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Wake up. Your competition is asleep. It's you against the world. And if you want to win, we need to get a few things straight. Your business is a mental war. Your success is a mental war. And making money is a game. And the game of money starts in your mind. This podcast exists to help you weaponize your brain through advanced marketing, mindset and money concepts. To have what others don't, you need to know what others won't. Your future fortune awaits. Welcome to the War Plan podcast. Hey, what's up, my friend? Welcome back to the War Clan podcast. Today we're going to talk about fopo, how it can change your life if you can learn how to slay this dragon. It is the primary culprit of you not getting what you want or you getting what you want. But it's painful and slow and it takes too long. It's the mindset part of it. But don't click off this episode. I'm going to give you practical, tactical stuff you can do. Give you some new ways to think about this. Because here's the truth. Many people actually already know what to do, but they're just not doing it. Now, that doesn't mean that you have every answer figured out, but there's probably a whole bunch of stuff you already know you should be doing, but you don't do it. In understanding FOPO and understanding that you're not broken and you don't need to be fixed, but better understanding yourself and how this stuff works will be helpful for you. That's what I want to talk about. So I'm standing outside. It's about 38 degrees. I was gonna say 40, but it's 38. In Michigan, we had a snow apocalypse. It's really cold and I like recording outside because it's quiet and I can hear the trees blowing. And I'm writing a book this year in 2025. I don't know what the title will be exactly, but I'm working with 35 different business owners, privately, secretly getting this book together. And it's an imperfect but beautiful process. Crazy. Absolutely crazy. Already happening. And this is a 10 week process. I'm walking them through the FRAP formula and this idea of how do you close the gap? And a big part of what I'm measuring in the 35 business owners is FOPO. And so for some people it's not a huge deal, and for other people it's the entire problem that needs to be solved. So what is fopo? FOPO is the easy to Remember acronym that I coined. Tell me if you can relate Fear overwhelm, procrastination or overthinking. Fear, overwhelm, procrastination and overthinking. That is fopo. That's the enemy. Because what people think is happening is they think they need the next piece of information and that will set them free. Or the next software tool and that will set them free. Or they need to read one more book or go to one more seminar. They need that extra little oomph, the extra little push. What they really need to do is stop trying to seek information when the problem problem is mindset. It's mental, it's between your ears. FOPO has to do with the things that we think, the things we believe are true. False beliefs. Has to do with imposter syndrome and all these things going on in our head. And in my book, the reason I'm talking about this is I realized you could give 10 people perfect information. Let's just pretend that the perfect 10 point plan existed for 10 different people in 10 different industries to get exactly what they say that they want. If I gave that 10 part plan to the 10 people that gave them exactly whatever it is that they said that they want. Person one says they want 10 million in the bank. Person two says they want to be debt free and buy a beach house. Person three says they want to pay cash for their kids college and donate a million dollars to orphanages. Whatever. All of them get what they want if they just do the perfect 10 point plan. And it could be bullet pointed out with subsections, with pictures and diagrams and graphs. It could be written in a way where there's nothing confusing in any shape or form on what to go do. Here's the problem. As far as I can tell, eight out of 10 of those people still won't get what they want. I'm not laughing. It's not really not funny. It's just shocking. 80% of people, even if given perfect step by step bite size, not confusing information, still won't get the result. So the question becomes why? Because you'll notice with popular business books, at least I notice this, people feel smarter just for reading them. And people are always quick to recommend books. This is just a human psychology thing. But you'll notice online if someone says hey, anybody got a good book recommendation on blank, tons of comments will happen. Why? Why did tons of comments happen? It's because people want other people to know that they've read lots of books. People want to be the first person to comment or they want to be the seventh person but has an even more obscure sounding book than everybody else. Because we want to have the appearance of success, we want the appearance of intelligence, we want to believe that we're good simply for knowing things. When the truth is is that success comes from doing things, not from knowing things. So why is it that 8 out of 10 people won't