The Grind Mastermind: Episode 10

Transcript

[00:00:00] Josh: All righty. The system is revving up. Revving up. The YouTube engine is revving up, and I think we are live. Awesome. The Grind Mastermind, episode number 10 for June the ninth, 2023. Chris, how the heck are you? I

[00:00:22] Chris: am good man. I am finally chilling out a bit. Finishing up a couple of client projects so I can finally spend some more time on other stuff, which is good.

What about you?

[00:00:36] Josh: Cool. Especially with summer getting started. That’s that’s probably a good thing. Exactly. I’m good. We had a really good couple weeks actually. We’ll have some good, good updates to share. Things have gone pretty well, attended a cool event, so lots to talk about. So maybe, maybe we’ll jump right in.

How did the last two weeks go? I’m pulling up your goals. So Chris’s goals from two weeks ago, number one, post your second YouTube video, and number two, evaluate two more weeks of Facebook ads and decide next steps. How did that go?

[00:01:11] Chris: Yes. So Facebook ads been pretty consistent. Some days I get three, four subscribers.

Some other days I get one. So on average, I would say, yeah, between one and three subscribers per day or 10 pounds a day budget. So I’ll, I still have some budget, so I’ll keep it going for the next two weeks. Right. See how it goes. Yeah, I mean, I keep promoting my YouTube channel as well, my email list, and I see signups.

I, I just reach 61 I think. So that’s like I see that promoting it with new people coming in

[00:01:51] Josh: works. Ha. Have you looked into, so on the Facebook ad side, like cuz eventually you’re, you’re gonna want to get that down, right? So if you’re getting one to three per day, that’s anywhere from what, three to three to 10 pounds per lead?

Are you looking at how much the cost per click is as well? Like, are you getting cheap clicks but. Drop off on the landing page or are you getting very few clicks but high conversion on the landing page?

[00:02:20] Chris: Yeah. I actually have haven’t paid that much attention to the actual numbers yet, just because I wanted to let it keep it going and get a bit more data.

Right. Let me check.

[00:02:34] Josh: I have it here. Yeah, cuz that’s something like, If your, if your cost per acquisition isn’t like super low, then that’s what I would keep an eye on. Obviously you want to have statistically significant amounts of data, but what’s your cost per click? If your cost per click is super high, then it means your Facebook adss not that great.

If your cost per click is pretty low, but your cost to acquire a signup on that landing page is very high. Then you might wanna look at optimizing or split testing the landing page, right? I mean, that’s why ads are so interesting. You can get, so you get such good data and all you have to like, numbers don’t lie, right?

All you have to do is follow the numbers to optimize, optimize more. Yeah.

[00:03:22] Chris: So I’m saying

so I’m seeing cost per link click. Two pounds and 51 in, yeah. Six May from May

[00:03:36] Josh: the sixth. That’s pretty high.

[00:03:39] Chris: Click through rate one point 10%. So yeah, I have to look at it and see what’s happening,

[00:03:45] Josh: but that’s weird. It, it costs you 2.6 pounds a click, but some days you’re getting three pounds per lead.

So that leads me to believe that your landing page is pretty good. It’s caught, but, but your ads might need to be improved, right? It’s like once you get them to click, your conversion rate seems to be pretty high.

[00:04:05] Chris: Yeah. You know what? I might try, I might try a video ad just because now I only have pictures.

Because with pictures, like images, ads, I have no idea like what works. I mean, I can compare. I have a couple of variants. But I don’t know anything about best practices, so that’s something that I would need to learn. But at least if I make a video ad, maybe that’s completely different and I get more data that I can use maybe to see, at least to say, is the video better than the image?

[00:04:41] Josh: Yeah, I, I think a good video will probably outperform a good image. But you still need to even, you can test what’s a good video, right? You could, you could test 50 videos. So yeah, I would get, I would say if any of your photo ads aren’t doing very well, because how many ads, so you’re getting two 60 a click, how many visuals are you running?

Is it just one or multiple?

[00:05:10] Chris: I think I have two or three

[00:05:12] Josh: or four. So if you click in, can you see which ones are performing better? Because two 60, I’m assuming is the average across three or four.

[00:05:21] Chris: Yeah, I have one is one point 14, which is, I don’t know what this means, but Facebook does some weird shit.

