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The Side Hustle Show
636: Is Business Coaching Worth It? A Look Inside the last 12 months of Side Hustle Nation
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Nick Loper
Is business coaching worth it? Here's a look inside the last 12 months of side Hustle Nation. What's up, what's up? Nick Loper here. Welcome to the side Hustle Show. It's the entrepreneurship podcast. You can actually apply. So there's been a few requests for a progress report type of episode. Just kind of a state of side Hustle Nation, so to speak. And it's been a while since I've done this, probably over a year. So wanted to take some time today to catch you up on what I've been working on, what I've been working through some of the challenges, wins and projects from the last 12 months or so. And the biggest new thing is late last year I joined a business coaching program called 2X. It's run by Austin Netsley, who I must have met 10 years ago at probably my first ever blogging conference. This was like three businesses ago or more for him now. Our paths have crossed several times since then in the podcasting world, in the self publishing world, at different conferences. But what really sealed the deal for me was having three different friends all go through 2X, and these are people you would recognize. They've been guests on the show, sometimes multiple times, and they all saw really strong results. And on top of that, another friend of mine, Tom Sylvester, was one of the 2x head coaches. Beyond that, they actually had this, you know, power guarantee, which is something you could take away and maybe apply to your own business, but it was a power guarantee, like, hey, look, if we don't increase revenue by the amount of your investment, we'll just keep working with you until you do, or something like that. So very little to lose. Even though it was a big upfront investment, and especially when combined with my kind of long history in the business, it was over 10 years old at that point I reasoned, look, it's time to get some outside perspective from a group with a proven track record of getting results. My biggest fear going into it was, am I even coachable? With those 10 years in business, I had developed certain habits and processes that were pretty well ingrained, maybe some bad habits along the way, and to be fair, they were working pretty well. But there's always this nagging, grass is always greener kind of feeling of what could be. Is there a way to make more and work less? Is there a way to build better systems? Is there a way to make the business less reliant on me? And then even on a more existential level, is that something you'd even want? After all, you gotta Fill your days with what lights you up. And I still get a kick out of finding and sharing cool side hustle stories. But up until that point, I really had had very little in the way of formal coaching from a business standpoint. I worked with a podcast coach for a while a few years ago, which was helpful. I had a speaker coach leading up to my TEDx talk, which was helpful, but not a lot outside of that. I remember thinking as a kid, look, if Michael Jordan is the best in the world, what's he need to coach for? And then over time you start to realize that no, no, the highest performers in just about every field still work with coaches in some capacity. And in most cases, those coaches never reached the same level of achievement in that field as the people they're coaching. And that was always weird to me. But I came to accept that it didn't really matter so much as their skill in guidance and frameworks and fundamentals and pulling the best out of their clients. And I would like to think of myself as having humility enough to admit, look, you got this far, but you don't have all the answers. And even though every business is different, I want to share a couple of the X frameworks that I found most interesting slash helpful. The first is understanding your value chain. This is a way to describe your customer journey. How do they find you? How do they pay you? What's a typical lifetime value of a customer? What are the steps in that chain from marketing to sales to fulfillment? And what kind of numbers and percentages and conversion rates are associated and costs are associated with each of those steps. Now, the typical 2x client is a six figure service business that's trying to figure out how to scale to a million or beyond. And the value chain might be like someone clicks on our Facebook ad, a certain percentage of those people opt in for some free guide, a certain percentage of those book a discovery call, and a certain percentage of those sign up for a four or $5,000 package. And a certain percentage of those ended up being a good fit for our monthly retainer type of service. But understanding all of those little steps and the little sub steps inside each part of the system is pretty fun. And you can start to think about what different levers you can pull to make a dramatic impact on the end result. On the bottom line, what was challenging for me as more of a media business? The question became, well, you know, what's a website visitor worth? What's a podcast listener worth? How do we break that down? Well, if we're sold out on ads. Maybe a Download is worth $0.10 plus or minus. Like not to diminish it, but kind of small numbers relative to oh, I sold a $5,000 package and maybe that listener becomes a subscriber, maybe they listen to dozens of episodes, Maybe they tell five friends about it and those downloads are worth another 10 cents. But it was really difficult and that totally discounts the value of the relationship and the trust and the possibility of connecting someone to a hopefully