad. In fact. And this was the breakthrough, it was like, yeah, I'm always the one who's creating that response. No one can force creation of any emotion in Me, other than me. So that means it gives me the power back to choose my interpretation. When an event happens, and it was huge, especially with things like dating, you get rejected. It's like, oh my God, I'm ugly and hideous and no one will ever like me versus you get rejected. And it's like, okay, what did I learn from that experience? Let's not use that lame line. Let's try another line with the next person. Something simple as that. That was a powerful reframe. NLP talks a lot about reframing, and that was perhaps the ultimate reframe, I think, is just learning to interpret things in a different way.

Just simplifies it, right?

Yeah, I guess so. It simplifies to a positive angle, and this makes it easier.

It's interesting, Jaro, that when I work with companies around the world, the successful ones that I, I see a lot of companies that struggle, and I see a lot of companies that are doing extremely well. And the ones that are doing extremely well have a few things in common. And one of those is they have somebody on their executive team with the why of simplify or right way. There's another why that's right way. It's a structure, process, systems based why, which is a lot of what you do. You just simplify it down even more to where it's useful and easy to understand and anyone can do it. Why is it important for you that things are simple? Why do you want things simple?

I really think about it, it's probably because seeing chaos results in emotional turmoil from the confusion, from the lack of control. A lot of people think a desire for simplicity is a desire for control, and I would agree with that. I think on two sides of the same coin, I feel what is simple is easier to control, so less chaos. That being said, you can't control everything completely, but by simplifying it makes it much more manageable and easier to do so. And that's what we all want, I think, is that sense of our controlling our own destiny. Right? So by simplifying, that gives you the power to do so and also simplifying the outcome as well. That's why for me, that reinterpretation of events too, was a way to just go to be happy. I can just simply make the choice that's so simple rather than the chaotic potential of all the other ways I could interpret this. Especially if there's a linear outcome, we're just trying to get somewhere and I can just focus on where I'm going rather than all the things that are not working. And same with a business, right? Growing a business is a very chaotic experience. But if you simplify, you then have one goal to work towards and you just take the steps to get there.

Yeah, it's interesting. How do you feel about complexity, then?

I enjoy the fact that complexity exists, but I find it frustrating not being able to necessarily feel completely that I understand because of the complexity. Even something as grand as what happens after you die, if we knew what happens, it would be very different, but it's very likely something super complex that we can't comprehend while we're alive. Frustrating. And even when I said about traveling, I'd love to have been everywhere in the entire planet, I know I can't. And it is overwhelming and complex to think about everything going on in the planet, but I'm glad it is that way, too. And that also makes it more exciting. Would I simplify it so I could understand everything? I probably would, but then, you know, it wouldn't be as beautiful.

I don't think people, you in particular, let's just. I don't know that you realize the value that simplification has for the rest of us that may not be able to do it like you do. I see CEOs in desperate need and desperately looking for your talents, but they don't quite know what it is that they're looking for. Or somebody with your why of simplify. And so it's because complexity kills execution. Right. You cannot execute as a team if it's so complex that the only one who knows what we're talking about is the person who created that complexity, whereas you're the opposite end of the spectrum. Let's simplify this complexity to the point where anybody can do this. I can hire somebody to do this for me so that then I can be more effective in another area.

Exactly, exactly. Yes.

And it's such an amazingly valuable skill. So for those of you that are listening, if you're struggling in your business with over complexity and nobody else can do things and everything ends up back on your plate, you need to find somebody with the why of simplify, even though that's hard to do, or the why of right way to help get that stuff off your plate so that then you can move forward. So if you've listened to the podcast for quite a while, you know, a little while back, I had another gentleman on with the why of simplify, and he had taken over his father's auto mechanic business, and it was a big one. I mean, they saw a couple hundred cars a day, but it was in bankruptcy because they had overcomplicated everything. He took it, stripped everything down to the basic elements of what they were doing in a way that they could communicate with other people, communicate with their clients, especially women, in a way that they would understand it. And the business just took off. It's now in the top 10 in the country because he simplified things. But he did exactly what you did. I remember in that interview, he said to me, you know what, Gary? Now I don't even know what to do with myself. I don't have to show up. And that's what you said.

Yeah, that's the goal. Then you have the space to ask the question of what you want to do next, which is a nice place to be.

Yeah, that's awesome. Well, Yaro, thank you so much for spending this time with us. I look forward to staying in touch as we move forward. And I appreciate you being here.

Thank you, Gary. And I have to say that that was a very untypical interview of some many podcasts I've done. So I appreciate going and some of the directions that you took the interview.

Thank you. So it's time for our new segment, guess the why. And I want to use TV chef Gordon Ramsay. What do you think his why is? See, I think his why could be right way to do things the right way, because he believes cooking should be done a certain way and will yell and scream at people who do it the wrong way, even if he's teaching them. So that's one of the things about the why of right Way is they're willing to have a tantrum. They're willing to yell at people. They are willing to make a scene in order to get things done the right way. Now, there's many people that love him and many people do not, which can be a common trait in Right Way as well. He is particular and he will have his mind made up on someone or a dish, but he's very specific. He knows what he wants, he knows how he likes it, and he's willing to make a scene to make that happen. So what do you think his why is? Let me know in the comments. So thank you so much for listening. If you've not yet discovered your why, you can do so@why institute.com use the code PODCAST50 and it'll be half price for you. If you love the beyond your why podcast, please don't forget to subscribe below and leave us a review and rating on whatever platform you are using so we can bring this to more people in the world. And meet our goal of impacting 1 billion people in the next five years. Thank you so much. Have a great week.

I really hope you enjoyed today's episode and that through today's guest, you heard how important it is to know your why and how impactful it can be in your life and the lives of those around you. Be sure to head over to whyinstitute.com and discover your why today. Remember, the more you know about yourself, the more you'll know about others. I'm Dr. Gary Sanchez, and I'll see you on the next episode.