The Startup Ideas Podcast - Mental Models from a Shrink for Entrepreneurs

Episode Date: June 15, 2023

Today Greg is joined by Peter Shallard, The Shrink for Entrepreneurs. In this episode, they'll talk about conscious blind spots and cognitive biases particular to bootstrapped and venture-backed founders. ►►Subscribe to Greg's weekly newsletter for insights on community,creators and commerce.You'll also find out when new and exclusiveepisodes come out from Where it Happens. And it's totally free.https://latecheckout.substack.comFIND ME ON SOCIAL:Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@gregisenbergLINKS FOR THIS EPISODE:Production Team:https://www.bigoceanpodcasting.comPeter Shallard:https://www.petershallard.com/SHOW NOTES:0:00 - Intro4:47 - How to practice focus16:12 - Bootrapped vs. Ventrure-backed mindsets30:14 - The business of coaching

This is a special episode because it's with my dear friend Peter Shalard. I wanted to bring you on the show because you're the shrink for entrepreneurs. And I feel like I've got a few stories with you, but I feel like you've got just hundreds, thousands of stories because you're working with a lot of some of the most well-known people. But before we get into that, how do you define what a shrink for entrepreneur is? Well, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be chatting. shrink for entrepreneurs is, you know, my background.

I'm a psychotherapist by training, and I am an entrepreneur. My first business was a brick and mortar therapy practice. And so what I did was build a specialty and working with founders, a lot of founders in tech, a lot of venture-backed founders, helping them with psychology, with therapy. And then as you and I have discussed, you know, what I kind of ended up doing was taking the world's greatest lifelong MBA program because by working with these people, I got to learn as much from them as I was helping them with their psychology. So I've been at this for best part of 14 years now, and it's been the world's greatest MBA that I was paid to take. And so now I get to talk to my

clients not only about psychology, but business strategy as well. And literally every single entrepreneur I work with has the same story about what happened right before they met me, which is, oh, I went looking for a therapist, I knew I wanted to do, you know, some therapies and coaching. I knew I wanted to optimize my thinking and behavior. And, and then they just have this weird experience of talking to someone who just completely doesn't get it. It's almost like a civilian attitude of just not knowing how entrepreneurship works that, you know, unfortunately, most people who specialize in therapy, they're just, they couldn't be further away from the call face of entrepreneurship. And they just don't get it. There's this gulf of

misunderstanding. Okay, so walk me through how you actually help people like me. Well, first of all, I generally meet people like you the morning after the darkest night of the soul. So I tend to think about like any type of therapy is you tend to reach out and get started when things are very, very bad. So I meet a lot of people in crisis. You know, over the last decade, there's been a few VC funds that will have me on speed dial for when a founder that they believe in and they want to lead a company, kind of has one of those crisis situations where if it goes badly, they might end up not being the right person to lead the company. So I'm usually a resource that's put in to help the founder accelerate their personal growth and development when the company

is such a rocket ship that it's like, you know, doubling every couple of months in size. The founder is waking up every day to a totally new business because of the scale and the speed at which it's scaling and their job as CEO is changing so rapidly that like you know it's totally reasonable for anyone to kind of get some whiplash from that. So what I help founders do is accelerate the rate of their development as operators as leaders, their interpersonal skills, their ability to do really great investor relations. And I do that by helping them really iron out their cognitive biases and blind spots. So, you know, any areas where a limitation, and their thinking is causing them to not see the truth of what's going on.