life changing new income stream. So the value chain exercise is really interesting to try and break down what that looks like for your business. And every business is different but it kind of all comes back to these certain fundamentals and even for the different areas of your business because the website traffic value chain is a different one entirely. The other one that I want to share was what they call the CEO takeover. And the process looks like this. Imagine you're about to get fired as the CEO of your business and there's a new CEO that's coming in and he's got, or he or she's got a much bigger, more ambitious, more strategic vision and they're coming in. So what actions are they going to take in the next one to three months? What are they going to stop doing? What are they going to focus on? Where are your biggest opportunities? And of course the punchline is that CEO is you. So go get after it. Now as far as results, business is up compared to last year. How much of that is a direct result of 2x is hard to say. But I will say this. I feel like I have a more strategic outlook on the whole operation. I feel like I have a clearer picture on the work that I truly love and enjoy. I feel like I've built some better systems for my team and have attempted to get better at letting go of certain responsibilities. Oh, the other, the other thing that was, that was kind of annoying but actually ended up being helpful was this quarterly planning process. I would hardly, you know, go, been doing this business for 10 years, would hardly ever do anything like that. Big picture, what are our most important initiatives for the next three months? I'm sorry, I'm too busy chopping down trees to sharpen the ax here. But in doing so you get some helpful clarity and some positive results came out of those planning sessions. Now 2X is a structure wise, it's combination of one on one coaching. My coach Brian has been great. There's some group sessions and then there's these in person person masterminds roughly every quarter or so. And what I learned about myself is it's got to be one on one or in person because I had a really hard time prioritizing any of the group stuff. The in person events were really cool, almost a forced pause to get out of the normal day to day operations and think at a higher level. Now Austin has been generous enough to offer side Hustle show listeners a free copy of his book From Six to Seven Figures at 2x Co Sidehustle subtitle on this one the Proven Playbook to get more traction, free up 20 hours per week and schedule scale past $1 million in revenue. It's a great book. I first read it a few years ago on my second pass through it. I think I actually had to put it down and go implement some stuff, which is a great sign. Again, this is best for people who've already got a business up and running, but maybe you're running into bottlenecks or maybe you've hit a growth plateau and you're looking for a playbook to unlock that next stage of your business. Again, 2x co sidehustle to grab that book for free from 6 to 7 figures by Austin Netsley so thanks to Austin and his team for putting that together and really for all their help over the last year or so. So I wanted to kick off this progress report episode with that coaching program because that's kind of been the underlying base layer foundation for everything else that I've been working on and not working on now. Prior to joining last year, there were a couple other significant shifts that I should talk about on the podcast side. It was joining a new ad sales network called the App Media Young and Profiting Media. As you've probably heard on the show, they've done a great job selling sponsorships far better than I ever did on my own. Bigger deals with bigger brand. Now as part of that shift, that meant getting off of Libsyn as the podcast host, shifting over to Megaphone, which supports dynamic ad insertion across the whole catalog. Where previously I was just selling a set number of predicted downloads on the latest episode, hey, we think we can deliver you 30,000 downloads in the first 30 days. In the first 60 days on this episode that's going to air on this date, I was definitely late to make this move, but it's another example of that underrated entrepreneurial skill of simply looking around. What are the other top shows doing? Well, they're doing this and they've actually been doing it for a while. Get with the time sloper now. The other challenging thing on the podcast was this download Drop that, you know, I guess was a result of some iOS update late last year. It impacted a ton of different podcasters. The hardest hit shows were ones like mine that had a big back catalog. And in talking with other hosts, it sounds like this was pretty much across the board where all of a sudden you're getting half to two thirds the downloads you were previously getting. And so on the one hand there's like safety in numbers. There is, you know, the misery loves company aspect to it. And even if the numbers today are more accurate or more accurate picture of what's happening, it's still a blow to the ego where I had this inflated sense of self worth. Hey, I'm talking to a stadium full of people every week. When it's more like, well, you're talking to an arena full of people every week. Still great, still super grateful to be able to do it. Now to combat that, I've done a couple of things. The first was adding a new episode like this one every other Monday. Usually shorter format, but gives listeners more content to choose from and has proven more sustainable than my short lived attempt at going to two a week a couple summers ago that ended up not really working out. But this one has been, you know, probably six months or so and it's, it's