00:00
Jonathan Goodman
My mom called me and she asked how I was doing. Then she gave me the best single piece of advice that anybody’s ever given me, which is, if you love this girl, you better get your ass on a plane. And I did. And I was in Thailand two days later. We found ourselves in this cave and the Internet was so bad that it could barely load a webpage. The entire reason why I built all of my platforms based off of writing was because I made that decision when I lived in a cave in a remote area of Thailand with a woman who very clearly at that point, was going to be the love of my life. Buffett says the most successful people say no to almost everything. But I’ve read a lot of biographies on the man.
00:41
Jonathan Goodman
I’ve come to the conclusion very clearly that his definition of success is radically different than my definition of success. I think you should say yes to just about everything.
00:51
Brad Weimert
Congrats on getting beyond a million. What got you here won’t always get you there. This is a podcast for entrepreneurs who want to read reach beyond their seven figure business and scale to eight, nine and even ten figures. I’m Brad Weimert and as the founder of Easy Pay Direct, I have had the privilege to work with more than 30,000 businesses, allowing me to see the data behind what some of the most successful companies on the planet are doing differently. Join me each week as I dig in with experts in sales, marketing, operations, technology and wealth building and you’ll learn some of the specific tools, tactics and strategies that are working today. In those multi million 8, 9 and 10 figure businesses. Life can get exciting beyond a million. Jonathan Goodman, it is awesome to see you. I wish it happened more often, my friend.
01:36
Jonathan Goodman
Yes sir, Always a pleasure, man.
01:38
Brad Weimert
It is, it is. And I’m catching you in a construction site in Mexico.
01:42
Jonathan Goodman
It sounds like, oh God. I mean the combination of quiet and good Internet and also backup power generation so that when the power goes out, the Internet doesn’t kick out is few and far between. And this is one of the few places that I found where I rent an office and they have decided to, I guess drill through concrete for some reason somewhere close to me today. So hopefully that won’t persist.
02:08
Brad Weimert
We’ll get through it. So you’re a fascinating character for me because you’ve been in the fitness space for almost two decades, 15 years or so, but you have a lot of contrary opinions which I want to talk about. You have the personal trainer development center which has a couple hundred thousand products sold through it. You’ve written A shitload of books. One of them, Ignite the fire, has almost 1500 reviews and a 4.7 star rating, which is significant to everybody, but specifically those that have written books. But on top of all that, you travel with your wife and two kids basically non stop. So yeah, tell me, let’s start there with, you know, you run a business that has lots of traction, has been around a long time, there’s lots happening there.
02:57
Brad Weimert
How do you facilitate life on the road with two little kids while you do that?
03:03
Jonathan Goodman
Sure. So for context, my home is Toronto. Like that’s where our house is. That’s where our home is. That’s, that’s where home is. But yeah, I mean I’ve spent four to six months abroad every year for the last. This is year 13 now. How, how do you do this? Yeah, I mean it started when I was a single guy, then I started bringing my wife with me and then we had one kid, now we have two kids. My mother in law lives in the next town over. She bought a in the next town over where we spend a fair bit of time in Mexico and San Pancho. And my parents are actually here this year for the first time ever for like three, four weeks. You know, we bring a whole contingent now my wife is pregnant with our third.
03:41
Jonathan Goodman
We’re planning probably a full year trip next year and we’ll have three kids and a nanny and you know, all that fun stuff. You know what it is, Brad? It is not a money or business optimization strategy. It’s a life and fulfillment optimization strategy. As you’ve said so many times, there are trade offs in every decision that you make. And I think one of the most important trade offs that you have to make is what do I want to get out of this? Like, like I want to go to bed tired, not exhausted. I want to be ready for sleep, but excited to wake up and do it again the next morning. I’m happy working hard, I’m happy making money. But I also realized that there is a point of diminishing returns with all of this stuff.
04:24
Jonathan Goodman
Particularly if I want to stick around for a long time and do good work in an interesting way for a long time. There was a line that I heard about book writing the other day, which is the only way to write good novels is to have novel experiences. You can’t do interesting shit, you can’t create interesting shit unless you’ve had interesting experiences. And a lot of what we fall into, I think as we progress through adulthood is same, but different. You know, it’s the same day. It’s the same pattern. It’s the same people. It’s the same experiences. We get better at stuff we’re already good at. We shelter ourselves off from other things more and more, as algorithmically, these filter bubbles kind of surround us. The type of people that we like, the type of things that we like to do.
