The Create Your Day Podcast

100. Learning vs. Knowing: The Difference Between Dreamers and Doers

• Jenn Cody • Season 1 • Episode 100

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Breaking free from the paralysis of perfectionism is one of the greatest challenges entrepreneurs face. Smart, capable people often find themselves stuck in endless planning loops, researching and preparing while their dreams remain unrealized. But what if the secret to success isn't perfect planning, but imperfect action?

In this milestone 100th episode, I dive deep into why we get trapped in expensive procrastination and how Artificial Intelligence can be the game-changer that propels you forward. The truth is simple but counterintuitive: successful entrepreneurs aren't those who knew the most from the start—they're the ones who learned the fastest through real-world experimentation.

I challenge the fundamental belief we've all been conditioned to accept since childhood: that we need to know everything before we try anything. Remember learning to ride a bike? You didn't master balance through lectures; you learned by getting on the bike, falling off, and trying again. Your business works the same way.

The Minimum Viable Product (MVP) becomes your secret weapon here. It's not a subpar version of your ultimate vision—it's the smallest version of your idea that can be shared with potential customers. Using AI, you can create these MVPs in hours rather than months, accelerating your learning process dramatically.

Planning gives us the illusion of control, but it's really just fear disguised as preparation. Every day spent perfecting your plan is a day not building your business. Every week researching is a week not serving customers. Every month prepping is a month not generating revenue or making an impact. The cost of overplanning is significantly higher than the cost of starting imperfectly.

Listen to discover how to use AI not as another planning tool, but as a catalyst for action. Learn practical prompts that will help you overcome perfectionism, test your ideas quickly, and build your tolerance for imperfection. Your business is waiting for you to build it—not to think about it. Are you ready to stop planning and start doing?

Thanks for listening!

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Speaker 1:

Hey everyone, welcome to the Create your Day podcast. I'm your host, jen Cody, and this is episode 100. I'm so happy that you are here with me for all these episodes. If you're not new here, welcome back and congratulations on making it to episode 100. If you are new here, welcome. I'm so happy that you've discovered this podcast and I will say right off the bat that this week's episode is a little bit of a continuation from last week, so if you are new here, you might want to go back to episode 99 and listen to it.

Speaker 1:

We spoke last week about expensive procrastination, how all of our planning that we do can actually keep us stuck in one place. I did issue a challenge, a 48-hour challenge. If you did it, great. If you haven't already messaged me about it, please hit me up on Instagram at Solutions by Jen Cody, or you can send me an email at Jen at JenCodycom, and there are two N's in Jen. But today we're going to go a little bit deeper and we're going to bring AI into the mix, because I know after our last conversation there's so much more we need to talk about, especially about why really smart, really capable people get stuck in these planning loops over and over and over again, and we're going to talk about what works instead.

Speaker 1:

So let's start by just talking about learning versus knowing. We've been conditioned since we were little to believe that we need to know how to do something before we try to do it. So go back to when you were younger. Right, think about when you were in school. Think about when you had conversations with your parents as you got older. Think about you know all of the professional development courses you've ever taken. Anything that you've ever chosen to learn has kind of approached it from the place of you need to learn it before you can do it, and that's not really how learning works when you think of it. So let's go back still to when we were kids and we were learning to ride a bike. When you first learned to ride a bike, you certainly did not read about balance. You did not get lectured on maintaining momentum. You learned by getting on the bike and you fell off until you figured it out, even if you got hurt. You scraped your knees, banged your head. Eventually something clicked and you learned how to ride the bike.

Speaker 1:

Our business works the same way. A lot of things work the same way, but for today we're going to talk about it through the lens of our businesses. We don't learn marketing by taking courses in marketing. Right, they're helpful, but what actually teaches us marketing is trying to market something and seeing what happens. We don't learn sales by reading sales books. We learn sales by trying to sell something and seeing what happens. We don't learn sales by reading sales books we learn sales by trying to sell things to people and discovering along the way what's working and what's not working. So the entrepreneurs and business owners that you know who are successful, they're not the ones who knew the most, they're just the ones who learned the fastest, and that is a totally different skill set, and we're going to get into that a little bit today and again, like I said, I want to talk about AI.

