Mental Models from a Shrink for Entrepreneurs

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. 

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LINKS FOR THIS EPISODE:
Production Team:
https://www.bigoceanpodcasting.com
Peter Shallard:
https://www.petershallard.com/

SHOW NOTES:
0:00 - Intro
4:47 - How to practice focus
16:12 - Bootrapped vs. Ventrure-backed mindsets
30:14 - The business of coaching

Creators & Guests

Host

GREG ISENBERG

I build internet communities and products for them. CEO: @latecheckoutplz, we're behind companies like @youneedarobot @boringmarketer @dispatchdesign etc.

What is The Startup Ideas Pod?

This is the startup ideas podcast. Hosted by Greg Isenberg (CEO Late Checkout, ex-advisor of Reddit, TikTok etc).

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Greg: This is a special episode because it's with my dear friend Peter Shard. I wanted to bring you on the show because you're, 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. Um, but before we get into that, how do you define what a shrink for Entrepreneur is?

Peter: Well thanks for having me. I'm excited to be chatting. Um, shrink for Entrepreneurs is, you know, my, 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 what I did was, build a specialty in working with founders. Uh, a lot of, uh, a lot of founders in tech, a lot of venture backed founders helping them with, with psychology, with therapy. And then, uh, 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, 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, some coaching. I knew I wanted to optimize my thinking and behavior. And, um, 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, they're just, they couldn't be further away from the, the coalface of entrepreneurship and they just don't get it.

There's this gulf of misunderstanding.

Greg: okay, so walk me through how you actually help people like me.

Peter: well first of all, I generally meet people like you the morning after the darkest night of the soul. So I tend to, the thing about like any type of therapy is you tend to reach out and get started when things are very, very bad. 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 c e o 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 in 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? Cuz 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, um, and start to believe that everything they touch turns to gold and lose, lose their kind of psychological calibration to what the actual result is, what 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,

Greg: I wanna take a few minutes to selfishly get you to coach me right now.

Peter: Let's do it therapy for Greg. Let's go.

How are you

doing, Greg?

Greg: 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 rollercoaster on steroids. several rollercoaster I won. 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.

Peter: 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, what type of Greg do you need to be for this holding company you've built?

Greg: Uh, 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 in a holding company, cuz the world is your oyster. for example, yesterday there was the Apple event, And there was a, listen, there was a lot of really cool stuff that's gonna 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 wellbeing than sort of being oh my God, I need to go stop everything and rethink everything while it's happening.

Peter: 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 are the one with the agency.

That it's not Tim Cook deciding that 10:00 AM 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. It 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 the 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 mornings 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 wanna find out from you, is what is the rubric for deciding, like, I think you are 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?

Greg: 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, 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. Um, that's why if you look at, most of my tweets, they happen between the hours of nine and 10:30 AM Eastern. Cuz that's when I'm generally having my first coffee.

Mm-hmm. And I allow myself to basically take it all in. Just, 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 gonna wanna 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.

Should not be, you're getting buzzed. Every single time something happens in the world,

Peter: All notifications off by default.

Greg: 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.

Peter: Mm. 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 are like, that's a distraction. I've gotta stay away from it.

Greg: So, I don't know man. I built like an intuition and you just gotta trust your gut. Like there's a reason why we have our guts, you know? And there's a reason why we feel certain things. I'm laughing to myself cuz I was chatting with my co-founder, her Theo, um, yesterday, and I was like, and I quote, we should do X, I'm a hundred percent sure it's gonna work.

And then he's sitting there and like a hundred percent like, what are you, are you on crack? Like the a hundred percent. How are you sure that if we're gonna go build that product or do that thing, that it's a hundred percent chance? And sometimes you just gain so much conviction based on your gut that you just need to.

You need to follow your gut. I wish, like, in my twenties, I followed my gut sometimes, but I, I really followed other people's guts. I would be like, okay, if, Kevin Rose from Dig is building a video startup, I need to build a video startup, or, Kevin Systrom 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, the stuff that I create becomes way more, you know, as Seth Godin puts it remarkable. Something that you'd make a remark of.

