Hala Taha: [00:00:00] [00:01:00] Yeah. Bam. If you've ever found yourself stuck in an endless loop of learning, but still not taking action, this episode is your wake up call. Today's guest is serial entrepreneur and smart passive income founder Pat Flynn, and he's back on the show with a powerful message. Sometimes the key to achieving more is learning less.

Pat's got a brand new book called A Lean Learning, and it's a bold invitation to stop cramming your brain with every course, book and masterclass out there, and instead, focus on learning just enough to move a needle. In this conversation, Pat's gonna break down why over learning is Killing Your Momentum and what the most successful entrepreneurs do differently when it comes to acquiring knowledge and taking action.

Pat, welcome back to Young and Profiting podcast. 

Thank you for having me. Excited [00:02:00] to be here. 

I am really excited for this conversation. So I was reading your new book and I learned that you call yourself an over learner. Talk to us about what you mean by that. What is an over learner and how has that actually blocked you from becoming your full potential?

Pat Flynn: Yeah, so Overlearning, I think we can all relate to this, where we're subscribed to way more than we need to consume, whether it's YouTube channels, podcasts, books. If you think about the way most of us consume books, we go and we read those books and we might then pick up the next one and then pick up the next one.

And if we implement anything, it might just be a small sliver of what we had just read. And I think that's a waste of time and we're at a point now. World where there's just so much information that we can pretty much get whatever we want whenever we want, just in the power of our phone. All the information's out there and if information were the answer, we'd all be where we wanna be, but we're not.

And the trouble is, not only are we now at this buffet out of information and stuffing our plates full [00:03:00] of it and over consuming, and similarly to a diet we are. Lethargic. We are tired, we're overweight, if you will, with information. We're also being force fed information. There's algorithms putting things in front of us that we don't even know we need and we're consuming it.

And when we think about the brain and why we do that, we're treating information like it's a scarce food source. 'cause if you go back to cave person days or whatever, if you come across the food source, you port it because you might not find another one later, right? This survival, the trouble is we're treating information in the same way.

And right now we need to make that distinction between just in case learning, which is what we've all been doing, and just in time learning, which is finding exactly what you need for what it is that's most important to you right now. Knowing that when you reach that next step or next phase, those resources will be there yet again.

We are just conditioned, if you will, from school or just society on learning everything about everything first. And then probably never taking action at all or convincing [00:04:00] ourselves that there's just too much or we're not cut out for this. The classic example of overlearning is the person who is in their car listening to whatever the next podcast is on their list, just simply because they have that time.

And although, and again, that was me for a while, although it sounds like you're being productive, there is also such a thing called overin inspiration, where you now get drawn over here and then you get drawn over there, and then you get drawn over here. And every time you say yes to that new thing, you're also saying no to the thing that you've already committed to and that you're never gonna follow through with anymore.

And that's what this book is meant to solve. 

Hala Taha: I feel like this is so pertinent because with technology, everything has changed. There's ai. Before that, there was Google, we were slowly moving to this type of learning with Google. But now with ai, things have totally changed. So talk to us about how the way that we once learned was conducive to the technology that we had.

But now that we have different technology, we've gotta learn differently. 

Pat Flynn: No longer is the person with the most information, the most successful, right? That's [00:05:00] how it used to be. The smartest person in the class would always get to the best college would always get the best job. The more knowledge you had, just the more power.

It seemed like if you had an Encyclopedia Britannica in your home, if you were old enough to know what those are, you were seemed as smarter and more wealthy because you could afford information that other people could not. Now, what's useful, especially like you said, with AI coming in and just making it so accessible and easy, again, the information is all there, so how are we going to navigate this?

How are we going to understand what is actually meant for us versus just an overconsumption nature that we have? So the idea being find the right resource for the right moment and implement right now. Those mistakes that we're all afraid of making that we think are gonna derail us, become the guardrails that we actually should be working in between.

So there's a lot of psychology in here as well, because a lot of us worry about fear of failure. We don't wanna make mistakes. And again, we're taught to be perfect. I was grown up in a house where I had to have a 4.0 grand average or better, or else I was wrong or ruining my life, if you will. [00:06:00] Also, the idea of fomo, we're afraid of missing out on that new hot thing everybody's talking about or passing around on social.

So of course we absorb it, but then that also absorbs our mind, our time and attention away from the things that we should be saying yes to. So the fomo, the fear of missing out is a hard thing that we have to deal with too. And this relearning how to learn is what is gonna be most valuable. How quickly can you pick up new things and implement it versus how much do you know?

Because before calculators, right, if you were good at math. Great. You were super useful. And then of course the calculator was just like, okay, well I can do this in an instant. And that's AI right now. AI can find information and give you information in an instant. It's how you choose what to consume and how you then implement it that matters most.

That's what's gonna be valuable in the future. 

Hala Taha: I love this topic. I feel like it's so perfect for right now and for all the entrepreneurs and creator entrepreneurs tuning in. So let's talk about a real experience that you had. I remember when I first interviewed you, I think about a year ago, you were telling me about a time where you got laid off as an architect, which was your dream [00:07:00] job.

And at that moment, how did you approach learning, and what was your experience like with learning? Did it help you or was it actually like a stumbling block? 

Pat Flynn: Well, initially I felt betrayed because I had to move back home with my parents, had gotten laid off from my dream job just a month, literally after getting engaged, which made it even worse, I was like, I'm moving backwards in life.

I'm moving back with my parents. No offense to them, I love my parents, but. I didn't wanna be 25. And in my old childhood bedroom where my feet are kind of coming off the edge of the bed and I'm looking at the wall and I see all the certificates, best attendance, top grades, best citizenship awards, all these things, and I'm like, none of that mattered because I still, even though I did everything perfect, got laid off and let go.

So my first inclination, again, because of how I was raised, was I should probably go back to school. Maybe I should go get a master's degree or something. That's what I should do to help, even though that was gonna take another two years and so many more dollars and delay any sort of moving forward. But that was an option.

I then [00:08:00] discovered podcasts, and this is why podcasts are so important to me. This was in the early, early, early days of podcasting in 2008, 2009, and I had discovered this world of internet marketing and online business and entrepreneurship. Something I had never done before, but I was getting educated in this podcast space through a lot of these various podcasts, and I went back to my old habits.

I listened to hours and hours, just every waking moment. I was listening to everything, and as a result, I was getting a hundred different ways to make money online and being pushed and pulled and dabbling and trying this here, trying this there. I even got pulled into an Amway conference where they were making a festival out of all these diamond, double platinum members who were making money.

Doing things. Then I was like, oh, well now I gotta sell lotions and cosmetics to my family. Like, no, this is not what I was meant to do, but no longer could I go back to architecture. What's gonna be the case here? So then I decided to follow one path, and it was a result of finding one person who is teaching this stuff who I could follow.

I loved how they were [00:09:00] doing it. They were very honest and upfront, and shout out to Internet Business Mastery, which was that podcast, and I decided to build a website to help people pass an architectural exam, and I started to get traffic on that. I was like, oh my gosh, this is working. I didn't set up a website before, but I did it as I was going.

Then I got the idea to publish a study guide, an ebook, and I was like, I don't even know what an ebook is. So again, I went back to old habits. I started watching too many videos and reading all about it. And it took my mentor at the time, his name was Jeremy from Internet Business Mastery. He said, you have to just stop learning and start doing, because the more that you consume, the more time it's gonna take for you to get the result you want.

So I said, okay, I'm gonna write this study guide. I have the information in my brain, I have some of it on my website. Let's do this. And then I started researching again, old habits. Okay, I need to write the book. I need to format it. I need to figure out how to sell it. I need to write sales copy. I need to study that.

There's too much here. This is never gonna work. And I almost talked myself out of it because I went through the whole thing and saw there was so [00:10:00] much. But then I said, okay, well I have to make this work, so let me just do step one. What's step one? Well, I just have to write this thing. What's the easiest way to write it?

