SPI 935: How to Stop Quitting on Day One with Roger Coles

SPI 935: How to Stop Quitting on Day One with Roger Coles

Roger Coles: I remember when I first hired a business coach, I said, “Roast my business.” And she was like, “The only thing I would say is right now you’re thinking more like a freelancer, and I want you to think more like a CEO.”

And I loved that advice. And at the same time, the most magical things that have happened to me in my business happened because I was not thinking like a CEO. Would a CEO be like, “Yo, I’m gonna write this silly rap song about Canva and I’m gonna post it on Instagram”? Probably not. So I feel like that’s a little bit where the magic is, and if we left a little bit more room for play, who knows what could come from that.

A lot of what I do sometimes feels rooted in fear, because it’s like, “Oh, I gotta make sure that the bills are getting paid.” And the way that fear manifests for me is in overthinking, the fear of doing something that people won’t understand your intentions behind it. And that was one of the things that happened with, like, the song that went viral. There was so much that people had to say about it. The way that I counteract that is speed, simply speed because fear doesn’t really have a chance to catch up. I’m outpacing whatever fear might keep me from doing the thing.

Pat Flynn: All right, we got a fun one today, ’cause we have a very special guest with us who has gone bonkers on social media. In fact, his theme song has been stuck in my head for a very long time. It’s not Should I Open It Or Should I Keep It Sealed. I’m not talking about myself. I’m talking about Roger Coles. If you don’t know who Roger Coles is, you will in just a moment, so stick around for that.

But I also wanna introduce, if you didn’t know, we have a new community director at SPI, and she’s here with me today. We got Liz Wilcox in the house. What’s up, Liz?

Liz Wilcox: What up? Bam, bam-bam-bam-bam-bam. Bam-bam-bam. That’s the sound effect.

Pat Flynn: You been, you been surviving lately?

Liz Wilcox: I’ve been survibin’ lately.

Pat Flynn: Bro. Survibing?

Liz Wilcox: Survibin’, yeah. The vibe has spoken, and Roger Coles is in town, y’all. I’m so excited.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, and we have Roger. I mean, Liz, maybe you can introduce Roger, ’cause I know you’ve seen his work and, and know him pretty well, so set him up.

Liz Wilcox: Yeah, so Roger is the Canva guy. I don’t know how else to say it.

He is, like, T-H-E, all caps, the Canva guy. He literally wrote a song on Canva. It got picked up. It’s on Spotify, y’all. Stream it. So excited to hear everything he has to say today. He’s just one of the most genuine guys I’ve ever met on the internet. So well-spoken, looks great in red, looks great in glasses.

I just can’t wait for today. I’m super stoked.

Pat Flynn: Let’s welcome Roger. What’s up, Roger?

Roger Coles: Woo. Woo. Yo. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Pat Flynn: How would you describe yourself? I know that we all call you the Canva guy, but how would you describe yourself?

Roger Coles: Yeah, I mean, uh, I would say Canva, the Canva rapper is probably the thing that most people call me, but yeah, at, at my, at the core of who I am, I’m an edutainer.

So whatever it is that we’re doing, I wanna teach it, and I wanna have fun while we’re doing it.

Pat Flynn: And you’re teaching Canva to the masses, and you’ve taught millions of people how to do certain things, myself included, so thank you, by the way. And you do it in a very interesting way. In fact, I got to know Roger more recently from his involvement in one of our challenges, the 30 Day Video Challenge.

Tell me about where you’re at with that, Roger. What did you do, and, and how did that work out for you?

Roger Coles: Yeah, so the funny thing about the challenge is that I think you started promoting it sometime in December. Maybe it was November or something. Mm-hmm. And I was like, “Yo, it’s gonna happen in January. I’m down for this challenge.”

When I started my Instagram, I started with a Reels challenge, and so, like, it is at my very core. And I was like, “I’m gonna do it.” And then I was talking with my business coach, and we had all these goals aligned, you know, for the future and the three to five-year arc and everything. And I was like, “You know what?

Does doing a challenge like this align with those goals?” And then I, like, started second-guessing it. And then I was like, “You know what? I don’t…” I even filmed the first video, and I had already written the song and everything, and then I just was like, “You know what? I don’t think I’m gonna do it. I don’t think I have time to do it right now.”

