136: Start Finishing—Pricing, Projects, and Momentum Planning with Charlie Gilkey

Hi, this is Charles Michael Davis. Toyotathon is on so stop by your local Toyota dealer for incredible year end deals on the cars, trucks and SUVs known for their legendary reliability like the stylish and efficient Camry, the Ready for anything RAV4 or check out a rough and rugged Tacoma or Tundra, all with great financing and lease options available to qualified customers. Visit buyatoyota.com to find out more. Toyota let's go places.

What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot Podcast and author of the Only Move that Matters is your next one.

For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast if Change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Hello everybody. I am absolutely delighted to have longtime friend, mentor, friender Charlie Gilke with us here today. We are actually piloting an experimental format which is a live Pivot Podcast recording with the Momentum community. So you are listening right now and you can't see, but we have a whole momo crew here behind the scenes on mute. The first half of the conversation will be me interviewing Charlie and then we're gonna open it up for live Q and A. We have never done this before. We're all a little excited and I can't say nervous, but just curious how it's gonna go. So that's what you can expect in this conversation. And before we dive in, I'll tell you a little bit more about Charlie and remind you that Momentum doors are reopening for enrollment on October 10th, so we would love to have you. If you are looking to build and Design your ideal six figure heart based business in 2020, you can learn more@pivotmethod.com Momentum and don't forget, I'll be doing a live masterclass on 10 scalable streams of solopreneur income at 10am on 10 10. So should be easy to remember. You can enroll in that for free at Pivot Love 10 streams. And that's the number one zero streams pivot.love 10 stream streams a little bit About Charlie Charlie is the founder of Productive Flourishing, a website that helps change makers, creatives, leaders and entrepreneurs start finishing the stuff that matters. It is routinely placed in the top 50 websites for planning, productivity, creativity and team development for creative folks. His most recent book, which just launched and is the subject of this conversation, is Start how to Go from Idea to Done and it helps people get their best Work out into the world by identifying what matters most and overcoming challenges that get in the way of finishing your most creative projects. The last fun fact about Charlie is I finally met him in person. We had been friends through the Internet for a few years, and I met him in person in 2012 at a conference in Portland. And it was him and Pamela Slim, our beloved Auntie Pam. And they both said to me they were the first and only people in my life who said to me, jenny, you would be crazy not to quit Google. We believe in you. What are you waiting for? So Charlie was that angel on my shoulder so many years ago. He's a business coach to so many of my friends and people in this space. And Charlie, I'm just beyond ecstatic to have you here today. Welcome.

I am so pumped to be here. Jenny, thanks so much for having me and thanks for taking me back to that moment. Because, you know, that's the great thing about this life and the work that I do is that you never know who you're going to be there for on that day and then how it's going to unfold years later to where you know you're coming back full circle.

And how meaningful those words can be of giving somebody courage, you know, and just that, that little nudge where everyone else in my life had been saying, you're crazy to leave Google. What are you thinking? Why would you do that? And you were just said, you're crazy not to. Like, no one had said it in that way to me at that point.

Well, let's make it about Jenny for just a second. For real, for real, though. No, no, seriously, I want to, because this is super instructive. Because at that time, you know, the big challenge, if I may reveal a little bit here, Jenny, is that, like, feel free, this really great job at Google, like, who leaves Google? No one leaves Google. Right. Unless you absolutely have to. But.

And it wasn't yet the story of the week on fastcompany.com, you know.

Yeah, it weren't, you know, but it was one of those things where what Pam and I saw at that time was like, you were in that window of opportunity that you had created for yourself. And the longer you stayed at Google, the harder it would be to leave at the same time that. The harder it would be to invest and drive your business forward at the same time. So you're just in that inflection point where it's so easy to hang on to the safety of the shore while you sort of have one foot in the raft. And eventually it's going to pull you apart. Right. And so I'm just so proud of you for, um, taking that very unconventionally at that time. And look at you go now.

Well, thank you. I've never heard it put that way of one foot on the shore, one foot in the rafts. And it's so true. That side split can only last so long. This must have then been 2010 or 2011, because I left Google in March 2011.

So yeah, I think it was 2010 or 2011, but it was early. Yeah, it was.

It would have had to be 2010. This is crazy right now. Okay, now we're going way back. You had a really interesting pivot. And what I find so fascinating has been also watching your journey over the years because you pivoted from the military into doing your own thing with productive flourishing in the military and a background in philosophy. I am so curious when, because I actually didn't find it in your bio, but what year you started productive flourishing? And what gave you the confidence to pivot from that very tactical job doing military as doing battalion planning officer during Operation Iraqi Freedom, pivoting to this platform that you have now?

I think the official start date is 2007.

Wow.

Is when I started PF. Now, I've been reading in the background and I want to be clear here. I'm all about showing the dirty laundry, especially the early dirty laundry. You don't get to see yesterday's, but I'll show you 10 years ago. That's a half joke. But anyways, Productive Flourishing is actually the third, actually name of the blog. It had two terrible names before that. And what, how I pivoted was that, you know, I was. I had just come back from Operation Iraqi Freedom and I was right back in graduate school for philosophy. I'm a social and political philosopher and also an ethicist. And I was simultaneously pushing both careers forward. And I'm not a sort of marking time guy. I don't do well with just sort of sitting the bench. Like, if I do something, I want to do it and win. And I'd reached this point to where, you know, both of those careers were going full steam ahead. We had recently bought a house. And if you've ever bought your first house, like buying any house is a project, but your first house is a real project, right? So we had just bought a house and I was trying to be a somewhat decent husband, which I consider as a project, right? And looking back, what I was saying is like, I really have to get my Stuff together. I'm not getting this done. Like, what, What's. You know, the first thing is what's wrong with me? But then I sort of figured out, like, wait a second. No, it's just a lot going on. But as any good scholar and any good sort of teacher would do, I started looking out and saying, like, look, other people have had this problem over commitment is a human problem. I'm a human. What have other people tried? And so that's where I sort of stumbled upon the getting things done. And I stumbled upon the seven habits and I stumbled on sort of the productivity and personal development literature. And as great as it was, I found that it really, like one side of it, the productivity side of it was far too granular and sort of nitty gritty and tactical. And I found the personal development literature to be way too big and broad. I mean, I love conversations about values and purpose and vision. But at the same time, when you read that, like, how does that apply to the next thing that you do? How does that apply to the work that you have to get done this week? And so there's this pretty big gap. And so what I started doing was synthesizing a lot of the stuff that I had learned as a military officer and as a Boy Scout and also synthesizing the stuff that I was learning from social and political philosophy and ethics about what it meant to thrive and what it meant to live a good, rich life. And sort of injecting that into the middle of the literature to sort of bridge those two gaps. And that's eventually where we end up with productive flourishing. Right? Which it's important to me at least that productive modifies flourishing. Right? The end goal of our activity is to thrive and to live this really good, rich life. And it turns out that to live that good and rich life, you've got to do stuff to build that life and to maintain that life. And so that's how I ended up pivoting. And it wasn't some people start businesses because. And Jenny, I think you might have been in this perspective. It's not that I hated being an officer. It's not that I hated being an academic. It's just doing what I do at Pfizer is, was at the time and continues to be the best way for me to live this rich, full spectrum life that I wanted to live. Because as a officer, I found that I had to hide significant parts of myself, especially the philosophical part of myself. Right? I mean, that was much more, get it done. We've got a mission like we don't have time to think about all this stuff, so on and so forth. And as a philosopher, I found that I actually didn't have much room to talk about the practical, pragmatic stuff. Right. Is all ivory tower stuff. And so neither one felt complete to me. And it turned out that productive flourishing ended up being that synthesis where.

Those of you who know me well can know that I can very much put on a drill sergeant or a military commander hat when I need to to get something done. But I can also sit and talk philosophy and ideas for hours at the same time.

And you just are the biggest hearted guy. It's like even with that big logistics brain of yours, before we hit record, I loved seeing you show us the book and how beautiful it was and all the thought and intention that goes into it. You just have the warmest presence. It's warm and calming on top of all of that.

I appreciate that. Thank you.

You also have, I think one of your superpowers is laser vision into complexity and into exactly what's tripping people up. Because I know so many of friends have gone to you as their business coach and even I'll see you after not seeing you in person for several years and you'll just zoom right in. You'll be like, is it this or this? And boom, you've cracked this nut. And I'm wondering if you've always had that gift of I don't even know if it's just simplifying complexity or truly it is like laser vision into things that are stopping people in their business somehow. And you also know how to take them toward the solution. And I wonder how you developed that skill and what allows you to do that.

