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Today I spoke with Brad Hart, who has been a part of over 30 masterminds, built several startups, and written the book "The 8-Minute Mastermind". We had an engaging conversation on what masterminds are, how powerful they can be, and why Brad has...
Today I spoke with Brad Hart, who has been a part of over 30 masterminds, built several startups, and written the book "The 8-Minute Mastermind". We had an engaging conversation on what masterminds are, how powerful they can be, and why Brad has worked to teach people how to create their own.
Yeah, let's actually geek out about the learning model if you don't mind, because you're a very enthusiastic learners for me. The purpose of life is learning. That's my life purpose. No matter what I do, I always want to learn.
So, the question I asked is what is the best way to learn and what I have deduced for me personally as well. I can learn from someone else, someone who is a few steps ahead of me, I can mastermind with someone who's walking beside me, that I can teach someone who's walking a few steps behind me
for me if I do all three, all at the same time, then I really are deepening my understanding of something. Right. So that's how I have deduced it. What are some of your learning models as way to really help you accelerate, , and, explore what's possible
well, definitely I call that a, the 33% rule, right?
33% where you're at 33% above 33% below, your current level of skill and expertise. but I think also just the immersion. Peace is what I learned from Tony Robbins, immersion and space repetition. So when you learn something you really want to go all in, you might want to spend two, three, five days just going all in. It could be weeks, depending on the complexity of scale, with the best possible people and teacher, you can find full immersion.
And then as time goes on, you'll eventually lose those skills unless you have spaced repetition.
So, you've got to commit to every two months, three months, six months, whatever it is for that particular skill to go out and use it again. So like when I learned how to ride a motorcycle, I rode as much as I possibly could, but that first year, and now I ride a lot, but I don't ride nearly as much as I can put thousands and thousands of miles on that first year. Cause I want to get really comfortable and I want it to like get all the jitters out because I recognize it. I understood. And this is the same thing when I was driving.
I'm actually pretty good. When I come across a situation that's potentially hazardous. I don't get, I don't freak out. I get really common. I handle it. But that was trained into me after putting myself in so many hairy situations over the years where I just know not to freak out and I just react, , and I don't react in a way that's detrimental.
so whatever it is that you're learning, I think that is really important that, that full immersion at first, cause you, you can learn a language over 10 years. You can learn it over 10 years weeks. If you immerse, if you move to Spain, you can learn Spanish or if you've moved to Mexico and you, ,
out of Necessity.
Yeah, you have to. Yeah. So one of the sad things about the world is that it's becoming so easy to learn things that nobody's actually mastering things, , because the information is so accessible, used to be able to go out and seek it and find it and find the mentor and like really go through the hero's journey.
You got to Google it and in the world of google and YouTube in the information age, you would think everybody would be a shredded billionaire with a perfect relationship and a perfect family. And everything would be amazing, but it's not true because people pay attention what they pay for and what pays them.
And there's that element of mastery that I think is, is being left behind and the most successful people I know yourself included have really fallen in love with that idea of learning. whatever they do, they never want to stop learning. So whatever my business is, whatever my title is, whatever I'm involved with.
I think my first goal. As a human, I just like the three Ls is leadership, love and learning.
Right. I love that. Thank you for sharing that.
My pleasure.
for those people who are not familiar with the term mastermind, why don't we actually define that first for those people?
so masterminds are not new. Although the interest in them has gotten really big in the last few years. masterminds are groups of people that come together that have similar vision goals, mindset, and they really want to move forward in their lives. And it's kind of like having a support group, but with action and accountability.
So it's like taking all of the best of everybody's connections, resources, opportunities, systems, wherever they have and bringing them together to help solve each other's challenges and move them forward faster.
Typically they're groups of eight to 10 people. I've seen them as large as 50, a hundred, 150. They tend to get a little unwieldy after a hundred people. but then again, you can create masterminds up to 2000 people. If you break people into smaller groups and you have a way to do that.
So, like I said, I've been, I've been doing it for like a dozen years now. I've been a part of a lot of them and I've seen what works and what doesn't.
And when they work really well, it's like one plus one equals 11 is just incredible insights. It saved you a lot of time can make you a lot of money and the right person, the right deal, the right connection at the right time.
"Right. But what would you say is a real value of being in a mastermind, being in a proximity of those who have the same, values.
Yeah. So I think all those are fun stories, but they don't define who you are. I think the real moments of the work you do on making different choices than you made before to get different results in your life. Because the easiest thing for humans to do is to drift and stay in their conference zone.
It's like the way we're wired, really. So it's conserve energy, stay safe. Our ego keeps us in a little box that we hopefully don't go across. And what I loved about all these people that I've met over the years, that, you know, I consider my heroes and I think a lot of people might. Was that they were always pushing the edges of their comfort zone.
So the biggest thing that I learned was just to keep pushing and expanding this idea of what you are and what you're capable of. so I, I have basically a mandate, like if I'm scared of something, I gotta at least try it.
