♻️ How To Define Success To Reach Your Goals Faster (Featuring Nic Peterson)

Right now, everything we're doing, we're playing the game in order to determine whether we want to keep playing or not. That's the purpose. And if we can get people in that mindset, they have way more fun series of micro steps. They could pivot a whole bunch. And it's perfectly fine because we're not keeping score as much as trying to determine if this is a game we want to continue to play. The worst thing you can do is have success in something that you hate doing because you feel married to it. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast with your boys, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear. Hey, what's up, everyone? Welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. We mentioned that this month, January of 2022, we're going to be playing sort of the greatest hits, the best of episodes. These are literally the episodes that change the game for us. The biggest ahas and perspective shifts that we've ever had as podcasters came from the episodes that we're sharing this month in January. These are the ones that shaped the journey and led us to where we are today. In this episode, I am bringing welcome back to the Surface, our episode with Nick Peterson. And in this episode, we talk about all sorts of things that are super relevant to our big pivots in our business and in our lives. We talk about defining success and how money's not always the way we define it. We talk about how to figure out what your priorities actually are. We talk about how we all kind of start businesses with this motivation and excitement, but it kind of fizzles out and why that is. And we talk about why businesses start to become monotonous. And we talk about why people sort of lose their passion and love for what they're doing in their business and what to actually do about it. So obviously, all of this sounds very relevant to our major pivot to where we just weren't feeling it as much anymore. Talking purely about Digital Marketing, the Web3 stuff was what was really exciting us. And this conversation helped us kind of decide to make that pivot. So we wanted to share that with you. But this episode's also relevant for another reason, because Nick Peterson, after we talked to him, he made a pivot into doing web3 crypto, crypto type stuff as well. We're actually trying to get him back on the show. We'd like to talk to him a little bit more about what he's doing in the crypto space. But he's got a token called the Wolfie Token, which is a token that can be burned in exchange for education and guidance. And if you don't know what that means, you know, we'll probably talk about that in a future episode. He has this token called the Guardian Token, which is a token where you can create a liquidity pool with busd, which is Binance's Stablecoin, and you can earn these rewards off of it. Again, something. We'll get into it in a future episode. And you can also earn these things, things called knight tokens, which are a reward for creating liquidity for his token. And these knight tokens actually have real world value as well. So he's doing some really, really cool stuff in the crypto world. He's building his own sort of defi platform. So we're excited to talk to him about that. But this episode specifically, we're going to talk about what motivates us, why we sort of lose the passion for things, how to kind of move on, how to think about business and in life. Nick Peterson's just a philosopher, and he's an amazing one at that. Before we get into this, I want to remind you of two real quick things. So, number one, we are taking the notes on this episode, or we did take the notes on this episode back when we recorded it the first time. We don't do notes on newer episodes, but we do still have the notes for these older episodes. The only way to get them in the past was to subscribe to our membership, but now we're giving away for free if you are a member of our Discord community. So if you go to hustleandflowchart.com discord we will hook you up with the notes for this episode. So make sure you head over there. That's hustleandflowchart.com Discord we'll give you the notes. Just look for the channel inside of Discord that says downloads, and that's where we'll make them available. Also, if you aren't already, follow us on Twitter. I am mattrwolf M A T T R W O L F E on Twitter and Joe is Joe Fear J O E F I E R on Twitter. We curate a ton of really cool Stuff in the Web 3 and Creator Space. Make sure you're following us there because that is the social media platform that we spend the most time on outside of our Discord community. All right, so let's go ahead and chat with Nick Peterson. How's it going, Nick?

Doing all Right.

Oh, man, there's a lot of, a lot of crossover in our world. Jeff Moore made the introduction partner of yours. We're working with all these folks and your name's just been popping up a lot. So it's just finally one of these chances where you're like, all right, let's do this. Got to sit him down, record some talks.

Yeah, and everybody we talk to speaks insanely highly of you too. We were talking to Jeff Spencer yesterday and like, as soon as we got on the call, he made a comment about how any friend of Nick is of friend of mine. I'm like, well, you know, Joe's talked to him once and he's like, that's good enough. If you know Nick, you're a friend of mine.

Yeah, Jeff is.

Jeff's a great human. Both Jeff, Jeff Moore and Jeff Spencer, they're both partners. They're. They're both brilliant and they're world class humans as just connectors and, and they just care so much about the people in their world. It's. It's fantastic. So I'm happy to hear that.

And another shout out to Aaron too, because file that made this happen as well. So she's cool. Great human too. Lumper in there. So, yeah, you've. It's interesting because you've come up so much, but I don't think there's like a lot on you out there publicly. And that's probably on purpose, I would assume. So I'm curious, like, honestly, like hearing about you because it's all. Yeah, I know you do a lot of partnerships, so it seems like you're kind of tandem with a lot of folks. So let's take us back a little bit and how this, how Nick happens.

Yeah, it's. It doesn't make any sense to me either. I learned a long time ago. I tell people this is probably one of the, one of the best consulting tools I have, especially for the type A people that like, need to understand every detail. Sometimes you just gotta. If it's good, you just let it happen. Does it have to make sense to you? And a lot of my life has been that way. I'll tell you, without going way back, because it's like a childhood was rough. I spent about 14 years of my life. Homeless people go, that's hardcore. But the reality is when you're living it, it doesn't feel hardcore. It's just what it is. And.

