- How to handle burnout
- Why you might be facing burnout
- Wearing all the hats as a business owner
- The damage of over-saturating yourself in one aspect of life
- Pacing yourself for success
- How your well being is a sum of your life, not just one part
- Why the four bottlenecks discussed in episode 188 are important to understand
- Avoiding water in your gas tank
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[00:00:00] Welcome back to another episode of the six figure creative podcast. I'm your host, Brian Hood. And again, I'm joined here with my substitute cohost, Mr. No energy drowsy kind of poopy feeling, I guess. I don't know. Mark Eckert. Is it the
best intro
That's right. The slowest, the the most tired you will ever see mark accurate here in the flash. What's happening, baby.
Oh, man. It's so funny. Cause here the topic today's episode is around this sort of hilarious, like dichotomy between how I feel right now and how mark feels right now,
I'm cutting you off. Okay. Cause this is how it really happened. Brian hit me up and he's like, Hey man, let's do a podcast. He's like, I got all these great ideas. It's going to be great. It's going to help the whole community. It's going to be amazing. Then I showed up, I was in a trash mood and Brian was like, dude, we should talk about how you're in a trash bin and how I'm in a great mood,
That's not even remotely how it happened just for the record,
but yeah, I mean, like I just got back from vacation two weeks in Cancun I talked about on last week's episode, just on the intro of it. and then you're like, when's the [00:01:00] last time you were on a vacation?
I mean, it's, it's been a couple months for sure.
Like it's maybe six months.
I was going to say a couple, like, no one here. Like everyone's playing the world's tiniest violin for your boot a couple months.
no, but, well, here's the thing. Wait a second. It's probably like six to eight months. The problem is, is that yes, I did take time off from work, but where did I go? I was like on a trip because I had to do something related to an extreme amount of work or I was visiting my parents and everybody knows that's not a vacation.
Okay. So answer me. When was the last time you actually took a vacation, which by the way, for anyone listening right now, The topic of today is sort of, kind of around the burnout conversation, losing creativity, not feeling motivated. So that's kind of the, the like framework here, but we're not saying the only solution is vacation.
So that, let me just get that out of the way right now. But when was the last time you actually took a real vacation?
I think it was New York in September. Yeah. New York in September.
No one on earth would think New York has a vacation. Mark.
Oh dude. No, [00:02:00] it's, that's where I get the most inspired. I'm so stoked. I love being.
yeah, I'll be there later this month, which is actually when we, my wife went up there to see a few Broadway plays, funny girl and a what's the other big one uh, with, uh, Hamilton or something. Yeah.
Cool.
uh, Going to see how's moving castle now. So that was your vacation, so, okay. So all that to say, mark has been through a lot of stuff and you've been doing a lot since then, and you just went through it like a home renovation, home renovation, which is like a whole show of things.
that's probably a big part of
And like you sent me a photo of your studio.
Like, again, you were at your assistant's house right now with that stupid cat behind you still, it's not your cat, thankfully it's not your cat. And you're taking over his apartment into this podcast because your, your quote home studio is still in shambles right.
now. So you can't even do anything.
Yeah. I mean, like there's just so much going on. So it's my wife and I, the idea of us. Being able to sleep a lot. It's just not a thing. Cause like every week and also she started a, this awesome vintage business.[00:03:00] oh yeah, she almost sold out at vintage Charlotte. It's like this huge I dunno thing where, you know, thousands of people show.
And they just all by vintage. Yeah. She almost sold out. She's killing it, but she was prepping for that. We just didn't like have any time off and then renovation, we visited by parents and then, you know, I've just been building my business. It's just been, it's been a lot. It's been crazy, man.
Well, let's actually get on the episode because this was, this whole conversation was spurred by uh, one of the conversations in our Facebook community, which you can get to, by going to six figure creative.com/community. and I was just gonna read the posts word for word. This is from one of our community members.
says lately, I've been struggling with this. And I was wondering if anyone had any ideas or suggestions to overcome this I've been working with a couple of clients over these last few months, and it's a lot of creative brain work and it's been super fun, but it's also extremely mentally exhausting and almost fatigued with a hint of wanting to take a nap mid session.
