SPI 492: How to Find and “Characterize” Your Passion with Connie Neal AKA Grandma Goodie

SPI 492: How to Find and “Characterize” Your Passion with Connie Neal AKA Grandma Goodie

Pat Flynn:
Now, I want to tell you a quick story related to today’s special guest, because today’s guest, Connie Neal, a while back, this was years ago, she’s a member of the SPI audience, she had listened to the show before, and she said, “Pat, I want to send you and your family something. It’s a business idea that I have. I’m going to custom make it for you, and I just want you to be very honest with me about how you and your family enjoy it.” I received it in the mail. You’ll hear during this episode what this exactly was in just a moment, but I received it, I checked it out, and honestly, I didn’t like it. I love the attempt, I love the heart and the passion behind it, but as far as usefulness, it was just too difficult to use. It was too hard to actually implement the strategies and the instructions and all this stuff. So what did I do? Well, I had to reach back out to her and just be completely honest and tell her exactly what I just told you.

You can understand how many people would feel very heartbroken, especially with putting a lot of time and effort into something, but Connie did something different. She pivoted, she went a different direction, and she got a lot of confirmation that her original idea wasn’t the best one. She has since gone on to something else called Grandma Goodie. If you look up Grandma Goodie on YouTube or even at GrandmaGoodie.com, you’ll see Connie, but you’ll see Connie playing a character named Grandma Goodie. And Grandma Goodie reads stories to kids from a safe, loving grandma character in her voice, and it’s really amazing, it’s quite a journey, quite a story she’s been on, and she’s still in the middle of it right now.

We’re going to talk all about it today, and how you can characterize your passion, how you can pivot from a failure and do something even stronger, even better, even more impactful, just like Grandma Goodie/Connie Neal had done. I hope you enjoy this episode. This one’s a fun one. Connie’s a character, literally. All right, let’s play the intro.

Announcer:
Welcome to the Smart Passive Income podcast, where it’s all about working hard now so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host — if he could be any Pixar character, he’d be Russell from the movie Up — Pat Flynn!

Pat:
What’s up everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to session 492 of the Smart Passive Income Podcast. You know one of my favorite things is to bring members of the audience on the show to have them showcase their work, their journey, and everything that they’re going through and everything that they’re planning for. That’s exactly what we’re going to be talking about today with Connie Neal, AKA Grandma Goodie. This is going to be a lot of fun. Enjoy.

Connie, welcome to the Smart Passive Income Podcast. Thank you so much for being here today.

Connie Neal:
Thank you. I’m honored.

Pat:
I’m honored that you’re here too. You and I have gotten to know each other pretty well over the last few years. You and I first chatted, actually on AskPat a while back, when you then sent me and my kids something that was about a business that you had, and you completely shifted things. I want to start there. When did you first get into entrepreneurship and just trying to get something going online?

Connie:
Well, I spent 18 years as a freelance author and public speaker and writer, so that was entrepreneurship for 20 years. But then everything changed, and I realized in about 2008 that just the written book medium wasn’t going to be the medium of the future, that I needed to transition to multimedia. So I decided to go back to school. I went back, got my graduate degree in instructional design for online learning, so decided I’m going to now change the world and offer something and contribute using online resources, creating online resources.

But where it really started, where you and I connected, was I went to a Dave Ramsey event, where Christy Wright and Dave Ramsey and the VIP lunch. I asked them, “How do I know? I have this dream to do this thing, and how do I know if it’s right or not?” Christy Wright jumped up. “Oh, I have the book for you. It is Will It Fly? That’s the book. End of question. Just go get it.”

Pat:
That’s so good.

Connie:
So I did. I read the book, and I went through your course, the free online course that went with it, and I went, “Oh, that’s a great idea. Let the book be the launch into —” So I had to re-think. I mean, I had spent my living writing books and ghost writing, so I had to completely re-learn. I had to un-learn and re-learn. What is a book? What is it used for in today’s world?

Pat:
So by you going through that book and then going into the online course, that gave you ideas for some of the books that you could potentially write, or the books that you even had in terms of the book fitting into the entire environment versus just the book itself, right?

Connie:
What it did for me was really affirm that I had made the right decision to learn to transition to multimedia when I did. It encouraged me, but I made a huge error. In fact, when I found out that I was going to get to be on the podcast, I thought, “What could I share that would really help the people I now know who listen to you and follow you, the people I got close to in The Income Stream?” So now I know that I’m speaking to Ryan and to Don and to Jess Samson and to Cathy. So I thought, “How could I offer anything to help them?” And I thought, “This was my biggest mistake, and that’s why what I sent you failed, but that was the biggest gift.” Like you said, the only real failure is giving up.