And that's led to a lot of things that I would never, I could never picture my life having the quality it does without, as led to a lot of things that I'd never do again.
but I'm glad I did them because I don't want to live with the regret. I'd rather live with the story and the experience and the, even the traumatic stuff. Then the regret of never having tried.
What's an example of that actually, before you move on to the lesson.
So one example is motorcycles. Like I used to be definitely afraid of getting on a motorcycle.
Now it's my preferred mode of transport. I have a little scooter for around town and I have a motorcycle. And, however you feel about motorcycles. If it wasn't in my life, I think I would, I would be very, you know, I don't know what I would have been missing. It's such an enjoyable part of my life.
And it all started out as something I was very afraid of and would like judge other people and be like, you're crazy for getting on that thing now I get it. That's a good example.
What's another one?
Drugs. I used to be really drug judge about drugs. you know, a child or an alcoholic ever wanted to get involved in any of that.
I quit drinking, you know, with some success for, for a long time, have you back and forth things. I think I've been, often now about three and a half, four years, something like that. And I would never like try any kind of hallucinogenics. I would never get involved with that. And I got introduced to the burning man community where that stuff is kind of commonplace and it's a little more caretaking, at least in the communities.
I'm not saying, you know, go to any dude at burning man and ask for drugs. But, you know, in those communities, there's people that really understand this stuff at a high level and can do it safely and create a supportive environment. So my experiences with that, it really opened me up to, different levels of impact that even the most astute development work, personal development work can't touch like MGMA therapy is off the charts. For me, it was such a big deal for me.
And then without drugs, like, EMDR is that what's called with the lighter. Yeah, that was fascinating. I did too many sessions in too short of time.
Against the advice of the therapist. And I would recommend like, if you do EMDR, it's more powerful. Then you realized, and you needed to take time off, like at least a couple of weeks off in between sessions. I did four sessions in two weeks, 90 minutes, way too much too soon. And then my whole life unraveled for the better overall. But. Too painful of a transition.
So it's like, you have a conscious grip of reality, but then when that dissolves and there's stuff happening underneath, and you're no longer able to cope with that, or there's too much being surfaced at once. There's too many memories being processed. Like I processed my entire timeline in my whole life three decades in two weeks, it was too much. It's a process all at once.
You need to like, take a chunk, bite it off, chew it, finish your meal, take another chunk, you know, relax and rest. So stuff like that, NLP master prac was huge for me having the therapy and learning about all that.
And then actually doing it on a number of other people. I don't practice professionally anymore. cause it just takes a lot of time, but it's the most powerful work I've ever done. So like if people are listening at home and they're just looking for stuff to check out, you know, I can't obviously recommend drugs, right.
That's that's a very personal choice. it can be a very dangerous choice if you're not supervised and you don't know what you're doing. And there's, there's a whole bunch of things that we just don't know. Right. So I'm not telling you to make that choice for yourself, but anything that doesn't require direct intervention or chemical changes to your brain chemistry, like I would absolutely give it a shot.
Cause what's the downside. The upside is you lose a piece of baggage. That's been holding you back. The upside is, is, is tangible. And it's worked a lot for me and I can only tell you what I've done, but. I would keep going down those roads and, you know, if you have the right access to the right people and the right guidance, then you know, I think society is starting to come around and say psilocybin and LSD.
And, MDMA especially for, for therapeutic benefits.
Yeah, for sure. I would say on the broad level, I mean, as a scientist, as a former technologist engineer, I would say any of these transformational modalities, even as something as mundane as like an ice bath, as an example, right. That's super basic at the same time, there's always some quote, unquote, risk or exposure involved. Right. Because even as something like vipassana, a 10 day retreat, you just sit there and do nothing. You just sit there for 10 days. Some people have really delicate, psyche, and then they come out, as you said earlier, and their life unravel, because you were really, really delicate.
So, it's a lot of it depends on your own discernment. So for those people who are even interested in exploring all these different kind of beautiful, transformational modalities, exercise your sermon
yup. A hundred percent and just. Go slow. Yeah. Small go slow. Get in a comfort level and then expand from there.
And there's no reason to go pedal to the metal all at once. You know, and people have a tendency to make light of, of things like this. I, I don't think there's a good reason to, to go fast, you know, enjoy, savor, get what you get out of it. Journal a lot, process a lot, rest a lot, and then go back to it.
At the end of the day when it comes down to it, the way I I think about is, you know, in statistics, they call it what's the expected value, right?
What is the probabilistic payoff minus what's the probabilistic cost and the end of that, you get net, net positive, they're negative, and not that neutral, then, then you can make it accordingly. So that's kind of how, you know, how I think about it
"there's product market fit, but there was also founder market product fit. Right.
This could be a great idea, but, you the right person to bring it to the world.
Right. Let's talk about more on the purpose side of, of core value side of things.
So for you, you had mentioned. Hey, I did this thing, many things, with Tony Robbins, you know, now I have an opportunity to do it with my ex girlfriends. You actually start something, right. That was a serendipity. that was opportunity but something within you click and say, I'm going to continue to do this.
