Insight with Chris Van Vliet - Finding Your Zone Of Genius - Jonathon Kendall On How To Maximize Your Time

Episode Date: February 11, 2022

Jonathon Kendall (@jonathon.kendall) is copywriting, funnel building, course creation, and capital raising specialist. His crowdfunding systems have recently raised over $110,000,000 for startups & iconic brands like RadioShack and Pier1 Imports. He is also the former CEO of MentorBox and masterminded the creation of over 300 courses for New York Times bestselling authors, and Pulitzer Prize & Nobel Prize winning intellectuals. He joins Chris Van Vliet to talk about the concept of your "Zone of Genius" and how you can stay in it longer, his favorite books, how he got started in business and much more! For more information about CVV and INSIGHT go to: https://podcast.chrisvanvliet.com If you enjoyed this episode, could I ask you to please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcast/iTunes? It takes less than a minute and makes a huge difference in helping to spread the word about the show and also to convince some hard-to-get guests. Follow CVV on social media: Instagram: instagram.com/ChrisVanVliet Twitter: twitter.com/ChrisVanVliet Facebook: facebook.com/ChrisVanVliet YouTube: youtube.com/ChrisVanVliet TikTok: tiktok.com/@Chris.VanVliet Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

All systems are going. Ladies and gentlemen, Chris Van Bleas! Ah, how are you, my friends? Welcome back to another audio adventure here on Insight. I'm CVV, Chris Van Bleet's so good to have you back with us on this one. And let me just say a huge thank you to you for making January such a big month for the podcast and also the YouTube channel. We just hit 30,000 subscribers on the CBV Clips channel where we post the most interesting and memorable clips from these interviews and 305,000 subscribers on the main Chris Van Fleet YouTube channel.

Just so grateful that you enjoy these conversations as much as I do. And I appreciate you being with me. I appreciate you being on this journey. And I appreciate Jonathan Kendall being with us for this one. He is a brilliant entrepreneur. And I love this idea that we talk about during this conversation. It's the zone of genius and how you. can stay in it. You are going to get a ton out of this. Give them a follow on social media

at jonathan.comendal on Instagram, and you can connect with me if you haven't already. I'm at Chris Van Fleet. Our fan of the week is Jay Zeus, four who says, this is awesome. You're the man. Keep them coming. Well, please keep these reviews coming. I read one on every single episode from Apple Podcast. If you have an iPhone, please take a second to just leave a few words and I will shot you out on the show for free. Just hit 2,200 reviews on Apple Podcasts. So let's keep that going. Spotify has ratings now.

So if you are a Spotify listener, please give us a listen on there. All right. Let's dive into this. Please welcome Jonathan Kendall. Welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Look at this beautiful courtyard that we're in right now. I love this.

Yeah, it's nice. I'm outside in Puerto Rico. Amazing. The thing that fascinates me about you, Jonathan, is the fact that you've learned how to learn. And that sounds really simple saying that, but I think a lot of people don't ever do that in their life. I think for a lot of people, the learning ends when school ends. But you're like a student for the rest of your life, and I love this. Yeah, I get asked this a lot at various panels or in my event. People ask me, what is the one thing, you know, if you could only do one thing, and I always say become obsessed with learning, becoming a learning machine,

sharpen the song. And, you know, I just read a book. It just saying, well, I'm always reading the book, but one of the last books I read was called The Price of Tomorrow. And the punchline at the end is actually about cryptocurrency and AI technology. kind of like big macroeconomic but at least it starts with this really cool thought experiment

and I think it makes this point really well he asked the experiment imagine you had a piece of paper a piece of notebook and you fold a piece of paper one time now it's twice as thick right you fold the paper again now it's

four times a stick you fold the paper again it's eight times he's and if you could it's there's not a piece of paper that exists that's this big but in theory mathematically. If you could fold a piece of paper 50 times, how tall do you think that would be or how thick would be? And the average guess is like two feet. And my guess was like one meter. Some people will guess, like Empire State Building. But the answer is it would reach the sun.

Oh my gosh. Which is, was literally kind of, I remember coming back from, I always listen to an audio book while I'm on. came back and immediately I told my wife this thought expressed. And I said, I feel like this just changed my life because I didn't really understand the compound effect. And we can't really understand the compound effect and try human brains. There's just something we can't. That's why we do logarithmic scale.