Well, thank you for that. I think a lot of it is pattern recognition. When you read and do and have experienced as much as I have in these short 39 years, like you see a broader, a broad array of human patterns and anti patterns and what's going on. And so part of it is just having a deep pool. It's kind of like people think chess masters are making like brilliant moves and doing all that, but really what they've done is they've unconsciously memorized lots and lots of games and the next move is just from them sort of picking the picture of the game that matches the one that's closest to the one they're playing. Right. And so a lot of times when, when I see that, it's like someone's talking and I kind of. It's a weird feeling, but I Like, see under the words of what they're saying. And I'm saying, like, okay, here's what's going on. And also, because I work with so many brilliant, compassionate, driven people, I know all the different ways in which we'll hide our weak parts. Right. And sometimes, Jenny, it's kind of funny because sometimes it's like I see people starting to build, like, this big mental labyrinth that they want to pull people in and run around in that labyrinth. That's not actually what they're really challenged by and what they're really afraid of, but it's where they feel safe. And so if you're not careful, well, you could end up in this mirage of what people are doing. And I want you to believe when really what they're saying is, like, look at the shiny bubble over here. Look at the shiny bubble over here. And then somewhere else is where they're hurting, and somewhere else is where they're weak. And so I've just learned to see that enough to not even pay attention to most of the labyrinth that they want to tell me and to just go like, you know, I'm not even going to address that because that's a bridge to nowhere. But I'm going to jump in here and ask this other question because I think this is what actually is closer to what's going on. And that could be really unnerving for people. Like, I have to ask permission or be in a relationship where I can do that.

But I think it's just.

I guess the best way to say it is like.

I want to love and see people and help them do and be their best. And sometimes that means very quickly getting into this uncomfortable space and out of those labyrinths and out of those shiny baubles and doing the best I can to be sort of that gentle, warm force, but also unrelenting about what needs to happen right now or what's actually going on.

So that, you know, we can get to where we're trying to go.

And that's such a mark of a great coach, too. That said, that's listening not just to the words being said or, like you said, even a business or project owner's comfort zone of what would be comfortable to talk about versus your intuitive sense and seeing of what's really going on or what might be going on, at least putting out a hypothesis.

Yeah. And that's one of the main differences. Not to go too deep into, like, shop talk around coaches, but around coaching. But one of the chief differences on the business consulting and coaching side is that there are legit parts of the world that they're working in that they can't see and they don't own. So sort of on the life coaching side, what we kind of say is like, they own the problem and the solution, but on the business side, a lot of times there's just a. There's a educational gap, there's an experience gap, there's a confidence gap that prevents people from seeing what can be what's actually going on. And so you have to sort of apply different tools and different ways of approaching that when you're dealing with people. And at the same time, we're also people. Right. So you can't get away from the life challenges and the life stuff that people are going through. And sometimes people can't see that their challenge with their partner is actually the same challenge that they're having with their teammates.

Their inability to tell their parents that they need space and boundaries is the same thing that's tied to their inability to claim the space for the vision for the business. And so you have to sort of walk in these two worlds pretty simultaneously.

And that's so fascinating. And I really do have always thought that business, parenthood and partnership are the three biggest like, or at least three ginormous personal growth journeys that running your own business will bring. Bring up all that stuff that could be showing up in those other areas and you're going to have to confront it all. If you're the founder.

Yeah. I mean, at some point on the journey to entrepreneurship or freelancing or whatever we want to call owning your own business, you will have to come face to face with your worth.

Or learn that your worth is not what you think it is, and it's not understanding that. But I think when we come to some of the challenges, especially in the scale of businesses that you help in the momentum group, lot of it is around worth and value. And in fact, I was teaching at a workshop this weekend and someone was talking about pricing and how troubling pricing can be. And one of the things I said is like, look, one of the best things you can learn is to separate worth from price. Because when you start thinking like, is my service worth it? Is my talent worth it? Is my experience worth it worth the price, Then you get really super weird because that price can float based upon different audiences that you might work in. And so it's the fact that you're working with multimillionaires that need to pay 10x to actually understand the value of your service. How does that Relate to your worth. How does that. So we so closely entangle our personal worth and what we charge that it could really trip us up.

That's so true and so well said. I feel like, I feel like it's also a. Almost a staircase. Like I have to confront that worth question in different ways. It's very sneaky over the years. It's not like it happened once and I check the box and I'm done. It's like every time I'm taking my business to another level, I go through that cycle again.

Or at a zero. At a level.

What'd you say?

At a zero. At a level.

Yeah, exactly. Or there's the thrash. I'll be working on a sales page, like for the momentum launch that's happening now and I'll go through what you describe and start finishing as a thrash. And I'm like, oh, is this even worth it? Can I even do this? You know, And I just go all the way down that rabbit hole of worth and questioning and thrashing. And I'm curious to hear, what do you recommend? So if you, if it's important that entrepreneurs separate price and worth. And of course we know self worth is priceless, but how do you recommend people think about pricing?

Pricing is just what someone is willing to pay.

So I'm going to go. I don't know how much time we have today, Jenny, but I'm going to talk about this because I think it's helpful. We come from in the West a subconscious or we come from a rich tradition of what's called just pricing, where two, 300 years ago, people could literally be fined and hanged and imprisoned for charging a higher rate than what something was worth. And it was normally cost plus a little bit, right? That was the just price for something. And we haven't used that as a cultural framework for quite a while. But the vestiges have hung on. If we charge more than something is worth, then we've cheated somebody and we've done something unethical and so on, so forth. But when you really look at any given service, especially when you start talking about services, the price elasticity, meaning what you can charge for a given service, is really, really broad in the United States. I mean, you can make, for instance, freelance designers, right, Website designers. You can make a website for $500. You can make the same website in a different audience for $50,000. What determined the worth and value of that? Just what someone was willing to pay and what someone could pay. And so what I would say is you really have to look at your prices and base it upon the economic reality of those of whom you're serving. If you're serving people that come from a high income or high wealth background, you're going to need to charge and you don't. I'm going to say it that way and you don't, you're going to need to charge far more than you're comfortable with. But you've got to understand that there is this placebo effect that happens a lot of times with products or services, that the more we pay for something, the more we'll value it. And especially if your product or service is especially transformative, if you're not charging enough, people are not going to invest in it enough to do the hard work that they never do or that they need to do. So if you've ever given free advice and are you given a lot of free advice and seen what's happened, you know what I'm talking about, People just won't do the work. But if you take that same thing that you said and you throw, you know, $100 or you know, you throw a thousand dollars on it, and all of a sudden people are like, oh man, this is super valuable. I have to take action on it because I paid for it and I'm not gonna let that money down. It's the same advice. The motivation has changed. So one, price is a signal for what someone can pay. Two, be careful that you don't fall into a just pricing trap. Three, base your prices on. Well, I'll say this, there are also three factors. You'll get this from me a lot. Sorry guys, it's just the way the brain works.

I love your brain. I'm loving the framework already.

There are three ways to really base your prices on. So one is cost basis. How much does it cost to make or serve the particular service or offer that you're doing? So that's one framework. The second is the market basis. How much is going on in the market? Just pro tip, look at the average in the market, multiply it by 0.3, because if you go back for the average, you're basically setting your rates upon other people's insecurities. And the third is value based pricing, which is the value to the customer. Typically what we look at is that first, one is the lowest level of profitability that you're going to be able to get. And the latter is the highest level of profitability. But it's also hardest to sell the value to someone else. So usually it makes most sense to get A range of what people in the market are paying for given good or service that's analogous to yours that creates the market based pricing. Compare that to what it cost you to create or deliver that service and make sure that it's profitable. Because there's plenty of rates out there that actually are averages in the market that are not profitable and sustainable. So you need to check against the cost basis to make sure that you can actually continue to do it. And then as your business grows and as your confidence grows and as your expertise and ability to deliver on your promises grows, then that's where you start growing into value based pricing.

I love the framework. This Charlie Gilkey everybody. So it's so good, so helpful, so specific. And I have to say this is we found this in Momentum as well. In the early days, we would give complimentary membership at certain moments or friends or people who, or clients. And no matter who we gave complimentary membership, they didn't really participate. They weren't part of it. And then as soon as someone chooses to invest and does invest, they're so much more likely to participate. And we even had experiences years ago where someone would go sort of graduate, they would cancel their membership. And we tried a few pilots where we'd offer complimentary membership as a thank you for helping us build the program. And it still didn't work. It just didn't work. And I notice myself too, every time I go purchase a course, I think to myself, doesn't matter if it's 500 or $10,000 or a coach or an event, I say, now how am I going to earn this back or how am I going to earn double this of whatever I just spent? And it does motivate, it does in a way call your clients to rise to that level of investment and commitment.

Absolutely. And.

