Joe Polish's Sabbatical Lessons: Epiphanies Every Marketer & Entrepreneur Should Know That Can Positively Transform Your Personal and Professional Future Featuring Joe Polish and Dean Jackson - I Love Marketing Episode #437

Entrepreneurs that are too tightly scheduled cannot transform themselves. Right? So it's like, okay, where do I want to transform myself? What do I actually want to have happen? I didn't want to recharge my batteries, I wanted to replace my batteries. If you'd like to join world renowned entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network event or want to learn more about Genius network, go to geniusnetwork.com welcome everybody. Dean, it's hard to summarize. We did a coming back event which I was so happy with a month ago. Yeah, we had 250 people. We sold it out. All the Genius Network members were together. It was really incredible. A little bit about business, a lot about life, a lot about just connecting and dealing with challenges. All the stuff I really like talking about, you know, marketing stuff is a means to an end. But in terms of what have I been doing? I mean, just really trying to reprogram the way that I look at things and how to, you know, how to just go deeper with things that matter and how to unlearn a lot of things that were not excellent in my life. There's that saying I have on the wallet ingenious network, which is one of the things that I went into the sabbatical with, which is be willing to destroy anything in your life that's not excellent. And I had a lot of really good things in my life and I do. I mean, I have a really blessed life. And so my purposes are going on the sabbatical. I wanted to explore work, to think about what work actually is and what should get my Tammy my time, attention, money, effort and energy and how to best allocate that for business, for connection, for joy, for health, and, you know, all the things that were valuable. I kept lessons throughout the whole sabbatical of what am I learning, what am I doing the way that I started it. When you're so pressed like for time, it's hard to, to be able to digest stuff when you have so much coming in. Your digestive system doesn't work physically while your brain is, is very similar. If you have too many tabs open, it's really hard to focus on much of anything and to go back. What caused me to take the sabbatical in the first place is I have a friend that I got the term elf easy, lucrative and fun. Years ago, back in the late 90s. We were playing golf and he said, you know, created an elf business, you know, easy, lucrative, fun. And I saw, I go, I actually like that, I like the ring that I go, I'm going to develop that into something. And then I came up with half. You know, hard, annoying, lame and frustrating. Right? And I was looking at my business over the years. You know, what's elf? What's half? And the type of marketing that we teach on. I love marketing. I really would put into the ELF category. It's like, how do you replicate yourself? How do you do, how do you set up like automation? And in part of it is as much of an attitude as it is a technique. Part of what you do with your time is time management, time management by attitude. You know, you look at things and you basically make the decision, do I need to do any of this shit? And I found myself in a lot of success traps, as does everyone here. Everyone has their own version of a success trap. You know, you have to fulfill an obligation. You have to deliver on something. You know, it's, it's one of the downsides of being a good marketer is you can sell stuff and oftentimes you will sell things that require a follow up that you may not be well equipped to handle. Right. You might sell too much of it and then you have a capacity thing. Like, you know, our friend Keith, Keith Cunningham says, you know, many companies don't die of starvation, they die of indigestion, where you just have too much stuff, you know, going on. And so going back to Mark, you know, Mark had given me this term, elf. For years we had developed ELF marketing systems. It's one of the things that has allowed me to frankly do pretty good. If I had not had developed ELF marketing systems, which is neurotic as I am, I don't know how I ever would have made a living because I just bounce around in 2020. I was talking to Mark a couple times a week and he was the one that gave me the term elf. And he was very wealthy. He was worth about, I don't know the exact number, but I'm sure around 300 million. And I'd introduced him recently to Paul Abdul, the singer, who I've known for years. And they were putting together a big project. And then, you know, one day in summer of, you know, 2020, I get a message from his son asking me if he can call me on WhatsApp. And I said sure. And so I call him and he tells me that Mark, they found his father Mark in bed that morning at 59 years old, dead. And this just the one of the first things that came to me is like, you know, I need to take a sabbatical. And where that came from was probably planted when David. David Bach gave a talk at the Genius Network annual event. He had planted that seed of, you know, taking an extended amount of time off. And although I have been very open about being an addict, workaholism is one of the sneakiest forms of addiction because you can hide behind productivity, you can hide behind virtue, performance. Yeah. And it's. It's sort of a. It's a different form of being a stimulant junkie, but you can do it through fame and notoriety and making money and having people follow you. It's very seductive. There's a book on workaholism, which the subtitle is the Respectable Addiction. And so, you know, when my friend died at 59 years old, worth a bloody fortune, I was, you know, what came to my head is like, what the hell is going on? It wasn't from COVID you know, it was. He just passed away. And I was like, man, how many people do I know that are very driven? Very, very driven, you know? And as Gary Halpert used to say to me all the time, the world advances on the backs of its neurotics. I mean, I love these successful people that go out and achieve things and innovate things and come up with stuff and