3 Weeks of Monk Mode: What Did We Build?

Boom. Welcome back to another episode of the Espresso Hour, where the running joke is this going to be much shorter than an hour? Because we are once again hyped up on caffeine. And, Cole, I know you're probably feeling this way, too. I'm hyped up on a little bit more caffeine to get through this episode because last three weeks, they've been something. And I'm glad we had that double espresso at breakfast because I needed it. For sure.

They've definitely been something. I had a really nice iced almond milk latte, which was great. That's been my jam lately. It's a good summer drink. But, yeah, I am. And I've got a social weekend coming up. It's my birthday. I turned 33. And then you and I are traveling next weekend. And yeah, there's just a lot going on. I'm feeling it, but I'm feeling it in the best way.

Feeling in the best way, I think is how I describe it too, because it's extremely fulfilling. Tiredness. It is not a drained tiredness. It is a spent. Like, I feel battery empty rather than battery like has been running without me consciously being the one running it down. And that's definitely a different feeling than I don't want to be doing this anymore or anything like that.

Something I thought about yesterday was when we were in Cabo listening to Tom Bilyeu speak. One of the things he said that really stuck with me was your goals demand things of you, which I think is an opposite way of thinking. I have a goal, and so I have to go do all of these things, which I think sometimes feels a little draining. Whereas if you reframe it from the future, looking back, your goals demand things of you. And so when I was feeling tired yesterday, I had this moment where I remembered that and I reminded myself, this is what it's supposed to feel like. Your goals demand things of you, and this is what they are demanding. And I signed up for that, you signed up for that, and that's great. And just enjoy that. That is the expectation and that is what's required.

And so can the fact that it's not something you have to always do forever. So with that in mind, I think what we want to talk about is what we've done in the last three weeks. So really four. Since four weeks ago. Today, Friday, we arrived in Cabo, or not arrived, but it was the first day of the event. So that was four weeks ago. Feels about six months ago. And then we got back we got delayed, got back on Tuesday, kind of spent three days, and then we had the meeting on Friday, three weeks ago today. Basically saying we have to focus on one thing at most. If we are going to get ghostwriting to where we want to get it to, we have to basically put every single thing else on autopilot. And that's on the business side. And I definitely had it on the personal side, and it worked. That's the big takeaway is that we're sitting here three weeks later and we just had our team meeting and. And the amount of effort that it took to get ghostwriting accelerated to a place where we just got it to was intense, but had to be done, otherwise it never would have gotten done. I don't think. I don't think. And we. We have this framework overall, of the amount of effort it takes to accelerate something is often more than you think. And the amount of effort to maintain something is far less than you think. And we had that meeting and said, if we are going to accelerate this to where we know we want to get it to go, it's going to take more effort than we think, which means we cannot have any leaks elsewhere. So we literally took everything on our project list, moved it off, except for one thing, which was launch ghostwriting, reopen ghostwriting, and all the things that had to fall into place for that, which created this massive list that we can talk about all the things we kind of knocked down, but that was it. And so looking back three weeks ago, we didn't even film too much presso hours. That was one of the things that had to go because of the context switch that required, like, doing a good job, sitting down, preparing for it. I didn't write any Twitter threads, so, yeah, a lot there one.

I really am liking this framework of what is required in order to accelerate something means removing things. I think for a lot of my life, I always thought if I want to get something done, I need to do more. Like, I need to take all of the things in my life and then I need to do more on top of it. And really, if we reflect on our mini Monk mode of the past three weeks, the real unlock of being able to accelerate PGA and do all of the things that we've been able to do. We'll recap some of. Some of them here in a second is we removed a lot of things. I didn't talk to a lot of friends. I worked 12 hours a day. There were some days where the only thing that I did was basically eat, shower, and then like say goodnight to my fiance and then do it again, you know, and go to the gym for an hour just to move my body because I'm sitting in a desk chair for 12 hours, you know, And I think that is a real. I've been having the same conversation with a couple friends in my life as well, where it is a faulty belief to think that in order to move the ball forward, you need to do everything you're currently doing and then more, because it never works. You burn out and then you just unconsciously start picking and choosing the things that you give your time and you don't. Whereas we were very conscious about this three weeks ago and we went, we want to build this, we want to accelerate this. What do we need to remove? And we just cut things. We're not doing espresso hour this week. We're not doing this meeting for the next two weeks. We're not caring about writing these emails for the next three weeks. We're not writing Twitter threads for the next three weeks. Like we just remove, remove, remove. And then you have all of this abundance of time and then we go, great, now let's go aim that time in a direction.

