Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
The podcast for aspiring entrepreneurs who have families. If you're a dad looking to escape the rat and quit your 9 to 5 while keeping food on the table for the family in the process then this show is for you. We discuss the challenges, tips, tricks and hacks to help you make the leap into freedom.
Brendan:
This is the employee to entrepreneur podcast, the show for the family man who's looking to escape the rat race. So if you want to build a business for yourself so that you can spend more time with your family, then you're in the right place. I created the show for you because I am you. I'm your host Brendan Ryan. And today I want to talk about something that I've been reflecting on quite a bit. Lately, it's this idea where in the past I have often felt like I missed the boat that I was a day late and a dollar short a lot of the time. And what I mean by that is if I rewind all the way back to my high school days, that is when I found my first love, which was health and fitness, working out and in particular, eventually bodybuilding. I actually competed in a couple of bodybuilding shows. I became a personal trainer. So I was completely obsessed with the gym and nutrition and That's what I studied in undergrad. That's what I worked as, as an undergrad at the University of Florida. I'm repping that shirt today for the people watching on YouTube because college football season is upon us. It's coming up in the next couple of weeks here and I'm a big Florida Gators fan. So anyway, back when I got into bodybuilding, that was my first love. Like it was something that I could just consume all the time and I was completely happy doing. I thought about making it a career of sorts, just becoming a personal trainer. Ultimately decided not to do that because I was working as a personal trainer in college and thought that, A, there wasn't that much money to be made unless you have like celebrity clientele, that kind of thing. And B, when you take something that you love, sometimes if you make it a job, it doesn't, it's not as, uh, it's not as fun anymore. you start to have to deal with all the administrative stuff and the red tape and all that kind of stuff. And it just makes it a little less enjoyable. And so I'm not saying that if I went that route, I wouldn't have been better off. I think that I would have had more fun with it and a better quality of life, honestly, than eventually going on and becoming a pharmacist like I did. But The point is this episode, what I want to talk about is this idea where I felt like I just kind of missed the peak of, in this case, bodybuilding. Bodybuilding got really popular in the 70s and 80s, a lot in the 80s and a lot in the early 90s. And here I am, it's like 2005, 2006, somewhere in that range. So early to mid 2000s. And yes, of course, bodybuilding is still around. It's still around to this day. There's plenty of bodybuilding shows that you can go to. They still have the Mr. Olympia every year and all that kind of stuff. But back when like Arnold was the guy and Ronnie Coleman was the guy and those were the Mr. Olympias, the top guys in bodybuilding. That was back in the eighties and nineties. Back then there was a bodybuilding boom, if you were, if you will. And once I really immersed myself in that niche, I realized that eventually that I kind of, I had missed it. Like I missed that. And at the time I was living in Southern California in the Inland Empire, in a place called Redlands, which is a awesome place to grow up. I was so blessed to be able to grow up in Southern California, but that's where the, the original muscle beaches in Venice, in Venice beach, California. I remember going there and it was like, you know, just not what it looked like on all the pumping iron documentaries and all that kind of stuff. It was a bit of a disappointment, you know? Not to say there wasn't people working out there. There was, 100%. Now I hear if you go, haven't been back to California in a bit, but I hear if you go there now, it's a lot worse. You know, lots of homeless people and all that kind of unfortunate stuff going on there. But the point is, like, that was my first instance, my first experience of feeling like, man, I love this so much. I love... this particular activity, but I really feel like I missed the best time to be in it. Like I was this late adopter. Like if you think of the adoption curve of technology, right, you have the true innovators, like the 2.5% that pick things up as soon as they come out. They're usually people that are very tech savvy, have their ear to the ground, they're always paying attention to that kind of stuff. And so they're the ones that, you know, get the iPhones as soon as they come out, is that kind of thing, right? or whatever it happens to be, whatever the new innovation is. So you have the true innovators, then you have the early adopters, right? That's about another 16% or so of people who these people still actually get tons of the benefit and are able to ride the wave up, right? And then you get the early adopters. That's the early, or I'm sorry, the early majority. So it's about 64% of the people in the middle of the bell curve there. That first half of that. majority, the 32% or so, still get some benefit, right? Not as much benefit as being an innovator or being an early adopter, but you still are enjoying that. And then you have the late adopters, or the late majority, sorry, the late majority. And those people are literally coming in right at the peak or a little bit after it, and are riding the wave down in popularity, so they don't get