121: Be More Clippable

You're listening to Quit. This is a podcast about change, the challenges of improving your career, making tough decisions and starting something awesome. I'm Dan Benjamin. And, you know, today is November. Is it important to say the day? I think it is November 13th because it's Friday. The 13th. And for this day, I could only possibly have one person join me today. And that is, of course, Sean McCabe. Sean, welcome to the show. How are you? You were just telling me before we started.

when the last time was that you were on the show and it shocked me i had to look it up it was back when the show was called grit right episode 62 2014. i mean that is hard for me to believe that it's Six. We've talked in the last six years, though. This isn't the first time that we've spoken. That's true, but it's been a minute.

It has been. It has been a long time. And it's weird to me to think that that many years have passed. And like, that's just bizarre. It's just bizarre. I'm getting phone calls right now. A phone call I've been waiting for all day long. now is when it comes in right when I'm doing the show. Isn't that always the way that it is? So Sean, what have you been doing? You have done so much in the last...

Six years, let alone last year. First of all, who are you, Sean? Who are you? And tell the audience who you are. I think they'd be curious to know, too.

That's a great question. I've done a few things, I guess, since we last talked. I used to be a hand letterer back then. Right. I was going to say that when you came on the show last, we were talking all about your hand lettering. And can I say this? You've famously done... like six figures of sales in, in an hour and it was a big deal. Right. And, and now you still do the hand lettering or? No, no. I stopped like five years ago, honestly. So mostly just helping people.

get unstuck, start their business, quit the corporate stooge job. So I'm all about it. So if I remember right, you had come, you kind of had Cinderella boy coming out of nowhere and you had- Wait, what is that? What does that mean? Cinderella Boy, it was your story. It came from nowhere. And all of a sudden, you're a hand letter. You're internationally famous. And I still have some of your stickers. You did some Austin stickers.

that were wonderful, that I have always put on my laptop. Every time I get a new laptop, I put the Austin sticker on it. And you had come out of nowhere and done this amazing lettering course that people loved. And they went nuts for it. And this kind of helped get you out into the public eye, right? Am I right about that? Is this was kind of your gateway, like you'd been doing other things, but this really launched you into public awareness?

Yeah, that's fair to say. And I started just sharing what I was learning about business and marketing as I went. That's when I started podcasting back in 2013. I think we're actually at 499 episodes. Oh, wow. Almost the big 500. But podcasting just unlocked everything for me. Just relationships, met people, went to conferences.

So I owe a lot to podcasting, started listening to Back to Work. I think I found it in 2011. So going on a decade now, but you were always a big inspiration to me to get into podcasting. I'm so glad that you're here. Podcasting, as you know, has exploded like crazy. Back when I started doing it in 2006...

No one knew what it was. And there was no way to make any money from podcasting. It was just for fun. And then a few years later, it started to become something that people, they took seriously. And they said, maybe this is a real thing. Maybe I can...

do this not for a living but maybe and i said i'm gonna try it for a living and you've come so far i mean you do the video stuff uh you you're helping people across the world how does the evolution from How lettering and teaching people that evolve into all the stuff that you're doing now, video, podcasts, and everything else? How does that happen? I mean, was it a plan? Was it something that you thought of and you said,

this is what I want to do, and the hand lettering just got me there? No, just one thing to the next, really. Started sharing, you know, people were wondering how I was making a course, how I was working with clients, how did I come up with my prices? So just sharing that stuff. And then I found that as much as I liked the art, I liked helping people get unstuck even better. That just was so fun to me, like seeing that people could.

quit their job and do something they really enjoyed doing and they could make money from it. They could make a living from it. That was fun to me. And so I leaned into that and just said, I'm just going to help people. We put, we put a conference together in Austin, Texas. Did that for a couple years. And then, you know, we've got this business community online with different courses and stuff to help people with launching a digital product online or finding your first clients.

And so I've really enjoyed helping people with that. But I would get so many questions from people saying, oh, you do all this content stuff. Can you do that for my business? And I would say, no. I mean, I teach you how to do it. And they're like, yeah, but I want you to do it for me.

And so it was kind of always in the back of my mind. But earlier this year, we decided, you know what, let's do that. Let's kind of build out the client services arm of our business and do some video work for people where they're doing the long video show.

but they want those short clips for social media. Let's do that for them. So that's what we focus on now. And I mean, you kind of came in and I feel like you mastered YouTube. You figured out the algorithms. You found a way to really promote it. And anytime I would come out, I just wanted to share this with the listeners, viewers. Anytime I would do a video, Sean, you'd say, here's a better, here's a way your title could be better.

You should really call it this. And I don't know if it matters or not, but it feels right to me. And so how do you, you know, this has got to be part of the mystery of Sean, I think, is understanding. When you look at something, you don't just say, I'm just going to go and try this thing. I'm just going to see how it goes. You come into it and you say, I'm going to study the hell out of this thing.

And I'm going to game this thing, whatever it is. And I've watched you do it. You're going to game Twitter. You're going to game YouTube. You're going to game all these and game. That's not a bad thing. That's like a really good thing. But. You come in and you do that and you understand it and you master it. What is it about that approach? Where did you learn that approach? And how is it that you can...

get that kind of laser focus and still maintain the excitement. Because I think for a lot of people, they get excited, they want to jump in and do something, and it takes a certain degree of restraint and self-control to do it the way that you do it. Talk about that. It's a strength and a weakness, I think, because it gets me into trouble.

I have this on or off switch. I don't know how to be anything other than obsessed about something. Right. I mean, and that's, it comes across that you are, you are kind of obsessive, right? I mean, is that safe to say that? it's fair like i got into i got into gaming and i spent like a couple thousand hours on gaming and got to like eight percent top online overwatch competitive player you know it's like

That's my personality type and I have to be careful because it's like, okay, I could do that, but what does that do for me? I can play video games and get addicted. Or I can play the game of business and it feels like I get better returns on that. Right. I mean, and that's a good point, but there are so many people who would try to do the same thing that you're doing, right? And they don't get the same kind of success.