I got into college for test scores and athletics. I was really, really into athletics. That fe. Like, that was my way out Right. And so I was going to play football in college, and I went to. I went to Eastern Washington University, and then I went to this place called DeFrancos. Joe DeFranco's. It's a training facility in New Jersey. And he takes, you know, the younger kids and turns them into pros. And I realized while I was there, I don't really want to play sports. I love the process, like, learning and just learning how to do these things. So I quit, and I said, I'm going to open my own gym. So I opened my own gym. And it's just because I thought, like, if I have a gym, I can work out all the time. Right. I actually. So I was in Vero Beach. Florida is where my gym was. Florida is really hot.

And it was in a warehouse because it's like, I could just barely afford a warehouse. I actually lived. I slept in that warehouse for three years.

I have some other germ friends that have done something similar, so I can kind of relate through them. Yeah, yeah.

It's not people. People, like, get a job, you know, like, stop. But, like, when you're doing it, it's just not weird. It's just what you do. So there's a lot of that. What I wanted to do is, because I was done playing football, I wanted to find another process that I could just, like, hang on to, right? Like, really latch onto. And I found strongman. Said I want to go pro and strongman. And so I would train just enough people to make just enough money to, like, get a little bit of food and travel to do strongman stuff. I did that at a really, really high level. And then once you go pro and strongman, that's it. You can't compete amateur anymore. So you either go to World's Strongest man or you do nothing, really.

You can't go back down and play around with the other.

They don't let pros compete against amateurs, right?

Yeah.

And there's not enough money in this sport for there to be, like, a lot of events. So I was like, okay. So I got into powerlifting. What's another process? It was like, what's another process? And I learned through this process that I like the really short feedback loop. Like, if you're powerlifting, you know, immediately, if the weight's too heavy, you don't have to wait six months to find out. So these are things I'm learning through that process. I tore both my hamstrings, I tore both my pecs, tore my left hamstring a second time, and My left adductor. And I said, I can't do this. I'm like, I was like, 25 and I was crippled. Like, I, you know, I couldn't walk like a normal person. I was in pain all the time. But I had this gym, and through the intensity in which I used to exercise, right. It actually attracted, interestingly enough, nasty, like, dirty, gross gym. Never cleaned it. I just kind of used it as my own personal whatever.

Yeah.

But the intensity level, it attracted this a certain kind of person. Probably not the person everybody would think, Right. It attracted people like me, but also this type a professional female, like, used to be a doctor or a lawyer. Super type, a high achiever, but then had kids and now they're stay at home mom. And they need something to, like, just.

Be a badass in, like, structure and. Yeah, be a badass, too. Yeah.

And then they got a little masochistic streak, which they just need to satisfy every now and then. And so I was like, hey, well, I can't power lift anymore. Maybe I'll try to figure out how to make money because I'm kind of tired of living in the gym and being poor. And I realized real quickly, one, how easy it is to make money. But then it hit me that these are really smart people. These are the people that I had never had contact with. I can't afford to hang out with these people. So what if I just build this whole facility around this kind of person and I just get to hang out with doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, people that make money. I just learn from them. I don't have to pay for it. They're actually paying me to, like, spend time with them. It was just. To me, it was like, this is wild. Yeah, you actually pay me.

You're sort of defining why we got into podcasting.

You feel guilty. Like, you're almost like, okay, somebody's going to find me out and take me to jail for this, because this isn't like, Right.

Yeah. And you were taking their money and, like, we just take a little bit of time.

No, it's wild, but very similar to, like, the reason why a lot of people started podcasts is, like, we just get people to talk to us and share their deepest, darkest secrets. It turns out as a personal trainer, you're also a therapist, so you get all that too. So I had a little tiny bay, right? Like, the strip mall had a little tiny bay over the next and never learned how to pay for traffic. I didn't know how to market advertising, none of that. I just figured out this Feedback loop. If I say these things, they think it's awesome. And they bring their husband in and he gives me money. And I learned if I say these things to him, he brings his friends and they give me money. And ended up knocking down nine walls. So we ended up taking the whole strip mall space. So ended up being what they call the Unicorn Gym. Highest price, by far. By far the highest price. Always on a wait list, never paid for traffic. Celebrity trainers were flying from LA to Florida to come work for me. They'd move their whole life to Florida.

From LA to Florida. That's like. Doesn't happen. That's backwards.

Yeah. A lot of them came to visit, say, what the hell's going on here?

Right.

And then just never left.

Wow.

So built this community. That was cool. And throughout the process, I'd found some of the pro, strongman and elite power lifters. And I just realized that if you show up willing to learn, almost anybody at that level will talk to you. I was also fat. I was overweight. It's really strong. I said, I got to get this nutrition thing sorted out. I really want to figure out how to not be fat and die when I'm 30. And so I went down the same kind of journeys, like, who's the best in the world? And sort of through all the Internet stuff. And it's like everybody's saying the same thing. And found a guy in Arizona at Arizona State. We actually met a few years before that. And he was on track to get his PhD in metabolic chemistry when he was 23. And he said, you know, I really think this whole nutrition thing is a joke. There's a way better way to do this. And I was like, cool. Tell me what I need to do. I will follow all your instructions. He's like, cool. Everybody thinks I'm crazy. So if you'll follow my instructions and I'll just tell you what to do. So my body transformed significantly and my lifestyle as well. I could go out and have ice cream and stuff like that. And I just happened to have a gym full of people watching everything I did. And so they're like, this doesn't make any sense. What are you doing different? So I kept talking about, his name's Trevor. I said, trevor this, Trevor that. And at some point, I think they thought I just made this person up.

