SHAWN STEVENSON: Today's episode is all about unlocking your superpower. We all have the capacity to create, to be, to do, and to experience so much, but today, more than ever, we are inundated. We are overburdened, we are absolutely swimming in so much, so much of what? So much of everything, so much information, so much food, so much chemicals and chemistry in the environment. So many people. We evolved knowing a few dozen, a few hundred people in our tribe respectively. But today, you have the capacity to be watched and communicate with thousands of people on end at one time. It is very abnormal, and our brains are just trying to figure out a way to adapt. And so this feeling of overwhelm and being overburdened is rampant in our society.

But today, again, we're going to unlock your superpowers by helping us to get clear and to clear out the clutter. And yes, to take advantage of the access that we have today because we can learn anything. Anything that you want to know you have access to. But just that sheer access can be overwhelming. And so today is about clarity. It's about dialing in what feels right and what is inspiring for us, and again, unlocking our superpower and our own gifts and capacities so that we can create the life that we truly want to create. And our special guest, this individual who's gonna be teaching you about this today, I'm telling you, he's been so impactful in my life, personally, a big part of the Model Health Show with over 900 episodes that we've now published.

It's amazing. It's absolutely amazing. At the very beginning, his resources, things that he was teaching helped us to create and publish the show. And so we go all the way back like that. Not to mention, every Monday I have the honor of meeting up with this individual in our mastermind group and this dynamic group, this eclectic group of individuals. We get together and we share our ideas. We share our struggles, we share our wins, and we support each other. And it's been incredibly valuable. It's been a staple in my life for many, many years. And to go from, again, not knowing this individual, but learning from him, from afar to him being an instrumental part of my life and being able to support him and to amplify his voice, his very important and timely voice and timely message, it just does my heart so much good. So I'm so excited to share this conversation with you today. 

Now, before we get to our special guest, one thing that he would agree with me on is that we've gotta fuel our bodies for performance. And especially when we're on the go, my man just drove up here from San Diego to Los Angeles, that is a hefty drive. And to be able to perform and to share his voice and to share all these incredible insights, he's gotta be fueled on the good stuff. And by the way, afterwards, we're having a phenomenal dinner. Yes, we're having a recipe from the E Smarter Family Cookbook. We're having the salmon burgers, which will knock your socks off.

You better have your socks strapped. I'm talking taped to your feet because they will get blown right off these amazing salmon burgers. But when we're on the go, my family, my team. Our special guests, you know, sometimes they're going to multiple interviews. We share the very best snacks with them, and one of my favorite snacks is the Superfood bars from Paleo Valley. Not only does it have more than eight organic superfoods and collagen rich, 100% grass fed bone broth protein. There are no added sugars or sugar alcohols. These are true food bars, true Superfood bars, and this is from the Amazing folks at Paleo Valley. Go to paleovalley.com/model, and you're going to get 15% off all of their incredible snacks, their food-based supplements and more. Again, definitely check out their Superfood bars. They come in a variety of flavors, including Apple cinnamon, chocolate chip. And more. That's paleovalley.com/model. P-A-L-E-O-V-A-L-L-E-Y.com/model for 15% off store wide. And now let's get to the Apple Podcast review of the week. 

ITUNES REVIEW: Another five star review titled Long Overdue by ShaneS2S. After a few months of listening, I have finally caught up with the show, a bittersweet feeling. This show has gave me a huge understanding of overall health from the guest you have featured on your show. I have a lot of things I want to implement in my life, but you have already given me the blueprint for basic health routine, waking up drinking my water to making my four Sigmatic lion's mane coffee, driving with the window down to get some natural air. Contrast showers and foam rolling before bed. This routine helps me feel like a refreshed and ready version of myself. Thank you for all you do. PS you and your wive's relationship is epic. Having an example of what a healthy, loving relationship gives me life and more love in my relationship. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Thank you so much for leaving that review over on Apple Podcasts. I truly do appreciate that. And you can leave a review on Apple Podcast. Share your voice there. Or if you're listening on Spotify, you can leave a comment on each episode. Share your voice there. Of course, you could rate this show over on Spotify or leave a comment over on the Model Health Show YouTube channel. It really does mean a lot. And without further ado, let's get to our special guest and topic of the day.

Pat Flynn is a bestselling author and one of the most influential voices in digital entrepreneurship. Through his diverse portfolio of businesses, award-winning podcasts, newsletters, YouTube channels, and thriving online communities, pat teaches and inspires millions of people each month. He's the founder of SPI, an online community for digital entrepreneurs, co-inventor of the Switch Pod and host of the Deep Pocket Monster YouTube channel, as well as founder of Card Party, a large scale live event for the community of Pokemon collectors. Pat also serves as an advisor to dozens of companies and is a sought after keynote speaker. In his free time, he enjoys fishing, collecting Pokemon cards, and rewatching the back to the Future trilogy. Today Pat is going to teach you the power of a lean learning to transform your business, your relationships, your body, and your life. Let's dive in this conversation with the one and only Pat Flynn.

Lean Learning. Let's go, man. So happy, Pat Flynn. Legend, and I don't use that word lightly. I don't use that word lightly. Part of the bricks that helped to build the Model Health Show. We're handed to me from you. You're gonna take this, all right, you're gonna take this. When we started this show, there was so many questions we didn't know, like, how do you publish? What do you do with all this? What's the distribution? You had a roadmap for us virtually, right? You are a virtual mentor for us, and we utilized your approach and got the show published and over time, and per my first tweet to you once, we were the number one health show in the country the first time, and I said, pat, thank you so much. Your knowledge helped us to be the number one health show. He replied back something to the effect of Sean, that's amazing, but that wasn't me. You know? You couldn't have a number one show without you creating something really awesome, and that really speaks to your humbleness, right? Even though you are this incredible great man, you're so giving, you're so humble, and you're one of the best people that I know. And I'm so grateful to have you here. I'm so excited. I've been excited all day. I've been giddy like a school girl kicking my feet. 

PAT FLYNN: I didn't know you were gonna start by trying to make me cry, man. Thank you. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. 

PAT FLYNN: For saying that. And in a way, through you and your superpowers, I've been able to also help contribute to people who've bettered their lives as a result of that. And that's what I think about, about my content and what I do. It's not just, you know, helping people individually. It's helping people who also help a lot of other people, you know, trying to lift everybody up through amazing people like yourself. So, congrats on the show. The new studio is amazing. Dude, I love this. So grateful to be here. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Thank you, man. Thank you. Well, listen, you know this better than most. We are swimming in information. We are feeling overwhelmed, overburdened, and we want to, so many of us have aspirations. We wanna get healthy. We wanna take care of our bodies. We want to take care of our relationships. We wanna create that dream business. And yet, because of all the information, we can feel overwhelmed and sometimes even this feeling of just drowning or feeling stuck. What in the world is going on right now? 

PAT FLYNN: Information overload is the new normal right now. And you know, I'm not a scientist or anything like that, but it's kind of obvious that we have not evolved to be able to consume this much stuff that not only are we voluntarily consuming, but stuff that's getting forced down our throats, right. Now information used to be valuable because not all of us had access to it, right? Remember Encyclopedia Britannicas, like if you had one in your home, you were like smarter because you could afford additional info that other people could not.

The smartest kid in the class was always rewarded and if you knew more, you were more powerful. But not anymore. 'cause we all have access to literally the same information on our phones and chat, GPT and AI and all this stuff. It's just leveling the playing field for what we have access to. 

And if information were the answer to all of our worries and problems, wouldn't we all be where we wanna be? We're not, like you said, we're drowning in it now and we don't know how to, how to, how to handle it. Like we're treating information like, it's like it's a scarce food source, right? Like back in the day if you come across Bush with food or a carcass or something and like you, you get it all because you might not come across another food source for a while.

So you absorb those calories so that you can survive. But we're treating information in the same way. So when we come across something that may seemingly be valuable, we don't really put it through any filters. We just download it, we absorb it. And as a result, of course we have less time to do other things 'cause we're learning. Learning feels like we're making progress, but we're also getting over inspired. We're getting pushed and pulled in so many different directions, right? How is inspiration bad? It's bad because you've said yes to one thing, and before you even finish or follow through with that, you're already saying yes to this new thing and you're getting pulled every which way.

