SPI 866: How to Get Better at Anything, Faster

SPI 866: How to Get Better at Anything, Faster

Pat Flynn: I have a confession to make, and this may not sound great upfront, but I’m gonna tell you why this is everything. Tomorrow I’ll be speaking at Social Media Marketing World, and I think it’s in its 10th or 11th or 12th year. I’m not exactly sure, but all I know is I’ve been there every single year.

And I’ve been on the keynote stage twice. I have run multiple workshops. And every time I’ve had these amazing slides, one of my superpowers actually is creating slides that really tie into the talk that I’m giving, and sometimes very memorable slides, especially when it comes to frameworks and things like that. But I have a confession to make.

Like I said earlier, I don’t have my slides ready. I don’t have my slides ready. In fact, I haven’t even gotten started yet. It is Monday, March 31st. I speak on April 1st, and no, I’m not gonna go up on stage and go, ah, April Fools, I don’t have my slides. I’m not prepared. No, I’m completely prepared because the truth is I will not be using slides at all.

And this will be the first time that I will have never used slides on a presentation like this. I was always so worried and so obsessed with these slides and how they look that I started to notice that they started to take away from me actually thinking about how can I best engage with the audience?

And so I’m gonna practice something that I speak heavily about in my upcoming book, Lean Learning. In last week’s episode, I gave you a little reading from Lean Learning, so you can go and listen to that one if you haven’t already, that’s 865.

Today, however, I’m gonna be talking about something called voluntary force functions, and my very first experience with a voluntary force function was 15 years ago. About 15 years ago, is actually 14 years ago, but a very long time, and it was my first time on a stage.

So, yes, we’re coming full circle here, and you might’ve heard my story about speaking on stage for the first time, but I’ll retell it really quickly here. And I have to thank Philip Taylor, the founder of FinCon, because that was the first event that I ever spoke at at its inaugural event in Schaumburg, Illinois, in 2011.

And at this point, I had just started my blog just a few years back. I was just getting my wheels going with my podcast. My podcast started one year prior and I had never done any public speaking, and I was deathly afraid of it, and I had opportunities, but I said no because of that timidness, because I was scared of it.

I was scared of what people would say. I was scared of what people would think. I didn’t think I’d do a good job. I liked blogging. Because I could write ahead of time and if I made mistakes, I can just correct those. But, oh my gosh, live on a stage, like what am I gonna do? If I make a mistake? People are gonna throw tomatoes at me.

I don’t even know where they get these tomatoes from, but that’s what I thought. And so I avoided it at all costs. That is until Philip or PT as I call him, he reached out to me and he said, pat, I have this event. I’d love to have you speak at the very first one. I’d love for you to do a breakout session.

And as much as I wanted to say no, I wanted to help a friend out. And so I had this thing on my calendar in the next six months. That I saw that I needed to work toward, and that was a voluntary force function. I volunteered to put myself in a situation of heightened pressure. To force myself to do something that I knew I needed to do and to actually do that work.

And immediately I started brainstorming and coming up with a presentation. It was a presentation about standing out of the crowd. I was doing a good job in my space, in the world of, no, not MySpace, like the platform, I got a make sure I make that clear. ‘Cause I Yes was on MySpace, but I wasn’t teaching MySpace.

Man, I’m old. Does anybody remember MySpace? Oh my gosh. The glitter and the marquees and the top five friends. And how much drama was caused when you had friends replace other friends? It was just a whole thing. I. Now that really hasn’t changed. Only the technology has. Anyway, going back to the entrepreneurial space, I was becoming known very rapidly for certain things.

I had created an income report that people were reading. I was getting interviewed on a lot of podcasts and being positioned as somebody who was an expert in the business space. I had this case study in my architecture business that I could share, and that. Put me in a place of authority. I talked about the importance of authority building and using things like your own case studies to build that authority.

A number of episodes back in case you wanna listen to it. It’s one of my favorites of this year so far, and that is 861, how to make people see you as an authority, even if you’re not famous yet. So go and listen to that one anyway. PT reached out, knew I had some goods to give, so I was ready to give them, and I had six months until the summer of 2011 to prepare for this talk, and it got me to do things right, knowing this thing was on the calendar, this deadline, this experience that I was going to have put me in a position to do things and prepare like I had never done before, and it forced me to get up on stage and learn how to do that. It got me in front of the right resources at the right time. This is just in time learning, right? Not just in case learning, but just in time learning. I read Stand and Deliver by Dale Carnegie.