It was like, Nick's lost it.

Yeah, yeah. Like this imaginary Trevor. And so I reached out and I said, hey to Trevor. And I said, will you come to a seminar? We teach these people what you're doing. He's like, yeah, whatever. As long as my travel's paid, I'll come do it. Came did that. And as soon as he gave the seminar, everybody wanted it, Whatever again. Kid got his PhD when he was 23. He's brilliant. And so he moved to Florida and we launched a nutrition company, which is now Trevor Cashew Nutrition. They do fantastic. So launched a nutrition company, and there's a handful of people that did really, really well, got results like I did, and another handful that didn't. So the next thing was I latch onto stuff like, I really just, why are some people getting results and some aren't? And that led us down this path of cognitive behavior therapy. Because we communicate with some people one way and other people need to be communicated with. Right? It's not about being technically correct. It could be. That's where most technicians fail, in my opinion. It's about saying the thing that will get the person to change their behavior in a way that's beneficial to them. Those are two different things. So we went really deep on cognitive behavior therapy. And everything I do now is built. Built off of that. I am almost never technically correct. I don't care because of the little bit we talked about. My partners and people, they're technically correct. So I know what needs to get done. What I have to do now is figure out, how do I say this to you in a way that'll get you to actually modify your behavior? So that's where I learned that Jim. Jim was doing well. Nutrition company was doing really well. I had no interest in exercise or nutrition.

You're just interested in the mind and.

Like, yeah, like, I solved my problem. Selfishly, I solved my problem. I want to do the. I want to codify this so I could help a whole bunch of people. But I don't really want to sit here and do this. I don't care about exercise and food. I still exercise and I still eat a certain way, but that's selfish. I want to look and feel a certain way. And so then somebody, a good friend of mine, said, hey, I'm going to shut my business down just because it wasn't profitable. Got great results. But after chargebacks and travel and yada, yada, yada, and I said, cool, can I have it? He goes, what are you going to do with it? And I said, well, I'm not going to do what you did. This is what I'm going to do. And I just told him, and he said, how soon can you be to Albuquerque? Let's do this. Together. So, okay. So I sold the gym on the spot. I walked into my business partner and I said, here's the deal. I'll sell you the gym for this much. I'll keep half, but I'm not going to be here. So you're going to be pissed that you're paying me money and I'm not here. Or if you just want to sign this right now, you can just have it. But I got somewhere to be. And so I got rid of the gym, kept the nutrition company, moved to Albuquerque and this new business. And I'm not going to name names because we're still good friends. And that part partnership did not end well. Zero to $1.2 million a month in the four months I was in Albuquerque. Oh, wow. And so it was like a lot, right? It went from homeless in the gym to all of this stuff that I don't understand. So that partnership fell through mostly because I didn't want to. It was still fitness related. I want to be in fitness. So I spent the next. I still didn't know anything about advertising or marketing, but I'd seen all this success or I've been part of this. So I spent the next year in Nashville and I joined a bunch of these high ticket masterminds because I'm thinking, like, if I did this without knowing anything about all this advertising stuff, I'm going to take over the world. And I got into all these high ticket masterminds and one, I realized nobody's doing what they actually say they're doing. That's frustrating to me. And two, some of the most brilliant people. There's a fertility coach, for example. 100% success rate after IVF fails. She's brilliant, but because what she does doesn't fit in a high ticket webinar model, the whole room is telling her how stupid she is. And every event I went to, there's a handful of these really brilliant people that just didn't fit in the. Oh, you just do a webinar and then you dig for pay and close them. It's easy. And I said, they shouldn't. In my mind, I'm like, they shouldn't do that, but they have a gift and we don't want to rob them of that gift. And so I spent a year just thinking about, how can I help these people and do I really want to get into that? Because it's a lot. And one of those people called me and said, hey, thinking about doing this offer. He's a doctor, my partner in Master Mount. He's a doctor. He's brilliant. He's like. And he could build systems and operations. Like, he just has. His brain just works in a way that mine doesn't. So think about doing this offer. Do you think there's a need for it? And I said, yeah, there's a need for it for sure. And we decided to partner on it. And so as we're getting that off the ground, because systems and operations are super sexy, we said, hey, what can we do for, like, a cash flow infusion? I've been kicking this around. I'll just kind of put out a post or something, or I'll reach out to something. I'll see if anybody just wants to pay money to hang out with me and, like, you have my phone number and talk, like, just for some cash flow. So one person did that. Another person called and said, what are you doing? I heard about it. I want in. By the end of the second month, we had 33 people paying three grand a month just to just to, like, have my phone number and hang out. And what that has turned into is the thing that I partner with Jeff Moore on. That's the network.

The network, yeah. The master.

Yeah. And what that is now is it's doing exactly what I was thinking about maybe doing. No two people do the same thing. So I don't have any two people in the same industry, same niche, and they all have unique abilities that don't fit into the standard whatever the Internet is teaching right now.

So when you go to all these other masterminds, you're like, all right, give me your rejects. The ones that don't fit in your bucket, in your Lego square pegs or whatever.

