Focused - 43: Don’t Ask Us Permission

Episode Date: March 20, 2018

David attended a conference and was asked for advice (or was it permission?) from many potential free agents. When he got home, his professional life was in disarray. What are the lessons to take from that? Jason ponders putting more effort into video. David continues down the path of hyperscheduling.

David Sparks and Jason Snell spent their careers working for the establishment. Then one day, they'd had enough. Now, they are independent workers learning what it takes to succeed in the 21st century. They are free agents. Welcome back to Free Agents, a podcast about being an independent worker in a digital age. I'm David Sparks, and I'm joined by my fellow host, Mr. Jason Snow. Hello, Jason. Hi, David. How are you doing?

Good. Hope you're having a good March and everything's going well for you. Yeah, you know, it's rainy, so I'm spending a lot of time indoors, but that's okay. That's fine. It's fine. We're in California. We'll take it. We will take the rain whenever it falls on us, which it's doing now. So I'm okay with it.

All right. So how's your month as a free agent? Oh, it's funny. I'm doing what we were talking about before we started. We're doing some work on the house. And I am am reminded you know how i told you a few months ago about how i realized i'm one of those people who is much more comfortable sort of when things are orderly yeah uh and i'd like my workspace to be kind of kind of clean and orderly and it just kind of makes me feel a little less anxious a little bit a little happier um so doing doing work on our house uh in the backyard and in the driveway having the concrete report um and so we've had people working around the house and we did we did some work on the house a few years ago and had a new floor put in and redid the

kitchen and i had forgotten and i wasn't working at home then but i had forgotten quite how traumatic that was until uh until the there were jackhammering in my backyard and i had to flee the whole house and i realized that even even when they weren't working aggressively like whole you know parts of my house aren't, are like rubble. And this is my workplace now. And it's been unpleasant. I have been a lot less happy. I know that the end result is going to be great, but it's definitely been, you know, disruptive. And it's amazing how little was required to make it disruptive yeah the felix part of you was not happy i'm sure well yeah and it's an invasion of my personal

space right because even though this is my you know it's our it's our house but it's also my workplace and so having people knocking on the door or talking in the backyard. And then, you know, having, like I said, you know, you look out the back of the house and there's rubble and giant ruts of mud and stuff like that. And it's not, it's just, it all doesn't quite feel right. And I think that that all plays into it. Just a few days ago, I was recording podcast ads and I live pretty close to Camp Pendleton down here in Southern California. And they were bombing that day. They were doing explosions of some sort. The wind or whatever was blowing just right that I realized, oh, wait, this is getting on mic. I've got to stop and wait till they're done bombing.

All right. Well, I'll tell you what's been rough for me is I went and spoke in Chicago last week. I do this every year to this. The American Bar Association has a conference for kind of geeks. And I've been speaking at it, I don't know, something like 10 years now. And I went last week and I was there for a couple of days and then I had travel to get to Chicago and back to California. And I was just looking around, and things just really fell apart for me during the time I was gone. And I've been thinking about that. When you're solo, you don't have a lot of people back at the office to kind of keep the trains running while you're busy. And I think I made a bunch of mistakes on this trip.

Like what? The first thing I did was in the weeks leading up to the conference, I had some things come up on calendar that were optional, that needed to get done at some point, but not right away. And I stacked them up for the week I got back. I don't know why I did that. We did two episodes of Mac Power Users. We got this show going down this week in addition to a bunch of kind of optional legal stuff that I did. And I just loaded myself up for the trip back. And I don't know what I was thinking. I think I even talked about this on our show at one point, how you should never do that when you go on vacation. But I came back and the first work day after I got back, I had a full calendar and it's just been that way all week. So

I had a couple client matters that were important that happened while I was there. And that always happens while you're at a conference. And so I got back and I had those to deal with. And I had the stuff I had voluntarily signed up for like a like an idiot before I left. So I've just spent the whole week just feel like a step or two behind, which has been rough. The other thing I think I made a mistake there was I've been getting really good at this whole thing about calendaring my day and getting realistic goals for the day. I didn't do that while I was at the conference that I should have. I should have blocked a

couple hours just for maintenance stuff with the law practice. The law practice for me is the one that usually has the biggest fires to put out. Writing books for Max Barkey, if I had to put that off a day or two, that's okay. But when the client has some kind of need, it's hard to put that off. So I just feel like I kind of blew it. And I actually took a bunch of notes this week that I'm going to force myself to read before I take another conference trip. I just am looking and seeing you and Katie did like an Ask the Experts section. And you did it. That's cool.