Again, you came out of nowhere and you created something that really resonated. Was it timing? Was it luck? Did you come into this and say,

I feel like hand lettering is a thing and I'm going to teach it to myself and I'm going to teach it to other people. Was this a plan? You see where I'm going with this? Was this all a big, massive plan? No, it's luck. It really is luck. Really. It was all luck. I think there's more to it than just luck. Come on. Okay.

The alignment of things, like getting into hand lettering right when there was a huge resurgent interest and the searches were spiking. I didn't know that. I didn't plan that. I didn't mastermind that. Right. But I happened to be there because I'd been showing up. every day that that's kind of my mantra is show up every day for two years that's what i was doing every day i'd post a new drawing nobody really cared for two years and then suddenly it was like at the two-year mark

people suddenly started caring and it blew up. I think that is luck that it happened to go big at that time, but it wasn't luck that I was showing up every day. So I think it's just you... The way I've heard it put that I really like is increase the surface area of luck. Give luck more space to land. Right.

I love that. And there's something about the showing up every day. That's something that I've talked about a lot on this show, but you talk about it all the time. You're the master of showing up every day, I think. A friend of mine who started uncreate.com, which is huge. I mean, everybody knows uncreate now. When he started doing it, of course, nobody knew what it was. And he showed up and every single day he did, I forget if it was four or five posts about cool stuff.

He showed up every single day and put these posts out there, like clockwork, five days a week, four or five posts a day, every day. But how do you know that it's working? I've been doing this stuff for a long time. And I have a few of my videos that I did that they have like 150,000 views on them, which is great. But then I'll do a new video and it'll get a thousand. I'm like.

That's frustrating. Not like I expect everyone's going to get 150,000. That would be amazing and ridiculous if you're just starting out. But how do you have the endurance and how do you convince yourself? that you're not wasting your time. When you create some kind of content, you put it out there and like 50 people see it. And you're like, well, that's 50 people, right? Yay, 50 loyal people saw it. But also it was only 50 people.

That person over there just did something that got them 50,000 views. I mean, how do you encourage yourself to stick to it and to keep coming back and showing up every day like you did for two years? That seems like most people would have quit by then.

It's difficult because it's a balance between it takes time, but also you don't want to do something that doesn't work forever and just waste your time. So how do you know? I feel like... i feel like there's early signs like there's there's sparks so like the hand lettering thing that was that was a spark like it just it just happened and it worked and i was showing up and i was i was there and there was this alignment and that was really cool but

once i shifted out of hand lettering i tried a bunch of different things you know we we did podcasting we tried a membership podcast which i think was it was too early now people do paid podcasts and paid newsletters but it's It's about timing. And this was like 2016 or something. And it wasn't a thing yet. And the timing was bad. And so I went, changed it back. And then, you know, did conferences. But it's like, I didn't like.

I didn't want to do them like, Hey, we're going to pitch you on this thing and everyone sign up, you know? Right. And so it's, it's just, I spent the next six years after the hand lettering thing, just struggling, like really struggling. Like. doing a bunch of things trying a bunch of things i was working on a scale of one to ten i was working at a level 11 and i ultimately burned out and like i for like a period of two years during that time i was just like

done. Like I couldn't even feel the water in the shower, like just numbed out, you know, and like not feeling it. So I know what that grind feels like. So it's just like six years of working at a level 11 effort. and stuff just wasn't working you feel like you're just treading water like getting i gotta meet this next payroll i gotta get to the next month you know make ends meet and then this year you know 2020 of all years

decided to launch this new service. We call it the Daily Content Machine. And it's this long form video into short form clips. That's the service. But I started just barely telling this to people. I hadn't even publicly launched it.

and they were practically shoving money down my throat and it felt like wow i haven't i haven't experienced this since 2014 and now here again it's like it's the right thing at the right time for the right person and it just it's a spark And now I mean when you talk about that when you say that.

you know, you come out with something and people get excited about it. This can't be the only thing you've come out with since 2014. Is this the first thing that you came out with that got that kind of a response? I mean, you mentioned before podcasts and a community group. I mean, this wasn't. your only you know because you always hear these stories about oh this person had such and such a success after

this many years of working, but there have to be a lot of smaller successes and maybe failures along the way, right? I mean, was this the first thing you did since 2014 that's been big? It can't be. This has to be other things, right? Well, I guess... It depends on your perspective, right? Because I've launched other things. I've launched different courses on pricing and copywriting. And those might have done, let's say...

40, 50, $60,000 launches, which, which sounds really cool when you're like, yeah, I could quit my job. I could live on that. But at the time I had a team of eight people, right? You know, we had like tens of thousands of dollars every month in payroll. And so.

I think I grew things too fast. I grew them the wrong way. I took a thing that wasn't working. You could picture like a bucket of holes. And then I just made it a bigger bucket of holes. That doesn't actually make it more efficient. And so we're just, we're. we're bleeding money right and and eventually i had to let people go you know and that's to me that's that's a failure right but like it's you have to put a frame on it i think as an entrepreneur to survive it's like

I can sit here and wallow in the failure or I can learn from it. And I can say, you know what, next time before I hire people, I want to make sure what I have is working at a small scale and not just expect that if I make this bigger, things are suddenly going to work out.

Right. I mean, and that's the thing that I think is a struggle for people is not only that concern that what they're doing is not going to be seen or heard by anyone, but that they will... create something and then as you just described for some reason it it doesn't work out and now there's people who are disappointed maybe people that you hire that you gotta let go i mean

All of these things I've hired and had to let go of people over the years for a variety of reasons. And it's incredibly disheartening because you personally feel like a failure if you've hired someone. And you've said, you know, come and work here and it'll be great. And then for whatever the reason, I mean, it's different if they don't perform on the job. But if financially or business-wise or some other reason you have to make a change, like that's incredibly.

difficult to do and I feel like hurtful to yourself as a person, if that makes sense. Yeah, well, it's the worst when it's not because they're doing a bad job. Like that would be easier if they're just a terrible employee. Right. If they just suck, you're like, you're fired. No big deal. Yeah. But when they're great, but you hired them for the wrong reason or at the wrong time and whatever you're doing in your business isn't working and it's not sustainable.

