How NOT To Start a Solopreneur Project (& What TO DO Instead)

So welcome everyone to How Not to Start a Project and What to Do Instead. You are here because you signed up for a presentation on how not to start a project, and you are in the right place if you would like to know what to do instead. And what's going to— what you should do next is make sure you have something to write on, write with, make sure you have something to keep you hydrated. I appreciate everyone that can be on camera being on camera. As a recovering musician, it just helps me do a better presentation if I can see the crowd. There will be, again, replay and resources made available very soon after the presentation. So a quick warning, my presentation style is very much firehose to the face. If you are, you know, in any way associated with the Alt MBA You know what that means. Going to give you a lot of information. I'm going to give it to you very fast, uh, and which is why I encourage you to take notes. Um, I'm going to share things probably that for some of you will come, you know, as some ideas or concepts that you haven't considered before, or ideas or concepts that you're receiving in a very— from a very different perspective. Anybody that's in this room is welcome to connect with me after the presentation if you have questions or want additional resources to the ones that I'm going to share. If you are a member of the Solopreneur Success Community, and there's things in this presentation that you would like to do a deeper dive in, into, I'm happy to arrange something on a, you know, for, for an upcoming meeting of that community. So real quick, two, two quick questions before we dive in. We should have folks here from a variety of communities that I interact in. So there's people here that I recognize from the Purple community, Seth Godin's community of, of work group. Uh, there's people here from the Solopreneur Success Circle, which are members of, uh, my paid, uh, Substack community. I think Cato might recognize some folks that are from her group, the Wolf Criers Club. Uh, and there's also some folks, um, I don't see any of them here. Oh, actually, no, we have one person here that I'm associated with through the Guardian Academy. So just just for fun. If you are here as a member of the Solopreneur Success Circle, put an S in the chat. If you're a Purple person, put a P. If you're a Guardian person, put a G. Uh, if you're a Wolf Crier, put a W. And if you're in multiple communities, you can put in multiple letters. And if, uh, and if you don't fall into any of those categories, I would love to, uh, you just type in where you are. So lots and lots and lots of Purple People, some Solopreneur Success members. We have some that are in 3 or 4. And thank you, Molly. Yeah, lots of, lots of good stuff here. All right, great. We have a really good— so this is, you know, my people call this a gathering of the clans. I'm always really big on getting communities to collide and intersect and overlap. So it's great to have a really diverse group. Second question before we start, when we're talking about how not to start a project and what to do instead, usually I'm speaking to people that are solopreneurs, independent business owners, or maybe you are a creative, you know, that's invested in some sort of creative project. So Um, in general, people fall into one of two categories. You have an established business or project that you're wanting to advance, uh, meaning that you've been doing what you've been doing for some time and you're seeking to optimize and maximize your progress in that endeavor. Or you're someone that aspires to start a business or start a creative project., and you're looking for, you know, some information about how to get started. So just, we can just do a, a show of hands virtual, or, you can use the raise your hand feature. How many here are advancing solopreneurs and creatives? Someone that already has a business that they're optimizing or a project that they're advancing. That looks like almost everyone. Um, how many people are more in the aspirational category where you're looking to get something started around a solopreneur business or a creative project? Just raise your hand. All right. So we have mostly, it looks like mostly advancing. I'm gonna present some ideas that will help with both. And I'm gonna start with Cato's request to share an origin story. I'm actually gonna share two origin stories 'cause I think they are they'll be illuminating and instructive for where you put yourself. So right before I joined the Alt MBA 6th cohort in August of 2016, I was in the year or two preceding that was in a period of transition. I had a 20-plus year career as a performing guitarist and guitar teacher. Uh, and I was looking for something new to do. I wasn't quite sure what that was going to be, but I decided that one of the ways that I could make this transition is that I could take this wealth of knowledge that I accumulated over a 20-year career, uh, and I could package it into an online course for beginning guitarists. I called it Beginning Guitarist Jumpstart. My superpower as a guitar studio owner and teacher was helping people that had had bad experiences trying to learn the guitar have a better experience, uh, with me. And I was really good at taking lots of complicated information around music theory, how to fret chords and all that sort of thing, and, and really simplifying them. So I decided that this Guitar— Beginning Guitar Jump Start course was gonna be my ticket to creating a passive income stream that would give me all the slack in my financial situation to explore what I was gonna do next. So I bought a bunch of equipment. I bought software platforms and apps, uh, which I had to learn how to use all these things in addition to all the all the investigation and exploration for which things to purchase. I scripted out a detailed curriculum. And then I spent almost 6 months working anywhere between 5 and 8 hours a day shooting this course that then went onto a platform that was ready for me to market and sell. And of course, I