Solving the Success Paradox: The Top 9 Mistakes Holding You Back

What's up everybody? Welcome to another YouTube Hangout. I'm really excited to be here with a friend of mine. His name is Skip Pritchard. How to introduce this man? I think Renaissance man is maybe the easiest descriptor, although he will be much more humble and won't accept that title. But he is a CEO. He is a speaker. He is a friend. He is a blogger. He is an author. He's got a new book out that we're going to talk about today. The Book of Mistakes. And one of the reasons I love this guy is every time I'm with him, I learn something. It makes me think. I go home a better person because of it. And two, this guy is a studier. He is a learner. And for me, I love modeling success. You know, you see the people behind me on the wall. You guys watch the videos. Most of what I do is focused around success. So the top 10 rules of success. Skip has a different approach, which is why I love him. He's focusing on mistakes. His new book talks about the 9 most common mistakes that come up over and over and over again that prevent you from having success. Without further ado, Skip, welcome aboard, man.

Thanks. It's great to be here. Already, I'm feeling your energy. That's the thing I know about you. I met you in person in Madrid of all places and saw you podcast or doing this YouTube right live in the streets of Madrid and got to hear you speak. You were amazing. Inspired us all. I love it.

I love it. So, so tell me about the why. So we've got this book coming out, The Book of Mistakes. It comes out February 6th. Is that right?

On Tuesday. We're excited.

So it's preorder right now. We have the link in the description. You guys can check it out. Tell me about the why for this book. Why did you write this? Why is it important?

The why behind it is that we all make mistakes and the mistakes tend to follow us. And, you know, I was doing a lot of research. I've interviewed over 1,000, the most successful people in the world. And I was doing some research into regrets when the people are near death. And you'll find that many people will say, here's what I regret, here's mistakes what I made. And I've always been fascinated by people's mistakes and failures and also their successes. And that study is kind of the why behind this. And I'm excited to put it all into a book that people can digest and learn from.

I love it. Now, there's 9 mistakes, and I think the hardest thing for me in prepping for this is picking which ones to talk about because I know we're on a time limit and I like all of them. So I picked my favorite 3 that I want to dive a little deeper with you. The first one was mistake number 1, working on someone else's dream. And I see this so much. A lot of my audience, they're entrepreneurs or they're wannabe entrepreneurs trying to get out of the 9 to 5 to go do their own thing. How do you break the mindset? How do you get out of that zone of working for somebody else, taking that safe job and doing your thing? Like, how do you get the push to do it? What do you think?

Well, working on someone else's dream where so often, you know, I was talking about people who have these regrets later in life. Oftentimes they'll cite this. They'll say, I wish I would have been more true to me. I wish I would have been more myself. And so often we're swept up into someone else's dream where we're told what to major in, maybe by our parents, or we're pushed into our first job, and then we're, you know, why did you end up in marketing? Well, that's what my first manager kind of encouraged me to get into. And so, we, you know, it's the natural pull of the current is to get swept up into somebody else's dream. And yet, inside us, we have something that we want to get out. And that dream may be a business, it may be a book, it may be a song. There's something in us. And I think you're right. So, so many times we just drift. And you have to stop yourself from that drift. You end up somewhere that you don't want to be, and you have to be cognizant. So, the first thing is to recognize where you are in that process and to think about your dream and to think about, am I living my dream or someone else's dream? And you can be working even for someone else and still be successful because it could be part of your dream to support that mission. You may be passionate about the same thing, which is great. But you don't want to end up in a place where, hey, all the work that I'm putting in, all my passion is dead because I'm really not working on what's inside of me.

So how do you get the confidence or the courage or the mojo or whatever it is to, to stop doing the safe thing, building somebody else's dream and go off and do your path? I think that's where a lot of people are stuck. How do they summon the courage to go off and do it?