And it makes the day drag and makes me not as productive. [00:04:00] I've been heavy on coffee vibes as a bandaid, always a good band-aid by the way, but it doesn't last and causes me to want to crash later on, which is the negative of too much coffee.
And then he, he kind of finishes off the post, but just talking about how one of the things that has helped him is bringing more friends or collaborators into his studio to help him out. So I think that's, that's, that's just kind of where he ends off there, but this is a, this is something that, that hit home close to home to me for.
Cause I've been through this exact thing and same for you mark. Cause your exact same situation right
Stop talking about is
triggering.
Yeah. So like, okay. So for my background, my background for anyone who doesn't know is a music production. And when I used to be producing bands full time in the studio for like 12 hour days, it can get intense.
Like You're trying to use your creative right brain in a way that completely drains you. And you have to be performing at a high level for many, many hours at a time. And while you can do that in short spurts, if you try to do that for a long period of time, I don't think there's any way on earth not to get drained by this.
You may disagree, but.
No, I completely agree. I think something that you're not even mentioning is like [00:05:00] there's clients that are a plus clients and then there's clients where I'm making rent, you know, and the making rent clients are going to be a lot more exhausting. They're gonna be a lot more. to be completely honest, like that's never really going to change.
You're always going to have clients that are going to be easy and you're always going to have clients that require a little bit more attention. So if you have clients and you're just keep getting hit with the more attention hitting clients. Yeah. You're just going to, you're going to burn out if you're not passionate about the work or whatever, it's like, dude, you're not going to, you're not going to leave that day.
Feeling nourished, creative.
Yeah, but I still, because I specifically remember instances where like middle of the day I was miserable. I wanted to take a nap and I didn't want to work. Like there were long stretches of time where I remember putting in the hours, like, cause, cause I'm telling you there were years where I was just straight up hustling the kind of lifestyle that I do not condone.
Now these days I was just hustling. I was putting in. I was exhausted. So I, I have felt what he is [00:06:00] feeling and it doesn't matter. It didn't matter to me, at least whether it was a client that I loved or a client that it was just bill paying work. Because again, No matter what level you're at. I wouldn't say no matter what level you're at most people will continuously have to do some amount of bill paying work in their careers.
Even the best people are tempted with the bill paying work. When those people are willing to pay a premium rate to work with the best of the best. So like some of the, some of the higher end freelancers are in my background, music producers will still work with like bands. They don't really love because they will pay.
They're like. You know that high rate where you're just trying to tell someone to go away. You know, here's a triple, triple my rate just to get you to go away and people still pay it. And so that's bill paying work, even if you're at a high level, you'll still do this stuff. So I just want it to kind of say that, but w we were having a conversation before this episode, mark, that I think is interesting and pertinent is, when you're in this engineering mode, I'm sorry, when you're in this. technician mode. audio engineering producing, like, that's my background. Anyone else in any other field? There's, there's still this in your world, but you get to this technician mode where it's less about creativity [00:07:00] and more about, specifics. how would you you word it, mark?
I'd say, I mean, the way that I kind of refer to technician roles or technical roles is it's the focus on the craft. It's not focused on building of, more of it. I think the best way to kind of explain it is like, you're just want to build more as opposed to you. Just to focusing on step by step by step.
It's just exhausting.
So, but some people love technician roles. Like, you know, if all you do is just play guitar and you're just like, are, you know, focusing on riffs and like weird all the time. I don't play guitar, but that's a technician role,
Well, I want to say this, like again, I was very technician back in those days and that's why I was willing to just sit in a cave and do this work. It was very draining. It was usually rewarding in some capacity or also I wouldn't have kept doing it, but it was, it wasn't a healthy place. And over the years I've shifted.
And this goes back to the book, the E-Myth revisited by Michael Gerber. He has. the entrepreneur. there's three types of business owners. The technician and the manager, [00:08:00] and very few people are all three, but you need all three in order to succeed.
And I was very much the technician. I was a little bit the entrepreneur. and not at all the manager, I've always, that's always been my weakest of the three, but as I've grown and shifted things, I've gotten more and more to become the entrepreneur.
