Mastering Anything: A New Way to Faster and Better Results  ## Metadata - Author: [[Social Media Marketing Podcast]] - Full Title: Mastering Anything: A New Way to Faster and Better Results - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/b8b4f903-d2f1-4b59-92b6-a98ea27c68be ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Information Value Has Changed** - The value of information has decreased because it's readily available to everyone now. - We must focus on just-in-time information rather than hoarding everything at once. Transcript: Pat Flynn I think very obviously the world has changed. We are no longer living in a world where information is actually the valuable thing as it once was, because back in the day, information wasn't available. We didn't have the internet. And even when the internet started, there was still a scarce amount of information about things. This is why back when we started, online courses were sort of the way to quick learn things because that information wasn't available elsewhere. In fact, my first business was information to help architects pass an exam. And that no longer is the case in terms of what's valuable because we all have access to the same information now on our phones and AI and chat GPT are coming in to commoditize just again Information that we need and if information were actually the answer we'd all be successful we'd all be where we want to be now it's a matter of the fact that we now live at this buffet line Of information and we just evolutionarily have not been evolved to consume this much information. We're still playing like we were in the caveman days, right? Where when you find some food, you capture it, you hoard it, you collect it because you might not come across that food again. That's a survival tactic to hoard this stuff. And we are hoarding information. I ran it. It was not at your event, Mike, but at another event, I ran a survey and just asked the audience. There was about a couple hundred people in the crowd and I did a little raise your hand sort of demonstration thing. And I found out that more than 80 percent of the audience was subscribed to more than five to 10 different podcasts. That's podcast alone. Michael Stelzner Hey, I know I've got like 20 of them I subscribe to. Pat Flynn Yeah, I can't possibly listen to them all. Right. Correct. However, many of us try to or feel bad if we don't because we feel like we're missing out on what perhaps might be the next best thing. And then in the marketing world, things are moving even more quickly with what is working. And of course, with AI, there are so many things happening that we're getting overloaded. We're getting confused. In fact, we're getting too inspired. We're getting inspired to go here and then go there and try so many different things that nothing that we do will actually have the focus and required energy that we need to find it to success. And this is why I wrote the book, Lean Learning, to be able to navigate the world we live in, to find the right resources and develop a strategy for how to tackle the next task that we wanna Do. And really the big difference here is the idea between just-in information, which is what we've all been consuming, and just-in time information, only what we need to take the next Step. And then trusting that those resources we need on the next step after will be there. They absolutely will be and they will likely be better because more time has passed and somebody else has created something more useful. It's just we're kind of dealing with the way we've been conditioned to learn and especially for us marketers. And I'm a marketer myself. Things are moving fast and I want to learn it all, but we shouldn't. ([Time 0:03:17](https://share.snipd.com/snip/99fe00f8-462b-4584-b8b5-38d1b2d5113d)) - **YouTube Shorts Viral Success** - Pat Flynn started a YouTube shorts channel opening Pokemon cards daily for 60 days. - After 35 days, one video went viral, leading to massive growth and over a billion views across platforms. Transcript: Pat Flynn So another reason why I wrote this book is because people have seen me do a lot of new things and learn these things quite quickly and say, Pat, you're just like naturally good at these Things. And I'm not. I'm not at all. But I have developed a framework to discover how to learn my way into things rather quickly. And more recently, I started a brand new YouTube channel. It was purely experimental, and I kept it separate from everything else that I've done. So it was siloed. And I started it about 300 days ago. And this was a YouTube channel about Pokemon where I open a pack of cards every day. And in the beginning, I said, I'm just going to do this for 60 days. It's one of the strategies is you give yourself an amount of time to actually see things through and kind of create blockers around distractions, right? So I decided that I was going to do a daily shorts channel, opening a pack of cards every day for 60 days. Come day 30, I was only getting about 200 to 300 views on these videos per day. And normally I would say, well, I've been at this for almost four weeks now, I'm gonna give up. It's probably not gonna work. But I said, you know what, I'm not going to count views or likes, I'm counting uploads. And I'm halfway through my goal. And if I get to day 60 and I've done the daily thing, then I will have one either way. And I can assess at that point whether or not I wanna continue or