And this is where this conversation can get really fractal, right? Because we could talk about thousands of different examples. But a good one for a founder who's really winning is like being a foil for their hubris, right? It's really easy for people who have quick wins to get carried away and start to believe that everything they touch turns to gold and lose their kind of psychological calibration to what the actual result is what's going on in their business. And they might be winning when they start feeling that way, but they may not notice it when they stop winning, when problems start occurring. And so part of what I do is provide this like radical hit of self-awareness. I want to take a few minutes to

selfishly get you to coach me right now. Let's do it. Therapy for Greg. Let's go. How are you doing, how am I doing? Right now, amazing. I'm in Charleston, South Carolina. And I run a holding company. So I run a bunch of different startups. So that's like a, you know, a roller coaster on steroids. Several roller coars I want. So sometimes it's helpful for me just to like take a step back and just extract myself from the situation and like go somewhere like Charleston and sort of rebalance myself. So that's what I'm doing right now. Rebalancing. And it's been awesome. I feel awesome. Nice. What is it that you what is it that you think you need to focus on when it comes to your thinking and behavior to really crush the next 12 months. What type of Greg

do you need to be for this holding company you've built? I would say the most important decision that me and many founders can make is ignoring the noise. It's so easy to chase shiny objects, especially if you're running a studio and a holding company because the world is your oyster. For example, yesterday. There was the Apple event. And there was, listen, there was a lot of really cool stuff that's going to, like, transform our businesses. But at the same time, like, do I need to be, like, stopping what I'm doing and watching it and spending the whole day just kind of, you know, digesting what's happening? Like, probably not. Like, you know, I probably can take a Saturday morning, catch up on it in a more leisure way. And that's probably more healthy for my well-being than sort of being,

oh my God, I need to go stop everything and rethink everything while it's happening. Right on. Yeah. So what you're talking about is a real important key to mental health. It's the principle of agency and volition that one of the big things that can change our like relationship to stress, overwhelm our ability to focus isn't even really about what we do. Right. Like you might watch that keynote start to finish, but it's about being in control of the choice. so that you're the one with the agency, that it's not Tim Cook deciding that 10 a.m. Pacific on a Monday or whatever is when Greg stops work and focuses on this,

it's about you having, like, you having the agency, you being the one who's in the driver's seat, because even if you're tactically getting distracted by the bright, shiny object, at least you're choosing to. You've got a thesis about when it's right to do that, right? You know, the Apple event's like a big one and only happens once or twice a year. But I think, you know, these social media platforms can be really dangerous for entrepreneurs because they'll look at, you know, they'll look at a tweet that they're just scrolling on the phone while they're sitting on the John before they start working on a given day. And they'll see something really interesting that's one of those bright, shiny objects.

And it can feel like, oh, this is game changing information for my industry and whatever they intended to do that morning's out the window now because they're going down this rabbit hole of like learning. But the rub is like, and this is what I kind of want to. find out from you is what is the rubric for deciding? Like I think you're someone who would have a really interesting answer to this because with a holding company ostensibly you are looking out for really interesting new opportunities, right? What type of criteria do you have mentally at that earlier stage when you find yourself getting sucked in and getting curious and seeing the possibilities? Okay, a few things. One is if you're listening to this, I'm pulling up a coffee cup, it's an empty coffee cup. And why is it an empty coffee cup? Well, number one, I love coffee. But number two, I only go on

Twitter while I'm drinking coffee. I call it the coffee framework. So I drink a coffee in the morning and a coffee in the afternoon. And while I'm drinking those coffees, like I'm allowed to go on Twitter. That's when I do my tweets. That's why if you look at most of my tweets, they happen between the hours of 9 and 10.30 a.m. Eastern, because that's when I'm generally having my first coffee. And I allow myself to basically take it all in. Just go wild. All you can eat buffet for Twitter in the morning and then the afternoon. When I'm, you know, if I'm on the John, I'm going to want to pull out my Twitter and I just try to refrain from doing that. And it's just about setting these systems for yourself so that, you know, I always say don't let push notifications push you around.