You know, you feel personally responsible and you are right. You know, you're, you're the one giving them the job. And so I actually wish that I ripped the bandaid off sooner because I had a thing that wasn't working. And I was pushing myself to make ends meet and pay people. Um, but yeah, I think back to the spark though, like show up every day for two years, but show up every day for two years on a thing that.

When you try it a little bit, you see a spark. There's a little like, like when I came up with this daily content machine idea and I passed, I told people about it immediately. It clicked for them. unlike anything else I'd put in front of people in the past six years. Why do you think it clicked right now at this time? I think...

Content has got to the point where people see it as a legitimate thing. Also, pandemic, people are, you know, they're on their phones a lot. They're on their computers a lot. They're on social media a lot. And so... I think some of the smart business owners, it's weird. This pandemic has put a lot of people out of jobs. It's caused a lot of stress for a lot of, a lot of people while at the same time, certain businesses are doing disproportionately well.

And they're just making a ton of money. And so they're seeing this as, hey, you know, maybe the economy is going to be reeling from the pandemic, but this is an opportunity for me in my position to kind of.

push the gas pedal a little bit like i'm actually going to lean into this i'm going to expand my brand in this economic downturn and so it's just once again it's like the right thing at the right time for people right the right thing at the right time but knowing that is a talent too isn't it being able to feel that out you often hear of people who have these successes one after another after another and when you ask them about it they're like well it just felt right i mean that's

about trusting your gut, right? That's about having that there's something... There's something inside that feels like an instinct where you get a sense of something that's happening and being able to strike while the iron is hot, so to speak. It seems to be...

a talent. Is that something that you think people could learn? Is there a sense? Well, I have, I've learned it. If we differentiate between talent and skill and say talent is something inborn and skill is something you learn. I learned by doing things the wrong way. for many years. I feel like just kind of spinning my wheels on things. And I think it was as a result of starting with what I wanted to do, what I wanted to make, and then just trying to get other people to buy into that.

And sometimes you can get lucky, right? Like I did with the hand lettering stuff. I was doing a thing I wanted to do and then I put it out there and people wanted it. But it's not a guaranteed way, right? It's just playing the lottery. You could win. It's just not a reliable strategy.

I've since said, okay, I'm not going to start with what I want to do. I'm going to start with, actually, here's how I developed it. I said, who has money that they can spend right now? I'm going to find the... business owner who's running some kind of a digital online business that's making six figures, seven figures, they have the expendable income. And I reverse engineered the offer from talking to different business owners I've found.

In the six to seven figure business owner, there's a sweet spot. And it's a service or a line item on your expense sheet that's around $2,000 a month. Believe it or not, it's practically invisible. They practically, they'll pay for things that are $2,000 a month and they won't even audit it. They'll pay for coaches they don't even use. They'll pay for services. And I'm like, how did you, okay, how did you figure this out? Two ways. One.

I am such, I am such a person. I'm, I'm a person that is in the target audience and I'm the same way. Right. And then I would also talk to other, other entrepreneurs and they'd be like, yeah, you know, I'm, I'm kind of just bleeding money. And I'd look at their expenses and we talk through it.

And I say, what's this $2,500 a month? And they're like, oh, that's a coach. I don't really show up to the calls most of the time. Sometimes I do. He's pretty good. I'm like, you've been paying $2,500 a month and you're not utilizing this. And they're like, yeah. And so it's basically death by a thousand cuts. But I realized.

hey, I can fly under the radar there, but I can do it ethically by providing a really great service. I don't want to just take their money for nothing. But I recognize the psychology for the people. that i'm trying to reach that that's a sweet spot so i said okay this is my audience they have money to spend this is a sweet spot for them where it's no brainer how can i say this is the price

Basically, this is the price. What can I offer for that price that would be compelling for them? Right. And so you show up and you create something and then you put it out there and you hope they show up, right? How do you get it out there? How big is your audience? Could somebody without...

an audience and a group of followers that are as big as yours have done the same thing? Or do you need to build that audience first? Is that important? That's a great question. I want to make it so that I don't have to... lean on my audience. And the way you do that is you can't sell a $5 product. Cause if you get someone to your website and you get a 2% conversion rate on a $5 product, I mean, you want to make a living for yourself, let alone hire employees. You're going to need.

hundreds of thousands, millions of visitors. You just don't have the scale. So the solution is sell fewer things at a higher price point for people who have the expendable income. People or businesses.

And so you don't need this big audience. I mean, the crazy thing is within three or four weeks, the agency arm of our business was itself a six-figure business. And you're like, wait a second, how does that even make sense? It's like, well, it's just math. We charge, I'll just tell you the price. Can I tell you the price, real numbers? Yeah, tell me the price. Okay, so this is positioned as basically when you're ready to hire a full-time video editor.

to edit your clips, find the best moments in all of your long form recordings, edit them down, animate everything, write the titles, post something every single day on five platforms, 150 times a month. When you're ready to do that, you probably pay that professional video editor. $4,000, $5,000, $6,000 a month if they're that good. We price anchor against that, right? Hey, you don't have to hire a full-time employee. Pay us $2,500 a month and we'll do everything for you.

$2,500 a month is what our clients pay us. If you have four clients, you're making 10 grand a month. Right. That's 120 a year, right? 120 a year. Yeah. You don't need many clients. Right. And you just focus on keeping them happy and you don't even need to worry about...

additional clients. Do you stop though? Or do you, are you tempted to then grow the business and say, well, we've got this many, so we should add some more. And that means we get to hire some people. And now you're a bigger agency, right? Is that the plan or is that the opposite of the plan?

