Part 1 - How to Identify Your Passion with the Business Fulfillment Tool

Have you ever had an idea to start a business but were too afraid to jump off that entrepreneurial cliff? We believe this is the result of a lack of ambition and that by properly identifying your passion, you can obtain the necessary courage to take the next step as an entrepreneur. Follow your hosts, Hill and Val as they interview Joshua in his journey overcoming trauma and into entrepreneurship, where he developed the tools you need to succeed. We believe in the power of tripping forward in someone else’s shoes so you can learn from other entrepreneurs, the mistakes they made along the way, and the lessons they gleaned from them - in order to take your side hustle and turn it into your main hustle.

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Transcript

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Why did I start this in the first place? Terrified that I was going to lose my arm. They're afraid of not having that strong vision, challenging themselves in such a deep way, because that's when you find the most scary things about yourself. We live in the age of influencers, clickbait, information overload and short attention spans, we start things we don't finish, and the responsibilities and stresses of life can sniff out our deepest passions. So how do we pierce through the noise and pressures of society, cast a vision, really discover what we love how we want to spend our time, conquer the fear of failure, and awaken ambition, we're here to unpack that and hopefully give you some company on the journey. That's where Valerie and I come in. Hey, guys, I'm bow. And I'm Hillary. We're your hosts. And our goal is to take everyone along for the ride, no one gets left behind. Whether you're already on the road to building your business, or flirting. With the idea of training in your nine to five the freelancing career you've always wanted, we're here as your guides. Hey, come on in. This is a podcast about business, about scaling your side hustle, that thing you've always wanted to pursue, but maybe have been too afraid or insecure, is something already coming to mind. But this is also a podcast about life. Because the two go hand in hand are stories and form, what kind of business we build and who we are as entrepreneurs. We'll be following the life of Joshua McGuire, and his passion for helping others build businesses, we'll dive into his struggles to gain traction in the freelance world, the people that mentored him along the way, the traumas that shaped his story and the success he achieved through hardship, you will meet other entrepreneurs, we'll call them hustlers, just like you who are taking the leap of faith to start something new. On today's episode, episode one, things are gonna get a little dicey, because sometimes life really bites. But before we get to that story, and unpack how a traumatic situation has the potential to shape and grow us, we want to provide you with some tools, what are the practical resources that make up the toolkit of a successful entrepreneur, we'll be diving deeper into all of those resources throughout the entire season. But today, we'll let you in on what some of those tools are the ones you'll need to scale your business or take the first step toward making your side hustle, your only hustle. I'm Val, short for Valerie, my roots are in Columbia, South America. But I was born and raised in states I've experienced in working in the corporate world, in the small mom and pop businesses as well as dabbling and freelancing. But what I really love is anything natural health, anything to do with nature, being outside, if there's some nice dewy Moss, I'll definitely be touching it. But also learning about just biohacking and alternative health. That's really, really a passion of mine. Hi, my name is Hilary, I also grew up in the States, I'm really passionate about Latin American culture. As we spent seven years living and working in Bogota, Colombia, worked for a nonprofit there and community development, but have since come back to the states and have started my freelance career I love to write. And so I do a lot of copywriting, translation, and trying to build that business. I also love to be out in nature and enjoy rock climbing, and anything to kind of balance out the time that we can spend in front of the computer. So my mind doesn't slowly turn to mush. Yeah, that's, that's in a nutshell. Yeah, that sounds. So we're here with Joshua. And Joshua has a lot of experience starting his own businesses, and has moved on to helping other people start their businesses and even established companies improve their operations in our culture, even people like me. Yeah, like us. Yeah. He's helped us try to create a business through our passions. He's really a jack of all trades. However, he really has mastered the business field for sure. And yeah, we just wanted to do this on a bigger scale. He wanted to be able to help more people. That's why scaling side hustles began. So let me introduce him, Joshua, say hey, to our listeners, Hey, everybody, glad to be here and hope that you enjoy this podcast and looking forward to having some of you on the show. So currently, Josh was helping multiple clients, many of which are minorities are Hispanic, just because he has a heart for especially the Latino community being that he's half Hispanic and his love for different cultures. Josh, what what percentage Argentinian Are you? Well, my dad was born in Argentina. But I would say that I'm 51% Argentinian. How do you get that one? First of all that to say Josh is very proud of his