get the thing that they claim they want really bad? They're sure they really mean it. They want to pay off their parents debt, they want to trav the world, they want to do all this stuff. You give them the plan, they don't do it. It's because of FOPO. And so in my book about FRAP, I know I'm throwing way too many acronyms around. FRAP is a logic based works 100% of the time in any industry formula to make way more profit without spending any money on ads. So that's the core of what the book will be out be about. Excuse me, is how do you not spend money on ads but make a ton more profit so that when you start to run ads you can scale way bigger, way faster? Right? But I know that even giving people the frat formula step by step isn't enough. So I'm paying attention to fopo. So let's talk about this. Fear, overwhelm, Procrastination, overthinking. You're probably not taking notes because this is a podcast. So just hopefully you can remember this because it might change your life. Let's talk about fear. First, I'm going to give you a back of napkin solution to each of the elements of fopo. Now in full transparency, it's, it's a little more deep than this, but this covers, you know, 80% of the cases. If you actually have fear, straight up fear, you're scared to do something even though you know that thing will be good for you or it's the next step for you. And this could, this could be anything. Could be firing someone who's got leverage over you. It could be hiring someone because you're just terrified. It could be going live on Facebook. It could be selling marketing, making phone calls. It could be looking at your numbers, filing your taxes, whatever it is, doesn't matter what it is. If you have fear, here's the 80% of the time, it works every time. Anecdote. The antidote to fear is action. Action itself is the thing to slay the dragon of fear. Okay, so we're talking about fopo. There's four Parts to it. The first part is fear. Take action. Now, we teach our kids that the definition of courage is doing what you know is right even while you feel afraid. This is huge, because feeling fear doesn't make you weird. It doesn't make you abnormal. It doesn't do anything. It's actually human. It's normal. There'd be something neurologically wrong with you if you never felt fear. You'd be like a psychopath or something. If you feel fear, you're normal. The problem is lack of action. If you take action, it will change your life. Because when you do the scary thing, you quickly realize it's not that scary. You quickly realize that the monster didn't have any teeth after all. Besides, that action itself creates clarity. And by taking action, you can see more clearly. Action creates clarity. Action creates clarity. Action creates clarity. Do the thing my friend Eileen Wilder always says. Do it now. Do it now. Do it now. Do it now. So that's my encouragement to you. Do it now. Do it now. If you need to fire that person, pull your car over on the side of the road and get a game plan. And do it today. Do it now. Do it tomorrow morning. Do it now. Right. Fear can be killed with action. Okay, the second part is overthinking. Overthinking. Actually, no, that's not right. The second one is overwhelmed. Sorry, there's two O's. Fear. Overwhelm. Overwhelm. When you feel overwhelmed, like, you feel a wave of anxiety in your brain, maybe in your body and your chest. You can feel it. You're like, oh, your heart's palpitating, your palms are sweaty. You're just. You're all done. You, you, you. You hit 10 out of 10 on the all done meter, and you're like, I can't do anything. And so you get paralyzed because of overwhelm. Here's the back of napkin. Works 80% of the time, every time. Formula to defeating overwhelm. Ready? Prioritization. Now, that's not a sexy word. You probably hoped it was a more mythical, magical thing. But. But hear me out for 30 seconds, okay? Actually, write down all the stuff you're overwhelmed by and only do the most important one. Next. Prioritization is a superpower. Prioritization is actually really easy to do. But we get in our head. We live in our head. We're too close to it. Our IQ drops a hundred points when we're working on our own business. Have you noticed this? We become dumber than a box of rocks trying to solve simple problems, especially when you're overwhelmed, the key is prioritizing all the stuff you have to do. Now, the next part of fopo, okay, which is procrastination, it's like second cousins with overwhelm. Okay? So the F O, P O, fopo, the O and the P in the middle, they kind of go together. And one of the reasons people have a hard time prioritizing and also one of the reasons people continuously procrastinate are related. So if you want to defeat procrastination, we have to increase your desire. Desire. This one will take a second to explain. But the truth is, is most people maybe you really don't know what you want. And that's a problem, okay? Because when you want something really bad, it's difficult to procrastinate. And if you sort of set a goal, but on the inside of you, the truth is you don't really care. You really don't. It's just kind of the next goal. It's, you know, I guess I