Focused - 51: Freedom Frogs

Episode Date: July 10, 2018

David and Mike talk about why “eating your frog” is an important Free Agent survival skill. David talks through a pivot in his approach to book publishing. Mike shares his struggles with “Imposter Syndrome” and how he overcomes it.

David Sparks and Mike Schmitz spent their careers working for the establishment. Now, they've had enough. They've rebelled against the status quo and are now seeking success on their terms. 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 co-host, Mr. Mike Schmitz. Hello, Mike. Hey, David. So today we've got a content show, and one of the things we wanted to start doing is take on like one topic each show before we get into our challenges.

And one that I know that Mike likes talking about is this guy who's now the Coast Free Agents. He likes to eat frogs. It's true. I even gave a speech one time called Eat Frogs to Breakfast of Champions. And yeah, this resonates with me because this is an integral part of my story, which we talked about last episode. So tell us the history of this eating your frog thing. Yeah, well, this is something that I picked up from Asian Efficiency before I started working there. But it originated with an author, Brian Tracy. He wrote a book on this topic. And it's

really 21 different strategies to help you overcome procrastination, which probably everybody listening to this can relate to, where you know there's something that you should be doing, but you just don't feel like doing it. And so the whole concept of eating a frog, in the book that Brian Tracy writes, he credits the original quote to Mark Twain. And it says, if you eat a live frog first thing every morning, nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day. The productivity, yeah, I know it's, it's, it sounds kind of gross, but also the productivity angle to this is that if you do the hard thing right away, then it almost doesn't matter what happens the rest of the day. Like if your day goes completely off the rails by 9am, but you got up early and you did the thing that you knew you

needed to do to get you to where you wanted to be, then it almost doesn't matter. Like you're still satisfied with the work that you've done, but it requires thinking about it ahead of time and prioritizing the things that you decide are important. Yeah, I love that saying. And I do think as free agents, it's a challenge sometimes to eat the frog because you don't have a boss looking down at you, jamming it down your throat. And finding that ideal time to get those big tasks done is going to play a huge factor in whether you're a free agent for six months or for 30 years, because you still have to get the work done. Yeah, absolutely. And like you said, if you don't have somebody who's forcing you to do it, it can be really hard to follow through and do it every single day. We talked last episode about how I got up early. That was my frog, is I was going to get up and write for an hour before I

went into the office. And then if you just do that enough, you do it consistently enough, you can create the results that you're looking for. So really, frog eating is not a one-time event where you get up and you do this one thing at the beginning of the day one time, and then all of a sudden things get easier. You've got to do it consistently. But if you do it consistently and you make frog eating a habit, you can pretty much create whatever it is that you want to create, whether it be a side business, which eventually becomes main business as you become a quote unquote free agent, or you finally write that book. You know, I heard a statistic at one point, like something like 80% of people believe that they have a book inside of them and that they should write it. But when you look at the number of books that are actually

written every year, it's something like 0.05% that actually do it. And I think a lot of it comes down to just, those are the people who have established this habit. Uh, I forget who is the author is one of those professional authors though, who said, I only write when inspiration hits. Fortunately, it shows up every day at 9 a.m. sharp. They've developed the habit of eating the frog, and as you do it, it becomes easier to do it. After a while, it tastes like chicken. It's really fine. Yep. Frogs aren't as gross as you think they are, although that is another rule of frog eating, is that if you've got two frogs that you have to eat, eat the ugliest one first. Okay, yeah, all right, I get that. eat the ugliest one first. Okay. Yeah. All right. I get that. Well, that's like a challenge for me in that is, is I still, uh, I'm doing two things, you know, I've got this law practice and I've got

this, this publishing business and I, um, so I have two flavors of frogs. I usually need to eat most days. And one of the ways I've kind of got better at that over time is I realized I was missing some of those. I'd get to the end of the week and the big rocks or the frogs didn't get eaten. And so now in addition to planning tasks and OmniFocus, sometimes when I've got something that's ugly that I need to deal with, I block time for it immediately. And sometimes I'll even do that, like, as I'm going through the week, I will use Sunday as kind of like a repository of blocked times for the following week as it occurs to me. So, like, maybe Wednesday I realize, oh, I really need to get this job done. I really need to eat this one frog.

I'm not going to get it done the next two days. I will actually, in addition, in my task system, I'll push it to Sunday because Sundays is when I plan the week. I will actually put a two-hour block on Sunday. And so I'll look at, like on Friday, I'll look at my Sunday and there's like eight hours of block time there. But that's just like a holding place for it. And then when I get to Sunday and plan my week, then I push those things off. I don't, however, necessarily eat the frog first thing. To me, it's like I know the periods of time when I'm going to be most productive and hopefully have the least amount of distraction. And sometimes that's not six in the morning. Sometimes that's ten in the morning or maybe it's one in the afternoon. Getting to Sunday and being able to put those blocks in place and making those promises to myself and then keeping them really is what gives me confidence that I'm going to be able to work for myself for longer than six months.