And then a buddy of mine, the day of the challenge said, “Hey, Rodge, you know that Pat Flynn challenge you were talking about doing? I’m gonna do it.” And I was like, “Oh, okay. Well, I’ll do it too then.” And so I posted that video that I, I literally was thinking, “This video is trash. I don’t even think I’ll ever post it.

It’ll probably just stay on my phone forever.” But I posted it that first day, and then I am– My wife knows this about me, that I am, like, zero or 100. There’s no in between, so if I do a challenge, it’s like, yo, we are doing this challenge. And so she just kinda took a deep breath and was like, “Okay For the next 30 days- this is gonna be what Roger does.” And, uh, and I’m so glad I did it. And the funny thing is, my buddy who said, “I’m gonna do the challenge,” posted one time and then didn’t post at all for the rest of the challenge. But he was the inspiration that, like, got me to do it.

Pat Flynn: Oh, he didn’t keep going?

Roger Coles: He didn’t keep going. No.

Liz Wilcox: Oh my gosh. That’s so funny. I have to interrupt, Roger, though, because he said, “Oh, this video is trash.” If y’all go to his account, I’m sure the link will be in the description, nothing that Roger does online is trash. His stuff, I literally wrote down in my notes, y’all, like, your stuff is so pristine. Uh, his stuff always looks so, so good.

So I’m sure it was awesome.

Roger Coles: I appreciate that. I know that we’re, we’re our own worst critics, right?

Pat Flynn: Yes, for sure. A lot of people said that and didn’t do the challenge, and then they did the second challenge that came about, which is good, largely because they got inspired by people like you. First of all, your wife and my wife would get along very well-

Uh, because w- you and I are the same in that way. And your song, that I didn’t know was made just for this challenge, right? “Things you can do in Canva.” That was for the challenge?

Roger Coles: That was just for the challenge, yeah.

Pat Flynn: Dude, that’s crazy.

Liz Wilcox: That’s epic. I didn’t know that either. That’s super dope.

Roger Coles: Oh, I be writing songs, y’all.

Like, I write songs about things that I love. Like, I’ve written songs about Doritos and Krispy Kreme and, like, so many ridiculous things. And when you look at how many songs I’ve written for Canva versus the amount of songs I’ve written for my wife, it is shameful.

Liz Wilcox: Oh, wow. You heard it here first, folks. We didn’t even ask that question.

Pat Flynn: That’s great. So you kept up with the challenge. How did it go for you? I mean, did it pop off on day one, or when… Like, what were some of the patterns that you were reading after going every day for 30 days?

Roger Coles: Yeah, so initially there was, like, a decent response, and it probably took a few days into the challenge for me to kind of get my bearings and figure out a rhythm that worked for me.

And this is one of the things that I talked about in the case study that I did, that, like, day five I changed the music. So when I first started the series, it was very… Like, I started with the jingle, but then you’d hear lo-fi, like, kind of chill music. And I was like, “That’s not really the vibe that I want for this series,” ’cause I am a little bit more playful.

So on day five I changed the soundtrack that you’d hear during the actual tutorial portion of the video to a very whimsical, like went to epidemic sound. It was like do, do-do, do, do. And I was that vibe fits so much better. I don’t know if I saw a, a rise of, in engagement because of that. But I did start to notice that tiny things like the audio hooks would make a difference.

So I started playing more with, like, click sounds when I would click on a certain part of the screen, or if the screen would go from pan from one side to the next, I’d add in, like, a whoosh type of thing. And then I started playing with risers, you know. So, like, it built that little bit of tension, so it was like, “Things you could do in Canva,” ooh, ting, and then it would, like, start a video.

So those are the little things that I started to see and play with just from, like, the back end. But then I started to see, oh, there are certain patterns that I’m starting to see some traction on. And the first video that went viral was, like, I think four million or something like that. And I was like, “Oh, okay.”

People that I assume have been in Canva for a long time, there’s a lot that they still don’t know. And when you’re fully immersed in something, you kind of forget what it’s like to be new to something. So I was actually shocked to see that keyboard shortcuts was one of the videos that popped. And I was like, keyboard?

It’s just like hit C for circle, L for line. But people were like, “Oh my goodness, you just saved my life. Like, you saved me hours.” I

Liz Wilcox: literally just learned. Today I learned, TIL, y’all. Wow. I’m gonna have to go check that video out.

Pat Flynn: It’s called the curse of knowledge, right? Ch- Chip and Dan Heath wrote about this, and it’s this idea that when you know something, you forget what it’s like not to know it.