05:14
Jonathan Goodman
What feels comfortable are things we do more of, we get better at, and we expose ourselves to less. That’s perhaps fine, but it’s not anything that I was interested in. And so I made a decision years ago. The second winter that I spent away was in Southeast Asia. This would have been 2013. And I chased after Allison. We were not. We. We were dating. And then were split for a bit of time. And then she graduated naturopathic medical school and went away on her trip on her, you know, what was going to be her one big trip before she became a doctor and, like a responsible adult. And were, like, kind of having fun that summer. But weren’t dating. We weren’t official. We didn’t have a title.
05:56
Jonathan Goodman
And I took her to the airport with her family, and when I got home, my mom called me. You know, mothers can sense when something is up, right? My mom called me and she asked how I was doing. And I don’t remember how I responded, but I guess she could sense that something was going on. And she told me a story that when her and my dad were dating early on, my dad went to Europe with his friend Michael, and she missed him more than she thought that she would. And so she ended up getting on a plane and visiting him. And then she gave me the best single piece of advice that anybody’s ever given me, which is, if you love this girl, you better get your ass on a plane. And I did. And I was in Thailand two days later.
06:38
Jonathan Goodman
I was writing a book at that time and. No shit, Brad. I had a suitcase of books that I checked and dragged around Southeast Asia for four months that year because all of my notes were in these books. That was my research. I wasn’t planning on going. But we found ourselves in this cave that were living in. A literal cave, like bats would fly in overnight. In this area of Copenhagen called had you on. It’s only accessible by boat, and the Internet was so bad that it could barely load a webpage, let alone upload audio and video. This is 2013. I had self published a book already at this point. I’d had a website that was starting to pick up like a Blog that was starting to pick up. I saw the writing on the wall.
07:24
Jonathan Goodman
I saw audio and video mediums were coming in. I probably could have gotten ahead of it, but I was like, I kind of like being able to live in caves on remote islands in Thailand. And I kind of think that I want to be able to do this. And so at that moment, I made a decision to build my platform based off of writing. You want to know why?
07:47
Brad Weimert
Please tell me.
07:48
Jonathan Goodman
It took less bandwidth, Literally.
07:52
Brad Weimert
Because Internet bandwidth.
07:54
Jonathan Goodman
Internet bandwidth. Internet bandwidth. The entire reason why I built all of my platforms based off of writing was because I made that decision when I lived in a cave in a remote area of Thailand with the woman who very clearly at that point, was going to be the love of my life. And I knew that I wanted to continue living for the foreseeable future in weird places like caves on remote islands and remote areas of islands in Thailand. And the only way that I was going to be able to do that was going to be able to build a business that did not require high quality Internet. And that was a trade off. You know, if I chose to do audio and video back then, my business and my brand would probably be bigger than it is right now.
08:47
Brad Weimert
Well, that’s not fair. If everybody chose that in 2013, their brands would be bigger. I mean, it was clear that video was going to be a thing. I think it just wasn’t clear how big of a thing. Or maybe it should have been.
08:59
Jonathan Goodman
Maybe it should have been. But, like, you know, if you were working, like, not a lot of people were actively working and building platforms. Like. Like I was a quote, unquote creator. Like, by 2013, I was spending upwards of a million dollars a year on content, on free content. Not many people were doing that back then. Some were, don’t get me wrong. But not many people were in it to that extent. Like, it was there, but it was still kind of under the surface, I guess.
09:33
Brad Weimert
Yeah. No question about it. Well, I think that in most. First of all, I love the Love Story. That’s awesome. Second, I love how it informed business and became a criteria of business. I have a few different questions around that. One is tactical and how you actually produce when you’re on the road. But before we get there, this. This idea of forming a business based on criteria that’s relevant to the life that you want to live. One of the things that I see young entrepreneurs struggle with is picking a direction and running with it.
10:11
Brad Weimert
And I think there’s sort of a divergent path or a divergent School, two divergent schools of thought, which are make sure that you thoroughly plan out where you’re going and have sort of a vision and a structure and a path and then the other is just fucking do something. Yeah. What do you think a 20 year old should do?
10:33
Jonathan Goodman
A 20 year old? Explore. Explore obsessing over one thing at a time and see how it feels. It’s interesting because I’m asked this type of question a lot, particularly because it’s covered in the, in my next book a fair bit. But I’m not asked it in context of somebody who’s 20, so I’m going to answer it a little bit differently. I’m often asked in context of somebody who’s had a little bit of success already, you know, either in an entrepreneurial venture or as an employee of another organization. But somebody who’s, you know, call it early 30s. And the advice that I give to them is pick two weeks. If you’re 20, I would say pick one to three months at a time simply because you have more time and you can use that time to get a little bit, perhaps better data.