The scary thing when we first started that of removing everything, and I think this has been my limiting belief around focus, is that if you stop doing a lot of those things that you can never start them again. And so you hang on to, I need this meeting and I need to be writing a thread every week and I need to be, you know, my atomic essays have to go out at this time and I need to have our YouTube video meeting for an hour at this time because if I stop doing that, then I'll never start doing it again. But it's clicked for me in these last three weeks, I'm going to sit down tomorrow on Sunday or on Sunday this week and say, okay, Here are the 15 things I stopped doing. Which of those can I continue to stop doing? So it was nice to actually wipe the slate clean. And then what are the four or five that I need to bring back now that we are out of that zero to one mode? Because I'll just take people through the day in the life. For the last 21 days, I've been 5am up at the desk at 5:30 to 8:30, 8:30 to 9:30, I'd go for a walk, listen to sales calls, recordings, come back, run a sales team meeting until 11, do sales calls from 11 to 5, or if it was Friday, Saturday, Sunday, it would be either learn new frameworks to Teach our sales guys, build fulfillment, some kind of work from like 11 to 5, take another break, eat dinner and then probably work another one or two till about 8:39, fall asleep, wake up at 5, do it again. And I loved every second of it. That was what was fun. It was like, damn, I was sitting down. But the things I removed that I know I won't be bringing back or I didn't listen to any podcasts except for pardon my Take the sports podcast at night when I was like, I gotta shut my brain off somehow. I'm gonna listen to them talk about the NBA playoffs. But like all in my first million Tim Ferriss, all the ones that I just like to consume, I didn't read a single thing on Twitter. I deleted Instagram from my phone because that was a huge time Suck. I removed YouTube from my phone. All those things that once they were gone, I was like, I can't believe how much time I actually spent with those just in the background thinking that they were a little bit productive too. And I'm writing about this now of there is a certain point where you have to stop consuming all content. And there are probably some people listening to this right now who are in that mode where if you just did the things that you know you should do right now. This podcast, unfortunately, even though we'd love for it to be, is probably not on that list. And I had that realization as I was cutting out all content consumption because I was like anything that I would listen to someone else say right now, I could spend either listening to our new sales team or actually putting in like a just in time framework that I needed to learn. And so it's been very refreshing to have all that gone and say, okay, what am I going to bring back from it?

It's funny you say that because I've been getting very little dopamine out of like watching YouTube or scrolling on Twitter or anything recently. And I've pinpointed that the primary reason why is because I literally know exactly what I or we need to do. I already know the next 10 books I need to write. I already know the next five programs we need to build. I already know the next 18 different newsletters we could build. And so when you have that level of clarity on the creation side, consumption is actually becomes very frustrating because you're aware that the consumption is really just the bottleneck on the creation. And I know there's a gazillion people, the argument is always, yeah, but consumption shows you what's possible and it inspires you and I don't have an inspiration problem. We don't have an inspiration problem. We don't have an idea problem. Right. So there's no sense in consuming and getting all these ideas when I already can't create the ideas that we have and we're moving at lightspeed. And so I think just to give context for. For everybody, the past three weeks, we basically went from in Cabo pinpointing that no amount of tweaking on the ship 30 side would generate the revenue potential of building premium Ghostwriting academy. That was the next thing. We need to build that. We came back and went, we need to do that. And then real bottleneck there is sales. So then we held group interviews. From those group interviews, we narrowed down two sales guys. We then got them up to speed on the offer, trained them on the offer. I say we. Dickie, you did a lot of this. Got them up to speed on the offer, had them sit in on calls with us. So you and I had full calendars, then had them do part. Yeah. Like, full days of calls and then. Or at least full half days of calls while we did everything else in the mornings. And then had them do parts of the calls while we did the other parts of the calls. And then finally, as of. What was it yesterday? Finally cut them loose and had our first. All right, you're taking this on your own and seeing them close completely on their own without us. It's like, wow, in three weeks, we went from, we don't have a sales team. We are interviewing for the first time to you are now closing on your own. And that's. And I think, you know, we make this joke all the time, Dickie, about video games, and it's like the only thing standing between you and your goal is, like, a thousand bores. Right. You just got to go kill a thousand boars. And you can either stretch that out over the course of a year, Right. You could kill, like, five boars a day and just chip away at it. Or you can just go full monk mode for three weeks and just do all of it in three weeks, and then you're done. And I think that knowing that you can push and pull that lever of intensity is a really cool but really powerful skill to build because we can amp it up, and then we can pull it back.

