SPI 808: How to Take Control of Your Time with Nir Eyal and Matt Gartland

Nir Eyal: The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. That's really the summary of my 10 years of research. That if you wake up every morning and your cell phone is right there, you're going to pick it up before you even say hello to your loved one. If you leave these type of decisions to the last minute, you will fail. But if you plan ahead, there is no distraction we can't overcome. Paolo Coelho said, "a mistake repeated more than once is a decision." So, how long are we going to complain about, "Oh, social media! All these things are so distracting!" before we do something about it? So a distracted person keeps getting distracted. They are choosing to be distracted because they keep making the same mistakes.

Pat Flynn: One of my favorite authors as of late is Nir Eyal. And he has written a couple books that have gone pretty wild out there, Hooked, How to Build Habit Forming Products, and Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. And we're going to talk more on the latter today, in a round table, with myself, Matt Gartland, and Nir, of course, himself, and we also get a glimpse into some of the other research and findings that he is doing with relation to a new book that he is working on, which is really fascinating.

But today we do talk about things like habits and willpower following through, how to make sure that you are being held accountable. What does that actually mean? And, and actually how to get to that next level in your business and in your life through the world that we live in today. And what I love about the way Nir approaches his work is it's always sort of science and research based and he explains it really easily.

I mean, there's a lot of authors out there who do science based findings for things that involve self improvement, but Nir, I find breaks it down easier than anybody else. And so enjoy this conversation between Matt, myself and Nir, and let's talk about leveling up in life and in business. Here we go.

Cheers.

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, it took him nearly 40 years to finally get over the fact he'll never be taller than six feet, Pat Flynn.

Matt Gartland: Hello friends, and welcome back to the pod. Another fun round table episode, as always with my partner in crime, Pat, and this time around a very special guest. We are thrilled to have Nir Eyal with us. Neer, how's it going? Thank you so much for being here tonight.

Nir Eyal: Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Matt Gartland: Yeah, we're thrilled to reconnect.

There's so many great things that you've been doing over the years that, you know, are, I think, as relevant and prescient as ever. So really just to kind of jump in, and it's a fun connection point back to even our relationship where it started, is your book Indistractable came out about five years ago, which was crazy when I looked back at that.

And more than ever, these days, I feel more pulled than ever, you know, there's more signals, there's more noise, there's more fractiles on the internet where I could be putting my time and attention. So I'd love to kind of even hear your perspective being really like you wrote literally the book on it.

Like, do you feel like distraction in the universe that we're living in, especially with online media, has it improved in the five years since the book has been out or has it gotten even worse?

Nir Eyal: For sure, the world is becoming a more distracting place. And why does that happen? Because it is the result of abundance.

This is the first time in human history that we have so much, right? If you are fortunate enough to be living in the industrialized world, you're much more likely to die based on a disease of excess, like diabetes, than you are starvation. And that's, that's the first time in human history that that's been the case for 200,000 years.

Humans have been plagued by drought and starvation, and this is the first time that we actually die of these diseases of excess in any significant number. So we're seeing something very similar when it comes to information abundance. That the price of progress, again, the price of all this progress, of having all these good things in the world, is that now we have to learn how to deal with them.

So yeah, it's a wonderful thing that for the first time in 200,000 years of human history, we don't have to be constantly bored. If you look at literature, if you look at, you know, the historical record, there's Boredom was a huge problem for people for 200,000 years. This is the first time in history where we have this amazing boredom alleviation device in our pockets at any time of day or night.

And that's pretty great. That's wonderful that we can learn a new language with Duolingo that we can use an app to read a book. We can watch videos about pretty much anything we'd like to learn about. But the price of all that progress is that we have to learn how to become indistractable. So I really think that there's a bifurcation that there's people in the world who will allow their time and their attention to be controlled by others, essentially have their lives controlled by others and people who stand up and say, no, I will control my time and attention.

I will control my life. Because I'm indistractable. So the world is definitely becoming a more distracting place, but that doesn't mean we're powerless.

Matt Gartland: So then how do we think about trying to reclaim some of that power or at least put, you know, the guardrails so much of that wisdom is in the book. I just wonder in five years, how have even your own applications of that right in your own career, with your own business, with your own family, you know, we all here have some kids.

So I'm curious, like how you've even adapted and evolved along the same guidelines.

Nir Eyal: Absolutely. So this is what the book is all about. And it took me five years to write Indistractable because I kept getting distracted. And so it wasn't until I learned these tactics for myself that I could put them to use.

So today I'm 46 years old. I'm in the best physical shape of my life. I have not quite a six pack, maybe like a four and a half pack, even though I used to be clinically obese. It goes to show I'm not very athletic at all. I've never been athletic. But I work out when I say I will, I eat right because I say I will, I have a better relationship with my family than ever before because I'm fully present with them.

I'm not on my phone. I'm not distracted. I'm fully present with the people I love. And so I have a better relationship with my wife and my daughter than ever before. And I'm more productive at work than ever before because instead of diddling around with email and slack channels and whatever other junk, I do the work that I say I'm going to do.

And so this is the skill of the century because there is no facet of your life, your mental health, your physical health, your professional wellbeing. All of this stuff requires you to be able to focus your attention. If you can't focus your attention long enough to read a book or to, you know, take an online course or to sit still long enough with your family over dinner without checking your device, you got a problem and we got to figure out how to fix this problem. And listen, I was patient zero. I wrote this book for me more than anyone else, because when I read everyone else's take on the subject, it was stupid stuff like, well, just tell your boss, no, right. Just say no more. That's stupid advice.

Who's going to, you know, the only people who give that kind of advice are tenured professors who can't get fired. If you tell your boss, no. You're going to get laid off. That's a stupid thing to do. Or here's a better piece of advice. Stop using social media. Stop checking email. Thanks, stupid. I'll get fired.

I won't have a career if I stop using these technologies. So I just, I didn't feel it was productive. It was certainly wasn't for me to tell people, stop using technology. Technology is the problem because you know, when I started studying this topic, well over like 10 years ago now, one of the first things I learned, Was that distraction has always been part of the human equation.

Plato, the Greek philosopher, 2,500 years ago was complaining about how distracting the world is. So the problem can't be caused by our technologies. It's not technology's fault. We love to blame the technologies. It's very convenient, right? It's Mark Zuckerberg's fault. I'm not doing it. But of course, what I learned when I studied the psychology of, of distraction is that the vast majority of distractions are not external triggers. External triggers are the pings, the dings, the rings. That's where everybody starts. They think they know how to manage distraction. Turn off your phone, grayscale your screen, turn off notifications. That stuff doesn't work because only 10 percent of distractions come from your phone.

You know where the other 90 percent of distractions come from 90 percent in here, right? They start within us. They're not external triggers, their internal triggers. So the big aha moment for me was realizing just digging into the basic research, starting from first principles around what is distraction.

Distraction is an emotion regulation problem. It's an impulse control issue. Your brain probably is not broken. You don't need any pills. What you need is skills. These are skills that we don't learn. I didn't learn them in school. And we don't teach our kids. How do you focus? How do you make sure that you can become indistractable?

It starts with, there are four big steps, so I can, I can walk through those in a minute, but the first and most important first step is to master the internal triggers. Boredom, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety. If you don't understand the root cause of why you are escaping reality with distraction, you're always going to get distracted by something, whether it's too much news, too much booze, too much football, too much Facebook, you're going to find distraction because you're always escaping a feeling.

So if you don't have tools to deal with the feeling, none of that other stuff is going to work.

Matt Gartland: I think it's, it's powerful to continue to even reflect on history as then a barometer of the future, right? I mean, so many of these things that truly can be, I get synthesized into constants, right? You know, some things are truly timeless.

And then just trying to acclimate ourselves as best we can to current state realities, but know that, yeah, some things there's just really common denominators for. It was an appreciation I had. for the book when we were working on it together. And I don't think I completed that thought in the setup, but it was one of the last book projects that I did before Pat and I joined forces and created SPI Media was working on on Indistractable.

One of the big takeaways though, of that time working together and then just even myself trying to, you know, continually work on myself in the same capacity, right? To try to do the internal work and then set up external environments, my office, other things to play a factor was how much of this was like on me personally, right?

And there's still that, that sense of self responsibility, of course, to process this information, to do the internal work and to do that. But what, what I've also found and would love Pat, you didn't even chime in on this as well, is surrounding yourself with other people that kind of believe in trying to operate in the same way, sort of like an internal and the small community effect where like, if I can have, you know, my team or my partners also like talk about these concepts, right, maybe together in our sort of safe spaces.

Trying to help each other has helped me in my own ability to reduce my susceptibility to distractions. And I'm curious if like more of a network effect has played into, you know, Pat, your lived reality with distractions and in your, if it even, even remotely begins to kind of overlap with some of the research that you've uncovered on the subject.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, I mean, for me, you can't read the label when you're inside the bottle. And sometimes when I'm in my own work or I'm even being distracted, I don't even notice it at times because it's almost automatic in many cases. And when there are other people who I've given agency to, to catch me or, you know, help me stay on track, it's always helped out.

And this is where my mastermind groups come into play. This is where my wife comes into play. This is where you Matt have come into play several times as well. It's like, Hey, we, we got something to focus on. Let's stay on the path. And, you know, some people need outside help more than others, but it's been vital, absolutely.

The hard thing is Nir the last time you were on this show, I think it was on a seven years ago, and that was after your, your book hooked, which plays directly with this because like these tools and social media, like they're not built to help us through these problems we're talking about right now. I mean, they're actually working against us, which is why I love that you follow this up with your book and they're not going to stop trying to hook us.

So for me, it is a willpower and discipline more than anything. And that is something that If you don't consciously think about it, these things are going to control you. You're not going to have control over it, and it's really scary what can happen.

Nir Eyal: Yeah, I'd love to build on some of that. So one of the things, the concept that I had to change my mind about was this concept of willpower.

In fact, we're starting to realize, and much of the psychology community has already come around to believing, that willpower is a myth, actually. It's not a concept that's actually a helpful psychological designation. In fact, we used to have this belief, that we called it ego depletion in the psychology community.

Ego depletion is this idea that you run out of willpower, just like battery charge on your phone, that it becomes something that you run out of. And there were some studies done by one very prominent professor that showed that in fact, this was true that people, when they were taxed with difficult tasks, they would run out of willpower.

They would, you know, use up the gas in their gas tank, so to speak. And so this got a lot of popular press. And then it turned out that as we do in the social sciences, when a study sounds fishy, when a concept sounds too good to be true. What do we do? We replicate the study. We run it again. And as far as we know now, a decade off from, from when these studies were published, it turns out that this idea of ego depletion, that we run out of willpower, like gas in a gas tank, as far as we can tell, the studies don't replicate. It doesn't exist. It's not real, except, interestingly enough, in one group of people. There is one group of people out there who really do experience ego depletion. They really do run out of willpower like gas in a gas tank. Who are those people? People who believe that willpower is a limited resource.

That's it. It's the only people that had this effect. So this is super important because when we hear things in the media all the time about how technology is addictive, how it's hijacking our brains, how we're powerless to resist it. In fact, what we're doing is reinforcing exactly what the tech companies want.

It's called learned helplessness. The media companies want you to believe there's nothing you can do, right? You're powerless because what do people do when they believe they're powerless? Nothing. So it's not me. It's not my parenting style. Oh, it's my kids are playing are on TikTok. They're playing Fortnite.

That's it's addicting them, right? The word addiction comes from the Latin slave, addictio. It's a clinical term and addiction is not, Ooh, I like it a lot. An addiction is a pathology, but we toss this term around as if we're all enslaved. And as Henry Ford beautifully said, whether you believe you can or you cannot, you're right. So one of the things I'm really fighting out there is this perception that we're powerless, that we're slaves, because that is the number one best way to give these media companies what they want is to believe there's nothing you can do about it.

So I think a much healthier approach is to see, you know, what media, all forms of media, whether it's the news, whether it's movies, whether it's social media. All form of media is fine. It's great as long as you use it with intent. I think the big problem is that people, they use these tools to escape a feeling.

And this is not something we talk about. We talk about willpower and grit and resilience. We don't talk about how to manage uncomfortable emotions. And if we can begin to identify those emotions and figure out, wait a minute, when I'm bored, I tend to check email because email will tell me what to do.

When I'm lonely, I check social media. When I'm uncertain, I Google something. When you can begin to identify the internal trigger, the feeling, with the action, then you can start taking steps to break that spontaneous stimulus and response relationship. But if we just go about our days thinking, oh, it's something broken about my brain.

I probably have undiagnosed this, that, or the other. I probably need pills for this because there's nothing I can do. Then we actually do become powerless. So that, that I think is a very important aspect.

Pat Flynn: And then confirmation bias kicks in and you look for signs that that's true, which like just furthers the spiral.

Nir Eyal: Totally. Absolutely.

Matt Gartland: Yeah, that's absolutely fascinating. I wonder how, again, with a certain sort of accountability mechanism, you know, and this is coming from a layman. I don't have social science or psychology to back up maybe a theory, but like I can physically feel more focused and in more control.

Maybe that's just my, my brain doing things, but when I am in a small group or I can get help from my mastermind, right. Or Pat and I are having a private conversation and we're able to really kind of refocus ourselves on what's important and kind of check in on priorities. That to me feels like it is helping to fade away some of the distractions or the impulse pulls that sometimes are just kind of their own, which is like they're in the ether. So like, is there any science or truth or, or backing to, again, the power of accountability in groups like that to try to assuage some of these, these impulses?

Nir Eyal: Yeah. So, so this is called a pre commitment device, which is just a fancy way of saying you're going to plan out what you're going to do and when you're going to do it. And this is very well studied. I mean, there's thousands of peer reviewed studies about exactly this mechanism that you're describing. There are a few different kinds of pre commitments, or you can think of them as a pact.

We have an identity pact where we have some kind of self image. So that's why the book is called indestructible. I made up that word. It's meant to sound like indestructible. It's who you are. It's an identity. This, by the way, comes out of the psychology of religion. When someone calls themselves a devout Muslim, they don't say, Oh, I wonder if I'm gonna have a gin and tonic with my dinner.

No, devout Muslims don't drink alcohol. It's who they are. When someone says, I'm a vegetarian or a vegan, they don't say, Oh, I wonder if I'm gonna have a bacon sandwich for breakfast. No, because that's who they are. It's their identity. So one very important pact is to have a new identity, to call yourself indistractable.

It is who you are. Because remember, behavior change always necessitates identity change. If you want to get in shape, you have to call yourself an athlete. If you want to learn a new skill, think of yourself as an academic, right? Thinking of yourself as a new identity is incredibly powerful as a tool. So that's one identity pact.

