The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show 199 Ronan Leonard of Eccountability

Episode Date: May 6, 2018

Ronan Leonard of Eccountability

Hi folks, Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Here we're coming to you with another great podcast. And of course, we always have all the best audiences and all the best guests on. The best. Anyway, thanks for tuning in. We certainly appreciate you guys as an audience. Be sure to tell your friends, neighbors, relatives, refer it to people. To go to iTunes, Google Play, go to youtube.com for us Chris Voss and

you can see all sorts of great reviews we do there as well and puppy videos we have Siberian puppy videos like who can say no to that for reals if you don't subscribe to the puppy the puppy might die so save the puppy and subscribe that's a horrible macabre way to start this podcast isn't it but I mean seriously you subscribe to this thing what were you thinking you were getting anyway uh uh anyway i have a wonderful guest all the way from down under australia uh ronan lennard and ronan is the mastermind guy he connects small business owners to support groups the innovative concept of masterminds. Without a founder or business coach, most solo entrepreneurs are often overwhelmed with to-do lists.

They need impartial advice to get the right support to help them achieve clarity and better results. Ronan believes we've lost our connection to the Tribe A community that will help you solve your problems and accelerate your learning. And he believes there is more value in making real peer-to-peer connections than paying external contractors that have no vested interest in your success. Rona, welcome to the show. How are you doing, bud? I'm doing well, Chris. Thank you for having me on the show. Looking forward to it.

Sounds good. Are you guys approaching winter there in the down-under nether regions there? The nether regions is somewhere else, but yes, yes, it's coming into winter here. But it's all relative. Australia is pretty warm overall. So it's not that sort of New York cold that you see in the U.S. Do you guys get snow there? Certain very small places, a couple of the high altitude ones,

but we don't get the huge difference that you get in the U.S. between winter and summer. But, yes, it is coming into winter. And we're also a day ahead of you, so we're actually going into the future with this show. Yeah, so when the world goes to hell, you guys get a front-row seat. That's awesome. And most likely, if the world does go to hell,

it will be because of us Americans so enjoy the ride well we'll blame you when it actually happens roll with the apocalypse so Ronan give us your plugs tell us where people can find you and your websites on the internet

so the website is e-countability.io so it's accountability but with an E, and it's an IO extension, not a.com. So I'm quite hard to find. I'm also very active on LinkedIn as well, just Roman Leonard, the mastermind guy. Also on Twitter as well, eCountability. Cool, eCountability.

So tell us about that company, what does it do and what do you do with it? Well, effectively, we connect people together in peer mentors. I believe that there is no one guru that's going to solve all your problems. I also think that people buy these courses as they never, ever finish. You know, they've had five grand on a course and at the time they're super motivated. They're convinced they're going to do it. And then with a couple of weeks, they drop out. But they've already spent their money. So the course owner doesn't really care and has no vested interest whether they finish or not so i really connect people that don't have a co-founder or they don't have a business coach already and they work on their roadblocks what

what are they currently facing it's ever-changing and the reality is that Information doesn't help us solve all our problems. We live in the information age now There's massive amounts of it on the internet about everything you need to know about business yet We're still failing at the same rate. So clearly it's not the amount of information. It's is that information relevant to me? Can I can I get some help just in connecting the dots? What does that information mean to my particular business? Because it's quite generic and it was built or it was written with somebody else in mind, somebody else's experience. So we just crowdsource everybody else's experience, expertise, knowledge, and ideas and help everybody within that group grow and stick to their goals and

their accountability that's it in a nutshell awesome sauce awesome sauce so i imagine you have a lot of experience in business and life and everything else i've been in small business for 14 years but i've come to the mastermind concept quite late in life and i've done everything i've worked on cruise ships i worked on a ship that sunk on the wild coast of South Africa. I've traveled the world for nearly a decade, lived in India for a while, just hanging around on a beach doing nothing. But for the last 14 years, I've been in small business, running my own small business. Cool.