And it's hard because we are on social media and we have access to everybody. And so how do we control that? How do we define in our lives what matters and what doesn't? That's the real trick here. And over the years, I've developed a way that I've approached a lot of things and the information that I've been bombarded with to selectively choose the right things to help me in the path that I want to go down. So that's why I wrote my book because a lot of people have asked me just again and again, how are you able to do all the things that you do? Because I've done a lot of different things and I've supposedly done them pretty well, well enough to impress people, I guess to then ask like, are you just good at everything? No, I'm good at learning quickly, skill acquisition, but speed run. And I think now is the time to have this conversation 'cause the way we are learning is for an older world. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah.

PAT FLYNN: We're in a new world now.

SHAWN STEVENSON: And that's one of the cool things is that learning quickly isn't some innate thing that people are just able to do. Some people just learn quickly, other people don't. There's an approach to doing it. Can you talk a little bit about that? 

PAT FLYNN: Yeah. Really it's this idea of understanding what just in case information is, which is what we're all absorbing just in case versus just in time information. Right. Knowing where you want to go, but within that, knowing what the next step is and just mastering that. Learning from people who talk specifically about that. Reading a particular chapter of a book, just about that. For example, my very first business in 2008, I sold a study guide for architects to pass an exam and I'd never sold anything before. So my mind immediately, this was after getting laid off my mind immediately was like, okay, if I wanna do success and successful in business, I have to go to business school.

Right. It's like I have to learn more in order to be good at this. But I had something at stake. I moved back in with my parents and I was about to get married. I didn't want to still live at home and raise my family that way. So I was motivated to figure things out quickly, right. And so for example, I didn't know how to write a book. I didn't know how to publish it. I didn't know how to make sales online, but I knew that I had to get something on paper. So that's what I did. I just opened Microsoft Word, wrote down all my notes, and it was just in sort of a, a long format. And I said, okay, now that I have all this here, I need to know how to format it.

I don't know how to format things. I've never done this before. Let me go watch a YouTube video 'cause that's the answer I need right now and then implement that. And cool, now I have this manuscript that's laid out in a landscape style two columns. I'm now more motivated than ever to keep going 'cause I've already had something that I didn't before versus before I would've. Overlearned everything, the whole process and probably just confused myself out of it or, and, and never took any action at all, which is what most of us do. And we're trying to learn how to do something new. We, we talk ourselves out of it. And then of course, I never sold anything, so I needed to figure out how to do that.

So I found a tool that allowed me to put a button on my website, but I needed a sales page. I'd never written a sales page. I wasn't a copywriter, but I found a book, it was called Moonlighting on the Internet by Yanick Silver. And this book is made up of, I don't know, 25 to 30 different ways to make money on the internet. Everything from selling on eBay to whatever. I didn't need any of that. I just needed the appendix in the back, which included a mad Madlib style sales page where I can just plug and play my own product. That's the only thing I needed from that book, and probably one of the most valuable books I've ever read, because that piece right there that I then put on my website helped me earn over seven figures from just selling a study guide to architects.

And I didn't do that by learning everything and, and, and getting overwhelmed. I did that by piecing it out, learning just those singular pieces and then moving on to the next, and today as opposed to back then there are more resources than ever. Right? If you take this iterative approach of just in time learning, you have to trust that by the time you reach that next phase where you need new information, that it will be there 'cause it is, and by the time you need it, it's probably better than if you were to get it upfront. You know what I'm saying?

SHAWN STEVENSON: Absolutely. Yeah.

PAT FLYNN: It, it's, this isn't revolutionary. This is just rethinking how we approach learning because we're just so absorbed with everything. Like, I remember I was at a event once of people who were business owners and I asked the audience to raise their hand if they were subscribed to a podcast, and almost everybody in the audience was subscribed to one podcast. I said, okay, keep your hand up if you're subscribed to five or more podcasts. Hardly any hands went down. Keep your hand up if you are subscribed to more than 10. Some hands went down and by the time I got to the end, there were still dozens of people who were subscribed to 50 plus different podcasts.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah.

PAT FLYNN: And it's like, what else are you doing in your life other than just consuming all this stuff that's now confusing you? Or is it just entertainment? Are, are you feeling like you're making progress simply by learning, or would you rather learn by doing, which is the whole point of this, right? If, if I were to sum up this book, lean learning in a couple words, it's just like, just do. I can't say just do it 'cause somebody else owns that. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: So come in and swoop, yeah. Swoop you up, man. You know what, this applies so deeply to, yes, our personal development, but also with our health and fitness in particular, because more than ever there are all these conflicting voices and perspectives and there's no shortage of, you know, controversial approaches and very simplistic approaches and what we can. Find ourselves doing is just, again, consuming all this information instead of applying things. And also, so many of the things that you talk about in this book was the way that I went about things unconsciously. You basically laid this roadmap out of your success of many of the successful people that you know. But you know, being able to choose a guru or maybe two gurus, right? You don't have to call them gurus, you can call them mentors, you can call them whatever, but just choose one or two people. Don't follow everybody.

PAT FLYNN: Right.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Don't follow everybody. 

PAT FLYNN: But, but, but he might have one thing that would change everything for me.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. That one thing.

PAT FLYNN: So I need it all so I can pick and choose. And the problem is you're not gonna be able to manage that, right? So I love that. Pick one mentor or two to learn from somebody who shares the same values as you, who is living the same life you wanna live or has the same body that you like, whatever it might be, and then tune everything else out. Now the struggle is we have fomo. So a lot of this book, learning what to do and who to learn from is what's happening up here. We're fighting against ourselves. So when it comes to absorbing information, we have this fear that we might miss out on something important, right? So here's the strategy to solve that. You take those things that are important, that are coming your way or seemingly important, and you put them through Filter, is this important for me right now? 

And if not, you put 'em into like a virtual shoebox, a notion board, or you know, an Evernote or whatever it might be, or Apple Notes. Just put 'em away so that your brain can move forward. And what's funny with me and my students who I share this tactic with is 99% of the time, you will never, ever go back to that. It's just simply a mechanism to move forward from it. So you can start doing. And by the time again, like I said, you need that information. It was probably something better and more relevant that just came out.

SHAWN STEVENSON: And this wasn't something that, you know, you just automatically did. You also found yourself being a over learner, especially in those beginning stages. And you shared that story of meeting with your business coach. And you had all these notes. You had notes on notes, on notes. You were just consuming all this information, podcasts and books and you know, his, his input. But you had, you had one of those moments. 

PAT FLYNN: Oh, yeah, yeah. So I had a business coach 'cause again, I go to mentors to help me and hold me accountable. And back then I was a, a hoarder of information for sure. And I had my notepad and I wrote every single word down. It was almost as if I was like in school again, right? Where I draw a line on the, on the left hand side, and then like the right hand side is the notes and the left hand side are just like the outlines. Like I was literally approaching it the way I was taught in school. And then he eventually, after he was teaching me stuff, he was like, okay, put the notepad down.

Here's what you need to do. And I was like, getting ready to write this down again. He's like, just fricking get started. And he said it in a much more serious tone and he used a different F word. And I started to write that down and he was like, stop! Like you're literally overlearning. You are replacing this feeling of doing by writing stuff down all the time. Just get your book written. And this is the architecture book that I was talking about. Um, and so I started to commit to action over information at that point. 'cause by then I already knew everything I needed to know. Everything new was just an opportunity to cloud the action that I was supposed to be taking.

So I was very grateful for that aggressive approach that he took that day because he was never like that before. And I think that's why it stood out to me more. He literally yelled at me and sometimes we needed to get yelled at.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Tough love.

PAT FLYNN: Yeah, tough love. My wife will tell you that, that's for sure. She yells at me. I love you babe. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Right? Caveat. Yeah, caveat, alert. Just to be clear. Well, this leads us perfectly to, you know, again, you sharing in a very concise, easy to consume fun, but also repeatedly action oriented, new book, lean learning. So I wanna break down these pieces because we are in, we are in an information war right now. It's, it's just flying by us 24/7. There's no escaping it. And we've gotta be strategic. We've gotta take control of our minds. Whether we want to create the body and the health that we want, the relationships we want, the business that we want, there's a way to go about it in this world today. And we need to be intentional because if not, and I know many people listening have, have felt that overwhelm and just all of this stuff and this feeling like I have to know more or even just a lot of junk as well. And I know you're gonna talk about that. A lot of junk inputs that we can come in contact with. Yeah. And so I wanna break down these sections of lean learning and start off with selective curiosity. And this is again. When you described it, I was like, oh, that, that's what I did. Let's talk about selective curiosity.