I'm trying to prepare for the next time we do that. What do I just need to do? Like, what is the checklist of things? I've eaten the same three meals for 21 days in a row legitimately. Not a single different thing for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Like I have, I have remarkably stripped away. I have probably 50 unread text messages and I'm just gonna answer them all at one time. I. I took out any decision. I already wear the same shirts, but like, if I could have, I would have found a way to only have one. But I kept the cleanliness at least as a maintenance mode. But yeah, that's exactly right, because we held 40 sales calls from nothing, which are on their own, like private consultation sessions to figure out if someone is a good fit for pga, then taught them how to do it, had to hire them and listen to every single one, because rather than just take the call, I then got off the phone and said, I need to listen to it so we can improve for the next one. And it's. You put it perfectly. We were a certain number of iterations away from having that built. And the only difference between how quickly that was built is how quickly that iteration loop could become. So rather than weekly rather than monthly, it became hourly, where every single hour really, for the last three weeks, something was improved. And we've had this realization with the way ghostwriting is structured. It's a daily feedback loop business where Ship 30 has been a quarterly feedback loop business. Which almost gives me chills to think about what we could do on something with that tight of a feedback loop, because we got to see it this these last three weeks, but now we're kind of at a point of, okay, now it's maintenance mode on that. And we will accelerate top of funnel with more content and more education around helping people get introduced to the world of ghost riding. So it's been fun and all the pieces are pretty much there for the.

Summer, just judging off of early data. You could even say that it took us two and a half years to build ship 30 to where it's at today, run rate, etc. And it essentially took us three weeks to hit that same run rate with PGA.

I'd say three months, because we did it in February and then had to stop. But if we didn't have to had stopped, we probably could have done it even faster. But the first ghostwriting enrollment call was February 15th, and it's May 15th. So three months and one of those, for six of those weeks, we fulfilled on a Ship 30 cohort.

And that is the massive difference between a, a business where you have quarterly feedback loops and a business with daily feedback loops. And, and also too, you know, this is what makes ship 30 an interesting forcing function for us. We've Learned that running ship 30 cohorts are taxing whichever way you slice it. No matter how many different ways that we've tried to remove ourselves, automate ourselves, improve everything. And what's interesting is the realization to build ghostwriting program also kind of happened in a. It happens in a pressure cooker because we finish ship 30 and we go. We have eight weeks. We have eight weeks till the next ship 30 cohort. So either we do it in eight weeks or eight weeks go by. The next ship 30 cohort runs, rolls around, another month goes by, and then we're not building this thing for another four months. And so it's an interesting forcing function of you finish doing one thing, you catch your breath for a day or two, and then you go. This is the only pocket of time we have, so let's make the most of it.

We didn't even catch our breath for a day or two because we had that meeting on Friday and the Ship 30 celebration call was Sunday. We had interviews for, for our sales reps on Monday. So there was no breath catching. It was reverse breath catching.

Yeah, you're right. No, not even. We didn't have interviews on Monday. We were training them on Monday. We remember they started on Thursday.

