Focused - 56: Iterate in Public, with Sean McCabe

Episode Date: September 18, 2018

Sean McCabe started his free agent journey as a designer doing hand lettering, and has built a successful online business through teaching what he knows. He joins David and Mike to talk about the lessons he's learned along the way, including the power of rest and why he takes a sabbatical every 7 weeks.

David Sparks and Mike Schmitz spent their careers working for the establishment. Now, they've had enough. They've rebelled against the status quo and are now seeking success on their terms. They are free agents. Welcome back to Free Agents, a podcast about being an independent worker in a digital age. I'm Mike Schmitz, and I'm joined by my fellow co-host, Mr. David Sparks. How's it going, David? Hi, Mike. I'm looking forward to doing some free agent stuff today.

Yeah, this is one of those guest episodes, which is always a ton of fun. But before we get there, I know you've got a couple of housekeeping things you wanted to mention. Yeah, the first is it's membership month over at Relay.fm. Every year we do this where they do a membership drive, and it's a lot of fun. You know, membership at the Relay.fm gives you some benefits. You can get access to a custom podcast, you know, members-only podcast, of which Mike and I are going to be releasing a particular episode into the members-only feed. You want to talk about that a little bit, Mike?

Yeah, so we talk a lot about the work stuff on Free Agents. We're going to talk about the other side of it and talk about some of our favorite games. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to that. And that show will actually already be in the members-only feed when this show goes live. So that's immediate gratification. There's nothing better than that. So you can also get members-only wallpapers.

You get previews of upcoming shows. In fact, Free Agents, the original episode of Free Agents was put out in the members-only feed before we released it to the general public when Jason and I were still figuring it out. They have a monthly behind-the-scenes newsletter. It's just a lot of fun. Honestly, Mike and I, in a large extent, pay for our shoes doing these podcasts, and it helps support us.

We'd really appreciate it. The way to sign up is go to the website. You can support just this show, or you can support any collection of shows that you listen to from Real AFM. They have different levels of membership so you can go in. But no matter which one you get, you get access to all those goodies we were talking about. So we'd really appreciate it if you took some time and went and signed up. Absolutely.

And then you've got another announcement that you wanted to make. Yeah, talking about self-promotion. Absolutely. And then you've got another announcement that you wanted to make. course in the learn.maxsparky.com episode is up. It's the first new course. It's all about Siri shortcuts. So if you're getting iOS 12 and you want to get good at automating your iPhone and iPad, I've got a course up there. It came out great. It's over three hours of screencast content. So there's a lot in there. Spend some time watching it and you're going to become a pro at managing Siri shortcuts. So I'm really happy to announce that's there. And if you're interested, go check it out at learn.maxbarkey.com. So we have a guest episode here today and I'm thrilled to announce my friend. I'm going to call you my friend, Sean. Sean McCabe is on the podcast. Welcome, Sean.

Hey, good to be here. Yes, we are friends, Mike. podcast. Welcome, Sean. Hey, good to be here. Yes, we are friends, Mike. I went to a conference that Sean hosted as part of his Sean West brand, and he's been a guest on the Productivity Show. And he has written a book called Overlap, which is very appropriate for free agents. He's an entrepreneur. He's an artist, kind of got his start as hand lettering, which we'll get into in a little bit. And he's a podcaster and YouTuber. So really excited to have you on the show today, Sean. I'm thrilled to be here. Excellent. So before we dive too deep here, why don't you just give us a little bit of a background on your own free agent journey? How'd you get started in free agency? Well, I started out washing windows in high school. And one time I was up on a really tall three-story building and started

kind of rethinking things, had a little slip, a little close call. And I thought, I think I want to do something other than wash windows many, many feet above the ground. And so I joined a band. We started touring around. We called it full time. And it kind of was for a few months until it wasn't really paying the bills. And that's when all of us, we didn't want to quit the band, but it wasn't paying the bills anymore. So we tried to find something that we could do. And we kind of all got our start in entrepreneurship that way. Just started doing of all got our start in entrepreneurship that way. Just started doing different jobs, different freelancing things. In my case, I started a computer repair company and then got into web design and ran a web firm and sold the computer repair company and did the web firm for about

three years. And during that time in my nights and weekends, I started just drawing letters, hand lettering, kind of like the Coca-Cola logo, you know, where it's custom type, not a font, but hand drawn. And I was just doing this for fun in my nights and weekends. But after about two years of doing it, and what I mean by drawing letters and doing that in the nights and weekends, I mean, I literally did nothing else but draw letters for maybe six hours a night outside of my nine or 10 hours building websites. And yeah. Yeah, Sean, I think I'll wind back a little bit. I definitely want to talk about the lettering and how you got into that. But you went pretty fast past that first part.

And I'll tell you, the first time I saw your picture in my head, I said, this guy was in a band at some point. Because Sean has the hair of a guy that was in a band. I'll say that. So I want you to go look at the picture, Sean. Glorious locks, Sean. They're glorious. You know, when I started making YouTube videos, someone commented they had been listening to my podcast before they saw me on video. And they said, your voice didn't have so much hair. I love that.

And then the other thing is I want to go back to that beginning part, you know, that life shift you had when you were washing the windows. I had a similar experience where when I was in high school, I was thinking, well, do I really need to go to college? You know, at the time, I was making pretty good money playing my saxophone, and I thought I had the world figured out. My dad said, that's fine. But if that's your thought, you need to start working, you know, more hours. So he got me, helped me get a job repairing boat engines in Ontario, California, which was where I grew up. And it's like in the summer, it's like 110 degrees. And it's the part of the LA basin where the smog just

lays there. So I spent three months in a shed with no air conditioning, fixing boat engines. And all of a sudden, college looked amazing to me. But so you had that kick, you know, and then and I think the second thing that's interesting to me is how do you go from a web guy to a hand letter? Yeah, that's kind of a weird one. I guess what I didn't anticipate was around the time that I went really full time with the web firm and sold the computer repair business. I had recently gotten married and I was still in the band kind of straddling the music and business.

And I really needed to go all in just to make consistent income. And so I stepped down from the band and it was kind of a bittersweet time. But what I really didn't anticipate was losing that creative outlet and how much of a void that would leave. And it's not like I didn't enjoy aspects of building websites, but I needed some kind of a creative outlet. And it wasn't until I met a hand letterer that I had been following online. I liked his art. He was coming into town and we ended up getting coffee. And he said, you know, it seems like you're really into this. You know, why don't you just create? And I don't know why, but I just had this idea that whatever I did, if I was going to do it, I had to go all in. It had to be something serious where I would make a living from it. And I thought there's no way I

could make a living from drawing letters. So I'm just not going to draw letters. And this, this guy said, just, just do it because you enjoy it. And I don't know why it seems so silly looking back, but it was like he gave me permission just to do it for fun. And so I thought, okay, no problem. I'll do it in my nights and weekends outside the job and see what comes of it. And I just, I really enjoy it. I didn't play video games, didn't go party with friends, didn't even watch Netflix. I just drew letters and I was posting it every day for like two years before anyone really noticed, like no one really cared. But it didn't bother me because I just I just enjoyed it. I enjoyed the process of creating. But somewhere around two years in, people started paying attention to it.