Speaker 1:

Ai is everywhere. You can literally use it in every aspect of your life. There's an episode a couple of episodes back, where I spoke about AI for your self-care. Go back and listen to that one, if you haven't already. There are so many ways that we can incorporate AI, even down to meal planning, which is actually something we're going to talk about in a little bit. One of the clients that I worked with did some AI meal planning that we're going to get into, but for now, let's start with this.

Speaker 1:

I want to talk about something that we didn't get to last week, which is the minimum viable product, or MVP. This is a concept from the startup world, and every single person in business really needs to understand it, because I have found that a lot of people are getting this wrong. They think that the MVP is like a crappy version of what their ultimate vision is, but that's not at all what it is. It's not. The MVP is not there for you to be embarrassed by it and have to tell someone don't worry, it's going to get better. The MVP is the smallest version of your idea. It's like the tiniest bits and pieces of the idea that you have that you need so that you can share it with someone else, and this is kind of where the 48-hour challenge was going, when I was telling you you know that you should take whatever it is that you're working on and share it with one person over the next 48 hours. This is what we're talking about. It's just the MVP. So if this is something you don't have or you don't even know what it would be, so if this is something you don't have or you don't even know what it would be, ai can completely change the game for you.

Speaker 1:

Instead of you spending months building your elaborate program or building your elaborate business, you can use AI to help you create these MVPs in minutes or hours you know, instead of weeks and months. So let's say you want to start a coaching program similar to what I do. Right, my MVP is not my comprehensive 12-week program where I've created workbooks and bonus materials and I have my Facebook group. My MVP is just coaching one person through one problem connecting with someone and offering to help them with whatever their one problem is that I can help them with, right there, on the spot. That's my MVP. You can use AI to help you. If you're looking to do something like this. Ai can help you create a simple session outline for a coaching session. It can help you prepare a list of questions. It can help you if you record your session. You can put it into AI and have it help you debrief afterwards what do you need to take away from that session. So that's how AI can help with that.

Speaker 1:

What about if you own a product business? Your MVP, again, is not manufacturing a thousand units with packaging and a marketing campaign. Your MVP is making a few units by hand, or maybe it's actually even making just one prototype so that you can see if people actually want to buy it. Ai is there to help you brainstorm. What are the most simple materials that I can use to build? Whatever the product is that I'm trying to build, what are the most basic instructions that I need to come up with to help someone understand how to use my product? And how about market research? Can we use AI to figure out who are our potential customers? Here's what I'm looking to create. Figure out who are our potential customers. Here's what I'm looking to create. Tell me, give me four or five avatars of people that you think would be helped by this product.

Speaker 1:

So I want to talk about the meal planning, right? So AI is amazing when it comes to this, and I've thought about it when it comes to our personal life, right, like? I can go on AI, chat GPT or Claude or whatever. What is it? Gemini? You can go on there every Sunday and say I have X, y and Z in my refrigerator. Give me seven meals to make this week. That's a way that you can use it to cut time in your personal life, however, I worked with someone who wanted to actually start a meal planning service for like people trying to get in shape and count their macros, things like this, and she really could have spent months creating really elaborate recipes, really elaborate meal plans for every single dietary restriction, and instead she used AI to create one week and then test that with a few people. Just to start off, she offered it to, I want to say, maybe three of her friends and in that week she learned so much about people's preferences, what is easiest, what was really difficult, and it would have taken her months to put this together without the help of AI and she still would have learned those lessons. But think of how much faster she got a little further along in her business Because finding out that people really didn't want elaborate recipes, they wanted really simple ingredients, they wanted these, you know, simple shopping lists. That was something that she only found out so quickly because AI helped her test and iterate really quickly.

