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Living a Richer Life

today, we're going to talk about living a richer life now. My entire business for the last 10 years has been about helping us live a rich life, and I think there are a lot of different aspects of a rich life. Most people think it's just about money. I think money is important. I think it matters. But I think that a lot of us want to know. What do we love? How do we share that with the world? How do we get the freedom to do the things we want to do? And so for the last 10 years, I've talked about automating your finances, starting to invest, finding your dream job, finding a business that you can run, whether it's with clients as a freelancer or a consultant, and most recently starting an online business. All of this has one thread interwoven throughout the whole thing and that is using the power of psychology to change your behavior and change the behavior of the people around you in a positive way. Um, we're gonna cover a lot of tactics today. I'll show you some strategies that I have...

used to grow my business, but it's not just tactical. We want to really understand the mental and psychological side of starting a business as well, because I know for a lot of creatives, You know, I could give you the perfect idea today. And we have a lot of mental barriers and blocks, right? How do I charge Mawr? Nobody will pay for my services. What is my idea? I'm not sure. There's so much competition. Why would anyone choose me? We're gonna talk about how to cover those in starting a business. So today we're gonna cover how to start a business we're gonna cover. We're gonna do a case study with one of my students. Vanessa. She has an amazing business. And Chase Jarvis, one of the founders of creative life. He's gonna come out, and we're gonna chat as well. So as we start as we start talking today about an online business, I'd like to first ask the people here in the audience Who here has thought about starting an online business before? All right, perfect. So we have mikes. I want to ask a few questions. Why an online business? What is appealing to you about starting an online business in particular? Go ahead. Just pick up a mike pretty loose today. Yeah, Go ahead. Sir. Just the impact that I'd be able to have on a number of people. Maybe just kind of a magnitude, right? Kind of 1 to 1, but one of many beautiful. So you can scale. Okay, Perfect. What else? Just how many people you can reach versus your local markets? Absolutely. So impact. What else? Location. Independence. What does that mean? Allowing me to work from wherever I want to work. Beautiful. So we have the prototypical pictures of people on their Mac laptop on a beach. Right. OK, so that's one. The other thing is, you could live in a different city. You could travel for 23 weeks at a time and your income continues growing. Your impact continues going. What else? That's right over here. Let's see. You can like personalized to each customer, like individually. Because, like technologies Very Ah, you could manipulate very easily. Yeah, well, I wouldn't use the word manipulate, but you can certainly scale your knowledge. So think of the best sales person in the world. Maybe this person works at Nordstrom. Maybe this person works at G. Whatever the case, they can typically work Oneto one there really good. But now we have some of the best salespeople online that can work one to a 1,000,000. Think about Amazon's recommendations. Think about somebody that creates a life changing course and spends the time to really understand the customer. And now, for the rest of time for the next 10 2030 years. Anyone who comes to that site and identifies as a customer, it's almost as if it was created custom for them. So when I think of starting an online business, I started asking people around me, and it was very interesting how most people said, I want location independence, by the way. Interesting how no one here mentioned money. I want to make money. Why don't we just get real with each other? I think that a lot of people want to do it because they use the word passive income, right? Oh, I want to make money while I sleep, and we're gonna cover that as well. Ah, but you'll notice that a lot of people say I want location independence. I want passive income. I want to be able to scale. Just put that aside, we're gonna come back to those things I just said in a few minutes. Um, I want to talk about what the lifestyle could mean, and I want to talk about how I've built my business, and then we're gonna go through exactly some strategies to do that. So let's take a look at some of the products that we've released in my business over the last five years or so. And I want to ask you what you take away from this chart. So this is my book. This is some online information products. I create courses to teach people strategies around their finances around finding a dream job around, building their businesses and even mastering their inner psychology. What do you notice about this chart right here? What do you notice? Yes. Okay. What's the implication? You're good. You're doing better. Okay. Back here. To me, it looks like it gets a little more complicated. Definitely. That's good. We're gonna talk about that. What else? Anyone else. So let me point out a couple of things that are not obvious. The price points on these air. About 10 bucks and $8 a month. The price point on this was around $12,000. What's the implication? A lot of people try to jump to creating a 23 $4000 course, the first