Living The Red Life - How To Dominate Your Industry in 60 Days w/The Leap Frog Method : Jonathan Goodman

Episode Date: November 21, 2024

In this episode, fitness entrepreneur and author Jon Goodman shares insights from his journey of professional growth and personal reinvention. He emphasizes the importance of shifting focus from constantly refining expertise to mastering marketing and entrepreneurship, encouraging listeners to recognize the value of their existing knowledge and start making an impact. Jon introduces his concept of "leapfrog learning," a 60-day process of intensive skill acquisition and teaching, which he has used to explore areas like AI, automation, and wealth-building. Jon also previews his new book, *The Obvious Choice: Timeless Lessons on Success, Profit, and Finding Your Way*, offering wisdom on aligning goals with the "game" you’re playing, whether in business or personal pursuits. He highlights the need to use tools like social media strategically, rather than letting them dictate your path, and shares lessons from rebuilding his business after facing significant personal challenges. This episode is a motivating guide for anyone aiming to build a purposeful and impactful career.CHAPTER TITLES 03:00 - The Art of Letting Go: Freedom Through Delegation05:00 - You Already Know Enough: Stop Overpreparing07:00 - The Confidence Trap: Comparing Yourself to Colleagues09:00 - Obsession Shift: From Expertise to Marketing Mastery11:00 - Leapfrog Learning: Mastering New Skills in 60 Days13:00 - Teaching to Learn: Sharing Knowledge to Solidify Growth15:00 - The Power of Philosophy: Creating a Family Wealth Strategy17:00 - Different Games, Different Rules: Knowing Your Objectives21:00 - Social Media vs. Business: Playing the Right Game23:00 - Timeless Lessons: An Introduction to The Obvious ChoiceConnect with Jon:Personal Trainer Development CentreIG & X = ItscoachgoodmanBOOK - The Obvious Choicewww.theobviouschoicebook.comConnect with Rudy Mawer:LinkedInInstagramFacebookTwitter

What your customer, what your client actually needs to succeed is a relatively low level of information. You really don't need to know that much, therefore, there is a significant point of diminishing returns when it comes to industry-specific knowledge. And so, these leapfrog skills, really, wealth management, presentation communication skills, behavioral psychology, and what's unbelievable about these skills are multiple things. If you work for yourself, you're going to easily stand out amongst your instruments because most other people in your industry are going to do the easy thing. And the easy thing is always to learn more about something you're already good at or

add something on to knowledge you already have. Not because it's necessarily that important, but because it feels good. My name's Rudy Moore, host of Living the Red Life podcast. And I'm here to change the way you see your life in your earpiece every single week. If you're ready to start living the red life, ditch the blue pill, take the red pill. Join me in Wonderland and change your life. What's up, guys? Welcome back to another episode of Living the Red Life. We have my good friend on today, John Goodman.

He is a very famous marketer and educator in the health and wellness phase. I've known him since my personal training days. He's now, you know, branched out into teaching mainstream entrepreneurship business and lots of other amazing things. We've been fortunate enough to bump into each other in many places around the world. I did travel, he's traveling.

And we both definitely mastered how to work on a laptop. But John's mastered a lot of other things, which is what we're going to talk about today, such as how to really develop the skills you need to be successful within 60 days or less. He has a bit of a technique called the leapfrog method that I'm excited to dive into. And also explore a lot of the cool stuff he's got in his new book. So John, welcome to the show. What's up, Rudy? Good to see you, man.

You too. You too. So, you know, me and you have known each other basically since I moved to America. Obviously, we both started in the health space, but you know, now you teach such amazing stuff for any entrepreneur listening. If they don't know who you are, do you mind just giving a 60 second overview on all of that? Yeah.