So what prompted you to start this company? Ronan, what prompted you to start this company? I was in a mastermind group about two, three years ago and I just loved the accountability. I loved the connections because I'd spent almost a decade in business and the only soundboard I had was my wife and she's, she's clued up. She's smart. She works in corporate, but you know, when you're unloading on the same person all the time, I've got this problem and that problem becomes a little bit, a little bit much for the marriage and, and it's just not that diversity. So when I was in this mastermind group, absolutely loved it.

And then when it finished, it just ran its natural course. I went to join another one. I just couldn't find one anywhere. Most masterminds have always been an adjunct to somebody's course. So it might be LinkedIn sales training. It might be how you do copywriting. We've got a mastermind course at the end of that that you pay extra for and you join that group. But there wasn't a general

one that you could easily sort of search and join so like a lot of entrepreneurs i built it mainly to scratch my own itch and just to connect to some other people that can can help me so that's that's how the business model came about yeah building uh that seems to be the way most uh entrepreneurs start their businesses you know know, scratching an itch. There's something that bothers them or something that they need fulfilled. And they find that they have a common sort of thread that runs through our humanity. And there's usually a lot of other people that are suffering from the same problems. Yes, there is a twofold double-edged sword with that in the fact that you can build something

that scratches your own itch and no one else wants it. So that's the downside. You invest all your life savings. I was watching Shark Tank a couple of months ago and this guy from Australia had spent $250,000 building this software that works out which of your mobile, your cell phones are private and which ones are business. Now, here in Australia, you just go to the accountant and say, look, my bill is $80 a month. It's about 70%, and they'll take a 70% number.

They don't need to work out the exact figure. So he'd send all this money without asking two or three people, would you pay for that? And they were going, no, I wouldn't, because my accountant just works out the number as a percentage, done. You know, 10 seconds. Yeah, it's always good to do focus groups, because one person's, I don't know,

one person's gold is another person's trash, I suppose, sometimes. But, yeah, I mean, you do have to do your research and say, well, I love this idea for myself, but will other people buy it? And certainly they're in the trash heap of entrepreneurialistic ideas and companies. It's full. Like you said, the failure rate, I think, is still 99, 98% within the first two years of a startup business, which is kind of surprising to me. That number hasn't changed.

Maybe it shouldn't be. Maybe we should think about that statement more. But in reality, I mean, in the 90s, I created businesses that were brick't changed. Maybe it shouldn't be. Maybe we should think about that statement more. But in reality, I mean, in the 90s, I created businesses that were brick and mortar and had to earn a profit very quickly. I didn't create these startups where I have, you know, multi-billion dollar VCs handing me money and not caring if I don't make a profit for 10 years.

And the hard cost of starting a business in brick and mortar is just staggering. I mean, we have to buy phone systems, furniture, secretaries up front. We'd have to call the phone company and negotiate rates and bring in this whole bank of lines. And they'd have to send the phone company truck by and they'd spend a week laying our line or whatever the hell was we needed and it was just extraordinary i mean just to open the door and say we're in business um you used to have to wait uh sometimes sometimes a week at least two to four days before your business line would get active you know and it was a nightmare what you could do nowadays I mean so much stuff is done virtually without all that stuff I mean I've been loving business since I

left brick-and-mortar businesses where you can just start a business online and where you go you're making money so you know it's it's something that's pretty freaking awesome when it comes down to it. And I think, so I'm kind of surprised there's more failures, but maybe it's because the ease of entry is easier to get into. People are still feeling an incredible rate because they're not having to work as hard to make sure that the investments they're making are going to get the return they want. Yeah, exactly. They don't have the skin in the game you talking about building that bricks and mortar

business you would have sunk a lot of money into it upfront but also as you said you would have worked damn hard to make it work yeah that reminds me the story of the kid who tries to borrow money from his dad and in his dad keeps throwing the money in the fire and then he finally goes and gets a job and the day that his dad throws the money that he kept borrowing from his family but then he worked for into the fire he goes into the fire for it uh and yeah you i i remember living in my office uh going home to shower and change my clothes and then going back to my office and at one point i actually talked to my business partners about installing a share of my office so I didn't have to bother going home anymore.