not. Day 35 comes around. One of those videos, one of those daily videos hits 750,000 views on YouTube in one day. And ever since then, the channel has just exploded. Imagine if I had quit just a little before that. But through the reps, through the iterations, I've learned how to take something that once took 45 minutes and now only takes 15 minutes per day. I've now learned through all the data from the daily videos on what is working and what is not, what people liked, what people disliked. The retention graphs that you can see on YouTube are very important for understanding what moves to make next. And I was seeing that coming in daily. And now we're at a point where this channel on YouTube alone has just crossed 1.5 million subscribers. We are at 980 million views on YouTube alone. We're about to pass a billion views in less than a year. It is provided incredible opportunities. It is making more than five figures a month. And it's also something that is repurposed on TikTok and Instagram. So overall, over 2 billion views across those three platforms, incredible opportunities, new revenue. And it just happened. And it didn't just happen randomly. It happened because I had this lean learning approach and I practice what we call micro mastery into things, which we'll get into, I'm sure. ([Time 0:06:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5e5090a4-dea8-4bf8-9fba-3f178b4770ae)) - **Focus on One Step Next** - Avoid trying to learn everything before acting; focus only on the next step. - Use “If this were easy, what would it look like?” to simplify complex tasks and avoid overwhelm. Transcript: Pat Flynn Think the first one is feeling like we have to learn all the things about the thing first before taking action. It's similar to reading an entire book and then going back and trying to implement some of that stuff. That's traditionally how we consume content. We absorb everything and then go, okay, which out of all this can we use or is useful, right? We read a textbook, then take a test on it, right? This is going to delay us and how quickly we have to move, especially in the marketing realm. Rather, if you imagine an entire pie graph of all the things there is to learn about something, all that you need to know to get started is actually a tiny sliver of that. So all we need to know is what is our next step? And then only allow ourselves to learn about that next step. Of course, we should have a North Star. We shouldn't just like do things aimlessly. We have a goal. But within that, we break it down and we take that first step and we learn all about that and that alone. Trusting again that those resources for the next steps after will be there. And there are people, there are resources and guides on how to do those things. But there's also so much that you can do on just this next step alone. So that's number one is sort of getting over the fact that you need to learn everything because in doing that you will likely get overwhelmed and talk yourself out of going forward case In point I had a invention that was built in 2019 called the switch pod you know about this Mike and we've talked about this here on the show before in fact switch pod sponsored social media Marketing world back in 2019, I believe. Thank you for that. I had never invented something before. It was something I'd never done, and I was more of a digital marketer, but I wanted to experiment with what it would be like to launch a physical product. And I didn't know the entire process. However, if I learned and really went deep into all the components of it, I would have probably said, yeah, this is too much. Why am I even doing this? I'm not going to do it. I really wanted to, but I knew that the first step, for example, was to just figure out whether or not I could create like a shape of a tripod that people would actually use and get excited About. So what do we do? Well, if this were easy, what would it look like? That is the guiding question that I use and would recommend for people when trying to do something. If you're gonna run a campaign and try to sell something, ask yourself that question first. If this were easy, what would it look like? I got that from Tim Ferriss. So we asked this question in the SwitchPod world, okay, if this were easy to look like, what would we do? Will we cut something out of cardboard, which we already have, go to YouTuber events, and just give them to people and hold them and have them talk about what they like or don't like about It with what we have in terms of our vision. From there, after we got a prototype idea and sizing, we said, okay, well, if this were easy to actually turn into a real product, what would it look like? Well, it wouldn't look like spending tens of thousands of dollars to create a mold yet. That's later once we confirm things, but it would be easy, we found out through conversation, to 3D print this thing. So that's exactly what we did. And we had one that actually worked and gave us more opportunity to have more conversations. Fast forward to the Kickstarter campaign in 2019. We had never run a Kickstarter campaign before, but we knew that's how we wanted to launch it. So we went to events that had people who launched physical products on Kickstarter. We just went right to the source and started asking questions like, how do you do this? How do you price these things? What do you do? If this were easy, what would it look like? We would only have one or