any benefit, really. And then you have the late adopters, you know. Those people wait for everybody else to try something before they start picking things up. They are not trendy people at all, right? So you know, in that case, I was like the late majority or a late adopter, if you will. Of course, I wasn't even alive in the 70s and 80s to be able to do it. But I'm just bringing this up so that you kind of have some type of visual in your head about other things, right? Like other things that I might bring up here. So I had that experience again. After I left, I didn't leave. I finished college, I finished pharmacy school. And once I started working as a pharmacist, I finally had time to start reading and learning about the things that I really wanted to, right? Instead of reading and learning about whatever school told me to learn about. And so I dabbled in some trading options a little bit at first. And then shortly after that, really got into poke. I'm still into poker. I love the game. I think it's just an awesome game and specifically no limit hold them, right? And again, still around, 100% still around. You have the World Series of poker all the time. You have live streams all the time. ESPN actually just recently dropped covering the World Series of poker, which is something that they did for decades. So that was a big blow to the poker community. But same experience here. Once I dove into you know, head first into this space and studied game theory and started playing a lot. I learned about the history of poker too. And there was a poker boom in the early two thousands. So I had, I just missed it by about 10 years. So, um, back then you were able to play online and you know, it was much more televised for whatever reason. I think it was better economic times too, but there was just a lot more action back then, right? And so here I am again. And I remember thinking at the time, this really feels a lot like how I felt bodybuilding, you know, this is, this feels the same, feels very much the same. And so why am I talking about all this? So the reason I'm talking about all this is for a couple of reasons. One is if you get into business, if you get into sales, entrepreneurship, all that kind of stuff, this stuff is evergreen. Business is evergreen. You're never going to be too late to business in general. You might be too late to a particular industry. And so you wanna be careful about that. You don't wanna be a late adopter. But there's getting into entrepreneurship, sales, marketing, this kind of stuff. It's an evergreen industry. It's an evergreen area to be in, in a broad sense, of course, right? And like I said, you can get into individual areas Not so much, right? But the other reason I wanted to bring it up is because I also think about this with regards to the concept of getting quote unquote, getting lucky, not, not in the, not in the bad sense, right? But you know, you, we found yourself in a fortunate situation. And so there's a couple of different ways I think about this, right? Because I would consider myself fortunate or lucky if I had. entered bodybuilding right at the boom or if I had entered poker right at the boom because then I could take advantage of all the extra sponsorships, all this extra action and attention that was going on in those spaces. Some people do just naturally find themselves in the right place at the right time and get lucky in that sense. But that's not the majority of people. The majority of people will end up going into some industry. and maybe adopting it late like I did, that kind of thing. And so if you can relate to what I'm saying, listen to me, listen to me, because there's a couple of things I wanna point out about this in particular. And I will say that I don't think I've ever felt early to anything, including Bitcoin. I'm a big Bitcoin guy, I got the Bitcoin grenade behind me right here. I was playing with it actually back in 2017 because I was buying into poker games with it. So I was aware of Bitcoin, but I didn't... buy and hold it then. And so I didn't really actually start buying and holding it in an investment type way until 2020. And I've been doing great ever since then. I've been buying and holding, et cetera. But at this point in time, you're definitely not somebody that is an innovator or even an early adopter. We might still be in the early majority. There's definitely still plenty of money to be made in Bitcoin if that's something that you're thinking of investing in. But it's not like you're going to get 100x return at this point. Right? Because you'd be looking at what? $3 million per Bitcoin. This is not going to happen. You probably, you probably will see a 10 X at least, at least the 10 X to return over the next five to 10 years. I would almost guarantee it. So we're at $30,000 per Bitcoin right now. It'll be above 300 K. Yeah, it will. I'm pretty confident. Anyway, point is not early to Bitcoin either. I've never felt like I've been early to anything. And so it's made me think about this a lot. And what I was saying earlier about this concept of being lucky, some people do just kind of get lucky. They find themselves in drop shipping right at the very beginning before anybody knew anything about drop shipping. Right. I do feel like I'm in the early adopters probably of remote sales. I do see it becoming more trendy and that scares me a little bit because that means there's going to be a lot more people entering the space. Like in Mongodzis. having a course coming out. And so I'm probably kind of early for remote sales. And that's something that I've been preaching on the show over and over