We also have a price pact where we have some kind of monetary disincentive. So the way I got in shape and stop being clinically obese and today I'm in the best shape of my life is because I have this price pact that every morning I walk into my closet, and I see this calendar on the wall and taped to the calendar is a crisp 100 bill.

And every day, this is called the burn or burn technique. Every day I look at that 100 bill and I have a choice to make. I can either burn some calories, right? Take a run, go for a swim, do some pushups on the spot, some kind of physical activity. It's a rule I made for myself. Or I have to physically light that 100 bill on fire.

So burn some calories or burn the money. So I've entered into this price pact with myself to do what I say I'm going to do. Right. To finish this book Indistractable, I made a bet with my buddy, Mark. I said, Mark, I'm going to finish this manuscript or I'm going to pay you 10,000. Works like a charm. It's the most one of the most effective techniques you can use so the only problem with these packs there's a couple other packs.

One of them is a social pact you described earlier the only problem is these techniques come last. Okay, if you listen to this interview and you say, oh great I know how to change my life. I'm gonna start making these packs and tip making bets. It will fail It will 100 percent fail unless you do the other three steps first.

So step number one, master internal triggers. We talked about those emotions. That's the most important first step. And I show you how to do that. Step number two, making time for traction, putting in your calendar time to do what is in accordance with your values. Step number three, hacking back the external triggers, all those pings, dings, and rings.

That's kind of the simple part, but super important. If you do those three things first, then the packs will work. What most people do if they try these packs, even the social packs that you talked about earlier, which are very effective, right? Entering into a pack and saying, okay, Pat, we're going to get together.

We're going to sit next to each other. We're going to keep each other accountable for the next 45 minutes. Go very, very effective. But if you do that last. It will fail. It will break. You have to first do the other three.

Matt Gartland: So they stack. It's one plus one equals three maybe equation. If you can be successful with the foundational layers, at least I would hope so, you know, they become more powerful collectively, right?

Sort of the unity of all the forces together.

Nir Eyal: It's like learning any new skill, right? If you want to play basketball, you have to learn how to dribble before you can dunk. So you really have to figure out how to manage your emotions. That's the most important part. You have to have those arrows in your quiver ready to go.

And people gloss over this stuff because I don't want to think about my icky sticky emotions, right? That's no fun, but I'm telling you, we have to acknowledge that distraction is an emotion regulation problem, an impulse control issue. So what I found in my research is that the most successful people, people who are at the top of their game, whether it's in business, The arts, sports, whatever it is, these people, they experience the same exact internal triggers.

They also feel lonely and bored and stressed and anxious. They feel the same emotions that everybody else feels, sometimes even more so than the average person. The difference is that those people know what to do with those emotions. So highly successful people, they don't do what most people do. Most people, when they feel a little bit bored, a little bit anxious, a little bit stressed, they look for an escape.

Give me a pill. Give me a drink. Give me a scroll. Give me a click. Give me something to take my mind off of this discomfort, right? What highly successful people do, they don't escape the emotion with distraction. They use it as rocket fuel to propel them towards traction. And so that's really the big difference.

But good news is that we can all learn how to do that.

Pat Flynn: I'm curious about, in terms of high performers, you had mentioned time for traction, calendar, and putting things on there is so important, but I know a few people who use them in completely different ways, right? There are people who will literally put minute by minute what it is that they're supposed to do so that they don't have to think about it, they're not going to get distracted, and that's not my style.

I prefer more time blocking, and this day is meant for this, and this day is meant for that, or in between these hours. I'm curious if there's perhaps one that works better than another, or is it kind of like a diet. You kind of kind of have to figure out the one that works for you. How do we best utilize our calendar in that way?

Nir Eyal: Absolutely. Okay. So step number one, master internal triggers. Step number two, as you said, is make time for traction. You have to turn your values into time because you can't say you got distracted unless you know what you got distracted from. I'm going to say that again. This is so important. You cannot say you got distracted unless you know what you got distracted from.

So if you have a big open white space calendar. What did you get distracted from? You didn't plan traction. So you can't say that you got distracted. You have to plan what you're going to do. Now I'll tell you what doesn't work. Pat, what doesn't work is when people say, I'm going to be spontaneous, right?

Whatever happens happens. I'm just going to go with the flow just so I can, you know, go wherever the muse takes me. That absolutely doesn't work. We know. From study after study that the more freedom, the more leeway, the more unscheduled time people have, the less productive they are, which is of course is an illusion, right?

How many times we have a weekend and we say, Oh, I've got nothing planned. I'm going to sort through the garage and I'm going to organize my bookshelf and I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that. None of it gets done. We need constraints. People operate best when they have some kind of constraint. And so the best constraint you can have is time blocking now.

And a lot of people have converted to this. Mark Andreessen, the famous venture capitalist and Andreessen Horowitz, he used to have a famous article about how he doesn't plan ahead. You know, if someone needs to see him, he needs, they need to come during the moment and that's just how he operates. And I was so happy recently, just last year, he said that technique doesn't work at all.

What does work? Time boxing. And that's exactly what I promote in my book is planning out what you're going to do and when you're going to do it. So this is what Elon Musk does. This is what Mark Andreessen now does. If you look at the calendars of highly successful people, they don't go with the flow.

They plan their day. If you look at the calendar of unsuccessful people, they don't plan their day. So what that means is you've got to plan out according to your values, right? Values are defined as attributes of the person you want to become. You have to turn your values into time. Now, whether you schedule them like I do where I do 15 minute blocks, some people do an hour block, some people do a minute block.

It doesn't actually matter what denomination you choose. The only thing that matters is that it's chosen in advance. So sometimes I'll actually schedule half a day. For example, when I'm with my daughter, we have what we call planned spontaneity. Sounds like an oxymoron plan, spontaneity. Why do I do that?

I have four hours with my daughter where we're just going to hang out and we don't know what we're going to do. Maybe we're going to go surfing. Maybe we're going to go to the library. Maybe we're going to go to the park. We don't know what we're going to do, but why do I plan that time? Why do I time block it?

Because that tells me what I will not be doing. I will not be putzing around on my phone. I will not be taking business calls. I will not be saying, Oh honey, let me just do this one thing on my phone. No, I have scheduled that time and devoted it to somebody I love very much because that's in accordance with my values of being an available father.

So that's why it's so important to schedule that time is not only what you will do, but what you will not be doing. And then you can experiment it, right? You can try 15 minute increments, 20 minute increments, all day increments. It doesn't really matter as long as it's planned in advance. Do not change it in the moment.

Matt Gartland: How far in advance are you doing that planning? Are you doing weekly planning, monthly planning? And, and I ask in part, because especially with say some of our, our community members trying to build businesses, they're in the early stages, they have lots of ideas. They're trying to, you know, kind of curate their ideas, right?

And the notion of going from an earlier stage of even a creative process, whether I guess it is a business endeavor or just even a hobby project or something, the question of, of that time horizon, like how far out am I trying to, to do that planning so that I can bring more focus to the thing and I can see a light at the end of the tunnel and I can stay committed to that end point.

Right. So I'm curious how you in your own work, in your own life, do that.

Nir Eyal: So in my 10 years of experience and working with thousands of clients at this point, I would say about 80 percent of people can do this once a week. That's what I do. So almost all white collar professionals have visibility for about a week's time, right?

That's about what we kind of know. All right, I wake up around this time and I tend to have lunch around that time and I, you know, have these tasks to do in these meetings. So that's what I do every Sunday night. Okay. 8 p. m. It's on my calendar. I have 15 minutes where I review my schedule from the week that just passed.

I look at my schedule for the week ahead and I make adjustments. Now, I would say most of my calendar stays the same, right? I tend to work out at the same time. I take meetings at the same time. I have my focused work sessions around the same time and I'll make adjustments. Oh, you know what? This person needed to meet with me at this time, so I need to move some things around.

No problem. So for me, the cadence is the every week I do it on Sunday nights. Sometimes I meet with professionals who say, you know what? I don't know what's going to happen tomorrow, right? Like, I don't know until I get there. So for example, doctors give me this a lot, right? Like I need to show up and then I need to know what's going on.

Then I can make my day. So the idea is that you make that schedule in advance. With the amount of visibility that you have into your day, week, or month. So if you can see ahead and say, okay, I basically know where things are going to fall out from my day. Then you can make it, you know, so many people I work with, they do it first thing in the morning.

Many people do it the last thing at night for the following day. I happen to, and about 80 percent of people I work with, we can do it once a week.

Matt Gartland: Pat, do you have any rituals? I'm kind of curious, even with your creative processes, you have a number of projects, obviously SPI, but you have the Pokemon channel, you have other things happening. So yeah, how do you even give some curation and definition to that?

Pat Flynn: Yeah, I mean, to add a little bit more color to this amazing discussion is one thing I've learned that I've needed to do is plan to plan.

If I don't give myself time to then figure out the time that's going to happen later, nothing happens. So when I'm working on a new project, okay, we need a two hour block of time to sit down and plan this project out. Right. And that has helped so much because not only just does it help me, but it helps everybody else who's involved in the thing.

When I'm planning a video shoot, okay, we need to sit down, figure to then talk about how we're going to shoot this thing. We don't just like get into it right away and put it on our calendar. We need to figure out the spacing and when, when this is all going to happen. And it's, I don't, I don't know if it's a different part of the brain, but it feels like it, because in some moments I need to be more creative and spontaneous.

And I do block time out for that as well. But other times I have to be in planning mode to think about my future time right now, and without that space, I think it would just be a jumbled mess.

Nir Eyal: Pat, I'm not surprised that you use this technique because this is something I see in successful people that unsuccessful people don't do.

And that is that they don't differentiate. I think I use different terminology, but you're already doing this. It's the difference between what we call reactive work and reflective work. Reactive work is reacting to notifications, reacting to emails, reacting to taps on the shoulder from your colleagues.

Everybody in their day has to have time for reactive work. That's just the nature of work. These days, the problem is that people get habituated to reactive work. Why? Because thinking is difficult. Most people do not like to think it requires cognitive horsepower. It's much easier to say. Huh? What do I do right now?

Well, let me check email. Email will tell me what to do. That gives me that nice warm glow of, Oh, I'm being productive. Even though if you're not planning time in your day for reflective work, reflective work is a kind of work that can only be done without distraction. Planning, strategizing, thinking for God's sakes can only happen during reflective work time without distraction.

So if you are not planning some time in your day, to think, and that could be 30 minutes, an hour. It doesn't matter, but you'd have to have some time in your day for reflective work. If you're not doing that, I guarantee you you're running real fast in the wrong direction.

Pat Flynn: I think I remember Ramit Sethi talking about how he reserves his Fridays specifically for that kind of planning, right?

He's doing his work. He's doing his calls Monday to Thursday. 20 percent of the week is dedicated to literally, okay, let's strategize for the future. Let's all come together and think in a way that we just didn't have the space to do so earlier in the week. And so he's a high performer. He's doing well. I know a lot of other people would do that now too, that you've said that.

So I appreciate you calling that out and giving it some structure.

Nir Eyal: It's kind of an untapped competitive advantage. I mean, if you look across your industry, most people ain't thinking. They're not. People are not thinking. They just do. They just react. They don't reflect, but game changers take time to reflect. Now, the reason people don't do this because they don't realize you have to plan that time ahead.

So even when they do plan that time, they do it for like five minutes and then they have to check email and then they have a notification and then the, the, the, the, and they don't have the time to properly think about the task in order to make those game changing discoveries. So you, you've got to not only plan that time, but keep it sacred.

Pat Flynn: I don't know if you know this Nir, but I have started a YouTube channel in the Pokemon space and it's been doing really well. We're almost at a million subs. And there's been a lot of other Pokemon YouTubers who've been in the space for such a long time. And they're starting to notice how quickly we are growing.

And they're just like, where did this guy come from? And you're producing all these amazing videos and the audience is going to you. And we've been here for such a long time. Like why aren't we getting views? And it's interesting because I just see them habitually creating the same videos every week, and it's the same thing.

They're not giving themselves time to step back and go, okay, let's actually talk about what the audience wants today. The audience has changed over the last decade. And of course me coming in new, I have a new perspective and I do plan time with my producer to go, okay, what is trending right now? What's coming up later in the year?

That's, that's interesting. Oh, the Olympics are coming this year. Can we do anything related and around that? Okay. Well, we got to start that planning now. So now we're ahead of everybody because we have given ourselves time, literally the space to come up with stuff. And like you said. And you're spot on, just a lot of us are on automatic mode because it's like, okay, one podcast a week, let's go, let's record it, let's schedule it, we're in it and we're doing it and we're feeling like we're getting busy work done and maybe we're not seeing the results because we haven't given ourselves time to plan a big bold move that can, that can help us jump up.

Nir Eyal: Totally. And not only is that, do we see that in the professional space? That that's very relatable. Unfortunately, and here's where it gets pretty raw, we see the exact same results and deficiencies when it comes to our personal lives. How many of us give scraps of whatever's left over in our schedule to our significant others, to our kids, to our brothers and sisters, to our parents, to our best friends.

We just give them whatever scraps of time are left over. And what this leads to, I mean, my, my mission in life here, the reason I wrote indistractable was because I don't want to live with regret. My goal is to live the kind of life that I can look back on and say, wow, I did what I said I was going to do.

Not what social media said I should do, not what the New York times or my friends or whatever else said I should do, but I lived my life according to how I wanted to live it to minimize regret. That's, that's the idea is to kind of become the kind of person that I would admire by doing what I say I'm going to do according to my values, as opposed to, you know, letting the wind blow me this direction, that direction based on other people's interests.

Because if you don't plan your day, somebody is going to plan it for you. So that's why we can apply the very same techniques that we would to our business, to our own life, to our personal life, to make sure we have that time with friends, with our family, by the way, also time for yourself. You know, we see a lot of people ragging on different behaviors, you know, Oh, you like to go on social media.

You like to play Pokemon. You like to watch YouTube videos. Oh, that's a waste of time, right? That's ridiculous, right? We see so much negativity around how people spend their time. People are so judgy around how other people spend their time. Oh, what you play Pokemon? That's ridiculous. What a waste of time.

But oh, I watch four hours of golf on TV. That's somehow okay. Ridiculous. That makes no sense. So we need to stop moralizing and medicalizing these technologies and realizing anything you want to do with your time is fine. Enjoy it without guilt, but do it according to your schedule and your values, not someone else's.

