Mastering Anything: A New Way to Faster and Better Results
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Welcome to the Social Media Marketing Podcast, helping you navigate the social media jungle. And now, here is your host, Michael Stelzner. Hello, hello, hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the Social Media Marketing Podcast.

brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers and business owners who want more exposure, more leads, and more sales. Today, we've got a really exciting episode for you. I'm going to be joined by Pat Flynn.

And Pat Flynn, as you know, was recently on the podcast, if you're a regular listener. But today's episode is completely different. We're going to talk about how to master anything. Now, you listen to this podcast because you love to learn. And sometimes...

We need a new framework in which to learn so that we can become master crafts people at whatever it is we want to be known for. Today's episode is going to rock your world because it's going to give you a really awesome and new framework in which you can become a master at anything. I cannot wait to hear your reaction to today's episode. Also, if you're brand new to the show,

Follow us on whatever app you're listening to because we've got some great content coming your way. Let's now transition over to this week's interview with Pat Flynn. Helping you to simplify your social safari. Here is this week's expert guide.

Today, I'm very excited to be joined by Pat Flynn. If you don't know who Pat is, you've not been listening to this podcast because he was recently on, but he's also the host of the Smart Passive Income podcast and author of multiple books, including Will It Fly and Superfans. His newest book is called

It's called Lean Learning, How to Achieve More by Learning Less. Pat, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me, Mike. It's an honor to be back and now talking about the book. And also, great job at Social Media Marketing World. It was a fantastic event. Thank you so much. And it's always amazing to have great people like you speaking there. Today, Pat and I are going to explore how marketers, creators, and or entrepreneurs can adopt a new method of mastering any topic.

And I'm really excited to dig into this because there's so much stuff going on in the world right now that people need to learn about. But before we get into all that, I'm going to ask a why question, as I always do. Why do we need to change the way we learn as marketers, creators, and entrepreneurs? I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. I think very obviously the world has changed. We

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, you know, 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 online.

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 able

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 into, 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 of

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 podcasts alone. Hey, I know I've got like 20 of them I subscribe to. 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 want to do. And really the big difference here is the idea between just in case 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. - So share a little bit about what's possible when this is done well and specifically what you've done with your short pocket story. - Oh yeah.

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 gonna 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?

Right? So I decided that I was gonna 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 won either way. And I can assess at that point whether or not I want to 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

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 has 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. And again, this is just one of many examples of how I've done new things and have done them well. And I'm excited to talk about it. Well, and folks, just so you understand, Pat does not disclose who he is in these videos. You do not see his face if you do not know his voice.

You have no idea that this is Pat. So this is just proof that if you follow what we're going to be talking about today, you could, through this methodology, achieve things that seem outside the realm of possibility for you. So, Pat, what are some of the biggest mental barriers, if you will, that stop us from making progress in the areas where we...

we want to progress. I 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

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 in 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

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 SwitchPod. You know about this, Mike, and we've talked about this here on the show before. In fact, SwitchPod 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 going to 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? Well, 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 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.

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. Oh, okay. 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. But by putting it aside, maybe even putting it in an ocean board or a shoe box or something somewhere where, you know, it's there, but it's not time for it yet. Right.

That allows your brain to move forward and recommit to the things that are important to you now. And by the way, when you help yourself by putting it aside, 99% of the time, you won't even go back to that thing because there's been a new resource that's better that's come out since. It's just a method to allow your brain to go, okay, it's there in case I need it. So let me go back to what I said I was going to do. So those are some mindset things around this idea of learning and

ways to combat some of the biggest struggles that we have today. Yeah, I want to talk a little bit about some of this because I'm very fascinated by this. Today, I was talking to one of my employees and we were talking about book farts, smarts, book farts. Yeah.

