174: What Book Marketing has to do with Glass Blowing: Reflecting on Free Time’s 1-Year Bookiversary 🥂

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The joy has really been in the feedback. Every time you or somebody writes to me and says I loved the book so much, here's what I did as a result, here's the time I freed as a result, it just fills me to the brim with gratitude. That is why I created the book To Free youe Time. So when I hear about these actual life changes and business breakthroughs, that's bliss for me.

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

Today marks the one year bookiversary of free time making its way into the world and the two year podiversary of launching this very podcast. There's been a question looming as I approach this milestone. Has it been a success? Has the podcast been a success? Has the book launch been a success in its first year? Has the big investment in this new direction of my business and this new subject area been a success?

I'll answer that and I'll get to some of the nitty gritty one year in launch debrief that I know you all appreciated when I did one month after the book launched. But first, there's an important detour that we need to take. If you're caught up on recent episodes, you'll know that in episode 170, imagine a world of Abundance, I share how walking by a piece of New York City street art completely turned my morning around. I had woken up grumpy from lack of sleep. I've been having more health issues than usual this year, despite all my best efforts to focus on my health as my number one priority. And in episode 172 I shared that free time is not just for the fun days. Sometimes we need free time. Not so that we can go to the beach or sip mai tais or pina coladas on a beach. We just need to decompress and give ourselves time for deep rest. So you could imagine my feeling of a little conflicted that the one year anniversary of the book launch is coming up and it's a lot of effort to create a book, to have the idea, to believe in the idea, capture the ideas from one's mind onto the page, to go through the whole machinations of launching a book out into the world and the vulnerability of that I'll put the episode on the vulnerability of launching and 11th hour gremlins. Those two links in the show notes and so I wanted to do something to acknowledge this milestone, but because my mood has been a little lower than usual and it's not just turning around on a dime, I was feeling a little bit deflated. I was feeling like I don't know if it's been a success. I don't know if I have any exciting metrics to share now. This, of course, is me being hard on myself. I was recently emailing with a podcast ad agency and when they asked for my statistics I felt shy about sending them, that maybe my shows are still too small for them to represent me. And then as a result of that thought, feeling discouraged that I don't quite have the energy to project myself very loudly or boldly into the world right now. And yet it seems as if that's what the business needs from me. And then I get an email from my dad with the subject line seen inside the Taj Hotel in Mumbai.