And that's the second thing, which is, I don't know why 99.9% of people do not have, do not disturb mode on at all times. Like, do not disturb mode should be the default. It should not be, you're getting buzzed every single time something happens in the world. All notifications off by default. Off by default. Like, what are you doing? You know? And I try to do this so I can actually have like the time and space to like think about,

okay, like what do I want right now? What is good for my businesses? And it takes me from being on the defense to being on the offense really quick. And this is something that I've been doing for like six, six and eight months. Like it's literally transformed my business. That's incredible. So when you do have something that I'm just turning this into an interview, less of a therapy session, when you do have, when you do have something that you really, like when you have an idea, when you have the very beginnings of something you think you want to pursue as an entrepreneur, how do you know internally? Like I'm curious about your psychology. How do you know internally this is something good that I should look like that I should explore versus like, you know, those very natural mental dialogues we have where we're like, that's a distraction. I've got to stay away from it. So I don't know, man.

I built like an intuition and you just got to trust your gut. Like there's a reason why we have our guts, you know? There's a reason why we feel certain things. I'm laughing to myself because I was chatting with my co-founder Theo yesterday. And I was like, and I quote, we should do X. I'm 100% sure it's going to work. And then he's sitting there like 100%. Like, are you on crack?

Like 100%. How are you sure that if we're going to go build that product or do that thing, that it's 100% chance? And sometimes you just gain so much conviction based on your gut that you just need to follow your gut. I wish in my 20s I followed my gut sometimes, but I really followed other people's guts. I would be like, okay, if Kevin Rose from Dig is building a video start. I need to build a video startup.

Or Kevin Sistram from Instagram is starting, you know, a news app. I should build a news app. And now I'm kind of trying to like ignore as much as possible. And with the hopes that the stuff that I create becomes way more, you know, as Seth Godin puts it remarkable, something that you'd make a remark of. I mean, this is one of the most kind of common cognitive biases that can trip up entrepreneurs who have like got something and they're running with it, right? Is that that imitative desire that's driven by starting to like form a peer group.

What a lot of people who are starting out don't know is that it actually gets worse, the more successful you become because you start to feel that you're sort of at the table with some of these amazing people. And so a lot of entrepreneurs, the more traction they get, the more success they create, they start to pay more and more attention to what their peers. And also the people who are just a little ahead of, them who might have pretty big profiles like what those people are doing and what they're reacting to and what their insights and their mental calculus is about like the next big thing hence

kevin rose is doing a video app you have got to do a video app right like that effect actually becomes harder to resist the more experience that you get until you get a level of maturity i think an intellectual maturity out the other side of it where you learn to put those things aside And one of the ways that you can fix this cognitive bias is by focusing if you are going to consume information on the primary sources so that your intuition, your instincts are reacting to the same information that these people like Kevin Rose are also reacting to. Because you're more likely to form a unique point of view. If you're looking at what's happening in the objective world and thinking, what can I do with that? Like, what could I build with that? rather than looking at, hey, what are these people doing, right?

And how are they reacting to the real world, to reality? Because there's a, you know, there's a Plato's cave allegory there, right? If you're looking, if you're just watching where the other people are moving to, you're not seeing what it is that they're moving toward. Exactly. And that was actually Theo's response. He started laughing. And because he knows how ridiculous it is to say something like that.

And he was like, okay, so what you're really saying is, How do we win even though we lose, which I think was a really interesting way of framing it? What he means by that is, okay, crazy founder, CEO guy, you know, I understand that you have got a lot of conviction, but this feels like a zero or one thing. It's either going to really be successful or it's going to fall flat. How do we make sure that if it falls flat that we still learn? because in the holding company model and the product studio model, learning is also helpful because you can basically say like, okay, I learned this, you know, how to do Twitter ads. Even though we spent $50,000 on Twitter ads and it went nowhere, we can actually apply that

to another one of our businesses. We were jamming about this recently when we hung out. I think there's been a really big shift that, you know, with the holding company you're at the front of of like the strategy of getting after, getting after opportunities. opportunities where there's obviously a win, but then failure is like an actual other win, like a real concrete win, because I think we're coming out of a period, this is what you and I were chatting about, of like big investing in technology companies, a lot of hype kind of reached its absolute peak in 2021, where, and you know, in that VC model, it's go

big or go bust that like you want to be swinging for the fences. A lot of people were shooting at crazy big ideas where they were 100% certain it was going to win or be an absolute massive failure. Right. And when there's enough capital floating around the system, you can take those shots. But now there's an opportunity for entrepreneurs to chase after ideas where there's an opportunity at really big success. But even taking another fork in the road is like a different type of success, right?

