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All right. Happy Monday, everyone. Wow. I didn't get to see the number until we. We opened the room. We got north of a hundred people here this morning. Happy Monday. Love to see that. That's awesome. Thanks, everyone, for blocking the time. I will. I will do my best to. To deliver. This is great. Happy Monday. How's everyone doing? Any. Any fun wins you want to drop in the chat? Anything exciting that's been happening? Yeah, sorry I missed last week. I'll spare everyone the details, but I. Yeah, I got. I got really bad, severe food poisoning. I was out all day Monday, quick turnaround. 24 hours later, I was okay. But Monday was. Was pretty rough. Disclaimer. You should throw away the food you have in your fridge. I learned. I learned that lesson the hard way. So, anyway, we're back feeling good. Thanks everyone for asking. That's really kind of you. Who are the newcomers? Anyone here? Is this your first Monday hot seat first workshop? Always love welcoming the newcomers. These are. These are a lot of fun. I love starting the week this way. Daniel, great. Welcome. Chad, thanks for making the time. Awesome. Ted. James, Annika, Great. All right, so lately we've been. We've been bouncing between either hot seat style. Christina, great. Thanks for joining us. We've been bouncing between hot seat style, if. If there's really good questions, especially different questions that haven't really been asked before, and little master classes, which are more like walkthroughs, and people have found those really helpful. So I think that's what we're going to do today. I have a couple ideas of things that I think would be helpful to walk through for everyone and especially too, I love having the space to. To share new frameworks and things like that. Because whether you're here live or you watch the recording later, I think these are great assets that you can come back to over and over and over again, especially when you hear certain explanations of things. So before I share my ideas, though, would love to get a quick temp check in the chat. Is there anything in particular that you find yourself really struggling with in terms of ghostwriting, landing clients, talking to clients, fulfilling on clients? I just want to get a quick poll essentially of. Of some different topics that would be helpful. So, Roman, bouncing back to outreach after a long break. Okay, pricing. James, you should go through packaging and pricing inside pga. That'll probably answer a lot of your questions. Balancing fulfillment and outreach. Okay, so time finding the right prospects to reach out to, managing the outreach when volume goes up, how to keep my clients moving on their side. Of fulfillment, how to qualify leads, outreach on email. Okay, cool. All right, why don't we tackle a couple of these? Because I think this. This stuff will be. Will be helpful. Let's start with how do you qualify a lead? Okay, now I want to. I want to preface with something and, and if you have other ideas or other questions, feel free to drop them in the chat. I'll try and tackle as many as I can. Something that's worth sharing about qualifying leads is that it is very common for you to find someone on the Internet and the person that you might think, oh, that looks like someone that has a huge budget, they would be really easy to work with, I should pitch them. That's not always the case. And you also find the opposite to be true. You'll find someone with a very, you know, blank profile, or they have 11 followers and they look fairly inactive, or someone that, on the surface, you're like, oh, that's a small business. They might not have any money, or they're a solopreneur. You know, they. They probably don't have a lot of budget. And then you get on the phone with them and you start talking and you realize, you know, they've sold three companies already and have five houses around the world and funding their next startup with their own cash. And I ran into that all the time. And so my point in sharing that little tidbit is I think it's. I almost would encourage everyone here to not even feel like you have to qualify people as much as you should. Just try to talk to as many people as possible in the beginning. Almost every question just for. Just as like a good overarching meta takeaway for everyone here, almost every question I see in the chat gets solved with volume. Just. And it's such a hard answer because it is the honest truth. It's just not the answer that everyone wants to hear. Okay, so instead of asking, how do I qualify a lead, the question instead should be, how do I reach out to 10 times more leads? Or how do I more effectively block time on my calendar so that I can talk to 10 times more people? How can I have 10 times more conversations? How can I send 10 times more DMS? Right? Because if. If you take a lot of time to try and qualify people, you have to realize that, like, one of my favorite. And I talk about it all the time, but one of my favorite Hormozi frameworks is this idea of more, better, new, or different. Okay, so when you say, how do I qualify someone before I have a conversation with them, you're essentially jumping to better. How do I do this better? But the. The problem is you shouldn't jump to better until more is completely maxed out and there is literally no more volume that you can do, because more is the much easier thing and the more likely thing that's gonna work, right? And then you can see where new or different would be. Like, how do I qualify leads on a platform that I haven't used yet? Well, why are you trying to do something different? Why are you trying to do something new? You know, just do the thing. And I'm telling everyone this. This little framework remains true for way longer than you want it to. I live this inside our business every single day. It's very easy to come up with new and different things to do. It's very, very easy. The challenge and the problem is that most of the time, that is actually the mistake, because you already have something that's working or has the potential to work. You just need to do significantly more of it. Okay, so then this is sort of a nice segue into, well, time, right? Like time blocking. So how do you get more out of your time? Well, here's. Here's a. Interesting way of thinking about it. I. I think about this constantly. The way you get more out of your time is by improving skill, because