Josh: Hey, good morning, guys. My name is Josh Lustig. Welcome to the space. Thanks to everyone for the tech fest. I think it’s really a cool idea and it’s gonna just transform and snowball. So thanks for being here and supporting the first one. So I guess my quick bio, I call it the “nobody cares” bio. Because what I’ve found is not many people actually care. You’re here to learn something for you, right? So I’ll give you the high level overview. Why the heck am I even up here talking? We’ve done a few things. By the grace of God, we’ve had some successes in the insurance industry. How does that relate to tech? I’ll circle back around that in a minute. Basically, my bio is, when I was 19, I dropped out of college after four months and said screw it. Not for me.

It came easy to me, but I just didn’t know it wasn’t working out for me as far as what I was learning. And I wanted to get married. So I married my girlfriend about six months later. We have now fast forward nine years. We have four little kids expecting our fifth one. So all seven and under. So that’s a little crazy. I know. It’s a crazy house. In the middle of all that, somehow we turned our insurance agency, mostly health insurance, Medicare, that kind of thing, we turned that into a $50 million company and a private equity firm came and purchased us. Who here is in some kind of a business? Like you’re a business owner, you’re starting out your own company, self employed. Cool, cool. I would like to get a little like, vibe on who’s here. So that really helped us.

And we had a total of eight staff. So people are like, “Gosh, I have to have, you know, hundreds of employees and all this overhead and all this stuff to make a decent amount of money.” And I try to, when I get the chance to speak, to dispel that myth and say, look, with technology, with the resources at our disposal, in today’s modern world, we can do a lot with a little. So how come an insurance guy from a town of 1,000 people, there’s literally more cows than people in my hometown, right in the county, right? There’s one stoplight in all of Idaho county. If you’ve ever been there, it’s in Grangeville. And we started using online marketing, Facebook ads, YouTube ads, Google Ads, pushing people to online webinars, really doing the online marketing thing and then doing phone sales.

And on the back of technology, all that is based on automations, you know, different software programs. That were just adopting earlier than some other people, and that turned into a $50 million company with eight total people. And so I think I really believe in the mission of how do we use technology? Not to replace people, but to make it easier for people. Thank you for the clap. So we’ll go through a little bit of. That’s my whole story. I won’t get into that. My number one most passionate topic is not about the logistics of how to create a business. That’s important. And you’ll probably hear a lot about that today. The tech side, the business side. Surely I’m the least technologically advanced person in the room, probably at a tech conference. But we just know how to use it to make money.

Who wants to do more of that? Right? So what I like to talk about is we do a lot of consulting. About three years ago, we started a consulting firm. We’ve consulted thousands of clients and their businesses across the United States, and we do a lot of traveling. We bought a jet, do the whole, you know, fly across the country every week kind of a thing. And what I found in speaking to most business owners is, 90% of the time, what stops us from the next level or what stops us from advancing in the new tech startup you have or the new career that you just started, whatever it is not actually some logistic, you know, the actual tech itself.

It’s not the little thing that you picked up at the conference that was, oh, I know how to do the, you know, the algorithm better or the math better or whatever it is. What I have found is the thing that stops people or propels people is literally me, you, the actual human being themselves. So I’m gonna talk a little bit more about that today. That’s the flavor I’m gonna bring. Just because what happens is you go through and ask me how I know. You get to a spot where. Where you’re scaling, you’re going quick, you have some employees, you have hundreds of thousands going out the door, hundreds of thousands coming in the door on a weekly basis.

And what happens is you have a kid get sick, or God forbid, one of your parents gets cancer, or God forbid, something happens and your spouse are no longer getting along. Has anybody ever had or heard of anyone having any of those challenges in their life? I got two people. You’ve never heard of anyone having a problem in their life? Put your hand up. Thank you. What happens is we just get derailed, and we don’t really know where we’re going. We kind of float through life and then we wake up a decade later and just think, man, I did a lot of stuff, but I didn’t get a lot done. So, anyway, I want to talk about. Not this. I don’t know why. Can you just manually forward that for me, or is it in the back? I don’t know. The clicker’s not working.

But I want to talk more about the goal setting. So if you are taking notes, the framework that I like to remind myself of is GPA: Goals, Plans, Action, GPA. I always tell people when I speak to students, I’m like, this is the key to your success, is gpa. It’s not what you think. It’s not grades. It’s goals, plans, and actions. And it’s so simple. It’s so simple. But then I would challenge people like, well, Josh, I already know that. I, too, have read a Tony Robbins book, you know, five years ago. But then I like to challenge myself when I think that way. And I go, well, then if somebody walks up to me right now and says, josh, what’s your goal?

