How Podcasters Can Achieve More by Learning Less | Pat Flynn

Most podcasters try to learn everything and end up doing nothing. The pressure to master it all becomes overwhelming and stalls progress. Don't let this be the case for you! In this episode, Alex Sanfilippo and Pat Flynn share how to focus your learning, eliminate noise, and grow by doing less. You’ll learn how to take aligned action, avoid burnout, and get real results without chasing every new idea. Get ready to stop the overwhelm and move forward with clarity and purpose!

MORE FROM THIS EPISODE: HTTPS://PODMATCH.COM/EP/366

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Lean Learning Lifestyle
01:25 Defining Lean Learning
04:41 Inspiration Overload and the Inspiration Matrix
10:49 Choosing Action Over Information
18:43 Navigating Mistakes and Community Feedback
19:38 Navigating Hurt and Vulnerability
23:43 Protecting Your Progress and Time
30:15 The Decision to Persist or Pivot
36:55 Embracing Mistakes and Learning

Takeaways

Lean learning is about doing more with less.
Just-in-time learning is more effective than just-in-case learning.
We are overwhelmed with information in today's digital age.
Inspiration overload can lead to burnout and lack of focus.
The inspiration matrix helps prioritize what truly matters.
Choosing action over information leads to faster results.
Mistakes are part of the learning process.
Community feedback can be harsh but is essential for growth.
Joy of opting out helps manage FOMO.
Simplicity in approach often leads to better outcomes. It hurts to be hurt, especially for creators.
Hurt people often project their pain onto others.
Feedback, even if hurtful, can be valuable for growth.
Protecting your time is essential for progress.
Time blocking can help maintain focus on tasks.
Commit to experiments for a set period to gauge success.
Count episodes, not downloads, to measure progress.
Persistence is key, but know when to pivot.
Chasing money can lead to poor decisions.
Embrace mistakes as learning opportunities.

MORE FROM THIS EPISODE: HTTPS://PODMATCH.COM/EP/366

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Lean Learning Lifestyle
• 1:25 01:25 Defining Lean Learning
• 4:41 Inspiration Overload and the Inspiration Matrix
• 10:49 Choosing Action Over Information
• 18:43 Navigating Mistakes and Community Feedback
• 19:38 Navigating Hurt and Vulnerability
• 23:43 Protecting Your Progress and Time
• 30:15 The Decision to Persist or Pivot
• 36:55 Embracing Mistakes and Learning

Transcript

Hey everyone, Alex Sanfilippo here, your host today, and I am honored to be joined by my friend, Pat Flynn today. Pat, welcome back to Podcasting Made Simple. Thank you, man. Excited to be here. Yeah, I'm really excited about the topic for today. We're gonna be talking about this idea of a lean learning lifestyle. And it goes right along with your book titled, Lean Learning. And I'll share more about that and some exciting things with it later on for everybody. So stay tuned for that for sure. But Pat, I just wanted to really say thank you for this book.

comes at one of the most pivotal points, at least in the online learning world. I really am very grateful for what you have done here. And I think that this conversation is going to be so valuable today. And Pat, as you know, the listeners here and the people joining us are podcast hosts and podcast guests, which I just believe are the people kind of the center of this whole learning thing, right? So finding a way to do this really well and efficiently as the world kind of evolves, especially the online space, it's just gonna be so, so important. And so this is really talking about how podcasters, guests and hosts

can achieve more by doing less. And Pat, thank you again for putting this together, man. Yeah, my pleasure. From the perspective of a creator, this is really important. From the perspective of a consumer of information and how we're all overwhelmed, this is very important. And I started this process four years ago, and it was already important back then, but it's gotten even more important now, especially with AI and just how things are going, where the world is shifting. So I'm excited to dive in and hopefully hit the mark for a lot of people.

Very cool, man. I think the best place to probably start is with a definition of lean learning. Can you describe what this means to us? Yeah, the real idea here is it's determining the difference between just in case learning, which is trying to pile everything into our brains just in case we need it. And of course, we're overwhelmed and we treat information like it's a scarce food source, right? Like if you imagine back in caveman days, if you find a food source, you get it, you grab it because you might not find another one later, right? You hoard it. And we're treating information in the same way because it once used to be

Just as scarce and this is what was cool as creators as well like you could create information It didn't exist before and then you could get authority you could build a brand and some awareness in that regard However now with all the information that's available I mean anything that you could ever need and one is there times a thousand and it's not slowing down either We're at a buffet line of info now and not only are we still trained to sort of like hoard all of that and fill our plates But a lot of these things like algorithms are force-feeding us

All of it, all of it, right? And so we're overwhelmed, we're sluggish, even though we have access to the most and best information now, we're seemingly further behind. So it's the difference between just in case learning, which is what we want to avoid, and just in time learning, finding the things we need from the right resources at the right time that we need them, and then implementing. And then there's a lot of principles that go along with that from understanding that mistakes and failure are a part of the process. That was something that I ingrained into my kids, and then I try to teach them and even had to learn myself because I grew up a perfectionist.

