The Meetup Mindset - Creative Nation Tour stop in St. Louis

What's up, everyone? Today we are on our way from Indianapolis to St. Louis, Missouri. That's our next stop for the Creative Nation tour. I am driving about three and a half hours from Indianapolis to St. Louis and I thought about taking a bus because I really cannot afford to lose seven hours of productivity time. Like every hour is so valuable to me as far as getting stuff done and producing value and even spending time with family, obviously, that is well. And I toyed with a few different options and I just couldn't get it to line up right. You know, I wasn't quite sure how the bus thing would work out. I've never taken a bus publicly before and I was kind of weirded out by that, but I was willing to push through it, but the logistics of it just didn't make sense. And then I started breaking down, okay, how much transit time am I going to have to get to the transit? You know, it's going to take me 30 minutes to get to the bus stop.

I got to get there 20 minutes early.

There's going to be an hour bus stop break in the drive. So add another hour to that. Then we're talking about the return trip. So there's probably about three hours of just pre transit time and intermediary transit time within that transit time. So I started looking at it like, man, I just really don't want to be locked into leaving at a certain time. And the whole logistics of it was just stressing me out. I was like, I don't want to be stressed for this thing. I just want to get there. And whenever I'm ready to go, I'll get back on the road and ready to go, whether that be tonight or tomorrow morning, I don't know. So I don't have a hotel booked or anything. So I decided to get on the car. So I'm hopped in, ready to rock and roll and we are off to St. Louis. So funny thing, it's going to take us a little bit longer than I thought because I just missed my turn. To be fair, I missed my turn on a normal, any normal given day. So we're doing a U turn now because we are headed the wrong direction. And I made an assumption that was definitely wrong. I don't know where we were headed. I think we were headed to Chicago on that one. All right, so we're about, let's see, about an hour and a half away now and just want to share a quick update on the mindset going into this meetup. So I went to the Chicago meetup A couple weeks ago. And honestly, I was a big frickin pussy. Like I should have done so much better at networking and building relationships and getting to know people. I robbed myself and I robbed other people of relationships by not putting in the effort that I should have been. I gravitated to a lot of the friends that I saw, owner's club members that I saw, you know, just people I knew and felt comfortable with and knew, you know, because it's just easy, right? It's so easy to just do what is easy and what comes natural to you. And you know, this drive has got me thinking, you know, it's a Saturday, my son is sick. So I almost didn't even come because I felt bad my wife has to deal with that at home and my son's not feeling well. It's the weekend. I work full time during the day. I work, you know, W2, right. So the weekend is the only time I get to spend with my family. And a lot of times I'm working on the weekend too. And so. So you need to value your time. And so when I think about valuing my time, my time is worth a lot to me. And it's worth 10 times more on the weekends than it is during the week because that is the time I have to spend my family. So I'm taking time out of my day, the full day Saturday. I don't know, you know, I don't have any plans tonight. Like I don't know when I'm coming back home. It could be later tonight. I could be driving three and a half hours back tonight or I could stay the night. You know, I don't have a hotel booked or anything, so I'm just winging it. And so you think about, I'm spending a whole Saturday and part of Sunday away from my family. I'm doing a disservice to my family if I don't go out there and absolutely kill it and create a bunch of relationships that gives a lot of value and hopefully I receive some value in that. But it is my obligation to go out there and say my feelings, you know, it's not about what makes me comfortable. I need to push myself and I need to focus on the skill sets that I have and the value that I can bring to people. Because that little tiny voice inside your head, inside my head still creeps up when I get to meetups. I still think about that shy, timid little boy when I first came into sub 