They started asking if I could make t-shirts of the designs I made or if I had prints. And so I started selling those. And since I already had my money covered from basically my day job of the web firm, I just reinvested the money I made from products back into the, I guess you could call it a business. I didn't even think of a business. It was just kind of like a little side gig, if you will. I love that.

And I think that there's a lot to unpack there, but it's really cool, in my opinion, how you can, quote unquote, follow your passion and have it lead you to somewhere. how you can quote unquote, follow your passion and have it lead you to somewhere. But I think the key is in your expectations. Like you mentioned the conversation you had with the person you get coffee with, and they basically gave you permission to do it for fun. I think a lot of people can get in that mindset of, I'm going to make this leap. I'm going to be a free agent. I'm going to follow my passion. And they expect that just because they made that leap that all of a sudden people are going to be lining up to give them money for it. And that wasn't the case for you. But also there's another principle here, become so good they can't ignore you. I mean, you showed up every day. There's a lot to be said for

that consistency and you kept getting better. And then after a period of two years, which I would argue really isn't a whole lot of time, you were good enough to solicit attention. There was another aspect to it, which was at the time, I was actually doing a lot more than just drawing letters, especially with the work I was doing at the agency. I was doing user interface, illustration, screencasts, some animation, logo design, icon design, really just an assortment of things. And what I would do is just share anything that I made. As soon as I made it, I posted it. And so my feed was kind of a random, who knows what you're going to get. And if you followed me back then or looked at my profile

or my portfolio, you didn't really know what you were looking at. You certainly didn't know what to expect. And I think that's the question we're asking ourselves when we decide to pay attention to someone, to subscribe for anything, to follow anything, is what can I expect? What am I going to get more of? And what worked really well is answering that question for people. And the way I answered it is by curating what I shared instead of putting out everything that I was doing. I just decided one day, hey, even though I'm doing eight or 10 different things, I'm going to share only the lettering. And that was sort of the point where I started to see an inflection in my audience growth. Yeah, you start out, because in your case, you started out not looking to this as a side hustle business. It's just a passion. It's a way to exercise your creativity.

Yeah, it was definitely not anything that I thought I could make money from, certainly not a living from full-time. It was just for fun. Do you think the pivot to just talking about lettering was the point where you started to say, wait a second, I want to do more than just make this a hobby. I want to make this a job. Well, I mean, it's almost like if I had tried really hard to make it a thing as fast as I could, it wouldn't have worked. It was the fact that I just poured myself into it without any expectation. And I'm not saying that's a key necessarily. It was just my experience that people started associating me with that. So they would think of me and they would think of this thing that I was sharing and I was creating. And then eventually, whenever they saw lettering anywhere in the world, they would think of me.

And so lettering became kind of an advertisement for me because I focused on it so much. Whereas before when I posted everything, people didn't remember me for anything. I always get a little nervous when we talk about saying, before when I posted everything, people didn't remember me for anything. I always get a little nervous when we talk about saying, you know, just do something you're super passionate about and it's going to turn out okay for you. Because there's another element to that if you want to turn it into a gig is you've got to be able to have a market for it. You've got to have something you can do with it. But at the same time, I've always felt like when you follow

your passion, it's like you pick up all these skills that you don't even know how you're going to use later. And, you know, kind of reverse engineering Sean here. I mean, you went on the side to get this artistic skill that you didn't know you were going to use the way you did. But at the same time, in the day job, you're learning how to make a great web presence. And at some point, job, you're learning how to make a great web presence. And at some point, a combination of the day job and the passion project all come together where you can make something really kind of brilliant. I think you're spot on there because it is more complicated than just follow your passion. And a lot of people attribute the popularizing of that idea to Steve Jobs. But I think if we dig a bit deeper, what he was really saying is you need passion to essentially be irrational when it counts,

to stick to it when you get discouraged and when you don't really want to. It's like, if you love what you do, passion will see you through the times where it's not easy necessarily. And it certainly didn't all work magically. But like you're saying, you kind of pick up things here and there. Like when I repaired computers, I learned how to work with clients and how to do taxes and accounting and send invoices. And then when I worked with the web firm, it was just me and a partner. I kind of started it up because my computer clients, some of them knew people with businesses

and they would have me repair a bunch of their computers and then say, can you update my website? And I said, yes, I will figure out how to do that. But I learned how to price, you know, and I learned just on a whim. I don't know why, but I decided I'm going to learn about licensing. And I ordered books on licensing and started watching videos about licensing and reading blog posts. I can't even tell you why. I was just curious about it and I wanted to learn. And so I was reading these books about licensing your art and I was talking about the World Wide Web and CDs

and stuff, but the principles were solid. And so I adapted what I learned from these licensing books for the internet age. And within three months of reading these books and just kind of going deep on this research, this is like what I would do in my downtime. I landed three jobs that utilize that knowledge about licensing. So in a sense, I came into the art world through business, whereas most artists, I would say, at least from what I've seen, they kind of start out in art because they're more creative and they're expressing themselves. And then they have to figure out how to make a living from it. Whereas I'd already worked with clients and run businesses for many years. And so I knew that, hey, my art, it has selling power, you know, and when someone wants to use my design to sell products, I'm not just going to charge them a flat rate. Because that's what so

many people would do. I'd have these companies come to me and say, hey, you know, we'll pay you a couple hundred bucks to do this design. And I'd say, what are you going to do with it? And they're like, well, we're putting it on these products and we're going to sell them forever. And I was like, okay, well, we're going to use this licensing agreement and you'll pay me royalties every quarter. And they're like, no other artist we work with does that. And I said, well, I do that. Nice. I do think that there's a very important distinction that you made there. I'm glad you called that out between a business person who makes art and an artist who's trying to start a business. I think that probably puts you in the minority in that particular field. And I also think that it's kind of cool, you know, talking about all the different things that you are learning, really just embracing the growth mindset, how, you know, success is

never a straight line. And you're kind of connecting all of these dots, you're getting all this information, and you're applying it, and you're forging your own path. But you wouldn't have been able to do that if you hadn't been, if you hadn't had that approach where I'm going to put these things together in a way that fits me. It's not like I'm going to try this thing because everybody else is doing this and maybe it'll work for me, maybe it won't. And if it doesn't, go try something on the other end of the spectrum. It seems like you were very intentional about the types of dots you were collecting and massaging them into a workable vision for your future.

you were collecting and massaging them into a workable vision for your future. I guess I was just fortunate about the order in which events played out. I ended up in business and then the art thing kind of took off. And so I just naturally applied what I understood about business to the art. So where did you go from there then from being a freelancer because that's that's not really what you do now like what's the rest of the journey look like from hand lettering for clients now to where you are today well the hand lettering stuff is something i did for myself freelance um with without you know i i went on to teach some of the things that I had learned, but I was actually making really good money as an artist. And because I understood things about licensing and pricing and contracts, I was able to land some pretty big jobs and got to the point where I was charging $8,000 for a logo. $8,000 for a logo. And I found out through friends who had friends at the companies that hired me that they actually thought I was cheap, which shows you just how much money is floating

around, especially in the, you know, San Francisco area. And just like, I landed like a five figure job with the city of Las Vegas doing like a business-to-business ad campaign. And it's all because I understood usage rights. And I wasn't just, I think of when you sell the rights to your artwork, it's like selling your soul. That's the best way I can explain it to an artist because they can relate to that. Instead, you should sell slices of it. Like think of a pie. You know, there's this usage right for the work on this type of product in this medium, in this territory, and it's either exclusive or non-exclusive.