been fine, it's been fun, it's kind of. I like the creative challenge of, you know, filling in, filling in those dates with, with content that hopefully is compelling. The second thing was expanding my paid listener acquisition efforts. What that looks like in practice is probably spent 20 grand this year trying to grow the show by advertising on various podcast platforms like Castbox, like Overcast, like Podbean, like Player fm, some smaller ones as well. And those do deliver some download and listener growth. But going back to that listener value chain is still somewhat of a question mark in terms of how profitable that ad adspend is or if it's even profitable at all. Or is it you just, you know, banking on that long term value of a listener? What I do know is that listener growth is a really consistent lead domino and it has been for 10 years. As downloads grow, so tend to many downstream metrics like email subscribers, ultimately sponsorship, sales and other revenue. So that's why I'm comfortable making that investment even if it doesn't, you know, even if it's really hard to tell the near term profitability of that. So that's been what's going on on the podcast front. I missed podcast movement and PodFest this year, but do hope to get to a podcast specific event next year to connect with other hosts and just learn you know what's the latest and greatest in the industry. I'll be right back with more of this online business progress report, including the simple tweak that probably should have made years ago right after this what if you no longer needed five separate apps for your business bank account expense tracking, invoicing, contractor payments and tax planning. I'm excited to partner with our new sponsor Found for this episode because Found is business banking designed specifically for side hustlers, solopreneurs and small business owners like you. Under the hood, you'll find one easy to use app to help manage your money, track your spending, invoice clients and even handle your taxes so you can focus on more important things like running your business. There's no minimum balances, there's no account maintenance fees, and there's no paperwork or credit checks when you sign up. One cool feature, Found calls in Pockets lets you allocate income to certain categories like marketing or taxes or profit. Which is really handy if you want to practice the Profit first methodology, but you really don't want to set up a bunch of different accounts. Over 500,000 small business owners like you chose Found as their banking solution. So stop getting lost in countless finance apps and try Found for free@found.com Sidehustle Sign up for Found for Free today at f o u n d.com side side hustle. Found is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided by Piermont bank member fdic. Found's core features are free. They also offer an optional paid product, Found Plus. Here's a quick side hustle you can do today. It's called the Substitution Game and it's an easy way to score what I call reverse passive income in your life. That's money you're no longer spending every month. That goes straight to your bottom line. How it works is you find lower cost alternatives to the things you're already spending money on. For example, I made the switch our sponsor Mint mobile back in 2019 and haven't looked back. Mint Mobile offers Premium Wireless for 15 bucks a month when you purchase a three month plan and all plans come with high speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any Mint Mobile plan and keep your existing phone number along with all your existing contacts. To get this new customer offer and your new three month premium wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month, go to mint mobile.com sidehustle that's mintmobile.com side hustle cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at mintmobile.com sidehustle $45 upfront payment required equivalent to $15 per month new customers on first three month plan only speeds slower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional taxes, fees and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details. The other big shift that happened just before joining the 2x coaching program was adding display ads to the side Hustle Nation website for the first time. Like you, I think display ads on the intern Internet are pretty annoying. I've been using an ad blocking browser for years. I was always hesitant to clutter up the site with them in the name of better load times, better user experience. But that being said, 10 years into the business I come out of my cave for a minute and again practice that underrated skill of looking around and notice that all my friends and peers in the personal finance space in the side Hustle space are running display ads on their content. So I said, hey, let's give it a test. Doesn't have to be permanent, let's just turn it on and see what happens. Well, here's what happens. No noticeable drop in site traffic, email signups, affiliate conversions or whatever drop there was was more than offset by the incremental revenue. This is through mediavine, by the way. They've been super supportive, They've been great to work with. They're very involved in the creator economy. I would always see their team at fincon and at other events, but flipping this one switch pays the mortgage and then some every month to the extent I probably should have done it years earlier, as much as it pains me to admit that. And then what we were able to do just recently was figure out how to turn off the ads for side Hustle Nation email subscribers. So if you're already a subscriber and you click a link from one of our emails, it should be an ad free experience for you, at least on that first page. I don't know