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? And I don't know if you have any thoughts that you want to talk about the why and the purpose, because I feel like that's also important.

kind of an easy way of just knowing is it getting us closer or further away? You have any thoughts on that? Yeah. I mean, the why is vital. The why is your guide. The why are the guidelines. And it allows you to check in with yourself every once in a while. In fact, in the book, I talk about something. There's a lot of dad jokes in the book, by the way, because that's just who I am. There's a lot of personal stories as well. I call this strategy every month. You should take 15 minutes, just 15 minutes and do a what I call a Wi-Fi, a Y focused introspection, just kind of

zooming out a little bit and going, are the things that I'm actually doing or learning about or taking action on in alignment with my why? Because if you don't have Wi-Fi, you're lagging. That's the joke. I love it. By the way, we got to stop and we have to share a little story. For folks that don't know, Pat and I are in a mastermind group. We've been in for like over a decade together. Explain to them how you wrote this darn book, because I feel like the way you wrote this book is also...

actually practicing what you preach, you know? Yes. So I don't want to discredit my publishers at all. 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 it 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 a 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.

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. So thank you. Well, my pleasure. But what do you want to say to the Mastercrafts people out there? Because, Pat, you are a Mastercrafts person. You are a creative perfectionist, I'm going to say. So what do you want to say to the creative perfectionists that are out there? Because

You obviously had to overcome some perhaps limiting beliefs in the process of getting to where you are right now. Do you have any thoughts for those kind of people? 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 mistakes.

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 going to delay any sort of learning that you could 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 yourself.

to happen. I love it. I love it. When I started my shorts channel, the first week or two was like just me trying to figure it out. And there was no penalty in that. It was just, I didn't get a ton of views, but eventually I landed on this format that took two weeks to figure out. And that format still exists today with billions of views. But,

If I didn't get started because I was waiting for the perfect kind of format, it would have never happened. For those that are like, whoa, Pat was undergrad for five years. Well, I'm going to tell you, I was undergrad for six years before I went on to grad school for three more years. So I was in college for nine years, changed my major, you know, all the story.

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It's been a lot of fun up to this point. Now we're going to get to the brass tacks of some of the magic stuff that Pat writes about in his book.

So you have this concept in the book called micro mastery, which is really a great model to help us begin to master a topic. Why don't you describe what it is and let's dig in on that. 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-creators.

coworkers 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 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 had 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. Which is what? What is the scratch golfer? 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.

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 what, 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 do.

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 know I even know you did that, Mike. You hyper focus 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, OK, how do I make sure that people click the

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 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. Like that is it.

And I was like, this is crazy. Like 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 to become a part of who he is in terms of what he uses for thumbnails. And now he's micro 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 is

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 and you can increase the conversions on your website and 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 fascinating as I'm listening to your example of your public speaking

Your craft of storytelling from the stage has transferred over to your craft of storytelling and videos. Your use of hands has

in your presentations has worked its way into your success with your videos. As a matter of fact, you could say with your shorts channel, it is exclusively how you use your hands, right? Isn't it true? I have the most recognizable thumbs in the world, I think. I've actually been at places where they'll be like, oh, are you the should I open it or should I sealed guy? And they're like, is that really you? And then I'll throw out my thumb and they're like, it is you. So yeah, you're right. I never even really made that connection, but I have, I mean, I don't go, okay, today,

Although, no, you're absolutely right. There was a couple of times where I played into my hands and my thumbs. My thumbs look weird, by the way. They're kind of club thumbs. Like if you know Megan Fox and her thumbs, that's I have her thumbs. I don't know her thumbs, but I believe you. Yeah, I don't have her looks, though. But I've bought fake thumbs once and just didn't say anything about it on the shorts channel. And people are like,

Making a big deal out of it. Like I'm just having fun with the audience too. That's the other thing about like learning when you can make learning and this process of doing fun. Like imagine that you were on a hike. If you had the opportunity to snap your fingers and be at the top of the mountain already, would you?

No, you're there for the hike. You're enjoying the process. Well, some people would snap their fingers and want to be up there. Then why are you on the hike? Right. So your why is important to go back. But you're right. You're right. So, OK, let's explore this micro mastery thing a little bit deeper. When you are brand new to a topic that you want to master and you don't know which section to focus on or what section.

What part of it to essentially start with? How do we decide where our focus ought to be in anything that we want to master when there's so many areas that we could potentially master? Yeah, 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. 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? 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 use 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 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 answer 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

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. So let's play hypothetical. OK. OK. As you know, artificial intelligence, the use of AI for creatives and marketers and entrepreneurs is kind of a big thing right now.

