Video Transcript:
What's up. This is Jason Drohn. Welcome to episode number 75 of GSD Daily.
We're going to talk about the process vs talent today and we're going to talk about how lacking a process is a very quick way of failing and I'll give you some examples of some of the things that don't work or haven't worked quite a while until there has been a process vs talent in place for me. So I have found that working on my own for the better part of 14 years and so having your own business and working remotely is a blessing because you get to do your own thing.
You get to do what you want when you want with who you want, that kind of thing. So it is a dream in a lot of respects. It is a nightmare also in a lot of respects too, because that level of independence carries with it certain risks, certain issues, so it's very easy to be complacent. Now, luckily, so one of the things that I learned from like my Pepsi days was you're putting in 40, 50, 60 hours a week, daytime hours, that kind of thing.
So it wasn't like I went to college and then started a business. And then you had very little framework around what work look like, what you needed to do, all that.
And so I have always just adopted like a nine to five schedule, which has worked out well. And when working from home, working from the home office, it's something that we've just done forever, for a long time. When the pandemic hit, Chelsea and I have kind of joked, we were made for this. We've been practicing for this for many, many, many years, 14 years. So it didn't change our day a whole lot. It didn't change how we did things except for these podcasts, which I started. So, but in thinking about all the things that I've screwed up in my career, everything kind of led to this thing that I wasn't comfortable with the process. I wasn't comfortable with the task, or I didn't know the process vs talent or whatever.
And there's a certain level of unsureness whenever you venture out into a new direction. And you don't ever, like when you have a big goal, you don't even know how you're going to attain that thing. All you know is you set your sights and you're going to try to navigate your way there and recognize opportunity when it comes so that you end up leading yourself to that mountain, no matter how distance, no matter how far off it is in the distance. And that's the point of thinking grow rich or the secret is when you set your mind on something when you believe wholeheartedly that something is going to happen, then it will happen because not only will you make it happen, but you will pick up all those little subconscious cues, all those little things that are put in your path and you'll be able to make use of them knowing that each one of them is a stepping stone to that distant mountain.
So there is still a process vs talent, even in the ambiguity, there's still something, you still have a path, even though you don't know how you're going to get there. Now in the book Mindset by Carol Dweck, there is, so if you've watched the movie Moneyball or read the book Moneyball, you know of Billy Bean who put together the whole book is about it. But anyway, so he created this methodology for playing baseball. That was entirely based on scoring runs, entirely based on the minor little things that all added up to a winning game. So he came to believe that scoring runs, the whole point of baseball was much more about the process than about talent.
And so I, as We grow businesses and as we work with clients, and as I realized that every business has a process vs talent and the processes aren't different. The customization of the process is different, but there are only a few frameworks for how online businesses function. So a sales video is a sales video, a sales webinar is a sales webinar, but copying scripting is different, of course. The emotions and fears and desires and all that stuff from the prospects, that's all different. But the process vs talent is the same. The buying process is the same. And the times that I have forgotten that is when we've had the worst failures. So when you skip a part of the process, then the whole thing falls apart. Earlier in the week, we talked about creating products and not giving those products enough of their fair due.
You pause advertising early or you don't give it enough advertising to show that it is worthwhile or show that it's going to work. You pull the plug early, spend a hundred bucks, 200 bucks, 500 bucks to a thousand dollars. You pull the plug and say, "I'm done." No, you didn't, you just didn't try. Yeah, you could have spent another thousand dollars, but in that thousand dollars, you would have tested and optimized and all that other stuff. So the process is always more important than the model. So behind me there, right, no, that's a side, right there. So inspiration is for amateurs. You can see the right there. So right there.
So inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just shut up and get to work. At the end of the day, when you sit in your desk chair and you push it underneath the desk and you put your hands on the keyboard, you're rarely going to be inspired, but you show up and get to work because you have to. And that's the thing. And the thing that you're going to execute is the process, the process of writing copy, the process of designing a banner ad, the process of setting up a campaign, and the process of setting up an order form. Those are all the things that I'm sure there are hundreds of little, little, tiny, small steps. And there are hundreds of little tiny decisions that make up that process.
But if you can simplify the process, then you're going to be that much more apt, that much more able to pull it off successfully. This podcast, for years, I've tried like four or five podcasts throughout my history. So I had a podcast with JD's blog, which was my very first blog. This was 13 years ago, 11 years ago. And so I started doing podcasts once a week. I recorded an MP3, put it up in iTunes. I don't know how many podcasts are where, but there weren't that many ways back then. And so I remember I did it, I think I had like 12 episodes. And then I stopped updating that blog. I went off on some other shiny object and went off and started doing work on something else. And I came back a couple of months later, logged into JD's blog.
And lo and behold, I had one particular episode that had 66,000 downloads or something. And I was like, "Holy shit." There was one of those outsized returns that I would've never, it went viral 13 years ago. This is like before Facebook, MySpace was still around. But yeah, I was too green to know what any of that meant. So then, I went and I started this domaining ebook, so it was called the Art of Domaining. I don't even know if it's still around and I would spend $10 on Google ads. And then so I spent $10 and I make $40 or something like 30 bucks. It was like $27, $29 was the price of this ebook. And then I turned around and rather than spending a little bit of time to update it because I needed to update it.
I ended up just posting it for sale on Flippa and it sold within 12 minutes for 1100 bucks. This property, this website. And that was a sheer fucking failure on my part. I didn't know what I had. I didn't know what I was looking at. Somebody else did, somebody else said, "Oh shit. And he's doubling and tripling his money. Okay, fine. Cool. Let's do this." That was my first, it was one of my first utter fuck-ups, that was a long time ago. It was 11 or 12 years ago. And I remember I was just happy with the 1100 bucks, not knowing that I could increase the ad spend and just keep making money. But I didn't know the process. I didn't know how to scale a company. I didn't know how to scale a brand or product. And even like I said, this podcast, I always, the excuse was, well, I can't do anything. At a set time every week, I'm going to be late, I'm going to forget or whatever.
But, recording episode 75, now I know that I can do something every day. At least one thing like 10 o'clock every day, it might be a couple of minutes late here and there, but the reason I can do it every day is, first of all, it's a priority. Second of all, I have a process for it. My process is I turn on the camera, I set up my little lights here. So turn on my lights, turn on my computer, log in to the StreamYard. And then I just go.
And this week has been exceptionally difficult because I've had to find source material because I can't just riff about personal development the way I can about internet marketing. Next week, we're going back to internet marketing, by the way. I think I've shared enough of my failures here for a little while. We're going to start going into some microcosm kind of failures. We're going to start doing some little stuff as opposed to the sheer, this is some of the big shit I screwed up. We'll go to the back to the little shit I screwed up. And then we'll talk about those.
But the process makes all the difference. If you have an idea of where you're going to go, it's easier to get there. Or, and if you don't have an idea of where you're going to go and you have faith that you're going to figure it out, which is way more important, then you will get there every time. And it will be a fun journey, and you will discover a lot about yourself and everybody around you along the way. So with that, if you have any questions at all, go to doneforyou.com. Next week, we're going to resume our internet marketing sales funnel growth, hacking, scaling shit show. And we'll talk to you soon. All right? Thanks. Bye.