Can you walk us through some of the processes that you have for you personally, for your clients perhaps can actually help them? I don't find that founder market fit.
regard to, you know, why am I the guy for masterminds? I think it was a question, I just feel like it's what I meant to do at least at this stage of my life and to help people, because I realized at one point, like I could start a hundred masterminds, maybe, you know, and an impact, you know, thousands of people, but it's never going to be as big as the impact I could have if I help other people start masterminds.
So hence the company and the book and everything that I've done with Tony and Dean in regards to that, It's such a powerful framework that I want more people to use. And they use it in ways that I would have never imagined.
Like I have a guy with a mastermind cops, this lady at a mastermind for horse owners.
there's all these wonderful things. He niches that I would never, ever impact in my lifetime 10 lifetimes. But now they're, I think as well, that's a really cool thing
to your point the opportunities are endless. There's so many, any people you can help solve so many different problems, you don't have to be the expert.
It's so beautiful. As far as a business model. and when you really find that thing that clicks with people, you can scale it. I have clients with hundreds of clients. It's great. And they, they just keep coming fast and furious. They get ads gone, and it's just crazy. I have one client that, spends a dollar. It makes $9 on Instagram right now. Cause his niche is just so cool. It's like New Zealand cops,
that's a very specific group of people. Yeah. He's able to do really well with it.
Hmm. I love that. So let me actually recap some of the things I heard. Okay. So, so why I heard that you like is, was a scalable model.
You enjoy the interaction, you know, whether you can be the group providing answers or you can just be the interview or holding the space for them, right. They enjoy the, the leverage impact you get to make. You're now helping others, creating masterminds. and there's certainly the, the, the residual is subscription. The monthly subscription that comes with that as well,
"During the time that you guys spend together, that you're like, Oh wow. You know, he's, he's the real deal. And here's something I learned from him what to do, perhaps we'll maybe even what not to do.
So this is going back 11, 12 years. So my memory might be a little fuzzy on some of the points, but some of the things that stick out are how much you read, like any time you wouldn't be talking to him or he wasn't talking to anybody, he'd have his nose in a book. and you took a lot of notes. So a voracious reader, that was one thing.
another thing was just how detailed his questions were. he's just a great question asker Like he just really wants to go deep. And when he finds out that you don't know anymore, there's no more questions.
It's it felt like there was just like this, this air between like, cause I'm 24 Oh kid. He's this really successful guy. that was a little bit challenging for me because I, like, I felt like I was on the spot sometimes.
And then. I got malaria on that trip. I got really sick towards the end. So my memory is a little bit fuzzy from that too. And just being in Africa, generally, it was very hot and a lot going on, but like we had some fun experiences. Like we got to play golf with the president and, general of Kenya. They were playing behind us and they like were yelling at us and Swahili cause we weren't fast enough. We didn't know what the hell are you doing? And we had to wear these like ridiculous pants. The 10 minutes that'd be barks. I didn't bring any pants. And you had to wear pants on the golf course. So I was wearing Tim's like blue bonobo pants that stuck out like a sore thumb and were the only white guys for like 50 miles. It's really funny the scene that we got into.
but I think generally what I learned from Tim is that when you have an expectation of what somebody is going to be like, and. You know, like he had no desire to keep up with me or be my friend after that. And he made that very clear.
I was like, that kind of hurt. Cause I wasn't going to try to be your best buddy, but it would've been nice for us to part on good terms, you know, and even like, I've forgiven him for it, but it just didn't feel good at that time. You know?
Like I wouldn't treat anybody like that. So that was something I learned is like, when somebody is really investing to spend I'm with you, at least make them feel like, yeah, you don't have to be your equal, but at least like, you know, That there are human beings.
And, and I feel like for all the gifts that Tim has, at that stage of his life. You really wasn't that well dialed into personal stuff or there's something else going on there who knows? Right. I don't, I don't know him personally. I just met him that one time and spent 10 days with him.
And then we bumped into each other a few times over the years, but, he made it really clear that he didn't want to be friends. So I was like, okay, cool. But I was hurt at the time. I'll be real.
Yeah, of course. I appreciate that. Thanks for sharing that story. let's see, what can I take it? reflect on that personally, I would say that I used to be someone who is like that as well is younger. And I would say, you know, inside those are not part a part of my proudest moments, shall we say? and especially doing any kind of ceremonial type work when kind of like long retreats, those are the moments that actually show up like, Oh, okay. So now here's what's it like to receive why you said on the other side. And then for me it was very humanizing and very humbling, very in an actually helps me get a little bit more compassionate towards myself as well as towards others.
yeah, and without him, I would've never, you know, been introduced to all the, like, he taught me how to swim. Like I read his book. Is his part about swimming without him? I would've never discovered masterminds. I would've never fell into Neil circle. And, you know, I get now as a much older man, you know, where his head was at, when he said that, but at the same time, it is, you know, I felt like it could have been handled better.
Like that would be my feedback. So yeah. Yeah. I totally get it. And I understand, and it made me less of a sycophant, like, cause I used to really like look up to these guys and then I realized, well, they're just people, our own problems. And I don't really need to just talk up to anybody. I just need to be the best version of me.