I grew up somebody who was trying to get perfect grades and thought I was a failure if I didn't do that. But in order to grow, in order to learn, especially in businesses, especially as creators, you have to learn how to fail and you have to learn how to learn from those failures. And so that's exactly what this is about. The difference between just in case learning and just in time learning. Now there's a lot more to that obviously and finding the right resources and defining what matters to you and finding the right colleagues and as I call champions around you to support you on your journey and you to support them as well.

A lot of the stuff in the book is not like revolutionary. It's not new. It's almost in a way going back to how things used to be before the internet. We used to learn by finding the resource that we needed at the right time. You are doing a research project. You go to the library to find a book on that, implement it, and then figure it out as you go. Even go back even further. If you were learning how to become like a blacksmith, right? You learned.

from a pro blacksmith who would show you and kind of get you right there in the forge and maybe you burn yourself a little bit here and there, but that's how you learn. And then you go become a master blacksmith. So, mean, mastery is what we all want. And we think it's more information that we need when really it's more implementation. And this book helps people navigate the world we live in today. I think back to something I mentioned a couple of years ago, it was actually on podcasting Made Simple. I talked about how I believe the information age is quickly

becoming a thing of the past, we're moving this idea of a transformation age where people really are seeking not just more information, but a way to transform themselves. And I think you just put a really great name to something that I've been trying to live by. So thank you for that. Like this idea of lean learning is now if I tell someone like, people are like, why are you the way you are? And be like, lean learning, that's my lifestyle, right? So I appreciate you coming up with that. one of the first things I want you to talk to and talk about here is this idea of inspiration overload.

I think that that's extremely common in today's world. We're inspired by so many things. And I think you did something really cool in this book and I've heard you talk about, which is this idea of this inspiration matrix. Do you mind kind of sharing that real quick? Yeah, like the context in the book is taking an audit of what's going on in your life and what is inspiring you, what you're putting your time into, and then kind of allocating them in certain areas on this grid that I'll reference and talk about for those listening to determine if you are putting all your energy where it needs to be.

And this idea that a lot of the work that we do, a lot of the time and focus we spend, when I run this audit with my students and other people when I was testing the concept out, we found that a lot of people put a lot of time and energy and effort into what I like to call junk sparks. The things that almost initially give you a spark of interest and then you kind of touch it a little bit and you hit the surface of it, but then you move on to something else because there's another thing that's inspiring you. And there's another thing and another thing. And because we're so connected and because we're actually following a lot of people who we...

want to learn from, who we admire, who we enjoy, we're actually getting pushed and pulled in all different kinds of directions. And as a result, just more tired and feel, you know, stretched thin. So junk sparks is where you can get a lot of time back, really dedicating yourself to the few things that matter right now, not necessarily forever, but for at least for a period of time. So you can have a certain level of focus, but also a certain level of, okay, these resources that are available to me are not important to me right now.

so I can put them aside to make room for things that I'm committing to right now or the commitments that I've already made. The other part about this, and if you imagine a matrix, if you go from left to right, it's less important to more important. And from bottom to top, it's less exciting to more exciting, right? So you have your upper left quadrant. This is your less important, but more exciting things. These are sort of your recreational inspirations. These are the things that

are like hobbies and things that oftentimes I find, especially entrepreneurs and podcasters and creators, we have empty. Meaning we don't put any time into anything other than work. But it's important to have at least one thing in your recreational sort of quadrant so that you can have a break from the work and the stuff that you're really honed in on and hustling on. It's important to have something to step away to, to reignite your excitement as you come back to it. For me,

It's a lot of outdoor related things, fishing and sport related things as well. These things that are not going to become like career based things for me, but things that help me take a breath, things that help me escape. It's important to have one at least thing in there, but also not too many. Too many people have also the opposite problem, which is I have 10 things that I'm interested in, right? And it's like, how can you get good at any of them? And how can you enjoy it if you're putting your energy across all these things? I see it as a soccer coach for my son back in the day. I had a couple.

kids on the team who I hardly ever saw because they went to some practices, but they also had karate and baseball and wrestling and like hundred other things. And they were just kind of tired. And they never really got good at any of those things because they weren't focused. In your upper right-hand quadrant, these are the things that are most exciting and also most important to you in your career and what you want to do. These are your passion pursuits. And it's important to, again, allocate some energy into just one or

