Video Transcript:
Hey, what's up. This is Jason Drohn. Welcome to GSD daily. Number 73. This is probably my favorite number. I think 99 is my favorite number. So maybe we'll have a party when we get to episode 99, but 73 is near and dear to my heart. It's my high school football number. Not that that means a damn thing other than it's... I don't know, it's just a cool number.
So anyway, today we're going to continue on our fuck ups and failures week, and talk about some of the things that I've done wrong and continuing to struggle with on a day-to-day basis. You know, just because when you are in business for yourself and when you do your own thing, it's really easy to go on tangents. It's easy to go down a path that doesn't yield any results. And it's really easy to trick yourself into the delusion that this is the path that you need to travel.
So Monday we talked about not giving offers enough time to mature, to grow, to build, to scale, to get traffic and start showing results. And then yesterday, we talked about failure and failing fast and why when you fail fast, you can scale more quickly, and how every day we end up having multiple, multiple failures. Some of the big, some of them small, some of them are just simple, add variations that don't work. And some of them are much larger. Do you know?
So today, I want to talk about something called the focus. You know, focusing on one thing, splitting focus. Now I... So all of us as business owners, have this sense of entrepreneurial ADD or ADHD. We always think we need to do something else, reinvent the wheel, go in a different direction. I recognize it in our clients all the time. I recognize it in myself all the time. There are always new ideas and new things and new ways to go. So in preventing against that, the entrepreneurial ADD, I printed out this poster that I designed it and I printed it out and I hang it in the office. You've seen it before, but it is this. So if you chase two rabbits, both will escape.
The reason I take it down and put it back up, it's like the same thing as banner blindness. So always try to make sure to move it around so that... Move it around the office, move it around my office in the media room, which is right outside so that when we get a little bit of a... So that I don't get banner blind to it. But the reality is that all of us, we have a lot of different priorities, we have a lot of different things. And inside this book, so there's a book that I read back in 2017. So how I read? When I go through books, written books, at least.
So the book we're going to talk about is The One Thing, there, by Gary Keller. What I do is I write down the date that I read this in. So there it is. 2017 is when I wrote it or read it. And then I took notes in 2019. So this is three years ago. When I go through and read a book, this particular one, I went through and underlined a bunch of passages that I thought were interesting. A lot of times what I'll do is I'll go through and highlight them. And then I'll take notes as a college student would. Going through and that way I can just scan through stuff. I can search for it. I can find something. There are things that I'll read something in 2017, 2018, and then I will learn something new about it. Then I'll read through my... Just search my notes and see where I originally learned about it. It just happened.
There was a book. Well, I talked about it earlier, but a book called Super Better, which was talking about the vagal nerve. And I didn't know, it wasn't until I was listening to an audible book. But in this audible book, he was talking about how the vagal nerve is responsible for goosebumps. So if you are doing yoga or you're in flow, you're in a certain state and you get goosebumps, it is responsible for... It is because of the vagal nerve and the vagal nerve is, the stronger, the vagal nerve, the less you get sick, the more aware you are, like all that stuff. It gets kind of weird, but ultimately it was... You know, one of your synapses is connecting your brain. Do you know what I mean? It's like, "Oh shit. Okay. I got it."
So anyway, The One Thing. So this particular phrase jumped out at me more thinking about splitting focus, thinking about diverging paths, thinking about chasing two rabbits. So the one thing becomes difficult because we've unfortunately bought into too many others. So the one thing, the one priority that you have in your life, or the one priority that you have in your business, it is difficult oftentimes to continue moving towards that one thing, because there are so many other things you say yes to. There are so many other commitments that you have in your life.
So I literally... So just a little bit of why I do what I do now. Six years ago, I started building sales funnels for clients and it was very much a need thing. So basically, I put on this webinar, I didn't necessarily have anything to sell at the end, but I knew that I wanted to help businesses. You know, so this webinar... Did the webinar, ended up. The call to action on the webinar was to sign up for a sales call or sign up for a call with me. And I didn't even have anything to sell.
So on that call, it became very apparent very quickly that people needed help from a tech standpoint, from a setup standpoint, from a sales funnel standpoint. I knew that I was uniquely qualified to help fill that, to help fill that need. So, that is literally what I did. This was six years ago. Since then we have worked with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of companies around the world doing marketing for them, setting up sales funnels, doing ads, and all that other stuff. That has always been the primary focus.
Now, where I have fooled myself in the past is... Then I started building software. And so I started building Scriptly. I started building Curately and Axis and all of these other software applications. And basically, the justification that I was making to myself at the time was I'm building the software so my team can fulfill better and I'm building the software to sell it down the road. One of those pieces of software worked well, Scripting. It still works well. I mean, it still sells well. We have a lot of users who love it. That Axis was born out of Scriptly.