So that actually kicked me off.
that's great. That's a, that's a great lesson. Cause, where are human? I think it's easy to look at some of these people with great accomplishments, and say are demigod levels. And they don't have their own problems or they don't put on their pants one leg at a time.
Yeah. Well, and then that all saying comes back full circle. It's like people forget what you say. They'll forget what you did. They'll never forget how you made them feel. You know, a decade later, I still remember how that felt. I don't even remember the context of all the conversations or why it came up.
You know, it doesn't matter, but, it's interesting to remember. So like, I just try to be sweet to people as best I can. And I have a temper I'll just be real vulnerable. Like I'm a child of an alcoholic. I've struggled myself, you know, a lot of anger issues that I've worked through over the years. And when I'm under resourced, I can get snippy with people, especially if I feel like they're, you'd be being aggressive towards me.
Like I'm a very protective energy about that. And I'm like the sweetest guy you'll meet, but you pushed me over the edge. I'll get nasty, you know, and I have to notice that about myself because people, you can't take anything. Personally. People are out where they're at. It's nothing about you or 99% about them, you know?
That's another piece that I think is really important to understand. So I hope that's what you're looking for as far as, a thorough, vulnerable, authentic answer.
" so you've done all this mastermind, you've experienced it, you know, partake in 30, which is a lot.
And then when did you make a switch and saying, Hey, I can do this. I can, I can be a curator to help others. And I could actually be a curator of masterminds myself.
So it happened around the time I got into Tony Robbins. Now I've been to like 15 Tony events of Madam. I'm going to spend time in Fiji. VGs private islands.
A resort called Namaly, either late this year, early next year, hang on. COVID and how everything goes. I'm a top affiliate. I've worked with him and Dean on, on their project, mastermind.com. And I'm not saying any of this brag or impressed, but just to impress upon you, like, I understand this really well, and where it all started even before any of that was an idea that they have dad was with being at his event.
I met one of his coaches, a woman named Elena for hardo, who. we were dating at the time and we ended up starting a mastermind together and she was really sharp on, you know, she understood Tony's process. She had done like 40 of his events or some crazy thing. And we started this, this kind of brand merging.
It was, abundance and purpose. So she was the purpose coach. I'll find people's purpose. And I was the make more marbles guy, the abundance guy. Right? So purpose mastermind, we started out very cheap, you know, like 50 bucks a month or something and ran it for a year. And. it went pretty well, you know, and we started raising our price over the time.
We actually text our pricing over time and just kept rolling with that. We wrote a book as a mastermind together, which was really interesting and fun. And I just realized like, okay, there's not that much to this. I can do this. I love this model. It's consistent. It's monthly. the people that are showing up are really great.
And I just realized, like I could create masterminds to learn things too. for example, I really wanted to learn about Amazon. I met a guy at a conference. They Michael Quinn, who was really crushing it on an Amazon. Who's doing like a hundred thousand dollars a month, maybe four or five years ago. And he had been at it for awhile.
And I asked a man, like, can you teach me how you're doing? This is you're, you're making, you know, seven figures working five, 10 hours a week. I'm like, this is great. He's like, yeah. It's like 30 grand to coach with me. I'm like, okay. Yeah, I could spend 30 grand, but. What if, you know, I asked them questions like w you know, what, if you taught this to a bunch of people and brought the cost down for each person and brought the, the impact up for everybody, everybody takes better notes, ask better questions.
We all go as a group. Maybe I'll go to like China and Hong Kong, go to the product fairs, learn how to source products. You could teach us as more of an experience and have a lot of fun doing it. like a mastermind. I said, yeah. Okay. I'll be into that. And he had a pretty good following of people that couldn't afford to coach for them, but would be very interested in learning from them.
So I took on all the work of like enrolling these people and putting them into this group. And we brought 52 people to China and Hong Kong. We did like a week mastermind where, you know, we had training, leading up to it. By the time people got on the ground, they were like, they knew what they were doing.
And then he would like answer their questions and show them how it was done. And we had a really great trip and I got my trip paid for, I made some money. He made some money. He ended up spending all on a boat party. It was really fun, but more importantly, I connected with a lot of people who wanted to do this also, and learned enough where we were able to with a couple of partners, launch a marketing agency and Amazon marketing agency that went from zero to 75 K in six months, I ended up selling my share.
And moving on from that project, but it was just really powerful that, you know, somebody who didn't know anything about it was able to get paid, to learn from an expert, launched something in real time, because that's really what masterminds can do is they can create incredible opportunities in short amounts of time, whether you're an expert or not, if you're committed to helping other people get the answers that they're seeking as well.
So as long as you come from that, that space of abundance, that space of, you know, I don't need to be the expert. I don't need to be like the guru. As long as you come from a place of, like , I want to solve people's problems and I want to learn and I want to grow and I want to earn, and all these things like you can make it all happen.
So that's kind of the premise of my book is the eight minute mastermind. And that refers to the length of the hot seat, which is how to travel anywhere for free at a hundred thousand dollars for your business in five, 10 hours a month to solve any problem that your business can come up with, because it's really, important that people understand they have this incredible opportunity to learn.