PAT FLYNN: Yeah. It's good to be curious, right? That's how we grow. That's how we learn when we grow up to be adults. Sometimes that curiosity is stunted, right? When we normally would wanna ask why we stay silent, because the little kid who asks why all the time, who's trying to learn? We tell 'em, Hey, just stop saying that. Like, just do what I tell you, right? Yeah. But the why. The why, the why. That's how we learn. However, again, with access to everything, being too curious means you're never gonna do anything, and so it's important to, as you come across different inspirations, to put them through a filter to understand whether or not they're worth continuing or opting out of, right?

We have this FOMO thing that we talked about earlier, right? The approach to combat that is not the joy of missing out, which some people say. The counter to FOMO is not jomo, because that's just kidding yourself. I'm not gonna be joyful that I'm missing out on this. The joy of opting out is the answer. By basically saying, okay, I see that. I recognize it, but not right now. Yeah. I'm going to opt out of this. Which does what? It re-op you in to the commitments you've already made. You are saying yes again to the thing that you said you were gonna do, but in the beginning, if you're not quite sure, putting these things through a filter. And there in the book there's this thing called the inspiration matrix where you can, you have it up there, which is great, and it's important to have a balanced sort of matrix of things that you are interested in and there's different components to this.

So the first quadrant in the upper left is gonna be your recreational inspirations. These are like hobbies and things like that. Things that you don't necessarily wanna turn into a complete passion or, or a business or something like that. But just it's important to have at least one thing in there because I found that when entrepreneurs especially don't have anything in their recreational inspiration quadrant, when they're just grinding on stuff, they're not able to escape that and recharge. And so it's important to have a hobby or something like this and, and to recognize if you are overworking yourself to have some breathing room. So for me, it's fishing and for a while, like I'm picking up golf again, which is great. Gardening during the pandemic was a big recreational inspiration.

I'm not passionate about gardening, but it is something that I enjoy doing and I was able to get my kids involved with that too, so they could finally eat their veggies because they grew it instead of just like force feeding them, which is great. So we use that as sort of education for the kids as well. But if you zoom out and you consider that you don't have the thing that you could look forward to, to escape your normal life of the thing that you're grinding on, then that's gonna be a problem. So finding at least one thing in there to focus on. And then of course within that you wanna get good at it. You wanna learn and you can use lean learning to get better. Just like how you can use lean learning to get better at gardening like I did, right? I learned by making mistakes. I planted seeds too close together and they didn't have room to grow, right? Or, certain types of seeds that I planted in, in San Diego weren't able to do as well as other plants, right?

In, in different times of the year. And, and those kinds of things. And you learn by making mistakes and there's a lot of metaphors to gardening in life too, you know, pruning and, you know, not putting too many seeds in the garden. That's the perfect metaphor for what we're talking about here, right? You put too many seeds in there, there's just gonna be no room to really grow. So we've learned to create specific, raised bed gardens for crops like tomatoes, two tomato plants per raised bed, and we can get a yield that lasts all summer. It's incredible. The next quadrant over are gonna be your passion pursuits. These are the things that you cannot stop thinking about, that you are dreaming about, that you are sacrificing a lot of things to do and try to make work.

For many people, it's certain businesses or certain organizations that you might be a part of that you just want to have work out and learning and understanding what those are important 'cause that's where you're gonna put most of your time. That's where we get a lot of joy back. Right. The investment into those things is a reinvestment into yourself.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah.

PAT FLYNN: And then of course you have your junk sparks. And this is where we get into a lot of trouble. This is where, when I run this experiment and filter through a lot of people, we find that most of the things that they're doing are in the junk spark quadrant. Which means at one point it just was a spark, an inspiration that was like, Ooh, that could be exciting.

Let me dabble with this. And then within a week or two or a month, it's just kind of in the back of their mind and it's not going anywhere. And it's not just one thing. Usually it's like five or 10, and these things are all things that we could put aside to make room for our passion, pursuit, or recreational inspiration. Oftentimes the audit, the best benefit is to see what your junk sparks are and remove them from your life. There's a book called Essentialism that helps do something similar where you rank all the things that you're doing right, and it's like the nines and tens, you keep. The ones and twos and threes are easy to remove from your life, but it's the 4, 5, 6, and sevens.

The things in the middle that are kind of like, they're there. You kind of have a little bit of interest, but maybe, maybe not. Those are the hard ones to leave out and get rid of. But when you do that, that's a reinvestment, like I said, into those uh, things that are more important. And then you have your critical commitments, the things that you have to do that you can't really get out of. It's a part of your role at work or your responsibilities. You might not enjoy it, but you have to do it. Making sure that's just not overloaded as well. And that you have a balanced matrix of inspiration is, is important. And then when you get those inspirations and you wanna get better at those things, then it's using some of the tactics in the book to fast forward that skill acquisition in many different kinds of ways from surrounding yourself with the right people who have done those things before.

Right? Finding the one or two resources. Like when I learned how to speak in 2011, by the way, I was deathly afraid of speaking. You've seen me speak on stage before. I consider myself a pretty decent speaker now, but it didn't happen by reading about speaking, it happened by number one, just getting on more stages. But when I started, I went to other people who I knew were speakers. A lot of people you know as well, Sean and I said, if you were to start over again, what's the one resource you would go to? And two or three people said, well, you need to read the book, stand and Deliver by Dale Carnegie. So, although there were dozens of books, if not hundreds, on speaking, I just like, okay, I'm gonna focus on this one.

Im gonna study it. I'm gonna go deep on it. And that's what helped me start, not start perfect again. Getting over that perfection is an important component of this as well. Again, we're fighting ourselves in a lot of this, but it got me started and it gave me a nice foundation to work off of. And then I hired a coach, Mike Paton, to help me speak as well. So I got into the mentorship game there and invested some money and time to again become a world class speaker. And I've now got, gotten paid nearly seven figures of speaking fees over the years, and I've spoken on 350 stages and it's a craft that I absolutely love, but to get even better at it, right?

Mastery is important to a lot of us, especially high performers. How do we master something, not just get started with it and get decent? How do we master it? So in the speaking world, I wanted to become a master of it, and the way that I did that was through something I call in the book Micro Mastery. And that is taking all the little components that you know you need to learn how to do, breaking them out, and then focusing on one area at a time, for a certain period of time. So in the world of speaking, for example, it was like, okay, I'm gonna learn how to story tell, I'm just gonna go deep in the storytelling. Yes, there are slides. I need to know where to speak on stage. I need to know how to use my voice. I need to know how to get on these stages.

I'll worry about those things later. But if I can tell great stories, I think that's gonna be a, a, a high leverage opportunity for me to have all these other things just kind of naturally happen. So, I studied stories, I watched TED Talks and just paid attention to the stories. I would write notes just about stories. I'd read about storytelling. I'd read about screen playwriting, all these devices that I could get again, learning a lot, but it was controlled about one thing. And I said, I'm gonna learn about storytelling for two months, and then I'm gonna incorporate that into my next talk. And I've gotten pretty good at storytelling.

Then after that, it got even to the micro level of what am I gonna do with my hands? So for two weeks I said, and it's important to give yourself an amount of time to learn so that everything else is kind of shielded outside of that. For two weeks, I studied hands just what do people do with their hands when they're on stage? I watched Ted Talks and noticed how when people would kind of bring their hands close to their body, that they were in a more vulnerable state with what they were talking about, right? But if you wanted to get bigger and you're making a bigger point, you can use your hands to emphasize and then you can even use your hands to selectively choose which parts of the talk that you're speaking or should hit home for people anyway.

There's a lot of like tricks and little things like that. It reminds me of a friend of mine, he's an ultra marathon runner, you know, he's crazy. He runs like 50 miles a day or something like that. I don't know how y'all do that. And he wears those like toe shoes and stuff. I dunno how you feel about that. I think you wear those, right? 

SHAWN STEVENSON: I do. I do.

PAT FLYNN: Okay.

SHAWN STEVENSON: When, when I'm like training.

PAT FLYNN: Do you like 'em?

SHAWN STEVENSON: Walking.

PAT FLYNN: Does it feel weird?

SHAWN STEVENSON: Love, love em, man. I, I didn't talk about it for a year. I did it in private, in secrecy. You know, so that I wouldn't lose cool points with myself and I just fell in love with it. When it, whenever I go home after leaving the show, for example, I throw those on.