Couple of those things versus again having too many things or not having any it's important to have something to look forward to something that is The thing you think about when you're going to sleep and also when you wake up the thing that you're building toward that's important we talked about the junk sparks in the lower left quadrant and then the lower right quadrant are the Very important but very not so exciting things and these are sort of must-do's these are mandatory things I mean from taxes to just like specific responsibilities that you have that you might not enjoy but you know, they're there you realize that

And you can balance that out with some of the other things that we just talked about. So this matrix again, allows us to define the things that are happening and also where our interest lies. And if you find there's too much interest everywhere, you're now over-inspired. And again, it's an environment that we live in now where it's so easy to get over-inspired. And the sort of trick around that is to not have FOMO, which we often feel, right? And this is why we want to do all these things. We have FOMO, fear of missing out.

There was a counter to FOMO at one point called JOMO, which is joy of missing out, which I also don't agree with because that's almost kidding yourself. I'm not gonna be joyful that I'm missing out on something that I actually feel compelled to do, but no, I shouldn't. So like, I'm not gonna pretend like I'm happy about that. I'm not, I still wanna do it. So what is the answer? The answer is joy of opting out. Realizing that opportunity, that inspiration, whatever it might be is there. And then saying, okay, I see that and I'm gonna make a choice right now to not get involved with that.

because I'm going to recommit to the things I've already committed to for a certain time period. Or I'm going to use that thing as a reward for after I reach a certain point, but not right now. And this again helps us navigate all the noise and the excitement that's out there. It's very difficult to do though, but it is something once you are cognizant of it, you can navigate and actually take control. Yeah, and I love that saying, joy of opting out. I think that's really a great thing to say because it shows that you have some self-discipline and some direction. And I like that a lot. When I think of junk sparks,

specifically, do see a lot of podcasts hosting guests really like that. I'm not here to say anything bad about our community or something like that, but a lot of us, myself included, we like new things. And we think about like podcasting, although it's been around for a while, there's still so many new things that come from it. To me, in many ways, shiny objects are the junk sparks. It's like, we don't need it, but it's new, so we wanna check it out and look at it a little bit, right? And it really does take so much time, right? For sure. I mean, it feels good to see these new things that could become

opportunities, but we also once already said yes to other things that gave us the same feeling. And we're not doing those things any favor by, you know, taking ourselves away from them and putting our energy into somewhere else. this is brilliant. And just going back to that matrix idea, focusing on that right side, whether it be more exciting, less exciting, right? Higher priority, or feels like a lower priority, but we really got to focus on those passion pursuits and those core critical commitments. Like that is just so, so important that we keep up with that.

And that's a lot what you just shared here. And this makes me go straight into another question I have for you, because you talk a lot about this idea of choosing action over information. And you have a question that I've heard you ask, and I saw it in the book as well. And it caught me off guard, because the question was, it we will. And as a guy who sometimes struggles with reading, I stopped reading. I was like, let me keep on reading. I read it like four or five times. I'm like, I don't understand. I'm like, oh, you explain it in the next few words. I just didn't make it that far. I'm like, it we will. Did I find a typo in Pat Fiel's book?

Can you talk about this idea? working exactly the way they wanted it to. It's like such a weird acronym, but it spells it we will. Yeah. And it's like, what does that even mean? It's an acronym from a question that Tim Ferriss taught me that has helped me navigate a lot of noise, a lot of overwhelm with so many different pursuits that I've personally had. And that question is this, if this were easy, what would it look like? It's literally a question you should always ask yourself when you're approaching something or trying something new.

Because you're gonna find that we often, especially again, us creators, entrepreneurs, we over complicate things just because we don't think things should be that easy. We almost feel like if it's easy, we're not doing it right. However, the easy route is in fact the right route because you'll get to those results faster. And even if they aren't the right results that you want, you're gonna learn faster from the doing, right? Action over information. So if this were easy, what would it look like?

When we approached this with my invention, the SwitchPod, my videographer and I, we invented a product called the SwitchPod. The tripod legs kind of fold together to turn into a handle and they can open up really quickly back again. This was the idea. But we had never invented anything before. We didn't know how to do this. So we went down the process and if we had gone through the research process of everything that was required to invent something, we would have given up because we would have been like, this is too much for us. But we took it one step at a time and asked ourselves if this were easy, what would it look like?

