EP 471 – Avoiding Entrepreneurial Burnout with Aaron Young

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This is the no Closer show where you get the latest developments in distressed note investing and learn the secrets of how you can control millions of dollars worth of property for pennies on the dollar. Get educated and entertained by someone who has closed thousands of deals and lives to support you in achieving the same. Now, here's your host, CEO of We Close notes, Scott Carson. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everybody. Welcome to this episode of the Note Closer Show. As always, Scott Clarkson, your host, excited to be here today and jacked up to have my good buddy Aaron Young from Laufen and Associates joining us as well here today, too. And today's topic is a little bit something different for those that don't know. I just got back from a three plus week vacation traveling. Aaron was headed out to Ashley, Tuscany for his Mastermind Mastermind right before we left. And you've been doing some traveling as well. And so we thought we'd talk, spend this hour on the podcast kind of talking about some of the ways that we avoid burnout and how things that we can do to really help recharge our batteries. But first and foremost, good morning. Welcome back to if you're in the west coast there this morning. Hi, Aaron.

Yeah, you know, it's funny because it has been fun keeping up with you in all the different time zones we've been visiting. So we went over, we did the Mastermind a few weeks ago, but we were two and a half weeks. We road tripped. You boat tripped. We road tripped. We went from Paris, up through eastern France, Switzerland, all around the northern part of Italy and back to Paris and did the Mastermind. So here's the thing for the listeners, for the viewers to think about, basically two and a half weeks trip, three and a half days work. Think about that one for a minute. We got to have a tremendous experience, but we were able to wrap it. We're there. Anyway. One of the people that came to my Mastermind group, they had never been to Italy and they decided to stay for five weeks.

Wow.

So they were gone for they were like two weeks before and then the Mastermind and then two weeks after. People, I think realize that sometimes you have to go and you have to like really go. But let's go down whatever road you want to talk about and we'll play with this topic because I've got a lot of opinions on burnout and so on.

Well, it's a good thing for those that don't know or listening to the podcast, Aaron Young is the CEO of Lawford and Associates. They're a company over 40 years of doing, doing business out of Reno, Nevada, but working with entrepreneurs and business owners all across the country and help them not only maintain their books, but keep their books up to target, keeping their documents, keeping everything rock and roll, and to avoid the IRS and other things from stepping in, basically help you provide a lot of asset protection with your business so you can keep more at the end of the day. We've been friends going over five, six years now. Time flies when you're having fun. Aaron's a regular here on the podcast every month. Very honored that Laughlin and associates sponsor the podcast as well. But the thing is, we bounce a lot of ideas off each when we're traveling or we're speaking at a lot of the same events or hanging out. That's the thing a lot of people struggle with, is they look at, oh, man, you went to Italy and you hung out in Tuscany. I would love to do that, but I could never do that. Or, hey, Scott, oh, my gosh, you guys went on a vacation. Man, I could never do that. And I think a lot of times as entrepreneurs, we get so busy looking at the bottom lines or keeping our nose to the grindstone or going day in, day out back to the salt mines, that we forget to take the time to kind of recharge a little bit or take the time to plan something, to celebrate our wins or celebrate the successes that we have, or just to basically step away a little bit, to kind of relax and go from there. Right, Aaron?

Yeah, I agree with you. And I'll go a step further with that and say, I mean, I meet people constantly. I met them on the airplane flying back yesterday who just say, I could never do that, or, that's bigger than anything I've ever done, or, I don't know if I'll ever get to Europe or what. You hear this all the time. These aren't just from workaday employees. These are also from business owners. And I'm going to suggest for your consideration, folks, that as long as you think that way, you never will have it. And here's the thing. Now, I understand if somebody works for a wage, right, they get so much an hour, so much salary, and they've got to budget it this much for mortgage, this much for car payment, this much for food, and we can squirrel away a little bit for vacation. And if that's the zone you live in, well, I understand it's where my parents live, it's where my siblings live. It's where most people I know casually live. They've got a finite amount of money and restrictions on their time, and so they are trying to figure it out. But if you're a business owner, even if you're a solopreneur, but especially if you've got a team, my attitude has always been, I bet yours is, too, Scott. If I want to do something else and it's going to be a greater expense than what I'm currently doing, I don't go, how can I figure out how to do it? It's always like, how am I going to make more money now? How am I going to do it out of my limited money? What else can I do? Whatever. The Tuscany thing started because we wanted to build a new house, and I thought, I need about a half million dollars down. Where can I come up with an extra half million dollars? Oh, I know. Let's do an event. And we did something brand new, and people resonated with it. People felt like they got more than they paid for by coming. And still all of a sudden, now the bank account goes up, you want to go on a vacation, like you said, put it on the calendar, start planning it, start booking things. It's magic how all of a sudden it just happens. There's always a way.