Well, I'm just gonna open up Word, just get everything on there and then I'll figure out the rest later. And after three and a half weeks, I had 74 pages in a Microsoft Word document, and I was like, oh my gosh, I have it. I could feel myself. Getting there, but what's next? I don't know how to sell or any of this stuff.

Okay, I don't need that yet. Let me find somebody who teaches how to format eBooks. So I found somebody to do that. I watched some YouTube videos and just got it done in a couple days. Stuff that I didn't need to know before, but I needed to know now. I was like, great, okay, now I have this book. I'm feeling the momentum.

It's a PDF file, but how do I sell it? I don't know. I asked a couple people who had sold digital products before and I said, what do you recommend? And they told me about a tool called E Junkie, which was a website that you could upload your PDF file and that it would give you a button to put on your website.

I said, okay, great. I did that in a day. I was like, oh my gosh, I'm so close. But now I need to learn how to write sales copy. What do I do? [00:11:00] People go to school for literally sales copy and marketing. I'm not cut out for this, but again, I brought it back down to Earth and I said, if this were easy, what would it look like?

And I eventually found a book called Moonlighting on the Internet by Yannick Silver, and this book was. A few hundred pages worth of all different kinds of way that you can make money online from eBay to all these other things. But I didn't need any of that. All I needed was the appendix in the back of the book, which was a Madlib style sales page that I can just plug in my product, put in the features and benefits, and I just took that, adapted it to my stuff, put it on the website.

And that website is since made over seven figures over a million dollars by selling a study guide to architects. Not because I learned the whole thing, but because I took it one step at a time, found the right information I needed for that next step, and then just continued to move forward. And that's how I've now approached everything moving forward from the YouTube channels that I have now with over millions of subscribers to my invention, the Switch pod.

And I had never invented anything before, but I took the lean learning approach and just figured things out as I [00:12:00] went and found the right resources when I needed them. And this is what is now in this book, this process of just in time learning and just in time information. 

Hala Taha: I feel like something that's really important to highlight is that you not only learned it, but you took action right away.

So talk to us about the importance of actually doing the thing that you're learning right away. 

Pat Flynn: In those days with the architecture thing, I had something at stake that forced me to make a decision. If I didn't have to do that, if I was still in architecture and I was like kind of dabbling with it, there would've been no reason for me to do a lot of these things that were outside of my comfort zone or learn things that were new to me.

I would've just fallen back to old habits and probably still would've been an architect if I hadn't gotten laid off. So it's important to have a reason to take action or else action is not necessary. And this is why in the book I talk about the importance of what I call a voluntary force function.

Something that you can put into place that has a time and a date, sometimes a location for you to show up and have had the learning done so that you're not over learning, but you're actually taking action and making [00:13:00] mistakes. So for example, and Tim Ferriss is the godfather of this from back in the day, he even had a series on Apple TV where he was demonstrating.

These lean learning principles. For example, he was trying to learn how to speak Tagalog, which is the Filipino language. I'm half Filipino myself, so I was really interested in how he was gonna do this. And he said, in order to force him to learn, he booked an interview on a Filipino news station in about a couple months time.

So he had two months, he had a deadline. He knew he was gonna show up on this Filipino news channel, and they were gonna speak to him in Tagalog and he was gonna have to respond. So he wasn't able to learn every single word, but he found the right words that mattered in a conversation like that. And he actually put himself in a situation where he was forced to learn.

He moved in with a Filipino family for a period of time so that he can just, again, learn in real time, if you will. Same thing when I was learning Japanese. I tried to do the Duolingo thing. I tried to learn with flashcards. It was just not sticking. When I was in Japan ordering food and talking to people about how to get [00:14:00] around, I made mistakes, but I found my way through that.

And those things have now been internalized. S like things are now ingrained in me and written as opposed to just cramming, right? The style of learning that we're all familiar with cramming the night before kind of thing. So the action happens because you have a reason to do so. So putting yourself in that heightened situation helps If you wanna learn how to speak on stage, great.

Book a time on stage or sign up for an event, and man, you're gonna get in motion for learning how to do these things, right? If you wanna be a good interviewer on a podcast, great book an interview and get ready. Listen to these amazing podcasts like the one you're listening to right now, and how interviews are conducted in a way for you to just fast forward your way there.

This is all about speed, running, skill, acquisition by putting yourself in those situations. So yeah, the action is key because information without action is what they call just a waste. If you were to audit all the things we've learned in life from podcasts, we've listened to YouTube videos, books that we've read, and then you actually take into account [00:15:00] how much have we actually implemented of that?

It's going to be a really scary number. That's gonna be disappointing for all of us because we've realized we actually just are literally wasting our time. And I wrote this book because my kids are soon to be young adults, but the world is so different from the one I grew up in where information was scarce.

Now it's everywhere and we have to learn how to navigate it. 

Hala Taha: So true. So we've got these influencers like Alex or Mosey who are talking about focus all the time, right? One of his main messages is focus on one thing, focus on one thing, get good at one thing. Then you've got influencers like Gary V who are telling all the 20 year olds to explore and be curious and to learn.

 you know, I've got listeners of all ages who listen to the show from teens to sixties, right? Is there a point in time in your life where you should just be curious, and then how do you figure out what to actually spend your time on? Is there some sort of guide that you can give us in terms of how to follow our curiosity?

Pat Flynn: Curiosity is great. It's how we learn. It's how we understand. It's why kids when they're young, they keep asking why. 'cause they're curious. What do we do? [00:16:00] We stunt that curiosity, right? And then we say, no, shh. Be quiet. It's important to be curious, and I do agree with both Alex Rami and Gary V. When you're young especially, that's your time to try and experiment and understand not just more about the world, but more about you and what lights you up.

And when you can land somewhere where you can show up every day, even if it's not great, but you are lit up because of it in the possibilities there, then you're going to eventually get to that point by learning incrementally of success, whatever that might be defined for you. I also agree with Alex because many people are dividing their energy across too many things.

So focus on one thing at a time is key. But the question is, well, what do we focus on and how do we manage that? So in the book I have this thing called the inspiration matrix, where you can take any of these curiosities you have and put them through a filter to understand where they might fit in your life.

Because some things are gonna be what I like to call critical commitments. You cannot escape them. You have to do them. And it's important to audit so that you can understand what those things are. Because if you notice that your critical commitments, the things that you feel like you have to show up for all the time are things you [00:17:00] can actually push off or reduce, then that's great.

'cause those aren't necessarily things that are gonna get you excited. But a lot of things we just have to do, where most people can get their time back though, is in the places of life where we get a spark of inspiration, but they aren't really in alignment with where we wanna be in life or what excites us in the long run.

And these are what I like to call junk sparks. And this is where most of us are suffering right now, from the easy access to everything that we have. they give us a little spark in the beginning, and then they. Often derail us from the other things that are important, like our passion pursuits or even recreational type things, which we don't need to go deep in, but it's important to have some recreational things, some hobbies to escape the things that are gonna take up most of your time to be able to breathe and to give yourself space.

So I'm not gonna get too deep into the inspiration matrix and examples, it's all in the book, but I will say a happy medium between Gary V and Alex Pro is a strategy that I call the 20% itch rule, because I disagree with Alex that you should only focus on one thing at a time. In fact, he even [00:18:00] mentions how he loves writing books, and it's not even necessarily something that is in his business plan, but he loves to do it anyway.

So even Alex is doing more than one thing at a time, but in general. The 20% itch rule is this, it's 80% of your time being committed to the things you've already said yes to, your responsibilities and the things that you're, you've got going on. But allowing yourself, in fact, giving yourself permission to have 20% of your time contained for experimentation, for play, for scratching that itch and that curiosity.

And I found that to be really, really key for me because that allows me to escape the 80%, but then go back to it with more energy when I get back to it. So if you divide the days of the week, 80%, 20%, that's, for example, Monday to Thursday is gonna be your 80%. Friday is gonna be your play day. And I look forward to Fridays every single week because that is my time to experiment, to try to play such that if even that thing I were focusing on were to fail, my other stuff is still protected.

