Episode 249: How to Generate A-Ha Moments and Big Ideas with Joe Sanok
22 Apr 2019 · 45 min
Joe Sanok shares a five-step framework for generating breakthroughs: Intention, Design, Experiment, Activate, Scale. Daily habits like exercise and meditation, plus quarterly retreats, create the conditions for aha moments. He pairs low-cognitive tasks with learning to maximize what he calls net time.
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I'm great. How are you?
I'm doing well. Studio is Kelsey Ayers. Jay Bone. Hey, Jay Bone.
Yo yo.
And myself. I am Mike Bukalowitz. I am the author on a mission. I'm on a mission to eradicate entrepreneurial poverty. You know that perception the world has a view of tremendous success, that you just hang on the beach doing whatever you want as the business generates money for you. But the reality is you're in the struggle. You're dying inside. You want to give up. You're resentful of it. Listen, I've been there. I know you've been there. We're getting you out of it on this show. So that's who I am. Kellis, why don't you share a little bit about yourself? Who are you?
My name is Kelsey. I was born in Sussex, New Jersey. No. I came to join Mike about 2 1/2 years ago after having my own little business. But I wanted supplemental income because I was starting to resent my business. So then I started hanging with Mike, and I loved him so much that I hung out with him more. And now my business is just a hobby.
Wait, wait, wait. So I hung out with Mike Moore, and now my business is just a hobby? It really isn't working.
Don't do what I did.
Yeah. And. And Jay Boner, you've been an entrepreneur for years, too. Like, this whole community is entrepreneurs here.
Yeah, off and on. But yeah.
And yeah. And do some. You. Do you still have Hunter's recipe?
So I was actually looking at it last night because I still get messages all the time on my Facebook page. Like, all the time. Actually, somebody sent me a message, and I didn't even see it. It was, like, six months ago. They're doing a TV show, and they wanted me to, like, kind of, like, be, like, a sponsor for TV show. So I should have paid attention to.
My own Facebook page. Talk about a missed opportunity.
Where's that sound effect?
Here it is. No, nothing closer. So, Kels, where can people find us?
ITunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, radio, sports, Spotify, or iHeartRadio or any podcaster anywhere. But please be sure to rate us, review us, comment wherever you are and subscribe. That's super important.
Yeah, we'd love to get you as a subscriber. We're going through a rebranding now. When this goes live, we're pretty far into it. To entrepreneurship elevated. But entrepreneurship is funny. I was out with Michael Hyatt. He's a very popular speaker. We went to dinner when we were down in Nashville, and he's like, oh, I want to subscribe to your podcast. And so he, while I'm sitting there, pulls up on his phone, he starts typing it in, and he just types in the word entrepreneur, and we are buried. The best show for entrepreneurs is buried. So I said, just type in the word profit, and he found it instantly. So maybe it'll take time for us to own the entrepreneur category, but I tell you, if we get more subscribers and people post comments and reviews, we'd really appreciate it because that gets the elevation. It elevates the podcast's popularity.
Yeah.
So, Kelsey, what have you been up to?
Oh, so today is Valentine's Day. Do you do what?
Yesterday was the day before Valentine's Day.
Galentine's Day.
Galentine's drinking.
I was drinking with my cocktail club, but we were celebrating Galentine's day. It's when you celebrate your female relationships.
Is that true for guys too?
No.
You celebrate your guys relationships or no, you just.
That doesn't exist. I don't think that's Valentine's. Well, for a female that's, you know, Valentine's Day, you celebrate the guy.
Well, but if you're a guy, you celebrate the gal.
Yeah.
So I thought the day before, did the guys celebrate the guys?
I don't think so.
Bro Day. Bro Valentine's Day.
Bro Day.
You know, I do Bralentine's.
Bralentine's. I used to do man day. I did it for 15 years consecutively. But the group I'm in, it was through entrepreneurs organization. I couldn't, I'm just traveling so much. I can't stay in the organization. So this will be my first upcoming year with no man's day. So I'm thinking about scheduling my own man day.
Yeah, you should.
Yeah, but not by myself, like with some friends. Jay Bone, you're invited.
Oh, thank you.
If you want to.
Yeah.
And we do manly things so we like eat some kind of like red meat or something. And if it's, if it's anything over medium rare, you're not allowed to come. We smoke cigars and, and then we drink whiskey. And if you don't like whiskey, you have to drink again until, until you like the whiskey. Like that's the mandate. And then we don't do it necessarily in that order. We end on the whiskey. We often start by smashing something like you know, go to a crack up derby or smash something. Okay. I want to ask you guys before we. We're going to have a new segment today. I'm starting to bring some fresh stuff. So do you guys. Later on today, if we do our interview, do you want to play dead or alive where we. I'm going to give you a list of entrepreneurs, a little bit of their background. Not going to tell you anything like when they were born or the product they made, but I'm just going to tell you their name and a little their history. You have to tell me if they're dead or alive. So that's one game. The other game we're going to do is which one's the fake product. So there's multiple products that have been invented. I'm going to give you three and description they are. You tell Me. Which one's the fake one and which ones are the two real ones? Do you have a preference, Kels?