Yeah, we had interviews on Wednesday that week. We had to learn how to do the interviews first and then we hired them on Thursday and then we worked through the weekend. And so they've been on the team for two weeks and one day. So I'll talk about a couple things I've been feeling. The number one realization I've had is that as you continue to kind of build new skills in this entrepreneurial game, which is at this point learning how to work with a sales team, not only does it feel like a video game where it's like, okay, new level, let's go think about this. But with each new level you unlock, you begin to connect all the old pieces of your life that influence your ability to execute this level. And so I have now made this connection of when I'm training a sales team. I feel like my old offensive line coach in college, where I know what needs to get done. They are putting out game tape every single day with their calls and with my own. And so it's my job to make the cutups which are watching the film, coaching, continuing to iterate. And I think back to my most effective coaches. What did they do? We'd sit down for a meeting. And those were such tightly run 60 minute meetings where they had already done the meeting themselves twice Beforehand, So they knew exactly what to say on each play, exactly what to point out. And I, I think so much about what are the other life experiences that I take into each new skill that we're building, which has made it very fulfilling because it's. It shows you that you've really been playing this game your entire life. You just haven't applied it in this of lucrative a direction.

We were just having the same conversation on the sales side this morning at breakfast, Dickey, which is the realization that hiring a salesperson that has sales experience, the real bottleneck or the real skill is their ability to reskin their skills to a different offer. And entrepreneurship is the same thing. It's like your ability to reskin a skill in a different direction. And that's probably why I. And we talk all the time about video games or weightlifting, bodybuilding, like all these different interests, because really that, that conversation at its core is just the reskinning of a skill. Which is why my fundamental belief is there is no time wasted. Right? It doesn't matter if you go spend three years mastering pottery, right?

The. The.

That's not time wasted if you are able to reskin the fundamentals and the underlying skills in a different direction. Right? And so for us, you can see how every single level is just sort of a reskinning of. We have these skills. We need to put them in a different vehicle. We need a higher leverage vehicle. We need. We just need to think about it differently.

And with each level of the game comes that different vehicle and level of thinking. How I think about building new skills and taking on new initiatives. Right now is a framework from Tim Ferriss, which is when you're evaluating something to potentially spend your time on, it should have two things. It should have in some way uncapped upside, such that if you do it, there's a chance of a lottery outcome, whatever you decide that lottery outcome is. But it's some kind of exponential upside. And the downside, worst case, is that you build a skill that then you could reapply elsewhere. And so I look at writing on Twitter as the perfect example of this. The upside is every single time you publish a tweet, it could go viral. Anyone on the world could see it. Elon Musk could see it. You could reach the most powerful people in the world. So if you publish 100 tweets, 200, 500, a thousand, you're putting all those lottery tickets on goal or in your pocket. Worst case, you write 100 tweets for 100 days and you become A little bit better of a writer, and no one reads to them at all. And so I think for anyone thinking of, how am I, what am I leveling up on right now? Make sure you're playing a game that has both exponential upside and zero downside, because you would build a skill that then you could reapply later.

I was having this conversation on some of our strategy slash sales calls last week with some people who are interested in pga. And some of the conversations the questions were would go in the direction of, you know, what if I do this and then I decide I don't want to be a ghostwriter? You know, like hedging that downside. And the thing that I continue to remind people of is everything in pga, for example, is, yeah, it's about ghostwriting. This is. It's also just a fundamental belief of mine and of yours, Dickey. It's impossible for this to not come through in the things that we build, which is, yeah, it has to do with ghostwriting, but there are so many underlying fundamental skills that there's just no way that you wouldn't apply those for the rest of your life. There isn't a world where you getting better at sales hurts you. There isn't a world where you clarifying your. Your ability to write compellingly hurts you. There isn't a world where you learn about packaging and pricing and understanding how to present new and unique offers and. And that hurts you, right? So a lot of times for people that I think this was always the same. I had the same conflict with my parents growing up, you know, and they're like, you shouldn't play video games. And in my mind, it was always, it's not about the thing, right? It doesn't matter if you end up wanting to be a ghostwriter or not. The question is, what are the skills you're learning? And then are you able to apply them in whatever direction ends up exciting you? You know, and. Yeah, I just. I think that's obviously something that doesn't get taught in school. We don't teach people how to learn, but our continued growth will be dependent on our ability to reskin the skills that we're building just in new and higher leverage vehicles.