You know, I've asked a lot of entrepreneurs how do they do it. I ask leaders, what gave you the courage to do it? And the answers are as varied as the people that you'll talk to. But it's finding that within, you know, one of the things that I talk about in the book is readiness. And to me, it's so very important before you begin the journey of the 9 mistakes, it starts with readiness. And what I say in there is readiness is when your desire is greater than your distraction, right? All of us have these distractions, and you, you can work on both sides of this equation, right? Desire and distraction. You need to limit the distraction. So if you want to write, you just got to write every day and get rid of the distractions. If you want to start a business, you've got to get rid of the distractions, the naysayers, the critics. At the same time, you need to increase your desire, right? What do you desire to do? Is it a burning desire, or is it just something that's kind of floating by me and kind of like, "Yeah, I'd like to do that someday." Is it your passion? This is my desire. So, I like to work on both sides of that equation, increasing my desire and making sure that it's true and decreasing these distractions. So, readiness is when your desire is greater than your distraction. And there's a whole formula for working that. Otherwise, if you start too early, your distractions are going to stop you, right? First negative relative calls you and says, "Hey, what are you doing that for?" And you're just, "Ugh." Yeah, you're right. No, if you're prepared and your desire is strong enough, you can overcome any distraction.

I love that. When your desire is greater than your distraction, I could see a whole social media campaign for you launching around that.

Thank you. That's when you're ready.

Yeah, I love it. Now, now you're talking a lot about regret here, and this was so— in going through the book, it's interesting because regret seems to come up in various ways through the number of rules or mistakes. But it's not its own rule. It's not its own mistake. It's not like— so is regret mistake number 10? Is that a new book for you, or is it just ingrained in every single rule? How do you see— like, where does regret fit in terms of mistakes?

Well, regret is something that if you study, that if you're making these mistakes, you're going to end up with regrets. And we all have failures, right? We talk about that. You and I've talked about that. If you fail, it's okay. If you're not failing enough, that means you're not trying enough. If— just make sure you fail quickly, right? You want to get back on your feet. Regret comes when you're failing and failing and failing and you're pulled into someone else's mission, someone else's purpose, not true to myself. So regret can happen with all of the 9 mistakes. If you continue to make them and you don't change, you're going to end up in regret. But if you pull and you have the discipline to get to work on your own desires and dreams, then you're not going to have those regrets. Um, the key to regrets, just like failure, You can have them, have them every day, just have them quickly. Some people say, "Oh, I have no regrets." I have a lot of regrets. Every year I think about what do I regret because those are the things I'm studying so I can say, "You know what? I'm going to learn from that. I don't want to waste this time. I regret that I spent time with these people who weren't pulling me into my dream but were kind of pulling me off course." Whatever your regrets are, you can learn from them. Embrace them. Study them. It's like failure. You can use all that as fuel. To get you to where you want to be. I love it. I love the energy.

All right, cool, cool. This is great. So I want to jump to mistake number 3. That was accepting excuses. And I think with mistake number 1, which was working on someone else's dream, people acknowledge that they're working on somebody else's dream, but they don't have the courage or know-how to actually go out and do it. With the excuses, I find people don't have the awareness. They're just accepting it. They don't know that they're making excuses. They don't take responsibility for their life. So how do you get the awareness that, you know what, this reason of why I can't go start my own business or why I can't get that promotion or whatever the thing that they want to do, but that wall in between them, how do you recognize that that's just an excuse and not just a fact?