PAT FLYNN: Really?

SHAWN STEVENSON: And I go walk. Yeah. 

PAT FLYNN: I don't know how to feel, how I feel about that. I'll have to try it out. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: But also they gotta be cool. We got, we can still make 'em cool though as well.

PAT FLYNN: Okay.

SHAWN STEVENSON: That's the, that's the thing. That's the bridge. And so I got you. We're gonna, we're gonna make 'em cool. 

PAT FLYNN: Okay. I have a weird, like my second toe is bigger than my, I don't know, nevermind.

SHAWN STEVENSON: And no judgment. Hey, hey, all feet are welcome, inclusive.

PAT FLYNN: That's a different website. So this friend of mine, ultra Marathon runner, his name's Ryan, he told me how he got better at running and got faster times. And it wasn't just by running 50 miles a day without sort of any conscious effort on different components of his running that he wanted to improve. So he said that for a month he just focused specifically on how his feet landed on the ground. Right? And when you're running 50 miles, there's a lot of moments of that. So those, those little micro improvements that you make compound and can exponentially help your time across many miles, right? So he hired somebody to slow mo video his feet as he was running so he could study just how the feet landed on the ground.

He learned about that. He talked to people about that, and it was just micro mastering that. Then he focused for a while, I think it was like a couple months where he was really training himself by just focusing on breathing through his nose and expanding his lungs so that he could have more endurance and like all this stuff that was like, that's such a small component of what it is. But like James Clear talks about in atomic habits, that 1% incremental improvement just begins to stack. And of course, once you master how your feet hit the ground and then master how you breathe, you can then focus on other things. And then these, this helps you become world class at what you do. And even as a creator, as a YouTuber, this is what I do, right?

For three or four months, my producer and I, we were studying thumbnails. That's it. Just thumbnails. There's a lot that goes into creating a YouTube video, but thumbnails are important. It's the first thing people see before they click a video, and we study this. We went to classes to learn about thumbnails. We now have a thumbnail guy who we do photo shoots for thumbnails specifically and all this kind of stuff, right. And then we study titles. We study storytelling. Again, stuff that I learned from my speaking career has now gotten, into the YouTube world with my Pokemon YouTube channel, which is blown up and a lot of people know me for now. And that's another thing I like that I was able to do in a relatively short period of time. Right. Have 1.5 million subs on a YouTube channel about something I didn't know about four years ago. Yeah. Thanks to the kids for getting me involved in that one too. But they kind of outgrew it and I did not.

SHAWN STEVENSON: But yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. You know, and I got to be there and the inception of the idea and to see it come to this incredible, incredible level where, you know, people are recognizing you in other countries. Like are you deep pocket monster? Yeah. Right. It's just, it's unbelievable man. So cool. And you know, I want to ask you about this because that quadrant, when you split things up, it provides such a simple framework that will take us five minutes, you know, to be able to do and just get stuff out of our head, write it down.

But I think there's gonna be a reservation because we are worried about doing the right thing, like the passion pursuit. Am I choosing the right thing? I've got a lot of passions. I've got a lot of passions. Am I choosing the right thing? And you provide a solution for that too. In the book, you provide one of the coolest visualizations. This is something I've been doing for, you know, about 20 years now and I had my Imagination station, right? Yeah. I would bring up this screen and this beautiful setting and, you know, I would run through the way that I would want things to go, right. Whether it's a day or whether it's an outcome for a project.

And you take people and have us hop into the DeLorean and set the time where we can go into the future and see next year when you focus on this one passion pursuit, this primary thing, what does your life look like, right? We can stretch that out even further. And so you get to, and, and you can also, if you're doing this the right way, which is being honest and feeling the feelings, like is this leading me to the life that I really want? Or do I feel like this isn't right for me right now? Yeah. You know, and I can choose, I can go hop back in the DeLorean and I could choose something else. I can go back and now I'm gonna choose what if I choose this thing and go out, map that out, see what your future looks like. And that's the only way, that way.

And also, you're giving us permission. You said it earlier. Such a huge part of learning is making mistakes, right? And I love this sentiment that it's not about making the right decision, it's about making the decision. Right. You know? And so many of us are afraid to make the right if we're making the right decision or not. Whatever we choose, it's an opportunity to learn and that can guide us to exactly where we want to be. 

PAT FLYNN: Yeah. I think it was, Dan Martel recently said in a video, it's not rejection, it's redirection. I was like, man, that's good. Right? So for the four people in the audience who don't know what a DeLorean is, it's a time machine from the movie Back to the Future, which is my all time favorite movie. And the exercise, exercise, I run through my students with this, and I wrote about it in a previous book as well. And it has literally made people cry. It has made people angry, and it's also made people very, very happy. Why? Because the exercise as you were explaining, is you, you know, of course if you're making a decision, if in the book it's like, okay, choose one path and choose it for a while it's not a forever thing, but you need to make a decision.

So sometimes with my students, the decision point is let's throw a dart at the dart board just so we can get going. Because every day you wait to take action is a day you're not learning. Right. And those mistakes that you are worried about making, that you think are gonna derail you actually become the guardrails that you move within. So those mistakes are important. You gotta take action. But if you're worried or you're curious, and it's important to do this exercise, you get into your DeLorean, you go 88 miles per hour one year into the future, things worked out the way you want them to, right? Like, don't worry about how that happened.

It just is one year from now, the business you started is rolling and it's exactly how you want it. The passion, pursuit, whatever it might be, is doing what you want it to do. And you see yourself a year from now and you ask yourself, like you said those questions, what's your day like? Are you fulfilled? Do you regret that decision or do you not? Who are you with and how are you loved? These kinds of questions that you can experiment with start to reveal some truths about the decision that you are about to make now, one way or another. The reason some people have cried is because they realize that they are climbing the wrong ladder. That they are painting a future, that even if it were successful, is not where they want to be. So the crying happens because they're realizing they're in the wrong spot. But how much of a blessing it is to learn that now.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Right.

PAT FLYNN: Versus a year from now, five years from now, 10 years from now, whatever. Other people get upset about that and that they've made the wrong choices. And for many people, that exercise actually confirms and validates that they are on the right path. In fact, it reinforces the whole why behind this in the first place, right? So for me, for example, I had played out that scenario in the mid 2010s, 20 13, 20 14, big in the blogging space.

I was a top affiliate for a hosting company. That hosting company asked me to become a CEO of their company. They wanted me to come in because I knew I had the marketing skills and the name to go with it. It wasn't the company that I was promoting. It was a competitor company. And they wanted me to come in and be CEO lots of money. I would've had to move, I would've had a team of about a hundred people under me, you know, directors and, and, and their subordinates and everything. And I was like, if this works out the way I want it to, what would my day look like? Well, I'd have to wake up early, go into an office. I would probably sit at night and never fall asleep because I'd be worried about the servers failing and all my customers 'cause that's just how I am.

Like, this is not a life that I want. And even though it would come with a lot of rewards, it just wasn't in alignment with who I was and my values and what was important to me. So it was easy though. Easy. No, I opted out of that to re-op into what was important to me at the time, which was designing a business around my family and my young kids at the time. And being there and being able to walk them to school when they went to school age and every day until they were basically in middle school. My wife and I were both able to take them to school and bring them back, back home together and I'm so happy that I made those decisions. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. That's so special, man. I shared this with you that just watch, um, reading the dedication to your book. I, like my eyes were welling up, you know. 

PAT FLYNN: Lemme see the book. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah, here you go. 

PAT FLYNN: I'll read it for everybody 'cause this is important to me. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. 

PAT FLYNN: Oh, I wrote a note in there for you too. So the dedication to lean learning is "to my children as you stand on the threshold of adulthood, may the lessons in these pages guide you to learn with purpose, live with passion, and lead with integrity." As they are 15 and 12. Now they're entering a world that's very different than one you and I lived in, right? There's some pros and there's some cons. And one of the hard things is there's just so much, it's confusing and people are overwhelmed, stressed out, depressed. And with all the resources in the world, shouldn't we be equipped to be able to go wherever we want, should be. But with the way learning is and education in schools and stuff, it's just slow to adapt to how quickly everything is moving right now. I mean, things are moving so fast. When you think about where tech is going and all the things that are happening. If we don't change the way we're learning, we're gonna get left behind.