I want to do the latter.
The latter. So the fake product.
Yeah.
Okay. Jbone, you go with that?
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, so we'll do that in a little bit. Do we have a listener shout out?
We do. This One comes from BCSLPC. ITunes subscriber, they write. I don't know if it's a female or a male. As a business owner, my time is at a premium if I'm gonna spend time listening to a podcast. And it needs to add value. This podcast does. I learn things that I can actually use. Totally worth it.
Boom. I love that.
Thanks. Bcs.
Yeah, exactly. BCL speed is very efficient. They don't even put their name down. Yeah, it's that. I don't know what all those initials are. That's probably the longest name in the world. It's like Brian, Kurt, Sam, Lester, something. Okay, let's get you ready to get to the show at hand?
Yeah, I'm ready.
Stop wasting my time, guys. You're killing me. His name is Joe Sanock, and he is a consultant, keynote, and TEDx speaker, and the number one podcaster. His practice of the Practice podcast teaches healthcare professionals how to start, grow, and scale a private practice while also helping them to pursue big ideas that will reshape the world. Specifically, Joe has strategies to foster those aha moments. The most important moments of an entrepreneurial's journey is to have aha moments and then translate that into action. That's what Joe's about to teach us. With no further ado, Joe, welcome to our show.
Welcome, Joe.
Thanks so much for having me.
Oh, it's a joy to have you. Hey, man, you know, I want to start off. Maybe it's a little bit of a macabre note, but I know in 2012, you had a big realization about your own life, and it translates into what we're about to discuss. What happened then?
Yeah, so my mom was coming off the heels of intestine cancer and kind of in and out of the hospital, and she was doing better. And we had just had a baby. And right before, for our oldest daughter's first birthday, actually on May 4th, so Star Wars Day, which actually was some good juju for us, she ended up having heart surgery. And so that year before, when I actually had launched my podcast and had launched my blog, was in and out of the hospital with her, trying to just get her up to weight to be able to really just have that heart surgery. And then after that heart surgery, we had about two weeks. We got the all clear. I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. So what we thought was just a chapter in our life, you know, in and out of the hospital, daughter's good. Then we were back in the hospital and so went through the whole kind of thyroid surgery. And in the process of that, we announced to our family that we were pregnant, but then shortly thereafter had a miscarriage. One of our friends had breast cancer. And it was just, I mean, one of those times when you're like, how much more can a family take? And. But in the midst of it, you know, I remember still writing a couple blog posts when I was sitting in the hospital. And it was a good distraction. And I had to think to myself, like, why am I launching this new podcast and this blog? I have a full time job. Why am I, you know, not just going back into the counseling world and why am I doing this in the midst of all this? And I had to ask some really important questions and say, so my daughter's about to have heart surgery. Why am I doing a blog post? Like, what's the best use of my time and how do I stay focused on that? And that's something that I would never have wanted it to happen that way. Which I think is common of a lot of people that have their own version of my 2012 that they say, I never would have wanted this to happen to anybody. But here's kind of what happened because of that. And it really reshaped me in a new way to be able to focus differently on my business and also have just a certain level of, I think, groundedness and appreciation for where I'm at.
So when I think of aha moments, I think of those shower moments where you have this inspirational idea or a thought that can change things for your business. But I'm hearing is there's a greater aha moment where there's these life traumas or significant experiences where your entire perspective on life changes. So when we talk about aha's, are we talking about both or one or the other? How do you define it?
Yeah, well, what's interesting, you know, as a clinical psychologist, I'm really interested in how the brain kind of comes up with those aha moments. There was a University of Illinois study that looked at vigilance, decrement, vigilance meaning how well we pay attention to something decrement, meaning how it breaks down over time. And so what they were looking at was, you know, the typical person, you know, you work on a project for an hour. The amount you pay attention to that project at the end is less than at the beginning. It's. And so they took these college students and they put them in front of a computer, gave them a random four digit number, say it was 5178. And whenever that number came up, they're supposed to hit a button and just all these numbers were coming up for an hour. So super boring task. So what they did is they looked at their vigilance decrement over that hour. The amount of times they hit the button at the end was far fewer than at the beginning. So they were paying attention to the beginning. They decrement by the end. So they had a second group that a third of the way through. What they did is they gave them a one minute break and they said something like, oh, we put you on the wrong computer. Go sit in the lobby for a minute, we'll get you set up. Or this is a tough task, Just stand up for a minute and shake it off. And then at the 2/3 mark, they did the exact same thing. So they found that that decrement didn't happen with that one minute break. So what this points to is something that then neuroscientists have really drilled into and tried to get a better understanding of. And that's that our biggest aha moments happen when we slow down. So when we're in the shower and we aren't maybe listening to a podcast and we're just letting our brain wander, we're driving down the road and say, I'm going to just turn off radio for a bit and just daydream. Our brain actually is working in those moments now when trauma comes in or unexpected life things, it kind of speeds that up in a lot of ways. I remember when I was in the lobby about to get a blood test for my cancer treatment and the billing coordinator had been kind of a jerk to me and like I was just in a bad mood and my wife was sick so she wasn't there to support me. And I'm sitting in, in this lobby area waiting for my blood test, just feeling really down on myself and really kind of frustrated with the medical system in general. And I said, okay, if I was one of my own clients at my private practice, like what would I tell myself? I would tell myself, fake it till you make it. Find some appreciation, you know, do some deep breathing. So I'm like, okay, let's see if this counseling crap actually works for myself. So I take some deep breaths and I look around And I see this kid that has cancer that's with his parents. There's this old couple that comes in. I really can't tell which one of them have cancer. There's a guy missing his jaw and I'm like, I have thyroid cancer, which is one of the best or easiest cancers to get. If you're going to get a cancer like, that's the one to get. We have savings, so we don't have to host a spaghetti dinner to be able to pay our medical bills. My medical insurance is going to cover this. And my mood changed and it sped things up. And so I think that there are these traumas that speed things up, but you don't need that in order to have the aha moments. Those shower moments really tap into exactly what the brain needs and actually what will speed up your own business as well.