I was agreed. There is always a way to do it. And the first thing you have to do, it's like if you have a goal, all right, you got a goal, an idea, the first thing you have to do is write it down, versus just thinking about, you got to write it down. And that's one of the big things that we've, over the last couple years, been very big about that. Okay, let's put it down the calendar. Let's go ahead and put it down. Let's plan like we were doing. Planning event or planning a workshop. Let's plan the vacation. Here's what we got to do. What do we got to do between now and then? And make it a goal out there and post it where the people can see it so they know and respect it. Right?

And you become accountable. Also, if you tell people you're going and you put it on the calendar, then people are going, oh, are you so excited? You know, then you kind of have to go. And if you say, well, I want to go in the fall, we're going to go for a week this summer, but you don't put it down on the calendar, Forget it. Either the calendar will get filled up, or more likely, you won't prioritize going and doing it. I'm with you, but you know, there's more to it even than that. So first of all, let's get really clear about this. This past week. So from last a week ago, can't remember if it was Thursday or Friday, but I got back from Europe. I was home for almost a week. Then I flew to. From Portland, Oregon, to Washington, D.C. where I met with a bunch of diplomats, a bunch of foreign service officers, ambassadors, and so on. I got home on Sunday. I was home Monday, Tuesday, I got up first thing in the morning, flew to Los Angeles, met with the president of a hospital, and then went to Frank Shankowitz movie premiere for the Wish Man. Greg Reed, Mark Gold, all those guys. But Wishman premiere, got home on Wednesday, got up Thursday morning, flew to Vegas and trained the hospital on Friday and Saturday. The executive team got home on Sunday. Here's the point. People go, oh, you got to go to D.C. oh, you got to go to Vegas. Oh, you got to go to Hollywood.

Hollywood.

Well, those trips are rewarding, but they're not vacation. And how many places have you been? And people are like, oh, that's so cool. You're in New York. You're in Miami. You were whatever. And you're like, no, I was running my butt off. I never saw it. I went from the airport to the hotel to the airport. So those aren't vacations. You can't count that. That doesn't help with burnout. That creates burnout. Is that true?

Amen to that, brother. It definitely does create it, because then you're going, and let's face it, airport and airplane air is not the cleanest air out there. You're getting up early. Your time zones are all off. Especially going from Europe, where you're six or seven hours ahead, or for you, nine hours.

Yeah, nine hours for us.

Your body gets off. Plus, you're not eating the best food, you're not sleeping the best.

There's a lot of things that's not vacationing. It's not helping. It's good to do it. It's interesting. Hooray. But, I mean, almost the entire time we were in Europe, I never called the office. I didn't have to get on and do reports or get work done. We were on vacation. We were gone. That's part of the whole idea of being unshackled, right? It's. The system works when you're not there. Now, some people don't believe that's possible. You're wrong. It is possible. But we as business owners, if we're gonna stay fresh, we're gonna come up with new ideas. We're gonna manage employees, we're gonna deal with stress. There's gotta be a way to decompress. What's your favorite thing to do, Scott? How do you let go of it?

So I'll give everybody a little bit of an insight here. So being gone for three and a half weeks, we do a lot of marketing. We have a lot of moving parts. We're selling assets. So I empowered my team to make decisions while I was gone. I empowered my team and actually put help selling assets off on a third party buddy of mine, Joel Markovitz. You've met Joel before.

Sure, I know Joel.

Helping me sell some assets. We communicated via a couple text messages is roughly about it. Because the Internet on a cruise ship is not the greatest. Let's just put it that it's horrible and it's expensive for the most part. Even though we spent about a grand on Internet just from uploading photos and things, I think I only logged in my email like twice whole period. Just take care of a couple things. But the thing is, you have to. You plan accordingly. You put people in places and put them to work. So Shannon here was marketing while we were gone. Hazel in New Jersey was still working on loan modifications and borrower outreach. She made decisions, actually saved us money while traveling because we empowered our employees to make this thing. Entrepreneurs are such control freaks. They have to control everything themselves. And they're like, well, I can't take three weeks off because the business is going to fail. I'm gone. You have to delegate, right, Aaron? You got to learn to delegate.

Yeah, you've got to delegate and you've got to trust. If your employees are only there to do your bidding, like, all they're going to do is do what they're told. If you go back to the scriptures, right, they say that's a slothful and unprofitable servant. Right. I don't know why I'm using all of a sudden jumping into scriptures, because, you know, I'm not a big church guy, but one of my favorite parts of the New Testament is the parable of the talents, right? And the person who just waits and holds on so they don't lose any money for the boss, they get fired. Basically, when you go out and trades and works and ends up multiplying what their responsibility was by tenfold, they get more response, they get elevated. And I'll tell you what, that individual in that story was the happiest employee in the business because they got to go make choices and do Things and use their brilliance and not just be waiting around to be told or to get in trouble. If we hire a team that's more competent than us in a lot of ways, their specialty, they're way better than us, then we can feel very confident going away because we know we have brilliant people in key roles and they're going to do probably a better job of doing the job than we would do. I'm better at long term. I'm better at big picture. I'm better at, let's go do that. Come on, everybody. Let's go put on a play. Let's put on a show, right? But when it comes to the costumes and the script and the lighting and the food and all that, don't get me involved. I'll screw it up.

