The Self-Discipline System That Made Scott Allan a Best-Selling Author, Ep 59

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 Eddie writes about  Reinvention, Market Domination & Technology to give us an edge.

🎁 Free course: 8 Ways to Supercharge Your Motivation & Crush Sales

📘 Grab Scott Allan’s book: Do the Hard Things First 

🌐 Connect with Scott:Scott Allan Publishing

📺 Follow Eddie on YouTube: @EddieIsin

🎙️ Episode Summary

In this episode, Eddie ISIN sits down with best-selling author and mindset coach Scott Allan to break down the exact self-discipline system that helped Scott go from creative burnout to publishing over 20 books and selling more than half a million copies. You'll hear how Scott overcame procrastination by doing the hard things first, what it means to build trust with yourself, and how micro-habits can create massive transformation.

This is a must-listen for entrepreneurs, creatives, and anyone trying to close the gap between intention and execution.

⏱️ Episode Breakdown with Timestamps

00:00 – Welcome + Eddie sets the stage for the conversation

 01:00 – Scott shares how procrastination nearly ended his writing career

 03:30 – Creating the "Anti-Procrastination List" that changed everything

 05:30 – Why procrastination is really self-sabotage

 07:00 – How doing one small thing daily rebuilt Scott’s momentum

 10:30 – Eddie asks: how do you prioritize when everything feels important?

 12:30 – Scott’s framework for aligning business goals with life design

 16:00 – The daily structure Scott uses to stay consistent with content creation

 20:00 – Triggers, resistance, and how to override the avoidance loop

 25:30 – From nearly quitting to becoming a best-selling author

 31:00 – The snowball effect: how his books went global

 36:30 – Why creators need to focus on momentum, not perfection

 39:00 – Multitasking vs. deep work: Scott’s focused productivity method

 43:30 – Using podcast interviews as exposure therapy for public speaking

 47:30 – The real secret to public speaking confidence

 51:00 – Eddie’s story of reinvention, speaking, and entrepreneurial clarity

 56:00 – Building inner peace and a mindful, intentional lifestyle

 1:02:00 – Final takeaways: clarity, consistency, and owning your daily actions

 1:08:00 – Wrap-up + where to go next

Join the newsletter: http://TransformYourFuture.com

 Eddie writes about  Reinvention, Market Domination & Technology to give us an edge.

🎁 Free course: 8 Ways to Supercharge Your Motivation & Crush Sales

📘 Grab Scott Allan’s book: Do the Hard Things First 

🌐 Connect with Scott:Scott Allan Publishing

📺 Follow Eddie on YouTube: @EddieIsin

Subscribe to Transform Your Future Newsletter Where Eddie writes about personal development, reinvent & identity: http://transformyourfuture.com