if it'll remember that setting throughout your whole session if you click on, you know, multiple pages or navigate throughout the site. But in any case, it felt like a win to be able to hide the ads for people who've already opted in. On the website side, I have definitely struggled to create new content this year. We've probably only added maybe 20, 25 or so new posts, and this was a realization of mine in the last month or so. So we've made a focus and investment in maintaining the existing library of content. Defend what you got Keep that up to date. But with that, there's only so much potential search traffic we can capture, right? Even if we do everything right, there's only so much search volume surrounding those keywords. And some of that is being eroded by AI snippets. It's being eroded by more ad results in the search results pages. A million and one Reddit posts. And so while it definitely is important to keep keep the archives up to date and relevant, if we want to increase traffic, we're going to have to get more serious about adding new content to expand the, you know, the quote unquote surface area of search potential. One idea that I tried early, early in the year that flopped, surprising, I don't know, it was recruiting a handful of paid side hustle app testers from the community. I said, maybe I'll, you know, I'll pay you 50 bucks, test this thing out, answer a few questions about the app, take some screenshots. Easy right now. This plan was inspired by Dave Chesson from kindlepreneur. He says, look, I can get this raw feedback from users. I can hand it off to a writer who knows SEO. They know how to structure product review posts that are going to rank in Google. Then I do my final edits and hit publish. I thought this was a genius plan. I thought this was really going to accelerate content production. And while I did get several volunteers to test the apps, when it came time to actually do the work and send in the answers to the questions and send in the screenshots, it all fell apart. It was like radio silence. So what I'm trying to do instead is hire a dedicated app tester or reviewer who be a consistent member of the team and help put these together. Hopefully they'll be hired by the time this airs and we'll see if that approach works any better. And quick note, quick pause on the strategy here. So there are dozens of little apps and websites that promise you can make money with them. You know, they're, they'll pay you to, you know, take pictures of your receipts. They'll pay you for tracking your steps. They'll pay you to take little surveys. And I've tested a bunch of these over the years. Some are better than others, but the plan is to create honest reviews for those. Here's how it works. Here's how much you can realistically expect to make. Is it legit or not? You know, if you still want to sign up, here's our affiliate link or referral link, if such a program exists. A lot of them have Referral programs. A lot of them don't, but if not, here are some alternatives that might be worth a look. And if you're serious about making extra money, why don't you check out the side Hustle show? Hey, we got 600 plus episodes. They're filled with legit business ideas. Come on in. So my gut says that that could be valuable. Top of the function type of content. You've heard about this app, you're looking for a little more information. You say, okay, maybe that isn't for me, but the, there's, there's other content here that can help me get to where I want to go. So that's what my gut says. If we can build a system to test and review those in a way that attracts visitors. A couple other projects on the site itself were more on the technical side of SEO. So I hired a couple pros off of upwork to update and modernize the schema across the site in the articles. This is kind of like the structured metadata that theoretically tells Google what the content is about, how it's structured, who wrote it all that jazz. Hard to say if it had any direct impact, but you know, relatively low investment for, you know, some potential upside there. The other upwork higher was related to site speed and load times. Again, I think a fast website is probably just table stakes at this point and we just wanted to make sure we were playing by Google's best practices here. You can punch in your site to Google's page Speed Metric metrics tester tool and see how you're performing. Don't just do it for the homepage, make sure to test some internal content pages as well. I'm happy to link up the profiles of both the freelancers that I hired in the show notes if you'd like to hire them for your own, for your own site. The other thing on the website front was creating more product displays and call outs using the Lasso plugin. This year I've been a customer of theirs for probably about a year or so. Easy to use the product displays. They look nice on the site. They kind of look like the wire cutter displays, like, oh, our top pick is this. And it's got little star ratings and a link out to the product. It really only takes a few incremental conversions to pay for the software. So been using Lasso, loving that. And then inspired by Alex Goldberg in a recent episode we did on his like paid traffic campaign. I had been running a small scale paid traffic campaign through Google for years, but was kind of inspired by that chat with Alex to try and ramp it up a little bit. If you missed it, it was about driving consistently profitable affiliate traffic through Google Ads. I don't have the most sophisticated traffic tracking system in place, but I've added a few new campaigns over the last few months and we've kind of been trying to find a freelance expert to, you know, with some paid media arbitrage experience