Basically. It’s called Autogenerated video. Autogenerated video. Video from image.

[00:05:39] Josh: Oh, so it’ll take the image you

[00:05:40] Chris: upload. Wow. Yeah, so that’s. What I’m seeing now, this is, that’s nuts. Cost per click. So one point

[00:05:50] Josh: 14. Yeah, so I would like turn off any of your ads that are over, like, because that means if, if one of them is one 14 and your average is two 60, then some of them must be performing.

Not that great. Yeah. Yeah. I have

[00:06:03] Chris: another one, which is six point 90. Another one is 4.58 and another one that’s two point 27.

[00:06:12] Josh: Yes. I, I would turn those two bad ones off. Mm.

[00:06:17] Chris: Which it’s, it’s weird. Like one, like the one that’s six 90, it’s, let me, let me check it out. So one, okay. And the one that’s six 90.

[00:06:35] Josh: And are they, are they all the same audience?

[00:06:37] Chris: Oh wow. Can I share my screen? Just

[00:06:40] Josh: do I want to show you, you can share the screen, but it’s going to screw up our YouTube video, but I’ll, I’ll try to adjust it. I mean, you can, if you want to for like, a little bit, for anybody watching on YouTube, it’ll, it’ll mess up the overlay, but it’s not the end of the world.

Can you see my screen? Yep. If you’re, if you’re listening on, on YouTube or if you’re listening on the podcast, we’ll, Try to explain what’s going on here. Yeah,

[00:07:05] Chris: basically I’m looking at my Facebook ad page and you see the different image variants here and one. Okay,

[00:07:13] Josh: so you’ve got four

[00:07:14] Chris: images. Yeah, so, so this is the six 90, and look at like the only thing that changes, so this is the six 90 is the copy and this note, and this is the other one.

What changed the image? Oh, wow. It’s crazy. It is like three times as

[00:07:34] Josh: much. But then go back to the first page, the ads manager. What’s the difference between the bottom two? It looks like,

[00:07:44] Chris: I don’t know. This is the video one that I, it doesn’t allow me to see.

[00:07:47] Josh: Oh, so it, so they took one of your images and they like turned it into this one.

[00:07:52] Chris: This one is the exact same of the, of the 2.27, but

[00:07:57] Josh: a different picture. Wow. So I mean, that tells you a lot. Right? So for, for those who can’t see on YouTube, it’s the same. He’s got two ads, it has the same headline, the same text, the same picture as Chris. The only difference is in the bottom left quadrant of the video, you’ve got like a different logo or image.

Yeah. It’s not even like a huge picture.

[00:08:23] Chris: To be fair, this is not really visible. So I guess this right. Also with the kind of visual, like your copy socks kind of reminds you of like vomiting or something. So maybe it’s funny, I don’t know.

[00:08:36] Josh: That’s why it’s all about, that’s why it’s such a, it’s such an art, right?

Testing these ads, you just gotta dump a whole bunch of variants. And see what sticks. Yeah. So I would turn the bad ones off and get a few videos up and see how that goes. I tried you that,

[00:08:54] Chris: another test that I did in the past couple of months was I tried with the yellow background, but I saw that wasn’t working well, so I kept the blue one.

Right. That’s already that I’ve done. Yeah. So. I can set a goal for next two weeks to record a video ad for the newsletter.

[00:09:13] Josh: Hold on, let me pull this up. Okay, so record a Facebook ad video. I would do multiple. You wanna say like two or three? Yeah. But what do you change? Record two to three Facebook ad videos.

Well just change the messaging a little bit or change the script. I don’t know. Okay, keep them short, right? Like 30 to 60 seconds. Hey guys, I’m Chris. If you’re blah, blah, blah, and you want help with blah, blah, blah, you know, this is what I offer, blah, blah, blah.

[00:09:48] Chris: Or I might do, or I might do maybe a one a bit more polished, maybe edited, and another one was like super rough and she,

[00:09:55] Josh: yeah.

One, tell a story. Hey guys, I’m Chris a few years ago, blah, blah, blah, and then I did this and this is how it’s better and blah, blah, blah. Or I work with a client, blah, blah, blah. I don’t know. Who knows, right? You change a picture and you just, and you save four pounds of click. So just throw a bunch of crap at the wall and see what sticks.