Yeah. Actually, I don't. That would be the best marketing strategy, because that did happen. One mastermind actually shut down. Right. And a whole bunch of them just came into my thing. And I don't join masterminds for that reason. Unless it was like, I would join Russell Brunson's inner circle just to steal his clients.

But I don't have a relationship with him. So there's been times where I said, I'd love to go, but I'm going to tell you what is probably going to happen. It's not intentional, and I don't want us to have that kind of relationship where there's a certain kind of. Your client that's going to be really attracted to what we do. I just. I rather not, you know, participate and cause that friction.

Yeah.

So is the ideal.

I will be the best marketing, though, is the ideal.

Client. Someone that's like, they're. They're brilliant in one area, but they just can't grasp the marketing side of things. Is that kind of who you.

Or get the support maybe that they're looking for?

There's a book. There's a book written by a PhD for other PhDs. So I used to recommend it. Nobody ever reads it. It's called the fusion of innovations and the simplest way to explain it. And this is really important for service providers. People make decisions when they have certainty. So you give them information and they feel certain, and then they take an action. If we're uncertain, we'll take certain misery over uncertainty. Right. Like we will choose to be miserable because the devil we know versus the devil we don't know.

Familiarity.

Yep. And so now the mistake is with people like the people we're talking about, these really gifted people, when they say something they think they're giving, they. You have your gap. There's a gap of uncertainty. This is how much uncertainty somebody has. The goal is to give them information to close the gap of uncertainty. What they consider information is actually innovation to a regular human. It increases uncertainty. The biggest problem is they think they're saying something that's helpful. It's actually incredibly confusing. That's most of the problem. Most of the problem comes from. Again, they say. Well, I told them that. Yeah, but they don't know what you're saying because you've been doing this for 30 years and you have a PhD, you have like five PhDs. And like, they just kind of take.

For granted that the. The things that are normal in their world aren't normal in everybody else's world.

Yep. Yeah. It's a. I call it a base knowledge disconnect. So even when we think we're speaking to, like, the base knowledge, we're actually speaking to the base knowledge of people like us, which is not the buyers.

Right.

People like us don't really buy from us because they have the same skill set as usual. So that's the biggest. It happened. Right. Academics are trained to speak in a way that impresses other academics. Personal trainers speak in a way to impress other personal trainers. And none of that is particularly good for sales.

Yeah. It's like us as marketers talking about CPMs and CPAs and KPIs and all the various acronyms that we make up. Somebody that works at the coffee shop overhears us, has no clue what we're talking about. But.

Right.

You know, among our peers, it's pretty common knowledge.

Yep. It's just recognizing that. And the longer, the deeper you've to do research. You develop a paradigm. You have to.

Right?

Because if all. If everything is an option, you can't go deep. So you develop this paradigm. And even when you simplify things as much as you possibly can, you're still. You still have kind of these blinders, and you're working in this paradigm. Unless somebody else has also done deep research in that field, they don't have the same paradigm. That's usually the issue. I have two kinds of ideal clients. One is like a Dr. Jeff Spencer. All you have to do is get them in front of people and it's game over. It's not.

So his qualities specifically, would they be like, okay, high achiever. He's obviously proven himself through and through because you're spotting success. I'm imagining you seem to have a really good filter on what maybe the gap that, you know, you can solve because you have a purpose. But you're. It seems like you're always on the hunt for the right people and the right things, but you have a hell of a filter. It sounds like for all this, the.

Filter is, again, it's my own paradigm. It's certainly faulty in some ways, but the filter is. It depends. If I say, hey, what should I do? What should I do about getting better sleep? And they're like, where are blue blockers? You have an answer that quick without any context, any diagnostic or any compiling of information, that's a big red flag to me. Everybody I know in my world that I lean on would say, well, it depends. Oh, there's a diagnostic process. There's some kind of compiling and analyzing information before we strategize and execute. Right. So that's my main filter. Anybody that is certain of something without context? Nope.

It's almost like maybe certainty across the board. Would you say that? It seems like things just change faster than ever. We just actually chatted with Steven Kotler. Things are changing all the freaking time, super fast, you know. So what would you say just with certainty in general? Like, is there certainty, like, in anything?

Yeah, I mean, that's the project that I'm most excited about. Skipping ahead to that. But the only reason is because it is actually an app and it is called the Certainty App.

It almost sounds like you teed him up for that.

I know. I like it. Yeah. Tell me more. I have no clue. I'm curious now.

Yeah, certainty, the concept is for business owners or anybody, we acquire money and sometimes we forget that more does not not mean closer to Things that matter to us. What matter? So we have to be clear on what matters to us. Our priorities. And we have to be honest with ourselves. So you don't have to tell anybody else, but we have to be honest about what our priorities are. You want to be famous? Great. I don't care. I have no judgment. But you need to know, because each priority has a cost. So let's say you grow your business and you want 10 hours of free time to spend with your kids. There's going to be a cost to replace what you do in your business, and you need to have. That needs to happen in the next two years. And let's say you got to pay off your mortgage because it's stressful and you want to buy another house, and that has to happen in five years, and you never want your wife to work again, and that needs to happen in three years, and that's 70 grand a year. Now we have your priorities. We rank order them and put a cost in a timeline. Now, all that matters in my mind from a business perspective is every move we make in our business gets us closer to funding those priorities. You could say, I'm going to partner with Elon Musk and he's going to give me $10 billion. Does it that get you close to your priorities? Because if not, I don't care. So what the app does and what I'm always looking at is given the current trend, so the return you get on your investments, your salary, all that stuff, are you on track to fund your priorities in the time that's appropriate? If no. Well, I'll start with this. If yes, every move we make should be creating certainty, removing the risk, creating redundancy, all that stuff. It's not grow your revenues. Because if you push to grow your revenues, you also take on risk. Always. Right? So if no, if you're not on track to fund your priorities, then you do have to take on that risk in order to get on track. And then once you're on track, we remove the uncertainty and the risk and the volatility. So it's certainty that you get to the things that matter to you. And so it's a huge frame shift for the way most people think. But ties into your bank accounts, ties into all of your businesses, everything. And it just says, hey, if I make this move, am I getting closer to the things that matter with more certainty?