What would the shape be? Well, I don't know, we could use AI or try to find other means of like figuring out how this thing should be in terms of size and weight and all this stuff. But what if we just cut this thing out of cardboard and handed it to YouTubers and just literally ask them if this was the right size for something like this or not. And that's what we did. We cut out some cardboard, we gave it to some YouTuber friends we knew and they gave us the right sort of size that made sense. Then we said, okay, well, if we wanted to make this work and actually usable, I mean, we could

get the molds made, would cost like $75,000 and we, you know, to have somebody like handcraft this thing. if this were easy, what would it look like? We would just 3D print this thing. And for 40 bucks, we had a workable prototype that was made out of plastic, but it showed people when we handed it to them again, what it did and how it worked. And you can actually screw in a camera on it and it started to work out. All the way fast forward, same question being asked over and over and over again, all the way to marketing the thing. If this were easy, what would it look like? Well, it would be on a

platform where there's already people looking for new and innovative products like Kickstarter. Cool, Kickstarter is a great marketplace where we can launch this thing, but we've never done Kickstarter. To learn how to do it, if it were easy, what would it look like? Well, that's when we went to an event that had a couple people who spoke at the keynote who had launched physical products. And we literally were just taking notes and learning from them. In fact, we were able to take them out to dinner and ask them a few questions like, hey,

What would you do differently the next time you launch a product? And they got behind our product and helped launch it as well because they really, really enjoyed it. So again, if this were easy, what would it look like? It was always guiding us. And in February of 2019, we launched this thing again. We've never invented something before. We didn't have an audience in the video space, by the way. We launched it to 4,800 backers and we had made $415,000 in 60 days from doing it that way by taking it one step at a time, by learning what we needed to know right at that moment.

I mean, this is exactly how I, and it sounds like you, approach things too. When I wrote my very first study guide for my architecture website after I got laid off in 2008, that's how I wrote my study guide. I didn't know how to write a book, but I knew that I had to just get something in Word. And then from there, I was like, okay, now I need to learn how to format it. Let me go find a resource for that. Great. Now I need to learn how to sell it. Let me find a resource for that. Great. Here's a tool. I need to learn how to write sales copy. I never done that before. Do I need to go to school and spend tens of thousands of dollars to do that? No. There was a book that was told to me by a friend of mine called

Moonlighting on the internet, right at the back of the book, there was a Mad Lib style sales page. I just copied that, inserted my own products, features and benefits. And that website using that template has helped me generate over seven figures from that architecture website since 2008. And it's still up and running and it's still doing its job. So again, we often overcomplicate things. There is a easy way to do something and there's a hard way. When you want to do it the easy way, well then ask yourself, what is the easy way? And then figure it out.

Pat, I've got a real life example. This happened literally today. So time recording this happened today. So I'm excited to share this. I have been working out, I picked up working out more seriously when I started PodMatch. You might actually think this is funny. I sold my TV in 2020. I'm like, I'm starting a business, I'm on the computer a lot. I'm getting rid of this TV and I'll find other things. I got into soccer like more competitively and I got into working out more. Anyway, long story short, I plateaued a year ago and I have not been able to break this PR.

And it's probably mostly mental when you all hear the numbers. 220 on the bench press. My goal is always to have four 45 pound plates. That's 225. I've always seen people do that. I've never been able to do it. And I plateaued a year ago at four, 220 pounds. I was like, man, I don't get it. And there, was looking at all this information, YouTube and there's nothing wrong with YouTube. I was looking it up. Oh, I need this type of like nutrition. I need this type of vitamin. needed this kind of pre-workout. I got to change my lifestyle to fit this. need to sleep an hour extra, right? There was all these things. And the thing is like,

my wife, Alicia, and were very into natural stuff. So I don't do any pre-workout. I'm not going to do anything that isn't super above board with anything. So I kind of just hit this point where I'm like, guess this is just too much. I can't do it. And then I saw this guy in the gym, and he was repping out this 225 like it was nobody's business. And he was a lot bigger than me. Grandma, I'm not a big guy. I just asked him, hey, what's the simplest way you suggest me to do this? And he goes,

anytime your chest isn't sore, do pushups. Anytime you have a bench press around you, just do as many reps as you can at a high amount of weight and try it a month later and see if you can set that PR. I was like, okay, like going back to your question, if this was easy, what would it look like? So for me, it was just dropping, pushups anytime my chest didn't hurt and using the bench press whenever I could. And today I hit 225 and I did it twice. Let's go. I was like, my coach was like, Whoa, no way. She's like, you've never gotten even like close to this, right? Like sure. Five pounds off in her mind. That wasn't close. But for me,

That was huge. And all I did was instead of following all the wisdom of like, here's the 300 things you need to do to get the formula down. I just dropped into 10 pushups every chance I got. Yeah, that's awesome. And sometimes it's that simple and right. You gave it a time period to try that out. You could have tried 50 other things all simultaneously, but then, you you're spending too much money, you're wasting too much energy and you know, you might even hurt yourself. But here's the one plan I'm going to try for a short period of time.

see what happens and then go from there. And that's how you do it. And in the grand scheme of things, one month, if it didn't work out, cool, well, you gave it a shot actually. That's the whole point here. You're helping yourself actually, you know, place bets that may or may not work, but at least they have a chance. If you're just kind of all over the place, it's never gonna work, like guaranteed, right? So congrats on that. That's a huge PR. And so what, 2 35 next?