I'm still dedicating any percent of time. It's not out of control. It's like a little Petri dish on Friday that I can play around with. And if it doesn't work well, I can just [00:19:00] throw it away. And I have failed before. I've done software companies and other things that have totally failed, but that was again reserved for Friday.

However. Many things have done very well on that Friday. For example, the Switch pod, which is my invention that was built between 2017 and 2019. Every Friday, my partner and I, we would work on this project. We'd go to events and hand our prototypes to different YouTubers to get their feel for it. And eventually, in February of 2019, we launched and had made $415,000 in 60 days on Kickstarter from this quote unquote side project that we had given ourself permission to try and even if we didn't win.

And in those moments where I fail during that 20% of time, again because it's protected. It's never failure because I'm still learning. I'm able to put in those learnings into the new things that I try and even into the 80% of things that I'm doing. Another example today is the 20% of time that I'm scratching that itches in the YouTube world in specifically a niche called Pokemon.

So I have a Pokemon YouTube channel that has grown [00:20:00] since 2020 to nearly 1.7 million subscribers on this channel and about to cross 300 million views. And it in and of itself has turned into a five figure business and has allowed me to connect with the Pokemon Company International directly and get invited to different places around the world.

I even am invited as a celebrity, sort of like, you know how they invite voice actors sometimes at these Comic-Con type events. I'm now on that list to get invited to sign autographs. It's just crazy. And again, this was contained and it was my curiosity. My kids got me into Pokemon in 2020 and they outgrew it and I definitely have not.

And these things wouldn't have happened if I were to only focus on one thing at a time. And in general, for most curious entrepreneurs who I speak with, the one thing at a time is a drag. And yes, maybe Alex is in a special camp because he is making a hundred million dollar offers and he is doing acquisitions all the time on so many big levels.

But for most of us who aren't at that level, you can have an incredibly successful business and an incredible life [00:21:00] by having not something huge, but something that allows you to even focus on a thousand true fans. If you have a thousand true fans, imagine them paying you a hundred dollars a year for access to you.

Your item, your product, whatever it might be. A thousand times a hundred is a hundred thousand dollars. There's your six figure business right there, just a thousand people. And you can do that in four days a week and then have something to play with experiment that can then stack onto that as well. So I think that's the perfect balance.

Hala Taha: It's great advice and it's really important for entrepreneurs to hear because we're rewarded for being inventive, right? I think of myself and my experience. Everything I've built was just something I was curious about. I tried to sell it, it worked, and then it turned into a business, or it turned into another business.

But then as you get more and more successful, there's all these ladies in the red dress is what they call them, sexier and sexier opportunities. And you've got to learn how to focus. And it reminds me of this quote that I've heard from Elon Musk. He says, entrepreneurship is like [00:22:00] staring into the abyss and chewing glass.

And what he means by chewing glass is entrepreneurship is basically. Hoping you don't fail because so many of us fail. And then chewing glass, doing the things that you hate to do that you know that you actually have to do. And so that's the 80% that you're talking about. We've gotta chew glass, do the things that we know we have to do, and then you've got 20% where you can pursue things that maybe light you up, you're passionate about, you wanna invent so that you don't miss opportunities.

'cause as an entrepreneur, you need to continually think of how to invent and pivot. And you can't always just do the same thing over and over again. Especially the way that the world is moving so fast. 

Pat Flynn: Entrepreneurship is seemingly very chaotic. We don't know what the plan is. And this is why people who spend the time to, in fact, build an entire business plan soon, find out.

That's just the best guess. And typically, things never go the way they planned. They seem to work out as you do. So wouldn't it make sense to start doing sooner now, again, not [00:23:00] uncontrollably, but in a more contained approach is important. But there is something to be said for having. Excitement behind it to enjoy the glass.

Chewing in a way, right? It's all a part of the process. And no pain, no gain, right? I remember certain moments where Elon Musk was sleeping in the Tesla factory, just grinding to make things work out. He was very close to the brink of bankruptcy, and I'm sure burnout. However, he had a belief and he had, you know, a good team behind him.

And of course, now that he's gotten a little political, you could say various kinds of things about him, but in the early days of building those businesses, he knew what he wanted. He had a mission. And that is important to have your mission and values in place so that you can draw a line and say, Hey, here's what I'm standing here for.

Who wants to come along this side of the line with me? And that's important. A lot of us, when we're starting out, we don't even know who we are as ourselves. And it's important to figure out what your values are. What is your mission? Especially when you're young, what lights you up? What do you believe in?

There's no right or wrong. If you are [00:24:00] not sure, how can people get behind you and your product if you aren't even sure about what you are and what are you doing this for? So that again, can only come through experience. So the longer you wait or the longer that you only do one thing and focus on that, the longer you are gonna be to find out exactly who you are and what you're doing this for.

Hala Taha: I wanna do a really fun segment called Learn or Burn. Okay. And basically, I'm gonna rattle off five different ways that people learn these days, and I want you to tell me should we learn it or should we burn it? So let's start off with YouTube rabbit holes. 

Pat Flynn: I will preface this and say, rabbit holes are amazing when you know why you are in that rabbit hole.

So in that case, learn because maybe you are looking at becoming a world-class speaker. Great, let's go in the deep rabbit hole of TED Talks and purposefully go in there not to just, okay, I'm, if I watch more TED Talks, I'm gonna get better. But something I talk about in the book is called Micro Mastery, and that is finding a.

Part of what it is [00:25:00] that you're doing that you wanna master. For example, if you're a speaker, learn how to open your talks in the first two minutes and grab people's attention. So I'm gonna watch a hundred TED Talks, but just the first two minutes of them, I'm gonna get in a rabbit hole of just how people open their presentations so that I can master that, absorb that, and then move on to the next thing.

Maybe I then MicroMaster what I do with my hands when I'm on stage, where I go on stage. Could be another one. Compartmentalizing those learnings into maybe a few weeks or a few days. Just again, rabbit holes on purpose. That's the key. The whole point of this book is really just conscious learning versus unconscious automation, right?

We wanna un automate from everything and then resubscribe to the things that matter. Rabbit holes are dangerous. And you can find yourself easily in places of YouTube where you eventually wake up and you're like, how did I even get here? Why am I watching Dr. Pimple Popper right now? Right? I don't know how I got here.

Even though it's very intriguing. That's where it's dangerous, right? So again, conscious learning. So there is [00:26:00] a pro and K side probably, I'm guessing, for all of these things, and I hope this explanation helps solidify that. But YouTube amazing resource. It's literally right there. But be careful. The algorithms, they're there to get you.

 So you're gonna find an amazing video with an amazing title and an amazing thumbnail like raising a grocery store, lobster as a pet. Now you are following Leon the Lobster, which might be great for just a distraction every once in a while. That's fine. I'm not saying don't be entertained, but I'm saying if you're going in there to learn, go in there to learn and learn about the things that matter.

Hala Taha: How about online communities? Like a forum or something like SPI Pro or something like that? 

Pat Flynn: And I'm not just saying this plugs my own stuff. There's many other communities out there. You have communities that, yeah, communities are one of the most special things that you can do to fast forward your learning.

Why? Because you are also alongside other people who are learning those same things. And just like learning something in school that you're interested in, like imagine a robotics club or something. You're into robotics, cool. It's one thing [00:27:00] to learn on your own and read textbooks and go deep into a YouTube rabbit hole about that yourself.

But being in a room, whether virtual or in person with other people who are interested in that, and you're getting your hands dirty. You're trying things, you're like, Hey, how did you do that? Show me that There's so many amazing things that can happen when communities come together because teachers become amazing teachers by finding other students and students become great teachers to other people who are just coming in at the start.