was, I was prepared to be the CEO of a thriving digital empire that was was just going to be making me tons of money while I slept. Anyone want to guess how many, how many courses, how many students I enrolled in Beginning Guitarist Jumpstart? One. And I got that one because I sold them my $97 course for $47. So essentially, you know, half a year, 9 months of my life invested in a project that resulted in, if you rounded, to a factor of zero. So I'll talk a little bit about kind of the virtues and perils of that approach in a minute, but I'm going to juxtapose that origin story with how I started my career as a musician, which was— my background was in education. I was a school teacher. I taught at some famous schools that some of you would probably recognize the names of. I thought it was my passion. I thought it was my purpose. Turned out that, um, although I love being a teacher, uh, I don't love hierarchy and administrative politics, and I definitely don't like dealing with entitled students and parents of those students who think that they deserve more than they have earned. So as I was transitioning and out of teaching, I was taking other jobs, but in the back of my mind I had this nagging calling to become a professional musician. It's something I really wanted to try to do. One of the conversations I remember having with myself is I don't want to be the age I am now and look back and say, I actually I wish I had given that music thing a try. So I had a conversation with my wife and I said, you know, I'm gonna start building out this music career on the side as I'm working this other job that I have in the wine business. And if I ever get to the point where I'm making enough as a musician to justify leaving my position as a wine consultant, I'm— I would like to give that a try. She agreed. Spent a year building this performance career, organizing bands, booking gigs, learning how to book better gigs. And year, year and a half later, my day job is interfering with my creative passion, my pursuit of a music career. So I decide to quit my day job, and I went full on into my music career, having already built the runway, and with a promise that as long as I made enough today to justify doing this again tomorrow, I would continue to do that. And I continued to do that for 20— well, actually, before it was all over, almost 30 years. So those are just two personal anecdotes about how I started two very different projects. Well, what I'm going to do now is I'm going to share my screen And I'm going to give you some principles that have— that I've learned the hard way that I hope will be very helpful to you in advancing a project that you're already doing or starting a new project. And so let's just get to the screen share here. Everybody can see my screen? Just give me a thumbs up. If you can see that. Yep, looks like everybody's got it. So these are two strategies that I unpack in the book that I've been talking about on Purple, which is called Close the Gap. It's a book about how to build a fulfilling and prosperous solopreneur business that funds and fits your ideal lifestyle. And these are two principles from the book that I think hopefully will be really helpful. And then I have a third for those of you that are neither advancing or aspiring, you're just kind of confused about what you want to, to do. The Four Lenses is a strategy, uh, principle that comes from my friend Dan Nicholson's book, Rigging the Game. And the Four Lenses are some— are, are a, uh, checklist of sorts that you want to consider before you start a new project. And the 4 lenses are: is doing this thing going to save me time? Is doing this thing going to save me money? Is doing this thing going to make me money? And does doing this thing create a forcing function, meaning does it, does it force me to do something that I really should do anyways? And what you wanna do is you want to make sure that you can check off at least 3 of these 4 boxes before you invest your precious time, attention, money, and effort into a new project. So when I think about the Beginning Guitarist Jumpstart Course, it theoretically was gonna save me time. Because I was going to have my entire curriculum in one spot and I could just send it out to anybody that wanted to hire me to teach them to play guitar. And it would all be curated and laid out in a curriculum in one place. Saving me money? Maybe. You know, if it did save me time, it possibly, you know, would save me money. Because I would be able to invest that time in other money-making opportunities. That was a real question mark. So I didn't have any real certainty about that or confidence in that. Making money, this is always a guess, but I made that guess without doing any vetting or validating of my offer. I didn't— nobody in my circle of connections was begging me to make an online course. So I had no idea whether or not it would be something that people wanted. And I didn't have the foresight at that time to put it out into the world saying, hey, I'm thinking about making an online course. If I did, would you be interested? And then force and function. This one, I, I kind of was able to check off cuz I really did need to start to curate my, uh, my approach to teaching beginning guitar players. It was going to help me with my studio work anyway. So the forcing function box was checked off. So really I only checked off 2 of the 4 boxes and subsequently discovered that it was not a great investment of all the time, all the attention, all the effort that I put into it and all the money that I put into it. If you look at you know, my music career, I was going to get time freedom if I was able to become a professional full musician. I was going to be in charge of how I spent my time and who I spent my time with and where I spent my time. Uh, it possibly was, you know, it would, would save me money. And because if I would have more control over my time, I would have more control over optimizing the time that I spent making money and optimizing the time that I spent with my family. It was definitely something that I had a justified