two pledge levels versus a million, which often people say we had too many pledge levels. Okay, so we're learning from mistakes that others have made before us. Cool. So we launched this thing, the SwitchPod in February of 2019, $415,000 was earned in 60 days and it still continues to sell automatically on Amazon, which is pretty cool. So that's just another example. The last thing I'll say with regards to mindset around this is FOMO. FOMO around missing out on learning the next new big thing when of course we've already said yes and have committed to things. By learning more, we potentially uncommit to those things we've already said yes to and that we know is the right way forward. So the fear of missing out on this new information that's coming across our feeds is really hard to deal with. ([Time 0:09:06](https://share.snipd.com/snip/cee08591-6a07-45d1-bee7-cf8efde9c09e)) - **Joy Of Opting Out** - Combat FOMO by choosing the "joy of opting out" and saving new info for later. - Put aside topics to maintain focus on current priorities without guilt or distraction. Transcript: Pat Flynn FOMO around missing out on learning the next new big thing when of course we've already said yes and have committed to things. By learning more, we potentially uncommit to those things we've already said yes to and that we know is the right way forward. So the fear of missing out on this new information that's coming across our feeds is really hard to deal with. So there have been strategies in the past to try and deal with that. One of them is called JOMO. So joy of missing out. I don't like JOMO. I don't like JOMO because I'm just kidding myself. I'm not going to experience a joy by missing out on something that I probably want. So I've come up with a different strategy. And that is the joy of opting out by saying, not yet. This is for later, right? There's a number of different ways to say it. ([Time 0:12:36](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5a6a2f31-c220-40d9-9ad5-23de545864e2)) - **Use Purpose to Align Learning** - Street smarts come from figuring things out through action, unlike book smarts that focus on learning first. - Purpose and mission help determine if an action aligns with your path and accelerates progress. Transcript: Michael Stelzner Today, I was talking to one of my employees and we were talking about book smarts, book farts, book smarts versus street smarts. And my hypothesis was that I think street smarts is what a lot of entrepreneurs are because they just kind of figure it out and they go for it. Where book smarts in my mind is people that are really well learned, but they struggle getting started. And I think what I'm hearing you say is that just focus on the next necessary thing, right? I like how you said if this was easy, what would this look like? Or what's the next step that I need to do without worrying about all the steps that come after it? That's really hard for people to wrap their head around. And one of the things that I often tell my team is, is what we're about to do in alignment or out of alignment with what our purpose is or our mission is, right? ([Time 0:14:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2decfed6-18a2-4a0b-b9e8-a0c3f6fbd84d)) - **Power Of Deadlines** - Pat Flynn rewrote his book from scratch in two weeks under pressure, producing his best writing. - Heightened limited-time pressure helps overcome procrastination and boosts productivity. Transcript: Michael Stelzner Also actually practicing what you preach, you know? Yes. So I don't want to discredit my publishers at all. Pat Flynn This is my first traditionally published book, by the way. I've had three self-published books. Some of them went on to become bestsellers, which is amazing. It's my first traditionally published book. So there's been some interesting adventures along the way, I will say, and eventually got to the point where I had a very limited time to basically rewrite the manuscript, to get it to Where we wanted it, because it just was not great at first. And the truth was it wasn't. So we had the idea of either scrapping the entire project or within two weeks, getting another one done. Writing an entire book in two weeks is kind of madness, madness. I mean, you've written books. That's just crazy. But I decided to hunker down. And this is a way to almost voluntarily force yourself to get the good stuff done. And I told my wife and kids, I'm going to be locked in my office for the next two weeks. Just if you can feed me and get me water, like I'm just going to be hunkered down in here. And I was able to rewrite the entire book from scratch within two weeks to get the manuscript in during the deadline that was asked. We probably could have extended it, but I knew if I kept pushing it back, this is the other thing. If I kept saying like, can I have another month? Can I have another month? It would have never gotten done. So I just gave myself a contained moment of time of heightened energy, something in my book, I call it Power 10. And I gave myself two weeks to just write this thing and I cranked it out. And it's some of the best writing that I've ever done. In fact, when I've shared the story in the book to the publisher, they were like, this is better than we expected, better than we wanted. And it wouldn't have happened if I hadn't had that heightened sense of pressure. Right. So my first experience with understanding this sort of pressure in my life was