So. In the book, I talk about the importance of connection with other people, and there's three levels of having what I like to call champions in your life to support you in your learning journey and your curiosity journey. So the first is your emotional support system. These are friends and family who probably don't understand the language of entrepreneurship or whatever it is that you're getting into, but find those family members and friends who are gonna be excited when you get excited.

That's the key, right? If you find that you're in communities where when you win, they start to tear you down, you're in the wrong rooms. You wanna find the people who, when you're winning, they're like so happy for you and vice versa. That is where magic happens, [00:28:00] especially in the second level of champions, which are your colleagues and your peers, right?

Mastermind groups and other people in your communities or networks. That's where magic happens. 'cause you're all doing similar things, but you can share your superpowers amongst each other, right? You can fill each other's gaps, you can support each other, hold each other accountable, but then the third level of connection to other people.

Whether you find them in communities or you pay to get access to them, or you just happen to be somewhat lucky, perhaps, is where you can find a virtual mentor, or better yet, a real in-person mentor. Somebody who is gonna take you under their wing. Who's going to not only just hold you accountable, but be brutally honest with you because they wanna see you succeed.

Even if it's not the nice thing to say, which I've had to have in my life at certain moments. So yes, communities are amazing. 'cause you can find those peers, you can find those connections, you can find that accountability. One of the best ways to fast forward your learning for sure. 

Hala Taha: Okay. Learn or burn college diplomas.

Pat Flynn: Well, I mean, I have a diploma here. I've never used it. I mean, I used it for a few years, but I mean, looking [00:29:00] back, it was entry into that space that helped me discover more about what else I can do to serve that audience by creating an architecture exam. Right? So I wouldn't say I'd go back on that, but recently we've had some legislation and, and other things from Washington that said basically, okay, those of you who had once gotten loans for your student loan have to pay them back now.

And this was a big deal because you know, they were frozen for a while during the pandemic and stuff, but they're asking for you to pay that now. And there was a lot of people who were very upset about that. And I'm not gonna talk about what's right or wrong, but what was interesting around that time when that was announced was a lot of people were coming out and saying that they had a degree that they weren't even using it.

That if they could go back, they wouldn't have gotten that degree. So I wouldn't necessarily say burn. However, I will say as somebody who might be thinking about college, I want you to really understand. Why you would wanna do that. We tell our kids, if you go to college, not when you go to college, for me it was when you go to [00:30:00] college and you better go to the best college or else you're a failure.

Mm-hmm. That was how I grew up. Traditional household. Thankfully that conversation's changing a little bit. However, there is still this, okay, if you don't go to college, you're not as successful as you could be yet. We see a lot of these incredible entrepreneurs who dropped out of college, from Zuckerberg to whoever to start their thing and actually go bigger and become world class entrepreneurs.

So it depends on your path and what you want. Of course, if you wanna be a doctor, then absolutely you need to go get a degree in then some. But what do you want and where do you want to go? And you're not a failure if you don't get a college degree, you're a failure if you just don't think about the decisions you're making.

Especially big financial decisions like that, especially if it comes with a loan. So be careful. And for me, I got lucky that I got into a college and enjoy the classes I took. Quite honestly, I took architecture because it was the only thing of interest to me that seemed. To like not take as much work. 

Hala Taha: I recently interviewed Rachel Hollis, who is super [00:31:00] successful and didn't go to college, and I asked her, what do you tell your kids?

Her kids are of college age? And she was saying, I recommend them going because I can afford to send them to school. However, if you're a person where you have to take out a loan, I wouldn't necessarily recommend it. Or to your point, I would think really hard about what you're doing. 

Pat Flynn: That's fair. I think being able to afford it is a luxury and many people have that luxury, which is amazing. But if you don't, you definitely need to think about it. And if, you know, a lot of people use the excuse of, well, that's where I learned who I was. I became social. I joined these clubs. It wasn't even about the academic part of it. It was about the experience part of it. That's great. There's other experiences that could teach you life skills and how to integrate into the world that aren't just college.

I. traveling abroad, going to Japan to teach English could be an incredible experience or going on a mission somewhere. These are all experiences that can give you a better understanding of and a sense of who you are and, and what you like and dislike. It took in the, the season three of [00:32:00] White Lotus, one of the characters actually staying overnight at a Buddhist temple to understand that that's probably didn't, not what she wanted to do, but she experienced it, she tried it.

That's a fiction story, but uh, it's just on my mind 'cause we just seen it. 

Hala Taha: Okay, the next one's too easy. It's AI productivity tools. So I know you're gonna say learn, right? 

Pat Flynn: There are a million AI tools out there picking the one or two that can support you with what it is that you wanna do.

Absolutely do that. Learn it, understand how it works, get really good at creating prompts. I will say learning how to write great prompts is such an important skill right now, more so than just knowing the information, right? Know how to create amazing prompts. However, it is very easy in these hot moments of tech to go, I'm gonna subscribe to this, and then this, and then this, and then this.

And all of a sudden you're spending like 500 bucks a month across 20 different tools to get access to. Like, well, this one does this a little different and this one does this and this one, you know, does this. It's easy to get caught up in that culture wave. However, [00:33:00] it is such an important understanding for where we are in the world today.

And if you're not familiar with it, you're not gonna have access to the ability to create and understand more about how you can integrate it into your goals and your life, and perhaps your storytelling and whatever it might be. So yes, I think learn for sure. But again, like anything you can overlearn, I think it's again, conscious learning.

When you find the thing that excites you and that you wanna learn about, lean into it. And like a diet, you lean out everything else. There are so many tools out there right now that I wanna play with. There was one that just came out from Google that literally with prompts, you can basically create movies and it looks amazing, like cinematic and I wanna play with it so bad.

But I have this book launch coming up and I have an event to run in at the end of June. Yes, I'm being polled and compelled there, but I am disciplined enough thanks to my past to know that that's not what I need right now. And by the time I have time in the middle of summer after all this stuff is done to play with it, it'll probably be even better.

Or there might even be a competing tool. So again, conscious [00:34:00] understanding of what it is you're putting your time into is key. 

Hala Taha: So you told us a story about how, what was that, 20 years ago when you created your ebook? How long ago was that? I. 

Pat Flynn: That was 2008. So I mean, we're talking 17 years ago. 

Hala Taha: Okay. So AI didn't exist so much. Technology that we know of now did not exist. How would you approach you launching that idea or similar idea today in the terms of the way that you would learn and what you would do? 

Pat Flynn: There were a lot of things that I was learning as I was going by doing research and figuring these things out.

I was watching videos and picking up resources about, well, what goes into study guide and how can I take this information on my website and format it so it looks like a study guide? And that was all done manually back then. Now you can do that in an instant. I use a tool called Poppy ai. I, I don't know if you've heard about this, but with Poppy ai, I can upload my book.

I can connect various websites, I [00:35:00] can even connect an ebook, a different ebook, and say, okay, hey Poppy, ai, take my information that I have on my website and I wanna format it in a study guide that is similar to format to this one that you have connected here. And I could just see that probably in two minutes.

And that way I can easily fast forward the results I want. It's still important to know what I'm trying to get out of this, right? Not just dabbling on ai, but this is a key thing I want to get out of this. And now AI is a tool that I can use now to fast forward that process. I also recommend using ai, and I use it every day as a creative partner in what I'm trying to do.

I use it as in role playing. I tell it sometimes if I'm coming out with a new product, for example, and any young entrepreneur should know how to do this, use AI and say, Hey, you are a potential customer who has these reservations about X, Y, and Z. Who is somebody who is in this part of life and whatever.

And you say, role play and be a customer who I'm trying to sell. Tell me why you aren't making a decision to buy. When [00:36:00] I pitch with you, oh my gosh, what an amazing opportunity because now I'm seeing and hearing the objections that my target audience might have before my target audience. Here's my pitch, and I can address those things.

I can get in front of them, right? So using AI as a creative partner has been amazing for me, especially in book writing, creating outlines, understanding goals. What exercises can I include in these books based on this chapter? And it'll just like spit that out for me really quickly. And then I can choose from like the best ones, I can take a piece of content that I write and say, okay, simplify this and cut it in half, but still.