And when you're the entrepreneur, the reason things get better for you. Tend to and marks into Mark's case. Maybe not so much. you tend to burn out a little less is because you get better at understanding what burns you out, what drains you and what fills you back up.
And so for anyone here, that's sitting here struggling, wondering why they want to take a nap at two o'clock every day.
And it's not because of their diet. It's not because of exercise. It's not because their coffee is a coffee crash. It's it's because they know?
they're drained creatively or mentally. It might be T it might be a time to maybe read E-Myth revisited first, but also tap into that entrepreneur self because the entrepreneur tends to look at the big picture.
That's the biggest difference between the entrepreneur and the technician technician is in the weeds, in the thick of it, doing the little tiny little steps that [00:09:00] have to get done, the little technical things, and by the way, not all technician work is non-creative a lot of creative work is technician type work.
So don't think that just because you're a little creative that you never do technical work, and you're not the technician. Some of the most creative people I know are trapped in the technicians world and they never get out of it because they never zoom out as the entrepreneur to look top down with their business, to see that I need to change something in my business.
So some advice that I would give people a place to start at. As if you've created a business that drains you, it might be time to look at the policies that you have created in your business that allow those things to drain you. So, one of those examples, and I I've talked about this extensively in past episodes, but one of those things that I realized was interacting with the artists in the studio for me drain me.
I am actually more introverted than I am extroverted. I don't get energized by people. I get drained by people. So what I did was I said, I'm no longer going to serve. Clients in the studio, I'm not going to work with them. I will work with them remotely and offer other services that I can [00:10:00] do remotely so that I never really have to be face to face.
Now there's some negatives with that. We don't have to get into that, but that helped me on the, during that season of my life, transition to a healthier, better place. And it started with me being the entrepreneur, looking at my business objectively, and we even talked about it recently on the 80 20 episode mark, the last one you and I did where I made those shifts by looking at my numbers.
And that was kind of that transition.
for me, I was kind of in the opposite thing where I'm extremely extroverted. And if I notice that I'm alone all the time and I'm just behind my computer, like, you know, emailing and I, you know, it's funny too is like, yeah, you being a technician or a manager or entrepreneur in E-Myth, it's not a hundred percent.
Any of those,
No, it's not black or white. That's, that's huge. It is not, it's never black or white. And for those of you familiar with any of gram, if, you are an Instagram, I think it's one or two. I can't remember one of those who knows Enneagram one they're very much black or white thinkers. So it's like, I will either.
Always be around people or I will never be around people. And I think we all learned like, no matter how introverted you [00:11:00] are and how, how much people drain you. I think we all saw 20, 20 to 2021 being isolated is good for nobody. So like there still needs to be some balance.
Yeah. So, I mean, the, I think the main thing is kind of being self-aware of like, what mode am I currently in and where can I counterbalance? So I noticed like the past, I don't know, six or eight months, there was a certain you know, I had a really, really focused like entrepreneur thinking on the business.
And it wasn't even necessarily about. Building necessarily. It was about like the long-term. Okay. What, what are we, what am I doing here? Like, what is the actual goal here? And I was in that mode for so long, as soon as, you know, I kind of needed some counterbalance, so it's like if I had just made music, that's a, and that's all I was doing.
Holy It would feed me so much. If I was only doing technician work for eight months straight, like this guy in that Facebook post, if that's all he's doing, then yeah. He needs to be doing, he needs to be [00:12:00] reminded of what the big picture is probably, you know? So I think kind of counterbalancing, that is what makes sense.
And that's why a lot of people will go on vacations or they'll invest into themselves for something, but you always kind of need to play counterbalance in order to not, you know, it's never going to be set. You're always just going to be bounced.
Yeah.
So to go back to Christopher's post, just to kind of give him some advice that anyone can kind of take and apply to themselves. My advice. Figure out how much creative juice you actually have to give people, because once you go past that, once you've, once you've drained your creative juices, you don't have anything left to give.