Yep. So now we're, we're back up to six people and we're, we're growing. I just signed a new, I signed a new client, talked to another client right before this call. Like it's, it's growing now. That's very exciting.

In the questions here, one of the... People asked a question. Ben, he says, I love the idea of turning long form video into shorter social media pieces. I know some people, myself included, can be a bit rambly. Do you coach your clients? How do you become more clippable? And so that's really two questions.

That makes sense. Do you coach? And how do you become or how do you create, just like your comment, giving luck more space to land? How do you come up with stuff like that? Do you sit down late at night and write it down? Is it on the fly? What's the story? Yeah, that's a great question. We do help out our clients, give some tips. We like to say, if you give us 60 minutes per week, you do an hour-long show per week, we're pretty much guaranteed to find seven moments in that to make daily clips.

Here's a way to think about it. I say, go into the recording. Just write a little bullet list for yourself, a little outline with seven points you want to make. As long as you give us seven valuable takeaways, it doesn't matter if it's an hour. It could be 36 minutes. give seven valuable takeaways, that can turn into clips for every single day. Now, as far as delivering, something that we tell people is one of our favorites is either Q&A or being interviewed on someone else's show.

So here's a great free content idea for you. If you're interviewed on someone else's podcast, even if they do audio only, get your phone, get your webcam, film yourself. You've got footage of yourself. delivering these valuable nuggets and insights in bite-sized pieces, which is how you naturally deliver on an interview anyway. Right, exactly. And so as long as you're thinking, and here's the key, if you're asked a question, just like when you're speaking on a stage.

repeat the question before you answer it. And then what you're doing is- Oh, then you created your perfect soundbite and you can just release that thing. And plus they like it when you ask the question back again, right? Yeah. So you got the built-in hook right there, right at the beginning. How do I grow my podcast SaaS? And then you answer the question, okay, I'm engaged. Right. I love it.

You know, let's go back to talking about luck as well as timing and things like that. Because there was a time where... podcasting we're podcasters so we can you know we can talk about this there was a time when podcasting was just simply unheard of it was unknown and then all of a sudden

probably thanks to Serial, but there were a lot of other things that were kind of building at the time, it all of a sudden became a very big thing and everybody wanted to get into it. And so now coming up with content that's unique. Is is actually there's a lot of infrastructure that allows you to do that right now. There's you know, we're streaming right now onto three different services at the same time. I run a podcast hosting company.

There are lots of ways to get your voice out there. But how do you, if you're coming into this without an audience already, without a big following, and this is what people always ask me. I never have a good answer other than what you said, show up every day and work really hard. How do you build the audience? That's the number one question that people ask me. And I hear a different answer with everyone that I ask.

What's your answer to that question? How do you build an audience and how do you create that space for yourself to have the luck and the creativity? What do you do? I think it's three part. You want to go where the people are. Where are the people you're trying to reach? Where do they hang out? And that can be physical. It could be digital. You know, are they on Reddit? Are they on Instagram? Are they on...

Pinterest. It's different depending on who you want to reach. Where do they hang out? What do they consume? What shows do they watch? What channels do they subscribe to? Thinking about this whole thing as... go where the people are. And then I think it's a three pronged approach, right? You've got, you want to build your own platform, right? Like have your, have your website, have the place where people can land.

to learn more about you, to read more about you, to watch, to subscribe to your email newsletter, to ask you to coach them, to buy your product, to purchase your mugs, you know, whatever. Have your platform as a place that you can point people to for where they can go. Then, I like how Gary Vee talks about this. He calls it the 180 strategy. And it's not like 180 degrees, but like $1.80. And it's like, what is $1.80? Do I have to spend that?

But it's a play on words where, you know, how people say you give your two cents, like put in your two cents. These are my thoughts on the topic. He says, essentially, go where the people are. Go. To say it's Instagram, right? Go to the hashtags where people are talking about podcasting or they're talking about dog walking or whatever, and go be a part of the community. Go leave comments on other people's posts and contribute.

And people will, they'll check out your channel and maybe they'll send you a message and comment on your post and you start to build this relationship. The third piece is partner with people, by which I mean. Get them to interview you on their show. Go to their audience of people that you want to reach and deliver value.

It's not unlike what we're doing here today. Maybe some people end up checking out my work as a result of this conversation, but I'm just coming here to help people get some clarity, get some ideas. And that's a really good way for people to come check out what you're doing.

That's a great answer. Before we let you go and wrap up this segment, there's one really good question that's been asked in the chat room. Adolfo asks, I appreciate the transparency. Where is he hiring his labor? And to me, that's a really good question because one of the challenges that everybody has, especially listening to you talk about how you're growing now, right? You've got to find really good people and these people have to be trusted, especially if you're in a services business.

like you're describing. If I hire a developer, let's say to work on Fireside with me, and they don't do a good job, I can say, hey, you're not doing a great job. Do better. And then if they fail to do better, I can fire them and nobody knows about it. There's no client because this isn't, we're our own client and our clients are the customers really. So we're delivering, we're delivering features and reliable service to.

our customers. But if you're in a direct services kind of a business, you know, the client may actually be interacting directly with the person that you've hired. Maybe you don't allow that. Maybe you have an in-between person. these people are representing you and their work is directly representing you. So how do you go about finding somebody who really is a good fit, especially now?

With COVID going on, where everything has got to be remote, you can't sit in front of the person and really get a feel for them. How are you doing that? Yeah, so multiple things. One, I have a competitive advantage in that. I have this online community I built seven years ago and we have a lot of really, really smart, creative, talented people who are, they're on board with our values and everything that we're about. And so I just tend to hire straight from my community.