When you're committed, I know what it's like to be one year of not making a profit and you're in debt. Thankfully, we were in debt to ourselves from one of our other companies that loaned the money to the other company. But still, we were running a huge negative balance that had to be repaid on top of that somehow we had to return a profit in the second year and i know how sweaty that was to try and come out of that and uh it can be hard and difficult um but yeah um so i'm surprised um but yeah i imagine a lot of people are it does give i think the internet a lot internet people a lot more chances to fail fast. They can try an idea and if it fails, then they're not out, all that skin in the game, that massive investment. And it gives them probably a chance to restart and reshift and give it another shot without losing all their marbles and having to rebuild again.

Yeah, it comes down to whether A, they've learned their lesson, or B, whether they are really – I think they need to dial into their why. I think a lot of people start a business for an idea that they will make money, and that's what's sold on the internet, you know, have the Ferrari, have the house, have this other lifestyle. And then you probably know yourself, Chris, you've been around the block right now and you've learned those lessons, is that a lot of it is your intrinsic motivation, your why.

Why are you doing this? What's your purpose? Are you really solving a customer's problem? Do you love that feeling of actually completing whatever job you do or whatever service you do and knowing that you've done the best you can and made an awesome product or really helped somebody. Because business is just about helping people. And a lot of people start a business without that, and then obviously when it gets a little bit tough,

that motivation and that why just isn't there for them. So it's easy for them to just close the doors or switch off the website and just go, no, this was a bit too hard because I hadn't really thought it through and it's not really what I want to do. Yeah, and the percolation of a lot of these websites and businesses and I see it all the time on Facebook ads. I can show you how to make millions of dollars on YouTube and you're just like you know I have a YouTube and I'm fairly successful I think I have over 50 or 60 million minutes viewed on YouTube there's over 3,000 videos on YouTube and the podcast as well plug shameless plug and it's really hard to make money on YouTube these days there was a time where it was very hard to make money on YouTube these days. There was a time where it was very easy to make money on YouTube.

Now it's really hard because of the way they've re-geared it. But I think the average user makes about $1,500 a month, and that's kind of like the top sort of area of the average user. Like I said, the very top. They built a two-tiered system where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer on YouTube. I think it started about 2014. But there's lots of examples of these things where people get sold to make lots of money. And I think, too, a lot of the stuff out there is designed, it's kind of like motivational books. They sell you a motivational book. You were talking about this earlier. They sell you a motivational book and people buy the book hoping that that will fulfill them in starting business and getting rich

the problem is they never read the book or go forward with it and they just keep going and buying new books it's the fulfillment that of the person who never reads books thinking that well i'm buying the knowledge so therefore i have i'm acquiring it through acquisition yeah it doesn't work that way you can go you can spend you can drop your grand against you Tony Robbins for the day and you come away oh I'm highly motivated and you know maybe last a week from it that's it it's not life-changing they just go back to their same routines and same habits so in the mastermind group we try and teach people every week to sort

of make those small incremental changes and just stick to the plan and just keep on the right path. If that is that the right path and get that advice and feedback and make those small adjustments rather than thinking there is one course, one book, one guru that is going to change you overnight. And all of a sudden you're going to be super rich, super motivated, know exactly what you're doing, got it all figured out. But unfortunately, the 10X your business now, as you said, I'll show you how to make millions, that's the click bait that sells and they're just suckering people in that really don't have the tools or the follow-up process to implement most of those ideas. Yeah, and honestly, if you're paying $5,000 for a giant program or whatever, some sort of upscale resale program, I have my own mastermind stuff that I do, so I'm knocking

myself here. But my first company I started, I started with $2,000 and we built that into a multi-million dollar company. A year and a half later, we started a second company with $4,000 that we were supposed to give to the IRS and we opted for a penalty. And we just, well I think if I recall rightly what it was is we bet the irs money we owed irs money like at the end of the quarter we were beginning of the quarter and we gambled that we would be able to replace that money by the end of the quarter to give the irs that's what we did

so we were literally just betting that we would uh get that money and back and we did and we built it that into a second multi-million dollar company we at one point had a tier multitude of different companies that we under ran and so just that small amount of money we built multi-million dollar companies and a lot of sweat got equity I should say as well but those were brick-and-mortar companies back in the day yeah well gambling is the IRS versus a loan shark was probably the lesser of two evils. You probably figure, okay, the government will give me a break. I'm sure I'd always recommend it ever, but it was the quarterly payment that you have to take and make.