And when we're looking at investments, because exponential just doesn't make sense. And that's how I think about learning. So if I am learning 1% to, percent, three percent, four percent. I'm staying on the cutting edge of software. I'm staying on the cutting edge of what's happening in the market. I'm staying on the cutting edge of what's happening in social media. And you're not, even if I'm only getting one percent better every day in three, four, five, ten years, it's going to be very difficult to compete with me and my team. And so that's all I have. Have you always been this way or did something happen or shift

in your life a little bit later on where you went, oh man, I should probably catch up. I think it's a company. I don't think you can teach ambition very well. So I've always been really ambitious and I've always been a big dreamer. You know, what do you want to be when you grow up? I used to say president of the United States, right? I would always have these like massive goals. And I think that that, but I'm also very kind of an engineer brain.

And so I would walk back that to reality and say, okay, well, how would I get there? Whatever the goal is, what would that be? And if, if you, you know, like, how do you eat an elephant? fit, right, one bite at a time. Until you ask yourself, what's the next thing that I have to do? And I got really good at just being okay with the next thing. But then what ends up happening is that you reach a plateau of your ability. And so then the only way to get to the next level, you know, to beat the boss at the end of the video game, you know, is to level up, is to learn something new, is to become more powerful to acquire another skill. And the only way to do that

is to learn. And so, you know, I thought like kind of the oil underneath all of this road to get where I want to go with, you know, learning quickly, which creates a new problem because then you have to deal with your own insecurity. You have to fail in order to learn. Part of the cycle of, you know, Kalnupor talked about this, like deliberate practice, right, is part of the cycle of deliberate practice is being aware very quickly of what you did wrong and then trying to improve it. And so if you're scared of not facing the mirror of your own inadequacies while you're learning, it can be very difficult to learn. So there's a lot of psychology involved in.

When you set an ambitious goal as a kid that I want to be the president of the United States, do you actually want to be the president of the United States or you just want to set like an unattainable huge goal? My wife has vetoed that recently. But my current one is. to win the Nobel Prize of Literature. And so that's sort of an equivalent so far away and so big. It's unperpose. I like these goals because psychologically,

then I don't feel the day-to-day pressure, right? So I can continue to grind, and I know that Steinbeck didn't win it in his 60s, and Hemingway didn't win it when he was in his 60s. So it gives me emotional distance from the goal. So I'm okay with failing in the short term. But it also is big enough that it forces me to be, you know, ambitious and not take it easy. Because in order to get there, it's going to take, you know, everything you got for 40 years.

How many books do you read, let's say, in a week? And how many are you reading at a time? Usually two or three at a time. And I'm usually reading two or three a week. I read a lot of nowadays less now than I did when I was the CEO of Mentorbox because, you know, I had to for the job. And I couldn't just read it. I had to really understand it because I would be on camera with the author.

And so I'd have to be able to play tennis with them intellectually and be able to, especially some of the authors are introverted and they're authors. They're not gregarious speakers. And so you, you know, I have to kind of pull out from them a good story from the book that may be extemporaneously because they were her. or they could remember or whatever. But nowadays, yeah, two or three a week. And I'm always reading something that is not business related at night to kind of calm my brain down.

It does very on purpose. And then in the mornings during my runs, I usually run a five or ten day in the morning. It's part of my morning routine. And I'll listen to an audio book at 1.5 or a director. So, you know, that gets the equivalent of an hour to two hours of reading every morning. And that will always be some business-related or success, you know, success principles or something like that. I know a book that we both read that I know spoke a lot to me and I think really helped to change and shape who you are is Tim Ferriss is the four-hour work week. Can you kind of speak to how that book really affected your life?

yeah that book was absolutely life-changing i remember specifically the drive when i say i read books i generally listen to audio book you consume books yeah exactly i consume books which i have a strong opinion that that's not cheating because in fact like oratory and the way that we told stories way back when was auditory like there was a reason why for thousands of years everything was was passed down without people being literate. So I think that this, you know, hyper intellectualism of I have to read the book, otherwise it doesn't count. Yeah.