You're a forest, not the banging your head against a tree.

And I love all of our people on our team that just do such a phenomenal job of day to day making all the little parts work. And then I just go, hey, how can we do better? Hey, look what worked. What happened?

Well, that's the thing is I like to step away. You asked the question, how do I recharge? I prefer if I'm going somewhere on vacation to be floating in the water somewhere like, you know, go to the Caribbean or something like that. If I can get in the water, that's the best thing. Just give me the water, I'll be floating. Give me a life seat. Steph can go snorkeling. I'll just be, I'll be the happiest guy, throw my hat on, be floating like a beached whale on the water, enjoying myself. That's my favorite thing to do is just to float in there.

I've done that. I've stood out there on the Caribbean side, right? You get up to like your chest and you can just kind of bob there. Like being in a nice comfy bathtub and you just, you can stay out there for hours and just talk. It's completely meditative. But the thing is, people need to give themselves permission. Well, I shouldn't say they need to. I'm not your parent. But I would encourage people to figure out, you know, it's water, right? I love walking around old buildings. I love that. I love going, this thing's been here 900 years. Oh, my gosh, how come my house is falling apart after 30 years?

You know, you're both talking about the Alhambra excursion. A gorgeous place back in what, 14th century, 15th century, still standing today.

The Alhambra was built. It was the last Moorish castle they'd come across from Africa. And about the same time she was sending Columbus off to find Caribbean, Queen Isabella was also chasing the Moors out of southern Spain back across into Africa. And the Alhambra was their last big outpost. You go there. You were just there. I was there a few years ago. You can't help but be transported away from your normal. Oh, my gosh, my Internet is so slow. Oh, my gosh, my. I wonder if I could still. If I have time to stream one more episode. You know, it's like, no, this is. This place takes your imagination away. Whatever stress you had at work goes away when you look at endless scrolly writing on every single wall and all the layers and the huge clock that's made by water flowing into it. Oh, my gosh. You go whatever you thought was.

And all that stuff. I think it's just the getting away to see that stuff. You have you forcibly. You can't think of anything else but being overwhelmed by what's going on there. That's one of the big things. My dad. When before. Dad's been gone about. Well, God, going on almost over 10 years now. But one of the big things my dad left me with was the fact is, hey, go out and make memories. He worked his ass off. I got my work ethic from my parents. But the thing is, he was always, let's make some memories. Let's go take an excursion. Let's go get off the boat or get out. A lot of people just stayed on the boat for different places. I'm like, that's not really experience anything. If you wanted to do that, you could literally go to a golden corral with a water park and be fine. But if you think about it, it's.

The getting out fresh pizza over here in the corner. It's like, here's the ice cream machine. Just eat until die. It's a cruise ship.

It's a cruise ship. Luckily, I only came back with £3 extra. As over what I left with. That's all right.

Every croissant found my mouth.

We walked over 100 miles while we were gone. We kept track of that. So, man, it doesn't have to be to Europe. It could be taking somewhere and going to Disneyland. It could be going getting the weekend away. It doesn't have to be something massive. It could be a couple days. It could be a day to do something. But the biggest thing is putting on the calendar, empowering your staff to do that and taking the time to do that right Aaron, you got it.

One of the principles that I love talking to people about. I stole it from a book. It's not my idea, but in the book they call it an artist's date. An artist date. And the whole idea is, give yourself. And I try to do it once a week. I try to block out time for Aaron, I protect it. All it is, is the idea of the art estate is to just go where the wind blows. You basically don't make a big plan, take a different road, walk into a store, walk into a museum. I used to love to go till I ran out of closet space. I would go to the Goodwill and I would go for an hour and thumb through junk. I didn't need any of this stuff, but everything I looked at triggered a memory. Maybe think, oh, maybe I could use this for this. I would always leave with a couple of little treasures from the Goodwill as a treasure hunt. Other times I'll go up and park. We live in the mountaineering area up here in the Northwest. So I'll go park my car sometime and just walk down a trail. I don't know where it's going to go. And maybe it'll take five minutes and I'll run out of trail or maybe I'll walk and I'll find a waterfall or a stream or something. And of course, I'd like to go horseback riding. And so those things. I had an opportunity to speak a few. Well, now it's been probably six, seven weeks ago. And Megan Cole, whom we both know and love, said, hey, can you do this last minute speaking thing? And I said, no. And she's like, well, why not? I said, did you look at my calendar? She goes, yeah, it just says horseback ride. I said, yeah, I'm going horseback. I'm not giving a talk. I'm going horseback riding, right Then that's what I'm doing. If we don't protect those times, we become a slave. We become indentured servants. If we say, as you said earlier, celebrate Greg Reed, our buddy Greg, who introduced us. Actually, Greg said if he has a little win, he'll go out and buy a pair of socks. And if he has a big win, maybe he'll go out and buy a car. I think it's kind of fun to look at that pair of socks or that car or that golf club or that watch or that snorkel or whatever it is you want to buy as a memory that says, like, you know, I picked up some Swiss army knives when I was in Switzerland. I could go buy them At Walmart. It's different when I buy it in Switzerland and I go, oh, see this, this little $20 thing? I was in Lucerne, Switzerland, and I got this. Those little trophies, little prizes, take you back on the vacation. Go ahead.