that means for every, you know, effort. So one effort equals x output. The more skill you have, the more the same amount of effort yields a higher output. Does that make sense for everyone? This is why whenever someone asks, especially in the beginning, they're like, hey, Cole, how many outreach messages do I need to send to land a client? Well, in the beginning, if you have no skill, you have to send way more messages, right? But the more that you do it, the more skill you build, the more output you generate. Okay, so improving skill is how you get more out of time, right? Like, just to say it in the inverse, everyone here, if. If I took over whatever thing you were doing for an hour, do you think I would get more output out of it? Yeah, I would probably get more output, right? It's not because I'm special. It's just because there is a skill gap. Okay? So that is why we focus so much on, okay, you have to build skills, because the more skills that you build, the more output you get per unit of effort in time. That is literally the definition of productivity. You get more out of the time that you deploy. The second thing, which is way easier, and this is something I encourage everyone here to do, is batching similar activities okay, so drop in the chat. Does anyone here currently do this? So you do all your outreach back to back. You record all your looms back to back. You try and schedule all your sales calls back to back. You schedule all your client calls back to back. You do the writing back to back. There is, there is probably nothing that will have a bigger impact on your ability to get more out of the time that you invest than batching. And, and you can say it in the inverse, if you don't batch, that is where you will feel that feeling of, I don't have enough time. I'm not getting enough accomplished right there. Nothing crushes productivity more than bouncing between different things. Okay, so for example, it's like even on, on Mondays. So Monday, I'm living it right now. There's a reason why Monday mornings we schedule as many calls as possible. We had our marketing call before this. We have PGA call. I might schedule a couple of meetings after this. Right now we're in a ship 30 cohort, so I'll do the ship 30 call right after that. I want to be in call mode for five hours. And then when I'm done with call mode, then I have the opposite. Then I have no calls, and then I will go work on one specific thing. Okay, so every time you switch the task put you're working on, you just cut your effectiveness in half. You just cut your productivity in half. The thing that you can, you can take this to another level though, and you can think in terms of batching, not just the task, but similar things within that task. Okay, so I'll. I'll give everyone an example that I'm going through right now is I am trying to figure out, because I write a lot of different things inside our businesses. And even though it's all writing, right? Like it's all writing, but there's actually lots of different types of writing. There's short form writing, there's long form writing, there's more like newsletter marketing, ish writing. There's digital product creation, there's video scripts, and then there's also short form scripts and long form scripts within that. And then there's also VSL scripts, and then there's landing page copy, and then there's ads. So if you just look at writing and you think, oh, I've blocked four hours to get some writing done, but you don't realize for one client you're doing, you know, short form, and another client you're doing long form, and another client you're doing newsletter writing. Or then you're also writing your own content, then you're right. Every one of those different formats is another switching cost. Okay, for, for anyone here, if you haven't done it yet, I'm telling, like writing ads couldn't be more different than all the other types of writing. Writing ads is a completely different. It's a different way of thinking. It's a different cadence, it's a different frame, it's a different. I'm talking to people who have never seen me before. Warm audiences versus cold audiences. It is so radically different. And I have learned, just sharing with everyone here, I have learned that if I sit down and I try and bounce between, let me write an ad. Oh, and then I'm also going to do like some digital product stuff, let me go back to ads, then I'm going to write some of my own content, then I go back to ads. It is so incredibly inefficient. Okay, so for everyone here, nice little exercise for yourself and for clients is, for example, you want to write your own content for the week. While your own content might be, you have some short form content, you have some long form content. So in one time block, all you do is the short form. Then you go take a break, you walk outside, maybe make yourself a cup of coffee, then you come back. Then all you do is the long form content, then you leave. Different time block, all you do is your client's newsletter or multiple clients newsletters or multiple clients within the same industry newsletters. Right. So does this make sense for everyone? There are levels that you can take this idea of batching too. And, and the thing that I notice whenever people have some sort of issue with time or not being able to get enough done, or I'm struggling juggling, you know, like my work with side hustle clients, or I'm struggling juggling multiple clients, or I'm struggling juggling clients and outreach. It is always, it is always a batching problem, okay? Because we all have the same 24 hours. It's not like I've got some pill that lets me have an extra 12 hours a day. Right? So it is purely a game of how do you, how do you get the most out of your hours? And you can invert the question by asking, okay, well, how, how do I get the least out of my hours? The way everyone here gets the least out of your time is by constantly jumping between different buckets of things. Right? And yeah, I mean, Alicia as. Or Alicia, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, like for I have severe ad add severe And I'm unmedicated. But I, I have spent years of my life. Like, I, I, I really have to train myself. Like, this is the one thing we are going to do right now. It's the only thing. Turn off your phone, you snooze, your laptop notifications. This is the only thing we're doing for two hours. And you have to recognize that this is a skill. It