Like at that point you're running on empty. That's why you want to take a nap. That's why you're crashing. That's why, no matter what you seem to do, you have nothing left to give, and maybe I'm being a little dramatic here, but like, I think anyone can relate to that. So Instead of just putting a hard line when I'm talking about boundaries earlier, instead of putting a hard line like I did and said, I am never producing a band again, which by the way, I haven't, I am only mixing and mastering bands from this point.
I'm like, instead of shifting your business in dramatic fashion which again, I still wasn't [00:13:00] in the healthiest place then to make decisions. I was just making my baby steps towards. Nurturing my entrepreneur side and learning how to make better decisions and learning what the negatives and pros and cons are of making these drastic left or right black or white decisions instead Christopher specifically can find ways to space up his work so that he is able to work on some type of.
Part of the day and other types of work, another part of the day or days on and off, or just, just basic, especially understand how to pace yourself. Some people can run a full marathon. I can't. So if you can run a full marathon, go for it, do that. But I don't know many people that can run a marathon every day.
it's about knowing what your limits are in a short amount of time. So a marathon and over a long amount of time. So like, Or two months or a year, how many marathons can you run in a year? Look at it.
from the creative perspective. If I can only run three miles, which is about where I'll tap out at Right.
now, then I know I can do short amounts of stuff, but I could do that every day and it wouldn't kill me either.
there's a popular story, that [00:14:00] kind of ties in with this and I'm going to butcher this. It's fine of I think it's the a hundred mile or no, it's the 50 mile March, something like that. so there were some. Pioneers back in the day, trying to finally make it to the south pole for the first time.
And there were two groups going after the south pole, you have to make it there and make it back. People had made it there, but they died on the way back. So, cause this is back before you had like wonderful companies, like the north face. I'm joking. That's probably not what I wear to the north pole or south pole, but they had, they had like limited gear.
They had limited visibility. So what the two groups did, the one that actually won this competition instead of. Clear day is going a hundred miles and snowy days sitting still what they, the other group did that actually one is they did a certain amount of miles every single day. It was a relatively low amount.
Like let's call it 20 miles. I don't remember how many it was, but 20 miles a day, rain or shine. Good weather or bad weather, no matter what, 20 miles a day. So on good day. beautiful clear days that did 20 miles on awful snowy blizzard days that did 20 miles. And they kept up a really good, consistent pace.
And not only did they get there and back they did it [00:15:00] faster than they thought. So I think we can all take from that story that I somewhat butchered and apply it to our businesses to find out what is our 20 mile, March or 50 mile March. What can we do? That's a, a consistent amount of creative work every day, so that we're not burnt out, that we're still able to stay sharp with our skills there.
We're able to still make money and serve our clients. And then the times where we're not doing those what I'd consider like deep, creative juice draining work. Then find place, find other types of work that you can still make money from. This is not as draining. And I think most people in most services have some sort of work that is those two things.
One is really draining high creativity work, and someone's just like technical work. That's like, I can do my spare time and I don't have to have face-to-face at clients or whatever that balance needs to be for you.
to add to that, this is actually a funny story. So couple of years before this, this was like pre COVID.
God, those were, those are the good days.
Oh bro. When you could just. Spit on people and sneeze everywhere uh, dead anyways. Um, But I [00:16:00] went, I went to the Y with one of my buddies you know, he's showing me the ropes.
I don't know what the hell I'm doing. I've done like MMA and like boxing and Krav, but like I'd never really did weightlifting before that. Oh, thanks, bro. Yeah, clearly you don't need a great bod for I'm a man anyways, I didn't say I was good at it, but I never did weightlifting and you know, he was showing me the ropes and we see this guy near us granted definitely on steroids, but you know, it was just, skin was like just blood was just coming out of his skin and he just, he was definitely on Roy's but we, he was absolutely right.
And then he just, we were talking to him you know, he's been working out for like 20 something years, 30 something years. He's an older guy. And he just says doesn't have big weights either. Like he doesn't have like massive weights with them, but he was like, you know, listen, I am, you know, he admitted to us that he was definitely on steroids, but he was like, I've been working out for like, you know, Years straight every single day.