Yeah, that's an important point that you just mentioned. You have to figure out when is the ideal time to work on these things. I read a book one time by Chris Bailey, The Productivity Project, and he tells this idea of your biological prime time. So if you figure out when is the time that you really work best, I mean, maybe it is at 10 a.m. And so you don't want to do your deep work or your focused writing first thing in the morning because nothing good comes out of you at that time of the day. So you do have to identify the times when stuff works best for you. You can work smarter, you can work harder. You can spend more time on something, but if you figure out when is the right time to do something, it can make it more efficient. The general principle though with

eating your frogs, and the reason why I would recommend that everybody at least start with doing it first thing in the day, is that the beginning of your day is when you have the most mental resources available to you. As you go throughout your day, you're making decisions. I think the average person makes something like 35,000 decisions a day. Every single one of those decisions reduces your willpower, which increases the chances that you're going to procrastinate on this big thing, your frog, that is distasteful, which is why you should eat which increases the chances that you're going to procrastinate on this big thing, your frog, that is distasteful, which is why you should eat it at the beginning. Because if you're able to muster up all that stuff that's inside of you at the beginning of the day

and do this thing, then like I said, you've at least got the confidence that I've checked that box. And so now whatever else happens, happens. If you put it off until later, there is a chance, especially if you're trying to balance a bunch of different things, that something comes at you, which is kind of out of the blue, and now your day takes a turn and you don't end up doing that thing. And we've all had that experience where things just go sideways on you pretty quickly. And the first thing you did was your big project for the day. You can say, well, at least I got that sales report done. At least I got that research done, whatever it is that you need to do, at least you get that done.

Yeah, exactly. And I want to, you mentioned, you've got different flavors of frogs. That kind of gets me thinking, like, if you are in a position, you've got a quote unquote, jobby job, you know, you, you have to eat maybe that frog first first. That'll bring benefit in that particular area of your life. But maybe you've got a side hustle or something that you want to do on the side. I'll call that a freedom frog, based on last episode, doing those things. You have no idea where those go. I like that. So maybe you do have to eat multiple frogs and you've got different time blocks associated to the different areas of responsibility, different hats you're going to wear, whatever. So I think that that's an important distinction. Although, you know, since we're just

going to just torture this frog thing for the next 10 minutes, I do think that if you have different flavored frogs, that's something to pay attention to. Like, if you are always eating the frog from your job and never eating the frog from your passion project or your side hustle, that tells you something about yourself and your priorities. It's a form of feedback. Yeah, absolutely. We told my story in the last episode, but I think that the freedom frog, for lack of a better term, I kind of like that idea. That's the thing that's inside of you that you just got to get out. For me, it was a book. But I think everybody's got something in there. I mean, I know, David, we're going to talk about this a little bit later, but you've

written several books. I mean, that probably started as something which was a freedom frog, and you decided that eventually I've got to eat this thing, and I got to see where it leads. And it's opened up whatever doors. And we'll talk about where that goes next in a little bit here. But everybody's got this thing. And one of the quotes that really hit me was this quote from Todd Henry in the book, The Accidental Creative, I believe it was. He shares this quote from somebody who had asked, where do you think the most valuable land in the world is?

And he says, several people threw out guesses like Manhattan, the oil fields of the Middle East, the gold mines of South Africa, before his friend indicated that we were way off track. He paused for a moment. He said, you're all wrong. The most valuable land in the world is the graveyard. The graveyard is where all the unwritten novels, never launched businesses, unreconciled relationships, and all the other things that people thought I'll get around to that tomorrow reside. But one day, however, their tomorrows ran out so uh freedom frogs will help you get those things out so they don't end up in the graveyard yeah that's great that's great very uplifting too well i mean whatever whatever causes the the the train is to start going in

motion you know that's that's i get it Yeah, I get it. Yeah, I'm with you. Because what really is exciting about this whole process to me as I've embarked on my journey is it was only maybe four years ago that I wasn't doing anything in this online space. This was not me. And it didn't take a whole lot of time. It just took consistency to get to this point. So I think it doesn't matter if you're 25 or you're 65, if you've got this dream or this vision inside of you, it's not too late. All you've got to do is start eating your frog,

do it consistently, and you have no idea where it's going to lead you. And just make good stuff and put it out there. Whenever someone writes me, they're like, how did you do Max Berkey? How do I copy it? I just say, make good stuff. I mean, that's what people want. And it rises to the top. Yep, exactly. But I do think kind of the message for today about eating the frog is when I think anybody who's either contemplating going out on their own or if you're on your own, you really need to give thought to that.

I mean, I've got this goofy thing where I stack up appointments on a day. That's an artificial thing I do, but it allows me, when I plan a week, to really know what I have to get done and forces me to make time for them. And largely, I stick with those commitments. If I put a certain frog eating project on Thursday morning, it gets done on Thursday morning, short of, you know, some medical emergency with the family or some client emergency that I have to like drop everything for. But largely that stuff gets done. And when you get that, I, one of the points Mike made that I really want to send home is once you get that consistency and start to trust yourself, this stuff will get done. It really doesn't feel like eating a frog. It does taste like chicken. I mean, it's just something you do. And so often,

in your head, you make these big projects feel like they're just dreadful. And when you actually stop to do it, it's not that hard. You just make the time, get it done. And I guess the one thing I would add to that is also give it enough time. It's very easy with these big projects to say, well, that'll take a half hour when it really takes an hour and a half. So either get really good at estimating them or just like double the estimate that you naturally come up with. But I'd much rather have you have a little extra time to go make a cup of tea in that block, then feel like you're running out of time. Doubling the time is probably the safer approach. Yeah. People tend to be really bad at