Turns out my dad's second cousin, his daughter Gretchen, was traveling in India and spotted Free Time right behind the front desk of a hotel bookstore. When I saw that photo, I couldn't help but burst out into a huge smile. First of all, Gretchen and I have never met in person, and my dad doesn't live very close to his second cousin. But my dad had sent them a copy of FreeTime. They shared it with their daughter. She was then traveling the world to the other side of the planet and spotted Free Time not tucked into a back of the bookstore bookshelf, sitting behind the front desk, the COVID facing out front and center behind the clerk who was working the desk right there smack in the middle, just presented in all of its glory. That's when I realized that me being down on myself at all in any way is so beside the point. It's an example of me getting caught up in some hedonic treadmill of success and enoughness. That's the thing about success and reach and impact of our work. If we judge it on the wrong metrics or we create a bar for ourselves that is always moving, we will never feel successful. The word success itself is so relative. There's a good relative pun given my opening story. That story, that moment of seeing this photo had me reframe and realize that I created something that is sitting front and center in a hotel bookstore in India, across the world from where I'm sitting right now. As I read that email message, I say in free time, eyes on your own paper. This moment had me refocus on all the many accomplishments that have happened, all the good things, all that the book has helped me create, knowing that it's always going to be a work in progress. It's the journey, not the destination, as the cliche goes. Speaking of cliches, I think often about being an optimist or a pessimist. Is the glass half empty or is the glass half full? And we could ask the same for a launch of anything. A course, a product, a book, a business. Is it a success? Is the launch success? Glass half empty or half full? This story of the book traveling across the world zoomed me back to the glass itself. And I've thought about this before. I've never really shared it publicly, but I've always thought this metaphor is missing something. Because in this case, I created a glass. It almost doesn't matter what statistics I share with you about hardcover sales, audiobook, ebook. I will share those with you when you're out. Just because I love hearing people's specific details. It doesn't matter how many podcast listeners I have, you're here. I am delighted by that. I am overjoyed by that. If I get a single email from an episode of somebody saying that it changed their day, I am overcome with gratitude and joy. And I know that what I'm doing is working. Those are my metrics of success. In this case, thinking about the book launch, I created a glass. I created a book. I was just telling Michael this morning that the idea for Free time came to me in a download. I was walking or in the shower and boom. The phrase free time dropped into my mind. As clear as that, as a phrase. And I knew that this would be the next direction of my body of work. I created a glass. So from this one download of this two word phrase, then running it by friends, then doing a big brand strategy, launching a podcast, getting all my ideas about systems and operational efficiency and how to set time free, getting them all down into a book, collaborating with a hybrid publisher idea Press seeing the book through to publication. Every time I mail the book to a podcast guest or someone in the media or bring them or sign them at an event, that is the glass. That is what I have created. So the statistics, whatever liquid I pour into the glass, whether it's water or almond milk or coffee, please, more and more coffee. I love coffee. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. I created a glass. And we so often forget to acknowledge the things that we create and how valuable that is and how that is our contribution. We don't have as much control as we might like to think about the impact that what we create makes in the world. Now, of course, sometimes it is helpful to have delusions of grandeur, as I often do of my books, selling millions of copies and hitting escape velocity of book sales and hitting it makes some sort of list and then that list propels the sales further and further and then the snowball becomes unstoppable. And then all of a sudden I'm earning a million dollars a year in royalties and all of a sudden all is well in the world as far as metrics and measures of success. That would be great. And it happens every blue moon to an author. But even those authors, if you ask them about how to market or the secrets to a great book launch, yes, they can tell you many things that they have done. And they will almost always tell you it also involved a sense of luck, a sense of perfect timing, a sense of one just right opportunity leading to the next. I've been really fortunate to be invited