You know, there's so many, so many slices of it that you can sell. It's why, you know, Star Wars makes so much money because they can license a character on a lunchbox, you know, on a blanket, on a mug. It's just very, very powerful. And so I was able to make really good money as an artist. But the weird thing was, after sharing my work consistently for so many years, the vast majority of the people in my audience wanted to learn how to do what I was doing, essentially to make a living as a hand lettering artist. How was I doing that? And up until this point, I hadn't been teaching or sharing any of that at all. Yeah, just the point of monetizing your work is an interesting one. I was thinking, as you were talking about,

I'm a big fan of jazz music. And there are so many great classic jazz songs written back in the 50s and 60s by these guys that just gave up their rights as soon as they wrote something. And now, 50 years later, those songs are still popular. And it is something you need to think about if you're a free agent you're doing something creative is how do you preserve that and and how do you monetize and it sounds to me like one of

the things you did is you had the guts to charge real money for it yeah I mean it was really knowing that I I could that there was more to my I, I think most artists just don't know. They don't know because a company comes to them and they feel so like appreciated. Like, oh my gosh, someone, someone wants my work. You know, this is such a privilege to work for this big company. And like, because I had set aside the time to learn and read books about this stuff, I realized my art is going to make them a lot of money. I think artists and freelancers would be well served to think of it being a privilege to work with, you know? And instead of saying, yes, by default, yes, I'll work with anyone,

anyone who will give me any amount of money, even if it might devalue my services, yes, I'll work with you because you're desperate, right? Instead of saying yes by default, qualify people, you know? The answer's no until I know you're gonna be a great fit for me, until I know you're going to be a great fit for me, until I know we're going to be able to work well together, until I know I'm going to be able to create value for you, until I know that you respect my process and the way that I work. So no jobs for exposure then?

Well, yeah, that's a tough topic. I know people have a lot of opinions on that. I think that's great advice for anybody, not just artists. Anybody who's on their own, you need to value your work. This episode of The Free Agents is brought to you by FreshBooks, online invoicing made easy. To all you free agents out there, you know how important it is to make smart decisions for your business. important it is to make smart decisions for your business. Our friends at FreshBooks can save you up to 192 hours with their cloud accounting software for freelancers that's ridiculously easy to use. By simplifying tasks like invoicing, tracking expenses, and getting paid online, FreshBooks has drastically reduced the time it takes for over 10 million people to deal with

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We thank FreshBooks for their support of this show and RelayFM. All right, so you had mentioned before the break that you had transitioned because you realized that a lot of the people in your audience were asking you for advice on how to do what you were doing. And up until that point,

you really hadn't been do what you were doing. And up until that point, you really hadn't been teaching what you knew. What was that process like from going, I do this thing, I get paid for it to, I don't know what the term would be, maybe being like a thought leader in this space. But it seems to me like that's a pretty different mental mindset when you flip the switch and you say, I'm going to help these other people, whether they have a bunch of money to pay me at that point or not, just focusing on giving things away and teaching what you know, which I think is a big theme of yours. What was the process that went through your head as you were making that transition?

Yeah, it wasn't a flipping of a switch for me. It was really just solving a problem, which was I was getting a tremendous amount of emails. I mean, like a dozen emails a day, which quickly added up just hundreds of emails were in my inbox if I went any more than a week without answering them. and so many of them were asking very similar questions. And I was just frankly tired of answering the same questions, and I didn't even know about TextExpander and things like that back then. I was just typing the same thing over and over. So I thought, I'm just going to make a guide, and it'll just be a 10-step introductory guide for people who want to get started with lettering. And I put it up on my site, and I didn't know anything about marketing. I didn't know about email lists. I guess I was doing it all wrong,

but later it actually really ended up working in my favor because I put it all up on a page on my website. It wasn't some kind of PDF opt-in lead magnet, none of that. It was just a page. And so whenever someone emailed in, I'd say, oh, here you go. Here's an introductory guide. And I'd link them to the page. Well, because all of that content was front facing, because it was indexable by Google, it ended up making it to the very top of Google for anything related to hand lettering, lettering. This was back in the day. And basically 200 200 000 people read the guide over the course of a year and that was before i ever did anything with it i just was checking my analytics and realized oh a lot of people are interested in this stuff and they were sharing it on pinterest and other

social media and so i thought, there's clearly interest here. I can go a lot deeper. And so I spent the next six months working overtime on freelance work with clients to save enough money to take another half a year off to produce a course, something that would go much more in depth, and something that would bridge the gap between essentially what you learn in school and what you really need to make a living as an artist. Because I just found that there was so much of a gap there. People basically told you how to work in an agency. They didn't tell you the business knowledge that you needed to succeed as a free agent. And so I thought, I'm going to bridge

the gap here. And I'm going to teach people not just the technical drawing skills, but how to price, how to talk to clients, how to write contracts, what do you need to learn about licensing. And at the time, there weren't very many courses at all on this type of thing. A few pretty cheap courses, like $20, you know, how to draw some letters. And I came in and I was charging this multi-hundred dollar premium price for a course that was going to give people the business knowledge. And so as I'm producing this in these six months, I just listened to podcasts. I just absorbed everything I could about marketing, about email, about

launching an online course. I'd never done it before. And when it came time to launch it, I had, at this point, I learned how to build an email list. And what I did is I took that guide, remember the front-facing page, I turned that into a PDF and I replaced the existing page with a much longer landing page. I spent three months on it, you know, making illustrations and stuff, making it look super nice, basically announcing this course that was about to come. It wasn't ready yet. You're scrolling down, you're scrolling down. And it was talking about it as if it's ready. So by the time you scroll to the bottom, you're like, I want to enroll, where is this thing? And I said, hey, it's coming soon. If you'd like, I can notify you when it launches, and in the meantime, I'll give you my 10-step guide.

That converted really well. I had 15,000 people on the email list by the time the launch came around, and then the course ended up making six figures in the first three days. Wow, good for you. And then the course ended up making six figures in the first three days. Wow. Good for you. Yeah, I was hoping maybe to make some of my money back to make up for not working for six months for clients. But I had no idea what to expect. Completely just it far surpassed my expectations. That was like when my family started to actually believe that I could make it.