Do you need to seed an aha moment? Meaning I noticed when I'm in the shower and I have a epiphany, it's often a question I asked of myself a week ago, a month ago, maybe even that morning, but then didn't put any conscious effort in germinating that idea. So. So my question really is about seeding it or do you just kind of just see what presents itself whenever it presents itself?
No, I think that, you know, I have this kind of five step process from looking at the neuroscience and also working with numerous consulting clients on big ideas and aha moments. And the very first step is intention, being intentional in how you schedule your time and what you put into your mind, how you acquire kind of new ideas and inspiration. And so even just thinking about the typical entrepreneur, you know, when they have a business under a million dollars and they're overwhelmed and they're stressed and they have 15 tasks in front of them, what is the process that they go through in order to decide the single best use of their time? Because they know they have X number of hours in a week to work on the business. And so when we seed those specific ideas in to have some intention behind it to say, well, you know, it's actually more valuable for me to listen to a podcast like this because it's going to save me for that, you know, hour or so I'm going to put into it and reflect on it and take some actions, that's going to save me five hours of time on the other side.
But let me ask you a question on that, because the, the entrepreneur that has millions of things, you know, I think it's called the superhero syndrome. I come in the Business, I got to save everything. It's constantly putting out fires. There is no time to think. So therefore, how do I become intentional about thinking?
So I would challenge that idea that they don't have the time. I would say it's probably a misuse of the time. And so the typical counselor in private practice, so they're seeing maybe in a successful practice, 30 clients a week, 25 to 30 clients. They have these people that genuinely need them. And so there's a reason, if they're, say, the only trauma therapist in town, that they feel like, I can't stop doing this work, work. But then if we step back and say, well, what would be a better model to have two or three other people that also serve trauma? So we're tripling the number of therapists in town. We're training them, we're creating systems for automation, and in the process also making more money. We first have to, of course, put out the basic fires that are going on, but then we have to say how much of this is fueled by ego because maybe initially you are the only person that can do it this well, but could someone be trained and even do it better? So, for example, on my own podcast, I'm an artistic guy. I loved making the kind of art that went with each podcast episode. It was a lot of fun for me. But what did that do? It meant that instead of spending the half hour for an interview and a little bit of editing, it took two hours to put out each podcast. Well, what can happen if I give that to Sam, who is an amazing designer, matches my brand, I can double the amount of podcast episodes I put out. And then really saying, what's the one thing that for me is going to move the needle forward? That book, you know, the one thing has been pivotal for my way of viewing the world where what is the thing that only I can show up for? I can't have Sam come show up here and do an interview with you, but I can have her do all the follow up. I can have her do all the promotion on social media when this goes live. I don't need to be doing every single one of those things.
Gotcha. So I just had an aha moment. I just realized I lost where we are in our sequence. So we had one, we had intention. Did we tackle number two yet or did I miss?
We didn't. We didn't. So let me give you all five of them just so people have it all at once. So it's being intentional or intention, whichever resonates with you. So Intention, design experiment, activate scale. So spells ideas, so it's a little easier to remember. So intentional. You're time blocking. You're saying, what's the best use of my time? You're saying to yourself, okay, for counselors, if they're charging 150, $200 an hour, how much time does that buy? If I do one extra session, I should be able to kind of COVID all of my practice with assistance that are doing all the things that I'm wasting time on. So then we're going to look at design. So you have some of this aha moments as a result of being intentional in how you structure out your time. And we can talk about the neuroscience behind that as well. But so in that design, we want to say, well, what are some kind of best guesses around this idea? To implement it a little bit. And then that's going to move us into that experiment phase where we're going to give it a whirl. So this can be in the lifestyle design for yourself or your business design. So a couple summers ago, I was stressed. I had left my full time job. I was doing, you know, before that I was doing the podcast and the private practice on the side on evenings and weekends. So I left my full time job and was just going to do this. So I took every client I could, consulting, counseling, wanted to make sure that we were going to make our ends meet. And I said, this isn't the kind of life I wanted. I've given myself a job instead of a business, which I think a lot of people will do. And my friend Kelly Higdon, she said to me at a conference, like, if you just designed your life, what would it look like? And that really shifted things. Where we start with, as we teach people, how do you design your life first and then put your business into that? And I did an experiment where I said, okay, this summer for three months, I'm going to just take Fridays off. I'm going to see what happens. I can always go back to work in the fall, but this summer, you know, I've worked really hard. Let's see if the business falls apart. And parts of it did. So then I knew I had to set up systems to address that. But at the end of that summer, having three day weekends was pretty awesome. And so I kept. But I also found that the amount of work I got done in four days was what I had spread out over five days. You know, Parkinson's law, we hear a lot about how work will expand to the time given. So the Next summer, I decided that I was gonna do another experiment, get some information, see if it would work, take Mondays off. Same thing happened where I squished all that work into three days. I was more effective, but even more so. I then said, what are the systems to make my business run like clockwork?