I watched a lot of TED Talks and I developed my own presentation. Now, two weeks before the event, PT reaches out, he said, pat, you’re ready, right? And I said, I think so. And he said, well, I have a favor to ask. I said, oh gosh, what is it? And he said his closing keynote dropped out of the event and he no longer had anybody to close the show.

And he had asked me to close the show, and he said it was totally up to me. If I didn’t feel comfortable doing it, I didn’t have to say yes. But I did say yes, and it was because I knew I’d be even more uncomfortable doing it. This was a huge opportunity, right on paper. I get to keynote in front of a live audience and that on my resume as a future, hopefully public speaker, somebody who wanted to do this more and get better at it.

As nervous as I was, I knew that this would be a great opportunity, and in retrospect, it was absolutely the right move. But I remember as soon as I hung up on the phone with PT, after he’d asked me. I had broken out in a sweat, like literal pit stains kind of sweat, and my wife even saw that I was looking kind of nauseous later that day as well.

But again, I. A voluntary force function. I volunteered myself to put myself in a position of heightened pressure to be able to do what I needed to do to deliver. And in the book I talk about the importance of putting yourself in these situations, right? A semi heightened sense of danger, if you will. Not something that’s actually dangerous, you know, physically something that could harm you, but something that creates a little pressure, and I think we all know we need a little bit of pressure. There’s that cliche phrase, right, like diamonds are formed under pressure and when we put ourselves in a little bit of pressure. Oftentimes we do deliver, especially when you tie in the why behind it, right? If you just put yourself in a situation that’s kind of dangerous, just because to try to get you to do something that you’re really not even that into, well then you’re not gonna take the action required.

But when something’s really important to you and when there’s something at stake, and in this case when there is an audience that’s gonna be there, and yes there is a world where I performed so poorly that it damages my reputation. I knew I wouldn’t do that, but I also was worried about that. But it did again, force me to take action and do the right research to deliver something that I thought was pretty decent, and based on the line that formed after the presentation, based on the comments that I got, I got a lot of comments of people who were surprised that that was my first live event that I’d ever spoken at. I even had a person reach out to me a couple weeks later who was an event coordinator at that event, not the event coordinator, but they worked at an event and they had ties to an event coordinator that then got me on that stage later on, which got me on another stage, which got me on another stage, and I started to get really good at public speaking, and for anybody who’s ever seen me speak live, you might know that I try to bring world class performance to the people on stage.

So let’s go back to today. I don’t have my slides. They are not ready, nor will they ever be ready because I am going to be. Volunteering to do the entire presentation without slides.

Everybody else uses slides, so I’m not, I’m gonna try something a little different now. What is this helping me do other than make me a little nervous? Because I have often relied on the slides to help point me in the right direction to help guide me through the presentation to help remind me of certain things I should say.

And to me, that is what the benefit of a slide presentation is. It’s not to put a whole bunch of words where you don’t even need to be on the stage. Your audience could just read the bullet points. No, that’s death by PowerPoint. That’s why they’re called bullet points. No, it’s little markers to help you and little markers to help amplify the messages that you’re giving.

But there are other ways to do that too, and I don’t think I’ll be spoiling this for anybody because by the time you listen to this, it’ll be about a month after that event. And I hope Mike isn’t listening to this. Mike is the founder of Social Media Marketing World and a great friend of mine. He and I have been in a mastermind group for over a decade together with so many other amazing people.

Cliff Ravens Craft, or Ray Edwards, Mark Mason, Leslie Samuel. It’s just a, an amazing group of gentlemen and I’m so proud of all of them. And Mike, don’t be mad at me. I didn’t have my slides. Not because I didn’t care about your event, but actually because I cared a little bit more, and I want to grow as well.

I want to grow as a storyteller. I want to grow as somebody who could engage with an audience, a live audience, without slides. Because here’s the thing. If I can do that, then the slides won’t a feel like so much pressure like they often do every time I do a presentation like this. B will always be able to tell myself I have proof that I don’t even need the slides at all.