And for all of us who are in this space, who are trying to help and educate and serve our audiences, it’s very important to kind of go back and go back to the basics. And it’s like, okay, well, how helpful can that be? I think there is a edutainment part of this that is now required. It’s, like, it’s, you can’t just say the thing ’cause anybody can look it up.

But you have to get in front of them with the hook and, and whether it’s a jingle or something visual that shows up. So tell me a little bit about your thoughts on how you improved. You know, you said the music. You said, like, what other things were you noticing from the reaction that your community was giving you?

What kinds of things were they saying, and were they helping you determine what to film next?

Roger Coles: 100%. That’s the beauty of a series like this is one of the little tricks that I did throughout the series is when I would close each video, I would use a different type of Canva feature that I hadn’t talked about yet as a teaser to see if people picked up on it.

So for instance, at the very end of one of my videos, I used the outline effect, and people immediately in the comments were like, “How did you do that thing at the very end of the video?” And I was like, “Yo- Mm-hmm … that’s gonna be another video.” And yeah, so they’re kind of… Even though I had built out 45 days worth of ideas, it was really nice to get that feedback in real time, the questions that people actually had.

So I, I had, like, a bank of ideas, but then I was willing to pivot when necessary.

Pat Flynn: That’s really cool. That’s one of the beauties of going daily. I mean, Liz, you and I have seen so many people in our community who’ve gone daily who have learned, and some people, they learn on the first couple. For some, it’s after 30 days, and many people have still continued.

So I just wanna take a moment to celebrate not just Roger here, but our amazing community. I mean, Liz, you have direct connection to many of them, and they’re doing awesome things, aren’t they?

Liz Wilcox: Yeah. Today, somebody in the community posted, “I just hit 20,000 YouTube subscribers,” and I was like, “Oh my gosh, what are you gonna do to celebrate? That’s so awesome.” And I asked him, you know, “Hey, how… You know, what was the big contributor to success?” And he said, kinda like Roger, he had the bank of ideas, but he was willing to ask his audience, you know, listen and pay attention to the comments and grow from there. And he said it took about nine months to really, you know, catch a groove, and then it just took another nine months to hit the 20,000 or whatever.

But Roger, I love that you said this word play. I’m, I’m a playful guy. I w- I wanna play with the content, things like that. So a lot of our listeners are beginners. They get, like, super nervous, nail biting. Oh my gosh, 30 days. Like, you know, that, that seems overwhelming. And so… And I mentioned your content is so pristine.

Has it always been that way? What has the content creation process been like for you over the years?

Roger Coles: Oh, yeah. Everything that I did early on, like when I started my Instagram, I started with a 30-day Reels challenge, ’cause Reels was brand new in 2020, I think. And so I was like, “Yeah, let’s all kind of learn this new feature together.”

And there were days that I would spend hours, I mean hours, to get just like a little 30-second video. And I’m doing crazy transitions, you know, and like insane edits and stuff, and they’d get like 10 likes, and five of those were my cousins and one was my mom. And so it was just like, oh man. That, that was the beauty of the series was that there wasn’t enough time to be a perfectionist ’cause I- you have to do it so quickly and you’re putting out so much.

And there were times that I would batch the content, and that was really helpful, but then there were other times that I’m just having to create so quickly that I don’t have time to be like, oh, well, let me be super picky about this one transition or, or whatever. And for me, the challenge, one of the things that you talked about was like what pivots did you make?

I found that when I first started the series, I had no idea that there was gonna be any kind of virality or any new followers or anything, and that honestly wasn’t really my goal. My goal was that I wanted to be able to have a bank of videos that I could send to past clients and future prospects, ’cause this is what I do now.

Like, I do a lot of Canva education. And so I was like, I wanna be able to, at the end of these 30 days, to just send this to past clients and say like, “Hey, here are some things that I think might be helpful for your marketing team.” And so as we started to go through the series, like maybe 10 days in, 15 days in, I started to see a couple of them really popping and going viral, and I found myself catering to the algorithm a little bit more, where I started to talk a little bit faster, the edits were a little bit quicker, and I had to course correct and go, “No, no, no, no.”

These are supposed to be a little bit slower paced so that I can send them to a client who doesn’t really know about this new feature, and they can just digest that information. So yeah, the algorithm also kind of tried to play with me a little bit, and it was a constant course correction for like, “Wait a minute, what was the goal of this series to begin with?