is a skill to block and protect time. It is a skill to when you start going and then something gets a little hard and your monkey brain is like, oh, just grab your phone and open TikTok for two seconds. Right? That crushes you. It is a skill to reject that impulse. It is a skill to be able to look at your calendar and go, okay, I have multiple calls this week and right now they're all over the place. Can I try and reschedule them so that they're all batched together? Right. Another example for everyone. Right now I'm looking at expanding our media team a little bit and so I'm doing some, some research. I want to talk to other people who have built media teams and I want to learn tomorrow, batching. Just giving everyone a real life example here. Tomorrow I have like five 30 minute calls only talking about video media all morning. And when I went and scheduled them with everyone, I was like, here's the time slot. Great, I got 30 minutes here. Okay, here's another one. Here's another one. Here's another one. And so my goal is I wake up, I'm in one mode for four hours, five hours, and then I'm done with that mode and then I can go do something different right now. I love this, Christina. My nervous system couldn't take five client calls in one day. Your nervous system can't take five client calls in one day yet. Right. Just like if you're brand new to marathon running, you can't run a marathon yet. If you're brand new to weightlifting, you can't go to the gym and pick up the heaviest weights yet. Right. And I think this was something that I, I lived viscerally. Viscerally. Is that the more, the more of this that you take on and the more that you do, the more your capacity grows, the more your endurance grows. Right. In the beginning, you can maybe you can barely write one client piece in one day. You're like, wow, that was really hard. Okay. But the more that you do it, then you can write two pieces in a day, then three pieces in a day, then four pieces in a day. Right? You have One sales call in a day and your brain's fried. Okay? But then you can eventually work up to two, then you can do three, then you can do four. It was shocking. It was shocking to me to see how much my endurance improved over three years and my ability to do things that in the beginning, there was no way I was gonna be able to do that. But that's how it is for everyone, because you're just starting, right? So it's. I am such a firm believer in all of these things, right? Is none of these questions or none of these issues are actually like, oh, like, you need to hear some answer that you haven't heard before. Okay. That's why I started this with volume. Okay? You can handle more. As you handle more, your capacity grows. The more that you take on, the more that you do it, the more skill you acquire. The more skill you acquire, the more output you get per unit of effort. The more you batch similar activities together, the more skill you acquire faster because you are compressing more effort into that smaller period of time more often. Okay, so all. All of this is really a game of. It's actually how do you get out of your own way, right? How do you stop doing things that are ineffective so that you can create the space to do things that are more effective? Okay. Does that make sense? Is this helpful also? If it's helpful, great. I'll. I'll keep going. If it's not. If it's not helpful, we can move on to something else. But, yeah. Okay, so, Jeff, that's. That's a great point. Right? Like, sometimes. Sometimes with batching, you. There's no way around it, right? Like, if you're trying to schedule two calls with two potential clients, and one's like, I can only talk at 8am and the other one's like, I can only talk at 1pm like, okay, it happens. And as you. As you take on more, your endurance will grow and you'll. You'll be able to, you know, manage. The goal, though, for everyone here is you want to try to be as proactive as possible. You want. Like, most people don't realize that, especially when you're scheduling things with other people. Whoever. Whoever is more decisive is. Tends to be the one who just gets the thing that they want. Okay? So if I'm scheduling a call with you and I say, let me know when you can chat, right? Well, I'm giving up the power and you get to decide. But if I'm scheduling a call with you and I go, hey, I've got 30 minutes tomorrow morning at 8:30am Pacific time. Let me know if that works for you. Most of the time the other person's like, well, you made the decision. Can I make that work? Yeah, I have an open slot. Okay, sure. Okay. So that's why one of the big things that we talk about, especially in the, in the modules of working with clients, is you want to be the one to set the agenda. You want to be the one to set the time. You're the one managing your own calendar, right? So if you're booking sales calls, book them all back to back to back, right? If you're booking client interview content calls, book them all back to back to back, right? Like, try and batch these things as much as possible and also try and bake into your schedule where you have this separation. Like, I've just learned, if I have three hours of calls, it's very, very rare, very unlikely, unless I'm in an absolute time crunch like Black Friday. You just, you got to do what you got to do. I've learned that if I have three or four hours of calls, I'm not going to get off. I'm not going to end that time block and immediately go into deep work. It's just not going to happen. My brain's fried. I'm going to need a minute. I kind of got to get out of call mode and I got to get ready for a different mode, right? So a lot of how I schedule my days is batching a ton of calls together and then let me go make lunch. And when I go make lunch, it's like, I'll take 45 minutes, I'll take an hour. I won't have my phone on me. I won't stare at a screen. I'm just, I'm literally, I can feel my brain like moving out of one zone and resetting. And then I go, okay, so now I've got my afternoon. Now let's do some deep work, let's do some writing, let's focus on whatever we want to focus on, okay? And if you're balancing this with a full time job, this becomes the morning, this becomes maybe your lunch break. This becomes right after work, this becomes late at night, right? You have those. It's not that you don't have the pockets. You do have the pockets. It's just they require, you have to give something up. So I'll tell everyone. An exercise that I've been doing a lot in my own life is anytime I say that I want to do something, okay, so very easy to make, to do lists. So I say, I want to do something. I want to set a goal. I want to do this thing in my life in the past, what I would do. And it's funny, because I did this for 10 years, and it never worked. And yet every year, I kept doing the same thing, thinking that it would work, and it never did. In the past, what I would do is I would. I would make a list, and I'd be like, these are all the new things I want to do. And then. Anyone want to guess you want to drop in the chat how many of those new things I ended up actually doing? 