Have the same results, and now I'm helping people save time with AI because my writing is pretty wordy, and then I can cut that in half and make it easier for people to consume and get to the result faster. Right? So that's an example of how I would use AI to write this book. And it'd probably be even more valuable now because again, information is not what's valuable.

It's getting to the result faster. So for my book listening or reading audience, just like I do with Lean learning, it's taking all this information and not putting it all in the book. It's [00:37:00] just what at a minimum could I include to get the person the same result and inspire them to take action. 

Hala Taha: I love that you call AI a creative partner.

I feel like that's how I use it too. I use it for everything, for researching my interviews, for writing webinars or presentations. I use it in every single activity. It doesn't do the whole thing for me. I have to use a lot of my own brain power, but I love the way that you phrased it as a creative partner.

So I have a lot of creator entrepreneurs that listen to this podcast, and when I think about you, you are like token creative entrepreneur, right? You're the definition of a creator, entrepreneur. So what do you think are some of the biggest roadblocks when it comes to learning that creator entrepreneurs have?

Pat Flynn: Again, trying to find out all the information upfront is often a struggle and being okay with learning as you go. I think I interviewed M-K-B-H-D, world renowned tech reviewer, 20 million subscribers now, and I interviewed him when he was around three or 4 million subs, but he's [00:38:00] continuing to skyrocket.

But I asked him when he first started out, what kept you going in those early days? And he said, well. I just wanted to learn about creation, and the only way I could do that was to just create, I wasn't expecting millions of viewers or, or anything. I just knew that I would get better every time I did it.

And he said his first 100 videos were for less than a hundred subscribers on YouTube. He got to a hundred videos before he even got a hundred subscribers. But all those videos stacked and enabled him to learn. And eventually, especially as a creator on these platforms, it can just take one to change everything.

And it did for M-K-B-H-D, and it did for me even recently. So for example, I created a shorts channel. I had never done a successful shorts channel. I dabbled with it before, but it was always random what I would create. But I decided that I was gonna create a series. I was gonna silo it from everything else I did, so I didn't link to it from anything else.

I just wanted to experiment with it. And so one thing that I did that was successful this time was I said, okay, I'm going to go daily on YouTube. I'm gonna repurpose that on TikTok and Instagram, which is pretty easy to do, and I just wanna do it for 60 days. A lot of [00:39:00] entrepreneurs worry about, okay, well am I gonna be doing this forever?

What if it doesn't work out and they start to question everything and then not put their all into it, or like try five different things and then nothing has full energy To actually find success, you have to commit and understand that it is through the doing that you will learn what works and what doesn't.

And so my goal was just to get to 60 days. If I got to 60 days, even if I got hardly any views, I would still call that a success because I gave it a chance. So I started to create this series called Should I Open It or Should I Keep It Sealed, where I open a pack of Pokemon every day and you know, sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad.

I got a fun little jingle in the beginning, created and for 30 days I went and halfway through the experiment, I looked at the views and I was getting maybe between 200 to 500 views every single day. In general, not doing very well. And normally I would've just given up if the views are what mattered, what mattered was just how I was learning.

And to get to Day 60. Now, although the views weren't really where I would've hoped, maybe they would be. Some things did happen [00:40:00] by day 30. Number one, I was able to get my editing time for these videos down from 45 minutes to 12 minutes so I could crank these out, and I was able to actually create an entire week's worth of these shorts in a single day within a couple hours.

So my production got faster. Again, making progress but not views because I wasn't counting the views, I was counting the uploads. The uploads are what I can control. I can't control always what happens with the algorithm, but I can control how I show up. So that's all I wanted to do. Day 35 comes around and one of those videos hits 750,000 views, just like phishing.

You keep casting out there. And finally I did something with that bait to get that large bass, and it happened on that day. And ever since then, all those channels have risen up. So I now have with this shorts channel, it's called Short Pocket Monster on YouTube. On YouTube alone, it has only been 305 days, hasn't even been a full year yet.

We were at 1.2 billion views. It's generating five figures a month just on the [00:41:00] shorts channel. 1.6 million subscribers, by the way, on TikTok 1.5 million followers, I started with 20,000 and it went to 1.5 million followers and over a million followers on Instagram just from these 12 minute per day videos that are coming out.

And what was interesting also, even by day 30, I was noticing some videos did a little bit better than others. And I started to analyze because the more you get your reps in, the more you're gonna start to see these patterns. Imagine just trying this once a week. That's not a lot of data to go from. So I found that certain videos did well.

Like for example, when I was in person at a store, and that was the beginning of the video where I was negotiating with somebody for whatever reason, people retained a little bit longer on those videos 'cause I had that data and videos where the pack of cards had a sticker on them with the price seemed to do a little bit better as well.

And that video that hit 750,000 views in a single day. Did incorporate that, but I also know that it wouldn't have happened if I had just given up because I wasn't getting views, I wasn't counting views, I was counting uploads. And that's [00:42:00] key. So the longer you wait to create, the longer you're delaying the learning process.

So that's a big struggle because again, it has to be perfect, right? The constraint of coming out every day forced me to not overproduce. I had only a little bit of time to do this thing, so I just figured out what could make this easy and not overthink it, right? The fact that we have access to all these tools and amazing cameras and all this stuff that's actually working against us because we feel like it has to be perfect and it's just delaying us actually creating.

And again, when you have that constraint and you have that force function of you gotta come out daily, well, you gotta get it done. And so you say no to more things to get it done, and then eventually you hit if you keep going. 

Hala Taha: this is bringing up the voluntary force function that you were mentioning.

The other thing is that you got started, right? You started doing stuff on Pokemon, which I'm sure you probably had some internal reservations, like everybody knows me [00:43:00] for a certain thing. I am in a certain space, and now I'm gonna talk about Pokemon, which is completely different than marketing and things like that, that you talk about, 

So I'm sure you had reservations about that. I saw this quote on Instagram for creators that said, everything you want is on the other side of cringe. And I think especially younger people, they're really afraid of what people are gonna say about them. And I remember when I started this podcast seven years ago, I had friends that were giving me the side eye.

I had friends asking me, why are you doing this? You already tried to be on radio. You already tried this. It didn't work out. I wasn't even 30 years old. You're too old to start a podcast. You're too old to be doing this. Right? So all this negativity from people that I knew who now are very supportive, but people come around once you've had some sort of success, right?

They see what you did and then suddenly are inspiring, right? First they're gonna ask you why you did it. Then they're gonna ask you how you did it. That's the world that we live in. So talk to us about, you've got this, just fucking do it. [00:44:00] I think it's in the book. Yeah. Or just get started. Tell us about that.

Pat Flynn: JFGS. Yeah, just fucking get started is what my mentor told me because I was writing things down too much. I was taking too many notes. And he's just like, just do it. I have a saying. And that's, you gotta be cringe before they binge. And it's absolutely the case. You gotta be a disaster before you become the master, whatever the phrase is, the lesson is still the same.

You have to just put yourself out there, and the fact that you have other people watching and trying to tear you down just means that you're actually taking the right actions, because that's always gonna happen. We just live in a world like a bucket of crabs, they say, and if you have a bucket of crabs, you won't ever have to worry about any of them crawling out, because as soon as one tries to get above and crawl out, the others take their claws and pull them back down.

That's the kind of world we live in. So that's why it's again, important to surround yourself with people who are going to lift you up. For sure. But it's hard. and it's the universe's way of testing to see whether or not you really want this or not. When I first got laid off and started doing my architecture entrepreneurial thing, I was getting similar side-eye.

I was getting people saying, why don't you get a real [00:45:00] job? That hurt because I did get a real job, and then I got kicked out. It was the recession and I didn't have any control over that, but I still felt betrayed. And I was like, no, if I'm gonna fail, it's gonna be, 'cause I failed on my own terms, not because of other things I couldn't control.