estimating how much effort it's going to take to do something. And the statistic I heard, or the phrasing of it that I heard was that we tend to overestimate what we can get done in the short term, but we underestimate what we can get done in the short term, but we underestimate what we can get done in the long term, which is why something like the 12-week year works. Because we say, I'm going to do this thing this year. And typically, you wait 11 months and then you're like, okay, I better start working on this. But if you shorten that time frame, and really the key is, like you said, show up every day, create every day, iterate in public, as Sean McCabe would say. Just do it. And then you have no idea what that will lead to. And that triggers really this idea called the compound effect, which I think was

originally in a book by Darren Hardy. But I mean, there's a lot of different arenas that you've probably heard about this from. Maybe the most popular one is the whole idea of personal finance and compounding interest rates, where if you invest $1,000 when you're 12, by the time you're 55, you're a millionaire sort of a thing. The version I really like is about the guy who invented the game of chess. It says that he invented chess and the king of the country asked him, what do you want for a reward for this incredible invention? He says, I want one grain of rice doubled for every square in the chessboard.

So one for the first, two for the second, four for the third, eight for the fourth, and so on. And after a week, the king asked the royal treasurer if he's paid the man yet. He says, no, we don't have enough in the royal treasury. It's something like 9,000 trillion grains of rice. So just doubling that one thing, doing it every day, and then eventually, not even eventually, quicker than you think, you get the results that you're looking for. All right. So everybody, I want you to eat your frog and let us know in the Twitter and various feedback how that's working out for you and how you conquer that challenge.

back how that's working out for you and how you conquer that challenge. Mike and I have some challenges of our own that we want to share with you right after this break. Yeah, this episode of Free Agents is brought to you by Squarespace. Make your next move with Squarespace. Squarespace lets you easily create a website for your next idea with a unique domain, award-winning templates, and more. So maybe you want to create an online store, or maybe you want to create a portfolio to show your work as you get up every day and you eat your frog. Maybe you want to create a blog. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform that you should use that lets you do just that. With Squarespace, there is nothing to install, no patches to worry about, which is great. I've done a lot of WordPress stuff in the past, and I've hated having to go in and update plugins. You don't need to worry about that with Squarespace. There's no upgrades needed. You don't have to worry

about any of it. Squarespace has it covered. They've got award-winning 24-7 customer support if you need any help. They let you quickly and easily grab a unique domain name. And all of those award-winning templates are beautifully designed for you to show off your great ideas. I've done web development in the past. And when someone comes to me now and says, I want a website, I just point them to Squarespace. And within an hour, they've got their website up and running and I don't have to maintain it anymore. Squarespace plans start at just $12 a month, but you can start a trial with no credit card required if you go to squarespace.com slash free agents. And if you love Squarespace, which I know you will, when you decide to sign up, use the offer code free agents, all one word,

to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. And that will also show your support for the freeents podcast. Once again, that's squarespace.com slash freeagents and the code freeagents, all one word, to get 10% off your first purchase. Thank you, Squarespace, for supporting the Free Agents podcast and Real AFM. Squarespace, make your next move, make your next website. So Mike, in prior shows with Jason and also listeners and guests, we've occasionally come up to the topic of pivoting. And I think as a free agent, that's something you always need to have your mind open for because things change. It looks like I'm about to hit my

first big pivot on the Mac Sparky side. Nice. Yeah, you do need to be able to pivot. And that's one of the things that I've learned in my journey is you never know what the next step is going to be until you try something. Why don't you talk a little bit about your pivot? I'm curious to hear your perspective on this. Yeah, well, it's funny because the way I make money as Max Barkey is three ways. I make it from podcasting, like we're doing right now. I make a little bit from the Max Barkey blog, and then I make money from writing books. And I've now written nine books, some for big publishers, some self-published. And that's always been kind of my identity.

In fact, when people push me, like when you go out in public and someone says, what do you do for a living? I say, I'm a writer. You never say you're a lawyer. It's bad. But I say I'm a writer. And even on this show, I've referred to that, you know, that I have a publishing business.

So I very much self-identify with myself as an author. But then there's a bunch of stuff happening in the space that I work in. Several months ago, Apple did an education event talking about book publishing, and they invested entirely in their Pages application as opposed to iBooks Author, which has been the platform I've used for years. Didn't even mention it, you know, and the software hasn't been updated. And I'm starting to get like

leery feelings about, I don't know that I want to be, you know, investing in a platform that I'm not sure the people behind it are invested in anymore. And so it got me thinking, you know, about other formats. And my first thought was, well, I'm going to get off the iBooks author platform and get into something like EPUB, which allows me to do the books as well. Because my books have always been very media rich. I mean, an average Mac Sparky Field Guide is like two gigabytes, and it's got tons of video and screenshots and everything in it. So it's more like a, an interactive book slash video than it is a book, a traditional book. And that's what kind of got the seed in my head thinking, do I need to be an author anymore? Or, you know, what would happen if I just decided to turn this into video courses instead of books? And I'm not the first person to come to this conclusion.

I mean, you know, Don McAllister does Screencasts Online, which is all video courses. You do some work with him. There's been a lot of, like, I've done these video field guides for years where they're just like a screencast on one product like OmniFocus or Hazel. But I also have these traditional books, and there's a whole bunch of problems kind of arising with that now. Number one, Apple doesn't seem like they're totally sold on iBooks. Number two, a bunch of my customers now are not using Macs. They're using iOS devices, and they want to stream. They don't really want to download a two gigabyte book to their device.