If I can’t spit it out exactly what the goal is, what my plan is to get there, and what I’m doing literally today, well, then, good for me. Good for you. We know the right answer. Oh, we should be having goals. We should be having actual plans. But if we’re not executing on it’s worthless. Everybody say worthless. Thank you. And really, for me, I have to challenge myself every day on this. I will notice a week. If I don’t have a actual plan this week, I will get pretty much nothing done. I’ll run around like a chicken with my head cut off. Right. Farm talk. Sorry. I’m a farm kid. I’ll run around like that all week doing all these things, and then realize nothing actually is moving forward. So I want to challenge you to think a little bit.

I don’t have enough time to go through all these, so you can take screenshots of the questions. This is a good exercise for you to do on your own time. But just like a reflection of who do I want to be? Where am I looking to take this thing? So whatever you’re doing right now, I don’t know why you guys came to this. I don’t know what the reason is that you’re here. You’re probably looking to do something in your life. We all are. What is it? Maybe it has nothing to do with business. Maybe it has nothing to do with tech. Maybe it has something to do with your personal life. You want to get married or you want to have a kid, maybe you’re thinking about more of those things. So I’m going to break these down.

I stole the seven areas of life from Zig Ziglar. Anybody heard of that guy? Awesome. I’ve been following that Since I was 17 on the farm, and I just really like it. So, categories, in no order. Financial. Literally, how much money do you want to make in your life? This exercise, write it down for yourself. How much money do you want to make? If we will not hit a target that we cannot see, you won’t do it. I like the image that I read in a book one time of a guy. Imagine you have a apple on someone’s head, right? And it’s a loved one, and you spin around in a circle with a blindfold on. You have a bow and arrow, and you spin around and around and around. And then you just shoot and hope you hit it.

I think a lot of us accidentally, myself included, there’s stretches of time that we just accidentally float through and then realize, what have I even been trying to do in my life? Macro. Macro level. What am I even trying to do? Okay, maybe, like, make more money. Well, how much more money? What’s enough? So you used to think you should make more money when you’re making 20,000. You thought 50,000 was going to be enough, and then 50 and then 100. For some of you’re making a million plus. I know you. Some of you’re making more than that. And you just got to ask yourself, well, is 2 million going to make it that much better? Is a $2 billion tech company exit going to make it that much better? Well, I don’t know. I didn’t really think about this.

I kind of went through a depression after I sold my company. If I’m being just straight up with you guys, if I can bring it to that level, probably five months. Five months. And it was just because it was like, I tied so much to, like, oh, my first hundred thousand. When I was 19. I was like, who? Yeah, I felt so good about it. And then I was like, well, the answer must be 250,000. You guys are going to laugh because I’m not that smart of a guy. You’re going to laugh probably because you’re like, well, so I get to 250, and you know what I say? I just would have thought this would feel different. Not even better, just, like, different.

The next day after I hit that benchmark, and I’m like, oh, I made 250 you know, oh, it must be 500. The Instagram guys, they say it’s 500,000. So I go to five and I’m like, I’m 23 years old. Actually, 22. 22 Years old, making 500,000 in a town of a thousand people. Right. Should feel pretty good about yourself if you’re a business owner. It’s not about this. I say, oh, immediately, it’s a million. Oh, seven figures. Seven figures, everybody. That’s what it’s going to be. That’s going to be the thing that solves, you know, anything that’s going on, and it just goes on and on. Well, I have decided I’m not stupid enough to get to a $50 million exit, which makes my net worth lower than that.

For any of you that are doing math, it’s much lower than that, but it’s still a decent amount at 28 years old. And I go, I’m not going to be stupid enough to say I have to be a billionaire to make myself feel good. Does that make sense to anybody? But you look at Instagram, you look at social media, you look at these things and. And everybody wants to tell you the opposite. Everyone wants to say that is going to be what makes you so happy. It’s not. It’s fun to have money. I’ll be honest. It’s fun to have the jet. I’ll be honest. It is cool. But it has very little to do with your happiness. Actually, sometimes it’s an inverse relationship if I’m just going to talk like that. So, like, why would I say any of this?

Because I don’t want to wake up 30 years from now or at the end of my life, whichever one’s first. I don’t want to wake up at the end and realize that I played a game and won the game I set out to win, only to wake up and realize it was the wrong game to play in the first place. You tracking me? Thanks for the amen. So what game am I playing? I don’t want to. I don’t want to play basketball my whole life, get to the very end, and then realize, dude, the game was actually golf. Now, you’re a hell of a basketball player. Good job, Josh. But the game was actually golf, for example, and you suck at golf because you spent zero time thinking about it.