And let's say someone who's listening has decided that they want to really master the use of AI in their craft. Let's walk through a hypothetical dialogue of where we might want to go with this. And I'll add my thoughts after you add your thoughts. And let's just see where this goes. Sure. Let's say I'm coming to you, Pat.

as your friend and I'm saying, hey, I've been hearing a lot about this AI thing. I think it's going to be a big deal. Where do I start? 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 why or what's the whole purpose of this, right? So.

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. 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

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 use 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 as 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, OK, 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. 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. I love that.

I know I'm going down an AI rabbit hole here, but I don't want to go too much further. But hopefully people are getting ideas that, hey, whatever your topic is, what Pat is telling you is you've got to have a vision of where you want to go. And then obviously, as we talked about earlier, are the actions you're taking getting you closer or further away from the vision? Right. Right. And what's the next simple step that you need to focus on?

And one of the things I think I heard you say multiple times is maybe pick an area that is a personal interest to you to get started. Something like maybe you want to go from good to great, right, Pat? Maybe you're a decent storyteller, but you want to be a great storyteller. And maybe you're aware that this can transcend the work that you're doing, even though Pat wasn't aware when he learned storytelling how important it was going to be to everything that he does.

you now have that advantage looking back, those are listening to the podcast, right? Yeah. I love that example. If I want to become a better storyteller, because 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

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 Pacione, 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 going to show up every day. I don't care about the views. I don't care about the results, but I am just going to 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 cringe before they binge. If you're a creator, you're trying to get better at something. You got to be cringe before they binge, right? That's like such a beautiful way to use social media as a practice platform. I love it. I always say your first is your worst too, right? Because it's always, it's only gets better from there.

Love it. Okay. You have this other thing, which is quantum leaps. 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? Micromastery. Micromastery. So yes, micromastery 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 is 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. And the hard thing for businesses is like, we're supposed to be automated in a way. We have to get into a rhythm and a cadence, right?

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, uh,

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 going to 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.

We're gonna call it marketing week. And every day we're gonna talk about a different topic for every day of the week. And we're just gonna go a little harder for a shorter period of time. And what does that do? We're gonna 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 gonna see bigger results. Yes, it'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 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.

Pat Flynn, it has been an absolute joy to power 10 with you, to see you do quantum leaps and micro mastery over many years of our friendship. And this has been, if I can say this publicly, one of the more, definitely my favorite episode I've ever done with you. Now, folks, I want you to go out and I want you to get his book, Lean Learning. As you can tell, Pat is a master craft person. You will not find anything

a better piece of work that Pat has done. So Pat, tell them where they can get the book and if they want to connect with you and or anything else you've got going on, where do you want to send them? Yeah. Thank you, Mike. And thank you to everybody listening. Like seriously, this is,

as you might find, not a business book. I mean, there are business ideas within it, obviously, but it is a self-development and self-help book because I think this is what we all need. In fact, I wrote this because my kids are entering their young adult lives soon and they're entering a world that's so different from the ones that we live in. And even us as adults are struggling with how much information is out there. So if you want to check out Lean Learning and pick it up, I'd be very much appreciative if you go to

Amazon and pick up Lean Learning, you can get it there. Of course, you can also pick up the book with some bonuses if you're listening to this before the launch date on June 3rd. If you go to leanlearningbook.com, you can get it there. And let me know how you love it and maybe not love it. I just would love your honest opinion on it to see how it might be able to help you and your family, your kids, those around you. I'm at Pat Flynn on most social media channels. But again, Lean Learning is the book, how to achieve more by learning less.

And again, Mike, thank you so much again for the opportunity to be here and all of you for your time today. If you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over at socialmediaexaminer.com slash 668. And if you're new to this show, be sure to follow us. And if you've been a regular listener, I would love it if you would consider sharing this with your friends, your network. If you want to tag me, I'm at Stelzner on Facebook, at Stelzner on LinkedIn and at Mike underscore Stelzner on Instagram.

And also do check out our other shows. AI Explored is my fun project on how to put AI to work. And of course, we've got the Social Media Marketing Talk Show. This brings us to the end of the Social Media Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may your marketing keep evolving. The Social Media Marketing Podcast is a production of Social Media Examiner.

Just a quick reminder before you go, if you're ready to become indispensable in the age of AI, the AI Business Society is your solution. Join now and secure your discounted membership by visiting socialmediaexaminer.com slash AI. I can't wait to see you inside the AI Business Society.