100: Top Ten Lessons from 💯 Episodes

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This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the FreeTime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

Hello, Hello Free Timers. I cannot believe it, but this is episode 100 of this show we launched on March 21, 2021. And here we are 100 episodes in I have learned so much from every single guest and from challenging myself to publish a solo episode once a week. But today I've given myself the very tricky task of trying to pare down into the top 10 lessons learned from these hundred episodes, specifically from my beautiful, incredible, intelligent guests. So I wish I could have pulled an excerpt from every single guest. Honestly, it's really tough, but I was trying to synthesize what lessons have really stuck with me since I conducted the interview with that person. What am I still carrying? How has it informed my own thinking? That's what I'm sharing with you here today in this episode. If you enjoy this show, I would be so grateful. Not just for a rating or review. That helps tremendously. Please share this episode with a friend. You can go to Pod Link freetime and share this one or any other favorites. What I love about podlink is that it allows the receiver to open up that episode in the podcast app of their choice because we're all listening in different places. Now, let's dive in.

Lesson number one See yourself as a star performer if you're juggling too much. If you are what I call the Chief Everything Officer, that is the fastest road to burnout. I loved hearing from Jordan Harbinger in episode six, Sarah Apgar, who was successful with her Shark Tank pitch in episode 11, and Dave Crenshaw on episode 19 about most valuable activities. Here's a clip from each one of those favorite episodes.

It depends on your business. But if you're in the podcast slash radio business, it's a performance, any way you look at it. And if you think about other performers, let's say like a ballet dancer, no one's like, hey, these women are all here from 9am why don't they set up the chairs? It's like, because they're going to perform and we don't want them tired from cleaning the aisles of the theater. Nobody would ever have the singer of the concert help set up the chairs. No one's like, hey, Bieber, can you go grab that pallet of Coca Cola syrup? We need that in the concession area. Right? You want that person to be fresh because they have to be able to give their performance their all.

Ultimately, that's the advantage you have.

It's really more about the mindset to walk in there with the confidence to have a conversation about your company and answer the questions thrown at you in ways that you can really communicate your vision and ultimately convince someone to share it.

I mentioned before about how entrepreneurs have 10 to 20 different job descriptions, but only one, maybe two of those things are your most valuable activities. I call them your MVAs. And the more and more that you can focus your time on those most valuable activities, the more valuable your business becomes. And in fact, one of the things that keeps a small business from growing is a business owner who spends too much time in their LVAs and their less valuable activities. They're running small errands. They're doing things that could have been delegated to someone else, either because they didn't want to take the time to delegate it, or sometimes they have a little bit of an ego and feel like no one can do it as well as they can. You have to let go of those things and start to delegate to other people. And with my team, when I bring them on, I tell them what my most valuable activities are. They're two things. It's creating valuable training and delivering that training. So right now, having this conversation with you, I'm in the middle of one of those MVAs, and I tell my team if I am doing anything other than those two things, I'm not leading properly, and I need to help you get those off my plate.

Lesson number two, train the system, then the person. I just released a solo episode on this topic, but where it really hit home was my conversation with Cal Newport in one of the very first episodes of this podcast. Episode 2. Big thanks to Cal for helping me launch the show. We were talking about his book, A World Without Email, and he was saying that if you don't address process and actually try to reduce the number of emails coming into you in the first place, then you're just taking Advil for your hurt knee. You're not actually healing it. Here's Cal on the importance of being an observer, not just in your inbox, but in your life and designing process to route things before they ever get to you in the first place.