And like I said, I'm just looking around and seeing a lot of other people going to these video courses. And so in the last month, I've kind of come to the conclusion slowly that my next book, which is largely written at this point, is actually going to end up being produced as a video course. And I'm going to pivot the publishing business into a video course business, which is as big of a surprise to me as it is to anybody else. Yeah, that's interesting because I know the iBooks format, that's how I got introduced to your books anyway. So maybe you had written some things before that, but like the paperless field guide, the email field guide, like that was kind of the thing that made a lot of what you did possible. So on the one hand, you know, it was the right thing at the

right time back then. But like you said, a lot of the situation has changed. The environment where you are putting these out into is changing. And like you said, Apple's kind of, who knows what's going to happen to the iBooks platform. So I think it's smart to be looking for other options. The video side even is interesting. If I were to wager a guess, maybe that's the next thing, but that's not even what it looks like in five, 10 years. Who knows where this ends up. But I think that it's wise to be looking for different avenues to deliver the content that you're creating. And ultimately, I mean, that's the thing. I think that who you are, what you do, maybe you've defined it, like you said, as I'm an author and I write books. But really, you're a writer, you're a producer of thoughts.

Whether that ends up as words on a page or videos, it's kind of irrelevant. It's still in line with your unique ability. Yeah, well, I went through the same thing on the legal side when I realized suddenly I'm no longer a trial lawyer after having been one for 20 years. And it was a shock to the system because I think you carry these identities inside of you. And the longer you do one thing, the more you make the mistake of thinking that it is what you are when it isn't. It's just a thing you do, if that makes sense. And it's hard to drop those weights as you carry them around a long time. But I was always proud of the fact I wrote these books.

I expected I'd be writing many more. And maybe something will change. This show is kind of a lab for me. I just kind of say what I'm thinking. But at this point, I've got a web developer hired to help me make a nice video delivery system. Some of the problems I had with prior methods, like with the iBooks, is I don't know who my customers are. You buy your book through Apple, they don't give me a list.

And I never really liked that. So this gives me a better relation with the customer, gives me a way to distribute it to people who live in countries that don't have iBooks. It just solves so many problems for me. And I'm still going to try and find a way. I'm going to run transcripts of these videos, so it's going to be kind of like getting a book too, but yeah, I haven't got all the details figured out, but, uh, my, uh, my company is shifting, uh, into its distribution model in a big way right now. And I'm spending money on it and exploring and starting to do tests. And, uh, it's, I'm not scared at all. That's one of the weird things I'm super excited about.

I feel like, oh, this is what needs to happen now. Full steam ahead. That's awesome. You made a point about embracing certain identities, which I think is really interesting and also very important. I could totally see a situation where you've identified as a writer and you haven't fully identified as a video producer. Your situation is a little bit different, but somebody else who's in your shoes is writing iBooks, author-type books, and now they've got to find something different. If you're so wrapped up in that identity of what you used to do, it can be really hard to embrace a new identity as the leader of this distribution company, like you mentioned, instead of just, quote unquote, just an author. Embracing something new can be really scary, but I also think it's the key to

transitioning from one thing to the next successfully, like you're doing right now. And I think, like you said, you've successfully identified with the new thing, which is what allows you to say, I'm not scared about this at all because you're in control of the situation. Yeah. I thought I would be, I mean, Jason and I have talked in the past about pivots and like, it's going to come when you go out on your own at some point in the future, the thing that got you out the door, the thing that got you your freedom is not going to keep you your freedom. At some point, you're going to have to change things up. And to a large extent, the books are what got me out the door. And I just didn't expect that this soon I would have to shuck that off and do something different. And I was always in the back of my head thinking that is going to be

a terrifying moment for me. But it's just kind of interesting to me. First of all, it didn't come to me in a bolt of lightning. This is something that's been on my mind for a while, you know, the Apple event, talking to some friends, dealing with some usual customer problems because of my current model. It's like just a bunch of things have started to gel in my brain to the point where I said, well, maybe I should switch to video and then further investigation like, oh, yeah, this is the right decision. And it's just not as it's not as terrifying as I thought it would be, which is, I guess, good news. Yeah. What got you here won't get you there.

Yeah. And, you know, other people have said it as like the one constant in life is change. And I think that being out ahead of it and being in control of the change, there's a lot to be said for that. Even if you're in a position, you are working with a company and you see the writing on the wall, I would argue that it's better to leave that situation and go step out into the unknown than to be let go because they can't pay the bills anymore. I mean, I've got a relative who was working with a big company here locally for a long time and was basically forced into an early retirement. Didn't really want to, but they had to because everybody higher up was being let go. And that's ultimately what you have to deal with. That change is going to come.

And if you can control the change, then you're in a lot better position. Yeah. Well, this is kind of a big move for me. I'm sure it'll probably come up again on free agents, and I'm in early stages. But probably within a couple months, I think I'm going to have a video product. So we'll see.