0. 0. Do you know why? Because you don't have any more time. You don't have any more capacity. It's already being used. So I'll give everyone my new exercise. And I have. This has been very challenging for me, but I want to pass it along because I have seen it help a lot. It's just hard. Anytime you say you want to do something, you have to answer the question, what are you going to give up in order to do it? Because if you had the time, you would be doing it already. So fundamentally, that means you want to add something to your life, to your schedule, to your calendar, which means it has to take the place of something else. Okay, sometimes that can be work. So you say, I want to start prioritizing my own content. What does that mean? That might mean you can't take on that other client because you have to choose. Actually, I want a little bit more capacity to work on my own content rather than I want to take on another client and make another thousand bucks. $2,000, $3,000. Right. Sometimes it can be little things in your life that you enjoy. Like, I'll tell everyone, my. My most recent one is for years, I really enjoyed. I would wake up early. I would wake up in the morning, and I would spend the first hour of my day with my wife. We would make coffee. We would make breakfast together. We'd sit, we'd have breakfast. We would have that time, and then we would both go about our days. And a couple months ago, I realized, you know, like, we're. We're going through this growth spurt. I've got these goals. I've got things that I really want to accomplish. We have dinner together every night. And I had a conversation with her, and I was like, I. I don't. I don't think we can do that anymore. I'm sorry. Like, I. I love our. Our time in the evening. I will always have Dinner with you. That is a non negotiable. But in the morning, I'm going to start waking up at 5, 5:30am I'm going to make breakfast on my own and I'm just going to get to work. And I need those extra 2, 3 hours in the morning. And yeah, I also sleep an hour less too, Roman. Yeah, so I gave up an hour of sleep and I gave up a nice leisurely coffee and breakfast with my wife every morning. That's what it cost. That's what I have to give up in order to have another 2, 3 hours of uninterrupted time in the morning. So these are the hard questions. And for everyone here, I'm not saying like, oh, and you have to figure out how to get by on five hours of sleep. I still sleep seven and a half, eight hours a night. I go to bed at nine. Okay, so I'm not, I'm not saying the answer is like, actually the misunderstanding of what I'm saying is burn the candle at both ends, sleep five hours, have no life, do nothing else. That's what people hear sometimes when I say this or when people give advice like this, this is. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is you have a life, you have a life constructed. And there are, there are things that you are choosing to prioritize in your life right now. You might be prioritizing watching Netflix for 30 minutes every night. You might be choosing to spend some extra time with your partner and you might be choosing to have a hobby. You might be choosing to travel. These are all choices and it's not that any one of them is right or wrong. It's your life. Do whatever you want to do. But anytime you say, I want to do something new, I want to add something to my plate, right? Then what you need, the real question you need to ask is, so where is it going to go? What am I willing to give up? And most people, myself included, for a very long time, don't answer that question because it's a hard question to answer because we don't want to give anything up. And it's so much easier to just make a to do list and go, oh well, let's just do one more thing. But you never do it. So what's the point of that? Right? Does that make sense? Does that click? It's a very hard question, but it's very, very important. Okay. I didn't think we were going to go down this rabbit hole. But you know what? It's actually kind of a special interest for me lately. So let's do it. So, Roman, you asked, do you have a wind down routine? Okay. So this is actually really fun for everyone. I've gotten very into like biohacking in the past year. My honest answer is because I feel like I have dialed in as much as I can in my life. Which means that the only things that I have left to really, really improve are extremely small details. I already am a very productive, high output person. You. You know, like I, I get to the gym and I exercise like the, like the big stuff I already have. And so a lot of, A lot of. And yeah, sadash. Yeah, I don't take medication, but I'm very into like mindset training, meditation. I've completely like removed substances from my life. I, I might only have alcohol at a wedding. You know what I mean? Like, very, very focused. Something that I've gotten really into. And I'll share it because, Roman, you asked and maybe it would be helpful for other people. Well, yeah, Never cough. I mean, coffee is not a, I mean coffee is coffee. Coffee is like the, the other half of the human bloodstream. I mean, that's a natural, right? Okay, so I have, I've really worked on my evening routine and so I'll share it here. Big disclaimer, right? Like not, not a physician by any means, but I will share, I will share some things that I've been doing. So One is I'm 35, so I stop drinking water at 8pm because if you're, you continue drinking water, high likelihood you're going to wake up in the middle of the night and you're going to have to go to the bathroom. Right. So you get, you just, you have to stop at 8pm helps you get a great night of sleep. Some supplements that I've really been into, so I do glycine, I do magnesium, do vitamin C, I do