The anti-biology, but anyways, my point is, I remember the drive when I was traveling to visit a friend of my wives in Toronto. And we were on this long road trip from New Hampshire to Toronto and going up through Buffalo. And we listened to that book the entire time. And a couple of years later, I moved to Mexico to arbitrage the U.S. dollar to peso translation like he does in the very beginning of the book when he was in Argentina. And he had a supplement company and he was living off of Argentinian pesos at the time.

And so I said, I can do this. I've always wanted to be a writer. I always wanted to be a copywriter. I wanted to be kind of a freelancer and live that backpack for lifestyle. And before that, you know, I had dabbled in fiction writing for restaurants. I wanted to turn pro like Stephen Prescott said. And that I thought was the really best opportunity for it. So I took that for our work week idea and literally implemented it, moved to Guadalajara, Mexico.

And, you know, it was able to start my freelance copywriting career, which eventually moved into, you know, full-time copywriting, which moved into digital marketing, which moved into entrepreneurs, which leads into where you are right now. I mean, what is it that you're doing right now? What's the day-to-day look like for you? Yeah, I have two companies that I'm day-to-day involved in, you know, both of my companies.

One, racist capital is called Deal Race. We've raised about $140 million over the last couple of years. Connected accredited investors with entrepreneurs that are doing crazy. And then I also have an outsourcing digital marketing agency. virtual worker now. And we have 400 employees and we provide digital marketing services. Ecommerce stores and the back end for various agencies. So copywriting, video editing, social media, ad buying, funnel building, all of that. And I think the best part about the latter business there is that I think a lot of entrepreneurs have a really difficult time delegating

tasks. I think a lot of entrepreneurs are like, well, I can do this and this and this and this and this. And I heard this from somebody else who said that early on as an entrepreneur, you're willing to spend time in order to save money. And then as you get going, you're willing to spend money in order to save time. 100%. That's absolutely true. No, you have to go into your zone of genius at some point. And it takes humility. It also takes, I think, ambition. And so you have to be, I think a lot of Gary V talks about this, you know, self-awareness.

is like the super is being self-aware to know would it make sense for me to have to wear the seven half if I really want to scale to a unicorn or nine figures or even no high eight figure at some point you become an HR company and you become a coach and a consultant for your own executives and your own management that's really all you do you're a cheerleader you know you're a salesperson where you stay on the cutting edge of what's happening in the market but mostly you're an internal consultant for your own team. And you make, you know, a couple of decisions a quarter that maximize, you know, hopefully seeing around the bend and staying on the cutting edge. But yeah, you in the weeds, I tell this to, you know, my CEO, you know, of the outsourcing

company. I say, you know, your job is to really just make decisions and coach the other executives and coach the managers. And, you know, if you find yourself like in Excel or you find yourself like clicking and click up and like changing, you know, something click up, you have to ask yourself, am I the only person in the company that you? And probably the answer is no. So a lot of it is just getting out of your own way. If someone's looking to start a business, what would you say are like the three pieces of the best advice that you'd pass along to them?

I would say step one is really understand your unique value proposition. So if you can't articulate to yourself, even if it's really terrible brainstorming in a journal, at some point you have to be able to articulate what is the problem that I solve for whom and why should they buy my solution versus all my competitive? And if you can't articulate your niche or your particular competitive advantage, then no one should buy your problem. And you have to ask, it's kind of existential. It's this kind of purpose of your business, purpose of your life question.

And if you can't answer that question, then don't even make the product, don't even make the service. Because you're not really contributing anything new. Kind of like when you get a PhD, you have to, your thesis has to be something that no one else has done, which is why you get these people that are studying like this one microbe and this one lake and this one part of Michigan. And they did their entire PhD thesis on it because you know, you have to be, you know, niche of niche, niche, and you have to be all articulate that, right? One, and then two, as I would say, really get obsessed with getting your first sale. You know, don't, like, it's fine to say, I want to win the Nobel Prize and I want to have a U.S.

But what am I going to do today? And the next thing that you need to do is you need to make one sale and see if you can actually do it, right? You can make 10. If you can make 1, you can make 2. If you can make 10, 10, 10, you can make 100, right? And then new problems will come at scale. But, you know, one, is my product worth it at all? Is my service worth it at all?