good guess that I could make money because I had already started to make money before I even began my full-time career. And then the forcing function for me was I want to give this thing a try because if I don't, I think I'm going to really regret it. Later on in life. So I checked all 4 boxes and had a much more successful experience with that project. So that's the idea of the 4 lenses. Does it save me time? Does it save me money? Does it make me money? Is it a forcing function that makes me do something that I really have to do anyway? And if you can check 3 or 4 of those boxes, then it's probably a project worth further consideration. This idea of frequency, intensity, purpose comes from Randy Massingale. I have a great interview with him, uh, on my Creative On Purpose Live broadcast. Randy is someone that you really can't find any information on online. He has a LinkedIn profile that barely explains anything that he does. He's primarily known as a professor at Seattle University. Randy was also Bill Gates's closest advisor and an advisor to the entire team at Microsoft for most of the 1990s. He is an exceptionally talented and intelligent person who I have had the benefit of learning quite a bit from. And he, he has this process for how to define a purpose, a goal, an aspiration, or something that you feel like is aiming toward. And the frequency, intensity, and purpose format is something I recommend inverting and start with purpose. You're going to go through frequency, intensity, purpose in that order, but just to understand it, purpose— this is Randy and Randy's, uh, explanation and something that I agree with. Purpose isn't that thing that Simon Sinek talks about as your why that's fixed, you know, by the time you're in your 20s and never changes. It's not a fixed destination. It's not this thing inside you that you have to excavate and figure out how to execute. It's something that emerges through frequency, through intensity and frequency. It's something that emerges by engaging the field by doing things that mean something to you, that you can then refine as your purpose, your passion, however, your calling, you know, whatever word you want to use for purpose. It's, it's that place, that work that you do, that place that you find yourself where you feel the greatest sense of fulfillment and flow and joy in your life. Perp— to To cultivate purpose and to create purpose as an emerging quality, you have to first put your unique stamp on whatever it is that you're doing. So this idea of intensity is that it comes from doing the thing that you're doing in the way that only you can do it and infusing that work with your unique ability, your unique perspective, your distinct style., and something that aligns with your, uh, unique values and guiding principles. The step before frequency is to just start doing the work. You know, for those of you that are in purple, this is very much aligns with, um, you know, that idea. You want to establish a daily practice of sitting down and doing the work, or standing up and doing the work, depending on you know, what, what it is that you're building or developing. So you want to set up a behavior, a habit of showing up consistently, engaging in intentional action through a daily practice that nurtures work that you have an instinct or an intuition that is calling you to express itself. And I can get really woo-woo with all this stuff and start quoting the Bhagavad Gita and Stoic philosophy and all that stuff, but, um, you know, just in a real pragmatic way, um, what we're talking about is starting with an idea and starting with the minimum viable product, process, service, concept, idea, and setting up this daily discipline and being present and mindful and paying attention to, you know, is this rewarding? Is this fulfilling? Is this fun? Is this energizing? And as you continue down, bringing, you know, as you master the fundamentals and the frequency phase, you can bring that personal, uh, personal stamp that you can put on that work. And eventually your purpose, the clarity of where you're going and what you're trying to achieve, will eventually come. And then finally, um, The— there's a period in my post-Alt MBA journey where I was working with a lot of folks that are, you know, what I consider people that are entering the second half of life. Your career is winding down, you're becoming an empty nester. Maybe there's some transitions going on in your, you know, relationships and so forth, and you're trying to figure out, okay. I've done all the things that I'm supposed to do, you know, went to school, got good grades, went to another school, got good grades, went and got a good job, took care of my responsibilities, raised a family, moved my way up, uh, in a career. And now that it's over, I don't know what to do. And so I've developed this process, um, that I've shared in a very small handbook called The Art of Encore Living, where you can simply sit down and figure out who am I? Start with who. What are your values? What are your guiding principles? You know, this is— can come down to just very, uh, it can be done very easily through some— there's some tools that if you click on that link when I share it, um, are in the appendix of the book. There's some surveys and so forth. You can just think about like, what are the things, what are the things that upset me most? Like, if dishonesty is a really, you know, something that really ticks you off, then you're probably a person that really values honesty. If people being mistreated in the world really bothers you, you're probably a person that really values justice. Like, there's very simple ways to just reflect on what are the values and guiding principles that matter most to me. What you do This is, um, kind of taking an audit of your skills and talents. Um, skills are the things that you learned in school and on the job. Talents are things that you've just always innately found yourself gravitate— gravitating toward and, and are good at. Again, the handbook gives you some surveys that you can take. Um, I recommend just reflect back on