So I had identified, I had created something called the dream box, which was for parents to help their kids learn to make their own dreams come true, and identify their superpowers and stuff. I had done enough research to know if anyone would like this, it would be Pat Flynn and his family. So I’m going to test it by sending it to them. So I was all excited, and people can go back and listen to that AskPat episode, the first one.

I was so excited, and I sent it to you, and I felt sorry for you afterwards because you’re so nice. I knew that you knew how much I had put into it and how much it meant to me, and also it didn’t work for your family at all. You’re honest. You’re an honest person, and so I signed up to do Ask Pat 2.0, where I would come back and follow up after you had had time to try it out. And I anticipated that two ways: either they’re going to love it and this is going to take off, or Pat’s going to be really nice. He won’t quite know how to tell me no, this is not good.

Pat:
So what happened?

Connie:
You were very nice, but within two minutes, I saw you really struggling. I said, “Do you know what? You’re off the hook,” basically.

Pat:
Yeah. I’m trying to be nice. I don’t want to put people down. You put a lot of hard work into it, but I also want to be honest.

Connie:
Yes.

Pat:
This box, I don’t know if you remember some of the feedback. I think it’s important to hear the feedback, and if you wanted to help pass that along, might you remember some of the things that I said, or perhaps thoughts that came across about the box that you put together?

Connie:
This was huge. You just said, “It’s way too hard. I don’t have time for this. When we play board games with our kids, we look at the instructions and go, oh, it takes more than 20 minutes?” And that bit of advice, when I realized it – because here’s what I was doing. I looked back at my life when I turned 60, and I said, “Okay, when Laura Ingalls Wilder turned 60, she decided she might write a little story book,” and it turned into the Little House on the Prairie series. So I thought, “What do I want to leave the world?” Nothing like exploding your expectations on yourself. No pressure. I realized, from you saying that, the feedback was, do you know what? I didn’t know my audience. And there was something else. I was looking at it and saying, “I know the best thing for a parent to do, and I can tell you what you should do, and I can tell you exactly how to do it if you’re willing to put in the work.” So you’ve already got some shame, you’ve got some guilt. It’s not a good mixture. People don’t welcome that.

So you inspired me. After that, I realized I misread my audience and I misread my own importance. It’s like in the StoryBrand by Donald Miller. He says you should not be the hero of the story, and that’s how I was seeing it. It’s like I’m 60 years old, I’ve raised three amazing adults who’ve gone on to do wonderful … all the benefits you’d ever want of parenting, I can give it to you in a box. And that was off. So after I talked with you, I realized I missed it. I was more about me than I was about the needs of you as a parent of young children today, which is very different than when my kids were that age, totally different.

Pat:
Well, thank you for the honesty and the vulnerability. I think it’s really important to hear these kinds of things, plus this just supports the idea of testing with your market. You built this box and you got so much valuable information from even just one person to just point out some things that are so hard to know when you’re in it yourself. As I often say, and you’ve heard me say this before, it’s hard to read the label when you’re inside the bottle. You need other people on the outside to read it for sure.

Now, here’s the big question. That moment of, this isn’t what I was expecting, this isn’t going to work for us. That can be a very deflating moment for a lot of people, and I know that you kept going. You mentioned a phrase that I shared earlier, which is true failure’s giving up. How did you not give up? What gave you the encouragement to keep trying and doing other things, versus, oh, this big, grand idea I had is now not coming true, which is often when people stop?

Connie:
What I did was I remembered what I want to share with you at some point, the story of this huge lesson I had learned very early in life, but I keep forgetting it. I decided, do you know what? I want to switch my caring from myself and what I want to accomplish before I die. I want to just get rid of that, and I want to care about a real person. One of the quotes that you said that I got from The Income Stream that was just so wonderful is you said, “Before you try to change someone’s life, change their day.” So I decided – and I went volunteered at a parenting conference. And I thought, “I want to see these people, these individual parents. Not my idea of parents. I want to see them. I want to hear them. I want to care.”

So I went and volunteered at this event, and I watched these parents come in. They were so enthusiastic, and they were just hustling. They were all late from work and rushing, but they were coming on a Wednesday night to a parenting conference. So these were your motivated, over-achieving parents. They went in, and for one of the lessons, one of the speakers said, “Do you know what? You really need to control screen time, because your kids, it’ll ruin them,” and gave all these statistics. I watched these parents deflate. I watched their shoulders cave in. They had an authority basically telling them that they were bad parents because they hand their kid the iPad or they put them in front of YouTube.