If they're just willing to think outside the box a little bit. And if you don't mind, I can share a, we have like a free plus shipping offer. If you guys want it's an eight minute mastermind.com. There's also three free bonuses. When you go to check it out, even if you don't grab the book, we have 101 questions for mastermind facilitators.
That's a cool little download. We have a mastermind cheat sheet. and then we also have, 50 recordings of me doing hot seats. It's called 8minute mastermind. So there are about eight to 10 minutes long and you can learn like, okay, this is what a mastermind really is. This was about how to get clarity and solve problems in the shortest possible time and move people through through the various stages of that.
and you can hear me do it. So if you wanna check that out, it's eight minute mastermind.com. That's my latest fuck. I'm also working on one on money. I used to run a hedge fund Australia successful, and we have another one on marketing coming out next year.
"for someone who wants this type of engagements, rather than just reading a book, joining your masterminds, et cetera. One question that may show up may be, Hmm. I'm kind of an introvert. I don't know if I want to be a part of this or I'm kind of an introvert. I don't know if I wanted, but I don't know necessarily I have what it takes to start one. What would you say to that person?
Yeah, you should have a lot of clients who are introverts and that's a great question. I mean, you have to honor your energy. You have to honor how you relate to the world. I'm getting more introverted as I get older.
So natural introvert, most of my life, and that are extrovert. Yeah. My life. And I'm getting more introverted as time goes on. and my girlfriend's an introvert, so I understand like the real difficulties yeah. That comes through is I'll just share a quick story. We were out on our scooter, he went to the farmer's market the other night, or Sunday rather.
And I went to just drop something off at my friend's right after. And then, you know, like we're in the driveway, I'm chatting, she's waiting out by the scooter. I'm like, just come in, come say hi. And it's like, no big deal to me. And she's like, I just need, I need like time to like, get into extrovert mode.
I'm like, really? Like, you can't just say hi to somebody and then we leave. And like, for me, it's, it's it feels like no big deal for her. It's like, it's it's work to, yeah, it takes real energy. So she just needs to prepare. And she actually was able to explain to me what it's like. So I get it to some extent.
She actually started out as my client. She was running two masterminds when I met her and we got them to triple their revenue and decrease her working hours from like 80 hours a week to 30 hours a week after a couple of months working together. But, the biggest lesson for me is honor your energy honor, your style and your focus.
It doesn't mean you can't run one. You just have to be more. prepared, maybe know what you're going to say, know what you're going to do. You're not going to be the kind of person that's gonna want to wing it. You'll probably want to rely on experts even more, even if you are, you know, the model of expertise and have your content structured.
So it's not like a bunch of rapid fire questions, you know, some of the most effective entrepreneurs and mastermind runners I've ever been to, you know, like Sam ovens and like these kinds of people are very introverted. So it's absolutely possible to run one. You might just rely on the structure a little more and you might not be as, able to, or willing to do all the networking and the glad-handing and everything afterwards.
and then just protect your energy the best you can just understand that you have limitations that maybe some other people wouldn't have with that. And just make sure you have the time to care for yourself. Maybe scheduling a massage, maybe scheduling some body work or some quiet time or some meditation.
Like we always have meditation rooms that are masterminds and we do them in person. You could just implement that as well, or keep it virtual. So it's not your whole schedule. And then you just choose the times you're going to be on. That would be some of my advice for more introverted folks and maybe find some introverted mentors to model.
There's a lot of them out there that you wouldn't even believe it, you know, that are so introverted, like painfully shy. but they're huge names and they've learned to speak and they've learned to share their message in a way that is, it works with their nature and it also, gets the job done.
So Sam oven, who else?
I think James Wedmore is pretty big introvert. Brendan Burchard strikes me as a little bit of a closet introvert. You know, people like that, you know, I don't know who you would look like. Amy Porterfield's might be more extroverted, but I think she, you know, Oh, what's the one I'm thinking of.
she's really popular and she does a lot of launches. She'll come to me. but you know, there's, there's definitely a lot of introverts out there that are just crushing it in this extroverted online space. Hmm.
"Yeah. So let me refer to Dane's model because he said it so beautifully. So I wanted to, to, to borrow that he said, business really simple, simple, you can, you can simplify into three components, you know, a customer, a end result they want, and also the mechanisms to fulfill where they are and where they want to be. Right?
Most entrepreneurs focused on the mechanism part. They fall in love with their widget versus falling in love with the customers and as well as helping them get to their end state, get really clear about those things.
The rest is easy for me, that that makes a lot of sense. So I was asking you the questions about the founder market fit. One of the things I recommend my listeners to do, do a lot is these things call the airport test, right? Hey, if I ever stuck at the airport with this person for an hour or two, three hours, four hours, what's my gut reaction. When I get excited or I just get like, Oh, Oh my God, I can't believe I got to spend time with you. Right. So, so that's a very easy, Easy test.
Another test I asked for you to ask them to do is imagine now a it's called a conference test. Now imagine that your company takes off right now you're conducting a convention of all these people. Again, what's your gut reaction to a convention hall full of your people? Are you like, you want to spend some time with them? Are you again? I'm like, Oh my God, I can't believe I'm spending time with a thousand people like that.