We knew that we had to make it in three months, and we were like, can we make sure that we get that money back so we can pay the third month and so that was our little gamble but yeah I mean that's small money started business and certainly that was in the brick and mortar where he had to spend some money to open an office and everything but you know I mean on the internet you can do so much different things you know one of the things that you're doing, I recommended this years ago, after about 13 years in business, my best friend and business partner left our company, he got really burnt out with entrepreneurism

and just wanted to go work for a normal paycheck. And I found myself alone in the business. And we didn't have a board of directors, we didn't have anybody I could turn to. I didn't have a board of directors we didn't have any way I could turn to I didn't have any Michael Cohen lawyers and what I did is I came with this concept because I I didn't have my partner anymore that could bounce ideas off so I came with this concept of a virtual board and so instead of paying board members and hiring a board I took and found other entrepreneurs and made them what I called virtual board members and hiring a board, I took and found other entrepreneurs

and made them what I called virtual board members. And I basically just made a deal with them. Look, I'll listen to your ideas, concepts, and things you're trying to do with your business if you'll listen to mine. And that worked out really well because it gave me other entrepreneurs I could bounce stuff off of. They could call me up and bounce stuff off of. And it didn't cost me a bloody dime.

So that was working out really well. It sounds like what you're doing with the e-business is basically creating a mastermind that people can take and use so they can convey their own sort of board of directors. Absolutely, yeah. It's a very, very similar concept. It's not rocket science. It's not rocket science, it's not a particularly new concept, it's just a bit more at scale.

And as we're globally connected now, it's one of those things where my mastermind groups, I've got people from the US, the UK, Australia, Malaysia, so they all connect together and you've got different personalities, you've got that different life experience. know people do different business in america different to the to australia we're a bit more conservative more laid back americans a bit more gung-ho yeah let's buy that now so you get you get that true melting pot of the mastermind concept which is napoleon hill's one

so yeah you've already figured that out yourself and and you know congratulations why why pay some external consultant um thousands of thousands of dollars to give you a bit of advice when you can swap around and utilize your business knowledge as you said you'd had 13 years worth of experience that's a great amount of of insight and knowledge and you know you've talked about how you almost went bust and you've you know you've done the hard yards and you're able to sort of pay that experience forward everyone talks about this you know failure and and when we fail we learn all these lessons ideally you don't want to have to be in that position of lost all your money and failed and learned the hard way tap

into the people that have done there and be there and pick their brains before you get to that point. So the really smart people will listen to somebody who's already failed rather than fail themselves first. It's a cheaper route, to be honest. Yeah, yeah, definitely much, much cheaper. So what are some of the life lessons you've learned as you've gone through the years of starting your own business and doing your own things? I've learned that there's a huge disconnect between what people will say and what they

end up doing. And I'm not really even sure how to bridge that gap. The world's full of, yeah, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that. And for me, that's quite strange because I'm actually really good at habits and motivation. And I worked out a couple years ago what's my unique genius and it's as simple as saying that I'll do what I say I'm going to do and it sounds really dull and it sounds really boring but the world is just full of people that yeah I'll get back to you on Tuesday and then they don't

and then you follow oh yeah sorry something comes up I'll get back to you next week and then you never hear from them again so well know just just own it and when you own it and you create that self-belief in yourself which which makes you push further and harder but also people want to work with you if you're the type of person that shows up on time like i did today this this podcast that says i'm going to do something those people you gravitate towards them because there are a lot of snake oil, sharp, you know, a lot of people out there in the world that promise everything and deliver next to nothing. So I also look for those type of people, those people that share the commitment.