So before I get into the next section, I just want to maybe have a self reflection of. Maybe you can take a little time just to think about your own life and be like, what is my actual priority? What’s the priority. I say the priority is. For some of us, I say the priority is God. Okay, Josh, why don’t you freaking sit down for a minute and ask yourself, how much time did you spend talking to God versus everything else in your life? Okay, that’s just for me. Not trying to say what you need to believe or what you don’t. But I am saying that’s the only thing that will actually make you happy. At least that’s what I found. I say my wife is the most important person on the planet.

Okay, well, when it comes to a decision between helping your wife with something and being with the family or going off and doing something else, that, yeah, is quasi business, but it’s also fun. Which one are you going to choose? I have a strict be home by 5:30 policy, and I can wake up and work at 3 in the morning. That’s great. Our whole marriage, that’s what it’s been. But at 5:30, pretty much, unless I’m traveling, I’m home. And that’s not been easy. But I’m like, you can have both. You can have both. It just takes a very intentional person. All right, I got sidetracked financial. These are the questions that I would ask myself if I could take a half a day to just sit down. How much money? Where does the income come from? What investments do I own?

Are you investing in real estate? Are you investing in companies? In this ideal world, what would the answer to this be? What car do I drive? Is that even important to me? Why or why not? I’m not telling you if it’s important to drive a nice car or not. I personally am not a car guy. I try to be. I really do. I try to be. I just don’t care. A week later, I’m like, this feels the same as driving that piece of crap 1999 Grand Marquis that I had literally handed down from my wife’s grandmother. I was making a million a year driving that. Now I’m driving a Dodge pickup. My wife drives a Navigator. I just think it’s more expensive. I’m just not a car guy, but I love people that love nice cars. I think it’s awesome.

I am a house guy, though. I do like nice houses. Right? So the point is, want what you want and put it on a piece of paper. If you want the nice house, go get it. You might realize it’s not really what it’s cracked up to be. Or you might realize that it’s the fulfillment of your lifelong dreams. I won’t spoil it for you. How much do I give to charity in this ideal world? How much do I give? What’s my net worth? Does that even matter to me? If yes, why soul search a little bit. And I want to start with this event this way, because I want you to see everything else that you hear through that lens. Like, I’m trying to reframe the way we’re looking at it.

So instead of it being like, I’m just kind of here, maybe I’ll meet a couple people, whatever. If you decide today’s the day you’re going to change your life in a category, it’s just going to be, write this down. If you don’t raise the stakes in your life will raise them for you. Meaning Doctor says, hey, Josh, if you don’t, let’s say fast forward, you know, 25 years, hey, Josh, you’ve been living unhealthy for 35 years of your life or whatever, and you’re literally going to die of a heart attack if you don’t start exercising every day and eating healthier. Has anyone ever heard of somebody getting that news? Somebody else? Not you. No one. Do tech people not have hands? Okay, cool. I’m used to talking to insurance agents. They’re a little gun. Pull the trigger too fast.

So if that happens, what happened is you will do it, you will work out more, you will go, and you will actually eat healthier because you have to. You have to. Life raised the stakes for me. Well, my thing is, like, how can I convince myself to rewind all the way today and be like, well, I don’t want that to happen. So why don’t I raise the stakes today? The problem is only urgent things get done. So how do we apply urgency to some of these things if I don’t start focusing on my finances? Yeah, I think. Oh, that’s why. All right, number two, career. What’s my job title? What does my dream day look like? What do I want to spend my time doing? When’s the last time we thought about that? Do you want to spend it coding? Great.

Do you want to spend it talking to your own employees? Great. My dad does not like having employees. I’ll be honest. He likes talking to customers. Right. That’s. That’s just the difference. I don’t necessarily want to do that anymore, and I like the macro of it all. So just ask yourself what I actually want to do in my day. What impact do I make on people around me? What’s the structure of my company look like? What am I known for, they say, and somebody. I’m not supposed to get political. This is not a political comment. But they say if you ever met Bill Clinton. There’s a couple other things they say too. But if you ever met Bill Clinton, they say one one, you felt like you’re the only person in the world that existed.

That despite maybe some of his faults or maybe some of his good qualities, whatever, that in the moment when you’re talking to him one one, you feel like you’re the only person that existed in the world. That’s a pretty decent thing to be known for. I think there’s some pretty things that you shouldn’t be known for on the Bill Clinton conversation as well. But some jokes are just for me career. All right. You’ll have to manually slide that for it for me, Rob. Might just have to be comfy. Might as well just sit and be comfy. 3 Social and I’ll skip a little bit. So if you want to take a picture for later, you’re welcome to do that. What does my social circle look like? What status do I have in that circle? Is that important to me? Why or why not?