This light went on for me, and I thought, “Do you know what? I don’t need to give them a bigger burden and tell them if you were a really good parent, you’d be willing to do this.” What could I do to give them a little relief and encouragement and support? The light went on, and I thought, “Do you know what they need? They just need somebody to give them a 10 minute break where they can give their kid the iPad or set them in front of the TV to put on YouTube.” They’ve got a break. They feel safe. They know that their kids are not going to get sold to or manipulated. I then went back and found my super powers, and came up with a whole new way that I then let you off the hook and shared with you so we could pivot together.

Pat:
Yes, and wow. Really cool of you to go out there and actually just kind of see and put yourself in a situation with your target demographic, the parents who it is that you serve, and to literally see the deflation when that stuff was happening, and the presenter. I can imagine that as well because, you know, we’re not perfect. We give our kids the iPad and YouTube every once in a while too. Of course, it’s dependent on what it is they watch, which is where I know you come in now, because instead of going, “No, you’re bad,” you can go, “No, I’m going to give you actually something that can help you and actually supports you.” Like you said, you won’t sell to the kids. It’s for kids, but it’s also at the same time for parents. So tell us a little bit about the pivot you made. are going to maybe feel nervous that if they went down the same path, that they would feel embarrassed, they would feel maybe a little bit closed in. So why don’t you reveal what happened next. What did you build? What did you create?

Connie:
Well, I looked at my super powers. I had been a public speaker. I knew I was a good story teller, and I had learned to tell stories by trying to teach the Bible to junior high kids who didn’t want to be there. If you can do that, you can handle any crowd in the world.

Pat:
This is true.

Connie:
In fact, during graduate school, I went back and took a job doing that again, just to make sure I had honed my skills. Because they will throw things at you if you get off point.

Pat:
How do you teach a junior high student about the Bible? What’s the one or two things? I’m just curious, just for me personally, what do you need to happen?

Connie:
You grab the story. It’s all about the story. The stories … see, we’re lucky. This generation … I mean, lucky in a way, not in another way. But this generation of young people are mostly ignorant of all those stories. So when you get ready to tell them an exciting story of the Bible, they don’t know the ending. So I would do these stories, and I would do things that were immersive. Things like just interactive things where I had them come in and they had to go through this gauntlet. First they walked through maple syrup, everybody, shoes off at the door. Walk through maple syrup. Then you walked through cat litter. Then you walked through crumbled corn flakes. Then you walked through dirt. Then you get on this plastic tarp and go, “What is she doing? Why did she do this?” And it all turns into a story about how Jesus said, “You guys all want to be the greatest in the room? You want to be the one with the highest position and the highest ranking? Instead, I’m going to wash your feet.” And that was the lowest job, that was the slave’s job. And here is their master.

So I said, “Okay, who wants me to wash their feet?” They’re like, “Ew, no, I don’t want you touching my feet.” Like you and Chris Ducker with the foot massage. It’s a very intimate thing to have someone wash your feet. So somebody finally did it. Then I said to them, “Okay, either you go home like this or you have to wash each other’s feet.” Do you know what I’m saying?

Pat:
I mean, that’s memorable. That is immersive.

Connie:
Yeah. You’ll never forget it. Do you know what? They all wanted their feet cleaned. The only way it was going to happen is if they found somebody else and they washed each other’s feet. And then I gave them towels.

Pat:
Just so everybody’s listening. You had mentioned something, Chris Ducker and foot massage. This is related to a game we played on the final day of The Income Stream on day 365. I’ve never given Chris a foot massage. He’s never given me a foot massage. We were playing a game called Blank Slate. That’s all I’m going to say.

Connie:
Yes, yes, disclaimer accepted.

Pat:
Exactly. By the way, we can, I think, get a sense of your story telling just through how you set this up, how you’re leading us through the next parts of your story here. So thank you for enlightening us on how you wash your students’ feet, number one, but number two, tell us now what it is that you created. So taking this experience from public speaking and story telling, how are you going to do that to help parents?

Connie:
Okay, I do a character called Grandma Goodie. I created this character, and Grandma Goodie, for that parent, I thought, “Do you know what? Wouldn’t it be nice if you just had a grandma in the other room that you could just say, go with Grandma for 10 minutes, I really need alone time,” or whatever. So I created this character. She’s loving. I modeled her after Mr. Rogers in that she speaks directly to one child. She doesn’t speak to an audience. She tells the story in a very engaging way. I use props, and I’ve added some pictures now so that they can see, and annotations. All the things I learned from you. Pattern interrupts, and now Grandma Goodie even knows how to zoom and pan.

Pat:
I like it.