This is the way I think about work and it's the way I recommend other people thinking about work is move beyond just how often you check your inbox or this or that and say, what are these messages coming in? What processes are they implicitly connected to? So if I'm getting a lot of requests, for example, like we were talking about a lot of requests for like speaking and jumping on calls, let's give that a name. This is the incoming request process. As someone who writes and does podcasts, there's lots of, like, businesses and people who want to talk and share opportunities and all right, now that I've given a name to that process, I can really think it through. Like, do I want that process in my working life? Where is it valuable? Where is it not? Okay, how do I design them? My rules about it that is going to maximize the value I get while minimizing the negative impacts. And now it opens up lots of creative things like, well, I certainly shouldn't just have these coming inbound over, like just a general purpose email address. And I'm just thinking out loud, but maybe what I really want is like a special email address for those. And I do one call every Friday so that I'm exposed to randomness. And then for each of these, you say, what's the right way to do this process? And in general, the things you're trying to optimize. What I argue in the book is when you're trying to optimize a process within your work life as a knowledge worker, you typically want to minimize context switching. So you want to find a way to achieve that process, these goals without you having to constantly switch your context, like, let's say, keep checking back in on ongoing conversations and inboxes. And two, you want to avoid a sense of overload or ambiguity. So you say, what's the right way to handle this process? Where I feel like it's under control and there's not just tons of stuff out there that I'm missing or I'm not, I'm behind on, or like, what's the way to structure this process? And if you go through with this mindset through each of your processes, then you end up with a lot less emails or emails of a type that are much easier to deal with. And so that'll be like the underlying foundation to my solution. Discussion here is that you go to fix the underlying processes that generate emails. Because if you stay just at the level of once all these emails are here, what do I do with them? You're not getting to the core of the problem. You're taking Advil. You're taking Advil for the hurt knee instead of actually getting the knee healed.

Lesson number three from episode 29 Imagine that we are All Funded by Source this was from a conversation with my dear friend Ksenia Brief. She has since renamed her podcast to me under her own name, Ksenia Brief, but for a while there she had called it Funded by Source, a phrase she picked up from one of her mentors, Michelle sinnet, in episode 29. I love how Ksenia talks about abundance not just being in a place of gratitude, but recognizing abundance that goes so far beyond financial abundance and the dollars in our bank account, but to observing and appreciating everything around us. Here's Ksenia on how she remembers and tunes into that abundant feeling of being funded by source.

It's this softening into trusting that ultimately money, when we think that we are making it, when we think it belongs to us, we're once again removing that space of playfulness of okay, source. How can we invite in miracles? How can we invite in abundance not just in the shape of money, but in the form of peace, in the form of connection with someone you care about, in the form of a hummingbird looking you straight in the eye through your window. And so for me, I feel that really noticing different forms of abundance in my life, whether that's being able to sleep an extra hour or making a really nourishing breakfast and actually allowing myself to really enjoy it from my heart bowl or having an insane weekend. Insane. I mean, to me, it's insane of just being able to be very up and close and intimate with alpacas and get to hug them and kiss them and play with them and, you know, just go into the forest and explore wild BlackBerry bush on our property. Those are all forms of abundance. And even when I see flowers that have more petals than I think other flowers do, I always notice it. And I always make it a point to be truly present with it in my heart because then it expands my capacity to notice and receive abundance in all kinds of forms. And it's not easy. In my experience to trust the unknown that way and to trust that we can truly be provided for just by being ourselves without having to try hard or fit into any mold. But I've been getting glimpses of that, and it's good.

Lesson number four Invest in brand for your business. I believe in brand and the power of brand strategy, but I love hearing from the pros on how to see it as an investment, not a cost, as you'll hear from Emily Hayward, the co founder of Red Antler from episode five. You'll also hear from my friend Adam chloyacip in episode 45 on his thoughts behind the branding process and why it matters, how it creates emotional resonance. He and his team at Together Agency branded everything you see for free time, the book, podcast and beyond. And you also hear from my friend Alexis Grant in episode 93 on how it's okay to put yourself in front of the business as the brand to build trust in the early days, even if you plan to pull back down the road in order to scale the business and bring more team members in.

