MBA906 5 Things I Learned From 5 People in 2017

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Hey O. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA Show Business Building goodness in every single episode. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba. If you want to start a business or just getting started, check out our free guides over at 100mba.net guides know the essentials of a business website, build a better brand or learn how to teach and present like a pro. It's all there at100mba.net Guides Today's a very special episode. They're all special, but this one is particularly special because I do this every single year. I share with you five things I've learned from five people in the past year. So in today's episode I'll be sharing with you five things I've learned from five people I've been following in 2017. People that I've studied their work from afar. They don't know I'm doing this, but I do it so I can learn so I can become a better entrepreneur. And this year's list is very different. There's a lot of variety. Some of these people I know personally, some of these people I don't. Some people I just know them online. But I'm gonna share with you the gems I discovered from these people and what you can learn by following their work and implementing some of their strategies into your business, into your career. This is also kind of fun. Cause they don't know that I'm doing this. They only learn that they're on the episode after it's aired. So. So if you're listening, I want to just say thank you to all five people. You don't know it, but you've helped me and you've helped our business. And I'll be sharing how in today's episode. Sit tight. This one's gonna be a lot of fun. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. All right, five things that I learned from five people in 2017. And what a year, by the way. It just flew by. And for me, 2017 has been a year where I've kind of really went inwards and really tried to spend a lot more time on building our business, building myself as an entreprene. I spoke at a lot less conferences this year and I've kind of been a little less social than normal. I've been trying to just build the existing relationships that I have build upon them. It's just been kind of the theme this year for some reason. But the advantage of that is that I had a chance to really focus on self improvement in business and in life and really learn from some great entrepreneurs and some great creators out there. So to kick us off, the first person that I Learned from in 2017 is Brian Dean from Backlinko.com now, if you don't know Brian Dean, Brian Dean is an SEO, search engine optimization and YouTube expert. I'm going on the record in saying that Brian is the best person you can learn from when it comes to these two topics, SEO and YouTube. He's a great teacher. His content is full of value. His blog is incredible. He's one of the few blogs I read every single time he publishes because it's incredible value. Now I've gotten to know Brian Dean personally. He's become a friend. We actually met up in Berlin when I was in Berlin earlier this year. Brian lives in Berlin and it was a great time to catch up and we had a great conversation over lunch. I remember looking at my clock after the lunch was over and it was like three and a half hours flew by and we were talking about life and business and our hobbies and things like that. And it was a lot of fun. But the one thing I learned from Brian Dean is this. Brian's all about quality over quantity. If you know anything about Brian and His blog, he publishes once a month on backlinko.com only one blog post a month. But that one blog post, boy, it is the go to guide. Go to post. It's the post that defines that topic. So if he's writing a post on how to generate more backlinks for your website, it's like the ultimate God. It's like 3,000, 4,000, sometimes 5,000 words long. It's a book, for crying out loud. Right? He's got these huge blog posts that are incredibly interesting with screenshots, with infographics, with all this great, great information. And he walks you step by step. Really, his blog posts are worth paying for. They're so good. But the point here is, or what I learned from him is that he just really focuses on making the posts of that topic every month. And he tackles a new topic in his, you know, in his marketplace, SEO or YouTube every single month. So he just goes to town. If you look at this blog, gets tons of traffic, great comments on every post, and he gets hundreds and hundreds of emails a day because people want to subscribe to his newsletter and they love his content. All because he leverages the power of quality over quantity. Instead of trying to produce, you know, six, seven, eight, 10 blog posts a month, he does one blog post. But make sure it's the definitive post of that topic. And it's a strategy that I'm really implementing with our new blog on Webinar Ninja. I've seen great results because I'm really dedicating the whole month on writing the post and it really pumps you up. It really makes you want to write the post on that topic and just crush it with SEO. Crush it with being like the top ranking post for that topic. But I love this quality versus quantity mentality when it comes to content. Now, it doesn't mean that you have to only publish once a month or make a video once a month or whatever it is. It just reminds you the quality shouldn't take a backseat to the number of posts you want to create or the number of actual pieces of content you want to create. The make sure the quality's always top notch. Thanks, Brian, for imparting incredible wisdom for being a great leader in our space. And we're really pumped because Brian Dean is going to be doing a guest teacher lesson on the hundred dollar MBA show coming at you early 2018. All right, the next person I learned from in 2017 is Ethan Klein from H3H3 Productions. Now, this one's a little bit different. If you don't know. H3H3. It's a very popular YouTube channel.

And.

