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We’ve all experienced that dreadful feeling of our business train coming to a complete halt, especially after the start of a new year. What do you do when all your tasks and to-do items pile up, your motivation dips, and everything feels daunting and overwhelming?
This week, we wanted to share an episode that was a bit more off the cuff. We had a friend visiting for a week, we both got sick, and momentum has slipped from our grasp! Now… what the heck do we do?
We share the steps we’re taking to regain momentum and we also talk through the idea of “starting ugly” and what to do with the feelings of wanting to change EVERYTHING.
If you take nothing else away from the episode, just do the following: Keep going.
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We’re Jason and Caroline Zook, a husband and wife team running two businesses together and trying to live out our version of a good life in the process. In this business podcast, we share with you our lessons learned about how to run a calm, sustainable business—one that is predictable, profitable AND peaceful. Join us every Thursday if you’re an online creator who wants to reach your goals without sacrificing your well-being in the process.
[00:00:00] Caroline: Welcome to Growing Steady, the show where we help online creators like you build a calm business, one that's predictable, profitable, and peaceful. We're your hosts, Jason and Caroline Zook, and we run Wandering Aimfully, an unboring business coaching program, and Teachery, an online course platform for designers. Join us each week as we help you reach your business goals without sacrificing your well being in the process. Slow and steady is the way we do things around here, baby.
[00:00:29] Jason: All right, cinnamon rollers, that's you. Let's get into the show. It's our second episode with our new intro.
[00:00:41] Caroline: Have you gotten used to it yet, or do you miss the old one?
[00:00:43] Jason: And our new music. For those of you who have not heard us talk about this yet, for some reason, you jumped to this episode before last episode, where we announced our new podcast name, our new podcast art.
[00:00:54] Caroline: Yes.
[00:00:54] Jason: How many renditions of the podcast art do you think you've done?
[00:00:57] Caroline: The latest one?
[00:00:58] Jason: Yeah, just the final.
[00:00:59] Caroline: Versions. Like ten.
[00:01:01] Jason: No, not true. Not true. I've seen at least 30.
[00:01:04] Caroline: No, you haven't.
[00:01:04] Jason: I've seen a coral stroke. I've seen a yellow stroke. I've seen a green stroke. Those are all different versions, ma'am. I've seen a white background. There's a lot of differences.
[00:01:14] Caroline: I have a lot of respect for people who design podcast art.
[00:01:17] Jason: Yeah, there's a lot you're trying to cram into that little square.
[00:01:20] Caroline: You are, and you're like, how does it show up in the feed? How does it look?
[00:01:23] Jason: Also, we didn't talk about it in last episode, but I think it was a good choice for us to stick with our signature blue.
[00:01:29] Caroline: Okay, well, that was a big discussion around here because I really wanted. I know for me personally, I've listened to podcasts, and when they change the cover art and it's like a completely different color.
[00:01:40] Jason: It's hard to...
[00:01:41] Caroline: The funny thing is, you adapt very quickly, but that moment of jarring, of...
[00:01:45] Jason: Change is hard.
[00:01:46] Caroline: I'm not used to seeing this. So we stuck with the signature blue.
[00:01:49] Jason: Yeah.
[00:01:50] Caroline: We hope that you're okay with everything. You got to evolve. You got to allow yourself to evolve. That's one of our cobrandments.
[00:01:56] Jason: Sure.
[00:01:56] Caroline: And in case you're wondering to yourself, Caroline, your voice sounds a little different.
[00:02:01] Jason: Yeah.
[00:02:02] Caroline: That's because I did have a little cold.
[00:02:05] Jason: You did, yeah.
[00:02:06] Caroline: And I...
[00:02:06] Jason: I had some food poisoning.
[00:02:08] Caroline: Yeah. In the past week, as of recording this, Jason has had food poisoning.
[00:02:11] Jason: Which, great way to lose some weight. Just, if you're trying to, you know, do that.
[00:02:15] Caroline: Yeah. And I had a little cold. And thankfully it didn't last very long, and it wasn't...
[00:02:21] Jason: I will say it is one of those things when you're in the thick of especially what I was dealing with, which was like, couldn't stand up, would have to run to the toilet, vomiting. For those of you who are curious which way it was going, boy, when you feel good again, you're like, this feels great. I really need to just enjoy this moment because, man, it is debilitating when you literally can't get up out of bed. And it really gives me the whole time I'm laying there for like two days. I can barely watch anything just because I have a little bit of a headache, probably have a fever. I'm just like, man, people with a chronic illness, I give you all so much credit for being able to get up and get out of bed every day.
[00:02:58] Caroline: I know. We are sending lots of love to all of our chronic illness listeners out there because we can't even imagine the battle that you have to fight on a daily basis and the energy that it takes to do that. And yeah, like Jason said, there's nothing that makes you more grateful for your health than when you feel less than optimal. Thankfully, I'm feeling like I'm over the hump. Still not 100. Not a hundo.
[00:03:21] Jason: Not quite a hundo.
[00:03:23] Caroline: Not quite a hundo. You know, it kind of parlays a nice segue into the topic of this episode, which is...
[00:03:31] Jason: Well, hold on, I have two housekeeping on it. Excuse you.
[00:03:35] Caroline: Keep the house. Go ahead.
[00:03:36] Jason: Are you the podcast producer? No, you're the talent. You show up, you just have to like...
[00:03:42] Caroline: Okay, where's my craft services?
[00:03:44] Jason: Bellow out things.
[00:03:45] Caroline: Where's my craft?