And let’s stay true to that.”

Pat Flynn: That’s really insightful. You can follow Roger on Instagram. That’s where you can locate these videos and listen to the jingle, @mysocialdesigner. Beautiful looking page. The videos are super fun. I’m curious though, and since we’re talking about production, like, what have you purposefully done to reduce your editing time?

I think this is something that really kills a lot of people, and their momentum is just like, “Oh, it just takes forever to edit.” You had mentioned it takes hours to edit. I remember when I did my Should I Open It or Should I Keep It Sealed series, I mean, it took forty-five minutes to create this pack opening video, and then now it just takes me twelve.

I could just bang it out. So what are the things that you’ve done and put in place to make your life easier?

Roger Coles: I’ll speak specifically to the series because that actually helped me to define this framework- a little bit easier, a little bit better. And I realized partially through the series that me doing face to camera became a real hindrance for me to open the video, and I know that there’s a big push for, like, more face to camera.

The funny thing is that when I look at my analytics in 2025 when everybody was saying, “2026 is gonna be the year of, like, face on camera,” I was like, “Yo, well, how come the videos of my face ain’t doing very well?” “Y’all just don’t like my face? Okay.” So I’m always willing to experiment, and I’m just looking at the data to see, you know, what’s gonna make the most sense.

But with the series specifically, I found that it was way faster for me to just make a quick animation in Canva. That was the opening for every single video, was things you can do in Canva, me just pointing to the screen, so it has that nice visual hook as well as the audio hook with the jingle. And then I ended every intro with that little chime of me telling you, like, what day it was.

So like part 34, day 34, whatever So that was the intro, and then the, the middle of the video was always a screen recording with a voiceover, and then the ending was always the same. The call to action was always the same of like, “This is part of a series where I’m showing you how to make the most out of Canva.

Follow along so you don’t miss the next episode.” So that became like a three-part framework that was really easy for me to repeat on a regular basis, and it took all of the overthinking out of the process.

Pat Flynn: That’s genius. I mean, th- that’s the beauty of a framework. You had mentioned voiceovers. That’s often a magical tool we can use to make the storytelling or the tutorials a little easier.

So would you perform the tutorial essentially kind of quietly even and then edit it the way you wanted to edit and then kind of just like watch it and talk?

Roger Coles: Yes. Yeah, so there was like a little bit of a storyboard in my mind of what I knew I wanted to capture on screen. So I would just open up ScreenFlow, that’s what I use, record the parts of the video that I knew that I needed, and then I would put them all into, I’d start editing it, and then, this is kind of backwards, but then I would write the script, and then I would just read the script as the voiceover. So you probably should start with the script, but in this framework, it just seemed to make more sense to get all the cuts in place and then write the script so that I could just read right over top of everything.

Liz Wilcox: That makes sense to me. So I will say I am Instagram and Shorts inconsistent, um, but I recently did a sponsored Reel, shout out Applebee’s and the gang. Yeah, finally. And they wa- and they wanted a voiceover, and I’d never done a voiceover. So I’m talking to you at home if you’re like, “Oh, a voiceover? That sounds so complicated. Can’t I just talk to camera? Isn’t that hot right now?” And so that was me at home, like, “Oh my gosh, they want a voiceover? I don’t even know how to do that.” So I used Instagram, and it ma- it made it super easy, and I was like, “Oh, wow, this is so easy. I could just film myself doing things and then talk over it.

Why have I been, you know, resisting this for so long?” And like Roger, I did the filming. I kind of had mapped out what I wanted. You know, it was a sponsored post, right? So they had kind of told me like, “Oh, make sure you put this and that.” And then they were like, “Oh, but we want it voiceover.” And so I was like, “Okay, well…”

And I was just watching my own video and talking, and like Roger said, it actually became really, really simple. So if you’re listening and you’re thinking, “Oh my gosh, voiceover? Another thing to learn?” It actually was really, really simple. I was super surprised and laughed at myself.

Pat Flynn: It does make it a lot easier.

I mean, as much as you’re right, Roger, face to camera is in, of course, if we wanna be more human. But it is also human to have a point of view, a POV view, right, where it’s, like, your eyes looking out at the thing that you’re doing, the thing that you’re playing with or the yarn that you’re crocheting, right?