Two, can I make one sale? And the answer to two, can I make one sale is number three, obsessing over your point of sale. So your point of sale is often just your funnel or your way of collecting money. If it's a brick and fork shop, hey, come to my store. If it's a e-commerce store or a potion program or whatever it may be, there has to be some, some point where someone can give you money. I think the most stereotypical version of this is artists. And artists are terrible because they're creative and they have this product and it's

necessarily unique generally because they're an artist and it came from their brain. So they created something. So check that off the box. That's good. And now, too, can I sell it? Oftentimes, it's because they don't have a Shopify store, they don't have a piece of art on a T-shirt, or they don't have it.

There's no way to actually sell it. So whenever I talk to artists, I say, well, where do I buy? How do I give you money? Like, where do I click? Will I pay pal you? Do I vend? Like, where is the point of sale? And this is obviously very beginner,

but when people are really starting to get a business, don't overlook that box. You know, like create a basic click funnel store, a basic Shopify store, just so that, you can get that first sale. You feel the emotional intensity of the other. You might have the white glove the customer support for that first buyer,

and that's okay because that's what you do. I did all the customer support for MentorBox for the first couple months, even though I eventually became the CEO, that's a part of it. So I would say those three things when you're starting. Yeah, when you talk about MentorBox, it's so fascinating to me

that you went from being a copywriter there to basically what you were. You were running the company. So what were some of the biggest things you learn from working your way up from the bottom to the top? I would say you have to think about it. Two things. One is the customer obsessed, which is not new.

It's not new. Is to really be obsessed with the product, obsessed with the end consumer. Giving value. So not waking up and thinking, what can I do for myself? How much money can I make? you know, what is the, how do I feel about it? Like, you have to be, get out of your own head and really be, I'm going to give more value to the world.

That will then I think often result in you being more ambitious. A lot of people who are intrapreneurs that start in a company, a startup or even a big corporation. If everyone else is worried about me, me, me, me, me, me, and the politics of the company, what's going on in me, and how, you know, the boss deals about me, me, that's not what you should often. If you're off the mind, giving more value to the world than everyone else

in the company, what's going to happen is that eventually the powers that be, and if you're in a toxic company, then if you're in a company that really does reward merit, then what's going to happen is that's going to be seen as ambition. And then you're going to get an opportunity. And that opportunity is often not going to be immediately rewarded with a next run on the last,

matter, you know, or even more money. They're going to say, they're going to test you. Well, okay, so you did copywriting, but could you also build a website? Could you also hire the graphic designer? Do you think that you could write the macros for customer support? That's not generally what copyrighters do, right? And your ego part of you might push back on that and say, well, you know, that wasn't in my job description and I'm not going to do that unless I get this bonus

or unless I renegotiate. and it's a little bit of a leap of faith, but if you're in a company that's pretty done for, you know, meritocracy, over time, you'll prove yourself, and this has a lot to do with, again, coming full circle learning,

because you don't know that software yet. You don't know what that is, but you say, okay, I'm going to go to the diner, you know, from 1 a.m. to 3 a.m. and drink coffee and watch tutorial,

and I'm going to figure it out. So then the next day, I have this. Right? And so I can give more values and more people. I think those are the two things, like, one, being customer obsessed, and then two, being ambitious enough to know that you, in the long run,

if you're working for the right company, you'll eventually get the offer. What would you say is the best piece of advice that someone has given you, whether this is personally or professionally, the best piece of advice along your journey? I think that it wasn't, I mean, I had the privilege of meeting him, which was amazing, but he first gave me this piece of advice through the form of a book is Ryan Holiday is the obstacle is the way I think that people really don't understand the power of this he's known as they're originally known as this marketer guy and then he's now known as like a stoic guy but in the beginning the book that really set him off with the obstacle

away which I think is the most powerful like sub lesson of stoicism which is that whenever you have a problem this is Elon Musk you're painting and direct proportion of the difficulty of the problems you solve. When you have a problem instead of thinking about it as, or Ed Milette says, you know, this happened for me, not to me, right? This idea of really turning an obstacle on its head and being, like, excited about it. It is, it literally is the way. It's the way, right?