So these to me are really good gut checks. The subjective reality, what you are actually enjoying time spending with a customer.
And I say this because at some point I was serving rotarians and plumbers. And for me, I realized in hindsight that those were just people that I wouldn't really want to engage in a long,
yeah, they were paying you. You wouldn't have gotten into it in the first place. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Ideally, if you could find something that you could serve that you would do for free and get paid for it, like masterminds, I'd go for free. I love masterminds. So that really got me. I was like, Oh shit like this. Maybe I should be the mastermind guy. I've been a part of so many. I spent so much money on them. You know, how could I take what I've learned and make it easy for people to start their own idea was born.
"looking at your own journey, knowing what you know now, do you feel that for the people who are starting this journey, they have to go through similarly and, you know, charging very little to charging more?
No, no. I made a lot of mistakes early on, which is why I do what I do. I help people to kind of skip that.
I want it in a way more market research. I would've gotten better at crafting offers and selling. And I would have followed a formula really that helps do it. And really like, we don't just teach people about masterminds.
We teach people how to build a business from scratch. Right. We teach people. I do market research, have conversations, sell in a way that has integrity, and sell it before you build it because you don't want to build something and spend a ton of time and energy on I'll. Just give two quick examples.
I spent $45,000 on my first internet business back in 2011 and I failed miserably. cause I didn't know what I didn't know. And then when I went after it again, cause I got into real estate.
can you underline some of the mistakes.
I was focused on everything, but doing the actual work, which is finding a product market fit.
So I was a real estate agent in New York city. And back then the real estate. Game in New York was dominated by brokers and you had to pay these giant fees. And the landlords loved it because they got free labor out of the agents. And the agents loved it because they got big commission checks. But guess who hated it was the customers, right?
The actual renters hated it. They hated the system. They wanted a different way. So I knew there was a pain and a problem, but I hadn't like connected to what they really wanted. So I created a course like how to find your own New York city department. I'm like, I'll, I'll put up a website. I'll just, I'll, I'll promote it on Craigslist.
And I didn't like, it was a solid idea and there was nothing else like it at the time, but I didn't test it. I didn't find the market private market fit. I didn't test the marketing of it either because my whole plan was to get it on Craigslist, which guess what their entire funding was coming from real estate agents paying $10 per ad per day.
Right. That was their bread and butter. They were making all kinds of money on it. They didn't want me advertising, competing product on there and they shut me down without recourse. I realized like after a bunch of begging and pleading to let them get me back on that. I, you know, I wasn't holding the keys to the kingdom.
I didn't have the, so it was a great idea. But at that point I already sunk so much money into it. I built the course. I had done all these things. I could have tested it out with a couple of ads and see how it went and like, pre-sold it. And then refunded people if I didn't workout or I did anything and that's kind of the way I do it now.
So, you know, I did everything. In backwards order.
Now, if I have an idea, I want to rule it out as fast as possible. I want to find the reason it's not going to work as fast as possible, but when you're young and you have an ego and everything's tied up and your sense of identity and self worth, or your idea that you had, which may or may not be a good idea, you know, everybody asks me, is this a good idea?
I said, I don't know, ask the market to do that. So now, you know, after a few more failures like that, I just, I have this dial to the point where I've launched a couple of hundred projects. And I always start with the idea on paper. And I go find 10, 15, 20, 25 people to sell it to. And if nobody buys it, that's a big red flag or if only a couple of people buy it, it's a big red flag.
"when you think about mastermind, you think 10, 20, 15, whatever number of people, there's a lot of pressure. I got to be all professional, all these things. What is the smallest, the lowest risk way to start one?
If you just start with the hot seats, it's not on you, you just facilitate and keep it moving and keep the time you make sure people don't get too long winded.
You make sure that everybody feels supported. It's not really about you being the center of attention. In fact, if you're doing it right, you're kind of in the background a little bit. so, you know, versus going on a huge stage 500 people and giving a speech, it's a very different experience. So, you know, for, for people who are really looking for a way to increase their impact and income in a short amount. I would absolutely try it. You can do a one off, right? You can do a half day mastermind. You can do a two day mastermind and just see what it's like in reality, before you make up a story about it in your head, right.
You can do anything. I have two days, you know, I just like to try things personally and I encourage people to try it as well. I don't want them to make up a story.
Like people tell me I don't like sushi. I said, have you tried sushi? They said, no. I say, all right, you get to try it. And then you, if you don't like it, you don't like it, but you can't not try it and say, you don't like it before you've had an experience.
"I often speak to overachievers and they want to build this big thing. Right. They're looking at their mentors and then say, I want to do that thing. Or I want to do that thing that used to do, you know, building out industry or whatever they're at a past success. And if I don't do that, I'm a failure. It says a one or a zero type of mentality. And I was encouraging them to actually break it down. When you get to a atomic unit of fulfillment, like find the thing that you enjoy, however, small, maybe you can always do incrementally versus setting this huge thing. If I don't achieve this huge thing. And then you have, you know, a failure. So what would you say to someone on the psychology side of things? Hey, I just wanted to go big or go home. I don't want it to do these type of little incremental tests as a way to find my groove.