I'm peering into your professional life right where the streams cross, quite frankly. It is weird. It is weird. But it's fun. It's fun. And it's fun because a lot of solo attorneys and corporate attorneys were there that listened to our show. And I was getting cornered all over the place to ask questions about free agent stuff. And I've got a few things to talk about that later in the show. But that was fun. I had a great time and I really made an effort to be present for the conference and do a good job on my talks. But I do think that I could have done, if I had it to do over again, I would have been much more precious about my time the week following, which was my biggest mistake.

And just a little more deliberate while I was there. Like if I could have just, on vacation, I was really good about getting up for a couple hours each morning but on this trip for some reason i i couldn't do that so i'll get better so would you have would you have spread out the done more pre-work or admitted that to yourself that you weren't gonna need to do so much work the first week back and maybe spread it out over two or three weeks exactly all right i mean because some of this is like we had a we recorded a mac power users episode like two weeks in advance because there was some scheduling stuff i'm like oh that's fine i'll just do it that week and i didn't have to do that you know a mac power users episode is it takes a couple hours to record

but there's usually about two or three hours of prep in one of those episodes too and i would have liked to have that time back this week. I could have done it next week a lot easier. And same thing on the legal side. I had agreed to do some stuff for a few clients that wasn't time urgent. But then once you say you're going to do it on that day, you've got to deliver the goods. Yeah. You've just added urgency to your schedule that was not necessary. Yes. What was I thinking, Jason? I don't know. happens i i i do

that too when i go to conferences or am speaking somewhere you know there is this the the famous thing that we've we've talked about before the you know be you don't want to say no you want to say yes but you know every time you say yes it's like you're writing a check that your future self has to cash yes and and that going to be a challenge conferences you know i i try to i know that it's going to be time and it's going to be work if i'm speaking but even if i'm just going like that that it's unlikely that i'm going to be able to do a lot of work and so that's always part of the the calculation is how do you build in time around it in order to make it to make it happen and if you're speaking it's even it's even worse because you have a lot of prep plus you have stress um and that could be that's

like there's extra cost there i'm actually doing a speaking engagement next week and And it's, I'm happy to do it. It's a group. It's like a Mac user group that I go to see every year and it's fine. It's great. But, you know, there is a cost. So I say, yes, six months later, I have to, I have to pay when I'm, I'm, I'm about to do that. Yeah, I get it, man. And, and I guess we all do. Whether you speak or just attend conferences, it's an issue. But speaking is even worse. Like I had a couple days where I was speaking twice, and I had this idea that, well, I'll be done at like three with my speaking things. I can go back to the room and work for a couple hours. But after you've spoken twice, you don't have anything left in the tank. I don't. No, in the tank. No, I don't.

No, that's that mental exhaustion. I had that related to that. This weekend, my family was traveling. They went to visit some of my wife's family, and I didn't go. I stayed home, and I had work to do, so I did it. But I recorded like six hours of podcasts, and podcast is public speaking of a different sort, but it is. And I was just wiped out. there was so much of it and it the fact is it it engages your brain and all that so it's something i guess what we're saying because not everybody is is going to conferences and not

everybody is speaking at conferences but certainly the the larger point to take away from this is to be aware of what um and of what is going to make you unable to work and how your your how a trip usually goes and don't pretend don't fool yourself into thinking oh well i'm actually going to get work done and then when i come back because travel is exhausting too right so when i come back that next week i'm going to be i'm going to be working at at 150 efficiency for that week i'm going to get everything done because it's not going to happen. You'll be lucky if you're at 100% efficiency the week back after a trip. You got to take your energy level into account.

And then there's the whole other thing where the airlines are just gaslighting us all. Every time I get on an airline, the seat is like a half inch narrower. I'm convinced they just keep track of it. And every time I get a new ticket, they say, okay, Dave's coming back. Let's make them narrower. Uh, or maybe I'm getting wider. I don't know. But the, uh, every time we get on a plane, I've got the guy in front of me. In fact, it was funny this time, got a cup of tea. I'm super happy. The, uh, as soon as the plane, I've got my iPad. So I think I can get a bunch of work done. It's a long flight. The guy in front of me just cranks his seat back in such a way that just like

smashes the teacup between the tray and his seat. And I'm just looking at it like it's about to explode all over my lap with hot tea at any moment. You really just can't count on getting work done. And then you've got the kicker behind you and you've got somebody sitting next to you that's huge and you can't – I don't know. It's tough. Yeah, don't count on that either. Yeah, exactly. Well, so I did learn something. My takeaway from all of it really was I wrote down like a page and a half of notes about the challenges I had when I got back.