Transcript

0:00

Scott Allen, thank you so much for coming in to join me on the Transform Your Future Podcast. I've been looking forward to this. We've been messaging back and forth. How are you doing today? Thank you so much. I'm doing great, and thanks for having me on the show. It's great to be here. Yes. Let's jump right in because just as a little bit of a frame here, I'm very excited to talk to you because number one, we're going to talk about personal growth. We're going to talk about Kaizen and continuous improvement, and we're going to talk about your journey as an author speaker, which I'm very interested in since I'm working on a book and I want to get it out there in the world. So let's jump right in and talk about your book, doing the hard things first. Sure. Yeah. I published, there's four books in that series now, but I published the first book in 2021, just cunning out of a very rough year in 2020. As you know, it was covid, so it was probably rough for everybody. But coming out of that year, I think by that time I already published maybe 15 or 20 books and I was really winding down, and actually it was, I don't want to say that I was giving up on my business, but I was pretty close to giving up on my business. I hadn't published anything in 2020. In fact, I probably unpublished more books than I published. Coming out of that, I had this, I think it was an idea, but I had heard, I'd been listening to some podcasts and interviews and reading some books on the topic of procrastination. And the reason is because it was one of the things that I've always struggled with, and I was really struggling with it at the time when I put this book together. So it was in a sense, the book was yes, to help a lot of other people with that problem. It was also designed to help myself and get myself out of a really bad ru. So I put together a little system for it that I think was easy to follow. It had quite a few steps, probably had one too many lists that it needed, but I think I launched the second edition of it, maybe, I think it was this year, actually earlier this year. But the first edition was, it was a good book, but I think people really gravitated towards the concept of doing the hard things first. And of course, it's compared a lot to the, Brian Tracy calls it Eating the Frog and somebody else calls it something else. But the idea behind that though, isn't the first book is around how to overcome procrastination. Yes. But the real purpose behind it is to build trust with yourself, because what was happening is when you procrastinate the way that I do or the way that I did, And you do that enough over the weeks, months and years, and it becomes, for me, it became such an ingrained habit that I wasn't really thinking about it. Just if I had a bill to pay, I'd put it off and I've always paid my bills. But it was one of those things where, or my taxes, for example, I've always done my taxes too, but I also waited till the last minute to do them, and when it push came to shove, it'd be like two days, and I had to get everything ready, and it just caused so much stress. I mean, I realized this could probably be avoided if I just broke this down into a monthly task or so. I started to really think through how I could stop this habit of self-sabotage, which is really what procrastination is. Now, procrastination actually can be a good thing sometimes. Sometimes there are some things we should put off, but there are some things that if you're putting off some things that are having a detrimental impact, a negative impact on your lifestyle, on your finances, on your family, then there's probably a problem. And so that's where the book came about is. So what I did is in order to tackle this, and when the book started to take shape, I came up with an idea and very basic. I was like, I need to get clarity on what are the things that I am not doing? What are the things that I am procrastinating on? What are the unfinished tasks that are in my space, in my computer, in the rooms and in my home? I had to go through everything and it was great. So what I did is I just spent a couple of days making a very long list. I just grabbed a piece of a yellow legal pad, put pen to paper, and every time I found anything that was not in a file or something that was a form that had not been filled out, anything that was not finished or had not been started, it went on the list and this became my anti procrastination list. Let me interrupt you one second. So this list that you're developing, these are priorities, these are important things, or is it just everything? Great question. They were not priorities yet. So what I did is I had to get clear on everything that was just unfinished, because the key is to get clarity on everything that is basically taking up space in your mind, in your life, anything that goes unfinished. I think this probably goes back to maybe David Allen mentioned this in his book as well, that was getting things done, right? It's like anything that's in your space that goes unfinished, it's still taking up space in your memory. You could be subconsciously thinking about it. So I thought about that. So yes, you're right. So the list was actually just everything on the list. But then what I did is like, okay, the next step is to take action, which means we need momentum moving forward. So it wasn't necessarily, I didn't prioritize anything on the list yet. That came later, but what I did is I just picked one thing on the list every day for about 28 days, 30 days. One thing on that list, I did that one thing. Sometimes it was something as simple as sending an email that was just, I had to send an email to a publisher or to somebody, maybe I had to walk down the street to mail a letter, whatever it was. But that one thing, even though it wasn't the most difficult thing to do, it was important to start racking up those small wins. This is what happens to a lot of people when we start to procrastinate, is we start to feel guilty. We put pressure on ourselves, we call ourselves bad names and label ourselves as procrastinators, which by the way, I realized that's something I had to stop as well, because when you label yourself as I'm a procrastinator, therefore I put things off, therefore I don't do the work. And then you just keep feeding into that behavior. You set yourself up for it to continue to happen. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So I did that for 30 days, and then I was like, all right, this is really good. And then I went ahead and I looked at the list and I made a list of the hard things on the list. The things that I really was resistant to doing. It could have been creating a website was one of them. There was a list of a dozen things they were, because some of them were big projects, they were overwhelming, but they were also very necessary for some of them, for my business, others for my personal life. And so I made, I think I had 10, 15, maybe 20 things in there that were priority tasks that had to be done. But then I selected the three that were probably the most difficult to do, the most difficult or would take the most amount of time to do. And from there I had all these other little things that could be done, and I picked away at those. But when I drilled down into the hard things on that list, then I would pick one of those things to do every month. So one thing got the attention that got my attention, my focus for one month, and it didn't always take me one month to do this one thing, but there was nothing better than the feeling of when I focused on this one thing for one month and got it finished because some of these things I had been putting off for years, and there were things on there, forms I had to be filled out, and just a lot of things that were just kind of pushed under the rug, so to speak. But that was really where I had to get that momentum moving forward. That started to break the, I don't know if you'd classify procrastination as a habit or I guess a negative habit for sure. But it's really a form of behavior, and without getting into the whole where it comes from and how we develop it, I mean, people can just, I don't really think that matters either. The fact is, I'm doing this and now the only thing that really matters is what am I doing today to get out of it? What am I doing today that break the behavior? The fact that I used to procrastinate back in high school and didn't do my homework and all that, it's really irrelevant because, but well, in a sense, it is irrelevant. However, when I look back, you can see the pattern just like there's a lifetime pattern there actually of putting things off and putting off the hard things. And I realized it was such a feeling of freedom when you feel like you actually have control over yourself actually, and by the way, when you take action on these things and you get them done, getting back to my original point, you build this trust with yourself that you feel like you never had before. It's the trust that I've always wanted with myself because now trust builds confidence, and now you feel like you can tackle anything. Yes. So that was. The concept. It helps to improve with my integrity. It helps to improve my integrity. I can trust myself that when I say, I'm going to get this done, I'm going to get it done. I'm not going to just put it off for the next year. One thing that I'm curious about, and this is just me because I like everything to be kind of particular, but have, for example, I have an idea book, and I put all these ideas in it of things that I want to do, mostly creative stuff like this script, I want to write a story I want to tell. So if I make a list, I probably have at least 30 projects that I want to get done eventually. They're not priorities right now because the priorities always shift in our lives, but how do you make a list of everything and then figure out how do you classify, well, these