SPI 908: This Is How You Know If You’ll Win or Quit in 2026

SPI 908: This Is How You Know If You’ll Win or Quit in 2026

Pat Flynn: You know what’s funny? In 2008, when I got laid off from my dream job as an architect, there were probably hundreds, maybe thousands of people who started teaching entrepreneurship and online business at the exact same time that I did. We all had blogs, we all had big dreams, we all thought we were going to change the world.

But here’s the thing that might shock you. I think I’m one of the last ones remaining. I mean, there’s a few of us, but out of the thousands, if not tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people who are talking about making money online, I’m still here. Not because I was the smartest, not because I was the most talented, and definitely not because I had some sort of secret formula that nobody else had.

I’m here because of one thing and one thing only. I just never stopped showing up. And if you’re listening to this as we wrap up 2025 and head into 2026, which will be my 18th year anniversary of doing this, being my own boss, starting Smart Passive Income, venturing out on my own, I want to share with you why consistency, not talent, not luck, or even intelligence is going to be the single most important factor in whether or not you succeed or fail in the year ahead.

So let’s talk about it. And I want to tell you a story that I’ve never shared on this podcast before. Back in 2011, I was at a conference, one of those internet marketing conferences that were all the rage back then. I mean, there’s still some that exist, but I mean, they were so prevalent back in the day and of course, I attended them.

I was a part of that space and I was sitting at a hotel bar with five other entrepreneurs. All of us were around the same level. We all had similar sized audience, similar revenue and shared similar dreams. And we actually made a pact that night. We said, let’s check in with each other 10 years from now and see where we’re all at, right?

That’s 2021. Now that, of course, 10 years after that, it was an interesting time. I had just started my Pokemon channel and of course, COVID had hit and all those kinds of things. Anyway, I checked back in with him in 2021. Most of us were curious about what everybody else was doing, especially around the pandemic time.

And one guy, had gone back to his corporate job. Another had started three different businesses and quit all of them. One had gotten so burned out that he left the online space entirely, and another had pivoted so many times that his audience had no idea basically what he stood for anymore. His audience never followed him across each one.

He had to essentially build new audiences several different times, and it just felt like he was struggling a bit. And one, this one still breaks my heart. He’d actually built something bigger than what I had, but he got impatient. Made some risky moves, scaled too fast, and lost it all. Now, I wasn’t the most talented person in this group.

I definitely wasn’t the smartest, but I was the most consistent. And you know, when I was writing my book, Lean Learning, I came across this incredible story about a preschool that perfectly illustrates what I’m talking about, and this happened at my son’s school. My son’s teacher, Miss Jenny, she had a problem.

And if you’ve read Lean Learning, you know this, but there’s a lot of people who haven’t read it yet, which you should. That was a huge, huge moment of this year, 2025, becoming a New York Times bestselling author. And this story starts that book, so if you’ve heard this already, I apologize, but I’m gonna rehash it here again because it’s Very relevant.

So, my son’s preschool teacher, Miss Jenny, she had a problem. One day, there was a huge ant infestation in the classroom, and the kids could not eat inside anymore. Just, basically, all of San Diego is a giant ant hill. So, they had to eat outside, but unfortunately, it was very, very hot. It gets hot. And this was a new school, by the way, at the time.

So, the big problem is there wasn’t any shade. It wasn’t built because they hadn’t thought about that. So, they had to figure it out. And it wasn’t good. Now, most adults would have probably called an exterminator, right? Filled out some forms, waited for approval, maybe formed a committee to discuss the best approach on how to handle this.

But, Miss Jenny did something different. She gathered the entire class, these are five year olds, by the way, and said, hey, we have a problem. What should we do? And the kids brainstormed. They came up with ideas, some practical, some ridiculous, some of them just didn’t make sense, like, let’s go to Chick fil A every day.

Although that was a good answer, probably. But then they did something amazing. They picked one idea that one person in the classroom had and they executed it that same day. So what was really cool was we got emails that evening basically telling us this story and said any leftover clean blankets, PVC pipes, like bring them into school the next day.

So we did, a few people brought in some sandbags. We had no idea really what was going on, just that they were working on this project together. And when I showed up at the end of the next day, my wife and I were both just incredibly surprised. They had built sunshades, two eight foot tall sunshades made from blankets and PVC pipes with the sandbags holding them down, and what they were used for was of course, to shade the little benches that they had, which were From the sun so they could eat outside.