to BookMasterMind Zooms with fellow authors, sometimes as many as 20 of us in our tiny thumbnails, Brady Bunch style on the screen. And no matter how many books the group collectively has launched, yes, we all share strategies and tactics, but no one person knows everything. And the market changes, the economy changes. It is sometimes such a secret sauce as to what's really going to work. And even the strategies that used to work sometimes fall by the wayside. So even the best sellers will tell you again that it's a combination of strategy, quality, hard work, how big their network of peers is, how big their platform is, and if they've been really intentional about growing that over the years, their raw talent and luck. And it's this delicious crock pot or mixed chopped salad. That's my other favorite food of all those ingredients. It's never just one thing. And there's never just one answer or one way. You know, I love Tosha sober. I'm always talking about her. She's the one I read her Abundance Change Me prayer at the end of episode 170 on imagining a more abundant world. She would just continually offer her book over and say may it find all the people who can benefit. And she would just picture her book reaching all the people who would be delighted by it. And her book she self published Outrageous Openness, affectionately called OO Among Insiders. She self published that and it became a runaway sensation that later led to a book deal with a traditional publisher, but at first they had all rejected it and she even has writing degrees from Yale. My friend Tour Penny Pierce, she says, don't think of readers or your audience as outside of you. They're in your field, they're already here. When you recognize that reality, when you imagine that everyone's already in your field with you, they're not this thing you have to go out and try to get and over effort. And besides, who says that you or I can even know intellectually what is best? Who are we to judge the day to day events? I talked about that meme that I loved. Failure is the frame, not the picture. Sometimes we're judging the success or failure of something way too soon. I almost shut down this podcast. Don't ask me why. Three months before the book launched, I was walking with my brother at Christmas. I must have just been tired from doing a lot of work on creating things from 0 to 1, which is definitely what I love. But I was like, I don't know, is this going to work? Should I keep going? And he said, don't you dare shut this podcast down before your book even launches. He just said, don't you dare. It's not the time to judge the success of the podcast. You have no idea. You got to keep going. And maybe a year from now, a year after the book launches, then be the judge. But you're definitely judging it at the wrong time. And he just gave me that outside perspective. Of course. Now, truthfully, a year later, I'm so glad I didn't shut it down. It continues to be the favorite thing that I do, but I needed that outside perspective in terms of is what you're wanting actually what's best for you. I also think of that parable, we'll see the farmer and his son. I don't know the origin, if it's a Zen parable or if it's Chinese parable, but where something good happens. Everyone gets excited, but then the guy says we'll see. Then something bad happens and everyone gets worried and he says we'll see and then something good. We'll see. So the thing is, I've long valued equanimity, just not getting rocked by every wave. I'm so sensitive that sometimes I feel like just an exposed nerve walking through the world. And when I can remember to find equanimity in the good, the bad, the ugly, try not to judge things, trying to let things unfold in a will see mindset. I remember that I don't even know what one thing is going to lead to. One thing that looks good, one thing that looks bad. Who am I to say? It's so much more peaceful as a way to go through the world to find equanimity within it. All within the eye of the storm. If you haven't already heard it, I'll put it in the show. Notes Please listen to pivot episode 305 is what yout're Wanting actually what's Best for your with Luke Burgess. He was probably my favorite author of a book I read in 2022. His book is called Wanting, and we talk about the ways that mimetic desire kind of guides what we think we want, what we think we should go after. I've done a previous episode for this show, Stop Sailing the sea of shiny shoulds. Well, there are a lot of shiny shoulds out there. There are a lot of shoulds that we see other people doing in their business that we feel that we should be doing if we want to run a successful business that we feel would bring us greater results and success. And it's not always what's in our best interest, what's in the highest good for the project, for you, for the business. But still, we're memetic creatures. We see therefore we want, and nothing foments that more than social media, which is part of the reason I'm not on it.