Argentinian roots. So this season of scaling side hustles we are going to go more into depth into To the tools that you will need to scale your business. But Joshua, can you just give us a general overview of what are some of those resources we're gonna get into? Yeah, so we're really looking at a number of tools that a lot of startup entrepreneurs have seen before. And we've just built upon them from our knowledge in the industry and seeing what works and what doesn't. So the first tool that we're going to be talking about is really what we are calling the business fulfilment tool. And that helps us to identify like our North Star in business. And then we go into business modeling using an iteration of the lean model canvas, but it's our own term, which is the Lamb analysis. Val and I are here to really just figure out what these words mean. See said lamb Yeah, so the lamb stands for Lean Agile Model for business. Okay, now listeners know, so use the lamp. Well, I'm read foundation, I was jumping in on the lean that What did you say before that the Lean model canvas, okay, is that something that most people will know? Because you kind of set it as if like, well, everyone knows that. So that's why it's a lamb we're gonna describe, because that's what you created. But Sure. So the Lean Model Canvas is the second iteration of the business model canvas. It's to help simplify designing the business model and to validate if that business is going to be successful before you write a 30 page business plan. And what inspired these, they were inspired out of necessity. I don't know our listeners might need some more background of your story to understand the context of that. Let's go back now. Can you take us back? Oh, yeah. How do I know wrong button? Oh, mommy and probably myself. Well, Val, I think that's still a little too far back. That was three year old me. Born and raised in South Florida. I had a not so typical childhood, I My life has taken some surprising turns. These moments have shaped my character taught me painful life lessons, and allowed me to learn how to adapt in business. One of my first turning points came when I was 10. It was 2001 in South Florida, eternal summer, the heat of the day heavy in the air. 11 year old Joshua and the neighborhood kids were hanging out in a neighbor's backyard. The canal ran through the row of suburban homes, the perfect stomping grounds for exploration and high jinks. The boys would have been up there to go fishing snatch turtles, skip stones, rocky would come along to Rocky was one of the gang always up for playing and going on adventures. He was pretty big. So when he would like stand up, he would put his front paws on our shoulders. That's Joshua describing their favorite playmate. I guess we should mention, Rocky was a Great Dane while the other boys were hanging out by the water. Joshua and rocky were across the yard playing a game of fetch. After the dog got tired of playing fetch, she dropped the bone and walked a few meters and lay down. It's worth mentioning that Rocky was a friendly dog, a gentle giant, never having shown signs of aggression. So when the dog got tired and went to lay down, Joshua thought All he needed was some encouragement to keep playing. But when Joshua went to hand him the bone rocky attacked, and it happened so quick. I just remember the figure eight motion of of the dog like shaking the bone which was my arm. instead of grabbing the bone. Rocky had bitten straight through Joshua's arm and wouldn't let go. The more Joshua pulled the more rocky pulled back a bloody game of tug of war. I mean, I really went into like dream state there when it all happened, but when he let go, my arm was sore and I looked down at it. I was kind of holding it up. I realized that my phone was sticking out of my arm and when I lifted up my hand I felt my hand lift up but my hands never moved. So I was like total in total shock and I just remember screaming at the top of my lungs alerted by his screams Josh was friends ran over to help and they rushed Joshua inside the house. My brother was there with me and he was trying to distract me saying like oh, look at that over there and trying to keep my eyes away from the bone sticking out of my arm then Rockies owner in disbelief perhaps a bit of denial rushed over. She grabbed my arm as if I was faking into like II I did. It was clear he needed to go to the hospital. When the ambulance arrived. The paramedics did their best to comfort Joshua through the pain until he got to the emergency room was like super terrified that I was going to lose my arm. I remember the paramedic was so friendly. He was trying to distract me as well like as he was giving me the paint dollars or whatever it was really nice to see that level of compassion from somebody who knew the type of trauma that I was experiencing in that moment. Three months of cast's physical therapy for a year, Joshua eventually healed from the physical trauma. But what follow the event was arguably worse. When I would walk around the neighborhood the bullies in the neighborhood, they would bark at me as I walked across the their house. And I was just like thinking to myself, like what kind of person would do that after what I went through. Dealing with it as any 11 year old knows how Joshua hunker down at home, isolating himself in his room, and from the outside world. Joshua found solace in technology, escaping into systems intrigued by the complexity of their parts, he would take apart computers and put them together again, to understand how they worked. At the same time as he was discovering his passions, he was also considering