In every single category, there's so much competition. And you know, another way to think about brand is just making it incredibly clear to people the moment they see you meet you arrive on your site, whatever it is, of why they should care, like, what do you stand for?

How are you going to, you know.

Connect with their lives? Like, why should they take the time and ultimately like take the money, you know, to engage with your business? So to me, brand has to be seen as an investment, not a cost. And I think that people never balk when it comes to spending money on like setting up their legal documents or, you know, hiring an engineer to build their product or their website.

And for some reason with brand, it's always the thing that people are like.

Well, can I just bootstrap this or hack it together? Like, you know, find someone to do like a cheap design? And when you look at the businesses that are the runaway successes, all of.

Them have phenomenal brands.

The earlier you think about the brand.

The more set up you'll be to.

Succeed and to compete.

We're thinking about the brand differentiators and really truly what those mean. We want to come up with value statements, but we don't just come up with value statements. We want mic drop statements. We want things that you can say and if this is within an organization or a company or even on yourself, if you want to put these value statements up on a wall, so remind yourself of why you're doing what you're doing and what the walls of that playground are. Because brand is so emotional, we believe that design can be a change agent. We believe that design is what bring people back. There's a lot of noise in the world and there's a lot of things coming at us from all the different screens and all the different streaming services. And so if we only get someone's attention for two or three seconds, we need to make sure that you have that most meaningful and emotional kind of resemblance of who you are in your company organization in that time frame. And if you are done the work to make sure that you are resembling your brand accurately, then the goal is, is that someone who is looking for that at that right time, it hits them in the right spot, right in the heartstrings, and they emotionally connect to that brand. And at the same time, people need to remember why, you know, you exist. And so a lot of times having the visual and the voice really tight and consistent will just help kind of solidify that in someone's mind and memory.

I'd say I'm more the face of the brand for they Got Acquired than I was for the right life. And that was an intentional choice because here's how I think about it. Even if you want to build a big brand that doesn't revolve around you and doesn't have your face on the.

COVID you have to start somewhere.

And especially for a content company, you have to start with trust. And you need to get people to trust you. And people are much more likely to trust a person instead of a brand. And so when they got acquired, I'm not afraid to be the face of.

It for a while.

As we grow. And my goal is as that trust increases and our audience base increases and I built a team that can help run it, we can pull away a little bit from me being the brand and the brand can become itself. So I think there can be a transition there. I'll always be on the about page as the founder of the site.

We'll be right back just after this.

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On the other hand, that brings me to lesson five. What do you do when you're ready to transition out or you want to build a business that's sellable someday, that's scalable, that has redundancy? Well, you can take a page out of my longtime friendor MBS's book episode 57. He shares how he and the person who eventually took over as president of Box of Crayons Shannon tried to demichelify different systems and fill the Michael sized hole in the business. In episode 61, you'll hear from Greg Alexander who wrote a book called the Boutique. Greg talks about the difference between a body shop and a more scalable business that relies on IP that can actually sell and leverage systems and process in order to attract customers that are not just knocking on the door of the owner. Because if you only want to hire the owner, you don't really have a business, you have a job.

There's part of me going, yeah, but obviously I am irreplaceable because I'm amazing. Obviously my spirit animates the whole of this company. But a couple of things that help. The first is that from the very start I had decided to try and build around a brand Box of Crayons rather than Brand Michael Bungay Stanier. So I had decentered myself from being the hero of the brand and of the company a little bit. I mean, just because I was the writer and the speaker, I still was the face of the company, but I hadn't built a company around my presence.

And I watched you even pull aspects of that out over five to 10 years. Yeah, and you even told me something for listeners. I think a fun fact they'll like to hear is Michael's rates were often double. Whatever the workshop would cost with one of his facilitators would be double if you wanted to hire him. So he was always disincentivizing someone to bring him in unless they really just had to have him there.