Yeah, it totally does. Those are the little trinkets of time. One of the big things that Steph and I love doing is we'll get refrigerator magnets. And our fridge is full. We got a big fridge, and we're running out of space there. Cities and areas we go to, and we've got some interesting ones from all our travels. One of our favorite thing also to do is Christmas decor, Christmas ornaments. We've got a tree. Eight foot, nine foot tree. Basically, this last Christmas was just covered with ornaments from all the places that we've traveled. And that's always a great thing to go.

Yeah.

Reflect it. Now I got her down to, like, one tree, one big tree, which is a big accomplishment. Okay. It was up for, like, I was happy. It was up for four months from, like, November. It was up. We put it down before we went four months, we had it up. And I was like, it's fine.

Leave it up.

It's got all these great memories that we can see. She's embarrassed about that. But I was like, I don't care. It's just you and me and the cats. Who cares?

You know, Stephanie doesn't ever need to be embarrassed because Steph has a very fun, creative. She's willing to be in touch with her emotions and want to feel those things. So who cares? I'm terrible. My mom will, like, have a tree in every room, and I'm like, I don't know. I wouldn't even want to store that many Christmas decorations. But when it's full of memories instead of just a decorating feature, why wouldn't you want to celebrate it all the time? Your idea of the refrigerator magnets, now it's got me thinking. I love that idea.

It's just as simple. I mean, we find some pretty interesting ones from. What's always funny is when guests come over to the house, you know, they're looking at the fridge and they're like, what's this phallus doing on your thing? Oh, like, that's from Florence, from the David statue in Pisa or whatever where we bought that at. You know, she's like. They're like, what? What's this image of St. Kitts, like, the four Seasons at St. Kitts. We've got some magnets from there. You've been there in Nevis. In Nevis. Yes, yes, Nevis.

Four Seasons. Yeah. You know, I was there in the hurricane in 99 that destroyed the whole place. They had to rebuild the whole thing, washed the restaurants out to sea. And that's a phenomenal place. But, you know, almost nobody goes there. And even the word Nevis is weird. So if somebody sees a little memento and you go, oh, let me tell you, Conde Nast top 10 every year.

Oh, yeah.

But it sweeps you back from Austin, Texas, back to those nice beautiful sandy beaches, that nice Caribbean air, the breeze, being in the water. It's a way to your mind, your subconscious doesn't know the difference between real and imagined. And so if you can take yourself back in your imagination, you can get right back in the hammock. And it is in our stressful lives, sometimes it is good to just give yourself five minutes to drift back to St. Kitts and Nevis, to Pisa, to Florence, to wherever. And you guys have been to so many phenomenal places. But it doesn't have to be just for those two or three weeks. It can be again in the moment. In my other room in my studio, I've shown it multiple times on screen. The glass globe is low globe, but it's a bat globe, right? Because it's got bats floating around it, not snow that you gave me five, six years ago. And every single time I see it, every time without fail, and I've got it in a prominent spot, it takes me back to the room, to the trip. And then I'm thinking about baseball games we've gone to together, just all the fun and comedy shows. And that little thing takes me back to all these pleasurable, not stressful places. And folks, it's important to give your mind a place to rest. Sometimes for an extended period of time, sometimes for five minutes. But it's too easy to go insane. Being an entrepreneur. Yeah, you give yourself space.

Exactly. You can only run the candle of both ends for so long. And that's part of the reason we've done so much stuff in the last couple of years to remove a lot of that stuff that burns out. Trying to reduce my travel schedule for going back and forth and being like crazy to doing things online, to doing using like this. What we're doing now with the podcast, to help us educate people out there in a variety of different issues versus doing a class every month, you know.

Yeah, we're going to have a 90 minute session now on Burnout. Right. First we have to get all these people in a room and we got to Rent the room, we got to organize the food and beverage, and we've got to travel. Right. This is much more effective and efficient. This is a great thing. And you've got such a great following. It's an honor for me to be able to come on and be here. And I know you mentioned that we're a sponsor, but you and I were hosting each other way before anybody was exchanging money.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, Definitely.