One way that I've learned that you can be someone who offers free advice or if you just want to help people out, is attach that advice to a commitment. So if I'm talking to Jenny, I'm like, hey, it's been great conversation. So when are you going to do the thing that we've just talked about and they say, you know, I'm going to do it by that date. There's enough status investment, they got enough skin in the game via their status and their words that they'll actually do something with it? Usually, or more often than if you don't ask that sort of question and you don't necessarily have to follow up. But again, I think it's really about them putting skin in the game so that they're like, wow, if I don't do it, then they're going to think less of me or I'm not going to be the person that I want to be as opposed to just like, oh, that's cool, thanks, bye. Right, so that's, that can be a way that you, if you are in those scenarios to where you want to, you know, help someone or you want to do that thing that you do, but you want to make sure to non monetize it and keep it in a social realm. That's a way that you can make it effective. And just remember that, you know, one thing that I encourage people to think about is pick a percentage of your time. Maybe it's 15, maybe it's 20% of your time. That's just community service time that you don't charge for. And that could be that you're doing a, you know, class every quarter at the local college or we work or whatever. And don't worry about like whether you're getting what you're worth and whether you're doing all that, like show up and be of service and just carve out a little bit. And you know, for everything else though, charge what you're worth. Right. If someone can't afford and you want to give someone scholarship and you can make that work, then do that. But for everything else, don't wheedle on prices because in the end what will happen is you'll, especially for service providers, you'll have 7 different clients with 7 different rate structures. And when you start trying to go get support or you start trying to talk to assistants about that, it's so hard for people to figure out where you actually are. And it's so hard for you to figure out what your peak earning potential is, what your revenue can be, because you're literally all over the board with prices. Find a place. Find a place where you can be 100% generous and just do what you do, but that's a small percentage of your business and then for the rest, be 100% or as close to it as you can be. Like on top of and positioning your worth. Excuse me, not your worth.

Your values and your prices.

Awesome, awesome, awesome. I love that. And that's so great to have a container for the just pure service and free, complimentary, even a call once a month and then separating that from your actual services and charging what you're worth. Let's move over to start finishing. You have such brilliant ideas, solutions, frameworks for thinking about projects and I Would love for you to just take us to why we should be thinking about projects, not ideas. And maybe you could even just hop right over to giving an overview for listeners of the five project rule and even the project pyramid. So we're just doing a project pivot over to that topic.

I'm going to throw in another project concept while we're at it. So here we go. So, you know, you sort of alluded to it, Jenny. We don't do ideas, we do projects. And this is really important. It's simple, but really important, because as creative people and as people generally, you know, we can take on a near infinity of ideas, a near infinity of hunches and aspirations, but unfortunately, to do anything with them, we're gonna have to do that in space and time. And one of the fundamental challenges of the human condition is that we are these unlimited sentience in a body bound by space and time. Right? So our reach will always exceed our grasp. So what I want people to really start thinking about is, you know, yes, you can have all the ideas you want, but stop applying some commitment juice to those ideas. That as soon as you have that quote, unquote good idea that you should do something with it. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. And just because you could doesn't mean that you will. Right. And so just sort of separating that. But the second you start thinking about, oh, I'm going to go do something with this idea, that's when you start thinking about planning. That's when you start thinking about what you're actually trying to do, who you need to have, what's going to come up, and you go right into that process. And the way that I like to think about it is it's kind of like, you know, ideas exist in this sort of heavenly realm where unicorns and all things beautiful exist. I know I sound very Platonic there, but there we go. I'm talking to a philosopher, right? They live up in that realm and everything's great. But our job here on Earth is to take those ideas, pull them to the. Pull them to the Earth, sort of drag them through the mud a little bit, because that's going to happen. And what we find is that when we actually finish those projects, the result is actually more beautiful than what it started with. Right. Whatever image that we had up there, like when you do your best work, that work that your soul calls to do, that work that is going to benefit you and other people at the same time, that work that you're going to look back at at the end of the year, at the end of five years or in a decade and say, wow, I'm glad I did that. When you do that type of work, it opens up new beautiful possibilities that you couldn't imagine before you started the project. But you only get that when you finish the project. All right? Now the beauty of this is. Or not the beauty, I'll say it this way, we live in what I call project world.

And project world is basically the idea that every three to five years, your personal and professional life is going to change or morph into something different, right? So entrepreneurs out there, small business owners, by the way, every three to five years, your business is going to evolve into something different than it was before and you're going to be stuck in that gap of like, how do, how does what I'm doing now relate to what I did before and how do I talk about it? Like, that's a thing that happens to everyone and that's a good thing that's not happening. Then your business is too stagnant. Okay, I'm just going to say that now on the personal side, we do things like, you know, meet someone who comments, you know, on your rocking overalls as you're walking down New York and, you know, fall in love with that person, marry that person.

I know who you're talking about.

There's a three to five year sort of life cycle of that relationship before evolves into something else. Right? And before it evolves into something else, every three to five years, those around us, our siblings, our parents, our kids, if we have them, they take different steps in the journey of their lives and we need to be responsive to that as well. So there's real great grace to this, is that every three to five years you're going to be doing something different. You don't have to worry about making that once in a lifetime choice. You don't have to be paralyzed thinking, like, if I make this one decision that's like the next couple decades of my life and what if I make the wrong choice? And what if that's not what I want to be when I grow up? And what if, what if, what if, guess what? Win, lose or draw, three to five years, you're going to be doing something different. Now the downside to Project World is that you don't get to take all the things you just merely be working on with you. Like it really counts that you finish projects and wrap up that chapter of your life. Wrap that up. And so like from an employment perspective, saying, you know, I've worked here for 10 years is not really that great if you haven't had any significant projects or wins to show in that 11 years. Because we don't care about who's been. Who's had their butt in the seat. We care about who's been driving the bus forward. So you want to be one of those people. So I just want to slide with that project world idea because I think it opens up the possibility for a lot of people to try things and to quest in different ways than if they think, wow, if I do this, what about the rest of my life? Now, five projects rule is the long, nerdy way of saying it. I guess that only I'm going to say it is actually no more than five active projects per time perspective. So let me break that down. No more than makes sense. But people don't pay attention to that piece. Right? They think I get five projects. Okay, now remember, a project is anything that takes time, energy and attention. So getting married is a project. Getting your kid off the couch, you know, and off to college finally is a project. Moving across the United States to move from, you know, California to New York, that's a project. Cleaning out the closet of doom that we all have. Right. That's a project, too. As is starting a business, writing a book. All the other sort of things that we think about. When we think about getting things done in productivity in general, we have a bias that we think about economic work primarily and then sort of try to find a place in the gaps for the work of our lives. And I want us to really put it all on the table and make everything projects. And then we can start deciding to what degree our economic work should be prioritized with our personal work.

And I just want to second that because you say in the intro, your best work is easily displaced by other stuff. And even as I was trying to go into my first semester at seminary, I was getting married, buying a house, and moving. And then that spilled into second semester. And I'm like, and trying to run my business and trying to travel for speaking engagements. And I'm like, oh, why is school so hard? Why is my business so hard?

Hello.

I was buying, you know, buying a house and getting married. And it's like, we think somehow that our business is going to be this pure expression of productivity values. And then life happens and then it creates this collision where I think a lot of people feel sometimes guilty or, why aren't I getting more done? Or, oh, no, I'm getting distracted. And I know we'll get into some of that later. But I just love your idea, Charlie, of admitting like we have personal and professional projects and they're all important and they all count toward this five projects rule.

They all count. So Jenny, I was counting as you were listening, all the listing, all the things I was like, that's five and that's not counting like your yoga practice and your other practices that I know you also do as well. So I'm like, jen, I just started with four. I don't know that you started with four.

I don't think I did. I had like probably 20, way too many and it's not sustainable.

Yeah. And it doesn't mean that like. And I'm so glad you brought that up because I think when we are over committed in that way and we're not counting the stories, what we start doing is destroying ourselves. So as creative people, we are either creating something or we're destroying something. There's a reason why so many of our spiritual traditions tie spiritual, excuse me, tie creativity and destruction together because they're one in the same force. When you think about it. It just depends on how you're using it. But if we're not using the energy of our souls to create this type of work, we're going to be using it elsewhere. And you know, we're going to destroy the relationships around us because we'll get resentful and frustrated and mad that other people are not helping us do our work or they're getting in the way or whatever reasons. Right. We'll destroy our resources because we're like, you know, the irony here is we created. People say, if I just had more time and money, then I would be able to do the thing. But what we do is when we're not doing our thing, we go and we waste our time on Facebook and Instagram, YouTube, whatever, right? And we waste our money through retail therapy. So the very things we need, we squander and then tell ourselves we don't have that and if we had that, we wouldn't squander it. So we end up in this really catch 22 scenario. And the third thing that we really will latch onto for destruction is ourselves through the stories we tell ourselves, the head trash that we start to pile upon, the limiting beliefs, so on and so forth. So at a certain point we go from what's wrong to what's wrong with me. And that critical step can make all the difference between your ability to cope, your ability to adjust versus thinking that somehow you're uniquely defective. I'm not going to read Start finishing. I'm not going to read Pivot, I'm not going to read all those books because that works for other people. But I got this thing, this thing that makes me uniquely defective. And as long as I have that thing, I'm not going to be successful. And I know it sounds absurd when I say it that way, but think about how many times you've told yourself a story about something being wrong with you, your character and who you are that prevents you from being the boss that you know you could be. Okay? So I'm going to step off that soapbox. But I might get back on it. I can't promise you I'm going to stay off of it.