And what blew my mind, really, and again, this inspired the starting story of lean learning, and I do have to give credit to my publisher as well, Simon Schuster, because that was the story in the proposal that got them excited about the book and shoutout to Christy Fletcher, my agent as well at United, who shot that around for me.

In fact, Simon Schuster was not the only one bidding on that. So very grateful for how that all happened. Anyway, that story blew my mind when I saw it in real time. Because these five year olds, they didn’t overthink it, right? They didn’t research the perfect solution. They didn’t wait for the ideal conditions to do this.

They just started. They were curious. They were excited. And they just kept going, and thanks to Miss Jenny, it was facilitated, they were remaining safe at the time, which was great. I talk about the importance of champions inside of Lean Learning, having people guide you, but man, what an amazing lesson for kids, but also what an amazing lesson for all of us.

To just take action, and show up. And that’s exactly what most of us adults have forgotten to do so. This was, I mean, my son is 16 now. This was 11, 12 years ago, so it’s crazy even to think about that. But here’s a more recent story from my own life. In 2021, I had this crazy idea to start a Pokemon YouTube channel.

Actually, it was December of 2020, that’s when the channel was created. The first videos came out in 2021, but this was because my kids and I started to get into Pokemon, and I wanted a channel because I wanted to learn and publish what I was learning as I was going. I wasn’t pretending to be an expert. I definitely wasn’t an expert at all.

I had no knowledge of Pokemon other than Pikachu and Charizard and what I was learning from my son at the time and my daughter as well. But I had thought about it and I was like, what am I doing? I’m a business guy. What am I going to do with Pokemon cards? But I just wanted to have fun. I just wanted a platform.

I knew how YouTube worked and I knew how I could create really good titles and thumbnails to hopefully educate and entertain other people along the way. And I was passionate enough about it to keep going. I saw an opportunity to serve a community that wasn’t being served in a way that I thought could be served better.

Now, like I said, I didn’t know anything about Pokemon, so that was the difficult thing, but I decided to show up anyway. I didn’t know the creators, I didn’t understand the audience, and I definitely didn’t know if a 40 year old dad could compete with all these younger, more energetic creators, but I made a commitment.

I said, I’m going to post one video every single week, and I’m gonna see what happens. In some weeks, those videos got 500, 100 views and nothing much at all. In some weeks, they got into the thousands and then tens of thousands. But, I decided to just keep going. Because I enjoyed it. Because I found fun in it.

And that channel now has nearly 2 million subscribers. Now the channel’s content is very deep and it’s much longer nowadays. So we don’t publish weekly anymore. That was the initial idea to get the reps in. And we were doing that, but now that we found our buckets, now that we found my voice in it, I say we, because it’s my producer, Dan and I, we work together, it feels like a team, but I am the face on camera.

I am the talent on the camera, but it’s definitely a team effort. Think we’re approaching a billion views on the channel. And it’s opened up so many opportunities that I would have never imagined. It includes a live event called Card Party that now brings thousands of Pokemon fans together including creators in the space who I once was just overshadowed by, who are now my friends. I now have connections to, gosh, this is insane, this just happened about a month ago, Kiki Hernandez, if you know that name, you’ll know who I’m talking about, obviously. It is the L. A. Dodgers world champion, Kiki Hernandez, same team as Shohei Otani. They won the world championships. He and I have a friendship now. Kiki and I. Because he opens Pokemon cards, and he’s asked me for advice, and he’s seen my videos. Pat O’Connor from the Detroit Lions. He came up to me when I went to a Detroit Lions game and said, Yo, I’m a big fan of your channel. We should get together. I want to show you my collection sometime. I’m like, bet, let’s do it.

I recently made a connection with George Kittle. Olympians and celebrities and musicians with millions of followers who are here because I’m showing up, because I’m remaining consistent.

This is happening again on the Shorts channel. Should I open it or should I keep it sealed? I mean, we just had a merch launch! We had 2, 500 shirts made that said SIOIOSIKIS across the chest, which is the acronym for Should I Open It or Should I Keep It Sealed. And I posted one post to our YouTube members, because they get first crack at it.

And we sold 500 in one day! Now, the cool thing about these shirts is you get to play the should I open it or should I keep it sealed game, because you get to order the shirt in your size, but you don’t know which shirt you’re gonna get. You might get the base shirt, which is a white shirt with black lettering.

And on the back it says, oh no, you should have kept it sealed, which is the catchphrase at the end of the videos, if I don’t pull a good card. But you might get the black shirt with the gold lettering. That’s the hit shirt. It’s a hit. It’s one of three will get the black shirt. However, one of 50 will get the chase shirt.