I'm delighted to sponsor because I want to see your work get out to more and more people. But the bottom line is you're working with a lot of individuals who are a lot of them taking incredibly stressful risks at first, starting to buy notes, starting to get their first entities set up, starting to figure out, like, what does this all mean to me? And I'm having to evict somebody or renegotiate a contractor, go in and take on this. And then I've got all these people, like your clients, business owners who are taking risks and stressing out. So when you said, let's talk about burnout, I thought, man, what an appropriate topic. Because so many people feel tired and feel a little scared, a little stressed out. And you say, rightly so, that a lot of people, if I go away, this thing I'm so stressed about could fall apart. And I think the argument you and I are making is if you don't go away, it will fall apart.

It will. You'll eventually be so burned.

You won't.

You won't see the bigger picture. You won't see the smaller picture because you'll be overwhelmed with things. And that was one of the big things prior to leaving is what we plan. I was like, oh, I got a podcast. I don't want to miss out an episode. We're doing dramatic growth. I can't leave for a couple of weeks because my podcast is going to dip. And what I did is I planned. It's funny thing, I planned ahead of time. I filmed extra episodes. We leveraged things out. So that May, actually May. We had our best month ever as far as downloads and plays and views, and I wasn't here. Three fourths of the month.

That's great stuff up.

We preplanned. We used some of the simple tools out there. My staff did a great job. We did ahead a great month. Also with, like, our educational sales. We have a company helped out with that, that rent some promotions. The only time I had to answer my email was a couple emails, just updating a couple people on a couple things. But people don't Take the activities because they don't plan ahead. I can't take my hands off the wheel. I can't delegate. Look, you have to start delegating now. One of the best bits of advice I can give to people, if you are seeing yourself doing and you're struggling from burnout, you're struggling with trying to get everything done, hire an assistant. Hiring assistant is one of the most important things. If you want to make six figures in your business, hire an assistant.

How can you not have somebody doing the little tiki tacky stuff, figuring stuff out, looking things up? I mean, if you want to spend your whole time doing research on Google or YouTube or somewhere, I guess that's fine. But if you know what you need, you can hire somebody at a much lower hourly rate to dive in and do a phenomenal, probably better job than I would do. And you and I can go out. I was talking to somebody, maybe it was just yesterday, and they were talking about money and money issues and they were trying to explain to me how my situation was. Where I came from was not where they came from. And so that's why I can do it and they can't. And I thought, this is an excuse that we hear all the time. People who are under pressure say, yeah, well, it's easier for you. And I'm going to just tell people. I mean, I'm not going to speak for you, Scott, but I came from no money. My dad had a job doing sales for a trucking company. He would often have a second job on the weekend. My mother did daycare for most of the time I can remember if I was gonna have anything, I had to figure out how to make the money. So I started figuring that out in my teenage years. And it wasn't from going to McDonald's. It was from figuring out a way to make more money by taking on more responsibility. That's a different story for a different day. But you start to do things and then you don't get scared or quit. I mean, the people that are doing well are people who are taking risk. People who stay in that finite, locked in bordered zone are the ones who assume that that's all there is. They don't jump the fence and try something new. And my dad will tell me, I don't know how you do it. I don't know how you're always taking these risks. I don't know how you're always, how do you do it? I would be freaking out, I'd be having a heart attack. And it's like well, and that's why, no disrespect, I adore my parents, but no disrespect. That's why you live with my younger sister, her basement, that's why you live there. Because you were always worried about everything that could go wrong, not what could go right. And so as business owners we have these humans have money paradigms and they assume, they believe things they've heard over the years. Mostly everything I've done is against the grain of what I was supposed to do. It was not how you are successful. Now all the things that I learned about, oh, follow this track and you'll be successful. Those are people that now are my employees or that are my service providers. They're certainly not telling me what to do. I'm instructing them. The guy with one year of junior college, right? And I don't say that out of pride. I say that out of people that get stuck in believing that there's only a predetermined way to have a big life are probably destined to have a small life versus people like you. I love your story. Selling everything. You and the dog getting in the truck and off you go. You're going to hit all the baseball stadiums and you're going to teach note closing, buying non performing debt. I mean who does that? But I'll tell you who does it. It's the guy who now becomes the biggest name in the business. Who goes and eats ketchup packages because they can't afford the cheeseburger. Oh, Mark Cuban, billionaire shark, owner of the Dallas Mavericks. That's who does it. And every one of the rich people have the stories of doing what nobody else would do, nobody else would do it. And their parents are going, why don't you get a job? And they're going, you don't understand. There's something more than having a being limited in your thing. I don't want to just say I have a job. Being limited in your thinking you can have a job. You know how many people do I meet with your team, your followers who are working a W2 job but they're going, there must be more. I'm going to take my 401k or my IRA and I'm going to self direct it and we're going to start buying stuff or I'm going to go get investors, I'm going to bird dog deals. The investors will bring the money and we'll get it done. Because my uncle, such a cool guy, meter reader for the gas company in California, that's what he did. Was he read the meters. This is the low end of the totem pole. Kids walking door to door reading the meters. He started investing in real estate. Pretty soon he's living in this great big house. He's still working for the gas company, but he's got a home in Lake Arrowhead. He's got a big home in LA, they're driving nice cars and he's still working the W2. But he saw that there was more. If he followed the rest of the meter readers and just went and had a beer at night and did nothing else and watched tv, he would have retired on a meager pension and Social Security and that would have been it. But people that jump the fence, who get out of the line, who get off the beaten path and say, I can do more, I can accomplish more, I can think bigger thoughts, I can dream bigger, dreams are the ones that do it. And the best people, the richest people, the most successful people, the happiest people I know take time for themselves and they guard it jealously. They don't find their worth in the line of people waiting outside their door to ask a two minute question. Rather, they find their worth in being free to do what they want, not having to wait to deal with the lineup. Don't you think that's true, Scott?