We'll be right back just after this.

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What I loved about that conversation with Luke is that we talked about something like a book launch. How do you set goals for it to reach far and wide in the world while still detaching from the outcome? And I will say a year in it goes in waves. It's a rollercoaster, as I said. You kind of have to have these delusions of grandeur, like, I'm amazing, this book is worth being in the world. Everybody should know about it. Just in order to muster the will to ask to be on other people's podcasts. Like that alone is such a vulnerable process that you got to kind of back yourself in order to even do the work of lining up different marketing activities, ideally joyful ones. But nonetheless it's still vulnerable. And it can be easy then, once you muster up the will and belief in yourself and the project and that it's going to be positive and make an impact in people's lives to not want to then seek that validation from number of sales and from number of sales and whatever your metrics of success are. But the tricky thing is, is that we have also a tendency to get on a hedonic treadmill of success metrics where whatever you hit, you suddenly just want more, more, more. And that's where we get into the hungry ghost vibes of a project or a launch because we're so hungry for more and bigger results. In fact, even while I was working on Pivot, I was very deliberate about removing the word success from everywhere that I could. You will see it almost nowhere in the book itself. Maybe one mention in the marketing copy. I was adamant that it not be in the title. I didn't want the phrase career success anywhere near that book. Because pivoting, navigating change is a skill. It's a continuous process. There is no there there. When I worked at Google, I was in career development and people would often ask how do I get promoted? How do I work toward a promotion? And the Google mantra at that time was the bar is always raising. That sometimes the skills or aptitudes or whatever projects that would have gotten you promoted a year ago, while the bar is always raising, those might not be the same things that get you promoted this year. The bar is always raising. I can't tell you how many times I heard that we do the same thing. I do the same thing in my business. I do the same thing with a book launch or podcast launch. It's not enough to create it. All of a sudden the bar is always raising. So whatever sales numbers I've hit, I kind of then just raise the bar. And it's very subtle. And I find myself looking at how many books someone else is selling. How many Amazon reviews does someone else have? Maybe they're very close in topic to what I've written and maybe their book even launched very close to the launch date. And I'm not going to lie that sometimes I would get down when I would see a book very similar in topic or theme, get more media or more Amazon reviews even more quickly, and oh, get featured in a mainstream publication. And I would allow those things to sometimes make me feel dejected. Why not me? Why didn't I achieve those trophies, those measures of success?