I think bill Gates said it best, you know, multiplying inefficiencies just creates more inefficiency.
It just increases inefficiency exponentially. So getting it right, but nailing it before you scale, it is paramount. Sure. You could go throw a bunch of capital at it. If you have it, you can throw a bunch of time at it if you have it. But we generally have limited resources as humans. We have limited time, energy, attention, and money.
You have to decide how you're going to utilize and deploy those resources. And that capital. And once you spent it, especially at the time part, it's gone forever. And if you keep spending money poorly, you're gonna be out of money and people aren't gonna write you checks anymore to try out your new venture.
So part of the trick of entrepreneurship is to get that product market fit as quickly as possible. I think that's like more than half the work in my opinion is just getting the right product market fit because you can scale a company easily that has the right product market fit. But if you don't, then you're going to have a lot of things you're going to do are gonna struggle.
Getting the operators just paramount.
"Eventually. I just know my way about things, I I'll stick with something for three or four years and I'll be like, okay, How do I systematize this and let other people step into my shoes?
Cause what happens is this is just important. I think for anybody in any stage of their life, if you don't move on, when you've mastered something and you got to the point of saturation with a skill, you're really screwing three people, you're screwing yourself because you're not rising up and moving onto the thing that you were supposed to move on to next, right?
You've gained all the experience and you sucked all the, whatever you could out of that experience.
You're screwing the person who could step into your shoes and take on that leadership position. So in my example, like, you know, my former clients, for example, I want to teach people and they're like confident at the bet, like, get me involved. I want to help, I can allow them to start to do that and train them and do that.
And then you're screwing your future self, right? Cause if you stay in a position that you've outgrown, then you know, and not move into the next thing, then you're, you're robbing the world of your gifts in that regard. So I always try to think, like if I've been in a place for too long, regardless of whether I feel like I'm done, regardless of whether I feel like I'm, I'm the only person, like I don't, that's how I keep myself from getting stucked. Cause I know I need to move and change in order to not screw three people.
"So for someone who's listening to this and they said to themselves, I'm really inspired by Brad's story in how he thinks, how fast he thinks. So what's one thing you would say for them: hey, if you just take this one, the little nugget and then start practicing that as a atomic discipline that you'd take on.
write everything down. So I'll show you guys something I have a very specific notebook that I buy. It's called the echo low. It's a gilded 256 page book. And these are all my notebooks for the last three years. I don't know if you can see the dates.
Whoa,
that's everything from 2017 I just open a new one today. And I write everything down. This is every interview.
Every meeting, every sales call, every everything with the dates. And I make sure that. I write it down because I ingrained it in my brain. That way I'm a visual person. If you tell it to me and I don't write it down, I'll forget it I'll even do this with like, I have a little mole skin that I walk around with when I'm at meetings and stuff.
And I'll just make sure that I've written everybody's name down because otherwise I'll forget. Cause it's not all their freaking forehead. I'll tell you that much. And if, if you told it to me and I forget, I apologize, but I do my very best to work in the medium that I'm, I'm understanding. So like visual auditory, kinesthetic, you gotta learn your learning style.
And then play to your strengths. For me, it's all visual. I got to write everything down. So these notes are, are everything's me. And then, when I go through a book, I'll take a few minutes and I'll just flip through it. And I'll Mark any pages where there's, there's something that might be valuable in the future.
And I'll put like a little note or clip it or, write it down again just to remind myself of it, review it, I'll put a paperclip or. A folded page, whatever it is, just whatever your system is that works. And I write notes everywhere. I write notes online, offline, the writing physical writing act has been so valuable for me.
And I have a five minute journal as well. So I do five minutes in the morning, five minutes at night, and I switch it up to, I don't keep my morning routine the same. So there's like that there's meditation, there's exercise. There's all these different pieces of incantation running. There's always things I do just to put myself in the right frame of mind.
so that I can learn my best. I can be my best and I can do my best for myself. And that's a little bit of a quiz you have to figure out for yourself, what's your best way to do it is, but I can give you.
Yeah. I love that. well, let's talk about that for just a moment. If you don't mind.
It's cause you're talking to someone who's a geek about workflow as well.
I realized that for me, I take notes constantly, but that's my attempt to capture a stream of consciousness effectively. How do I package up my stream of consciousness?
what I realized though, is I rarely revisit the notes that I made. So it's valuable the fact of writing it down, but the actual physical artifact of it is actually not very useful.
Right. Then I came across this interesting idea called intermediary packets. So Google, if you want. And, and in it, they were saying how in computer science, they write these sub routines as a way to, , you don't need to continue to write code from scratch. You can just reuse these sub routines as way to accelerate the creative process, doing computer programming.
Right. So similarly, what if you have ideas that you can pull out, that's already developed in its own sub-routine forum called intermediary packets. And you can very quickly build, holistic ideas, right.
Mental models.