Peter: 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 a. 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, 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 gotta 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 in an intellectual maturity at 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 gonna 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, you are more likely at, 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 in? How are they reacting to the real world? To reality? Cuz there's a, you know, there's a Plato's cave of allegory there, right? If you're looking, if you're just watching where the, where the other people are moving to, you're not seeing what it is that they're moving toward.

Greg: Exactly. And, and that was actually Theo's response. He started laughing and cuz he knows how ridiculous it is to say something like that.

Peter: Yeah.

Greg: 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, what he, what he means by that is okay.

Crazy founder, CEO guy. Uh, you know, I understand that you're have got a lot of conviction, um, but this feels like a zero or one thing. Like it's either gonna really be successful or it's gonna fall flat. How do we make sure that if it falls flat, that we still learn? Because in the holding company model, in the product studio model, learning is also helpful cuz 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.

Peter: We were, we were jamming about this recently. Um, 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, the strategy of getting after, getting after opportunities where there's obviously a win, but then failure is like an actual other win, like a real concrete win.

Cause I think we're coming out of a period, this is what you and I were chatting about, of like big investing and technology companies. A lot of hype kind of reached its absolute peak in 2021, where, and you know, in, in that VC model, it's, go big or go bust that. Like you, you, you want to be swinging for the fences.

A lot of people were shooting at crazy big ideas where there were a hundred percent certain it was going to win or be an absolute massive failure. Right. And, uh, 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.

Greg: so. Let's talk about VC versus non VC a little more. So, and it relates to your whole like, meme idea. The idea that like people are sort of following other people and copying other people. What's that book?

Peter: Renee Gerard. Um,

Greg: 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 gonna invest in crypto.

If now VR is hot people are gonna 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 gonna die? You know what I mean?

So it's like VCs are just investing in companies based on these trends and.

Peter: Hmm.

Greg: 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, are gonna win, or a few of them are gonna win, and then they're gonna have outsize returns.

The problem with that for entrepreneurs is you end up changing your business to be in one of those spaces.

Peter: I'd say about maybe third, a third maybe 40% of the clients I've work with in general are, are bootstraps. Um, I love them. I think that, um, like there's some bootstraps out there that'll, that'll turn you green with envy, right? Like the, the, the types of businesses they've built, the lifestyles that they enable.

Um, it's a, you know, it's incredible and you front load 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? That those early years are like all grind.

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 like creates value in the world that convinces strangers to pay money at a, at a good margin for that value being created. That journey could be like five, 10 years long, but. When you go down the VC route, you can immediately start celebrating because you're getting rided 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, 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, they pop a bottle right on the night that they, that the, 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. Um, 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, I talk a lot about this dynamic that I call the action result gap, which explains like a lot of, uh, 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, 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 pree 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 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 10 years is really hard. And that's the biggest action result gap of all. But closing your next round is like in, 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 bootstrap is a monks man. They, 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 like live through this action result gap. Um, 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. Um, and, and bootstraps 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 are, you're, you're using your customers to fund your business.

You're, you're making promise, like a lot of amazing bootstraps started with the model of delivering services so that they have immediate cash flow upfront, and then building product that like creates some scale, uh, you know, with the margin that they make. And so, like, you know, that re 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.

Greg: 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, and you're making less. So you have to be, you have to really, really believe in, in what you're doing and, and be true to the path.

And, and also like I see a lot of bootstraps that like, We'll leave a company like Google start bootstrapping and then like three months later I see like they changed their LinkedIn to like, now they work at Shopify and

Peter: Right.

Greg: 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 timescale. 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 gonna go and build this thing. It's going to be bootstrap and I need to hit this goal of 20 K M R R or whatever it is in order for me to continue.

Peter: I think every entrepreneur to some degree is like motivated by freedom. And a lot of, uh, 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 'em, 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 gotta 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 accounted to 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.