And this is language that is used in the card collectible in Pokemon space, the chase card, the hit card. The base card, base set. And after a quick little mention in one of my shorts videos for this t shirt having just come out, we have sold almost all of the t shirts that we made. Almost all 2,500. And the reason they didn’t sell out is because the sizes are no longer available for people who want them.

We have now just the extreme sizes available, which we didn’t order too much of, but that’s why we didn’t sell out. The tough thing about t shirts is there’s different sizes, especially when there’s different colors, and some of them, one out of every 100, so there’s about 20 to 25 shirts, are signed. And what’s cool is the packaging makes it so that it encourages people to open it on their own channels as well, so anyway, on a little tangent now.

But this is stuff that has happened by showing consistently. None of this would have happened. If I had quit after month 3, or if the views on some of those videos were low, or by month 6 I just felt like I wasn’t growing fast enough, or month 9 when I had a terrible video that everybody hated, I just kept going.

I used those moments, those low moments, as learning experiences. The magic happens because I kept going. Going even when, especially when, I didn’t feel like it.

So here is the hard truth for you here at the end of the year. I need to tell you something and it might be hard to hear. Most of you listening to this right now are going to quit. I’m not saying that to be mean. I say it because it’s statistically true. Most people who start a business, start a YouTube channel, start a podcast, start any creative endeavor, they quit within the first year.

I don’t want that to be you. I want you to be the outlier. That is who succeeds. Not the talented person, necessarily. Talent helps, yes, it helps you put yourself out there and get some results, but you can work your way to that. I didn’t know anything about Pokemon. I didn’t know anything about business when I first started.

It just was simply because I kept showing up. It’s not because they don’t have good ideas. It’s not even because they don’t work hard. They quit because they expect results too quickly. And when those results don’t come as fast as they hoped, they lose faith in the process. This is why the phrase count uploads, not likes is so powerful.

Count uploads, not views. Shoutout to Alex Hodges, who is a daily shorts creator, who I learned that from, because it’s been so true. Because that is what you can control. You can control hitting publish, hitting record, writing that script, brainstorming, putting that prompt into ChatGPT. These are all things that you can control.

You cannot control, always, the immediate result of that one thing you published, the number of views on that one video, the comments that people might even say, those are all now learning experiences, learning moments, learning data that can come through that then you can use as ammunition the next time you hit publish, the next time you hit record.

The next time you write that script, the next time you go to ChatGPT. Consistency compounds. And if you know anything about compound anything, compound interest, whatever, you know that the power comes in the time that you dedicate to it over the long haul. That’s what I’ve learned after 18 years of doing this.

Every video you make teaches you something. Every blog post you write makes you a better writer. Every product you launch, even if it fails, gives you data you didn’t have before, but you only get those benefits if you stick around long enough to collect them. Which brings me to why I’m excited about a few things.

Number one, 2026, I have a lot of plans in place, things that I’m going to continue to remain inconsistent on, but there’s something coming up that you’ve heard me talk about before. I’m going to say it again because I really want this to be a smashing success for you. Our upcoming 30 day video challenge, which starts on January 12th.

All you have to do to begin to participate with this is go to 30videos.com. That’s it. Sign up there, we’ll get you situated, we’ll get you the pre work so that you can understand what to expect so that on January 12th, you can, with thousands of others, go through the process with me to publish 30 videos in 30 days.

Now you might be thinking, Pat, 30 days, that’s, that’s not that long. And you’re right. 30 days isn’t going to make you a master. It’s not going to make you famous. Although some of you, that could happen. Can happen quickly on social media. However, it might not even get you the results that you were hoping for, but that’s not the point.

The point of it is to get you those reps, to get you some data, to get you to not worry about what you look like or how you sound or what you do on camera. It gets you to understand how to hit record and how to publish. It ultimately teaches you how to be consistent. It will teach you how to show up when you don’t feel like it, how to create content when you don’t feel inspired, how to push through the resistance that Steven Pressfield, author of The War of Art, says will happen.

Most importantly, this challenge, again, 30videos.com. It will teach you that you can commit to something and follow through. And if you get to 30 days, you will have won. You’ll have succeeded. Whether you get views or not, that is proof to yourself that you can do what you say you’re going to do. Because again, those are the things you can control.