So going through number five, active, that means projects that are actually on your virtual or physical or emotional desktop, that you're actually pushing forward per time perspective. Now, this is the trickier part. This goes into the project pyramid that Danny mentioned earlier. I think we all intuitively know the difference between a week sized project and a month sized project. And we can quibble about whether 25 hours or 27 hours makes a month sized project, but we don't have to because we know, I think that difference between that size and quantum of a week size project versus a month sized project, just like we know the difference between a month sized project and a quarter sized project and a quarter sized project and a year sized project. That's our friend. Because when we're sitting down and we're thinking, huh, what am I going to do this month? All right, we fixed that time perspective. And that's where the five projects rule can kick in. So you look at all of the month size projects that you're currently doing or that you want to do and you say, which ones am I going to do? Because you're not going to get more than five done, right? People like I can get more, Charlie. But when you really look at it, when you really look at those people that are winning, those people that you know deep down have you frustrated and mad because they're lapping you with how much they're getting done, really what they're doing is just focusing on two or three things at a time and pushing them to done while you're carrying 22 and getting two done, right? All that additional project weight, all that additional emotional weight that you're carrying is not helping you get anything else done. Actually, it's in the way. So the fewer projects that you commit to that matter and the ones that you get done, actually, the faster you're going to be on those momentum flywheel where you get it done, you move to the next one, you get it done, you move to the next one and you don't have the dead weight. And sort of that feeling of all the other stuff that you're not doing, this is sort of dragging along behind you. I know I'm very visceral of my metaphors. Just work with me.

There's so much good stuff in here.

And so that's where the five projects rule can kick in. And obviously what we'd want to do is like, if you decide this quarter I'm going to do something. So if you're going to go on a 90 day sprint, you say, that's my goal, then start thinking, okay, so what are the month size projects that relate to that quarterly project? Okay, now that I've got that all right, this week, what do I need to do this week to push that project forward? So it really makes, you know, chunking projects down and getting them on your calendar so much easier. And I just want to pause here because I want everyone to know that we humans are terrible at thinking about time. Right? It's not just you if you have that sort of thing, like, it's just a really hard thing because there's at least four different ways we think about time. I won't go into it, but my editors actually asked me if I would write like a book, something like the Epistemology of Time. And I'm like, no one is going to buy that. But it turns out that there are four, maybe five different ways we think about time. But I just want to pause it and say it this way. Everyone listening, think about the size of an ant. Little black ant crawling around. Okay, now, as best as possible, at the same time, I want you to think about the size of the Milky Way galaxy.

Someone's brain just sort of like, I can't do it. Like, we can't do that scope of size at the same time. Our brains can't do it. Well, when it comes to time, my argument is that thinking about a day and thinking about a year invokes that same sort of thing that our brains can't do. So it's always important for us to sort of fix the level of time that we're thinking about, because that level of time is going to dictate the amount of clarity that we need and it's going to dictate what we will do with that space of time. But if you're ever trying to think about, you know, your year's resolutions and then writing the task that you need to do, like the literal 15 minute task that you need to do right now. Your brain is going to short circuit. Not just you, it's just part of our wiring.

I think that's why I'm bad at social media. Truly. Truly. I love spending time on big, strategic, meaty questions. And I think my brain just can't pivot to like firing off a tweet. It just can't. And I could get better at batching and scheduling it on purpose in advance, but I tried that anyway. That's a total tangent.

It's a total tangent. But it's also right. I mean, it's also right like going from, you know, a project. Oh, and that I'm glad you actually mentioned that in a sideway because I'm gonna slow, I'm gonna throw in here that like, it's really important that we have micro projects and habits that do get us to be kinesthetically active. So whether that's knitting, whether that's playing guitar, whether that's yoga or peloton or whatever your thing is. Because the more you do this is for Jenny, but it's for everybody else. The more you do like long term strategic projects, the more you need something grounded and tactical and now so that you have that relationship between effort and reward. Because a really frustrating thing is when you're setting a ball in motion and you won't know where it ends up four or five years from now. And you do that every day. At a certain point, it's not satisfying emotionally and you will check out of it.

Right?

But if you have these other sort of micro practices that do tie in your effort to reward, it can help you have the patience to let your strategic projects unfold without trying to short circuit them so that you get. So that you can actually see some fruit on the tree before it's ready to be yielded.

I love, I love that you brought in physical and kinesthetic and practices. At one point I even purchased clay off of Amazon because I knew someone had said playing with clay throughout the day can be grounding. But that just gave me an aha moment. Which explains why sometimes I like tidying in between calls and why I actually like admin work sometimes, which you talked about in the book. And I think I used to beat myself up like, oh, I shouldn't be doing this, I should be delegating this. There were certain things where I'm like, oh, I'm tinkering on my website, or I'm Tinkering in a sauna. And I know that I'm tinkering, but I think you just said it, which is that sometimes there is something to be said for just that small level tinkering and feeling of satisfaction, whether it's tidying a room, color coding a bookshelf or cleaning up a sauna. It's like I need it. I need it to balance the other stuff.

We all need it to balance stuff. It's why I clean my office at the end of the day. Like, no, win, lose or draw, I'm going to clean off my desk. I'm going to do all that, that sort of stuff. Because even if, you know, all of our strategists are control freaks, it's just part of the job, right? Even if all that shit goes, dang it, Charlie. Even if all that goes sideways and the world is going to continue to be the messy way that it is, and I'm going to have to reflect that. At least my desk is a place where I can have some sense of joy and some sense of meaning and purpose. And sometimes it's just those small corners of the universe that you carve off for yourself that enable you to step up and be in the arena of the larger pockets of the universe that you're working in.

I also want to highlight there was so much gold in what you just said. One not to take it personally. I just love how in fact I read this part out loud to Michael, my husband. On discipline. You say that a disciplined person with much less talent and experience can brute force their way into success, inspires no end of frustration for us creatives and that sometimes we fall into and you even call it comparatis, comparitis. Maybe that's how it's better said comparison where we're looking and we're seeing people that seem to be like flying with momentum and success and maybe they don't have what you perceive as much talent or not that we were comparing, but the fact that they're moving things to done and it's not personal, it's that they have figured out how to move, how to focus and how to move things to done. And you mentioned in there, you said momentum, flywheel and fun fact, I just love this because it to me just shows how much we're on the same page. That and you know, Charlie, but Charlie, Pamela Slim, who we mentioned and I, all three launched programs named Momentum at exactly the same time in exactly the same year. And that just was cool. Like we're on the same wavelength. And I know that's around when you launched your momentum planning method. So I'm wondering if you could just speak to the momentum flywheel and the momentum planning method if they're different than what you had previously just explained.

So the momentum planning method is just a amalgam of different practices that incorporates things like time based reviews. So when a week rolls over, you do weekly review of last week and you plan for this week. When a month rolls over, you do the same thing, quarter rolls over. So just a way. And it's a continual practice that keeps you in touch with what needs to be done, what you've said you're going to do, what you're not like, it just keeps your plans up to date, which means it keeps your work up to date, which means it keeps your sanity up to date. And so, you know, there are tons of resources we have on productive flourishing for how to do it. It's also in the book, the momentum flywheel is just the recognition that.

It'S easiest to build from success and from what you have completed than from what you're talking about doing, right? So you complete a thing that's going to open up new doors for you to do another thing. You complete that thing and you end up on this upward spiral such that at a certain point.

It seems like your project and your work is propelling itself and in a good way you're chasing it as opposed to when you're in that space where it's like, you know, you're trying to tug on and it's that really recalcitrant donkey that you're trying to tug on to get, to move for you and to drag something, right? And so it's just success that builds upon success that ratchets upon another success, so and so forth. And so project projects and our work, I think it has the same laws of like physics in the same way that inertia does. So like, you know, an object in motion stays in motion. I think a project in motion stays in motion.

And a project that stuck stays stuck in a lot of different ways. And so there is. Now, I want to be careful here because I don't want people to get the image of just sort of like that mindless juggling where stuff is just coming in and it's just, you know, you're kind of like the I Love Lucy episode where she's got the chocolate, she's cramming it in the mouth as it's coming down. That's not quite what I'm talking about. And it's Much more. It's much more elusive and hard to articulate, but there comes a point where you can kind of see work that's coming down the stream, and you know what's yours, and you know it's not right, and you only pick up what's yours and you leave the rest for somebody else. Because it's a big world, and there are a lot of people who need great ideas. So.

That'S really what the momentum flywheel is. And it's just the fact that completing a project, having that win, being able to say, I did it, and being able to say, I made this. Here you go. Gives you so much more of a steady ground to stop on. That sort of, you know, creates that positive flywheel versus, you know, like, hey, I'm still working on. Because you don't want to be the person that every time you see someone at that yearly conference is still talking about that same thing you're thinking about doing or that you're meaning to get to. You don't want to be that person. You want to be that person such that when you show up, you've done another thing or you've done another four or five things and you're having to keep people up with the momentum of your work versus creating a story about why your work is stuck.

Oh, I like that. I interviewed someone for Pivot, too, who calls slightly different, but career Roomba syndrome, where you're the one bouncing, laying off so many projects every time you hit an obstacle that you don't finish one. So it's either, like, you're still working on the same thing you said last year, or you've moved on five different times, but you didn't actually finish any of those five.

