In this solo episode of the Million Dollar Grit podcast, Julie Chenell delivers a year‑end reflection and forward‑looking roadmap for 2025. She acknowledges the challenges of 2024—lower revenue, personal burnout, and a noisy, AI‑driven market—yet adopts a deliberately optimistic stance, calling it “delusional strategic positivity.” Central to her 2025 strategy is the principle of subtraction: deliberately saying no, stripping away non‑essential tasks, and focusing on one’s zone of genius, a concept reinforced by mentor Helen Henley and a tweet from Ashwin Sharma. Julie stresses the growing importance of deep, intentional relationships—co‑founders, mentors, collaborators—as the bedrock of business growth. She highlights health fundamentals, especially restoring sleep and calming a hyper‑active nervous system, as prerequisites for sustained performance. She critiques the commoditization of ideas in the age of AI, urging listeners to prioritize execution over ideation, and to treat AI as a practical tool rather than a savior or threat. Additional actionable “leaves behind” items include reliance on one‑size‑fits‑all tactics, people‑pleasing on social media, and the binary view of AI. Throughout, Julie’s tone is conversational, candid, and motivational, aiming to equip entrepreneurs with a clear, focused mindset for the coming year.
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Welcome to Million Dollar Grit, the podcast that dives deep into the world of entrepreneurship, where tenacity meets strategy and dreams meet reality. My name is Julie, and I explore the raw, often overlooked truths of what it takes to succeed in business and in life. It's not just about the glossy success stories, it's about the grit it takes to get there. Hey everyone, it's Julie, and welcome to another podcast of Million Dollar Grit. It's been a little bit since I posted or published, and that's because for past couple months, I've been working with my business partner Kathy on our brand new podcast over at Funnel Gorgeous called The Gorgeous Effect. So we are publishing weekly over there. I definitely encourage you to check it out and download and subscribe. But today I want to do a little personal recap of 2024. It is going to be 2025 in 2 days. I cannot believe it. Time is speeding by. So a few things that are top of mind for me as I go into 2025, and forgive me if this podcast isn't super organized, but, uh, alas, this is my brain. I feel like a lot of us have come to the end of the year and there is a sense of like, oh my gosh, I made it, I'm still here, but I feel a little battered and bruised and not sure what 2025 is going to look like. Because to be fair, I think many of us thought 2024 was going to be a better year after some of the upheaval, and I think it was really hard for most of us. I know for myself and for the companies I run, both of my companies are coming in lower revenue this year than they have in prior years. Not by much, but still, you know, we, we anticipate we're going to either stay the same or grow. And so sometimes it's hard to reconcile, like, okay, how do I get momentum and how do I get vision for 2025 when 2024 felt like a small dumpster fire, you know? And so if that's you, don't despair. I actually think that 2025 is going to be a fantastic year. That is my intention. That is what I am setting up. And you might be like, well, Julie, what's your evidence for that? I don't have any evidence really, because actually economically and culturally, societally, like it's not super awesome right now. The landscape looks very disruptive, looks rocky, looks polarized. But I'm gonna go with a delusional strategic positivity that says 2025 is going to be amazing. And I'm not— I'm going to provide no evidence for that, but I'm going to go with that intention in hopes that allows my brain to look for the good and look for the opportunities because I'm positioned in that sort of positive mindset. So that's what I'm doing. Okay. A big, big idea I want to bring into 2025 that I want to share with you guys is the idea of subtraction. Versus addition. And this came from some genius on Twitter and— or sorry, X, I can't, I can't seem to get over calling it Twitter. And it was an idea of just like this: successful people, um, know how to say no. They know how to remove distractions. They know how to have relentless focus on one thing. And so I'm going to read a little bit. His name is Ashwin Sharma. I want to give him credit where credit is due. And he says, the most painful paradox I've learned is that you must have the courage to become less in order to become more. You must embrace subtraction as the path to addition, precisely because it demands the opposite of what every instinct screams at you to do: hoard, accumulate, want more status, more wealth. You see this paradox literally everywhere you look in art, relationships, business, but it's visceral when you look at it in design. So when Christopher Alexander described the perfect kettle isn't created by piling on features, but by stripping away everything that doesn't serve the sacred purpose of boiling water, you realize basically everything that's near perfection works by subtraction, not addition. Okay. So, and there's, there's a whole, there's a whole, you know, longer analysis, but subtraction ultimately asks us to know who we are. So using that idea, I am sitting here with two fairly large businesses. Both of them do 7 figures plus a year. And I'm saying to myself in my daily life, what do I have to subtract? What do I have to get rid of in order to become more of who I'm designed to be? And, uh, my mentor and colleague, uh, Helen Henley, she often says, you know, there's your zone of excellence and your zone of genius. And for many of us who are excellent at a lot of things, we can get saddled with responsibilities, ideas, things that are, you know, cool and good, but they are not truly our zone of genius. And what would we strip away to really dial in that zone of genius? And so my theory is that with AI running on the scene, with, uh, noise just continuing to increase, that if you're not dialed into your zone of genius, you are going to have a hard time getting attention. Right? Because we are, we are in an age now where information is a commodity. And, you know, the steps that you need to accomplish a tactic or ideas, you know, 10 ideas for your next reel, all of this is a commodity. AI can do this better than we can. And even if your audience hasn't quite figured out AI or how to leverage AI, it's coming. And so you need to tap into what you ultimately do better than anybody else. And for many of us, it's owning our story, it's owning our perspective, and it's stripping away all the stuff that does not align with that to become that known person in that one area. And I got to say, you guys, this is not an easy task for me. I have a