Right, this is a confidence booster. It’s similar to what I share, the 1 1 1 strategy. If you’ve heard me talk about that before, this is a perfect strategy for anybody who’s trying to get outta their own way when it comes to starting a business because you’re worried that what you’re doing is, is not qualified or not good enough for the people that you’re serving or that you’re not qualified. You know the imposter syndrome and the 1 1 1 strategy is finding one person, finding one problem that that one person has and helping them solve that one problem. And when you do that, it unlocks in your brain this confidence, this, yes, I can do this.

It becomes literal proof that all those negative things that you were saying about this not working or that you can’t do it, those all go away. So I’m going to take a little bit of a risk, put myself in a slightly heightened sense of danger, and no, I’m not going to be physically injured at any moment, hopefully, unless I fall off the stage. Knock on wood, that would be terrible.

But I will be putting myself in a situation where it’s me and a microphone, and nothing on the projectors, nothing on the slides, and I am so excited about this as well. This is going to allow me to move around the room a little bit more and not have to always look back at the slides ’cause sometimes these rooms don’t have confidence monitors. I mean, there’s so many benefits to this. Think about this, and I want you to also, while you’re thinking about this, consider what is your version of what I’m doing here. You know, I’m trying to lead by example and not just talk the talk like I am talking about in the book, but show you like I’m doing these things even as we speak, to become a much better blank, much better speaker, much better YouTuber, much better writer.

These are all things I’m doing to get better, faster. And so think about what is a voluntary force function that you could do. Maybe you’re trying to learn a new language, for example. Okay, well, Duolingo is great. You can go hundreds of days on your streak and yay, you’ve gotten that. Yay. But can you hold a conversation?

How might you best be able to learn how to hold a conversation with somebody? Well schedule a conversation with somebody in that language a month from now. And you are going to go to places that you’d never gone before. When it comes to the way you learn, because you’re learning now about things that matter, how do you start?

What are the common questions that people ask themselves or ask you if you were having a conversation? And how might you learn those things? And not the millions of words that you could learn, but just the most important few to engage in a conversation. You see what I mean? It really narrows down your focus on what actually matters.

So when it comes to this presentation that I’m giving, what actually matters? Attention. How can I capture and hold the attention of this audience Who’s gonna be sitting? This is a breakout session, so if it were a keynote presentation, I would still probably have slides because I wanna fill out the room.

I don’t wanna just have two large TV screens on either side of the stage, just like never doing anything. I think that is an amazing tool. I’m not saying that slides are bad. Yes, some slides can be terrible, but on a keynote stage like that, I think it would behoove you to utilize those tools in your performance and your choreography.

But when it comes to a breakout session in a much smaller room where you’re more intimately closer to your audience, I think there’s a lot of amazing ways that you can better engage with that audience. And I’m gonna do tactics like get the audience involved. Do I know exactly what I’m gonna say? No, I know how I’m gonna start.

And that’s really important, and I think that’s the next thing when it comes to a lot of this kind of stuff in lean learning, is just what is it that you need to do to get going? Because I’ve often found once you get going, once you hit record, after you’ve built that little outline, things just start to flow.

Just like this episode here, have just a very small outline, and I wanted to tell a story about why I don’t have my slides and why that’s the case, and no, I’m not, again, creating this episode to just tell myself why it’s okay to not have slides. Again, this is a purposeful decision that is putting me in a pressured situation because there is something at stake here. I could perform poorly. It would not look great for Mike, and I care about Mike and his event, and it would put him in a bad position. Obviously, you know, with people at this event who are marketers who have personal brands and social profiles, this stuff could spread if I do pretty poorly and yeah, that’s true. But again, think about it realistically, as long as I do the work and I know what I’m going to talk about, not necessarily know what I’m going to say. There’s a big distinction there. What am I gonna talk about? But what am I gonna say? Those are two different things. I am very confident that I’ll be able to capture and hold attention for the 30 to 45 minutes that I need to, that I’ll be able to tell story, that I’ll be able to run through this framework I wanna share. Also engage with the audience and get them participating and hopefully thinking a little bit more deeply about building a personal brand, which is what my talk is about.