You know, I wasn't just a starving artist. Well, you know, it is funny when you say you make your living working on the internet from your house, that a lot of times you have certain family members that want to give you cans of food and things like that. Totally. Yeah. And I mean, even my own wife, like she supports me, but like, that's when it was like, Oh, nice. So what were some of the, did you find it difficult to, to push through and release that course? I mean, it kind of sounds like you had this calculated and you had this plan and you had this runway and you're going to throw this out there and see if it worked. But did you have

to battle demons in your head the whole time you were working on that for that six months? Like, what if this doesn't work? Or did you kind of have a backup plan? You know, I didn't have very high expectations. I still kind of felt like I was just addressing an expressed need, essentially solving a problem. And I don't know, I wasn't relying on it, right? Because I had worked to save up enough money to take this half year off. And it took me half a year to do that. But what was the worst case? I mean, if it completely failed and I made zero dollars, I would just go back to client work. I would, you know, I could always go back. So I guess I just didn't have, I didn't, I was scripting it. I had cameras on tripods. I had microphones. I was animating the intro. I recorded music for the intro. I was editing everything. I was hosting everything. I was marketing, sending the emails. I worked 230 hours in the final 13 days leading up to the launch. It was, it was like, it was brutal,

but I somehow got it done. So you did everything for that course then, right? Literally everything, yeah. How has that changed to what you do now with the Sean West brand? Do you still try to do everything or how did you become okay with delegating things to other people? I know that's tough for a lot of free agents. Yeah, I mean, after that, I had some extra money. And so I started to hire people. And I started to try to delegate some of this stuff rather than do everything myself, like edit my own podcast or shoot my own videos in the future. I had someone else do that. And so I started essentially empowering other people on these things that I

thought no one else can do these as good as me or as well as me. I don't know. It was probably a podcast or a combination of podcasts that I was listening to that slowly shifted my mind on this. And it eventually clicked for me. I realized, okay, there's some things that I think I'm good at and I also enjoy them. There's other things that I'm also good at, but I don't really enjoy doing. And I still do them anyway. And there's plenty of things that I'm not great at and things that I hate. Why do I believe that I'm the best person in the world at these things? And I'm trying to do everything, literally everything in my business. And so this question of what if someone else came in and their entire job was to do this one thing and to do this one thing well

and take it off your plate. Are you telling me someone whose entire job is to do this one thing couldn't do it better than you? And if not, if not initially, eventually. And that's kind of what, what made me change my mind on it a little bit. I was like, yeah, you know, that's true. And then especially the things that I hated doing, realizing's true. And then especially the things that I hated doing, realizing, believe it or not, the things that you really dislike doing, maybe it's your accounting or your taxes or whatever. There are really, truly people out there who love to do what you hate. It's amazing. Yeah, that's a really powerful idea. I know I've struggled with that myself where I just don't like filling out spreadsheets. I don't like working with clients.

But there are people who love talking to people and people who love crunching numbers. And so delegating those tasks to those people, they enjoy that sort of thing. Where as me personally, even with a free agent mindset like you were talking about, where I believe that I'm the best person at this thing. This is my baby. No one else is going to care about this thing as much as I do. When you give somebody something to do that they like and you hate, oftentimes the quality of what you get back is a lot better than what you thought you were able to do, even though you're the one that cares the most about this thing.

That's very true. And that's where it starts. But the ultimate goal is to slowly work to the point where even the things that you are good at, that you like doing, that you know you shouldn't be doing, you need to delegate those things. And ultimately, you want to get to a point where you're doing the things that only you can do. Now, Sean, how do you get there, though? I mean, did you just jump in with both feet or did you dip your toe? I mean, what were the steps you took when you realized you wanted to do that?

Well, the first business I had, I hired one guy and he had plenty of work. And so I didn't get more work because we wouldn't have the manpower. And I didn't hire more people because we wouldn't have more work for more people. And I kind of just let the business stagnate. And I sold it, but I didn't make that much. It could have still been an asset for me. And so I thought, I'll do it the other way. I've learned my lesson. This time I'm going to hire proactively. I'm going to delegate absolutely everything. And I hired way too fast. I hired six full-time people in a year. And I had this $30,000 a month payroll. And sure, everyone was taking things off of my plate. Everyone was doing work. But essentially, the pendulum swung the complete opposite direction, and it was extreme in the wrong direction.

And what I didn't learn until later is when you hire, you're scaling. You're taking something and you're making it bigger. And what I had at the time was, yes, I had money from these course launches that I'd done. I went on to do a 2.0 version of the course that made even more in less time. Like I had cash, but I didn't have a business. I didn't have like a solid business model. I just had some money that kind of floated this thing for a while. And so it took time for me to realize that. So I had this very big payroll

with a bunch of people doing a bunch of things. And none of those things actually contributed directly to the bottom line of the business. They were just things that I was doing. And I had delegated those things because I didn't want to have superhero syndrome. So it took a while to learn that. And it was very difficult because I had to go through some painful things because, you know, I really liked the people. In some cases, they were family. And I ended up having to let people go because the business was essentially a bucket of holes.

I didn't really have a solid business model. I just had money, right? And we had to keep doing these things that were unsustainable to make money to continue to support this business that at its core wasn't working. And so when I hired, I scaled what was a bucket full of holes. So I ended up with a bigger bucket full of holes. And if there's anything you don't want, it's bigger problems, right? I mean, if you can't make a $3,000 a month payroll, it's not that much more fun to not be able to make a $30,000 payroll. Yeah, if the boat is sinking, the solution is not row faster. So do you think you found balance at this point?

I think I'm getting closer. So we have a much, much leaner team, and we've had to reset things. I mean, essentially, instead of being on a cash hamster wheel, actually trying to reset and say, what is the business model we want to have? How do we want to make our money? What do we want this thing to look like? Because I'll be completely honest, like we were making four or five, $600,000 a year and we were not profitable and it was stressful. And I honestly feel like the business took me to a place like it kind of, it kind of just, I don't know, sprouted legs and ran away and I'm just being dragged behind it.

And I ended up in this place that I didn't want to be, you know, I was, I was managing and I was stressed and it was, it was tough, you know? And it, it took letting people go, people that I really cared about and getting some space and some clarity and really thinking about it and just doing a reset to figure out what do I want this to look like. I think that's one of the risks when you're a free agent is occasionally you're going to be offered work that allows you to dramatically expand the operation. I don't know whether you're an artist or you make widgets or you're a lawyer or whatever. Somebody is going to offer you something that suddenly you're going to make a bunch more money off of it. But at the same time, you have to take into consideration what is the cost of that? Do I need to add extra people? Do I need to add extra capacity to the

business in some way? Maybe you need to go rent space or buy a bunch of equipment. And it's easy to think about how much you're going to make off of expansion without thinking about how much it's going to cost both time and money. Something that has helped me, this is a concept I talk about in my book Overlap, is this idea of getting to the new zero. So there's zero as in zero dollars, and that's what most of us think of when we think of having zero dollars in the bank. But reframing that to be whatever your monthly expenses are, think of that number. You could do this personally or for your business. What are your monthly expenses? Multiply that number by six and that's your new zero. You want to get to six months expenses in the bank.