involuntary. It was when I was laid off in 2008 for my architecture job. So I was forced to do things that were outside of my comfort zone to figure out how to become an entrepreneur. And I built a business to help architects pass an exam, something that I would have never done if I wasn't pushed into that. Now I actually try to put myself in those situations, knowing that that heightened pressure for a limited amount of time will force me to take the right actions to not overthink things, But rather just get the thing done. And the mastermind group was, I remember before I had actually decided to move forward and write this book in a record amount of time, I had presented this dilemma that I had. And I said, guys, what do you think I should do? And all of you were like, well, how much do you want to get this book done? And I said, this book is my life's work. And they're like, I think you know the answer. So thank you to the green room and the mastermind group for encouraging me. And you were very much a very important part of that, Mike, with your guidance and your wisdom behind that as well. ([Time 0:15:53](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3c9014b3-31b5-43d4-a004-73b78db026cf)) - **Embrace Mistakes To Grow** - Avoid perfectionism and fear of failure; use mistakes as guideposts for progress. - Fail faster by making and learning from mistakes, rather than overthinking or waiting for perfect conditions. Transcript: Pat Flynn Worrying too much about perfection along the same lines as waiting for the right time or the plans to align, like these things that we say to ourselves because we just want to make sure That when we take the action, good things will happen. Those are just symptoms of really just fear and worry. It could be any kind of fear or worry, but the procrastination and the fear of public failure, the waiting for things to be perfect or just perfection in general, these are all things That just get in the way of what actually is helpful, which is making the mistakes along the way. The mistakes are, in fact, the guideposts that keep you aligned. And so I always say fail faster, right? The mistakes are what guide you. And this is a huge mindset shift for those of us who grew up in more traditional households where you had to have a 4.0 grade and go to college and all these kinds of things. And you were just conditioned to have, you know, like A minus, why not A kind of mindset, right? Like it has to be perfect. That's gonna delay any sort of learning that you can have in real life. I remember going to school for five years for architecture. Berkeley was great. It taught me a lot. However, I learned more in that first week of actually working in a real job than I did in five years of college, right? Being in the workforce, working, actually seeing the things happen in real time, making mistakes brings relevance and relatability and just real stake for what it is that you're doing. So you have to, like every day you wait is a day that you're not allowing growth to happen. ([Time 0:18:53](https://share.snipd.com/snip/375b9fc0-a2a7-498b-ae46-e3f5b3534b0f)) - **Master Skills Through Micro Mastery** - Use micro mastery: break big skills into small parts and master one at a time. - Hyper-focus on a tiny component (e.g., email open rates) to boost overall results faster. Transcript: Pat Flynn Yeah, so micro mastery is taking this big thing that we're trying to learn about and chop it up into little pieces and then focus on one at a time and learn about that one thing. In the world of golf, for example, I talk about golf in the book and I had a couple co-workers of mine in architecture. One of them, his name was George and another was Terry. Terry was the guy who was subscribed to every golf magazine. He watched the golf channel during his breaks. He even had one of those putters that like return the ball to you that he would just use use down the hallway. Like one of those kinds of guys, right? He was not great at golf, even though he was learning all this stuff because he was learning about everything at all times, right? He would read an article about how to drive further. He would read another article about how to putt better than he'd buy like five putters. It's just like very common in terms of how we learn anything. That's how, that's our behavior. Whereas George was somebody who used micro mastery. First of all, he got coaching, he got private lessons. So we just learned from one source, somebody who'd gone down that path before, by the way, he didn't golf in college or anything like that, but he became a scratch golfer through this. Michael Stelzner Which is what, what is the scratch golfer? Pat Flynn Scratch golfer means like you're golfing par. Like if par is 64, you're hitting 64. You don't need any like help in your score to catch up. Got it. Like he's just, you're really good. But what he did was he would hyper focus on small parts of the craft of golf for periods of time until he could master that and then move on to the next. Right. So golf includes driving, fairway hits, irons, woods, putting, short range, long range, like all this kind of stuff. He would focus on one at a time for sometimes weeks. He would focus just on medium range putts, for example, like from eight to 10 feet away. And that's all he would do until he learned about that and was getting coached on that and read about that, et cetera. That's all he would learn about. And then it became