It's totally true. Those that wait for somebody to give them the permission. I always make the joke about asking forgiveness is better than asking permission sometimes.

Yeah, sure, sure.

But you've got to. You can't limit yourself. I think it was one of the biggest things. There's got to be more to life than punching a clock in. You make the joke about, oh, when are you gonna get a regular job? My mom used to ask me that question years ago. When you quit doing all this risky stuff and get yourself a real job. I've always been a proponent and actually one of the things that we're doing actually on tonight's coaching call is some of the things that you can doing with your side hustle to help you get to where you can leave your full time hustle so that your side hustle because you've got a book behind you, to your back, your right side, the AskGaryVee book that I gave you actually from an event. Gary Vaynerchuk always likes to talk about the side hustle. 7pm to 2am we all have that. Yep, I can see it right there.

Well, thank you.

You're welcome. But that's the thing, is some prizes.

I need them on that shelf behind you.

It's down here, lower on that side for him. But that's the thing. Most people, we get so busy doing whatever it is, whether we're working for the government, have a government job, and we put in time for the job, whereas we take. We don't put time into the side hustle. You have to real. At some point, you have to get outside your comfort zone, and that's. Most people aren't going to get outside of their comfort zone, their comfort spot, until it becomes uncomfortable. They're looking at getting laid off. They're looking at not having enough of retirement. We're all guilty of this. Everybody's guilty of this. All the comfort zone, sometimes I don't like it, but that's where the most amount of growth comes from, is getting outside of that comfort zone. You're going to learn more about yourself. You're going to stretch yourself, you're going to do some risky stuff or take some risks, I guess you could say. I wouldn't necessarily say taking risks. The more you learn about something, the less the risk is involved and the more you learn about something.

If you've ever been ziplining, you ever been on a zipline?

Yep.

They tell you what to do. They put you in a big old heavy harness. There's mechanical thing hooked to a cable, right? But especially the very first time you ever do it, you understand that you're harnessed, you understand that there's a steel cable. You understand that they do this as a business, right. I just waited in line for other people to do it. I've watched other people do it. So your mind should tell you that, A, you're going to be safe and B, it's gonna work, right? It's gonna happen. But still you stand on the precipice and there's a moment where you have to let go and believe in the system, right? And it's pretty terrifying the first time because down is certain death, right? But the difference between just, I'm pretty sure I can swing on this vine over to the next tree and getting in the harness and hooking onto the steel cable and having somebody that's done this a thousand times next to you, the difference is life and death. The difference is success and failure, and people are nervous. But there are so many formulas, there are so many proven ways that if you will just take the risk and let your feet off the platform, all of a sudden you're flying and you're exhilarated and it's amazing. And you get to the next platform, you're like, let's go again. Right. But that moment before is the moment that holds almost everybody up. They're not willing to just trust the teaching, the mentorship, the structure, the process, the software will work. And so they hang back. I almost did it. I had a great idea one time. Well, you know what I should have done? I look back and what I should have done. But you didn't do it because you didn't want to just let go.

I had a guy call me Friday, actually, a couple days ago, and said those exact words. Oh, I was thinking about getting in that note business, like, eight years ago, but I didn't. I stayed at my job, and I'm like, well, that would've been the best time to get into it. I mean, now it's not a bad job.

Can you imagine all the assets available? Not like today, where it's a little harder. Right now, things have been pretty good. Eight years ago, you could have made millions of dollars.

Yeah. I think back when you were talking about analogy. The first time I went skydiving on my 21st birthday.

Oh, I've never been. I got. Oh, my gosh.

