Hard work alone doesn't guarantee success. The speaker grew two podcasts from near-zero to hundreds of thousands of monthly downloads by staying persistent with learning-oriented goals and a long-term mindset. He recommends tiny habits like flossing one tooth and reading Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich.
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In this clip, we're gonna talk about why hard work is not, is not the key to success. But before we do, whatever channel you're on, don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. Actually, don't forget to follow. The rate, review, subscribe's for the end. Don't forget to follow or subscribe whatever platform you're on, 'cause it helps us grow. So, you know, we're growing up, our parents always teach us, our uncles, our aunts always teach us that it's important, that hard work is what it is, right? That's gonna help us succeed. So the secret isn't hard work necessarily, because if you think about it, if I am Cleaning trash, I work really, really hard. That doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to be quote unquote successful, right? Is that going to help me cover all the expenses I want, or is that going to be able to cover the lifestyle that I want? Is it going to be able to cover my family? Not necessarily, right? So hard work then is not necessarily just the one thing that needs to happen. So then what is the key to success? I'll share a couple stories here, and hopefully you can you start to figure out what the key is to success. And then I'll give you the book at the very end. Um, just remind me if you stay to the very end, you'll get the book for this too. Okay. So when I think about, you know, the early days of when I, um, when I took over the company Single Grain, that's the ad agency that I run, right? Um, I, so Single Grain was a failing company. That's how I was able to take over it in the very first place because you think the owners would have given it up to me if it was not a failing company? No way. By the way, the owners, the previous owners, they worked very hard too. Well then if they worked very hard, why did they have to hand off the company to myself? And then why was I able to take over the company, right? The previous owners, like they've actually been on this channel too. The podcast I do with Neil Patel, he was actually one of the partners. Sujan, he's actually been on this podcast too. And we talked about this. We talked about the hard times, the hard things that we had to go through in terms of trying to save the company, right? You know, when I look at that, it's like, okay, what did I have to do exactly to save the company? Well, it wasn't just hard work. You know, at the end of the day, it's, um, I could have given up a year into— we, we lost 15 of our employees, um, because I did not build rapport with people, right? I went in, I started to make all these sweeping changes, didn't build rapport with anybody, shut down the office. I did all the things that I thought were right, right? At the end of the day, it almost became, you know, it went from bad to worse and it almost became fatal, uh, to the company. Now, you know, okay, what happened there? Eventually I was able to, to build it back up slowly. Like I made a series of mistakes, made bad hires. Like everything was, was on me at the end of the day, um, because I just wasn't aware of what was going on. But, um, you know, when I think about it, okay, well what eventually led to success to, to where it is now? You know, we're in the office of Search Single Grain right now. You can tell it's a, you know, we made it out. Um, you know, we made it out of the tough times. Okay. So what was the variable there that allowed us to make it through the tough times? Like, you know, we had one person, you know, basically, you know, cause us to lose 2 employees, 4 clients. Um, you know, we'll yell at the clients too during meetings. That's my fault at the end of the day. Shut down the office, didn't build rapport with anybody, went all the way down to one employee. I even got to a situation where our outside accounting firm called us and, you know, there's the people that were helping, there's a bookkeeper and there's owners of the company saying, hey, look, I think it might be time to shut it down. And I just kind of looked at them and I was like, kept going, right? Um, and then, you know, also I had another opportunity where, you know, it was very high salary and I could have taken a full-time job, very high salary, could have made it into 7 figures a year. I didn't take it. So there's all these variables that happened during the— I think this is over like a 1.5-year period where I probably, probably should have just said, man, it's time to throw in the towel. So that's the Single Grain story. Now another story is an example of this is when I think about my podcast, Growth Everywhere. I've been doing that podcast for 5 years and after the first year, I was only getting 9 downloads a day and after the second year, only 30 downloads a day. I wasn't getting the traction that I needed. I was spending 6 hours a week on it and I was trying to save Single Grain at the same time. So after the first year I probably should have stopped and then after the second year I probably should have stopped and it wasn't like I was making any money on it. But you know what happened? Like it just kept, you know, eventually it worked itself out and then now that led, that podcast gets about 100,000 downloads a month and then I do the Marketing School Podcast. That's about a million downloads a month. So, you know, my point here is this, you know, when you think about these stories that I just shared with you, what is the one thing that's in common there? It wasn't that I— sure, I worked really hard, right? But a lot of people around the world, they work really hard. It was because I kept going. That's the only reason. Like persistence separates kind of the people that are, you know, really successful from the people that are kind of mediocre because the persistent people, they just stay with the problem longer. Einstein himself has even said that it's not that he's super smart, It's just that he sticks with problems longer. So I've shared those stories with you and here's what you actually need to do from a practical standpoint. If you think about the stories, when I think about Growth Everywhere, right? My, my, the first podcast I started doing. Now the reason I kept being persistent with it was not because I was pursuing a goal where I wanted to get a certain amount of listeners for my podcast every single month. My goal was learning, right? And that's why I stayed persistent with it. So focusing on the right goal initially, That's going to be the key for you to staying persistent. Because if you're focused on the wrong goal, it is going to demotivate you at the end of the day and that's going to stop you from becoming successful. So that's how you stay persistent, um, in, in that respect. Now the other thing is this, with Single Grain, the only reason I decided to continue with it, and there was 4 other partners as well, so there's 5 of us total. The 4 other partners didn't see much, uh, much that was going to happen with it, right? But you know, thinking