Speaker 1:

Instead of planning in a vacuum and that's what a lot of us wind up doing of planning in a vacuum, and that's what a lot of us wind up doing. We plan in a vacuum. We plan for what we think people want, instead of for what they actually want. So let's talk a little bit more about why us smart and capable people that I referenced in the beginning why do we get stuck in these loops? Why do we get stuck in these continuous hamster wheels of thinking about our dreams instead of actually doing what needs to be done to bring them to fruition?

Speaker 1:

I think it's because planning gives us the illusion of control and, by nature, people who are entrepreneurial, who want to own their own businesses by nature, people who are entrepreneurial, who want to own their own businesses we are control freaks. We want control. So if we think through every possible scenario, if we anticipate every potential problem and research all the solutions, then maybe we can guarantee our success. And I'm sure you know as well as I do that just ain't how business works and it's not how life works either. You cannot plan your way to certainty, and trying to plan our way to certainty is what keeps us stuck in these loops. The only way to actually get certainty is to try things and see what happens. So overplanning winds up just being an avoidance mechanism.

Speaker 1:

Right, we're trying to avoid the uncertainty of entrepreneurship, but here's what I want you to understand the uncertainty that you're avoiding. It's not a failure or a bug in the system. It's actually a feature of this process where we can find things like hidden opportunities. We can find places for our innovation to get lit up. These are the moments when we're uncertain that our brain those like areas of the brain light up and we start to become creative. We start to grow as entrepreneurs, as people, and really were able to see clearly things that we weren't able to see before. This is why what I really want you to do is embrace and lean into that uncertainty instead of trying to eliminate it, because when you do that, you're going to see that every single thing changes and we get ourselves into this place because we get really good at telling ourselves stories right, I'm sure you're just as good of a storyteller as I am and we get good at telling ourselves any story we need to to justify where we are. I have heard myself say these things and I have heard all of you say these things to me.

Speaker 1:

I just want to be prepared. I don't want to waste time going in the wrong direction. I want to make sure there's really a market for this. I need to understand my competition better. They all sound reasonable, but they're really just fear. They're keeping us stuck because we're afraid of putting ourselves out there.

Speaker 1:

I'm going to tell you right now you cannot prepare for most of what's going to happen. You are going to go in the wrong direction, and that's how you find the right direction. There might not be a market for your exact idea, but finding that out is going to help you pivot to something else that you do find a market for, and understanding your competition doesn't matter if you're never going to put yourself out there and actually compete. So what we need to do is get really practical and honest. Let's talk about what are we really afraid of? What are the business reasons that you're telling yourself that you need to keep planning, because what's actually going on are certain deeper fears underneath that.

Speaker 1:

So right now, do me a favor grab a piece of paper, open a note on your phone whatever works best for you and write down what you're afraid will happen if you start before you're ready. Really, write it down. Maybe you want to pause this. Do a little brain dumping. It doesn't have to be one sentence. Let it be as much. As it's going to take to get it out of your brain. I don't want you to just think about it. There's really something powerful about getting it out of your head and onto the paper. So if you need to hit pause, go ahead and then come back when you're ready.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so assuming you've written this down or put it on a phone note inside your iPhone, look at what you're afraid of, and then I want you to ask yourself two questions. The first one is what is the worst case scenario that could realistically happen? Make sure you use the word realistically when you ask yourself this. I want you to go down this road, go down the road of the worst case scenario, and every time you think you're at the end of the road, ask yourself and then what might happen? And then what might happen and allow yourself to go to the really dark place. Happen and then what might happen, and allow yourself to go to the really dark place.

Speaker 1:

Because what I'm hoping is going to happen for you is, as you get to the end of that worst case scenario, you're going to ask yourself question number two, and that is if that worst case scenario did happen, how would you handle it? Chances are, you probably have some knowledge inside of you that you know how you would handle it. And if you're stuck there, here's where AI can actually help you. Take those fears you wrote down. I want you to paste them into ChatGPT or into Claude, and then I want you to put this prompt in there Help me reality check these fears what is the actual likelihood of these scenarios happening and what are some practical ways I could handle them if they did? Because one thing AI is never going to do it's sugarcoat it. So you're going to get a really balanced response because you won't get the sugar coating, but it's also not going to catastrophize things the way our brains do. It's going to give you an objective perspective, which is what you actually need to see that most of your worst case scenarios either aren't that bad or that you're more than capable of handling whatever comes up next.