Yeah. And the funny thing about finishing is that what most of us count as finished is not finished. Right. There's a good 15, 20% stuff and activity that needs to happen after we finish that really makes it done. And so, for instance, I'll speak to the entrepreneurial side of things. It's not just enough to finish the sales page.

Right.

It's not just enough to finish entirely.

Always with these reality checks.

Come on.

It's not just enough to, like, you know, create the sales page and then send it out via social media and call it good. Like, finishing means getting it so that it, you know, if someone comes to your site, they can find the thing within three clicks. Finishing it means that all of the people you've talked to over the last six months that weren't a fit for whatever you've got going on, right? Emailing them and saying, hey, I got a thing for you, wanted you to know about it. Finishing it means looking at your welcome sequence or your email sequence and saying like, where does this new thing fit in there and what do I need to do? There's all of that work. But also finishing means stopping for just a damn second and saying, I did that. Look at what I've accomplished. Look at all of the product of my hard work. And amidst all the odds and despite all the odds and all the distractions, I actually did that thing. And if you can't celebrate the smaller wins, especially the smaller wins that happened in process, you're going to lose the ability to celebrate the bigger wins, both because you won't create them, but also because you will just lose that gratitude and appreciation muscle for yourself and instead you'll replace it with a, yeah, but I could have done better and I didn't do all the things and all of that sort of head trash, which is not helpful, right? So part of finishing project is actually celebrating the finish, the completion of that project and running what I call a victory lap so that other people know about it. But again, I gave some other nitty gritty things that we often will forget to do as entrepreneurs. And so. And trust me, Jenny, my clients hate me as much as you do as well. Because I'm like, you know, we got about seven more things to do, right?

Oh, my gosh. See, I'm all about, I'll run a private victory lap, but as soon as it gets to be a public victory lap, that's where. I don't know.

I don't know, Charlie, but we need that. I mean, I'm going to say it for Jenny, I'm going to say it for everyone. So here's the thing. Especially when you've recruited people from your success pack, which we didn't really go into on this one. No, we're going to be talking a lot, right. When you've recruited people to help you, they need to see you win so that they can see the fruits of their effort too, Right? It sucks to sort of like throw a penny, you know, throw a penny in the well and never see what happens to it. We all want to see what, what happens with that. And also.

We forget how many people are watching us for inspiration. They're watching us as a guide, they're watching us as a model. And if we just sort of, you know, put it up there and tuck it and run like we haven't done the service to them. Of them being able to see, like, my hero, my person. They did the thing, and I'm super excited. I want to be a part of it. And you're like, nope, I'm gone. I'm off to the next thing. And so there's. This can be really hollow. And there's. Look, I know. I completely get it because it's been one of those things I've had to practice a lot over the last two or three years. Right. But the thing about it is we have victory lapse rooted in so much of our behaviors anyways, is why we have bridal showers, is why we have baby showers, is why we have weddings and graduations situations. It's why we have, you know, Olympians stand on the. On the thing and run around. It's why when we buy a new car, we want to go around and show everybody those are all victory laps. It's a part of who we are. And I think the more that we can practice the courage, the vulnerability, and the appreciation for ourselves in public, the more it enables us all to do that more.

Very well said. Okay, I'll think again.

I want to open it up to questions, actually, and I do want to hear about success pack. I have, of course, 20 gazillion more questions I could ask you, too, but let's open it up for momentum, or momo, as we call it for short. If any of you have a question that you want to ask live, feel free to pop off of mute. And I think Megan is going to be our intrepid question asker. Who goes first. So, Megan, you're up.

Hi, guys.

So, Charlie, thank you so much for joining us in the momo community, but also for writing this book.

I loved everything about this book, and I appreciate. You know, you even talked about that gap that you found between the kind of very tactical productivity books and then the more, you know, bigger picture, personal development. And I think that's why this book spoke so much to me, and I appreciated how you were both kind of that, like, reality check throughout the book where I kept going, charlie, get out of my head. But also your care and compassion came through on every page. So I want to thank you for writing this wonderful book.

Oh, thanks for that.

Yeah. My question is, because there are so many wonderful ideas and tips and techniques and methods and frameworks that you share, and you do a great job in presenting it and structuring it in the three different sections, can you talk a little bit about how you envision a reader approaching the book? Because for me, I definitely had to take my time with it because there are places where you need to stop and do some work. So are there natural places throughout the book that you would have people kind of of take a break, do some work, and then come back and revisit future chapters?

Absolutely. And I actually think that if you could read more than, say, 15 or 20 pages of the book without having to stop and do something, that I haven't done a good enough job with the content, just because.

Part of my job is to constructively frustrate people and reveal some of these things that we would like not to be seen. Not in a way of, like, showing everyone's laundry, but just like, oh, yeah, this is who I am. And sometimes that could be uncomfortable. And so the book is set up so that you can take three different journeys through the book. One journey is picking a project and working that. Excuse me, picking an idea and pushing it all the way through. Done. A second one is, for instance, there are parts of the book, like, part three is really good. If you're stuck with a project and you're just like, how am I gonna get done? Like, I'm tired of it. I want to go forward. So you can just jump right into part three. And then it's set up for dippers who just, you know, want to go to a random page and find something useful. And it's quite a creative nut to crack, but I think, you know, we did a pretty decent job at that. I think in the end, though, if you take the latter two journeys of the dipper or the.

The person that's jumping into a certain part, I think there's a lot of value in taking it from an idea, pushing it all the way to done. Because as I say in the first chapter, projects are both mirrors and bridges. They're mirrors because if you pick a right project that really matters to you, it will mirror what's going on in your internal world and show you what's really under there. Sometimes we don't want to see that. Sometimes it's really useful to see that, but it'll also mirror what's going on in your external world. So if you find that you're doing a project and you can't get forward because you don't have the time, energy, and attention to do it, then what that's telling you is there's something in your schedule that is too constraining for you to do the type of work that you can do, and that's really useful information, because then it becomes a project to figure out how you're going to recalibrate that schedule to work for you. So I think. And they're bridges because they are the thing that. That builds that gap or that bridges that gap between where you are and who you want to become and what you want to do in the world. And so walking through with one project, I think really does take the reader on a hero's journey that will allow. Will allow you at this certain point to be like, you know what? There's this thing that keeps coming up over and over again. I'm going to pause here, because we have patterns. We all have our own pattern patterns that are not productive for us. And we somehow think that with this project that I'm thrashing with now, like, if I'm thrashing and it ends up being that I have a time management problem, we somehow forget that if we jump to another project, that time management project problem goes with you. It's not like you just automatically dissolve and you get to start new. Like, no, it's going to go. And so picking a project helps you confront that time management dragon and figure out what you're finally going to do about it, as opposed to always walking up into the threshold and then being like, nope, not going to do it this time. I'm going to go find something else and walk around for a year only to find out that you're back at the same damn place. So I know I've made it sound like the idea to done is the preferred pathway. I want people to take the pathway that gets them where they are right now to do their best work. And I think there's some value, especially because my. I think there's some value in the I did it done model, especially because I know that typically the first one or two projects people will choose are actually easier ones that they want to get some momentum on, but they're not quite yet the deepest and best work that they can do.

Awesome. Thank you so much for that. That was very well said. I love the idea that you talked about with the mirrors and the bridges. And it kind of segues into a second kind of semi question that I had, which is that idea that we, once we kind of start to put everything in that project perspective, we often see, as Jenny spoke about, that we have more projects on our plates that we're actually, you know, crediting for. So as you're going through and picking that right project to. To address, how do you manage, you know, kind of clearing the decks for all the other things that might still be there that you have to kind of work through in order to allow yourself that time, energy, and attention to the thing that is going to be your best work.

Yeah, that's a great one. So first thing I'm going to say is sometimes the best way to finish a problem, a project is to drop it completely, right? And so you may find that there are, there are projects that you have chosen. Or let me, let me make this more specific. Let's say I'll stop picking on Jenny. I'll pick on myself here. Let's say that, you know, 10 years ago you decided that finishing a dissertation was like something you really wanted to do. And then you live life for 10 years and then you're looking at a certain threshold of what you might choose next. Well, maybe that project that you chose at that time doesn't feed you in the same way that wouldn't feed you in the same way now that it did then. Does it make sense in a lot of ways to complete a project that doesn't feed you, doesn't push you to where you're trying to go just because you said you were going to do it. Because that's going to displace a right now project or today project that builds the bridge that you need to go from where you are to where you really need to go. So sometimes I think giving yourself the permission to just delete and say, you know what, I got what I needed out of that project, or it's building a bridge to somewhere I don't want to go is one of the best ways to clear up some of the decks. The other thing that I'll say is I think there are different ways for us to, let's say, cash out our values and priorities. And I'll speak directly to sort of the experience that I've heard from mothers and fathers, you know, where, like, they think that being a dad or being a mom, it like means doing certain types of things that have committed him to doing things in a certain type of way. When they really started thinking about, it's like, you know, there's actually an alternative way. I could be this really awesome dad that makes room for me to do these other things and not in this place, end up in this place where I resent my children because I followed a practice or followed a pathway that actually I didn't need to do, wasn't in alignment with the total matrix of priorities. The last thing that I'll say is you may also just find that you're in that position where you just literally have too much and you have to defer or you have to like kick those out to the future. And that's where you can use sort of the project snowball that I've talked about, where you just focus on doing, you know, clearing up all that work that you need to do, but you can't quite get to yet. Excuse me? The work that you need to do that's preventing you from getting to the work that you need to get to. And then once you free up that time, you use that time on the next thing that you need to clear up. And then you take both of those times, you put it on the next thing, and eventually if you go on a project diet at the same time, eventually, after a little work, you'll find that. Wait a second. I've cleared up 12 to 15 hours of my week now and I haven't added a bunch of stuff. So now I can go to some of this work that I've been like really waiting to get to and I can decide of those projects, excuse me, of those ideas or of those projects, which ones am I going to do going forward. Does that help, Megan?