Now the structure of my talk is very much based on a framework, which definitely helps with the memorization of where I want to go and what I wanna say, this is the brand-in-a-hand framework. If you don’t remember this, this was one of the first episodes of the year, giving you this framework about building a personal brand.

If you look at your hand and you start with your pinky finger, you start with the people. These are the people that you’re serving and where they are, and also who else is in that space serving those same people. Building out your market map. That’s what the pinky represents. The ring finger, right? Ring finger, like where you put your ring when you get married, this is the dreams. This is the pursuits of the target audience, right? So you have your people, your pursuits, so that we’re going all five Ps here. Your pursuits are the dreams, hopes, aspirations, desires, goals of that particular audience, and the words that they use to describe them, how they talk about them, who they look up to and what they’re trying to achieve.

The middle finger is the middle finger for a very specific reason. Those are the problems. That that target audience goes through. Those people, these are the obstacles that are in their way. This is what they say F you two. They hold up that middle finger. Two, because they’re not able to get to those goals and what they’re pursuing because of the middle finger and all the things that are in the way.

And of course, it’s the largest finger that we have on our hands. So this is the largest problem. That’s the middle finger. The pointer finger is where you point people to your platform. This is where you set up shop one platform that you call home, that you show up to and build that authority on authority, like we’ve talked about before.

It requires the three C’s. Clarity, confidence, and showing up consistently. And when you do that, you start to build some authority and you can use other C’s to help you build authority, right? It might be the seven Cs or something. I dunno. We, we will figure it out. But firstly, case studies. Case studies, the contrarian view.

Is another way to build authority, right? So again, you could see how it actually might be seven Cs. I might have to come up with a few more to make it seven, just to kind of like, oh, we’re sailing on the seven Cs. I don’t know. The dad jokes come out. And that’s the fun thing about doing it this way versus the opposite extreme, which would be literally scripting everything I’m gonna say and then having slides with every word that I’m gonna say on it, right?

That would be stupid. So I’m gonna go. How do they say it? I’m gonna raw dog. I’m gonna raw dog. This presentation, I saw a TikTok the other day about somebody who quote unquote raw dogged Disneyland, which means they went to Disneyland, they didn’t ride any rides, they didn’t bring any friends or family.

They just went in and walked around and it was just them and their thoughts the whole time. And then there was this trend, which was so stupid, that I saw on social recently before that where you raw dog during a flight and that means. You’re just sitting there in the plane, you’re not listening to anything, watching anything.

You don’t have any devices out. You don’t look at the screen, the entertainment screen in front of you. You’re literally just sitting there with your thoughts, and that’s quote unquote raw dogging. Now, I’m not gonna raw dog the presentation and just sit there on stage and do nothing, but I am going to go without slides.

There’s another important reason why I’m doing this because I think it represents what I’m trying to make as far as a point here. By the way, let me finish the hand really quick. Pinky people. Ring finger pursuits, middle finger problems, pointer finger, platform thumb. After you put all those four things together, you make a fist, what do you have left over?

Your thumbs up That is your product, what you could serve that audience with, now that you know everything you need to know about them, if you’ve run through building a sales page before, it’s kind of the same thing. Who is it that you’re serving? What do they actually want? What’s holding them back?

What’s the solution? What do you say? How do you provide that for them? And here’s the price point, you know, more piece. The price point. Alright, going back to another thing I wanna sort of represent by not doing slides. There’s a lot of people who are building personal brands. Often think that it’s about the logo and the website and what it looks like and getting things perfect on your Instagram and all that kind of stuff.

And although that stuff is important, it’s not where you start. And so the idea here being in this 30 minute time period, can I teach, can I move people? Can I engage, can I bring some emotion into this without slides to show that you don’t need the visuals to still build a brand because what is a brand really, it’s what people think about you.

It’s what people say and share when you are not there. It’s how people describe what it is that you do for them. And that is what really matters. And so again, this demonstration of not using slides, I think a lot of you might just think, I’m just joshing and I’m just like, I, I don’t have time to make slides.