Speaker 1:

So I did this exercise about my podcast. When I first started the podcast, I was really terrified that people wouldn't think I knew what I was talking about, and I was really terrified that the people who knew me would think less of me somehow would think that I had. You know I was trying to do something that I didn't know I was. I don't know, I just I was uncomfortable about putting myself out there, and when I put that fear into AI, it helped me realize that even harsh criticism was just going to give me data to improve, and that was literally the worst case scenario that I was so afraid of. So there is a way for us to overcome those fears and if we're stuck in that loop ourselves, use AI. Go through those prompts and see how the AI can help you.

Speaker 1:

Okay, let's move on to something else I want to talk to you guys about, which is opportunity cost. Every single day that you spend perfecting your plan is a day that you're not building your business. Every week that you spend researching is a week that you're not serving. We have customers to serve. We have things that we need to be out there doing. Every month that you spend prepping is a month that you're not generating revenue. How about that? Or making an impact.

Speaker 1:

I know for certain that a lot of you are doing what you're doing because you are trying to make an impact. It's what drives most entrepreneurs. What's the impact you're trying to make? You can't make it behind your desk. You can't make it in your office all day. You need to be speaking to people, be out there working your business, serving your customers. Those opportunities, they do have expiration dates. The market conditions that exist today while you're doing all your research. If it takes you six months to put that into practice, those market conditions are not going to be the same thing six months from now. Those market conditions are not going to be the same thing six months from now.

Speaker 1:

The problem you want to solve there's a good chance it's going to be solved by someone else while you're still planning. And the people who need what you offer, they're going to find a solution. So why shouldn't it be your solution? Because otherwise they're just going to be finding someone else's solution while you're still getting yours ready. And I'm in no way saying that you need to be reckless. I'm not saying just go for it. You know, throw caution to the wind. I'm saying that the cost of over planning is higher than the cost of starting imperfectly.

Speaker 1:

So think about this what if you had started your business idea six months ago, even imperfectly? Where would it be now? Where would you be now? What would you have learned? How many people might you have helped already? You know there's that meme about working out right and it says you know, in six months, you'll have wished you started today. It's the same thing when it comes to our business. We need to put good planning into practice so that we don't get stuck in these expensive procrastination planning loops. And it actually is simpler than we think.

Speaker 1:

The first thing we need to do is get clarity on the problem we're solving and who we're solving it for, and then we want to put that hypothesis into place. How are we going to solve it? And then what is a plan for testing? Remember, last week I said, we know, as entrepreneurs, that we have to get clarity, get clear on who we're helping, get clear on the problem we're helping them solve. But how do we figure out how to test whether what we're doing is actually working? Figure out how to test whether what we're doing is actually working and how do we commit that we're going to actually learn from those results and pivot when we need to. Everything else can get figured out as we go along.

Speaker 1:

So let's figure out how to use AI as our secret weapon for smart planning instead of endless planning. So, instead of planning weeks, weeks and weeks and weeks researching your target market, go into AI. Today I want to solve this problem for this type of person? What are the most important questions? I should ask five potential customers to validate this idea. How easy is that? Because those are the things we need to do that market research and figure out who our target market really is.

Speaker 1:

Instead of creating elaborate financial projections, let's use AI. Help me create a simple, one-page business model for your idea. Insert your idea there. Where are the key assumptions I need to test first, let AI be your friend. Let AI be your assistant. When you want to research your competitors, ask AI. What are three simple ways I could differentiate my business idea in a crowded market. Give it the names of your competitors, if you need to. If you don't know who your competitors are, ask them. Ask AI to tell you here's what I do, here's who I do it for, who are the top 10 people that are in my market that my target market is going to, and then how do I differentiate myself from that crowded market? Ai can give you 80% of the solution in 20% of the time, and this is what's going to allow you to spend your energy on the thing that actually matters, which is testing your ideas with real people. The only thing that is ever going to move your business forward is sharing it with people. I understand that you want to know as much as you need to know about it, but if I wanted to open a pizzeria, I can't just sit in my kitchen by myself cooking pizza all day and never sharing it with other people. If I wait until I think the pizza is perfect, all of those people are going to go buy pizza somewhere else.