l. Theanine and I do a very small dose, like half of a milligram of melatonin. And I do that every night. Yeah, glycine. Glycine is awesome. It's, it's, it's. I'm gonna butcher the explanation. Just go look it up. It's a natural supplement, but yeah, it's great. I don't do creatine, actually. I've heard a lot of good things about it, but I don't. And no, if, if you get magnesium separate and glycine separate, they're two different, they're two different things. Yeah. And I do vitamin C in the evening. The reason I do that is because I am a very like high energy, high output person. And so I have a lot, I have a hard time winding down at night. And so these I've found just sort of help, you know, they help like they're not, it's not like I'm taking a Xanax, right. Like they just, they help sort of calm your nervous system a little bit. The thing that had the biggest impact, massive pro tip for everyone here. Okay. Biggest thing that had an impact, blue light glasses starting at 7:30pm okay. This is shocking to me. The first time I did this was actually in an airport. Fun little cool thing. If anyone is like travels internationally, there's this really cool company called FlyKit. I hope this is fun for everyone. I love this stuff, but I hope that it's helpful. Okay, great. This is nice little, nice little side quest here. So if anyone travels a lot, you should look at this company called FlyKit. It's really cool. It was developed by, I think some like Navy seals or something. And basically you flood it, you plug in your flight path. So say I was traveling to, I don't know, France. I would plug in my flight path and maps it out and basically reverse engineers the different time zones that you're going to go through. And then you get these little supplement packs that tells you, okay, so throughout your travel day you should take these supplements at these times and it helps you adjust to the new time zone. I, I tried it a couple months ago when I was traveling internationally and it, it helped a lot. It was actually really, really cool. So I would definitely check it out. It's not super expensive, but it's, it's cool. But the thing that they also tell you to do is that throughout your travel they have you wear blue light glasses at different times. So they give you these little blue light glasses. You could also buy your own on Amazon, whatever. And I was sitting in the airport and I forget where we were. It was like our connecting flight. Maybe we were in London or something. And it said to put the blue light glasses on in the afternoon and within 30 minutes I felt like I needed to go to sleep. It was crazy how much it impacted my nervous system. And secondly, usually at the end, you know, at night I'll have dinner with my wife and maybe we'll watch, I don't know, an hour of a show that we're watching or something before bed. And I know watching screens before bed isn't the, isn't the best thing, right? But at the same Time like I want to watch TV with my wife at the end of the day. I started wearing these blue light glasses while we would watch TV. So I'd put, I put them on around 7, 7:30pm and then I keep them on literally until I get into bed. And this has had a massive impact on my, my nervous system's ability to start to chill out and then by the time I get into bed, fall asleep. So little pro tip for everyone. These, I mean, you can get these for 20 bucks. Whatever it is huge impact on your ability to fall asleep at the, at the end of a day. Okay. And then morning. My little, my little thing here is I will wake up and chug. Let's see how much of what is this? One of these? So basically a liter. So 1 liter of water obviously doesn't have to be mountain valley. Like take a water bottle, fill it up, put it in the fridge the night before. If you want some lemon. Some lemon and salt is also really great in there. Wait 60 to 90 minutes to have caffeine to let your, your body adjust. In my coffee lately, I've been doing some MCT oil, which is natural fat, which is nice. That's kind of it. So, yeah, so you can see how like, yeah, these, these little things, I mean, these are like on the fringe, right? Like, what's the more important thing? The more important thing is do the thing that you're supposed to do and do it for a prolonged period of time. And then as time goes on, you can, you can optimize these little fringe things. But like, let's all not get it twisted here, right? Like, this is not the secret to how do I reach out to more clients. The secret to reaching out to more clients is reaching out to more clients. Okay. This is just the, the fringe stuff. Yeah. Okay. What else, what else? What other, what other questions? Anything else that would be helpful? Yeah, you could do some breath work. I'll go through periods. It depends on the time of year, it depends on how much we have going on. But I'll go through periods where I'll start the morning with a little, you know, 15, 20 minute meditation. I don't do that nearly as consistently as I'd like to, but I mean, that's always nice. But I'm a, I'm a big, big believer in how do you get to work as fast as possible. And then at the end of the day, how do you get out of work and go to sleep as fast as possible? Right. I, I am, I am not the guy of you wake up and you've got your whole, you know, two and a half hour long, get ready for the day, ice bath morning ritual. Like, that's, that's just not, that's not b. Rebecca. I go, I go for a walk around the neighborhood with my wife and dog like every night after we have dinner. And that's like our time to talk and catch up and, and do all of that. It's nice. Jeff, Did I retire from looking like Arnold because there wasn't enough time for writing? I feel like that's phrased as a joke, but it's actually 100% true. Yeah, yeah. I, I reached a point where I realized I couldn't do both, and so I made the decision. I, I gave it up. How do you handle distractions and thinking about all the other things you need to do when you're in the middle of deep work? Yeah, that's a skill. That's a skill. Like, I mean, there, there's really no other way. There's no. There, there is no answer other than you. You just have to do it like that. How do you manage distractions? Well, either they distract you or they don't, you know, and you can, I can say some like, you know, motivational thing, but that's not really what matters. What matters is you block the time and you don't let other things infilt. And