How To Develop PIVOT-Ability And Take Your Business and Life To The Next Level Featuring Adam Markel - I Love Marketing Episode #433

If you own it, if you own the result, as in it didn't work this way, take the feedback and make a small change, even a five degree, you know, change in direction over time, you can create a massive transformation. And that's what happened for YouTube. Small change in direction. But over time it became what it is today.

Hello, this is Joe Polish. Now real quick, before you listen to the podcast, which I hope you're going to love, just wanted to let you know I spent the entire last year on a sabbatical and I've got so many insights, so many things that would be super valuable. And my first official coming back event and my first public appearance is going to be February 11th through the 13th in beautiful Scottsdale, Arizona. So if you are a high level entrepreneur and you would like to attend in person, go to Joe Polish returns.com joepolishreturns.com check it out. Hope to see you there. Now enjoy the podcast Pivot, the art.

And science of reinventing your career in life. We're going to talk about this. So you wrote a book called Pivot. And the term pivot implies from my definition, if you can make a big.

Shift, pivot, you know, making a big change doesn't start with a big change. That's the kind of, the enigma of it is that it's, it's the, a large change starts with a small change. It starts with a small domino. You start with a straight line, right? And I think of that straight line is everybody's trying to just kind of live a good life and not make too many mistakes. And I'll sometimes ask people, how many of you like to make three times as many mistakes next year? And nobody's hands go up and I go, see, that's your issue. Your issue is that you don't want to make mistakes, you know, because you equate mistakes with your life not working and things not working. But what ends up happening is that if you make a small change, even just like, you know, even a small change in your direction of 5 degrees. So it's like you can barely tell the difference between those two lines, right? It's hardly noticeable. And you just extend that out over time. So you imagine this line over time just stretching out. Well, the bottom line is the line of status quo and that's the line that leads to mediocrity. And the disruptive line is the line of change, constant, never ending change. That's the rule of the universe, that nothing is stagnant. Nothing stagnates. And if it does stagnate it, it gets toxic. So people are trying to live a safe life. And that's the problem, is that safety only begets mediocrity and unhappiness. And when you realize that something is not working. So, like, look at a business context for a second. YouTube, right? Most people know YouTube. Everybody knows YouTube. That business started out as a video dating site. It was a video dating site. So what did they do? They looked at the model. It wasn't working. They decided to take the experience that they were getting, you know, and the feedback from the market. The market tells you everything you ever need to know about your business, right? The market was telling them everything they needed to know. This business sucks. This business will be bust, right? So instead they kept the video, got rid of the dating, you know, got rid of the dating, kept the video. Look at where they became, you know, where they went to. Because what they did was the most valuable thing in a pivot, which is that you take, you know, you have experiences, so you're not committed, you're not committing your life to the status quo. You're committing your life to experiencing life. You have an experience, you might call it a failure, which there is no failure, there is only feedback. And feedback is simply a way to find out. You find something new out, right? So you have your experience, you get your feedback, and if you own it, if you own the result, as in it didn't work this way, take the feedback and make a small change, even a five degree, you know, change in direction over time, you can create a massive transformation. And that's what happened for YouTube, small change in direction. But over time, it became what it is today because they took the feedback, they didn't say, hey, you know what? Video dating, it's going to be, right. Trust me, it's never going to fail, right? Even though the market's telling you no, and you insist through ego or whatever it is, just being blind, that it's going to be right at some point. It's like the clock that's broken. It'll be right twice a day. If that's your method of approaching a business challenge or a life challenge, you're stuck. Because I'm sure that people listening to this right now might be feeling like they're without options, feeling pretty frustrated that maybe something they've been trying for a while isn't working. How do I iterate something new? What do I do? I'm in partnership. I don't like the partnership. The business doesn't seem to be working. My relationship or some Other area of my life is causing me pain. Which way next?

What did you learn from writing the book?