That's one of the things that I'm sort of really interested in and I gravitate towards those type of people. Yeah. Sorry to interrupt you there. What about you, Chris? What sort of people are in your wheel? You bring up something that I experienced a lot as an entrepreneur and still do, but it used to be worse back in the days when, you know, I had lots of employees and it was, you know, a lot of people people were there was a lot of pressure on me to take care of these people but as an entrepreneur you know you don't have a lot of time to screw around I mean you don't like you say you you got to get things done and it all comes down to you

and the biggest challenge I would have is dealing with corporations or employees of corporations who would drag their feet, like you say, and, you know, I'll get to it, you know. And a lot of times they don't have a direct accountability. You know, they have a guaranteed paycheck at the end of every Friday or whatever their schedule is, but they have a guaranteed paycheck. If they sit around and watch, don't know cap videos on YouTube all week most likely they're still gonna have that paycheck in the end of the week you know with me I can't watch cat videos all week or else at the end of the week there's nothing there in the bank and then a lot of people are very

unhappy with me and so one of the big challenges I had a piano entrepreneur was my level of accountability, like what you're talking about, where I've got to get shit done. And other people's level of accountability where it's like, I get paid anyway, whether I get you done. And, you know, I used to work, one of our companies was a mortgage company. And in the mortgage company, you're literally the big fish, but you live off your feeder fish. And so you've got the title company over here that you live off the credit company. You've got the appraisal company. You've got the lender that you're selling the notes to.

And you're dependent upon these people. And if they don't do their job then your job doesn't get done and you've got this orchestra of of timelines and and you know the credit company's got to come first and then the appraisal is going to get ordered the title is going to get ordered and then we need the the uh credit company to verify the credit and that's going to come in the appraiser has got to do his job and come in the title company's got to do their job and come in the lender's got to process the loan approve it and then ask for whatever documents andiser's got to do his job and come in. The title company's got to do their job and come in. The lender's got to process the loan, approve it, and then ask for whatever documents. And then we've got to go to the customer and ask for whatever documents. And so you have just this endless, seemingly endless group of people that if they don't do their job and one person isn't doing their job, it just mucks up the whole system.

And that's a big challenge that you have. And, and so I'd encourage, uh, other entrepreneurs to surround themselves, like with what you do with your group or whatever, um, to have other entrepreneurs around them because nobody knows the pain and hustle of your experience than other entrepreneurs. I mean, I, you know, I talk to people, I I've got friends that they have, um that they have wives who work for the government, which is even a more guaranteed paycheck. Their wives just do not understand what the hell they have to deal with every day. They have no clues to the pressure that these guys are under and having to make a buck.

But then they're also angry because they make more money than they do working for the government. He's never happy yet. They're like, you don't have a college degree and you make more money than me, but I work for the government and I have a great insurance. But how does that work? Well, that's the reward system. But, yeah, surrounding yourself with other like-minded entrepreneurs can really help you out, whether it's meeting on the Internet, whether's doing lunches uh of course those are getting harder and harder to do most people like to do stuff this is one of the things i like to do of course the podcast because i get to meet wonderful people like yourself uh and uh great ideas and people are interested in innovation and entrepreneurism so having those sort of things is really important. Yeah, this booming entrepreneurism, we've sold this dream that, you know, leave the

bus behind, leave the corporate world and you've got all this freedom. And the reality is the exact opposite, or what I say, the discipline that sets you free. Because once you sit there in front of your laptop and you go, hey, I'm living the laptop lifestyle now, who's there to kick your butt if you haven't done what you said you're gonna do? You set your goal for the week and it's in your head and there's no accountability. There's no manager coming up and saying,

look, I need this deadline by Friday. You're your own boss, so you start, as you said, watching cat videos or you find, you work on the easy stuff that you like without pushing yourself and the hard yards is, the growth is where you're doing uncomfortable things whether that is starting something like a podcast you've never done it before or cold outreach or getting on the phone and cold calling people all those things that

that will improve your business at the very early stages or your next growth phrase you can put off because there's just no one there to to really sort of give you that extra little push. So this paradox of the freedom, really, it's actually the discipline of going, every day I've got to get up and I've got to work on my highest leverage first. I encourage people all the time, keep working on your highest leverage because the easy stuff anyone can do. And it feels like you're busy. I've had a really busy week this week.