Connie:
So I created these little Bible stories that are under 10 minutes, and I don’t assume they know anything. Because I also know that a lot of parents, they don’t know anything, and the reason they don’t share Bible stories with their kids is that they don’t want to be asked questions that they have no idea the answer to. They don’t want to look stupid. So Grandma Goodie tells an engaging story that happens to be in the Bible. No spin, no promotion to a church or any religious organization. If it’s the story of the Passover, that’s back in the book of Exodus, I don’t tell it as a Christian, I tell that story at that time so that any family, Jewish, Christian, no religion, Sikh, whatever, that story alone, and then at the very end, Grandma Goodie has a chalkboard and she gives them the secret code where you can find it yourself. Because the idea is – Oprah Winfrey says that people want only two things, and I found this to be true. Have you heard this?

Pat:
I think I have, but I’d love to hear it in your words.

Connie:
Okay. She says they want to be seen and they want to be heard. So at the end of every Grandma Goodie story, I look right in the camera, and I say, “You remember kiddo, Grandma Goodie loves you, but God loves you more.” So it’s always that reassurance. They just, over and over and over again. But what I’ve given the parent is, I can’t hear the child. That’s one of the restrictions. I can’t even get comments on made for kid videos. But what the parent could do is just say, “Hey, you listened to Grandma Goodie, tell me what she said.” So the parent doesn’t have to know anything. The parent’s not going to look stupid or be embarrassed, and the kid is going to be excited to tell them what they heard from the story. So that’s what I do. It’s completely ad free. It’s cost free.

I’ve come upon one objection that some parents have if they are a religious family. On YouTube, they’re afraid of what might come up next. So I’m actually taking everything I put up on YouTube – and I’ve got 60 stories up now. I’m making it so that I’m also putting it in a membership, but the membership will be free. But it will be closed so that there will be no outside ads. They can safely know … if they want to get it on YouTube, everybody can get in on YouTube still, but I am going to also make a place called Grandma Goodie’s house. My daughter’s an artist, she did my illustration of Grandma Goodie, and for my birthday she just did Grandma Goodie’s house.

Pat:
That’s cool.

Connie:
Yeah. So that’s what I do. I was surprised, because I wasn’t sure. I’ve been disappointed. You mentioned, I don’t get many views. I maybe get an average of 20 views a week on a video. The one time you tweeted or something, I got 390 views. I was like, “Wow, yay.” But I also know my first year, my plan was … You said how did I not get discouraged? My plan was, my first year is not to get viewers. My first year is to find out who Grandma Goodie is, and to workshop the character, and to get her to the right place. At first, my best friend was listening to it, and she was like you were, kind of like, uh. I’m like, “Okay, tell me what’s wrong.” She goes, “Well, your voice is just so high pitched and annoying. As a parent, I don’t want to hear it in the background.” So Grandma Goodie learned to talk a little bit more refined like, and with a little softer and not quite so high pitched. So I said to myself, “This first year, I’m just finding out what I’m doing here. I don’t know.” Thank God I have a good job, so I don’t need it for money.

Pat:
That’s so great. First of all, what a wonderful friend to just give you honest advice like that. I think that’s really important that you are taking this first year just to kind of find yourself. I think this is really important, because a lot of people start on YouTube especially, and they see other people with hundreds of thousands of views, and other people have started even after them with loads of subscribers. Really, when you think about some of the most successful YouTube channels in the world, I think about people like MrBeast with 50 million subscribers, or MKBHD, who we’ve had on the show here before, one of the top tech reviewers in the world, with over 13 or 14 million subscribers now. Millions of views per video.

When you really look back at their history, they did exactly what you’re doing. They took the time to discover themselves. They put things out there with the purpose of honing in on their skills, learning about YouTube and analytics and just getting better. MKBHD came on this show and he said his first 100 videos were for his first 100 subscribers. When I dug into it a little more, he was actually exaggerating a little bit. His first 100 videos were for his first 72 subscribers. This was back in 2013, 12 or something like that. I’m looking at your channel now. You’re at 156 subscribers, so you’re growing. You’ve done this for how long now? Just like a year or two?

Connie:
Actually, the very first video Grandma Goodie ever did was September 2nd, not last September, but the September before, because she’s modeled after my stepmother and my mother combined, and September 2nd is my stepmother Edith’s birthday. So Grandma Goodie was born on her birthday.

