SPI 848: 3 Themes of 2024 that Have Helped Me Find Success

SPI 848: 3 Themes of 2024 that Have Helped Me Find Success

Announcer: You’re listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, a show that’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, he used to play with pogs on the playground in elementary school until they were banned from the school grounds, Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: We have just a week and a half until the end of the year 2025 is right around the corner and I wanted to spend today to talk about three sort of themes, I guess you could call them three lessons, three ideas that I’ve really grasped onto this past year that have helped my In so many ways, it’s helped in some new projects that I’ve been working on, like the shorts channel and Deep Pocket Monster.

And it’s helped with SPI and some of the activity that’s happening here with the team and Caleb. And by the way, you’re going to hear Caleb in the next episode. We’re going to chat a little bit more about the future of this podcast. Don’t worry. It’s not going anywhere, but there are changes that are being made and you’re going to hear a week from today, if you’re listening to this on the Friday that it comes out, a very special guest will be on the show on the show. After Caleb, John Melley. My voice guy, who you just heard in the beginning of this episode about a minute ago. And he’s been with us since 2010. And this will be his final fun fact will be the last episode of the year, because again, we’re changing formats and the first episodes of next year are going to be a little bit sort of transitional.

They’re not going to be exactly what we want yet, but more on that later when I speak with Caleb, but that episode with John next week, 850, it was bittersweet. It was a tremendous pleasure to be working with John Melley for so long, the voiceover guy, and we talk about the origin story and how he’s gotten work with myself and a few others in the space and just kind of where he’s going from here.

So it’s a fun time. So three themes for this year. Number one, simplify. Simplify. Simplify. Simplify. When it comes to the work that you’re doing, simplify. Remove the extra stuff. A lot of times we get into this mode where we’re kind of just doing the things that we’ve always done and then we adjust, we add things, and we don’t ever rewind or go back and kind of assess where we’re at and what we’re doing.

We just kind of have this jumbled amount of work, getting back to first principles and figuring out, okay, what is the simplest way that I could get this done? This was something that with the podcast, I remember feeling this a number of years ago when things started to get a little complicated. It just felt like a lot of work to get podcast episodes out.

And I stepped back, zoomed out and said, okay, how could I simplify getting from recording an episode or even before that scheduling a podcast interview, how might I simplify all the parts of the process between then and getting a podcast episode out? What are some templates that I could use? What are some systems that I can put into place?

Who might I be able to hire to be able to help me simplify this? So simplifying your systems, taking a step back, a great exercise, something to do right now if you haven’t done it already. Hopefully you’ve already started to think about that a little bit. in terms of your work for 2025, but simplify also, and even perhaps more importantly, for your audience audiences I’ve noticed are getting very, very picky with who they are learning from.

And people are not learning from the people who have the most information. People are not learning from the people who have not even necessarily the best information. They’re learning from people, and they’re building trust with those who can help them get results faster. Often as a result of simplifying methods.

And this is something that we are taking to heart here at SPI. And you’ll see come next year. And we’re already in the planning process and building phase of simplifying things, right? We’ve simplified the membership and how it works. It’s there’s just one membership, join the SPI Community, and there’s different ways that you can get involved with that simplifying the content that comes your way, the understanding of that content and how to move through it.

So inside of the community, we’ve simplified the pathways. To go from here to full time. And we’re going to continue to work on that. Because we want things to be simple. Doesn’t mean they’re going to be easy. Often times they’re not easy. But we want them to be simple. Because when they are simple, they can be understood.

And when they can be understood, those actions can be taken. And learning can happen. Simplifying was something that was a theme when writing my book, Lean Learning, which will probably come up a couple of times in this episode as a result of just taking a majority of my year and the year prior in a way.

Oh boy. I have a fun story to share about that in just a moment, but simplifying the frameworks, saying things in the book in a way where if I could say it in half the length of time or half the amount of words, then great. I should, because I want to simplify and make things easy for you to understand.

And audiences, like I said, are tired. Audiences are impatient and audiences just want to get moving along. So again, if you can help your audience understand the framework that you’re teaching, the methods to the madness in a way that doesn’t cause them to be mad. You’re going to be far better off. You’re going to stand out, even from those who have better information.

This is why I think it’s important to sit down and have space and time every single week to consider the things you are teaching or going to teach and go, how can I simplify this? What can I do to create a framework, a memorable framework? You might remember brand in a hand. Simple. If you think about your five fingers, your pinky are the people that you’re targeting within those people, you have your ring finger. What are their passions? What are their dreams? Desires, right? Your ring finger. Dreams. Desires. Your middle finger. The F U’s in that particular target market or the problems, right? Hence, middle finger. The pointer finger. What are you going to point them to? What platforms are you going to be on?