I mean, all the important parts of my life. I'm a dad of two. I have my third child on the way, two boys. I spent the last 12 winters abroad, so I've traveled four to six months a year, every year for the last 12 winters abroad, so I traveled four to six months a year every year for the last 12 years. Lived basically everywhere throughout the world from Canada, so escaped the winters, come back in the summer, my home's Toronto. During all that time, yeah, I built up a whole bunch of businesses, basically congruent businesses

that are complementary to one another for people who work in the health and fitness space. So everything from coaching businesses to we've got a software company with about 40,000 users. I wrote the textbook for online fitness. I've self-published 11 books, hosted five conferences, created eight digital products, kind of sold, produced and sold information in about every way you could possibly produce and sell information generated in and around

35 million in sales, average about a 60 to 65% profitability. Right. And look, I think, you know, obviously I've known you, we need about four episodes to cover the things I've to cover, but, but you know, we have a day. Stories about you, Rudy. I have stories about you that I will share one time. I will do one quick story, so this is really fascinating. So I was back in England, was gonna move to America in a year, and I was really learning like all the top fitness experts and stuff in my industry, and you know I've always been very different out the box. Right.

So I, we had, we were forced to do an internship in my last year of university. Who was this? This is like 2000 years ago. Yeah. Do you listen to it? And 11 years ago, we were forced to do an internship for a month and everyone else had never had a job in their life.

So they were going to go down at a physio or personal trainer but I had already been working for four years right and had my own company so I was like what am I gonna do? So in the end I said to my teacher I was like can I go abroad for four weeks and work with like a top scientist or expert? So I cold emailed you and 19 other people, you know, all the people I'm friends with now and your friends. And you and a couple of others replied and you invited me to Thailand to come and work with you for a month. And sadly, I never did it.

I wish I, you know, did. I just didn't put it all together. And in the end, my lecturer actually said, actually, Rudy, you've got so much work experience already, you can just skip this module. So no, I didn't do it. But I think about like, this is like pure butterfly effect, right? Or sliding doors, like, yo, if you got on that bus, how would our lives have been different? I mean, I didn't know you from anybody else.

You are, I know, to say sure, which is pretty cool. And that's what I wanted. Sure. And I would love for you to be there and hang out and ride scooters and build stuff with you, but imagine what would have happened. If we were to work together then maybe I'd be sitting in a big green chair beside your big red chair, who knows. Maybe I wouldn't be sat in a red chair because you would have helped me do something else, who knows, right?

I would have owned you, I would have gotten you to sign contracts, anything you produce would be known. Who knows. Anyway, coming back full circle, I moved to America a year later and I ended up joining a mastermind, met you and we've been friends ever since and bumped into each other as we both traveled the world with our family. The weirdest of places, a place I didn't even know existed called Montenegro. Me and you hung out and had fun there and many other places. But back into the episode, John, let's start with this method that I teased, right?

This idea of in a few days, really learning what you need to know to be successful. Because I see people take 10 years and still think they need to learn more versus starting to sell the damn thing that they're learning. So I would love to break this down. Okay. So my background is personal training. Yep. And I realized very early on when I was personal training that the vast majority of people

that I ever worked with really did not need anything complicated. And I think this is actually the case with just about every career. Like what you do and the value of what you do is important. Your credentials, your education, whatever your study is very, very important. What your customer, what your client actually needs to succeed is a relatively low level of information. And this is the case for just about every career.

Like if you wanna solve your customer's problem, you really don't need to know that much. Therefore, there is a significant point of diminishing returns when it comes to industry-specific knowledge that I think is underappreciated. Now, this isn't to say that you should not continue to develop your industry-specific knowledge, but you have to understand that you're developing that largely selfishly for yourself because it's something you're interested in and less potentially to serve your customers. And so, you know, going back to my career, like I was a mediocre to low quality personal

trainer when you looked at my knowledge of physiology, biomechanics, even psychology. But the reason why I was so successful as a personal trainer at a very young age is I was also a mediocre to low level at writing and behavioral psychology and marketing. And so if I continued to just go along the general path of continuing to get better just at personal training specific like physiology, reading more studies, whatever, one plus one equals two. It's linear growth that actually starts to level off reasonably quickly, if you can picture this on a graph. But when I started to combine low to mediocre skill sets of these other what I call leapfrog skills, what happens is one plus one plus one doesn't equal three anymore. Mel equals 10.

It becomes exponential. And so these leapfrog skills really, I mean, I've identified five in the obvious choice in this book, but there are more. And so wealth management, presentation, communication skills, behavioral psychology, call it business writing, but like writing, business writing. And what's unbelievable about these skills are multiple things. Number one, they can be combined with any industry, with any industry-specific knowledge, exponentially positive gains.