his future. After observing the doctors putting his arm back together, Joshua entertained the thought of becoming a surgeon by wanting to become a surgeon to help other people in the same way, then I found out that there was like 10 years of school that I had to take, and I was pretty turned off by that idea, especially the school wasn't super enjoyable. For me time, middle school was pretty tough. School had become an extension of his neighborhood life, constant bullying and hallway scuffles with classmates. So that's why I kind of like secluded myself into like learning the computers and stuff. And when I started to teach myself Photoshop, I realized like, I love this a lot. And just like this understanding of systems with creative outlet of like Photoshop, I think it really developed, you know, a wide variety of skill sets that I use everyday today. So these traumas and circumstances put you in this place of isolation, where you were forced, and really chose to discover your skills and talents that you still use in business today. So how about someone like me? Who didn't experience the same circumstances? Get their start? Like, where does one start? Well, I think someone jumping off the entrepreneurial Eclipse should start at the public library, because there are a ton of resources there to help guide you. Okay, but this is 2022. So why wouldn't you just jump into the internet? Well, I think like, that's everybody's first inclination. But if you look at the amount of information that is on the internet, like it's not super well organized, you don't know which sources to trust, and a lot of times they're not in a an order that you can follow and say, okay, you know, why? Why should Why should I trust this article versus the other one? Yeah, that's true. So I found this book, The Ultimate Startup Guide, I have it here with me like Kevin Duncan. And it's a great resource, but it's not the whole picture. You know, it follows this thought process that I don't entirely agree with. It says, Be honest with yourself. Do remember, however, that confidence can be misplaced. In fact, overconfidence can be guiding you into believing that you have a viable idea or successful way of doing things, when in fact, you don't so confront your own hubris and work it out privately before it trips you up. So it brings you to a place of being realistic about what you want to do. And then building a business from that. I don't disagree with that methodology. But I don't think that's the start. The start is starting higher level, to set a North Star to have some sort of direction to the business that you're building, so that you don't spend five years building a business just for profit. And then you become so immersed in the day to days that you have found that you've lost yourself. And you're like, why, why did I start this in the first place? Well, why can't you just start a business for profit and make all the money you want, because money doesn't bring happiness and those that have no money and those that have a ton of money? Talk about the same sort of problems like that they're chasing happiness, obviously, happiness will be found in like, less stress, but it's not like a completeness. You know, the Kardashians seem pretty happy to me. She got them on the podcast, do they because they have have like, brand new skin look like before, not dogging on them the beautiful, just saying. So I think like the first step is to identify your passion. So this is like a tool that helps you to identify your passion and then kind of work backward from there. And you know, we thoroughly believe that everyone has this unique passion unique something or some things that they're meant to do in life. But they spend a lifetime distracted by what society tells them as as important. And so our journey through entrepreneurship as a company has been really trying to identify this within each person and we've seen a pattern of everybody has something unique about them. And there's ways to develop economic models around their passions. But yeah, like the first chapter of the book says it's not realistic. So don't focus on that wholeheartedly, you need to find a way to build that into something over the next 10 years. So if we're talking about the Ultimate Startup Guide, the best startups are founded by people who are passionate about what they're doing. And those become successful because the entrepreneur never gives up. Even when they face failure. Yeah, because they have like the bigger objective, right, that they've unlocked ambition, if you believe that everyone has this unique passion ingrained in their DNA, but they just not applied it to business, then you can agree that everybody has ambition about that thing in their DNA. And it's a matter of teaching them that they can have the tools, and they can learn from other people's mistakes, to build something uniquely aligned, but also, like a unique business model around that passion. You know, just because somebody hasn't done it before, doesn't mean it can't be done. Here, I'm talking about like, the first step to identifying your passion. And what you're meant to do is to sit down in nature, away from all of society's distractions, and spend some time thinking about what is what which categories of life are important to you, like, which hats do you wear in life? And it's interesting, because we were talking about this two days ago, and you were you're jumping from personal to work and stuff. And this is a conversation that I have with every single entrepreneur that I've worked with. And the common thread is how do I find this fulfillment? In each one, I say, first, you