And that was really important to me and lifted me up as a creator. I think it was Alex Ver or somebody said, success is the best revenge. Let the dogs bark. I like to say, you know, you're walking by a fence and there's dogs there. It could be scary, but just let 'em bark. You're doing your own thing. You got stuff to take care of.

And as long as you keep casting that bait out there, you're gonna keep catching fish. Maybe not on every cast, but eventually you'll learn how to do it and great things are on the other end of that. For sure. 

Hala Taha: Have you heard of Miss xl? She's like huge on TikTok. 

Pat Flynn: Yeah, I saw her speak once. She was great.

Hala Taha: Yeah, she was telling me that she just started and literally didn't tell anyone. She just started putting out content under Miss xl, so not even under her real name. And then eventually when she already [00:46:00] started popping off, people were like, oh my gosh, is this you? Like, who is this? So I feel like that's also a cool strategy.

Just do it. Don't even tell anyone. Do it under a stage name if you have to. If you feel so embarrassed. 

Pat Flynn: I mean the shorts channel is just my hands, so it's not even my face. It is my voice. I'm very much me on it. I put dad jokes in there and other things, my thumbs, however, which are very close up, 'cause I'm picking up these cards, have now become world famous.

They're the same as Megan Fox's thumbs. They're like club thumbs. And initially I was scared of that. Like people were making fun of my thumbs. They were like, what's wrong with your thumbs? Or like, you know, doing the throw up emoji. And I was like, oh no. And then I was like, you know what? I'm gonna embrace this.

I think it was Sally Hog's head who also did the same thing. People were making fun of her when she was a kid for her last name, hogs Head. And now that's like the center of her brand. There's a logo with a hog's head on it and it's like, you can't mistake who that person is now. And she's world famous and writes books and it's a New York Times bestseller, et cetera.

So I did the same thing. I was like, you know what, there's a Pokemon that has like a funny shape called a diglett and I'm just gonna call my thumbs [00:47:00] diglett thumbs. So I started to own these things that people were making fun of me for. And now when I go to events, people take out the Diglett Pokemon card for me to sign.

People are even saying like, pat, you should tattoo diglett on your thumbs. It's all up to you how you write the story that's happening, right? People will say things on the external, but it's the internal, what you do, how you react. That then guides whether or not it goes this way and it becomes something you hate, that you cringe about or something that you can embrace that makes you unique.

And with the Pokemon thing on my long form channel, it's very much me and my face was on it, but I'm still me. If you watch the Pokemon stuff and if you watch my business stuff, I'm talking about different things, but I'm still me. I still show up in the same way with the same amount of passion. And it's funny now because I'm actually getting parents who followed me from SPI, they'll say things like, I heard your voice in my son's room and then I went in and he was watching you on the iPad, but you're doing Pokemon stuff now.

What is happening here? How did you get there? And so it's just amazing how these worlds, even though [00:48:00] they're completely separate. Do overlap, and I am now able to introduce a lot of my entrepreneurial brain and entrepreneurial curiosities into the world of Pokemon. It's now a five figure per month business from how I'm an affiliate, the top affiliate for a binder company now generating thousands of dollars per month by recommending products just like I do on an entrepreneurial side of things, but now for a different audience to, yes, the YouTube ad revenue, but even brand partnerships and collaborations.

I have had companies pay $25,000 for a 62nd ad on one of my Pokemon videos just for 60 seconds, 20 5K, and it's like I. Those negotiations. I know how to now understand what a company wants and what they're looking for. That all came from just experience that was messy as I was learning in the entrepreneurial space, and now I can come into this new space and provide value in a similar way.

Hala Taha: I had the opportunity to interview Gary VM person and he was talking about the TikTok ification of social media, and what you're saying right now really reminds me of what he was trying to share with everyone. That you can't really just [00:49:00] focus on one topic or the future of creator entrepreneurship is not focusing on one topic alone.

Because the algorithm's job is to basically share relevant content with people who wanna learn about that specific content. And in order to reach as wide as an audience as you want, you've gotta have multiple topics. Now, I feel like for people who are just starting, it's best to have one that you focus on and grow an audience.

But you've been doing SBI for so many years, you've already acquired a big audience. It only makes sense that now you've got this totally different new audience that you can monetize. And you're in the audience based business, and now you've got a business audience and a Pokemon audience are two totally different demographics that you can monetize in totally different ways, but in the same ways in terms of the approach in which you monetize, which is awesome.

It's so cool that you were able to basically build two audiences. That's like the peak of creator entrepreneurship. 

Pat Flynn: I've had a lot of friends ask me how I did [00:50:00] this, and I've shared it publicly and I have documented it, but because they feel stuck on the one thing that they've been doing forever and they feel like there's maybe a lost energy there and they can see and feel the excitement of a now 42-year-old man playing with cardboard, with cartoons on them.

I mean, it's at a point now where with a long form videos, I mean, there's a video that has 15 million views that has earned over a hundred thousand dollars. Just one video. Every Monday I go live and I just give away cards, like as a Mr. Beast kind of style sort of thing. And uh, we have six to 8,000 people watching me concurrently live every single Monday.

And I found out, and that it's not kids, it's kids who are watching because their parents were into Pokemon back in the day and they're now doing this as a shared experience together. They're in fact watching on a television during dinner or with popcorn on the couch. Yes, it's an audience based business, but all of this really is a tension based business.

It's. Showing up and being relevant and to the point of yes, sticking with one thing. Yes, the niche is Pokemon, but very common on this [00:51:00] channel are comments from people who say, I'm not even into Pokemon, but I love these videos because of the storytelling that happens within them. Because if you learn storytelling, and this is gonna be in addition to learning more quickly, and the things I talk about in lean learning as an important skill to have, storytelling is gonna be one of the most important skills to have, especially as AI is again, making just based information completely accessible to everybody.

It is the stories, how you wrap that information around in a relatable way that evokes some sort of emotion. I think it was Ryan Deis who said, if you can make people laugh, cry, get angry after reading, watching, or listening to your content, you're hitting them on another level that's more than just information that is internalization of that stuff, and that is key.

So what I'm finding, working on shorts though, because what I love about shorts and tiktoks and reels is. There's less worry about having to be perfect. It's more raw, it's shorter, so you have more room to experiment. And what I love about it is every day you can create a new experiment and [00:52:00] something just might work out, which is really amazing, right?

And there's less worry about it being perfect. So you have more opportunities to show up. And when you can show up about even a specific topic, but make it culturally relevant, that's where you find you have the widest net, right? For so long, the information based business was all about the riches are in the niches, and in a way that's still true, right?

If people don't know what you have to offer them and how it's specific to them, why would they purchase or why would they be a customer? Sure. But now with shorts, especially starting that conversation on a more cultural, wider net relevance, right? And then having a certain percentage of those people understand what you have now to them.

Like there's a lawyer. Gosh, I can't remember his name, but he was on a dire of A CEO lately, and he has a lot of these, how to communicate with people type of videos. He'll be just in his car and he is like, Hey, if somebody ever gets in your face about something, here are three things you can say to deflate the situation and make them feel bad [00:53:00] about being aggressive to you.

Right? He'll say things like that. He's a lawyer, he wants clients for his firm, that's his niche. But to have cultural relevance and say things that are general and useful for everybody, whether they need a lawyer or not, is how you get attention these days. And that's a little bit about this book. It has notes and flavors of entrepreneurship, but it's self-help and self-development.

And this is why it's not just about learning about business. It's about learning about learning, right? And hopefully as a result of being more culturally relevant, especially today with how noisy things are and how much information there is, it will hit more people and hopefully make an impact. And hopefully we'll see some nice results from that.

Hala Taha: So many gems in what you just said. I was just thinking like, oh, I'm just gonna go back and listen to this. I do a lot of webinars and I was thinking that is gonna be a clip in one of my webinars to teach people about, you know, how to get attention online. One more question about lean learning before we wrap things up, and it's something that you alluded to and [00:54:00] it's a quote from Tim Ferris, and I believe the quote was, if it was easy, what would it look like? So talk to us about how we can use that quote to be better learners. 