Yeah, I tried to make me unaffordable by almost everybody because I wanted them to go, oh, we kind of want you, but not at that rate. I mean, you're not that good. So we'll hire somebody who is good enough. And the other facilitators were always more than good enough. They were great at what they did and delivered. And actually this is something that Shannon and I talk quite a lot about, which is like, how do we demichael the process? Because there were parts where I was particularly strong, pretty good at designing stuff. I had a little bit of flair around some sort of marketing stuff and trying to, as Shannon would put it, replace the Michael sized hole in the company was a two year process for her as a CEO to figure that out.

You told me something that you heard that your biggest strengths as a business owner or the things that you love the most are your business's weaknesses. That's probably where the systems and process are the least built out. And that has stuck with me ever since.

Right.

If the goal is to scale and sell your firm at some point, you can't be a body shop. And a body shop is defined as a client hires you because you're an extra pair of hands, your capacity. That's not a scalable or sellable business.

What differentiates kind of a body shop or a staffing firm, staff augmentation versus a professional services firm is there's professionalism. There's methodologies, tools, an army of trained people. There's a way to do things. And the way to do things, the methodology, the process has value and the client is willing to pay you for that either through a license for the actual methodology itself or through a higher bill rate, an hourly rate, which implies not staffing, but they're paying you a premium because it's not just a body, an extra pair of hands, it's a well trained body who's going to follow your process. That's the real difference. And what I would advise your listeners find themselves in this awkward stage where they're trying to move away from being a body shop is to start with the intellectual property that the client's willing to pay for. That's the most important part. And see if you can validate that what it is that you have to offer solves a mission critical problem and that clients are willing to pay to solve that problem using your proprietary methodology. Once that's done, then you can figure out how to get your team to be able to deliver it. They feel validated when they're needed. So when a client says to them, hey, I'll give you the work, but only if you do the work, it makes them feel good and they say okay, and they do it. But what they don't know is that's an insult. That's the client telling them that they haven't built a business, they haven't hired the right people and trained them the right way. And they're not hiring the firm, they're hiring you. So basically you're just a freelancer at that point. And if that's your objective, that's fine. But if you want to scale beyond yourself, that's the wrong thing to do. So what's required of a founder to make that transition is self awareness and seeking their personal validation and professional validation in places other than the workplace. And their validation should come from the P and L, the bank account, the employees that are developing over time and taking on more responsibility, not directly sourced from the client.

Lesson number six. Ooh, this one's a tough one. And I put it in here because it's always good to be reminded to say no to people pleasing and invitations that don't spark joy. My rubric for this is would I initiate this type of invitation or event if I wasn't just on the receiving end of it? So rather than saying yes out of guilt or obligation or even just a minute meh feeling, is this something that I would be jumping out of my chair to say yes to? You'll hear from Vanessa Van Edwards. She just came out with a book called cues. In episode 71, she shared how people pleasing gets in the way. You'll also hear from my friend Dorie Clark, longtime Friendor in episode 35, we were talking about her book the Long Game, and she talks about the transition from the days where you wanna say yes to everything to where you need to start saying no. Finally, you'll hear from my friend Christine Arilo in episode three, early on from the show talking about a revelation she had at the hands of an acupuncturist.

If all you're doing is trying to people please, there's no way you're going to be able to get the ask out because all you're going to want to be doing is people pleasing them. But if you go in knowing that you still want to be liked and you still want to be trusted, that you know that you're worth more and you go in with competence, knowing exactly how much you bring to the table and how much you deserve to be paid. That blend of really good intention. I want to do good. I want to be open and honest and competent. I deserve to be paid my worth. I can show my value. That is super charismatic.