So the difference between traction and distraction is one word. And that one word is intent. As Dorothy Parker said, the time you plan to waste is not wasted time. So if you put in your calendar, Hey, I like to watch YouTube videos. There's nothing wrong with that. It's in my calendar. See, there it is. Now it's traction.

In fact, anything else would be distraction. So it's not that I'm arguing for, you know, this acidic life that you have to just work all day. No, no, no. I want you to plan time for the fun things in life. That's what makes life worth living. But again, have it scheduled according to your values.

Pat Flynn: I'm going to give you a second to pick up the mic you just dropped real quick.

Matt Gartland: Pretty darn good. What I find fascinating, interesting, maybe even difficult, right, to talk about publicly, and I don't know this way because we'll publish, but even privately is, at least in our industry, there is like literally the term creator now, like the identity to even or with the identity point that you brought up earlier Nir is now ingrained as to just execute to make a thing and make as much stuff as possible.

There's sort of this implied idea that if we slow down to plan, if we go slower, right, that is a bad thing that you're not hustling hard enough. You're not working fast enough. Like velocity is, is a big thing, right? Or at least it's implied or even externally discussed in that way.

Pat Flynn: If I'm not creating, who am I?

Right, Matt? It's like, so therefore I must create and create more.

Matt Gartland: Yeah. But if your primary identity, and this is something that spicy takes and whatnot, like if creator is your primary identity, it's something that I think is somewhat of a slippery slope, if not even, you know, a dangerous thing to the, the ultimate concluding thought or the end point of, Oh, I just, thus must always be creating.

Right. And, you know, create with intent is, is a different thing than just like create on autopilot. Or at least that's my interpretation of some of this conversation and just my own work, our work together, the creating communities were a part of. So I think it's a real thing to like consciously. Choose to slow down, right, and plan and dial things in and to look at the right KPIs and signals in your business or whatever it is that, you know, you should maybe be calculating right and looking at to then further inform your path is probably even harkens back to your example with the Pokemon if you're probably looking at certain signals, right?

In your analysis with your producer to further inform what you plan out and execute, but you got to slow down to do that.

Nir Eyal: The important part I think is it's not necessarily about the pace per se. It's about isn't in accordance with your values. So values are defined as attributes of the person you want to become.

So what does that mean? It means you look at how does the person I want to become spend their time. And so I give people these three domains, you've got you, you're at the center. If you can't help yourself, you can't help other people. You can't make the world a better place. Then you've got your relationships, right?

This is part of the reason we have a loneliness epidemic in the industrialized world is that people don't make time for these close relationships, particularly with friendships, right? Friendships don't die, right? They starve to death. You know, people who lose touch with their friends, they don't end these friendships because they got in a big fight.

That's pretty rare. They end these friendships because, Oh, we haven't talked in a long time. And I don't know. I guess we're still friends, but if we were friends, we would have talked a long time ago. So what happens now? We're not friends anymore. So that happens because we're not making time for those relationships, let alone with our kids, with our spouse, et cetera.

And then finally the work domain, which we talked about reflective and reactive work. I think the part that's, that's missing is the frame by which we assess how we turn our values into time. So I actually advise people not to make too many super longterm goals. Like for your example, if you're saying, my identity is to be a creator that that can be helpful, but it shouldn't be, you know, a forever and ever type of goal.

I think it's very hard people to define their values by saying what's important to me, right? Write down my values. Most people have a really hard time with that because we have conflicting values. I want to be an available father, but I also want to be a great business person, right? Like these are conflicting values.

So the reason a time box calendar is so powerful is that it forces you to make these trade offs given the constraints. If you want to know someone's values, you look at how they spend their time and how they spend their money. Now what they say, you look at how they spend their time and how they spend their money, right?

The problem is that for most of us, we're so stingy with our money. We look for sales and coupons and deals, and we split checks because we want to save a buck when it comes to our time, we just give it to whoever wants it. Oh, there's a stupid thing trending in the news. There's a war 5, 000 miles away. Oh, let me give my time to pay attention to those things, as opposed to spending the time the way I really want to, with intent.

As opposed to people who, who spend their money in a way that's very cheap and they count every penny, what we should be doing is being generous with our money, but stingy with our time. And why? Because we can always make more money. You can always make more money, whether you're Bill Gates or Elon Musk, you cannot make more time.

So I think we need to be stingy with our time, but generous with our money because time is a non renewable resource. So when we turn our values into time, when we say to ourselves, you know, I'm just going to plan a week's time, that's it. No more, no less. I'm not thinking about five years from now, certainly I'm not thinking about a lifetime, just this week.

How would the person I want to become spend their time, meaning how much time would I spend taking care of myself? So if personal health is important to me, well, do I have time in my schedule for exercise? Do I have time for rest? Do I have time if I like playing video games? Is that on my schedule, right?

How would the person I want to become spend their time, time with my relationships? Is it in your calendar? And then time for work, of course, reactive work and reflective time. So having that time in advance on our schedule is the only way we can turn our values into time. And then that will change over time.

So if you find, you know, like for one season of my life, being a creator was super, super important when I was writing my books, that was really my top priority. So I could see I had to make more time in my schedule, without neglecting my other values. But then after the book was done, you know what? I wanted more daddy time.

I wanted more time with my daughter and I could adjust that week by week, as opposed to having a very calcified identity that this is the way it has to be all the time that tends to stretch you in too many directions at once because you just can't do it all. Whereas when you put it on a calendar, you have to operate under those constraints.

Pat Flynn: I've heard a lot of other creators talk about that similarly with seasons, like, this is my season of writing a book, so therefore, during that season, yes, it'll be, you know, I'm gonna be waking up early and sacrificing a few things to get that done, but once that's done, it's my season of being at home all the time with the kids, just like you said, I've heard that, and it works really well.

And the idea of time being something that we shouldn't just hand out, although we do, it reminds me of this movie. I don't know if either of you have seen it, but it starred Justin Timberlake. And it's where time till death shows up on a person's arm and it's like a ticker. It goes down, but you can exchange time with other people so that you can live a little bit longer.

And it like changes your idea of like what time means when you realize that you only have so much of it to offer and the decisions you make and the things that you do change because of that, and that's actually how it is versus like you said, money, you can always make more money. It just doesn't feel like it or it doesn't feel like there's an unlimited amount compared to I don't know.

It's just relationship with time and money is so important here, and I'm so glad you called that out because it's, I mean, we see it with our kids are growing up so fast. I only have four summers left with my son. Crazy, right? You know, before he's out, it totally changes the decisions that I make and where I spend my time.

And I've had to tell myself that if I catch myself going down a TikTok rabbit hole, that that is time I took away from my kids with the limited amount of time I have with them. That gets me to shut off the app and go back and, and, you know, play catch again or something.

Nir Eyal: Yeah. Yeah, totally. And look, there's nothing wrong with some time on TikTok.

You know, parents, we need a break too sometimes. Sometimes I say, you know what? I've had enough kid time. I need to go do something on my own for a little bit. And that's, that's totally fine. But again, it should be planned. It shouldn't be I can't stand this feeling that I have right now in my head, let me go play a video game.

Let me go hang out on Tik Tok. Rather it should be, okay, I know that time is coming in my day. And this kind of is counterintuitive in that. One of the things you can do for yourself as well as your kids, you know, many people there's asked me about how do I help my kids become indistractable and there's a whole section in the book on how to raise indistractable kids.

One of the best things you can do is actually schedule the distraction. So if you're struggling with TikTok or email or YouTube or whatever it is that you find you're using for psychological relief from discomfort, in fact, putting it on your calendar, scheduling time for your kid to play that video game that they, you think they're addicted to, it's one of the best things you can do.

Because now the brain isn't constantly thinking, when can I play, when can I play, when can I play? I know exactly when I'm going to play, it's in my calendar, it says right there. So I don't have to constantly keep ruminating about it.

Matt Gartland: Yeah, very powerful. That, thinking back to a younger version of me, I will at least label myself as old, you know, now with kids and everything else.

I, I just wish these sorts of conversations were happening earlier, and again, I wish I had more access to that stuff 10, 15 years ago, you know, when you, you're an early stage entrepreneur, you're young, you don't have some of these important other kinds of constraints to like a significant other, or maybe you're married, maybe you have kids yet, right?

It's, it's at least it was for me easier to justify just drifting, right. And spending more time working or hustling or things with less intent. So if anything, you know, we're trying to like pull some of this wisdom forward to like the next generation of entrepreneurs that, you know, Have the next best idea, right?

But still to try to practice these disciplines and actually turn them into muscles and habits now, right? Far in advance of maybe other life events, you know, happening down the road.

Nir Eyal: That's right. Yeah. And, and look, there's nothing wrong with hustling hard, right? Like if you want to go be an investment banker or build a startup, you're going to work a lot of hours and that's, and that's fine.

I'm not saying people shouldn't work like crazy. If you want to work 24/7, that's your prerogative. It's not up to me or anyone else to tell you how to live your life. Okay. What I want to help people do is to live the kind of life they want. If you say you want a certain type of life, if you know you're capable of more, but you're not doing it, that's what I want to help with.

So I'm not going to tell you exercise and you know, here's what you need to eat. And then, you know, no, I'm not gonna make any judgments. If you want to play video games all day long, great, do it. But I want to help you do it with intent because the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. I mean, that, that's really the summary of my 10 years of research.

The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. That if you wait till the last minute, right, if you're on a diet, but the chocolate cake is on the fork, You're going to eat it. If you're trying to quit smoking, but the cigarette's in your hand, you're going to smoke it. If you wake up every morning and your cell phone is next to your nightstand, right?

If it's right there, you're going to pick it up before you even say hello to your loved one. So if you leave these type of decisions to the last minute, you will fail. They will get you these distractions. If you plan ahead. There is no distraction we can't overcome. So there's a wonderful quote, Paolo Coelho said, a mistake repeated more than once is a decision.

Such a good quote. A mistake repeated more than once is a decision. So, how long are we going to complain about, Oh, social media! Oh, video games! All these things are so distracting! My email! All these things are so distracting! Before we do something about it. So a distracted person keeps getting distracted.

They are choosing to be distracted because they keep making the same mistakes. Whereas an indistractable person says, okay, I see what you did there, right? You got me distraction, but I know that there's only three causes for every distraction, an internal trigger, an external trigger or a planning problem.

That's it. There is no other source for distraction. So an indistractable person says, okay, I'm going to take steps today to prevent getting distracted tomorrow.

Matt Gartland: That's your second or third mic drop probably in one episode. That's outstanding. It has, these things tend to happen. It is evaporated on us. Nir, this has been just a remarkable chat and you're continuing to write and expand upon all of this work.

Where can folks go to engage on that and get the latest and greatest from you?

Nir Eyal: Absolutely. Thanks. Yeah. I'm working on my third book now, so that'll be a few years ahead. But if you want to follow my writing until I get there, I publish a lot of my ideas as I'm working on my next book. And so my blog is called Nir and Far.

Nir is spelled like my first name, NirAndFar.com. And my latest book is called Indistractable, how to control your attention and choose your life.

Pat Flynn: Neil, may I ask you, can you give us a little heads up on maybe the topic that you're focused on for the next publication?

Nir Eyal: Yeah, sure. It's about beliefs.

It's about how our underlying beliefs affect our reality. And it's, it's an old topic. It's probably the oldest self help topic, but there's been a lot of research lately that's kind of overturned our understanding about the effects of beliefs. So for example, I've been going really deep into placebo research.

Placebos are frickin fascinating, and there's all this interesting research that actually now, I'll give you a taste. So, we used to think that in order for placebo to work, you had to not know that it was a placebo, right? So you'd go into the doctor, and you'd be in some clinical trial, and they'd say, okay, you know, we, we don't, it's a double blind controlled, randomized control study, so the doctor doesn't know if the pill is a placebo or not, the patient doesn't know if it's a placebo or not, and then we could see if the placebo has an effect.

And we used to think that you had to be deceived in order for the placebo to work. You had to believe you were getting the real drug. Turns out, that ain't true. That in studies where they tell people this is an inert substance, it has no pharmacological effect whatsoever, it is a placebo, it still works!

It's called an open label placebo. And in fact, the placebo effect in clinical trials, you know, like if you're a pharmaceutical company and you're, you have a new drug, you have to prove it's more efficacious than a placebo, right? The problem is that year after year after year, drug companies are having a tougher time getting their medications approved because the placebo effect is getting stronger.

The placebo effect is getting stronger in the general population in all of us. Why? Because more people are hearing about the placebo effect. And so it's turning out that it's beyond the belief. You don't even have to believe it's the medication, that there's something hardwired in us around expectations, essentially beliefs around, around how things should work.

That actually does change our perceptions. Placebos can't cure cancer. They can't cure heart disease. But turns out they have an amazing effect in Parkinson's. They have an amazing effect in insomnia, in depression, in anxiety, ADHD. I mean, the list goes on and on and on all the things that placebos can do. So that's just kind of a taste of what I'm working on now.

Pat Flynn: Thank you for that. That I cannot wait for that.

Matt Gartland: That's a fantastic trailer on what's ahead. Yeah. Excellent. Nir, thanks again so very much for everyone listening. Thanks so much for tuning in. We'll catch you next time in our next special episode of around table. We'll catch you then.

Pat Flynn: All right. I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Nir. Again, you should definitely check out his books, Indistractable, Hooked, pay attention to what he's got going on for his next stuff about beliefs, placebos. I want to know more about that. And I'm glad that we have somebody like Nir who is kind of advancing on that stuff, researching it, understanding it. And again, like I said, in the intro, he's so good at taking all of this stuff and making it easy for us to not just understand how it works, but how to apply it in our own lives as well.

So Nir, thank you so much. Matt, as always, thank you for joining me here on the podcast.

And I hope you enjoy this one until the next round table. We have more Friday episodes, some coaching calls ahead, and of course, our amazing interviews on Wednesdays, which you'll see coming up very soon. So if you haven't done so already, please hit subscribe.

I look forward to serving you the next one. We'll see you then. Cheers.

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. Our senior producer is David Grabowski, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media, and a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Catch you next week!

SPI 791: How to Generate More Course Sales and the Crossover between Data and Art with John Ainsworth

John Ainsworth: Sending out an email promotion every month, one of the reasons people don't do that is because they feel salesy and spammy if they send out regular email promotions. So the trick is people think it's either send out an email promotion and then feel salesy and spammy and my audience hates me or don't send out an email promotion. But there's a third option, which is send good email promotions that people like receiving and make your sales at the same time. So that's the trick. And that's actually where the bulk of the additional revenue for most people is available, is just sending out good email promotions on a regular basis.