It does a lot because I think I'm kind of in between all of those things. There are probably some that I just need to just drop completely and some maybe I need to think of alternative ways that might free up my time and then definitely. Okay, how do I.

Get done with the smaller ones or the things that I can just get out of the way so I can move forward? I actually just got. I'd been using the digital ones, but I actually just got the physical momentum planner in the mail yesterday. So I think that will also help me, hopefully.

Thanks. If I could speak to something real quick. I know we have a question. Jenny. I'll try to make this brief.

Please do go for it.

I think we often will make a choice when it comes to social time and the people that we hang out with. We'll choose to do things like, like spend an hour of sort of half focused time with people a day because we think that's a better way of being in relationship with them than if we were to spend like four hours on a Saturday afternoon with them. Like, they're super focused just about that. And so one. One of the tensions that we have when it comes to our projects are the sort of the people and social time. And what many of my clients and myself have found is that sometimes saying, you know what, this week I'm just going to be heads down working on some different things. I'm going to be super busy. But Saturday afternoon or for me and Angela, we have couples brunch on Sunday. So there's like a good four to six hours windows where we don't do anything else except for talk to each other and eat yummy food and chase each other around the house and all the different things that couples do. And I would rather have that six hours a week and none of the time in between than to not have that and just have sort of hours where we're sort of ships passing and sort of half sitting down, half sitting down with each other and not really feeling like that there was a significant amount of time where we were present together. So just an option for people to think about.

I love that, Charlie. Thank you.

It goes with. There's so much. People are just going to have to go get the book, start finishing. Because within the momentum planning method of daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually, you talk about making sure that you have different blocks of time within a given week. So social time, batch time for our batched admin recovery blocks and focus blocks. And I love being as you described with Angela. Shout out to Angela, who we love what meal is better than brunch, but having that block of time that by doing this momentum planning method that you came up with, you can be intentional about building that in. And there's these micro daily reviews. Then we get into weekly, monthly, and it all works backwards. This project pyramid visual is so cool.

That's.

That's in the book too. But yeah, I'm gonna. I'm gonna turn it over to Kevin and then Linda because we have two more questions, and I just have to give a side note of behind the scenes. It is so fun. Like, live collabo with momentum with all of you while Charlie's here. This is a very exciting way to do a podcast, I have to say. It's usually just me and my crazy mind and the guest, and now here we have, like, 10x the fun that's happening in chat of, like, coordinating. So super cool. And props to Charlie for being our first brave guest of this format.

Yeah, Grabs. I'm having fun. I'm having a lot of fun.

Awesome. So, Kevin, you're up next.

All right.

Hello, Charlie. I also really enjoyed the book and thought it had a lot of really good ideas. I would say that my favorite idea from the book was the creative red zone. I'm preparing to launch a podcast pretty soon. I definitely feel like I'm in the red zone of that project right now. So I was wondering, can you talk about that concept and how you came up with it and some strategies to get through it.

Great. Thanks so much for that, Kevin. And thanks for being an early reader, too. So, for those who haven't read the book, the Creative Red Zone, it's an analogy from American football where it seems like the closer the offense gets to the finish line, the harder they have to fight. So a lot of times what will happen is they'll get to, you know, the last 10 or 15 yards and then end up not making it to the touchdown and either do a field goal or end up turning it over. And then the other offense does the same thing. And there's a reason for that in American football. And this is similar to our own creative work in American football, actually, where the defenders have to defend tightens up, they don't have nearly as much ground to cover, and there are different plays that the defense can do that puts more constraints on the offense at that point.

Our projects are much the same way, Kevin, as you're dealing with, like, the second you put that date and you say, I'm launching 9 24, your room, as the creative person to wiggle around that date and to come up with alternative options is constrained quite a lot at the same time that all the head trash and demons and all the different challenges have a direct line to you. And so you're probably going through that right.

Right now.

Right. Where it's like, oh, crap. All the things like that one project that you thought you can do in two hours, turns out it takes a day to do it, you know? Are you feeling some of that?

Definitely, yeah. As I'm getting closer, I'm finding things like owing to think about this, or I didn't. Didn't think about this other part of the project or the podcast and all sorts of things like that right now.

And speaking of accountability, Kevin's launching a podcast, everybody. So I feel like, Kevin, if you're feeling brave, you should just say the name of it on this podcast, and then.

That will be the commitment from your team.

Team me and Charlie.

Sure. So I don't have a date yet just because there's still a lot to plan out. But the podcast is called Talk Burnout, where I talk to guests about how to avoid and overcome burnout at work and look forward to Jenny Blake being one of my very first guests on the podcast. So I'm really sure to announce when it comes out soon.

Great.

Awesome.

Thanks for that, Kevin. If it were about any other topic than burnout, I would say we need to pick a date right now.

But I'm concerned that that may be counter to the ethos of the.

So I'm not gonna push that. But what I would typically say in this. In this situation, Kevin, is it's not real until you have a date on it yet.

And that's because as you continue to get to whatever closer date that you think that is, there's gonna be idea creep and there's gonna be scope creep, and then you'll think of 13 other guests that you want to make sure that you're in season one and we just add to it and you're at the point in the project. So one way to get through to create a red zone is to not just block the addition of new ideas, but to actually start looking for things that you can eliminate so that you can get it done. So maybe you don't need the perfect graphic. Maybe you can start it without the jingle. Maybe you can start it without the best you know about the podcast. Maybe you can start it just on itunes and not having to make sure that it's on 17 different platforms all at once. So one of the first things is start eliminating aspects of the project so that you can get it to. So that there's a much more doable, finishable, you know, place that you can be. And it turns out that no matter what you do, Kevin, I'm going to be the bearer of bad good news. You're going to forget something. There are going to be pieces of things that like it. Like, two months later, you would like, man, I should have done that. But you won't know it until you've done it. And so, you know, your introductory season of a podcast or when you first start, that's a really beautiful moment because there's so many places or just so much grace and that you don't need to know what's going on. And you can fail in a smaller audience and you can fail faster so that you can succeed faster. So rule one, start eliminating things that are not essential. And when you think it's not essential, cut back another 20% until it hurts. And then you're finally probably going to be closer to where it needs to be. Two is you gotta have a success pack. I know you've read the book, so get some people online to help you with some of these aspects. And especially I would encourage you to have some sort of either director of no or some person, some accountability buddy that every time you want to add something, you have to run it by them first.

That's hilarious.

Their job is to Veto it. Remind you to get back on finishing what you've already committed to.

I have never heard of that kind of accountability, buddy, but that is hilarious.

The third thing I would say is you gotta. I mean, seriously, date on it makes a huge difference because it will just force. Force you to actually make it a real thing. Like, and, you know, you've read the book, but if you like it, put a ring on it. And it doesn't have to be next week. I would say, if it's next year, unless you're in a really busy career, that's too long. So sometime within the next two months, there's a date with your name on it where this podcast can go live if you will let it and not have your perfectionism win the battle of the day.

Gotcha. Thanks, Charlie. I would say. I would say, in my defense, I am planning to launch this when I have 10 guests for my first season, and I already have nine either interviewed or scheduled to be interviewed. So that's why I say soon, because I know I'm getting to that point where you can definitely set a date and put it out there.

Seriously, though, you should have the next guest in the next two weeks, right?

Yeah.

Right.

Right.

Yes.

All right, so we set a date for four to six weeks from now.

Oh, boy.

Kevin.

I'll launch momentum.

No, I'm not playing this game with you, Charlie.

Not doing it.

What I will say here, we're both.

Waiting for, like, Kevin.

I'm not gonna put him too much on the spot there, but, like, you know that. That resistance that you're currently feeling right now, that tension. I really want you to sit in that space because there are two or three levels of story under that about why you can't pick a date six weeks from now and you're going your first. The top level is going to be logistics and scheduling and trivia, Right? You can have a backup guest.

Right?

You can have, like, whatever you say. Trust me, as someone who does shows like this, you need to have some backup guests, because one of those guests is going to get sick or life is going to happen. So you're going to need different people for different reasons. So develop that contingency. But what I'm actually trying to encourage here is the idea that you can set that date and hold to it as firm as possible. And if life happens in so many different ways, that's awesome. You'll have a good reason.