Yeah, I guess. I don't know. That was kind of my vision on this. don't know. I'm not going try to, everyone, this is not a workout podcast. We're going to bring it back to something more applicable here. But to make this more applicable and actually move on to another point here, Pat, maybe I'll hit that 235, who knows. But for everyone else who's not having that type of goal, I think that this is what would be very interesting to you. When we launched PodMash, we decided to go with the same model of we're going to just take action instead of just continuously trying to get data and information. Of course, we try to stay informed when we're making decisions. But I have said, oops.

and I'm sorry to our members, to our community many times. And I want to bring this up because I think that that's really applicable to podcast hosts and guests. There might be things that you're like, oops, that didn't work. And some of it's actually public, right? What I found that I want to talk about, because I think this really gets a lot of us stuck, I have had a number of people say really hurtful things. I don't know if they necessarily, it seems very forward. They probably mean to, but I don't know. I try to think the best in people, but it's just like,

you make a mistake and like, could you make such a dumb mistake, right? Or saying something weird and that, or this is such a dumb update, why would you all do this? When we were really just trying, we were choosing action over just information and stepping into that analysis paralysis mode where we're a software company that never updates, right? Like we wanted to update. I think that some of you are scared of getting hurt, the backlash of doing something. So we want all the information so that we can feel smarter than somebody who says, hey, that was stupid, right? Like we want to be able to kind of be like, uh-uh, and here's all the data to show why.

It hurts to be hurt. I don't know if you have any thoughts on this, but I just want to turn that over to you because I think this is one of the things that gets us stuck is because we don't want to feel stupid or like we made a mistake. Yeah. No, this is a great point. And as creators, especially, you're vulnerable to the public and the public eye and the public voice, the public comments. And it can be very hurtful, especially when we're trying our best. And for somebody to say something, often anonymously, you're behind some sort of screen name, but it might be a customer too. You know, it's really important to understand that that is valuable.

It is valuable feedback that's gonna help redirect where you go from here. Now, of course, you also have to learn from these things. If you make a mistake, great, own up to it, number one, but make a change if it is a change that makes sense to make. At least it's more information that is real versus just hypothetical information, right? You could potentially waste years thinking about every single thing that could go wrong and then not have anything to show for anything, right? So it's better to make those decisions. Now, I'm not saying like,

fly blindly, right? Have a baseline amount of information to get started and do the thing and then see what happens. And when it comes to the public and they're trolling or hatred, a lot of times hurt people hurt people. People will take what it is that's going on in their life and find a target and then just target them. And in many cases, in most, it has nothing to do with you, right? I often try to lead with empathy and realize that when people say hurtful things about me, which I still get, that it's often because there's something going on in their life.

and they're either just kind of letting it all out in a place that they had an opportunity to do so. Now, sometimes, and I'm not recommending you do this, but sometimes I'll reach back out to these people who are hateful and are trolling, and I'll see what I can do to help them and learn about what they have going on. And they all of sudden stop and they go, wait, wait, wait. Like, I just made fun of you and called you this and that, and you are offering to help me. And then they end up telling me like something crazy has just recently happened in their life. They lost a loved one or.

You know, they're just upset because of something that happened that had nothing to do with me. And 99 % of the time, that's the case. Other times, especially now, people are just engaging farming, engage farming. So they're just trying to say stuff to rile somebody up so that they get more engagement than be seen in the algorithm to promote their crypto bro scam or whatever. That's, I've seen that happen. So again, don't take these things personally.

but take the information that they're sharing about what's maybe not working or maybe you've made a mistake on and learn from that. And that's important because then oftentimes if you take that and you come out with maybe, for example, the next version of the software that addresses that and makes it even better than it was before, you can actually get a big win from people saying, you actually listened and you made changes and now this is awesome, right? Or you can go, no, nobody likes me, I'm gonna fail and I'm not gonna push anything out there anymore because I guess I'm not cut out for this. then, you know.

than what you go back to how things used to be. No, that's why we're creating and doing these things in the first place. We want to design our lifestyle. We wanna do that, but you can't do that just on paper. You have to do it by, again, taking that action. Thank you for sharing that. I think it's just really important for all of us as creators, guests or hosts. Like we say things sometimes and maybe we mean them, maybe we don't know. We're talking, it's part of our job, right? It's what we do. And so for many of us, it's kind of like, man, we get a little nervous about that.