You want to talk about stress relief? Talk about anticipation growing, your heart pumping as you're getting ready to jump off the thing. The first time, you usually go, you're in tandem, so you're latched into somebody behind you, Right? And I had. I asked the guy. I was tandem. I was like, okay, how many times he goes, I've done this thousands. I was in the Air Force for years, or army. I was like, okay, I trust you. Let's do it. And we had a group of, like, 25 people that were gonna go do it. Well, only three people out of the 25 actually end up. Okay. Ponied up and dead. And you get to that plane, you're looking down, they open the door, there's a little sign. This is like a garage door on the side of the plane. And then seats. You're on, like, a wooden platform, sitting down, latched in, and get over there. And they lean you out of the plane. And you're looking at the underbelly of the plane. As you're looking down, you can see planes down below look like a little ants flying. And they do that to make sure you're not going to pass out on them because they don't want 200, 300 pounds of dead weight on them. Okay. I'm like, okay, let's go, let's go. And they jump out, and then suddenly you don't feel like you're Falling. You feel like you are floating. Yes. The wind is pushing your face. And I had a video taken when I don't know where it's at, but I had a video somebody took of me falling. And you feel like you're literally floating. You feel that wind pushing back a little bit. Floating. It's like a minute, minute after they pull the chute and then it jerks you and then you really are floating down there. To this day, it has been the most stress relief thing that I have ever done. Two weeks I didn't give a crap about anything because I was like, I just jumped out of a plane.

I lived through that.

Yeah, I lived through that.

You know, I can live through this traffic.

Yeah. But we get so bent out of shape on little things a lot of times that it ends up causing us to get more frustrated and irritated. And my friends are like, scott, you're just like, oh, it'll be okay. We're gonna put that on your tombstone. It'll be okay. I'm like, well, it is. You mentioned this a couple minutes ago. Well, we always worry about the worst possible solution, the worst possible thing of why we shouldn't do something.

Yeah, right.

You and I have a tendency to say, well, what's the rarity. The likelihood that something, the worst possible thing can happen is very small, minuscule. All right, what's the likelihood that it's the good is going to happen? Sort of what if? What really? What if.

What could. How could we win? Somebody asked me again. Oh, it was when I was working with these people at the hospital. One of them said, I really want to go to Europe. I really want to go. I really particularly want to go to France, but I'm afraid to go because of all the terrorist stuff. And I was like, I've been there multiple times in the last few years and I didn't ever blow up. Nobody ever shot a gun in my direction. I never saw something explode. It's interesting. Five days was even five days, four or five days. Short time after we left Lyon, France, there was somebody, suicide bomber in a bakery that was only about five blocks from where we were staying. So do things happen? Sure. Are there millions? Literally, there's over a million people at any given moment in the air. In airplanes around the world, there are thousands of flights every day. How often do we hear of a plane crash? But yet somebody will go, I'm terrified of flying. What if we crash? I'm like, well, you're not going to crash. You're way more dangerous to drive to the airport than to get in the airplane. But if you do crash, you're going to die, so who cares? It's over anyway. Are you really going to sit on the sidelines and never try something because there's a one? It's like winning Powerball. The likelihood of you getting hurt on a vacation, like dying from terrorists. You're much more likely to get run over by a bicycle than have a terrorist attack. Especially if you go to Amsterdam. Oh, my gosh, the bikes are everywhere. And they're silent killers.

Seven killers.

You're so grateful they're going ring, ring, ring, ring on their little handlebars because they just. Boy, they're on you that quick. No cars, bikes are everywhere.

Like on 6th street with the goped or the mopeds. Not the mopeds or the scooters. Here on 6th street on the little.

Talk about scooters, go to Rome, baby. Oh, yeah, it's 100 scooters crowding in between the cars. It's like, what the heck is wrong with these people? They're going to all die. And you do hear a lot of ambulance sirens going. Yeah, I think that's the thing is.

I think so many of us, we get programmed. I'm going to refer to the E Myth here by Michael Gerber or the E. Myth revisit. Yeah, Fabulous book is we all end up with trying to wear three hats as entrepreneurs. The forward thinking, the customer service, and the research and development side of things. We're all wearing three hats. As you mentioned before, you're the guy that wears the hats of forward thinking. You gotta be thinking ahead as CEO of your company. Whether it's a company of one or company of thousands. You've got to be forward thinking. You've got to learn to delegate the other things off. Whether it is having assistant doing the little piddly things or the things that aren't income producing or the things that take away from you being forward thinking or bringing on vendors or partners or things to do that stuff for you or assist, like virtual assistants, something like that. You've got to learn to do that. And it's cheaper than anything else. 4 bucks an hour, 6 bucks an hour. Heck, you even paid somebody 10 bucks an hour for 10 hours a week to come in. They would exponentially help you grow your business, help you grow your sales. Because as you said before, it's not all about the expenses. When you see something like you said, I'm looking for a half million dollars, I'm going to do down payment. What do I got to do. To do that. Let's think of a way to build.

That, to raise that new money, new creation.

New creation. One of the things that I have, my availability and my power to do that. And I think a lot of people just forget that they have that. So many free resources around them, especially these days, podcasts or webinars or things like that, to make it fruitful.

Yeah, well, it's true. People, if they will allow themselves to open up their creativity and to think out of the box and as I always say, get out of line with everybody else. Get out of the crowd. Get off somewhere else, if you will, get out of the crowd. Do we have time for a quick story?

Yes.