You can control hitting record and hitting publish. That’s worth more than any single video you’re going to create. However, as a byproduct, by doing this, some of you are going to see massive results. Just as a byproduct of that. So let me share something I learned from my rowing days at UC Berkeley. We had this thing called a Power 10.

Ten strokes when you’re rowing, where everyone in the boat gives it their all, pushes through for just 10 strokes. For just that moment. And you’ll see anybody who has familiarity with rowing or regattas, and these boats of eight men or women, just peeling through the water, you can immediately see when a boat does a power 10 because it just sails through.

It just cuts a hot knife through butter and they just go. And it’s fun because then other boats have to catch up and they implement a power 10, but you can’t do a power 1000 because you’re going to die. You will burn out. But if you just coast and don’t do any sort of added effort for a period of time, then you’re going to lose for sure.

You’re just going to get left behind. So the idea of a power 10 is to every once in a while, put some extra effort into something. And that’s why this 30 day challenge is sort of an example of that. Hey, for 30 days at the start of 2026, January 12th, 2026, let’s just push. It’s not forever. It’s for a period of time, we’re going to give ourselves a chance to win.

And then you keep going. And you might keep going daily, you might switch it to once per week, however it might be, but that’s your power 10 and we want you to remain consistent for that moment. Now I know what some of you are thinking, Pat, what if I’m consistent with the wrong thing? What if I’m wasting my time?

Here’s the truth. There is no such thing as wasting time when you’re learning and growing. Every consistent action teaches you something. Every failure gives you data. Every small success builds your confidence. The only way you can truly waste time is to not take any action at all. And yes, you might need to pivot or change or transition, you might need to adjust your strategy.

I’ve done that countless times over the past 18 years. But you can only pivot from a position of movement. You can’t steer a parked car. You can’t. So here’s something that might blow your mind. The difference between someone who posts one video a week for a year versus someone who posts one video a month for a year isn’t just 52 videos versus 12 videos.

The person posting weekly learns 52 times. They get feedback 52 times. They improve their skill 52 times. They build momentum 52 times. And by the end of the year, they’re not just ahead by 40 videos, they’re ahead by an entire skill level. And if you bring this into the world of short form videos in the 30 Day Videos Challenge, I mean, imagine a whole year’s worth of videos.

365 days of compounding learning, compounding feedback, compounding data. So you know, I’m recording this at the end of 2025. And as I do that, I’m reflecting on my own journey. 18 years of showing up. 18 years of creating content, serving you, and building different businesses. And yeah, there have been times I’ve wanted to quit.

There have been times when I thought, maybe I should just get a regular job. I’ve thought that for years after I started, until I really learned that there’s really no going back for me. There have been times when the criticism has been too loud or the failures were too painful or the success felt too slow, but I kept showing up.

Not because I’m special, not because I have some superhuman willpower, I kept going because I understood something that most people don’t. Success isn’t about being perfect. It’s about being persistent.

So here’s my invitation to you, the listener, as we head into 2026.

Stop looking for the perfect strategy. Stop waiting for the perfect moment. Stop trying to figure out every detail before you begin. Just start and then keep going. Join me for the 30 day video challenge starting on January 12th at 30videos.com. It’s free to join, free to participate. I’m not asking you because it’s going to solve all of your problems.

But because it’s going to teach you the most valuable skill you can have as an entrepreneur, the ability to be consistent, and then hey, you might see some results too. And if you’re not ready for the challenge, that’s okay too, but find something, anything that you can commit to, to doing consistently.

Maybe it’s writing a hundred words a day. Maybe it’s reaching out to one potential customer a day on social media. Maybe it’s learning one new thing about your industry every single day. The specific action, to be honest, doesn’t actually matter, as the consistency of the action.

Here’s what I know for sure, 2026 is right around the corner, and it’s going to be an incredible year for the people who show up consistently, for the people who do the work even when they don’t feel like it, for the people who understand that success is a marathon and not a sprint.

The question is, are you going to be one of those people? Are you going to be the one who’s still here in 5 years, in 10 years, in 18 years? Don’t worry about what you might be doing then, but will you still be doing something? Will you still show up in some way, shape, or form? I hope so. Because I promise you this, if you can master consistency, if you can learn to show up day after day after day, you won’t just succeed, you may very well be one of the last standing. And that’s where things really start to bloom and blossom.

Thank you for listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, I’m Pat Flynn, and not only will I see you in the next episode, but I will see you next year. Happy New Year to you and your family, stay safe, stay well, and I’ll see you soon.

Let’s do this.