[00:03:45] Jason: Over there.
[00:03:46] Caroline: Crafty.
[00:03:46] Jason: You just had crafty. It was yogurt and granola. Two housekeeping items. Number one, if you didn't listen to last week's episode, or maybe you did and you didn't do it yet. If you go to podcast.wanderingaimfully.com, either on mobile, on the web, we now have a place for you to add a little voice memo. If you want to leave us a little voice memo, a little question you want us to answer on a future episode, we'll just kind of collect those as you have thoughts or ideas as a listener, so feel free to do that. It gives you, I think, two minutes of recording time, so don't doddle around. You need to submit your question quickly, and I will be happy to tell you my cinnamon roll recipe in a full episode, if that's what you're asking. But feel free to use that podcast.
[00:04:24] Caroline: Also, if you're, like...
[00:04:24] Jason: WanderingAimfully.com.
[00:04:25] Caroline: If you're like me and you get really nervous of leaving voicemails or memos or anything, it will allow you to listen to your thing back before you submit.
[00:04:37] Jason: Yeah. And you can start over.
[00:04:39] Caroline: And you can start over and you can do it as many times as you need to if you're a little bit of a nervous nancy like me.
[00:04:44] Jason: Nervous nancy?
[00:04:44] Caroline: I don't know. I just made it up.
[00:04:45] Jason: Okay, fantastic. Second housekeeping item. The people have spoken, and by the people, I mean me. Want a Creami update. They want to know how our life has changed or not.
[00:04:55] Caroline: Right.
[00:04:56] Jason: Since it was about a month ago that we decided to embark on this Creami journey. And if you don't know what...
[00:05:03] Caroline: Cremosa.
[00:05:04] Jason: If you don't know what this is, this is the ice cream maker. It's like a little personal pint ice cream maker. And I brought it up here kind of out of the blue on the podcast, and we kind of chatted about it, decided if we were going to do it. How has it been, scale of one to ten? One being like, that's the worst thing we've ever purchased. Why do we do this? Ten being, you were right, this is amazing. I should let you purchase anything you want. Go ahead.
[00:05:30] Caroline: I don't think you're going to like my answer.
[00:05:32] Jason: Okay, that's fine. Go ahead.
[00:05:34] Caroline: The words that you're saying are, that's fine. And the facial expression you're giving me are, that's not fine.
[00:05:39] Jason: Go ahead.
[00:05:41] Caroline: I would give it a 6.5.
[00:05:44] Jason: Interesting.
[00:05:44] Caroline: Okay. And here's why.
[00:05:45] Jason: Okay. Yeah, lay it on me.
[00:05:47] Caroline: In the pro column, things I absolutely love. First of all, as a device, I think it does exactly what it says it's going to do.
[00:05:52] Jason: Very well made.
[00:05:53] Caroline: Very well made. It's not one of those where you're like, you kind of got scammed on the Internet where you get the thing and you're like...
[00:06:00] Jason: You got influenced.
[00:06:01] Caroline: Yeah. It's not one of those. It does the thing it's supposed to do. And I love that. The other thing I love about it is that you love it, and I love seeing the childlike joy on your face when you decide that it's, as you lovingly say, Creami time.
[00:06:15] Jason: It's Creami time, baby.
[00:06:15] Caroline: Okay. And I love that for you because I love you.
[00:06:18] Jason: Usually, I yell from the kitchen, who wants to get Creami? Which is a fun thing to be able to yell.
[00:06:23] Caroline: I do love the flavor combinations you come up with. I love tasting them. It's fantastic. But here's the rub. For me personally, I am not someone who is very sweets driven. I'm a savory gal. I'm not a sweets gal. Okay. So when I look back and I'm like, now I've integrated a food item in my day that is not unhealthy because you make it with natural ingredients and whatever, but no one's going to say that it's healthy.
[00:06:53] Jason: It's not leaning toward the health side.
[00:06:55] Caroline: It's a bunch of sugar that I didn't have in my daily intake.
[00:06:59] Jason: Let's be honest. I know. I'm just saying, like, when we say sugar, it's not granulated sugar.
[00:07:03] Caroline: No.
[00:07:04] Jason: It's sugar from dates or it's a sweetener.
[00:07:06] Caroline: Totally.
[00:07:06] Jason: From stevia.
[00:07:07] Caroline: Absolutely. And I understand that it could be worse sugar wise and health wise.
[00:07:11] Jason: Now, the mix ins do a little bit of sugar. I will give you credit there.
[00:07:13] Caroline: Yeah. Because now we need mix ins, and now we need to buy a couple more sugary things that we didn't have before, which does increase the joy of it. But if we're just talking about on an almost daily basis, I had to have a serious conversation with Jason and said, I can only do a Creami every other day. I can't do this every day.
[00:07:30] Jason: Now, here's the thing. Are you done with your prosecution? Does the prosecution rest?
[00:07:37] Caroline: So all that being said.
[00:07:39] Jason: Yes.
[00:07:41] Caroline: The only reason that I don't give it a higher score is because I'm a little bit concerned that I've incurred a health cost that is not being outweighed by the positive that I get from it because I'm a savory gal.