are the things I'm going to focus on right now because, because of some reason. Yeah, yeah, great question. So it comes down to clarity of your goals, and that was the thing is if you don't know what your goals are, then it's going to be really hard for you to, I mean, anything on that list could go really, you can just choose anything, I think. But when I knew I've got my big goal for say, my life, my business, and what I do is I've decided that I have a vision for the lifestyle that I want to build, and so I build my business around that. Whereas before it was like I thought, okay, well, I'm going to build this business first, and when it becomes successful, then I can finally live the life that I wanted. But I reversed that recently just through I think Justin Welsh, somebody who I follow very closely, and that's what he said, that's how he built his business, and I thought, that's great. Decide the life you want to build and then build your business around it. When I started to work on that, my goals became very clear. So that's the thing. It's like, yeah, if you know what your goals are, then you can decide what those priorities are, and if you don't know what your goals are, well now you know where to begin. By the way, you mentioned having lists and things like that. I mean, I do journaling all the time. I make lists all the time. I can't stop making them, and I do have them in five or 10 different journals. And it even got to the point where each journal has its own theme. I have one journal for my goals and another journal for a project and things like that. So it's a little bit obsessive. But the good thing is though, is you're going to keep having those ideas for things that you want to do and projects, and I think that's a great thing. Keep making those projects, it's great. But just to be clear on, so for me, my goals are the action tasks that I'm working on are the lever movers that are working, moving towards my goals. So one of my goals, for example, is to become a public speaker. I want to be on the big stages and doing lots of interviews and those kinds of things. When I did, I was just very clear on, okay, well, how many podcasts should I be doing? And I just made a list of all the things that could be moving me towards that goal so that every day I'm working on something that's moving me towards that, maybe whether it's 10 or 15 minutes practicing in the mirror speaking or setting up interviews, those things. So it's sure it's very self-motivating, but you also feel like when you're working on those hard things, things, and again, I'll spend an hour in the morning, that's actually part of my writing routine is doing one hour in the morning of creating content or sometimes two hours a day, and it might be in the afternoon, but the thing is, I have that time blocked in. Now, do I always want to show up and create that content? Not always. There's resistance to it. Just like anything, just like going to the gym. I don't always want to go to the gym, but when I go and I put in that workout, it feels great afterwards. So that's something to just keep in mind that when you're feeling that resistance towards doing the things that you need to get done, but you don't really want to do them, it's not so much about your feelings. Your feelings may tell you that, Hey, I don't really feel like doing this, and then you're going to talk yourself out of doing it. But for me, I project myself after I've done it, how am I going to feel? How is Scott going to look after he shows up and actually gets this thing done? Visualizing yourself after the fact. It's very powerful because if you can take your emotion and push that into the future, and now you can actually emotionally feel yourself succeeding and pushing forward with your plans, to your point, it's building that trust with yourself and that integrity as well. So I think that's a really good goal to strive for though, because if you develop that kind of attitude and you're towards something that's moving you towards your goal, again, one of those levers that you can just, it's one of those levers that every time you pull it, you're moving. You're jumping ahead. That's something I think that you want to keep striving for, and if you're doing that, you don't have to worry about procrastination because over you anymore. And when you do feel like, well, there's something I've got to do, but I'm feeling resistance towards it, well, maybe you don't need to take action on it right away, but at least just that self-awareness, actually pushing it off, that's actually a good thing. Now you know what the trigger is. Give you a quick example. There's a pile of receipts behind me that I've got to get done for taxes, and I've been putting it off for a week, and every time my accountant asks for it, I'm like, I'm going to get that to you tomorrow, and I don't do it right, but I've done all these other things. I'm working on another book and this and that, but every time I look at that pile of receipts, I can feel that feeling again of like, oh, yeah, okay, I've been here before. The list just keeps getting bigger. The pile keeps getting bigger. It doesn't go away. So I just sat down tonight, Ashley, before we got here for 30 minutes and just sorted them out. And I probably spent, I'd say I spent more time, probably three or four times more energy into avoiding doing those things than I did and actually getting it. Yeah. Yeah. That's amazing how that happens. You put something off, you put it off, and then you say for some reason just like, okay, I just have to do it, and you stop everything and do gosh, it only took me five minutes and I put it off for a month and thought about it more than five minutes. Yeah, it's amazing. One thing that I want to talk about is, so I know that this book really had a lot of success behind it, this idea and this concept, again, this book out there, what were some of the other principles around the book that people really gravitated to? One of the principles in the book, I think once we got into, I think it was section two, maybe section three where I have a 20, I think it was 21 steps that people can take to tackle their procrastination. So they're really just some simple things in there, having accountability. Tell somebody, here's one, tell somebody about what are you working on? Talk about this with people. The other thing is I'm really big on modeling as well, so if there's something that I want to accomplish, and I learned this way back in the day probably from, I think reading Tony Robbins, maybe Jim Rohn, they talked about this all the time, and they still do, or Tony still does, but he's like, if you want to achieve something, find somebody who's already done that thing. So that's one thing I'm really big on, and I mentioned that in the book as well, because I want to be modeling the action takers, people who are getting things done, people who are successful in their business, in their family life. So anything that you want to be successful at, find somebody who's successful at it. It sounds like a very obvious thing, but surprising how many people try to reinvent the wheel or they're going to go off and figure something out when in fact other people have already done it. Now you just have to model what they're doing, and you may not get the same result that they're getting, but you're going to get a result and it's probably going to be, may be a good result because at least you're moving forward with taking action. So that's probably one thing in there that I think a lot of people mentioned. The other thing is I have a section in there on actually tackling resistance and fear because the fears that we have when it comes to, well, we'll say because the book was based on procrastination, there were some the fears around procrastination. syndrome. Actually, when people want to try new things, they're actually held back from doing that thing because they have the fear of the imposter syndrome shows up, then they tend to not do it, which is a form of, it can morph into a form procrastination as well. But I think it's important just to recognize that when up, it's actually a good thing. Imposter syndrome is not a bad thing because it's showing you that you're doing something you've never tried before, and when we're doing things that we never tried before, we're going to feel fear around that. We're going to come up with excuses as to why we're not ready yet and we push it off. So my attitude towards this now is more like I want to recognize when I'm actually pushing something off and when I see it, I'm like, okay, what could I do right now just to get this out of the way? Sure. Maybe it's like tackling the pile of receipts. I mentioned maybe it's going for a run. Actually, I went for a run tonight and I haven't taken a run in months yet. Every day I tell myself, maybe today's that day when I'm going to get some cardio in and I never do it, and next thing you know, I am in front of the TV with popcorn. There's nothing wrong with that, but if it's a reward that I'm giving myself after running great. So I went for a run. I lasted about 10 minutes, maybe did a kilometer and I was done, but it's like, okay, great. I'm obviously not that great at running. I go to the gym all the time, but muscle training and cardio are two very different things. So tomorrow I'm going to run again. Now this is leading back into putting it off and just saying, I'm not going to do it because what is the best way to set yourself up for success? Get rid of any of the resistance you're going to feel when you go to do the things. Borrowing an idea from one of my mentors that I model who had a similar problem with working out, he said he puts his gym clothes and his shoes by his bed every morning when he wakes up, it's right there. He just without thinking puts it on. He's out the door, he's at the gym or he's running. So I do the same thing now. I