You know? Sounds good. How did the second YouTube video go? So

[00:10:20] Chris: the second video, I, I delayed it a bit, so I’m gonna post it next week just because I’ve been working with this communication code. So I prepare the script, the description and everything, and we are, and going back and forth, forth with her to kind of improve the way that I, like I speak and communicate.

So, Just reviewing it together with her. I have a coaching call today and so then I’m gonna be ready to post it next week, but I more, more than that, I work on a schedule that I want to be held accountable for maintaining, which is in short let me see. I have it here, so I want to post four videos a month, starting, ideally from next week.

It’s gonna be two content videos, which is kind of me explaining concepts. Like anything like five to 10 minutes of me explaining a concept in a couple of points, like edited with B-roll and everything. Then one tear down a month, and another one is just a screencast screen share video where I share like a process thing that I do.

Mm-hmm. Behind the scenes. So those are the four videos and the way that I’ve. Dated. I, like I said, days. So in one week, for example, the typical schedule would be on Monday I plan, script and prepare the video. On Wednesday, I release the video from the previous week just because I saw the Wednesdays are typically the best days to post the YouTube video.

And on Friday I record the video for next week to be posted next the, the Wednesday after. Right, and this is basically the schedule and, and I’m working with the, with my VA to, she’s gonna try to edit a couple of videos as well. Okay. And she can do it. It’s gonna save me a lot of

[00:12:10] Josh: time. So I’m gonna write start weekly YouTube posting schedule.

So by our next episode, you should actually have two videos up, right? Yes. Yeah.

[00:12:23] Chris: Okay. So yeah, one one content, and the other one is probably gonna be either a process or the other thing was,

[00:12:32] Josh: Okay, so we have two to three Facebook ad videos and weekly YouTube posting schedule. Anything

[00:12:38] Chris: else? Yeah, either.

Yes. I wanted to, oh,

[00:12:41] Josh: snap. We’re going for the hat trick here.

[00:12:44] Chris: Yes. Going to the push, push goal. I want to create. Free landing pages for my website for the productized services create, which I have to update

[00:12:56] Josh: landing pages for productized services. I thought you said you wanted to take it easy the next two weeks.

No, let’s go grind it out, man.

[00:13:10] Chris: Before the summer. Yeah. I’m probably gonna chill most of July because I’m traveling, right? So I want to get as much stuff as done as possible love and, and with chill, like what I mean by chill. Like the my in the business, like deep work stuff. I consider it chill. Right? What I don’t consider chill is more of like the client work, so Right.

That’s what I

[00:13:29] Josh: meant. Right. Cool. All right. So for Chris’s goals for the next episode, that we’re gonna hold him accountable for start weekly YouTube posting schedule. So you should have two videos out by our next episode. Record two to three Facebook ad videos and get them running. And create three landing pages for productized services.

Cool. All right. And we’ll talk about books and tools at the end, as we always do. So on my end, 30 cold calls per day. So my goals from two weeks ago, 30 plus cold calls per day update content creation schedule, update letter growth letter growth profile, and reach out to five more. I pretty much did all of this.

The only exception is that. Last week we, we went to a conference. So just as a quick reminder, I am building a, an immigration tech company in Canada. And so last week we attended a big Canadian immigration conference, and it was like a Thursday night, Friday, Saturday. All day. We had a booth. It was pretty good because it was basically like a whole conference of our target market, so that was really good.

It was also good to just go, you know, in person, shake hands, network, all that kind of stuff. And it went pretty well. But obviously I wasn’t, it was, I wasn’t cold calling those days. Obviously Thursday was a travel day and then we. Had some stuff in the evening, Friday, Saturday all day was at the event. And then before and after you’re doing a little bit of prep.

So some days I wasn’t able to hit the 30 plus cold calls. But we have some really good, you know, conversations ongoing from that event. Mm-hmm. So I’ll leave that in 30 plus cold calls per day. Cause I would just want to keep cold calling. It’s been pretty good for us. We actually had a really good two weeks man.

We’ve In like one week we converted like six plus firms to our paying account, so we’re in the double digits for, you know, paying clients. It’s, it’s been really good. I think we’ve kind of hit an inflection point where our product has just gotten really good. Our sales funnel has gotten a lot better, and so now we’re starting to convert, which is really exciting.

