Seek GUIDANCE - #EvansBook ep. 56

Seek guidance. So one of the things I'm a big fan of is if I don't know what I'm getting into, I don't have the answers, I've never done it before, I try to seek guidance. That comes one through modeling success. It's the name of this channel. It's why I try to do the top tens and espressos to learn people who've done it before. It's what saved my first business as a 19-year-old entrepreneur. Find someone who's already done it and try to model their success. The other way to do it is through actual mentors, through people who've actually done it, who you can have a conversation with, not just watch a video on or read a book about or, you know, watch an interview on. And so how this relates to my book is I've never done a book before, right? It's my first book. I've done a lot of other products and marketing and, you know, building a brand. But book is totally new for me. And so I don't want to assume that I have all the answers on how to create a bestselling book. I'm super confident in the product. I love the book itself. I love the content. I read it and I get alive. I think it will change lives as well. But the marketing, the exposure, how to promote it— I have some ideas, but I don't pretend to be an expert in doing it. And so one of the people I've reached out to for help is Ryan Holiday, who is the master book marketer. We've had him on this channel for his top 10 rules for success video with the bonus 11th rule. And when I first talked to him about the book, he's like, can you send me the manuscript? Let me look it over. Let me see what I think about it. And of course, I only want Ryan's help if he actually likes the book. I hate having somebody who's on my team just doing it for the work. They gotta like the product, right? They gotta feel emotionally connected to what we're selling, what we're marketing. Otherwise, for me, it doesn't work. And I wasn't able to send him the script because my publisher said, "It's not ready yet. We gotta send him a clean copy. We don't wanna have a bad first impression." And I said, "You know what, with Ryan, it's okay. We have a decent relationship. I'm sure it'll be okay. We have to go back with the second version. He's not gonna be too harsh on spelling mistakes or any changes." But he said, "No." No, no, no, no, no, we can't send it out. So it's frustrating. It's like, okay, when can I send it out? And then finally this week I got the okay. They sent me a clean draft. They said, okay, you want to send it out to Ryan and anybody else? Here it is. You can send it. And I was so excited. I looked through it. So excited. So excited. And I sent it to Ryan and he wrote back. It was just last night. And he said, I'm going to check it out on the plane. He's just going through his book launch right now. And he's going to give me some feedback and see what we might be able to do together. So it's a, it's a, You know, big moment to have that final draft kind of ready to go and hopefully get some good feedback from Ryan. But more importantly, the bigger message is to seek guidance. If you haven't done what you're trying to do, then don't just try to come up with every solution yourself. That's the, that's the slowest way to success. The faster way is to model and to seek guidance from people who've done it before. Get their advice, build that team so you can get there a lot faster. Let's get to the questions. First up is G1. Many things to take away from every video. Can't wait to read your book. Appreciate the love, G1. I can't wait for you to read the book. I'm so excited. So excited. It's been a year-ish of writing and we still have until December before it comes out. It's crazy how long it takes, but I am super excited to have you guys read it, to hopefully have your lives changed by going through the theory and the exercises in there. Just so excited and appreciate the support. And this journey has been fun to kind of share, have you guys tag along. Next up is Simeon. My question is the following. How do you separate your time during the week? When do you get up? When do you start the actual work? Do you work on your own or you're always surrounded by your team? When you finish work and perhaps go home, in the moment, do you feel that you are delighted with what you've done. What do you do before bed? Do you read a book? What are your hobbies? I'm not really at the business. On and on and on. All right, so that's a great question. I'm a big believer in chunking my time. I'm a big believer in setting routines and habits and structure. So my wife and I try to go to bed, we start getting ready for bed around 11. That's not always possible because we both do salsa dancing and that keeps us up later sometimes, so we can't always do that. But when we're home, we try to start getting ready for bed at 11. We'll do a meditation that we're playing with. Called Headspace, and then we go to sleep. We usually wake up 7:30-ish, somewhere around there. She has to wake up and get ready for work. I wake up and start going through my regular kind of morning routine. I'll watch some videos, I will answer some comments, I will do a morning workout. I will then start my official work at 10 usually. So from when I wake up to 10, it's workout, it's, you know, making my wife some breakfast if I wake up with her, it's cleaning up. Like for me also being part of a clean environment, like if my desk is super messy, I can't really work. So just cleaning up from the day before. So I'll usually start at 10. From 10 is pretty consistent where I'll be, I spend time answering comments, checking out a certain number of websites. There's about 20 websites that I check out every day, do my YouTube comments, and then answering the email from my priority folder, which is my team, media, big customers, important partners, and I'll make sure that gets done every morning. Apart from that, every day becomes something different. So Monday is my TDS day, trying to dance salsa. So Alex comes over and we spend the whole day together. So he'll come over at 10 and we'll spend the rest of the day working on TDS stuff. On Tuesday is my book writing day. So I usually end up going to a Whole Foods or Starbucks and working on Before it was writing the book, now it's been writing edits for the book, and it's gonna evolve to become marketing the book and creating content around the book. So I block off Tuesday for that. Wednesday is my video recording day, so today is Wednesday when I'm filming this. I film all my videos on Wednesday, they get