Pat Flynn: Yeah. This is what I call the keystone question, and whenever attempting to do something initially back in the day, I would always, again, overlearn and over complicate it. But Tim was able to bring me back down to earth. He and I are connected and we help each other.

I was able to help him start his podcast and he's been a mentor from afar, if you will, but at one point I was trying to work on something and he said, well, if this were easy, what would it look like? And that immediately. Help me understand what I was supposed to be doing, which was, in his words, try to find the minimum viable product or whatever it is.

But in general, we overcomplicate things or think things have to be more intensive than they have to be, or more exhaustive. But the truth is, if you just ask yourself that question as a filter for anything you're doing, Hey, I'm starting a podcast. Okay, cool. Well, if this were easy, what would it look like?

Well, it probably wouldn't be in a multimillion dollar studio. I probably wouldn't [00:55:00] necessarily, be able to get access to these A list celebrities, but I do know some people who would be valuable to have on the show might start with them and, okay, cool. Let's narrow it down so that you can just do, instead of just outlearn yourself and have zero confidence as you move forward.

So anything you do that you're attempting to do and learn for the first time, ask yourself that question. If this were easy, what would it look like? We ask that stuff, our question so often when building out the switch pod that invention. 'cause we're like, okay, there's so many parts to this manufacturing, inventing patents.

Even before we had the idea, we were like, okay, what does it take to get a patent? We're researching that and there's like patent lawyers and there's all this information. There's courses about patents and we're like, do we even need this right now? Because if this were easy, what would it look like? Well, we would just cut out a shape with cardboard and just hand it to a YouTuber and see if it was the right size.

So that's literally what we did. We cut out just shapes with cardboard and just played around with them. And then eventually we got to a size that made sense and we're like, okay, now we can actually make this thing make like, let's make a prototype. Okay. Well [00:56:00] prototypes, especially with metal, will need like a mold and it's gonna be handmade.

It's gonna cost so much money, but okay. Wait, wait, wait. If this were easy, what would it look like? We eventually asked around somebody who, again, had done this before. Oh, just 3D, print it. Well, how much is that gonna cost? Like 50 bucks. Okay, cool. So we hired a person to put it in CAD and get a 3D print of it, and then it actually did the thing that we thought it was gonna do where the legs of the tripod could fold together, become a handle.

And then we're like, okay, like how are we going to figure out if actually people would use this thing or not? Well, let's just go to a YouTube event. We went to Vid Summit in 2017 and said, okay, well, let's take our prototype and just literally hand it to people and record their thoughts. That way we know where to go from here.

Again, if this were easy, what would it look like? And eventually, like I said, in 2019, we launched it to nearly half a million dollars in 60 days because again, if this were easy, what would it look like? We didn't hire a PR firm, which is again, what most people think you need to do with these kinds of things, especially if you're not experienced.

We just [00:57:00] had YouTubers who loved it when we shared it with them. We just signed them up to an affiliate program to get paid if they were to promote it. And we had everybody from Peter McKinnon promoted it for us. He helped us get to our a hundred thousand dollars funding goal in 11 hours because somebody with some influence who already had an audience liked it and shared it.

Hala Taha: I love that filter. If it was easy, what would it look like? It's like almost every decision in your entrepreneurship journey you could put through that filter. 

Pat Flynn: A thousand percent. 

Hala Taha: Okay. One more actionable thing from the book. We were talking about just getting started, getting momentum, especially when things aren't moving as fast as you'd like.

You talk about Power of 10. 

Pat Flynn: My favorite chapter are about power 10. So I used to row at Cal when I was there in a team crew is what they called it. And so I was in a boat with eight people and there's a ninth person who's usually the smallest person on the team who yells the commands to the rowers, right?

And if you've ever watched one of these races, it's incredible because it's a lot of mind games going on. And you might think it's just like, oh, [00:58:00] well whoever row the hardest for the longest. And that's actually not the key. 'cause you need to set a pace and you need to see where the other boats are next to you, right?

So when you're in a boat racing, the way to get ahead is to not just tell people on the boat to row harder. You have to contain a heightened amount of pressure and strength. For a period of time, and that's called the power 10. So a rower or coxswain is they're called the person running the commands on the boat will say, okay, you're rowing and you're at pace.

You notice the other boat's getting ahead of you. You initiate what's called the power 10. They'll say, alright, rowers. Here we go, three stroke, two stroke, one stroke, go power 10. And for 10 strokes and 10 strokes alone. Every person on that boat gives their best, most powerful strokes just for 10. And you notice those boats just start to fly ahead of the other boats next to them.

So even though they're going, you can go faster by doing a Power 10, and it's important that it's just. 10, because if it was a power 100, [00:59:00] you'd exhaust yourself and you'd die if you were rowing. Or the opposite case is if you just went at the pace you were going, you'd be last place and be left behind. So the way you move faster in life, or what it is that you're learning is to find these moments of time where you can give it a little bit more energy and put more power into it for a contained period of time, not forever or else you're gonna experience burnout like most people do.

Hala Taha: Give us a business example, 

Pat Flynn: like a hackathon. 

Hala Taha: 

Pat Flynn: 24 hours, we're gonna code something and you're gonna stay up with pizza and Red Bull for 24 hours, at least 24 hours. Team, we're gonna create something amazing. That's an example of a power tent As a podcaster, I've done this few times where I'm on my pace, one interview per week for years, but then I decided to insert a power ten one week, where every day for one week.

Was the podcast episode seven days a week, and I promoted that it was more energy required, more time and power and team and all this kind of stuff to make it done. But it was only seven days, and so it was contained. But what did that do? It gave us a lot more time to promote it and get people excited about this Power Week that we had, or Marketing [01:00:00] Week.

It had a lot more downloads during that week than we normally have. As a result, our podcast started to gain in the rankings because rankings are based on velocity and how much happens in a shorter period of time. So we saw some major results and even more customers as a result of putting in our version of a Power 10.

This is something that we can all do no matter what it is that we're doing. A lot of authors do this where you're writing a book, but you're just like, okay, I just need to get an Airbnb for a week and just grind this out. And they'll do that and they'll come back and they'll be that much more ahead because they've had that contained period of time to focus on it.

So it is such a powerful thing that I do in everything that I'm trying to master, that it has accounted probably for the biggest jumps in my learnings for sure. 

Hala Taha: While we're sticking on teams, I do the same thing with my team. Let's say we have a webinar and signups or I'm like, okay, let's just have a workshop where we're all gonna just create content and just bang it out and send a thousand dms in this hour, or whatever it is, right?

So I do stuff like that all the time. So I love that. I have a word around it. Power 10. But in terms of [01:01:00] lean learning, what are some things that, you know, a lot of my listeners have companies, they've got teams. How can they implement this with their teams? Or what is the best way to get started? You think?

Pat Flynn: The most powerful thing to do is to brainstorm together and have a power 10 moment to brainstorm. That's where I find a lot of companies who are in motion, kind of in that rhythm or cadence, they're not innovating because they have their task list and things they're supposed to do, but then eventually you'll get left behind if you don't have room to innovate.

Innovation is key, but uncontrolled innovation is what we were worried about in the beginning, right? Like out of control learning. That's chaos. So. What I would recommend for a company, small team, or big teams, have the executive team, if it's maybe a bigger team. I know a few companies who I advise who do this too.

Every quarter they'll have a single day reserved for brainstorming to be able to be curious together, to expand their thoughts on things that maybe were put aside, Things are still happening, those are contained. But this is a moment in time for us to now power [01:02:00] 10 focus on, okay, well where do we wanna go from here?

What innovative ideas do we have in this moment? No bad ideas, but we're gonna contain it within this six hour period. And let's talk. Let's jam. Let's get excited about this. Let's make it a day. And I've been in those days for some of these companies, and it's just like magic to see. It's almost like a writer's room, right?