Pat:
That’s cute. I love it. And you have some actually videos here that were not published very long ago with hundreds of views. A spooky Bible story riddle for Halloween. You have some other ones that are here. You’re doing really good with the thumbnails and titles. I know there are some struggles, and we’ll get into this in a little bit with regards to kid only content, because this is directly for kids. It’s not like other types of content, for example, Pokemon, which started for kids but you can make the argument, and in most cases all of my viewers on my Deep Pocket Monster channel are all 25 to 35 years old at this point. Yours is definitely for kids, and as a result, you have to mark them as such. Because of that, you don’t get found in search, you don’t get comments, and it’s really difficult to engage. So the fact that you have 156 human beings who are following you is so good, especially within the first year and a half of having it up there. Like you said, you are finding yourself, and I’ve noticed the changes over time, because we’ve been talking. I’ve been following you. I’ve done some website and YouTube channel reviews for you over time, and I see the changes, Connie. I see the changes, I see the refinement, and I hope that’s encouraging to you.

Connie:
Oh, it is. And I want to say to everyone listening, I started going to the live streams on The Income Stream a year ago. Especially, they say that the largest growing demographic on YouTube right now are the Boomers. In fact, I listened to your interview on YouTube with Darryl recently, and he brought that up. They’re hesitant to learn. Do you know what? Just relax. I say over and over again. This isn’t hard, it’s just unfamiliar. Sometimes my biggest struggle trying to do my website, I didn’t even know the right questions to ask. I would have a problem, it wouldn’t work, but I didn’t have the vocabulary. I didn’t know what to call it to ask. And the younger generation are using vocabulary that’s native to digital natives, but I don’t even know how to put that into words. So your Build Your Own Brand, you went over the terminology. This is one of the things that … I mean I work full-time creating online courses for a university. You do one of the things that is most important. You define the terminology at the beginning, and that made all the difference.

So I just said, “Okay, I’m going to try to do a website.” So I did it. It wasn’t very good, but I did it. Then I said, “Pat Flynn’s willing to review my website.” So I kept that. I cut that little episode where you reviewed my first website and you found 10 things wrong, 10 major things wrong. So I made myself a list, and I just went through them one, two — sometimes I’d have to take a couple of hours and go learn what I need to learn to come back and do the next one. But I did that. So I want to encourage people. This is an amazing world we live in. Your voice, your message can go out not only to the whole world, but it can go out to your grandchildren that aren’t even here yet. I don’t have any grandchildren. So I’m leaving something that, if they come after I’m gone …

One other thing, Pat, you said that was interesting is that I was surprised, because in The Income Stream, people were talking about in generalities, but they grew to love Grandma Goodie, and they encouraged me so much. And I accidentally went in with my Grandma Goodie handle, so I became Grandma Goodie to that group.

Pat:
You did.

Connie:
I did. And I loved them. It was so interesting because we had people, one person said to me, “Grandma Goodie, it’s not just for kids. I can’t sleep at night. I have insomnia, and I listen to Grandma Goodie, and I go to sleep remembering that Grandma Goodie loves me, but God loves me more.”

Pat:
Wow.

Connie:
There was someone in Malaysia. I mean, Elton Kua. He said, “Will you call me kiddo?” And I said, “Sure, but that’s usually reserved for the kids.” He goes, “My grandma used to call me kiddo, and she’s gone now.” So from then on, he became my kiddo. I was amazed that, you know what, it’s not just the kids who need this. It doesn’t matter what your religion is. I’m not pushing religion. I’m not even teaching the Bible. It doesn’t hurt you to hear great stories, and these are stories gathered over thousands of years. So Elton, who’s in Malaysia, he’s one of my most faithful supporters. Thank you, you’ve helped me improve it to the point where now people can do it without being pity watchers.

Pat:
Yeah. That’s really cool. How are you strategically building this out? I’m curious to know what you have in store or in plans for growing the channel. I know we’ve talked about this quite a bit. Like we talked about earlier, there are different challenges. It’s really funny, you had mentioned that people just know you as Grandma Goodie. For a while, you might not have known this, but we cut out something in the middle because the internet went down or something. To try and get Connie back, I was like, “Grandma Goodie. Grandma Goodie, are you there? Grandma Goodie.” I just went to that. Anyway, you didn’t hear that because we edited it out, but that’s what I just did.

Connie:
But it’s wonderful, because really Grandma Goodie is a part of me, and my mother and my stepmother, when I was an author, one of my most moving stories was my mother was an alcoholic my whole life, my father and mother were never … they were both married, just never to each other. So my stepmother raised us because my mother was an alcoholic, and it was a very chaotic childhood. Here my stepmother couldn’t have children because of an early miscarriage in her life. Always wanted children. My mother had seven kids, but she was an alcoholic and was dying of alcoholism. And Edith, my stepmother, she loved, she loved and she told me these stories. I wasn’t a Christian growing up. It was like this love that just, when we would be sent back to my mom, she’d be sending care packages to my mother. And as Edith was dying, my mother, who had since then stopped drinking and I had introduced her to Jesus, she went and lived where my stepmother was and took care of my stepmother while she was dying.