To alter that date. But right now, you have a plethora of reasons. Like, I've seen this happen. Enough, Kevin, I don't know you personally, again, seeing those patterns. I've seen it happen enough that like, once you choose that guest, there will be some other hanging chad that needs to be solved and then there'll be some other hanging chad, you know, some other hanging thing that will. And I know you're. You're a driven guy where this not about burnout. I would say let's do it six weeks from now, but I'm conscious that that may, that may be tie into a personal journey there that I don't want to over that I don't want to put tension on. But really think about what's, what's deeply keeping you from picking a date, you know, four to six weeks out. And if you know right now, that's great. But if you want to sit with it, that's cool too.

Yeah, I think I'll sit with it. Thanks for the advice, Charlie.

Okay.

Yeah, I appreciate all that.

Cool.

It's been so fun to watch Kevin. Like he shared when he was first starting to ask people for interview, he shared like getting yeses, getting no's. So it's been really cool, Kevin, to just watch your journey of setting up the podcast. And I was very impressed by your interviewing style for the early ran out the gate. So whenever it does launch, can't wait to listen.

Yeah. And Kevin, congratulations. I know I can be intense in those moments. Just wanted so congrats for everything you've done this far and just want to remind you that there is quite a lot of people right now who need that podcast every day. You wait, they're waiting too.

Thanks, I appreciate that.

And speaking of podcasts, if you love the way Charlie's mind works, he has a podcast called Productive Flourishing and He has over 200 episodes. So if you are enjoying this conversation and how his. How he thinks about things, there is a rabbit hole waiting for you called Productive Flourishing wherever you listen to podcast. Linda, you're up next.

She's like, I'm not sure about this now. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Never mind.

I'm good.

Let's see. Linda, just type in the chat. Oh, there you go. Okay, perfect.

Okay. So I love that Kevin went before me because a lot of the things that you said, Charlie, were actually perfect for me to hear. So my, my question is that. And I. And I probably beat myself up about it on a daily basis, but I've had this idea to create a course.

For nine years, and I made some, you know, you know, steps towards it, and then I stopped. And this was nine years ago. But I can't give up the idea. It's like I. I can't let it go. I can't take it off my mind. And I'm looking at this idea of projects and I have to give you a backstory. I have over 25 years of project management expertise. That's what I do for a living, is manage projects. And I have an excellent reputation for managing other people's projects. But I.

Yeah, I guess my question is.

I can't seem to let it go. But.

How do I break through this? The neural pathways I've set up for the past nine years of not getting traction to actually make progress and get it done.

I'm guessing that you have a no win scenario that you're telling yourself. And the structure of those are always, if I do this and I'm successful, then I'll have to give up something that matters to me.

No, I don't have that. I have that. This is something that I really want to give out into the world, but it's not something that I feel like I'm going to build my life on it. Do you know what I mean? So I don't have a, you know, it's designing a same sex wedding. How to design your same sex wedding in a really authentic and wonderful way. And so I don't have a desire to be a wedding planner, but there's just so much that I've learned that I really want to, you know, support others in their journey. So I want to get that out.

Okay. And you mentioned that it's a course, Correct. Okay. Why is it a course as opposed to like an ebook?

Yeah, good question. I guess I thought I could monetize it to make more money that way.

I thought she just said that you don't really. That it doesn't propel you in that way.

Yeah. Good, good comments.

Okay. I want to use it as a way to get started so that I can build other courses that are more in line with what I do want to do. But I don't know what that is yet. So I don't know what that is yet. So I want to make a start someplace.

So it seems like two things. It seems like a sandbox project that's related to your current, your, your current career trajectory would be a better way to learn how to do. How to do that.

Yeah.

Whereas it sounds like this is either a service or legacy project, then there may be easier ways to get that out there to the world to do what it needs to do. So it may be that it's an ebook with worksheets and you let it go and then you move on to the course, building in a way that actually fuels your current life and your brand.

Okay.

Thank you.

Was that it or did you know?

I mean, I.

Yeah.

It'S not so straightforward, which is part of the thing that drives me crazy, you know, because I, you know, clarity is everything. But I think that there is, there is a coaching element because I do want to do, just in time coaching associated with it. Because I think people really need that service and they don't want to hire necessarily a full blown wedding planner, but they need somebody to talk to as they go through the challenges and, you know, planning their wedding. So I do want to do that. So that's why I don't feel like the ebook necessarily lends itself to that. And the coaching element is something that I am a good coach and I would like to continue coaching.

But not necessarily in wedding planners. So it's a good platform for me to start and develop that muscle.

Okay, so I kind of hear what's going on here. One thing that I would really want you to get with here is I think there is some.

Intention ambiguity here where it's not super clear to me, or maybe it's just that I misheard something there like how this powers you. And the other thing is remember to think in terms of iterations and prototypes. So just because you start with the ebook and worksheet and get some traction around that doesn't mean that you can't come back and convert it in a certain way. Doesn't mean that you can't coach off of it. In fact, that's how many coaches actually do it is we start with a smaller product and then build the service around that. But it's better. Like if you're really trying to find product market fit with your service or with what you're doing, getting it to people sooner is actually fortuitous as opposed to waiting longer. And so I think in terms of the ebook, workbook, whatever that is, as being a prototype for both your service and that course to see if that's actually what people want. Because you may find that people in that scenario actually don't want to take a course. They, they want a workbook or they want another thing or they want to talk to you for two hours about it or they want something else. So way better to not over invest in that. And plus, you know, there's. You've been sitting nine, nine years on it. The faster we get it, we get it out there and we start testing it, the more you'll soon see this is what I want to do. This is not what I want to do. This is what people want. This is not what people want. This is what people will pay for. This is not what people will pay for. All those things we only find once you ship it and we can start smaller and build from there.

Okay. Love it, love it, love it, love it. Thank you.

Cool.

I have a lot of anguish about having this not, you know, either off the list or not done. Do you know what I mean?

I do know. And trust me, you've got what I call creative constipation here. Right.

And you're not going to feel better until you push the project. And like, it doesn't have to be the monumental project that you've made it. It can be something small and you'll still feel that sense of release and momentum that will drive you to the next thing. But it's super hard to get that momentum when you're stuck and sort of in the place where you are. So I definitely feel you on that one and I hear you on that one.

Well, thank you very, very much. I really, really appreciate it.

Cool.

And I'll just jump in to say, I think, Linda, there's a tiny percent chance because I've known you now a long time. There's a tiny percent chance you don't want to do this at all. But there's a part of you that's having trouble letting it go. And that might be true, but I have a feeling that's like 5% of you and the 95% actually really does believe in this and feel that it's important. And you could be a strong, beautiful, powerful, encouraging, loving voice for people who are planning a same sex marriage and wedding in a. In a generally a culture that's shifting, but still so much of that marketing is geared toward heterosexual sexual relationships. And your voice here is so important. I love what Charlie said to Kevin. There are so many couples waiting for exactly this from exactly you. And I'm going to pull in Charlie's momentum planning method because I wonder what does it look like to go to done in one day? This is like real extreme, but I'm being extreme on purpose. What if you only had one week? What could you complete in one week that you could could create and ship and make public even just within our momentum community? What could you do in one month and what could you do in three months? And I'm actually going to forbid you from working on an annual project at this point, at this juncture, and would wonder if you only had three months or one month or one week, what would you create and how could you get something to done? And I think the psychic release that you will experience after seven years of punting, basically like punting the project down your project pipeline, it is going to unleash the floodgates of creativity in the rest of your life. I think it is going to go far beyond this project. You will be free of something that as Charlie describes in the book, the more important a project is, the more we thrash. So you're thrashing around. This is normal because it's so big.

Jenny, your text's in the mail.

But seriously, I'm going to pause here real quick. I'll talk, talk obliquely to Linda. So Linda, if you, if you need to check out, that's cool, but I mentioned no win scenarios largely because the longer I've known that people who hold onto projects for that long have some version of that. And what I would say the version up here is if she's successful with the ebook or the course, then she's going to have to give up her freedom to do what, what she most wants to do now. So there's some constraint that if she's successful with it, but maybe she won't want to do do it. Maybe that's not where she wants her life to be right now. But then she's sort of confined by the success that she's created so therefore she's not going to do it. Or you know, a lot of us have the perfectionist tendency.

And sometimes it's like if, if you put it out there and you're successful, then maybe people will see all the flaws in your work that you don't have to reveal right now. So there's always some sort of nested especially when we hold on to them longer. And unfortunately the longer you hold on to a project like this, the more no win scenarios you'll create for yourselves so that you're in this place where you're stuck and that it's a part of you that really does want to do it. But there are 17 parts that don't. And you know, with those powers combined, you end up in a position where like what we do is in response to that, the part that wants to do it makes it the biggest, best, amazing project that it could ever be done. And of course we can't do that, so we're stuck yet again. So that's, that's kind of why I went to no win scenarios. And I always look for that because it's so easy for us to tie ourselves in knots that way.