We all can think that they're facts, right? So, I've seen people who will say, well, excuses, the weather, I'm married to someone who's negative, a friend of mine's negative, taxes are too much, oh, I don't have the capital to start this, money's a problem. We have all these excuses. You know, when I started thinking about this, I interviewed Rich Gaspari. Rich Gaspari was a former Mr. Universe. He is the CEO of Gaspari Nutrition. You'll find his products throughout the world in all of his nutritional products. But here I met him, and decades later, after he had been this amazing bodybuilder, he said, I'm going to be on the COVID of a bodybuilding magazine. I mean, this is when people would be like, You're middle-aged and washed up, etc. He goes, "I'm going to make the cover." He wrote a book called No Excuses. I met him, and he got himself into the same shape that he did in his 20s and got on the COVID I thought, "Wow, what excuses could you have? He is determined." I thought that same thing isn't about bodybuilding. It's really about building a life. What kind of life do we make? Whatever those excuses are, we're all going to have them. I'm too tired. I have a great show I want to binge on Netflix. All of these reasons will stop us. We have to look at the excuses for where we are. If you can't get past this, there are always these excuses. They're always going to pull you off course. You're going to create them. What I say in the book is this: the most important microphone in the world Don't say this part, but it's not the one in front of Evan right now. The most important microphone in the world is the one inside your mind. Guard it with everything that you have, because the voice inside is either stepping up to that microphone and making excuses or providing reasons for you to succeed. And so guard that microphone, because it's those voices inside, that voice inside that's much more determinative of your fate than these voices outside. Guard that microphone. It's either stepping up and giving you excuses, or it's saying, I can do this, I can find a way around this. Yes, I don't have this, but I'm going to figure it out. Yes, other people have dealt with this, but they have also figured it out. There are some people who say, oh, I just can't. You know, the big one is money. Oh, the constraints of money and time and my job and my kids. And they come up with all these reasons. and yet you can get these lists of all these people who've had all those same things and they experience the success. Why is that? Because they've reframed all of those into, you know what, I can get through this. I'm going to use this. And in fact, people that— if you interview people as I have on creativity, they will say that the most creative people, whether in business, whether in the arts, They have constraints. It's amazing. If you look at some of the most successful companies today that are flush with cash, they're not innovating anymore. They just take that money and buy other companies, right? The biggest innovation usually happens— not always, there's no general rule— but usually happens when you have these constraints of capital, of time, etc. So the people that use these excuses to stop them, and other people use the excuses as these constraints to figure out a better way, more efficient. And I think that's a major difference in how you talk to yourself.

So how do we prevent the trap of falling back into it? So, so if you guys pick up the book, you see that chapter, you acknowledge, wow, I'm making all these mistakes. I'm, you know, I'm telling myself in that microphone, I'm holding myself back. And you read it and you feel it. But then, you know, when you've done the book or you move on to the next chapter or the next week or the next month, it's easy to fall back into the old habits and old way of talking to yourself. What do you recommend to keep that as a consistent habit?

Well, one big thing is what are you fueling your mind with? What are you listening to, right? Are you listening to the greatest YouTubers who are going to teach you to believe? Are you listening to great podcasts that are going to feed your mind? Are you reading things that are going to lift you up? So, you have to continually guard that. I mean, too often, if you leave that microphone unguarded, you're just filling your mind up with things that will take you the opposite direction. So watch what you're reading, writing, seeing, etc. And if you surround yourself with all of these great voices that are filling you up, it's going to keep you on track. And have somebody that you're accountable to who will just stop you and be like, whoa, you know, what happened to you? You're getting real negative, and pull you back in. And that's why you'll see so many people will will be in that same group and they're all enthused, and it's because they're feeding off of each other's energy. Now, I also wrote a leader's guide to The Book of Mistakes, which is available on thebookofmistakes.com, that helps with some of these strategies to keep you on track.

I love it. I want to jump to the last mistake, mistake number 9. And what's great about this, you guys haven't seen this yet because this is the, the preview copy that Skip sent me, uh, it shows it like it's super clear. So you got, you know, mistake number 9 and then what the mistake is and then a quick, like, it's really motivating reading that page and then there's a lot more content behind it. Mistake number 9, believing you have all the time in the world. And so just that idea of like making today count, that I'm not going to put off my dream until tomorrow, I'm not going to wait till next month or next year, that like today, it's got to happen today. Talk to me about the importance and why people make this mistake so often.