So how they

[00:15:34] Chris: pay you, is it like a

[00:15:35] Josh: recurring monthly Yeah. Sas, b2b, sas. So, Yeah. No, it’s been, it’s been, it’s been good. It’s been good. So now we’ve kind of really. Seeing what’s kind of working for us, what’s not the key targets, you know, the target market. Even though our, our market is kind of niche, we’re even nicheing down further to like the specific types of professionals and the sizes of the firms that are most interested.

So it’s been really good. We’re gonna keep the pedal to the metal, 30 plus cold cars calls per day. Gonna keep that up. Update content creation schedule. So I did that. It wasn’t a huge update cuz I, I, I didn’t need to revamp it. I just need to kind of like fine tune it a little bit. I switched from my daily emails to weekly, which I think is the right call.

So now what I’m doing is like, I post daily on LinkedIn Monday to Friday. I post snippets of this podcast on YouTube and TikTok because I have someone make the snippets for me. I actually, maybe I’ll talk about this in the tools at the end, but I found an AI tool where you can upload a YouTube video like ours and it’ll auto generate snippets for you with captions.

Oh, I need that. It’s nuts. I’ll talk about it at the end partially cuz I forget the name off the top of my head. So that was good. Basically the only stuff, well, and and maybe I’ll ask you this, like I got rid of, so right now I’m just kind of posting daily on LinkedIn. I go live every two weeks on LinkedIn.

We go live every two weeks on YouTube and I’m just repurposing that video and you know, trying to promote our show, trying to promote my tech company, obviously Vista and I’m thinking about like how I can repurpose more of the LinkedIn content as well. I’m thinking maybe I should be doing like a daily short video, right?

Like I’m, I’m already writing a post every day for LinkedIn. Should I also be recording a short posting on YouTube shorts? Posting in it on TikTok as well? Yeah. Probably. So let me, let me type that in. So confirm,

[00:17:38] Chris: I think it makes all sense, especially cause we are, it’s your from no, it’s your like lawyer, visa, immigration, TikTok, right?

[00:17:49] Josh: Yeah. So on LinkedIn, if, if any of of us are connected, I post a lot about Canadian immigration, immigration tech. AI plus the law, you know, stuff like that. So I think what I might start doing is like right after I write that LinkedIn post and hit post, I can just hit record on my phone and basically like reiterate what I just typed, you know what I mean?

Yeah. And post it as on the Vista YouTube shorts channel posted on the Vista TikTok channel, which already has a lot of followers. So I think I need to start doing that. Of course it’s, it’s always just about time, right? But that doesn’t take too much time. So we’ll see. So I’ll confirm a strategy for that.

I think it’s worth the time. And update letter. So I updated the letter growth profile and I did reach out to about five more. I had a few people reach out to me actually from letter growth. I don’t know, a good chunk of them just don’t respond. So I used your template, Chris. After the last episode, or might have been two episodes ago, Chris shared a really good template that he uses to reach out to people on letter growth, which is a tool that we’ve talked about in the past for cross-promoting on email lists.

It’s a good platform. It just, the fact that they don’t, he doesn’t have in-app messaging yet. Drives me nuts, right? Mm-hmm. Like especially if it’s built on like a drag and drop builder, it shouldn’t be that hard to build in custom messaging. No. Anyways, I just find when I email a lot of people, they don’t respond, which maybe my messaging’s not good enough, but my assumption was, Hey, if you’re on letter growth, it’s cuz you want to cross promote, right?

Yeah. Yeah. So the fact that so many people aren’t It is good. Maybe I just need to outreach to more of them. I don’t know. The,

[00:19:38] Chris: I think like, I, I reached out to probably like 20 people and 15 replied to me. Hmm.

[00:19:47] Josh: I’ve reached out to probably 10 or 15 and I think I’ve gotten like two or three responses.

No.

[00:19:53] Chris: So hopefully, hopefully it’s not your email ending up in the spam

[00:19:56] Josh: folder or something. It could be. That’s why I think he needs in-app messaging, right? Because with how difficult some of the spam filters are these days, that’s a benefit, right? If instead you li Hey, I forget what, what’s the guy’s name?