Who do I have influence over right now? How am I using that influence? I’m a big like self reflection guy. What social skills am I a master at? Do I look at people in the eye when I talk to them? We think that these things don’t matter and they actually are the thing that matter. Back to my earlier point, the logistics of okay, do I have the fanciest spreadsheet? Honestly, most of the time an investor comes to me or, excuse me, wanting me to invest in their company or their project, if it’s super fancy and detailed and the spreadsheets are all over the place, most of the time that person won’t be the most successful. I’m just being frank. Most of the time, they’re too smart to be successful. We’re taught the wrong things. In school.

That person analyzed it to death, ran 5 million scenarios, and then you know how many actions they took? 0. I can accidentally be that person. That’s why I’m passionate about it. I know the difference in my life when I’m analyzing things to death or if I’m literally taking immediate action and just saying, we’ll figure it out along the way. We have a decent plan, we’re gonna execute. It’s gonna change tomorrow anyway. All right, how do I use those skills to advance others lives? Family life? I’m gonna skip this. But it is very important. Intellectual. What I do keep my brain sharp. Sorry, if you’re taking pictures, you can interrupt me. Intellectual. What skills am I constantly practicing? What books, podcasts? What am I listening to? What am I. What am I feeding myself? I’m gonna pause on this one for a second.

I deleted my social media apps. Kind of funny for a guy that wanted to be a social media, like podcast, you know, star kind of funny. Right. I just deleted them. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of what it’s feeding my brain. You know, my grandparents, they grew up in a small town for. Did you know that they had no idea what was happening in Russia today? They had no idea what was happening across the country. They had no idea what was going on 50 miles from their house, nor did they care because they didn’t have access to it. And you know, some of the happiest people I’ve ever met. You guys want to just guess? My grandparents, those people, right.

The only thing that effed it all up for them is they found out later in life they should watch the news, the old TV box and screwed it all up. So I’m not anti tech, clearly, but I think that we need to manage it and use it at work and at home. Turn the damn thing off. You know what I’m saying? If you’re like me and you’re kind of have an addictive personality, it’s very easy to get sucked into and the same messages get repeated. And those are lies. Back to the earlier, oh, if you’re not making a million dollars, there’s somebody the other day that literally said, if you’re a man of the household, you’re not making $400,000 a year, then you’re a failure as a man and you should give your man card away. I’m like, what are you even saying?

And this is like a billionaire. I mean, this is actually somebody that’s respected in the business community. And that’s the attitude we’re gonna have. Tell me how that makes sense. How did we get to that place? But you know who’s believing it? On accident, Most of us. Especially if you’re on social media. Because. Just rampant. And it’s not just that. Anyway, digress. Next. Nothing to do with the slide, by the way. I don’t know. Physical. How do I look? How does this make me feel in this ideal world of yours? What are the attributes of you? Are you feeling healthy? Do you have energy? If you’re like me and have kids that you need to go run around the yard with, are you Feeling like every day you’re groggy or you feel like, yeah, I can go do this, right?

I want to be the grandpa that can throw my kids in the air. That’s why recently, very recently, I’ve decided to get a little healthier. I have a long way to go. This has been traditionally my worst category of the lot. What types of foods do I enjoy? What. This is a big one. What did I used to be addicted to and now I’m free of? And this ideal world. What did I used to be addicted to and now I’m free of? I already told you, I’m a pretty addictive personality. I think a lot of successful people are. You just have to, you have to have something to keep you busy. And there’s a time period in my life where I was drinking way too much. I wasn’t the guy that was like, can’t function the next day.

It’s just like, do you really need to have three drinks all the time? Do you, do you need to go to like that lunch meeting and always have a cocktail? Probably not, right? And it was a way for me to cope with that much stress at a 23 years old and running a multimillion dollar company. And it turned into a problem for me. It seriously did. And I was like, something’s got to give. This is what I mean by sometimes. It’s not the logistics. You know, what just about derailed my entire life. I’m 23. No, I was 24 at the time. I’m making over a million dollars a year net in my pocket in a small town where nobody knows anything about it. They all think I’m still broke because I’m driving a small car, like a bad old 99, you know, marquee.

And one night we go out to my property. It’s 200 acres. And my friend wants to go out and see it. So we have his kids over. He has five kids. We have him over and his wife. And we have a nice dinner. And it’s nothing crazy. We’re just sitting around having a couple drinks, whatever. He goes to his house, puts his kids to bed, and he says, why don’t I come back over, just hang out for a bit. So he comes over, it’s like, oh, 10 o’. Clock. That point we have a cigar, sit out my yard, it’s like July or something. Have a couple more drinks. I didn’t think I was getting any crazy. Just a standard night. My wife went to bed. She’s probably Pregnant always is. But she probably went to bed, she was tired.

