by: AskPat 503 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: What's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 503 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week.
Okay! Here's today's question from Leonardo.
Leonardo: Hey Pat! My name is Leo. I'm from Rio, Brazil. I want to ask you about work/life balance. What do you think about that and do you think you need to work all day, all night, to accomplish things in the early stages of business? What about your family, your friends, and stuff like that? Thank you man! You're awesome!
Pat Flynn: Hey Leonardo! Thank you so much for this question. I think this is very relevant because I know there's a lot of people who are just starting out. Or who are in the first year, for example, of their business. A lot of times there's this notion that you have to work night and day, on your business. You have to put in that time upfront, to reap the benefits later and that's absolutely what you have to do. You can't just, I'll go sleep and tomorrow wake up with a ton of money in your bank account without doing the work. However, do you have to spend all your waking hours working? No! Absolutely not! You will have to put in a lot of time and effort upfront.
I feel like there is a smart approach to it. This is where the smart in Smart Passive Income comes from. Is it's not just work, because you could work on something and get nowhere. Right? So, you have to figure out what it is that you should be doing and working and focusing on that next thing before you actually, you know, the thing that's actually gonna help you.
A lot of people, too many people—I know I use to do this even when I was working a 9-to-5 job. I would work on things, just to stay busy. I would work on things and feel like I was getting things done or feel like I was making process or progress, but not making any progress at all.
That's why I feel like you need to take a little bit of time upfront to decide what it is that you're gonna do. How you're gonna do it and actually validate those ideas that you have and move forward from there, instead of just working to stay busy. Hustling—you know this word hustle gets thrown around a lot. I know Gary Vaynerchuck talks about it a lot. He hustles, you know, but he's hustling because he knows what to do. He's putting full effort into those things, where a lot of people hustle in the struggle.
You know, you're gonna have to struggle. You're gonna have to make mistakes at the beginning, but as long as you're smart with your time and you're actually doing things that you know are making you move forward no matter how incremental they are. You're doing the right thing and you can put in as many hours as you want. I feel like the more hours you put in, obviously the quicker you'll go. But you don't have to work day and night. You don't have to starve yourself. You don't have to spend time away from your family. I think there are some sacrifices that we can all make, to find a little bit more time in our day. Whether that's sleep, or a few minutes here and there throughout the day based on things that you do that can add up to a whole hour.
Really, to get started, you just need an hour or two a day, I feel. There's a lot of different ways you can do that. I talked about this strategy before. This is called the pay yourself strategy. In the finance world you can pay yourself first, to help build a nest take-up because instead of paying your bills first, you pay yourself first. You put that money in your paycheck, or from your paycheck into an account somewhere and you pay yourself first before you spend that money elsewhere. You can do the same thing with your time. Where you wake up in the morning and you're spending that time on you, on your own personal development, on your own business before you share that time and energy and effort into other people's lives because usually we wake up. This goes along with Hal Elrod in The Miracle Morning.
We usually wake up for somebody else. We usually wake up because of an alarm that we set based off of something that we have to do for somebody else. Right? Whether its get up to bring the kids to school, or get up to go to work or whatnot. If you wake up a little bit earlier, even an hour earlier, those hours add up. When you wake up knowing that that's your hour to have your time to whatever it is you want to do, and hopefully focus on that thing you know is gonna help you move forward, its gonna add up over time. It is gonna be incredibly powerful for you, to help you get started and actually keep moving forward, and actually motivate you to wake up everyday. This is as opposed to spending all day working for somebody else or putting in a ton of time and energy into something else and then trying to fit in your business at the end of the day. It's just—you've drained yourself.
I can't remember where I heard this from, but I believe we have this tank in our brain, in our energy that is all dedicated to decision making and it's limited throughout the day. You kind of get it back when you sleep. If you use that up during the day its going to be difficult for you to make any smart decisions after that's all depleted. We usually expend a lot of that energy in that tank in our daily lives, throughout work or with our family. Now if you start the day with a full tank for you, its going to be much better. That's where I would start.
So do you have to spend every waking hour? Do you have to neglect your family? Do you have to starve yourself in order to succeed? No. Absolutely not. I think that's not the way you want to approach it. What you want to approach it is, is there any extra time I could get? As Gary Vaynerchuck once said, “Stop watching Lost.” Now Lost was a show that everybody was addicted to. People were spending more time on that than their businesses. Well, same idea, there's a lot of things that we could probably sacrifice that aren't necessary in our lives. This is all about essentialism. It's, what is your top priority? If you find that your business is not your top priority, you're not gonna make those sacrifices. So you have to make it a priority and you have to find time and block time out to be able to spend time on it and make sure you're spending time on the right things too.
I want to mention my book, again, WillItFlyBook.com. It's going to help you understand that next thing your working on. Whether that is something that you should be spending time on or not. So again, you can check that out at WillItFlyBook.com. Coming up in the next month or so here on SPI and I look forward to sharing that with you.
Leonardo thank you so much for the question today. I hope it answers your question. I look forward to sending you an AskPat t-shirt, all the way to Brazil, for you. You'll hear from my assistant in the next couple weeks so we can give you that.
For everybody else out there, if you have a question you'd like to potentially feature here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page.
Thank you so much! I appreciate you!
Thank you so much! I appreciate you! Here's a quote to finish off the day by John Egan, he said, “The absolute fundamental aim, is to make money out of satisfying customers.” That's what you gotta do. Your earnings are a bi-product of how well you serve your audience.
Cheers! Take care, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.