[00:07:56] Jason: Fantastic. Okay, so the prosecution rests, the defense may approach the bench. Hello. Welcome. You all know what ice cream is, correct? This is me talking to the jury who are you, listeners. I give it a ten, 100%. This device does exactly what it says it's going to do. Does it well. And yes, it does take longer to make your own ice cream, but it doesn't take like an hour of putting it in an ice cream mixer. I don't even know how long ice cream mixers take, but it takes two minutes for it to make the ice cream once you have left it in the freezer for 24 hours to freeze. My personal favorite part of this, absolute favorite part, if I buy a little pint of Ben and Jhery's, the whole pint is basically like 900 calories, sometimes over 1000 calories. Now, I'm not going to eat a whole pint of ice cream for sure. But I'm probably going to eat half of it almost every time I sit down to do it. When I make a Creami, it's like 400 calories at max for the whole thing if I eat the whole thing.
[00:08:53] Caroline: Totally.
[00:08:53] Jason: So what I love about it is that for someone like me, who loves sweets.
[00:08:56] Caroline: And that's the difference.
[00:08:57] Jason: Is I can make one of these. And I've probably made 15 of them, 20 of them at this point. Nine different vanillas or so. I think we've finally hit on a great vanilla recipe.
[00:09:07] Caroline: Sure did.
[00:09:08] Jason: Which also has protein in it, which I like that I'm getting a little bit more protein in a snack that's sweet and savory. But again, my point is, I'll make one of these, we'll put it together. I give you one scoop. We've determined you're a one scoop gal for you, which is probably like less than 100 calories minus if we're adding little, like cookies or something on top. But I like that even if I eat half of it, it's 200 calories. And then adding in, like, a couple of little accoutrement is like maybe another 100 calories on top of it. For me, personally, I'm like, this is a win. This is a huge win because I love snacking and I love delicious things. So with the way that bell curves work and sliding scales of test scores.
[00:09:47] Caroline: Yes.
[00:09:47] Jason: Because I give it a ten and you give it a six and a half, it ends up at an eight and a half.
[00:09:51] Caroline: Okay.
[00:09:51] Jason: Yeah. So I just need everyone to know.
[00:09:53] Caroline: Okay. I think six and a half was too low.
[00:09:54] Jason: Okay. Because you're now thinking about how delicious some of them are. Like the butter.
[00:09:58] Caroline: No, actually. And that is delicious. The delicious score is not what raises it, and they are delicious. But I'm just telling you, this is how much the sweets does not affect me. You know, how, like, emotions in general don't register for you?
[00:10:11] Jason: No.
[00:10:11] Caroline: Okay.
[00:10:12] Jason: I don't know that.
[00:10:13] Caroline: Sweets don't register with me. Okay. But what I am raising the score for is I can just see the joy on your face right now. And I think that that is worth it.
[00:10:23] Jason: I think so, too.
[00:10:24] Caroline: It's just you having something that you really enjoy. And if you are someone who loves sweets, and you do, you are convincing me that it is a more healthful alternative.
[00:10:35] Jason: 100%.
[00:10:36] Caroline: And so we're aiming for a healthy, long life here. So I think that's a win.
[00:10:42] Jason: Okay. I believe the jury has agreed. I'm acquitted of all charges. Now let's move on to this actual episode where we have three different topics that we want to kind of cram in here to discuss.
[00:10:53] Caroline: Okay, so can I go back to my segue?
[00:10:54] Jason: Absolutely.
[00:10:55] Caroline: Okay. The reason why I said it was a good segue is because as I am just now getting over my little sickness, that was about three days of a cold. You had about three days of food poisoning immediately before that. And then amidst all of that, we had a friend in town who, shout out to Jen, was visiting us for about a week to come and hang out with us in Portugal. And poor thing, like getting here when you had food poisoning for three days of it. But she was a trooper and we did get to do plenty of things before we went down.
[00:11:25] Jason: The good news is the weather was kind of crappy after the first two days, so we got two good days. And then after that, when it was crappy, it was like, well, it's kind of crappy weather anyway.
[00:11:33] Caroline: But as of recording this, it's been about a week of basically almost no work. You have to check in and you have to do a couple of maintenance things to make sure that nothing's on fire. But in terms of making real progress on our Teachery goals and what we're trying to do, I'm sitting here going, oh, I don't really have anything to show work wise from the last week. And I think sometimes we started out the year feeling so much momentum and so much enthusiasm towards our goals, and I wanted to record an episode about what inevitably happens when that motivation and momentum dips and you start to feel like I'm just not seeing progress because it happens for every person in every business, in every project. You're going to hit this point where you kind of feel like, man, I'm not seeing the results. And what do you do when that happens? And I want to talk about that.
[00:12:32] Jason: So that's one part. So the second part we want to talk about is also just what it's like to be kind of at the beginning of this journey of working on Teachery and building it because I think that this is the type of content that you make a YouTube video about it and you say, like, we worked on our SaaS for two months and our revenue went down, but we've done a lot of things and how does that feel? What do we do about that? So that's kind of the second thing we want to talk about. And then the last thing we want to talk about is the temptation to change everything. So when you lose momentum, when things aren't, like, up and to the right on your revenue charts, and you get this urge to be like, well, this is really hard. Maybe I should just go do a new exciting thing. What do you do when those feelings come up? So those are the kind of like three things I want to talk about. So let's talk about the losing momentum first.
[00:13:16] Caroline: Yes.
[00:13:17] Jason: Go ahead.
[00:13:18] Caroline: So I kind of already described to you why it feels like we've lost momentum and it's just a very natural part of we're doing other things. And I think this is so much a part of the Growing Steady ethos and why I continue to want to show up and have a podcast about this different approach to business, which is when you're just a solo creator, or you're a small team of creators, or you work with your spouse or whatever that is, there's only so much that a small team can do, and there's only so much a small team can do when you're someone who wants to balance living a good life with that. Right. So when friends come into town, we intentionally choose not to work during that time because we want to be present with our friends. And I feel like a big part of life is experiencing things with your friends, and I don't want them to feel like, hey, go do your thing, while I...