Paul, the guy who runs it. Paul, if you’re listening, yes, please add in-app messaging. Because then you get a message, you get an email notification and you know, to go check your message. Right? Instead of everything going to spam. So anyways,

[00:20:23] Chris: so have you tried, have you tried reaching out to people? Because he, he’s got the, what’s it

[00:20:29] Josh: called?

The, oh, the Discord. The Discord. Maybe

[00:20:32] Chris: I should do that. Reaching out to those guys on this one. That’s a

[00:20:35] Josh: good idea. So I’ll do Cross say

[00:20:38] Chris: promo outreach and say, Hey, we sent email together,

[00:20:42] Josh: letter Growth Discord. That’s smart. And, or I wonder if there’s a cross promo channel in the Discord. There probably is.

Let me open it right now. Yeah. I

[00:20:51] Chris: haven’t been active at all there, so I have no idea. I just know that there’s a discord.

[00:20:56] Josh: I, I was a little bit at the beginning, but then things got so busy with, with Vista that I just hold on a sec. I’m pulling it up. Daily check in getting subscribers when I post your landing pages.

Cross promotions. Okay, perfect. That’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna do it on the, in the discord. All right. So I have 30 plus cold calls per day. Confirm repurpose strategy from LinkedIn content, cross promo outreach on their discord. And then the other thing I’ve been thinking about is creating more of a community around immigration and ai.

Mm-hmm. So I’m gonna try, let’s say for the next two weeks, it’s gonna be think about a strategy for immigration, AI community, because now we’re, we’re getting. We got a lot of users now, and it’s all law firms, Canadian law firms that are like forward thinking about tech and ai. There’s a ton of these communities for immigration professionals, but most of them are like, you know how to run your business, how to get clients, immigration law, discussion.

So there’s enough of those. We don’t need more of those, but not many of them are going in depth on AI and tech. And that’s what a lot of people are thinking about and talking about. So I might do a Discord community for that. I just, I need to think about it a little bit more and, you know, all that stuff.

So, okay. So I got that written down. Okay. We got a busy Friday head. Let’s, let’s talk books and tools before we before we call it today.

[00:22:34] Chris: Want to. I want to hear about that. Repurposing tool,

[00:22:38] Josh: all rights. Let me pull it up. So the tool is called Opus, Opus Do Pro. I’m gonna, I’ll put it in the show notes.

Opus Pro on, let me just confirm the link. opus.pro. O p u s link. Yeah, there it is. I’ll put it in the show notes. So if you’re listening or watching, it’ll, it’ll be in the description below. I’ve, I haven’t used it a ton. It’s on my to-do list to do this weekend. I took one of our previous episodes, right, one of our previous grind Mastermind episodes.

You copy paste the YouTube link and then they have AI that generates clips. And then it also gives you a score, like a virality score on which clips it thinks they’re gonna do the best on social media. And then you can kind of like edit them a little bit. The editing right now is a little bit clunky. So what I, what I have to do on the weekend is go through, like, I want to go through each of the 10 clips and they give you the option to kind of edit them, but I haven’t fully watched all 10 clips to see if they’re actually good.

Right. That’s my biggest concern. Well, my two biggest concerns are, number one, are the, are the clips that it’s pulling out actually good. And then secondly, is it easy enough to edit and download them so that I can post them on shorts and, and, and TikTok and stuff like that. But it’s pretty cool. And I’m sure there’s like 10 others, right?

AI is taking over, especially at the beginning in marketing, right? Digital marketing, because if, you know, in a, in a bunch of other industries, it’s gonna come, but it’s gonna take a little bit longer. But for stuff like. I’ve seen some really cool tools like where you can type something in and it’ll generate a video for you, right?

Type a script, click on an avatar, click on a background, and it’ll just generate a video for you. So there’s all this nuts stuff. What was it called? Hold on. The one that I found recently that looked cool. I haven’t tried it, but it looked cool. Is one sec. I just sent it to a buddy of mine. It’s called Hagen, H E Y G E n.

Again, I’ll put the link in the show notes, and it’s basically, you type in a script, you click on whatever avatar you want, you select your language. It’s multiple languages, and it’ll just generate a video and the avatar will say your script for you. So it’s pretty wild. Anyways.

[00:25:17] Chris: Yeah. I’m curious to try that opus every, do you plan on like, on like paying for it?