So that is a competitive advantage. However, you know, you don't have to have that. There are other ways. I think however you end up finding the person, no matter if you know them really well or it was a job board or it was a friend or something like that. No matter what, and even when I hire from the community, I'm doing this. I lean heavily, heavily, heavily on processes. Everything we do.

is systematized down to the step. I can tell we have 1300 tasks that the team performs for each client's week of content. Every week, they're completing a set of 1300 tasks. Three different people work together in tandem. There's handoff points. It's all documented. Okay. Give me an example of one of these 1300 tasks, because it sounds like a lot. Yeah, it's a lot.

The first thing we do is we take your long form piece of content, we transcribe all of it. Our writer will scrub through everything to identify what we call clippable moments. These are moments where you said something really good that works on its own. where the viewer doesn't have to have seen the entire recording to get something valuable out of it right and then they edit it down they remove the filler words the ums the uhs they remove the tangents so like the um

Like the comment we got earlier, how do you, you know, if you're rambly, we clean all that up. We make you look good. Right. So some of the steps might be identify highlights in this long form 60 minute piece of content. So go through, identify highlights, then write 10 titles, then pick the best title. These are different tasks that would be in the list.

Right. So each each one of those is now do you have one person who does the same task every time or is it just whoever is working on the particular project in that role? Does it or how is it? Yeah, I thought it. I thought about this as well. Should we train someone how to do this entire process A to Z? Right. Which is what I used to do for myself. And then I created this process to have other people make my clips. But then...

they were doing everything A to Z. They were the writer and they were the video editor and they were the animator. And I'm thinking in terms of scale. It's going to be hard to find a unicorn like that. It's going to be hard to find someone who's so multi-talented in all of those areas. It would be better if we broke this up into specialties. We've got a writer, we've got a video editor, we've got a project manager.

And then they, they do the same thing, which is like their one third of the project each week. So more like a traditional job, like here's your job, here's your role. This is the stuff that you do. And it may be that you perform 400 tasks, but they're. the tasks that you do as part of your job, you're just doing them for multiple clients. Exactly. That makes sense. That makes good sense. Okay. So before I let you go here, where can people go if they want to find out more about what you do?

and how maybe they want to be your client. Maybe they want to talk to you. Maybe they want to be more clippable. Where do they go? How do they find out about you? Yeah, dailycontentmachine.co. So I couldn't get the .com. Apparently it was already taken. DailyContentMachine.co. There's a little video there. Shows you what we do. You can learn more. I am on...

Twitter and Instagram, the place is at Sean West. So it's S-E-A-N-W-E-S. Got it. Sean West, thanks so much for being here. Sean McCabe is the name. Can they still go to seanwes.com if they want to go there? Is that... Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. And who are you on Twitter and those places? Yep. That's at Sean West. Sean West everywhere. All right. Thanks so much for being here, Sean. I really appreciate it. And take care of yourself. All right. Thanks, Dan. All right. Bye. Bye.

And the show continues. Don't get too excited. It's not over yet. You're not free to go yet. I'm going to tell you about a sponsor. And then I'm going to read some of your emails. I'm going to answer them. because there's some good ones in here and you know what i'm talking about if you're one of the people that wrote in and by the way we need your emails we need to hear from you so you know what you can just email me dan at uh at five by five dot tv or

You can go to quit.show and click contact and send it in that way. It doesn't matter to me, however you want to do it. You can ask me on Twitter, but I tend to lose track of those. Not great. I'm not great at it. I don't have a system for that. So quit.show, janet5x5.tv, either one works. But I would love to hear from you. I'd love to hear your questions. I've got a good... set in there now, but keep them coming because that's what makes this show great is hearing from y'all about it.

Before we do that, I would like to tell you about our sponsor today. It's SaneBox. This is an excellent sponsor because you know, the one thing that I always talk about as being really important, it's the one kind of currency. that cannot be earned or replaced it's time i always talk here about saving time The best way to save time is to eliminate obstacles, right? So that way you're not wasting time grinding through stuff that's a struggle, not facing obstacles that you can't move, right?

That's a waste of time. So don't waste your time. SaneBox is going to help you not waste your time. They're here to help you solve the problem of email and getting too much email. We all get too much email. Here's how SaneBox works. It moves unimportant email out of your inbox. It puts it in a separate folder and it summarizes it into a digest.

Isn't that amazing? That way you only have important emails in your inbox. You can process everything else whenever it's convenient for you. You don't have to change your habits. You don't have to create like a burner account. It's not reliant on some other app.

This isn't something, well, I can only do this stuff on my phone because it's only an iOS app or it's just for Android or whatever. It's not an app, I'm telling you. This happens above the email point. Does that make sense? It's happening. out there basically on the internet in the cloud and it's looking at each of the emails that you receive it doesn't read the content so settle down privacy nerds

It doesn't read the content. It just looks at the headers. This is the same stuff that every email server that's responsible for delivering your email across the world is looking at anyway. It's never looking at the content. But it analyzes your past behavior, right? So which emails you've opened, which ones you've responded to, how quickly, how often. It looks at this stuff.

And then based on that, it determines which emails are important and which ones should be put in the digest and which ones you should just see in your inbox. It's genius. And there's so many other features. It has one click unsubscribe to get you off the newsletters that you don't even know how you get on. It lets you snooze non-urgent emails. It lets you move attachments to the cloud. It even has these really cool things called a sane reminder. So it'll remind you when you need to do it.

follow-up email, which is really great if you have clients or if you need to remember to invoice somebody or just to, you know, send your grandmother a birthday wish, whatever it is, this is all built in. to SaneBox. It's amazing. I'm just so impressed by these guys. They have a special URL. If you go to SaneBox, S-A-N-E-B-O-X, SaneBox.com slash quit.

You'll automatically have a $25 credit applied to your account, and that's on top of their 14-day free trial. How can you beat that? You can't. I'm here to tell you, you won't beat that. $25 credit applied and a 14-day free trial. Thanks very much to SaneBox for making this show possible. All right. Now, but listen, something important to tell you here.

And before I do these emails, I have to talk to you about this because somebody was asking me about this this morning. And I realized that I'm maybe the only person that gets this in the world. You're going to hear it here first. Okay. And here's the thing. I've got to tell you about this. I know exactly why Donald Trump is not conceding the election.