second nature to him to a point where then the next thing that he would learn would stack on top of that. I did the same thing when it came to public speaking. I was definitely afraid of speaking and started speaking in 2011. And I know, you know, this, and many people who've watched my presentation, especially the keynote in 2018, I'm a pro. Like, I will just say that I can say that because I have studied and I've gotten coached and I care about speaking so much that I call it a performance. But in the beginning, the way I mastered my way into that was by hyper-focusing on small things. For example, learning just the craft of storytelling. No matter what my slides were, what I was going to say, no matter where on the stage I was, I just focused on the story. And by learning that and leveraging that, it carried over into other things. Then another time I just focused on what do I do with my hands? And I learned all about that. I asked people what they did with their hands. I watched TED Talks and watched people with what they did with their hands. Learn that skill, practice that. I would go to a conference and say, I'm just going to focus on majorly my hands today and what I'm going to, so that I could focus, and use my hands to support what I was talking. And just kept going with that, and now I'm a world class speaker. And how would this pertain to a marketer who's running a campaign right now, right? What would Micro Mastery look like? It would look like not just trying to get better at writing emails, but getting better at just getting emails that get opened more, right? There's so much more to emails, but what about just focusing on open rates? Well, what does that mean? Well, it means focusing on subject lines and deliverability, making sure they get into a person's inbox. Cool, let's hyper-focus on that. I even know you did that, Mike. You hyper-focused on deliverability for your emails and making sure everything was fine-tuned to a point where no matter what, as many emails as possible would end up in a person's Inbox. You hyper focus on that was micro mastery. And then later, once you master that, and that's kind of set and done, you move on to the next thing, which might be, okay, how do I make sure that people click the links that are in my emails Out? Let's micro master on that. Let's get all the reports from our previous emails. Let's just hyper focus for two weeks on this and see how we can master that and move forward, right. It's, it's your funnels, but then breaking that funnel down into little components. It's on YouTube, hyper focusing and micro mastering on your titles or your thumbnails. I remember watching Mr. Beast speak at VidSummit a number of years back. And I was so excited to learn like all the things I could learn about being like the best YouTuber I could be. His entire one and a half hour presentation was about thumbnails. That is it. And I was like, this is crazy. The whole one and a half hours was about thumbnails. Well, that's what he was micro mastering at that point and what he was learning about, getting so granular with what was working and what was not, that now he doesn't even have to think About it. It's just become a part of who he is in terms of what he uses for thumbnails. And now he's macro mastering on more storytelling in his stuff. So this is a great strategy because the things we want to accomplish include so many components and improving any one of those things can increase the results that you get. But if you increase your open rates, everything else downstream will increase and then you can increase your click through rates. Then you can increase the conversions on your website. Each of those little focuses rather than all at the same time. And this is so much easier, so much better. And there are resources for each of those little components that you can learn for. It's ([Time 0:22:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5b10de2f-a9d3-4f39-85b7-2d19aa350382)) - **Act First, Learn Next** - When overwhelmed with what to learn first, pick the highest-leverage step that interests you. - Start doing something even if unsure, as action reveals what to learn next and avoids paralysis. Transcript: Pat Flynn This is a great thought. I mean, imagine again, from a marketer's perspective, if you were to brainstorm all the things you need to do as a marketer, imagine the sea of post-it notes of all the things you'd have To do, right? That's just way overwhelming. So let's break this down and let's focus on, again, just using the example of email. And even when you write down just the components that are required for email, there's so many things to look at. Michael Stelzner There's bazillions of things. There's DMARC compliance, BIMI compliance, verified mark certificates. I mean, people are like, what the heck is that? There's the call to action. There's the story. There's you do use images. There's split testing. Right. So, yeah. How do you know where to go? Pat Flynn Right. Well, imagine, first of all, seeing all of that, trying to learn all of it and then trying to take out like you're just going to get bogged down rather than, OK, if this were easy, what would It look like? Yeah, that's the question. OK. Right. Well, I would just send great emails that would get opened. OK, well, what does that mean? Well, what does it take to get open? Well, we need good subject lines and to make sure that the emails get into the inbox, which