So whenever things are coasting and everything is running smoothly, like, okay, that's fine. And then when I feel, man, things are really tough right now. Things are really tough, right? I feel stressed. There's some problem with an executive. You know, this client cancel. You know, things kind of feel like they're all falling apart all at the same time. That to me is the most exciting part of entrepreneurship, because now I feel like I can really

earn my freedom. I can earn my responsibility in society. I can earn my paycheck. Because if it's all easy, then it's all easy. So I enjoy that, that moment of stress. And it took a long time of brainwashing myself to, to, it's like, it's like at the end of a video game level when the boss arrives, right? You're, it's like, yeah, it's more stressful, but it's also more exciting because if you

beat this, you're going to be at the next level. So that I think is the most powerful. I feel like, I feel like sometimes we're just living in a video game. Like, I don't know. Yeah, for sure. Is this real life or is this a simulation? I'm just not sure. I don't know either.

I think you've given some great advice for people who want to be entrepreneurs. I'm just so curious to know, Jonathan, should everybody want to be an entrepreneur? No. I would say that I've studied before I became copywriting, you know, like a lot of copywriters, I want to be a writer, you know, a novelist and, you know, a fiction writer and storyteller, streamplay writer. And so I've studied story structure and. the hero's journey and hero with thousands of days and all that.

And I think that it's everyone's going to have a hero's journey. Everyone's going to have a purpose. Everyone's going to do something, whether you are choosing to do it or you're passively, you're not choosing. Nonetheless, you still are making an impact every single day. And I think, again, it's back to self-awareness. It just, you know, it requires journaling about it or trying a lot of things when you're younger because you don't know yet and that's fine.

But starting with, you know, where is my goal? Where is my newest star? And there's archetypes. That's another part of storytelling, is that Carl Jung talked about. There's a very archetype. Some people use like the Myers-Briggs or other people use astrology or whatever may be. There's a lot of ways of approach. But the idea is that you are a type generally.

And I think that in society, there has to be the nursing. type. Like, I'm not the nurse type. I'm not an empath. You know, I might be the opposite of an empath. I'm more of an engineer brain. And then I apply that to, like, human system. I think that's, you know, why I'm an entrepreneur and a leader. But that's, I think my brain is organized in a very particular way. And if everyone was like me, then, you know, there would be no one, there would be no doctor. If there'd be no, because I don't, I'm not as good at the one-on-one. I'm more as like the general system of engineering. And so in one way, I think I'm lucky that society,

in the way that we keep score in terms of money, rewards kind of my way of like building large-scale systems. But that doesn't mean that we don't really need doctors and nurses and lawyers and all that kind of stuff. There's no wrong way of living. You've just got to be aware of what you want and then just, you know, dig into that. Yeah, and I think it's about being true to yourself. You mentioned self-awareness, and I think that if you don't belong in that lane and you don't feel like you belong in that lane, well, maybe you shouldn't be in that lane.

So 100%. There's no, there's no wrong. I say this to my team. There's like two major rules, right? So you have your value structure rules, and four values. And as long as you're aligning with your, so, you know, if our core values is something like the opposite way, that can apply to being the best data. act, right?

Yeah. And all your core values will apply to any, anything that you want, if they're first principle, and their fundamental. Right. And then also we have the laws of physics. So to me, if it doesn't, if it doesn't break your core values and it doesn't break the law of physics, then go to it. Right.

And, but whatever the two it is, whatever that North Star is, whatever the flag is at the end, is up to you and your path and your journey and your community's path and your family's path and whatever it may do. But I would say that here's one little caveat. One caveat is I think a lot of people limit themselves. This is why I think can grow rich by Napoleon Hill. Chapter 1 is belief. And I think that's really powerful.

The reason why it's belief is because if you limit yourself prior to choosing that North Star, then you're not being honest with it. you're saying, this is what I think is realistic and then drawing back relative to that realistic. But that's going to cause a lot of stress and depression and anxiety and like subconscious worry, which is why this goes back to is it against my core values? Does it, is it physically possible? Then, okay, those are the only things that matter.

after that let's just be honest what do you really want yeah look you were the former CEO of mentorbox i think everybody can agree it's really important to have mentors in your life to help guide you but i think there's a lot of people that would say i'd love to have a mentor where do i start how do i find one so i have this uh very strong opinion that that you have to guard what you put into your brain you have to guard the energy

if you will that you allow into your spirit and the I would say you start with anchors start deleting anchors and toxicity and also start

following people that are where you want to be and even if you don't know them you can I mean, now it's easier than it's ever been in the history of the world. So you've got to ask yourself, who is in my life, who is in my feed, who am I listening to on YouTube? When you go to YouTube.com, the first videos that you see will tell you a lot about you. And if you're honest about your goal and you say, this is who I want to be.