Pat:
Wow.

Connie:
So that love, and then she was able to love my kids and be a good grandma when I thought she never would. So when Grandma Goodie is there, she’s full of real love and a real sense that life is really hard but everything is possible. We can change. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to get off on that tangent.

Pat:
No, it’s okay. Especially during the pandemic, of course, that kind of positivity is what we’ve been looking for and searching for, and I think a lot of people like Elton and others have found you. You have a smaller, relatively, group of people, but they’re real people. They’re real people, and you’re connecting with them, and that’s what’s important. What are your plans for moving forward in terms of gathering more people and growing that audience when we do have some of these challenges?

Connie:
Yes. My plan is I have 60 different stories that I’ve recorded as Grandma Goodie, but I’ve realized, you said to go back, re-do the thumbnail, re-do the hook, re-purpose it, upgrade it. So I did that for all my Christmas videos and now I’m doing it for my Easter videos. What I realized was that I was getting so discouraged looking at the numbers of other people, and really feeling … I tried to tell myself not to feel this way, I kept repeating the things you said, but I was just getting discouraged. I re-calibrated, and I thought, “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Laura Ingalls Wilder decided to write a book when she was 60. She didn’t get published until she was 65.” I just turned 63, so I’m going to make myself a goal. Between now and two years, I am going to finish 100 Bible stories, the 100 Bible stories kids should know.

Do those, and I also have a vision of … I don’t think people even know there’s 66 books in the Bible. Heck, we don’t even know the 10 commandments. I mean people, if you ask the man on the street interview, who was Noah’s wife? People say Joan of Arc, because Noah was in the ark. I thought I’m going to take 100 Bible stories, and I want to do one story out of each of the 66 books. Then I did icons for them so that if you have a row of six squares across and 11 down, that makes a quilt of 66. So I thought it’s comforting to know where to turn.

So between now and then, I’m going to look at building up the quality, but my main focus is going to shift to finding that audience, because I still haven’t found my audience yet, not really. Listening to them on ClubHouse, it’s been very helpful, thank you for that. And spend the next two years trying to find people this would help, and invite them in. Get rid of the obstacles. Then when I have those 100 done, on my 65th birthday two years from now, I’ll give myself freedom to either go on or not, depending on whether it’s serving people.

Pat:
Cool. I love it. I love that you have a timeline, a deadline. That always helps. To know that you have this plan moving forward, I absolutely love it. I’m really excited for it. This is honestly why I wanted to bring you on, because I think that you have so much to offer, and a lot of the struggles that you might have with YouTube not helping you because the algorithm doesn’t help and serve those that are kid friendly, like yours, in ways that other channels have been helped. So perhaps there might be a few people in the audience who are listening who might be interested in learning more. We’re not done yet, by the way, but I would love for you to point out where they can go to find Grandma Goodie, and where you would like to point them toward.

Connie:
Okay. You can go to GrandmaGoodie.com, and it’s spelled G-R-A-N-D-M-A-G-O-O-D-I-E. So GrandmaGoodie.com. And I’ll always have links there to the most recent YouTube videos. Then I also did give you the link to … I still have an author page on Amazon if anybody wants to see any of my old … my books are still out there. But first of all, Grandma Goodie’s been pestering me. She wants to tell you a story, she wants to tell your listeners a story. But also, if it would be okay with you, I really want to share this story. I think it will summarize the biggest mistake I made.

Pat:
Sounds good. I’m ready to hear it. Yeah, and then I have some things that I want to run by you. Just ideas that we can kind of brainstorm with to help you even further.

Connie:
I promise you you’re going to love it.

Pat:
Okay.

Connie:
Okay. This was the summer of 1978. I was living as a student, going to school at Pepperdine University in Malibu, which is one of the richest and most beautiful communities in the world. It’s basically filled with wealthy people who are movie stars and at the highest levels of society. And I was a very poor girl who got a full scholarship to Pepperdine, and just was dropped into this world. I was like, “I want to share God’s love.” The community of Malibu did not really like the fact that Pepperdine has a big bell tower with a cross, so we agreed to turn the light off but not knock down the tower.