And so we’re like, why don’t we go see the property, Josh? So I jump in, my side by side after a few drinks, jumping my side by side. And I’m talking. It is a half a mile from my house in town to across the highway to my 200 acres that he wanted to go see. Not a big deal. And you got to realize in small town Idaho, if you’re not from small town Idaho, this is not a big deal. To have a few drinks, jump on a piece of equipment and drive around the middle of the night. That’s just how I grew up, right? So my thought, no biggie. Turns out it is a biggie. We go. He’s like, I think you should plant an orchard tree there. An orchard, you know, there with a bunch of trees. I’m like, oh, cool.

I kind of turn and I just misjudged something and I flipped that thing. I’m talking middle of the night. This is like 11:30pm now flip it. It turns off. My phone’s out of my pocket. I fly from me to the back wall. I’m dressed in dress clothes still. And I’m on the ground. No phone, no lights, pitch black. I’m screaming for this guy’s name, getting. We can’t find him. He’s a good friend. Well, he hit his head and he’s profusely bleeding. We walked to the neighbor’s house, woke them up, scared them to death. Brought. I’m trying not to, like, get emotional, but brought him to the local hospital where I know everybody, right? Like, my best friend’s mom is the ER nurse. You know what I’m saying? Like, put it in perspective. I’m. The doctor says, I don’t know if he’s gonna make it.

What? Basically, I just killed a guy because I was an idiot one night, right? I’m sobbing on the floor of my hometown hospital in the little chapel, begging God to save my friend’s life. I’m not a bad person. Made some stupid decisions because of some things I was addicted to. And I didn’t say that I was right. Stupid. If I would have killed that guy on accident. First of all, my life is kind of over. Probably not, but it would have felt like it went to jail. I can’t even help their family. Best friends of mine can’t even help their family because I’ll be the enemy to his wife. Should have seen his wife come to the er. What do you do? I’m balling She’s Ballin, but she hates me for good reason. I hate me, right? He pulls through, it’s all fine.

I go back to my day to day life, right? That would have derailed everything, has nothing to do with the logistical piece of advice that I learned at a conference one day about how to grow my business. But it would have single handedly stopped me in my tracks forever. Maybe I would recover in 20 years or something, you know. So the bargain I made with God in the hospital is I said, I won’t. This is the best I could come up with again, I’m not very smart. I said, God, I’m not supposed to bargain with you. I don’t think that’s how it works. But I’m gonna do it anyway because I have no other option. I don’t know if this is how it works, but I will not drink a drop of alcohol for, I don’t know, a year.

That’s the best I could come up with to save my friend’s life. And so I didn’t, you know, what I wanted to do. Two weeks after this all, everyone’s fine, he’s back to being healthy, everything’s good. Two weeks later I wanted to drink, but I didn’t. Why? Because the stakes were high. I felt like God, like lightning bolt me or something if I reneged on my, you know, on my deal. So yes, I did not drink at all for 12 months. Why? Because it wasn’t just a goal. The stakes were high enough that I was not going to fail. So I want you to take that, all that long story and think about like what in your life, first of all, does some addiction need to be gone?

Drinking, smoking, something else, I don’t care what it is, does it need to just get social media for me? Got rid of drinking, addicted to social media, got rid of social media, Now I’m addicted to something. I’m hoping I get addicted to trading so I make some freaking money, right? But at the end of the day it’s, if we don’t raise the stakes and say right now I’m going to decide to quit drinking, smoking, whatever, if I don’t do it now, life will raise those stakes for me later on. Don’t worry about that. And then it’s really serious. I killed somebody or something else happened on accident and then we got a change. So in your business or in your career, we have to artificially do this to raise the stakes.

We have to say, well, is it really that big a deal if I, if this company is successful Enough. I just started. Is it really that you got to figure out a way to artificially raise the stakes today, otherwise nothing actually changes. We’re simple creatures, we just, we’re. We thrive off of fear and urgency and so if it’s not urgent, we won’t do it. Alright, next. Somebody’s have to give me the time too because I think we’re not gonna get through everything spiritual. Do I believe in or serve a higher power than myself? Is that important to me? Why or why not? Do I belong to a certain faith or religion? Why or why not? What does my spiritual life look like? How did in this ideal world, right. Future state, we’re making goals here. How do I make this decision or lack thereof?

I think about it, I just do what my parents do. Did I research it to my college friends 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago influenced that? Does that matter? Does whole conversation matter? Why are we not? What is my life’s purpose in mission while on this earth? If you don’t have one, if you don’t have something deeper, the money’s never going to be enough. The cool technology we create is never going to be enough. The community that we have is never going to be enough. So I want to tie my self worth to something that can’t change. If I tie it to money rises and falls. That doesn’t seem like everybody say that doesn’t sound like a good idea. No, if I tie it even to good things, I tie it to my spouse. What happens when my spouse dies?