And I made a promise to myself, I'm going to read that now every time I've got one of these things coming up. And for some reason, it was a speaking gig for me that was harder than the vacation, which probably makes sense. But I'm going to try and be more aware of that as I take on these responsibilities in the future

and certainly as I plan around them. That's good. That's very good. So Jason, you had some thoughts about being in or out. In or out. In or out. That's the big question. In or out. I just, you know, I keep struggling with the idea of whether I want to work on new projects

or not. Yeah. And there's this challenge the idea there is do i want to do i want to put in the commitment uh required to do a big project especially at at um at a level of quality that it's going to be acceptable to me and potentially to my audience so um video is a thing i mean you and i've talked about it a little bit because you're doing the Max Barkey video field guides. I thought about doing some projects like that, where I do more videos, either on ongoing videos, or I build a video package that I can sell

something like that. And it's, it's a real, it's a real challenge. I don't have an answer here. I just, it's something I'm pondering because like video, let's take that on one challenge. I don't have an answer here. It's something I'm pondering. Because like video, let's take that. On one level, I've been doing video stuff since high school. I was a video editor in high school even. Back when you had two VCRs and you would attach them to each other and roll. We could set endpoints and stuff. And then you would roll the tapes back and then roll them forward and do a tight copy and you'd get the video it's like i've been doing this a long time the tech is much better

now um but i have not done very many that i would consider sort of in my capacity as a as a a content professional i which is not to say that i haven't done videos uh but i haven't done a lot of them it hasn't really been my job. I focused on podcasts and of course, writing over the years and magazines and things like that, which actually is part of the problem here. And I wonder how you've experienced this with the field guides, which is the challenge is that people look at us and say, well, those guys are professionals, but we're not video professionals. And I think that there's a challenge there where people expect professional level work from us, even if we're still figuring out the best way to approach this medium, uh, that we're not

used to being in. And that's always been one of my struggles with, um, doing video is not the video, um, doesn't have a role because there are a lot of there's a lot of stuff that's great on video and not that I don't I'm resistant to doing video but there is this challenge like how do I do video that I that it's something that I'm proud of and that people will will will get and understand and consider to be an acceptable level because i don't want to embarrass myself but at the same time i'm i'm a one one person deal here i'm not going to make a major motion picture it's not going to happen and yet that's sort of the standard that we all have been trained on is the highest kind of professional production values in a lot of ways not necessarily in the

context of like a youtube video but there is a challenge if you're somebody who is viewed as a professional to make something that's, you know, the bar is not the same that you have to clear if you're a professional, then if you're somebody who's just posting some videos on YouTube where there's a much different expectation. So I'm not quite sure where I'm going to go with this, but I keep thinking about it and I keep, it's one of these things that I keep toying with, but I have not made any kind of ultimate decisions about. Yeah, I'm in the process of, you know, OmniFocus 3 is going to come out at some point in the next, you know, six months. And I did the OmniFocus 2 video field guide. So I'm going to do a new one for the old one. So I've been watching the original one I made and I see so many mistakes I made. And even just, um, I had a

worse microphone at the time and I, the audio to me sounds terrible and all the, everybody that watches it tells me they like it, but I see a million mistakes in it. And I do think, uh, and taking this even bigger than video, if you're really good at something, but you're looking to expand your, your indie gig to something else, at some point you just have to do it. And it's not going to be as good as the thing you've been doing for 30 years, but you know, you can get as much advice as you want and you can do your best with it. But the only way you're going to get better at it is, is actually doing it. So I think at some point you just have to do it and treat it that way. And don't get so hung up on, you know, the fact that, you know, whatever you've done, you're so good at this other thing,

that this new thing, you're not going to be immediately as good at it. And I think get as much help as you want. I'm, I'm in the process of, um, Leona LaHua is a pal of mine and she used to work with pixel core and she wants me to do some YouTube stuff with her. So she came over and we set up proper lighting and everything. And even then I'm still terrible at it. We haven't even put anything up yet. At some point I'll do a little bit of it. But I'm treating that as a thing where I'm going to give myself permission not to be perfect at it.

And let's just see how it goes as an experiment. But no matter what you're doing, whether it's graphic design or being a lawyer or whatever, I think if you want to expand into something else, you just have to give yourself permission to start somewhere. Yeah. So the challenge is really figuring out how much effort it's going to be because of course there's only a finite amount of time and schedule the time. And then that goes to all of the stuff we talk about, about doing projects and longer-term projects. Talking to Sean Blanc last time, you know, that was one of the things that stuck with me is this idea of saying, if I'm going to do a video series or something like that, I'm going to set a deadline and schedule it and know that that time is taken up with this and can't be used on another project. But you also have to reach that level of commitment

that you're willing to do that. And for me, doing videos, basically it's at that point where I need to commit. And if I can't commit at the level that's required, I need to walk away from it. So that's where I am right now, is trying to figure out how to put that, put that all together.