The important part on that is you're only able to learn all the eight skills that come with ghost riding. When you give it the container of learning to ghostwrite. Because if you went and tried to learn solopreneurship, packaging, sales, content creation, marketing, all of the things that go into that as a general course, you're not able to, because you lack the context with which to apply all of those skills. Which is why I think following your passion quote unquote is stupid in the beginning, because you should just pick something where most people don't even know what they're passionate about. So they do all this thinking of, like, what am I passionate about? I studied math and computer science in college. I love to this day think I have a more analytical brain than I have writing. But there was no way where I was going to learn the game of entrepreneurship as easily trying to teach math and computer science. Maybe I could have, but once I learned to write, I've learned that skill, and now I've been teaching that skill, and now I'm applying that skill that I learned at the very fundamental level in higher leverage vehicles. And if I eventually want to reskin that down the road to a different topic, I have all the skills because of it. And I think that holds a lot of people back from picking something because they aren't like, what? I don't want to do this forever. But you have to pick something to build all the skills that come on top of that. And then you can always change the foundation later. And then the number of times I'm seeing this framework pop up. Now, if you're picking a niche to write on the Internet, you have to pick something so you can learn everything that comes with it. If you're trying to play a sport and get in better shape, you have to pick a workout plan, start it, and then iterate on it. If you're trying to learn this, the skills that come with solopreneurship, you have to pick a service business or a digital. You have to pick something, do it, and learn all the skills that come with it. And I want to write a lot about this approach to learning because you pick something, you immerse yourself in it, you learn all the skills that come after it, and then you could just immerse yourself in something new, but you still have all the context to how to spin it up more effectively with the new thing.

Another thing I've been thinking about a lot, just because we've taken so many of these calls and talked with so many people showing interest in ghostwriting, one of the most interesting things has been for how many people the real bottleneck is not really the hard skill. It's not really I don't know how to write or it's not really I don't know how email works, or I don't think I can learn how to set up a convertkit campaign, right. It's almost never actually the hard skill. The real bottleneck for people is they don't believe that they deserve it, or they don't believe that they can, they can do that, or they don't believe that something like that is possible for them. And it's been really interesting how many of these conversations, you know, the people who have decided, you know what, I don't want to, I don't actually want to do this. 90, 95% of the time it's because of a faulty self belief. It's just, they're like, I don't, I don't believe that this is for me. I don't believe that it's possible for me to go sell $5,000 clients. And then on the other side, the people who are like, you know what? Enough is enough. I'm tired of the way that things have been going for me. I want to do this. They're right at that tipping point of internal belief and they're like, I know even if I don't know exactly where the path goes, like, I know I'm capable of more. I know that I want something more for myself. And it's been really fascinating to me how it's like, yeah, we're building a ghostwriting program, but really, in a lot of ways it's it, it is big time self belief program too. And it's big time getting people exposed to what is possible and getting them to realize that a lot of the things that they've built up in their head as being too out of reach or too difficult or there's no way I could do that. Who am I? Who's going to listen to me, right? That is all this like unhealthy internal narrative where you just keep reminding yourself that you aren't, you aren't worthy, you aren't capable and watching. To me, the most rewarding thing of PGA so far is watching how many people. It's not them landing clients, it's that it's the brain break moment where they go, this was never as hard as I thought it was. Or I never knew that I could attract opportunities like this for myself. And once someone makes it to the other side, their whole life, your whole life is different, your whole life is different. And yeah, that's, that's just been one of the most fulfilling things for me so far. And I think it's only going to get more fulfilling.