Well, I think this kind of ties into what. When we asked you before we hit record, what sort of lights you up right now, and it was the topic of defining success. What does success actually look like? I think that's probably a good transition into that piece of the conversation. So let's start with why is that something that's so on your mind right now?

A few reasons. The first being as there's some things like once you know or once you see, you can't unsee it. So in a position where I do have clients and partners and there's, there's, I have a responsibility to consult or guide or implement. It's really hard to do that knowing, like knowing what I know now about priorities. It's really hard. When you say, hey, should I look? I'm thinking about like pulling an all nighter and building a webinar. Should I do that if I don't know what your priorities are? I have no idea. If your priority is to have a webinar, sure. But, but I need to know in order to consult. It's kind of like it's not skin in the game when consulting, but it's like Soul in the game is whatever book that is. I need to know that we're actually getting closer to things that matter. Or I can't with confidence say, yes, you should do that. So on one end, it makes consulting a lot easier on the other end, personally, for myself, I want to make sure everything I'm doing is getting me closer to things that matter. I have walked away from, I've been to the point where I've walked away from an outrageous amount of money because I was miserable. And that just kind of like this thing, this clicked where it's like, there's gotta be a point other than just having money. Right? It represents something. So for me personally, I want to make sure everything I'm doing is getting me closer to things that matter. And if I'm responsible for anybody else's stuff, I want to make sure we're getting closer to things that matter.

Oh yeah.

So if you can't, if we haven't defined success, then how do I make more money? Like I don't. There are hundreds of thousands of ways to make more money. But if we know your priorities, if we know your unique disposition, we know your personality, we know what matters to you, that's going to eliminate 95% of them. And now we can actually get something done because we have like four or five options instead of hundreds of thousands.

I know you have frameworks for everything, like you were saying too. So for people struggling with maybe their priorities in general, they just don't know or they think they know, but Their priorities have probably swollen too much where they, they're not really a priority. It's just a bucket of things that they still like to do. Like, how do you help them find those priorities?

So first thing is, sometimes we don't. It's really hard to define what we want. I think we have to because we're, we're aiming creatures. Like, we need something to aim at. So I wrote the book, I wrote my book Bumpers as the foundation, which is like, avoid bad things first. Right. Learn to appreciate when bad things don't happen. So maybe you don't know you're about to have a kid and you want to be the best father ever and you don't know what that looks like. Can we identify the things that you never want to do as a father and just start there?

The inverse, basically, of the thing that you think you want, but you might not know how to get there. Yeah.

Yeah, okay. Because people say, hey, I want to get in shape. And they're like trying all this really advanced stuff and whatever, but then they go out and they binge eat and drink all weekend. And if you just didn't do that, that'd be a pretty big step forward. So I always start there. What are the things we know we don't want? What are the non negotiables? I will never, for example, I will never waste time trying to prove that I'm right. I can. You know how much time in my life it is saved when I'm realize I'm about to get an argument to be right. Whatever you can be right. Just go do it over there.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's a good one. That's, that's one that I probably should work on.

It's just, it helps you kind of figure out what you do want, you know, and the other thing is, like, I won't start something I'm not willing to do forever.

How do you, how do you run that through a lens? Like, what's your lens for that? Like, what's forever? I guess obviously it's forever, but.

Yeah, you can. Yeah, I mean, you can fudge it too. Like, I fudge all my own rules, but there are some things where I can't even convince myself. Like, I can't even fudge it. And then I know. So it's like, hey, you wanna, you wanna like build a business where you gotta take a bunch of sales calls? I don't wanna do that forever. So I'm not even gonna start.

Got it? Yeah.

Because anything I'll use diet. Everybody relates to nutrition stuff. Let's say, hey, we should try being vegetarian for like, like 90 days, right? You think, am I willing? It's not. Am I going to do it forever? Am I willing to do it forever? No. Which means it's possible that any benefits that come from it are short lived anyway.

That's 100% true. It's funny because you look at the diets, almost all of them are like, hey, this 90 day thing or this, whatever, this cleanse. And I'm sure there's benefits, but probably over time it's really habits. You want consistency through success. Like are you looking for that more than anything? Sounds like for the projects that you're on.

Let's, let's get as, let's get as close as we can. Like we're talking about nutrition and like, let's get as close as we can with stuff we'll actually do forever so that we know that we can actually maintain the results forever. There's achievability, which is what everybody's shooting for, and there's maintainability. Those are two different things. If I can make a relative improvement in a sustainable way, time is on my side. If you're going to go vegan for 90 days, you're ticking time bomb. Time is not on your side. Every day you're one day closer to ballooning back up and having a meltdown. So I try to rig it assuming I'm gonna be around for a while so that time is my friend. Which means if I can't even convince myself, yeah, I think I might do this forever, I just won't do it.