So we'll see. When the Leon and I first started talking about doing this YouTube stuff, I, I mean, I'm not, you know, I'm, I'm realistic and realize, you know,

I'm not going to be the next Casey Neistat or any of that stuff, but I do feel like it's an enhancement for some of the other stuff I do for the people that are interested in what I'm doing. It gives them another Avenue. And so what am I willing to give for that? That was a big concern for me. And I just decided two days a month is as much as I'm willing to give for that. If I can't get it done in two days, then I'm not going to do it. And to make that work, I'm doing like a day of prep, a day of shooting, and then I'm paying my film girl daughter to do all the edits so So I don't have to deal with it.

And, and I think two days is as far as I'm willing to go with it, but I try to go into it very deliberately and nothing is even out yet. So I guess by the, by next month when we get on, there'll be one or two of these things up. So people can tell me how terrible I am. Okay.

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is go to freshbooks.com slash free agents and enter free agents with the space, all caps in the how did you hear about us section. We want to thank FreshBooks for their support of the show and helping free agents everywhere. All right. One of the things that we talk about on the show when we've had asked of us before is about insurance. We talked about health insurance. It's definitely a huge issue if you're, especially in the United States, regarding how you get covered if you do not have an employer. And we will keep talking about that probably. But I see here that you would like to talk about some other kinds of insurance that we don't talk about that probably, but I see, you know, I see here that you would like

to talk about some other kinds of insurance that we don't talk about so much. Yeah, I just wanted to mention forgotten insurance. And this is a kind of a sad story. A friend of the family passed away in the last month and he was a dentist and a free agent. He had his own practice and he had never bothered to get life insurance and left his wife and kids with a bit of a burden. And that just got me thinking. We talked about insurance on the show, but we were talking about health insurance. If you're a free agent, you got to think about all the insurance. Get yourself life insurance, get yourself disability. And you got to build that into your spreadsheet when you decide to make your break. If you can't afford it yet, then you should really consider whether

you're doing the right thing because those types of insurance are just as important. I talked about it on the show, but get yourself a broker or somebody who can be your friend and look out for you and get you the necessary insurance. And I got a birthday present when I turned 50. I came home and my life insurance premium doubled. It said, hey, happy birthday. Now you got to pay twice as much because you're more likely to die. So I called my broker and sent her a copy of the statement. I'm like, is there something you can do for me?

And she found me another company that offers essentially the same product at a significant discount. So I'm switching life insurance. But now I got to go through all the blood tests and all the other nonsense you got to do. But I don't think it'll be a problem and it will save me some money. But as a free agent, you got to be on top of this stuff. And this isn't really a big point. I just wanted to kind of raise it to say, I hope you're thinking about that stuff. If you're thinking about making a move, make sure you think about it in advance. If you've made the move and you don't have life insurance or disability insurance, get it. Yeah, I got disability insurance last year.

And we just had that conversation where we were talking about like, what happens if I, if something happens to me, and I'm unable to do my job, whether that's, I lose my voice, and I'm unable unable to podcast or I lose my ability to, let's say, use my hands to type articles. Like these are these are serious issues. Like how do you how do you continue to provide for your family if you're unable to do the thing that allows you to work? And the answer is you get disability insurance so if

something happens to you and you're disabled in whole or in part that the insurance will cover basically what you you know what you would have been able to make if you weren't disabled and it's a a lot of um a lot of employers have this for their employees but when you're on your own you gotta you gotta do it yourself yep yep um another thing that happened to me this month is i got a um a potential call from a client and it was you know one of those calls where you immediately feel bad vibes you know oh you know And the client, this potential person was making some demands and wanted me to agree to do certain things that I wasn't comfortable doing. And, you know, it's just like very early in the call, I realized this is a mistake and where,

you know, it's something, a bit of wisdom I've got from doing this a while, because I think when I first left, I would have been saying, okay, let's, you know, let's schedule a meeting. Let's sit down. We'll figure this out. I can bring this person around to the way of doing things right. Whereas these days I'm just like, oh, you know what? We are not going to be a good fit together. So let's just end this call right now. And I wish you the best of luck. fit together. So let's just end this call right now. And I wish you the best of luck. And when I hung up, I thought, wow, that's a little bit of maturity that, uh, that I've needed for a long time. That's yeah. That's great. That goes back to us saying,

you know, sometimes you got to say no. And also ways to detect that, uh, that this is not a job you need to take. And that doesn't always mean that the client is awful, although it can, but it can also mean that it's just a bad fit. And so being aware of that and able to recognize it is part of the process. And the other part of the process is being able to communicate that and walk away. So congratulations. Good job. Yeah, hopefully I can keep that up. It's scary, though.