put my running shoes are by the door, gym clothes are ready, and that way when it comes time to say, I wonder if I should take a run, oh, I can't find my shoes. Well, they're right there. I even put my socks near my shoes. You make it easy. It's so easy for yourself. Yeah. The thing is, you can apply that to anything, right? If you're writing a book, same thing. I mean, I've always been writing for years, but I still struggle with showing up every day. So I keep the book that I'm currently working on. I keep the word document open all the time on my desktop. It's the first thing that I see as soon as I sit down and open the computer just so that their mind are like, oh, there it is. I don't have to go looking for the word document, which means I don't have an excuse for not finding that. But yeah, I think that's just an important point too, is just recognizing the triggers that you use to push things off again and again and again, and when you see those triggers go, there it is again, every time I see an ice cream, I want to eat it, for example, because cutting out sugar was one of the things that I have always struggled with. Chocolate and ice cream and all these things. And again, so just going back to this topic of procrastination, there's another flip side to that as well. It's not just pushing off the things that we don't want to do, but it's how do you stop quitting the things that you want to stop doing? You keep doing these things again, maybe you're eating sugar all the time. I occasionally do. How do I stop these things? So I recognized the triggers. Every time I went to the supermarket, I went straight for the candy section. I was probably the only 50-year-old in the candy section with a bunch of kids who were all in there looking for chocolate, and we were all fighting over the last candy bar. So anyway, just little things like that. So I guess my message for everybody is whatever it is that you want to do or you don't want to do, recognize the trigger that's holding you back. And once you do, then self-awareness is the key. And once you're self aware of what that is, then you're able to say, ah, there it is. And then you can actually make a conscious decision in the moment to not give into that thing or to start something new, to start that thing that you've always wanted to start working on. Yeah, this is great. I mean, there are certain things in my life that goals of mine, things that I want to do. For example, with my health, I have went through a bunch of different things and have come to the belief that if I do this thing, I want to do this thing, this plan to get results in my life because other people have done that. I want to model myself after those people, but what they're doing is rather difficult. It requires a lot of work. I need to do something that's probably going to take an hour and a half every day. And so because of all these different things and me, what's that going to do to me? How am I going to react? What if I have a reaction to it and then I can't work all day or something? I have all these things drawn. So this is something that I can apply definitely to what we're talking about here, to kind of make a plan and start moving towards it instead of just keeping it there in the background all the time. It's something I want to do to improve my health, and I leave it alone, and then I have something that happens, a symptom or whatever, and I'm like, God, I really need to do this. I want to get better, and I want to feel more vital. So everybody has things like that in their life, things that they want to do that they've been putting off because of whatever reason. So I see why it's such a great topic to talk about. Let's segue a minute, and I just want to segue into your personal journey as a author, as a speaker, tell me how this thing started that you started writing, and let's talk about how you did that and how you eventually got to get some books out there that sold a half a million copies. That's very, very incredible. Really, that is not the standard. I mean, I think the standard is if a book sells two or 3000 copies or 4,000 copies, that's a lot in today's world. So let's talk about that a little bit, your journey as a writer and why you started writing. Okay, yeah. I'll just go back a few years. I won't make it a long story, but I started writing when I was probably junior high school, maybe elementary school. I loved reading Stephen King. I actually started writing fiction. So I have a very active imagination, a lot of creatives do, and I started writing. I wrote my first book when I was 13 or 14 years old. Just sat down one day, just started writing it out. I stopped about a year later and I had a book. I did not publish it, and to this day, I don't know what happened to that book actually, but I do remember that was the beginning of everything, I think, and I probably eventually I stopped writing life, took over, went to university, got a job and all that stuff, and then I came to Japan back in 19 eight. And how I just quickly, how I got here was I was going through, I think a period in my life where I had to make some serious changes regarding my mindset, my lifestyle, everything. I was always out in the bars drinking all the time. I just had this very chaotic lifestyle, which I seemed to really love at the time until I tried to stop it and I couldn't. So once I cleaned everything up and I got really clear on what I wanted, I realized, Hey, wouldn't it be great if I just took a trip overseas and went backpacking, and I had a career as an electrical engineer. I was already working, and I had a pretty good lifestyle. I was living in Victoria City from Canada, so I was on Vancouver Island at the time. But what happened, how I got here is during this period where I started reading self-help books, because I think one of my mentors or coaches at the time gave me this book. I can't remember what book it was, but it was this 20 Lessons, 20 Life Lessons of Something, something. But I read it and I was like, wow, this is really good. I enjoy reading the self-help stuff. So I went and read another one and another one, and then came across Tony Robbins book, awakened the Giant Within in the bookstore, took it home that day, started reading it, and it just changed my life because there was a chapter in it called How to Build a Compelling Future, and I thought, wow, I like that. That sounds exciting. I don't know if it's something I can do, but I'd like to give it a try. So what I did within a week, I turned my apartment into a vision board. I had stuff on the walls, places I wanted to go, things I wanted to do, positivity, quotes everywhere on index cards, all of my wall and everything. So I went to the library and I started taking in all these books on how to speak Thai in Vietnamese, and I wasn't thinking about Japan at the time. That came later. But what I was doing is because I had made the decision that I wanted to travel to Southeast Asia, just I think because I met a lot of people who'd been there before, and they were telling me about all these adventures, and I used to be a very adventurous person too, and it wouldn't be great if I could do that. I just made a decision one day. I was like, you know what? I'm going to do that. After reading Tony's book and building out this vision board and everything, I was like, I'm going there. I'm doing that. One year from now, I'm going to be in Thailand. And that was just a decision I made. I didn't change it at all. But what happens when you make a decision, that's what I call a pivotal decision, where you cannot go back after that something takes listening to whatever I wanted, and three months later, I was just picked up the newspaper one day and my roommate brought it home, opened up the newspaper, and I never read the newspaper in my life. I was just open to the entertainment section or something, but just open it up that one day. And right there was an advertisement that said, teach English in Japan. And I thought, apply now. And I thought, yeah, I'm going to do that. So I applied, got the job, and yeah, six months later, this company was flying us over to Japan. Another thing is I ended up here, just going back about a year later, or a year earlier, I decided when I made that decision I was going to move to Southeast Asia. One year from that moment was, I think I even decided the date was going to be March 26th. Well, as it turned out when the company brought us over to Japan, it was actually March 26th. So I dunno how that happened. But anyway, what happened? I got here, I completely changed my profession. I went from being an electrical engineer to working with high voltage equipment to suddenly teaching business English and companies in Japan. I have no education, no background in education, I mean as a teacher, but the thing is, the only requirement was you had to speak English that, and it was great. I just loved it. Now, what happened with the books is that I was still reading self-help books and fiction, still always loved books. And that's the thing I would say after I was here for about 10 years, I started getting restless again. And that for me, that's a trigger that something needs to change or there's something I'm not doing. And I realized what it was. It's like I've got to write those books I was talking about years ago that was on my vision board back home, and I'd never forgotten it. The thing, I had lots of books on how to write books and how to apply to publishers and all these things, and I read all those books. I actually procrastinating on writing for a long period of time until one day I just got so tired of telling people that I was going to be a writer. One of my friends finally said to me one day, just show me something. Show me that you're actually going to do this thing. And that really woke me up, and I just made a decision that day. I sat down with a pen and paper and started penning out