And now ask yourself, is what I'm consuming on YouTube and the people I'm following on Instagram, the people on following TikTok, is. this brainwashing myself to become this most purposeful version of myself. And most of the time the answer is no. So I would say you're cutting out the stuff that's just absolute noise. And it's actually making you a worse person and taking you away from the goal. Cutting all of that toxic, including who you follow, including what you watch, including your friend group, including family, even if they're toxic. like no offense, but if you have a great purpose in your life, then you know, you shouldn't let

anything stop you. And and then simultaneously, yeah, I use this on experiment. Like if I was going to learn, I was going to learn fencing. Sure. What an example, by the way. I love it. What my guess is, and I don't know this for a fact, but I would bet, I'd bet everything on this, that there are books about fencing and there are videos on fencing and they're instructor on fencing and i bet that those people are like olympic medalists is my guess or or coaches of olympic medalists you know so you have access to these people already and so i think that it's a it's a false dichotomy and it's actually like an unnecessary excuse to say well i don't have i'm not personally being mentored by Gary V.

So, you know, wo is me. How am I going to do anything like? Well, have you read all of his books first? Have you watched all these long form podcast and not just the, you know, dopamine of TikTok? Like, have you really dug in? And then when he gives some advice, do you have a notebook open and you're practicing? Have you turned it into homework that you're going to try in real life?

Have you said, well, why did I fail? Oh, I failed because of this. And then did you try to acquire that skill? A lot of it is just being conscious. And it's difficult. It's difficult to master anything and to face, you know, the reality of your own inadequacy. Because the reality is that we're all bad at nearly 99.99%. I don't know anything like this chair that I'm sitting in.

Like I know absolutely nothing about how to build this chair. I know absolutely nothing about how this magic, you know, headphones work. I don't know, I don't understand electricity. I don't know how to make a light. I don't like, if you just, if I'm just honest with myself, I don't know anything about basically anything, right? And that doesn't make me a bad person. It just means that I've like, I'm focused and I specialize in the thing that I want to specialize in. And so if you come upon something where you're like, hey, I want a mentor for this and I've tried it and I've tried it and I'm not that good at it. Like, no kidding. Welcome to the club of humanity, you know. And I would also

think that if you went after it, you'd be better in a month than you are now. And then you'll be better six months from now than you are now. Yeah, I heard Naval Ravacon, who's the founder of Angel List, he said that all success literature and all nonfiction literature, which I'm kind of like for my goal because why am I reading all of it. But he's right. He said it all is summarized in one idea, which is successful people are good at delayed gratification. Yeah. And, you know, going back to that whole thing about like, I don't know how headphones work or microphone works or anything, there was a comedian that had a bit that was like, what would we do if all the people who made that stuff just disappeared? Like if I send you out into the woods with a hatchet, how long until you can send me an email? And I was like, yeah, like never. Like 5,000 generation. Yeah, something like that.

Like, yeah, no, literally. Like, if you would have, first you'd have to have a mate and you'd be like, wait, how do we create fire again? Yeah, it would just, yeah, you'd start from scratch. What is your favorite quote? Or is there a quote you always go back to? You know, I kind of made up this quote and this, I don't, or I don't know if it's, I'm sure I right it somewhere. But there's always another level. This is like a mantra that I taught myself all the time so that I've never complacent. Because the truth is that I have, you know, I'm already

at the 1% and, you know, I'm incredibly grateful for, you know, everything that I have and have been given. But I also know, you know, the little Johnson that I want to be president, one of people asked me that question, you know, my answer wasn't, I want to be president because I want to have power and have people like me and I like cameras. You know, that wasn't, that wasn't my answer. My answer was, I think that that person has the most influence in the world. And so therefore, they can do the most good. Yeah. It goes back to this idea of responsibility. So for me, whenever I feel like, okay, we have, you know, 400 employees and, you know, we're paying, they're paying rent to their families and, you know, we're the downstream effect of, you know,

the butterfly effect of everything that we're doing is reaching tens of thousands of people. I think, okay, good, you did your best, you did well, that was good, there's another level. I love that. And that pushes me the next thing. And I think it's also important to realize that once you, you know, you know, you know, get to that next level, you're now at level one of that next level. Exactly. 100%.