How can you direct them and what are those directions? That’s your pointer finger. Directions. Put those together. You make a fist with one finger left, you have your thumbs up. Thumbs up in terms of branding, marketing, messaging, positioning. But also you have your thumbs up because likely you’ll, at that point, understand who your audience is and what you can do to serve them.

How do we simplify that even more? You gotta know who you’re speaking to. And what their problems are, and what their dreams are. That’s it. That’s, that’s really it. When you do that, you will then be able to build those products, create that content, get in front of people, build an authority, earn trust.

Simplify. Rewind. Zoom out. What are the messages you’re sharing out there? Are you, in fact, attempting to make things simpler? Because that is of value these days. Simplifying is of value. Overwhelming, with more content, is not necessarily more value. Sometimes it’s overwhelming and confusing. Simplifying.

Theme number two. This one definitely speaks to the Pokemon channel and especially the new Shorts experiment that happened this year. I’m gonna share some numbers and share some results with you. Actually, let me pull up my YouTube channel right now. Short Pocket Monster is what we’re talking about. We have gone a hundred, at the time of this recording, a hundred and forty nine days straight.

Every day, the systems are getting easier, editing is getting a little bit faster, and the results keep going up. Just published a video, not one hour ago, and we’re already at 215, 000 views. And overall, since this experiment started, let me hit up my analytics here. Ever since this experiment started, we have gotten a total lifetime amount of views of 371 million views, 786,000 subscribers.

And we are now in the mid five figures in earnings from ads and some affiliate marketing, no sponsorships yet on this channel, but I’m not actively looking for that. This is only able to happen, and I’m able to now shrink the amount of time to create this because I’ve put in, this is the theme, reps. Get the reps in. Repetition.

Doing it over and over again, committing to that for a certain period of time. You don’t have to commit to it forever, but if you’re going to be doing something, you want to do it for a good amount of time. A month, six months, and say to yourself, I’m going to commit to it. Me winning is committing to this. Not necessarily the results of me committing to this, because we can’t always control that. And if you were to see this experiment happen, which started in July, you would see that daily I had about 700, 800 views. And then July, couple thousand, and then all of a sudden August hit. And then we had the millions of views per day happen.

But that was after almost a month. If I had given up, In a month because I was like, Oh, I gave it a month, didn’t really go anywhere. The more that you can put reps in, the more you’re going to learn and give yourself more of a chance to understand what is working and what is not. And on platforms like social media and YouTube, the more reps you put in, that’s more opportunity for your audience to find you for something to go viral.

The ability to do something daily is a very, very amazing skill. And it is something that takes a lot of work. We’ve seen success with something daily before with John Lee Dumas and entrepreneurs on fire. And I’m not saying you have to go daily with something like a short form channel, challenging yourself to come up with a show concept or a video concept that would allow you to easily and get excited about creating a daily thing.

For me, it’s daily opening a pack of cards and filming that and then voicing over it for other people it’s shooting a golf ball over their glass house and trying to hit a hole in one on their putting green behind their house and Brian C was a golfer professional golfer who did that and gained millions of views Millions of subscribers as a result of this daily thing and it was a simple concept It’s gonna hit this golf ball over his house and whatever day number it is is how many shots he gets Again, simplify, but also reps, get the reps in.

And if you can only afford weekly, great. Don’t do yourself the disservice of just trying to get it out and then moving on to the next, get it out there and learn, get it out there and figure out why is this not working or why is this working? What are others doing and how might I be able to adjust in my next one?

So imagine if you do something weekly, you have 52 chances. You have 52 reps, you have 52 opportunities. Imagine twice a week, now you have a hundred and four. Opportunities to get better, to learn, to make mistakes, to adjust, to get back up, to figure out what’s working and what’s not. Imagine daily, 365 opportunities to learn, to adjust, to simplify, to get those systems going.

Now there’s a very, very careful approach that you need to take. You do not want to commit to daily. If you do not, And you completely understand that it’s just impossible. Might be too busy, might have other things going on. But I gotta tell you, by committing to this daily shorts channel, and I’ve also published these videos on TikTok and also Instagram.

Instagram has grown to about 750,000 subscribers. It has made zero dollars. Instagram has made zero dollars, FYI. TikTok has grown to, at this current moment in time, 900,000 subscribers. And it’s generating about 6,000 a month through TikToks that are over one minute. And I try to make all of them over one minute, or just over one minute, so that on YouTube I can make it just under 60 seconds, and still fit in the Shorts feed right now.

Because they do, yes, allow longer Shorts, but that, Algorithm is just not working right now. It’s kind of messy. So I keep things under 60 seconds on YouTube over 60 seconds on TikTok It’s literally the same video Just the last part is stretched out or slow mo just a little bit to reach that mark and it’s doing very very very well. So anyway reps reps reps reps reps reps.

What can you do? And this isn’t just for business. This is for life You know, it’s like, showering daily. You do these things daily so that they just become automatic and you get better at them. Not that you’re competing for the world championship of showers. Although I’d be pretty good at that, I think. Extra foamy and sudsy with my loofah that I have.