It does not matter whether you're an entrepreneur or a business owner or whether you're an employee. What you're going to do is you're going to make yourself indispensable by learning these skills. And so if you work for somebody else, you're going to make yourself indispensable for them and can command a higher salary or move somewhere else if they're not paying you. If, if you work for yourself, you're going to easily stand out amongst your industry because most other people in your industry are going to do the easy thing. And the easy thing is always to learn more about something you're already good at

or add something on to knowledge you already have. Not because it's necessarily that important, but because it feels good to reinforce what you already know. I want to unpack a few things because yeah, so, so I, I teach my members all the time. I'm like, stop learning. Don't learn a damn thing about what you're trying to do right now in your industry. Start learning marketing and sales. Right. So I say in a more blunt, less educated way than you just explained it, but it's

probably, that's probably what you people need. You know, not be overhead with the shit. Yeah. You know, just slapping the face. Guy, you already know enough as a nutritionist. You know enough as a whatever, a dance instructor, a basketball coach, a relationship expert, all your products been, you know, a lot of the time too, it's product development. They'll spend 12 months making a course and I used to do this 12 years ago too, when it's like make

a course for two weeks and then spend 10 months or 11 and a half months selling the course and keep adding to it as you're building on it. Italy based off of real world feedback. Yes. And it's this whole fighting, I think part of it is perfectionist syndrome, which a lot of us have when we start and the good entrepreneurs get out of it. And then yeah, a lot of it. And I also remind them too, I say, tell me all the other people out there that

are big influencers that make a ton of money and they sell a way worse product than you, and they're really good at marketing and you're not, right? And when I, that way, you know, it's like a knife in the belly, right. Especially if an expert or, you know, someone that really cares about the industry. But yeah, yeah, yeah. And then they get it. So, I mean, it's so absolutely true. Um, and then I want to point on the other thing, the five killers or areas you said,

I guarantee if you look at any great entrepreneur, they all have those traits. And I see a lot of entrepreneurs that have maybe three of those traits and they suck at the other two and unless they outsource for it, their business gets stuck. So it's interesting, like, you know, me, you and all my mutual friends that do many millions, tens of millions that are consistently successful and consistently can move across industries too. Like I've done many times and you know, you've done in capacities and lots of our mutual friends have. I bet we all have those five traits. Yeah. So I agree you can outsource these things, but I still think you need a baseline knowledge of yourself.

Like, yeah, like you've got to be able to speak the language in order. And you got to be able to, I don't know about you man, I've hired a lot of contractors and consultants who are really bad at what they do. You need to know the lingo for sure. And to judge it. I'll add a third reason, because I think you nailed the first two. I'll add a third reason why I found that people are pretty resistant to this and it's imposter syndrome. And so, can I tell a quick story?

So, in college, my roommate smoked a joint, put a bunch of oil on a pan, was going to fry some potatoes and then went and lay down and fell asleep. And what happened is that the pan got on fire and when I walked in, my roommate is sleeping, to be honest. I don't actually remember the be- I probably smoked a joint with him. I don't actually remember. Either way, he was sleeping. I noticed a pot was on fire in the kitchen. And so I picked up the pot and I brought it outside to the driveway, which was very lucky, as you'll soon see.

And then I went and got a big bucket of water and I filled up the bucket of water and I tossed it on the fire in the driver. Now if you're listening to this and you understand how to put out a fire, you immediately know how stupid I was because what happens is that oil and water don't mix. They naturally oppose each other. Now if the oil's on fire, when you put water on that oil on fire, it basically blasts that oil away. Said another way, it makes a fucking fireball. You don't put water on a grease fire, on an oil file. So I didn't know that. Luckily, I was on the

driveway. The thing basically blew up. It was actually really cool, but it didn't cause any damage. Okay. Now imagine you're a firefighter and it's your first day on the job. And somebody calls you and they say, we have a fire in the house. All of the other firefighters, you feel like you're not enough to them. They've been there for a long time. They know all this about fire theory. They've gone on all of these jobs. Anyway, you get to the house and you're like, yo, that's a grease fire. And you take a dry chemical extinguisher and you put it out. And then you say to the family the next time that this happens, throw some baking soda on it, cover it, turn off the heat source, wait for it to self extinguish. Emu, ho shirtless for calendar, kiss a baby, do whatever I expect.