a self-help book. Now, I could have gone with fiction, and I love fiction and I still write it occasionally, but something told me I had to go and build out this personal development book because I'd read so many of these books. Keeping this knowledge in was just if it was just for myself, it just seemed like a waste. So everything I learned, everything that I had absorbed over the years that I was applying, I was going to put it into a book. So it started that way, and I spent three or four years just writing content and editing it and doing all that. This was before, so once Amazon had launched their self-publishing platform back in 20 12, 20 13, this is the thing too. If you want to be ready for an opportunity, you have to prepare for it. So when that opportunity came around, I already had my book ready to go. In fact, I was pitching at the publishers, got a few rejection letters, and then when I realized I could self-publish it, I was like, alright, now I didn't know anybody who was doing this. It's still a new thing, and nobody was really doing it. So I just read a couple of blog posts. I hired some designer online and an editor and put my book together and put it out there. Now here's the thing, I've never and certainly those first few books weren't perfect, but if I had hesitated and been afraid to put it out there because of the fear of criticism and rejection, probably never would've done it. So I just thought, I'm just going to put it out there, because the dream really was just to have my book published. I mean, I wasn't thinking about selling a million copies. I mean, if I did, yes, but to be honest, I didn't believe that was possible. But I did believe I could publish the book. So I was just going one step at a time. Now what happened going forward a little bit, I put out a few books, things were going well. I wasn't really selling any books and I was working in my full-time job still. I was still teaching in a corporation, and so that was taking care of the family and the bills, so I didn't have to be working as a writer to pay my bills. I would say something interesting happened around book number four, maybe book number five, I think it was with Relaunch Your Life. Actually, the book actually just kind of took off. I can't explain it. And at the time, wasn't a great marketer, wasn't a great salesperson or any of that stuff. And now I'm pretty good at marketing. I'm okay at sales, still a lot to learn there, but back then I was just didn't know really anything. But I knew how to write and I knew how to put material out there, and I knew how to tell a story, and the book just took off. It started actually selling, and I think within a few months it was actually, I was earning more from Amazon than I was my full-time job. And that was when I realized, this is interesting. I wasn't expecting this one. And then what happened? I ended up getting an email from a publisher, I think it was in India or something. Anyway, they wanted to buy the rights to the book. And I thought, well, this, I've never heard of this before. This doesn't sound right, publishers coming to you. So I thought there had to be something up about this. But I went for it anyway because I thought, what have I got to lose? And then it happened again. It was like this publisher from Vietnam and then went from Thailand. I thought, what's going on here? And they actually, I did have to put anything into it. They bought the rights to the book, they did all the translating, they published it, and that was it. And then I would get some royalties. So that was quite a while ago. But what happened though, just to fast forwarding a little bit, and over the years I put out more books of course, and I eventually started coaching people around how to publish books and market books. There was a demand for that. But when I published through the Hard Things first, something happened with that book, within three or four months, I started getting these requests again from publishers saying, Hey, we want to publish your book. And I was like, okay. Well, by that time, I had already had some contracts with a few publishers and a couple publishers in India, one in Russia, just like a few here and there. But with that book, just again, it wasn't a plan of success. It took off and I started getting a publisher from Korea, wanted the book, and then a publisher from, again, from Vietnam and India and Thailand. And then they just started flooding in. And within a year and a half, I think I had about a dozen publishers actually who bought the rights to the book. So what happens in this case is outside of the US and outside of traditional publishing, there's actually a large market, which I didn't realize, and apparently a lot of other people didn't realize either. There's a large market for hundreds of other publishers in all these different countries who actually are looking for books to purchase, and they'll buy the rights to it, pay you an advanced royalty, and then they'll pay you royalties once they publish the book, which might be six months to a year once they buy it. So yeah, I mean, that just happened a lot. And I think what happened is that, so apparently my friend who works in the publishing business, he told me that what happens is when this kind of thing takes place is that your book is put onto kind of like a special list, and it gets passed around a lot. And so I was getting offers all the time, and I signed two more last week. One was with China, a publisher in China, and I've got a few more on my desk already, but they just keep coming in. The great thing is I can develop a relationship with these publishers and they'll publish the books and everything, do all the translations, and I think there's nothing greater than, and that's kind of where selling a large amount of books, a lot of it came from that. Yes, some from US sales. And I also have a publisher in Japan now, and I think we sold about, I don't know, maybe a hundred thousand books last year. So they published a book or we're up to two books. We're doing a third one as well. But again, the great thing about it is a self publisher, you do all the work, all the marketing, and actually it's quite expensive because you have to put a lot of your money into it. You have to develop real skills or hire people for those skills, which I've done both. I'm always learning new things and hiring people for things that I would rather not do. But when you have a contract with a publisher, now they can go one way or the other, I think. But as long as they're not asking you for money, which if somebody does, you should probably just run. But if they're buying the rest to your book and they're going to publish it in another language and you just have to collect a paycheck every month or once every year, sometimes they'll pay you randomly. But I mean, yeah, why not? And also, the great thing about it is people in these other countries now can enjoy your material. That's the best thing about it is, and again, none of this was planned, but I realized what I did with the publishers though, I would ask them, well, you bought several books already. What other kind of books are you looking for? And they would actually tell me, and then I would go and I would build those books with the intention of if they're looking to buy these books, then maybe these other publishers in other countries like Korea and Vietnam, and there are so many, right? So anyway, we're working out relationships with the publishers so that we can publish a certain amount of books with them every year, and that's kind of where the volume comes from. But it was really exciting because again, but here's the point to all of this is the, just going back, if you have something that you want to do, list, okay, maybe you want to write a book and publish it, because I work with new authors all the time who are writing books, and they haven't published them. And one of the biggest fears is, what if no one likes my book? What if no one buys it? And I'm always like, well, okay, but if you don't put the book out there, no one's going to buy it anyway. So the only way to fail is to not do anything. Right? And that's just my approach to everything, really. It's just like, yeah, I mean, I've put money into a lot of things that never worked out very well, and I could have stopped then, but it's like, well, okay, I kind of lost on that deal, or sometimes' hire the wrong person or whatever. But I mean, that's just part of the business. Give yourself enough credit. When you talk about that the book was successful and it kind of just happened, I would say, well, you wrote 20 books before, and you've been doing this for several years and you've been committed to it. And you talked earlier about preparation is part of the key, right? You got to prepare for those opportunities. I would say really, you prepared for that, and you did your best to put everything in there and put yourself into it, and that's why you got results. But I do understand you didn't plan to sell 500,000 copies. I get that part, but that's awesome. That's awesome. Let's talk a little bit about your process. What's your process like day to day? I know you mentioned before you try to spend two hours, is that what you said every day? Writing? Yeah. I have a two hour window every day where, well, I call it my content creation time, so I'm always working on a new book. I'm trying to slow down from that a little bit, building out the course platform now, which we're launching this year. The challenge that I find is that I love publishing books and I just can't stop. So I'm not sure what's going to happen with that challenge. But my day-to-day process though is, yeah, I wake up very early. I usually do, I might do two or three hours of coaching in the morning, some mornings, but I'm usually up early doing early morning meditation, deep breathing will go to the gym, so I have to do these things for me, taking care of my health is the number one thing. And also mental health, physical health, and spiritual health. So if those are aligned, aligned, I'm with you. Yeah, those are aligned. You can do anything, right. But yeah, I'll have a two hour window, so a two hour content creation window where I'm actually creating a newsletter for my list as well. So we have an email list of subscribers on the list and an email. We put out a newsletter every week, and so there's always something that I'm working on. Again, it's one of those levers that is moving me towards my goal, which aside from becoming an international public speaker, is to become one of the biggest publishers in the world. Kind of a big goal. But then again, it's like, well, if it's not a big goal, well, what else is there? Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's a good point. You mentioned though, sometimes when you're in the middle of it, you don't realize how much you're actually doing or achieving. For me, it's just like the day-to-day, and I think it was this week, last week, I published six books in German. We've been translating these books in German. I finally just put them out there, and I didn't think anything of it, but when I mentioned it to someone, they're like, wow, okay, well, that's not something people do every week. But to me, it was just one of those things that I just had, I'd had it on my back burner for so long, I was just like, I'm just going to get them out there. But again, it's, that's all momentum. But again, I always say back. So let me interrupt you again. You're two hours a day, that's your goal of writing. Writing, that's the two hours that includes whatever you're going to write for your newsletter or a new book that you're working on something. Yeah. What I'll do, good question. Yeah. Just to circle back on that two hours, we focused on one thing. So what I'll do is from a newsletter, I'll do maybe a two or three hour time block, and I'll just focus on that one thing because I can build out three or four posts from my newsletter during that time. And then what I'll do is I'll preschedule them for maybe the week, maybe some weeks I put out two newsletters, but I try to keep it to one, and so I can build out my content in one afternoon and then schedule it for the month, actually. So the next day might be a two or sometimes three hour time block for a book I'm working on, which could be writing that content, or sometimes it's doing self editing, but it is focused on that one book. What I've found is that, and people may have different working styles, but when I spread myself too thin, what I try to multitask, or if I'm spending half hour on this and one hour on this and 20 minutes on this, it's very ineffective for me anyway, I've proven to myself that multitasking just doesn't work. I think I had learned, actually from Tony Robbins, this idea a long time ago, I don't remember what book he talked about chunking and to get things done to just say, okay, I'm going to sit down and I'm going to work for four or five hours. I'm going to just do everything to get this thing done, rather than spending a little bit of time over periods of times and jumping tasks. And I've always liked that and benefited from that for sure. Yeah, so that is the approach I take. And just the other thing I do as well is the night before, I will spend 15, 20 minutes maybe just going through building up my calendar for the day, which is something that was really hard for me to do. Just I'm one of these people that, although I'm very productive, I think I never really had a calendar. Things were just all over the place and I was just working on this and working on this, but when I started to put my calendar together, things flowed much better. It's like, oh, this is what it feels like to actually have a schedule. Having the routine things that I think some productivity groups, they live by that. So I'll spend time in the evening putting that together, and then I'll decide what my number one priority is for the next day, which might be something I'm working on during that too. And sometimes it is a three hour time block. Sometimes I go a bit longer if I have time during the day. Yeah. So let's segue for a second. You said you're building out the course platform. Tell me a little bit about that. Sure. Yeah. I think the courses is something that I built courses for publishing before, but I never built a course around my books. And I think because it comes down to, I have such a comfort level when it comes to writing. I'm not saying writing is easy, but I can put together a framework. I can put together content very easily. And then when it came to building out the course, that was just always something that, again, something I put off, but my people that were my subscribers, or sometimes I would get fan mail and they would ask, Hey, do you have courses? Do you have something else we can sign up for? So the demand has always been there, but I've just always been so busy working on new books and putting it out there. I always thought, okay, well, I'll get to the courses after I launched the next book. The thing is, there was always a new book coming, so I was always just staying focused on building content. Now I've got so much content that I realized, well, okay, well maybe now it's actually time to go back and just slow down on the content a bit and market what you've got. Because someone said to me the other day, you've got all these frameworks and material you built out, and 99% of the people out there probably don't know about it because not everybody's going to buy your books. So people are looking for different ways to absorb it. They might be watching your interviews, they might, they're looking for your course platform because they like to go through videos instead. So not. And as you go out there in the world and you're speaking to audiences small and large, you have something else to talk about that, Hey, if you'd like these concepts and ideas, I talk about check out my course platform. Yeah, I think it's awesome. And just last thing on that, the course that I'm building out is several mini courses, but I'm working on, I do the hard things first course for the first book. So we're very excited to push that out. That's awesome. So I know you wanted to talk about your public speaking journey, and let's talk about that because that's a big deal. My fantasy, I'm sorry, I said the word fantasy, which makes it sound negative. I apologize. My goal is to be able to sell from the stage. This is something big. I see all these speakers that they learn their craft and they're out there honing their craft, and they end up in a position where they could sell from the stage. And I'm into sales. Sales and influence is my thing. I eat, sleep and drink it. I sell every day. I'm a high level achiever, very goal oriented, incredible work ethic, but I love people and I understand people, and baby I touch. But anyhow, so when I see that, I'm like, my God, that's what I should do. That's the best that you could be. Just you and your voice on a stage and sharing an inspirational, motivational message to get people interested and then the stage. I think it's fantastic. So tell me a little bit about your journey with that and where we're going. Yeah, that's the dream. So here's the thing, I've been terrified of public speaking my whole life. Speaking one-on-one is fine, one to a few is good. And then when it becomes one to many, or just maybe in a small group of people that, I don't know, I just get really anxious and I can't speak in front of people. It's always been, it depends on the situation, I think. But here's the thing, similar to you, I love communicating, and I've always been a teacher. I taught here for 20 years, and I've actually been on stages here, not talking about my books and stuff like that yet, but just doing presentations in front of companies and stuff like that. So that had no problems with that at all. There were times when I'd be in a room where I had to share something and be vulnerable in front of maybe 20, 30, 50 people. And wow, when all eyes were on me, I just felt like this wasn't just anxiety, it was sometimes I felt like I was going to pass out. I just wanted to, they'd be introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about yourself. And I was like, no, I don't want to talk about myself. Yeah. Lemme talk about a topic or something, not about. Me. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But once I started putting the books out there and they got a little bit of attention, I started getting asked to do some podcast interviews, and this was way back in going back quite a few years, and I remember my first actual podcast interview or radio interview, I was up all night practicing. They sent me a few questions. I was trying to perfect the questions and just hoping that I got them. And I did a few podcast interviews like that, and it didn't go very smoothly. I think I was just so tense, just worrying so much that they're going to ask me a question that I didn't know or ask me something about, something that was in my book that I forgot about, because that happens all the time, by the way. Someone will say, Hey, tell us about this thing you wrote in your book. And I'm like, did I write that? I honestly can't remember. Anyway, yeah, this went on for quite a while, and occasionally it still pops up, but I think that what happened, actually earlier this year, it was similar to if you'd asked me 20 years ago what I wanted to do, I would've said, I want to be an author. I want to publish books. And if you were to ask me now what I want to do, I still want to do that. But Ashley, I want to be just, as you said, I want to be on stage in front of one to many, sharing the message, sharing the story, sharing the frameworks to help people. And for me, that really, now that jazzes me up, that's the dream. That's the new dream. But when I think about it, I think it's something I always wanted to do. It's just that the thought of it doing it was so terrifying. I didn't think it was going to be for me. So probably earlier this year, I just thought, you know what? I've got to get over this thing because every time I get onto a podcast, I freeze up and I just can't speak. And so I want to get over that because there's got to be the exposure therapy. I wrote about that in one of my books, and I was like, I wrote about exposure therapy, and I'm telling people to get out there and do these things, and I'm not doing these things, so that's not good. So I, I said a goal for myself to do 200 podcast interviews this year. So We talked about earlier this year, earlier, just before we got on here is like I've done 60 or 70 in the last couple of months, and I noticed, yeah, the first five or 10 were a little bit stiff and rigid, but after that, things just started to get easier. I think I started to relax more. They'd send me questions ahead of time, and I even, sometimes I wouldn't even look at them. I just jump on and was able to answer them anyway, so yeah, no, so I figured, okay, well, if it's working, if this is working, then what's next? How can I get better at this? Because, see, I'm not a great public speaker yet, but that's okay. How do you get to that level? That's what I'm looking at now, is who can I model who's already done it? There's a lot of people out there who've already done it, and when I actually listened to their story, they're like, yeah, I just practiced a lot. I was watching with Alex Zi the other day, says, when he launched his book maybe a few months ago, he had half a million people. He was on stage. I think he had half a million people in Zoom room or something like that, but he's like, he practiced that a hundred times. People were saying, oh, it was so perfect. You're so great. And he's like, yeah, I practice it 99 times. And it's just interesting hearing that to me is like, oh, okay. So yeah, I guess practice does matter. You do have to get out there and do it. Because what happened with me is like, okay, I'll do this thing after I get really good at it. I'll practice in front of the mirror for 20 hours and then I'll go do the thing. But what happens though is you actually get on stage and you forget about the mirror practice because now you're on stage and because you have to get good at that, and you probably just have to do, I don't even think we should frame it up as having a bad speech or having a bad interview. It's like, you went out there, you did your best. The next one will just get better. And that's progress. That's all it is. It's just progress. But when you see, see these speakers, William Rai, who wrote getting the Yes, he does this, talk about it, and he goes around the world sharing it. I mean, I don't think he does it anymore, but he did in the past. And you see him do one of these presentations and you could tell this guy has practiced this, practiced this, practiced this over and over again. He gets the audience involved and he obviously has created involves them. And he's practiced and practice with audiences. I mean, you could tell a lot has got into it, and that's why it's so darn good. And he gets asked to come to all these places to do the talk. Yeah, it's fantastic. I love it. I love it. Anything in life worth doing is something worth doing. Well, for example, for the last 20 years, sales and influence and sales training has been my thing. I eat it, sleep it, drink it, read about it, listen to it, practice it every day. Training, training, training every day. Even still today, I'm very good. I got to touch, but I still spend at least an hour every day training and getting my mind to stay on top, just like a sports person would shoot a hundred baskets, 200 baskets at lunchtime to stay focused and keep their game up. And now doing the same thing with public speakings and things like that. Exactly. You got to start incorporating your life and practice, practice, practice every day. So it definitely works. It definitely works. I love it. Yeah, it does. Yeah. You just have to be okay with making mistakes and knowing you get better with every discussion. And again, I think if you love people, if you love communicating, then I think those are the most important things people are going to, I think they're going to gravitate towards your story and especially gravitating towards the truth. And I find myself on podcasts talking about things that I never thought I'd talk about, and then the fear of that vulnerability. What do people think? And then I hear like, oh, I watched your now people are, instead of what's been happening now lately is instead I saw your book, or I read your book, they were telling me, listen to your interview on dah, dah, dah, which did not happen before. Obviously they're getting out there. But that's part of, to me, that's like, okay, great, well, that means I should just keep doing more than that. Good feedback. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, so anyway, yeah, nobody's come forward and said, that interview really sucked. I don't know. And that's okay if it did, because it's like, well, yeah, maybe that was one of the first interviews I did, and things were just off a little bit. But hey, again, I think just going back to, again, love quoting Tony Robbins, but he always said the measure of success is progress, and that's it. That's just that one word. It's just all progress, so not perfection. Yeah. The second major reinvention that I did in my life back in the nineties, like 96, 97, I made a lot of changes and I was doing something different. And you had talked about imposter syndrome and you talked about doing different things. I had a lot of fear around this idea, and some of it was some beliefs, some things that I told myself that was a lie. But until I opened up and spoke with another person who I trusted, who was a mentor of mine that had my best interest at heart, when I shared these things with him, he told me, I don't know where you got that idea. That's total bullshit. So what I wanted to say is what really helped me was building a support system around living my dream and living this new life and achieving things I never did before. And it was that support that gave me the confidence to keep going and keep doing this instead of feeling like I'm afraid I'm doing something I never did before, who am I to go out there and do this? And at the time, what ended up happening is by 19 88, 99, I started going around speaking about my expertise and what I had learned those last few years and what I was doing and projects I was getting out there in the world. I was a filmmaker and I still am, but I don't do it as much anymore as I did back in the nineties and the early two thousands. But what I'm trying to allude to is I didn't realize I was public speaking doing one to many, and this was what was actually getting me the results in my life that I was building this business with. And eventually I kind of stopped doing it because things got so good and I started bringing a million dollars a year of business that I didn't have to worry about it anymore. And then it was just a matter of doing that first thing that you mentioned, which was, you're right, it was backwards where I built the business first how to make my life work around that, which eventually I had to kill everything and start over and do it the way that we're talking about now, which is to build a business around the lifestyle that I want to live, which is what I ended up doing. But anyhow, my point is that it was so instrumental, and so now knowing all that the last few years, I'm like, I don't know why I ever stopped, because this is really an important thing, even in sales. Just imagine you can talk to some great audiences and you could pitch 50 people for something instead of just pitching one. This makes a lot of sense for growing a business. So I want to just get that off my chest. And now, let me just say before we wrap up, I know you want to talk about some key takeaways and whatnot, so let's take a few minutes here and let's talk about some of the key takeaways you want the audience to have, and also anything that I haven't asked you about that you want to talk about. Sure. Yeah. I think one of the things I get asked a lot is like you asked me about my daily routine, my work routine, things like that. But I think too, just one of my favorite words is yes, clarity. Clarity really is the key to, I think, not just goal setting, but being able to create the lifestyle that you want. You have to be, I dunno, 70 or 80% clear on what it is that you don't have to be a hundred percent yet, but you have to have a really good indication of what it is that you want, because if you don't, then well, it's like the analogy of getting in a car and just driving and you don't have a destination, you'll never arrive there, or any direction is a good one, I think. So what I do for this though is aside from spending some time at night building my calendar, I do spend time every day. I'll do half hour meditation. And just to define what meditation really is, it's really just, I mean, look, I go to a meditation retreat every Sunday. Actually, it's near my home where I sit down like 20 monks, Japanese monks, and it's a great time. We just sit there for an hour and kind meditate. It's kind of neat, and I just enjoy the atmosphere. It's in this gorgeous old 500 year old temple or something. But the thing is, is that taking time out for yourself, sitting down, doing vacation or deep thinking, think of vacation. I think it was something coined by Tom biu, one of my great mentor coach, so I listen to his stuff all the time, but he talks about this too, is where just getting quiet with yourself. Because one of the greatest things that I have been moving towards is having that inner