Pat Flynn: What I find very interesting about today's guest is not his awesome British accent, but rather the kind of juxtaposition between his domain name and really what he's about plus the name of his podcast. So let me tell you both and then we'll get into it. The name of his podcast is The Art of Selling Online Courses.

And this topic is something that is near and dear to my heart. It's near and dear to a lot of your hearts as well, since you might be selling online courses or looking to sell an online course in the future. And of course, online courses have changed a little bit over the years. And we do talk about that a bit.

But here is the name of his website, DataDrivenMarketing.co. So our guest today, John Ainsworth, is going to help us with the crossover between the two, data driven marketing and the art of selling online courses. He also has a third website where you can get an actual personalized audit of your own funnels called PimpYourFunnel.com. So, I mean, we're kind of going through all the spectrum here, but all of it is here to help you and serve you. And online courses, winning strategies. It's all what we're going to talk about. So let's get right into it. Here is John Ainsworth from Data Driven Marketing and The Art of Selling Online Courses.

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's not sure if a wireless mouse should even be called a mouse anymore. Because there's no tail. Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: John, welcome to SPI. Thanks for being here, man.

John Ainsworth: Thank you very much. Delighted to be here. I've been a fan of the show for many years.

Pat Flynn: Well, I appreciate that. And I was so grateful to be on your show and everybody's going to be grateful that you're here because we're talking about making more revenue, generating more sales with our online courses.

And a lot of this can be used for whatever it is that we're offering online. Because there's a lot of principles that will matter. And The Art of Selling Online Courses is your podcast. And like, tell me why it's more of an art. Why isn't it just like, oh, numbers and stuff. Like what makes it an art?

John Ainsworth: I know, right?

Because my business is called the Data Driven Marketing. So we're totally all about the numbers. And it's because my copywriter was coming up with possible names for the show, and she thought that one was the coolest one. And we all liked it. And that's it. There's no, I don't know. There's a bit of an art to it, right?

So there's a certain amount of science and a certain amount of art to it. What we've tried to do as much as we can is like boil it down into like systems and processes and stuff that you can do repeatedly. And then within that, then there's a certain amount of creativity that you have to do inside of that framework.

Pat Flynn: Were you always into marketing and data driven in your previous life if there was one?

John Ainsworth: So my first thing that's kind of led me to here was I started off in sales. When I was a student, I had your typical rubbish jobs working in a factory and all that kind of stuff. And then I saw this advert for job selling.

Actually, I don't think they said in the advert what it was. It said just like travel to America, meet lots of people, get great experience. I was like, Oh, this sounds interesting. And it turns out it was a job selling books door to door. And it was absolutely brutal. Know, 80 hours a week, commission only, they give you a week's training, and then they kind of throw you out in the field and off you go.

And I did really well at it, and I made a lot of money in my summers when I was a student selling books door to door. But it was, it was like, oh, it's hard, man. It's a really hard thing.

Pat Flynn: You're in the UK. Yeah. Yeah. And you went from the UK to the US during the summer because of an ad. I mean, that's good copywriting, number one. To sell books, how do you do that? Like, what's the approach when you go into a bookstore? It's like, Hey, I see you have like thousands of books already. Like, do you want another one?

John Ainsworth: Oh, you sell it door to door. You sell it to people, like to family books, go to people.

Pat Flynn: Okay. I mean, that's even worse.

John Ainsworth: These books were for helping people with their homework. So as families, you had school aged kids helping them with like the maths homework, English homework, that kind of thing. You know, you've got encyclopedias back then, you know, or the internet just kind of started to exist and that kind of stuff helped with doing like big book reports or doing like big assignments.

And this was for more like the little bits of homework, how to do algebra, how to remember the names of all the presidents, whatever, that kind of thing.

Pat Flynn: I see. So was it, was it hard for you to, I mean, you got good at it at some point where you naturally get at that at, at the start or?

John Ainsworth: Oh, no, no, it was terrible.

How'd you get better? So my first week, my first door, I remember going and knocking on it and they given us this whole script and we'd practice the script and we'd got amazing at it over the course of like a week and we really nailed it. And I got up to the first one. I'm so nervous. I just, the guy opens the door and I look at him and I just go, everything's gone.

My whole head is completely empty. And I just look at him and I go, books?

And he's like, no, I was like, Oh, okay. Then I moved on. But I basically, I just got obsessed with it. I was like, okay, right. I know that this is a thing that other people can do. There's a process for how to do it. Let me learn how to do it. And they had a whole manual for it. And I'd just go home and I'd study the manual and I'd read back through it and I'd practice all the stuff and every day I'd be like, right, I'm going to get better at this one little part of it and I just get better day after day, week after week.

And then I went back like three different summers and did it again and again until I got, you know, really, really good at it. Nice.

Pat Flynn: So it was reps. It just took reps for you to get it.

John Ainsworth: Yeah, reps and like, it's quite easy to have rubbish reps. Do you know what I mean? Like we just do the same thing again and again, but this was like, you know, really focused on, okay, how do I make this a bit better?

How do I make it a little bit better? I quite like that whole, what's that term? Kaizen? You know, like 1 percent improvements, just a continuous little improvements kind of approach.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, James Clear, Atomic Habits, 1 percent better every day kind of thing. And I think that relates very well to, business online.

I mean, a lot of us go through our rubbish first door knocks, if you will, on the internet and like, you've seemed to have figured out how to do this very well. So in today's world, you know, it's early 2024 right now, John, what is working for generating revenue? Cause I've been in this business for 16 years.

There are principles that always remain the same, but things are changing all the time. It's confusing. It's hard. Give us a little rundown. What, what framework systems should we be worrying about right now? And then we can get into the dirty details after.

John Ainsworth: Yeah. So there's three main elements that work for increasing revenue, especially if you're selling courses.

The same thing applies if you're going to be doing e commerce or selling services, but the details change between whatever you're saying. So when you're selling courses, there's three main areas. One is how can you make more revenue per client? The second one is how can you make more sales to your email list? And the third one is how do you grow your email list bigger? And what most people who are in this kind of space are doing is they send out one or two bad email promotions a year. They have low revenue per sale. They have low numbers of promotions, the emails themselves aren't good, and they're not building their email list that much.

Now, listeners to your podcast are probably doing a better job at a lot of this stuff, because I know you cover a lot of these things. But that's the general trend. That's like 95 percent of people that I see. So if you can correct those and have high revenue per sale, good percentage of your email list buying, and a bigger email list, then overall you make a lot more money.

Normally, like five times more, that kind of thing.

Pat Flynn: I think it's interesting that you started with more revenue per user. That's really interesting to me because in most cases, I think, especially for the beginner, it's like, okay, we need more people to just know about us, right? I mean, yes, maybe we have a few sales here and there, but we need more.

We need to introduce ourselves or get in front of or interrupt somebody else's thing to put our thing into it. However, you're saying no, like there are people who are already potentially buying from you. This is for maybe you had a first lunch, but there's when you say more revenue. We're not just saying like, okay, I should just double the price of my course, right?

What do you really mean?

John Ainsworth: Yeah. So what else can you sell those people? So the people who buy something from you are 20 times more likely to buy something else from you. That's approximately what the data shows with our, with our customers. 20 times. About 20 times. Yeah. So if you've got an email list and you've got a percentage of that email list you've bought from you before, those people are 20 times more likely to buy the next thing from you than the ones who haven't bought something from you before.

And it varies slightly, but that's the right kind of ballpark. So once someone's bought something, why not offer them something else to buy from you? And that could be an order bump or an upsell, or it could be, you know, ongoing membership, something like that. So the reason I put them in that order is because that's the order that we recommend people to do them in.

Because it's easier to make more money from an existing customer than it is to grow your email list. And the reason for that is you make more money right now when you start making more money per customer. It's the easiest one to see the result from it. So I had someone come up to me at a conference a little while back and he said, I saw your talk at a previous conference and I implemented the order bumps and now I make 5,000 more per month.

And it's like, that's fantastic. Like it's the only thing that he changed. He just did that one thing. It makes 5,000 more per month. And I was like, did you do tactic number two? He's like, no, I totally forgot that it was anything else. That's the only one that I remember, but I did that. And that made me five grand.

I'm like, okay, cool. I've got tactic number two for you. Tell me again in a year, how you got on with that. And so the ways that you do that is there's two really simple ways, order bumps and upsells. So if you're selling courses at the moment, this is about how do you offer an additional product to someone as they're buying from you.

So an order bump is an additional offer that you have on the checkout page and an upsell is an additional offer that you have after the checkout page, like the confirmation page after that. Apart from that, they're basically in concept, kind of the same thing. It's just offer them something else, but technically they're in different places and then there's slight nuance to what you offer.

Pat Flynn: So how do you make an order bump, you know, this is before checkout, not feel like the aisle at the grocery store where it's just like, Hey, okay, you're checking out. You got your stuff that you needed, but gum, beef jerky, the little travel Advil's, how do you make it not seem like you're just kind of siphon as much money as possible, but how do you make it more valuable?

What kinds of things are good order bumps?

John Ainsworth: Yeah. What we're looking for is something that makes the course that they're buying be quicker To implement or goes along with it nicely. So for example, if you're selling a course, you might sell additional workbooks, or if you're selling a main course, you might have a secondary course that kind of goes along with it. As we've got a client who was selling a course for about 600 and it was about SEO. It's about how do you build up the traffic that you're getting and then they had as the order bump a whole bunch of pre research niches. So they'd gone and they'd found like there's 30 or 40 different niches that they thought were going to be, you know, good for SEO that you could be like, but that's the topic. That's the niche. I'm going to be focusing my content on that. They've already done a bunch of the work for you in advance. So people can kind of see why that makes sense that it's not an essential part of the main course, but it's something else that makes it easier, makes it faster for you.

Anything that you could put as a bonus, you also could put as an order bump. I think that's kind of a good way of looking at it. It can't be an essential part of the course that you've just missed out. But if there's an extra thing that you can come up with that makes it easier for the person to implement it or faster, then that fits really well.

Pat Flynn: How would you know whether to make something a bonus versus an order bump? That seems like it might be hard for a person to decide.

John Ainsworth: Yeah, I guess maybe that's part of the art of it, I suppose. How would you decide with that? That's an interesting one. So here's what we do, right? We go through all the products that somebody already has, and normally people have got more stuff that they've ever made than they even realize.

So people have in their head, Oh, I've got this main course and this main course. Okay. What have you ever created? Have you ever done an additional Q and A webinar that you no longer have available for everybody out there? Do you have any extra training that you did in person that you recorded? Do you have anything that you've ever done that you've sold through a partner that you don't have as a main offer?

Just list everything that you've got, then look through all of those things and say, which of those would make the best order bump. Now that's not necessarily the perfect order bump, but the huge benefit of doing it this way is you can get something up straight away. And if it doesn't convert, if people aren't buying it, then you can go back and say, okay, that wasn't perfect.

Maybe we're going to try something else, or maybe we're going to make something bespoke. But the biggest mistake that I see people make here is that they try and create, they say, ah, I've got the idea. I know what the perfect one would be. I'm going to make that that's going to take me two months and then they don't get around to it for four months because I've got other projects going on and then they don't do it.

That's not the approach. The best one is make a list of everything you've got and then choose something from in there and go that, let's try that out. And I think if you're making your course and something feels at that point, like it belongs in the course and you, yeah, call it a bonus, you call it part of the main course.

Don't include that, but find something else that fits with it. So I had a friend actually who did had a main product was for marketing agency owners, and it was a training on how to run some specific part of their marketing. And the order bump was. A Q& A with other agency owners about the biggest mistake they made when implementing their marketing.

And so it was obvious that that didn't have to be a part of the course. It wasn't how to do the thing, but it fitted really well. It was really kind of nice fit with it.

Pat Flynn: That's nice. I like that because you're right. I mean, we can think of a good one and then we have to create it and then we're not going to do that.

But you might already have those assets. What system or tech are you using to do the order bumps? This often will hold people back as well. They're just like, well, it sounds like a good idea, but I don't, I don't know how to do that. Do you have any recommendations?

John Ainsworth: Yeah. I mean, most of the systems that people are using for either checkout software or for course hosting like Kajabi or Thinkific or Teachable have all got order bumps in there.

So as Thrivecart, so as ClickFunnels. So most systems have already got this in. If the tech stack that you are using doesn't allow you to do order bumps, then don't do this one first because changing tech stacks takes ages and it's so much a form of procrastination. It's really easy to go, I'm going to change to the perfect tech stack, and this one's going to be exactly right, and none of them are perfect.

I've never seen anything that people are like, Oh, my God, every single thing about this is exactly the way that I want to be. You've got to make some compromises. So just go with what you've got. If you can't do order bumps, but you can do upsells. Do upsells. And if you can't do order bumps or upsells, leave that for now and focus on doing more email promotions and then come back to this at some point once you've implemented the other steps.

Pat Flynn: Nice. Final question on order bumps. Also, I want to throw in SamCart in there as well. That could be easy one to add on top of anything else you have to do. Order bumps, that's what they specialize in. Last question. Order bump for additional access. Is that something that you'd recommend? It's like, Hey, here's a 30 minute call with me if you pay this much or get into this cohort that will allow us to connect together for a certain period of time for our course or something like that.

John Ainsworth: Probably would put that as an upsell. And the reason is, as a general rule, we found that about a third of the price of the main product is a good price point for the order bump. And about the same or more expensive is a good price point for the upsell. So if you're offering a 30 minute call, unless your time is being offered quite cheaply, then probably that's going to be more expensive than the course that you're selling.

So I probably wouldn't put that in. I've got a friend who he does that as I don't know if you know him, Jack Hopkins. Oh, yeah. He runs Piano in 21 days. And he's got, I think, two free sessions with him or something like that as the order bump. And it kind of works for him because not that many people actually ever book those sessions.

But then that's not great for his customers. So he's like, is that good? Is that not because if people aren't ever booking that thing, well, I've just spent money on something. They're not actually using, which doesn't, you know, it's not amazing, but if everybody booked them, he'd almost definitely stop doing it because.

He would just be booked up with all of these one on one sessions with people. So, I think you need to be charging a good amount for any one to one session. And the same thing with, you'd said about like, you know, get access to me through whatever, a cohort or an ongoing session. That's probably going to be more expensive.

I think you talked when you came on my podcast about it being maybe 300 bucks if you're buying the course and 500 bucks if you're also buying the access for the cohort kind of process to go through.

Pat Flynn: Exactly. In general, your time is valuable. You don't want to cheapen that, right? And that anchors the other things too, that you have going on.