100% agreed. And the realization I've had is that the only bottleneck to growing any kind of solopreneurship based business is the solopreneur themselves. And which makes it a perfect vehicle versus the 9 to 5 job where your performance and the results of your performance are not in any way limited by your skills, beliefs or character traits because you're just in the wrong vehicle. But once you're doing something on your own, the only bottleneck to your growth is whether you believe you can do the thing, you can do, actually do the thing, or you show up enough to do the thing. And that's from Alex Ramosian. He talks about this a lot. But the I think the most common one is usually financial belief where your belief around $5,000, selling that as a client or your business will grow to the bottleneck of what you think is possible to grow your business to where if you think that $10,000 a month is a lot of money, which it is, but you will continue to outgrow that as you grow your business, it will grow to that until you make the realization that it is not. And then you hit a new one and then you get there and the journey is the important part because you're having those realizations all the way. The Journey Original Ship 30 My goal was to make $10,000 in a year, one year, because I thought that's like $1,000 extra a month. And that was only two and a half years ago. So it's been a lot of unlearning of beliefs along the way. And I think you just accelerate how quickly you do that unlearning. And I look back and I think five years in the future me is looking at me now saying, yep, that limiting belief financially is still holding back the business. And it took you a little bit longer to get there, but once you made that, you jumped forward again. I think all the time about all the dumb things I'm doing that my five years in the future self is looking at me now saying, yeah, you'll get there. You just, you're going to have to pay the tax of getting there. And soon enough you'll make that realization and you'll take the next step. So that's been a fun thing to experience. And yeah, these, the enrollment calls have been 100% turning into life coaching calls where you have to coach a lot of belief. And one of the common ones is people who say I don't feel like I could do this because I don't know how to sell a $5,000 client. And I jokingly made the comparison of that's like saying I want to learn to play Guitar. I don't know how to play guitar, so I'm not going to take lessons until I'm really good at playing guitar. And so if you're not there yet and you know you want to get there, that means you have to take the steps to get there. Not just. I'm not. It's never going to feel like I could play the guitar really well. So now I'll get started. It's. I know I have to get started taking those steps if I'm ever going to get there. And that landed home for him, and he ended up joining, which was awesome. We think that we have to have it in place to go do the thing, but you have to do the thing to get it in place.

Yeah. Real, real quick. I mean, to me, this is why. And we even felt it in Cabo, Dickie. It's like, why did we pay 70 grand for this mastermind? Well, you pay the 70 grand partly because you. You want to desensitize yourself to the next level. You want to sit in a room with people who are all doing it, and all of a sudden, when. When you're in a room of a hundred people who are all looking at you going, yeah, there's no reason why you can't do a million a month. All of a sudden, you stop thinking that that's a difficult thing because you're in a whole room of people who all don't think that that's a ridiculous thing. Right. And so I even. I see it too, as that's a huge benefit of this, of this community in pga as well, is that you need, I like to call it exposure therapy. You need to get exposed to more people doing the thing to make you realize that it is not as hard or difficult or scary as you think. And I even, you know, this is. This is also why I encourage people to, like, find an accountability buddy or find someone that's on a similar trajectory as you. I think back to Dicky. I will never forget. I remember where I was in my apartment in LA too, where you called me and you were like, I think we need to upgrade our. Our email systems. But it's like 100 bucks a month or something. And ship 30 was early, but we were doing like, I don't know, like 15, 20 grand a month. So nothing crazy, but, you know, we had cash to reinvest. And I was like, okay. And you were like. You were like, made this whole case for it. You were like, I just really feel like, you know, like, we're going to need this infrastructure. And I, you know, I know it's 100 bucks a month, but I just, I really feel like we should do this. And I was like, I don't understand why you're calling me and asking me this like, of spend the money. What, what do you, what do you mean? You're asking me if we can spend $100? But like, that was, that was a moment where you were like, oh, this is a faulty belief. We had to talk through it. And then we still go through that. We went through that with the Mastermind three years later. You know, it's like, should we spend the money?

And what's so funny about that, dude, is so two things on it. It was a thousand bucks upfront. It was a thousand. And I was like, yeah, it's a thousand, but we can 6 pay it, so it's only 200amonth. And like, that was my, my justification to you. I was like, it's not a thousand. And that was Brennan Dunn's Mastering Convertkit, which single handedly generated probably 2 to 3 million dollars on that. Having that up and running in Convertkit, which is so funny. And so we're gonna look back on the same thing with coordinates, right? 68k turned into tens, right?