and over again. It's sales is a gateway drug to entrepreneurship. I think it's a fantastic way to be able to get location freedom, time freedom, and get your feet wet in sales and in business in general so that you can make the transition from employee to entrepreneur. But anyway, need to stay on topic here. So come back to the idea of luck. How do we get lucky? So two things, two things. One is, I don't know if you guys have heard this definition of luck before, but it comes from actually from a philosopher, I think it's Seneca, who said that luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. So what does that mean exactly? Well, when I think of it, at least, that means that if you're taking massive action for long enough, eventually you're going to get lucky. Now that might happen earlier. than for some people than for others, right? But as long as you're committed to a particular thing, as long as you keep taking action on it consistently, day in and day out, eventually, you are gonna get lucky because that's the preparation. Preparation is the action part. And the opportunity will present itself eventually. The problem is, and I've done this, I'm 100% guilty of it. The problem is people don't stay committed to things for long enough. We have ADD basically with regards to especially things like making money online, right? We have shiny object syndrome where we see drop shipping and we go try drop shipping for a while or then we see, oh, everybody's doing the social media marketing agency now. Let's go do this for a while. And then now it might be everybody's doing remote sales. Let's go over here and do this for a while. And that's not by the way why I recommend it. I think there's plenty of other reasons to do it. But my point is people don't stay committed. If you want to find success in something, you can't be changing your focus every three to six months. You're just never going to get there. It takes a certain amount of time to get to mastery. You have to put in the hours. You have to put in the reps in order to get good enough that you can separate yourself from your competition. If you don't have. skills. If you're not that skilled in any industry, whether it's marketing or sales or whatever, you're not going to stick out among a crowd and opportunity is not going to come knocking. So that's the main thing is over the last year, I made a decision back at the end of last year. I said, okay, I am going to commit to sales. I'm not going to just have my one foot in and then one foot in this lead generation thing. And maybe I'll try this other thing over here. No, no more of that stuff. I'm going to commit to sales. committed to it. I'm not going to take on all the other things, all the extra stuff that I used to do. And so, you know, I can't say that I've gotten that lucky so far, not yet anyway. I've had some success, but I know that it's right around the corner. And to that point, I think that's actually a perfect segue into the other idea of luck that I actually really like that I'm stealing from a guy named Arlen Moore. If you don't know who Arlen Moore is, He is a young, he's younger than me, entrepreneur, who if you're a young man, especially if you're male, and you're looking to expand your network, this is that guy's niche. He has something called Tribe, which is phenomenal. He's also a great YouTuber, has some vlogs and stuff on there. Anyway, bit of an artist if you will, but his idea of luck was quite different than anybody's I had ever heard up until that point, but he said that If you think about it, luck is often conferred on you by other people. So to give you an example, I had to use, you know, talk about Bitcoin or crypto because kind of already touched on that, but it could be something like somebody told you about Bitcoin back in like 2014, right? Some dude just happened to mention, Hey, have you seen this send you a link or whatever, and maybe you bought it, maybe you didn't, but somebody conferred that opportunity on you, right? And so. You can think of other examples too, right? Like you might think of, say, you know, your dad golfed all the time, right? At this fancy golf course in town. And he got you a job at that golf course when you were 16 years old working as a caddy. And because you worked as a caddy at this fancy golf course, you eventually ran into a highly successful businessman, a highly successful entrepreneur who took you under his wing and you became his... In turn, you learned a ton from him and that's how you got lucky. Right. So if you think about it, it's often connected to your network, often connected to other people who, who confer an opportunity on you. And I think that's true. I think that's a hundred percent true. I really like that idea. I think that, you know, I actually made a short form content, short, real, or, um, YouTube short about this the other day. But if you think about. the influence that Alex Hermosy has had on the internet money space over the years. He talks about the idea of skill stacking, which is so important, right? So many of us come out of this traditional didactic educational system and we have like kind of all this knowledge in our head, even though we've probably forgotten more than we have in our head by the time we graduate, but we have very little true skills. We don't actually have skills. Meaning like can... Can you fix a car? Can you sell? Can you like, can you think of actual skills, right? That the school system gives you it's very little, very little skills, if anything. And that's unfortunate. And so what's going to separate people right now and in the, in the near future