And it [00:17:00] doesn't take much weight. Like he had like, I dunno, 35 pounds or, you know, Whatever the dumbbells, Jesus Christ
You're doing so good, mark.
anyways, but it was like, it's
called?
gorgeous, dude. Anyways, he was like, yeah, it doesn't take much weight. I just show up all day. But if you look at it, the cumulative amount of weight that I've lifted over these many years is more than someone who's just doing a ton of weight once every couple of days, you know, it's just, it's the longest.
And then not only that I have minor back issues. And so occasionally if I'm doing heavier weights, like if we're, when we're doing heavy squats, I might throw my back out, like tap it a couple of times in my workout career. So. As I get older, that will probably only get worse. So you also have to look at the long, the long game, cause like the reason he's able to get to the size, other than the, the juice, the creative juice he's taking he has a different kind of creative Other than the juices he's taking, he's able to [00:18:00] get to the sizes of these at and maintain the size of his, that at his age, because he doesn't overdo it.
He knows his limitations. And he does the long game versus the, like the, the pain game. That a lot of us,
whether it's the, whether it's in the gym or whether it's in our businesses, like a lot of us we're like masochists, we show up to work and we are like, I'm going to hustle, hustle, grind. I was just listening to Gary and I'm going to
put a 30 hour in a day.
Well, it's like you look at I dunno, everybody's got a sad friend who sells insurance um, anyways, but yeah. Yeah. And the thing is, is like, you look at them and they're, they're going all in, right. Cause if they make one sale, they make a load of money. But if they're on like, you know, sleeves patrol all the time, they're trying to get every sale.
They can. They maybe last a year and a half, two years, and then they just can't do it anymore. They made a load of money, but they're like, I'm miserable. Everybody hates me. I feel like I sold Amway, you know? And then they, [00:19:00] then they leave and then what happens? They're so burnt out that they spend all of that money.
Cause they can't get another job because they just couldn't give a They did a Coke habit. Cause that's the only way that. Maintain that a volume of sales is just be stoked about life insurance and then, you know, the money goes away and then they have to get another job. So it's like stop focusing and doing these big spurts and just focus on that marathon.
Yeah. So Christopher our community member, that's the future. You have to look forward to if you don't figure this out,
Yep. Coke
coked out.
insurance,
Oh my gosh.
Rock and roll baby.
Well, this brings, this brings us to physical health and I think that's extremely important. would imagine that you agree, like, I mean, you have been having a great, like workout routine since, I don't know, the past couple of years
So this there's, this goes back to um, you as a freelancer, there's no separation between you as a human being. And you as a freelancer, your personal life will carry over to your, your business. Your business will [00:20:00] carry to your personal life. Your personal health will carry over to all, all of these things.
So like, again, the better you are mentally, the better you are physically, the better you are in your relationships. Then the better you'll be with a business.
Most people I know that continuously struggle and their business has some sort of. Going back to the phrase we used in past episodes, dirty fuel, they have some other dirty fuel in their life that is causing the problems in their business.
It could be that their marriage is in shambles. It could be that they have trauma that isn't dealt with. And so they have mental issues. It could be that they are, they have not left their home in the last three years and they've put on 30 pounds and all they eat is like Uber eats. It could be all of those things.
And so for you to think that I'm just going to go to. The six figure creative podcast advice. And my business is going to be transformed because I go do all the things that they say to do. You're you're fooling yourself. Like it takes all of these things.
There is no mindset that you can gain that [00:21:00] outperforms your biology. You know, if you're a sad sack of and you don't move all day, any Tony Robbins pick me up is not going to make you more money. It's just like, you need to make sure that you are focusing on yourself and I'm, I'm guilty of this. Like all of my friends.
Even my team, Shira, my wife, everyone knows that like my self care routine is either like, oh wow, he's got, he's got a good thing. Go, it's going great. And then, ah, God, we got like two weeks. I haven't worked out. I've just been eating pasta, you know, so I could get a lot better at that. I think people try to say they're perfect, but like, nobody is, everybody's going to go through that.
No. So it's it's again, I don't want this to be a black and white thing either. I know people that they put all their focus into their, their fitness and the rest of the life is in shambles. I don't have people that put all their focus in relationships, but their health is bad and they get the gain a bunch of weight, and then they feel bad about it.