And I think that's what gets us down this, need to have all the information before I talk. And to some extent, right, on certain topics, that could make sense, of course. But I think that having that discernment to know if this is something I should engage with when someone's hurtful or not is really important. Something that we actually have this written down internally for our company. And it's hurting people hurt people. And our job is to love people who are hurting. And so always remember that. of course, you have the discernment to know when it's just someone who's.

pushing the crypto bros, right, as you said, or if it's somebody that you, hey, this is someone that we could actually, we should engage and find out like, is there merit to this and could we help? And I really respect it at your level, Pat, that you do that same thing and model that. So for all the podcasters checking this out, like just take that to heart. If that's the thing that's got you stuck here and you feel like you learn too much because you're scared to take action because of how someone might react, please don't let that be what stops you. Just such an important point here.

So the next one, Tamale, is like kind of going on this topic of progress now, like we're making some progress along the way, right? And you talk about protecting your progress and you talked about this just-in-time information when we first started the conversation. Can you talk more about this and why this matters? Protecting your time is really important. This is why to give yourself almost like a container of time to focus on things is really key, whether it's time blocking. And time blocking is something that's not new. But I want you to think about time blocking in the sense of like you're creating a shield around that time.

honoring the time that you put in your calendar to work on something, to do your podcast guesting or whatever it might be, and you're blocking everything else from inserting itself into that time because that's when you're supposed to be focusing on it. So that's number one. Or if you're going to be running an experiment, running it for a certain number of days and then committing to that, and then at the end assessing whether or not it was worth continuing or not. And another example of this is recently I ran an experiment on TikTok and shorts, YouTube shorts and reels, where

So I have a Pokemon YouTube channel that's done very well. have 1.8 million subscribers now, but I started a recent channel that is completely separate. I didn't link to it. I wanted to experiment and see if I could do this on its own. So I created a separate shorts channel and my face is not involved. I'm just opening card packs every single day. And I said, I'm gonna do this for 60 days. If I get to day 60, all of one, no matter what the views say, me committing to 60 days to just give this thing a shot is a win. So by day 30,

Again, going daily every single day. My views weren't really that high. I was getting maybe 300 to 500 views per video, which is not much in the grand scheme of things when you compare to other people. And as much as I likely in older version of myself have given up, I said, well, I'm only halfway through my experiment. I'm just going to keep going because a win is 60 days. However, by day 30, something interesting happened that I did notice. The views weren't up.

However, I did notice that my editing time for these videos, because I was editing everything myself, went from 45 minutes to 12 minutes. I was able to get much, much better at the editing process just simply by showing up every day and getting those reps in. That's number one. Number two, I had 30 days of information coming in telling me which videos did somehow perform a little bit better than the others. And I started to see the patterns. For example, when I saw that my videos were done in person at a card shop to start the video and a transaction happened.

those ones had a higher watch time and had a slightly higher level of views. Anyway, I took all this information, kept going, kept getting better. Day 35, not too long after that, one of those videos hit 750,000 views. And ever since then, everything has risen. And right now, that channel on YouTube has surpassed my long form channel. It's almost at 2 million subscribers. We got to 1 million followers on Instagram and 1.6 million followers on TikTok.

and it is over 3.5 billion views and we're not even a year into it yet. Like that is insane. And I only was able to do that by taking action, learning on the go, figuring it out and not worrying about the views in this experiment because I can't control the views. I can control how much I show up. I can control when I hit publish or when I hit record. So I'm gonna focus on, in terms of my goals, the things I can control that.

if done well, could lead to those views that I ultimately want. As my buddy Alex Hodges says, uploads, not likes. And it's so true, especially when you're, and again, it's not forever, it was for 60 days. Now I've kept up with it because it's done very well. But even at the end, if I stopped, I was like, okay, it's not getting the views that I want. However, I've gained this new skill of editing much faster in these shortcuts that's gonna help me in the next thing that I do, right? So these things continue to stack on each other over time. Man, I really like that.

that quote that you use and just to put that into podcasting, it's count episodes, not downloads, right? would be the same idea. in podcasting, listen, the data is all there, podmatch.com slash report. We update that every month and it shows that even making it to 10 episodes, which is nowhere near where anyone should expect results, more than 50 % of people have already quit. on the guesting side, we just recently added this, Pat, this is really interesting. It's very rare for a podcast guest to make it past two episodes.