Like trying to build a really big scalable company, but if it doesn't go so well, you accidentally build like a small cash flowing business that runs itself. Quick interruption from me. If you're listening to this on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, you're getting any value. You need to come to YouTube and subscribe to the Where It Happens podcast YouTube channel. I promise you the experience is richer, more interesting. So if you're getting any value, just stop what you're doing,

open up the YouTube app, go to the website, and press subscribe at where it happened on YouTube. And if you're watching this on YouTube and you haven't subscribed, what are you doing? Go press subscribe. Thank you. Enjoy the rest of the show. So let's talk about VC versus non-VC a little more. And it relates to your whole like mememic idea, the idea that like people are sort of

following other people and copying other people. What's that book? René Girard. The point of that book is basically that like people buy things that other people buy to self-identify. And when you think about venture capital, that is a business that like is all about trends. And it's all about following what other people are doing. So if crypto is hot, people are going to invest in crypto. If now VR is hot, people are going to now invest in, you know,

the new Apple studio companies built on top of that Apple reality pro or whatever they're calling it. So I don't know, like two weeks ago, the Metaverse was dead. Now the Metaverse is back. Is the Metaverse going to die? You know what I mean? So it's like VCs are just investing in companies based on these trends. And what ends up happening is you just see a influx of companies that look and feel very similar that are attacking a space. And one of those are going to win or a few of them are going to win and then they're going to have outsized returns. The problem with that for entrepreneurs is you end up changing your business to be in one of those spaces. I'd say about maybe third, a third, maybe 40% of the clients I work with in general are bootstrappers. I love

them. I think that like there's some bootstrappers out there that'll turn you green with envy, right? Like the types of businesses that've built, the lifestyles that they enable, it's a you know, it's incredible. And you frontload the effort. It's a lot harder. When you start a bootstrap company, you're not getting, no one's offering you awards, you're not getting written up in tech crunch. No one knows you exist, right? Those early years are like all grind. And I think this is what is so compelling and what was so compelling about the last decade of like crazy venture capital, like froth and growth is that, yeah, like you start feeling like a winner as soon as you get a meeting at like a major fund, right? From a psychological point of view, there's all of these

proxies for success that are immediately accessible or short-term accessible along the path, which is like a really long path to building a successful business that actually makes money, right? That creates value in the world that convinces strangers to pay money at a good margin for that value being created. That journey could be like five, ten years long, but when you go down the VC route, you can immediately start celebrating because you're getting ridded up on Forbes 30 under 30. You're at the pre-seed stage and you're booking meetings with really big investors. You're telling your friends, you're getting patted on the back for that,

let alone like getting to your actual first round of fundraising where a lot of, like a lot of naive entrepreneurs feel like they've won. They pop a bottle, right, on the night that the funds wire for their seed stage, not understanding that they're now obligated to a bunch of investors to work their ass off to build something that, has spectacularly high odds of not working out, right? Like they now have a contractual obligation to grind really, really hard. And a partner who's done their part because their part was writing the check and providing

the capital and now it's all on you. I talk a lot about this dynamic that I call the action result gap, which explains like a lot of human behavior, right? When there's a gap between taking an action and getting a result, it becomes difficult for us for human beings to do those things, right? like there's an obesity epidemic. The reason that so many people struggle to be in really great shape is that to get in really great shape, you have to take the action of like working out and eating salads.

And the result doesn't really kick in for like three weeks, right? If you like work out every day and eat salads every day, three weeks later, you'll maybe two weeks. You'll step on a scale and be like, huh, and you'll get a result. And there'll be that like dopamine, serotonin experience of like, wow, like this is working. I'm getting sexier. This is cool. But those two weeks are really hard for us psychologically, right, because of the gap between taking the action and the result, whereas a donut has no action result gap.