And I don't know if it's the robots that are gonna take our place and for some people in their jobs, that's already happening. You know, think about how we used to learn back in the day. Like back, back, back in the day, if you wanted to learn to be a blacksmith, what did you do? Did you like..

SHAWN STEVENSON: Apprentice.

PAT FLYNN: Yeah. You found a blacksmith who would take you under their wing and they would get you in the forge and have you hammering the thing. And that obviously I'm not a blacksmith, I don't know, I just keep saying the thing. I'm like there is a world where we can combine the apprenticeship model and learning in real time, making mistakes in real time and being okay with that, with the tech that we have today. That's my vision. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Hmm. 

PAT FLYNN: Is that there is some world where that happens, and I think I'm starting to see some of this happen. 

There are some schools that are more experimental that I'm seeing where, you know, you imagine five days a week in school, well, not actually, it's two or three days a week in school. The other days literally interning, working, getting your hands dirty, doing the thing. So I hope that this book at least starts a conversation there, or at least opens up people's eyes, and the world. But even for you, the individual, like, what is it that you're doing? Are you learning about things and being fulfilled or are you getting overwhelmed from all the things that you're allowing yourself to have access to? Because it's really gonna be up to you. We're not stopping this content that's coming our way. There's more and more information being uploaded every single day, and that's not going anywhere. So it's up to us. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Got a quick break coming up. We'll be right back.

There's one beverage that rules them all when it comes to longevity. In fact, a study published just last year in The Lancet found that people who regularly drink tea age slower than people who do not. Now, there are so many varieties of tea that come teaming with health benefits and flavor profiles from green tea to ginger tea and more. And speaking of anti-aging and anti-obesity effects, a study published in the journal Clinical Interventions in Aging took 59 overweight or mildly obese subjects to see if the renowned tea called Pu erh makes a notable difference in weight loss.

The randomized double-blind placebo controlled trial gave participants either a placebo or Pu erh for a 20 week study period. There were no other interventions noted. Here's what happened. The researcher stated quote, consumption of Pu erh was associated with statistically significant weight loss when compared to the placebo. Fat loss was seen for the arms, legs, and the hip and belly region, unquote. The participants who received Pu erh lost more overall body fat, and what was especially remarkable was that they maintained more of their muscle mass, and that is the equation for healthy aging. The tea that I personally drink most often is Pu erh, but the only pira that I drink is from Pique life.

It's triple toxin screen for purity and made through a patented. Cold extraction technology that makes it as effective as what was seen in this study. It's wild harvested in truly the best pur air on earth. Head over to piquelife.com/model right now and you'll receive up to 20% off plus some limited time free bonuses, like an electric frother to mix your favorite beverages, and you get to try peak tea's risk-free with their 30 day money back guarantee. You'll either love it or you'll receive a full refund. Go to piquelife.com/model right now. That's P-I-Q-U-E-L-I-F-E.com/model and get hooked up with all of this good stuff as peak life.com/model. And now back to the show.

SHAWN STEVENSON: What do you think of that saying, Jack of all trades, master of none?

PAT FLYNN: It's false. I'm more of a pat of all trades, master of fun is what I like to say. You know, the one thing strategy makes sense. That is the more well-known counter to just the overwhelm, right? Just focus on one thing. Alex Rami says it right, and even then he still writes books and even said like that. So he does a few things too. Even Mr. One thing himself and then the one thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan, that book, the One Thing. I have tried, the one thing and I was unhappy, I was unfulfilled because I'm just curious. How could I pigeonhole myself into just one thing? I'd be miserable because part of who I am is an explorer, a doer, a trier, a a person who likes to play and experiment.

So I've developed a strategy, which I talk about in the book called The 20% Itch Rule, allowing yourself 20% of the time that you have to play, to experiment. Take that curiosity, don't go crazy, but contain it. Between 2017 and 2019, my 20% of time, the itch that I was scratching back then was an invention called the Switch Pod, and we were able to take this thing in invention for videographers, a tripod where the legs kind of fold into each other so you could hold it. We'd never invented anything before. We took the lean learning approach to do it and make it happen. And in February of 2019, that launched to $415,000 made in 60 days between 2020. And today my 20% of my time is the Pokemon thing. Now we have a YouTube channel with over 1.5 million subs, nearly a billion views, and in and of itself it's its own business that's generating revenue through ads and brand deals.

We even host an event called Card Party just, a couple months from now we have 6,000 people coming to Tampa Bay to nerd out on Pokemon adults and families alike. And it's, it's awesome. There are so much opportunity out there, but being able to learn in a container. And then the, the reason the 20% thing works is because even if that were to fail, you're still at least committed to the 80%. And if you look at the days of the week, that's Monday to Thursday is gonna be the thing that you said yes to. The things that you're committed to give yourself Friday to play that allows you to escape the Monday to Thursday. I really do hope we get into a more national four day work week. We practice a four day work week in our company and it's been the most rejuvenating thing.

People come back into Monday with more energy, right? And they're able to get the same things done in four days and now they have their fifth day of the week to play or do whatever it is that they wanna do, my team and I. And I failed many times and you know, times before that I tried to build a software company and that failed. But it was always a lesson. And the things that you learn from the mistakes that you make always stack into the next. So, I dunno, I think it's good to be curious, but it's to be curious and not contain that is unwieldy. I think it's, what's the quote? It's to have vision without action is a dream. Action without control is a nightmare. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: This sidebar, I actually wrote this quote down here somewhere. Action information is chaos, but information without action is waste. That was in the book as well. So, yeah. You know, and just like there's so many sentiments throughout time and many of the people that we are inspired by had figured this out, right? We are not here to be constant consumers of things. We're here to be creative. We're here to, to release. And so never before have we had the environment to be an over learner like today, it's rampant. And so what happens when we're just consuming and consuming? You gave the analogy earlier, the times are different now.

When we would gorge, if we came upon something that we can get some nutrition from, some calories from, and today, the environment. That we're living in and that genetic thrust to do that, it's a mismatch. Yeah. And so thus we're seeing epidemics of obesity. The same thing holds true with the human mind and our desire to know and our curiosity. And we are in this environment with constant consumption and no processing, no metabolizing of the information, and especially no release or no action, no way to express the things that we're learning. And so we become constipated with information.

PAT FLYNN: Yeah. It's a lot of sh*t.

SHAWN STEVENSON: It's a lot of sh*t that's not getting out here because we're holding onto it. And that's what lean learning is all about is releasing your sh*t. That's right. All right. 

PAT FLYNN: I mean, that's why it's lean learning. 'cause it has that little motif of, you know, staying lean in what it is that you're consuming. Right. Just like with food. But it's also, once you find the thing, lean into it. Right. Don't just say surface level, go deeper with it, and you cannot possibly go deeper if you are allowing other things to come in as well. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. You know, this applies so well for every area of our lives and breaking it down into that inspiration strategy and the quadrants, and in particular, just for everybody to loop all this stuff in together when it comes to our health and fitness as well. Because that strategy of picking one guru, following through and giving yourself room to play around with some other stuff, but still having that 80% that you're focused on choosing one book to follow, one program, whether it's an exercise program, whether it's a nutrition program, whether it's to eat Smarter Family Cookbook that you eat from for you and your family, and following those principles and stretching that out.

Jumping into the DeLorean, visualize what is, what does my life look like a year from now? Right. And seeing if that feels right for you. Giving yourself permission also. I love that having that wiggle room and that 20%. That, that idea itself was so freeing to me because I'm naturally curious as well. I think we all are at some degree. But putting myself into this box where it's just, I have to do this one thing, it, it makes me feel constrained. But here's the rub that is required for, for a level of mastery and a certain level, especially today, I think that more people are, are, are really connected to excellence, not just 'cause there's so much junk. Yeah. There's so many little, so..

PAT FLYNN: Put 10,000 hours into it, right. That kind of thing.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Not, not even necessarily 10,000, you know, this, it doesn't have to be 10,000.

PAT FLYNN: No.

SHAWN STEVENSON: But just..