should hit a million dollars in revenue or what? If you have a placeholder goal, you know, just kind of the what you think society told you you're supposed to have as a goal goal, if that's your goal, it doesn't create a fire in you. And procrastination becomes a luxury. Procrastination, you can only do it because you. You can do it. You know, people sometimes complain to me and they'll be like, I'm so tired of being poor. And then I'll say, yeah, but why aren't you even more poor? They're like, what do you mean, Josh, you monster. I'm like, no, seriously, let's. Let's think about this. You're dissatisfied with the amount of money that you make. And they're like, yeah, I said, but why don't you make even less than the amount that you make? And it's because people get into this identity range, this comfort zone where they're kind of okay. Even if they complain about it, they're still fine. They're okay, right? Because if your electric bill is getting shut off tomorrow, you're not procrastinating anymore. You do a whole bunch of stuff and fix the problem really fast. And so you gotta understand, overwhelm, having a big pile of to do's and procrastinating on things that you know you should do, kind of both related to this idea that you don't know what you want or the thing that you think that you want doesn't create a fire in your belly. At all. There's no sense of urgency because you don't have to do it because who cares? You don't really want it in the first place. It's more of a. It'd be nice if I had a million dollar business. That'd be pretty cool. I'd be proud of myself. But I'm not like gonna like, like suffer and sacrifice and claw and dig for it, you know, Because I'm okay. My electric bill is paid. Right? The example I use sometimes for this honeymoon, I've been married 22 and a half years and I can tell you, especially for all my male listeners out there, we'll do a PG13 thing. I. I'll just say this. I did not procrastinate on purple unicorns on my honeymoon, if you know what I'm saying. Okay, okay. I didn't procrastinate. I wasn't like, hey babe, you know, I've been thinking. We're going to be married like 50 years, so it's fine. We can just purple unicorn it up later. No rush. No. Procrastination doesn't exist when your desire is maxed out. And so maybe instead of reading business books, we need to go back to basics and figure out what do you want? And there's not a wrong answer. One of the reasons it's so hard to choose what you want in the first place is because there's so much opinion of others around you. There's religious programming. There's your grandma when you were seven that said a bunch of negative things to you. There's a high school guidance counselor. Everyone's telling you what you should want. Everyone's telling you that what you want is wrong. The truth is we just had to figure out what you actually want. When you get it locked, it's hard to procrastinate. It's easy to prioritize because we know what we're aiming at. We know why it matters to us. We don't have to make bones about it. We don't have to apologize for it. We just go do it, baby. Okay? So fopo. Fear overwhelm procrastination. The last one is overthinking. Here's a couple thoughts. And overthinking. Then I'll tell you how to solve it. The first thought is that if you are a overthinker, it's probably, it's highly likely partially because you have a higher IQ than other people do. It's not the only reason. It's not a hundred percent true, but it's often True. Often, Often, often. Because people that are smart have a tendency to underestimate their own abilities and they overestimate other people's abilities. Not only that, people that are smart are very aware of everything that could go wrong. You're just aware of it because it's technically, statistically true. I mean, you could get struck by lightning bolt and eaten by a werewolf on the second Tuesday of the full moon. I mean, it might be a.00001 chance, but someone that's intelligent thinks things like that. Not literally, but we're always thinking of what could go wrong and the probability of things. What if I do this? What if I make a mistake? It can come from perfectionism too. But I'll tell you, overthinking is a dream killer. It's a killer. So how do we fix it? Well, we fix it through constraints. Constraints, and I'll explain constraints in a second. But let's recap. If you want to fight fopo first part being fear, you fight fear through action. You fight overwhelm through prioritization. You fight procrastination through increasing your desire, making sure the goal you have even matters to you. I was at a business conference a while back and I had this whole long conversation. This dude I'd never met before, and he almost started crying because he's like, oh my God, I actually don't even want the goal that I've set. It means nothing to me. I just thought I was supposed to want it. I feel free right now. And he got all emotional because he already had a nice business, he was aiming for the next thing and he didn't care. He was suffering for nothing. So anyway, and that leads us to overthinking. We be overthinking through constraints. And a constraint is. It's