Third theme. Flow not force. Flow not force. This goes along with the term flow state getting into that state where you’re just a little bit challenged And your brain is in that state of mind where you’re kind of just going you’re not even thinking Things are happening and all of a sudden you kind of have this out of body experience while things are going on and boom You’re done on stage.

Or boom, your podcast interview is over. Or boom, you finished your book. And when writing the first draft of Lean Learning, it absolutely felt forced. And I don’t know why. Maybe I’m out of practice. It had been, it’s been five years since my last book, Superfans, had come out. Superfans was so easy to write because it was from a presentation that I had done at least 40 times.

Reps, baby. Anyway, it felt forced. Writing felt like a drag. I want you to think about the things you’re doing in your business that feel like a drag. Feel like you’re just kind of slowly stepping through that molasses, or you’re like knee deep in snow, and you have to like lift your leg up so high just to move a little bit forward.

That’s, that’s not cool. And it’s hard to make progress and get excited about work when it feels like that. So my challenge to you is to find the fun. Fun helps you find the flow, right? When you’re having fun and you’re playing tag and you’re, you know, out there playing baseball or playing pickleball, whatever the case may be, you’re in the flow because you’re in the moment.

You’re having fun. You’re challenged a little bit. So you’re not like, okay, I’m going to move my hand over here and then hit the ball and then I’m going to take five steps forward and then I’m going to make sure I don’t step in the kitchen and then I’m going to back up when my partner comes up and because we don’t need two people, it just happens.

And yes, you’re going to suck in the beginning and then you get better. The more reps you put in, the more swings you take, right? And if you can get some guidance along the way, even better. There came a point with the book writing process where I finished the first draft. And the publisher got back to me, and they were not happy.

They were like, this is just a bunch of random things kind of put together. It sort of makes sense, but it just doesn’t feel like you. These people had read my books, Will It Fly and Superfans, and even Let Go. And they were like, these are very personable. This does just not feel like it is a book that you would write.

Right? We expect it different and the book’s due in about a month, so I don’t know if we can accept it. And I was like, it’s due in a month? So then a couple weeks went by. I had asked what I could do to revise it and change it up and they were like, I don’t know if this is I don’t know if this is worthy of saving, like it just doesn’t feel like it’s going to work.

So you know what I did? With a week and a half left, I went to April, my wife, and I said, Hey, I’m having this problem with the book, I need to create some space in the next week and a half to get this done by the deadline because I’m going to be rewriting the whole thing from scratch. It was either that or I have a failed project, I’ve let a lot of people down, especially the publisher who believed in me, and I took on that challenge.

I wrote every day for about six or seven hours. It was a grind. First day, absolutely terrible. I mean, I was in the thickest molasses that you could ever think of. But then, the day after that, I started to speed up a little bit. I started to understand it. I understand it now, is what I would say. And I started to pick up momentum.

And, lo and behold, after a week and a half, 50,000 words were written. And it is some of the best, writing that I have ever put out there into the world. The voluntary force function, if you want to call it that, which is what I call it. I put myself in that situation with heightened pressure with something at stake, which forced me to not overthink it, to not force things, but just go with the flow.

Wherever my mind was in this outline that we had, the stories I felt excited to share and write just started to flow out of my fingers. And that is where I found my best writing. And for me, it feels like I need that pressure and that deadline in order to find that flow. I need a countdown clock to be able to perform and shoot my best three pointers.

So I’ve discovered that about myself. I, I always knew that I didn’t think I’d ever utilize that strategy in a probably the biggest publication of my life. I mean, this is my first traditionally published book. Anyway, I’m very, very excited for all of you to read it. It is a lot of my life’s work in there.

Very personal stories, but also almost a calling to everybody to say, Hey, like stop with the learning, like start doing right. And stop worrying so much about. What’s going to happen five, six steps down the road? Like just focus on the next step and move forward and trust yourself. Trust this process.

We’re so conditioned to believe that mistakes are bad and failure is the worst thing in the world. Rather, I think taking action is the way to learn. So, force. No. Flow. Yes. Flow over force. All right. So remember, simplify reps flow, not force. Thank you all for an incredible year. SPI has changed my life. It continues to change my life and change the lives of many others.

And I’m looking forward to hearing your success story next year as a result of the work that we’re doing here together with you. So thank you so much. If you’re in the SPI community, shout out to you for believing us, especially in investing in us, because we are here for you. SPICommunity.com. If you aren’t a part of it, we’d love for you to be a part of it in 2025.

Invest in yourself, invest in us. We want to be the premier education platform for entrepreneurs and small business owners and personal brands. And we’re here for you. Thank you so much. And two more big episodes to finish the year. Strap in.

Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I’m your host, Pat Flynn. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media and a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Catch you next week!