And Ethan Klein is a comedian now. I said very popular. It's extremely popular. It's got 5 million subscribers. Now. His genre is not business or marketing or anything like that. He does reaction videos. He finds obscure, interesting, weird, outlandish videos on YouTube and he comments on it or gives commentary in a very funny way. He's a little bit edgy. I subscribe to his channel because it's always hilarious. It's so funny. Now, other than just being purely entertaining, what I love about Ethan is that he talks about how he got started on YouTube. He's got 5 million subscribers, but he started with one subscriber, right? And if you go back into the archives and go back into, you know, the first episodes that he published on his channel, they're very basic, very low production quality, but he really advises people to just get started. Ethan really wanted to be in comedy, and he's really a huge star on YouTube now because he just gave it a shot from his dinky apartment in New York at the time. He had the camera rolling and just in front of his computer screen, really. Now the production quality has increased over time and all that, but his whole point was that this would never be here. His audience and his, you know, popularity. And obviously he's making a lot of revenue through ads, through YouTube and other merchandise he sells through his brand. But he said all that would not exist if he didn't just get started and give it a shot. And it's a great reminder for all of us, even those who have existing businesses like myself, if you're going to try something new, whether it's a podcast or a YouTube channel, or you're going to start blogging more often or whatever it is, you got to put yourself out there. You got to just try. And he also emphasizes, not only just try, but you got to keep on trying. You got to keep at it even when it feels uncomfortable, even when it feels like, ah, this is not great. I'm not so good. I'm not sure if people like this. All these doubts creep in. He kept on trucking, he kept on moving forward. He kept on producing videos even though they were low quality and things like that. But he just had a chance to refine his craft and become who he wants to become as a comedian, as a YouTuber, and the following started to grow and all happens incremental. Like they really were hoping to get 10,000 subscribers. They got to 10,000, and then they were really hoping to get a hundred thousand. And I remember when they hit their first million and they were going bananas and they were just so excited. And now Ethan and his wife Hila, who's his co host, are like celebrities, right? They're on very popular shows. They're on very popular YouTube channels as well. Remember catching them on the Hot Ones, which is a funny YouTube show that has celebrities like Kevin Hart, Terry Crews, Kevin Durant, we're talking about like a listers. All because he gave it a shot and he kept going at it. So that was the message and that really encouraged me to keep going at anything I start as well, to give myself a chance. So even if you're established, even if you have a, a successful business, this advice is very applicable because you're always going to have to try something new to keep on improving. So thanks Ethan for that. Love your show. Keep doing what you're doing. The next person that I've Learned from in 2017 is Jason Fried from Basecamp, formerly known as 37signals, but now they're all called Basecamp, but him and his partner David Hanemayer Hansen, and they have a software called Basecamp that we use to manage our team and our whole company online. It's a fantastic software, great ui. But Basecamp is all self funded and their whole team is remote. Very similar to our team here at the 100 MBA and webinar ninja, my software company. So I really can relate to what they've done, but they've been in the game for a very long time. They started back in 1999, so we're talking about 18 years. That's like a thousand years in online business. Right? But 1999, they have a lot of experience under their belt. So Jason is a very, very outspoken person when it comes to managing teams remotely. He doesn't believe in unnecessary meetings. He believes in empowering people, giving them tasks and just making sure that people know what they are expected to do and is following up to make sure that they did it. That's it. He believes in efficient work and he really believes in the self funded model. So we have similar values. Right. But the one thing I really learned from Jason was to grow slowly and make sure that you're profitable. Sometimes we can get over ambitious and really try to grow super fast and make incredible amount of hires and really try to pump a lot of money into it and then realize, wow, I made a huge mistake or maybe you feel like I need to scale it back. So it's better for you to grow slowly at a pace and to stay profitable along the way. And I've studied his story with David with Basecamp and this has really helped me with webinar Ninja to really put an emphasis on profitability before anything else to make sure that I can continue to build a great software for our users. Now, Jason's also quite approachable. We've had a few conversations on Twitter. He's very responsive. So I want to just say thanks Jason, for being so communicative and helpful and being a voice for people who want to stay lean and run a business that's not a thousand employees. I believe they want to keep their business under 50 employees for us, we want to keep it under 30 for so thank you so much Jason for that great advice. Staying lean, staying small and staying profitable. The next person on this list, someone who taught me something in 2017 is Ryan Holiday. I've mentioned Ryan Holiday on the show a whole bunch of times. Ryan wrote some really amazing best selling books. He's a really good writer. Obstacles Away is a must read. You have to read Obstacles Away by Ryan Holiday. Egos, the Enemies, Fantastic Growth, Hacker Marketing, another book that I reviewed on the show. His latest book, Perennial Cellar, is one that I am about to read. I am looking forward to it. So if you're looking to get spoiled as a reader with great writing for nonfiction books, then check out Ryan Holiday. So I've been reading Ryan's blog this last year. I've been catching a few interviews that he's been on. So recently Ryan Holiday was on Noah Kagan's YouTube channel. So definitely YouTube, that search that Noah Kagan and Ryan Holiday. Noah interviews Ryan and he gives some really great advice about the economics of, of writing a book. Now in his advice he talks about, you know, what are the differences, what are the advantages and disadvantages of self publishing versus publishing through a traditional publisher. He actually gives the best argument I have ever heard for traditional publishing. But the point here that he makes in the interview and something that he reiterates in his blog and in his work is to really focus on what you're good at. Focus on the skill sets that you can offer the world. If you're a great speaker, cultivate that skill. If you're a great writer like Ryan is, then focus most of your time writing. And that's what Ryan does. You know, Ryan says, I don't really enjoy public speaking as much as I do is writing. And that's why I really try to write really great books and spend most of my time doing that. And he builds A life around that. And it's a great reminder and it's also a great relief. You don't have to be a jack of all trades. You don't have to be an expert at everything, really be a specialist at something and let people come to you for that thing, you know, When Ryan's book the Perennial Seller came out, I bought it on Kindle without even thinking about it because he's such a fantastic writer. I read his other books, I enjoyed them thoroughly. Great content, great delivery. He's a great writer. I come to him for great books. What's your thing? What's your special skill that you're going to cultivate? Focus on that and deliver. And I love this message because a lot of us, we try to spread ourselves too thin and be great at everything and be on every platform and be on everything and be in everybody's faces. You know, when it comes to Ryan, I read his blog, I read his books. I'm sure he does other things. I'm sure he's got a TED Talk somewhere or something like that. I don't know. But the point here is, is that he's a great writer. He focuses most of his efforts on writing well. And by the way, I'm pretty sure he wasn't a great writer from day one. He had to cultivate that skill. But he saw that it's something he can cultivate and therefore he doubled down on it. So thanks for that, Ryan. Really appreciate the great books you produce and appreciate, you know, the conversations we've had over email and on social. Looking forward to reading the perennial seller Gas snacks Tolls. This trip is draining my wallet.