You don't want to cheapen, in fact, you kind of want to also just keep that higher. That's premium so that everything else will feel like, okay, well, I can't get access to Pat or to John because it costs a lot. So I'm going to, you know, this course sounds like a great deal versus the other way around.

That's really great. Okay. So that's order bumps and upsells. You obviously talk a lot about this on your podcast. There is some art to it. There's a lot more science behind it as well. The more you do something, the more data you get and the more you can analyze what is working and what's not, and continually making changes over time.

When you. Are looking at the data. I'm curious. How often are you looking at data and what kind of data is important to you when it comes to sales? You know, obviously, revenue is important. But beyond that, what are we looking at? And how do we analyze that best?

John Ainsworth: Yeah, we break this down into a lot of small steps.

And then we know what the benchmarks are for each one of those steps. So therefore, you can tell exactly where you should be focusing. So most of the revenue for course business comes from sending email promotions. So we're looking with that with how many emails were sent. Yeah. How many were opened and what was the open rate?

How many were clicked and what was the click through rate? How many of those people actually got to the sales page? So you might lose some people between the click and the sales page, especially if it loads slowly. Then how many people got from the sales page to the checkout page? How many people went from checkout page to buying?

And then what percentage of those people who bought got the order bump and what percentage got the upsell? So it's a funnel. It's like the numbers in a funnel. That's exactly what we're always looking at every single time. So every email promotion that we do, we'll track all of those numbers and then we'll analyze them and go, How did it do?

Was there any step in there that wasn't good, that needs improving?

Pat Flynn: How do you track easily? I know a lot of people get flustered by that and it's like, Oh, now there's like five different tools and there's numbers from each of them, right? Your email service provider, and then it's like the click through rate, but then they go from there to the sales page. And so you have to look at traffic, but then. traffic to conversion into the sales page and then checkout, it just again could be very overwhelming. Can you simplify this for us?

John Ainsworth: Yeah, so we do it all in the spreadsheet. We don't use any fancy software for it. So we'll be using, let's say it's ConvertKit, right?

We're going to be using ConvertKit for what was the open rate, what was the click through rate? How many emails were sent? And then we'll be using Google Analytics typically for what was the conversion rate from the sales page to the checkout page from checkout page to buying is easy, right? Because that will be in whatever software you've got for the sales.

You have the number of sales in there. How many people bought the upsell will be in there as well. How many people bought the order bump will be in the checkout software. We put that all in the spreadsheet, and then there's a formula that calculates the conversion percentage. We don't ever do it in anything more complex than that, because that is the simplest possible system that can get you the result and that keeps everything under control.

Pat Flynn: I like that. It's kind of, it's just raw at that point. There's no connections and APIs. And I mean, I know a lot of, there are tools that are available that try to help you see the funnel and those can work too, if, especially if you've figured it out, but if you or a small team or a solopreneur, it's going to be much, much easier to just kind of go to the raw data for important metrics.

So there's a lot of conversion points here, right? There is the conversion point of just open emails from email to click, click to sales page, sales page, to. Of the entire funnel, where do you think is the biggest opportunity for people to generate more revenue?

John Ainsworth: The way to look at this is what steps are you currently not doing?

So let's say you already got email promotions going out and they're going to a sales page and you've got a checkout page. Now you can make your sales page convert better and you can make your checkout page convert better. But if you don't have an order bump at all, then it's the easiest win is to just put an order bump in because you're guaranteed it's going to do better when you've got something versus when you have nothing.

So the first thing to do is go through and actually just put all of those steps in place. So anything that you're currently missing now what most people are missing completely are having an order bump, having an upsell and then doing email promotions regularly. Most people only do email promotions like once or twice a year.

So for example, Black Friday is one time when everybody does it. And then everybody has this giant spike in sales when they do the email promotion. And then the rest of the year, they're not sending email promotions out at all. And then they don't have that spike in sales. So one of the things there is sending out an email promotion every month.

Now, if you've only got one course, that's tricky. But if you've got, let's say, three courses, then every month you could do a promotion for a course, and then after three months, you cycle back through again and start again. One of the reasons people don't do that is because they feel salesy and spammy if they send out regular email promotions.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, the pitchforks are gonna come and get me if I promote too much.

John Ainsworth: Yeah, and they feel uncomfortable about it. And they're worried that their subscribers will unsubscribe, which are all fair, yeah, fears, right? That's all things that could happen. So the trick is it's not a, it's a false dichotomy. People think it's either send out an email promotion and then feel sales can spam me and my audience hates me or don't send out an email promotion.

But there's a third option, which is send good email promotions that people like receiving and make you sales at the same time. So that's the trick. And that's actually where the bulk of the additional revenue for most people is available is just sending out good email promotions on a regular basis.

Pat Flynn: So define good email promotions.

John Ainsworth: So it has to be really, really valuable content for those people who aren't going to buy, because in every single email promotion, about 99 percent of people are not going to buy from that promotion. So you want them to actually think the content was valuable and want to stay on your list.

So we've got a structure of kind of framework of how we always do this. But I would say that you want at least half of it to be useful content, even if someone doesn't buy that thing from you. And even if someone never buys from you, they should actually be getting value from receiving all of these emails.

Pat Flynn: It's funny because when I do a webinar, it's like, Oh, it's got to be 45 minutes of incredible value because I want it to be worth a person's time because their time is valuable. And then I can go into a much easier, not even pitch, but it's just the end of the conversation is, Hey, if you want to work more with us. Like here it is. Yet when we think about emails, we don't think about it in the same kind of way. Although we are still asking people to spend time reading that email, why not make it valuable? So what is a valuable email to a subscriber related to a topic look like? Is this a listicle? Is it a story?

What's in that email specifically?

John Ainsworth: So we've got a framework that we use where it's 11 emails that go out over two weeks. And the Framework for it is pain, agitation, solution, gain, logic, fear, future casting, frequently asked questions, going, going, gone. So that's the overall framework and kind of break down if you like what all of them are, but that's the kind of the overall structure.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, I mean, we don't have to go through necessarily all 11, but let's go through the first one pain. So the first email that goes out that then talks about a course or something that we're offering. What do you mean by pain?

John Ainsworth: Yeah, so we're not mentioning the course at this point. at all. Oh, not at all. No, the first week is just value.

So what we're trying to do is so pain, agitation, solution emails is the pain is talking to them about this is a pain point that you're currently feeling and you're trying to make sure that they understand their own problem more clearly than they previously did. If they believe that you understand their problem, they're more likely to believe that you might have a solution for them.

If they don't believe you even know what their problem is, why should they think that you can solve it? But we're not just trying to show them that we know what it is, we're trying to help them understand their own problem at the moment. And then the agitation, when we're talking more about, okay, this is what that might mean in your life.

This is what emotions you might be feeling because of this is what knock on effects that might have in your which they probably don't even realize because they're too day to day within their own stuff that's going on. Let's say they've got a new puppy and their puppy pees on the carpet and they're just like frustrated because they haven't managed to train their puppy first.

So first of all, your email, you're talking about the pain of what that's like. And then the agitation you're talking about, okay, here's how that might affect you in the future. Here's how six months later you is going to feel because of this thing, which you know, and they don't know, you know, because you've gone through it.

That's a separate email, right? The agitation is like email. Yeah. Okay. Got it. So as a sequence, and yeah, that's great. And then the solution is, well, let's give them a tip. Let's help them to actually solve that problem right now. Even if they don't get your course, we're just solving, we're just giving them a tip on how to solve it in the solution one.

Pat Flynn: I like that. I talk about quick wins all the time. And sometimes I go into the quick win way too fast. It's like, Hey, if you're dealing with, you know, a puppy that pees on the carpet, here's a quick win for you. Because I want to give as much value as fast as possible. But I think it's so important that I need to be reminded often that we really need to lean into the pain and the just relatability.

And this is where story comes into play. This is where a case study might come into play or data like studies, like 68 percent of people who don't take care of this end up either getting rid of the puppy or, you know, having fights with the other people in the house because of it. And we don't want that to happen to you too.

And it's like the more care you take into setting things up, the more a, the solution is wanted. and B, the easier it is to just bring it up in a conversation like manner where it doesn't become salesy. I think almost it's salesy if you don't do the pain and agitation part. It's like you're just trying to jump into what you have to offer.

You're not really trying to be relatable, right?

John Ainsworth: Yeah. One of the things that goes wrong, I think, in people's psychology with this is that they're so worried about how they feel about themselves that they don't think enough about how does the audience member actually feel when they're reading us. So the starting point for this has got to be this person has got a problem. You have got a solution. We want to help them. We've got to forget about ourselves. We've got to get rid of our own thoughts about our own insecurities. And what if someone thinks this about me, what have you? And really focus on this audience that I've got. Some of them have got a dog that is peeing on the carpet.

We've got to help these people. And we've got to think about like, how's that affecting them? How's that affecting their life? And I've got a solution, which is I've got this course, which is going to help with that. And with training their dog overall, if they buy the course, their life will be better. So it's my duty to try and get that across to them and not like force it down their throat, but to actually like, see, can I help this person to see that this thing can solve their problem?

And when you start to look at it like that, it, Gets a little bit easier because your own fears and worries and concerns don't get in the way so much.

Pat Flynn: That's so true. A lot of things are coming to mind where we kind of jump to trying to be problem solvers so quickly that we forget to do the listening part up front.

That helps a person realize that you know what they're going through, right? I'm sure you could talk to my wife about that, in fact, about me. Anyway, what goes after sharing the solution? So that's like email number three. You mentioned a bunch of other letters and we can pick apart a few of those.

John Ainsworth: Yeah, so gain logic fears the next one.

So this is reasons why someone should solve this problem more deeply. So our first few emails have talked about the problem and got them thinking about it and make him giving them that tip. Now we're starting to launch the course and tell them yes, you can actually go and buy this course, it's available, it's going to help you to solve this problem.

But the content of the email, the gain logic and fear all about why should they solve the problem. So the gain one is about what benefits are there going to be to them, by solving this problem, whether it's through getting your course or through something else. The logic is all stats, figures, examples of like specific numbers, studies, whatever about people who've solved this problem, how much better their life has been or have you.

And then the fear one is about the emotions of it. What are someone concerned about losing if they don't manage to solve all of this? So each of those they're going to appeal to each person to a certain extent, but some people will gravitate more towards one of those angles or more towards another.

Some people are more fear based and some people are more logical and some people are more gain based.

Pat Flynn: That's really great. Now, I know you go deeper into this in your podcast and you have a website called Pimp My Funnels?

John Ainsworth: No, Pimp, Pimp Your Funnel. Pimp Your funnels. Pimp Your funnels. Yeah, I went to buy Pimp My Funnel and I found that Russell Brunson had already had the same idea and he bought it before me.

Pat Flynn: I mean, great minds think alike, you know. No, that's cool. So yes, definitely check those places out and you go much into deeper detail about each of these things. But one thing that I'm thinking of, that like none of this works if we're not getting people to open our emails. Yeah. So what are we doing and how do we get a person to see our email and click it when literally that's what everybody else is trying to do at the same time?

John Ainsworth: Yeah. So I think this is really just about trying to provide as much free value as you can. And I think most people who certainly a lot of people who I'm talking with are making lots of great content on a regular basis. They're creating a podcast or they're creating YouTube videos or they're writing blog posts and the simple version of this is just sending out useful links to all of those things and saying here's what's great about this video.

Here's what I'm covering and then sending out somebody a link to it and so that most of what those people are receiving from you is either useful educational content or entertaining content or what have you so that they are used to seeing stuff from you that is good and they want to click on it and go open and it builds up your authority and it builds up your your open rate I don't have any kind of magic, clever tricks on that.

It's just send those out on a regular basis and make sure they're really good content.

Pat Flynn: I mean, it sounds like the regular basis part of this is really important so that you can almost in a way, train your audience to know that every time they open one of your emails, every time they see it in their inbox, that there's going to be something worth their time in there.

John Ainsworth: Yeah, absolutely.

Pat Flynn: And then I know that it's really important that once you get a person to click on that email, it almost becomes sales page, like in the sense that you've got to hook a person in the beginning of that email or else they're kind of out, right? They got to understand that that is for them.

So in, for example, the, the pain email or the agitation email, how are you starting those emails?

John Ainsworth: A lot of it's based around either stories or stuff that's based on what your audience have told you. So one of the things that we do as an essential starting point, whenever we're working with a client, is that we do a survey of their audience.

We do a customer avatar survey. So we will send out a lot of questions like what is the benefit that you got from the course if they bought it or what benefit are you looking to get in your life? What problems are you currently facing? We ask them stuff about, you know, age and gender and we're trying to understand what kind of people are in our audience and we're learning as much as we possibly can about what their problems are, what their desires are, what they would do to solve this if they didn't get the course from us, et cetera, et cetera.

And we do two things with that. We make a customer avatar from that. So we're saying, okay, this is the kind of person who we're targeting. It's much easier to write for one person, even if they're an imaginary amalgamation of everybody in your audience, than it is to write for 50,000 or 100,000 people.

And the second thing we're doing is we're making a customer language document. So we're taking specific words and phrases that are repeatedly used by our customers, and we're including those in the customer language document. And we can also use going through forums or comments on YouTube videos or whatever else anywhere their audience has been participating to pull that information in from.

Once we've got that, that's what we're using in the emails. So we're talking to them about their pain points, not what we think their pain points might be, but what they have told us their pain points are. So that's all the stuff that we're taking and we're, we're saying back to them. And then we obviously might talk to them about how they're going to be solving that, how our understanding of that pain point, but our starting point is the raw material of what is our audience saying to us.

Pat Flynn: That's such a great tip. It almost becomes like you don't have to necessarily even guess anymore. Like, you know what the words are. You just kind of have to put them in the right order and, and try to hook them. Are you using or are you and your team using any AI or tools like Chat GPT to help you with coming up with this stuff?

And if you do, like, what are the things we should make sure to do so that it's just not like generic content that we're putting out there?

John Ainsworth: Yeah, we're testing it. And sometimes it's good. And a lot of the time, it's not at the moment, we're still working on, you know, which different tools might give us better results, the best process we've got so far that has worked the most reliably is we take all that data, I take our customer avatar and we tell that ChatGPT, we'll paste that into ChatGPT and we'll get it to say it back to us. So summarize this customer avatar back to me to show that it's got that in the memory that it's understood. And then we'll say, okay, and here's the customer language document.

And then we put that in and get it to say some of those phrases back to us to make sure that we've added it in. Right? Is it? And then we say, now what we're trying to do is we're trying to create this kind of an email. Now we're doing the pain email. Here's an example of that email. Now pretend you're a copywriter and write a version of that email for this audience.