here's just to be really real with everyone, they will still infiltrate. Like, it will still happen. Right? You, you will, you will try and you'll say, I'm going to do this little wind down routine and then you'll do it for one night and then the next night you won't, you know, and you say, I'm going to do this little morning routine and you'll do it for one morning, and then the next day you won't. And I think something I spend a lot of time thinking about is it's not. You either do it perfectly or you never do it. Everything we're talking about here is actually a daily battle. It is a daily battle. Every single night when I go to bed, I have to have that conversation with myself where I go, all right, tomorrow morning, are we waking up early? Are we doing it, Are we getting it done? Are we going to get that deep work time in? Every morning there isn't. There isn't a night or a morning when that doesn't happen. Right. Every single day I am trying to protect time. Every single day I am trying to batch. Every single time I am managing distractions that's there. There is no. Like, we make these decisions, and then it's that way forever. This is a daily battle. It's a daily battle, which is why the whole game is you. You show up every day going, let's try again. Let's try again. Let's try again. Let's try again. Right? This just happened. I just. I just went to a friend's engagement party this past weekend in Atlanta, and something I've really been working on is on travel days, I don't get a lot of deep work or writing done because I'm traveling. And. And so. And I typically. If I'm on a plane, it's way easier for me to just stare out the window, think, you know, maybe watch a show on my phone, something like that. And so I'm like, cole, come on. Like, we got goals. We got more growth, we got more to accomplish. You got to make use of the plane time on the way there. I did it. Did a great job. I wrote for three hours on the plane. It was awesome. I felt so happy after. I felt so accomplished. It was great, right? The way back on Sunday, I was hungover. I was tired. They didn't want to do it. I was at their engagement party all night. Right. I got on the plane, I tried. I wrote for 30 minutes. I was like this, saying it, and I didn't do it, and I failed. And the next time I travel, I'm going to have to go through that same process again. I'm. It's another battle. And you try it again, and you try it again. Right? And I. I want to stress this so much because it's like, it's not. It's not like you make these decisions and then you're done. These are decisions that you have to fight for every single day. And if you do not fight for them, other things are happy to take their place. There's a gazillion things in life that are ready to consume your time, energy, attention, and mental head space. Okay? So this is a daily battle. My poison, Roman, is tequila. And we had. We had a little too much tequila this weekend. But that's okay, right? That's okay. It's like, I know. I know what I'm giving up. I'm there to celebrate, my friend. It's fine. It's all good. You do it for a day, do it for a night, you're tired. And then, guess what? Right back this morning, what was I doing? Here we go. We're right back at it. Daily babble. Yeah. For everyone here I mean, maybe this is why it's helpful to share. I don't. I prefer focusing more on the core stuff. You know, why we're all here. But these things do matter. And I do think that so much of progress in life comes down to how you're thinking about it, you know, and something that I love sharing is whatever thing you want to do, every day that you do it, you are practicing doing that thing. Every day you don't do it, you are practicing and getting better at not doing it. So you have to think of it like a skill. If you say, I want to wake up early in the morning every morning, you don't wake up early. You are practicing. I don't wake up early. And guess what you're going to get really, really good at. I don't wake up early. Right. If you're like, I want to write my own content every day. You don't write your own content. You are getting really, really good at not writing your own content. You're. You're world class at it. Right? It's all. Everything is. Yeah, it is. Try. See if it works. If it works, do it again. If it doesn't work, try again tomorrow. Every day is the same. Every day is the same. All right, what else? This is fun. What other questions? What is your opinion on willpower? I mean, I think. I think it's worth clarifying that question. That's, That's. That's a very broad question. Yeah. Matilda, how do I switch between fiction and business? For example? Same thing. I can't do those in the same time block. They're so different. I have to. I have to space them way apart. In fact, almost all of the fiction writing I do happens on the weekend. It's very, very rare for me to do it during the week because I just. I. It's too hard. It's too hard for me to switch contexts like that. Now, sometimes I'll do it, but if I do it, it'll be like at night after I've had a prolonged break. You know, it's pretty. It's hard to go. I was, you know, neck deep in writing ads. Let me go think about a fantasy world, right? It's just. It's too big of a switching cost. So that's why. Same thing. You want to separate these as much as possible. Rebecca, this is a good question. If you're implementing a new habit, how do you approach it? Only work on one new habit at a time and don't move on to the second new habit until the first One has been done for at least a month. It is so, so easy to make lists of all the things that you want to do, all the new habits that you want to build. One habit in and of itself is hard. So just focus on one, one habit at a time and don't move on until that has become ingrained in whatever thing you're doing. And then also don't be surprised even if you do that for a month and then you add something second in. Right. Like the second thing is probably going to make the first thing a little wobbly. So it is constantly this like slow building process. Andrew, do you need to search for business life partner early on? I don't think you need to do anything. I mean, I think it's. Every person's life experience is different, right? I will tell you, like both my life partner and my business partner, it happened very serendipitously, like I wasn't looking for it, you know, it just happened. But I also don't think everyone needs