Because minimum it’s 16 a month. I’m

[00:25:27] Josh: seeing It depends. If it’s good, I’ll pay for it. Cuz right now I, I pay someone to cut these into snippets for us, and 16 a month is much cheaper than what I’m paying. Right? So one

[00:25:38] Chris: 200 upload minutes with 16 a

[00:25:40] Josh: month. Yeah, we don’t have 200 minutes, right? We do two episodes a month.

They’re about 30 to 40 minutes. So that’s less than a hundred minutes a month.

[00:25:50] Chris: Yeah. I mean, if, if the clips that it makes are the ones that are on the website, which some of them are from like huge people, like the Prof G Show. It’s a guy that I follow as well. Mm-hmm.

[00:26:02] Josh: Oh yeah, I’m seeing that now on the landing page.

You just gotta test it, right? Like all these companies, they throw big names on the homepage, you know, whatever they raise from big, you know, big money, blah, blah, blah. It’s pretty easy to test. So I I, I’m still on the free trial, so I’ll, I’ll, I’m gonna go through it on Sunday. By the next episode I’ll have my feedback on whether I think it’s good or not.

You should try it too. And cuz for example, as you post your videos on YouTube now with your new strategy, You can throw them all into a tool like this. I’m sure there’s other tools too, right? You don’t have to use this tool. We’re we, we’re not, we’re not affiliated with them. I’m sure if you just Google like AI, video snippet generator, there’ll be 50, you know, maybe not 50, like, probably at least five to 10 other good ones to try.

So anyways, and that’s great, right? Because now it means anybody, any company, any brand can like much quicker, much easier. Repurpose content, right? Like, you gotta think if you’re, if you’re a video editor, if you’re a copywriter, if you’re a, you know, anything, you know, a, a blog post writer, you better find a way to smarten up and differentiate, right?

Because more of these tools are gonna come out and get better and just take your job. So like in your case, Chris, it makes sense that you’ve kind of combined it, right? You’re not just, Hey, I write copy, right? Yeah. It’s like copywriter plus UX and it’s more in depth and blah, blah, blah. So anyways, that’s my tool for the week.

Nice. You want to do books as well?

[00:27:39] Chris: Yeah. So one that I finished this week, which is a pretty short one, and it’s An od It’s My Life in Advertising by Claude Hopkins.

[00:27:50] Josh: Just writing this

[00:27:51] Chris: down, legend copywriters in from the 1930s. It’s, it’s really good. I’ve actually, I went through his most popular book is Scientific Advertising, which is more about teaching you how to write copy.

This one is, is autobiography basically. Mm-hmm. But it, like, if you want to read about someone who’s like a master at their craft and who actually loves their work, read this book, it’s like, like the, one of the best examples I think that I’ve ever read of someone who actually enjoys the work and. Puts everything into it and it treats it like a craft.

Yeah, it’s very good. Is

[00:28:31] Josh: there any, is there one like cool story or snippet quote?

[00:28:36] Chris: Yeah, let me, I actually

[00:28:37] Josh: have, doesn’t have to be a quote. Just like any, Like, what’s the coolest part of the book? When, when you say, like, really loves his craft, or is that too long of an answer?

[00:28:47] Chris: I’m, I’m gonna use my second brain here and just found a quote.

He basically, he talks about like how he makes work look like play, and he, he makes this example of this foreman working, I don’t know, in like a warehouse or somewhere. It says if a thing is useful, they call it work if it. If useless, they call it play one is as hard as the other one can be just as much a game as the other.

In both there is rivalry, there is a struggle to excel the rest, all the difference is all the difference. I see lies in the attitude of

[00:29:24] Josh: mind. I think that was in one of your emails, right?

[00:29:28] Chris: Yeah. Yeah. It makes you think like a lot of it is the way that you see your work and also how, how do you define play?

A lot of people define play as like getting drunk, getting twisted on the weekends, you know, which for me is not like that. Like so maybe it’s obviously. You might not be working on client projects all the time, but like even just working on my own business, the content stuff, that’s how I also see my work as play as well.

What, what about you,

[00:29:59] Josh: For books or for working as play? I know.