I'm here to tell you. I'm here to tell you. Okay. I've got that. I know it. And I'm the only person in the world probably that knows this. So I'm going to share this wisdom with you. Then you can be the only person in the world that knows it. It's the gift. Okay. To you. Come join me here for this gift. Here it is. Donald Trump is okay with losing. Hold on. Hear me out. He is okay with losing.

He's not okay with quitting. Uh-huh. You hear where I'm going with this? Listen to me for a second. This is important. It's important. He's okay losing. You would say, wait a minute, Donald Trump won't admit defeat. He won't lose it. I think he will. I think he can. Because if there isn't a chance to lose, then you can't win, can you? You have to be able to lose in order to win. And I'm not saying that he wants to lose, or even that he thinks he will lose, or that there maybe isn't...

Other factors at play here. But he would be okay losing because it would mean he was beaten. Somebody was better at something, and okay, he was defeated. He lost. But... Unless he completely pursues every single angle, every single possibility, tries every single thing that he can try, he sees that as quitting.

Think about this. If he doesn't file lawsuits in every state, then he hasn't explored the option. He has what? He's given up. He's quit. He can't quit because quitting is bad. Losing is not great. But even winners lose sometimes. But quitting is saying, hands up, can't do it, sorry, sorry I tried. I guess I can't do it. No, you've got to try everything. And I think that's the secret.

I think that's why you're seeing this going on, because in his mind, at least, anything less would be quitting, and quitting is unacceptable. Losing, okay, it happens, but quitting, uh-uh.

Uh-uh. That's my theory anyway. I'm just saying that's my theory. Are y'all watching this or are you listening? Because for those who just listen to this as a podcast, I guess I've got to tell you that this is a live, we do this live on video. And then I take the video and I post it to YouTube. So if you've got YouTube. If you've got Periscope, you know what I'm saying? You can jump in and you can watch this. I'm publishing it to Twitch also.

So if you're just sitting there and you're driving in your car and you're like, I wish I could see Dan. I wish I could have seen Sean on the show. I'm here to tell you that you can. You can. You can just go to youtube.com slash Dan Benjamin. Why not? Why not? You can see the pretty lights behind me. I'm telling you, you're missing out if you're just doing this as a podcast. I've got some great emails, some really great emails.

All right, I'm just going to start him with this one. This one's an interesting one. This is from listener Ryan. Hi Dan, I never wrote in to tell you this before, but quit was a huge factor in my success at leaving the world of corporate IT and striking out on my own as a freelance developer.

Congratulations to you, Ryan. I had been unhappy for a long time and wanted more control over my own destiny. With a young child, depending on me, it didn't seem like the right time to quit my job. So I tried to follow your advice about making my current...

job work better for me. So for those who haven't heard some of these older episodes, this is what I always say. If you're in a situation where it would be unadvisable for you to quit, for example, if you're the sole supporter of your family and you don't have something new lined up. Okay, that's a good example. Or if it's COVID, like no one should be quitting your job right now. Listen, is this not obvious? Is this not obvious? You shouldn't quit right now. Don't quit right now.

OK, like, don't quit. You'd be foolish to quit your job right now because there are people who are incredibly talented and gifted who can't get a job right now. You don't want to compete with them. Even if you are talented and gifted, now is not the time to quit anything. But if you can't quit, try to build something better within the context of your job. If your job is slow and you have extra time, use that time to learn a new skill. Learn that time to take that time to master something, right?

devote that to building your own skills, your own inner strength, right? Because you've got to grab onto that opportunity and you've got to use that opportunity and make yourself better. You don't like your job? Go to your boss and say, I want to do more. Promote me. Give me more to do. Give me something different to do. Your boss can say no. But guess what? If you don't ask, they've already said no. Don't be that guy, corporate stooge. Back to Ryan.

So I tried to follow your advice about making my current job work better for me. I took on new and more interesting projects. I had earnest conversations with my boss about the direction I wanted to go. Ryan's the poster child. This is what I'm talking about. about the direction I wanted to go. I took control over my career by earning a certification that would let me pivot into a new niche or niche. I don't know how to say it because it's right both ways. I looked it up.

None of it really satisfied me. On top of that, while my immediate supervisor was supportive, my workplace was generally hostile toward my goals and I was feeling more and more boxed in. Besides, I'd seen the matrix. I like that. I'd seen the matrix by listening. to quit ATP under the radar and others. And I knew I shouldn't have to live like this. I like that. I talked things over with my wife and she was extremely supportive of me spending some additional time leaning.

In learning, I was going to say leaning into web development. Which, Ryan, I think sounds a little better, but I'll go with what you wrote. Adding time learning web development so I could be self-employed, which was something we had both wanted for a long time. I started getting up an hour early in the morning to do JavaScript tutorials. Sitting in the dark hallway outside my infant son's room with...

my laptop so I could hear when he woke up. I talked a couple co-workers into doing hashtag JavaScript 30 with me. I was the only one who finished. I grabbed up any scripting and automation tasks in my department that I could justify so I could get more practice programming and using developer tools. Let me just, let me stop here. Ryan, I don't see how you could have done

more to further yourself. This is exactly what I'm talking about. And when y'all are listening to this and you're thinking, oh man, I don't think I could do what Ryan did. That's why you're a corporate stooge. That's why you're sitting at the same desk every day. That's why you're reading the same boring emails every day and doing TPS memos every day because you can't do what Ryan did. Oh, you don't like that, do you? You don't like being told what you can't do.

Prove me wrong. Do what Ryan did and then write in and tell me that you did it. Because I'll tell you what, you can do it. You know you can do it. You're just being lazy. I don't approve of laziness. I don't approve of that. Work harder. Do more. Ryan did it. Who's Ryan? Who is he compared to you and what you can do unless you are Ryan, in which case you did it. You understand what I'm saying.