For me, it solidified principles. It solidified for me, my own story. I mean, I really got to own what I had done. And one of the things as a distinction that I got out of it was that I could actually use the book to break a myth because it's something that's perpetuated in the self development world. And if I offend anybody when I say this, you know, it's not my intention to offend, but I'm not going to apologize for it either. We tend to say to people, you know, what you want to be, you want to be successful? Then you got to, you got to be like the Mongolian warriors. You know that story of the Mongolian warriors? They never lost a battle. Why didn't they lose? Because they brought their families, they brought their possessions, their kids, their grandparents. He brought it all into battle right behind them. And so they had so much on the line that they couldn't lose. They wouldn't allow themselves to lose. And on some level, yeah, that's. I get that. And there are success stories out there of people who risked it all, put it all on the line and had the, you know, the fruits. At the end of the day, the biggest thing that gets in people's way is fear. And so what scares the shit out of people is the idea that they got to bring their families, they got to bring everything and put it all on the line. And if they lose, if it doesn't go well, if the economy tanks or anything, they've lost it all. So now that leaves them, It's a Hobson's choice. They can't make a good decision now, and so they simply do nothing, which is why they continue on that road of status quo. And so it's a jump ship mentality. And so what I discovered as I was writing this is that I didn't jump ship. I didn't leave my law practice for three years as I was reinventing and creating my plan B that ultimately became my plan A. It was just one little pivot, one little change, one little lily pad after another, one domino falling after another. And it didn't involve me putting my whole family and everything I owned at risk to have a better life.

How can people ultimately get clear on what they really want in life? And you have six steps for getting clarity. So can you kind of go through some of them?

To me, the first piece of clarity and it's a really big deal, is again, this process of unbelieving, of looking at your life and examining what, why you believe what you believe, where your beliefs come from, basically. So it's an awareness of where your beliefs come from, examining a little bit about why that is, and then making a conscious choice whether to continue to believe those things or not believe those things. Because we know that whatever you're believing is what's produced your, you know, created your actions. And now your results are the other fruit on the tree, if you will. And when you, you realize that you can release stuff and you release shit and shit thoughts and all this stuff that comes out of that you have, you're like, so you have so much more clarity to be able to create a vision, which is the next thing you know, it's. The next step is, you know, when you have a clearer view of what you believe or what you want to believe even, and why you believe what you have believed, and you make a choice to maybe not believe some or unbelieve some of those things, you get to create a new vision for your life. And, you know, any CEO, anybody that's managing or running teams knows that you have to have a big vision, right, that other people can be excited about. You know, but that starts with you. You're not going to enroll anybody else in your vision until you know what.

Your vision is, what are the best ways you've discovered for facing and embracing fear, which you talked about in the very beginning. So, I mean, there are some people out here that are paralyzed as a result of it. So what does that person do?

So, you know, to me, it's a conversation. And I like things that are simple because for me, simple is usable. And I, I feel like that's the same for everybody. We're having a conversation all the time. And that's either a conversation of limitation or a conversation of possibility and opportunity. And you can, you know, when you take a deep breath, you can ask yourself, what's this conversation I'm having in my head? And fear is always a conversation of limitation. So in that moment, you just get to say, okay, now I've identified it. No, kid, duh. I'm having, I'm having a conversation that starts with, I don't know how I'm gonna pay my bills this month, you know, or what if, right? That's a key phrase that'll come up. And then at that moment, you get to decide, you know, am I going to be curious about this and follow my curiosity, or am I going to stay rooted in my fear? And I think that's that's a big difference because when you're curious, you have objectivity, and that's the distinguishing feature. You know, when you're subjective, you're. You're in it, you're emotionally charged by it. You can't, you can't actually come up with a solution. You know, you try to think about something. Let's say I'm going to think about playing, you know, shooting the ball, right? Basketball or something. Any physical activity, I'm going to think about putting. You know, I'm going to putt this ball and I'm thinking about it. As soon as your head gets in, going, and you can hear your thoughts happening, you need to step away from the putt. You're going to miss the putt. The only way you're going to hit, you know, make that putt is by getting out of your head. Your body knows it's muscle memory. You know exactly what to do. You're perfect the way you are. You're a divine being. You're guided by divine, whatever you want to call it, source, energy, God, spirit. And when you get out of your way, it's all there for you. So fear is just a way of again bringing you back into your head and back into that limitation. I like the idea. So I have this conversation now. When I feel my fear come up, I go. So thank you for being here. Thank you for sharing. You know, you've kept me safe at different points in my life. It's not like I. I want to disown you, not like I hate you. But I also know that you're disempowering to me at various points. And this is one of those points where I'm not going to allow you to disempower me. When I wanted to write this book, for example, when I wanted to, you know, when I came home and I said to my wife, listen, we have a really great life. It's pretty cushy. You know, houses, multiple houses, cars, the kids, all these things. Money in the bank and a law practice I can just keep. I could dial this in for a long time, except you might be a widow. I did sort of say that, you know, if I keep doing this, you're probably going to be a widow, Very wealthy widow, but you'll be a widow. So it was about taking the fear and putting the fear in the backseat, not giving the fear the steering wheel and not letting them have the GPS and decide navigate where we're going. And so I think it's that conversation when you change the way you speak to yourself, everything in your life changes, and it is the little things that you do continuously. I mean, I'd say at this stage in my own business career, the biggest challenge is consistency. It's just to maintain consistency. Right. I don't know if that's the same for you, but absolutely, that's a differentiator. At a certain level in a company's success, what stops you from getting to that very next level or to that, you know, really higher level has to do with consistency.