need to identify which hats you wear. So I started this journey a while ago, and I just made a chart and I said, Okay, you know, my first, the first way that I identify is as a Christian. And then the second way that I identify as as a husband. And so as a Christian individual, I'm making sure that I'm putting my own mask on first, you know, what books do I want to read? What do I want to study? What makes me feel fulfilled and re energized? And then am I taking care of my wife? And you know, how is that looking? What is what, what is my vision for that relationship? And so I have to put myself 10 years ahead, in the present, and reframe my mind to set some affirmations some goals for myself. And I create this exercise where I go on top of the mountain and I sit in an inspirational place, I don't have any distractions, but nature, and I take each hat and each roll. And I say, okay, you know, it's 2030. And, you know, I'm living in this great house, but I'm not looking at what do I have as much as what is fulfilling in each role? And as I start to break that down, I'm seeing what is most important to me, if I remove any sense of is it possible, most people overestimate what they can do in a year, but underestimate what they can do in 10 or 20 years. So, you know, what can we do in 10 years? Should be infinite possibilities, like we should be existing in that fantasy. But we're not acting on that today. We're just trying to draw a connection from realistic to vision. Right, and that vision could be like 10 acts. Yeah, but we have to start with that vision. We can't start with what's realistic and confronting my own hubris because I'm not saying start that 10 year vision today. I'm saying work on something that's pointing north. And that's most important to start with. One Okay, episode one. Because we already know once it's validated, it was your much higher energy you want to do the already recorded. I think Episode One we recorded that kind of dialogue, since it's the first signal is that in in the episode right now in episode one, so how often do you think it's necessary to kind of revisit that vision because I know for me, I've I've had several different passions throughout my life like it's not just this one thing that I discovered once and it's like that's like when I decided to like to learn Spanish like, yeah, I still love it, but I know I'm going to have more passions in life. So is this like an exercise you would say to revisit like every year or in my experience, it can be a daunting task to go into nature when you're confronting your own mortality and saying, What do I want to do because we we find it very easy to live in the present and Netflix and be complacent with our day to day is because we're not confronting our 10 year vision. But when we get into that level of of discomfort by confronting our 10 year vision, then we have to face like really tough realities. But that's not to say it's impossible, it's just to say that most like half the people that I talk to that I tell to go do this exercise, they resist going into into find that solitude, because they are, I think they're afraid of themselves, they're afraid of not having that strong vision of challenging themselves in such a deep way. Because that's when you find the most scary things about yourself. When I started this process, I set out to do it once a year. Now, I've probably revisited it once a quarter, but not to go revise it or revamp it, but just to make sure that it's still aligned. And it started out as a simple bullet point list with each role and saying, like, you know, I have this or I am this, you know, working with the present tense, but in each hat or in each role, and then it birth into a paragraph, you know, super detailed and trying to extrapolate as much of that vision as possible to make it really real to me, can you give an example of those present tense statements that you say for the future? Yeah, so like, as a Christian individual, I want to put on my own mask first, but I want to study more. And what is important to me about Christianity is like, it's first off, I don't agree with religion, I believe in Jesus, not religion. And so when I study religious texts, I believe I'm doing it to prove or disprove something, and to be objective. So I look at that study as the the life of an apologist, and trying to prove the existence of Christianity, and to kind of be an advocate for that as a historical fact. And so I would write something like, you know, I am an apologist with multiple books that I've already published. Another example that's more related to business might be, you know, I'm a successful businessman with 10,000 employees or 10,000, team members working with me all across the world. And we have billions of dollars, the basic premise of the 10 year vision as a carrot that you never reach. And it should be mostly qualitative metrics. So that's where I would focus not on measurable goals, but I would, I would say, I'm a successful business person with billions of dollars, not 8 billion, right. And so if I bring that back down to reality, when I HalfLife it into my five year goal, now I'm looking at what's more realistic in order to achieve that 10 year fantasy, and then if I break five year down at a three year, this is the three year to one year is the bridge where you need to definitely go from fantasy to realistic because of the fact that you overestimate what you can do in one year. So that means you need to slowly come back to realistic life until you get to your day to day schedule, where you can start reading a book like this and find out what's realistic. But now you