Video Transcript:
Hey, what's up. This is Jason Drohn. Welcome to today's episode of GSD Daily, episode number 74.
This is failures and fuck ups week. We've been talking or I have been sharing some of my biggest failures, missteps in the 14 years that I've been in business, and how they have impacted and maybe shifted the way we do things now. It's funny, my wife just walked by as I'm looking through books trying to find some inspiration on what I'm going to talk about today. Because so many of the books that I've read in the past, they've informed what I do now or the way that I think or the moves that I make now. This book, this particular book, Chasing Excellence by Ben Bergeron ... or Bergeron, I'm sorry.
Originally read it in 2018, I flip through it often. Ben is a CrossFit trainer and he teaches some of the world's most elite athletes or trains them, coaches them. And so he's read a lot of the same books that you and I probably have because you can see a lot of his methodologies and his strategies. You can see how that stuff plays out in his world, which is coaching. It's the stuff that in stories, he retells the same self-help development stories that you've read in quite a few other books. It's just his slant is always towards training, which is interesting. Don't make excuses, work harder, as all of that stuff.
But there's something that ... I read a news article this morning on this idea of post-traumatic outsized growth. And then as I'm flipping through this Chasing Excellence book by Ben, he talks about this idea of adversarial outsized growth. What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger. It's a classic example of the way successful people use adversity to grow and thrive. This is perhaps no better sample size of successful people than the 80 fittest men and women in the CrossFit games. That's how it used to be set up, but anyway. So this idea of adversarial growth, basically when you fail, when something doesn't go your way, there's a lot of ways you can respond to it. The response is always in your head. How are you going to approach that failure? No matter the size. Failure is a failure, doesn't matter if it's a small little split test that doesn't go your way or it is a $10,000 campaign, a radio ad that didn't produce any results. I mean all of those things are relative, so failure is a failure.
What you do because of that failure is what makes all the difference in the world. There are no failures, there's just learning. You're learning a better way to do something. That's what this adversarial outsized growth is all about. Now we have made plenty of mistakes, we have launched products that haven't gone well. We have had offers, we've had products that have gone well and made hundreds of thousands, half a million dollars on them and then they imploded. There are lots of different sides ... lots of different sizes, I should say, to the failures that we've had. But out of every one of those failures has come to some sort of outsized growth.
When we used to do a lot of affiliate marketing, we basically had a huge failure and then it turned around and started giving away ... just building tutorials and doing a lot of products and doing that kind of thing, and that has worked out well. Open-sourcing a lot of SEO strategies and stuff that we used and we were able to build and grow a pretty big email list that way. It worked out nicely for the future of what we did. There were times when we did affiliate launches and it didn't work out so good. We had entire websites that were built, generating 20 and $30,000 a month back when SEO was working well, and those websites vanished because of a Google algorithm update.
All of those "failures", some of them we brought on, some of them were brought on by Google but they were all failures. We had to adjust the business models or adjust the way we did business because of those failures. It doesn't matter if somebody else was the reason for the failure or you were the reason for the failure or I was the reason for the failure, none of that matters because the only thing to do is to move forward. It's to put a plan together and move forward and grow, understanding that that failure was put there for a reason.
My friend, Chris Daigle, who someday will probably be on this show, he talks about cycles or he taught me about cycles a long time ago. I remember it clear as day, we were walking through the ferry in New York City and he's telling me about cycles and how entrepreneurs, business owners have these cycles. I've talked about them on previous shows. But everybody that he knew who was super successful had four, five cycles typically. It's like you cycle up and you're on top of the world and then you cycle down, something breaks, something happened, whatever. So you're constantly on this roller coaster ride and it doesn't matter. Some of the cycles are big and some of them are really ... because some of the dips are shallow, but you're still cycling at all times.
Some people hedge their bets and they try to cycle multiple things. So I can't really draw it, but basically, it's like ... so they'll cycle a couple of different business models, but on Tuesday we talked about focus. You want to make sure to focus on ... you want to make sure to be focusing on one particular thing at a time or make sure that you have people appointed to focus on your behalf. But in this idea of cycling, you're going to have ups and downs. Like right now globally there is a doubt so there are some people who are doing extremely well. So a lot of our clients are doing extremely well. We are doing extremely well. A lot of our friends are doing extremely well because we're all digital. So there's a couple of segments that are just absolutely fucking killing it right now.
Anything digital is one. If it's bringing somebody online, doing something online, digitizing something, they're killing it. Zoom, there was a stock company that I was looking at back in February called Fastly, it's a CDN company that is crushing it. They're up, I think, 220% from where they were in February. And they're kind of like the new stock darling, they've outpaced Zoom. So anything digital is doing well. Same with I think home stuff. Furniture, office equipment, all of that stuff is doing well. But then there are so many segments that aren't. So globally we're in this trough or a lot of industries are in this trough and they've cycled. So you can see cycles wherever.