Totally. And this will sound really funny to some people, but what a lot. And I've worked to maintain relationships with people that I find very interesting, very capable, very smart givers. I mean, most of my world is, I do my best. If people show signs of being a taker, I get them out of my life as quickly as humanly possible. And what a lot of people misinterpret as genius is simply redundancy, where people have stuck with something over and over and over again and they've just gotten really good at it. And if you do that, the world will view a lot of that as genius because you are good at it. And in some levels, I guess you could call it genius. People, like, they hear me talk about marketing and they're like, oh, you're a genius marketer. I'm like, when God was doling out brains, I got 98% of my brains to develop a marketing strategy, and the other 2% on how to run the rest of my life. You know, I just stuck with it. It's not that something someone couldn't do or someone couldn't learn. It's just a lot. It is consistent. What are the biggest lessons you've learned as it relates to growth? And what actions could a person listening to this take right now in order to just simply grow faster?

Well, that's. We could spend hours on that as a dissertation on this, but, you know, it's the failure to take action. And I really believe, again, we said earlier that fear is the thing that stops and everybody gets that. But I want to unpack that just in a little different way, which is that I really believe. And we're a marketing machine. Our company, we deliver several hundred events every year. And they're live events, they're not virtual. People come to a room. It's a massive undertaking to fill rooms of people that are seeking something that. That we're teaching, that we have some expertise in. And so I'm constantly letting our teams know that we've got to iterate. We've got to reinvent ourselves almost every six months on some level, be iterating something new. And that means we've got to test and test involves failure, constantly failing at things. And the only thing that's really agonizing and the thing that gets in the way of people really attaining, you know, any measure of their true potential for success is that they, they don't learn the lessons of failure fast enough so they fail slowly.

Right.

Is there's nothing worse? The only thing worse than failing is failing slowly. Right? Right. Because until they're willing to take the lesson and own the result and then go next, apply the lesson pivot, change your direction a little bit, and find that a video, you know, channel versus a video dating channel is actually the way to make a billion dollars. Right, right. And add billions and billions of dollars of value in the world. And until you do that, you're, you're, you're really just kind of breaking the first rule of management, the first rule of business, which is to continue to do something over and over again that does not work, expecting a different result, which sometimes is called insanity. But I love this book called Karmic Management. It's a really amazing book. And in karmic management, the first rule is to stop doing what doesn't work. And I love that.

Good advice.

So what doesn't work is failing slowly. What does work is failing fast. You failed three times faster so you can learn three times. You can find out three times as fast what is not working. So you do know what, so you know more of what might work. And then you move in that direction to find where the gold is. You know, if all you did was dig into the mountainside, you know, if the gold rush, you know, folks went out there and they found one spot and they dug and dug and dug and dug and dug, and that's the only place they ever looked. You know, a lot of them wouldn't have found any gold at all.

Exactly.

But they looked and looked and looked and looked. Okay, it's not here. Good. You know, I'm not going to beat myself up. I don't need to sit on a therapist's couch for 10 years. Oh, my God. This must mean I'm not worthy. I don't deserve it. I'm a loser. It's like you just move over, move over and dig in that spot. You know, there might be gold there. Don't miss another episode of I Love Marketing. Subscribe today@ilovemarketing.com. subscribe if you'd like access to the show notes or resources to help you take action on what was discussed, please visit ilovemarketing.com 433it.