Finally, things got bad enough at my job that my wife and I decided that I would quit after the new year, take my earned vacation pay, and try to make freelancing work. I'd been at the company a long time and had a lot of affection for it and for the people there, and I kind of felt like I owed them one last chance to do it.

write by me that's interesting because you were giving them a chance and you were giving them a chance ryan that they hadn't given you they had not given you a chance but you were still the bigger guy And you said, I'm going to give them a chance. So I wrote a long letter to my boss's boss. Oh, see, you jumped, you jumped over your boss and you did. I'm okay with that. You do what you need to do. Okay.

So I wrote a long letter to my boss's boss, detailing my frustrations with the environment and their treatment of me and asking them to give me a chance to switch to some other role in the organization that would alleviate those issues. They ignored it for several weeks, then called me into a meeting one Monday morning in early December. And fired me. I'm going to give you a bell for that one. What a surprise.

They did me a tremendous favor. I got severance and I didn't have to make the heartbreaking decision to actually quit a company I'd worked at for over a decade. I totally would have though. A little over a month later, I had several new portfolio projects and a sparkly new profile on a freelancing platform. The founder of a new startup took a chance on someone with no previous client work and hired me to build the prelaunch site for his forthcoming SaaS app.

the hours in two weeks to get it done, pushing my new skills to the limit. The gig was a success and I've been self-employed ever since. What a story. I couldn't have written this. Ryan is like the poster child, I think. Ryan is the poster child for 2020. Without quit, I don't know that this would have happened. Thank you, Ryan.

I owe so much to you and the other smart people who helped me see a way out of corporate life and into freedom of working for myself. Thank you, Ryan. Now listen, I'm going to correct you. It is not due to me. It is not due to quit. It's all about you. You did the work. I just said something into a microphone and you heard it. You did everything. You sat outside your infant son's room. You'd learn JavaScript. You went into the meetings and did all this stuff and put in the time.

I was just a guy talking into a microphone, but I'm glad it might have helped you a little bit. But don't kid yourself. You did it all. Thanks for the email, Ryan. That's a good one. All right. Here's another one.

Hi, Dan. It's almost three years after I sent you my quit story just after you released what would be the last episode of quit. reading the original email was like finding an old diary it has been an amazing three years in some months my salary can be five times what it was in my full-time employment, but more importantly, I feel happy, fulfilled, and I'm able to spend time with my young family. What I've learned, this is listener Aaron, what I've learned, diversity.

As mentioned in the original email, my side hustle, which meant I could leave my job, was a wedding business. At the moment, there are little to no weddings taking place, so my sales are down to 20% of what they would typically be. By having multiple and separate income streams has meant that things are okay. However, I could have been a vulnerable person if that was my only income stream.

As well as the wedding business, I have a marketing business, which delivers consultancy to multiple businesses for fixed number of days per month. And I have a giftware business, which as Dan encourages, makes me money whilst I sleep. Let me talk about the diversity aspect of it. And this is something that I've always, always, always believed in. If you are running your own business or you want to be an entrepreneur and your desire is to be independent, you cannot do just one thing.

You can't. You just can't do just one thing. It won't work. Why? Look, nobody could have predicted that COVID would have happened. There were scientists who were saying something like this is going to happen. Yes. but they didn't know when it would happen. They didn't know how it would happen. They didn't know what it would be and what effect it would have. Okay. But look at what I'm doing. I'm doing a show right now. I did a sponsor earlier. Thanks, St. Box. They're paying me some money.

Hopefully some of y'all will go to patreon.com slash danbenjamin and give me a couple bucks. Thank you. But this isn't the only thing that I do. It's not the only show that I have. right? I have other shows that I do also. And those will make some money and those will get some donations. But I don't just do podcasts. I also have a podcast hosting company called Fireside.fm.

And that makes money too. Now, is it making enough money that maybe I wouldn't have to do podcasts? Well, even if that were true... I would still do podcasts because multiple revenue streams, diversifying your revenue streams. We also have a podcast ad sales company built in. We do that because that generates additional revenue. Now, these are all based around the podcast industry, sure. So my eggs are all in the podcast industry basket, but it's still a really good basket to be in right now.

And there are still other things that I do. I do voice work and people can hire me for that. I can help people build studios. I can do consulting in a variety of different fields. Behind the scenes, I'm still a Rails developer. I'm still a database guy. I'm still doing this stuff every day. So if I had to, I could go get a job as a developer or pick up a client doing development work. I really wouldn't want to do that because I've got other things going on.

but I could. And so it's the kind of thing that if you're going out into the world on your own, you've only got yourself to rely on. and whatever savings you have in your bank account. And remember the rule I say, anytime you're making a change, not just if you're going to quit your job and start something awesome, but if you're going to quit your job and start a new job, because remember what happened to me in like...

2000 or something around then, I was working. I quit my job to take a new job that was supposed to be a promotion, and it freaking sucked. The job was horrible. It was one of the worst jobs I'd ever had. I hated it. And so I quit after only two weeks there. And I couldn't find another job because 9-11 happened. So I couldn't find a job.

And that's actually what led me to start my consulting company and everything else. But I had done the work. I had saved up. I want everybody who's listening to have a minimum. of two months salary. Now with COVID, and I would even say three months salary before you even consider making a change. Two to three months salary in the bank, even if you're just changing.

the job that you have because you don't know what's going to happen. I had a friend who took a job at a startup and he was there for a few months and then they went out of business. They fired everybody the next day. You don't know. You don't know what's going to happen. Okay, back to this email. Contribute to the community. A year after I quit, I started a business celebrating Coventry, the city I come from.