it and I think there are, there are a lot of people who have very different experiences. You just find, find what works for you. Tommaso, how many hours of deep work do you get in per week? This is, this is something I'm actively thinking about and working on a lot because with the size of our business now, it's, it's become harder and harder. You know, it's very hard for me to get prolonged periods of deep work because just the nature of having a big team. And there's a lot, there's a lot of admin and operational stuff that consumes 50% of my bandwidth, which is also why I started going, I gotta wake up earlier, you know, because there are a lot of days where seven hours of my day is nothing but working with people, you know, and it's too, it's hard to bounce between, you know, meetings and deep work. Meetings and deep work. So sometimes you got to find these pockets. There's a reason I've been waking up earlier. There's a reason why for years I would work from 7pm to 10pm every night. There's a reason why I work essentially every weekend. I might take, you know, Saturday off or, you know, two thirds of Saturday off. But I work every Saturday morning and almost all day every Sunday. It's just sometimes you just got to do what you got to do. Let's see a bunch of good questions here. Jeff. Pre call routine? Not really. So like a couple different, a couple things here. One, something that I've shared in the past is if you're doing something, whenever you're doing something that you feel some friction around. So maybe it's, you know, you're like, I've got a stretch of four hours of calls ahead of me, you know, Or I gotta sit down and I gotta work on something that is maybe not the most exciting stuff to work on. Like, transparently, my least favorite part of being an entrepreneur is the financial stuff. I hate. Oh, my God, tax season. Like, I hate it. And especially when you have. We have, you know, multiple different entities and multiple different companies, and I gotta sit down, look through spreadsheets and pull expenses and talk to accountants, and it is my least favorite thing ever. So little. Little pro tip for everyone. Whenever you have to do something that you're. You feel friction around, try and find a way to make it fun. So, for example, especially when I'm going through really taxing periods of the year, if I have to sit down and do something that's really boring or something that I don't really want to do, I might wake up early and go get myself a fun coffee or something that I don't normally get, you know, Or I might make myself like. Or I'll go to the grocery store and make myself like a unique breakfast. Like something that I don't always have the time to make. Right? So you try and find things that add in novelty so that you scratch that itch a little bit, but you still get done the thing that you want to get done. The reason I think this works so well is because what people tend to do instead is they take something that's really difficult, and instead of forcing themselves or finding a way to do that difficult thing, they replace the difficult thing with something novel. Right? So. So a big example would be, let's say you're like, I really need to sit down and do outreach for three hours. I really need to do that. Well, instead of doing finding a way to make that fun for yourself, what most people do is they just go, I don't want to do three hours of outreach. I'm going to go to the museum instead, you know, or I'm going to go hang out with some friends. It's like what you're doing is you're. You're avoiding the hard thing with novelty instead of using novelty as motivation to do the hard thing. And I find that works really, really well. We're coming up to that time of year for me, like, November, Black Friday, almost all of November is a mental game for me. Like, I got to find 100 different ways to keep myself engaged and focused and motivated. Because we have a lot going on and we have a lot to do, and a lot of it is me writing or creating things that I've already done. 150. So I got to find a little bit of novelty, right, to go. Well, I still got to do it. Let's just find ways to make it fun. Yeah. Is there such a thing as working too much, where you get diminishing returns? Yeah, absolutely. But. But I, I do think that that's a good example of. I tend to notice that people will ask that question long before they truly reached a point of actual diminishing returns. Okay. So it's, it's a little bit like, you know, I love fitness as a metaphor. It's like when you're, when you're doing something in the gym or you're running or you're swimming or whatever, your body isn't the thing that gives out first. The thing that gives out first is your mind. And that, that is, that is the hard thing. Like, that is why the entire industry of personal trainers exist. Personal trainers don't exist to help you lift the weight. They exist to help you not give in to your mind. Because your mind is what gives up before your body does. Right. And so are there diminishing returns to work? Yeah, of course there are. But the true diminishing returns don't kick in until you're 12 hours in. Right. It's not when you're an hour in. It's not when you're two hours in. It's not three, it's not four. It is way further than you think. And again, I've, I've just, I've witnessed that over the years, like my endurance and my ability to. I can. I remember, I remember when we first started ship 30 in 2021. And I remember we did, we did a live session and a webinar or something like that in the same day. We did them back to back. It was, it was an hour and a half call and then like 15 minutes or 30 minute break into another hour and a half call. And I remember the first time I did that, I needed the entire next day to recover. I felt like someone had just made me run a 5K. I was exhausted. I had never done that before. Fried. Just absolutely fried today, five years later, we do that like multiple days a week, every week. So the thing, the thing in the beginning that was like, there's, I cannot do this now is like an average day. Sometimes we'll do. We'll do more. We'll be like, we have a webinar and we have two live sessions and I've got, you know, two or three meetings with other people. And I'm like, yeah, all good. So it's not like the diminishing returns are way past wherever you think that point of, oh, I'm not productive anymore. Like, you still are. You still are. And the more