If I could go back and do anything differently. I started buying stocks when I was like 24. Because, you know, you're young and you're like, oh, I thought, I think this is how you build wealth. And I remember I spent so between the ages of 24 and 28, the amount of hours I spent checking Robin Hood and, and thinking I understood even 1% of what was going on. I wasted so much time. And not only that, I, I ended up locking up any capital I had, which wasn't a lot, couple, couple thousand dollars in these stocks where I would be like, I, I made 5% this year. Look at me building wealth. And if I could go back and do anything differently, it's the realization that there is no vehicle zero, not even bitcoin, that gives you as high of a return as yourself and increasing your own skills and earning potential, period. And so if I could go back, I would have spent the three grand and gone, what, what skill do I need to build in order to stop making 50 grand a year like I was as a copywriter, probably less 40 grand a year. And how do I acquire that skill so that I can go make 200 grand a year? And, and it's been so interesting, like as we've done these, you know, strategy sales turned life coaching calls with people is I see that same belief in so many people where they're like, I want this huge outcome for myself but I'm afraid to invest the money in myself. I'd rather keep it in Apple stock. And it's like Apple stock is not where the return is for you. You are where the return is for you.

I want to figure out the exact number that it needs to be before you start investing in any kind of stocks or something like that. Because I think there's a, there's a formula somewhere of until 10% return would be a monthly, like your monthly expenses or something like that. You shouldn't invest a single cent into anything except cash and skills. Cash skills, convenience and long term experiences that pay memory dividends. For a long time I think the world has been tricked into stocks. Yeah, yeah.

I mean Dickie, I think about this now with us like now, you know, our ability and our confirmed ability to build businesses. I would way rather sink 20 grand or 50 grand into. Here's the next thing that we're going to build. But okay, yeah, you're risking 50 grand and instead of a 5% return, the potential is up. We just built another half a million dollar a year business. And once you like the unlock of that is so powerful and yeah like we're, we're now getting to levels where you know, we can play with larger and larger amounts. But in hindsight I should have been doing this eight years ago. Like the fact that I remember like right when I started ghostwriting and I started making a little bit of money and I was like, what was the first thing I did? I went and spent a hundred hours reading about the stock market and trying to buy stocks. That what, what an idiot I was. Right? Because like I should have immediately looked around and gone who are the smartest people that are one or two levels ahead of me and what do I need to invest in so that I can keep taking my earning potential higher and higher.

All I've learned is that I just continue to learn how this game works. And five year in the future, me, like I said, is looking at what we're investing in right now, probably thinking, you idiots, you could have done this, you could have done that. Oh, I remember when I was thinking about that or like I was stressed out about that. So I always. The subtle mantra I've been repeating to myself especially during this monk mode is 85 year old me is looking back at what I'm doing right now is the absolute glory days. Like remember when you were waking up at 5. So you could work 14 hours in a row. And it was like right at the beginning of ghost riding. Oh, look, ghost riding wasn't even a thing then. Oh, you were still living in Miami at this point. Like, think about the reminiscing you're doing about the current time has been extremely. Both peaceful, like peace generating, motivating, and calming all at the same time. And that's been my. Every morning when I've been waking up, I'm just like, you're in the glory days. You're in the part where you are looking back, just in pure build mode. And that's. That's made monk mode something that I want to tap into a lot. Like, that's just kind of how I am. I'm. I don't want to live months like this, but I can't wait till the next time. It's like, all right, three weeks. Let's pull out the script. Here are the 10 things I'm going to do. Here's everything else I'm removing. Here's how I'm going to get out of it afterwards. And let's go build something. Because, yeah, I think we'll probably do it again in two or three months. Who knows with what it's going to be? But I got a feeling we will.

It's kind of fun. I mean, I forgot that, you know, I mean, this the past three weeks, I definitely felt like we were pushing, but I give you the credit. I mean, you definitely went even harder than I did.

And.