[00:14:11] Jason: Do whatever.
[00:14:11] Caroline: Write an email for 4 hours. I'm not saying that there weren't times in our lives where that was a necessity and we had to do that. But if I don't have to, I want to make the choice to be present. And so if you are someone who is choosing that way of operating your business, you are going to have to make peace with not making progress at the same rate as you see some of these glorified businesses around you. Right?
[00:14:35] Jason: Yeah. And I feel like I have an interesting perspective on this, not from our personal experience, but from watching our Wandering Aimfully members work on their businesses. And I used to do these one on one check ins with them every Monday, and I could very clearly see patterns throughout the year of almost every single person. And I probably did these check ins with, like, over 100, maybe even 200 of them. Every single person at some point in the year loses momentum.
[00:15:01] Caroline: Right.
[00:15:01] Jason: So this is like, even the people who have a team, they delegate everything. They know what they're doing. They've been in business for years. It happens to them as well, and it also happens to the people who are just getting started. They're trying to build their first thing, they're trying to figure it out, but they end up hitting a roadblock and I think one of the things that I always tried to come back to with them when that was happening was, like, feeling like you're losing momentum doesn't mean that your business train has come to a full stop.
[00:15:27] Caroline: Totally.
[00:15:28] Jason: It just means that it has slowed down from the pace at which you wanted it to go. And I think that's a really important realization. When you're feeling this feeling of losing momentum is like, oh, everything didn't just come to a halt. It didn't just get derailed completely, and now everything is just completely ruined. It might feel like that because maybe sales have dropped off completely, or maybe traffic has gone down or there's no new subscribers or any of those things, but I think the point is to look at the big picture of what you're trying to do and to go, okay, but have I moved forward in the grand scheme of where I was six months ago, a year ago, two years ago? Yeah, absolutely. It's hard for anybody to say, no, they haven't, because they've done something.
[00:16:07] Caroline: Definitely. And I feel like a good place to then place your energy, using your train analogy, is how can I shorten the amount of time it takes to then get the train back up to speed? Right. And so I think, for me personally, I look back over this past week, and I go, oh, man. Basically made no progress. Right? A, I start by thinking of, yeah, but didn't make any work progress. But there's so much more to my life than just work. Right. So what progress did I make? Well, I deepened a relationship with a good friend of mine. I had experiences that I wouldn't have had if I was just working every day.
[00:16:42] Jason: Got a lot of snot out of your body.
[00:16:43] Caroline: Those are memories. I got a lot of snot out of my body. Maybe. Yeah, maybe the sickness part, I wouldn't have. If I could go back, I would change that, but I think it's important to, A, go, what was I doing during that time? So if for you, it was like, maybe you took some time off to rest, and you go, great. Well, I had a chance to recharge the batteries, and that's fantastic. Or I was spending time with my family, or maybe it was not even, like, a positive thing, but you had something that came out of left field and your family, and you had to be there for somebody that you love. Well, even though that's, like, a negative experience, it's a positive experience when you think of the fact that you have people that you love and that that's how you were spending your time. Right. So I think number one is like acknowledging that that time was spent doing other things besides work. And around here, we acknowledge the fact that our lives are about more than just work. The second thing is then I go, okay, now I do want to get back on track. I want to start feeling momentum again. Where do I place my energy? And for me personally, it goes back to the daily, almost hour by hour small decisions in order to get the train and the wheels turning again. So for me, it was immediately like, I start identifying what are the small wins, right? So, okay, I can do this thing that's only going to take me a half hour, and that's going to make me feel like I'm back on track. For me also, my go to is I spend a half hour going in Notion because that's where I keep everything in my project management, and I just clean everything up. Right. So it's like some tasks have maybe been overdue because I thought I was going to get them done and I didn't. Cool. I assign new due dates and I sort of like, refresh the entire system so that I feel like I'm back on a good foot again. And I don't take any time worrying about the fact that I thought I was going to get x done and I didn't. I just go, cool, I'm starting at square one again. Let's get the pistons moving again.
[00:18:33] Jason: Yeah. I think kind of the big important thing that I was going to say that kind of goes along with that is, when you feel like you've lost momentum, the goal is not to jump back into a big, hairy task. The goal is to reset the to dos and find a bunch of small things you can do.
[00:18:50] Caroline: Exactly.
[00:18:51] Jason: Because that will give you momentum. And that was always my takeaway for the WAIMers when I was working with them one on one was like, great. Okay, I understand you feel this way. It happens to everybody. What are three things you can get done today that are easy? And we all know there's always things to be done. There are always these little tasks that are kind of hanging out there. So if it's like cleaning up your Notion, or if it's going through your inbox and answering some things, or if it's finishing a design of like a Canva PDF that you've been putting off forever, whatever feels small, do that thing. Whatever feels easy, do that thing. Because once that thing gets done, then you go, oh, okay, great. That's the feeling of momentum. Like, I finished a thing, now I can move on to the next.