See how it goes. Maybe it'll fail miserably. I don't know. we'll see. See how it goes. Maybe it'll fail miserably. I don't know. But I'll report in so you guys can learn from my success or mistake either way. Mike, what's on your mind these days? Well, kind of along the same lines, you know, we talked the last episode about my story and there've been a lot of different pivots which have happened in fairly rapid succession for me. lot of different pivots which have happened in fairly rapid succession for me. And the thing that I struggle with and is kind of renewed as I walk into this role as a co-host of free agents is the voices in your head which tell you that you're a poser. Because you can embrace a new

identity, but at least for me, whenever I embrace a new identity, whether that's, okay, now I'm going to be a writer, now I'm going to be a video producer, now I'm going to be a screencaster, now I'm going to be a public speaker, now I'm going to be a podcaster, whatever, the voices in my head always tell me that I'm not qualified to do that specific thing. And I've got to establish a track record before they start to go away. And really, the question that I just want to throw out there is, is this something that you still deal with? Or how do you quiet the voices that tell you that you shouldn't be doing this? Yeah, you know what? I think that's hard. And we had Merlin Mann on the show about a month ago. And Merlin, every time he's on the show,

he says one little thing that sticks with me. And the thing he said that episode was, he said something to the extent of you've never, you never arrive. He says, you never actually arrive. You always think, I'm just going to do this and I'm going to have arrived. You know, you're going to, you're going to be there wherever there is. And the fact is, you never do. And I feel like my whole life, I felt like, uh, my whole life I felt like a poser. I mean, I remember when I got out of law school and, uh, people gave me these really significant legal problems and I'm like, wow, people's lives are at stake now. I mean, not whether they live or not, but their, their whole business or whatever. And I, I would just lay in bed and stare at the ceiling my first couple of years as a lawyer. And I, you know, it's like, how do you make any decision when, you know, all the stuff that was theoretical for all of your life suddenly is real and there are stakes. And at some point I just realized that, you know what, me laying in bed all night and not getting any sleep is not going to help them solve their problems. And I'm just going to do my best. And every time I face that kind of poser thing, and I face it all the time too, because I run in so many circles, I feel like I'm a faker in almost everything I do. But at the same time, I just do my best and just keep going. I think maybe for me the trick is just not get hung up in that.

Yeah, I think that that really is an important key to defeating. I guess the term for this would be like imposter syndrome. Yeah. Is to just force yourself to follow through. And I think focusing on the people that you can help is important. I interviewed Sean McCable while back from Sean West. He wrote a book called Overlap for the Productivity Show. And he had an idea that he teaches in that book of basically teach everything that you know. It doesn't matter if you're a quote unquote certified teacher. It doesn't matter if you've achieved a certain level of certification. You don't need a degree. There are going to be people along the journey who are not quite where you are. And those are the people that you should look to help. You can get caught up in the fact that

you're giving advice to people. And it can be scary, like you said, you know, people's lives hang in the balance with your advice. And I know you've shared in previous episodes about how you get really nervous about people who listen to free agents. They're like, I quit my job because you told me to. You're like, no, no, no, don't do that necessarily. Yeah. But ultimately, the best way I've found to do this is just to be authentic and sharing. This is where I am.

This is my thought process. This is the results that I've gotten. And I can't say that this is exactly the formula you can follow to achieve wild success, but this is at least what's worked for me. And then in the meantime, like in between podcast episodes or things that I would create, when I'm hearing these voices, there's a couple habits that I've established as part of my daily routine where I tend to journal what has happened at the end of

my day. I find that that's really helpful because it gives me a track record of my progress. I can see the growth from where I was to where I am instead of focusing on the next ideal thing that's out there and looking at that gap from where I am now to where I want to be and saying I'm not qualified. If you can see the momentum that you're gaining, that's motivating. But mindfulness meditation also helps me out, which is something that for a long time I thought was kind of woo-woo and I never really gave it a shot, but it really, really does help. And then along with that, gratitude. If you can focus on the things that are going right instead of the things that are going wrong, it's a lot easier to step out there with the confidence that what you're going to do is going

to work. And more often than not, when I've done that, when I've actually mustered up enough strength, courage, whatever to give it a shot, the results have been fairly positive. And I just want to encourage people who deal with this, because I know I'm not the only one who deals with this imposter syndrome, just give it a shot. Because like we mentioned in the last episode, really, my personal belief is that if you don't do the thing, like you're not just ripping yourself off, you're ripping off the rest of the world from your contribution. Yeah. So you covered a lot there with the mindfulness meditation. And I understand,

you know, your initial thoughts about it. Like I know you're a Christian guy, you know, you're very active in your church. And a lot of people, they have trouble with ideas of meditation, mindfulness, because it's got so much Buddhism roots to it. But I started meditating in my early 20s. And I've done it almost every day for the majority of my life. And it's something that I was so kind of self-conscious about that I didn't talk about that on Mac power users for like the first six years that show ran, because I just didn't want to get into it. You know, you mentioned that, then you start getting all the weird emails, but I really do think it's really helped me. And I, it allows me to have a little bit more balance in my life. And I don't know how else to explain it, but there's some great, you know,

it's a lot much more accepted now than it was 25 years ago. And the, and there's some great apps for it. Like I, there's an app out there now called Headspace, I believe. Yep. That a lot of people really like, and it's like a coach. So you, you know, the B word doesn't have to be involved. If you want to just work on plain mindfulness meditation, there's some great tools out there and I would recommend it. I do think it helps you deal with the madness that is working for yourself. Headspace is great. The one I use is Calm. They all kind of do the same thing though. They train your brain. Like that's really the thing for me is your brain is going to go all over the place. And for a long time that kept me from meditating because I'm like, oh, I just can't do it. I can't focus long enough to do it. But the real benefit of meditation is recognizing that your brain has wandered and then bringing it back. You keep bringing it back, you keep training it to focus on that one thing, which a lot of times the meditations in those