And that.
hurts them mentally because they lose their [00:22:00] self-confidence and that affects their business. So like, there's, there's no like. I would never say go all in, in one of these areas, it is a balance. And as, as human beings, there is no way that we can properly maintain a perfect balance or a perfect relationship in all of these different areas of life.
We cannot have a perfect relationship with our spouse and a perfect body and a perfect business and a perfect mind all at once. Like not only will we never have a perfect any of those things, we won't even have a great any of those things all at the same time. So back to episode 180 8 that we did back in. February. We talked about the four personal bottlenecks, holding your business back from earning 16.
one of these four areas that I just talked about is the core issue in your life. That's holding your business back and go back to that episode, if you want to go into deep dive of this, but we're never going to have a perfect balance and we have to be okay with that. So it's up to us like mark, when you know, your fitness has been.
You start to work on that. It will eventually fall off. That is okay. We don't have to be perfect. And I think the sooner we, we relinquished the fact that we need to be perfect in all [00:23:00] areas. The sooner we will have a better, a better mental state. Cause I know people that beat themselves up because they let something fall through whether they forgot to fall to that friend, they let somebody down or they didn't go to the gym or they stopped going to do the same that committed to they beat them.
And so not only are they losing out on their fitness or their relationships or their business or their health or whatever, they're also beating themselves up mentally. So they're, they're hurting themselves twice because they can't just accept anything less than perfection. So this, this is not everybody like not everyone struggles this way, but a lot of people that are black and white thinking.
Struggle with this sort of thing. And this all goes back to the original problem that Christopher's having in our posts, where you are struggling creatively, and you're getting drained. A lot of times you have to look to the other areas of your life, as well as your business itself to find the answers.
Because again, as freelancers, there is no difference between us and our businesses.
Yeah. If you're not operating well, then your businesses and operating well. So that's, that's kind of a hard thing. It's like you [00:24:00] are the machine behind the factory. That is you, which you are the product. So yeah, you gotta, you gotta maintain
Say that one more time. I don't know if I followed that.
I'm burnt out. And I can't think so. I don't know if I can do that rewind 10 seconds now, as I was saying, it's like your, your product. So you have to, if you're the factory behind. Your product and that's what you're selling. Like machines break
workers. Don't show up like you, you need to maintain yourself to make sure your factories running.
I mean, again, like I just love the phrase dirty fuel. I'm going to tell a story right now, that is ridiculous. But my wife was working with. And she left that job and she gave them a month's notice. I think she did her duties to the best of her ability and that person did not want her to leave this job.
So what this person did was at the, [00:25:00] sometime during the day, while she's working, they decided to put water into her gas tank. And what that did is. Yep. What that did was on her way. Home, her car broke down. This is before We were married, by the way, or else, this would have ended very poorly for that person.
Uh, Her car broke down on the way home. She had to bring it to the shop. And the reason this happened is because one of the things that they had offered her to stay on more than just more pay was a car. So I'm not going to go into the details, anything past this. That's why I kind of kept the story vague, but all that to say, when the fuel was dirty, the car no longer ran. So if we look at elephant, I just leaving
everyone on unethical finger marks going be like, give me more details after this.
dude, we gotta throw dog at there at this company. Come on, bro. I'll shout. I'll drive out to Nashville. We'll just like go to a dog park, pick it all up. Well, I'll call you later. We'll get it. We'll get it.
Figured.
Yeah. We'll, uh, we'll burn to the ground. All right. So all this to say, like as creatives, we have inputs coming in in all areas of our life, relational inputs, physical [00:26:00] inputs, emotional inputs inputs for education. Like this podcast is an input for you. But there's also in a lot of the inputs that we receive are good.
But it only takes one source of dirty fuel to wreck us. If it's dirty enough, like we can have a great business, we can have great relationships, but if we are consuming some sort of like awful information out there, that's poisoning you. It can, it can permeate through all areas of your life.
It can, it can ruin relationships. We see this, like, man, we saw this in the political, like back in 2020 when like politics were at an all time high at, around the
election
cycle.
about? I don't even know what you're
There was so much dirty fuel going into so many minds just around that, that we saw all sorts of crazy And there were relationships ruined because people were doing crazy stuff.