released over the course of the week. Thursday is my public-facing day, it's my media day, it's my Hangouts day, it's my interviews day, it's my coffee meetings, phone call day. So it's usually back to back to back stuff. And then Friday is my get other stuff done day, my bigger projects day. JRise often comes over and we'll work on projects. It might be launching a new website or landing pages, or I meet with two key guys on my team every week on Friday via Google Hangouts. So some of the bigger picture stuff to help grow the business. That's my day to work on the business building stuff. And then that repeats. And as my life changes, like I wasn't a part of TDS As an owner, I was just an investor before. I didn't run the company. Mondays used to be something else. And as I find new things that I want to try or get involved with, or I find myself being pulled away into something else, then I switch up my schedule to be able to accommodate that. The one caveat to everything is when I'm in the flow on something, I will break all the rules and just try to stay in that moment of flow for as long as possible. Because the stuff that you make is gold. Like, the stuff that you will create when you are in flow is so much more important than your daily tasks that you have to get done. In terms of hobbies or how I'm spending my other time, we'll do a workout 3 times a week with a personal trainer here at TDS. Sean has been on the channel before. I'll do salsa dancing multiple times per week. I'll teach a salsa class on Sunday nights, but also come to the socials and the dancing and the parties. It's— I still love dancing. It's how I met my wife. And what else? Saturday is my day to plan the day for Nina. So we'll usually have It's my job to plan what we're going to do, so I usually plan the whole day, which usually involves visiting at least 2 different food places since she's a big food person. It's summer now, so I'll hop on the Vespa and head downtown and pop up on a few places. I think that's it. If you guys have other questions, let me know. Next up is Peter. How do you find mentors as a young guy who wants to start a business? I'm 20 years old. So I had my first business when I was 19 years old. I felt like I needed to have mentors in my company. I didn't know anybody. My parents my parents. That's family plus parents equals parents. So my parents weren't entrepreneurs. I didn't know entrepreneurs. It just wasn't part of my upbringing. And so I went to the bank. I thought, hey, a bank, they're supposed to help entrepreneurs, right? They would help me. And they said, do you need a loan? No, I don't need a loan. I'm just— I'm trying to get connections. I'm trying to find a mentor. And that's how little I knew about the industry and how to find mentors. But the first real mentor that I found wasn't wasn't a person I ever met. It was, it was Bill Gates. I was in a software company and I was trying to do everything myself and sucking and failing and then realized I'm not the first guy to try to sell software before. Who's done it and had lots of success? Bill Gates obviously did running Microsoft. And so I look at how he got started and most of my early mentors were aspirational mentors, people who I've never met, but I still got guidance from them. That being said, to step back a little bit, my parents were insanely great mentors for me just to teach me how to be a human being, values, how to treat people, Being true to your word, hard work, all that stuff came from my parents. But the entrepreneurial stuff, business stuff, I had to go elsewhere for. And to this day, I started the channel, I do the Top 10 and the Espressos and all this, most of the series, to learn from famous entrepreneurs. It's for you guys, but it's for me, because I want to learn from those guys too. And I consider everybody that we feature on the channel to be one of my mentors, and I learned something from all of them. And the goal is never to be them, but to take something from them to be the best version of myself. Next up is choreographic arts. I'm working and I think I'm doing my best. Not sure yet if everything what I'm doing now is going to take me where I want to go, but I'm doing it because it's going to be worse to regret and not try. The problem is, how do I know? How do I know if all what I'm trying is taking me somewhere, some good things are happening? But I feel my progress is kind of slow sometimes. So it never happens as fast as you want it to happen. Period. You know, like as entrepreneurs, we always want things to happen today, and it takes time for it to happen. It takes continuous grind, hustle, and effort to make things happen. I think for all big matters, for business, for career, for relationships, the most important thing is to listen to your heart. As long as you feel like you are still loving this, like it's still the right thing to do, like it still makes you come alive, The person you're with still feels like it's the right person to be with. The work that you're doing still feels like it's— you're contributing, you're learning, you're gaining from it. The business that you've started, you're still contributing to customers and adding value. Because a lot of the logical things that might come into play, like I'm not making enough money, I'm not hitting the goal, I'm not whatever yet, are negated by the fact that you love this thing that you're working on. And if you continue to love it, then you'll get to where you want to go. All the logical things will work out, but it doesn't make sense right now. You can't rationalize it right now because it's just an emotional feeling. But that's the most important one, because if you do love it, then you'll put in the time, you put in the work, you put in the hustle, you'll keep going, you'll drive through all the steps that everybody thinks are too crazy to do to get to where you need to go. And it doesn't— the path is unclear for most people. Like, you don't know where the final destination is going to be. I didn't know I was going to be doing YouTube videos. You go back to when I started my company, I wanted to inspire entrepreneurs that Bigger vision hasn't changed. I want to help entrepreneurs. I want to believe in entrepreneurs. I want them to believe in themselves. That's been from the beginning. But how I execute it has changed many, many, many times. And I followed what I've been personally interested and excited by. If somebody just said, go do YouTube because it's a good marketing strategy, and I tried it and I hated it, it