Speaker 1:

Good planning is what gets you to action faster instead of being so slow. It reduces the friction between your idea and your implementation. This is what's going to help you start and not delay when you actually start. All of your planning, like I said last week, needs to fit on one page. It has to have a deadline. Also, if your planning doesn't have an end date, it's not planning, it's procrastination. To have a deadline also, if your planning doesn't have an end date, it's not planning, it's procrastination. So get all of that on one page and then put a date to when you are going to put it out into the world, because you know what happens when you actually put something out into the world.

Speaker 1:

You get feedback real feedback from real people, not the imaginary feedback that you're getting in your head where you're saying, oh, this isn't good enough, because people might think X, y, z, no, no, no, you're going to get real feedback, and real feedback is gold. This is what tells you that what is working for you and what is not. It shows you opportunities that you never would have thought of on your own and it reveals problems that you might not have anticipated, and that's really key. But here's the thing you cannot get real feedback when you're just in planning mode. You can only get feedback on something that actually exists and other people can interact with, and this is why my fire ready aim approach is so much better than ready aim fire so much better. When you fire first. When you put something out into the world, the feedback you get helps you aim so much better the next time and I know we're perfectionists, right, we get stuck in planning mode and the whole approach feels wrong to fire first.

Speaker 1:

Every cell in your body is going to be resisting what I'm telling you to do today, because we want to resist putting something imperfect out into the world. But here's what I learned about my perfectionism, and I learned it the hard way. It's not about high standards. That's what we tell ourselves Our perfectionism is. It just needs to be exactly the way I want it. It's not about high standards. That's what we tell ourselves Our perfectionism is. It just needs to be exactly the way I want it right. My standards are so high. I just need it to be exactly the way it needs to be.

Speaker 1:

No, come on, that's BS. It's fear. We're afraid of being judged, we're afraid of failing, we're afraid of not being good enough. And perfectionism, as much as we think it does, it doesn't actually protect us from those things. It just delays them, it makes them feel bigger, makes them feel scarier and it just makes it worse instead of better. So the perfectionist they think that they need to get it right the first time. They can't do it until they're going to get it right. But the pragmatist knows that they need to get started so that they can learn how to get it right. And that's what you need to be. If you are a perfectionist, I want you to switch and become pragmatic in how you approach things. The only way for you to do that is imperfect practice. So here's a challenge for this week I want you to practice being imperfect on purpose. This is not about being sloppy. It's not about being careless. It's about building your tolerance for putting things out there before they're perfect. And again, let's bring AI in and let AI help you get comfortable with imperfection. So here are some AI-powered ways for you to practice this Ask AI to help you write a social media post about your business and then post it without editing it 17 times.

Speaker 1:

You can fix punctuation here and there. Give it a once over. Do not go over it 17 times. Have AI help you draft an email to your list and then send it, even if it's not perfect. Use AI to create an outline for a piece of content and then take action on that piece of content. Do it in one take. Take that outline and record yourself. Create the content. You can also ask AI for five conversation starters to reach out to potential customers. And then guess what I want you to do? Open up that iPhone, find five people that are potential customers and reach out to them today. Use those conversation starters. And last, you can use AI to help you brainstorm a simple version of your product or your service. So if you feel like what you're creating is too big, bring it back to that MVP, the minimum viable product. Use AI for this.