And also the identity. I'm a project manager. Like, you might have a feeling, Linda, that, well, I'm a project manager. Like, I have to do a killer job and this has to be great. And I got a project manager just the shit out of this thing, you know? And what does it look like if you don't do that?

That.

What if it is so simple that it's three steps to done. And I don't know what that looks like, but it might be you jumping on a voice recorder and transcribing it and cleaning it up.

Yeah.

And that three steps to done.

What are the five questions that you would want every couple in that scenario to ask?

Oh, I love that.

That's a worksheet. Put it out there. Right.

All right. Roll up your sleeves. We're building this right now.

I love.

Kevin and Linda are like, no, no, no, no. Not what we wanted. Not what we wanted. Oh, no.

Yeah. They're like, what do we sign up for? Linda, Anything you want to say before we keep moving? I just unmuted you.

Yeah. I love you both.

And you know what, Charlie? I'm glad that you're still. That you went back to the. I can't remember what you call it, but that. But yes, there's this. One of the thoughts that has held me back from the beginning is I don't want to create an identity that I'm a wedding planner. You know, that that's. I don't see myself as a wedding planner. So I. That that's been one of the. The things. But I really. That what I'm doing in this course is really getting at the heart of the matter, the really important things to plan their wedding that isn't talked about.

Yes.

And so that is something that I'm extremely passionate about. And that is what I would coach on. So it's not about, you know, I will address the, you know, the critical things that you, you know, the functional things that people need. But it's not about.

It's not about that. I'm a wedding planner. Do you know what I mean?

I could, I could totally see your website says I am not a wedding planner for this product. I am not a wedding planner, but I am an advocate for a joyful heart based wedding. Or how, you know, that's my language. However you define, just say it.

Just say first line. Yeah, first line. I'm not a wedding planner.

I am not Your wedding planner. But what I am is your advocate to have the very best same sex wedding that is based on your values and despite all the family madness that might ensue. You know, I will walk you through, I will hold your hand through this process as your champion, your advocate, and your friend.

I love it. Jenny. Charlie, what were you going to say?

I was going to say the same thing. Jenny just beat me to the punch, so now I have to send her even bigger. I was already going to send her, but yeah, I mean, that's the thing. You get to define how you work in the world. And I think you can also just say no. Someone's like, well, you plan my wedding. I'm sorry, that's not what I do. Here are three great people that I would refer you to.

Oh, that's so good. You have no idea. It's like the field. And Jenny, you were so spot on about the psychic weight that's going to. To, you know, come off of me. And I know that I'll explode afterwards because it's so. It's like I feel that it's just. It's. It's holding me, you know, I feel restrained by it, you know, and so, yes, I know that it will make an enormous difference in who I am and what I'll contribute in the world. And I thank you both from the bottom of my heart. It means so much, all of everything that you've shed.

So. So thank you. And will you create the guide that Charlie suggested? The five questions every same sex couple should ask.

What was it again?

I blocked it because.

You had earmuffs. Earmuffs. As soon as we said it's a worksheet, put it in a Google Doc. It's five. The five key questions every same sex couple should ask when planning a same sex wedding.

I don't know if I would say would ask, but I would say that they must address.

Okay, perfect.

I'm into it. We're going to link to it from the show notes. Linda, this is happening.

Okay? Yeah, it's happening. And so I had to put a date on it. Exactly.

Well, this is going to launch sometime in September and Stephanie is going to chase you down for this link so we can throw it in the show notes. Stephanie or Brenna.

Wait.

Micah's laughing in the background. She's going, when you were talking, Jenny, she was like, ra. Like thumbs up.

And.

And she's like, yes, and Mike is my wife.

There's that success pack. She can help you write it.

All right. No, wait. So what Am I committing to creating this? Five things that questions or concerns or whatever every same sex sex couple should do. And then what. What am I doing? Just.

You're gonna throw in a Google Doc and get view access so anyone with a link can view it. And then I am gonna link to it in the show notes for this episode.

Okay.

Okay.

All right.

Do we give you a hernia or is this exciting?

Is that a I will do this or an okay? There's a big difference.

No, I know it was. You were both correct in detecting the ambiguity. The only thing I'm not okay about is it linking it to the podcast.

Okay.

Because then it goes out to a wider audience.

The wider audience that might need.

Yeah, like people who might have a same sex friend getting married sometime soon.

Okay. So, yes, I commit to it.

She's like, I see where this is going. Just get me off of this, please.

Okay, I commit to it. And so what, by the end of September, is that.

Yeah, just. You can even send the link, you know, and then keep building it right up to the second. It'll be a live document. So we just need the link. And. And then podcast listeners will trickle over to it over time. So you can even keep updating it if that helps you comfort yourself. It doesn't have to be a final PDF or anything.

Okay. But I'm creating this document that's going to be in the show notes. But when do you need the link? Because I have to work backwards.

Two weeks. Two weeks.

Okay. I commit to it.

Yes, yes.

Put a ring on it. Jenny, put a ring on it.

Amazing.

Did you hear Micah in the background? She's going, yes.

I didn't know if that was you or her. That's so funny.

No, it was Micah. It was Micah with you, the two of you. So. Okay, thank you.

Okay, success pack. You have me, you have Charlie, you have Momentum, you now have podcast listeners, and you have Micah. You have the success pack you need.

Okay, thank you very much.

You got it.

Okay. Thank you, Charlie.

Thank you, Linda. So, Charlie, are we gonna just go into business doing, like, extreme discomfort coach?

Yeah, like, if you want to feel all sorts of, you know, vulnerable, awkward, and then be asked multiple questions. Yes, let's do it.

Yeah, it's something like just the two of us. Yeah, we'll just. We'll create it. It'll be called, like, you know, extreme coaching with Jenny and Charlie.

Yeah.

And Jocko will do our, like, intro, intro clip.

Or I could just put on my Jocko personality.

Yeah, true. Give me, like, could you Give me the VO for that.

That.

So today on get your project done, I'm here with Jenny Blake.

I love it. I love it.

Linda's come to us with a worksheet and we're going to focus on what she needs to do to kill it.

Exactly. Linda, you got this.

I love Jocko. I really do love Jocko.

Me too.

Especially having a military background. I get his humor and I get. I get him so much that it's funny.

Totally. And Michael used to do be the voiceover artist for the Middle east, and the most requested voice is the voice. Voice of God. So we'll just bring him in. But in all seriousness, Linda and Kevin, that takes so much courage to even come off of mute and ask a question. And Megan as well at all. So I really have to say thank you. Your vulnerability, there is somebody listening. And if you are listening to this episode and their coaching helped you in some way, please send me an email. Helloivotmethod.com I want to forward it to Kevin and Linda and Megan as well as, like a thank you. So if you were grateful if they spoke to something that you are thinking about in your own business and your own projects, please feel free.

Let us know.

Helloivittmethod.com and I'm going to send it to them as, like, encouragement and a thank you and gratitude on my part because it is not easy to come off mute and be in a pressure cooker on a project that you have in progress. They are like, sometimes it feels like a little eggshell, you know, and you don't want to break them. And there's a cute little chicken there that just hasn't come out yet. So I honor all three of for being here and Charlie again, for being on this very first collabo podcast. Charlie, as we wrap up, I want to give you the floor one more time. Is there one thing you would ask all listeners to do? And is there anything you want to say to the Momo crew? That's here. And then lastly, any links anywhere we can find you online.

Great. So my invitation is actually going to be for people to.

Allow themselves to step into the work that they've been pushing away for different reasons. We on this podcast and conversation have talked about some of the reasons we don't do that, but I just want to remind people, like, no matter what it is, there is someone out there in the world besides yourself who needs that thing. You're either delivering a delight or you're solving a problem. And if you don't do that, that person is left hanging without that delight delivered or without that problem solved. And so it is about you and what your soul calls to do. But also remember that we're here to take better care of each other on this planet as well. So that's just realize that sometimes that can be enough of the momentum or enough of motivation to get you going on that one. Now as regards to the book, you can go to startfinishingbook.com you can pick it up from any retailer online offline is going to be in a lot of indie bookstores too. So support your indies, support your local bookstore, or just head over to Amazon if that's your jam. And if you go to that page, startfinishingbook.com we also have a free sample chapter that has been lighting people up as well so you can try it before you buy it.

Amazing. Thank you Charlie. So I was trying to capture that's such a Good book link startfinishingbook.com I love it. And Charlie's podcast Productive Flourishing. So good. Charlie has been at this for such a long time and we didn't even scratch the surface of the. I mean we did. We actually made a very solid dent. But there's so much more great stuff in the book and in Charlie's beautiful body of work. Charlie, this is such a joy. I really want to say thank you for being here with Momentum Live with Pivot Podcast and as a friend tour and part of my success pack since the earliest days, even before 2010 when I met you in person. You have just been a light along my path and someone I feel so grateful to know. Thank you, thank you, thank you for who you are in the world.

Charlie Gilke thanks so much for having me Jenny and let's do it again.

Yes.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot Podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for PivotList, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter ennyblake.

Remember, remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.