[00:19:27] Caroline: Yeah. And I do think it can be all too tempting to the second that you get that restart where you go, I'm going to jump back into work. It's tempting to go for the big thing because you feel like it's delinquent, right. You feel like you've made no progress on the big thing, so you want to get back to the big thing, but all that's going to do is make you feel overwhelmed. All that's going to do is remind you of the timetable that you're no longer on. It's like Jason said, I think focusing on a couple of small things to get the momentum back is smart. And then finally, for me, what has been making me feel okay about it, because I started the year with such... this mentality of, you know, my word for the year is micro momentum. And I really wanted to feel like, at least at the end of each day, I can do one thing that is working towards my goals. And that was really the case in January, but maybe for the past week, with being sick and with having a friend in town, that hasn't been the case. But something that makes me feel better that I told you this morning at breakfast, is, for whatever reason, this has been hitting and resonating with me. The... and I've talked about it in a previous podcast episode, but it's the idea of this arrival fallacy, and I think Arthur Brooks was the one who talked about this on a podcast, just to give credit. But the arrival fallacy is the thing that all humans can relate to that goes in your brain. You go, I'll finally be happy when, right? Like, if I could just redesign my kitchen, I'll be happy then. If I could just reach x, y, and z goal, I'll be happy then. If I could just sell my business, I'll be happy then. If I could just find a partner, I'll be happy then. Our brains are wired in order to do that. And there's an element of it where we need goals in order to wake up in the morning and feel like there's a purpose to our day and there's a reason why we're moving forward. I think that's healthy. But when he was describing the fact that this is always a fallacy, because even if you reach that destination, you'll be happy for a moment, but it doesn't last. Like, our brains are wired to not have it last. And for some reason, that lately has just been very top of mind for me. So in this moment, when I think to myself, man, I haven't made any progress towards my goals, I immediately just remind myself the goal itself is a fallacy anyway, so the fact that I haven't made progress is okay. I should never believe the lie in my head that says that happiness is on the other side of achieving that goal. So to me, it's all just like, I don't even know if I'm articulating this correctly, but it's sort of, to me, it takes the pressure off because it goes, well, Caroline, you know, that's a little bit of a fool's errand anyway. Like, you know, the goal is just something for your brain to chew on. It's not life and death to happen, and it's about the journey anyway, and it's about the day in and day out of doing that. So if you spent the past week, day in and day out of doing other things besides that goal, it's not the end of the world.
[00:22:12] Jason: Yeah. And I think kind of to put a pin in this chapter of this podcast, the other thing very related to that is like, go back five years or ten years. Whatever feels right to you in your life. Would ten years ago you look at your life now and be like, wow, great job? You've made it to a place that we wanted to get to. And I think if the answer is in any way yes, even if it's like 10% yes, then great. You need to sit with that and enjoy that and appreciate that and look at, like, let me compare my life to my life, not my life to what I see elsewhere and what looks perfect and go, yeah, I have moved forward. I have gained momentum toward my goals. I might not be at whatever my big goal is, but that's okay. And I think that's just a part of life. And I think for us, that has been a huge shift throughout the years is to always look and go, yeah, but five years ago, we were at this place, and now we're at where we are now, and we're not at our enough number. We're not at our selling a business and retiring and not having to worry about money for the rest of our lives. No, but do we get up and work on projects that we really like every day, and we have customers we really enjoy, and we can take a week off to wrap our hands around a toilet and to really get lost in some kleenex? Absolutely, we can. And I think that that is a really important way to reframe when you feel like you've lost momentum is, but where was I five years ago? And I think for many people listening to this, you might be one of those people who, like, you've been working on your own business for the past couple of years, but five years ago, you were working for a nine to five that you absolutely hated, and it was soul sucking, and you've now forgotten what that felt like every day. Do you remember the fluorescent lights in that damn office? Do you remember the boss who was always breathing down your neck? Do you remember the meaningless work you had to do on a crappy computer every single day? The office culture that you hated? Those are the things that we lose sight of as humans, and they just get erased from our mind so easily. But if you think back to them and you go, yeah, I don't have those anymore. Like, I'm not doing 10k months or whatever, but that doesn't matter because you've gotten out of a different part of a journey that really made you feel like you weren't doing fulfilling work.
[00:24:12] Caroline: Definitely.
[00:24:13] Jason: All right, let's move into part two of this.
[00:24:15] Caroline: So you wanted to also talk about something that comes up a lot at this stage of the journey, which is it's important to remember when you're starting anything, that you're going to have to start ugly.
[00:24:26] Jason: Yeah. So I really think this is such an important phrase for anybody who's at the beginning of a journey in building a business. Or if you're pivoting a business, which kind of feels like it's what we're doing with Teachery. Teachery is a business that makes $10,000 plus per month in revenue. And that's not profit. That's just revenue. We have developers we have to pay. We have costs. We have all those things, and we barely take any money from Teachery. But it does feel like we're at this pivot point where it feels like we're starting over. We have built the application. Like the software exists, but it has been mostly unchanged for quite a long time. There are so many things we want to do with it. There's so many things that we're thinking about, but it feels like we're just at this spot where everything feels like it needs to be done. And I think that at the beginning of your journey, you're starting a business, it feels like you have to do all the things you've never done before. And I feel like when you're pivoting, it's the same thing. So what I wanted to really hit home in this is this idea of embracing the start ugly, embracing the fact that there is no perfect way to do almost anything you're doing in business. And I want to give an example. So we're currently looking at trying to better track our kind of customers experience using Teachery, which is our online course platform, and what they're doing within the application. It's funny enough, when it started, my original co-founder installed this product called Mixpanel, which kind of does that, and we ended up ripping it out of Teachery. Maybe it was like three or four years after we started because we just never used it. Also, it was the very beginning of that product existing, so I don't know even how helpful it was.