your childhood. What are the things that you did as a kid that really lit you up, that really energized you, that gave you, you know, where you found yourself in what you would now call that sense of flow, having a lot of fun? Doesn't mean like, you know, if you liked playing tag, it doesn't mean that you should open up a laser tag venue. It just, you know, but look at the collection of things that really lit you up and you can usually find a list of talents and skills that you really enjoy cultivating and leveraging. And then where you belong is simply, you belong with people who share your values and need your talents to enhance their lives. Where are the places where those people congregate? You know, this is something that we, again, um, in both the Solopreneur Success Circle and Purple, we find ourselves talking a lot about. People like us do things like this, Seth's definition of culture. People like us share these values, share these beliefs, share these guiding principles, and we do things like empathy, generosity, trying to make a difference, doing work that matters with people we care about. Whether that resonates as where you feel like you belong or not, it's just a way of articulating If you take a little bit of time to reflect on who you really are now, what you're really good at and what you really enjoy doing now, and where the people are that share your beliefs and values and need your skills and talents to enhance their lives, you can very— it's a very quick shortcut to start finding that sweet spot in the middle of the Venn diagram. Where you can start to define the difference only you can make. And then you can move into frequency, intensity, purpose to start to clarify that. And then you can move into the Four Lenses as you are refining or pivoting or creating new projects. So that's— those are the three kind of strategic principle-based ideas. Um, I'm not going to go through the rest of this in too much detail. Um, this idea of— I frame each approach, whether you are, you know, like with, with the Beginning Guitarist Jumpstart, I was using an approach that I call the Benet or Bennett approach. This comes from Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. I don't know if you've read the book, but she, she's, she's an architect. She studies and masters and understands all the social conventions and all the nuances of the Victorian age and the way people engage with each other. She has a very clear idea of the, um, the purpose or aim or aspiration she wants to engineer. And she very strategically and tactically uses all this knowledge and to leverage, you know, relationships and connections within her sphere of influence. And, um, you know, it's, it's a very tightly packed, very tactical strategic process for achieving a very specific intention. And that is a great approach when you have some degree of clarity of where you are, where you want to be, and what's required to get you there. So I think of that as like the quest model. Like, I'm on a— this is where I'm going and this is how I'm getting there. Gumping it. This actually comes from conversations that I've been a part of with Nick Peterson and the Guardian Academy. It's— this is his approach or his description of the approach. I call it a cottywample. It's a great word. You should look it up. It just basically an old English word that means to head purposefully toward a vague destination. So this is a great approach for— I have like this kind of sort of idea of where I want to go. I don't know exactly how I'm going to get there, but I'm just going to get started, and I trust that I can figure it out as I go. So it's based on the idea of Forrest Gump and the scene in Forrest Gump where he just starts running. He's not trying to start a movement. He doesn't know where exactly he's going. He's not trying to start a business or create any kind of movement, but people are drawn to follow him. And, uh, you know, and the, the spin-offs are, you know, running books, jogging magazines, and, and all this kind of thing, all coming from just following an instinct or an intuition and being open and receptive to the possibilities and the potential for what this might all lead to.. And in the case of the movie, being willing to say, okay, that's it, I'm done. And moving on to the next thing. I think there's real virtues in both approaches. There are definite perils to both approaches. If you're doing the Elizabeth Bennet or Bennet version, you can get really, uh, you can have blinders on and get, be really rigid and miss opportunities for pivoting or heading in a better direction just because you're so focused and attached to a specific destination. Um, but there's definitely a case to be made for having a clear destination, having a clear path for getting there, and for being strategic and tactical about how you get there. Same time, you can spend a lot of time wandering along your cottywobble, getting nowhere and no clearer, uh, and, you know, find yourself, um, just aimlessly wandering for much longer than, than, than you would like to. At the same time, sometimes following an instinct or an intuition and figuring it out as you go is a great way to end up where you're supposed to be. Uh, I'm gonna let everyone leverage the document for these last two things. There's two considerations, um, that I share. More does not equal closer. Our instinct as human beings is to keep acquiring tools and tactics, which only reduces the effectiveness and efficiency of your goal achievement plan. It's a systems reliability thing. The more components, the more complexity, the less effective and less efficient. The less is more approach, which is, you know, why I keep this sign within view all the time, is what's necessary, what's required, and how do I build a system where I can optimize whatever is the least effective or least efficient component. The idea of checking your rearview mirror— this is just as creatives and entrepreneurial or solopreneurial types, we're always looking out the windshield, like, what's the next thing I can do? You actually get, again, system reliability. You