You see it, you eat it, you take a bite, you immediately have that chemical experience, right? Your brain is bathed in these exciting neurotransmitters. You've got fat. You've got sugar. You're enjoying yourself. No action result gap. So it's a very compelling thing to do. This is all an allegory for venture capital, right?

when you can get high off of filling your calendar with meetings for your pre-seed company, when you close that pre-seed round, right, you haven't built a successful company. You are not at the ultimate result, but you've lined up all these little results, these little proxies for the things that you ultimately want that feel really emotionally compelling. And that's why people get sucked in at a psychological level. It's highly motivating because trying to build a successful business to a billion dollar exit over seven to ten years is really hard. And that's the biggest action result gap of all.

But closing your next round is like in front of you in the next 30 days. It gives us these kind of guardrails neurologically to go focus on to chase those highs that we ultimately need to inspire action. So bootstrappers are monks, man. They have like a lot of mental discipline because you have to really have a vision. You have to believe. You have to be able to see what is possible. and live through this action result gap.

I think the cool thing about it is that like on the other side, you get maximum freedom. I think most entrepreneurs have like share a value of freedom. They want autonomy. And bootstrapers are the ones who figure out that you can have it if you sacrifice it to begin with, right? Because, you know, you're severely constrained when you're starting out. You're using your customers to fund,

your business, you're making promises. Like a lot of amazing bootstrappers started with the model of delivering services so that they have immediate cash flow up front and then building product that like create some scale, you know, with the margin that they make. And so like, you know, that, that's a lot of work. That's like you have a, you basically have a job for working for your customers so that you can build a product and a business that can put you out of a job one day. And it's, and it's tough because you're like,

I just quit my job at Google making, you know, $300,000 to go start an agency doing services. And now I have like 20 clients that are, you know, emailing me all the time and texting me all the time. And this doesn't feel like freedom. And you're making less. So you have to be, you have to really, really believe in what you're doing and and be true to the path. And also like I see a lot of bootstrappers that like will leave a company like, Google start bootstrapping and then like three months later I see like they change their LinkedIn to like now they work at Shopify. And it's right it's like no this isn't something that

you can just try for 90 days or or 60 days and expect a result. This is something that you have to have a serious time scale like I don't I don't know if it's five years but you know at least 12 to 24 months of like, hey, I'm going to go and build this thing. It's going to be bootstrap. And I need to hit this goal of 20K MRR or whatever it is in order for me to continue. I think every entrepreneur to some degree is like motivated by freedom. And a lot of a lot of people make the mistake of thinking that the high autonomy environment of just like going and raising money, getting venture funding behind you actually creates that freedom. Right. that like so this when you've got some operating capital in the bank what most early stage founders

discover is they have this huge amount of autonomy there's not like a ton of supervision or scrutiny right like your investors if you have them they're not like micromanaging your time but that's really dangerous too because you're in this totally isolated state with a ton of money that other people's money that you've got to figure out how to build something with there's a purity to bootstrapping where you don't have that fake kind of freedom, right? Because you realize you're like, oh, man, I've just traded my job with one boss at like Google or wherever for a job with 24 bosses that I'm deeply accountable to. And they want things and they want it to be fast and quality and cheap all at the same time. And they're like blowing me up about it. And I don't get paid to sit in

meetings anymore. So it does feel a lot like that isn't freedom. You mentioned before around, people filling up their calendars with BC meetings and, you know, raising these pre-seed rounds and people thinking like, great, like now I've made it. I had a call yesterday with a founder who's raised $600 million, multi-billion dollar valuation company, and he's trying to figure out what to do. Like, he, here's a guy, like, you expect once you're having hit unicorns data, and you've got hundreds of millions in the bank, like, you're good. And it's like, no. If anything, he's like even more stressed trying to figure it out.