[00:26:00] Caroline: Yeah. And just to give some context, the reason why this is important is because, especially in software, you can't make improvements to the product and form hypotheses about what is maybe going to keep a customer on longer or what's going to help them get to value faster if you can't track that. Right. So being able to have data of, okay, this is how many people are adding a new lesson. This is how many people are creating new courses. Things like that is going to allow you to change something inside the app or even marketing wise, like add a new getting started guide, for example, and be able to basically have results from that experiment to say, did this move the needle? Right? Did this mean that more people were getting in there and doing x, y, and z? But if you don't have data, you're never going to know if any of your efforts are doing anything or moving the needle. And the reason I say that is because I know a lot of you listening don't have software products, but you do have online businesses. And if you want to form hypotheses about, okay, I'm going to change my welcome sequence. You want to know how many people are making it to the end of that sequence, how many people are opening those emails, right. So data can help inform that.
[00:27:08] Jason: Yeah. So getting back to my story of this is you're taking over the kind of like customer relationship management on the back end, trying to kind of build out some of these data tracking things. And Mixpanel is coming back into Teachery, which is very funny. And so we're going to do it. But the point that I want to make is now in the way that it's set up, you have this whole Google sheet that has all these events that we can track and whatever. What I can see happening is it's very overwhelming. This is incredibly technical to think through. What if we don't get it right? What if we're not tracking the right thing? And I think this is where it's like, you just have to embrace the start ugly mindset. No one is going to give us an award. No one's going to show up at our door, ring our doorbell and go, hey, here is your Mixpanel setup award. You got all of the events done correctly, and you get to have this trophy on your mantle forever.
[00:28:02] Caroline: Man.
[00:28:03] Jason: I know.
[00:28:03] Caroline: I wish.
[00:28:04] Jason: I know. It doesn't happen. And I think it's a really important just metaphor for you to think about in your business of, like, you could write the perfect welcome sequence, you could create the perfect online course, you could have the best client onboarding ever. But no one is going to show up and give you an award for doing it perfectly because there is no perfect.
[00:28:21] Caroline: Yeah. And I mean, okay, maybe that resonates with you. Maybe you're someone who, I know no one actually thinks anyone's going to show up with an award, but maybe just the idea of perfectionism is something that is hard for you to let go of. But for me, it's not really about the perfection. What it really comes down to is trying to save future me from problems. Right? That's what I'm really trying to do, is I'm trying to think through all the different ways that this could fall short so that future me doesn't have to solve a problem. But if you're that person, and that's what actually is driving your perfectionism, or your precrastination, as we call it, what helps me is to realize I cannot possibly think through all of those problems because they don't exist yet. And you don't know what you don't know.
[00:29:07] Jason: Exactly.
[00:29:08] Caroline: And so you have to start ugly in order to just... We say this a lot around here is get clay on the table. You can't sculpt anything into this masterpiece if you don't just get a hunk of clay, a big, ugly hunk of clay on the table. Then you can start sculpting.
[00:29:25] Jason: I'm going to throw out a movie metaphor that I don't know well because I don't think I've ever seen this movie, but I know the scene in Ghost when Patrick Swayze is a ghost and has his arms around somebody. Is it Whoopi? Is it the other person?
[00:29:36] Caroline: Demi Moore?
[00:29:37] Jason: It's probably Demi Moore. That would make more sense. And they're sculpting together. Right. That is a very iconic scene. He's like guiding her hands or whatever, and it's very whatever. If there's no clay on the table, that's not romantic. That's just weird. But when there's clay, they're doing something. Anyway, that's my metaphor I wanted to...
[00:29:57] Caroline: I'm so glad that we took that little side jaunt. Thank you.
[00:29:59] Jason: I think everybody's going to appreciate that part of it, for sure.
[00:30:01] Caroline: So the point is, you got to get clay on the table. And I think also how this relates to just the overarching topic of momentum is it's important that when you feel like you've lost momentum, a lot of times it might be because perfectionism is getting in the way, or it might be because you're overthinking some type of task where you're trying to prevent future you from encountering problems and just to recognize you can't do that. Let future you solve those problems.
[00:30:29] Jason: Just remember also, almost nothing that you're going to do in your business is permanent. For all of us who are building online businesses, everything is changeable. Everything is able to be redone. Everything is able to, like, we could pull Mixpanel out completely and put it back in and redo all of it. It's a pain and it's a bummer, but it is not something that is forever. And I think we're, as online business owners, we're afraid of these forever decisions. Everything we're doing can be changed.
[00:30:54] Caroline: Definitely. So that is something we're reminding ourselves lately as well. And then I want to talk about the third thing, part three of this little where we're at with the inevitable slump in the creation, the creator's journey, which is when you start to feel like you're losing momentum. At least for us, we find that there always comes this point where this little whisper comes into your head that goes, hey, what if you changed everything?
[00:31:25] Jason: What if you built, like, a whole new thing?
[00:31:27] Caroline: Hey. Instead of this project that you just started, because now you're realizing actually how difficult it is, what if you just scrapped the entire thing and you went a completely different direction?
[00:31:38] Jason: Yeah.
[00:31:39] Caroline: Anyone else deal with that?
[00:31:40] Jason: Yeah. I have a hypothetical question for you. Not a hypothetical, I just have a question for you.
[00:31:43] Caroline: Okay.
[00:31:44] Jason: On the count of three, how often do I come to you and say, like, I just want to blow everything up and change everything? How often does that happen? So we're just going to guess a time together on the count of three of how often that happens.