All right. I said to my wife one night, let's go out to dinner. It was a beautiful summer evening. Let's go out to dinner. So we're driving and she thought we were going to drive from out at the farm to downtown Portland. But I said, no, I've got another thing in mind. We've never eaten there, but I want to go try this thing. And so the logical route would have been down Interstate 5, cross the bridge into Oregon, turn east on Interstate 84 and go up 84 and then ways down there. An hour later, cross back into Washington to this lodge, to this place. I wanted to go, but as we're going, I thought, I'm not going to cross the bridge. I'm going to get off the interstate. I'm going to get on the state road, the two lane, because I've never driven that far on this little two lane road. So I just turned off. We were in no hurry. I turned on to Highway 14 and went along the Columbia River. Well, Instead of like 84, Interstate 84 sits right down next to the water. You're going right along the Columbia River. It's three lanes and two or three lanes on either side. You're going fast. There's not a lot to see, right? Except for other semi trucks and all that stuff. Instead, we get on the two lane, one lane each way or drive the line. It climbs up high in the Columbia River Gorge. It goes up along these cliffs. It goes through a few little dinky, charming little towns I didn't even know existed. But the main thing is there was a moment we were in the trees, in the forest and we turned a corner and the bridge, the road was literally built into the side of a cliff. They couldn't go through it or over it, so they built on it. And I've lived here almost my entire life. Scott, I've been up and down that river hundreds and hundreds of times. We came around the corner and it was like I thought I'd gone to heaven. It was the most majestic view. The light was just right. We're hanging off this cliff. The view was phenomenal. And I thought, I get to live here. This is fantastic. And then we went back and the moment passed and we're still going along. And I thought, if I'd stayed on the interstate with all the crowd, I would not have had that view. I would have never seen that. I would have never been. This transcendent experience would have never happened. Because I was trying to do the normal route that everybody else does instead of the one that takes a little longer, that there could be a little traffic jam along the way. You don't know, could be some shepherd out there with the sheep blocking. I don't know. But the point is, as soon as we got off the normal, traditional beaten path and went a different way, our experience just was exponentially better. Exponentially better. And that's what it is A, to be a business owner who's taking risks, but also a business owner who's taken the risks and also is now saying, I. I'm going to allow myself the time and space to get out of my day to day and do something. And it's an adventure, right? You don't know if you're going to love it or hate it. That's what makes it an adventure. You've never done it, you're going to try. But those moments when you get to glimpse the world from a different perspective, they change your life. It's like jumping out of that plane. It changes your life. You go, oh, you know what? There's way more to life than what I normally think of. I can do anything I want.

Amen.

There's my sermon.

Get off the beaten path. If you're struggling dealing with issues, don't be afraid to take the path less traveled. It's one of my favorite, actually. It's funny. And we'll end with this is one of my favorite poems or favorite quotes is by Ralph Waldo Emerson. He's got the famous quote of taking the beaten path. And I want to quote this. I always end up butchering it. The path less traveled. Basically, people this up here. Do not go where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. Ooh. Do not go where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. And for years, that is what I felt like I've done here with we closed notes. And the note investing is part of the reason I was getting off the beaten path, selling everything, going on my road trip and still doing it to this day, going. And you never know who you're going to talk to. You never know who you're going to meet with. You never know who's going to follow you down that path and go from there.

Get off the beaten path and leave a trail. I love it. You know, I use that, the Road not taken. I used that Robert Frost poem in some of my talks. And the fact is it's just a choice. Every day we have a choice. We can do what we're used to doing or do something different. And he says at the end of that poem, I will be telling this with a sigh ages and ages hence, at some point we will look back and we'll say, did we make our own path or did we just go with the crowd and get the same benefit or the same outcome that the average Joe gets? Or did we end up making our own path, having our own experience and maybe like you do so effectively, Scott, carving a path that others can follow.

Well, you do the same thing, Aaron. You definitely do the same thing. And I want to thank you again for being on the show today, bud. We got to kind of wrap it up here, but once again, thank you so much, brother. I can't wait to see you whenever the next time I see you.

We got to figure it out. But we have no camp coming up. Not too long.

Yep. No camp at the end of July and then you're going to be in Orlando, I understand, for a special thing that stuff's putting together as well, too.

I need to get a date, but I'm super excited for that one.

Yep, good stuff. I'll let you go, man. Give our best Michelle and everybody out there. Okay?

Thanks so much. See you, Scott.

Thanks, Aaron. All right, guys, that's going to wrap it up for this episode. Like I said before, don't be afraid if you find yourself in the same traffic jams, the same lane, your bumper to bumper traffic, hey, take the exit ramp. You never know which way it's going to lead you. Don't be afraid. It might maybe takes you a little bit longer or it may be take you a faster route. You never know until you take the opportunity and make sure to do that. So once again, everybody go out, make something happen. Glad to be back in the office here and we look forward to seeing you all at the top. Bye, everybody.