I've done all these things. But you've done the easy stuff. You've done the stuff that doesn't move the needle. You haven't worked on the 80-20 principle that 80% of your business comes from 20% of your actions. And you haven't looked at that and gone, okay, it's the hard stuff I've got to do. It's the cold calls. It's the cold emails. It's the hard stuff i've got to do it's the cold calls it's the cold emails it's the it's the uncomfortable things and without that accountability you'll just drop back into your

your comfort zone and you don't get that growth both personally and in your business because there just isn't there anyone there to hold your account at the end of the week and say look you're supposed to do this and you didn't and there's no one there to stop you so it is that paradox that, you know, you leave the corporate world because you want to sack the boss and you end up with no boss and you end up doing all the fun, cool things that don't make you the money

or don't give you the leverage that you really need. Is that right, Ray? I agree. I'm a big believer that if you don't control your destiny and someone else does, you're not going to have a very good destiny most likely. Yeah, so many business owners just start the day with opening the inbox and saying, okay, well, let's see what the world has thrown at me as my day instead of planning it out

and going, okay, if I spend the first two hours on my marketing that I've been putting off for months, if I spend the first two hours on a new product innovation, and then I open up the inbox, and then the world can go to crap, and I can be pulled in all those different directions of all these people want my time and my effort. But most business owners, each and every day, they just start the day with, okay, well, let's see what's going to happen today. And that's a recipe for very little growth and a recipe for eventually burnout, where you're just not working on your highest leverage.

You know, you just gave me a real tip I should apply to myself that I just realized. I do start every day by reading the inbox. And one of the problems with that, and it's probably the way I have my inbox set up, but I'll kind of scroll through the easy things I can delete really quickly. The news is usually one of them. But one of the problems with the news, especially here in America these days, is we are heading towards our own apocalypse. And you guys have a front row seat to it there in Australia.

Is the news is very, it captures your attention and draws you in, sucks you in. And I can click a button off a news item that comes to my inbox and then an hour is gone of me watching videos and reading whatever salacious story has come across our salacious American president. President in quotes, let's put it that way. Asterisk. So you're right.

I just was thinking as you're saying that of all the wasted time and and how that's deferred me i should probably set my inbox up separately where the news i think gmail has a way where i can set it up where the news things are put into a different category and i probably should really think about doing that because um i i you you've you pointed out a real time waste i actually i've got a boomerang on gmail so you can pause your inbox so pause it for two four hours something like that and just sort of get back to to your hard stuff i actually stopped watching the news about three years ago uh business coach sort of recommended it. And it's been life-changing for me because they sell you those bad luck stories. It's on purpose to get you, as you said, salacious,

clickbait, all those things. And the majority of it is completely irrelevant to you. There's so much you can't control. There's so much you have no end result in. They show you a story and then they don't ever follow up. So it's unfinished business, which makes you a little bit more anxious. So I've become really guarded around curating what I want to learn. I'm the same when I'm driving in a car now. I listen to podcasts. I listen to audio books. I don't listen to the shock jocks on the radio that have opinion on everything and know nothing, or even the music, I don't like that track.

So I've become much more guarded in how I consume content and I've made a deliberate choice to say, I'm curating my own content and it's that passivity. Again, we talked about being business, it's the same in life where I'm saying I'm not saying sit down in front the news and feed me what you tell me is relevant I'm saying I'm gonna stop that and I'm gonna start going out looking for things that I enjoy and then a relevant and I'm gonna pique my curiosity and challenge me instead of allowing just other people to just tell me all

their information their opinion yeah you've now encouraged me you've influenced me I'm gonna go really look at Gmail's inbox app and that's the app that that puts the I think it puts like the news and some of the magazines and stuff into a separate tab and it tries to parse your stuff because i i realize now and i i've been having this problem since uh 2016 when we elected some orange monkey to uh to an office that he's not qualified for in any way shape or form um pathological liar actually um and it's been really hard because the news is always salacious i mean geez we have guys in high office sleeping with porn stars and getting away with it paying them actually. And it's been really hard because the news is always salacious. I mean, geez,