doesn't matter how much logical sense it is to do. I wouldn't have success because I hate doing it. Meanwhile, I started it because I love doing it. At the beginning, I wasn't making any money, like it wasn't helping my business. At all. I wasn't getting comments, I wasn't getting advertising revenue, I wasn't getting brand deals. I wasn't very good either, but I kept doing it because I loved doing it, because I looked forward to coming in and shooting myself, because I felt like I was growing and I was getting better personally. And so you don't know how it's all gonna make sense, but the most important thing is that you're doing work that you love. If you do work that you love, it will make sense eventually, and you'll be able to make sense of it looking backwards. But looking ahead, you have no idea how it's all gonna align for you. So for me, that's the most important thing. Do you still love the work that you're doing? And if you do, then find ways to continue doing it. If you don't, can you adjust? Can you tweak? Can you shift to make your work more enjoyable? Or do you drop it and go do something else? And many times that's the answer too. Like, forget that. Like, you went in for the wrong reason, or you went in for the right reason but you don't love it anymore, so now it is the wrong reason to keep going. Switch and go do something that you love. Zeno's writing in, I'm still thinking about whether I'm gonna buy your book or audiobook. I still have plenty of time though. Yep, the book is coming out December 6th. I don't know when the audiobook comes out. I don't know if we have a date for that, if it's the same date or not. Zeno, the choice is obvious. You buy both, bro. You buy both audiobook and the regular book, and you can gift the other one to your friends. Rhonda writing in, PS, hope you had a happy Father's Day. Father's Day was great. Father's Day, actually, on the Monday, I got to go to Hayden's school, and they had a father-son kind of play afternoon. Monday is usually my TDS day, so I borrowed Alex's car and I drove up to Hayden's school and spent the— spent an hour with him playing frisbee and doing stick stickers and tattoos and a bunch of fun stuff and then came back. So Father's Day was pretty amazing. That's part of being an entrepreneur, hopefully, is allowing yourself to create that time to go and spend time with the most important people in your life too. Next up, CJP. I see you're wearing your Static Chaos shirt he sent you. You must really like that shirt. So yeah, when people send me stuff, I try to incorporate it in. I can't do it for everybody. It doesn't always make sense for what I'm doing. But clothing is relatively easy to incorporate. So if you send me something in the next edition of Mail Time, I might open it up and I might wear it. You never know. Next up is Anna Young. I don't like audio in general, but maybe because the readers weren't as good as Evan will be. Listen, I'm going to do the audiobook. It's going to be fire. It'll be fire. I'm already excited to do it. I'm going to insist on it being me. It's going to be amazing. I'm super excited by it. It's going to be a hard decision if you are not an audio person. I want to be the person that brings you over to audio just to listen to the book. I think it's going to be pretty good, but I agree with you in that most audiobooks that you listen to, if it's not the author themselves, it's weak. I don't know why authors wouldn't do it. It bothers me that they don't do it. I think it's just better when the author does it themselves. You got to put in the hustle and do it yourself. Next up, Dr. Phoenix. Hey, thanks for the shoutout, and I meant every word, Evan. Already subbed to your newsletter and will be keeping a close lookout for when the book drops. Can't wait to read it. Yeah, if you guys are on a newsletter, we put it at the end of every video. Typically, it's the easiest way to get updates on what's going on, whether I have a special Google Hangouts going on or the book is coming out. You guys will hear about channel too. I'll have at least a couple videos talking about it, promoting it. But if you want to hear about if I'm coming to your city especially, I usually only put that in the newsletter, sometimes on the YouTube channel. But then also any special events and hangouts— some people feel like they missed the hangouts, or why wasn't I notified about the hangouts? I do it through my newsletter list. So if you're on there, then you'll get notified. So you can check it out, link will be at the end of the video and also in the description. Last up is Eric: Evan, just a beautiful, raw, and honest video. Believe Nation is awesome and you rock. Much love, Eric. You guys rock. Believe Nation rocks. That's why I make this— these videos. It makes me come alive. I love sharing with you guys. I love that there's an impact on what you're doing in your day-to-day life. And I hope that you guys use the content to then inject something meaningful into the work you're doing and do, do the work to try to be the best version of yourself. Because so many people are playing here where they should be here. If you really think about it, and for yourself but also the people around you, are you actually being the best version of yourself? Are you doing everything that you can do to move forward on your goals? And for most people, it's no. It's no. You are not living up to your potential, period. And so hopefully by having resources like these videos around you, it lets you get a little bit closer. Because I think if you have the skills and you have insane potential, then it's your responsibility to chase it. It's your responsibility to try to reach your potential for yourself, but also for the people around you, because you can have an impact on the community that you're not having because you're slacking off or you don't believe in yourself enough or you come up with excuses where you should be playing at this level. And that's my goal is for you guys to get up here, play at that level, live the life that you should be living, have the impact that you should be having, and have the happiness that you deserve as well. So thank you guys so much for watching. I'd love to know what you think about the topic about getting feedback and seeking guidance from others. If you have a question about my book or the book writing process, leave it down in the comments below and I may feature you in the next edition of this series. Thank you guys for watching, continue to believe, and I'll see you soon.