peace where my, I think lifestyle, I used to be very chaotic and very, I would self-sabotage things and all this. And I realized when I started to work on deep breathing, do some meditation every day, doing journaling, just writing down my ideas and things like that, I started to get really calm after a while, and it was a little bit scary because I'd never really had that before. I found if you put me in the middle of a party with a bunch of people, I didn't really mingle very well, and I still probably don't. But now, if you put me in the middle of a crowded room with a bunch of people, I don't know, I'm still, I can be very calm. And whereas before I'd be very anxious like, oh, I hope they don't talk to me. What do I say is this social anxiety that I used to have? So I think where this is leading is that you want to build the life that you want. It really does start with, we'll call it the path of personal growth where that's a never ending path. I love the think Robert Frost, he wrote the poem of the Road Less Traveled, and I always think about that because I took the road less traveled, and that's made all the difference. So I try to encourage people to just think about those words as well. Not to say that you always have to take the road less traveled, but there's something when you are moving down that path and you feel like you're all alone, there's nobody else around you, you don't have any support. I don't think you're ever really alone, especially if you feel like what're doing what you stand for, what your mission is about. If you feel like if you can really tap into that and create that kind of energy where actually you're building your opportunities now, you're building your future, it really is a path of intention. So I just want people to think about that when they're. Yeah, meditation, spirituality, this is a major, major part of my life. It started 36 years ago, and it's never changed, and I've just grown and grown and grown in it. My third reinvention that I did that I totally changed my life, was all focused on taking a couple of years to retreat from everything and everyone, and just really focused on my spirituality and my physical health. And that has got me so much fulfillment in my life. It's been amazing. But I want to say I have some beliefs real quick, and I believe that there is a true me, the real me, so to speak, that is my essence, my aura, my soul, my spirit. And then I also believe that the mind and body are one thing. They're not two different things. A lot of people seem to be confused that they think the body and the mind operates separately. They actually is one thing I believe. And the third belief that's very important to me is that there's something quite different with the idea of mindfulness and meditation. They're not the same thing. They're totally separate. And so yes, I meditate so that I can get in touch with the real me so that I can be open to the possibilities of the universe so that I can listen, so I can get that intuition, that voice of reason, that voice of conscience get the answers to my, I'm praying, affirming. I'm putting the intentions out there, and then I got to listen to the feedback, to the opportunities. I like when you were talking about earlier, I'm sorry, I'm going to ramble right now, but I like when you were talking about earlier how you set goals for something and you said, I want to live in Southeast Asia, but then the opportunity came along to live in Japan, and you went for it. And I was just writing an article that I haven't finished yet, but I'm almost finished with it. That has to do about goal setting, not locking you into something, but being open to the opportunities and what happens, right? Because if you say, I want it to be green and blue with a white stripe down the middle, then you might get something that's a wonderful opportunity that comes along. But because it's not green and blue with a white stripe down the middle, you just discount it. And I've never been like that. I've always been opportunistic like you, where I'm like, okay, I did put the intention and I wanted to go this way, but look at this opportunity that just came my way. This is what the universe has given me. Let's go for it. So I think those things are vital, and by meditating, I can listen. It can help guide me through all that, and I can get to the self who the true self in my spirit, and I'll just talk about mindfulness for a second. I think really the best way to talk about mindfulness is to understand that most of the time we're mindless. When I get in the car and I'm going with my wife to the mall, but I start driving the car towards the gym because I go to the gym every day. This is because I'm mindlessly doing something. And so the idea is to be mindful of the present, this moment, who I am, what's going on around me, what are the messages, right? Is it sunny? Is it rainy? How do I feel? What am I thinking? Being present really, and being mindful of what I'm doing. It's not meditation, but doing that throughout the day is very helpful, and you don't get caught up in the stress and craziness. Yeah, I love that topic of mindfulness too. The one thing that keeps me centered with that is breathing, focusing on my breathing throughout the day. I'm just always breathing in, breathing out. And when I'm doing that, I again feel very calm, but the mindfulness is there. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's fantastic. It's okay to be mindless sometimes, too. I mean, we need those moments as well. Yeah. Well, I mean, you can't help it. That's going to happen, right? Yeah. So what are the key takeaways you want to wrap up with? I think, so yeah, just going back to three things that I do to stay focused is, number one, knowing what I want and not just what I want, but why do I want this one thing? So my big why, right? And I'll actually write this down every morning. I'll write down these three things. What is it that I want? How am I going to get it? And what is the next action I have to take in order to move towards this thing? So just three things really, and I think you can apply that to just about anything. But again, clarity is the key. Just spending time again with some meditation, mindfulness, doing some journaling, and think of vacation or just taking some time to do some of that mindfulness and deep thinking. And again, the reason for that is just to get centered with figure out what it is that you really want, because you may be working. I mean, I think a lot of people are working in a job that they claim that they don't really like. Well, it's like, and then they quit and they get frustrated with that. They quit, and they go and do another job they don't really like. And we've all done that. I think I hate this job. I'm going to go do something else. And then we're doing something else that we don't like. So for me, I just realized I wanted to stop that pattern by building something that I really wanted. Again, it just came down with, I knew what it was, and then I just had to start doing it. And then I had to keep showing up every day. And like you said, yes, when you are right though, those opportunities that came by for me with publishers and things like that. Yeah, I was planning for that maybe years before, even though I didn't realize it, but it all came back to that showing up every day and just putting in an hour and two hours, even when I had my full-time job and was raising my kids and all those things, because people are very, very busy. So one thing I hear a lot is, I don't have the time. It's like, well, I once thought that too. So what did is I thought, okay, well, I don't have the time, but I'm playing video games for an hour a day. I know I'm watching TV at least an hour a day, still working my full-time job and doing these other things. But what if I gave up the games? What if I reduced my TV time? And so I've actually looked at, it turns out I had three hours a day that I could actually, so yes, I had to make a sacrifice, But did I want to be playing video games or did I want to be publishing books? And it just came when I put those things in front of me, it was like, yeah, I'm giving up the games. And I did. I love playing Call of Duty. I mean, I was pretty good at it too, but it was either that or the other thing. That's fantastic. No, I love it. I love it. And I think as you clearly were speaking about earlier, you start organizing your life in this way, you start building those routines that you do, and you just keep doing that over and over and over again. And you just keep adding more to your life and working a little bit more, maybe at a higher level where you're more focused, like you were talking about taking these focus blocks to say, I'm going to work on this for three hours or four hours, and just being a hundred percent focused and just totally going, all in, doing it. So I think as we improve our lives, for somebody who doesn't have two hours in the morning that they're taking to go to the gym, take care of their health, meditate, and get themselves centered, and then end it with a five minute cold shower, and to start my day really, and then to go out and do everything else, you took time to get there. So everybody just needs to start and start incorporating these things in your life if you just, I forget who said it actually, but it's just about 1% improvement every day. If you just improve yourself 1% every day in a hundred days, you could see the growth and change. You could see it. That's awesome. Absolutely. And eventually that leads into putting in 10,000 hours towards something. Yes, yes. Yes. Absolutely. So yeah, it's been a great journey. Yeah. I appreciate you, Scott. I'm going to keep in touch. Have a great day. Yeah, I will. Well, thanks for having me on the show. It's been a great conversation. Thank you, bro. And I'll drop all your information in the show notes. Appreciate it. Okay.