[00:31:57] Caroline: Okay.
[00:31:57] Jason: I'm going to say how often I think it happens. And you can say often from your side how often you think it happens. Okay. Three, two, one.
[00:32:05] Caroline: Once every four years.
[00:32:07] Jason: Okay. This is fun.
[00:32:09] Caroline: Only because the last one I could even think of was, like, that time during growing WAIM when I was like, don't do this, man.
[00:32:16] Jason: Yeah. Okay. First of all, makes you feel great. Also, our Creami score is now to 9.5.
[00:32:23] Caroline: Explain the Creami rating system to me. It does not make sense.
[00:32:25] Jason: It's a bell curve. Did you understand?
[00:32:27] Caroline: The jury said.
[00:32:28] Jason: Did you understand when a class of students got grades and then, like, one kid was, like, the super smart kid, so it brought everyone's grades up? That didn't make any sense.
[00:32:34] Caroline: Or down. I don't understand.
[00:32:36] Jason: Anyway. Yeah. So I feel like in our business, I'm the antsy one that always wants to make new things, and I just love making new things.
[00:32:46] Caroline: Of course.
[00:32:46] Jason: I've made so many things in the past 15 years that the new and exciting is always invigorating and fulfilling and what have you. I feel like I'm doing that every year. But I think the reality is, like, you guessed, I'm actually doing it every couple years.
[00:33:00] Caroline: No, you're doing it every couple of years. But maybe give the people some context for this.
[00:33:04] Jason: So what happened was, I don't know how long this was, a week or two. We were going on a walk, and I just was having this moment where we've been working on Teachery, kind of like full time, quote unquote, for a month and a half.
[00:33:17] Caroline: It was not a walk.
[00:33:18] Jason: It was right there.
[00:33:19] Caroline: It was late.
[00:33:20] Jason: Don't do the couple.
[00:33:21] Caroline: I'm not doing the couples. It's important because it was 10:00 p.m. at night.
[00:33:24] Jason: Oh, that's fine.
[00:33:25] Caroline: When we were about to go to bed and Jason...
[00:33:26] Jason: Walk in my mind.
[00:33:27] Caroline: You were on a walk in your mind, and you were watching a podcast, and you paused it, and you went on this existential journey of, maybe we should just build something new. And I was like, hey, bro, I'm trying to wind down right now.
[00:33:42] Jason: Anyway, it doesn't necessarily matter when it was, but the idea of this is that I'm looking at what we're working on with Teachery, and I can see all of the negative parts of working on it. I can see all the places where it's not fun to do, especially, like, this Mixpanel thing. That hurts my brain. That's not where my brain operates well. And so I don't like doing those things. And that's not to say that every part of business has to be something you like. But I think with WAIM, that is a good example of we have found a business that we pretty much like almost every single part of it, and now we're getting into Teachery and working on it. Like, I don't like half of these things, and it's mostly because I don't understand them. I'm not a developer. I don't write code. I don't understand deep analytics of a software. I don't even know how to get them. I don't know what we're trying to do. I just want to make fun things. And so I was having this moment where I was just like, should we just stop working on this and instead make something else that's fun and new and different? And like you said, I think this happens every four years, more than every year like I think it does. And I think you did a great job of kind of the same thing I would do if I was talking to a version of myself who was doing this, which is like, you got to stay the course. Like, pun intended for our online course software.
[00:34:54] Caroline: I think I did a terrible job of...
[00:34:56] Jason: Well, it was 10:00 p.m. at night.
[00:34:57] Caroline: That's the point that I was trying to make, is I looked back and I was like, I really wish that I would have validated your feelings a little bit more. But it was 10:00 p.m. And I was sort of like, hey, man, don't do this. Don't do this to me right now. But what I was trying to communicate to you in that moment was, we just got started. It feels... This is the funny thing about time. And I don't know if anyone else can relate to this, but let's say you set a goal for 2024 and you feel like all this time has gone by and you don't have a lot to show for it, right? Like, maybe you're on a big health journey this year and you wanted to kick it off January 1, and you're looking in the mirror at the gym and you're going, I don't see muscles. I don't see muscles. And it feels like you've been showing up day in and day out for six weeks, and you're like, I don't see muscles. But you zoom the lens out and you're like, hey, we're a month into the year. Realistically, a month and a half into the year. And that was kind of like, my comment to you is like, we're still just in the foundation phase right now. I know it's frustrating to look up and go, we're not seeing any momentum, but it's because we haven't done anything yet, and we can't do anything until we set the foundation. And everything that we're putting energy into is going to pay off. It's just that it doesn't have any jazz.
[00:36:12] Jason: Yeah. And it doesn't have any tangible feelings.
[00:36:15] Caroline: It doesn't have any tangible feelings right now. Exactly. And this is why I do think having a business buddy is so helpful. I think being in a business community, not to plug our own thing, but WAIM Unlimited is so helpful, because sometimes you need that sounding board to remind you, like, keep going. And the thing that I wrote down here, which I think is so important, is we say that a calm business is one that's predictable, one that's profitable, and one that's peaceful. But you never make it to predictability until you push through the monotony. Like, you have to go through monotony in order to get to a place where you can experience the freedom that comes with predictability. And for years and years, we operated in this kind of chaos of let's build a new thing, let's do a new idea. And that was fun, and it really was. And I have no desire to abandon that in our businesses. But the best thing that ever happened to us was pushing through when we started WAIM, getting to that place of monotony, getting to that place of where we feel like it's just like, I don't know, is it going to work? I don't really feel the momentum and pushing through anyway. And because we pushed through that, we were able to get to a place of predictability. And I think you and I can both agree that that predictability has changed our lives.