a way to box yourself in. So for example, if you say you're going to lose ten pounds, there's really no constraints. Constraints on that. It's just a claim. I'm going to lose ten pounds. If you said I'm going to lose ten pounds in seven days. Now there's constraint. Okay, Better yet, what if I added some public accountability, which would behave as a second constraint. I could say, I'm going to lose 10 pounds in seven days and I'm going to go Facebook Live and tell everybody that follows me on Facebook that I'm going to do that thing and that they need to DM me seven days from now to make me prove that I did that thing right. So now I have public accountability plus a firm Deadline, the likelihood of success going up, it increases like you're going to succeed. But what the constraint really does is it inhibits your ability to overthink. You can overthink a little bit when you have a constraint, but you can't overthink in perpetuity. You see, a lot of people are making a career out of laying the groundwork, meaning they're preparing to get ready in perpetuity. They're reading books and courses and seminars, and they're. They're just about to get started. You know, it's like they're. They want to, you know, sit on the beach in Maui, but they won't pack their bag and go to the airport and go through tsa. They won't sit on the airplane ride with the person next to them sneezing on them. They won't do any of the bad parts so that they can get to the good part, because they're just daydreaming about Hawaii and they're overthinking, right? You can't overthink when you have constraints, because what will happen is you're three days in, there's four days left, you've lost zero pounds, and you're still crafting your perfect meal plan, your perfect approach to exercise. And now there's three days left, there's two days left, now you're 48 hours out. You have all this public accountability. You've called your shot, right? It puts this positive pressure on you to turn the overthinking part of your brain off and force you into action. And good things will happen. And even if you didn't lose 10 pounds, you're gonna have lost 5 pounds or 7 pounds or 3 pounds. And if you didn't add that constraint, maybe you would have lost nothing. So back to frap and business and closing the gap and getting your dreams to come true and all that stuff. We got to have the information, but we also have to understand how our brains work. And if you're experiencing fopo, there's nothing wrong with you. That's just a human thing, because there's actually good reasons for all of the FOPO things to exist. The problem is, is with your business, there's no mortal danger. You know, you launching a marketing campaign that fails. Nothing bad actually happens other than, you know, the $953 that you lost. But you didn't even lose it. It was research and development budget. Because now you know what doesn't work, and you can analyze why it didn't work. Oh, the offer was Good. The hook was good, but, oh, it was this time of year. Oh, I'm looking at my revenue curve. I shouldn't have launched that right here. I should have launched that six weeks ago. Okay, I'll test it again next fall. Right. And so getting that Data was worth $953. So Fox can protect you if you're running from saber tooth tigers or something and you're in survival mode. And the Australian outback. You know, procrastinating can be good, overthinking can be good. But in a business context, these are the silent killers of dreams. You not knowing what you want is a silent killer of dreams too. Because what ends up happening is you're aiming at a goal that in your heart of hearts, you actually don't care about. You will not hit the goal because the truth is you don't care about it. And then you're gonna shame yourself for not hitting the goal even though you don't even care about it. What a tragedy. It's a tragedy. But all my other friends, they hit a million dollars. Who cares about a million? Look, your business is supposed to be a slave for you. Your dreams, hopes, aspirations, etc. Fill in the blank. It's a tool. That's all it is. Your business is not who you are, it's what you do. It's like a car. You get in it and you drive it. If you want your car to be purple, polka dotted with pink falcon wings on it, cool. You can do that. You can do whatever you want to your vehicle, AKA your business, as long as it's serving your purpose, your desire, what you want to happen. So hopefully that wasn't too much word salad and it was valuable just standing outside on a cold winter Michigan night. So I'm gonna go get warmed up. Take care. God bless. Do you want to weaponize your brain and turn it into a money making machine? Consider joining War Plan Coaching. You'll get thousands of dollars in exclusive courses and training, a private community, the chance to come to in person meetups at Warplan Studios, and access to myself for Q and A every single month. Want to know the best part? It's free. Plus, we'll send you a private weekly newsletter full of money making tips and cutting edge ideas. Just go to warplan.com to sign up. Hey, I'm your biggest fan. I'm rooting for you. We'll see you next time.