Like, to me, like, there's a bunch of founders that right now, that are worth a lot on paper, that are going to have crazy headwinds, like within the next six to nine months because they're going to have to recap their companies. They're going to realize, wow, this venture thing, this is not as attractive as I originally thought. Because the other thing is for most founders who take venture capital, especially at like the series B, C, D, and E stage, these boards could fire you at any time. So imagine starting a company, raising $600 million, doing this for 12, 14 years. and, you know, recession hits, not even like, you know, you did your best. This is an outside externality that's happened.

Recession hits. And they're like, okay, thanks, Peter. It was great knowing you. Here's like a 12-month severance package. You know, you'll have your stock, but like we're going to go and recap this company, which basically is another way of saying, like, we're going to, change the ownership structure of this company. Like, see you later.

Happens all the time. Versus your bootstrapping, and it's like, you are the captain of your ship. I think a lot of, I mean, to sum it up, to put a bow on what we've been talking about, I think a lot of people start out the journey of entrepreneurship motivated by freedom, right? That's what they ultimately crave, is that autonomy, that sense of being the captain of their fate, the master of this all. And then they start thinking about what's the best way to go about this. And you have to be really, really careful if that's you, what types of strategies you start imitating. Because if you start chasing after like proxies, artificial versions of that freedom,

like the freedom you think you have when you raise some seed capital or like, you know, whatever, then you can really quickly end up in a place where freedom is the last thing that you feel. where you wake up every day, you know, stressed, obligated with this enormous pressure upon yourself to, you know, to go and perform. Because, yeah, that's, that is what success looks like for a huge number of, and we're talking now about champagne problems, right? Like about the top 1% most successful people in that ecosystem. That is what success looks like.

And so, yeah, I think, I think, I love that you're kind of banging this drum out there in the world because I think bootstrapping will always be hard because it's, It's like a front loading of the effort, right? Like you're taking the hits. You're taking the knock to your freedom at the start where you've got to just, you've got to find a way to sell the services, do the work, manage the clients. Do unscailable, like unsexy things to pay the bills so that you can, like I think it's totally feasible to spend 20% of your time in your first year of entrepreneurship as a bootstrapper

building the product that's going to one day liberate all the rest of your time. Right. Like it can really be you might spend 80. percent of your time just doing fee for service type work if you're just starting out that. My journey was exactly that, right? Like I built a therapy practice trading my time for money. And for a long time, it was just a journey of increasing my prices. Like if my lifestyle, if I wanted to have any upward mobility, I was like, guess I got to charge more. And, you know, after several years of doing that and succeeding to the point that my roster was booked and I had this great network of

entrepreneurs preferring me business and you know that i i looked around and was like i don't know if i can keep doing this for the rest of my life i've got to find something that scales um what can i do and that was when i started just like tinkering and iterating and playing with ideas and it was really hard because i would do it on like friday afternoon right like a time that not many people want to go to therapy and when i when i had some free time in my schedule that was when i would build and play and experiment. But I mean, for me, it was like, you know, I was living in New York City. I was, it's not a cheap place to live. It was like 90, 90%, 95% of my time was fee for service so that I could build something that could make money, you know, without me being the central

engine in the machine. I want you to talk about what you built with commit action. But I also want to let you know that when you told me about commit action in my mind, I was like, you are crazy. Like, why would you do this thing? You know, you're at the center of all these, you know, big venture back startups. You know people like Seth Godin and all these well-known people. Like, why would you go and create a service like this that could max out at $20 million, $40 million a year in revenue? That's like what in my mind I thought about.

And probably in my mind, even less than that. In my mind, I was like, this is a $5 million business. Fast forward to today, I'm like, man, you did all the right things. You literally did all the right things. You took a service business where you were making money. You learned about the problems. You productized it. You learned how to scale via profitable marketing channels.

You never raised a dollar. You have a good name. And it's been compounding ever since. So tell people. what it is because I think a lot of people can learn from your how you did it and let's go. I will. I do have to just clarify though. I did raise some money and I want to shout out human ventures.