And if you're not there, you want to think of yourself as being in the hole. Like first, get to par for the course, right? Get to the new zero. And then you can start thinking about expanding and hiring people. Because I was like, oh, look, I've got some money in the bank. I can afford to pay someone's salary. I'm sure they'll end up helping me make more money and it's all going to work out. Really, I should have had many months of their salary in the bank before I hired them. Yeah, that's really good advice.

Yeah, that's really good advice. What is the hardest part now about being, quote unquote, independent? And I know you've shared a lot of your story. You scaled quickly. You had to let people go, which I've worked with family. I understand how difficult that could be. But what's the biggest challenge that you face right now? But what's the biggest challenge that you face right now? I'd have to say not wrapping up my identity in the results of what I do. And this is especially hard if you happen to be in a position where your business is named after you. It's even more difficult to separate you from this entity. And when you do something and it doesn't go the way you wanted it to go,

it's really easy to think of yourself as a failure. But you are not a failure. I am not a failure, even if this thing that I do or this thing that I did failed. So I guess the hardest part is seeing that failure as data. Okay, I did a thing this way and I didn't get the results I wanted. How can I do things differently? But that's so easy to say. And it's a whole other thing to really wrap your mind around,

really not beat yourself up when things don't go the way you want. And I think we see these depictions of what looks like overnight success. You know, oh man, like, I'll just be honest. I've been making videos on YouTube for, well, on the latest channel that I'm focused on, four years, over 400 videos, and I have 9,000 subscribers. Now, there's two ways you could think of this. One is like, hey, 9,000 is not so bad. Or the other, which is the way I think of it,

is like, look at this other guy. He's made 37 videos and he has 200,000 subscribers. And it's like, why is everyone around me an overnight success? I mean, you're probably listening to this podcast and like this Sean guy launched a course and made six figures, like, and I'm over here busting my butt. Like I get it. You know, I, I, I feel the same way, but it's like, it's not overnight. And, and if you dig behind what looks like the overnight success, you're going to find every single time, you're going to find failure after failure.

They failed until they succeeded. And then it was only interesting when you see the success. So what I've tried to do is share all of it. And I recently just shared on my podcast that I went through depression for a couple years. And it's not the type of thing that's fun to talk about. And I was talking with my co-host, like, where do you discuss these things? Because it seems like on social media, it's, I don't know, everyone has this front on social media. They're posting pictures of their vacation. You know, oh, things are great. Look, I don't know. Everyone has this front on social media. They're posting pictures of their vacation.

You know, oh, things are great. Look, I've got money. Here's a car I rented. Or, you know, it's like, it's not, it doesn't feel real. And even when it's not fun, when it's not happy, it still feels like it needs to be wrapped in this hero's journey format, right? Like you're like, I think things were super bad It still feels like it needs to be wrapped in this hero's journey format, right? Yeah.

Like you're like, things were super bad and it was depressing and it was sad and I was having a hard time. And the person's like, yeah, then what happened? And you're like, I mean, no, that's it. Like it just sucks right now. You're like, well, now I'm depressed. No, I get it. It's hard.

And I mean, we all have friends that we see put posts on social media and you're like, who is this person? Cause you know, the person intimately, and you know, that's not the person that, that, you know, it's somebody else showing up on social media. So how do you push through that type of stuff then, Sean? Like you mentioned, and we don't have to get into all the specifics here, but you battled depression for two years. Like how do you maintain the consistency to eventually break out of that stuff? Well, when I started the podcast, it was kind of around the time that I was launching this lettering course. in a lot of different industries, be able to kind of eventually quit that corporate job that's sucking their soul away and start something that they enjoy doing, but in a way that can actually

sustain them, not just like pursue your passion and it works, you know, don't worry about it. So I actually don't do lettering anymore. And I've found much more fulfillment in helping people get unstuck. But when I started this podcast, it was because people were like, wow, you launched this course. How did that work? And so I was like, I'm just going to share what I learned. I'm going to iterate in public. I don't know everything.

I don't know exactly what I'm doing all the time, but I'm just going to share the results. I'm going to iterate in public. I'm going to talk about it as I go. And even if it's not great, even if it's not fun, I'm going to share that part because it's real. And I want people to know it's not always easy. It's not always fun. But I guess for me, I think it's still worth it. Like, at least I'm doing life on my own terms. Yeah. When you share the hard stuff, what's the reaction? Is it because I think a lot of people are scared to share that sort of thing. Do people rally around you and say, hey, yeah, me too.

I deal with this. Or is it kind of like, hey, be quiet. We want to see the happy stuff. I mean, they always do, Mike. Like they always do. But it doesn't keep me from like when I was recording this episode, it's called Recovery from Depression. I was writing for it.

You know, I wrote like an outline, like a shorthand outline that was 3000 words. I just there was so much to say. And it was two hours before the podcast started. I'm preparing for it. And the entire time, my heart is just pounding. I can feel it pounding outside of my chest. And I'm like, what is this? I'm just a person in a room in my home office. No one else is here. I'm just sitting in front of a desk and my heart is just pounding. And, you know, it's like, it's scary to talk about this stuff. It's scary to like, like to shatter what you think other people's perception of you is. Like people don't,

this doesn't fit. You know, I'm not supposed to be depressed. I'm supposed to be the guy that has it figured out. You know, why am I sharing this? You know, and I start thinking about like, this is not going to be good, you know, but of course, when I do start talking about it, like, this is real stuff. You know, I've read that one in three entrepreneurs has experiences with some form of depression. And I don't see that kind of representation in how many people are talking about it. Not that they, I'm not saying they should, like who wants to talk about this stuff? But the point is, it's real and a lot of us experience it. And so the response, Mike, has been like this, you're not alone. This is something I go through as well. Yeah, I think there's a lot of value in that. And that's kind of the goal of the Free Agents

podcast is not to put a shiny facade on all these things and say, it's always great. Life's always sunshine and rainbows. But these are some of the struggles that people go with and or go through. And there's a lot of comfort that people take. I believe we've got the free agents forum on the Mac Power Users forum. And people share their own free agent journeys. And I know that I get a lot of, maybe comfort's not the right word, but I get encouraged when I hear other people's stories and I hear about the things that they're going through. And I get encouraged when they're being real.

I'm like, this is the stuff that I'm dealing with. And obviously, yeah, you do like it when people put a bow on it and say, yeah, I overcame it. But sometimes, you know, it takes a while to get through that stuff. And I think that there's a lot of value in knowing that other people are sharing the same things.