Ultimately, the way out of compare and despair is to say, I'm so happy for this person. Bravo. That's amazing. The pie is big enough. The world is big enough for all of us. And none of this is a zero sum game. If you read one business book, it's likely you're going to read one more. It's not a zero sum game. Even though of course our attention is getting more and more fractured. And it does sometimes feel like we all, myself included, have less attention for deep immersive things like reading books these days. But I just had to keep reminding myself, jenny, you're running your own race. And in fact, what if I wasn't running the race at all? What if I was walking along a beautiful trail? What if I was a flaneur of a book launcher and not running any sort of race? And that's the truth. Because I'm not that motivated by numerical metrics. And that's why it's kind of silly for me to compare myself on a numerical basis again, whether book sales, downloads, number of reviews, et cetera, because it's just not the thing that motivates me. You're going to hear an awesome interview coming up in a few weeks with my creative coach, Jay Acunzo. He just launched a group coaching type situation for people who do creative work professionally and want to get better at at their craft. And one of my favorite prompts that he gave us is what are your even more meaningful metrics? Because like me, Jay is also not motivated, not that motivated by numbers, nor do the numbers indicate whether you're truly resonating with your desired audience. So he gave some examples when he sends out a newsletter, he calls it getting my two if two people respond to a newsletter with something powerful, he knows that he's doing something right. And as Jay said, one is an outlier, two is a trend. So that's why when two people respond to a newsletter, he kind of gives himself a gold star. Another one that he shared in that interview that you'll hear in episode somewhere around 181, I believe, coming out soon. Cackles per piece CPP so while you're making something, how many CPPs do you have? How many cackles per piece? We talked about one of my stats NNFM number of new friends made from podcast interviews or for him. We talked about like number of heroes that you've gotten to have a conversation with as a result of him having a podcast. I love when I hang up with a guest after recording and they say to me, that was so fun. So that could be one of my metrics. Twsf. That was so fun. If a guest tells me that I know I'm doing something right, Word of mouth shares. I say it even at the end of every free time episode that the best way we can grow this show is word of mouth. If you enjoy an episode, share it with a friend. And deep down, my belief is that if an episode is good enough and helpful enough, I don't even have to tell you to do that. I don't even have to ask you to do it as a favor to me because you will have already authentically wanted to share an episode. That's truly how I would know if I'm doing a good job is that you put a book down. And this has always been true for anything I create. My greatest measure of success is that you put something down that I've created and you can't wait to share it with a friend. Ideally two so when people came up to me and said, oh, I bought life after college for all my grandchildren, or I bought Pivot for all my friends. We're all going through this right now. Or I bought free time for my entire team. This is how I know I'm doing something right. So WOM shares Word of mouth shares when we spoke about this in the BFF community, Hillary offered number of synchronicities. And I love that as an even more meaningful metric. Number of synchronicities, where you have a conversation with a podcast guest and then that same idea shows up in a book you're reading and then a song lyric. How amazing would that be if, in addition to tracking revenue in our business and number of sales or number of clients and customers. We also tracked number of synchronicities this month. I just love it. So that's one little homework that I will encourage you to do from listening to this episode is just consider what metrics to you are even more meaningful than the typical traditional measures of success.