It's scary. I mean, I was talking to my wife about it later because you've always got this underlying pressure where, you know, you've got tuition to pay for your kids, you've got all these different insurance premiums to pay, and you know, all the other things that come with, you know, being on your own, there really is no safety net other than the one you built for yourself. So even though I was successful that day, I'm not sure that I would be successful every day in resisting work that I know in my heart I shouldn't take. So I think I still have a ways to go with this because, like I said, underlying, I'm always thinking, well, I still need to make money if this thing's going to keep – if this ship is going to stay afloat. yeah it's i i just had a conversation with lauren this morning about this about how i've got a a couple of potential clients that are that are kind of on in the offing and my inclination is to um

is to turn them down uh which is again a big step but it is very very much like do i need do i need to take on that extra work what's the extra work going to be what's the extra pay going to be do i have time to do it and the answer is no so what would i give up at that point or am i going to work myself that much harder in order to make this much money and looking at it and saying no i don't need to i don't need to say yes to this and again it's it's a big step. I mean, even the night after, I didn't sleep as well because I woke up thinking about it at some point. I think this stuff is hard. I wish I was magically had the solution for everybody, but I don't think there is one. So I talked about my hyper scheduling last month.

Yeah, we've been this is like the hyper scheduling corner that we're in now. I'm going to stop, I promise. But I touched a nerve somehow because I've got so much feedback and questions about it. I even put a post up on MacSparky just with all the questions I received and my responses to them. It really, people are really, some people are really kind of angry about the idea. And a bunch of other people are like, yeah, about time. I've been doing that for years and it works great. So, I guess the only thing I would say about it is we've talked about it enough, but it's now gone beyond an experiment for me. It's just a thing for me now and I'm going to be doing it. You know, I think after two or three

months, it's a habit for me and I'm hoping that I'll be able to hold on to it. Good. I guess so. Keep us up to date. Let us know. We'll schedule something in between minute 18 and minute 19 of the next podcast about. I know. See, that's the big complaint everybody tells me. It's like it's a fancy form of procrastination that you sit there and you treat your calendar like this precious snowflake.

And I don't do that. I mean, the smallest increment is like maybe an hour, where I'll say there's a specific contract problem or preparing for the free agents podcast. So, you know, that'll get an hour. But I don't have like 10-minute increments in the calendar. I use OmniFocus, so I just flag all the little stuff and I'll have two hours that I call, you know, capture flags and I'll spend two hours just working through that. So it's not as fiddly as it sounds.

Hey, you're talking to the right guy here. I'm all in favor of blocking off time on the calendar. We've talked about it. That gets me mocked by people like Mike Hurley. But I think it's a perfectly reasonable way to schedule your time and make sure that the things on your to-do list gets done. A lot of people will make a to-do list and they'll have that list and it'll be like, you need to do this list of things.

And that can even be paralyzing sometimes because it's like, which one should I do? And the answer is you make a schedule and you say, I'm going to do these here and I'm going to do this here. And then you just, as the clock ticks forward, you can't stop the clock from moving forward. So you just have to move on to the next thing and get it done because now's your hour to get it done. I'm a believer in that. I think it's, I think it's a solid, I'm more of a non-hyper scheduler, but I absolutely am with you. Yeah. I think for me, because I also use a big task list, but the trouble I was running into was I would spend the whole day working through the task list and feel empty at the end of the day. And maybe it's just a head game.