2, thinking I don't have any value to give to other People, that voice does not leave, at least for me. If you figured out how to get rid of that voice, please let me know, because I would love to know. I'm gonna force that voice out of myself for short periods of time. And that's what's gonna happen at tonight's meetup. Because I am sacrificing a lot by spending the time away from my family. So the impact that I have has to be enormous. It has to be. If not, I've done my disappointment to my family, to the people in the community, all of it. So I'm gonna go to this meetup like a heat sinking missile on a mission to help as many people as possible. I don't know how many people are gonna show up, but I think at least 50 people tonight that I can talk to easily. The challenge that I get is that when I get into a flow of a conversation, whether that be one way or two way, a lot of times it's the other way is wanting to tell me their life story. And I have to get to a point where I, like, almost have to cut them off. I haven't quite figured out how to master that skill in terms of being able to move around the room and maximize impact both for myself and for other people. Because again, if I'm plugged into one conversation, there's a lot of people that I can't help at that point. There's some people that probably need my help. They need the resources that I have and may need the resources that they have to be able to both further each other's business. And so I have to keep that in mind and find a way to gracefully move from conversation to conversation without getting stuck in surface level stuff that is really not going to benefit them and it's not going to benefit me. Not that this has to be by any means a transactional type of relationship thing, but it's really about more of focused, concentrated impact for the time that I'm spending away from the family. So that's what's going through my head on this drive. I was listening to some music for like 20 minutes. I was like, wait, what am I doing? Like, I need to be, you know, doing something my time, right? So that was listening to Alex Hormozi's Money Models book. Really great. Gave me some really good ideas how to implement my business. Then I started sending voice memos to people, getting caught up on some things and trying to give, you know, value to other people as they're reaching out and asking questions and really using the Rest of the time to just sit and think about the mindset, the approach, the things I need to work on, the things I need to get better. You know, sometimes working is not typing on a keyboard and getting physical product output. Sometimes it's working on your mind, you know, and oftentimes that's the most valuable work that you can put in. I heard Pace say the other day, if you had a magic seed that would sprout everything you've ever wanted, how many times would you water it? And that's a really great philosophical question to think about. And for me, you know, it's branding. You know, social media creates a huge impact because of just the reach and awareness that you can have if you do it well. And then the other thing is mindset. Working on the mindset, two very, very important things. So those are things that I need to water. Those are my magic seeds. I need to water them every single day. So doing things like this, forcing myself into uncomfortable situations, because this is naturally uncomfortable to me. I'm not some crazy extrovert. I'm actually an introvert by nature. And so it's really difficult for me to push myself. And I've gotten to the point now where it's not as difficult, it's not as uncomfortable. In the beginning, I was terrified. Now I'm very. It's very natural to me. I could show up to these events, have zero stress. I actually enjoy it now. Before, it would drain me and take all the life out of me. So I've already rewired my brain, and it's changed me a lot for the better. But the part I haven't been able to rewire yet is the part where I really dive into the uncomfortable territory and just walk up to people and get to know people that I have no idea who they are, what their background is, nothing about them. A lot of times I'm trying. I'm looking in the room, gravitating towards the people that I know. And so that is going to change tonight. So we're almost there, and I'm excited to show you how that's changing. So I'm here. I made it to the Four Hands Brewery back here. I just walked in, went to use the restroom. It's actually pretty small, so I'm curious to see how many people show up today.