It's almost like the switching costs, right? It's like this energy and time that was taken to you to do this new short venture thing that you probably just fell into. Like I'm going to try this little three month thing, but it's like, yeah, there's all this energy that was front loaded for this thing probably throughout the whole thing. But then another switching cost at the end of it when you don't stick along with it or you didn't establish the habit, then you're just causing chaos for yourself and potentially other people around you. And it's this weird spiral.

It's a doom loop.

Doom loop.

Called a doom loop.

Okay.

So if you're going and you're working or you're consulting with another business and you're talking to them, they have this realization of like, when I got into this I thought this is what I wanted to do, but now that I'm in it it's not really my thing anymore. Like, how do you guide people like that?

I become a fan of micro steps, which means we don't name the puppy. When you go to the pound with your wife and then she names the puppy and now you're going home with the puppy. So we try not to name the puppy. We try to switch to as much as possible. This is exploration. We're exploring and that's okay. Everything we're doing, we are not doing. There's phases when you do something new. We are not doing it to win the game because again, time. Right. Like, there's really no end. We're not playing the game to win the game. Right now. Everything we're doing, we're playing the game in order to determine whether we want to keep playing or not. That's the purpose. And if we can get people in that mindset, they have way more fun series of micro steps. They could pivot a whole bunch. And it's perfectly fine because we're not keeping score as much as trying to determine if this is a game we want to continue to play. And if not, that's fine. Fine. We need to recognize that as soon as possible. The worst thing you can do is have success in something. Success in something that you hate doing because you feel married to it.

Well, then you're stuck even more down the rabbit hole potentially, and causing a lot more effort to get out of that thing if you need to or you feel like you do. You said something. There was somewhere we're digging into. And it's the whole thinking. The more you think, more than likely the actions are probably never going to happen or they're not going to actually be. Be what you want them to be because the more you think, the lesser. It's like this weird scale, it seems like. So I'm curious about that. And that probably relates to your filters of why you don't have to think so hard to actually do the action. Because you've frontloaded that too.

Yeah. I'll wrap up the priority thing because I want to give something super actionable and nobody will do it. That's a challenge. I hope everybody goes, oh, yeah. If you list out your top three priorities and you put a timeline and a cost to it, more often than not, people, because what they're trying to do right now, with your time and your money and your resources, you're trying to fund 14 different things at once. But if you prioritize, and I got this from Dan Nicholson, if you prioritize, more than likely, oh, it's only $40,000 to completely fund this priority. Put your next $40,000 into that priority. 100% of it. And when people go, oh well I don't want to put all my money in that, then it's not actually your priority. You lied to yourself because it sounded better or whatever. Right. Because we vote with our money.

So list your priorities, put a time. And then if your top priority is going to be a hundred thousand dollars to fund the next hundred thousand dollars of free money you have should go 100% to that. And if you're not willing to do that, that is not your top priority. And you need to reshuffle them until you feel like it is worth putting every extra dime into it.

That is good.

We get gut reactions. We're like, oh, I don't really want to put the money into my kids college. Well, that's not a priority. No judgment, judgment. But stop lying to yourself. You'll never achieve anything that matters.

Seems like a good way to just close some loops in people's minds too. It's like throwing through the ring. Or even if they don't even maybe do the exercise, but you just talk it through them and they're like, oh yeah, hypothetically. That doesn't even make sense anymore. Click.

It doesn't necessarily mean it's not a priority. It's just not really, it's not really a top priority. It doesn't necessarily mean it's not something that you're interested in doing or pursuing. It's just, it's not. Not as high on the priority list as you've probably thought of up until doing the exercise.

Yep. And, and it's important that like you may have priorities that are diametrically opposed.

Right.

And like you gotta prioritize. Cause you, they're competing, you gotta pick one, then attack the other one. So it's. A lot of people are doing that. They, they wanna have as much money right now as possible, but they also wanna have as many followers as possible. And like, like pick one, make a bunch of money and then pay for followers or get a bunch of followers and then make money from them. You're not going to go anywhere if you are trying to maximize both at the same time.

That is really, really great wisdom right there. That needs to be the quote on the episode right there.

It just seems, I guess. Yeah. For priorities. It seems like most of the work right there. Right. That's the filters, the prioritization. I know that sure as hell would help me. I mean it. The fact that you're napping all the time. I read that numerous places was a daily nap. And I know this seems random to other people, but, like, you are partners with so many businesses. You're in a lot of businesses. I think he even made a comment like, how the hell is he doing all this?

Yeah, well, I mean, when we were kind of going through taking our notes on this, Joe is like, this is another one of his businesses. This is another one of his businesses. This is. And I'm like, holy shit.

Like, how.

How does somebody manage to keep up with so many different businesses? And, you know, it's. It's. I know you. You work on a lot with like, time management and productivity type stuff too. So maybe is that like a rabbit hole you want to go down from there?

And that gets maybe to that thinking segment after now we'd wrapped up prioritization. Yep.

There's. I have a gift or a curse, whichever it is. I have them mentally. So lines. Right. So you think like, this clean line between this business and this business or this relationship and this. I. I see them mentally and they're on paper, but I operate as if no lines exist. It's a comment I get from people all the time. It's like, you don't believe in rules or lines. And that makes it much easier because.