We make it because so often, especially when we're young and broke, and I was there, we think the most important thing is perhaps money or acquiring things. But the actual most valuable thing in the world is time because time escapes us all. And I remember years ago, I took this personality test. We all take these. and I remember I took this, Evan, and I got a zero on patience. They said, "You have a zero. Like, we're used to people maybe getting a low score or, you know, kind of skewing the norm, but you have a zero," and I felt awful, and I always heard people say to me, "Oh, you know, you need to develop patience," and all this, and I was kind of down by it. I'm telling the instructor, I'm like, You know, what do I do about this? And he said, this is the greatest thing you could ask for. He reframed the whole thing. I said, what do you mean? He said, it means you have the highest sense of urgency that we could possibly look for. And so I thought, wow, you know, you just reframed it for me. I now have the highest sense of urgency, and that urgency is so important. I have seen successful product launches, successful acquisitions of companies, successful launches of big new initiatives or new businesses be fueled by that sense of urgency. And entrepreneurs especially have it. They don't have this, oh, you know, we'll get to it, etc. Usually the larger the bureaucracy, the slower it is, and we tend to not have that same sense of urgency. Well, there's this process and have you put it through this form and this folder, instead of thinking about, I've got to get this done right now, I've got to live this. Well, the same thing in our lives, right? Why not get to it today? Why not say, you know what, I'm going to determine that these things that I have in my goals, I'm going to make them happen no matter what, and I'm going to have this determination to get it done now. If you don't have that deadline, you know, life passes you by and you say, well, you know, I can get to that later, and then it's too late. My grandmother used to have this plaque and it was something like, too soon old, too late smart. Well, you know, that happens to us all, right? We're too soon old, too late smart. And that was kind of the theme in these mistakes. So you know what, let's reverse that. Let's get young. Let's get smart now, and then we can enjoy being old when we're there, right? Let's not wait until we're too old to get smart. Why not take it on right now? Why not start that business this year? Why not start writing that book you want to write right now? Why not launch the product you want to launch right now? Why not start listening to the 3 podcasts, tune into the top YouTubers who are going to really enthuse us, watch these channels except Today. Why do we have to wait? We don't. That's the magic of all of this. It can happen today. Why wait a year? You can start taking the steps you need to make to where you want to go today, right now, right here. There's no reason to wait. You don't need to have the perfect education, the perfect capital lined up, the perfect situation unravel, the perfect genius idea Why wait? Just start on something right now. And yes, you'll make some mistakes. Yes, you'll make some failures. But the magic of it all is that you can tweak it, learn from it, fail quickly, change the course of where you want to go. And that to me is so very key to your success. Believing you have all the time in the world, it's a big one. It's central to get going.

I love it. I think we need to take that last like 3-minute rant and just cut that out, and that can be an alarm clock for people on thebookofmistakes.com. Wake up to that message every day. I love it. Guys, I want to get to some questions from you guys. We've got about 10 minutes left with Skip, so if you have a question, leave it in the chat. It's blowing up. People are already saying, "Learning so many things from you guys. Thank you so much. This is amazing. You're awesome." So we're getting tons of feedback. Tag me in the comments if you have a question for Skip. First one coming in is from Feel Good Within. Skip, how do you overcome your fear?

Well, feel good within. How do you overcome your fear? You know, I think there's so many ways, and part of it is just doing it. You know, one of the mistakes is about being in your comfort zone, and if you're in your comfort zone, you're not afraid and you're also not growing, right? And I think you've got to learn to be afraid of not growing. You've got to think, you know what, if I'm comfortable and everything's good, there's something wrong. How do I use the prime time in my life to develop and change that? And so, you've got to push yourself to the edge of your comfort zone and then a little beyond. What makes you uncomfortable? A lot of people are afraid of speaking. So, go out and start speaking. Join Toastmasters. Join some organization that will help you speak if that's what you're afraid of because conquering your fears really will give you that confidence that will fuels so much in your life. And everything that we do, we can have fear, right? I have this book coming out on Tuesday and I have natural fear. Oh, what will people think? Will they like it, etc.? Well, we all have those fears and it's constantly pushing and doing these things that will then give you the confidence to keep going.