to help scale this. The challenge I run into is, you know, aside from the revenue attribution, tracking is being somewhat limited or throttled by the bidding targets. This is where Google is kind of, you know, genius for setting this up as an auction system where for me there are certain prices per click where it makes sense to buy traffic, and there are certain prices per click where it would be super unprofitable to buy traffic. So Google's default suggestion is to increase that bid. You know, it's kind of like, well, you know, if you're trading a dollar for two dollars, would you trade a dollar for a buck fifty? You know, probably. Would you trade a dollar for a buck 25? Maybe, you know, would you trade a dollar for a buck ten? You kind of squeeze as much margin as they as they can out of you. But this is a situation where, yeah, I understand I can get more traffic if I spend more, but I need it to be at this price, not at your suggested price. I'd happily spend $10,000 a month or more if that was at a certain price point. So I think last month it was less than a thousand dollars in spend for the sake of reference. Now Alex's argument is that this is consistent, predictable, high converting traffic that doesn't rely on the ebbs and flows of social media or the latest SEO algorithm update in our survey of email subscribers early in the year. And this has been consistent every year we've run the survey is one of the biggest challenges or pain points for side Hustle nation members is finding customers for your side hustle or growing your business. So that led me to create a new course this summer called get gigs. It aims to help people with service based businesses get more gigs, connect with more customers, make more money. This week was a fun one because I got to pull in my all time favorite strategies from the over 600 episodes and compile them into this choose your own adventure course. Not every method is applicable to every business, but I'm confident a few of the strategies, when you put them into action, will more than cover the price of admission. And on the price of admission, I said, hey, let's not reinvent the wheel. So we went back to a launch formula that's worked well for me in the past. That was to pair the Get Gigs launch with the annual BC Stack bundle sale. The pitch went like this. Hey, I made a new thing. Here's how it can help you. But while I know these client finding methods are effective, I'm looking for feedback and testimonials. It's a brand new course, which means that you can get it at a special launch price. Instead of $97, it's going to be half off. And to sweeten the deal even further, not only do you get lifetime access to Get Gigs, you also get these 50 plus other products that are included as part of the BC Stack as well. That ended up being another $10,000 launch and hopefully helps a lot of people connect with new custom and build their side hustles. Now if you're in that boat of looking for more people to hire you for whatever you sell, put together a special offer for side Hustle show listeners. It's not as good as that launch price because that was a one time deal, but it's the next best thing. All you gotta do is go to getgigs me and use Promo Code Podcast to get that special listener only discount. Again, getgigs me and use Promo Code Podcast. Another bright spot from the last few months has been YouTube where my efforts in planting little money seeds has slowly been starting to pay off again. I think of these videos as evergreen mini digital assets that can earn traffic and revenue with a really long shelf life. Usually these are based off of existing side Hustle Nation blog articles, so it's not creating content completely from scratch. And for a lot of the newer ones I'm barely on camera at all. Some not at all. Where we're using a really cool new AI powered video tool called Pictory to create these and how it works as you upload your script and it pulls together dozens of stock video clips to make a pretty visually compelling video. This is the kind of work that would take hours to do manually and it does it in just a couple minutes. It adds subtitles. It's really impressive. It even has some AI voiceover capabilities if you don't want to do your own voiceover. For most of my newer videos I've been recording my own voiceover uploading to Pictory and then it syncs the visuals to what I'm saying. It's pretty slick. You can use discount code NSHN20 like Nick side hustle nation 20 to save 20% on pictory I'll also link that up in the show notes. We've been using Pictori for almost every non podcast video that we upload, and while they're not necessarily going viral, some are earning thousands of views and making money from YouTube ads every single day. Almost double what the channel was earning at the start of the year. And that income doesn't include any affiliate earnings, email signups, podcast listeners that the video content might result in as well. So the next question is, how do we scale production? There are a few steps from idea to finished video, but one of the key ingredients is that voiceover recording. This is where ElevenLabs comes in. I uploaded a few hours of podcast recordings, audio from YouTube video, and even, I think, some chapters from some of my audiobooks, and it created a pretty convincing AI version of my voice. Then you upload the video script to elevenlabs, it creates the voiceover MP3, and then you can plug that audio into Pictory. Of the videos created that way, a couple are closing in on a thousand views, but on average they haven't performed as well as the ones where I've recorded the voiceover directly. I have to imagine the data will come where it becomes almost indistinguishable and the videos perform as