And you know, the thing is, when you're a free agent, it's just on you. You know, we've talked in the past about if you get sick, what are you going to do? We talked about getting insurance and things like that. But if you find yourself dealing with a bout of depression or any of life's problems, you still have to produce if you want to keep things going. You can't just call in sick and still get paid. It doesn't work that way.

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Squarespace, make your next move, make your next website. Sean, I want to turn it around a little bit because I'm getting sad now. But something that you do that I find remarkable and aspirational is the idea of a free agent sabbatical. Could you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, so I was just going all in on this business thing, literally working 16 to 18 hour days, seven days a week for nearly 10 years. And I just, I don't know any other way to be

except all in. And I do love my work, know any other way to be except all in. And I do love my work, but I was not going to be able to sustain this. I was heading towards burnout. I've experienced burnout. And I was so burned out at one point, I didn't realize I was burned out until six months later. It was not good and I needed a solution to this. And so knowing myself, this is just my personality. I'm either all in on something or I just don't care about it at all. I don't like doing things halfway. And, you know, that's good in a lot of cases.

And in other cases, I tend to get obsessed. But I started researching what would it look like to go all in on a break, like some kind of long form break. I don't need just like a weekend or something like that, but something serious. I didn't know, I didn't have any language for this. So I started researching and I came across this concept of sabbaticals. And a traditional sabbatical is one where usually like a professor or someone in academics is given a seventh year sabbatical, usually for a specific purpose, such as writing a book or doing some research or traveling. And I thought it was a really cool idea, but it was too much. You know, I can't take a year off right now. I need something more manageable.

Like, why isn't there a small-scale sabbatical? And so I thought, well, there's a weekend every week, right? We'll take at least a day off a week. And there's this concept of a sabbatical where some people take a year off every seventh year. What about something in between? And so I was just kind of a play on numbers. I thought, why don't I take off every seventh year. What about something in between? And so I was just kind of a play on numbers. I thought, why don't I take off every seventh week? Just take a seventh week sabbatical

and recharge, just rest because I work so hard. I'll also rest hard. And in 2014, this was September, I took my first sabbatical, and it felt really just like a vacation because most of us have experienced a week or two weeks of vacation, and it coincided with a trip we took, and it was a nice trip, and I came back home and got back to work, but then like that, six weeks passed, and suddenly I was supposed to take another sabbatical. I'm like, I can't do this. There's too much work to be done. I can't just take off work every seventh week. But the problem was I'd been writing about it

and podcasting about it publicly. And I told people, hey, I'm going to do this experiment and I'm going to share the results with you. Isn't that great? And they're like, yeah. So let's tune in and see, you know, the next episode of Sean takes a sabbatical, what happens? So I kind of got my, yeah, I got my back against the wall and I had to do it.

So it sounds, it sounds sad, but I just gritted my teeth and took off my second week and, uh, got, you know, went back to work. It wasn't until the third sabbatical week, this third, seventh week sabbatical where for some reason it clicked. And I've noticed with employees and also people in my audience who have, some of them have done this on the same schedule for years, which is kind of cool. It tends to be the third sabbatical where it clicks because the first, it just feels weird. It's like a vacation and then, oh, I shouldn't be taking off time again this soon.

And then the third one is like, it's almost like your body is craving it. Like, yes, I need this rest. Like you start to adjust to the cadence of it and it just feels right. So what has been your experience then with the amount of work that you're getting done? Because I think that that's going to be the thing

that would hold a lot of people back from trying this is the fact that if I take off an entire week, my production is going to dip X percent because I'm losing so many working days. I'm guessing that being the numbers guy that you are, that you've crunched those and it's a net gain. And I'm curious to hear what that actually did for you. Well, you guessed right.

But you know what is also scary? Probably the most common fear of it is, you know, what about clients? Like I've got clients I'm working with. They're expecting certain things. And the way I like to explain it is imagine you're busy. It's Friday mid-morning and someone calls you and they're like, hey, can we schedule a meeting? You know, I want to talk. And you've got weekend plans. You're

hanging out with the family. You know, what's normal is to say, yeah, let's talk Monday morning. You schedule a meeting for Monday and they say, okay, great, talk to you soon. And then you both go off and you have your weekend plans and you talk on Monday. You know, for the most part, they're not saying, no, I want to talk to you tonight at 9 p.m. or tomorrow or Sunday. It's just, it's normal, right? Hey, I'm not available for the next couple days. We'll talk on Monday. In a very similar sense, when you have a sabbatical that recurs every seventh week,

you work around it. If you have a project that you estimate will take four weeks to complete and you have a sabbatical coming up in two, you budget a total of five weeks. You say, all right, the completion date is five weeks from now. And you communicate with the client.

And in my experience, everyone is super on board. As long as you set good expectations, a lot of times they say, wow, that's really incredible. You know, good for you. I should do something like that. Do you make any exceptions? Like if you're in your sabbatical week and you have a client emergency, how do you deal with that? Or do you have those? Well, not really. I mean, this is time that's off. I mean, I suppose exceptions are exceptions, right? Like if there was an exception, I could make that choice.

But it's not something that I've had to do. What I've found is, you know, back, Mike, on the idea of like, how much work are you getting done? People will say, oh, that's cool. You know, you take a seventh week off. At least you're more rested. Maybe you don't get as much work done. And I say, no, no, we actually get more work done because things tend to take as long as the amount of time you give them. And if you look at any modern study,

most employees get about three hours of work done a day. The rest is talking, messaging, social media, news, eating, and then researching other jobs. But we're just not getting as much work done as we like to pretend that we are. And if I highly recommend getting rescue time for your desktop, either Windows or Mac, it's free. They have a premium version, but track your time. Like, honestly, look at where your time is going. You will be astonished. I really try to gamify it and get as much productivity as I can out of a day, but I was shocked. You just install it and it runs in the background. You check in in like a few weeks and just look at where your time goes. Oh my gosh, eight hours a week on Twitter, you know, like 16 hours on YouTube. What am I even doing?

And so really we, we, we leak all this time. It's like the leaky bucket with holes, like the time just, it seeps out and where, where does it go? We don't know. But when you, when you box it in and you say, Hey, we're going to get seven weeks worth of work, that's hard to say, done in six weeks, we get it done. So we get the same amount of work done in less time because we box it in and things take as long as the amount of time you give it. I've basically experienced this with my book, which I wrote 80,000 words in 15 days, just boxed it in. And the only reason I was able to do it at that pace is because I actually initially

set out to write three books in a month. Like it's literally things will take as long as the amount of time you give them. So we get the work done. Then we have a whole week that's free. But I and the people on my team, we rest, we recharge. And so we actually come back the first Monday back from sabbatical and we're energized. Like we're ready to get to work. We're excited. We feel rested. And so there's this spike in productivity right at the beginning. And if you kind of average it all out, it is a net win.

So you say we, does your whole team take off the same week or do you rotate the weeks off that people are taking? Yeah, so that's a great question. We have a small team. We are able to take a sabbatical at the same time. My next book is called Seventh Week Sabbatical. And one of the problems I have to solve there is this idea of staggered sabbatical tracks for larger organizations that need to have customer support teams that are always on. So someone would end up always being there to reply to tickets.