Nice.
See what I did there?
Yeah. Promote the show quickly.
And so it's like at each step I'm then revealing what are the problems that I'm making it that I can't step away from this business. But then I'm creating systems from those fires that are created and then saying, okay, let's move up this stream a little bit. Here's the fire. Yes, I got to put it out now. But how did that fire happen? It's going to take some time to build that system, but then that's no longer going to be a fire that I worry about.
Gotcha.
So after experiment, then we're going to go into activate. And so we've kind of tested something out. We're going to want to really amp it up. So say it's a new launch of something in your business. Tested it, we've got information, kind of put out something that we're going to give it a whirl. So what I did, I launched a membership community specifically for people that have a private practice that they're starting. And so I had interviewed people from my audience and said, when you were starting a practice, tell me a little bit about what that experience was like. What do you wish was out there and how much would you have paid for that solution? Talk to about 20 people. So that would be the experiment side launched a beta test for this membership community. It sold out right away. Now it's time to activate that. And so then I doubled the price for it, added more money behind the Facebook ads, the webinars was able to amp it up so that it could be a successful idea launch. And that's usually where people will stop. The next step is to really scale. And so now I need to ask myself, how do I remove myself as the idea generator? I'm the visionary. I'm the one that says this is where we're headed with the business. How do I outsource as much as I can? And so, for example, with that membership community, the onboarding calls, we do a 15 minute call with every single person that joins. Well, I have Emily, she, you know, schedules that she makes sure people can log into teachable and get into the Facebook. And sometimes people's PayPal email is different than their Regular email. So she sorts out all of that. You know, I have Sam that's doing other information as a part of that. When I can then scale it, that then goes back to that very first step of creating time that I can have more big ideas.
Gotcha. Okay, so give me some, maybe some kind of quippy thoughts around generating those aha moments. So we talked about showers. Is there other settings that we can put ourselves in intentionally that will trigger just that relaxation of our mind so that we can have aha's?
Yeah, I would break it down into some daily habits, but then also maybe quarterly or annual habits. And so from just daily habits, we know that the neuroscience points to the basic kind of healthy things that are good for us are going to be multiplier effects. So having a regular exercise routine, meditation has been shown to be highly effective. So Sam Harris's waking up course. I've been going through that. It's amazing to teach me how to meditate in a way that I resonate with being able to have ways that you capture those ideas when they come in. So when you have an idea in the shower, how does that not just fall off the end of the conveyor belt? And so it could just be the notes section on your phone. It could be that you're going to put something into your calendar. You need to have a way that you capture those ideas when they come, but then we need to distill what are the best ideas. So on a regular basis, we want to be having that idea environment created, but we also want to then be able to generate ideas and capture them. Now, if we're looking at quarterly, we know that the neuroscience shows that it usually takes the average person about three days of detoxing from technology to really feel like their brain is grounded again. And so that's actually sped up in nature if you go on a retreat in the woods or you go for some hikes or things like that. And so having some sort of rhythm in your business life to retreat away is really important. So we do this thing called slowdown school. And it's a week long intensive retreat on the beaches of Lake Michigan. People fly in on a Sunday afternoon. We take them in a big yellow school bus out to this place where we stay. And for two days we tell them we really want you to just turn your phone off and be present. We hang out on the beach, drink beer at noon, have massage therapists and yoga teachers come in. But then what we see on the Wednesday, Thursday and Friday morning of it is when we do these 20 minute sprints, people get done things in those 20 minutes that often would have taken them months to sleep. So.
So it's crazy. What I was envisioning is say. You say, all right, send me a $3,000 check. We'll bring you to slow down school. People get there all hyped up. You're about to meet Joe and so forth, and then you're like, okay, so what are we gonna do? And you're like, well, you know, just hang out. Just.
We're gonna do a silent. You're just gonna be in silence exactly.
Five minutes, walk, hang out. Hey, you over there. And he's like, yeah, you should go take a shower. Like that's your mission. Hey, you over there. Go get a beer.