I should be reading this with a British accent. This started with a series of pin badges and has grown to sticker albums, playing card game, jigsaws, and more. With each product I release, I donate money to different local charities. I've been able to raise thousands of pounds for these causes and see firsthand what they do. I even won Role Model of the Year at a recent national awards ceremony for this work. And there's a photo, he's attached a photo of him winning the award. How cool is that?

satisfaction as i have a stable income and solid savings i'm able to make decisions based on my interests not what is guaranteed to make money during the uk lockdown i wrote a children's book celebrating my city's history he's obsessed with his uh city Come on. This is amazing. This story is amazing. Company of one. There's an expectation that as a business ages, it should grow. Whether that's renting office space, taking on staff. I disagree, he says.

When I hit a level of income that I was happy with, I decided to not try and bring in more contracts. More contracts or more employees would have brought more stress, which is something I was trying to move away from when I left the NHS. If you can live a life where you enjoy your work.

and are happy and can pay the bills, be content. A healthy work-life balance is essential to me. It should be essential to everyone. As I had hoped three years, I do go to the gym. I do go, I do the school pick up and drop off. I see friends, I play video games and that's just fine.

Dan has mentioned at the bottom of my email three years ago, if it was not for you and the listeners, I would not be where I am today. It's great to see the show back and you will no doubt inspire the next generation of quitters. I'm happy to come on air for a live chat in the future. If you're interested, yeah, Aaron, we'll get you on here.

and sidewards I like that and I'll tell you this is a great story because again it shows if you have goals and you set your priorities correctly you can achieve them And when it comes to achieving goals, my advice is always, if you think to yourself something big, okay, and I'm not talking about...

like sort of the law of attraction philosophy, where you kind of imagine the thing that you want, you find out, figure out what you want, you want it deeply and with emotion, and then you believe and expect that it will happen. That's wonderful for big goals and things like that. I'm talking about practical, how you actually get there.

You have to hold those things in your mind and you have to believe that they're going to happen. That's very, very important. In fact, I'll say that's critical for success. However, when you imagine... A big project, it can seem very daunting. It can seem impossible. It can seem beyond difficult because you can't imagine, well, I'll take fireside because it's the thing I spend so much time talking about.

If I had sat down and said, here's the million things that Fireside needs to do to be a successful podcast hosting and analytics platform, I would have said, forget it. There's no way I could never build all that. It's too much. I'll never get there, right? But that's...

First of all, that's the wrong attitude to have. But for people who say, oh, get there, it'll be no problem. You know, you get a sense that they're not really appreciating what exactly is going to be involved in building whatever the thing is that they want to build or doing the thing that they want to do. So what do you do instead? You say...

That's the big goal, but let's break it down into smaller components, right? Let's break it down into digestible pieces that you know you can accomplish. My analogy to this is building a house. If you imagine the complete finished house, you say there's... no way we'll ever get all of that done, right? I can't do that. I can't build a house from scratch. But someone would then say, well, can you hammer a nail into a piece of wood?

Yeah, I can do that. Okay, could you do that 20 times? Yeah. Could you do it a couple hundred times? Yeah, I think I could do that. Well, you've just built the frame of your house, right? Could you put that entire roof on? Well, that seems like a lot of work, right? Okay. Can you nail a shingle down? Yeah. Could you nail a hundred shingles down?

Yeah, I guess I could nail 100 shingles down. Okay, now you've got that section of your roof done. It's the same thing with any project. You break it down into its component pieces, right? So that each one of those things that you've put together... eventually becomes this bigger piece. No project ever starts out with someone saying, I know exactly how it's going to go and I know everything I've got to do. You just start.

And you start by hammering that nail into that piece of wood the first time. And all of a sudden, before you know it, you've built a house. It might take you a year. It might take you two years. It might take you longer. But you did it and you did it piece by piece. And this involves a certain degree of analytical thinking. You must sit down and say, what is the problem that I am trying to solve and how do I solve it? Right? And the way that you do that is by...

saying, what is the starting point? How do I dive into this? How do I accomplish it? And the only way that I can accomplish it is by starting small, starting with the individual thing. If you want to write a book, you have to what? First create an outline. And the outline is going to be your guide for creating that book. You don't just start writing, you create an outline. You might do, if it's a fiction book, you might have character arcs, right? You might say, well,

I want this character to evolve from, you know, a teenager who doesn't understand the world to a successful adult who's conquering the world. Whatever. I'm just making this up. You're the writer. You write it, but you have to start with an outline. Well, use that same concept for anything that you're doing. What are the tasks that I will need to do to accomplish this? And you break it down, not just into individual tasks, but into groups of tasks.

So that you say, well, to create this thing, there are these three big chunks that I need to do. And in the first chunk, there's actually 22 steps. And in the second chunk, there's 30 steps. And don't focus on all of them. Because it'll make your mind explode. You just focus on the ones that you can do when you start out and do them in the order. And then guess what? By the time that you're done, you'll be done. How long have I been doing this show today?

Oh, well, we're over an hour. That's why I like to cut it off after an hour. I have more emails. But listen, I need your emails. I'm so serious about this. Got to have them. Dan at 5x5.tv, quit.show. Without them, what am I going to talk about?

I'll just have to make stuff up and it'll be boring. So email me and tell me of your problem or tell me of your success. Do you disagree with me? I want to hear about it. Do you agree with me? Cool. Did you use something that I said or something you learned somewhere else? I'm always interested in learning more, and I learn the most by talking to people just like you. So enlighten me, write in, tell me what you think of the show. Of course, you can follow this channel. It's YouTube.

dot com slash Dan Benjamin. Like, subscribe, all that stuff that's important. But if you're just listening, I appreciate it. And you know what? You can rate the show on iTunes. It'll kind of wake iTunes up to the fact that we're back here. That would be helpful too.

And I sure do appreciate everybody who's tuning back into the show. It's great to be back. And I love your feedback. I love your encouragement. It means a great deal. So that's it. And be sure, last thing I'll say is if you enjoy the show, if you want to be in the chat. you want to share your questions, comments, and thoughts with me, you can do that by following me on Twitter at DanBenjamin and, of course, tuning in live when we do it at 5 p.m. Eastern Time every Friday.

So thanks for being here, and I'll see you all again next week. Have a good one.