I love it. Ben is asking a quick question. Where can I get this book? What's the best place for people to get it on pre-order?

Thebookofmistakes.com is my website, but you can get it everywhere. E-books, physical books, nationally, airports. It'll all be out on Tuesday. Barnes Noble, Books-A-Million, indie bookstores around the world that I love, amazon.com, all, all of the places you'd normally get books. The Book of Mistakes: 9 Secrets to Creating a Successful Future. Look for that red ribbon and you know you got it.

Yeah, it's nice. It looks like this is bookmark here. This red ribbon across the top. It's unique. It's on the side spine too, so you can see it. There's also a whole bunch of free bonuses that we'll talk about later on at the end, but we've also linked it up down in the description. You guys can check it out. Michael is saying, Skip, what is the best way to start mentoring others? Now I know you do a lot of leadership stuff. We haven't really touched on it here, but I know that's a huge passion of yours. How can you start mentoring people and how does the mistake book kind of fit into that theme as well?

Well, the mistake book fits into that because the leadership guide in particular will take you through how do you mentor people. There's also questions for a book club. It's a great book to read and kind of work with people and learn what's your key area. We're soon going to be releasing a little test that you can take that will tell you which one is most relevant to you. And so you can take that and then they can take it and then you can share. I think it's It's important to be vulnerable about what yours is and your struggles, and then share your successes of how you've beaten that over time. And so transparency and vulnerability are important, I think, when you're mentoring. I always learn from someone who's more willing to share their struggles than their successes, right? And I identify with people who say, you know, this was really hard and this is how I did this. And I seek those people out. So be vulnerable, share some of those things, be transparent. This is designed to be a story that you can work through, that you can help mentor someone by sharing those key mistakes. And I wrote it in a story form so that you could be entertained as you read it, but also kind of like Jerry Seinfeld's wife, Jessica Seinfeld, she writes these great cookbooks for kids to sneak in vegetables, you know, zucchini in the chocolate chip cookies. And so I wrote it in a story form so that you could entertain somebody who might not even think they're being mentored But then they learn, they get their vegetables as they go through the book. And so any way that you can use these frameworks, I think, like this story, may help you mentor other people. And then you learn— I learn so much more when I'm mentoring someone else. That's how I learn the best, personally.

Yeah, I think that's an amazing tool. Like, if you had some kind of self-assessment tool that you were giving to your mentees, and then you know, okay, mistake 5 and 6 are the ones that are keep going to keep coming up over and over again, that then as a mentor gives you the tools to say, okay, hey, you know, number 5 is here. It is. You're making it again. It's an easy way to guide them. So that's, that's super cool. I want to give this— when is, when is this tool coming out?

Probably on Monday because the book comes out Tuesday. So we'll be putting it up on the site on Monday.

Cool. I'm going to share it with my team. I'm excited. Okay. Archie is asking, I'm married, Skip, and really don't care much for my job. "how do I get my family on board to realize how important it is to get my business going so that I can leave my job?" You know, it's so very important.

And obviously, so many people have a passion and they want to do things. So, it's a very individual circumstance, right? Some people need to have a certain amount of money saved up or a certain safety net, etc. But the why inside of you, how do you capture that with others? How do you share that dream with them? They've got to catch it. And there are various ways to, to get that to happen. One is to talk about this readiness, right? Is your desire greater than your distraction? When you say that, what I hear in that is, my family's the distraction. I have a desire piece, but I have this distraction. So you've got to work on that so that your desire is high. And how do you eliminate that distraction? Now, I don't recommend that you eliminate your spouse. That's not what I'm saying. But how do you bring How do you get the people around you into that dream? Well, work on your desire. You've got to sweep them up in a way that they can see it as clearly as you can, and sometimes that can happen early and sometimes they may not see it until later, personality and other things, but doing all that. I will say something else. Learning to be passionate and working on a job that you're miserable in can be a key skill. And it can be something that will help you even in your own business because you're going to have the same days in a different environment that will pull you down. And it may be awful, it may be miserable, you may have a bad boss, you may have things that kind of tear, you know, you aside. But if you can learn to be happy, fulfilled, and work through all of that on your job, it will fuel success for you even when you launch your own thing. So I highly recommend that you think about how am I going to to turn that around and learn key things now that will change my business in the future.