No, I do. I in fact have these slides available already for this talk. I’ve run this presentation on YouTube before already, but I think it’s gonna make more of an impact if I can. Move around the room and talk and tell a few stories. I do have in my mind the framework of the presentation, right? The brand in hand, and then lead into the authority building stuff that I talked about in 861 to kind of support that because that’s how you stand out.

What makes that a thing. And then I’m going to, gosh, the one thing that I might provide slides for, I mean maybe it might make sense to bring some examples of this after I share the framework. Because all along the way, I’m gonna have people also look at their own hand. That’s the beauty of the brand in a hand.

You can look at your own hand. Maybe you did this yourself when I asked you to look at the hand or was talking about the fingers. That’s your personal slideshow. It’s right in your hands and it’s quote unquote always in your hands to build your personal brand. Not anybody else’s. Da da da, da, right?

There’s a lot of layers here that I could go through. And these things like the beauty of just allowing yourself to trust yourself with the knowledge that you know that you’ve practiced. And again, I’ve published a lot of content about these things that I’m talking about before, so I’m confident that I can talk about them.

It’s just how am I gonna string them together? And the idea of just outlining and not scripting allows me room to play, to feel the energy of the room, to just kind of impromptu call on somebody and ask them a question about what I’m talking about and engage with them from there. And those are the fun and memorable moments that happen in a breakout session.

Again, this were a keynote. I think I’d approach it a little bit differently or a lot differently. I probably wouldn’t be talking about building a personal brand at Social Media Marketing World on a keynote stage. But this is why it’s a breakout. Anybody who’s curious about that will come in and wanna learn how to build up their brand and like I was saying earlier, if there were gonna be some slides for examples after the frameworks, it would be for things that I’ve done recently, like Should I Open It Or Should I Keep It Sealed? By the way, this YouTube channel is approaching one and a half million subscribers. It’s bonkers ’cause it’s kind of taking a worldwide viral approach right now. There is a dj, let me grab his name because I, I would feel bad sharing this, but if you go to, let’s see here. I’m on my phone ’cause I’ve had a few people share this with me. J-S-T-J-R. So JST, like just without the U and Junior, that J-S-T-J-R put out a TikTok and a reels and a shorts of him performing in front of 15,000 people.

And during one of his sets, right before a beat drop, he inserts, should I open it or should I keep it sealed? And then he opens a pack on stage, a pack of Pokemon, this jingle that I’ve created, which is a auditory part of the brand. Should I open it or should I keep it sealed? Has taken the world by storm.

I have had many people parody it. I had some videos of people parodying it hit millions of views, and a lot of people ask me, Pat, aren’t you mad about that? They took your song and they’re seeing millions of views, and I’m like, no, that is absolutely amazing. That is incredible. Just like that dude who did his morning routine by opening up Saratoga Water and putting lemon in a bowl and putting his face in it and taking the tape off his mouth and just is absolutely ridiculous.

He was asked on an interview as well what people thought or what he thought about people ripping off his morning routine and kind of sharing videos that are very similar. He’s like, no, that is amazing because it always comes back to me as the one who started that. And same thing with S-I-O-I-O-S-I-K-I-S.

Now the brand also is very close to launching a merch line. So we have a T-shirt, if you imagine those college t-shirts that have like, you know, Duke or Cal or whatever on the sweater, kind of going across the front and sort of a slight arc. We’re building a T-shirt line that is S-I-O-A-O-S-I-K-I-S, which if you know what, should I open it or should I keep it sealed?

As you would see that and you’d absolutely know what it is if you didn’t. You’re like, what are all those letters? So number one, it could be a talking point is, which is pretty cool. We have a lot of fans who do wanna support the channel because they see me opening packs and it costs a lot, and I often lose money on the pack.

I am making money back on the shorts themselves, but it’s been pretty cool to see. But more than that, this shirt will be in a package sent to a customer’s house that says, should I open it or should I keep it sealed? And inside will be one shirt. You’re not sure which shirt it is. It could be the gray and black shirt that just says the Should I Open It?

Acronym on the front and then on the back says, oh no, you should have kept it sealed. Which is the audio that plays. If I get a bad pull in these Pokemon cards, or you might get the one with the yellow lettering, I believe it’s yellow. We’re still printing them out. I’m still getting samples of them right now that say wow.