They, a VC who actually understands the whole co model, one of the most successful companies in their portfolio, they're building in this way. They have a huge stake in CKBG, which is the parent company, the holding company that produces a bunch of spirits companies. And so I came to them with the idea. like they're building this really cool business there in a similar model to the way you are at late checkout. And I came to them with the same idea. I was like, I want to raise the first and last round for this company, a little bit of jet fuel.

And to their credit, they were like up for it. They saw the vision. And so we did it. But yeah, I just I just want to for all the shit we're talking about VC, I want to shout out to the people who get it. So commit action is the company that I built that was out of my services business. and it's a productivity company. What we do is a coached weekly planning ritual for entrepreneurs, for creatives, for executives.

We solve a problem. If you're one of these people, you're working in the knowledge economy, your ability to succeed is dependent entirely on how well you execute on the big, bold ideas that you have. So what commit action is, is a real simple coached weekly planning ritual where you actually work with somebody

one of our highly trained ninja productivity coaches to sit down and plan out the highest leverage use of your time every single week. Then you've got someone on your team, right? Commit action enables you to hire this pro effectively to be your dedicated focus and responsibility guy or girl whose singular job is to keep you focused and in the zone at all times. So we're the only productivity company in the world that rather than focusing people on checking off a bunch of to-dos or project management, we just care about what is the highest leverage use of your time? And are you carving out even just a couple of hours a week to work on that thing, that picking up the ball and moving it forward for like whatever's next for you, whatever creates the growth? And the cool thing about selling a real meaty service, right, is that we can give away all of the, information for free, right? Like where I, and that's kind of the journey that I'm on right now is I'm trying to figure out the right formats and the right way to just kind of share our methodology and teach anyone who wants to pay attention how we do things that come in action, how we turn

entrepreneurs into these execution powerhouses where we're social primates. We're hardwired to perform at our best when we're connected to others. Before we head out, what's, uh, what's the biggest tip you can give to folks around productivity? Oh, the biggest biggest tip around productivity is you're crazy to do it alone, right? Like, like I said, we're social primates. We're hardwired to perform at our best hundreds of millions of years of evolution, have optimized human beings to be at their best when they're working together in groups. And one of the really dangerous things for, you know, entrepreneurs, for creatives, for creators out there in today's world is that we are really socially isolated, right? these parisocial relationships behind through the screen, they don't do to our monkey mind,

to our animal brain, what actual social connection does. So the first basic tip for improving productivity and focus is to have people in your life who care, who you talk to about your goals, and you talk to about your implementation intentions. If you've got friends that you're discussing, you know, mutually with where and when am I going to work on my biggest ideas, and then they're checking. back in with you. You're simulating what we do, like, at a professional level at commit action, and it works. The science on it is, like, case closed, overwhelming evidence. Just even the

anticipation of social accountability that it might happen is shown to improve people's follow-through on goals by up to 100%. Right. Like, there's some wild studies out there about how this stuff is effective. So I think the tendency for a lot of people starting out or working on anything big is like take it into the back cave keep it secret keep it safe right like just like work on it work on it until the world is ready but you you've got to get some allies you got to uh you've got you got to you got to add some accountability because that's what sharpens the focus that's how human beings were meant to do their best work we love to see it all right man well where could people find you on the internet well you can check out my brand new youtube channel um just just under peter

Sheller and you can also find what I've built at commitaction.com. If you want to come take a look at what we're up to there, there's a ton of amazing free resources. On the nav menu there, there's an entire free training workshop. You can get all of our methodology. Everything our coaches know how to do. It's all available for you to download and plug into your life. And if you want to take a look at, you know, adding a pro to your personal productivity

stack, that's an option there too. So commit action. Well, just Google my name. I'm the only me in the whole world. you can find me my website everywhere, Peter Shallone. That's a low-key flex. I like it. I like that.