It also helps me to just realize what I'm sharing with you today just to notice when I've got my eyes on someone else's paper or any time that I'm feeling down. I know that that's probably not the whole truth, that I'm just looking at one little piece of the picture and in fact I can't see the whole thing. I love Malcolm Gladwell's masterclass and in it he talks about the fact that it took two years for him to get a tipping point for the book. Tipping point. So it's not like even that book was this smashing success on day one, right out of the gate, it took two years. I will link to that in the show notes. I'll also link to this fantastic conversation between Rich Rolle and Casey Nestat. And Casey was saying that it just takes patience. Not even just it takes patience. Being a creator, not obsessing over the latest social media trend, continuing to do great work that you believe in, it takes patience. And that those are the creators who are going to be the most successful in the long run. As my friend Dorie wrote a whole book on it's the Long Game. And in the long game, Dori talks about things going in waves. Your energy will go in waves, she describes. There will be periods where your head's up and there will be periods where your head's down. Writing a book is most definitely heads down. That's as heads down as I get in my business because I'll be heads down for months at a time. And then when it comes time for marketing, you're like one of those little meerkats that perk up on its two front legs, you know, or on its hind legs and the paws are in the front. And it's like, oh, I'm in heads up mode now. Now I'm in marketing mode. And then for me, I find that my energy is quite cyclical. So I've never shared this publicly because honestly, I don't know if it's adding anything new or not. But for many, many years, probably a decade now, I've thought about something I call the Creative's Journey. And it takes the shape of an infinity loop and it goes rise as you come up the left side of the infinity loop. Ride, release as you go to the bottom right and then retreat, rise, ride, release, retreat. Even for me, in this last year of technically speaking, I'm in marketing mode. I should be in heads up mode. Oftentimes I cannot sustain marketing mode indefinitely like a computer or like a machine, because it's not my natural mode. It does not fit my natural energy. So I need a lot of time to retreat. And so even in a heads up year, even in a year where, yes, on paper, my goal is marketing the book and ensuring that free time has enough momentum to keep going and that I keep feeding and seeding that momentum, or as I call it, the serendipity popcorn, throwing serendipity seeds out into the world. I'm also going to need periods of retreat. And that's what's been challenging about the first part of 2023 this first quarter, is that my energy is in complete retreat mode. And yet I'm measuring myself and holding myself to some unstated mission of what success looks like when you're out for the book.

With all that said, let's roll up our sleeves a little bit. Let me take you behind the scenes. I will share how the book Free Time is doing so far at this moment in time at the one year bookaversary, but I really wanted to share with you the journey and the mood swings and the rollercoaster and vulnerability of putting anything out into the world and, and the reminder to pull back from measuring it in ways that are discouraging or from having that hedonic measurement treadmill of always raising the bar, raising the bar and never actually appreciating success and celebrating the big and the teeny tiny wins because that is how we generate true momentum and that is how we actually enjoy the process. As I share in Free Time, how we bake is as important as what we make. So if we're sitting here as business owners, as people launching creative projects into the world, purely focused on what we're lacking, what we don't have, what we don't want, how we're failing, what kind of energy is that to put into the world? The book doesn't deserve that kind of energy. Readers, listeners, the ones who are here, you, you don't deserve that energy because you're here, which means something is working. It's human. We're all human. We're only human. Of course we're going to go through those dips, but it is so important to just pull back and focus on the good and build on the good and enjoy the journey. As cliche as it is, enjoy the cake baking process so that when the good things happen, we are poised and positioned to appreciate them. We don't just sweep them under the rug looking for the next person. Kind of reminds me of the dating scene and, oh, gosh, made a hundred million times worse when apps like Tinder came into the picture where there are some people who, well, satisficers and maximizers. If you're a satisficer, you go on a date, it's great, and you start to see more of this person. If you're a maximizer, nobody's ever going to be good enough. Talk about a hungry ghost. These are the people that are, like, tendering. You've heard horror stories while the one person is still at their house and they're already tendering of who they're going to get to come over next in that same moment. Like, oh my goodness, horrible. The same thing. We can do the same thing in our business where we're so dismissive of the good things that are happening that it's like nothing is good enough. So why would more good things come? And even if they did come, we wouldn't recognize them. Okay, end rant. This is what I had to get off my chest in order to go to some of the details, because again, the details aren't what motivate me, but I do find them interesting. And maybe you will too. For starters, I am very proud, very, very proud to share that FreeTime won six book awards and three for the podcast. So in the book space, it won Pencraft Literary excellence in nonfiction, business, finance. It won the 2022American Book Fest Award, best book winner in entrepreneurship and small business. It won the New York City Big Book Award. Very exciting. It won an independent publishing book award. It won as a finalist, so not a number one winner, but a finalist in the 2022 NIEA Book Awards National Indie Excellence Awards, and it was a finalist in the 2022 International Book Awards. Wow. I mean, these awards, to me, they're so validating because many of you know that the design of FreeTime Quality was one of my driving missions, of course. Quality ideas, quality writing, but also putting a ton of emphasis and energy and money into the design of the book itself. So it's super gratifying to have won these six awards. And I really have to thank the idea press team for submitting to so many places. The FreeTime podcast won three W3 awards. It won gold for best podcast in the consulting category and professional services category and silver for best host. So you're looking at a silver podcaster, ladies and gentlemen. Now let me also take you behind the scenes of even the podcast awards. You pay money to enter these, so you too can enter your business, your podcast, your book, whatever it is you're creating. There's probably an award for it. Sometimes there are hundreds of dollars per category that you want to submit for. I just submitted for the Webby Awards too, which I feel I have a very, very remote chance of getting any acknowledgement at all from the Webby Awards. But I paid over $1,000 to enter across several categories for the podcast. So just so you know, awards don't also just rain randomly down from the sky. You look for them, you submit for them, you pay for them. And then, of course, it's still special if you win. But this is something you could be a little bit proactive about.