Promote it. And we'll also tell it like, this is the course that we're promoting. This is the topic. And so feed all of that data in at the beginning and then get it to write the email back for us. With our current copywriter, we're finding that is getting her stuff that it takes it just as long to go through and redo as it would do if she just did it herself in the first place, but if you're not any good at writing emails, that process might be the starting point that you need, you know, feed all that data in and then tell it to give this a try, create a draft one for you.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, you got to train the system and what are you going to trade it on all these things that we just talked about? And I think that's really smart. And then over time, like, hopefully you get to pick these things up and they just become a part of how, you know, you, you know, your audience.

Well, you know, and then just those micro improvements over time and with every email. So we talked about a few things we talked about order bumps and upsells really important. Start there. It's quote unquote low hanging fruit, as they might say, to send more emails, but not just more emails, good emails using the system. We talked a little bit about the framework, and we featured a few of those. And then the end of that sequence, before we move on to the last bit, was the going, going, gone. Can you speak to that, and what that actually means, and what that might look like in terms of an email sequence?

John Ainsworth: Most people procrastinate on making a decision about most things.

So what we're doing in the going going gone is trying to deal with what is it that's stopping them from actually going ahead and getting the course. The standard way of doing these, the more salesy way of doing going going gone emails are saying it's 48 hours till the sale is over. You must get it now, otherwise there's discounts never going to be available again. That kind of thing. What we're trying to do in the ones we're sending is understand what is the actual problem that's stopping somebody from buying. What is the actual issue that's getting in the way? Is it procrastination? Is it fear that they'll never be able to actually achieve this result themselves?

What is it that's their blockage? And then we're addressing that head on and saying, you know, if you buy in the next two days, you're going to get a discount on this course. But the real thing is that if you make a decision now, you'll actually have the course and that's going to help you to deal with X.

But you're probably feeling Y emotion, right. Let's address that and talk to you about why that's not a valid reason not to go ahead and actually do this. And that might be procrastination or fear or whatever else it is.

Pat Flynn: So uncover any known objection that might be there stopping a person. So I know a common one, you know, I've done courses for a while is, Oh, I don't know if I'm gonna have enough time right to do this.

Like, this sounds great, but I'm already busy. I don't have any time. How do you refute that?

John Ainsworth: Yeah. So there's a beautiful approach to dealing with this. It works really, really well, which is you say to someone, okay, let's imagine that you've only got, let's take an imaginary scenario, one hour a week to deal with this.

You're not going to go through the whole course because you're not going to have time to do that. You're just going to choose this module, one of these three modules. And here's how you're going to decide which module it is that you're going to go through. And you're going to do one hour a week. This is the minimum amount that you might put in, and this is how your life might be different in a day, a week, a month, three months, six months.

If you do just that amount, if you do the whole course and you put five hours a week into it. Man, it's going to be phenomenal. But just that one hour, you still can have a real difference in your life. And it's actually going to be worthwhile. And here's how it's going to look for future you. And he'll be so glad, or she'll be so glad that you did that.

And here's the emotion that that future you is going to feel.

Pat Flynn: That's really good. I really like that position. Let's do another one. This seems expensive. Like the price is, you know, I know this is a common one as well. It's like, that's a lot of money, John. I don't know if I could, I can get it for maybe cheaper elsewhere.

It's not, it just costs a lot.

John Ainsworth: So there's a couple of different angles on this depending on what you're selling. So if you're selling something that's B2B, you're selling something that's going to help them to make more money. Then it's possible to break that down and give examples of, okay, this percentage of our clients who went through and did this made X amount more money.

Here's how that all works out in terms of it actually being worthwhile. And it depends whether they're saying it's just a lot of money or it's a lot of money compared to doing something else. Because there's something else, for example, might be going and just learning all from YouTube or listening to podcasts or what have you, which they absolutely can do.

That's like a totally valid argument. And the answer there is yes, you totally can do that. And if you have the time and you don't have the money, you Great, go do that. I've been making the podcast for three years. Go download all these episodes, knock yourself out. It's going to be fantastic. But what I've done in the course is I've put all that information in the correct order to make it really easy for you to be able to implement this.

And I've added in all of these additional resources to make it quicker and easier for you to be able to actually do everything. And you know, for definite that what you're getting in here is up to date and it is valid and correct. It's from me right now in 2024. So this is going to save you an enormous amount of time by buying the course and actually implementing that right now.

And if time is not the issue and money is, then I totally understand don't buy it. But if you just don't have enough time available, then probably it's worth spending the money on it because it's going to save you X number of hours.

Pat Flynn: Masterful. That is great. Let's do, let's do one more. These are good.

Actually, why don't you tell me what is a common objection that a person might have that we can address in our emails during our campaign?

John Ainsworth: Yeah. One of the things is that people just don't believe they're actually going to get the results. You know, they're not actually going to implement it. They're not going to follow through and do what they're supposed to do.

And that might be time or it might be something else about them. Right. So let's say it's around weight loss and everyone thinks, well, I've already tried all these other programs and they didn't work for me and they didn't stick. Well, presumably you've got some kind of a model, some kind of a mechanism that is different that you think is better.

So for example, I've got a friend, Ollie, who teaches learning languages through stories. And his angle is, you might not want to learn this, you might get bored learning these languages, you might find that you never stick with anything because it's all so dull. And therefore, what I've done is I've come up with this method called story learning.

And it's fun, and it's entertaining, it's interesting, and you can learn through reading books in other languages that you like, or learning through watching TV shows in other languages that you enjoy. Or I've got another friend who sells language learning courses, and she teaches people perfect English grammar.

It's called Shona. And her audience are people who want to get the grammar exactly perfect, they don't want to get it nearly right. They want to get it exactly correct because they tend to be academics and someone who's done really well in school, but in a different language. And so her angle is you haven't managed to be able to do this before because other people aren't focusing on getting the grammar perfect.

They're saying, go and just try out the language and talk to people and walk out into the world and just have a chat with people. And that frustrates you because that doesn't fit with what you're after. Well, in my classes, we're going to focus on making sure that you get the grammar exactly correct because I'm teaching this in an academic fashion that fits with exactly the way that you work.

Now they have completely different audiences to each other. Neither one's audience would buy the other ones course, but for their audience, they can say, this is why this thing is going to work for you for the kind of person that you are, this is why it's going to work for you. And that helps address that fear of Oh, I'm not going to do this.

I'm not going to implement it because I didn't manage with all these other ones.

Pat Flynn: That's really great, John. Thank you for those examples. Lastly, again, we talked about upsells and order bumps, and then we talked about sending more emails and we broke those down and we went into just a beautiful exercise here with the objections for the going, going gone part, et cetera.

The last one, correct me if I'm wrong, was just build your email list up, right? This is, and this is often where people start, which is why I love we started kind of in reverse order. But if John, you only had today one method available to you to grow your email list, what method would you choose today and why.

John Ainsworth: There's a very simple thing that most people aren't doing, and it's actually doesn't take terribly long to implement it, which is to take whatever your best lead magnet is, so you've, I'm assuming someone's already got a lead magnet of some sort, some free resource that they're giving away in order to get someone to the email list and just actually promote it everywhere. So if you're blogging, put the lead magnet, put adverts for your lead magnet, top, middle, and bottom of your blog post, put them in the sidebar, put them as a pop up, put them on your homepage.

Everywhere on your site, put those promotions for it. And what we typically find is about 0.5 percent of people's website traffic typically converts to joining their email list. That about 95 percent of the people I talk with, it's between 0.5 and 1%. And if you just do this, you can typically get to about 2%.

And the same thing with YouTube videos. If you've got lots of YouTube videos, but you never mentioned the lead magnet in the description or the pinned comments, just put it in every single video you've ever done go in and put a link to that lead magnet in there. So it seems so basic, but most people just aren't doing it.

And therefore, that's the easiest win is just to go and implement that.

Pat Flynn: I like that. You know, we often are hoping for the magic potion to do a lot of this stuff for us. And more often than not, the real answer is the thing that it was always in front of us and available to do. And this is another example of that.

So, John, this has been absolutely incredible. Thank you so much for the breakdown today. And if people wanted to go deeper with you, where should they go and shout them out?

John Ainsworth: Yeah. So if you want to learn about any of those specific tactics in more detail, then go to The Art of Selling Online Courses. We've got a YouTube channel with that name and a podcast with that name.

And if you just want the direct link, go to DataDrivenMarketing.co/podcast or DataDrivenMarketing.co/youtube. If you want us to do a personalized breakdown for you of what tactics should you implement and link you to some free training, then go to PimpYourFunnel.com and fill in the form there, and we're going to ask you for a bunch of numbers about what you've currently got in place. And we'll send you a link saying, this is what you should be doing. This is training on how to go do it.

Pat Flynn: Amazing. John, you're incredible. Thank you so much for coming in today. I appreciate you. And hopefully we'll get a chance to chat again soon.

John Ainsworth: Thanks, Pat. Really appreciate it.

Pat Flynn: All right. Take care.

All right. I hope you enjoyed that interview and conversation with John. Super smart. And I cannot wait to see what implementations you take away from this particular episode. Again, The data driven stuff, knowing your number is really important, but there is an art to that.

There is sort of a, of an understanding that it can only come once you do. And once you implement, and of course, if you've implemented and you need some help, you can go over to PimpYourFunnel.com to get a personalized audit for your specific business and brand from John and his team. Or DataDrivenMarketing.co/podcast. And check out his website as YouTube. And of course, this podcast, The Art of Selling Online Courses. I love how niche and specific that is. Yes. I said niche, not niche is I'm sure he would say it, but anyway, John, thank you so much for coming on today. I appreciate you. Thank you for listening all the way through and make sure you hit that subscribe button so you don't miss out on some of the upcoming episodes coming your way to help you in your business and with your brand as well, we're here to serve you. Thank you so much.

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. Our senior producer is David Grabowski, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media, and a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Catch you next week!

SPI 759: AI-ify Your Business with Rick Mulready

Rick Mulready: I think the first thing that people need to understand and get on board with is it's here. It's not coming. It's happening right now. And you can push against it and that's all well and good, but your business will be passed by people who are leveraging AI. It is an opportunity to streamline your business, work fewer hours, and increase profit.

Pat Flynn: Today, we're going to be talking about AI for business, businesses like yours, and we're going to get specific and we're going to get into some strategies. And the reason why I wanted to share that is because I actually had an episode come out earlier in the year about AI, but it was more positioning the fact that because AI is here and because we just can't ignore it, we're in it now to remember that there is the human element that's necessary, the personalization to still succeed in business.

Don't let AI take over your entire business. However, I had a lot of comments from that episode basically saying, Pat, okay, we get that, but what are the good strategies for AI for our business? And there's nobody better. Then the person that we have on the show today to talk about that because he has actually changed his business He's actually pivoted from what he was doing before to dive in headfirst and go expert level on AI for business and application of AI tools to systematize to get more time back and all those kinds of things from the tools that we now have access to.

And I'm speaking about none other than Rick Mulready. That's right, the former host of the podcast, the art of online business. He's somebody who has now shifted his business model to again, focus on AI. And we're going to get into some specific frameworks to help you inject AI into your brand in a way that makes sense for you, not just kind of get into all the bright, shiny objects that are out there.

We're also going to talk about specifically how to prompt AI and tools like Chat GPT to be able to maximize the results coming from them, not just use them right out of the box, if you will, but how to train these systems to be able to work better for you and better for you over time. And then finally we're going to be talking about specifically the different levels.

There's four levels of AI. And I found out during this conversation that I was actually just at level one. The way that I was using AI is maybe level 1.5 max. And we're going to get into how to integrate it into level two and to level three, and then eventually into level four into your business. So also do know before we go into this episode that Rick and I typically have coffee every single week.

And I decided that we were going to try something different today for this podcast episode. We were going to bring you along on one of our walks while having coffee. So you might hear some crunching of the ground. You might hear some car noises. You might hear some goats, we'll share with you why those goats exist right at the beginning.

But yeah, come on this walk with us. Have some coffee with us. Enjoy the show. Here is Rick Mulready from RickMulready.com.

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, if he could live anywhere else in the world right now, he'd live in Japan. Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: Rick, welcome back to the podcast.

Rick Mulready: Thanks for having me. I've actually never done a podcast interview like we're doing.

Pat Flynn: Like we're doing? Like walking through There's literally goats right next to us right now because in our neighborhood, they have goats eat, like, the dry brush so that they don't catch on fire.

Yeah. Because fires are a thing here in San Diego. The brush, not on fire, not the goats. Right. We don't want the goats on fire. The last time I did this was actually with Rameet Sethi. Yep. And it was the only other time I've done it. And back then, Caleb was with us and he had a backpack full of equipment and it was a wire from that backpack.

He was following us with a microphone and I had to continue to pass the microphone back and forth. A wired microphone? A wired microphone. And it was like 20 degree weather in New York. Oh. So this is much better. Yeah. So what I love about this style is we can just kind of be casual, we're walking, there's a different kind of energy.

Yep. And I wanted to start with, the last time you were on the show, you actually had a podcast many people might not know this. Yeah, but you don't have that show anymore. What happened and why?

Rick Mulready: I decided to sell the podcast.

Pat Flynn: Sell the podcast. Yeah, dude, that's a wild thing to think about.

Rick Mulready: That's kind of the reaction that people give me when I when I tell them what you know It's kind of weird to say what happened with it because nothing happened with it.

It just, it was something that came up in a conversation with somebody who used to be one of my coaches inside of my coaching program. So he was coaching members of my program. He is one of the early members of the coaching program that I used to have. I've gotten to know him over the years, just a great person.

And it just sort of came up in conversation in early 2023. And decided that with the move that I was making into AI and teaching AI, which we're going to be talking about, to online businesses that, yeah, let's, let's do this. Like it's an opportunity that I never, I never in a million years thought that I would sell the podcast.

Pat Flynn: Well, why sell the podcast instead of just talk about the thing you want to talk about on the show that you already had?

Rick Mulready: Yeah, and that's something I thought a lot about because obviously I had you know, there's a built in audience that I built up over the years I mean the show is very successful, but I felt like I didn't want to you know, I've been talking about one type of well serving online businesses in all different facets right from you know scaling and ads and team and hiring and all the stuff I want to talk about AI and I right now at this point, I only want to be talking about AI, except if I'm doing like one on one coaching, which I'm doing a few clients right now.

So I didn't think it made sense to kind of like. Hey, okay, you've been listening to the podcast now for, you know, six years, and now I'm shifting gears. I just didn't think it was the right thing to do. Originally, it was like, well, I can do, I can create another podcast. But I really, instead, wanted to focus my attention on YouTube.