Like that's just one example. I'm just gonna, I'm gonna, I hate politics. So I'm just gonna throw that one under the bus,
dude, I love politics.
but that's why we have to be so, so careful about what sort of inputs we put into ourselves. What do we allow into our brains? What do we allow into our bodies?
What people do we allow into our lives? Because [00:27:00] every single one of these things are inputs and they are going to give you the outputs. that can maybe be what you don't want to happen. It could be burnout. It could be bombs going off in your life. Metaphorically of course.
Yeah.
I mean, like, so that's kinda what I was talking about with before our call, I was telling Brian, I was like, dude, my dream. I think we actually talked about this on a podcast before about being a producer over a consumer. And I was saying to Brian, I was like, my goal is for me to never log in to social media, but I'm all over it.
Every single day. Like I'm getting, I have a bunch of posts, like 10 posts a day, but I never log in. That's
the system I'm trying to build out right now.
That'd be the grant Cardone effect. The grant Cardone fact, he has a, he has a million followers in every platform, the man does not ever create the posts that he has a whole team doing that stuff behind him.
The 10 X rule. Good book. If you want to know it.
Yeah. Great, great role. But yeah, I think that's the thing is like a lot of times too, if you're kind [00:28:00] of an interesting thing is like, if you are feeling a little bit. Dead kind of in the technician role and kind of jump into that entrepreneur mindset of saying like, okay, well the work that I'm doing every day, how can I compound that effort?
You know, is there a way where I can get, you know, 10 times the results for what I'm doing for one thing I'm doing, or like what we just talked about with the 80 20 rule? Is there one thing I'm doing in my technical role that is providing me 80% of my income,
you, know? Well, I'm just going to only do that.
if you look at the 80 20 role episode that came out a couple of weeks ago, which was episode 1 96, the 80 20 rule, how to make more work less and get rid of bad clients. If you look at that conversation, Let's have this conversation. They actually don't go together because sometimes even if 80% of your income is coming from 20% of your work and you, and you cut your business down to where you're only doing that 20%, that brings in 80% of the income and you scale that.
up, you might find yourself being miserable because that 20% doesn't doesn't fill you up creatively.
It
only drains you so well, I
just want to say, I want to [00:29:00] mention that because again, this is not black or white. Both things can be true. You need. Your business and your life, but you also have to look at what creative inputs, what fills you up, what drains you, how much you have to give and take. So like, again, this is why business is so complex.
That's why there's a million business podcasts. That's why we have 200 episodes almost on this podcast. And we will never run out of content. Even if we struggle some days to find good content for this podcast, we will never run out because it is so complex. And there are so many variables and it's so different from person to person.
And just because one piece of advice works for some person doesn't mean,
it's going to work for you. That's. I've never really said that social media has been a big part of my life. We're testing Tech-Talk we're on tech talk. Now over 10,000, 13,000 followers and Tik TOK or whatever it is, but I still don't believe in social media as a whole, because that's just something that I have not bought into personally, but for some people that's their sole business.
So I'm just saying this to say it's complex, and you've got to find a way to, to make these work for you individually and not look left and right in order to make your decisions, but find what [00:30:00] works for you. And this all comes back to creative inputs, dirty fuel, and the other things we can talk about.
Yeah, I think ultimately like, you know, and we talked about life design a little bit before,
Lifestyle design. Yeah. And
episode episode 1 96, we talked about that.
Yeah. It's like believe it or not, like you can have the life that you would like. It's not, I mean, they're, everybody's able to do that. So if you're able to kind of work backwards from that and figure out what is your day going to look like a lot of times you'll figure out that you're kind of just out of balance right now.
And there's a lot of stuff that you're doing right now that you may not. You shouldn't be doing. But also like in any business, there's going to be times that you have to do something before you can get help to do it. You have to figure out how to do it yourself before you can instruct somebody else how to do it your way.