And so many of them are the ones that are hitting up the Reddit thread saying, don't waste your time, podcast guessing doesn't work. And I'm like, you've done two episodes. Have you given enough time to even further your voice? I think that that's the benefit. If you do 100 episodes of different podcasts as a guest or as a host, at the very least, even if no one ever watches or listens to it, your voice is going to be so much more polished. You're gonna understand your stories. You're gonna understand how to just communicate at such a high level. To me, that alone is worth just sticking with it. But I love the idea of saying, hey,

this is my goal, and I always tell podcasters 50 episodes, this is my goal, this is where I'm gonna stick with it, and then I'll make the decision on what I should do other than that. Yeah. I mean, to your point, when I first started the promotions for Lean Learning several months ago, I started my podcast tour for it, because the podcast tour, being a guest on the People's Podcast, had, prior to this book, in my other books, had been very successful. So I knew it was gonna be successful again. However, this was a new topic for me that I'd never...

been a guest for before. So I did my first interview and it wasn't great. I was fumbling on the stories. I didn't know how to answer certain questions immediately and I was kind of defaulting to other stories from other things that I've done. So it wasn't poor, but it could have been so much better, which is why I kept doing it. And then after 55 interviews, these stories were polished. I was on a roll and these podcasts helped sell more books. And then I got on the New York Times list because of it.

among other marketing things that I pushed into the promotion as well. But the guest podcasting has been key for the book and it is key for getting your message out there, for building authority. And whether or not they quote unquote convert for you, that relationship can turn into something huge. The minutes you have, potentially hours you have with that host can turn into a partnership.

can turn into something that you couldn't even imagine. Those doors open up when you put yourself out there. So I would just say that to encourage all of you to keep going. Yeah, the next thing I wanna talk about here, and this is kinda bringing this thing to an end here. At some point, we might hit that 100 episodes or that 30 days or whatever it is we decide to do, and we need to make a decision. Do we persist or do we pivot? And I think that many of us really struggle with this idea. One, because maybe we're married to it, right? Like we've been doing it for so long.

that we feel like we have to stick with it or we're scared of like, will people think? And some of us, was just like, I'm just ready to give up, right? I need to go ahead and pivot and people pivot just way too fast, right? I'm like, you pivoted every month, you're pivoting to something new, you're enough time. I'd love for you to actually share a specific story. I heard that you built a WordPress plugin a long time ago, a real long time ago, and it actually ended up.

I'll let you share, but it led to one of your core values that you still live by today. And I'd love for you to share that story, because I think it'd be very helpful for everybody. Yeah, I mean, I am happy to share this story because I want to get the most out of it. I spent a lot of money on it, that's for sure. So I want to share it much as possible. I'm glad we can still be making some form of profit from it, right? Yeah, I mean, not even profit, just like, just spreading the word because I made a huge mistake. In fact, several mistakes. I had a couple of friends, this was back in 2011, 2012. I had a large audience on my blog already at this point. And two of my friends...

simultaneously without even knowing it, created two separate WordPress plugins and launched them to each of their respective audiences. They weren't competitors. They just happened to be two friends of mine who launched these softwares and did very, very well. mean, they earn like six figures in a week each. And I was like, my gosh, I have a bigger audience in both of you combined. And they're all entrepreneurs who build websites. Like I'm going to build a WordPress plugin and it's going to number one, I'm very competitive. I'm like, it's going to crush both of you, but also we're going to make

a lot of money doing this. And I mean, we're all buddies, we're talking, they're all right, Pat, let's see it. I was like, okay, cool. And they're like, what is it? I'm like, I'm not gonna tell you. You're gonna have to wait, because I have this idea. Well, the idea wasn't fully fleshed out. And I found that out because when I hired a developer immediately on Google, and I just found somebody, what was supposed to take six weeks and about $6,000 took six months and about 15 to $20,000.

because there was a lot of back and forth, there a lot of holes, things that I didn't even know about this development process. But again, I didn't want to tell anybody about what I was doing. I just wanted it to be a big secret and then this big reveal on launch day. And again, there's a lot of back and forth. All of it was my fault because again, I was approaching this way too quickly and I was approaching it for the wrong reason. I was approaching it because I saw dollar signs. I didn't approach it because I was trying to help anybody or serve anybody but myself. And so fast forward six months later, finally have a working model of this thing that's a combination of a

of a survey form related WordPress plugin and I shared it with some friends of mine, not the two people, but some other close friends in a mastermind and they were like, I mean, I guess, I was like, what do you mean? Like this thing is amazing, right? And they're like, well, I mean, it should do this and what if it did this and what if it did this? And I was like, I don't have any more budget to like change anything and it's at a final state. I'm gonna launch this in a couple of weeks. I never launched it. It was not going to work. It just didn't help anybody.

and there were other plugins that were better that did it as sort of like a side feature already. And again, because I was so drawn into the money part of it, I was blind. I was blinded. And so a few lessons learned. Number one, anytime that I've found myself chasing things just for the money first, I've had to stop myself. It's always either been a failure or I catch myself from going down the wrong route. So that's number one. Number two,

Sharing ideas ahead of time, this is what inspired my first real business book, Will It Fly?, which is how to test your next business idea so you don't waste your time and money. It was really inspired by this software thing because there are ways that you can have conversations with people to have them poke holes in things before you spend a dollar. And if I had these conversations that I had at the end, in the initial phases of my development,

I would have been so much better off. I would have found that my idea wasn't actually that great. I would have found that there were other ideas that incorporated a little bit much better. And I would have had, you know, even just the idea of marketing it as you're creating it, right? Working in public is a really great thing to do too. So a lot of people are afraid, somebody's going to steal my idea, but nobody's going to do that because they all have their own busy things going on. In general, for us entrepreneurs creating these one-off products or things here and there.