PAT FLYNN: You can learn on hour one.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Absolutely. And that's the thing, like somebody that we might have this frame, like, you know, they've been doing this for 25 years. Who am I? Life often isn't a respecter of time, it's a respecter of revelation, right? Can you really get that information and embody it? And also, another part of lean learning is sharing is teaching. Can you express that thing? And today, more than ever, we got a lot of people teaching that they might not necessarily really embody or know, but they might have a certain angle or a certain insight or a certain expression that resonates with people. And if we're getting the end result that we're looking for, what does it really matter? Yeah. So I want to go to the next one of these. And again, we're just, we're just having a little, little charcuterie board. A little charcuterie board of what's in lean learning. So we've talked multiple times already about action over information. But I wanna ask you about this one and this one. Stop me in my tracks when I was reading this chapter. And just really hit my heart. Just felt the whole body warmth. Talked about the power of champions. Let's talk about that. 

PAT FLYNN: Yeah. I wouldn't be where I am today if it wasn't for the people that I've been lucky enough to surround myself with. You included in that. If you don't know, Shawn and I have been in a mastermind group together for over a decade, right? We're checking in with each other every single week. We help each other out. We are able to lean on each other, cry on each other's shoulder, but also help each other out and give us tips and do fun things like this together. The human connection and the people to people relationships are so key, and there's different levels to that, right? A champion is somebody who is there to support you. That's why I call 'em champions. They're championing you and there's different levels to that. You have your emotional support from, like friends and family.

When I got laid off, I relied heavily on my wife or my fiance at the time, now wife, to just provide some emotional support that she was gonna be there with me no matter what. And as I was falling into depression because of my job and losing it, she was there for me and was able to get me back on my feet. Like really encouraged me. But she didn't know about business. She didn't understand the language of learning about internet marketing and any of this stuff, but she was still able to support emotionally, which was huge. And then in the middle level, you have your peers and your colleagues like you and I, right?

We're both on our own tracks, but we can both share a lot of value between each other and, and we both care for each other. And, these are the people who we share a common language when it comes to podcasting and YouTube and all this kind of stuff and business. So we have a lot to share with each other and we can lift each other up, right? A rising tide lifts all boats and that that's what this is about. But then you have your mentors, either virtual mentors, people who you study and you, you kind of learn from them. You invest in them online or something like that. Or a physical kind of person in person mentor who's there to take you under their wing.

And that is the most valuable. But some sort of crossover of all of them is really key to have a well-rounded support on your way up because you can't do this alone, right? And as you try to get better at something, there will be times where there will be other people who are gonna try to take you down, right? We live in what I like to call a bucket of crabs often, where if you put a bucket of crabs, live, crabs out. You don't ever have to worry about any of them crawling out because as soon as one tries the other crabs are gonna take their claws and pull the other one back down. And we live in a world where a lot of people don't wanna see us succeed because it defines where they're at and maybe their short fallings.

So to surround yourself with other people who are gonna lift you up is really key. Jim Rowan, I think, was the one who said, you are the average of the five people you spend most of your time with. So I always try to get in rooms where I can increase my average. You know what I'm saying? So finding those champions is key. Locking in on that. And then there was a part of the book that I talked about, which was done in the research of it, which was really compelling to me because I had always been somebody who shared my goals out loud. And there's a lot of science and there's a lot of case studies and, and people who have spoken about this.

This idea of having an audience hold you accountable, right? Other people holding you accountable. And so I had once fallen into the trap, and I know a lot of people fall into this trap because of how easy it is to have an audience now of sharing goals publicly. And when you share a goal publicly, like this thing you're trying to do or whatever inspiration you're trying to get good at. It often makes it feel like you've already accomplished it because you have this crowd who's saying like, yeah, you got this, and you're kind of already getting those good vibes that you might get when you finally accomplish the thing before you accomplish the thing. And I think it was Derek Sivers, I believe, who did a Ted talk about this very fact.

And I, I was, yeah, he's, he's right. But there was a study out of Ohio State University that said, sharing your goals publicly to people that don't really know who you are but are more of an audience is gonna work against you. But when you share your goals with somebody who you value, who is a mentor to you, you will do the work to make that happen because you don't wanna let them down. That relationship you have together. It is something that's now at stake by claiming you're going to do something. Just like when I tell my wife I'm gonna do something, stuff's gonna go down if I don't follow through. And so same thing will happen with a mentor, and that will encourage you to do the thing. So share your goals, but share it with somebody who you respect. Share it with somebody who is gonna hold you accountable to that, who you do not wanna let down. That's when that works really well. And that those are the best kinds of champions to support you on your way. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Oh man, I love that because you actually share a section and the truth about sharing your goals. And also we wanna be mindful of who we're sharing our goals with, if they're in close proximity to us. Funny enough, I saw a clip from Tom Cruise today, and he was sharing that he, you know, early in his career, he was sharing his goals about what he wanted to create, who he wanted to be, what he wanted to accomplish. And he felt like at the time, you know, he was of course getting belittled. Like there's no, what are you thinking? Like you're just this, you can't do that. That's not possible. And so he was like, okay, that's cool. He had enough self-confidence to still maintain. You know, his goals. But you know, for, for many of us, our goals are they're, they're sensitive.

You know, they're fragile and people can come in and, and step on your dreams. And so being intentional about who you're sharing with, it's important to share, it's valuable to share, but sharing it with the right people, but sharing it with people who hold you accountable that see your, your greatness and your potential, but also hold you accountable. And also being mindful of the publicly sharing it. Yes, you could do that, but sometimes that gives you all the feels of accomplishing the thing without accomplishing the thing. Is that what I'm hearing? 

PAT FLYNN: Yeah. Correct. Now that being said, my previous book, superfan, which you also helped promote a while back, thank you for that. I wrote that book in. A single month, November of 2018. So there's this thing called NaNoWriMo, national Novel Writers Month, where every November writers from all around the world will attempt to complete a book just in that month alone. So what I love about that, it's like all these authors who just are not taking action, it's like, oh, other people are doing it now too.

Now there's a start date. Now there's an end date. Like, let's do this. I love that. In terms of a structure around actually getting something done, that has always been a goal. So Nano Rmo, so I wrote that book in November of 2018. Didn't finish by the end of November, but I finished on December 6th, which I remember, 'cause that was my birthday. So it was a big birthday present to finish. And then in that book published in July of 2019, and I publicly shared each day, not that I was writing. Right that that would be just share your goal. Hey guys, I'm writing a book. Alright Pat, you got this. Good job. Can't wait to read it. Okay. Like, those are the good fields, but that's not really helping me.

So I devised a plan to share how many words I was writing every day because I wanted to get better at writing each day that I wrote. And I remember before I wrote that book, I was like, all right guys, I'm gonna share with you for the next 30 days exactly how many words I write on my way to my next book. There's a little bit of a strategy there as well. For a marketer, it's to share the thing that you're working on before or as you are working on it, this plants that see that that thing exists. So by the time it's over or done, people wanna see the final product. So that, there was a little bit of that in there as well.

And I asked everybody, how many words do you think I'm gonna write on day one? And I gave out surprises. If people got the right number, people were guessing like 4,500, 10,000, 3000, all these like big numbers. I wrote 150 words on my first day and then people were like, dang hmm. You suck at writing. But I knew that I just needed to get the wheels going. And I did this knowing I was not gonna do very well on the first day 'cause I was, I had to get outta my own way. And the numbers kept going up and up and up and up. And by the time it was over, this book came out and became a bestseller on Amazon in July of 2019. And we gave it away at my event and stuff, which was pretty cool. So, again, having moments of time to surge into something is really key. This is, I don't know if you've gotten into this part in the book too.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yep. Voluntary force functions.

PAT FLYNN: Voluntary force functions, putting yourself in a situation. Right. So if there's a crowd of people and we're like, all right guys, we're gonna do this together. Cool. You're purposefully putting yourself in that situation to do it right. Like when I first started speaking, same thing was like, all right, I'm gonna go speak at this event on this date. I signed up for it, it's happening. I better get going. I better learn and I don't have time to overlearn. That's the other thing about this, another strategy that I talk about, I got from when I used to row at Cal.

So I used to row obviously on the lightweight crew, not the heavyweights obviously. And it's this boat with eight people and there's a ninth person on the boat, the coxswain who's commanding the, the rowers, right? And I remember rowing in a boat of eight and racing in my first regatta. And it was the craziest experience because this was the first time I ever really felt the power of something called a power 10. So in racing, in rowing and, and crew, a power 10 is where for 10 strokes and 10 strokes alone. You like every rower in the boat will just give it their all for 10 strokes. So the coxswain will set it up, right? You're, you're going and the boats are going. And it's like, how do you go faster than the boats next to you?