get a lot more return on investment from optimizing things that you've already done. There's one person on this call that I know has come to me as a client saying, um, I've exhausted the approach that I've been using, so I'm going to create something brand new. And by working together, we, we learned that they had not exhausted the possibility for leveraging what they've already been doing, and that by optimizing an existing system, they're able to achieve their goals much faster than it would be if you, you know, burned the ships and started fresh from the ground up. It's always going to take more time, more effort more attention and probably more financial resources to build something brand new than it is to optimize something that already exists. And the reserve clause and the zesperometer are just, um, two wayfinding tools. The reserve clause is leave your— keep your obligations as, as few as you can and reserve the right to change your mind when you are confronted with new opportunities or new information. You don't have to just grit and grind your way to a destination because you set it for yourself 3 years ago or 5 years ago or 3 months ago or 3 weeks ago. You reserve the right to change your mind based on current information. And the zespirometer is something I came up with a while back when we, um, If you're engaged in something that you find consistently exhausts and depletes you, our instinct is to say we're doing the wrong thing and we're going to quit. What I have found is that more often that instinct or intuition we had, that calling, is actually something worth investing in. It's not that we're doing the wrong thing, it's that we're doing the thing wrong. So again, sometimes it's about how you're trying to achieve your aspiration, achieve your goal, or achieve your purpose, um, that's— that needs tweaking, iterating, or improving, and not the fact that you're heading in the entire wrong direction. In my experience, when people set a point on the horizon that they're heading toward they are usually— their life just unfolds in a way that gets them close to the path. The problem is you can be 1 or 2 degrees off and it feels like you're miles off. And so we spend too much time overcorrecting in our lives and in our projects when if we just course-corrected a degree or two and iterated and improved the system, the process that we're using to get what we want to achieve, we will end up getting where we want to in less time, with less effort, with less risk, and probably have a lot more fun and find a lot more fulfillment in the process. So that's, um, the entire presentation. This link at the bottom is a link, uh, to a flowchart process guide for the Close the Gap book. It doesn't require any kind of opt-in Um, but it's— that is the things that I've talked about today all are part of that flowchart and process guide. If you want a copy of the book, there is, um, an opportunity to click a link and opt in to get a free digital copy of the book if it would be helpful to you. So I have successfully, uh, finished in 40 minutes, and that means we have about 20 minutes for Q&A before I have to hop onto another call. Open to, first of all, just by, you know, was that helpful? Was that not helpful? Was that sort of helpful? Looks like we got thumbs up all the way around. I appreciate that. Always good to be helpful and useful. When you get to my age, it's all you really live for. Any reflections, any questions, any implementation advice that you you're seeking. I'm here for about 18 minutes. Do you think you could explain the force function, forcing function part of those four lenses? Yeah, forcing function is, um, it's an idea that, uh, is explained kind of in the two words, but it's also— I find it was difficult for me to understand, and I find it's it's— it is a difficult idea to wrap our heads around. But the idea of a forcing function is in some ways related to the idea of the beautiful constraint that we talk about in Seth's world often. It's, um, it's an— one way to think about it, Robin, is it's the antidote for sitting around waiting for inspiration. Right. And you know what I have experienced, what my people in my community and clients experience, is that inspiration, um, likes to see and land on someone that's already doing something, because inspiration wants to be expressed. It wants to be birthed into the world, and it's not going to be birthed into the world by someone that's willing to just sit and wait. A forcing function is a mechanism for initiating intentional action. So I'll give you a little illustration from my, my experience that maybe explains this better. When I left my position as head coach at Akimbo, I, um did that because I had done what I had very similar to how I started my music career. I built a coaching business on the side of this, you know, contracted gig I had with Seth, and it was earning me more than enough money to cover all of my financial responsibilities. So I left my position as head coach, went all in on my business, and was running a successful business. In terms of hitting revenue numbers. And I was working 8 to 10 hours a day. I mean, if I'm honest, a minimum of 80 hours a week. I really needed to invert that dynamic, you know, and make more revenue by, by working less and creating more efficient, effective systems. It wasn't until my older son and my daughter-in-law announced that they were pregnant, that a forcing function was introduced. Because when they said, we're expecting, my wife and I both raised our hand and said, we want to be the daycare. The kids left and we turned to each other and said, how the hell are we going to do this? We work 8 to 10 hours a day. We can't spend 9 hours a day with our grandson. So that was a forcing function. I had 9 months, actually almost a year because my daughter-in-law is a school teacher. I had a year to go from 80 hours a week or 8 to 10 hours a day to 2 hours a day and maintain my revenue number. So that was a forcing function that was kind of imposed or self-imposed by me. You don't have to wait for external events to set, establish a forcing function for you. You can just Create that beautiful constraint. Like, I can get this graphic design project done in 6 hours pretty consistently. Can I get it done in 5.5 hours? It will force you to think differently and do things differently and iterate and improve your systems so that you can save time, save effort, reduce risk, and hopefully make more money. Is that helpful? Does that make more sense? Yes. Yeah, definitely.