well or better than the old fashioned manual recording ones. How good is elevenlabs? I can tell the difference because I know I didn't actually speak those words, but I don't know how obvious it is to someone just discovering the channel for the first time. And maybe as a podcast listener you'd be better attuned to it. But you'll have to let me know if you were able to tell because the last 60 seconds of this episode were AI generated. A real nick back behind the mic now. Did I get you or could you tell it was a voice clone right away? Still, the real bottleneck that we've run into on the video side is in scripting. Even though we're starting from an existing blog post, in most cases not starting completely from scratch, a video script is slightly different. Like you wouldn't want to just read a blog post word for word. So we've been working on a series of chat GPT prompts to try and convert the article text into a YouTube script. But if I'm being completely honest, we don't have that dialed into the point where we want it yet. It's like, hey, I'm trying to create a a video based on this side Hustle Nation blog post. Do you understand? Yes, you can use a lot of the same wording, but it doesn't have to be word for word. Do you understand? Yes. When you introduce numbers on a list, make sure to script out, you know, number one is blank. Do you understand? Yes. It kind of like going through, kind of like prompting it, priming it, I guess, to what you, you know, what the output, you know, you don't need to include any visual cues. Do you understand? Yes. And kind of going through there and, and seeing. And then you paste in the. Okay, here's the script. Boom, go. Or here's. Here's the blog post. Now you can generate the script and it's been, you know, probably. And then you can edit it. So it's like not, you know, it's not 100% done for you. But that's the thing with all of these AI tools is it's, you know, just trying to make your work faster and more effective than, you know, having to. If you were to do it completely by hand. At least that's the way that I'm looking at it at the moment. And the reason that script is so important is because it's still going to be. It's either me reading it or Robo Nick reading it. It still has to sound like something that I would actually say. Still excited about building out that video library and continuing to stack up those evergreen video assets and hopefully the income from those as well. Lately, the channel's been earning around 25 to 30 bucks a day, which again, is double where it was at at the beginning of the year. It would be really exciting to get that to $100 a day or beyond. Some friends of mine I know are making $1,000 a day from this type of content. It's. There's a really high ceiling on where this could go. Now. If you want to check out Pictori, make sure to use our link and that discount code in the show notes. Been really happy with that addition to the toolbox. A couple other tools to note. Earlier in the year, I made the switch from ActiveCampaign to ConvertKit for my email list. Been happy with that move so far. ConvertKit is far, far, far more invested in the creator economy. And despite some learning curves like you'd have with any new software, it's pretty straightforward. And I'm just starting to explore some of their other features, like their sponsor network, like their creator recommendations and some of the Spark Loop integrations, you know, referral programs type of stuff. There's lots of cool things that they've got going on. Another tool swap has been on the bookkeeping side and that's been to KIK K I C K. It's an up and coming bookkeeping software that pulls in transactions from all your accounts, gives you a real time snapshot of how the business is doing and it should save over 1,500 bucks a year compared with our old bookkeeping software. Now I know this sounds like a lot of different things going on and it has been, but you got to remember, zoom out, you know, this is over the course of 12 months and we haven't talked about, you know, what things didn't make the list, you know, what things haven't gotten done. Still haven't prioritized, you know, really any social media, haven't created any sort of membership program. It's still on the table. I think it would be kind of cool to create kind of a side hustle into full time, you know, accelerator program for people who've already got something going. How do we get this over the finish line and make this your, your full time income? How do we get you out of that day job if that's a goal of yours? My children's book that I wrote last year, you know, still hasn't been published, you know, still going back and forth on illustrations for that. I haven't been able to update the side Hustle book as kind of a top of the funnel entry point. It was last updated 2019, so it's definitely overdue for a refresh and maybe that'll be a project for an upcoming quarter. Haven't really been able to touch the website homepage redesign. One of the question marks around that is so much of the traffic is mobile and so much of the traffic is to internal pages where it's like, does the homepage even matter anymore? Like you know, this nice big, you know, laptop desktop splash type of page. I don't know, like most people don't even see it, but it's something that is on the future project list or wish list is kind of that update refresh it's been since 2017 hasn't. It's been a long time. So definitely overdue for that as well. So even though there's been lots of positive progress and things that have gotten done, there's an equal or growing number of things that you know, have had to kind of sit on the back burner and you got to prioritize what is going to move the needle. So that's been what