When you're fresh out of college, nobody knows who you Are nobody is queued up, waiting, like, oh, God, I can't wait to talk to this person no one's ever heard of, you know? So when you do get an opportunity, it's great. Like, hey, why not? You never know where it might lead. And so saying yes is wonderful because you're expanding your network, you're learning new things, you're meeting new people, but just over time, it becomes unsustainable because as you progress in terms of your age and your experience and your public stature, more and more people are going to be reaching out. And if you keep the same behaviors, you're going to end up in a hole. You're going to end up always reacting, never setting a proactive agenda. And eventually you reach the point where just physically, you can't do it anymore. So first of all, it's a question of constantly refining your criteria and making it tighter, making it a little bit harder. And that can be frustrating. You want to make people happy, and some people will be a little upset that three years ago you had random coffee with no purpose with me. Why aren't you doing it now? But if your schedule has gotten tighter and you've gotten a little more serious about leveling up on things, you can't afford to just be random anymore. And indeed, some of the offers actually really are super tempting.

Think about time spans. So a timeline is linear. It's flat. It's all you can do is push forward on a linear level. And it takes a lot of effort. Like if you were just to take your hand and push forward, all of your energy and life force has to be there to push it forward. And there's no space in a line. But time spans in the visual that, like, for example, is in the book and the visual I use when even planning and pathing for my own business, it looks like a rainbow. It's a span, and it starts on the left, and it goes up to the top, which is like the midpoint, and then down to the bottom, which is your intended completion date. And we all have intended completion dates, but that's where the fluidity comes in. It's like you have to be fluid to, like, be able to move what's going to happen in the world and what's going to go on. Deal with the uncertainty. And you can kind of stretch. It goes back to the stretching. You can stretch out a time span, and it's still. You're still going to complete it, but you still have space in it. So when you're working within these time spans, it allows you to exhale like I'm just exhaling right now. And it also gives you some level of surety and takes away some of the uncertainty and some of the time pressure. I'm a card carrying member you all in the impatience club. I have been forever. I try to rip it up, I try to give it back. I always want to be where I'm not. I know this about myself which is why I developed all these practices to basically chill out and be able to work in the flow versus having to push and grind and strive and hustle, which is exhausting. I don't want to do it anymore. Put his hands on my belly and he just said to me retain, Retain. And I was like retain. Oh my God. It was like one of those epiphanies like retain my life force. Oh I should not just spend it all and then recharge or have to get sick in order to take care of myself and slow down. I should develop a practice that empowers me to retain my life force or know when I'm dipping into my reserves.

Lesson number seven don't work harder than you need to to bring money and cash in the door. Create a system for your sales in episode 12 I really enjoyed hearing from my friend Josh Kaufman who talks about 1 the importance of evergreen content, but 2 building systems and process to promote something like his book over the long term rather than a flash in the pan launch. Josh has been very intentional about building systems that will continue working for him over time even if he moves on to other things.

One of the things that I think worked very well for personal MBA is that it's an evergreen topic. Like people will always need to know more about how businesses work and improve their business skills, whether they're building their own business or they're working on their career. And so there's consistent demand for information like this and then hopefully writing something that helps people do this important thing in their life that's step one. But then marketing that book over a long period of time is step two. And so most of my marketing efforts over the years have really been focused on doing things to promote the book in a systematic way instead of I think what a lot of particularly first time authors will do is spend a lot of time, time and attention doing the big book launch, which may sell a lot of books over a week or two weeks, but won't necessarily sell books over months or years or decades.

We'll be right back just after this.

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Speaking of systems, that brings us to lesson number eight. It's one I will not forget on Buyer's remorse. In episode 83 of the show, Joely Coleman describes the inevitable buyer's remorse phase. The problem is that a lot of business owners don't intentionally design systems to address this with customers. So he will share some insights with you on why it's important to know that this exists and how to build some process around it.