take risk. I mean, there's. There's. It's admirable to see people, you know, create stuff. The question becomes, though, at what cost? You know, what cost of your happiness, your relationships, your health? And so that's where I first got the idea to take a sabbatical. It's a huge exercise in letting go, like, knowing that all of the stuff, the control freak side of me, that bad shit at least that I manufacture my head to be bad shit, things would fall apart and would I be okay with that? So I had to make a decision that no matter what, I cannot be bought out of my sabbatical. I also wrote a book that's going to come out with Hay House that will be later this year, most likely in November. It's a book on how to develop relationships with people. Because that's the number one thing that people ask me is how do you meet this person? How do you meet that person? And it's not about meeting people. It's about meeting the right people. It's kind of a. It's how to. It's how to connect with people that you're aligned with and how to disconnect with people that you're not aligned with. So it's. It's a bit of strategy and things that I've learned over the years on how to build rapport and connect with people. And here's the thing. Like, me and Dan Sullivan did a. It was the first time I announced I was going to do a sabbatical. We did it on the TEDx Talk podcast, and he has this line where. And we. We did an episode on this where entrepreneurs too tightly scheduled cannot transform themselves, right? So it's like, okay, where do I want to transform myself? What do I actually want to have happen? I didn't want to recharge my batteries. I wanted to replace my batteries. And that required me to think, like, how do I completely view the world differently? And how do I smoke out all the relationships that appear to be good? But, you know, we've all heard it a million times. You know, the enemy of the great is the good. You know, how do. How do I get rid of good things in order to have room for the great things? You know, all these analogies that I've used over the years, all these metaphors, which is, you know, one of the ways that I make sense of the world out of all the things that I can do. You know, what's the bronze coins, the silver coins, and the gold coins. How do I do this in the middle of a freaking pandemic? How do I do this without not destroying my business? There's a difference between being an opportunist and pursuing opportunities. And so in the midst of the doing the sabbatical, I became really aware of, like, wow, you know, some opportunities are traps disguised as opportunities. And how do you find, you know, peace and joy in your own existence without the continual need to be excited or stimulated or pursuing in the pursuit happiness causes most unhappiness. All this ties in breathing, sauna, cold plunge. Those are practices that actually don't take time. I believe they will give you time. They will give you more life, they will give you more energy. It is not about time. It is about what you do with the time that you have and how you best allocate it. And, you know, and so the sabbatical thing really taught me better ways to take care of myself and best utilize my time. De Can I go through some of the lessons I got from it? Because, you know, I almost have to fulfill on. We. We used, I think, some bullets of, like, what did Joe get from his sabbatical? So, I mean, that would be silly for me. So I'll share a few of them. I've got a whole bunch, but I. I shared some of these at my Annual event recently too, and got a lot of comments. People liked it and came up to me and said that was helpful. So humor heals. When you're going through a lot of shit, put yourself around people that are funny, things that are funny. If you spend all day watching the tragedies of the world and you don't give yourself a release valve from the pressure that that builds up, there's physical aspects of that. That's where yoga and meditation and cold plunging and exercise and things we talked about. But also humor, you know you want to. Humor heals. The middle of the puzzle is where the gifts lie. Years ago I'd written an article about getting your hair done, joining a gym, going to a seminar over a weekend. That's outer puzzle stuff. You rearrange if your life is a bunch of puzzle pieces. But taking on a recovery program, doing an ayahuasca journey, doing things that are really deep core inner work, makes every part of the puzzle shift. And so the real gifts in life is in the middle of the puzzle, not the outer edges. Crypto, blockchain, NFTs. All very fascinating, very confusing, and will make some people very rich. Some people will totally lose their ass and they are changing the world and it may be smart to pay attention to them. Try to understand things that are new before you say they're good or bad. Because in a state of ignorance, it's easy to make judgments. Another lesson, unlearning is harder than learning. We are in the midst of evil. They, in quotes, are not doing this for your safety. Life is not fair and I am truly blessed. So I have been in recovery for addiction for over two decades now. And I have had, you know, it has been a roller coaster. Recovery work from a life of chaos prepares you for chaos and uncertainty. It doesn't provide all the answers, but it helps. And all my friends in recovery, those are the ones that I turn to when shit is hitting the fan. They seem to have a perspective in a way to look at chaos in ways that people that have not gone through that journey don't seem to have. So it just gave me a whole nother perspective on addiction recovery. Because what is, you know, what is addiction? Addiction is response to trauma. It's a response to pain. It's an attempt to self soothe. And so you know, when your life has been out of control and you've been compulsively either destroying your life or you know, causing a ruckus for other people, and then you have to really take on changing in recovery from that. It's you know, there's two types of recovery. Ernie Larson wrote a book years ago called Second Stage Recovery. What most people think of recovery is to get sober, quit drinking, quit doing