apps are focused on that gratitude piece. And so you get done and you feel very positive about your situation instead of all frenetic about all the things that are going wrong in your life. Yeah. I mean, it's somebody, one of my first meditation teachers told me that the mind is the rebellious organ. It's the organ that works against you if you leave it alone. And you need to leash that up a little bit. But I guess my point was, if you've it alone. And, um, you know, you need to, to leash that up a little bit. But I guess my point was, if you've got some religious belief that makes you hesitant to try meditation, there's plenty of ways to do it out there that, that should, shouldn't be a problem for you. So please don't let that keep you from doing it. Um, the, uh, journaling is another one. Now, see, I got the idea from journaling. I think you told me about it at some point in one of your podcasts.

And I have always played with some journaling apps because I'm a geek. I bought a subscription to day one in January. And this year I've been doing that for the first time. And you're right. I think the nice thing about journaling, especially when you're on your own, is it does allow you to track your wins. It's so easy just to think about your losses, but a journal is a great place to write down where things go well for you. And going back and looking at that even a month or two later can really help you get yourself out

of that imposter syndrome. Yeah, you tend to think on, like I said, all the things that have gone wrong. But if you journal consistently and you keep track of the things that have gone right, you can pull out day one at any given moment and you can look at, oh, I did this here, here and here. So yeah, I guess, you know, I've proven now that I can do this thing. And like you said, that can help you get over the imposter syndrome. Another thing about journaling is like with day one, and there's probably other apps that you can do this sort of thing with too, but I've got a workflow set up where I don't have to sit down and write like three paragraphs about what happened to me today. I've got several prompts, very easy questions like what time did you get up? Because there's some quantified self stuff that I want to track. I want to make sure

I'm getting up consistently early and that I'm getting enough sleep. So how many hours of sleep did you get? And then really like, what did you get out of today? You know, those sorts of things. If you put a little bit of thought into the types of questions that you might want to ask, you can create very easily these automations, which make collecting this information that you want for the future a lot easier. Yeah. And you can use things like TextExpander or even I think you can put scripts right into day one if you're going to use day one. Yep. So, Mike, do you ever get to the point where you don't have imposter syndrome anymore? Do you ever arrive? Not for me.

Not so far anyways. But I will say that all the feedback that you get from people who are encouraged by what you do, at least for me, really means a lot. I've gotten several emails and people reaching out on social media based off of stuff that I've written, podcasts I've created, the book that I wrote, who say like, this has really helped me. And that helps me to keep going. I mentioned in the last episode, my life theme, but really, if I were to boil it down, like I want to help other people get to the level that I've been, because I don't think you can help people get to a level beyond where you've been. You have to be able to speak to that specific situation. But also, that's okay. I mean, when you get on an

airplane, they tell you if there's a loss of cabin pressure, put your own oxygen mask on first, then help somebody else. You can't bring somebody to somewhere you haven't been before. But that's the thing that really gives life to me is helping and seeing other people succeed, do things that they didn't think that they could do. that they didn't think that they could do. And then when they connect with that dream or that vision that they have and they step out there and it works, seeing the lights go on, like that's really exciting. And that to me helps me get over the imposter syndrome. It's like a high.

I mean, just from Mac Power users and this show, hearing from listeners who you have made a significant change in their life just by something you did that that's the reason we do this stuff yeah absolutely i mean i'm not doing this just because i i like talking into a microphone this is you know we talked about last episode this is actually pretty scary for me but i'm overcoming my imposter syndrome with the hope that this is going to help somebody and i believe that it will.

All right. Well, we'll talk about more on that going forward. But we do need to pay the bills. This episode is brought to us by FreshBooks. For all the free agents out there, you know how important it is to make smart decisions for your business. And our friends at FreshBooks can save you up to 192 hours with their cloud accounting software for freelancers that's ridiculously easy to use. Sending out invoices is hard, and it's not something that you quit your job to do. You quit your job to make something, not to send bills out. And as a result, a lot of times you just don't do it right and you don't get paid. And then that causes all sorts of problems. FreshBooks solves that

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the conversation uh as opposed to one where you see that they opened it the day after you sent it and they just didn't pay it so it gives you feedback and a way to address that problem with their new projects feature it's super powerful you can share files and messages with your clients. Somebody was talking on the Facebook group, how do we have a sharing platform with clients? If you're using FreshBooks, that may be your solution. You see how quickly things can happen when all your conversations live in one place. So if you're listening to this and not using FreshBooks yet, now's the time to try. FreshBooks is offering an unrestricted 30-day free trial to listeners of this show. There's no credit card required. All you have to do is go to freshbooks.com slash free agents,

and that's one word, and enter free agents, which is two words in the how did you hear about us section. Let them know you heard about it here on the free agents. They've been really happy with the sponsorship of our show. Obviously, a lot of our listeners are needing something like FreshBooks. It is a great solution. And I really wish if you're having any problem with invoicing, you would give them a try. Let them know you heard about it here. And thank you, FreshBooks, for all your support of the show. So we got some feedback, Mike.