is why I used that example earlier. But that might not be the thing that it needs to be a crossover between what you feel compelled to or where your energy goes. I don't want to get too woo-woo with this because it is, you know, tactical, but there is something to be said for what are you interested in learning about here? Because that will then carry over and add to the skill set that you're learning in this overall result that you're getting so if you imagine a venn diagram it's where you want to go and Your energy levels across something versus what will get you a little bit further right so the bigger domino perhaps that then knocks over the other dominoes which is why starting and Beginning like with just getting those emails open and you could write the best emails in the world if nobody opens them then nobody will see that. Right. So that's why I say like, think about maybe what the first steps are in a process or the first domino might be. But again, I think this is why also talking about this with other people, there's a whole chapter in the book about the importance of connections to other people from your emotional Support system, like friends and family to your peers and colleagues, like what you and I have in and in our mastermind, and just friends in the industry, as well as actual mentors who Are there to hold you accountable and keep you going. And when you can share these things that you're working on with others, you're going to get outside perspectives. You cannot read the label when you are inside the bottle. So to surround yourself with people who will also be like, oh, here are the things that work for me with email. Here is what's working for me now. And here's where I think you should focus if that makes sense for you. And this is where the sharing and teaching each other kind of helps support just the entire community at large. So it can be a struggle to figure out what to do first. In many cases, Mike, with a lot of my students, there is no right answer. The only wrong is to just continue to worry about what the first thing is to do and waste time. And so sometimes what we do is we flip a coin or literally throw a dart to get started and just kind of have fate, I guess you could say, if you want to call it that, decide what to do first, Because you just have to do something to figure out what the next steps are and what's working or what's not. Again, overthinking this is just going to delay any sort of actual learning and real results. ([Time 0:29:12](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4906d153-b834-43e1-953f-4f389d6b1ee7)) - **Use AI to Regain Time** - Define your 1-year vision with AI, then identify tasks consuming most time. - Use AI to automate or assist those tasks to regain time and boost productivity. Transcript: Pat Flynn So where most people start is they just start typing away and playing around with it. Right. And they might start to absorb content from all different sources, follow all the TikTokers, YouTubers about AI and just start to get drawn to different places. Ooh, like I could do videos with Sora and I can make music over here. Oh, no, I can write these novels with AI over here. It's like, okay, let's rewind and let's do an exercise that I talk about in the book called the DeLorean exercise. This is where you walk into, if you don't know what a DeLorean is, it's a vehicle in the film Back to the Future that is a time machine. And so I want you to step in this time machine, go one year into the future and you get out of this time machine and it's exactly how you wanted it to be with your experience with AI. Okay. What does that look like to you? Like if things were to be exactly like they worked out perfectly for you, what does that even look like? This is helping us get to our wire. What's the whole purpose of this, right? Michael Stelzner So, okay, let me hypothetical. Let's say that I want to be able to regain my time. Let's say instead of putting in 60, 70, eight hour work weeks, I want to be able to actually put in a 40 hour work week. So one year from now, not only do I have extra time to spend time with my family and pursue my passion projects, but I also am more valued as an employee. Let's say that's my one year objective. Pat Flynn I love it. And I love that you included the stuff about family and what makes this more valuable because that is the why, right? And that's where I was going and you already put it in there because now we have a reason to do this. Now already, it's just so much easier because I have context for what is important to you here. So now I would ask you, what are the things you spend your time doing in your business? And then the second question, once we lay that all out, is what of these could be handed off or used with AI instead? So you might find that, for example, you spend a lot of time brainstorming topics for your podcast or perhaps topics for different projects that you might be working on. Cool. Then you ask, is there a world where AI helps me do that? Yes, we live in this world now. And using AI is now a creative partner to brainstorm with can be a solution for you to spend now minutes to come up with 10 ideas for something rather than hours coming up with 10 ideas for Something. And you can even at that point, even start to imagine, okay, well, if I take this task that I do manually now, how much time will I save? And will it be good enough for me? Because sometimes AI is not going