Thanks.

You're very welcome. Other questions, reflections, dad jokes for grandpa to punish his family with? Go ahead, Tanya.

Um, I have a question. On one hand, I have two projects. The main one is our business. So of course I want to use these I mean, that's pretty much my full-time job, maybe 30 to 40 hours a week. But then by the same token, I also have written a book. I'd like to write another one. And this is on the side. And I'm, you know, I'm not trying to be, you know, bestseller or anything, but it's something that I want to accomplish and I want to continue doing. So, and of course, all of these things are good for your business and for your hobby or whatever it is. So I guess that's sometimes my challenge is, I don't know, balancing those two. So even when you said I went from 8 hours to 2 hours, and I thought, well, maybe that's how you do the— I hate to call it a hobby, but, you know, maybe that's how you do the other passion project. And the reality is I also have to make money too to live. So, um, and I enjoy it, but, um, So I guess I'm not even sure if that's a question. It's just kind of like, how do you balance those things?

Yeah, well, it's a great question, um, and there's several threads I can pull on. I'm just going to choose a couple that I hope are the most helpful. Um, the first is that when we talk about priorities, we are talking about something, um, that, that doesn't actually exist. The word priority was only used in the singular until the very early 1900s because priority means the one thing. When we talk about priorities, we are usually talking about two or three things. And of course, you know, we're not going to work on just one thing all the time, and, and we all have multiple interests and multiple projects that we feel called to invest in. My suggestion is prioritize your priorities. What are the 3 things that you want to accomplish in the longest time, time span that you can give yourself? So for instance, before we had our grandson arrive on the scene, my wife and I wanted to save $120,000 to travel around the world for a year after the pandemic ended. And we wanted to— we had sold our house during the pandemic to free ourselves up to be able to travel the world, but we wanted to have a home base when we came back. So we wanted to save a down payment for a home and we wanted to you know, take care of our debt and fund our retirement and all that kind of stuff. Our number one priority, the thing that we accomplished first was save the money to travel the world. And until we locked that in, we didn't work on anything else. Because the thing is, if you are trying to accomplish 3 things over 10 years, say, our instinct is I'll dedicate 30% of my resources to each. And then something like the pandemic happens and now you've got nothing. If you prioritize your priorities and kind of waterfall them, like get this one first, get this one second, get this one third in order of importance to you. If you can, we saved the money that we wanted to save and it was locked in. When the things changed and our grandson came on the scene, we still had our number one priority already taken care of. Um, the second thing, if you go to the Creative— um, or to the Solopreneur Success Stack on Substack and put in Recapture and Reallocate, there's an exercise. This is the most powerful exercise I can share with anyone that's getting started. It's something I put all of my prospects and leads and clients through. It's literally a complete audit of your assets— financial, time, energy, and attention. This, this is a great tool too for those of you that struggle with price, right? Because, you know, we all have issues. Most of us have issues rather with how we price our thing. We all contend with people that say, I can't afford that, I don't have money for that. Well, If you're selling a product or service that costs a little north or south of $1,000 and you're talking to someone in a room like this, they have discretionary income. What they don't have is a sense of priorities and an honest accounting of where their resources are going. The Recapture/Reallocate actually walks you through doing a complete audit first of your financial resources, because that's the one we understand. Once you know where all the money is going, excuse me, then it's which of these things are giving me a return on investment in terms of my priority, and which are not. And it doesn't mean again, that you have to quit spending money on anything that doesn't get you closer to what you want. In the In the document, I share how my wife and I, all we did was cut our entertainment and discretionary spending in half, and we were able to completely fund and find the resources for the things that we wanted in that moment. So it's a very practical way of discovering the true story of where you're already investing time, attention, money, and effort. And everybody that goes through that exercise recover significant— especially for when they do it for the first time, they recover significant amounts of money, time, and, you know, energy investment that they can put towards the thing they say matter to them. And then the secret, uh, B message of that exercise: if someone tells you that their priority is they want to establish this business but they are unwilling to reduce their spending on streaming services and lifestyle apps and entertainment, then their priority is not their priority, which is something really important to know. It's no, no judgment. Doesn't mean you're, you know, just means that like now you know what you say is a priority is not a priority. So now you can stop worrying about that. Does that make sense?