I asked on Twitter, you know, what do you guys want to talk about as a feedback? And a lot of them were funny questions like, tell us who you are, because I didn't tell anybody. We're recording this show a little early, and this is recorded right, you know, before everyone finds out who you are. So I guess we can say we've already done that. Just go back to episode 50 if you have that. But we also heard from some folks that are getting ready to make moves. Yeah, so Wynne Kelly Charles mentioned, I'm leaving my education job in three years to become a full-time writer, which I'm so excited about. But my question is, will my taxes go up

because I am a solo entrepreneur? If so, I'm perfectly fine with that. This is one of the things that kind of surprised me when I went from working with a company to being responsible for my own taxes. When I made the leap, I had to do estimates. I'm not sure if that's the way that you do it too, David, but the estimates are a little bit tricky if you've never done anything like that before. If you're just used to the taxes being taken out of your paycheck, all of a sudden having to budget for these things, which you have to pay big lump sums every couple months, can definitely throw you for a loop.

So I guess my advice, from my perspective, would be budget more than you think you need. Yeah, and to add on to that, we've talked about in the past kind of legal and tax stuff. Get yourself some professional help. I mean, it's just too difficult to predict. We just got a new tax law this year. Part of it was written at 2 in the morning with a Sharpie.

I was talking to an accountant friend about maybe coming on the show to talk about the changes in tax law for free agents. And her statement to me was, I don't think anybody really knows how they're going to enforce it or what it means yet. So everybody's afraid to give advice on it. But if the accountants are nervous about it, then you are definitely not to do this on your own. Get yourself, find a CPA or an enrolled agent or somebody that knows what they're doing. Tell them what your plan is. Because one of the things about the new tax law is sometimes if you have a company, your taxes go way down. Sometimes they don't. It depends what you do and a whole bunch of other stuff. So, you know, talk to a

lawyer, talk to an accountant that knows what they're doing. Spend just a little bit of money getting that advice up front, and it will save you a ton down the road. And this is something you shouldn't try and handle yourself, honestly. Yeah, I agree with that. The couple hundred dollars that we paid our accountant was the best money we ever spent. Yeah, yeah, totally worth it. On the Facebook group, we had a couple people writing in. One of them was about tools for communicating with clients, as I was just talking about in the FreshBooks ad. And Ted wrote in to say, look, I'm interested in hearing about any tools that people are using

for client communications and interactions. And what about project planning and things like that? We got a lot of good comments and response, and I'd encourage you to go to the Facebook group to check that out. But you don't really have a lot of clients, right, Mike? You're basically working for the companies doing the services for them,

so you don't have a client-derived program, correct? No. In fact, I've gotten away from client work as much as I can, although we do use some tools at Asian Efficiency for this. So I do have some experience with some of these things, but I'm curious. You probably have a better perspective on this from a free agent. It depends for me. I mean, everybody's business is different. There were some good responses in the Facebook group on this. I'll just talk with respect to my own experience and you can take it for what it's worth.

For the legal stuff I do, I've got a lot of clients that want just very traditional communications, telephone and email. I have managed to finally get rid of the fax line. And the very few that occasionally want to send me a fax, I've got them to do other things. So that's good news. But then I also represent a lot of software developers and tech companies. And for a lot of them, they like to use Slack. And so we've got a secure Slack thing we do together,

which is you just kind of work with where your customers are. I feel like if you're going to run clients, the most convenient thing for them is the thing you should probably be doing. I don't want to drag customers into something that they're not comfortable with. Yeah, that's definitely the advice that I would give too. Now, some of the comment here talks about basic project work planning and stuff like that. And there are a lot of different project management tools that are out there. But I think your advice definitely applies to those as well. So one of the simplest ones that's still pretty functional for like bigger projects that I would say to check out would be something like Basecamp. I've seen that used in a lot of different instances where you bring in a client who has no

experience with a project planning tool and they're still able to understand how Basecamp works although that's a little bit expensive so if all you need is communication then definitely see what you can do with Slack and with some of the integrations that are in there I mean you can pull in Google Drive documents all sorts of stuff yeah mean, the good news is there's really an abundance of riches now. And it's not like there's a bunch of terrible solutions and one or two good ones. There's actually a lot of really good solutions. And they're customizable enough that you can make them work for your business. Because I'm such a small outfit, I don't need a lot of that technology.

Like on the Mac, there's a really popular app called Daylight that a lot of people like. It's like a small office management. If you have a small team, it allows you to share calendars and task project management, a lot of that stuff. But because it's just me, I don't need that. And I think, so you really need to look at, you know, how big is your operation and what is the best venue for your own clients? What's going to make them happiest and, um, and work along that with, you know, uh, because I'm a geek, I have some clients that, that came to me from some of the geeky stuff I do and they want scripts and they want Google docs and they will, you know, it just, it just varies. I mean, I don't have one solution, I guess, is how I'd say. All right. We also had a funny question that I thought would be good to end the show with.

In the Facebook group, there's a whole discussion of office chairs, right? We're free agents. We get to buy our furniture. And by the way, my daughter is getting very close to moving out, and I'm going to be setting up my choice home office. I don't know how I'm going to avoid talking about that on the show, but we'll put a pin in that one. So, Mike, what's your office chair? Well, I'm probably the least qualified person to speak to this because I currently do not have an office chair. Oh, you don't? I'm recording this from a standing desk.