What happens because of being in that cycle, that adversarial outsized growth, you're going to see entire business models change. I was just reading an article that curbside pickup is not going anywhere. So despite, even if everything goes green and COVID disappears, curbside pickup is still going to be around because people like it, people enjoy it. Take out orders, still going to be around because people like it, people enjoy it. So those things I don't think are ever going to leave. I don't think we're ever going to see people get back to the office buildings the way they were. Now the businesses know that their people can work from home, they're just going to rely on it. Not everybody, but a good number of them. So there's always adversarial outsized growth, there's always posttraumatic outsized growth. When you go through a trauma filled event, there's always going to be growing out of that wreckage. Whether it's in your business, like the microcosm of your business, or whether it's a global whole.
Now I have gotten interested. I think a lot about where things ... those small failures, what can you do differently? How can it translate into something bigger? How can you learn from it? How can you understand and accept the flow of what's going on? Because there's always flow. So there's always inputs and outputs. So going to school for programming, understanding software I'm very process-based. And I just always have been, I'm very process-based so there's always inputs and outputs. We live on ... a 60-mile crick is right behind our house, we have a crick that runs through. One of my favorite things about it is just the flow, the representation of flow at this house. I mean you sit in the back deck you look at the flow like you're looking at a river crick flow.
But in the last like six months or last year, I've been very interested in this idea of flow, inputs, and outputs. Whether it's ideas, whether it's people, whether it's just commenting, whether it's money, whether it's whatever, this idea of flow. Now flow is happening all around us, whether we choose to partake in it or not. So you're always in the middle of a stream of ideas, of money, of people, of thoughts, of whatever. You're always in the middle of the stream, whether you choose to tap into it or not is up to you. And I know some of my biggest failures have been because I have chosen not to tap into the stream. So I have kind of shut myself down, out from what was going on. And it was always voluntarily, it was me just kind of shutting myself down. Do you know what I mean?
So for a long time didn't do too much with social media. Not that I think social media is the end all be all or anything, but I chose not to participate in the conversation and I thought that was a good idea. And it wasn't. Just being visible, being seen, all of that stuff. Even doing these dailies, these daily shows have been just such a night and day difference in terms of even old friends that I've been able to connect with and people that now we're just connecting on a different level because ... it hasn't been 20 years since they've heard from me, it was just yesterday and it wasn't just a conversation. Do you know what I mean? So, but I chose not to participate in the flow.
So in understanding that everything, no matter what happens, no matter what failure happens, no matter what happens to you or your business, you can grow out of it which will turn into an outsized growth. And in growing you can put together a plan that is going to help you get through it, help you get through it better. What is included in that plan is up to you? Personally, my plan for 2020 was to have one conversation a day from somebody outside of my circle. And the quickest way for me to do that, not even the quickest way, but one way for me to do that was to just post one thing a day socially. So that was kind of where I started coming out of my, not coming out of my shell, but kind of attempting to engage in this flow. And it was posting one thing a day and I didn't want it to be like something from me.
Because I was kind of a, I still am a chicken shit. But now I just embraced the fact that I'm going to be doing these videos and this week, in particular, has been very, very vulnerable stuff, but anyway. So I just started sharing articles in January and February. And then those articles turned into some people likes, some people liked my stuff. And then that turned into a couple of conversations and the conversations turned into something that more frequently happened. And then we started doing the dailies and so my engaging inflow are these and they open up different conversations. I'm able to participate in different ideas in different kinds of businesses and business models and thoughts and strategies and all that other stuff.
Now I wouldn't have engaged in this flow if it wasn't for failures in the past, failures last year, things not going quite the way that I wanted them to go. That's just where I wanted to go today. I want to start the conversation on flow, it's something I've been interested in quite a bit. Started the idea of posttraumatic outsized growth, adversarial outsized growth. Hopefully, you got something out of it. I mean, if I was to put together kind of a little action plan because I'm pretty procedural. When you recognize that you're failing in something, figure out why and figure out what you can do to pivot. Figure out what two, three, four things you need to do to pivot out of that failure and then take action on the first one. If it is a consistent thing, schedule something every day, just make it a point to have a conversation today outside of your ... You need to change something.
So if you're failing, there's a reason why you're failing. So change something. It doesn't have to be anything huge. Doesn't have to be momentous. It just needs to be something, it needs to be something that you can do differently that may lead ... On the small side, it is just a pattern interrupt for your life. You're doing something a little tiny bit different every single day so that you start to think about things differently, you start to see the world differently. On the big side though, that small thing that you do differently could open you up to so many more possibilities and it should. If you do something different starting today, starting tomorrow, and just interject a small, tiny little habit in your life, then you're going to have an outsized result from that small habit within a very short amount of time.
I couldn't have told you when I decided to just start waking up earlier than I would have read about 80 books since last October, read or listened to. I couldn't have told you that. I couldn't have told you that my 15-minute workouts would have gone to 45 and 60-minute workouts. All of that stuff was a result of waking up earlier. So that's my message for today. Tomorrow, I don't know what we're going to talk about. Something different. And my wife's probably going to find me hanging out in the library trying to figure out what I'm going to talk about three minutes before the call too. So if you need anything, let me know. Go to doneforyou.com and I'll talk to you soon alright? Thanks. Bye.