I can operate as if, like. So I have an advertising agency. We got Jeff Spencer's thing. That's a separate deal. Got Mastery Mode. Got the wealth Q and A with Dan Nicholson. Yeah, yeah. Which is consulting. Also have another advertising agency called Social Vantage. That seems like a lot. Right. But what if all of those others were just a client of the advertising agency and I. Or they were all just a client of the network. What would I do? Right. So to me, those lines don't exist. It's not as complicated as it might seem. I do have to remember, like, who works for who and who pays who and who's paying for this? Who gets paid for it? But ultimately, if it was all just one, it's also built. So it could be outside of the two advertising agencies. It could be one company.

Yeah, that's a good point. And it sounds like, yeah, there's somehow maybe not the agencies kind of connected in some way and they feed each other or there's overlapping components that's similar to what we've kind of built with our own business on back of this podcast with just all the different pieces of the platform, I guess we would call it is connected to this kind of end goal that we have. And Multiple businesses, too. So I guess that makes sense. The blurry lines are just no lines, really.

There's also a. There's nothing. There's a whole lot of. A lot of clients. A lot of people are like, how'd you. You know, like, I didn't know you could do that. Me neither, but I just tried. So I have zero loss aversion, not worried about failing. I just want to try everything. And so that. That helps.

Have you always had that feeling like that? Because you just seem like this whole time, and I knew this going into it, like, you have a very different energy than most. Most entrepreneurs would have. I feel like very, very calm.

Very sort of relaxed cadence to your speaking and everything.

Yeah, yeah. But at the same time, you're thinking as well. Like, this whole story. And I'm super curious. Like, obviously was a lot of that. The upbringing, you know, 14 years homeless, kind of seeing from a different perspective maybe.

I think I've always have a brilliant doctor. She's like, you know, she'll, like, get on. Like, she'd probably hop on the zoom and be like, I bet your ears itch, don't they? How'd you know? And she's like, you got gut problems. Like, she's like, savant.

Yeah.

And she. She said something. Something about, you know, in your blood work, the chemical levels, like, your brain processes things in a very different way than anybody I've ever seen. That's probably always been the case. It wasn't until my PhD friend Trevor, we launched a nutrition company. He came and he lived. We lived together, we carpooled together, we shared an office together. And it wasn't until I had him in my somebod who has a ton of processing power, like cognitive horsepower through the roof, would sit there and start pointing out things, like things about my mannerisms, things about, you know, like what we call intention intervention gap, where you say this one thing, but your actions don't line up. And we just kind of sat around and just like, pointed it out to each other. It wasn't really until then, until I had kind of a framework to think through problems and communicate them. Before that I was super addicted to.

Just always had to be doing something. And it wasn't until somebody was sitting there pointing out, hey, you said this, but you're doing this. And did you know that all of like he said, all your employees are terrified of you. I was like, why? Because I'm a pretty nice guy. You walk around and you're quiet and you have a resting bitch face, and I Never noticed that before. And again, the tight feedback loop.

Yeah, yeah.

And so I just made micro adjustments, trying to get more aligned with either. I had to change the perception of myself. I changed my behavior. So I kind of meet in the middle that I was even able to hold conversations for any amount of time. Before that, it was just like I was all over the place. So we spent about three years, two and a half years living together, carpooling, all that stuff, and it really just gave me a level of self awareness because it was just like you cloned me. And I was watching myself giving myself feedback.

Oh, man, that's good.

Good.

And obviously, yeah, you have a trusted guy. He's brilliant. And it seemed like he had a good. Obviously, it's very easy to get an ego in the way when you're getting called out by your buddy. Even if you do trust them, it's like, God, that thing I said, I said maybe. Jesus. Am I not allowed to say a single word? That's interesting. Is it through things like the Certainty app and your coaching, is that how you kind of parlay that learning and into others? If you see someone with ADD or that kind of. Is it typically a priorities thing? Would you distill it down to that?

Yeah, without getting too deep into this, because I actually just taught this at my last event because it's a thing we strengthen our attention deficit. Most entrepreneurs could probably remember a time where they could just line shit up and knock it down. They're super motivated, and now all of a sudden they're not getting as much done. They're tired. They go through these phases. And what it is, is it's a combination of two things. One, they lost sight of their values, so now they're chasing something somebody else told them they're supposed to chase. It's just really not like, whatever. So it's a priority thing. It's not clear how what they're doing is getting them closer to the priorities. And there's no feedback loop, which is what the search the app does, is every step you take, oh, look, I'm getting closer. And the other thing is there's four quadrants that we think about. And I learned this from Dan Nicholson, who got it from Randy Massington. Go, four quadrants. There's like, high skill, high difficulty, High skill, low difficulty, low skill, high difficulty, low skill, low difficulty.

Right.

And so for somebody like me, probably a lot of entrepreneurs, I need to be in high skill, high difficulty. It needs to require a lot of skill. It needs to stretch me and needs to Be difficult and I will latch on and I will be hyper focused once it becomes easy for me. Whether it's high difficulty or not, I want to open Facebook. I want to. It's not clear to me how this gets me close to my priorities anyway. Right. I want to open Facebook. And every time you do that, that you strengthen your own attention deficit. And so what's happening is a lot of times we chase the easy work. That's gonna be easy. Right. And it's just boring. And we can't find our. It's really easy stuff. Like this is list of stuff that I could do in 10 minutes. I'm not freaking doing it. So you're creating an attention deficit and you're strengthening it that whole time. Or this thing, like, for me, writing copy was one of those things where I was just like, there's tight feedback loops in an email, you know, and now all of a sudden, I started the daily email. Everybody loved it, I loved doing it. And now, like, God, I can't get myself to write an email. It's not challenging for me anymore.