If you have a system and a process in your business designed to address the buyer's remorse that we know that every consumer experiences, we scientifically know this based on brain science, research and biology that every consumer experiences this, go ahead and raise your hand. Now if you have a system and process that directly addresses the buyer's remorse. Okay? And that sound you hear is the sound of not many hands going up. Okay? Not many hands were raised right there. Crickets, right? Cue the tumbleweed. Here's the thing. The research shows that we make a purchase, our brain floods with dopamine. As you said, we feel joy, euphoria, excitement. This is the product we've been looking for. This is the service that's the answer to our prayers. But almost as immediately as that dopamine fills our brain, it's a chemical that starts to recede. And as it recedes, those feelings of joy, euphoria, you know, delight, are replaced by feelings of fear and doubt and uncertainty. What if this product isn't all it's cracked up to be? What if the service isn't what they promised on the website or they promised in the sales pitch? Will I be able to get my money back? How long will I be caught in this? I've made bad mistakes before. Is this another one of those? If you're making it in a business context, you know Is my boss going to be upset that we selected this vendor? What if I get fired? If you're making interpersonal context, what if, you know, my spouse is angry? What if this causes a problem with my kids? We extrapolate to all the bad things that could happen now. Meanwhile, if you're the person that sold the product or service, you're back in the office or back at home, high fiving, celebrating. Maybe there's a bell being run for a new sale being made. Maybe somebody just won a trip to Napa. Who knows what's going on, but you're feeling joy and euphorian, excitement and delight. The Delta or the difference between what we feel as business owners when the sale is made and what our customers feel, our brand new customers, as far as a feeling of buyer's remorse, if we don't close that emotional gap and close it quickly, we never get the chance to recover. So the secret is this all happens in the affirm stage, which was one of the eight phases of the customer journey. In the affirm phase, we want to reaffirm the choice they made to do business with them. We want to directly address their fears and their doubts and uncertainties. Nine times out of 10, all we have to do is let them know that we heard them, that we're there for them, and that this is going to be great. We just need to take that quiet period when they're in a state of doubt and come in with a piece of communication or a touch point or something that lets them know that they matter, that can springboard them to that first kickoff when they open our product or they start to experience our product for the first time or our service.

Lesson number nine this tip blew my mind when I first heard Alan Dibb talking about his epic evergreen email sequences in episode 669 of the podcast. He goes into a lot more detail, but suffice it to say, don't do a whole lot of heavy lifting in creating content just to never use it again and have all the new readers or listeners or whatever it is that you're creating miss it when they join weeks, months, years later, Alan shares his tip on how to reduce the most dangerous number in your business one and create epic evergreen sequence.

Income comes from assets. And here's what I mean. So if you own a house, you can get rental income. If you own stocks, you would get dividend income. And so the exact same thing is true for marketing. If we build marketing assets, they will generate new leads, new prospects, new clients, and ultimately new revenue without you Having to do anything. I mean, I can rent a house out and I'll get rental income whether I work hard or not. It'll just come. I mean, there is of course maintenance. You might have to whatever, fix a roof or whatever it is from time to time. But generally speaking, once you own an asset, it continues to generate new income. And so that's the exact same kind of philosophy that I have with marketing is how can we generate new income and new leads and new prospects without having to do more work? Because if you're the system, if you are the rainmaker and you have to generate all of the new income, well, if you want to double your revenue, well, you're going to have to double the hours that you work. And for most people that's not even possible and it's certainly not attractive. So really thinking in terms of your marketing, is what I'm doing going to build an asset that is going to deliver new customers new prospects in the future. So when I was doing email marketing, one of the things that really frustrated me was that I could write a killer email to my list and it performed really well and people loved it and things like that. But if someone subscribed to my list tomorrow or the day after tomorrow or anytime in the future, they would never see that awesome email. And it felt like very much a wasted effort. And so the strategy that I came up with was to build a long term maintenance sequence. So rather than just sending a broadcast to the list, which was once and done and took a lot of effort by the way, because you've got to do this on a regular basis, at least weekly. And in fact we mail our list three times a week. So it's quite labor intensive. And then this effort is kind of once and done. And I thought a much more powerful approach would be could I use this to build an asset, an evergreen maintenance sequence. So rather than doing a broadcast to the list, I started adding new emails to this long term maintenance sequence. And as you said, I think we're probably well over a hundred emails into that long term maintenance nurturing sequence. So people opting in today might get an email that was written years ago or months ago. And as long as it's still relevant and as long as it's something that is evergreen, one is the most dangerous number. As you said, one supplier, one major customer, one source of leads, and it just makes your business fragile.