drugs, sex, gambling, work, you know, over, you know, whatever, you know, gaming, eating, whatever the addiction is. Stage one recovery is stopping the consumption, the chemicals, the drugs, or the behavior. Stage 2 Recovery is dealing with all this in your life, which is mostly about relationships that cause you to do drugs or drinking behavior in the first place. A great way to be miserable is by comparison. A great way to be happy is by comparison. It's simply how you use comparison. So, you know, our friends Ben Hardy and Dan Sullivan wrote the Gap and the Gain, which is a great book. And it's really how you compare. If you compare your life to what you don't have, it's real easy to find a lot of other people that seem to have better lives than you do. But I will tell you, the very best life that you have is the one you have right now and what you'll do with it, because you ain't going to. You're going to change that. You know, you have to play it where it lies, you know. My dear friend Dave Keckic died last year, and Dave was instrumental in my thinking. And, you know, he was paralyzed from the chest down. And, you know, he had a couple of a hundred amazing credos. One of them is life easy if you live it the hard way and hard if you live it the easy way. You don't really know what you got until it's gone. You also don't know all the bullshit you put up with until you step away from it for a while. It really, really, really pays to save money and be nice to people. I mean, obviously I was able to do the sabbatical because I've worked really hard for many years. But I've also, I've done my best to try to be thoughtful with money and investments. We are in the middle of a war unlike any that has ever happened on planet Earth. It's a physical, cyber and psychic war. And the weapons are truly different. Drug dealers and pimps are truly running the world. They are and utilize the useful idiots that usually quoted the Stalin referred to as the media. This includes almost all media. Doing the right thing versus doing things right are much different options. The drugs that kill people are legal and the drugs that can save people's lives are illegal. We don't need a war on drugs. We need a drug against war. Some people are very respectful and others are not some people want you to win, and some people only want to win. There are less givers in the world than I once thought. But a lot of true warriors that some people I used to respect have lost that respect based on their ability to be truly fucking stupid and controlling. People truly are. Under a mass hypnosis formation, the people that are conspiracy theory people are oftentimes the early adopters that actually saw much of the truth through the propaganda before most other people have. They were insulted, attacked, called crazy, deep, platformed, canceled, sometimes lost their jobs, their freedoms, their livelihoods, and sometimes their lives. Now, that doesn't mean that everyone that has a conspiracy theory knows what they're talking about, but there's a lot of people that do. Life's easy when you live it the hard way and hard if you live at the easy way. From Dave Kekich. It's easy to lie to yourself and rationalize your behavior. People really do judge themselves by their intentions and judge others by their actions. There are no rules for sabbaticals. You do what you want. It's easier to make personal decisions when you're not burdened with business decisions. I said this one before. Not being on social media is healthier for my brain than reading inspirational quotes on social media. Ernest Hemingway said, you can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. Yeah. So there's a lot more, but those are some of the things. And I wanted to quit pursuing so much stuff that was available to me just by making the decision to make it available to me, like peace of mind or like love or connections. And so much of that pursuit is as if it's going to be out there. And this was. I didn't want to go anywhere. I mean, I went places, but I. This was in, you know, an internal job. I saw in a breathing video. The guy said, some doors you can only open from the inside. One of the biggest things that also happened is I bought a town. I bought a 40 acre ghost town with Jason Campbell, Mike Leone, Ben Hoodie and Jennifer Houdy. So I've, you know, there's three groups of us, me and two other partners, and we bought a ghost town. I now own the town of Cleader, Arizona. I am, I've been made the mayor of Cleader. But we're ultimately going to put Cleator into the metaverse and we're going to have our kind of. We're going to invite artists to come down and do cool stuff. We have our own Cleater nft. I'VE not even told people to go buy it and we've still managed to sell quite a few NFTs. It's called a citizen. So if you happen to look that up on Opensea or whatever, there's people that are trying to knock it off, but there is a real cleater nft. And yeah, so I bought a town and now on the town and it's crazy and we're better than I thought about it at the event. I said to everyone, what's your cleaner? What is the big vision that you have for something that we're going to, you know, keep everything about cleaner that's really cool and restore it and we're going to add in much better things like cleaner water and better electricity and better systems and we're going to use it for cleaner, for creators. We are literally going to use this town to have people that think their ideas are batshit crazy. A place where you can vision and dream whatever you want to dream and make it a reality. Because sometimes you're this close. You know, it's like my friend Peter Diamandis says the day before a breakthrough. It's a crazy idea. This is a canvas for me. I actually can figure out how to, you know, how to utilize this talent to fund addiction recovery and do amazing cool things with it. I am open to any crazy ass ideas if they're doable. Welcome back, Joe. Don't miss another episode of I Love Marketing. Subscribe today@ilove marketing.com subscribe if you'd like access to the show notes or resources to help the you take action on what was discussed, Please visit ilove marketing.com437.