course they launch. Pointless. Would you try to the first time you go for a run? Would you try to run a four minute mile? No, it's pointless. Would you try to create 5678 different courses in one year? No, it's impossible. And so I had one of my students who came out and said This is our first information products was gonna create a video course about a certain type of business. And she was like, I wanna already know the price. I want a charge. I was like, OK, I already knew where this is going. I'm not gonna charge anything less than $2000. And I said, Do you understand what it takes to be able to know how to create a $2000 course that sells? Why not start somewhere else and be able to master that before you jump to this? It's very similar to one of my students who reads my emails, and I asked, what is something you claim you want to do more of, but you don't actually do so. What's a classic answer to this? Like I claim I want to. What work out, right? Um, have better relationships with my family, etcetera. Secretary. So she writes me and says, I I always tell people that I want to run three times a week, but I never do it and I said, Well, why don't you just go run once and she wrote back, and I'll never forget, She said. Why would I run one time a week? What's the point? It doesn't even make a difference. So she would rather dream about running three times a week, then actually run one time. And that's where many of us trip ourselves up. But first we look at our competition. We look at these other people who have been at it for 5 15 years, like I want that I want the beautiful video. I want the HD quality. I want the multiple funnels conversion optimization. But the truth is we don't start there. You start at the very beginning, learning about a modest product and learning how to solve a very simple problem, and when you could do that. Then you can catapult that Inter growing into not just a product but a business. All right, so let me break down some really simple ways to create a business online because there's a lot of confusion. There's a lot of people who say, like I want to start a business online show. I do affiliates I do coaching. So I do this and that. So it's a simple way of breaking it down here. Low profit, high profit. So ads in general, you're gonna see sort of low profit per ad high profit. You're gonna see software you're going to see online courses. Building software's pretty expensive online courses. And coaching, in my opinion, are great ways to start a business. So who here has ever given some advice to a friend about relationships, fitness, clothing style, keeping your house clean and anyone not given advice to someone? All right, weirdos. All right, so So there's a lot of things you can do when it comes to sharing your insights with others on, and that's specifically the area we're going to talk about today. We're not gonna cover optimizing your ad spectrum and stuff like that we're gonna talk about how to share your knowledge with the world, Okay? And in my opinion, the two best ways you can do that are coaching and online courses. So let's talk about some counter intuitive insights about a successful online business. Notice the word I used successful. How many people here? No, someone who talks about business, who has a website who's on every Social Media network and actually is not making any money and doesn't have any real clients. Anybody know people like that. They're entrepreneurs. They wanna play entrepreneurship, but they don't want to do what it actually takes to build a successful online business. Today, we're only talking about successful, and that is a very important distinction because it means that you eliminate doing so many of the things that other people are doing. For example, one of the classic things you're gonna hear of one thing's gotta get on social media got to be all over all these now. Not true. We didn't have ah functioning Facebook page for about eight years. Um, my Twitter account drives as over 60,000 people on it. It drives virtually no business. It's purely ego, which I love, but it is mostly ego. Um, there's a lot of things that people say out there, but they haven't actually tested. How about another one? Got to keep your emails short. People. People just want to read it and move on. Has anyone heard that? Keep it snappy. Keep it short. Not true. My emails air over 10 pages. You know what someone else said? That there's another guy who writes even longer emails than me. And someone said like, Why would you write those emails? Who reads that stuff? And he smiled and said on Lee, the buyers. So one of the things we learn is that what a lot of people are saying out there may be true. It may not. We're gonna learn how to test it. The first counter intuitive insight. Passion is not enough. People love to talk about. Find your passion. Just look to the sky. Where is this passion? Oh, it's raining passion today. It's not true. You don't Passion doesn't just fall into your mouth from the sky. You find it, and also passion alone is not enough. All right, let's let's pass the mice around. What is something? You're passionate about And don't Don't be like I'm really passionate about helping people do conversion optimization should be true. Like, what are you passionate about? Acting great. What else? What else? Um, hand lettering. Calligraphy illustrates. Good. What else? The creative process. Okay. Anybody else? Fiction. Good. OK, so, actually, all the passions that we've heard today could be turned into successful online businesses. But