to get us to where we want it to go, but it's good enough. And that is worth it depending on what it is. So again, breaking these things down and then finding the highest leverage points where you can probably get most of your time back, likely in this case with something that you just Don't want to do or don't have the time to do anymore. Michael Stelzner Love it. Love it. And I think what I'm hearing you say is take a look at, you know, now that you've come up with your reason why, and a year from now, let's assume you've achieved it, then take a look at how AI can help you cut that time down, right? Because obviously there's things that we do. In my case, it's I'm very reliant on other people and I'm waiting for them. So the obvious thing that I would ask, is there a way that I could speed that up by not becoming dependent on those people anymore? And I think that's potentially an opportunity. Another thing is I spend a lot of time dealing with getting started, getting off the starting block. Like I put a lot of time into my ideas and I'm on a hold, hold, hold now kind of a philosophy. And I know that I could creatively use AI as a strategic thought partner, right? If I didn't want to talk to someone else and I could have it pump me up, which some of the people have told me on my AI explored podcast, I could have it poke holes in some of my ideas. I could have it kind of give me a framework to get started. Then all of a sudden it's like a rocket ship and I take off. Pat Flynn I love that. Michael Stelzner I know I'm going down an AI rabbit hole here, but I ([Time 0:32:53](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7ce285b6-1867-44b0-8790-f142de858762)) - **Practice With Voluntary Pressure** - Set a real event to force your practice (e.g., speaking in front of people). - Do daily micro-practices publicly (like TikTok stories) to build skills and confidence and overcome cringe. Transcript: Pat Flynn Love that example. If, if I want to become a better storyteller, cause we can break this down and actually use frameworks in the book to help us get better at that. So if that is my why, and I can understand how storytelling will make my life better and make my business better and help my personal brand, et cetera, then I'll do a couple of things. Number one, I'm going to set a date to which at some point i'm going to be in front of a group of people to tell a story oh i like that so this might be this is again what i call a voluntary force Function i'm going to ask to speak at an event or i will sign up for an event or i will even host an event or something where i'm going to have to go up on stage and tell a story maybe it's an open Mic night even if there is such a thing near you. And then I'm going to know that I need to get reps in. I'm not just going to show up on that day and I'm not just going to read about it and then do it for the first time that day. I need reps. So here's what I'm going to do. If I have 60 days until that happens, I'm going to go every day on TikTok and tell a quick story. And it's going to be about all kinds of random things until I find my best way of telling these stories. And all along the way, I'm going to find one or two resources from people. Mike, I might ask you, I might ask other people who I know are speakers, Mike Patione, who was my speaking coach. I went to him when I learned how to speak. And I said, what would be the number one resource? Keyword, your one single resource that you would recommend for somebody learning about speaking? Not what are your top five favorite books, which of course we just, again, we love those kinds of posts. We want to know the top 100 books. Why? What's the one single book I could read? It's called Stand and Deliver by Dale Carnegie, which is the book that I read to help me get to that level that I needed to with my storytelling and stage presence. And then every day I'm going to do it. And it's in a platform where I have a little bit of accountability. I'm telling everybody I'm gonna show up every day. I don't care about the views. I don't care about the results, but I am just gonna care about me showing up so that by the time we hit day 60 and I'm supposed to go up on stage, I'll be that much more comfortable. I'll probably already have some frameworks and understand about what I need help with or where I can get support. And that's how I would begin. You got to be cringed before they binge. If you're a creator, you're trying to get better at something. You got to be cringed before they binge. ([Time 0:37:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/cb86a355-c342-4088-b8dd-031fa6a2c5ff)) - **Accelerate With Quantum Leaps** - Use quantum leaps for big shifts and a "power 10" for short bursts of intense focus. - These focused surges break routine, accelerate results, and prevent burnout from sustained effort. Transcript: Michael Stelzner Obviously, you've hinted a little bit about it when you told the story about how you wrote the book. But let's say that. Well, actually, let's describe the quantum leaps concept because it's obviously another method that is a little different than what we've been talking about with these micro. What do we call them? Micro mastery. Micro mastery. Pat Flynn So yes, micro mastery is thinking small to go big. Quantum leaps are required or seemingly big leaps of faith to move into the next stage of what we need to do. This for me as a community creator in the world of