Yeah. And part of it is that of just saying, I'm giving you permission to step back. But I take them to my favorite hiking places. We, you know, on the Tuesday night of it, when we wanted to transition into kind of like a more amped up Wednesday, we did a silent disco where I brought in a dj. And, you know, everyone's got these headphones, but if they want to have a conversation, they can take the headphones off and chat. So we do a silent disco in the woods. It's a lot of fun. We played spike ball on the beach. And just people being kids, we did a skipping stone tournament on the water. And so you spend two days doing that. We did improv on the beach one night with all these therapists that have never done improv. It was crazy. I thought it may totally fall flat on its face, but it was hilarious. But what happened then on Wednesday when we do these 20 minute sprints, is people generate ideas like they never have before. So here's a couple examples. One lady, she. She was a great therapist, had a group practice, was really killing it on that side of things, but she knew she wanted to scale beyond that. Now she said, I want to do some consulting. Was kind of playing too small. I'm like, you have this great personality. She's kind of this crass, like, swears, drops the F bomb. Like, she needs to have a brand that really matches her. And she wasn't coming up with that. So during her 20 minute sprint, she named her practice, she bought the URL, she sketched out her entire design of consulting and then had three or four lead magnets she scheduled out and figured out within 20 minutes. I mean, one of those things would have taken someone a month to kind.
Of sort of brainstorm sessions. You hire a branding specialist. We gotta get going. So before we let you go, Joe, could you tell us a little bit more about Practice of the Practice and how our listeners can maybe join, you know, Slow Down School?
Yeah, absolutely. So the websites are slowdownschool.com. we'd love to have people come that kind of match what we're working on. We have another conference called Killing It Camp that's coming up. So that's killing it camp.com out in Estes Park, Colorado. That's a shorter kind of version of Slowdown School, but I put together over 30 resources for your audience. Everything from how to set up a Google business page and how to rock it out on Pinterest to if you have a private practice to how to be HIPAA compliant and scale your practice. That's over at practice of the practice.com resources. And then we have 300 some episodes of the podcast where we interview awesome people like you on the podcast.
Wow, Joe, this has been fascinating. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Thank you, Joe.
Thanks so much for having me.
All right, so, Kelsey, we got to do a few things here. Oh, what was the game you wanted to do the. The product? Which one's the fake product? So that. That's. That's coming up soon. It's. Right. What's that called? An open loop? Is that what Don Miller told us? Leave open loops. So we went to this thing called Story Brand training, Right?
Yep. Workshop.
Workshop. We went for two days, Jaybone. And it was myself, Kelsey Paul. We should actually had Jay bone down there now in reflection. And we had Bill Yen.
Amount of people.
Yeah. Yeah.
But there was 200.
I had fun. It was great.
Yeah, there was 250 people overall.
Yeah.
From our. From our business. 250 of us. And. But I will tell you, I got to endorse that program as one of the most remarkable programs I've ever experienced in the branding in the branding or marketing category combined.
I think anyone just like your mindset about your business and the way you communicate your business beyond even just, you know, what you would think about marketing.
Yeah. So go to. If anyone's Interested, go to storybrand.com it's highly recommended. I highly recommend it. But I will tell you one thing we did is we did what Joe was just talking about. Like, we went. We did the work and you're feeling your brain frying a little bit. And we went to lunch. It wasn't like we continue the conversation of the meeting. We didn't try to ideate further. We went to dinner and we're just, like, horsing around, having fun. But I think some amazing ideas came out of it the next morning, because we're fresh and new stuff, and we're at the airport when we're leaving. All of a sudden, some ideas started popping there because we didn't force it. We didn't have a brainstorm session or anything. We just were shooting the ball.
I think if we do this again, if we. Or any kind of training like that again, we should schedule, like, two days afterwards where we do a retreat. Yeah, exactly. Where we don't do any productive work. Right.
Are you on that? Are you gonna reach out to Don? Yeah. Okay, so why don't you just schedule a day with him, and we all go down, and then let's spend two extra days down there. Let's get Jay Boner down there.
Oh, yeah.
And just the MM team, you know, I'm saying. And if Ryan wants to do the reigning. Of the team, too, that'd be awesome. But let's just do another couple days.
Real quick, Mike, there's a professor I had at Rowan when you came to speak.
Yeah, what was the name?
Yeah, Dantino.
Yeah, I don't know if I met him, so.
And anyway, he told the story about an entrepreneur. I can't remember the name of the guy, but basically, they had this room that was just dedicated to creativity. There was literally nothing in it, but the walls were painted all kinds of crazy colors with different shapes and weird things.
Interesting.
There's a whiteboard. So, like, they would go and just sit in the chair and just think, wow. Not do anything. And, like, then they would write the ideas on the whiteboard, and then, like, later on that week, they would have a brain.
You know, when you get a bonus tip like that from J. Boner, it's called a J. Bonerous.
You're just making it worse.
It kind of works. I just blended, too. All right, and then we'll do our one takeaway.
And.
I got a ship. A ship to share with you. A tip to share with you. But first, I do want to thank our corporate partners. Who are our corporate partners?
Nextiva.
Oh, my God. Jbone. Have we. We haven't given you a phone yet, have we? Given you one? Have we? I can't remember.
Oh, I asked him every time, listener, tell us if jbone has a phone.
Yeah, I want the listeners to write you for every time you said that.
You do have a phone, right?
It's h. It's clear. Clear voice, true voice.