we have guys in high office sleeping with porn stars and getting away with it, paying them off. It doesn't get much more salacious than that unless we get video. I mean, that news comes through to Australia as well, and everyone's talking about it a couple of years ago. I'm sure. We're wasting everyone's time in the world when they see their inbox and we are just sorry world sorry world trailer trash america we're sharing so yeah you you give me some good ideas i'm going to go revisit the inbox i think it's called the inbox app by um by gmail normally i use my inbox as like a task to do list but you just

really identified that I I get circumvented and and distracted and then it becomes you know I mean that's that's the problem you get on the internet you see like cat video you know it's like it's like it's like a puppy raccoon you know chase yeah well the reality is I used to work in casinos. When I worked on cruise ships, I used to work in casinos. And social media used the exact same leverage that casinos do. So casinos, when you're playing the slot machines, it's randomized and it's the flashing lights.

So, hey, I've won something. So Facebook have used the exact same thing. Hey, you scroll through and it's the flashing lights so hey i've won something so facebook have used the exact same thing hey you scroll through and it's just random posts so you're looking for you just keep scrolling and scrolling because you never know what's going to come up most of it's crap most of it's irrelevant and then you get that dopamine here to hey someone's liked what i've said or i've got this message and it's the exact same system that the casinos use to get you your money. Instead, you'll get this adrenaline and this dopamine of social proof. So the smartest people in the world now work for social media companies

to get you to stay longer on their platforms. So don't beat yourself up, Chris. It's a whole industry around deliberately making you time inefficient and keeping you on their platforms for as long as possible. And they've hired the smartest people in the world. So don't beat yourself up. It's just human nature. But when you recognize that, you can start to think, okay,

let me put a couple of things in place to stop myself because otherwise i just can't yeah in fact i'm i'm looking right now at gmail inbox uh uh which is a different thing and in the past i've resisted this i've tried it and gone back but now i'm actually re-looking at it and yeah it takes my news crap and puts them into the news crap section. And then it definitely cleans up my inbox and gives me kind of, it actually gives me a visual thing. I'm not sure if that might be, I'm seeing a cool video here. But yeah, you're right with Facebook,

with those autoplay videos that they really get you hooked on distraction. Yeah. And it's a time killer. We said, we set these goals. We've got these big a time killer. We set these goals. We've got these big aspirations as entrepreneurs. We want to achieve this. At the end of the year, we want to double our revenue

or whatever your metric is, you set to the start. And then the reality is everybody else in the world is out to take a piece of your time, a little bit of what you've mentally set out as your goal for the year. So any tool, technique, or trick that keeps you on track, that keeps you focused, that keeps you motivated, that keeps you working towards the goals that you set out,

and there you are. So the more that you can tap into that, and the more you can deliver that purpose of what you really want to do and shut out all those distractions or work out ways that you can be more productive more more living in the moment and more engaged in the things that you love because the reality is you don't really love cat videos or most of the news you get there and you go that was a complete waste of my time. But as I said, they're pretty good at doing that.

So I really, I teach people and then I encourage people and I show them because I live it myself, that there is a way to be much more focused, much more goal-orientated. You don't have to give up all those things. I'm not saying it's all or nothing. I'm just saying that for most people, they are so distracted and it's only getting worse because we live in this information age where we're bombarded and everyone's on their phones

and they're hooked on them. But those Facebook and YouTube and all those other people are stopping you from achieving your goals if you'll let them. So if your goal is just to spend 20 minutes and get some entertainment, then that's fine. But the reality is most people spend, as you said, you go down that rabbit hole and the next thing you know it's gone. And that's an hour when you could have been landing your next customer.

It could have been an hour when you could be reading a book that you really love and say, I don't have time for that. The biggest lie we tell ourselves is that I don't have time. What we're actually saying is that I don't value that enough to spend the time on that. I spend it on something else. You should really write that down and share that as a quote. That's a brilliant quote right there.