Finally, lesson number 10, when it comes to taking on risks and new projects, don't worry about competition. Ask what's safe to try and Remember that there is room for you. In episode 81, Aaron Dignan, author of Brave New Work and founder of many awesome businesses, talks about how he runs his own decentralized organization and that rather than a hierarchical structure where people are looking to him for approval and him being the bottleneck, the question is really what's safe to try? You'll also hear from Megan Doherty in episode 89. She talked about this question or insecurity that a lot of content creators have. Is the market too saturated? She might use the word podcast. Fill in any word of your choosing. If you are somebody that's hesitating or you're feeling insecure, you're wondering if you should create whatever it is on your mind and your heart to create, but you're feeling nervous that maybe there's too much out there already. I wanted to close with words from Megan, not just because she puts this so well. I like to think of podcasting like making friends. Do you ever have too many friends? Sometimes, yes. But usually there's always room for one new awesome person, just like there's always room for dessert. I also wanted to close with Megan because she and the team at One Stone Creative have been doing such an incredible job with this podcast. I brought them on right before the book launched in the start of 2022, and they are the reason that there are 100 episodes that they come out consistently twice a week. And so I really want to say huge thanks to Megan, Darla, Erwin, and everybody else on the onestone creative team for helping this show exist and to sound as great as it does. Of course, I'm biased.

Writing the right legal agreements and the right social agreements with our colleagues to basically say we're all adults here. We could actually just be and treat each other like adults. We don't have to, you know, oversee and scrutinize and micromanage what each other does. And so we can create an operating system or a way of working that is based on consent, based on the idea of what is safe to try. And what have we chosen to constrain or restrict rather than permission, which is like, hey, you can't do anything until Aaron says you can.

No listener has ever found a podcast on a topic that they care about, either personally or professionally, and thought, gadzooks, I've done it. I have found the sole and single podcast on this topic I will ever want to listen to. Surely it contains every insight and viewpoint I will ever care about. My work is done and I may rest. It just doesn't happen like that if there are a lot of podcasts in your topic, it means that there are a lot of people interested in your topic, period. And you don't need to worry about competing to be the very best unless doing so brings you particular joy because people listen to lots of podcasts about the things that they listen to.

I also have to say huge thanks to all of you who are here listening. This show would not exist without you. I mean it could, but if a podcast releases into the forest and there's no one there to listen, does anybody know? I'm not sure. I know that. I'm so grateful for you. Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening, thank you for subscribing, for sharing episodes with your friends, and if you enjoyed this roundup this recap, please tell me, leave a review, but specifically share what's one of the top lessons that you've learned so far from the Free Time podcast. I'll be delighted to know you can leave that wherever you listen to podcasts. And again, if you want to share this episode with a friend, go to Pod Link freetime. Thank you so much everybody. Have a beautiful rest of your day.

If you've listened this far, you get a gold star. Thank you. Word of mouth is the most joyful way we can grow this show, and it helps us land interviews with the luminaries and insightful guests that you would most love to hear from. Please send this episode to a friend who might find it helpful, helpful and for show notes and related links from this episode, visit itsfreetime.com while you're there, make sure you're subscribed to the Time well Spent newsletter. You'll get instant access to my Tech Toolkit, a continually updated list of all the software I use, along with the total monthly spend to run my business where no one works full time even me. Visit itsfreetime.com join remember, you are running the show. It's time for radical reimagining and everything is up for grabs. Let it be easy, let it be fun, and build with love.

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