long-term, my thinking was if I could save Single Grain, A, That would virtually mean that I can save any business I wanted to save and I could probably, I could do, it'd give me a lot of confidence to do a lot more. So I looked long-term like, man, if I can make this happen, I can make any business happen and that's going to make me that much stronger. And even when I fail, there's going to be a lot of learnings, right? So that was my mindset around it. So you got to think about your mindset. Um, you think about the long-term mindset around it. Um, so that's going to help you be persistent too. So focusing on the right goals and then focusing on your mindset as well is going to help you be persistent. Same thing with sales too. I've been rejected so many times. Whether you want to think about sales or maybe attracting that boyfriend or girlfriend, at the end of the day, like you are going to get rejected so many times and you have to realize, here's the third thing you have to realize. You want to be persistent that it's a numbers game. At the end of the day, eventually you're going to be successful. Maybe you start a YouTube channel, it doesn't work. You start a blog, it doesn't work, but maybe you start a podcast and maybe it does work. And if you think about this is going to work for the long term, I'm going to try a couple of things and if I'm persistent with it, I'm going to be able to achieve my long-term goal. And you realize it's just a numbers game. You are going to be successful, right? I think Walt Disney got rejected, got, I think over 30 times or so for his whole concept around Disneyland or Disney World. Um, and guess what happened? And same thing with Marvel. Marvel was actually on its last legs, um, before they decided to do Iron Man the movie and that catapulted them into a completely different category. You know, you think about your mindset, you think about the long term, you think about, you know, if you're working on the right goal and that's going to help you get in the mindset of, okay, it's okay to be persistent, right? Because what you don't want to do is if you have no direction at all, it's hard to keep the motivation up to keep driving away at it, right? But if you wake up in the morning and then you're just like, man, I know what I'm working on, I know what I'm going for, you're going to have no problem at all, right? Because you think about my stories, like with Single Grain, that's why I decided to continue with it. Growth Everywhere, the podcast, 2 years, 2 years I should have given up, but my goal was learning the whole time. It wasn't necessarily getting a bunch of downloads, right? So if you have the right, wrong goal initially, just recalibrate it a little bit and that's going to keep you going for a little longer. And that's the only reason I have 2 different podcasts now. One's about $100,000 a month, one's about a million, right? And, um, even with this YouTube channel as well, if you're watching on YouTube, like the first year it was tough. I think it was really hard getting up to like 1,500 subscribers or so. And even now, like we're growing, we're getting better and better over time, but it's like, are we working on the right things? Are we doing the right things? Um, and you know, if we are, it's easier to be persistent, but if, if, if we're not, then it's gonna be hard to stick with it. And at the same time too, you gotta, you gotta think about this. If you set your goals too high, sometimes it might demotivate others that are helping you. So maybe you gotta think about bringing your goals down a little bit. Um, and then that might make things a little more easier for everyone around you if you do have people around you. So the key here is persistence and the book that I recommend that you read because you stayed till the end, it is called Think and Grow Rich. It's by Napoleon Hill. And in the book there's a lot of stories that are shared within there, right? And the point gets driven home over and over and over. And even to this day, I think I read this book when I was about 23 years old. Even to this day, I wake up in the morning and I rehearse the same lines I got from that book years and years and years ago. This is, we're talking 10 years ago now, or maybe even 11 years ago now. I still say the same lines to myself every single morning and I haven't— that's the one book where I haven't forgotten to do the same. That's a habit that I picked up from that book. So I recommend picking that book up, Think and Grow Rich, and it's not necessarily just becoming very rich in terms of money, but also your mindset. How do you make your mindset rich, right? Because if you can get yourself out of the mindset that you just have to work hard and you think you'll be successful, um, if you flip it into, if I just stay persistent working on the right things, I am going to be successful no matter what, right? That's the number one key to becoming wealthy, to becoming successful, becoming rich, whatever it is that you're, you're, you're aiming for at the end of the day. How you can make new habits stick in less than 2 minutes. Let's go. The very first thing you need to do is look into tiny habits. You can Google tiny habits. It's from a Stanford professor. So let's say I don't floss at all, right? Let's say hypothetically, obviously I floss, but if you don't floss at all, you're trying to establish this, this kind of cadence of flossing, right? So what you need to do, think about every morning is flossing one tooth, not like all of your teeth, but floss one. Your goal is to floss one. If you're trying to get into a habit of running every morning, your goal is to take one step in the morning. Because if you think about having to run 4, 5, 6 miles or so, it's too much. So when you focus on just one step, it makes life a lot easier psychologically. It's a lot easier, right? Yeah, I can floss one tooth. Yeah, I can take one step, right? So it's baby steps, right? So tiny habits, look into it, spend a little more time and it'll help you. Number 2 is getting the app way of life. So there's a lot of habit apps on phones. I use it on iOS. It's called Way of Life. I can put all my habits in there and I can check off every single day all the habits I hit. So my habits are flossing in the morning, waking up by a certain time, making sure that I train in the morning, reading for a certain amount of time, watching a TED Talk, right? It's all in there. Make sure that you establish your habits in there. Use a tool like Way of Life. There's a lot of free tools out there. Number 3 is to try adding one habit every 30 days. If you try to do too many things at once, it's just the same thing as tiny habits, right? If you try to floss too many teeth, Teeth. Yeah, teeth at once. You're only gonna— it's too daunting, right? So you want to try adding one habit every 30 days, testing it, and then continue adding it to way of life. Let me know in the comments what you plan to do to change or what you're working on right now. Um, and you know, we'll go ahead and also respond to you as well. Let us know in the comments and don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to this, whatever platform you are on. It helps us grow. And don't forget to check out the next video as well and we'll see you tomorrow.