11:21
Jonathan Goodman
You know, when you’re 30, you just don’t have as much time. So you have to put through this filter and make decisions quicker and run your testing cycles. And so here’s the process that I generally recommend and the process that I go through too, whenever I’m trying to figure out, like, what’s next? You know, this question of like, oh, what’s next? What do I do? Because my belief is that if I choose to do something that is going to be my thing for a minimum of three to five years. Like, I built a software platform and I was like, this has to be something that is going to be a central tenet of what I’m doing for the next three to five years or I’m not doing, doesn’t mean that it’s not a good opportunity, right?
12:05
Jonathan Goodman
And so in doing that, what I like to tell people is write down on a piece of paper all of the things you feel like you want to do. Okay? I want to sell Cutco knives, you know, door to door, I want to start a podcast, I want to create digital programs, write a book, whatever all these things are that you decide that you think that you want to do. Write them on a piece of paper, make your list. You generally don’t want more than four or five things. And so if you have more than that, do a quick, like, knee jerk litmus test. Okay? I Can cross that out. That’s, that’s a good game for somebody else to play. You know, this is a good idea for somebody else. There is a difference between good information and good advice.
12:50
Jonathan Goodman
There’s a lot of good information out there that’s bad advice for you. And so you can, you know, at its core, need your gut feel. You can kind of figure out stuff that is smart and wise, but like, not right for you. Once you have those four or five things, you want to put them through testing cycles and you want to test rapidly. And the idea with the testing cycle is you’re not looking for an outcome because you don’t. It would take too long to be able to get an outcome. You know, take one year plus minimum to really be able to judge whether something is effective based out of any kind of reasonable outcome or not. Instead, what you’re going for is confidence in the process, in your ability to execute on that thing.
13:35
Jonathan Goodman
And so what you do, if I’ll say a month, if you’re 20 years old, you know, generally I say put it through two week testing cycles. If you’re 20 years old, give it a month testing cycles. Each one of these things you’re going to go through for a month as a testing cycle. And that means that for that month, that is your focus. All of the information that you consume, whether it’s podcasts or video, or speaking to people, meeting people, reading, all of the information you consume should be centered around that topic and then you’re going to execute upon that thing. So if it’s like a podcast, you’re going to listen and read about podcasts, right? The skills that you try to develop in yourself are going to be soft skills that are going to help your ability to podcast.
14:22
Jonathan Goodman
Presentation skills, scripting skills, interviewing skills. If you decide you want to do interview podcasts, you can learn how to tell stories is going to be very important. And then every single day you are going to produce a podcast. Doesn’t matter if anybody listens to it, because by the end of that month, there’s three questions that you’re going to need to answer. The first is, do I feel like I could get good at this? The second is, do I enjoy this? And the third is, if I were to continue this for a year, do I feel like this would have the outcome that I would need to be able to provide for myself and the people that I love? If the answer is yes to all three, you found your thing.
15:11
Jonathan Goodman
The job now is to just put blinders on and execute upon that thing for a minimum of three years. If it’s not, then you move on and you go into the next testing cycle for the next thing. But once you find your thing, what does that matter? Or what does that mean? Once you find your thing, you have to develop yourself and your odds of success to succeed at that thing in every aspect of it. And this is the part that I think most people miss, that you’re going to get inside and out. Because you and I know each other and in these business communities and we understand that clearly just knowing a lot about merchant accounts is not going to be enough to grow a merchant account company. Right?
15:56
Brad Weimert
That’s true.
15:57
Jonathan Goodman
There are so many other aspects of it that are important. So let’s say that my thing that I decide my thing is going to be YouTube, for example. Just as just to pick an example off the top of my head, okay. I’m going to need to develop the soft skills to dominate at that. Well, I’m going to probably sign up for an improv comedy troupe and I’m going to learn how to act, I’m going to learn how to be a better entertainer. I’m going to learn comedy. Right. There are soft skills associated with whatever you’re doing. Then there’s technical skills, Then there’s technical know how. Okay, how does the YouTube algorithm work? How can I best, what’s best practices for testing things like thumbnails, you know, watch time is really important. How can I judge that? What are best practices for optimizing watch time?
16:51
Jonathan Goodman
For hooking somebody at the beginning, all of these technical attributes. Know how. Right. And then of course video production, you know, microphones, cameras, lightings, blah, blah. Okay, then you’ve got network. Well, what are you going to do? You’re going to, you’re going to become the center of the network. You’re going to lift other people up. Because what happens when we lift others up? Well, we get lifted up even higher. I mean this is just how the world works. And so create a up and comers group of local YouTubers and meet every so often to share tips, whether it’s remote or whether it’s in person. And then invite more established YouTubers to present to your up and coming group. Okay, so that’s your network, the events that you attend. And then the last one is probably the most important. How do you convert?