But anyway, I was involved in a church group that we met at a middle school. It was at a time when there was a homeless problem, and the problem was that some of the actors, I’m not going to name any names, but they’re still around. They thought it would be great to go down to Santa Monica where there were 5,000 homeless people and invite them to move up to Malibu. Well, that did not go over well because people came to Malibu to get away from anything that was unpleasant or not just beautiful. So there was this controversy going on in our community. So our church came up with the idea that we didn’t want to get on the bad side of the community, but we did decide that we would have sack lunches that we would discreetly give if we saw a homeless person. So I’m like, “Oh, that’s great. I’m going to do that.” So after church one day, I came out and there’s this guy standing there. He’s leaning against the wall, scraggly hair, scraggly beard. Your beard is much nicer, Pat.

Pat:
Thank you. I’m trying. I have no idea what I’m doing.

Connie:
And he had what we used to call a Tijuana sweater. It was like a big old bulky sweater that looked like it had straw woven in it. I felt sorry for him. I said to my then boyfriend, now husband, and his friend, I said, “Oh, that poor guy. I’m going to go get him a lunch.” They looked at me and started laughing. I’m like, “What?” I’m like, “You guys, your heart’s not right. Your heart’s not right because I’m going to go and take care of this guy. I’ll be discreet.” So I go and get the lunch, and I go over to him. I go, “Hi. I’m Connie. What’s your name?” And he goes, “Bob.” I go, “Well, Bob, nice to meet you. Where are you from? We’re so glad you’re here.” And he said, “California.” I go, “Me too. Small world.” I’m like, “We’re so glad you’re here at church today, and I hope you feel welcome and come back.” He’s like, “Yeah.” I go, “Would you like this lunch?” And he’s like, “No.” I’m like, “Oh, okay. Well anyway, nice to meet you.”

So I go over, and honestly, Pat, my husband Pat, and Gabriel, who’s our friend, they were honestly behind a truck, on the ground, on the asphalt, laughing. When you talk about fall on the floor laughing, they were doing that. I’m like, “You guys are really … What are you laughing at?” They’re like, “What’d he say?” So I told them what I just told you. “Bob. Ha ha ha. Bob.” They’re like, “Did he say his last name?” I’m like, “Why would he tell me his last name?” And they’re just laughing, choking. They said, “Because you just offered a sack lunch to Bob Dylan.”

Pat:
Oh my gosh. That’s so funny.

Connie:
It’s so – But the point, here’s the lesson. The point is this. I assumed I was the hero. I had this nice lunch and I was going to go do good, and I was going to force it on this guy. But I made the big mistake of not knowing who my audience was. Because if I had known, I still may have approached him, and I still may have welcomed him, but I would have completely done it differently. And if you do not know your audience, you may know what you want to say, but you don’t know how to talk to them.

Pat:
That’s so good. I feel like we need to end there, but I don’t want to. That’s a huge lesson.

Connie:
Wait, wait. Pat, Pat. Wait, wait. Grandma Goodie.

Pat:
Oh, Grandma Goodie. Hey, Grandma Goodie.

Connie:
I was cooking cookies. I’d send you some, except I burned them.

Pat:
I don’t want the burned cookies.

Connie:
No, I don’t. Sorry, but anyway, that’s the only kind I make. I have a story for you too. When my kids, after I’m long gone, my kiddos around here, if they smell anything burnt, they’ll say, “Oh, that reminds me of my Grandma.” Anyway, I have a story for you. I was thinking about this. Connie told me that you were going to let her go on your podcast dealy, and I have a story that I want to tell, okay?

Pat:
Yes.

Connie:
Okay.

Pat:
The floor is yours.

Connie:
This is for anybody. This will help your business, it’ll help your marriage. It’s for business and life, okay? There was this fella, he was an elderly fella, so he was thinking about death a lot. That happens when you get older. Anyway, he went to sleep one night and he had a dream. In this dream, an angel appeared to him and he said, “Would you like to get a little preview of heaven and hell?” And he said, “Well, I don’t know about the other place, but well, I guess. I guess I should. If you’re offering, okay.” And so the angel said, “Okay,” and poof, and it all went hazy and cloudy.

And then it appeared, a beautiful banquet hall, and all these people were on this long table lined up face to face across from each other. And on this banquet table there was every kind of food you could imagine, delicious roast turkeys, every best Thanksgiving dinner you ever had, every best birthday cake and fruit and juices and wine. Oh, mashed potatoes with lots of butter, gravy. Anyway, that’s what I like. But it’s whatever. Everything you like is right there on that banquet table, right in front of you. And the fella’s thinking, “Oh, I was hoping heaven would be like this.” And the angel said, “Well, wait. We’re not ready. We’ve got to announce that the banquet’s starting.” And he said, “Okay.” And so the angel said, “The banquet will now commence.”