And then the VO, the voiceover, almost becomes like, oh, I’m now inside of this person’s head, and I’m hearing their thoughts, and I’m kind of getting insight in that way, and that’s also very human too. So I don’t want you to think that you have to put your camera on face, but you still have to have personality.

You still have to have, not even charisma, which you definitely do have, but you just have to be you, and I think that’s really important ’cause we see your videos, Roger, and I will say there’s a, there’s a group of people listening to this who will go to your channel and almost be kind of like, “Well, I’m not that good. I’m not good enough,” right? What would you say to that person? ‘Cause I know you also work with a lot of beginners, especially in the world of Canva, who are like, “Oh, I’m not good enough,” or, “I can never get to that level.” What’s your advice for somebody who’s thinking that?

Roger Coles: Yeah. So first of all, I started in 2020..

It’s 2026, so I’ve been doing this for six years. So if you’re just getting started, like, that’s okay. Everybody starts somewhere. In fact, when I first started, I remember it was a long time before anyone heard my voice. So a lot of what I was doing, back then we were using trending audio and stuff, so I had no reason to speak on camera.

So I would just be, you know, back then everyone was just, like, doing the cheesy little pointing to the words on the screen kind of thing or, you know, it’d be a cool transition. And I remember, like, the first time I was like, “Oh man, people probably gonna think my voice is weird,” like they’ve never heard my voice before.

So that was a little bit of a barrier for me in starting out, and it just took doing it a little bit more, and now I’m super comfortable with being on camera. I’m super comfortable with doing voiceovers. And one of the things that I did in the series was that because I was removing my face from the intro of every video, I was like, well, I still want people to know the person behind these videos.

So if you watch at the end of every single video, the call to action is almost always me designing in Canva using a photo of myself to show whatever that design is.

Pat Flynn: I’ve noticed that.

Roger Coles: And that was my workaround for like, oh man, well, I still want people to be able to recognize. And then that happened ’cause at Canva Create I was teaching this session, and I was co-hosting with Meta, and so the whole session was about Reels that convert.

And I started talking through the series and gave just a couple of, like, stats on the count- on the case study side of things. And people at the end came up and was like, “I didn’t even know that was you. You’re– I started following you because of this series. I didn’t even know you were the guy behind that series.”

And so even with that, you know, my face was still there, but there was still a little bit of disconnect. So I j- I tried to kind of counteract that by just putting my face somewhere in the video.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, that’s really… Especially if you’re building a personal brand, you wanna be seen. That’s a really smart workaround.

You had mentioned you were at a Canva event, and Liz and I actually just filmed and are publishing inside of the SPI community a brand and sponsorship course. So Liz, I don’t know if you have any thoughts or questions for Roger related to some of the content that we filmed for the SPI community?

Liz Wilcox: Yeah. I would love to know just how you came about working with Canva, right?

‘Cause there’s a million and one kinda Canva ambassadors out there, people that are trying to get into Canva, trying to get people’s attention, whether it’s Canva or anything else. So what was really that story of, “Oh, I’ve, I’ve got their attention now”?

Roger Coles: Yeah. Oh, man. The origin story.

Liz Wilcox: Yeah. Yeah. It’s a fun one?

Roger Coles: Yeah. So not a lot of people know this about me, but I didn’t go to school for design or anything. I was a pastor for 15 years. I graduated with a degree in religion, specialization in biblical studies.

Pat Flynn: Wow.

Roger Coles: Started, you know, I started in my home church serving as a youth pastor. Started as an intern, then they hired me on.

And the reason I got into design was because the youth pastor at the time s- was like, “Hey, we need registration forms,” and he showed me how to use Photoshop. And then back then it was like MySpace was a thing. It was like, “We need a MySpace page for the youth group.” So I started learning a little bit of CSS, HTML.

That kinda led me into the design path. And, you know, when you’re a youth pastor you also make really stupid videos, so I learned how to edit videos and things like that. And then, uh and then a buddy of mine said, “Hey, would you be willing to make me some social media graphics?” And this was, like, back when it was, like, cool.

No one was really doing it, like these typographic quotes for social media. And I was like, “Oh yeah, sure, I could do that,” which then led to me doing verse of the day images for a Bible app called YouVersion, and I did that for a few years. During that time, people started hiring me to do design work, and I was working with podcasters and publishing companies.