One of my best friends, her husband died, she had seven kids and her husband died when I think he was like 30. She’s only 38 right now, so 33 years old. Crazy. Well, even that I can’t tie it to things that can change my opinion seems like a dumb thing to tie it to. Even good things like family. So then you just kept thinking like, well then what the heck is this all about? Eventually, even if it takes till our deathbed, eventually we’ll have to ask these questions, but might as well start asking them now while we have the brain space to do it, the capacity to do it. I don’t want to wake up on my deathbed and be like, damn, the game was golf, but I played basketball the whole time. I wish that I would have focused more on that game.

This is how I view this. All right, next we’ll go into some more logistics. Now, sorry, that was from a different slide deck. All right, goals, plans, action. So we’re going to skip the goal section because everyone probably knows how to make a smart goal. But. But the number one thing I want to talk about that so you can kind of fast forward through the goals section is like, the number one thing is we all say, I want to be healthier. Eh, what do you mean? How do you freaking quantify that? How do you know if you win the game or lose the game? I want to be healthier. I want to make more money. I want to make enough money. I want to have a happy relationship with my spouse. Right. I love those. Because guess what?

You can convince yourself if you win or lose every day on a daily basis, depending on how you feel. Am I winning? Oh, yeah. I have a much happier relationship with my spouse this month than last month. I’m much healthier. Well, by whose standards? On my whim. No, measure it. If it’s a weight goal, it’s easy. I want to go from 200 pounds to 180 in x amount of time. And that’s what it is. That’s the goal. Or if it’s you’re already at the weight you want to be, it’s because you’re way better than me at this category, Then it’s going to be some kind of other metric. Maybe it’s a lifting metric. Maybe it’s a personal, you know, a PR record at your gym.

I don’t know what it is, but make that the goal rather than I’ll just arbitrarily want to make more money. No, I want to make $200,000 by X date. Everybody says make sense. All right, cool. Once you have this goal, I want you to put it in present tense. Do back up one slide. Present tense. Because your brain. Your brain treats a vividly imagined thought like real experiences. Your brain does not know the difference between reality and what you just brainwash yourself to believe it is reality. So it’s so easy to gaslight somebody else, they can’t figure it out either. They can’t remember if they did this or didn’t do this a week ago. So if you just tell them that they did so many times in a row, eventually they think that they did it.

Your brain is very smart, but at the same time, you can kind of trick it. So why not use this to our advantage with our own self? Brainwash myself in the ways of positivity. My brain does not know the difference. If I start saying in a positive tense, let’s say I’m £200 and I want to be 180. Let’s just say that for an easy metric. If I say I’m £180 right now and in the best shape of my life, your brain eventually is going to start to believe that and start to take actions to do it. The inconsistency bias. Can’t take it when you say that.

And then later on you go and you go to McDonald’s and you order four Big Macs and a giant, you know, Dr. Pepper, it is gonna freak out and go, I know this is a normal thing for you to do, but you’ve been repeating to yourself every day that you’re in the best shape of your life. This obviously doesn’t make sense. It’s like a friggin AI program, right? Eventually you can’t lie to yourself in the mirror. If you go to the mirror every day, I’m in the best shape of my life right now. Sounds cheesy. There’s only two things that will happen if you say that every single day to yourself in the mirror. There’s only two options. Either you quit because you’re tired of lying to yourself.

If you can be disciplined and not do that option, then you will have to start making adjustments. Because when you order the Big Mac, you’ll throw it in the garbage can because you’ll be so pissed. I’m not going to go back to that mirror tonight and say another lie again. I’m tired of it. I’m done with it. And it’s a primitive exercise, but very effective. Every person I’ve ever coached on this and has actually done this has reported back. This has changed my life. Like, okay, some people in my industry are like, I don’t want to do sales anymore. I’m just burnt out. Well, that’s a dumb thing to tell yourself unless you can just stop doing it. But if you have to keep doing it, why don’t you tell yourself I love making phone calls.

Look at yourself on the way to work, in the mirror on the way and say, I love making phone calls. I can’t wait to dial the next person. I cannot wait to talk to somebody, change their life. They want what I’m offering before I even make the offer. You know, they want to buy this thing before I even talk about it. That’s how excited I am about this sales call coming up. When you talk to yourself like that, it becomes true. So believe me or don’t believe me. If you test it out, I guarantee if you do it for at least two weeks. Because the first couple days you think you’re in nutcase. Use it for a couple weeks, you will start to see results. All right, I’ll calm down a little maybe. Alright, plan. Create a plan. All right.