is the skills that they acquire. And so Alex Ramozzi's thing is you want to stack skills, but you shouldn't try to go master multiple skills at once. master one skill and then move on to the next one. So if that's copywriting for you, master copywriting, and then move on to media buying, or then move on to website design, or move on to whatever. Point is, you master a skill, and you start stacking them, video editing. The list is quite long of things that people have used to monetize themselves online nowadays. And so there's a lot of focus, a lot of emphasis, if you will, on the idea of skill stacking, but maybe most more importantly, maybe more importantly, arguably more importantly is if you can have all the skills in the world, but if you don't have the network, you're never going to go anywhere. So you have to work on your skills and your network at the same time. The best way to do that, by the way, in my personal opinion, is build a personal brand. post all the time, post about your journey, be vulnerable. I'm really bad at being vulnerable. I try, I'm really trying to like be a little bit more vulnerable. In fact, it's kind of embarrassing for me to, to tell you guys that I used to be in the bodybuilding. It's not that big of a deal, but it's slightly embarrassing, right? To put it out there on the internet. Um, and so that's key. Post the journey, post the struggles, post your vulnerability, like show, build in public is what they say. You really want to do that. You really want to do that. Another thing Alex Ramozzi said, and I know, I know I bring him up all the time. I just love that guy. I think he's one of the greatest entrepreneurs of our generation. I think he's basically a genius. He said something about you want to take pictures of the bad times because once you get to where you're going, you want to be able to show that. And I know it feels hard in the moment, like when it is the bad times and you're living in a one bedroom apartment with a mattress on the floor to take a picture of that, but someday. You're actually going to want that picture. Take the pictures, post the journey. And that by itself will expand your network quite a bit. You don't have to necessarily go attend conferences and that kind of stuff to be able to expand your network. In fact, I love a good conference, don't get me wrong, but I don't think it's that effective for actually expanding your network. I think a lot of times it's very difficult to maintain contact with people you meet from. things like conferences. The key nowadays is to use social media socially. DM people, build relationships, treat your followers and the people that actually comment on your stuff like royalty. Respond back to them, like their stuff, follow them, you know, become their friends, get interested in them, get invested in them, build a community. We should actually be thinking of it as we want to be building a community. That's really how you a great audience, but also more importantly, a great network. And that network will confer lots of opportunities on you. And so those two things, staying committed to something and by doing so, building the skill in that particular area, but also expanding your network are the things that are going to make you lucky. So if you feel like I have in the past, If you've had shiny object syndrome where you bounce from thing to thing to thing, and you never seem to really break through, never seem to really get good results, that's the key. That's what you need to do. You need to commit to one thing, master it, and then build your network at the same time, preferably of people that are in that particular niche, not exclusively of course, but you want to have plenty of people in that niche that you're talking to and learning from in a great way to. And in fact, actually. A great way to build your network is to invest in mentoring, in coaching. Group coaching is great because there's already a little bit of a community in there. And so if you're interested in that, by the way, reach out to me, DM me on Twitter, preferably, or Instagram. Those are my two main channels. Those are the social media platforms I've decided to be the most active on because there's just too dang many. So if you try to reach me on TikTok or something like that, I'm probably not going to get back to you, unfortunately. But guys, if you're looking for community and you are an aspiring dadpreneur in particular, a young family man who aspires to entrepreneurship, please reach out to me. I wanna know you, I wanna follow you on social media. I'd love it if you came into our Discord group. I'll put the link for the Discord group in the description down below for the podcast or if you're listening on YouTube, just click it and you'll be able to join. It's free. We got some young aspiring dadpreneurs in there. that you can network with and start building your own community. Or we also have a free weekly newsletter that talks about all the things that I talk about here on the podcast. So if you're more of a newsletter guy, please sign up. Love to have you. We've got about 150 of you on there so far, which is great, which is really cool to see that there's plenty of people that are trying to make this transition from employee to entrepreneur with me. So guys, if you are, trying to make the transition from employee to entrepreneur. I hope those two tips help you a little bit, especially if you felt like you've bounced from thing to thing to thing and you were always late and you never got any results. Do those two things. Stay committed, build your network, and opportunity or luck will find you. So.