Well, you have to strategize and figure out when to do a power 10. So the coxswain will be like, all right guys, here we go. Power 10 in three, stroke, two, stroke, one, stroke, go! Go! 10 strokes. Just everything you got just for 10 strokes. And when you see a boat, implement a power 10. On the water. They're just like a hot knife through butter, dude. They're going so fast and then they position ahead of the other boats and then they go back into their regular pace. The fun part of the race is like, now other people are doing Power Tens and it's like, you know, the psychological, but the Power 10 is such a fantastic way to contain a heightened surge of energy to move faster in something you're already doing.

So if you wanna be a master of something, find a version of a Power 10 that you can do. This is similar to like a hackathon for coders, right? Let's stay up for 24 hours, let's build something. Get the pizzas and ice cream in Red Bulls 'cause we're staying up to design something in 24 hours and 24 hours alone. That's like their version of a Power 10. For me as a podcaster, I remember running these kinds of experiments where, you know, I have a podcast come out every single week, but in certain seasons I'd be like, all right, everybody, for this week and this week alone, we're gonna have one episode per day this week.

Little heightened, more energy, more pressure, but bigger results. 'cause now there's more hype around it. Now I'm getting more downloads. Now I'm seeing the results of it happen. I started to get ranked. This is how I became the number one business podcast back in 2011 by running a Power 10 for my podcast. And so the Power 10 strategy is something that we should all do. This is how you just like, like a lot of writers do this, right? They'll be like, okay, I'm gonna go rent a cabin for two weeks and just crank it out. Some people work better that way, authors. But man, the Power 10 strategy is huge. Anybody can implement it in anything that they're doing, and it's how you go faster than everybody else.

SHAWN STEVENSON: I love that. I love that.

PAT FLYNN: Like imagine a power 1000 though. Like people want to like, like you would die if you were doing a power 1000, right? So you can't do it forever. That's why it works. It's just for 10 strokes. You can find a little extra in those 10 strokes. Imagine ever doing it. Now you're just coasting. All the boats are going faster than you. So find the power ten's. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yes. Yes, this principle is, I'm not gonna say it's my favorite because there's a recipe here with all of it, but voluntary force functions is so important today more than ever. Especially if you have, you know, goals and aspirations that are outside of the norm where people are controlling what you're doing. We have to create some pressure for ourselves today because there's so much stuff that we could just outsource our attention and our life to. And so purposefully putting something in front of us, having a hard deadline for something, creating something like that so that there's an accountability there. That's been very helpful for, for me is like having book deals and like deadlines, of course. Like I get the book done, but also, you know, many other things. You know, whether it's a speaking event that I have or whether it's a show that's coming up, making sure that I'm prepared, that I do my due diligence and I show up ready for the thing. Right. 

PAT FLYNN: Like imagine you're a musician, right? What's an example of a voluntary force function? You sign up for open mic night, a month from now. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: You set a date like my audio assistant over, here set a date for his show. And he's got to do whatever it takes to be ready for that show. 

PAT FLYNN: Yeah, for sure. If you wanna be a comedian, go to, like I said, go to open mic night. There's other versions of this too, like I'm, I'm a fisherman and there's a bait that I've always wanted to learn how to use called the jig. So artificial bait, it has like a skirt on it. And if you are fishing from bass, jigs are awesome because it has the biggest strike and you can off often get bigger bass, but it's hard to learn how to do because there's just certain technique and like there's baits that are easier to use but just aren't gonna get you as big a fish.

So when I would go out on the boat fishing, I'd bring my jig, but I'd all have my, all my other rods too. But I was like, okay, I'm gonna master the jig and try to get, get better at it. I'd do a few casts, I get no bites for like an hour. I'd be like, screw this, I'm gonna go back to old reliable, my drop shot rig and I'd start catching bass. Then again, solidifying that I was no good at jigs or maybe I was never meant to fish with a jig. Maybe I'm just a drop fisherman, A drop shot, fisherman, whatever. So because I really wanted to learn this, I went out on the boat one day and I took nothing except jigs. I literally was forced to only use jigs.

What was I gonna do? Drive back home? No, I'm gonna fish. Yeah, right. Even a bad day of fishing is better than a day at work. But when I wanted to put it away and put something else on, I couldn't. I was forced by 2:00 PM you know, I got there at 8:00 AM, no bites. 3:00 PM I get my first bite and it just unlocks this com. Oh my god. Like. It actually worked. Maybe I can do this. And by the time 5:00 PM rolled around, I caught two bass on a jig and now it's my go-to bait. I always use a jig now. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: I love that so much. That's a burn the boats type of thing, you know, you gotta figure it out. This reminds me of, you know, my youngest son is phenomenal basketball player. He's only 13.

PAT FLYNN: I've heard. Yeah.

SHAWN STEVENSON: All right. And he has this really interesting, just unique thing about him. He's ambidextrous, right? So he writes with his left hand, but he throws and shoots, he does pretty much everything else with his right hand. Right. It's just like what is going on? Apparently, you know, my wife's grandfather was ambidextrous as well. Oh wow. And so he's got a great on a basketball court like. Amazing that a kid can do, you know, be left-handed and right-handed with finishing at the basket. And he does them both equally, right? And so for me, being there as his competition in between competitions, this is like, this was a, a hole in my, in my game where I never, it was just something that I didn't need to do or didn't think about working on.

And so, in order for me to get good with my left hand, which I could do it, but it just didn't feel right. I just took a week of practices where I held a bottle in my right hand the entire time. Right? And so I'd go, and I'm, I know I'm looking crazy at the basketball court, you know, I've got this thing in my hand and I'm awkwardly, but the more I did this by day two, it felt so much more natural. Right. And it just felt more fluid. 

PAT FLYNN: Already by day two? 

SHAWN STEVENSON: By day two. Yeah. Actually by the end of day one, it's just like, 'cause your brain and your body figures it out. 

You know? And so, like, literally taking my right hand outta the equation, being forced to use my left, helped me to become better with finishing out the room with my left hand.

PAT FLYNN: I like that. Everybody thought you were just thirsty the whole time. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Like, why you put that bottle down, bro? Like, get one of the things that wraps around your head and you just feed you the water while you're doing it. 

PAT FLYNN: Yeah, I like that dude. Yeah. Voluntary force functions are huge. Yes. It's gonna feel uncomfortable, but that's where the growth happens. Tim Ferris had a show on Apple a long time ago where he would put himself in this situation. He was trying to learn how to speak Tagalog, which is the Filipino language. I half Filipino myself. I only know the bad words by the way. And he was set to do an interview on the news, on, on Filipino news. And he had to speak in Tagalog and he had a certain amount of time to learn. So was he gonna learn every word in the dictionary? No. He just needed to learn the words and how to have a conversation with somebody and just kinda the most basic things. And he was able to do it. And that forced him knowing that that date was coming.

He actually helped himself by actually moving in and temporarily living with a Filipino family that only spoke Tagalog. Which is another thing, it's like you can't help but learn. Right? And I remember when my family and I went to Japan for the first time a couple years ago, I was trying so hard to like flashcard my way into learning the language. Right. And I was like, oh my gosh, Arigato gozaimasu? Like, it was so bad. But when I was there, dude, and I just had like Google translate to help me kind of learn these things. It wasn't hard to pick it up literally in the context of being in the place where that stuff was being used. And I was like, oh, I got simas and like all these things. Ohio, I guess I'm not like, it's just. It just naturally you learn these things. It's just like how we learn our language just by being around our parents talking all the time, you know? So putting yourself in that environment and setting yourself up for success works really, really well. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Well, you've got the recipe laid out. A recipe for effective voluntary force function, a leap of faith moment, a time locked commitment, high stakes, a meaningful challenge, rewards on the other end, and you detail what all of these things are so that we can take control of our minds and give ourselves humans. We are so awesome at operating within a box. All right? We just like, I don't want to be, I want outta the box. I wanna think outta the box. Right? I don't want any constraints. I wanna be free. But when we have that freedom, what tends to happen is too much overwhelm going too far off the reservation. And so being able to create a box for ourselves, that's the key.

You have the freedom to create your own box that you can operate in, and that actually funny enough creates more freedom. And so you have that laid out for everybody. But I want to ask you about this because when it comes to purposefully putting yourself and giving yourself this kind of high pressure situation where you have to accomplish a thing by, you know, a certain date or whatever the case might be, what about hustle culture? What about burnout? Like if you're putting this pressure on yourself, isn't this gonna be in conflict with doing this in a helpful way? 