that you push, the more your capacity grows, the more that you will be able to endure. Yeah. Abhi. I mean, how do you handle clients who say, who question your methods or even say, don't, don't follow my advice? I mean, yeah, here's, here's the thing is like the, the honest answer. The honest answer. I'll, I'll answer your question in the chat, Bobby, is the honest answer is that everyone. There is no just one right way of doing anything. There's people who succeed doing what we've done. There's people who succeed who have done the exact opposite. Right. So it's not that there's only one way of being successful. It just tends to come down to who has the most conviction in what they're doing. You know, like, our whole business has been built on organic. There's other businesses that get billed completely on paid. If we go in a room and hang out with people who build businesses on paid, they're going to say, paid is the right way to do it. If you go hang out with us, we're going to say, organic is the right way to do it. And the answer is always either or, or both. Right. And so it's not, it's not necessarily like, no, they're right and they're wrong. It's just, well, who has what skills and what is most likely to work in this situation? You know, I wouldn't read too much into. Awesome. Yeah. Andrew, to be perfectly honest, there is. There. There really is not that many differences between where the things that you would need to do working for yourself, being a solopreneur, being a beginner in any, in any industry and, and like running companies like it. The same fundamental habits are the same fundamental habits, you know, and it's like nothing is. If you can't, if you can't do it on your own when you're only responsible for yourself, how are you going to do it? When you're responsible for you plus, you know, 30 other people, it's just not going to happen. Right. So that is why I do think, like, talking about these things is helpful. And I, I hope that this was helpful. For, for everyone here. We'll get, we'll get back to ghostwriting specific stuff next week. But I do think that it's really important to remind yourself that everything that you're practicing right now is the foundation for everything else. Right. And it's so easy to see that in other areas. Like, no one would sign up for a new gym membership and then go try and pick up the heaviest weight in the gym. Like, we all know that would be stupid, right? But yet we, like, have this expectation with ourselves that that's how it should be. It's like I started something new. Now why aren't I, you know, doing it at this level? It's like you have to, you have to start with the basics. You have to and all, like, all something I've been really into lately because again, like, I'm, I'm reaching these levels where the things that need to be improved for me are like, very incremental. Like, for me to get 1% better, I have to deploy months of effort to see that next 1% increase. That 1% increase. Right. Because that's just the natural state of getting better and better and better at something over a long period of time. And so I've been actually spending a lot of time lately studying pro athletes, reading pro athlete biographies, like when I have random 10, 15 minutes, trying to like, better understand what are the things that they work on, what are the things that they do, how do they prioritize? And something like a theme that I've been noticing over and over and over again I'll leave leave with this, is that people who achieve world class levels of output and excellence in their craft really are just relentlessly committed to improving on and practicing the fundamentals. You know, like Kobe's jump shot, MJ's jump shot, there's nothing about, it's not like, oh, when they got to a certain level, the way they like, it was all different. No, it was just they had done that one jump shot for 15 years, 10,000 times. Right? And so I, I've been thinking about that a lot myself is like, what are the fundamental things that are never going to change, they're never going to go away, you know, and they're all things, I mean, just apply it to what we're talking about here. You're never not going to need to talk to other people. You're never not going to need to know how to sell. You're never not going to need to know how to write something that's really compelling. All of these skills are only Going to make you better. And so that means that the path of getting better is doing all of those skills to the best of your ability over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. Right? And again. Just say it in the inverse. If I tomorrow reverted and stopped being able to execute the fundamentals, I would get way worse. Everyone here would be like, cole, what are you doing? That's all getting better is. It's like the same stuff that you were doing in the beginning. You just did it a gazillion times. Which is why I started the whole thing at the beginning with every question and every problem gets solved with volume. Period. Full stop, end of story. So I guess that was a nice way to bring it back around. All right, well, thanks, everyone. This was a impromptu little Monday TED Talk. I liked it. I hope other people enjoyed it. This was a fun different topic. So thanks everyone for showing up. Real quick. Before we jump, what's one takeaway? We covered a lot of different ground. I'd love to know what sticks. What was helpful. What's one takeaway? Volume. Make something awful fun. Yep. That is. That's a skill batch. Similar tasks. Yep. Batching. And the. The levels that you can take batching to. Every single day is a battle. That's right. Every single day is a battle. What are you gonna give up? Every time you say you're gonna do something, you need to ask the second question, which is, what are you gonna give up for it? Because you have to make room. The more you don't do something, the better you get at not doing it. I love that. Once that clicked for me. That was really helpful. Awesome. One habit at a time. That's right. Okay, great. This was awesome. I'm glad that a bunch of these clicked then. Well, thanks, everyone. Happy Monday. I hope this is a good start to your week. And next week we'll be back with. We'll see. Either we'll have some. Some hot seat questions, or we'll do. We'll do like a ghost writing or content writing specific master class. All right. Happy Monday. Enjoy the day. Enjoy the week. See everyone next week.