there are also people who are passionate about apple picking. Probably not gonna be a successful online business. Could be. Probably not gonna be so. Passion alone is not enough. This is where we have to ask ourselves. What are we passionate about? But also, what does the market one? And if given a choice when creating a successful online business of what am I passionate about versus what is the market want? The market will always wait. In my opinion, you become passionate when you are winning. It's a totally different way of looking at a lot of people think Oh, I'm gonna find my passion. And they wait 10 2030 years looking for their passion. My opinion. You get really good at something, and as a result, you become passionate about it. This is a very counterintuitive way of looking. Let's talk about the next one here. Cool. So a lot of us, how many of us are stuck because we have not found an idea how many? All right, so what is typically the process when it comes to finding an idea, we create a Venn diagram, right? We write down all of our ideas and we say, Like which one jumps out at me and then we Then we throw the piece of paper way and we go off and do something. And then we realized this doesn't work. When we come back and do it again, what else do we do? We go online, we type in all these things about ourselves to some questionnaire, and it tells us what type of sex in the city character we are, right? And what type of business we should start. You should be a forest ranger. No, I shouldn't. So eso it's not just about finding an idea because there are a 1,000,000 ideas. In fact, by the end of today, you're gonna have more than 20 ideas. It's about finding a profitable idea. We're gonna talk about why that's important. Anyone could start any idea. Let's just take my business. When I originally started, it was about helping people manage their money. That's not particularly compelling. It's certainly not novel. There's a 1,000,000 other people who do money management stuff online, but you can add wrinkles. You can position yourself differently. You can choose a different audience, and you could make it your own like there are all kinds of fun things you could do with your business. You do not need a novel idea, right? You don't need to have a brand new countering brand new idea. You can have an idea that exists, but change it for your own or market. We'll talk about that and finally front load the work. So there's a There's this really popular concept right now of MVP's minimum viable products. Lean start up. The idea is just come up with something quick, throw it out there and see what sticks. Now a lot of us have heard this concept and in translation it works like this. People come up with some idea. They write it down on a piece of paper. They're like, Yes, this is my ticket and then they create some kind of e book, right or really quick website and they throw it up. And then what happens? Who knows who can tell me crickets. They wait and they're like, Where my millions, where are they? I'm a big fan of rapid testing. I'm all about it, but I have a slightly different belief than the idea that you can just test your way to success. I believe in front loading the work. So when I taught my other creativelive class, it was three days, and it covered personal finance, dream job and starting a freelance business. One of things we talked about is when you walk into that interview room, most people walk into an interview, and they think I'm here to answer their questions wrong. You've already lost your there to communicate your key messages, and the truth is that 80% of the work is done before you ever set foot in the room. This is a hugely different way of looking at business than most people. So in an interview they think they walk in, they answer questions, and they went wrong. You already lost cause everyone else is doing If you've done 80% of the work. If you've front loaded the work, you already know the name of the interview. In fact, you priority met him for coffee. You already know the key challenges of the company because you've taken three other people out to coffee. You've studied the interviews of the CEO. You've done everything. Fact. Do you have a 10 page document showing them what you're going to do in the 1st 30 60 90 days? At that point, it's undeniable. They can't resist hiring. And the same is true for an online business front loading the work front loading the work means that you do the research up front instead of just throwing it out there and seeing what happens just to give you an example from our own business in my first all mine product that ever created it was a $4.95 e book. He was called Raw Meats Guide to Kicking Ass. I mean, I have a weird thing about names, but I was nervous. I was petrified that people wouldn't buy it. I had a lot of mental barriers about pricing. In fact, if you go look at the sales page, which is online, you can see how I was super defensive about Like Hagos was just no free. I know you confined most of it on Google blah, blah, blah and light. And then recently, you know, I sold a $12,000 course and the language was very different. I said, This course probably isn't right for you. Here's why. If you have credit card debt, you're not allowed to join any of my courses. That's a policy I have for my flagship programs. If you have this, you're not a lot of joint. And in fact we did way better. Way better. So front loading the work means being able to understand who you're targeting and what they want before you go public with your launch.