have a Northstar, I think that's how people that don't have the inclination to start a business can desire to start a business because people like you will go in just to get the first dollar, which validates our ability to do it. And people like Hill and Val will wait till they find that spark that incentivizes them to move forward. And in this podcast, we're trying to reach more people like that, that have a nine to five, but are stuck in a dead end job that's not valuing who they are. And we believe that everyone has these unique potentials. And if they unlock that ambition, they will start to create systems around that to look for their first dollar my belief system about the other side of the spectrum is I meet a lot of business owners like us that spend their whole life even though they're making lots of money, they aren't finding that true happiness or they've Miss identified what is happy. I think we met this guy the other day that that has this perfect story for that, you know, and he he's from Chicago, and he has been in the restaurant business for 40 years. And he said, You know, I didn't I didn't witness my kids growing up, but when I bought them their first Lexus, I asked them, would you rather have had your dad around or that Lexus and he's like that Lexus and that validates that he's putting money over happiness, because he's identifying like, my kid is saying he's happy with Alexis, instead of my time. But one of those things you can't take back, when he hits the end of his life, he's going to be like craving those those years that he lost. Oh, that makes me so sad. Yeah, but he was, but he was so convinced, well, not so convinced. But I think he was trying to convince himself to say, I did the right thing, what's best for my family, which was sacrifice all those years, not seeing the kid, because my kid said, he's happy with his Lexus. And that's, that's pretty much my point is like, we all understand money as a tool. But if you go into business, looking for money, instead of impact or joy, then that easily spirals out of control, where one day you have this understanding that, oh, I need money to run my business. And you don't need money to run your business. Your business is just pieces of paper with things written on them and numbers of the computer. And it's in this this facade. But the joy is found when we do what we love, or when we serve people. And we see their joy when I make them that pizza. And like I made that, you know, and that's what we're trying to instill in people is like that desire for doing what they were born to do. And giving them the tools and the confidence that can surround them and allow them to create that future for themselves. And that's what I don't think like a lot of people know how to do when I was first training, one of the business owners that I work with on this process, a few years have gone by, and he hasn't yet gone into nature to do this. And he has made millions of dollars. So it's it's not going to prevent you from being successful if you're a business owner, but it is going to keep you aligned to what you truly want to do. Right. It helps you like skip that heartache of not having fulfillment at the end of everything. Yeah, the first sentence of this book in the introduction, we owe it to ourselves to make our working life enjoyable, even if the main reason for it is to make more money. So they've asserted that enjoy an enjoyable life is making money, right? Which is telling a rat that chasing the cheese and the maze is the enjoyment of life. Exactly. It's the eating of the cheese. For me, it is. So how do we get here? How does one move from trauma to acceptance to healing? In Joshua's case, painful life events led him to isolate, which led to exploration, exploration to discovery and an understanding of his passions and talents, along with a newfound confidence in his ability to learn and adapt. You know, and I think that's a character trait that every entrepreneur has to learn, because you're going to deal with a lot of pitfalls and failures, and you need to know like how to bounce back from that. Thanks for joining us on scaling side hustles. Coming up on Episode Two, we're talking all about product market fit, and the five most important questions you should answer to validate your idea or business. We'll look at some famous companies that went through drastic and sometimes ridiculous name changes and so much more. Make sure you follow scaling side hustles wherever you get your podcast to never miss an episode. And while you're at it, we will still review if you'd like what you heard. And check out our show notes for all the resources we covered today. Go to scaling side hustles.com and enter for a chance to get featured on an upcoming episode. That about wraps it up. I'm helm and I'm Val. And this is Joshua we'll see you next time next time yes yes it is he's not sure about his name but he's sure about this this See you next time because I don't know how it happened it was just this traumatic event all over again. You know, like what am I dealing with now? I really want to start the starfish form. What is that? The problem is not like I'm in need of Mexican food and so you know sure I mean I often said that to myself Oh, did you oh my god you do see the first part and then you do see the second part. See you next time you don't want to miss a talking about seeing like for the letter C if I were one wouldn't want to miss this next episode. Who wouldn't want to miss this? Me? Wait, that's a double neck. Wouldn't not want to miss that. See you next time you wouldn't want to miss this what I you wouldn't just said that