So it’s still  S-I-O-A-O-S-I-K-I-S on the front, but on the back says, wow, you actually got something good. So now the customers can play the game and they might get a good shirt or a bad shirt. It’s still gonna be a shirt either way. But we’re working with a 3PL third party logistics company that will be able to program the hit rate that we want the good shirts to go at. So if we wanna say, okay, we want 30% of customers, three out of every 10 to get one of the good shirts and seven out of every 10 to get one of the bad shirts. I mean, they’re all good quality. They’re not like torn up or anything like that. And then inside we also created a coin that says open it on one side and keep it sealed on the other.

And I think we’re gonna sell this for like $24 or something like that. It costs $8 to make. I think it’s just something that is representative of the fact that this thing has taken a life of its own because. I’m consistently showing up every single day. We’re on day 200, and so this is day, let me, let me check opening my folders here.

251 was published yesterday, so we’re a quarter of a thousand the way to, well, a thousand which is wild. Quarter of a thousand, 250 straight days. And when I talk about this idea of just continuously showing up and getting reps in and having you micro master parts of that, every single time you, you show up, I’ve been able to get the editing down to about 16 to 17 minutes.

I’m, I’m not quite yet breaking the 15 minute mark, which is the goal. And I’m, yeah, gamifying a little bit. But in just 15 minutes-ish a day, I’m able to create a channel that supports new videos that get a million views after 24 hours is going viral and is generating five figures. This is a brand new channel.

And a lot of it has to do with the things I talked about and the brand in the hand, knowing exactly who this audience is, kind of people they are, what age they’re at. And again, that all is relative to, for example, some of the jokes I put in and some of the references that I make, the pursuits that they have, they want their hands on these cards too.

They want to see their favorite cards show up. And I film it in a way where it looks like you’re almost holding the cards yourself if you are holding your phone. It almost looks like you’re the one holding these cards. The problems, you know, we, we lean into how expensive these things are. We lean into how hard they are to get all those kinds of things.

I point people to, you know, the platform. This is all three platforms. Putting them on all three platforms natively each night at 8:30 PM I was late the other night and people thought I died. That’s how consistent it’s been. And then here comes the product, the t-shirt line. It’s not magic, it’s just showing up and showing up consistently and having fun with it.

That’s, I think that’s the biggest thing that I’m, that I’m doing with both of these things that I’m sharing, not just the Shorts channel, but with this presentation tomorrow, I’m so stoked. Even though I’m afraid, even though I’m nervous, I’m also excited because I’ve learned that same part of your brain fires up when you’re nervous, as when you’re excited.

So I’m flipping the script on what that actually means. These feelings that I’m feeling of nervousness and. I hope that I hit it outta the park for people. I hope it becomes a memorable presentation. I want like my visualization, if you wanna call it that, or affirmation or what I hope people will say after is, oh my gosh, my favorite presentation was Pat’s and he didn’t even have any slides that would speak so highly to the growth that I would hopefully have as a result of storytelling engagement and bringing some energy to the room. You know, this is a corporate event. They’re gonna see slides at every other presentation. I’m gonna pattern interrupt. Pat turn to interrupt with Pat. Anyway, just again, I wanted to show up for you today and share a little bit of the behind the scenes on what’s going on.

Again, this presentation at Social Media Marketing World tomorrow, and also, again, share examples of how I’m continuously learning. By lean learning and Im implementing these processes in in real time. So go ahead and check out the book, LeanLearningBook.com. There should be some bonuses available there for you.

If you buy more than one, you’ll get access to a few more things and help out so much. And we are shooting for the New York Times. That’s my visualization there. I imagine waking up on Wednesday after this would be what? The 11th of June? That’ll be the day that I know whether or not I hit the New York Times or not, and if I didn’t that’s okay.

I imagine the people reaching out and saying, this book was great, and that helps me and drives me as well. But I do have goals and aspirations to be a New York Times bestseller. This is a good shot if I don’t make it. You know what, I’m gonna try again. I got a lot of other books in mind, but one at a time. One at a time. So  LeanLearningBook.com. Thank you so much. I appreciate you and I’ll see you in the next episode. Cheers.