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All right, one more person on this year's list, five people that I learned five things from in 2017 and that's Cal Newport. Now, if you follow me on social, you may have noticed that I've taken a hiatus from social media. Now in our business, our customer support team does, you know, answer things off our page or post things on our business pages. But personally I've taken a break and a lot of that has to do with what Cal Newport has taught me about social media. Now, Cal Newport is not on social media yet. He's an incredibly successful author, speaker and business person. He's the best selling author of Deep Work and so Good They Can't Ignore youe, two fantastic books. He also has a very good TEDx talk on why he's not on social media. Now, I'm not hating on social media. I still have my accounts active and I'm just taking a break for a year or so and it's really just an experiment that calm inspired me to do how much does social media affect my business? And when I say that I mean like how much do I have to be on social media, answering, responding, reading posts and how much would that affect my business if I wasn't doing all that? And this is my experiment. I just found that I was spending an incredible amount of time on social media and it was a lot of time and it wasn't like hours on end, but it was a few minutes here, a few minutes there, maybe 20 minutes at this time, another 30 minutes at that time. And it was a time suck, especially when I was out, when I was socializing, when I was supposed to be shutting off my brain from work for a moment so my brain can recover and solve problems subconsciously. That's something he talks about in his book Deep Work. But the point here is, is that he's encouraged me to try something different, something that I just never thought I would do. I thought being an online business owner I have to be on social media. And I questioned that. Really, do I have to what's going to happen if I'm not? And I'm on that journey now. And Cal just really taught me and encouraged me to question things and question the habits I have in my business. And I saw an example in somebody that is successful and is not on social. So if I'm not on social for a year and I can't be successful, there's something I'm doing wrong in my life or in my business. I need to make sure that I'm not relying on somebody else's platform to be successful. So that encouraged me to take on this experiment. So. So thank you, Cal for that. You really taught me to question how I work and what I spend my time on. Make sure you check out Cal Newport's work deep work as well as so good they can't ignore you and I highly recommend you YouTube his TEDx talk. Well, there you have it, guys. Those are the five people that have taught me five things in 2017. Again, thanks to everybody I mentioned that has taught me something this past year. It's been a lot of learning this year, a lot of challenges, but I'm looking forward to next year and I'm also looking forward to taking on what I've learned and maturing as an entrepreneur and as a person. I hope you found value in sharing these every year. These things I've learned from five people. If you think it's valuable, let me know in an itunes rating interview. Jump on itunes right now and give me a review. Tell me what you think of today's episode and this type of episode. And don't forget to hit subscribe because come January 1, 2018, we're going five days a week daily. The Hunter RB show is back to daily. We are very excited about that. Can't wait for that short form lessons with all your favorite types of lessons, must reads, guest teacher lessons, Q and A Wednesdays as well as free ride Friday. We would give away a free ride to one of our programs for leaving us an itunes rating and review. All right, that's it for me today. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. The reason why I kind of have five people I learn from every year is because it's kind of hard to really learn from every hundreds of people in one year or 20 for that matter. Five is a good number for me. Gives me a chance to have some variety as well as gives me a chance to really go deep and learn something significant from the people I'm following. Maybe in 2018, maybe you should try see what you can gain from people that you are following. People that you're learning from in 2018. All right, I'll check you in the next episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

They put hot honey sauce on the snack wrap. McDonald's outdid themselves again. The classic snack wrap we all know and love paired with the sweet heat of hot honey sauce. Just what we needed to make it even more perfect. You know the drill, so go to McDonald's and try it today.