Have you tried. Have you made some calls with It.
I've made lots of calls.
I bet you if you call your mom, does she have one?
Yes, my mom has an ex diva. Yeah.
Yeah. You call her. She'll be, jeremy, is that you? And you'll be like, yeah, Mom. She's like, your voice is so clear. I bet you in the past you've been calling your mom to say, hey, mom, just checking in. How you doing? And she's like, who is this?
Yeah, well, she doesn't know Jay Boner, so that's the problem. Yeah, she doesn't know that name yet.
Jay Bone, did you have deja vu today when Mike asked you if you do?
I was trying to do.
I asked that, and I asked him every episode.
Literally one week ago, it was like, the same exact conversation.
I was trying to think of how many times. No, not. Yeah.
So when you asked him about woodworking.
Oh, yeah. How's the woodworking going? Good.
Good. Yep.
So you're gonna put. You're gonna throw in the thing for us?
Yeah, I'll bring my soul, dude, do the work.
Clearly, I'm not a good listener. It's so funny. We go these meetings and, like, thank God. I. Kelsey has a function, like two roles is when I. When I talk and I say something, the wrong word or something, she has to elbow me fast and correct me, but in my. You know, just whisper it so that I don't look like an idiot. The second thing that I look like an idiot is I don't remember anyone's name or anything we've talked about. So I go to the same. It's like I go to the same people and ask the same questions. Like, I know on the next episode, next week, I'll be like, hey, Jay Bono, do you ever get next to your phone? Oh, my God. So your job, Kelsey, just to elbow me fast and, like, remind me, say, no, You've asked Jay Bone a hundred times.
Yeah.
I'll just throw stuff at you.
One thing that you guys both say that I never. I never heard it pronounced this way. Is integral. I always heard integral. I never heard it that way until it's integral.
Both. So Amber looked it up when she was here, and it's integral. And integral.
So if I hear integral, I think of integration. Like, almost like it's. It's part of something if it's integral. But integral means to speak with authority and consistency.
Yeah. That is a key component to me.
It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I've literally never heard it said integral until you said it.
Interesting. Maybe South South Jersey.
It could be. Oh, yeah. Nice. You did a little chess tap.
Oh, wait.
Three, three, two.
Oh, so next to you, that's our voiceover IP phone system. We love them. Supposedly JBONE may have one. And then what about Receipt Bank?
What about Receipt Bank? What about Recedibank?
Recedibank? Oh, we were talking about that down at Don Miller's place.
Oh, great.
Yeah, we told them all about your understanding.
Lovely.
Yeah.
No, so I just have a great reputation at this point, dude, for all kinds of shady stuff.
It's so hard.
I'm like the worst friend of yours. But Receipt bank allows you to scan in all those receipts you have, and we got quite a few. Did. When you went out that one time without me as the three of you, you went. Did you guys retain the receipt?
Yeah.
Do you know where it is?
No, it's lost.
I see. Because you don't have Receipt Bank. I scan it right there on the spot. I don't have to worry about receipts. And now when we do reconciliations in this month, I'll be like, where'd you guys go? And you're like, we went out to dinner. I'm like, really? For $500, let me see the receipt. Like, I don't know where it is, and this whole dispute will break out. Recedibank saves you from that happening. And you probably did go place someplace seedy.
Yeah, why wouldn't we?
All right, that's our sponsors. Check them out. Receipt bank and nextiva. All right, Kels, what'd you learn? What'd you learn today, sir?
I love this. So first of all, I love when talking about Intention Challenge, that you don't not have time. You're just not allocating it effectively.
Oh, groovy, baby. Yes.
Just a misuse of it. And I like how we said, like, how much of that is fueled by ego like that you feel like you have all this stuff to do and how much could you actually delegate to somebody else and they might actually do it better, more effectively than you're currently doing it.
My big takeaway was that 5, 1, 7, 8. I remember the numbers. When he said that experiment they did that had people for one hour have to pick out that number, and then when they repeat the experiment, just by giving them two one minute breaks that they're. What was that word? Vigilance? Decrement or something?
Yeah, vigilance and detriment. I think it could have been decrement.
Wait, what if it was? Like, I don't know what it was. What was the Word. Do you remember Jay Bond?
I don't. I don't remember.
Joe. What was the word? Are you still with us, Joe?
Decrement.
Okay.
You got it. Well done.
So, yeah, the vigilance decrement, I thought was really fascinating.
I agree. I love that. And I feel like that's so true. And recently I've been trying to do that where I'll take little breaks when I feel like I'm just like kind of staring at my screen.
Yeah.
I'll actually take a break so that I can be more productive.
And I do the same thing. The thing is, though, is not to go for me to Facebook because that becomes instead of a one minute break, it's becomes a one hour droning decrement.
Yeah. And then I'm totally lost.
Yeah. So I try to do like a quick solitaire or me, I just look at sports news real quick and I hop.
Yeah, exactly.
Okay. This is the moment everyone's been waiting for. Cals, huh? This is called oh, we're not doing dead or life. We're doing Is this product real or fake? Now there's two real ones. There's one fake one. I will explain each one in no particular order, and then I want you both to vote on which one's the fake one. Which one's the real one?