But now the night before, I'm saying, OK, these are the tasks that are really going to get done tomorrow. And here's how I'm figuring out the amount of time I need to do them. And at the end of the day, I'm feeling a lot better about myself. And the other advantage is I'm able to schedule in time for priorities that aren't the stuff that was taking all of my time before, you know, like getting a book done or something can now become a priority because I'm scheduling the time deliberately. So I don't want to bang on about it. I think I've said enough, but it's, I'm kind of, a lot of times I do these things as experiments on myself. And at this point, it's no longer an experiment. This is just the way I do business now. people coming up to you and actually asking you questions about free agents business. But first, let's take another break to tell people about our other sponsor this week. This episode of free

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you quickly and easily grab a unique domain name for whatever your project is. And all of their award-winning templates are beautifully designed for you to show off your great ideas. The best thing, Squarespace plans start at just $12 a month. $12 for a whole website. Pretty cool. And you can start a trial with no credit card required just by going to squarespace.com and signing up. When you do decide to sign up for a regular plan after the trial, use this offer code, freeagents, one word, you'll get 10% off your first purchase and show your support for this show. Thank you to Squarespace for supporting free agents. Squarespace, make your next move, make your next website. Yeah, you know, that conference I went to was the tech show. It's all the nerdy lawyers. So,

I've been going for years, like I said, and I always get approached in the hallways and the bars and everywhere else to be talking about Macs and iPhones and iPads because that's my thing. But I had no idea that the free agents had got penetration into the legal market because I had a bunch of guys coming up to me and gals talking about how much they love our show. And thank you for listening. But they also were talking about how they had all these free agent questions, which I just didn't really expect much from lawyers. But there were two that really stood out for me, so much so that I took some notes afterwards. I wanted to talk about the show.

The first one was an attorney about, I don't know, he's probably under 40, but, you know, smart guy. And he's in a big firm and he's doing really well. You know, big firms, you make a nice paycheck. You've got all those benefits. You got staff. When you go on trips, you have other people taking care of stuff for you. But he's miserable. And that's how we started the conversation. He says, I'm in a, help me. I have a pair of golden handcuffs. That's how he started. And I'm like, oh, okay. I think I know what you're talking about. So, so he's got good money. He's got a

secure place. You know, it's not like they're trying to kick him out, but he wants more control over his life. And he's just tired of being at the whim of everybody. And he was, I felt like he was asking me to tell him it's okay to leave. And I wasn't telling him that, you know? I mean, that's one of the challenges of making the show really is Jason and I, I think I would both, I know speaking for myself, I'm, I'm a lot happier since I left. There were definite sacrifices I made, and I wasn't miserable like this guy was at the old place, but I'm happier where I am now. But I don't want everybody listening to convert that into, oh, well, then I can just quit my job and everything will be fine, too. I mean, every time you send me that email, you terrify me. Yes, yes. email, you terrify me. So, but so he was asking me that question. I said, look, there, there is no guarantee. I mean, it's all the stuff we talk about on the show. I mean, do you have a spreadsheet? Do you have an income stream when you leave? I mean,

are you doing the type of law where clients will come with you? Are you in a firm where you can even take clients with you? You know, and, and I started asking all those questions and he was getting these kind of deer in the headlights look. And if he's listening right now, I feel bad about saying this, but it's, you know, the truth hurts sometimes, you know, and I just felt like he needed to research it more. But I feel like that's a question that a lot of people face. And my answer always is you have to really do the math and really do the homework. You just can't, this is not a light decision to make. Maybe if you're living with your parents and you have no commitments, you can be a little riskier,

but for most people, that's just not true. And I don't want to give anybody advice that, that, you know, sends them down the wrong path. Now, one of the things there, there are a lot of podcasts out there and I'm not, I'm not going to specify, but everybody knows what I'm talking about. There are lots of business and entrepreneurial podcasts that are all about getting people pumped up about, you can do it. You can do this thing. You can do this. And they're more like infomercials.

And there are probably infomercials too. And we're not that. We're not going to be that. We want everybody to be aware of all the challenges in going out on your own. And although it's been good for us, the point of this podcast is not to convince you that it's the right decision to go out on your own. It's to tell our stories about what's happened while we've been out on our own and then talk to other people and let you kind of make your own calculation about it because there are going to be cases where it's a good idea and there are going to be cases where it's a bad idea and you have to we can't give you reassurance it's always

going to be a risk i i we can list the the steps you need to take and it's funny that you talk about a guy from a big firm and he's miserable but he's getting you know paid so well like that was my sister-in-law lauren's sister was exactly like that she she worked for a big firm and she and i would talk about how miserable we were at our jobs, and then we were both, within a couple of years, both of us were out of there. And some of it is, how miserable are you? Because being miserable is not great, and it probably should not be an extended thing. If you're miserable, yeah, you could probably survive it for a little while, but you should

be planning a departure if you're miserable you you can't do that forever it will erode your soul you need to get out of there and maybe going out on your own isn't the right answer maybe it's something else my sister-in-law got a different job that pays a fraction of what her firm job does but it's in a place where the cost of living is a lot less and she's uh she's still in the legal profession just a different part of it and uh i think she's much happier now quite frankly i haven't i mean last time i talked to her she seemed way happier than she did in the past so it can it can work but that goes to another point which is if you're miserable but you really like all the benefits