Yep. Right. So exactly. So, so that's one form of intermediary packets. So there's this guy, he wrote a beautiful book called how to take smart notes.
I believe that's what it's called. And they were, Essentially making a documentary of this guy's method of workflow. He, in his lifetime, he was not a learned man. And then in his lifetime, he became a sociology professor. He wrote 60 academic books. He wrote 600 papers.
Oh my God.
It's insane. How, how prolific this guy was
a hundred academic papers, little on, right?
Yeah. And then, and, but here's the thing. He didn't just write those books in one topic. He wrote about, , society, relationships on money just a wide variety of topics. Point being this method note taking is such a beautiful Skill once you have in a way to package your consciousness into something that people, someone else can actually can use.
absolutely. Well, and that's, this is how ideas are Genesis, and this is the Genesis and origin of all ideas. It's like, how do we make the experience of taking notes even better? So like Evernote got a piece of it right. And Google drive got a piece of it right. they have that app that Evernote called scannable. You can scan your notes. That's really helpful. And then you can search your own texts. That was really cool. Yeah. , I'm kicked out all these rocket notebooks, the one where it's like the special ink that you put it in, you use upload it to the cloud, and then you, you microwave the book itself and it deletes all the ANC and you start over. Like, that was, I was geeking out on that for awhile. And then I settled on my tried and true favorite, which is, , my little physical books. They fit in my notebook. If it were ever, I want to go. And I kick out on that.
And then my other system is I'll just give a little extra value here, my index cards. So I got this from Tim. Right. True priorities on the next card. No more than three to five every day and rip it up at the end of the day. And then if, as longer term than that, and it's a project or something, I've got to look at it later. I have posted notes that I have a system for my postings. These are industrial grade, extreme, sticky, posted notes.
They like, they work on fricking brick and drywall and anywhere you want to put them in they onstage. So I use them as
the names for those posters.
So these are called extreme posted notes, right. , there are just really high quality material. And what I do is I have three different codes for my saw, right?
So if it's green, it means I'm doing it myself and nobody's going to help me. If it's yellow, it means I'm collaborating with somebody, but I'm still involved. And then if it's orange, it means I'm delegating it completely. So I might have a meeting about it, but it's off my plate completely. So, and then I know based on how many green, yellow, or orange post it notes, I can give myself a quick grade visually.
I'm like, how much am I delegating versus how much am I actually taking out myself and adjust accordingly? Another thing I learned from Nathan Hirsch, he's a big VA guy. He built a huge eight figure company off the back of VA's no paid advertising and sold it. And he says he will never do anything for more than 90 days before he outsources it. That's his time limit. He's got to figure out a way to outsource it in 90 days or less.
Hmm. I love that. I love to interview that guy
I'll introduce you. Who's awesome.
Yeah. Very good man. Check out this tool. So for the listeners, this is a tool that I geek out about these called roam research
let me tell you why I love it. Right now, part of the issue, I try a number of different ways to capture my consciousness. Right? All kinds of different experiments. I even build my own website as a way to try to track my ideas very freely. The problem is bi-directional linking. So whenever I take notes, that's that?
It's a holistic thing. If I want to take on another project or none of the idea I need to start from scratch again. Right? Well, Rome did, to me, it was really. Revolutionary actually, it's so simple, but so revolution is, is you can link documents, document very easily, very effortless, and they also allow you to see the graphical.
I'm imagining there's a network in front of you, a neural net in front of you. You can see the intersections of all your ideas. you can find those things yourself. You can also see it. They will also suggest the vintage Dyneema has for you. If you think about the nature of creativity is in the intersection of ideas.
That to me is a beautiful feature.
So that mind map on steroids
totally. Totally.
You reminded me of another one that I've used with some success called WorkFlowy. Yeah, that's a good one too.
Yeah. Yeah. So, so, so roam research has a WorkFlowy interface.
Oh, cool. Cool, cool.
So it's very easy to use anyway. So yeah, check it out.
You'll love it.
I don't want to overload people with stuff I use. It are very effective because it's not about doing more stuff. It's about doing the right stuff at the right time consistently. So my clients and everybody, like, if you can do three things, three things that actually move the ball forward.
They're actually high, high impact every single day. Even if you only work five days a week, that's 750 things a year that are actually moving the ball forward in your business or in your life. And if you just did that, you'd be way more productive than 95% other people out there. Hands down. And then anything else you get Done is a bonus, but those three things, as long as you're consistent about those.
So I don't take calls in the morning. I don't talk to anybody until my three things are done. And I typically write them out the night before I'm just dead to the world. And then that's how I maintain productivity. That's how I keep all my products. That's how I write books so fast. That's how I, I get it done because I blocked the time I do it when I'm fresh.
So then anything like errands either it's off my plate completely, or it's at the very end of the day. No, I don't do shopping for myself anymore. I don't do errands for myself anymore. I don't like do my own laundry or, or, , and it didn't start out that way. I didn't have the budget for it, but now that the budget for it, I'm absolutely going to get all that stuff off my plate.
That's just not high impact.
Here are some great episodes to start with.