I definitely relate to that.

Yeah, you do that. And we have to recognize that and figure out. So what I've done now is I take, okay, I'm going to watch Dr. Jeff Spencer stuff. I'm going to figure out how to turn that into a super palatable email. There's the challenge. And if we can't find a way to make it high skill or high difficulty for us anymore, we got to get rid of it or we're going to just fall back into that add Stu. So that was a trend I saw amongst a bunch of my clients all around the same time, because Covid has us all sitting here staring at our computer all day.

We're all human at the end of the day. And yeah, you're right, it's. You need a little challenge. And Matt and I, you. You were even. We were chatting about this earlier when we were getting lunch. We're like, you know what? Like, having podcast interviews is interesting because it stretches our minds. It obviously gets us to get into, you know, typically chatting with someone kind of new and new ideas and concepts. It almost makes chatting outside of the podcast or like just around mundane stuff, you know, like, oh, I want to go shopping at this. Or it's like, I don't care.

Definitely interesting. Podcasting has made casual conversation sort of uninteresting to us. And we're trying to figure out new ways to make conversation, just, you know, small talk with people interesting again.

Yep. So I Think that that add stuff that entrepreneurs experience. Exactly that. It's. And again, you look back, man, I used to be able to knock out these emails or I used to be able to when it was. When it was engaging and challenging and you're developing a skill.

Skill.

But now you're not developing a skill. So the worst thing you do is try to plow through it. You're just going to make your attention deficit worse.

Yeah, makes sense. So get that thing off your plate or automate it or kill it. Do something. Awesome, man. I want to make sure you're good to go for. I know you have a call coming up here. Bumpers is your book. So was that Amazon or do you have a website for that as well?

Nick. PetersonBook.com will take you to Amazon. BumpersBook.com will take you through the funnel if you want to get upsold a bunch of stuff. Either one's fine. Same book.

Buy the upsells.

I'm sure they're good.

The upsell is actually the upsell. So I have bumpers accelerator, which is basically me walking through the learning stuff. All the stuff we just talked about. But then that's the bump. The upsell is Jeff Spencer's goal achievement roadmap.

Aha. Got it.

So you should go by the bump.

We just experienced the bump from the man himself yesterday, and it's absolutely amazing. So, yeah, go get it.

We experienced the upsell from it.

Yeah. Yes, we did. Yeah, the upsell. So fortune. And he'll be on the show later. So thank you for that introduction because he's a freaking machine. I mean, he's just an amazing guy.

I say we talk about. One of my favorite things is I aspire to be one day, but we talk about the titans next door, the people that you've never heard of. But once you hear from them, you're like, oh, this person is serious. And that's where Jeff Spencer falls is. You don't know him. Unless you want to be an olympic athlete or be the best in the world at a particular thing.

Well, we have them coming on the show, so people listening will get to know a little piece of them.

At least get a glimpse. Yeah. So, yeah, Nick Pitterson book or the bumper book, Right?

Bumper's book.

Yeah, Bumper's book.

Is there anywhere else you'd want people to check out or is that the best place to go after listening to this?

Best place to go is probably bumper's book, because then there's an opportunity on the daily email. Like you said, I'm not super easy to find. I'm easier now than I was maybe six months ago.

Keep it low key. It's all good.

Yeah.

Hey, if fame isn't on the priority list, then why push it?

There it is.

Exactly.

All right, Nick. Well, thanks for your time, man. I know it means a lot here.

Yeah. Appreciate you guys.

See you, buddy. Cool.

I'm sure you enjoyed that episode as much as I enjoyed re listening to it. I did another pass through a re edit of it and cleaned it up a little bit and edited out some of the us and ums and just tried to speed up the pacing a little bit. But I was absolutely blown away on my second listen through of this episode while I was going in through it and editing it. And I can't be more excited to try to get Nick back on the show to talk about what he's up to in the crypto world right now. Now, before I go ahead and wrap this one up, a couple quick reminders. We do have the notes for this episode. We took them when we interviewed Nick the first time. And if you want to get access to our complete notes, everything we talked about, all of the action steps, all of the guides, everything he mentioned in this episode are in our notes. We're giving away the notes for free if you become a member of our Discord community. So go to hustleandflowchart.com Discord join us in that community and we will hook you up. And if you're not already, just want to remind you, follow us on Twitter. We talk a lot on Twitter. That's the social media platform we spend the most time on. I am Matt R Wolf M A T T R W O L S on Twitter. Joe is Joe Fear J O E F I E R on Twitter. And if you want to get some extra credit, go follow Hard Fork Media on Twitter as well. That's our new media company in the web3 space and we will be sharing a lot of cool stuff, us and our partners over on that Twitter. So again, Discord, you get the notes to this episode for free. Hustleandflowchart.com Discord Discord. Follow us over on Twitter, Matt Rwolf, Joe Fear, and Hardfork Media. Thanks again for tuning in this episode and we'll see you next week for two more awesome episodes from the archives.

See you then.

Sam.