And all of the folks, they lifted up … their arms had been down at their side. Well, they lifted up their arms and they had a board tied to where their elbow was so they couldn’t bend their elbow. So this one fellow, he saw that turkey leg, and he was going to get that turkey leg before anybody else. So he went to walk and get that turkey leg. He accidentally hit the guy across from him, and then that guy didn’t like that he wanted that. Before you know it, he’s trying. Now, he’s got the turkey leg. He won the battle for the turkey leg, and he’s trying to get it, but he can’t get it to his mouth because he can’t bend his elbow.

So anyway, everybody’s grabbing for what they want, they want, and they’re frustrated because they can’t get it in their own mouth. It turns into a big old fight, and everybody’s fighting. Nobody has what they need. Everybody’s mean. And the angel says, “Now, that was hell. Now would you like to see heaven?” And he said, “Oh, yes, because this is not at all what I expected.” And by the way, this is not a Bible story. I heard this from somebody, I can’t remember who.

But anyway, they went poof, and now they’re at the same exact banquet table. Different people sitting there, same exact banquet table, and the angel says, “The banquet will now commence.” And the person lifts up his arm, and they had the board on their arm too. They couldn’t bend their elbows. And so one of them said to the person across from them, “Excuse me, please. I would really like that there turkey leg, and I can’t get it. Could you get that for me?” And so that person, he gets that turkey leg, and he holds it right up to the fellow’s mouth and he ate that. And he said, “What would you like? How many I serve you?”

And so they all began to listen to each other and to see what they needed. They began to serve one another first, and when they did, everyone had everything they needed. Everyone was full. The banquet kept replenishing, and they had love besides. That’s all Grandma Goodie, because I just wanted to say, you tell us serve first. If you go into business just trying to grab what you can get, you’re not going to get it and it’s not going to be fulfilling. But if you serve others and others serve you, you’re going to have the wealth of all the best that’s in life, and love to boot.

Pat:
Thank you, Grandma Goodie.

Connie:
So that’s all. I’ve got to go back. I smell my cookies burning, I better go.

Pat:
Yeah, go get them. We’ll try another batch next time. Thank you. Thank you, Grandma Goodie. Connie, that was awesome. I don’t know what you do to trigger that or what space you go to to just channel Grandma Goodie, but she always comes out. She’s really sweet, and thank you for that story, by the way. We’re going to finish up here, but for those who have access to the premium pass, you’re going to get a little bit more from Connie in the backstage here, so Grandma Goodie, Connie, one more time, where can people go to find you and learn more and enjoy more of your stories?

Connie:
Well, if you want to hear Grandma Goodie, please go to GrandmaGoodie.com, and it’s in the notes. Also, if you want to see my books, I wrote all the devotionals for the Life Recovery Bible, so anyone who’s in recovery from any kind of addiction, and all of my books that I did, if you go to Amazon.com/author/connieneal, I have them all there, and you can get them there.

Pat:
Awesome. Thank you, Connie. I appreciate you. Thanks for coming on the show.

Connie:
Thank you, Pat.

Pat:
All right. I hope you enjoy that episode. As you could tell, hopefully you’re smiling like I was in this episode. Grandma Goodie, or Connie, thank you so much for showing up today, for being vulnerable, for sharing all the ins and outs of what has happened. And I do recommend that you check out Grandma Goodie at GrandmaGoodie.com. That’s G-O-O-D-I-E, and of course you can check her out on YouTube. She’s still trying to figure out how to master YouTube from the perspective of somebody creating content for kids, and I think we talked a lot today about some of the strategies around that, or to kind of work through the parents instead, and I think that’s really smart. But we’ll see what happens, and we’ll see where we end up, and I’m sure that we’ll bring her back on at some point once she makes even more progress. It’s a slow start, but it’s a start nonetheless, and a pivot that was worth the while. ‘Cause already, she’s making an impact, and hopefully this episode has made an impact on you today. So Grandma Goodie, thank you so much for coming in and for all of your wisdom and all your joy. Thank you for spreading that to the world.

And for you the listener, thank you so much for listening all the way through. I appreciate you so, so much. All the reviews that have been coming in strong. I read them, I appreciate them, I see them no matter where in the world you’re at. They do matter, so thank you for taking the time. And I hope that if you haven’t yet done so, you hit subscribe, because we’ve got some great content coming up next week for you. Again, thank you for your time. I appreciate you and I look forward to serving you next week. Until then, cheers, peace out, and as always, Team Flynn for the win.

Thanks for listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast at smartpassiveincome.com. I’m your host, Pat Flynn. Sound design and editing by Paul Grigoras. Our senior producer is Sara Jane Hess, our series producer is David Grabowski, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. The Smart Passive Income podcast is a production of SPI Media. We’ll catch you in the next session.