of maybe you're in you know you're in a big city somewhere, and the cost of living is high, but you can manage it. And you've got some nice stuff, you've got a nice place to live, you've got a, you know, you got a boat, you know, whatever that kind of stuff is. That's the other thing to keep in mind is you, if you've got stuff like that, you're gonna have to trade that probably for being out on your own and not being miserable. And are you willing to do that? But these are all personal decisions that you have to make. But I would say the one thing is if you're miserable, like you described this person being, you need to think of how you're going to not be miserable anymore. That much is certain, whether it's quitting your job and going out on your own or whether it's looking actively for some other job or some other life

change to get to a place where you're not miserable. Yeah. And especially when you have children and all that stuff bleeds over into the rest of your life. You'd like to think it won't, but it does. So my advice to this guy was, you know, look at some in-house jobs. I mean, there are non-big firms where you have more standard hours, you probably make less. And one of the interesting things, you know, Lex Friedman and I were talking once, and he had a fancy pants job and then went to work at Macworld. You know, Lex is a good friend of yours. He said something to me that really stood out to me uh this was at macworld back when we had macworld expo and he says i know exactly what the cost of happiness is because i uh i paid

it you know he had a job that paid a bunch of money he took a job that paid a bunch of less money and he took a huge pay cut to come work at macworld and he was much happier and he says the delta that's the cost of my happiness and that was a that was an impressive statement i thought yeah anyway so i i tried to give this guy advice and honestly if you're thinking about it go back and listen to those series of shows we did on you know covering the basics and see how you're doing on that give yourself a scorecard uh you will never be in a spot where it's a completely secure move. It's always a risk. I waited too long, frankly.

Me too. Because I was afraid. But that's just who me and Jason are, I guess. But don't come up to us and ask us permission because we can't give it to you. You got to figure it out for yourself. The other thing that, the other conversation that stood out to me, it really isn't even a conversation.

It was just kind of an observation. So this is a tech conference and there's a lot of really good speakers at the show and there's some really good vendors, uh, sharing some products, but there's also a bunch of what I could only call snake oil where you've got these, these solos out there. And in the legal profession, now there's a lot more solos than there ever were because it's harder to get jobs. So people get out of of law school they don't know what to do they just open a law firm and there's so much to this that is not about being a lawyer and i think this could apply to any profession or or you know jobby job so there's these men and women walking down these

aisles and i'm looking at their faces, and they're just lost. And they're looking for some kind of technology, and they're willing to write big checks, as these vendors know, because they think that they're going to write that check, and it's going to solve their problem. And it's not. The technology is good for getting your business going, but it's really not the solution. I mean, there's marketing, client retention, planning, you know, all the stuff that you have, the hard stuff you have to do for yourself is not going to get solved with software. And I just felt like, I feel like there were some vendors that were kind of taking advantage of this idea that if someone writes them a big enough check, they're going to solve that problem for them, and they're never going to be happy. And I don't know.

That's just an observation I made, and I got thinking about it in reference to our show today. I think for a lot of people out there, you cannot do this stuff just by paying somebody to come up with a software solution or fix all your problems. You've got to figure it out yourself. Yeah. Boy,

I feel like we're, we're saying the same thing, which is, yeah, I guess you gotta, you gotta figure it out yourself. And there's some stuff that, that nobody else can help with,

but you know, you're, you're on your own and you've got to, you got to do it. Hey, we got some interesting Twitter feedback. Yeah, we got,

we got a, a question from Scott Mitchell who wrote in, I would love to know how you guys set up and track long-term goals, whether quarterly, yearly, or over many years. How do you do that, Jason? Well, what I was going to say to Scott is it's all upstairs, man. It's in the old noggin. My long-term goals are in my head i don't write them down anywhere i don't have them in a spreadsheet i they there is there is a list that's constantly churning over in my head of things i want to do and things i'm trying to do

and that's where i keep it and as much as i I have been again given a hard time by people like Mike Hurley for keeping my to-do list in my head and my you know a lot of my planning I just keep in my own in my own brain but certainly when it comes to things like long-term goals I don't have any formal thing I'm always on the one hand I'm always thinking about it on a certain level. I keep I make sure to come back to it. But on another level, you know, I'm not fiddling around with a with a document somewhere. You know, that I just it's in my head. So that's it for me. I mean, I wish I had a solution that I could tell you, like, use this app and use this method. But it's literally, I just keep it in my own mind, and I don't have any other system.