Okay.
Okay. First product is called the Snor. It's made for gardeners. And by the way, I wrote every description here so they'll all sound like my voice, but two of them are legit. Okay. The strainer. It's made for gardeners. The most difficult time of season is the winter. Snow crushes and freezes plants, killing them all.
Oh, snow Rainer. I get it now.
Okay, killing. You're good. Killing them all and compromising growth rates in the spring. No more. Place your strainer tent over your garden. Our patented moisture maker tarp. Gently heat snow in into water and evenly spreads the water over your garden and underground seedlings. Your garden will broom. Your garden will bloom like never before. Available now@snoraner.com, home Depot and Lowe's outlets. Okay, next one. That's product one. Product number two is fake wishbones. Now, don't let that word fake necessarily throw you off. Okay. It's called fake wishbones. Get your lucky break without harming a chicken. That's really ridiculous. You wanted it, now it's here. Wishbones. Made of biodegradable plastic. Countless animals have died unnecessarily to grant the wishes of children and adults alike. That's Hysterical. But it gets worse. There's only one wishbone per feast. No more fighting over who gets the wishbone, and no need to wait for it to dry out. Everyone gets a wishbone. You get a wishbone, you get a wishbone. Immediately get your wishbone. Family fun 5 pack or the serious Wish youh Wishing pack of 10@lucky breakwishbone.com. no bones about it. We are PETA partners. Okay. And the last product, the Boyfriend Body Pillow. Boyfriend Pillow is. I'm sorry. The Boyfriend Pillow is a perfect pillow for those lonely nights. Do you long to have the strong arms of a handsome boyfriend wrapped around you as you fall asleep? This pillow measures 22 by 9 inches for the body and 36 inches for the arm. With a heavy, strong chest that you can nuzzle into Every pillow. Comes with a removable microfiber shirt for softness and easy care. Chest hair optional. The new Deluxe Comfort P9000 Pillow, available on Amazon.com right now. Okay, that's.
You couldn't make it through.
I have a question. Did you research the one that it is fake that you made up? Did you research if it's actually fake?
The one that's fake does not exist. And two of these do absolutely exist and are available for sale right now.
You couldn't make it through any of the descriptions.
I just typed in the ridiculous products and, like, there is an endless stream. Jay, Boner, you're up first.
All right, so what's your guess?
The fake product.
I honestly think all of these are real in some form or the other.
That's exactly if it is.
No, I really. I really. I really don't think that. If there was gonna be a fake one, I would say that the Boyfriend Body Pillow, if it looks like a boyfriend, I've seen that.
Legit, though.
You've seen that?
Yeah, but not.
Oh, wait, wait, wait. Get on the microphone.
How do you notice I don't have one?
But how have you seen it?
I don't feel like the one I saw had chest hair on it. Like, it was like.
Well, maybe it's not real chest hair.
It was like a body pillow that had an image of a man on it. And it was like your fake boyfriend. So it didn't do the things that you said. But. But still it exists.
All right, well, for.
Well, you can't collaborate on this. Like, what's your.
For purposes of this, I would say the Boyfriend Body pose. Fake.
Okay. And I think that the strainer and the fake wishbone.
The strainer I've actually seen and used Something similar to that. And the fake wishbone. I feel like a vegan would come up with that just to have fun.
Okay. Okay, good. All right, Kels, what's yours?
So my guess is the fake wishbone more or less because you cracked yourself up so much.
Why is this ridiculous? Okay, so the real fake product is the snrainer. So neither of you are right. So why I clocked up is because I wrote each one of these descriptions.
There you go.
Why clacked up is because each of these I wrote the description, and it was just a blast writing, like, you know, no bones about it. We are PETA partners. But the fake wishbones is a real product. You can get it@lucky breakwishbone.com right now. And the boyfriend pillow, which I got the picture of it here, so we'll pass that around. Is real.
This big chest hair thing is so creepy.
Ridiculous.
It's so creepy.
Well, it's yarn or something, you know, but the strainer, the fact that you said you use something like this. Who the hell would put a tent outside? First of all, a garden gets covered by snow. It's like it doesn't matter.
No, it's. I thought the way you're describing it, and this is a real thing, there are these cones that you put around individual trees and plants, and it keeps the heat and the.
The.
The moisture in and. And doesn't let it get over watered. Okay, well, so the name of the name was different, but there are some.
Wow. I. I thought I made up the strainer. What I envisioned in my mind was this big tarp. Could you leave me alone? I envisioned this big tarp. You can't leave me alone. Big tarp over a garden. And, like, the snow coming down and it heating the snow to turn it to water to drop on it, like, which. That's just ridiculous.
I got you. I got you.
Okay. Do you want to see the body pillow?
Yeah, I want to take this.
Pass it over. Okay. Was that fun? Should we do that again next time?
Yeah, that was fun. That was great.
I can't wait.
I feel like it shows off your ability to write copy.
That is humorously and effectively so creepy. That is the creepiest thing I think I've ever seen.