And podcasters would be like, “Yo, I just need to change, like, the title of this episode.” And I’d be like, “I don’t even know how to, how to charge you for this. You know, we already did it.” They came back maybe a month later. I’m like, “It’s gonna take me five minutes in Photoshop. Do I charge for the hour? Do I charge for five minutes?”

So I started to dabble in Canva and make some templates that then they could just take and own those. And then every new guest that they have, they could tweak out… They could tweak out. No, don’t tweak out. They could swap out the, they could swap out the photo, the title, all that stuff. And so I was like, “Okay, podcasters, there’s a thing here with Canva templates.”

So I released a pack on Creative Market, which is a, a digital marketplace, and they went crazy. This was in 2020. And then, you know, everybody’s like, “Now is the time to start that business. Now is the time to start that podcast.” And so, like, I was like, “Oh, we making mad money off these podcast templates right now.”

But I also released a pack called notification templates. Back then it was like those reminder posts were real big. Not as much now. But Canva came across those and said, “Hey, we are starting a program called the Canva Creator Program, where we’re looking for designers who will submit their designs to the Canva library, and when users use your design, you get a royalty.”

And I was like, “Oh, okay. Heck yeah, let’s go. I’m in.” And within a few months of doing that, I really dove into learning Canva because when you’re creating these designs for Canva, you really have to understand usability. You have to understand what they’re looking for, what makes it easy for a Canva user to open up that template and be able to customize it without a huge headache.

And so I was staying up till 1:00 AM, 2:00 AM watching videos ’cause they’re based in Sydney, Australia. And so I was like, “But I need to be live in these webinars so I can ask questions in real time.” And so that’s what I started doing. And now I was like, I started using it more for my clients and I was like, “You know what? I love Canva. I’m gonna write a love song about Canva.” ‘Cause people, designers were, like, hating on me. I was like, “I’ve been designing for a long time,” but they were all coming at me like, “Real designers don’t use Canva.”

Pat Flynn: Mm.

Roger Coles: And so I wrote a song that was, like, kinda pushing back on that called Canva Love Song, and Melanie Perkins, the founder of Canva, came across that video ’cause her mom sent it to her. And-

Pat Flynn: Wow

Roger Coles: And she was like, “I love this video so much.” So she commented on it. Then I followed that song up with a song called Canva Paradise, which was a parody of Gangsta’s Paradise. Totally ridiculous. Which then led to an invitation for me to come to Sydney, Australia and close out their first Canva Create event that was happening there to kind of close out the show.

And then, so since then I’ve been in the Canva universe in some way. I performed at two of the LA events the last two years, and one of those went totally viral. You- don’t look it up. I mean, Pat, you probably know. I’ve seen it. Yeah. It, it was, it went totally viral. Yeah, it, it was wild. It was a wild experience.

But yeah, so that kind of like, I guess, put me on their radar. And the funny thing is like, it’s not because of design. Design was my thing that I was doing, but it was something unrelated to design. It was like this other thing. And that’s my encouragement for other people is like, there’s a lot of people maybe in your industry, maybe there’s high competition, but there is something unique about you and your approach and what you bring to that industry that no one else has.

And so you just have to lean into that thing.

Liz Wilcox: I love that so much, Roger. And yes, Roger has a lot of personality. He’s not afraid to show it- … on top of his design skills. But I wanna go back to something you said at the beginning that just, I can’t get it out of my head, of, you know, “My friend inspired me to do the 30 Days Challenge, but my friend only posted one time.”

Roger Coles: Yeah.

Liz Wilcox: And I know there’s a lot of us out there that are, you know, like, oh, guilty. You know, raise your hand if you’ve ever signed up for something and didn’t finish. But what do you think, you know, the way that your personality kind of distinguishes you against other Canva Creators, what do you think is part of your personality or that drive that keeps you going that says, “Yep, if I sign up for this, I’m gonna finish it”?

‘Cause I know the SPI community, we’ve got a lot of challenges lined up and we can’t wait to have more success stories like this. So what is that motivation to keep going?

Roger Coles: I think a lot of it is rooted in my love for experimentation and my love for play and trying new things. But I think that I’m trying to think about, like, what the differentiator is, and it’s just, it’s just a passion for what you do and leaning into whatever that is.

I want everything that I do to be fun, and I remember when I first hired a business coach, one of the things that she said to me was– I said, “Roast my business.” Like, I want the hardest truths that you can give me. And she was like, “We’re on a good trajectory. The only thing I would say is right now you’re thinking more like a freelancer, and I want you to think more like a CEO.”