But the thing is, is there was so many other failed ADD focus like priorities between Scriptly, in-between the service side and whatever. So what I found myself splitting focus on was I have this service side, which builds fucking great software. Great, great sales funnels. Writes great copy, fulfills like... I mean, works like a well-oiled machine. And I have the software side with developers and all of that other stuff, but they're two very different business models.
So they come together. Yes. You know, because our software side, informs the service side and the service side informed the software side. But at the same time, it's two different focuses literally or splitting focus. It's two different priorities. It's two different paths. So I have the agency side and then I have the software side.
Looking in my past, where I have failed miserably, the times that I've cycled and gone down and all of a sudden you're like, you're looking up thinking what the fuck happened. Do you know? It was always because my splitting focus was on the thing that it shouldn't have been. It was always because my focus was on a priority that didn't matter. And even though I realized that and even though I'm saying this, I know that it will happen again in the future. Not because I wanted to, but because we're human beings and oftentimes we will move in a direction we shouldn't. We will get invested in something that we shouldn't. We will spend time doing something we shouldn't, even though it's not necessarily in the best interest.
So the thing is, are you need to have systems and processes in place so that even if you have focused somewhere else, you aren't necessarily sacrificing anything. The processes and everything plays out. So what that means is you have to get to the point in your business where you were an investor. You know you're working above the business, not on the business, not in the business, but above the business. Then you have the liberty to splitting focus on other things.
But if you were working in the business or on the business and you're focusing in two different directions, then there's no way you're going to hit the target that you want to even if those things do inform each other. So, that's just one of those things that... And that splitting focus, it can be attention. It can be attention. It can be an investment. It can be money. It can be wherever you need to put the focus in, your number one priority.
One of the things I love about this book and I paged through it before getting on this call. But one of the things I loved about it was you can't have the priority, second priority, third priority, or you can't have a list of three top priorities. Priority means the most important thing. So if your priority is selling your courses or selling your coaching program, then literally that is the only thing that you should be worried about and consumed with. How do I sell more of my coaching? That's it. Not how do I get more ebook sales, not how do I add more blog posts? Not how do I do- I mean, all of those things inform the coaching sales, of course, but the question in all of it is how do I sell more coaching?
You know, so you don't go through the motion when you create content and you do podcasts and all that other stuff. I mean, everything you do needs to have that one singular focus in mind, which is selling more coaching or putting more people in a new mastermind or selling more digital products or whatever. Only then will what you do translate into more coaching clients. But if you are focused on growing a business over here, and then you're also focused on growing an e-comm product line over here, then without putting people in place and without putting systems in place on either side, inevitably both are going to fall apart because you're splitting focus in two different directions.
One of the other things about this book that I enjoyed was this fact. So especially now with the pandemic and with coronavirus and everything else, we like to think of this idea of work-life balance. I think work-life balance is a very romantic thing. I think it would be great if we were able to put in four or five, six hours worth of work, and then we were able to go off and live our personal life. There's a much more useful concept that Tony Robbins teaches. And I don't know if he originated it or what, but I heard of it from Tony Robbins, but that was work-life integration. So basically it was integrating your work and your life so that both are stronger for it. So, that might be answering emails on a Saturday and that might mean playing with the kids on a Monday afternoon.
There's another concept called the seven-day weekend, which I don't know where that book is. All my books are out there. I should just take you with me out there. But the seven-day weekend, it isn't a seven-day weekend. It isn't how to live a seven-day weekend. It's actually how to bring your work into the weekend so that you can live more throughout the week.
Also, a very interesting and novel idea, but basically what he says in this is, you need... To prioritize one thing in your life, which is growing, let's say, a hundred million dollar business. If you're growing a hundred million dollar business, then other things in your life will be out of whack. You're not going to have the personal life that people who are just worried about making 60 grand a month or 60 grand a year in salary. No, you're not. You're most likely... You're going to be faced with different challenges, different problems, different... You know, you're going to be coming up with different solutions.
You're going to be needing to travel. So there are lots of ways that your life is going to be out of balance because you're looking to do something that is so outsized and not in an ordinary or extraordinary, I should say. That doesn't mean you shouldn't go after it. That just means that you need to accept the fact that to be the person who has a hundred million dollar business, you need to do the things that a hundred million dollar business owner does to have the hundred million dollar business. That's all there is to it.
So work-life integration, focus on one thing, prioritize one thing at a time. And then also, make sure that you recognize that there's only enough... There's only so much willpower in a day, so go after the... Do the hardest thing first in the morning. Wake up a little bit earlier, write that blog post, write the article, make sure that everything you're focusing on growing your business, but do the hardest thing first.
I think that's about it for today. So prioritize, do cool stuff, sell shit. And if you have any questions, let me know. Just go to DoneForYou.com/start. Fill up the little action plan form and we will put together an action plan, which in this case is going to be your systems and staff to help you grow. And I'll talk to you soon. All right? Thanks. Bye.