I'm sorry, I keep coming back to this. Now, when you have your seventh week off, you're not going to deal with emergencies. You don't have those. Do you spend any time like on business planning or is it just a hundred percent Sean is out of the office? Well, it's definitely Sean is out of the office, but I only have one rule and I, it took me years to figure this part out. So I've been doing it for four years now. Um, initially I would just kind of treat it like a vacation and sleep in and do whatever. And, oh, look, I've got all this time on my calendar coming up, a whole sabbatical.

I'm going to meet someone. I'm going to write a book. You know, like you think it's such a long amount of time and it's really not. But I packed my week full of activities because I thought, look at all of this free time. And there's a difference between free time and margin. free time. And there's a difference between free time and margin. Margin is, think of it like, I call it beanbag time. You sit in the beanbag, you don't have any agenda. It's not like, oh, I need to figure out the solution to this problem, or I need to come up with 10 ideas for podcast topics. Zero agenda. Sit in the beanbag. Give yourself space, space to think, space to clear your mind.

That's margin. But so few of us have margin on the calendar. We don't have this dedicated time to be the space between activities. It's just, look, oh, free space. I can schedule another thing there. And that's what I did with my sabbaticals. And so I finally came up with this one rule to solve the problem. Because this is, I have to come up with systems, otherwise I just run myself into the ground. So in 2014, I made a sabbatical event on my Google calendar and I said, repeat every seven weeks. And I never touched it again, never since. And so I just look at the calendar and like, oh, got to take a sabbatical. There's the system. So this other piece of the system is, weeks and I never touched it again, never since. And so I just look at the calendar and like, oh,

got to take a sabbatical. There's the system. So this other piece of the system is don't schedule anything for the sabbatical. That's the rule. And initially people say, what, would you just stare at the ceiling the whole time? And I say, no, no, no. It doesn't mean I can't do anything. It means I enter the sabbatical free from obligation. That's the goal. The goal is freedom from obligation so that I can say yes to anything in the moment. Because I'm just, you know, I'm chronically burnt out. And I think a lot of us are. We don't even realize how much we need rest until we give ourselves the opportunity to rest. how much we need rest until we give ourselves the opportunity to rest. And so when I gave myself the opportunity to rest, I realized, oh, I just, I crave this. I want the downtime. I don't want to attend this meeting I scheduled for myself two weeks ago when I was in work mode. And so finally,

I entered into this free space. I can do anything. It was a week of potential. And so it ends up turning into projects. It could be just pure rest. It could be learning, you know, going through those, actually going through the courses that you bought. You know, I don't know if I'm the only one with that problem. I buy courses and then I don't go through them. But I would actually sometimes want to work on business ideas. Hey hey I'm going to come up with a campaign hey I got some ideas that would help the the business and I'd write them down maybe I'd work on them it's it's not that you can't work it's that you don't want to have to work right yeah so it's not that you don't do anything but you don't have to do anything yeah it's complicated

but it's simple in the same way I think the whole idea of space for a free agent is really important. And I know that it's something that I need to work on. But like, I was just looking at myself the other day, I take a walk every morning. It's a two minute hike through the local hills. And I'm so frantic that I'm listening to podcasts while I'm taking a walk. Why can't I just take the headphones out and just even give myself that space? And I think as free agents, a lot of us feel this constant pressure to get the content we need to keep going,

to not have a down moment. And I find this idea that you're talking about both appealing and revolting all at once because I'm afraid of it. How did you document or how did you quantify that you feel like you get more done with the week off? Sell us on it. Sure. So the first step is you need to start thinking ahead. If you're not thinking about what you're going to get done over the next two months, that would be the first step. A lot of us are just reacting to the day and hopefully we end up in a place. And I've done that before. You heard earlier

in this interview, I was taken to a place I didn't want to be because I just woke up every day and reacted instead of planned. Where do I want to go? What do I want to accomplish? Okay, I'm podcasting. What am I talking about on the podcast in seven weeks, in eight weeks? So the first thing is thinking further out in advance. And then it's a matter of, okay, I mean, here's a way to think of it. Could you get 30 years, like let's think of a career in a certain industry. Could you get 30 years worth of work done in 29? You're like, yeah, well, sure. You know, I'll work a little harder every single day. It's no problem. You know, one 30th, I can do it. In a similar sense, you can get seven weeks worth of work done

in six. You just have to be intentional. You just have to define what success looks like, what the goal is, where you want to end up. And then what you'll find is you have less of an option to procrastinate. You have less of an option to waste time on Facebook or Instagram or YouTube because you can't. I mean, I am the worst procrastinator. Terrible. Ever since high school, I'd wait until literally the night before to do a three-week paper and I'd still get a 78 just like when I took piano school, I'd wait until literally the night before to do a three-week paper, and I'd still get a 78, just like when I took piano lessons, and I'd wait until 30 minutes before my teacher, you know, was ready for my lesson, and I'd try and practice real fast,

and I would still do pretty good. And my teacher would say, Sean, you actually did really great, but you do so much better if you practice every day. I'm like, how did you know? But you do so much better if you practice every day. I'm like, how did you know? Yeah, she knew somehow. But like we wait until the last minute. And what happens when, oh, no, you know, I need to send out this newsletter. I need to publish this blog post. You waited until the night before.

Somehow you get it done, even though it should be completely impossible for you to finish a blog post the night before it's supposed to be done, you somehow do it. It's just that things take as long as the amount of time you give them. I'll tell you, we had Sean Blanc on the show, the other Sean. He does something similar. I think he got the idea from you, you were saying, or at your conference. Yeah, Sean's awesome. And then Mike Schmitz here takes his company retreat.

What is it? You do that, Mike, every month? Take a couple days? My personal retreat? Yeah. Every quarter, so every three months. I mean, I just feel like you guys are really onto something. I think it's really hard for the rest of us to figure out how to take that leap and implement it in a way that makes sense for the stuff we do. It's hard. Well, I think, you know, talking about your story, Sean, it's really an illustration of the fact that life is not a marathon. It is a series of sprints. And if you try to sprint for a very, very, very long time, like that's when you burn out. But sprinting means you push real hard

for a short period of time, but then there's the recovery phase. So you sprint and then recover, and then sprint and then recover, and that at least seems to be sustainable. You know, I really worry about that. Tell me what you think, but I really worry that people need to experience burnout themselves before they understand the importance of rest. And I want it to not be true. But sometimes, you know, it's hard. It's hard to learn from someone else's mistakes.

Like sometimes we have to learn the hard way. And I don't know. I don't know if that's how it has to be. But I just want so badly for people to prevent burnout because you just can't afford it. It's so bad. Yeah. I think that experience, you know, saying, you know, experience is the best teacher, but you don't have to experience to be taught. You can definitely learn from other people's mistakes. You just have to be willing to. And I think that the free agents listeners fall into that second category. They're smart people.