And so that's sort of what my thought process was behind selling the podcast.

Pat Flynn: Almost like a fresh start for you in this new sort of era of Rick. Versus still having it, having to worry about it on the back of your mind kind of thing.

Rick Mulready: Exactly. You know, am I, you know, are people getting angry? You know, are they just going to stop listening because all of a sudden this is all I'm talking about?

When this isn't what they quote signed up for when they, you know, subscribe to the podcast. So yeah, it just made a lot of sense. Start fresh. I don't think I would have sold the podcast to anybody else. Because, you know, this person had been a guest on the show a lot.

Pat Flynn: Oh, so the audience already knew him a little bit.

Rick Mulready: Yeah, and I took a four month sabbatical in 2023. This person filled in. You know, Kwadwo is his name. He filled in a lot of the episodes. And so, you know, the audience was being introduced to him, so it just made a lot of sense.

Pat Flynn: So four months sabbatical. Yeah. What was the reason behind doing that and what did you do?

Rick Mulready: Burnout, man. I was burned out. I didn't realize, I think I knew like deep down, but I, I wasn't sort of acknowledging it. Until it was starting to affect me physically. Like what were the symptoms? Like I had this like weird twitching eyebrow, like my left eyebrow would twitch during the day. And it came out of nowhere.

And I don't think I ever told you about that. No, I didn't even know about that. And I was getting headaches every day.

Pat Flynn: I just thought you were winking at me the whole time.

Rick Mulready: Well, that too. That's just the norm. Headaches? Yeah, headaches. And I just wasn't, I just wasn't feeling it. I just wasn't. I was tired all the time.

My, I couldn't focus. And, you know, it just was like, alright, you know what? Something needs to change. And somebody that we, you know, this person I know of this person, they just one day in 2023 just closed up shop on their seven figure business. And it just sort of got me thinking like, well, what if I not close up shop, but like just took a break.

And that was something that I never had even considered. So my first conversation wasn't even with, wasn't even with Amy, my wife. It was with my bookkeeper slash CFO.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, that's the first thing that comes to mind in my head. It's like, can, can I even take a break, like financially?

Rick Mulready: Exactly. And that's what, that's what I said to her.

I said, is this even possible? And she said, yes. And she said, and she knows me really, really well. And she said, not only is it possible, I highly recommend it. Oh, really? Even she said that? Yeah. Yeah. She said, because. This isn't something that can really go on at this, this isn't sustainable, basically what I was doing.

And so, yeah, took a, it was originally going to be a three month sabbatical. I hit the three month mark and I said, there's no way I'm ready to go back at this point. And so I was really struggling, I was like wrestling with that. And because I had told people that, you know, this was gonna be 90 days and I had people tell me before the sabbatical.

They said 90 days is not enough Oh, really? Yeah, they said At least nine to twelve months. Wow, and I was like, well, I'm not gonna do a year at this point But anyway, yeah, I tacked on another month. Everybody was super Supportive of it. I came back and that's when the sale of the podcast closed and you know, it was doing the transition of the podcast and then really starting to move into talking about on a more full time basis, if you will, about AI.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, I mean, when we have our coffee like we are right now, we're not usually recording a podcast during it, but we're just giving you a little bit of a seat with us as we record this together, which is pretty cool. We've been meeting for coffee for a very long time, and also during your sabbatical, and it felt like to me that giving yourself permission to just take a break from everything actually opened up the world to you in terms of what else you can do and what the other possibilities were, and this is where It was during then that I started to really feel from you that your new passion was gonna be all the stuff about AI that was going on.

You were telling me about these tools and you were showing me how to use them and I was like, Oh my gosh, this is incredible. Yeah. I was also like, dude, you're supposed to be not working. But it felt like this is like the new passion for you.

Rick Mulready: I was also building a, what I call Pick Rick's Brain. It's my coaching AI chatbot.

Pat Flynn: So this is a okay, this would be interesting for everybody listening.

Rick Mulready: So this is this is literally a chat bot but it is we've trained it. I say we like my team and I have trained it on my 10 years of knowledge Like we took coaching calls. We took Facebook group questions. We took my you know at the time my 720 podcast episodes and we turned all of that Content into Q&A.

Like a database. A database. Yeah. And in AI terms, it's a knowledge base. And I've partnered with a company called Coachbox. And we have built this, I haven't built it. I don't know anything about the technical side. But we've built this chatbot experience that people can interact with and ask questions as if you're coaching with me.

Mm hmm the difference here And this was the most important thing for me because it's super easy right now to take all right, you know take all the SPI episodes. How many episodes have you done?

Pat Flynn: 770 ish.

Rick Mulready: So take 770 episodes upload Literally the the entire podcast and then allow people to ask questions to it. That's very easy to do.

However, well we did that, but we did it before the capabilities that exist now. Meaning, we transcribed them. We transcribed 700 episodes.

Pat Flynn: Oh really? So it's all text based? Yes. That you uploaded?

Rick Mulready: So yeah, so it's very easy to create a knowledge base now, but the difference that we have, that we've created with Pick Rick's Brain is it's conversational.

So, what I didn't want is if somebody is coming to the chatbot and you just say like, Rick, you say, who should I hire next in my business? There's a general answer that you can give, right? But to get a, like, true coaching experience, there's questions that I want to know. Like, well, what does your team currently look like, right?

How are you spending your time during the day? What revenue level are, like, et cetera, et cetera. And so this PickRx Brain Coaching AI asks those questions to, so it's a conversation to get to a personalized answer. That's neat. That's most helpful. And so, we've created a monthly membership. It's super inexpensive.

And It's blowing people's minds.

Pat Flynn: Huh? So even though you've quote unquote moved on to talk about and teach AI and you have your YouTube channel now. Yep. You in fact have essentially cloned yourself and, and, and the way that you coach. Yep. So you kind of are still there. Using AI. Using AI, yep. Are you, are you upfront with people that this is a bot?

Rick Mulready: It's not me. Very much so. Yeah. I am, this is, I'm very clear. Like, look, this is. I call it my brain, but it's not me typing. It is literally my answers. It is how I would coach somebody. But it is not me, and I'm very clear about that.

Pat Flynn: That's cool. Yeah. Now, AI obviously is something that everybody's talking about right now.

This is the, I had a podcast episode go live. It was the first one of the year. It was called The Year of AI. And my episode was about how because it's the year of AI, the human parts of what you do are going to be that much more important. Yep. Actually, I had a lot of people disappointed in that episode because they wanted more info about AI.

Yeah. Because it is here, it's coming, and it's, it's something you can't ignore and you should embrace. So, when it comes to your philosophy on AI, especially with related to our businesses, like, what is your philosophy with AI? How, how are we to use it. It changes so quickly. What are some tips and or strategies that we should use just on a high level as business owners related to what this thing is now available to us.

Rick Mulready: I think the first thing that people need to understand and and get on board with is It's here. It's not coming. It's not something that's gonna be happening. It's happening right now. And you can push against it and you can, you know, just say, ah, I don't, you know, I'm not going to be using this.

I don't agree with it, whatever. And that's all well and good, but you will, like your business will be passed by people who are leveraging AI. It is an opportunity to streamline your business. It's going to allow you to, or it allows you to right now. Work fewer hours and increase profit because things are getting done so much more quickly and so much more cheaply.

Just as a simple, simple example, I just did a, uh, this morning I recorded a YouTube video. I was talking about nine AI productivity tools that hardly anybody's talking about. One of those tools I talked about was something that I told you about in late 2023 was Opus Clip. It takes long form video and will cut it up into short form clips for you.

And the AI does it for you. In the beginning of 2023, I was paying 1,000 a month to an agency to have that done. And there was a limit to the number of long form videos that I could, you know, submit to have clipped if you will. Well, Opus Clip does that for example, and there's a lot of AI at video editing tools and I've tested a lot of them.

And Opus Clip does the, what I feel like is the best job at capturing and engaging video.

Pat Flynn: And you know, wait, so what, what exactly does it do for you versus what do you have to teach it or train it to do?

Rick Mulready: The only thing that you're training it to do, if you will, is you're just telling it what format of video you want and like what type of text that you want on the video for it to come up.

So you upload, it's really for any of these AI video editing tools. You upload the long form video, let's just say it's a YouTube video or a video of your podcast or what have you. You upload that video, the AI tool will, in this case here that we're talking about is Opus Clip, the AI will take that long form video, find engaging clips within that video all by itself and do the editing and cutting for you.

Pat Flynn: So it has some sort of definition of what is most engaging or most interesting, and maybe that's the part that's, that it's continuing to learn and hone in on.

Rick Mulready: Yes. And that is the opportunity, I think, for these AI video editing tools, for example, is, I think there's still a big opportunity to improve. Now, because, it can grab a clip.

And it can seem great, but it might not have the context that it needs from like an earlier piece or earlier part of the video. But Opus Clip, for example, is sort of the best one that I've found.

Pat Flynn: Just to vouch for that, because of that recommendation, I've experimented and used it and it is like magic. I mean, I was also paying somebody at one point a couple years ago, thousands of dollars a month.

Yeah, yeah. To repurpose these longer form videos in our podcast episodes. And Opus Clip took a one hour podcast and with video, right? It was a video that was recorded using Squadcast. So I had the video part of the of the podcast to go along with the audio. And it magically just selected ten different parts of it.

Yep. And I would say Three or four of them were pretty spot on, right? This is six, six of them were like, well, this doesn't make sense. Or a person who just sees this on social is not going to get it. But, but the ones that it did get, I mean, I just used it. Mike, I put them on social, you know, and that's it.

I, that's all that I had to do. So saving hours of time, like you said, saving loads of money. And now it's just a matter of, and this is where I want to get to. It's not just like, and I appreciate that recommendation, but we keep seeing a lot of recommendations for, oh, use this tool for this, use this tool for that, use this for this.

It's when you can, and you've taught me this, when you can bake that into how you do what you normally do in your systems, right? The system system IT, systemization of it, that's where the magic happens, right? So, so where do we go from there?

Rick Mulready: Yeah, this is where, for everybody listening that has resisted creating SOPs, Standing Operating Procedures in their business, this is where, the use of AI, this is where, Creating SOPs is critical.

So, how do you, just as an example, how might you write an email? Like, what's your process for that? What is your process for putting together webinar slides? What's your process for writing a blog? You know, like, what is the process for that and having it documented? Because then you can figure out where within that process can AI maybe help you out.

And so, so that's a little, like, that's a little micro. If we go a little bit more macro, people are always like, well, I don't even know where to start incorporate, I don't even know where AI could help me in the business. Yeah, so where do we begin? So, yeah, so I put together this, I've created this like acronym.

I call it the APPTT framework. And A is assess. So basically looking at your business and figuring out what are all the things I do in my business, like literally writing them out. Like we send an email, email newsletter, we do a podcast, we do a YouTube channel, et cetera, et cetera. Then from there, the first P is prioritize which of the things that you've just listed, listed out.

Are the biggest pains in the butt, if you will, that if you get off your plate would free up the most energy, the most time for you. Then the next P is plan. So, okay, great. We prioritize what, what would be the biggest opportunities for you. Now let's plan meaning, okay, how do we do those things? How do we, you know, do that podcast episode, putting it together?

How do we write those blog posts? Whatever it might be. Then, after that, and within that plan, it's what AI tools could be most helpful for accomplishing these things. Is it ChatGPT? Is it Claude? Is it Firefly? You know, whatever it might be.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, people listening don't even know what those things are, so.

Rick Mulready: And I, and I'm happy to give an example. Okay, yeah, yeah. So, then, the first T is to test. So, alright, we've identified something that we want to accomplish in the business, that we want to start using AI for. And, now, we've identified which tool or what that process might look like. Now, like, okay, let's test it out.

Let's see if this works or not. And, then. The last T is, let's just say that, okay, cool, this is working. It's, we're watching it. It's evolving. Meaning like, we want to make sure it doesn't work just once. That it works multiple times. Meaning like, oh, this is something that I can incorporate into my weekly workflow in the business.

And then the last T, for everybody who has a team, and this is the key thing is you teach people on your team how to do this so that they take it over. So, perfect example. If you're a coach, you do coaching calls. So, you record the calls on Zoom. Okay. And then you send over notes to your coaching client afterwards.

And then you want to email them to them. Okay. Well that could be It's a pretty time intensive process, because you're either taking notes during the coaching call. Right, and not focused. And not focused, right. Or, afterwards, you're going back through, taking notes, and then going through and sending them.

Yeah, that's what I usually do.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, that's taking way too long.

Rick Mulready: Okay. So, you can record, obviously you're recording with, with Zoom. Well, one way to do it is, Zoom has transcription. Already built into it, as long as you're recording to the cloud. Or, you can use a tool like Fireflies.ai, which joins your coaching call.

I've seen that before. Quote, joins a call. I mean, it's like a member of the call. Yeah. But it's transcribing everything. As it's happening. Yeah. So then, you have that transcription, and Fireflies has other functionalities in there, like it'll highlight sentiment from the transcription or from the call and other things like that.

I've never been a big fan of, of it outside of just the transcription. Okay. But from there, you could have that transcription saved to a folder, like a Google Drive folder. And maybe all this is set up within Zapier, right? So, when the transcription or the video file hits the Google Drive folder, there's an automation that takes that transcript and sends it to ChatGPT.

ChatGPT takes that transcript now, and you've trained ChatGPT in this case to give you, to kick out whatever it is that you want from that call. A summary. Action items. Deliverables. And it will give you that output. Where does it give it to you? Well, that's where you tell it to. So you could say, you could tell it, this would be in Zapier, right?

Yeah, yeah. Or Make or whatever you want, Make.com. So, once it does the kick out of the output there, of your notes, then it, you can have it send it to Slack. It can Slack you to let you know that the notes are ready. It could notify somebody on your team, to have the team member send those notes to your client.

Pat Flynn: Could it hypothetically slack my coaching student who isn't Slack?

Rick Mulready: Absolutely. Like, it just does it. Yes, however, this is where I would definitely recommend having that human be checking the notes. Okay, just to make sure. Just to make sure that, you know, what, what ChatGPT took from it is what you would like to pass on.

So I wouldn't necessarily send it directly to your coaching client.

Pat Flynn: That makes sense. For a coaching student who's paying you, that makes sense. Exactly. But there are instances where you would want something fired off immediately to a team member without having to review it and, you know, saving a little bit more time that way.

Rick Mulready: So the only thing that you're doing in this whole thing is, you know, either, you're obviously doing the coaching call. Right. But then you set this process up once or somebody on your team sets it up and you now have this process that is running in the background of your business, which is saving you a ton of time.