And I loved that advice. And at the same time, the most magical things that have happened to me in my business happened because I was not thinking like a CEO. Like, that first song that changed everything for me, would a CEO be like, “Yo, I’m gonna write this silly rap song about Canva and use a bunch of Instagram filters, and it’s gonna take my whole day, and I’m gonna post it on Instagram”?

Probably not, you know? So I feel like that’s a little bit where the magic is, is like there’s so much that can come from just a little bit of curiosity and a little bit of play, and if we left a little bit more room in our work schedule for play, like, who knows what could come from that. And yeah, so I, I feel like if you’re someone who’s listening to this, everybody kind of has their own style, but I’ve found that I come alive when there’s a little bit of mystery to what’s gonna happen next.

Pat Flynn: I mean, I play with Pokemon cards, so. I’m doing a lot of playing. Um, this is amazing, Roger. Thank you. A- as we finish up, I have a question that kind of piggybacks off of Liz’s setup there, which was great. What is your relationship with fear? Fear is what is stopping most people. That’s why they do it once and never come back.

And although it wasn’t perfect for you when you started in your origin story or even in this challenge, you kept going anyway.

Roger Coles: Yeah.

Pat Flynn: And what is your relationship with failure?

Roger Coles: Oh, man. I feel like a lot of what I do sometimes feels like rooted in fear, and that’s, that’s not a healthy thing, but let me explain.

Like, I have a family, right? So, like, everything that I do, I’m doing for my family, so sometimes I feel like there’s a little bit of fear that kicks me into, into gear because it’s like, “Oh, I gotta make sure that the bills are getting paid,” right? So I’ll, I’ll push a little bit harder.

Pat Flynn: Mm-hmm.

Roger Coles: And I wish that it was something that wasn’t as dark that was motivating me.

I wouldn’t say that’s, like, my main motivator, but I guess the main motivator is my family and doing whatever I can to motivate them. But I have learned to manage that, and part of the way that fear manifests for me is in overthinking, the fear of, like, shipping something that isn’t quite ready- Yeah … or the fear of doing something that people won’t, uh, fully understand your intentions behind it, and that was one of the things that happened with, like, you know, the song that went viral.

There was so much that people had to say about it, but they didn’t realize that Canva is campy and, and cheeky and silly. And so they were, they were making these comparisons to the Microsoft guys, like Bill Gates, like, “Yo, my name is Bill, and I’m here to say,” right? Like that kind of thing. But it was like– It was n- it was o- we know we’re rapping about enterprise.

Like, we know that… Like, I’m literally rapping about single sign-ons and compliancy. Like, we all get the joke, but not everybody did get the joke. The way that I try to counteract that is speed, simply speed. Because the more that I have time to sit with an idea, the less likely I am to execute on that idea because I overthink it and I talk myself out of doing it.

So I’ve tried to minimize the time between the idea and the execution of the idea, and then fear doesn’t really have a chance to catch up. I’m outpacing whatever fear might keep me from doing the thing, if that makes sense.

Pat Flynn: Love that answer. I love it. Liz, any questions for Roger before we let him go?

Liz Wilcox: No questions, but I love– One of the things that I admire about both Roger and Pat is that bias for action, and that’s something we’re trying to build inside the community as well.

So I’m just super stoked. Thank you so much, Roger. Great, great, great answers all around.

Roger Coles: Thank you.

Pat Flynn: Yes, Roger. And one more time, where can people go to follow your work?

Roger Coles: Yeah, so you can go to my website, mysocialdesigner.com, head to my Instagram, @mysocialdesigner. And just for the listeners of this podcast, I set up a coupon code for the Canva course that I have.

Pat Flynn: Let’s go.

Roger Coles: If you DM me on Instagram PatPod26, you’ll get ten percent off of the course if you decide to purchase it.

Pat Flynn: PatPod26 at @mysocialdesigner on Instagram for probably what is the best course on Canva for beginners to get started. And I use Canva all the time, and I’m learning from you, and just wanna thank you on behalf of everybody who has struggled with design, ’cause we need to move faster, and we wanna get through that so we can get to the next thing.

So thank you for helping us move a little bit more quickly and hastily on our work. And yeah, looking forward to catching up with you again. Roger, this was amazing. Thank you so much.

Roger Coles: Yeah, thank you for having me. This was fun.

Liz Wilcox: Bye, friends.