Yeah. So he's saying what's creepy is the. The body pillow, which I think it's creepy that Kelsey's like, oh, I've seen that before. I don't want to go.
I'll put an image up on the video.
Yeah, put it up with the. Put the image on the video and if we can put in the show notes. It's so ridiculous. It's this. The best part is the hand. So it's hand. It's. It's a half a body, one arm. Yeah. So if you took as a human torso and you remove the head, you remove the waist, so it's just the. The torso. You then slice it down the middle so you have half this, the right half or left half. And it's this one arm that comes around with this creepy hand that looks like a Mickey Mouse hand with five fingers. It's too big that you can. That kind of just fondles you.
Isn't that ironic that it's Valentine's Day and that's the one that you picked for all those ladies out there, all.
You ladies, we should make a Mike boyfriend pillow. See if anyone wants to buy that. Could you do that? Kel's take care. No. Like any of our listeners. Hey, do you want a mic boyfriend pillow?
This creepy hand uses real beard hair for the chest.
Chest hair. Oh, my God, it's so disgusting. Do you want wiry chest hair in your face?
Do you want him wearing the cool UV glasses?
Yeah, exactly, Mike. My Bono glasses. All right, Kels, the tip of the day. Are we ready for that or what? Listener mail first.
Sure.
This comes from Rebecca Epperson. In 2017, we were happily profitable at 17%. Last year, 2018, we lost money due to issues which have been resolved. So my question is, do I do my instant assessment based on 2017 or 2018, and if I do it on 2018, the year of loss, do I put my actual profit at zero or the actual total loss?
Yeah. I suggest that you look at both years if you're a more established business. So if you've been in business for five years or more, I would suggest combining the most recent years because maybe 2018 is an anomaly, a bad year, or maybe 2017 was actually the anomaly where you had a great year. So combine the two, get the average and go with it. If you're a brand new business and you're only in business for two years, I wouldn't combine the two necessarily because you're on a growth trajectory and the last year is probably more representative even though you lost money. Make sense?
Makes sense.
Okay, you ready for my tip of the day? Ready. Okay, let me hit myself. So the tip of the day is this concept Anthony Robbins talks about. He calls it net time or no extra time. And so I'm taking this from Anthony Robbins, but I've done this in practice for myself. When doing an activity, sometimes you can do a second activity in parallel to accomplish two results simultaneously. Now, this is not multitasking. Here's one example. I like to listen to books. You know, audiobooks. I'm listening to Alter Ego by Todd Herman. Are we getting him on our show? We are. Okay. The book is phenomenal. I really love it. I'm going now through the second version of it while I'm listening to it. There's certain tasks I can do that don't require any mental attention. One of them is, like, you know, packing books or shipping books. I don't do that anymore. But when I was shipping books, I'd be listening to Alter Ego. Or there's certain emails I have to go through that people are asking questions, that there's an FAQ response. Jenna's doing that mostly now, but sometimes I just do it, and I can just sit there and go bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang things out. So do you have a task, maybe a more mundane task that doesn't require any mental focus, and then you can use that as a parallel learning experience? That's how you do it.
So that's walk on the treadmill and read.
Exactly. Yeah. Walk on the treadmill and read. Yeah. That's called no extra time or net time. There's a lot of these opportunities, and a lot of us don't even think about. So we do it literally. We listen to the book while we're, you know, drinking some soda or having lunch. But you could actually be productive during that period.
I used to structure if I had a long drive, I would start with the comedy channel on Spotify just to kind of get me in a good mood.
Yeah.
And then I would put on, like, a podcast or something I wanted to listen to, like, something that I could, like, learn something while I'm driving because, you know, that's awesome.
In the morning, I listen to music right away just so that I'm, like, awake and in a good mood. And then I listened. I put on either, like, an audiobook or podcast.
That's awesome. We're gonna talk about. Oh, my God, I can't think of the word tacking. Next week, I'm gonna share a tip on tacking, so just be prepared for that.
Okay.
It's a strategy to move forward quickly, and I want to remind people before we start wrapping things up. Kels.
Yeah.
That we still offer Surge for free. My book, Surge. But we are redoing the entire website based upon the brand story experience and the search book's. Gonna go away. So if you want it, this goes live. When does this go live? April.
April. Yeah.
Yeah, it's probably still actually gonna be your last shot. So rush over to mikemotorbike.com and get your search copy.
Or if you're. If you are watching this on YouTube, I put the link in the description.
Oh, yeah. Or exactly. YouTubers are the best. All right, Kelsey, you wanna start taking us out?
Okay. So again, please rate us, review us, and subscribe. Wherever you're listening.
Whatever podcast you're at, that's your takeout. All right, well, that was. That's basically it. I shouldn't have told about the surge thing because I have nothing else to share. But I will you tell you this. I got a brand new website coming out@mikemichalowitz.com I think you're going to find it more impactful than ever before. I love the website as is currently. It's a fun, engaging website, but you're going to get more results, more action, more benefit than ever before. I know you're facing as entrepreneur, you're facing the struggle. You're stuck in entrepreneurial poverty. We're going to resolve that together. Go to mikemcalois.com and let's do it. All right, we're out of here.
Sam.
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