Start with the end in mind. So let’s say we’ve been talking about health, but let’s talk about the business side. Actually we got a vote. Who wants to talk about business? Business money. Okay, I got like half. Who wants to talk about health? Got a couple people. Just throw out a different topic if you want a different topic. Come on guys, we’re a small group. Oh, I got five minutes. Okay, we’ll go with business money. Start with the end in mind. Let’s say you say I don’t know how much. I don’t want to under speak or over speak to the audience. If you’re a billionaire already, please forgive me, but let’s just say that you want to make a million dollars in the next five years. Okay, so you would start five years from now. What is today? 2025. Let’s just make it easy.

Assume it’s January 1st. We’re going to go to January 1st of all, 2030. Say what has to be true in my life to achieve this goal? What has to be true? If I’m making a million dollars recurring revenue in this company by January 1st of 2030, that’s a big number, 2030, then what needs to happen? What is true? Okay, well, I have a company that has this many employees, we’re doing this much volume, we’re doing this many sales, we have this whatever or I have this, you know, MRR. I’m going to try to speak more tech language or marketing language maybe. I have this many, you know, units that we’re selling. Software, widgets or hardware, whatever you’re selling.

I have this much okay at this margin, which means okay, to make 5 million net or to make $1 million net, I would have to be selling $4 million because we have a 25% margin. So 4 million gross means I have to sell X amount of units, which means you just reverse engineer all the math. You guys probably already do this. Start at the end and then work yourself backwards. Say, okay, what milestones? We’re five years out. So at three years. So at 2020, this isn’t exactly to make sense, but at three years, at 2028, January 1st of 2028, what needs to happen? Okay, go to one year. So I like to do everything in five, three, one year. And I chunk it into quadrants. Can I have the flip chart? Would you grab it for me? Thanks.

And the quadrant method for Me is this is just. I’m a hyper planner and this has helped me a lot is I go five years, three years, one year. Once I get it to one year now I know okay, for me to be on pace, I need to be at $200,000. Let’s just say is what I came up with. 200,000 By the end of the next 12 months. That’s the first tranche. Right. Then I want to break that down and say what needs to be true. What needs to be true at the end of 12 months. Horrible handwriting by the way. There’s probably six projects. Let’s say that you need to execute on this 12 months. I need to start the company. I need to do this. I need to hire somebody.

I need to get the sales team, whatever it is, get the marketing rolling. Let’s say there’s to make it easy. I mean let’s just say there’s four projects for the year. Let’s just say that’s how it worked out. There’s four projects I really need to have completed by the end of this 12 month period. Well then I’m gonna go Q1, Q2, quarter three and quarter four. Very simple. I just take a sheet of paper out. I like cardstock because I’m fancy like that. Draw it right. I’m still a paper planner. I know. We’re in a tech conference. Q1, there’s this one project and let’s call it Somebody give me an idea. Marketing. Let’s say it’s a new marketing campaign. Let’s say we’re gonna run webinars. Okay. Because I’ve done a million of those. Probably not quite. I bet it’s at least 10,000. Alright, webinars.

There’s gonna be sub projects in order to get webinars completed. Right. So this is the overall main project for the quarter. I’m gonna have webinars going consistently producing X amount of customers from the funnel and my sales team by the end of quarter one. That would be the goal that we’d write out next to this. Right? Okay. Sub underneath that. I, I got to figure out what are all the things that need to happen in order to achieve that in this quarter. Okay. So I just list them out. Boom. Quarter two is the next one. Sales team. Got to hire a sales team. Quarter three, whatever. Right. So then you have all these. Now quadrant method begins quarter one starts before quarter one starts. This is the year plan. I know if I hit the year, I will hit the 12 month mark.

Then I’m on pace to hit the three year five. If I hit the three year, I’m on pace to hit the five year, which is the end goal right now I got to zoom out a little bit more or zoom in. However you look at that now, beginning of Q1. Does anybody have a guess what I’m going to do? Quadrant method. I told you I’m not smart, right? It’s just the same thing over and over. So this is now the quarter one. And I’m going to go week one, week two, week three, and week four. And what was our quarter one? Webinars. And there’s eight projects, let’s say eight little mini things that I have to do. This is get the tech set up. This is actually record the webinar. This is get ads going and run the webinar.

So now I’m gonna look at my. At the beginning of the quarter, I’m gonna look at the four weeks ahead of me on my calendar. I’m gonna go, okay, well, week two is out because I’m freaking in Florida, right? Or whatever. That’s just how life works. I’m in Hawaii. So week two is pretty much out. So I got three weeks. This. I got three weeks. I’m sorry, I skipped a whole thing. There’s months. Shoot, you guys, there’s months. So let’s say it’s January. That’s my bad. February, March. I have three months in the quarter, right? So it’s the same idea on this. Which projects am I gonna do in January, which in February, and which in March? Okay, so looking at my January, it’s pretty open. February has a couple weeks missing.