[00:30:02] Chris: No, yeah. I mean, Yeah. I mean, what do you, how do you define lay

[00:30:06] Josh: in your work? Yeah, it’s a good question. I, I think the best thing you can do is just find the overlap with what you really enjoy and how to get, how to make money, right? Because well, I think.

There’s kind of like two, two mindsets to this, right? What you’ll find one camp that’s like, listen, do your work. And then when 5:00 PM hits, you know, go, go find work that’s like, you kinda like enough that’ll pay you well. And then when 5:00 PM hits or the weekend hits, go do whatever the hell you want, right?

And have your fun Then, and then there’s another camp that’s like, You know the find work that you love and you’ll never work another day in your life, right? There’s kind of like those two mindsets. I think the latter is more of like the entrepreneurial people, right? The people like you and me who are kind of like, I don’t know.

I don’t think I ever wanna work for another company. You know what I mean? We’re gonna grind it out, man. We’re gonna, you know, but, but we’re gonna grind it out, doing something that we love for, for ourselves, right? I think I’m more in that boat. So I don’t know. I,

[00:31:12] Chris: I, I think, I think a lot of it is also has to do with the fact that both you and I basically changed career.

Quite drastically, like went from like a more traditional career to this stuff here. So it’s actually something that we did like that we choose to do, that we did.

[00:31:29] Josh: But I think it’s for that reason, right? Because we’re like, Hey, I don’t, I don’t want to trade time for money for somebody else so that I can play only at nights and on the weekends.

Right. Yeah. It’s like we want play to be seven days a week. Right. So, yeah. I, I think though, it’s easier said than done, right. Finding that intersect of what you really love and then also making it work commercially can be difficult, you know, that that’s the pursuit. Yeah. But I think now more so than ever with all these AI tools, all these re, you know, remote work, all these, you know, solo entrepreneurship, It’s never been easier.

I’m not saying it’s easy, but it’s never been an easier time to do that. Right? It’s like Steve Jobs, right? The, the, the famous quote where he is like, every day I would wake up and look myself in the mirror, and if two or three days went by where I would say, I’m not excited to do what I’m, what I have to do today, then I would switch something, right?

Mm-hmm. I think that’s a really good approach or a really good mindset to have. So, yeah. Yeah. How do you, how do you overlap? I still think that there’s gonna be some separation, right? Like for example, once or twice a week. I love getting on my computer and playing video games, right? Yeah. And that’s never gonna make me money probably.

Right. Unless I get lucky and, you know, become a crazy streamer, but I don’t think that’s gonna happen. Right. But every, so you know, and it’s okay. That’s okay, right? Not everything you do has to make you money or be a, you know, be a side hustle or whatever. So find the right balance. You know, ideally if you can overlap the two, at least some of your, at least some of your play also makes you money, then you’ll, you’ll probably, you’ll probably lead a pretty happy life, right?

Yeah. Yeah.

[00:33:18] Chris: Cool. And yeah, for other books, I have to thank you because you kind of inspired me to, to start reading some fiction. Oh. So I just, what do we got? This series hits two books. The third is, is coming out,

[00:33:34] Josh: what’s it called? The Hunger

[00:33:35] Chris: This’s, the first one. Oh, the Shadow of the Gods. It’s the first one.

And The Hunger of the

[00:33:39] Josh: Gods. The second one. Oh, you jumped on my like fantasy

[00:33:41] Chris: genre. Yeah. This is very cool. I, because I, you actually made, like, reminded me that like 10 years ago I used to enjoy these books. Then I abandoned that. So I, I wanted to, yeah, kind of immerse myself. Back in, in a really good story, and these are supposed to be really good.

And also they have to do, it’s kinda like a mix of traditional fantasy with the Norse Viking world. Mm-hmm. So that’s, I’m, I’m super into that stuff and Cool. Yeah. I’m, I’m basically setting some time to read these now.

[00:34:14] Josh: Yeah. I think, I think what gets lost in like the hustle culture is you can actually, number one.

Make some time to do stuff you like. Right. If you like reading fantasy and fiction, spend some time reading fantasy and fiction. Yeah. And secondly, you can learn a lot from it. Right. You can still learn a lot. Sure. They’re not gonna say in, you know, they’re not gonna teach you the three steps to marketing, obviously.

But yeah. For the same reason that we learn a lot from biographies, which is a story about a person. You can still learn a lot from fiction. Right.