If you imagine writers for a sitcom, they're in a room and they're just eating off of each other with those ideas. That wouldn't happen if they were on their own. And then these become things that now the executive team has to go, okay, out of all these things that we have now on the table, what's the one thing we wanna focus on?

And let's put a date to it. That's how you can start to see movement on some of these things, again, in a controlled way where it's not overlearning, but you are finding moments of time to take advantage of those creative efforts from not just yourself and not even just so yourself and some of your other executives, but maybe even other team members who don't normally get to speak up.

This is the sort of town hall in the company that you could use to make people feel like they're a part of the process as well. And so that way when you actually implement [01:03:00] something and say, all right, everybody, here's what we're gonna focus on, they're like, yeah, I remember where that idea came from. We came up with that together.

Right? And so if you can lead in that way, not because you're just saying all the things, but because you're getting everybody involved, it can mean a lot more support for that thing if you go down that direction. And even more people to poke holes in it too, to make sure those holes are plugged before things get released or get put out there.

So teams are are really key, but learning how to lead those teams again, which there are a lot of great books out there around that. The Seven Dysfunctions of a team, I think is the one I would recommend it with. 

Hala Taha: Patrick Lynch. Yep. 

Pat Flynn: Yep. 

Hala Taha: I had him on too. Patrick Lencioni. He's great. 

Pat Flynn: Yeah, he's, great.

Pick that one book up and then start to live it and learn as you go. Because again, I remember when I was learning how to speak, I wanted to read every book on public speaking 'cause I was so nervous. But if I was reading all of it, I'd never have time to practice and rehearse and get better. 

Hala Taha: So if you had to say one sentence into the ear of an overwhelmed creator or entrepreneur, what would it be?

Pat Flynn: Stop learning. You have everything you [01:04:00] need to know for what your next steps are. Right now, you probably have been learning because you've been scared of that thing that you know you need to do. Do it. That's it. 

Hala Taha: Okay. I, I'm gonna ask you two questions that I end my show with. What is one actionable thing that our young and profits can do today to become more profitable tomorrow?

Pat Flynn: if you already have customers, reach out to your existing customers and see what they need help with Next. Your best customer is often your existing customer, and if you can create that. Chain of products from the start to what the next one might be.

That's maybe where your focus can be because they will help prove that that is in fact what it is that you need to create next. And you'll already have customers baked in for that. And then be able to get new customers in who might prefer product two over product one and be able to expand that way. So what does that mean?

It means really for anybody, whether you already have customers or not, what is the biggest problems that you can solve for your audience right now? Find out what that is. Have a single conversation with one person in your audience and help 'em get that one result. And especially for those of you who haven't found success yet, that [01:05:00] is the key to success.

One person in a community who you want to serve, what is one problem that they have? Get them that one result. 1, 1, 1. Because when you do that, not only will you have experience finding those people, communicating with them, helping them through a process which is ultimately very valuable to you, not only will you have that testimonial, you'll have now unlocked in your brain.

You can actually do this because very common is you'll talk yourself out of it by saying, well, I don't know if this is gonna work, or I don't know if this is gonna work for this person. Who am I right? That imposter syndrome? Who am I to serve these people? Well serve them. Get one person. If you can't find one, then you can't find a thousand.

So go find one first and unlock that truth that you can do this so that you'll never doubt yourself ever again. 

Hala Taha: And what would you say your secret to profiting in life is? This can go beyond financial. 

Pat Flynn: I would not be where I am today if it wasn't for the amazing people that I've been lucky enough to surround myself with.

Some of that has been luck for sure. Some of that has been purposeful. Getting myself into rooms and [01:06:00] situations and being able to provide value to different communities. To be in those rooms with people who have important relationships and you never know, the next person you meet could be absolutely life changing.

I mean, halal you and I wouldn't have met if it wasn't through some of our circles and our podcasting friends, and this opportunity to be able to come on and promote my book today and serve your audience at the same time. I'm just so honored about it. And it wouldn't have happened if I didn't get outta my comfort zone 'cause I am an introvert to meet people and to try to serve others.

Try to see how you can leave the rooms you join. Better than when you got there. That's how you can have people wanna reach back out to you you have something. I've had a lot of people who I've helped in the past who have heard that I've had this book coming out, who on their own account have reached out and said, Hey Pat, you've helped me out so much, how can I help you with this book launch?

And you had done just that as well. Thank you so, so much. And we're here to support each other. And maybe the last thing I'll say is, if you approach this world in the way that most people do, you're going to lose, which is like, we're at a poker table where Halah, if you [01:07:00] win, that means I'm losing. Or if I win, that means you're losing.

We treat the world like it's a poker table and it's not. It's abundant. There are ways for all of us to win together. And if you and everybody else thought that way, imagine how much more beautiful this world would be. And although not everybody's gonna think that way, find your own pocket of people in this world who do believe that.

And You can't lose. 

Hala Taha: Beautifully said. What a great way to end the show. Pat, you've done an amazing job. I feel like you gave us so much actionable advice, which we love on young and profiting podcasts. Where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do? 

Pat Flynn: Of course, lean learning available on Amazon or wherever books are sold. Lean learning how to achieve more by learning less, and of course at Pat Flynn on most social media channels. And if you are curious about Pokemon, check out Deepp Pocket monster on YouTube. You'll see the kinds of stories that we tell and how we're able to get millions of views, even from people who don't even care about Pokemon.

And uh, hopefully get some inspiration from that. But don't, learn too much. 

 Thanks for joining us on the show. I'll make sure all those links are in the show notes.Thank you. You're amazing. [01:08:00] 

Hala Taha: What an incredible conversation with Pat Flynn. He completely flipped the script on everything we thought we knew about learning and productivity. If there's one truth to take away from today, it's this action without information is chaos, but information without action is a waste. The key to unlocking our full potential lies in finding the perfect balance between the two.

Too many of us are stuck in a never ending loop of learning, consuming every course, podcast masterclass that we can find, thinking that more knowledge will lead to more success. But Pat made it crystal clear. More information isn't the answer. Intentional action is first. We've gotta stop being over learners and start practicing what Pat was calling.

Selective curiosity. You don't need to know everything. You just need to know what matters. Now, focus on just in-time learning that serves your immediate goals and forget the rest. The real skill isn't knowing what to absorb. It's [01:09:00] knowing what to ignore. Second, lean into Pat's bold mantra. JFGS just fucking get started.

As he said, the number one thing wasting your time is overthinking, overlearning, and asking too many questions before you actually try. You don't need more prep, you need more action. The learning happens in the doing, not the waiting. And finally, set yourself up with momentum. With voluntary force functions, those self-imposed constraints that force you to perform.

Use techniques like the power tend to create short bursts of focus and energy, because sometimes the best way to break through analysis paralysis is to leave yourself no other option but to move. And if you're ever stuck in decision paralysis, pat shared a powerful question to ask yourself. If this were easy, what would it look like?

That's one line that can cut through the clutter, simplify your next step and bring you back to clarity. If you're ready to stop overthinking and start overachieving, I highly recommend to grabbing a copy of Pat's new book, [01:10:00] lean Learning. It's not just a book, it's a call to action. Thanks for listening to this episode of Young and Profiting podcast.

If you listen, learned and profited from this conversation with the amazing Pat Flynn, then please share this with somebody who's stuck in learning mode and needs that push to take action. And if you enjoyed the show and picked up something valuable, I'd be so grateful if you left us a five star review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen to the show, dear Support helps us reach more people.

If you wanna watch this episode, we're on YouTube. Head to YouTube, subscribe to our channel, young and Profiting, and you can also find me on Instagram at YAP with Hala or LinkedIn. Just search for my name. It's Hala Taha. Of course, I gotta thank my incredible production team. I couldn't do this without you.

This is your host, Hala Taha, AKA, the podcast Princess signing off. [01:11:00]