Um, so it, it, it does feel a lot like that isn't freedom,

Greg: you mentioned before around, you know, people filling up their calendars with VC meetings and, you know, raising these pree rounds and, 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 g like you expect once you're ha hit unicorn status 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 gonna have to recap their companies, they're gonna 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, you know, you'll have your stock, but like, we're gonna go and recap this company. Which basically is another, a another way of saying like, we're going to change the ownership structure of this company.

like, see you later.

Peter: Happens old time.

Greg: Versus you're bootstrapping and it's like you are the captain of your ship.

Peter: 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 on, 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 their soul, 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, where you wake up every day, you know, stressed, obligated with this enormous pressure upon yourself to, you know, to go and perform.

Um, 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 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 gotta just, you've gotta find a way to sell the services, do the work, manage the clients, do unscalable, 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 gonna one day liberate all the rest of your time, right? Like, it can really be, you might spend 80% of your time just doing fee for service type work. If you're just starting out that, you know, 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 I want, if my lifestyle want, if I wanted to have any upward mobility, I was like, guess I gotta 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 referring me business and, you know, all that, I, I looked around and was like, I, if I can keep doing this for the rest of my life, I've gotta 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 an 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.

Greg: I want you to talk about what you built. With commit action. But I also wanna 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, a service like this, that.

Could max out at 20 million, 40 million a year in revenue. That's like what my, 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, like 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, tell people what it is because I think a lot of people can learn from your how you did it and let's go.

Peter: I will, I do have to just clarify though. I did raise some money and I wanna shout out, uh, human Ventures. They, uh, a VC who actually understands the whole co model, one of their most successful companies in their portfolio, they're building in this way. They have a huge stake in, uh, C K B G, which is the parent company, the holding company that produces a bunch of spirits companies.

And so I came to them with the idea, um, like they're building this really cool business there in a similar model to the way you are at Lake Checkout. And, um, I came to them with the same idea. I was like, I wanna raise the first and last round. For this company, a little bit of jet fuel and um, you know, to their credit, they were like up for it.

They saw the vision and so we did it. But yeah, I just, I just wanna, for all the, for all the shit we're talking about vc, I want to, uh, shout out to the people who get it.

so Commit Action is the company that I built, uh, that was out, out of my services business. And it's a, it, it's a productivity company. What we do as a coached weekly planning ritual for entrepreneurs, for creatives, for executives, we solve a problem. If you are one of these people, you're working in the knowledge economy, your, your abilities to succeed is dependent entirely on how, how well you execute on the big, bold ideas that you have.

. So what Command 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 res focus and accountability 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, 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 commit action, how we turn entrepreneurs into these execution powerhouses.

We're, we're social primates. We're hardwired to perform at our best when we're connected to others.

Greg: Before we head out, what's uh, what's the biggest tip you can give to folks around productivity?

Peter: 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 creators, for creators out there in today's world is that we are really socially isolated, right?

These parasocial 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 assimilating what we do like at a professional level at commit Action. And it works that, you know, the, 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 a hundred percent, 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 into the bat cave.

Keep it secret. Keep it safe, right? Like, just like work on it. Work on it until the world is ready. But you've, you gotta get some allies. You gotta, uh, you gotta, you gotta add some accountability because that's what sharpens the focus. That's how human beings were meant to do their best work.

Greg: We'd love to see it. All right, man. Well, where could people find you on the internet?

Peter: Well, you can check out my brand new YouTube channel. Um, this is just under Peter Sheer and you can also find what I've [e-mail]. If you wanna come take a look at, uh, 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, um, everything our coaches know how to do, it's all available for you to download and plug into your life. And if you wanna take a look at, you know, adding a pro to your personal productivity stack, that's an option there too. So, commit action or just Google my name. I'm the only me in the whole world.

You can find me my website everywhere. Peter Shalon.

Greg: That's, that's a low key flex. I like it. I like that.