Sean, you're one of the most experienced free agents we've had on. You've been doing this for a long time, and you've got the battle scars to show it, as we talked about. As we sit here today, what is the hardest part about being independent for you? I think evolving as a person. Because every time I level up, it's like I have to reinvent myself.

Maybe it's the, it's, it's kind of along the lines of the idea of what got you here won't get you there. And, and maybe I'm, I'm getting by and I've, I've figured out enough things to get here, but then I just learned a whole bunch of other things

I have no idea what I'm doing. You know, like one of the things, I just recorded a podcast episode this morning about exercise. I basically went most of my 20s sitting at a desk 16 hours a day, not even standing. I mean, bad. It's not even a standing desk. I wouldn't even stand up, let alone go on a walk, let alone run, let alone do any kind of like cardio or anything like that. I just worked and worked and worked. And you can get

away with that in your 20s. But I started talking to people who were, you know, 40s, 50s, 60s, and said, what would you do if you could go back, talk to your 30 year old self? And they said, well, first of all, they said their 30s were great. It's a great age. And so that was encouraging to me. So I'm excited. I'm about to turn 30. So I'm looking forward to my 30s. But they also said, I wish I started exercising sooner. I wish I got more active sooner because it only gets harder. And it's not to say that you can't start or it's too late to start, but it just gets harder to, and they wish they started sooner. So that's kind of this year. I said, I got to make a change here. You know, I need to evolve as a person, you know, certain things I'm

doing are not sustainable anymore. So that has been a challenge for me, but I'm happy to say I now have a regular exercise routine. Awesome. I love the fact that you asked older people what they would do if they could go back and talk to their younger selves. Kind of along the same lines, is there any advice that you would give to people, maybe advice that you wish you had had when you started your free agent journey? Oh, so much. You can't afford burnout. You can't afford scarcity mindset, which is desperation to take on absolutely any opportunity you can get, even if it's going to be a bad fit, even if it's going to devalue you, because you run the risk of killing the passion that you have, which is a pure thing. You want to insulate it. So it means you've got to cover your finances. You've got to pay the bills, you know, suck it up with the day

job. I mean, if it's a terrible environment, if it's toxic, you know, get a different day job, but pay your bills so that you can build this side thing the way you want it to be. Build it in a sustainable way where you're not desperate because the bad news is you don't ever reach this magic point where you're able to be selective with clients and opportunities you take on. It starts with you practicing selectivity. That's a choice you have to make. It doesn't happen automatically. And if you want to be in a place where you can make that choice, you can't be in a scarcity mindset. So it's covering your baseline expenses. It's getting to that new zero.

It's getting around people, which could be in person, or it could be like this podcast you're listening to. If you made it this far, you're surrounding yourself with people who are going to encourage you, people who are that, you know, we want the best for you and your career. So it's the people around you, but it's also the content you're consuming. So yeah, the last thing I would say is don't start with motivation, especially if you're just beginning. You're probably really passionate about this.

You're probably really excited. And maybe motivation is working for you to keep showing up. But eventually that's going to burn out. Eventually that's going to be fumes that you can't run on. Motivation isn't a source. It's not fuel for showing up. It's a result of showing up. So don't start with motivation. Start with a commitment to show up and then the motivation is going to come. That's all really good advice. And, you know, if you want to learn more, head over to seanwes.com. S-E-A-N-W-E-S. Sean, I am so pleased that you made the time to come on our show and share some of this wisdom. Oh, thank you so much, David. I really enjoyed it. I feel like looking at the outline that we're going to have to have Sean back

I feel like looking at the outline that we're going to have to have Sean back because there's a lot you could share with us. And if you're willing, we're going to have you back at some point to talk more about this with the audience. Maybe after your year-long sabbatical in 2020. We didn't even mention that. Sean, explain that to us because I'm struggling to figure out the weekly sabbatical. Tell us about the year the weekly sabbatical. Tell us about the year-long sabbatical. Well, would it be okay to tell them about the first book since this is the second

book? Oh, yeah, please. Read all of Sean's books. They're great. Well, I'll literally... So, hey, listener, you can buy my book for $29 ebook, $39 hardcover, or I'll give it to you for free. So whichever option you want, you can literally read it for free online, overlapbook.com. It's just the idea of making a transition from where you are now to where you want to be instead of jumping out of the plane and building a parachute on the way down. So that's kind of the practical stuff, like what we've been talking about today. But it was actually really difficult to omit one very large part of my life and what I do from this book just because

it was long enough already. And so I'm making it the second book. It's this Seventh Week Sabbatical. That's the title of the book. And I told you already that I take off every seventh week. But after several years of doing this, I revisited the concept and I decided to go back to the original inspiration, which was a seventh year sabbatical. And I'm doing it. So my seventh year since starting these sabbaticals will be 2020. So I'm taking off the entire year. I'm doing it. So my seventh year since starting these sabbaticals will be 2020. So I'm taking off the entire year. I'm essentially trusting the process. This is terrifying, honestly, as a self-admitted workaholic. I'm terrified of what this is going to be like, but I've seen such benefits from taking these smaller scale sabbaticals.

I just feel like only good can come from this. I feel like I'm going to get ideas. I'm going to, the creativity is going to just pour out. I'm going to meet people. I feel like I'm going to plant the seeds for the next seven years of success. And I don't know if that's going to be the case, but I'm just going to go on an adventure. I'm going to trust the process. And then as usual, I'm going to iterate in public. And so what I did is I just got a website, sabbatical.blog. And right now I'm just kind of,

I'm basically writing my book in public. So if you want to read my next book as I write it, that's at sabbatical.blog. But the other purpose of it is in 2020, I plan to daily blog my experience with taking a year off. So we'll see how it goes. Awesome. Well, I'm looking forward to it. And Mike, we got to put on the calendar because we can't ask Sean to come in in 2020. So we're going to get you on maybe shortly before you take the sabbatical to talk about. Well, here's the trick, Mike, not Mike, David. Here's the trick. You can't schedule an interview with me in 2020. But if you call me in 2020, I'll say, hey, I can do anything. Well, so we just got to show up in your hometown and be like, hey, Sean, let's meet for coffee and we'll record the interview.

I would love that. You know, I wish we could have the budget to just go visit some of our free agents. I think it would be so fun. All right. Well, anyway, Sean, thank you so much for coming on. Is there any other places we should tell people to go look at to learn more about some of your journey? I would just say at Sean West, S-E-A-N-W-E-S, Twitter or Instagram if you want to see more daily thoughts from me.

Well, I really appreciate it. We are the Free Agents. You can find us on Twitter at FreeAgentsFM. Mike, where can people find you? I am at BobbleheadJoe. My personal website with links to all my projects is mikeschmitz.me. And you can find the podcast at relay.fm slash freeagents. And you can find me on Twitter at Max Barkey or on the web at maxbarkey.com.

We'll see you all in a few weeks. Thank you.