lot of zones of excellence. I'm a copywriter, I'm a sales funnel builder, I'm, you know, sort of productivity expert, and I'm just like, how do I become the person whose zone of genius is so clear and so dialed in that despite the rising amount of noise and AI and all of that stuff, I can still carve that sort of financial freedom, that wealth, that success that I need in order to have the impact I want to have by focusing on that. And subtraction is a key part of that. And so that is a big thing that I am taking into 2025. Another thing is relationships. Relationships are the bedrock of our humanity. They are the bedrock of how we function in a society, and they continue to be one of the most important things you need to grow your business. If you are not in a room with people that can say your name, people who can give you opportunities, who can provide really valuable advice, you need to get in a room. If you don't have a coach, if you don't have a mentor, if you don't have collaborators, colleagues, team members, family members, friends— these are like just becoming more and more important. So relationship is another real big value and focus that I have going into 2025. Okay, so what are some things that I suggest you leave, like things that we're leaving behind in 2024? And that way, that's kind of like the subtraction idea that I started this podcast with. Okay, so number 1, pretending all tactics work. They don't. In fact, tactics by their very nature need to be like innovated constantly to remain fresh. Okay, so one-size-fits-all marketing is nonsense. Innovation is at the heart of it, which means that your ability to think creatively, to empathize with your customer, to take on their point of view continues to be more and more important than a particular tactic. Okay, second thing that I am— I've already started, like, 2024 was a big year for me focusing on my personal health and wellness, given that my nervous system has gone into overdrive after just one too many traumatic events. And so 2024, I was really focused on, like, how do I get my nervous system back to baseline so that I can continue to function? And one of the biggest pieces of that is sleep. And so I've already made 2024 a great year, but if you haven't, I suggest you leave your crappy sleep schedule in this year and don't bring it into next. And when we think about the 4 things humans need, right? Air, water, sleep, and food. We don't doubt that we need air, we don't doubt that we need water, we don't doubt that we need food, but yet somehow sleep leaves the building. And it is as important, right? You can't survive for 10 days without sleep. You know, you can survive 10 days without food. So sleep is actually kind of in the top 3, air, water, sleep, and then food, which is kind of wild to think about. Okay, another thing I think people need to leave behind is this idea of collecting ideas, right? And we love ideas, especially if we're entrepreneurial. Ideas are also now a commodity thanks to AI. And so ideas are inherently worthless unless they become actions, right? It's not special just because you thought it. And I think prior to AI, ideas felt like, oh my gosh, I have this idea that no one else has thought of. Well, now you can sit down and in 3 seconds you can come up with 100 ideas. Like, I remember when we launched Offer Cure in 2018, 2019, no, 2019. And inside of that course is 42 offer ideas that took me hours and hours to write. And it's actually a really good document. I recommend you, you use it because I, I give like real life examples. So I still think it's, it's superior to what ChatGPT could do. But had I had ChatGPT, I could have been like, here, give me 42 offer ideas. It would've done it in 3 seconds, right? Ideas are no longer as valuable as they used to be. So this is about being able to bring ideas to life or killing them off fast, right? And that ability to know what you should bring to life and what you should kill comes back to that idea of subtraction, because that's where you're going to see money. That's where you're going to see impact is when that idea actually comes to life. And if you're bringing every idea to life, you're going to dilute your impact. And so I would suggest you leave the idea that ideas are sacred in 2024, because execution is sacred, not ideas. Uh, okay, another one that I would love for you to leave is people pleasing on social media. Trying to be nice to everyone is draining as hell. So, uh, I suggest that you stop being afraid to speak your mind. And you know, for many of us, we have sensed the increasing polarization of our world, and so we tend to be like, oh my gosh, I can't say anything now. And I can relate to that, I feel that. But when it comes to being known for your zone of genius, when it comes to capturing attention, you can't afford to just play it safe all the time. And the good news is that social media has like an attention span of a goldfish, and so even if you get people that are hating on you for 48 hours, I guarantee it disappears after 48 hours and then people move on. And the last thing is I think we should leave behind this idea that either you're completely paranoid about AI or AI is the Messiah, right? And we've got two camps, you know, we got people who are terrified of, of what AI is going to do and how it's going to take over the world. And then we have people who think AI is like, going to completely be the savior that we're looking for. I'm going to walk into 2025 with the idea that AI is a tool. It is a tool that is going to change the world, much like the wheel, uh, was a tool that changed the world. But humans are going to do what humans do best, which is adapt. And I'm just going to learn the tool, integrate the tool, use the tool, but I'm going to continue to see it as a tool in my business and in my life, not as a savior, not as the devil. So I have a million more things to say, but I try to keep these podcasts short. So these are some things that I'm bringing, uh, into 2025, things I'm leaving in 2024. I'm really, really excited for the year ahead. And like I said, that delusional positivity is, is designed to create, um, awareness in my mind and in my environment that there are opportunities that, you know, maybe other people aren't going to see if they feel like, oh gosh, things are going to go, uh, south or sideways. So I hope you have a great new year. It has been so awesome hanging out with you guys, and I'll see you in the new year. And there you have it, folks, another dose of Million Dollar Grit. I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired, equipped, and ready to face your own entrepreneurial journey with resolve. Remember, until next time, embrace the struggle, harness your grit, and keep pushing forward. You're stronger than any challenge you face. I'm Julie Chenell, and this has been Million Dollar Grit.