Awesome.

Rick, we're gonna go with you for the last question, and then we're gonna— I'm gonna have to jump off for my next call. I have to, but I'll be quick. You mentioned that the Four Lenses and Closing the Gap. Could you repeat the author again, please? Oh, sure. Rigging the Game is by Dan Nicholson. If you go to the Creative on Purpose bookstore, I have that book and some other recommended books listed. Another one that comes to mind, and yeah, I mean, I mentioned Nick Peterson. He wrote a book called Bumpers, which is, um, is a, it is a bunch of principles and advice for how to actually accomplish the things that you want to accomplish in life. Um, and I, I, I can provide a link to download a free copy of that if anybody's interested. Just reach out. And tell me you want a copy of Bumpers, and I'll send you the link to download that one. Thank you. And then on what you just went through, I think I complicate and confuse myself in this, what's advancing and what's inspiring. When you talked about constraints, you mentioned that you can sort of volunteer your constraints with, I can do this 6 hours consistently. So can I set a new constraint to become better? How can— is there a way we can help ourselves see if I'm filling my advancing things with aspiring things? For me, the distinction between aspiring and advancing in terms of creative pursuit or business pursuit— advancing means you already have a business that you want to optimize. Aspiring means you're just getting started. And you're trying to figure out what you want to do. Okay, so if I have plenty of experiments within my advancing, that, that's not what you're talking about? Exactly. But okay, you can— that's good— you can have a business and, you know, put in an aspirational pursuit that you feel called to do, or you have an instinct that might, you know, advance, or just be a project that you want to start. But it's in general, um, just in case it's helpful to other folks, when you have a product or service or a cause or idea that you want to promote, as you're thinking about who it's for and who are your prospects and who are the best leads and who are the best leads that you can convert into your best clients personally. I have found, as someone that spent a lot of time in the aspirational space, I can really help someone that has no idea about what they want to do or where they want to go, but they just know they want to go somewhere and do something. Those are not the people that I am actually the most effective and efficient with. And they're not the kind of people that that I, in general, you know, find myself finding the most fulfillment working with. I prefer to work with people that are in that advancing stage where they're already doing a thing, they just are trying to figure out how to do it better. Um, and again, no judgment. It's just, you know, where, where are you going to find the most fulfillment and reward? Um, both, you know, in terms of you know, feeling good about what you do and the impact that you're having, but also in, you know, the kind of people that you want to affiliate and surround yourself with. Scott Perry. All right. If anybody has any additional questions or wants some implementation advice, feel free to Reach out to me. I will, once this recording is processed, I'll just do a quick enhancement and edit. And then I'll send you a cop— a link to the replay. I'll send you the document of presentation notes, which includes links to any of the resources I mentioned. Again, if there's something like, if you want a link to the bookstore to get Rigging the Game, or if you'd like a free copy of Bumpers or— and I'm happy to share that there is a link to look at the process doc and flowchart for the Close the Gap process, which is a process that you can use to achieve any kind of 90-day goal, whether it's a business goal, a health habit, a hobby, or just, you know, getting a project off the ground. So I hope that all of this has been helpful and useful. Feel free to share any of the resources or replay links that I send to you later on. And I really appreciate the gift of your time and attention in being here. All right, have a great day. Have a great weekend.