I do think there is some advantage to writing some of this stuff down. For the same reason, putting your tasks into a system is helpful, because our brains aren't really wired for storing databases. And if you can get it out of your head, then you don't have to have that overhead of remembering it all the time, if that makes sense. But I'm a little more formal than Jason. But the thing that's weird for me is because I have multiple businesses, you know, the stuff I do as a podcaster is different than the stuff I do as a lawyer. And that's different than the stuff I do as an author and publisher. So I've got these very different business lines, and some of them lend themselves more to future planning and others don't.

Like with the law practice, I don't have a goal of growing it to the point that I have to bring on a bunch of associate attorneys and get a big office. And so I don't have as many traditional goals like you would have with something like that. I'm looking at my notes right now. My goal for this year in the law practice is to replace, you know, 20% of my clients, you know, the worst 20% with new clients that, that pay on time and listen to me. You know, that's like, I'm not necessarily looking to grow clients, but to get rid of some of the ones that aren't, I don't want to keep anymore and replace them with better ones. That's not much of a goal really. Um, but for the, the publishing stuff, I have a list of things I want to do. Some of them are video products. Some

of them are actual books. And I, um, I keep that list all the time. And then as I finish one, I pick the next one and then I just kind of dive into that. And that's all I think about until that project is done. And then I go to the list and pick the next one. So that's the way I plan that stuff, which works okay. And it's not on a annual schedule. I talked a couple months ago about this 12 week year thing. And I'm kind of trying to put that stuff into it where I say, okay, I'm going to pick a project. I'm not going to let it turn

into a year or two year long project. I'm going to pick a timeline for myself to try and get the thing done inside. But I don't necessarily even share that because I don't want to publicly commit myself, but putting a time certain on it actually creates a little more sense of urgency, which, which is what led to the whole hybrid scheduling. I don't, you know, how this stuff kind of works together, but so I do write things down, but I'm not nearly as deep in it as some folks are. That's fair enough. I'm not surprised to get that, to hear you say it that way. For me, like I said, I, I think of my long-term goals as just something, it's just a part of what I do to examine myself all the time. And I don't, that's it. That's all I do. So, no answer there.

I think one thing I don't do good enough is considering, you know, what is this environment look like in five years? You know, what does the legal, you know, corporate attorney kind of environment look like for me in five years? Or what does the podcaster or the book writer look for me in five years? And, you know, I don't want to get myself caught at some point where suddenly I don't have any business and I'm in big trouble. And I'm not exactly sure how to plan for that, but I don't think I'm doing enough along those lines. But I'm not really sure how to plan for that but i i'm not i don't think i'm doing enough

along those lines but i'm not really sure what the answer is maybe it's because you're not you're doing too much no that's not it yeah it is i don't know i just i the for me the uh the issue is um i always ask myself like if i if i make a scoreboard if i make a list of this thing and say i suppose like as a recurring event like revisit your list every quarter revisit your list every year um that i'm gonna spend time doing that but it's not actually gonna it won't go it won't it won't be something i actually do or i'm going to be concerned with it all the time. I don't know. I just, I feel like I internalize goals and those are not things I want to export to what you said before about keeping your, you know, getting things out of your head and putting

it in a database somewhere. I feel like long-term goals, maybe I don't want out of my head for whatever reason. Well, I feel like in my case, I made, because the next iBooks author book I'm going to announce, hopefully in the next month, is something that took me two years to write. And I feel like the reason it did is because I let other priorities overwhelm it. And if I had been thinking about how important that book is to me, it would have been done sooner. So I feel like I've made some mistakes in the past. So I am looking for ways to get better at not doing that again. But I don't have the answers yet. I'm still figuring it out. All right, Jason, I think that probably does our feedback today. Yeah, I think so. But you can always tweet at us at FreeAgentsFM. And Twitter made tweets really

long. So if you've got questions or things you'd like us to cover, that's an easy way to reach us. You can also go to relay.fm slash freeagents. And there's a contact link on the side, on the left side there. And you click on that and it'll send an email that will go to both of us. You can also go to facebook.com slash group slash freeagents group. There are a lot of other free agents in that group and you can share your experiences with them. And I think that's about it. Anything I'm forgetting?

No, I think we're good for another month and like us for another fortnight because we've got a special guest coming in two weeks and I can't wait to share him with you. Yeah, that's right. It'll be another interview in two weeks and then we'll be back with your feedback and our stories in two weeks after that. So until then,

David, it's been a pleasure as always. See you in two weeks. Bye, everybody.