This is unfortunately another gray area, not black, not white. There are certain times in your life where you have to be out of balance in order to get to a state of balance. So for example, back in those [00:31:00] days, while I was producing bands, 12 hours a day, and I wanted to fall asleep and take a nap. And I hated my life at a certain point, especially when I was living in Alabama. Sometimes you have to get to those periods of, of imbalance and hustle in order to get to the other side or the next level that you want to get. So many people, they listen to gurus or especially like the kind of spiritual grew like manifest it, make it happen if you say it, you know, like that kind of stuff, which there's some truth to that, but we're not gonna get into that.
I dunno. but keep
oh, we can talk about that if you want. I'll argue with it a little bit.
It's it's the visualization plus action. Most people just want to stop at the visualization. That's that's my two second spiel, but they, they look at these things and they say, I want to have the perfect balanced life. I want to have like this.
I want to have this. I want to have this. I want to have the family. I want to have the house. I want to have the cars. I want to have the lifestyle design. But I want to work five hours a week, four hours a week, the four hour work week from Tim Ferris. And they don't realize that Tim Ferriss doesn't work four hours a week.
He set his business up so that it can work four hours a week. And that took a lot of work, many, many [00:32:00] hours to build a business to that point. So that then he has free time to go do what he actually wants to do. And that's, that's, the period of inbound. Where you have a lot of dirty fuel, you're running dry constantly in order to be able to set yourself up for the actual life you want in the future.
And then to add one more confusing level of this, because if I haven't confused enough people on our podcast enough, at this point, I'm going to say some people never get out of that. And they continuously do that until they run themselves into the ground, which might be Mark's problem right now is that he never gets out of those modes.
Well, yeah, that's, that's the thing, if you give me um, and I think this is a main thing going on for me is like, just being personal. if I know that like a, a work period that I'm in, I have a set date of like, okay, it's all, you know, we're working our asses off for this deadline. That's either.
But when you don't have a set deadline and a set goal for a specific time and an action plan to get to the specific place, when it seems unending, that's where you start getting really [00:33:00] tired. And that's where I've been at, because we've had to just like, you know, do things a little bit different. I had to, I had to figure out some stuff that I didn't plan on figuring out within my business and like yeah, it's taken a little bit longer than I initially planned and that's
okay.
goes, it goes back to where I was talking about setting policies in your business or setting expectations with clients a bit more to where you have these sorts of deadlines or boundaries in place. An example is my, my wife's going through this right now. She's in a super hectic, busy period of her business right now.
She's a freelancer herself and she has a project right now that happens four times a year with one of her. it is like crunch mode when she's doing these specific quarterly projects with this client. And so for her, right. I have to give her like space and time and grace that she's going to work past normal work hours.
And she's going to work on weekends for just a short amount of time is a set amount of time. So I've done this myself and I'm working on a big project or some big thing where I might have times where I'm working nights or weekends. It's rare that it happens, but it does happen, but there has to [00:34:00] be like a deadline of like past this point we can move forward.
What gets dangerous is when that's the. And that's when relationships can take its toll and people start drifting apart in marriage or friendships when you start making that sort of lifestyle, the norm. So yeah, that's, that's the kind of thing is like, it's okay.
to have this in seasons, but me and my wife, we call it seasons where it's like, all right, I'm going to have a short season of, of having to work nights and weekends.
Cause I gotta get this thing done in a certain amount of time. So Yeah.
Was my thoughts there?
Yeah, no, completely agree. As long as you have an understanding of when a crunch time is going to end, then say crunch time. It's not crunch.
We'll wrap this episode up, finishing this off for some some words of inspiration for not just Christopher who posted in our community, this wonderful post. That's got some good games. Again, you can get to our community by going to six figure creative.com/community, but also some words of encouragement to my buddy mark here.
Who's in a period of burnout and is incapable of doing anything at a high level. Like this is mark at 1%, by the way, wait till he gets to a [00:35:00] hundred percent y'all You're going through a tough season right now. My dude. You will eventually see the light.
at the end of the tunnel.
Yeah. You need to take time to rest yourself, get back to a period of equilibrium and don't be too hard on yourself for going through this season right now where you feel like you're maybe out of balance. You will eventually get to the other side, no matter how bad you feel right now, my dude. and I believe in you and I know you're going to do good things that goes for you and anyone listening right now.
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