Speaker 1:

Here's what I'm creating. I need to distill it down to something simple that I could just get out to someone immediately. The goal is for you to build your tolerance for imperfection, because if you can't learn to be imperfect in these small ways, you're never going to take the big imperfect action that actually builds your business. So one thing I want to say about AI it is not going to give you perfect content. We'll get to you know how to program it and set it up and teach it. All of that that's a different episode, but just know it's not going to give you perfect content. It's going to give you good enough content that you can improve and you can make your own, and that's what you need to break out of your perfectionism. So I want you to think about all of this and then understand that all of the people you admire, the people with successful businesses and confident social media posts, impressive revenue numbers, all the things that you want for your own business almost all of them started with plans that were nothing like what they eventually built. They started with one idea and ended up somewhere completely different. They pivoted, they adjusted, they learned, they adapted.

Speaker 1:

I was listening to Amy Porterfield's podcast last week and I don't know if you know who she is, but she has the Amy Porterfield podcast. It's all on marketing, really great information. And anyway, she referenced how she used to teach Facebook ads. I never knew she did that, but that was part of her journey in the beginning. And then she pivoted and did what she needed to do to become the person that she is now. So their success didn't come from following their original plan perfectly. It came from being willing to change the plan based on what they learned along the way. So stop trying to write the perfect plan for the business that does not exist yet. Start building something imperfectly and let it teach you what your business actually wants you to become. So what's the next right step for you? Not the next right plan, but just the next right step.

Speaker 1:

I would love for you to look at your business idea, look at all the planning you've been doing and then ask yourself what is the smallest, simplest thing I could do this week to test whether this idea has legs? Let AI help you. Don't just think about what you could do. Use AI to help you. If you want to offer a service, remember, ask AI. Help me write a simple message I can send to three people offering insert your service here for free in exchange for feedback and then send those messages today. If you have a product idea, ask AI what's the simplest way I could create a prototype of insert your product and what materials should I use and then go buy those materials this week?

Speaker 1:

Creating content Ask AI. Give me five titles for articles about whatever your expertise area is. That would help your target audience. Pick one, write it and publish it this week. If you want to start coaching, ask AI. Help me create a simple 30-minute coaching session outline for someone struggling with XYZ. Whatever specific problem is that you want to coach on, and then offer that session to someone for free. Open your phones, look for the people and connect with them. Call them up, send them an email or a text, ask them to meet you for a coffee. This is how your business grows.

Speaker 1:

The key is using AI not to plan more, but to act faster. Let AI handle the thinking so you can just focus on the doing. And I'm going to give you a little tip After you take action, go back to AI and ask I just tried, put in whatever it is that you did. Here's what happened. Put in the results of the feedback that you got and then ask what should I try next? Ai can help you iterate quickly instead of going back into planning mode. So look, I totally get it. This is scary stuff putting yourself out there before you feel ready. It goes against everything we've been taught about how to succeed. But how do you know that you are going to learn? It's because you're going to take a perfect action, much more than you'll ever learn from perfect planning.

Speaker 1:

And there's something really beautiful about using AI in your business too. It removes so many of the excuses that we use to keep planning instead of doing. You don't have to spend weeks researching, because AI can give you the insight you need in seconds. You don't have to agonize over perfect copy. Ai can help you create copy that is just good enough so that you can put the content out there and improve as you go. You don't have to have everything figured out. Ai can help you problem solve in real time.

Speaker 1:

But please remember that the AI it's a tool for action. It's not another planning tool. I don't want you to use AI to just create more elaborate business plans. Use it to create fast, smart action. Your business is waiting for you to build it. It's not waiting for you to think about it, and now you have all of this information, all of these prompts for AI to help you build it faster than ever before.

Speaker 1:

So I gave you your homework. You're going to connect with people, and I want you to pick one thing from today's episode Use AI to help you do it Not help you plan it, but then actually do it and then share with me. I want to hear what you're building. Send me the message on Instagram at solutionsbyjencody. Email is jen at jencodycom. Tell me the action you took. Tell me how AI helped you. If you discovered something along the way, share it. People learn from other people's experiences, and I love hearing from yours. So next week, we're going to get more into this and between now and then, I want you to take this information. Go out there, create the day that you deserve, create your day in the best way possible and create the business that you are dreaming of. Until then, take care of yourselves, take care of each other, and I will see you next week. Remember, time is now to stop planning and start doing. See you next week.