Pokemon, it was, for example, hosting a live event, right? That's not a small feat. And it was something that is going to take a lot of time and effort, but it's something that I believed in that I knew was going to work if it was done correctly. And now we host a couple events called Card Party per year in the Pokemon space. And that is my event that I run. And we are going to have 6,000 people in Tampa Bay, Florida in a couple months, which is going to be crazy. But, you know, again, this idea of a quantum leap being, okay, I need to make a big shift, right? A lot of times we get into automation mode, we get into a mode where we're just kind of cruising. And especially as business owners, we know this. But the trouble is when you get into that rhythm and cadence, like things just start to normalize and they can become boring or the results flatline and plateau or your audience starts To get bored. Sometimes you just need to inject something into the thing that you're doing to interrupt that pattern. And sometimes it's a big leap of faith, like for Nathan Berry, the founder of Kit, he put aside a couple very profitable business ventures to completely focus on building Kit, the email Software. And it went from $20,000 a month in earnings to now about a million dollars a month in earnings, if not more, because he was able to put his full focus into it. And it took a leap of faith to get rid of a six-figure business to turn something that was just very small into something much bigger. That is a big, giant leap of faith. And sometimes things require that. But if you don't have the room or even sometimes the will to go that big, there is a mini version of this that will still help you get much faster results. This is what I like to call a power 10. And I used to row at Berkeley. I was in the Cal lightweight crew. Obviously, if you're seeing this, you know that I'm not a heavyweight, that's for sure. But the heavyweight team, I mean, those were guys who were like in the Olympics and stuff. I'm a lightweight. And when you're racing in a boat of eight people, plus the coxswain in the beginning, who's yelling the commands, you know, stroke, stroke, stroke. There's some fun things that happen during a race. Because just like in our work and in our life, you can get into this rhythm where you're cruising down the river, but then all of a sudden these boats from other schools are passing you. How do you catch up? Well, you could just say row harder, but there's no structure to that. Plus, if you just tell everybody to row harder, some are going to row so hard that they're going to exhaust themselves and it's going to be a bad situation, right? So, what you do is a controlled moment of heightened sort of strength behind that or heightened energy. And in the world of rowing, it's called a power 10. So the coxswain will say, okay, guys, we're going down the river. We're gonna do a power 10 in three, two, one. And then the next stroke, everybody gives it their all. And you just immediately feel the boat start to coast like knife through a butter. The next stroke, number two. Number three, you see you're catching up to these next boats. You're going faster and faster. You can find 10 strokes to go faster. And this, the fact that there's a limit to it, I'm getting goosebumps thinking about this because like, it's the most incredible moment when you're on a boat and doing a power 10 because You just fly. And the same thing happens when you say to yourself, okay, for, let's say, for example, just to kind of bring it back to marketing, let's say that you have a weekly podcast and it comes Out every week, 52 episodes a year. But you know what? For this year, we're going to do something a little different. We're going to do our version of a power 10. So for the first week of May, we're going to do a podcast episode that comes out every day. And we're going to call it marketing week. And every day we're going to talk about a different topic for every day of the week. And we're just going to go a little harder for a shorter period of time. And what does that do? We're going to get a lot more hype. You can build excitement for it, more downloads, more likely to be ranked because velocity matters when it comes to podcast rankings. You'll have more call to actions in a shorter period of time. You're probably going to see bigger results. Yes, it's's gonna take some work, but it's not hard work forever. It's a period of time, a power 10, that you can give it your all for a certain period of time and then have a rest at the end or like go back to normal that gives you just kind of like a surge or A boost of energy, almost like an energy drink, if you will, for your business. And that works really, really well because we get into automation mode and we're just like, we're cranking, we're doing the same things. And I think it was, who was it? Einstein, you said, like, if you just continue to do the same things, but expect different results, you're crazy, right? Like that's the definition of insanity. You have to inject something else into it for a time being, but imagine a racing boat. If you did a power a thousand and just did all out for a thousand strokes, you would die, right? Like you would be burned out. So this is why this little heightened moment of energy goes a really, really long way to get you fast forwarding to your results. ([Time 0:39:52](https://share.snipd.com/snip/08be4344-e2f0-48cf-bb65-46becc9734e2))