So I think realistically I could do, you know, X, Y and Z on January. February, I can only do like one thing in March. I have it really open. So I’ll do the other four projects or whatever. At the beginning of January is when I break the old quadrant out again and do the weeks. That probably makes more sense, doesn’t it? Hey, thanks. So the week one of January, I’m going to look at my calendar and I’m going to say, okay, realistically, I can do these five things. Okay, These subtasks. Week two, realistically, I’m in Florida, not going to do anything. Week three, I’m going to do these four things and you just chart it out. Gets crazier. But you only have to do this once at the beginning of the month.

Now, you know, hey, if I just do each of these, by the end of week one, I’m done. I’m on pace to hit the month. Right. End of week two, great. Didn’t do anything because I was in Florida. Week three, hit the week. If you do that every single month, you hit the quarters and the quarters will achieve the year. It’s a systematic way to know that every single day that I go to work, every single day, I’m on pace to hit my goals. Most people have no idea show up to work, I don’t know, we just do respond to some emails or something, I guess. And it’s like, okay, I have an hour. What can I do that’s productive in this hour? And then we spend an hour thinking about how to be productive in that hour. Right. It’s just human nature.

So if we have a plan, then we don’t have to think, we just have to execute. So at the beginning of each week, call it a Sunday. I don’t work on Sunday, so I do it Monday morning. It’s probably better if you do it on Sunday, but I don’t do anything on Sunday. It’s just part of my belief system, I guess. So I would go and week one, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, I just decide, okay, look at my actual Google Calendar for Monday. And now I start charting it on the Google Calendar in time blocks. On Monday, I’m going to do which of the five tasks or six tasks or seven tasks for week one. Well, I’m gonna do project A, this one’s gonna be C, this one’s gonna be E, whatever, right?

I’m gonna chart it out actually, time block by time block on my Google Calendar. Does that make sense? It’s a systematic way to make sure that you are always doing something productive to move towards your goals. When I do this, I build pretty decent sized companies. When I don’t do this and I have stretches of time where I don’t, I feel very much like a lost puppy. I’m just like, I just noticed that three weeks went by and Josh, if I just put on a piece of paper, the things that I actually did that were valuable, it’s less than 20% of the time. The old 8020 rule. 80 20, Pareto principle. Sure, everyone’s heard of it. If I just leave myself to my own devices and I’m reactive instead of proactive.

80% of my time is on BS tasks, responding to emails, filling my time with driving to and from various locations, whatever it is, texting people back, scrolling on social media. And 20% of the time I’m on the phone selling something, I want to flip this, right? And inverse that. All right? I Think my time is officially over. As my guess, everyone can breathe easy. Hope it wasn’t too painful. If you’re gonna do one thing after listening to me, if there’s only one thing I could send you away with, first of all, it would be really take the reflection day. I mean, this is great. This planning system is probably what you’re actually gonna do, is my guess. But if you could do one thing, I would take your calendar out at the break today. I would look at where’s the next half a day.

I know you’re busy, I get it. So am I. The next half day, whenever you’re the most fresh in the morning or afternoon and just block the whole thing to go somewhere by yourself with no technology for a minute for not with no distractions and answer some of those questions and answer like, what do I want? Otherwise I’ll end up being the person with blindfolds on and there’s no way I’m gonna hit the target. I’ll hit a target. This might not be the one that I actually want. Alright, thanks guys. Hope that this was helpful.

Joelle: Thank you, Josh. I’ve heard that story before, but it gets me again. Raise the stakes or life will raise them for you. Does anyone else have a takeaway? First person to raise their hand might get a special prize from the Girl Scouts. Take away from Josh’s talk, I could think of a few right here. Got them up on the board.

Audience member: Yes. I constantly try to remind myself that I have to write down what it is that I need to do. Being the dad of a five year old, it’s. I’ve got to teach her things that I’m actually doing, otherwise I’m being a hypocrite. And so telling her that we got to write down things and do goals is like something that I. I really struggle to like remind myself to put in my commonplace notebook. What am I actually aiming for today? Right. These are the three things I have to do today. Everything else is irrelevant and I will do all of those other things to avoid the three things. So the writing down of the goals is definitely a good reminder for me. Thank you.

Joelle: Thank you. And here’s a present from the Girl Scouts. Girl Scouts of Silver Sage actually brought a ton of cookies back there. Everyone loves the Thin Mints. So over by the coffee, you guys are welcome to grab as many Girl Scouts as you want. We also have a trail mix bar, popcorn bar, so we’re going to have a lot of breaks. Actually one right now. So you’re welcome to get up for 10 minutes. The bathrooms are down the hall. Grab some trail mix or popcorn, and we’ll see you back here in 10 minutes, Okay?