And a lot of this was also your domain, and you were like, hey, this is my time. I'm going. And back in February, March, when we were first building the ghostwriting program, I had my monk mode. And I remember that was when you sent me the bag of Skittles and iced tea, because I was all. I would always make this joke that whenever I was going monk mode in my gaming days, I would just live off of, like, lukewarm Arizona iced tea and Skittles, which is disgusting to think about this many years later. But, yeah. And like, all of March, all I did was just write this entire curriculum for, like 12 hours a day, just. And I got sick, and I had stuff going on, and it was just like, I. I even forgot, Dickie, that some of the videos I recorded, I, like, had strep. And I was still like, I gotta record module six. And I would go back, and I'm like, ooh, I gotta re. Record some of these videos. I'm sounding a little rough in here.

And I thought, about that as I woke up every morning because I was like, Cole had his monk mode here and this is my time to get these guys up and running. And we will do that again. And that's the fun part of working with a team. Like, I see a lot of these tweets going around of like, solopreneurship is the only way. I'm like, yeah, that's fun. Until you surround yourself with a team of absolute all stars, where it's a lot of fun to come to work. I think people who've over indexed on solopreneurship have just been burned by bad teams in the past and been burnt out dealing with too many people. But a team of four to six killers who show up with the same tempo, energy and ownership that you do, that is a lot more fun than lone wolf. I only do things on my own. And we've gotten to experience that in the last three weeks as well, because everyone has raised their tempo with us. Right. The team operates that way when they see us in Slack at this time and doing this and keeping tight feedback loops. And that's how you know if people are going to stick around. And we had confirmation of everyone we've worked with that they will be sticking around because of what we did.

Yeah, I much prefer. I mean, I was one of those people after building my first company, I was like, I never want a team ever again. I way over indexed. And then when we started working together, Dickie, it's. It is always more fun when you have a friend, you know, it's always more fun when you've got a little team. And my favorite part is the fact that you can do things that I can't. Daniel can do things that I can't, Katie can do things that I can't. And so when I wake up and I see that, it's like, what an incredible feeling. It's like I wouldn't have been able to do that. So one plus one equals 11 million. It's great.

And this sets the stage for the summer, which we were able to build. Marketing, fulfillment, sales. We got a studio in the works. Potentially over the next couple weeks, these espresso hours could be coming to you live from our new Shipyard V1 headquarters, which will be a lot of fun to build out. We'll document this here on YouTube. A lot of content coming this summer. We got the book dropping. I know you're pumped for that. Got some educational email courses coming out. A lot of good stuff in the works. So I want to get back to Doing Espresso Hour every week for sure. I don't think there's any monk mode that needs to remove this hour because I had a lot of fun just recapping all this. But yeah, I think we'll look back on this episode in a few months and think that was the start.

Clearly this episode is like, I'm sure anyone listening can tell. In the past three weeks, I don't think we've even had a chance to think about what we've been doing. Like I haven't been journaling, I've barely been reflecting. Like I have just been going. And I know you've just been going. And so clearly this episode was our moment to go, okay, wow, what just happened?

Public reflection, man. And that was the whole goal of Espresso Hour to begin with is just a little bit of a public meeting. So we would have done this anyway and, and we just brought everyone along for the ride. So hopefully you walked away with a couple frameworks and you could take what we're learning, put em into practice in your own life. That's our goal with these. We'll be back with continued episodes every single week going forward. That's it for this week's Espresso Hour. Now a couple important notes. The winner of the last espresso hour free ship 30th of July cohort, which by the way, you can enter to win again on this video. If you write up your three takeaways timestamp them. That way you're not just listening, you're actually walking away with frameworks that you could distill. Or you can write a Twitter thread and tag us at the bottom of the thread. All of those winners are entered into a chance to win a free spot on board the July ship 30 cohort. So make sure you do that. This week's winner was David Schmetiche had three great takeaways on the last video. We've already been in touch with David to give him his free spot. I think we should go back and make videos on all three of his takeaways. So we'll do that in the future. But you can do that. You can leave a Twitter thread. Like we said, if you're watching on YouTube, no matter what, leave a comment. Hit like hit subscribe, turn the notification bell on. If you're on Spotify, Apple, itunes, leave us a five star review. Forward this to a friend that you would think would be helpful. It helps us grow. Grow the show. And that's it. Subscribe the Ship30 channel. Subscribe to the Espresso R podcast. I'll see everyone back here next week for another one. Have a good one, y'. All.