[00:34:46] Chris: So, yeah, it’s, it’s more just, it’s just. More indirect lessons, but like, for example, from these books, there’s a shit ton of lessons about world building branding as well.

There’s a lot of stuff writing, like obviously the writing needs to be very good.

[00:35:03] Josh: For sure. So you haven’t started yet, so next week we’ll have

[00:35:06] Chris: some no, no. I actually, I started it and just read the first three chapters. It’s really good. Nice. Super violent. Super rough.

[00:35:14] Josh: All right. On my end. So I finished the first book the City of Brass.

The City of Brass, which kind of, you know, again, fantasy fiction. I really liked it. It was a really good book. And SA sa Shork or something. I’ll put it in the show notes here. I’m pulling it up. SA Chakra Bordi, I think is her first book, and it got really good reviews. And I read it and it was really good.

And there’s, so there’s two more. I have them, but, so I finished the book, but usually I go back and forth, so I’m, I’m almost finished. It’s called like the Greatest Business Decisions of all time or something. Let me pull it up. Greatest business Decisions of all time. I just wanna make sure I get the title and I’ll put it in the show notes.

Yeah, so it’s a book by Fortune. Called the greatest business decisions of all time, how Apple, Ford, ibm, Zappos, and others, made radical choices that changed the course of business. It’s really good. It’s short. It’s like, I don’t know, 200 pages, I don’t remember. And basically what it does is each chapter goes into some detail about a big business decision that was, you know, they think one of the greatest decisions of all time, right?

So like right. Apple bringing back Steve Jobs, right? For example, Zappos deciding to offer free returns. Zappos is an online shoe store, stuff like that, right? Some of it seems like normal right now, right? Like for example, free returns. That’s not crazy now, right? 2023. But when they started in like 2000, I forget, it was like 2000 or 2001.

Free returns was nuts, right? That wasn’t a thing. Mm-hmm. So anyways, really good, really short, really quick read. I like it. And yeah, I recommend

[00:37:09] Chris: it. What’s next

[00:37:11] Josh: on the list? Do you already have? It’s a man, it’s a tough decision. So, number, I don’t know, I could either read the second book of that series, right?

The City of Brass. I kind of wanna read the second one soon while it’s still fresh in my mind. I also have two others on my to read list. Number one is the Challenger Sale. This is because I’m doing, oh, yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s, I have that one. It’s pretty well known. I didn’t, I didn’t finish. It’s pretty well known in the world of sales because I’m spending so much time on Vista doing sales.

I think I read part of it years ago. And then the second one is the 48 Laws of Power or whatever by Robert Green. I don’t, I don’t remember the title. Yeah, that’s huge. Yeah. We have to be ready. Yeah, that’s, that’s a big book. That’s a big book. But I think it would be also pretty valuable considering I’m doing sales and marketing and stuff

[00:38:00] Chris: like that.

Especially like, like thinking about like for you, you like, like gleaning lessons from stories that’s all about basically, Historical

[00:38:09] Josh: examples. Yeah, it’s, it’s another one of the classics. Right. So I don’t know yet. I, I, I have I think one more chapter of, of the greatest business decisions of all. So I should be done at like tonight or tomorrow and then, I don’t know, I might flip a coin.

I might, I have no idea. So we’ll see. We’ll leave you guys hanging on that and you’ll, you’ll have to wait and listen to the next episode. Cool. Any last. Comments before we head out. I’m just adding these again, all these books, all these tools that we mentioned will be in the show notes, aka the description if you’re watching this on YouTube or if you’re listening on a podcast.

Anything else, Chris, before we head out?

[00:38:52] Chris: No. I’m good.

[00:38:55] Josh: Cool. So we will be live again in two weeks. If you want to tune in on YouTube, make sure to Subscribe on YouTube if you want to tune in live and or just watch the recordings instead of listening to them. If you’re listening, make sure you’re subscribed as well.

If you like, promote, subscribe, all that fun stuff, it really helps to show if you want to follow Chris or I a little bit more. In depth. Then again, check the links in the description. We have a link to Chris’s website. We have a a link to my website if you want to jump on our email lists and get more of our updates along the way.

That’s it for me, Chris. It’s been a pleasure as always, and we will see you guys in the next episode. See ya. See ya.