I hope people will sit down with me. Where are we at right now in the show? We're about 40 minutes in. So if you want to go back and recapture that quote I think that's a brilliant quote what you just said put it on a shirt and I probably need that as a sign on my wall so 40 minutes into the show that there was your quote if you want to go back and grab it but yeah I mean that's that's really know, I've gone down wormholes with either the news or watching videos. And sometimes it's doing my own videos that I'm editing or something like that.

And then several hours will pass. I'll go back to my inbox and there's somebody for three hours has been trying to hand me money. And I've been ignoring them. And sometimes it's the end of the day so by the time they get the chance to talk to me communicate and give me money and it's the next day so I've lost the whole day of income that I could have done and sometimes that cautious sales because that person's like well maybe I'll go do something else with my money so they give to you you want to you're so Chris tell me a little bit about your masterminds.

Who's your masterminds for and what do you do in that group? Mostly consulting to get people coaching, help them ask questions, share ideas, concepts that I have for stuff that's doing. Most of mine are fairly small and in their infancy, and we're trying to grow them and build them and all that good stuff, mostly just sharing data and everything else. You know, if people want to be able to get a question in, they don't have to pay, you know, several hundred dollars an hour to talk to me for. They can get a pop for that and have it more easily accessible. They can actually have me as a board of directors, so it works out fairly well.

Okay. And how long have they been running? For a board of directors, so it works out fairly well. Okay. And how long have they been running? For a couple of years now. I've had two or three ones that I've done from two or three different formats of business things and mostly they're just open formats. I mean, I don't try and do the whole upscale 5,000. Usually I'm busy with my own consultancy and my own agency. So I don't spend a lot of time building them and doing things

You know, it's one of those things where you got so much you do you you try and do is what you? Yeah, I probably should watch list cat videos Okay, cool most definitely so you there because I'm sorry I lost you there yeah sorry we broke up what was that I was asking what's the sort of biggest lesson you there because the difference I believe in mastermind is it's a two way to two-way street there there is i believe there's seldom the guru it's a it's peer it's peer-to-peer so everybody's sort of learning from each other so you know in our conversation today you've already taken a couple of nuggets what do you learn from the groups

uh it's pretty interesting what people's questions are and what they're dealing with and what they're doing and you know it's one of those things too where sometimes you're the teacher and uh as the as the teacher you become the student so a lot of times you or they remind you of something that you need to go back to and and get back to basics as as the great basketball coaches say go back to basics and you you kind of you sometimes learn from them so bouncing back ideas uh and that's one of the great things, like I said, about maybe using a service like yours or having your own virtual board of directors as that makes it so you can bounce ideas off of. Because like you said earlier in the show,

sometimes you come up with ideas that sound really cool to you, but they really stink to the rest of the world. And so having those sort of resources really make a difference. Yeah, the difference between success and failure often is turning a good idea into a great idea and that just takes a left field, a bit of advice from somebody. Also, we already know half this stuff, but it's buried down. You just talked about it now where you used to do your inbox and you'll go back to that. We've learned so much stuff and then we've forgotten it and it just bubbles back up and go, okay, that used to work for me. Why the hell did I stop doing that?

And so it's, it's, it's not even teaching something new. Sometimes it's just reaffirming stuff that you know, and you've forgotten and you stop doing. Yep. Sounds good. I've got to go corral a puppy Ronan so I'm going to wrap the show give us your plugs and everything else

so people can look you up on the interwebs Well I'm always available on LinkedIn it's one of my favorite channels just because there isn't all that distraction so LinkedIn it's Ronan Leonard eCountability.io for the mastermind platform and on Twitter I. eCountability.io for the mastermind platform.

And on Twitter, I am eCountability. Sounds good, Ronan. And everyone go check him out. I've got to go chase down a puppy. Sounds like he's crying for me. We certainly appreciate you guys subscribing to the show. Make sure you subscribe or the puppy, you know, won't get enough treats or something. I don't know.

Go to Google Play. Go to iTunes. Go to YouTube.com for it says Chris V says Chris boss thanks for tuning in the show you guys are in wonderful audience and see you next time