Yeah, I just pulled the book out while you were talking because it reminds me of mistake number 2, which we didn't touch on, which was allowing someone else to define your value. And so, like, do you define your own value, or does your spouse define your value and deciding for yourself? And so all of these rules are great. You know, it's like, what is that? Is that 2? Is that 3? I'm trying to find it. So Yeah, it's like defining your life for yourself. I think it's super important. Jeffa is writing in, Skip, you're talking about the why inside you. How do you know you're being true to yourself and purpose?

You know, there's a lot of ways to define mistake number one of being true to your purpose. We work through some of them in the companion guides on thebookofmistake.com so that you can learn your purpose. One of the key ways that I find that I know I'm in my purpose is my energy level, right? So, everything really, if you're really sensitive to that and you're working on yourself within, you will feel your energy, right? And people will bring up your energy or they'll bring it down, right? One of the things when I met Evan, I first met him in person, boom, like my energy went up, right? Energy fuels so much. Who's around you? So if you're in your purpose, your energy is up, you're feeling your mood up, you're happy. Now, it won't always be the case, and it's not perfect, and you're not always— everything's going to be smooth, but you'll feel your energy. There are days when you go to work and your energy is there and you feel the passion and you feel like, where did the day go? Like, I'm— it was amazing, and I don't even feel like I worked, right? If you look at Tim Ferriss's Four 4-hour work week or whatever he calls it. It's really, I mean, of course, he works more than 4 hours, but it doesn't even count because he's so excited about what he does. So, it's so important to be thinking about your energy. I find that when you're in your purpose, your energy is up. And when you're not, if you're dragged into something and your energy is low and consistently low and pushed down, then you're not in your purpose. So, you've got to rekindle, look for something that's I love it.

Well guys, it's crazy how quickly time flies. We're already bumping up against the clock. Uh, go check out bookofmistakes.com. We've linked it up down in the description below. Skip, I know there's a whole bunch of bonuses that come with the preorder. Just quickly touch on what people get besides the book when they go and they preorder right now.

They get my free ebook on leadership, which is, uh, Leading with Others in Mind Instead of Yourself. Great for entrepreneurs, small companies, etc. They have— there's a book discussion guide, there's the leader's guide to The Book of Mistakes, so you can work it through with a small group of people, whether they're working with you or for you or just your family. And then there are other giveaways as well— chapter from Tim Sanders' book, an audiobook on fueling your engagement by Kevin Kruse. So lots of different bonuses at thebookofmistakes.com and Happy to have people check them out. It is, it is very exciting to put this out and, and to share this. And yeah, it's, it's, it's something that we want to inspire people, and we want it to be a book that inspires and that you can give to others and say, hey, let's talk about this, to start discussions like this, because that's really what fuels success. Get a couple people and 3 or 4 people talking about some of these principles and how they apply to you and your future can change.

I love it. There's some quick questions about formatting. So I have the hardcover version. Is this also ebook, Audible? What are the formats?

There's an audiobook, there is hardcover, and you can also get an ebook as well. So all formats are out, and my publisher's done a great job, and you should find it everywhere.

Awesome. And Ben is just asking the price. What is the price? $25 US, $32.50 Canadian. And then I guess ebook, audio, you guys can go check it out.

Right. Significant discounts right now on most of the sites, as you would imagine.

All right, get, get the pre-order bonus, uh, now, guys. Thank you, Skip. I know, I know we went like a little bit over. I really appreciate the time. Good luck on the new book, man. Thank you guys so much for watching. Go check out bookingmistakes.com, link in the description. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love, and we'll see you soon.