[00:37:30] Jason: Yeah, for sure. 100%. And I think the thing for me that I come back to in this moment of wanting to change everything or wanting to build a whole new thing, and I think you did a good job of reminding me of this as an opportunity for us, is like, well, let's do something fun.
[00:37:45] Caroline: Exactly.
[00:37:45] Jason: For Teachery, and let's have that be an outlet for this need that's within me, and let's figure out what that is, and let's assign something to that. And then, funny enough, just the other day, I was listening to a podcast I told you about, and it's of a company we actually use for our little feedback tool in Teachery. And they basically do, like, every six months, they just let their developers just build something for fun for, like, two weeks. And so this is their opportunity to be, like, it doesn't even have to do anything with our application, just like, it's a fun side project to do it. And obviously, we've always heard of the Googles is like 10% of your work week or 20% of your work week is just like your own time or whatever. But I think for us, it's something that we've never really done because we've always worked on stuff that we really liked anyway. And I think now that we're working on Teachery, which is there are so many parts of it that just aren't fun because of the nature of the type of business that it is as a piece of software.
[00:38:37] Caroline: Uncle Jhery.
[00:38:38] Jason: Uncle Jhery, just, man, there's so many dusty boxes filled with weird things. But I think for me, that is a really good outlet for this, is to be able to say if every six months we could do something fun with Teachery that's just out there and different and interesting. And even if it doesn't come to light, even if it's some type of feature, that we're just like, I don't even know how this fits in necessarily. It doesn't have to have a perfect end goal, but let's build it and see what happens. And let's just have that be an exploratory journey to stretch this muscle of wanting to change everything. And instead of changing everything, it's just changing a small thing or building a small thing and being okay with the fact that that's just stretching that muscle for me, and then we can move on.
[00:39:22] Caroline: Yeah. And what I have come to realize now over many years of experiencing this whole, like, let's blow everything up feeling is you get a lot of value out of asking yourself, why do I feel this way? And so when you brought that up to me, I was like, okay, let's dig into why are you feeling this way? And I realized it was after you were watching this podcast and they were building this really cool thing and they were really making an impact on an industry. I don't remember the podcast, but I remember you being like, their product is cool. It's doing new things. And I was like, okay, well, let's dig into that. So that's where the trail led you down to I want to blow up everything, but it was the seed of this one thing, which is, this is cool, this is different, this is unique. So what is a way that we could satisfy that itch without blowing up everything? And that's where we were like, cool. Let's come up with a little side project that would give you that feeling of, I'm doing something cool and unique and different when I don't have to completely either blow up my business or build a whole new thing in order to experience that core feeling that you're on the hunt for. Does that make sense?
[00:40:30] Jason: So, coming soon to Teachery are what we're calling ten second courses. You get 10 seconds to go through as much of the course as you can, and then it expires forever. It's basically like the Instagram story of courses, and you can never get that information again. So you're going to spend six months building a course that someone's going to get for 10 seconds, and that's it. We hope you enjoyed that.
[00:40:48] Caroline: We think it's going to be really big.
[00:40:49] Jason: I do like your last bullet point here to wrap this sucker up.
[00:40:52] Caroline: Yeah.
[00:40:53] Jason: It's just two words, and I think it's great advice, and it's advice we have given thousands of entrepreneurs over the years. Keep going.
[00:41:00] Caroline: Just keep going.
[00:41:02] Jason: I hope that if you're listening to this and you're at a place where you feel like you've lost momentum, or maybe you're on the cusp of feeling like you're losing momentum or you see just a huge roadblock ahead of you of a change or a pivot or whatever, you can look back at where you were again five years ago or ten years ago and see like, but I'm in such a better place overall. It doesn't necessarily maybe mean financially you're in a better place, but you're not in a soul sucking job. You're not in a situation where you feel like you have no ideas and nothing going for you. There is a lot of opportunity. There is a lot of momentum to be had. You just need to keep going.
[00:41:36] Caroline: And remember that there's so much more to life than work. And I hope that you believe that, and that's why you listen to this podcast. But if you're someone who believes that there's more to life than just work, sometimes it means that your pace is going to slow down and that's okay. And remind yourself that you're a full human being who's living a full life, and things are going to ebb and things are going to flow and just keep going.
[00:42:02] Jason: Would you say there's like a delicious pint size thing that's not involving work, that is very fulfilling and rewarding to have? Would you say that?
[00:42:12] Caroline: No.
[00:42:12] Jason: It could be six of those pints in the freezer that are like, there's a strawberry one, there's a chocolate one. We got the butter pecan one in there. There's a couple of...
[00:42:21] Caroline: What's our Creami score up to, babe?
[00:42:24] Jason: Solid 9.5.
[00:42:25] Caroline: 9.5.
[00:42:25] Jason: Solid 9.5.
[00:42:27] Caroline: Well, you really did something there with the math.
[00:42:29] Jason: Yeah, I didn't do anything.
[00:42:31] Caroline: You've heard of girl math. You've heard of all the... This is Creami math.
[00:42:34] Jason: This is Creami math. All right, everybody, that's our show. We hope you enjoyed it, and we hope it helps you. We'll see you next week.
[00:42:41] Caroline: Keep going, folks.
[00:42:42] Jason: Bye.
[00:42:42] Caroline: Bye.