Absolutely. That's really obvious with wealth where you think that you've ever been in a situation where you feel like you're doing all right and then you go into a room. I went to Dan Fleischman, 100 million mastermind. And it's a hundred thousand dollar ticket. And there's some people that have had, you know, billion dollar exit to close to a billion dollar exit and we realized like oh wow there's another level here and everything's taking the private jet in and so i mean that's just money it's an easy way of

people but there's another level to everything but forgiveness is another one that's really hard yeah very hard to be quickly forgiven but all of the great books say that it's you know core value all of the great religions are like hey you know the most enlightened people can forgive the people that were the harshest stuff. And that's very, very difficult. So, you know, when you put the anger of the judge and you say, okay, I'm going to forgive them anyway. That's another level of that.

It depends, you know, but it applies to so many things. Yeah. Looks like you're getting caught in a rainstorm right now. I'm so sorry. 100%. Massively. Well, we have just a few more questions before we wrap this up. But thank you so much for joining us, Jonathan.

It's been so insightful. And I really appreciate you sharing. this with us. What are three books that you most often gift to people? The Opticals Away by Ryan Holiday. Okay. This is Water by David Foster Wallace, which is a very short read, and I recommend everyone just YouTube it, and it's actually a speech. Yes, it's brilliant. And atomic habits by James Clear is probably my favorite book for the last five years. Yeah, that idea, what you were talking about earlier of just getting 1% better every day and that compounding on itself. That book is basically based on that whole idea.

This year, this year, the almanac of Naval Robicon. Okay. All right. Well, that'll be my next one then. The final question that I have for you is about gratitude. And I'm all about gratitude. I start and end every day, saying out loud three things that I'm grateful for. So Jonathan, for you, What are three things in your life that you're grateful for right now? I always start with my wife. You know, she deals with me on a day-to-day basis, and it's very difficult to deal with someone who's so driven.

And I'm very focused and very difficult to me, push me off my path. So I don't have a lot of flexibility. So she's number one, I would say. Number two, I think, you know, my employees with everything that, you know, exists in my life. They suffer, you know, like. And I think third is, you know, really just the infinite gift that we have of just being alive. Yeah. So unlike, you know, Gary, if he talks about this, it's like, you know, one out of, you know, whatever, some number that we can't even comprehend.

And we could have been born at a table or some gas cloud somewhere. You know, we're all made it the same stuff. So the fact that we're organized in this way is just a privilege. Yeah, I love it. Thank you so much for joining us. I hope that you can get inside where it's a little bit more dry there. But thank you. Where can anyone find you if they want to connect with you?

If you want to work with me, go to virtualworkinab.com. and, you know, read by. And then I'm mostly at Instagram, Jonathan.com. Perfect. Jonathan. Thank you so much. Well, there we go, my friends.

Big thank you to Jonathan for the conversation, and I feel like I have a whole bunch of new books that I have to read. Also, thank you to him for sticking it out in that rainstorm, which is what you were hearing there at the end. It was coming down like crazy. Connect with him on social media. He's at jonathan. combe on Instagram.

You can find me. at Chris Van Fleet, and I hope that you find that zone of genius for yourself. I'll leave you with the words of the great Marcus Aurelius, who said, the happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts. I love that. Be great, be grateful, my friends. Have a great weekend. We'll see you on the next one for some more insight.

The Hammer Alley podcast, an 80s flashback mockumentary. In the 80s, there were a thousand bands trying to make it in the world of rock. But there was one band that had it all. Hammer Alley. Whatever happened to Hammer Alley? How did they go from top of the rock? I'm looking for a music video. They're a band from 1987.

Hammer Alley. Ever heard of then? To Rock Bottom. Dude, I was born in 1987. I can't believe he's doing this. Hammer Alley. Follow and listen on your favorite platform.