PAT FLYNN: This is why having an amount of time that you set to hustle is important with an end date. I think Gary Vaynerchuk calls it micro hustle macro patients take a small moment of time to hustle on that thing. And then reassess whether or not you wanna continue or then adjust how you approach it for the next phase once you're there. So, case in point, recently I wanted to learn how to do short form video. So YouTube shorts, Instagram reels, tiktoks. And I had never done that before. I was more in favor of long form video, but I wanted to experiment and so siloed from everything else.

I didn't link to this from anything else. I started a new YouTube channel and I decided to post a video every day, but I was only gonna do it for 60 days because when I spoke to a lot of other people, again, when I'm trying to learn how to do something, I talked to other people who've done it before. I started to ask, well, how many days did it take you to kind of learn the ropes and kind of figure things out? And they said, oh, sometimes, you know, it took us 30 days, sometimes a few weeks, couple people. It took a few more months. So I said, okay, I'm gonna go daily for 60 days, and I'm just gonna open a pack of Pokemon every day.

I created a little jingle. Should I open it or should I keep it sealed? Kept it fun. But every day open a pack. At the end, you see if it's a good card or not, and that's just a stick, right? By day 30, my videos were just getting 200 to 300 views each. If I was the old me, I would've said, well, I've dabbled. It's not working. I guess I'm not cut out for it. But the goal wasn't the views. Remember the goal was to get to 60 days straight and hustle for a period of time before deciding what to do from there. And although I didn't get the views that I wanted on day 30, a few things did happen. I was able to cut my editing time down from 45 minutes to 15 minutes.

I had 30 pieces of data that have come in to share with me which videos of the lot were a little bit better than the others and why. And I could go into the retention graphs and start to see. I had a lot of data come in from just quantity, controlled quantity. By day 35, 1 of those videos hit 750,000 views. And ever since then, all the videos have come up to a point now where across all channels we're approaching 3 billion views. It's now its own five figure business through ad revenue and things that are happening there, brand deals and such. My editing time down is down to even 12 minutes a day now.

Right. And I batch process. So I just do all the whole week in one day. That's per month five figure. Yeah. I was able to get invited to a Detroit Lions game to open a pack of Pokemon on the field. Because of this. I saw a DJ take my song and play it in a mix of his in front of 15,000 people. I have had conversations with NBA basketball players and UFC fighters who have now watched my channel and some NFL players as well. I've gotten invited to a lot of parties that I just, I'm unable to go to, or that was a different part of life, simply by giving it a chance. Yeah. And hustling for a moment of time, but not forever. And now this thing has blown up and it's become a viral thing. And you know, that's kind of cool. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: 3000 views is like, that's like gangnam style, justin Bieber territory, man. 

PAT FLYNN: A video will get on average a million views after 24 hours now. And it's happening every day. There was one video that saw 35 million views in two days. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Unbelievable. I remember when you told us about this idea, you know, just experiment, you know, that's what you were saying, like, I'm just gonna try this thing out.

PAT FLYNN: Controlled experimentation. Yeah, controlled play. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Oh, of course. We're just like, okay, that's interesting. You know, and you didn't know much about Pokemon yourself at all, like, but you were just like, I'm gonna just gonna do this thing. And it's been so inspiring, you know, to go along with you and to see what you've created and man, it's just so awesome. By the way, with this said, again, this isn't about hustle or having to sacrifice our happiness or our comfort. You get plenty of comfort along the way. But you've gotta be able to move into that, lean into that discomfort in stages and being strategic about it, having a mentor, having a guide. You have that with Pat and you've been there for so many people.

You've been there for us, and I appreciate you so much. Another couple of sections in the book, I'm just gonna highlight these really quickly. Persist or pivot, when to know You talk about that micro mastery, which we've dabbled in a little bit here, but from learning to leading, I gotta ask you about this because I mentioned it a little bit earlier. Why is this a part of lean learning? 

PAT FLYNN: We've heard this before, that the best way to learn is to teach, but we've never really explored why, and I decided to do so, and I found that even this book itself is a version of what happens when you teach something. I was able to learn a lot more about how I was able to accomplish all these things because I wanted to teach it. And by teaching something, you begin to distill and create frameworks and begin to understand things differently when you know that you're gonna share that information with somebody else. Like I had a friend of mine who plays the ukulele, he gets lessons from professionals. And the professionals had asked him, Hey, have you ever taught somebody how to play the ukulele?

And he was very surprised by that question because he was like, I'm not, I'm learning from you. Why are you telling me to teach other people? But they knew that by teaching his son how to play ukulele, it would reinforce, oh, that's how you play a G chord. Oh, that's how you play a minor. Oh, that's because he's teaching it to somebody else. And now it reinforces that. Right? And for, you know, entrepreneurs and creators, when you teach stuff, you are forced to, for the purpose of standing out and easier consumption, create frameworks that now redefine how you learn. So the micro mastery, something I've always done. But I never really thought about it in that way until I needed to teach this in this book.

And now it's made it even easier for me to now approach new things that I do, break them down really easily 'cause now I have built a framework and a to-do list with that to be able to master things and get faster and, and, and have speed run my skill acquisitions. So that's why it's important to teach. But even more than that, imagine everybody in the world doing this and supporting one another through the things they learn and helping to better their communities as a result of sharing this information and not waiting till they're a professor or have a PhD to be able to do this, but to help the other people in your community get better at something or solve problems just simply because you've gone down those paths before, it just would make the whole world a better place.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Hmm. 

PAT FLYNN: I know that sounds cliche, but this is the, in my opinion, the most important thing right now with how quickly things are moving if we don't take it control. We will be under somebody else's control. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. Yeah. One of my favorite quotes of all time, I think about it pretty much every day, there's nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. The time for Lean Learning is now and pick up a copy as of the release of this episode, anywhere their books are sold or people can go to? 

PAT FLYNN: Lean learning book.com. It's my first traditionally published book. I've published three other ones. One of them somehow became a Wall Street Journal bestseller, which is cool, self-published, but I mean, you know, there's just another level at stake here with traditional publishing, and this was a beast. But I also think it was a beast because it's really, really important right now. And I'm just grateful to be here and, and to share it with y'all. And, you know, I hope that it at least starts a conversation with you and important ones around you about how to approach the things that you're interested in and how to get good at 'em and how to have more fun.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. 

PAT FLYNN: Within them as well. I think when you get good at stuff, you have more fun with it. And so I just want everybody to have more fun. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yes, it's fun era right now, starting today. And one of the biggest lessons was right there at the tail end. Truly one of the ingredients, one of the aspects of real fulfillment is teaching, is sharing what we know. And so often we handicap ourselves from teaching and giving our gifts because we think that we don't got it all figured out. We're not perfect. We are not there yet. And I guarantee you, wherever you are right now. You are a step, two steps, three steps, 10 steps ahead of many other people, and just being two steps ahead can offer so much value for somebody who's trying to figure something out, whether this is parenting, whether this is in relationship to a product that they're creating, whether this is in relationship to their fitness, share what you know.

It feels so good. It's fulfilling, and we get to learn it twice. We get to learn it. Th right. We get to keep learning it again and again as we're teaching. So you are helping us to really unlock so many of our superpowers with lean learning, and this is a must have book. Get your copy today, wherever books are sold, the one and only Pat Flynn.

PAT FLYNN: Thank you my friend. Thanks everybody.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Thank you so much for tuning into this episode today. I hope that you truly. Got a lot of value out of this. This is about getting these powerful inputs, taking back control of our time and our energy. Our most valuable resource in today's information economy is our time and our attention, and we've got to be more intentional about our attention. If you enjoy this episode, please share it out with the people that you care about. Take a screenshot of the episode and share it on Instagram and tag Pat. I'm sure that he would absolutely love to see it. Tag me as well. I'm @ShawnModel on Instagram. And listen, we've got some amazing masterclasses.

And world class mind blowing guests coming your way very, very soon. So make sure to stay tuned. Take care, have an amazing day and I'll talk with you soon. And for more after the show, make sure to head over to the model health show.com. That's where you can find all of the show notes. You can find transcription videos for each episode. And if you've got a comment, you can leave me a comment there as well. And please make sure to head over to iTunes and leave us a rating to let everybody know that the show is awesome and I appreciate that so much and take care, I promise, to keep giving you more powerful, empowering, great content to help you transform your life. Thanks for tuning in.