Now, I know one of the comments in here was for the Herman Miller and body chair, which I have heard great things about. And I will probably get one of those at some point. I've had my eye on it for quite a while. But for a lot of the things that I do when I am in my home office, which I think that definitely is a great topic for a future free agents episode, because I just finished mine off and put a lot of thought into the way I set it up. When I'm doing something here, I am at a standing desk and I find that standing helps me focus

and it just helps a lot of the work that I do be more effective and be of higher quality. Now, not everybody is going to like that. be of higher quality. Now, not everybody's going to like that. If you don't want to be standing all day like I am, definitely check out some of these chair options. But there's quite a range here. So we've got people who have recommended the $15 one, the Herman Miller one. I don't have the price in front of me, but last I looked, it was something like $1,000. in front of me. But last I looked, it was something like $1,000. Yeah, I am. When Paperless came out and it was successful, I went to the Staples and bought like a $250 chair, which was a lot of money for a chair. And this is, I don't know, almost eight years ago. And this was when I was at the firm and I took it to the firm. I sat at my desk. I'm sitting in it right now. It's

got like a memory foam bottom and a mesh back, so it breathes really well. When I left the firm. I sat at my desk. I'm sitting in it right now. It's got like a memory foam bottom and a mesh back, so it breathes really well. When I left the firm, that's the only thing I took, because the desk was theirs, but the chair was mine. So I took it. The one thing I did with my chair is I never install the arms on my chair, because I like to move around and I don't want the arms, especially when you're sitting at a desk. But to follow up on Mike's point, also, when I left the firm, the one thing I bought myself was a sit-stand desk. So my desk has a little motor in it, and it goes up and down. So I spend a good portion of my day standing as well. And I think that's kind of nice. And it's something that you can do when you're on your

own. So that's kind of fun. I will say that regardless of whether you like standing or you like sitting, put a lot of thought into what are the things that are going to make you comfortable. If you're dealing with back pain, you're not going to be focused. You're not going to do your work and you're not going to get paid for the results that you're creating. I do think that your environment really does play a very major part in the quality of the work that you do. Absolutely. Absolutely. And be willing to spend a few bucks on yourself. I mean, not necessarily at the very beginning, but as things start to work out for you, make it a workspace that you're happy in because you need to work a lot.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Now that I've finally finished off my office, it totally changes my attitude when I come down here to start working during my day. I used to dread pulling up the pulling open my my laptop in the workspace that I did have because I knew I was going to be dealing with distractions and interruptions and background noise. And now having a place where it's set up exactly the way that I want it, it just makes showing up to work a lot more fun. Honestly, it makes it a lot easier to, and we were talking about eating your frogs. If your space is set up and you enjoy the tools that you're going to be using on a regular basis,

that eliminates a lot of the resistance that would contribute to the procrastination for you not doing the things that you want to do. It's amazing to think that the desk chair that you have might be the deciding factor about whether you actually do the thing that you need to do or not, but it could be. It's definitely a piece. And since you've cracked the rabbit hole open just a little bit, you could talk about my office just a little bit. So yeah, I am so overdue. When I first left, I had like post-traumatic stress. I just don't want to put a suit and go into an office. I've talked about in the show before, I have a fancy office I have access to with a meeting room and all that stuff. But the more time I spend there,

the more money they charge me. And because of the nature of my practice, I really just don't need to go there very often. But we've got a relatively small house. When you live in California, But, you know, we've got a relatively small house when you live in California. It's pretty hard to afford a big house. And so a corner of the master bedroom has been my office for three years. And it is time for me to get out of here. I mean, there's just so many things wrong with working in the room you sleep in. And, you know, it's also my wife's bedroom.

So her stuff is in here. And like, if it wasn't for the fact that my daughter is moving out and I need to pay for a lot of money for her stuff for college, I probably would just go get an office at this point. But I, um, the way it's all working out, I'm when she leaves, I'm going to take over her room and really turn it into a nice office. And, uh, I I'm so overdue for it right now. And all the things you're talking about, I can't wait to experience. In fact, you know, the idea about this whole thing about now me switching to video, I'm going to, it's made me change my thoughts about that off. It's just like, okay, I need to set it up where I could shoot video in there comfortably and have a nice, nice look to the room. So that's, that's actually some of the choices I'm making are, are revolving around that pivot. So we'll see.

Yeah. It's, it's interesting. Like the video example specifically, you could spend a fair amount of money setting up your space exactly the way that you want to do it. But then every time that you need to create a video, it's all set up for you.

So how much time does that save you every time you sit down to do work? That adds up. People don't think about that. They think, well, the price tag for this thing is this much. But really what you need to identify is how much time, because ultimately that's what you're trading. You're trading your time for money, and then you've got your money. it's going to pay for itself that way. It's an investment in the amount and the quality

of the work that you're able to do in the future. And so that, again, is going to compound over time. You need to hold your powder on that one, brother, though, because if we start that conversation, the show's going to go another hour.

True, true. All right, so we're the Free Agents. You can find us on Twitter at FreeAgentsFM. Mike is at BobbleheadJoe. I am at Max Barkey. And we'll see you in two weeks with a guest. Bye, everybody. Thank you.