Firefighters do. That hoosen whose problem you solved is ecstatic. They don't care that it's your first day on the job. You knew how to put out the fire. Other firefighters might laugh at you. Maybe, probably not. But that's completely irrelevant. Yeah.

And so I think a lot of the reason why we always feel like we need to learn more about what we're doing is because we're stuck comparing ourselves to colleagues, which is kind of a symptom of the world that we live in where we're all in these really tight filter bubbles. The only people that surround us are people like us. And we compare ourselves to them. We're too close to our own world. Well, and I think I've heard someone else say one time that I always remember, you just need to be

one level higher than the customer you're selling to, right? That's a good summary of that. And look, most of us are passionate, we want to go deep and that's fine. But also don't be like, and we see this in the fitness industry all the time, that you can actually arm the client or the service if you overcompensate it, right? And that's kind of, you know, so you have to learn, especially when it's anything to do with coaching and education, what level should you be teaching at? So I really love this and I think this is very empowering for anyone listening

because 90% of the entrepreneurs I work with, they think their product and education needs more work before they can sell it. Whereas you need to learn marketing and basic entrepreneurial phrase. And I always say, if you do really care about your customer and your product's amazing and you want to help people, you need to turn your obsession from the education side or your industry specific to an obsession with awareness and marketing, which was the catalyst of my life that took me from a good personal trainer, but not a big business person to a millionaire and impacting tens of thousands of people. And I'll always, you know, it's one of the greatest gifts of my life is I made that switch

or I wouldn't be who I am today. So let me tell you, let me, let me go quick. Cause I know you want to go fast. So let me tell you, let me tell you about how you gain these skills, then the process of it, call this leapfrog learning. And so if you, if you accept the fact that you really only need to build a mediocre to low level of this new skillset, then you understand that you can actually do it really, really quickly.

And so what I recommend is you don't have to always be in one of these phases, but you take 60 days and you decide on which skill to learn. And there's two parts of it. Number one is 60 days to learn it and number two is teach it to somebody else. Because the best way to learn is to teach. And so I'll give you an example. I really wanted to wrap my head around artificial intelligence and automation, but in a very specific way, a number of years ago, what I wanted to do is I wanted to know about how

artificial intelligence and automation is going to redefine job roles specific to the coaching industries. What skills it's going to redefine job roles specific to the coaching industries. What skills it's going to choose for, what's going to become obsolete. And I wanted to learn that because we were building our software platform, but I was also just personally interested in it. And so for 60 days, I went and found every single book I could possibly find on the subject. At that time, there were about seven on redefinition of job roles for artificial intelligence. I spoke to people and I listened to podcasts and I joined the Reddit communities for AI

and automation. I obsessed over it for 60 days. And then at the end of the 60 days, I created a Google document with my findings. Basically, I created a white paper saying, here's the skills that are important. Here's what I found. Here's great quotes. Here's great quotes. Here's great resources. And then I sent it to five friends.

And that was it. I did the same thing with building our family's wealth philosophy. For 60 days, I read as many books as I could find about, well, the first thing that I did is I had to educate myself on the definitions. Well, the first thing that I did is I had to educate myself on the definitions. I read one book that basically taught me the history of money, how debt works, how credit works. At that point, I knew all of the main terms. I knew the main background, right? Not going to work in the industry, but I understand the lingo.

Then I went and read a bunch of books. I'm a reader. You don't have to read, but then I went and read a bunch of books on what people who work in money, how they actually invest their own money. And I spoke to as many people from as many different camps as possible, from real estate to cryptocurrencies to regular stock investing to whatever, right? And Alice and my wife and I had conversations throughout. She was listening to podcasts and things at the same time. And then what we did at the end of the 60 days was we said, okay, what's

our family's philosophy to this? For us personally, it's actually accepting, we are unwilling to accept even the littlest chance of catastrophic risk. And we will give up tremendous upside benefits in exchange for eliminating even the littlest bit of catastrophic risk. The four buckets that we're going to invest into. And then what I did is I created a presentation out of it and I presented it to my mentorship and I presented it on my podcast. That's it. Yeah, I love it. The next one. And I think also it's easier to do this than ever before because now you've got the world's best expert writing books and podcasts where they've