Yeah, people might think that, they're never gonna do it. You're the one taking action on it. And so there's so much more benefit from speaking about these things, talking about it, using that as practice to even pitch your thing, whatever it might be. So much more benefit in doing that than holding it in and then kind of waiting till a big launch day. Man, this inspires me to share something I've actually never shared before. For years, I kept track of how much money I had spent on the things I did that failed.

So things I did that did not work. I actually had like a calculator and I tracked it all on Excel spreadsheet. And I'll never forget the number. I'm not gonna say the exact number, it's gonna me forever to say it, but $23,000 and change is what it came out to be. And that was over years. I document the things that failed. And I had this idea that when I make it, I'm gonna pay myself back. Like I owe myself this. And my mindset was these are failures. I need to remember that I failed. And that is all around just completely a wrong mindset, right? Like you just shared this story, Pat. Like I don't know if you would have ever written

will fly if you didn't have that happen, right? Like, if you didn't write that, we can look at this chain effect of what would have happened, right? The butterfly effect along the way of all these other things have been created because of that. I'll never forget the day years after this that it came up with a reminder, because it was like a quarterly reminder. Hey, here's what the company, know, whatever you do, there was no company at that point, but whatever you do, here's what needs to pay you back because of all the failures that you've had. And I remember the day I realized, I opened it up and there was like a big one. I always looked at the big ones first. And I was like, well, actually that taught me how to do

what I'm doing now and if I didn't do that I wouldn't have done this and I started going through each of them, I'm wait a minute, actually aren't, they may have been mistakes or maybe something I learned a hard lesson from but it's not actually a failure because I've continuously picked myself back up. And I want to share that I actually deleted it. I deleted the whole thing, it was a pretty Excel spreadsheet because I love Excel but I deleted the reminder, I deleted the whole file and emptied my bin on my computer and I was like that's gone forever.

But I wanted to share that because I think that really adds value to a lot of people. And I don't know where you are as a creator, but I encourage you really don't look at things completely as a failure. If you've got to pivot, you've got to make a change, think about how that's going to propel you forward and what you were able to take from it because those lessons might be extremely, extremely valuable. Huge, huge. You've created a moment of closure for you on those items and we're able to move forward from it, which is great. And of course, you've seen now those things as investments, not failures, because you kept going, right?

That's amazing. I love that Alex. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah. Thanks, man. All right, everybody listen I want you to grab a copy of this book and you can go to lean learning book calm Pat didn't a phenomenal job with this and you feel like hey I'm stuck any of these points like please check it out It also comes with a companion course guide which for me was very helpful to see that but one of the things if you're like especially this last part we're talking about if you're like man I'm stuck with this idea of to persist or to pivot

Pat talks about the 4R framework to figure out which is the right move and so many other super helpful things. So again, that's leanlearningbook.com. I really encourage you. think every creator needs to read this book to prepare ourselves, not just for where the world is today, but for where it's heading. This is what's gonna be able to separate us. So Pat, again, I thank you so much for this book and for hanging out with us today. Before I let you go though, do you have any final thought for everybody? I do, I do. And you've spoken to this already, but this idea of making mistakes is really key. And so, fail faster.

is what I would say. I think this is big lesson and if I could share this podcast episode with my kids and I might actually, I will because there's a lot of big lessons here that are just for, aren't just for business and podcasting, but really for life. And so I hope you take and internalize this idea and if there's one thing to understand is to know, especially as a podcaster who's conducting interviews or being a guest on another podcast, like it's not gonna be perfect and it shouldn't be.

But the fact that you've got up and you did it is great. You should be proud of that and just keep going. You're going to get better and you're going to hold yourself back from getting better if you keep, you know, trying to worry about all the little mistakes that you make. Yes, be conscious of those things that you can get better at, but hopefully you can get excited about trying again and then again and then again. And you're going to see naturally without you even trying, you're going to make those improvements. So fail fast. Cool, Pat. Man, thank you again for your time. I really appreciate you being here with us today.

Thanks Alex, thanks everybody.