That's really cool. And so, that's the idea. It's like looking at where in your business are you doing things, especially those repetitive things that you're doing all the time. That you can leverage AI tools to help you with that. And that's just one example that we just went through.

Pat Flynn: Could I hypothet I'm just gonna make this make this up on the spot.

Yeah, go for it. When I do a coaching call and finish it, it sends the notes or whatever to a place where I can then review them. But it also adds like a ticker or you know, adds to an Excel sheet that I have as far as like tracking how many of these that I do per week. Yep. Then can I have it like text message me and say, good job, Pat.

Keep going. Sure you can. Yeah. How would you do that? I would do all that in Zapier. Okay. So Zapier is sort of the, the, the magic sort of connector between different tools and how they talk to each other.

Rick Mulready: Zapier is what's setting exactly. It's setting up the automation. Okay. What most people are thinking about in terms of AI, they're thinking about just the individual tool. Yeah.

Pat Flynn: That's how I think about it.

Rick Mulready: And that's fine. There's a ton of benefit, but it's like, look, if there are things that we do in the business every single week, how could we automate a lot of that? And when I say automate, I'm not removing the personalization. Hmm. I'm just saying, how can we set this up so that It becomes so much faster, frees up your time, and thus frees up your energy.

What a lot of people are using ChatGPT for is pretty basic writing stuff.

Pat Flynn: That's how I mostly use it. Hey, ChatGPT, give me ten ideas for a YouTube video about blank. Yep. Or, you know, write a description for a thumbnail, or even create a thumbnail now, because DALL E is connected to it for the pro plan.

Exactly. Yep. And then I, I like, get the thing done that I needed, and then I just, that, like, I got it. Like it doesn't automatically put it somewhere or, or anything like that. Yep.

Rick Mulready: And that's, I kind of look at that as sort of Level one, if you will. So I'm on level one? You're, you're higher up. Like 1. 5?

Yeah. Okay. So, level one would just be exactly what you just said. So you're, you're using, say, like a ChatGPT, to come up with ideas, write something, expand on something, do research, come up with contrarian views to what something that you're, like a topic that you're talking about, that sort of thing.

Which is great, because, you know, that, in and of itself, saves a ton of time. Now, there's different, I like to look at it like different levels within that. Something that not a lot of people do, in how they use ChatGPT, for example, is, let's just say that you had this framework. That you, like, let's just say Blue Ocean Strategy.

Most people know Blue Ocean Strategy. And it's basically just like, Creating something that sets you apart. So, let's just say you've heard of it, but don't necessarily know exactly what it is. Alright, so you can ask ChatGPT like, can you please explain to me what the Blue Ocean Strategy is? You can then take that and use it within your prompt.

So let's just say you're trying to come up with a lead magnet idea. And you can use, obviously, ChatGPT to come up with lead magnet ideas. But taking it a step further is you can tell ChatGPT I want you to come up with like in basic, we could go through the prompt format, which I think would be really important.

Okay, we'll finish on that. In simplicity's sake though, for simplicity's sake, you can tell ChatGPT I want you to come up with five different lead magnet ideas. You know, this is my audience, this is my this is what I do in my business, etc. But I want you to come up with these ideas through the lens of the Blue Ocean Strategy.

Here is the Blue Ocean Strategy. And you're just using what ChatGPT just told you that the Blue Ocean Strategy is. So, you're asking ChatGPT to help you through the lens of something.

Pat Flynn: So this, level one is just using, level two, if this is called level two, is training.

Rick Mulready: Exactly. And so, this is where you really start to get into some really cool outputs, if you will, that ChatGPT can, can give you.

Pat Flynn: Oh, I've actually done something like this. So, I've taught In one of the chats that I have at ChatGPT, I've taught it my writing style. You know, I've uploaded several different emails in my own words. And every time I have an email idea now, and sometimes that idea comes from ChatGPT, sometimes it comes from me, sometimes it comes from somebody else, I tell ChatGPT, Hey, here are the five points I want to make in this email.

Write this email in the style of Pat Flynn. That is that kind of like what we're talking about? Yeah. And then it writes it out, and then I double check it. It doesn't automatically get sent, but it saves me a ton of time, and I just have to change maybe a few words instead of write the whole thing from scratch.

Rick Mulready: So, you use Slack in your business. I do. So, what if you set up, going back to the, like, taking it a step further, you set up an automation. You've trained ChatGPT right? And now it has learned your voice. Yeah. Let's just say you set up a new channel in Slack that says, email ideas. You put your idea in that Slack channel and you, you know, you send the message that triggers the automation.

So that, it does all that for you that you just described and writes your email for you.

Pat Flynn: All in Slack. I don't even have to go to ChatGPT.

Rick Mulready: Nope. Amazing. I mean, that's still very basic, but that's sort of next level stuff. You're like, Pat, you have no idea what's going on.

Pat Flynn: This is what I love about what we've been talking about.

I always seem to learn something new from you like this every time we chat. And this is what people are able to learn on your YouTube channel. You're showing people the connection pieces between these tools that we all see.

Rick Mulready: Yep. Yeah, like the whole goal with the, with the YouTube channel and my newsletter, I've started a, like a quote, official newsletter.

Oh really? Yeah. Where are those things at? It's called, the newsletter is called AI-ify. AI-ify so I call it like, this is what we're talking about is like AI-ifying Your Business.

Pat Flynn: I like it. And the YouTube channel is?

Rick Mulready: YouTube channel is Rick Mulready. Okay. AI-ify newsletter, just go to my website, RickMulready.com.

Either you can opt in for the ChatGPT prompts lead magnet, or there's a button right at the top that says free newsletter. That's every week. My whole goal with this is to, and hopefully what, what I'm doing here is like just trying to simplify this. Cause it can be a very complex topic. Yeah. And my goal is just to simplify this.

There's a ton of people out there, like really well respected. Who report on AI. Yeah. Shout out Matt Wolf. Yeah, Matt Wolf is great. He's just reporting on this stuff though. Which is, which is awesome. Yeah. I want to take it a step further and say, okay, whatever.

Pat Flynn: You know, the like this tool that Matt talked about would be perfect for like a coach or a writer.

Rick Mulready: How do you actually use this stuff and implement it, integrate it into your business?

Pat Flynn: That's so needed right now. It's just Okay, that sounds cool, but how do I use this?

Rick Mulready: Right, exactly. Or, on the flip side of that, Hey, everybody's talking about this tool, this is why I don't think it's a good idea. And that's really what I'm talking about on the YouTube channel.

Taking that approach of, you know, implementation and actually how do you use this in your business and where it can fit. But in a simplistic way. We're not trying to add complexity.

Pat Flynn: I love that. Well, I think it's definitely needed. I think it's exciting and I don't see the topic of AI or the amount of tools that keep coming out slowing down anytime soon.

So I think, I think you're setting yourself up really well here and complimenting these other people who've, you know, were quick on the jump, which is really neat and, and definitely useful for those of us listening. Now, before we finish up, I want to talk about the prompts because prompts are very important.

Not just for Chat GPT, but for everything Is there, how, how do we go about thinking about something other than just like, make me a clown. You know? How do, how do you , do you do that a lot with your no. Come on, I misquoted that . That's supposed to be make me a bicycle clown, or something like that from Wedding Crashers.

Right. Anyway. What are the best practices for prompting?

Rick Mulready: Yeah, so I, what I've learned about prompting, I gotta give major props to Rachel Woods over at the AI exchange. She taught me a lot about prompting. I've kind of added my own stuff to it as I've gone along. So there is, you will get better results when you're using ChatGPT or Claude or Bard when you follow sort of a format.

So number one, the first thing you want to do is tell ChatGPT who you want it to be. I want you to act as.

Pat Flynn: To literally tell it you are a...

Rick Mulready: World class, I love world class for some reason. Okay. You are a world class podcast script writer. Okay. You write scripts for some of the top podcasts in the world.

Now you've given it context. You've given it a reference point to start with. Okay. Because if you don't start with that, you'll get an output. It'll be okay, but it's not through that lens, right? You are a business strategist. You are a world class conversion copywriter.

Pat Flynn: You're a CMO. You are a writer. You are a You name it.

Whatever. Yep. Okay.

Rick Mulready: So that's the first thing. Tell it Who you want it to be or how you want it to act. Can you give it a name? Totally. I mean And by the way, here's a little side tip. I always say please and thank you.

Pat Flynn: Dude, me too. Always. It's like a, it's like a, a superstition. You never know.

Rick Mulready: You never know.

Pat Flynn: You didn't say, you asked so much of us, and now we're here conquering the world. You're, you're cool. You said please.

Rick Mulready: I will, I will spare you. So, I always say thank you and please. Okay. So, tell it, you know, how you want it to act, who you want it to be. Okay. And And you can put a little bit of context in when you do that.

Then the next section is the context section. This is where you would put your, the tone of voice. Like if you've taught it to write or speak in your voice, this is where it would go, in the context section. If you are giving it your target audience, context section. So the context section is super important.

Because you are setting ChatGPT up to give you the output, whatever the output that you're looking for, through the lens of these things. Got it. And your context might be one bullet point, might be seven bullet points. Just whatever you're asking it for. The next section is the criteria. Is this all in one prompt?

This is one prompt. Okay. All in one prompt. So, just as an example, for criteria, I was using ChatGPT yesterday to help me write sections of a YouTube script. So I was giving it criteria of the output needs to be able to be read within a minute. Ooh. So that is a criteria.

Pat Flynn: And that's important because you know, as a YouTuber, that you need to be concise.

Rick Mulready: That is my biggest thing I'm working on right now. Having been, having podcasted for 10 years, I can be very long winded. So that is something I'm working on, and I, but I'm, I'm using ChatGPT for example, to help me take something and pare it down. So I'm giving it criteria to, to work with. Again, that's just one bullet point for this example.

And then the, the next thing is the instructions. What most people want to jump right to. This is where you're telling it what you want it to do. So. I want you to write a YouTube script based on everything I've just mentioned, you know. And, again, you're just telling it what you want it to do at that point.

Context could be the topic of the, or how it might be used, how it might be used. It could be like, if you're creating a lead magnet and you want ideas, the lead magnet idea must be able to be consumed and give the person a win within 15 minutes. The last part of this is in your, in the context, and you can reference it below, actually really anywhere in the, in the prompt, except for maybe criteria.

ChatGPT works best when you give it examples. So when you have an example of something that you really like, so maybe it's an email that's been written or an article or whatever it might be, you're giving it something to sort of model. Your results will be way better when you do that. So now you've got your complete prompt.

Now for everybody listening, they might be like, well, that is a lot, Rick, in one prompt. That is where you're going to get better results. Now the mistake that a lot of people make with this. Is that when ChatGPT or Claude or what have you gives you that output, they're like, cool, I'm done. I'm going to take that and I'm going to use it for whatever, and don't do that.

Number one, I'd recommend just does it pass the test of like, is this what I was looking for? Is this good? And then if you're like, okay, yes, this is good. I can use this. Then take it and put some personality into it. This is where you're putting your own personal touches to it. Now the idea is the better at prompting that you get the less editing you'll have to do.

But it's, it really is an art of doing this. This is not just like a one and done. Most people get frustrated after they, you know, they prompt it and then they're like Oh man, this didn't, this didn't work. Yeah, what a waste of time. Yeah, you know, like what's everybody talking about? I'm not going to do this anymore.

Yeah. It's just an art. It's just like getting better at it, like with everything. It's just practice. And if you, if for everybody listening, if you're ever stuck at what you should be asking it it's going to get super meta but ask ChatGPT what what should the prompt be if I want to get an email written, for example, and if you're not sure what to include in the context, for example, ask it, what questions do you need to know or what things do you need to know in order to accomplish X and it'll tell you.

And then you just give it that information and it's helping you get the best results from it.

Pat Flynn: Got it. Do you have a place the audience can go to to kind of see this in action or, you know, any copy paste type things, resources?

Rick Mulready: That's the PDF I put together. Okay. And depending on when this goes live, I'm going to just create a mini course out of it over five days, so people can download the PDF, but I'm also going to deliver it over five days, like a prompt each day. Cool. So I have prompts in there about like, how to teach ChatGPT to your tone of voice, your style, how to ChatGPT to write an SOP. It can do what you can do super, super fast.

How to write an email sequence. Like other things, I have, I think it's seven ChatGPT prompts that are going to be really helpful for any online business owner. Nice, so they can just go to my website.

Pat Flynn: So, RickMulready.com. Okay Well, you heard it here and Rick, I appreciate you coming on the show and going on this.

I don't know how many, I should have kept track of how many miles we walked. I know. Typically my watch goes on.

Rick Mulready: I know, mine didn't either.

Pat Flynn: Maybe we weren't going fast enough.

Rick Mulready: It means I didn't, I didn't walk today. Yeah.

Pat Flynn: No this, this was really cool.

So Rick, thank you so much. Congrats on the new direction. I'm excited to see where it takes you, especially being on YouTube, which I think is perfect for the subject manner that you're obviously very passionate about and we should all be paying attention to.

Rick Mulready: So we're just scratching the surface here today.

Pat Flynn: Oh, I bet. Yeah. I bet. Yep. So I appreciate you, man. Thanks so much. Appreciate you.

All right. I hope you enjoyed that interview with Rick Mulready. Definitely check out Rick Mulready and his podcast, his YouTube channel will have all the links on the show notes at smartpassiveincome.com/session759. It's definitely got my mind going. I mean, I know that I use AI and I have used it very successfully on a level 1 to 1.5 basis.

I'm ready to level up and start these automations. I'm gonna dive into Zapier and Rick has a lot of examples on his YouTube channel, which is pretty brand new. I've just been very encouraged by how he has delved into this and I've been helping him out as well as far as utilizing YouTube and he's, he's going all in on it.

And I think the fact that he's niching into specifically not just AI, but AI for businesses and the application, or as he says, the AI-ification, I love that. Go ahead and check him out. And thank you for listening in. I appreciate you. I hope for those of you who were looking for those AI strategies, this is a great starting point.

And definitely check out Rick and his YouTube channel for more applications for you and your business. Because there's definitely going to be some stuff that is there that's useful for you and there will be some stuff coming out, I'm sure, stuff that we can't even think about or don't even know exists yet that will be applicable to us as well.

So here is to The Year of AI, but not just randomly getting distracted by it, but rather using it, utilizing it and getting some great value from it too. So cheers, take care and I'll see you in the next one.

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. Our senior producer is David Grabowski, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media, and a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Catch you next week!