I've been working on habit wise. Mostly a continuation of last year. It was, you know, the goal of Walking a mile a day. I think that's been really positive just to get some extra steps in and get some extra outside time. It's been doing, you know, pretty consistently. My three question journal Nightly Habit. The three this is a, this is a journal that I created. You can find it on Amazon or 3Q Journal.com will redirect you over there. The three questions are what did I get done today? You know, did I do work that was important? What am I grateful for? Always important to have that gratitude. Practice and how am I going to win tomorrow? What are my top priorities for the next day? The other thing that I've added habit wise is going to hot yoga a couple times a week. This is, you know, I've been practicing yoga on and off for years in the name of flexibility and injury prevention. This is one of those things that's pretty uncomfortable in the moment and I guess that's true of a lot of workouts but feels really, really good afterwards. So I've been happy with that addition to the workout routine there. Now book wise always like to ask guests for their book recommendations. I've got some bangers for you. I feel like I've been on a real hot streak here. It started with this title called Astoria that a neighbor recommended. We were talking about the wager. Oh this incredible shipwreck, you know, survival story. Oh, have you checked out Astoria? No. What's that? It's the story. Even though Astoria, Oregon, you know, we've driven through there. Goonies is set there. There's some Northwest familiarity with Astoria. Never knew it was named after John Jacob Astor and his attempt to set up kind of a Northwest fur trading post in this elaborate overland party that was going to meet the over the sea party that went around the Cape of South America and the harrowing adventures that that ensued there. So that was a really interesting one. Really, really cool book was called Unbroken Broken. This is a World War II survival story where it's an Olympic distance runner, an Olympic miler gets joins, joins the war. He's an Air force bomber and ends up getting shot down over the Pacific. Him and like two other guys survive. They're in this life raft. Unfortunately they're floating east. They're floating towards Japan, enemy territory. They end up on this Japanese controlled island after like a month at sea trying to survive off of birds and trying to kill sharks and all sorts of crazy stuff. And then how they end up in a Japanese POW camp and just the horrible abuse and will to survive. Like crazy story. Living with seal was the Next book that I read, this was Jesse Itzler. He's like the founder of Net. He's got like some private jet company. But this is his experience in hiring David Goggins, Navy seal. What's, what's David Gogins book? It's, you know, can't hurt me like a super, super tough guy, you know, ultra marathon runner. I'm going to pay David Goggins to come and live with me and train me on the condition that I just have to do everything he says, no matter what time of day, no matter how crazy it sounds. And this is kind of a funny and intense read of like, look, if you want to be the best, if you want to push through pain, you know, here's, here's kind of how I did that for a month. The next was a detour into the fiction world. Thankfully a fiction story, it's called Alas Babylon took place in central Florida, Cold War era book. I think it was written in nineteen nineteen fifties. And this is like envisioning what life was like after the bombs dropped. You know, this little enclave was, was not hit, but everything surrounding them was. And it's the story of how they survived and put their lives back together. It was really, really interesting. And then the last book recommendation that I've got for you is called the Long Walk. This is not the Stephen King version. This is the Slabomir Rawitz version. This is the story. And there's some debate on the Internet whether, you know, how much of the story is true. So I'll put that out there. But this is Slavomir's account of his escape from Siberian, you know, Russian prison camp during World War II and literally walking thousands of miles south to India to freedom. And just like the common theme of just about all these books is, you know, persistence, tenacity, overcoming the odds, it's this dichotomy of, you know, human life is at once really, really fr. Agile. You just never know when you're going to get hit by a bus. But all of these stories illustrate a remarkable will to survive where you kind of put yourself in the position of these people and you ask, what would you do? Would you be able to handle it? And it makes you grateful for whatever challenges you're facing. It's nothing like what they went through. If they can do that, then I can certainly handle my day. Appreciate the request to put this together. I'll link up all of those books in the show notes for you if you want to go check them out as per the usual. I've got links to all the resources mentioned in the show notes for this episode. Just follow the link in the episode description and it'll get you right over there. Appreciate the request to put this episode together. It was a lot of fun looking back on some of the big projects and shifts this year, and hopefully this inside baseball look at what's going on in Inside Hustle Nation and the Side Hustle show was interesting and compelling for you. Thank you to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. You can hit upside hustlenation.com deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. Thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen and I'll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show. Hustle on.