We'll be right back, just after this.

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In terms of a sales update. So as always with hardcovers, there are returns that happen because the retailers might all order and stock their shelves and then about six months later, they might do a return. Okay, these didn't move. We're going to send them back to the publisher now. So the hardcover numbers went down a little bit. To date, we've sold 3,234 hardcover books, which I call the collector's edition. Crazily enough. I myself have never encountered free time in the wild, but one of the best feelings was when I would send out the early copies to advance readers and people would take pictures of free time with their baby or at the beach or Leanne, my friend, I mention all the time she took it On a yacht. Michael, my husband, pointed out that seeing the book in a photo, it's a built in meme because it says free time. So whatever you're doing, when you take a photo with the book, it's kind of this built in statement of what you're doing with your free time. And that has been so special. That's one of my very special metrics that are not tracked in the number of hardcover sales. Ebook has sold 1,477 copies. The audiobook has sold about 1,124 copies. Now, I shared more on the royalty structure behind all these sales in episode 164. That was a two part series on the three main publishing options of self, hybrid and traditional. And in the second part of that series, let's talk royalties, I really dig deep into what the author takes away. I tried to share as much as I could for all three in that episode. I also shared that in 2021, fewer than 1% of the 3.2 million titles that BookScan tracked sold more than 5,000 copies. So we're well on track with free time selling a cumulative about 6,000 copies to date. I probably gave away 500 or so audiobooks in the Bogogogo campaign. Buy one, get one, give one. It's not too late. I'm actually in honor of the one year bookiversary, I'm reopening Bogogo. So if you want to buy a hardcover and get the audiobook for free, you can still do that. It's freetime.com Bogogo B O G O G O And that's a good way to share with friends as well. And then I've also given away at least 500 hardcovers, if not more. I'm actually trying to give away hardcovers in a certain sense. Some people feel like, no, you gotta make people pay. This is your book. I think most books suffer from being unknown. So I feel that because I believe in the quality of the book, because I believe that when you put it down, you'll want to tell a friend. I actually try. I want to give away more and more copies. So if I'm speaking at an event, if the organizer says, no, we don't want to buy books, I might say, well, let me see if there's a way I can send a hundred books. And in my mind, my unit cost per book is about ten dollars. That's a thousand dollar expense on my end. But while the goal is spreading the word about the book, it's kind of worth it to me. I would rather have a hundred people who are my ideal readers. Get the book, love it, tell a friend, buy it, spread the word. That's actually more difficult to me and more important at this stage of the launch process than trying to ensure that I get paid for every single copy that changes hands. I'm also happy to share that we surpassed our goal of 100 reviews. FreeTime currently has 131 ratings and reviews. Thank you so much to every single one of you who's left one already. And if you want a handy little chatbot I created to guide you posting a review as well, I would be super grateful. You can visit itsfreetime.comreview and that will just guide you through some questions. Honestly, you could use it anytime you need to write a book review for anybody's book if they've said, hey, do me a favor, support the launch. You can visit itsfreetime.com review. It's a Typeform. It will walk you through just a few very simple questions and then email you your responses. So it's not like I, Jenny, am looking at that data. It's just meant to break the ice, the writer's block of writing a review. Because I know that even as somebody that writes and speaks for a living, sometimes I get writer's block when a friend asks me to leave a review for their book. So I hope that helps you. It's freetime.com review and big thanks again for all of you who have already left one so far. Most of all, speaking of the metrics that really matter, the joy has really been in the feedback. Every time you or somebody writes to me and says I loved the book so much, here's what I did as a result, here's the time I freed as a result. It just fills me to the brim with gratitude. That is why I created the book to free your time. So when I hear about these actual life changes and business breakthroughs, that's bliss for me. I also had a big mission to spark joy with. When you would see the book and hold the book and kind of surprise and delight that when I sent out the advance copies to media podcasters, it would go in a little box with two free time pens, one that says book nerd, one that's of the little flying heart icon, a free time pen green shred. And I just tried to make a really delightful book box that when it arrived, people would open it and be surprised and have a smile on their face. It's why there's confetti on the COVID because that's the design. When I saw all the options, that made me smile. That made me feel like life and business could be a celebration. That is why that fun was our launch theme for the launch month. Fun. We just only did whatever was fun. As previous guest Kay has said, in his business, he follows the fun. And you'll also hear another awesome conversation with him coming out very soon on his big business pivot in public, it can be so vulnerable to run a business and do it out loud and let people in behind the scenes. And I give K I just commend him for the courage to share his story as it's happening and let us in on his process. If we go back to that glass metaphor, is the glass half empty or half full? Doesn't matter because you created a glass from nothing. Now, I'm not an expert glassblower or anything. You'll have to listen to the two episodes with Jim McKelvey, who's an actual glassblower and one of the co founders of Square. From just a little cursory research, we could see that the glass blowing process begins with a small amount of molten glass from a furnace, or what's called a crucible. And that's when you see the glassblowers rolling that molten glass on a metal table and starting to shape it with heat. That phrase, the crucible. That is what so many of us go through when we create creative work. So technically speaking, in the context of glassblowing, it's a container used to hold and melt raw materials. In terms of a creative process, we are each taking our creative materials, our story, our experiences. And a crucible is also defined as a situation or experience that tests one's character, beliefs or values, it says. This concept is often used in literature, film, and other forms of art to describe a situation where characters are forced to confront difficult challenges or make tough decisions. Launching anything into the world can push us to our limits, can force us, can challenge us to confront our fears, our shortcomings, our personal struggles, the rollercoaster of emotions. And yet, that's the work of an artist to shed light on these experiences and provide insights into how we make it through, and then reaching behind us and helping pull others forward as well, right alongside us. I was totally overjoyed to know that some of my friends and previous podcast guests, Charlie Gilgie, put free time on his list of favorite business books that year, and that would go on his shelf behind him when he's doing video calls or interviews that Dave Radpravar and Jess they were previous guests talking about creating free time as a couple. It made the whole ste year end Favorite Book Roundup so every time this happened, I thought of Jay, who I mentioned earlier, my creative coach Jay's words, don't be the best. Be their favorite. Free time might not be a runaway mainstream hit on Amazon. I mean, never say never or on the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, but every single time that you or someone else has said this was my favorite book of the year, this is now my favorite business book. This is the book I always knew that I needed or could never find or says that about the podcast. And you know who you are because I've gotten some that have really lifted my spirits recently where they say your show was the one I listened to most last year. For me, that's not about ego, it's a vote to say you're doing something right. It is resonating. And to Jay's words, don't be the best. Be their favorite. It is the highest honor and greatest joy to know that I could create something that might be your favorite with that. Thank you so much for being here. This show would not exist without you. And I know we're not supposed to attach to words that are positive or negative in terms of reviewing a book. We're not supposed to get overly excited about positive praise and we're not supposed to get down because of negative trolls or anything. But I have to tell you, the kind words, the love notes. Knowing that it's resonating, it keeps me going. Thank you all so, so much for being here, for reading, for listening, and for spreading the good word. Here's to setting even more time free in 2023.

If you've listened this far, you get a gold star.

Thank you.

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

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