20 years of knowledge or 30 years knowledge, into a book, right? And I've done the same, I was looking at different types of real estate, I didn't go down big rabbit hole, I did what you did, did a few podcasts, read a couple of books, rang a couple of my buddies that have hundreds of millions of real estate, I said here's my feces, here's what I've generally learned, and my own right path, and they said yeah pretty much. Where are my blind spots? What am I missing? What am I getting right? Love it. So John, just as we come to an end of today, let's talk about the new book. You know, your other books were smash it, I've read many of them and fantastic. Tell us about this book just to tease everyone because I know it's going to be interesting.

It's called the obvious choice. Timeless lessons on success, profit, and finding your way. What happened was that in 2021, uh, business for the first time ever was not doing that great in and around the same time. My wife got diagnosed with cancer. I needed room to breathe. I fired everybody and I started over once we found out that my wife was going to be okay. And I had that amazing opportunity after 10 years and success in business, helping over 65,000 people directly who we've helped with our products and services.

Knowing now what we know, starting over, it's been fun. It's been explosive growth. And so what this book is, is this book is the 15 greatest lessons from that period of time. And the main thesis is pretty simple, which is you got to know what game you're playing, and you have to understand the rules of that game. And games are simply different. They're not better than one than the other. For example, this is just one of the examples in the book, the game of trying to be an influencer online,

an influencer, a creator, an entertainer, it's all the same shit. They're synonyms of one another. Right? The game of trying to be an influencer is different from the game of building a business. And neither game is worse or better, but they have different rules of engagement, odds of success, time horizons, and reward mechanisms. And problems arise when you conflate one game with the other one. You desire the rewards of one, but you're playing by the rules of the other. And what's happening right now is that a lot of people are playing the look at me online,

I want to win the internet game. When really, like your goal on Instagram is not to be famous on Instagram. It's to perhaps leverage that media to achieve some other desired outcome. Now I would take it a step back and say, what's your desired outcome? Is that media even the best way to achieve that? Maybe yes, maybe no. If so, are you using it in a way that serves your goals and not the goals of the social media company? Yeah. Because again, you're playing different games. The goals of the social media company is for you to create as much free content as possible and be on there as long as possible. Your goals are probably

to spend as little time and money and effort as possible and get the hell off and have it serve your business. And so nobody's wrong. But the insights that they're going to give you is clearly going to align with their desired outcome. And so you cannot measure your success on their platform based off of those insights. It's just one example. Yep. No, I love it. I love it. And I think guys, if you're listening, obviously today we talked about that one area, but like I said, known John so many years, so each one of those 15, I promise will be a golden nugget. And John, when the book's out, I would love to bring you back on and rapid fire in 15 minutes, the 50

over there. Okay. So I'll give you a couple of months to rehearse that. But that'll be a fun one. But that will be a fun one to put those in, in, in one episode. So John, last question, where do they find you just for the book? And obviously if they want to learn more. Yeah. So the book is Kindle audible. Hardcover it's published by HarperCollins. You can get it anywhere you get books.

Or do a copy of the book, order a cop. I don't care what format order copy the book. You can find me on Instagram or Twitter. I'm at It's Coach Goodman. And if you don't love the book when it comes, you can send me a message and I'll refund you 100% of the money you spent on it. And send him an angry message. Send you a really angry message.

He's read letters. I promise you it will ruin my day. Send me the angriest message you possibly can. But I'm serious, I will send you back 100% of your money. So you have no reason not to pick up the ball. Good. John, it's been a pleasure. Thank you for sharing this.

So valuable for people to hear. It's even just a reminder and a bit of a slap in the face. Like get to work, go impact people with your knowledge. You are enough and you know enough to make change in the world, which is why we're all here. And I'm very excited to challenge you to these 15 lessons in 15 minutes. I know you love your stories and elaboration, so it'll be good to see you condense it. Well I can condense it, but I mean the stories are what makes it memorable.

Stories are what helps people apply. Yeah, yeah. But we can make a good episode out of it. Guys that's a wrap. Go check out Jon and obviously grab a copy of the book and until next time, live in the red light. Take care. Bye!