My guess is 50.

I don't know. We may have this place just blowing up. Standing room only. I'm not sure. But when I first walked in, I.

Was like, dang, did I drive all.

The way out Here to have, like five people or what's going on? It's so funny how first impressions can change things. But we're here, and let's go inside. Okay. I was totally wrong. I did not realize that there was an upstairs to the bar. So this place is actually pretty freaking big. So I'm excited now. False alarm. It's gonna be a great meetup.

Let's check it out.

All right, so there's pace. We actually had the meetup booked at a wrong location. So I went upstairs to hang out with these people, and I saw on the table there was like a triathlete celebration. I was like, oh, is this someone's birthday? And they were looking at me like.

What do you mean?

How do you not know what this. And I come to realize that these were not real estate people. I was like, I'm at the wrong meetup. I was at someone else's private event. So then I asked the bartender. They're like, no, this real estate meetup was scheduled at someone else's or at another location 30 minutes away. So now we're actually opening up the garage, which is. Which is like. Which is like 200ft down here. And they said, we need a permit to operate this, but we're not drinking, so we're creatively trying to figure out a solution. They said it would be a $400 cancellation fee, which we were trying, like, how much is Google reviews worth? Right. We're bartering with them and trying to get them to send their staff down here so that way they can operate. Because they were like, oh, well, we can't send our staff. We got a pair of staff. We already told them that there were, you know, stats for that location. And then now we're gonna have to go to this location down here. So it was good that, that I got here early and realized that the meetup was actually not going to be at that location. That's the manager, Luke. She's in high stress mode. Props to her, though. She's, like, creative. She was down to figure this out. And this is gonna be a cool meetup, so I'm super excited. All right, so this is the space. We're gonna be having the meet up here tonight. This is actually pretty cool. This is so cool. This is great.

Great.

Great backdrop. Love it. I then send this text message to this guy, and then I get on the phone call with your seller, who you already sent over. Cash contract too high. I had a 20 minute conversation with him, and I explained to him there's no way this is what I told him. I said, hey, my girl Karen. We're all at an investor conference right now. I made it sound really legit. I didn't, I didn't tell them I was standing on a wood bench.

Okay, so this is the part of the video where I do like a cool montage of me talking to a bunch of people at the meetup and moving, you know, from person to person, helping, talking to pace, doing cool things. But yeah, I don't have that footage because I'm not pace with 20 people on the media team. The problem what I found at meetups because one time I hired a videographer to follow me at a meetup. It was interesting because it was like it was at a Golden Ticket event and there was two meetups. Basically there was a social networking at Golden Ticket, which I didn't have a camera person. And then there was a meetup afterwards where I did have a camera person. Everybody wanted to talk to me during the event with no camera person. When I had a camera on, no one wanted to talk to me. So I found that the highest, best impact because again, you're talking to a lot of people that are new and being in front of a camera makes them very uncomfortable, right? So you're putting them in a very uncomfortable situation. And whenever they're in a situation like that, their first instinct is like, shut down. Right? So I've learned not to do that. It would be better if I had like a couple cameraman maybe like from a distance that is like not in your face. To be fair, the guy that I hired previously, he had a huge camera and he was like in your face about it. So it was like, felt like you were on a TV show. So, yeah, I don't have those clips and I've recorded vlog stuff like this before to probably six or seven different events. And after I get done, I just go delete because I didn't think it was good enough content to share and post on YouTube because I was missing so many things that you would expect to see. So we're just going to use our imagination for the rest of the meetup clips. But it went well. It was awesome. I'm really proud of myself. You know, I moved around the room person to person, trying to give as much value as possible. I talked to an enormous amount of people. A lot of the people there were new. They weren't even a part of sub 2 or any Gator, no creative finance community whatsoever. So I just tried to help as many people as possible. And what I was doing is I was. Was building the reps, right? I was doing the actual thing, killing the prior version of myself that was too shy to talk to people. The prior version of my shell, the prior version of myself that was only gravitating to people that I wanted to talk with that were my friends already, because it made me comfortable, right? I was intentionally going after people. I don't know you. I don't know you. I don't know you. I don't know you. Just working the whole room. And that made me really excited because I know I can build off that. So in the next meetup, I know I'm capable of doing it. I did it, so now I know I can do it again. After the meetup went to dinner with Pace Jamil and his staff and a few other sub 2 members in the community. It was awesome. I really enjoy that. Anytime I get to, you know, go to some sort of dinner event with them, it's just like, so grateful, you know, I remember meeting Pace for the first time in Columbus, Ohio, and I was like, you know what? One day, just one freaking day, I'm gonna do something so cool that this guy's gonna even know who I am, right? And so to be invited to dinner with him is such an honor. I look up to him a lot. So, yeah, that was the meetup. I really hope, you know, if you're an introvert and you're uncomfortable with being in social environments like that, I really hope this video helps you because I'm living proof and I showed you behind the scenes insight into, you know, my natural sense of self, doubt in my head.

Right.

And some of the things that go into my head and being just open and transparent about it. So I hope that helps you. And I'm super excited to do more meetups in the future and just keep building the reps and then just keep giving value and building as many connections as I possibly can. See you next time.