17:43
Jonathan Goodman
How do you make money from this thing? Right. Are you going to go on pure views and like YouTube ad revenue? Maybe. Okay, how does that work? What’s realistic how much are you going to make per whatever thousand views? How much do you need right, to, to support your family? Or better yet, how do you convert people off of that platform to become customers? How you do this with any type of, whether it’s a media, whether it’s door to door sales, whether it’s cold calls, whether it’s. Whatever it is, it’s going to be very different. And so when you obsess about a thing, you have to obsess about all of the elements of that thing. Because your goal in whatever the thing is that you choose to do is not just to be good at it’s to become great at it.
18:31
Jonathan Goodman
It’s to become truly world class at that thing. And that means that you have to become world class at all of the end elements that makes people world class. Your value is not industry specific expertise, but in range, but in all the aspects of the thing.
18:50
Brad Weimert
Yeah, I mean, I. So a lot of things there that I think are great. One is the sort of the notion of the testing cycle and that I think when you’re exploring industries, your point was if you’re 20, you’ve got to do some exploring. And I don’t say that. Yeah, right, sure. And I think through a lot of life, you don’t know, and my back to those diversion schools of thought, my path has been, I don’t know what my fucking life mission is. What I know is while I figure that out, I’m still going to crank some shit out and create a good life. Right. And it’s a means to an end or it’s a means to the next chapter. There’s another way to say that. Right?
19:32
Jonathan Goodman
Yeah.
19:33
Brad Weimert
And so to your point, for me, as I went down the path of creating Easy Pay Direct and building a merchant services company, it’s not that I wake up and think merchant services are the most empowering, uplifting thing that would ever create a great human out of me. It is a medium to learn and develop myself as a business person and create a good opportunity for the staff and a good product and experience for everybody that we interact with. But those skill sets that have been developed through that course can be applied to lots of other things. And I think that the, you know, the cycle of looking at two weeks or a month to test something, I would strongly encourage people to do that, not only from a business perspective, but from a personal interest perspective as well. Right.
20:22
Brad Weimert
So, you know, if you’ve been interested in making pottery or race car driving or running. Right. Whatever it is have a dedicated effort to think, maybe I’ll just. For the next 30 days, this is all I’m going to do and think about my spare time is going to race car driving. But in addition, you gave some bullet points around kind of thinking through how to assess that and what are the other elements that might come into play when you’re thinking about it? It’s startling to me and I want to talk about it in application to your business, but it’s startling to me how often you get involved in a thing that you had no knowledge of to find out how different it is than what you thought it was.
21:07
Brad Weimert
You know, like what skill sets, what engagement, what it actually demands that you just didn’t even, it didn’t even occur to you say, oh yeah, you know, this activity also means that you’re really good over here. Oddly found myself at lunch with Lance Armstrong a few weeks ago. Super, super. He’s in Austin, so it kind of makes sense, but super strange. It was me and him and two other people. And I told him, which everybody in the group gave me weird eyes when I did this. But I was like, I always thought cycling was just boring as shit. And somebody next to me like kind of elbowed me and was like, what the fuck?
21:44
Jonathan Goodman
You’re talking to the best cyclist ever of all time. He’s probably spent 100,000 hours on a bike easily, right?
21:56
Brad Weimert
And I was like, yeah, I just always thought it was boring as shit until I started doing it. And what I didn’t realize was all of these other things that are actually engaged, first of all, how crazy difficult it is to go for long periods of time. Also what it does with strength. Oh my God.
22:13
Jonathan Goodman
That it requires. A friend of mine was an expert witness in his trial because he’s a PhD in exercise nutrition. And one of the things that he did as part of his expert witnessing was they basically loaded up a bike with the weight and so it would be the resistance that Lance was pushing on as he’s going uphill in like the Tour de France. And like this friend of mine was a competitive bodybuilder and like powerless. I mean, incredibly strong fit guy, PhD, next size nutrition. And he could hardly push the pedal for one revolution. The power that these guys have developed and the endurance and the ability to sustain that power is outer worldly, elderly.
23:06
Brad Weimert
And, and you don’t get a chance to think about that, understand it, or actually contextualize it into your life unless you give it that 30 day window or longer to actually experience that.
23:18
Jonathan Goodman
Let me put a pin in this before we move on.
23:20
Brad Weimert
Yeah, please.
23:21
Jonathan Goodman
There’s something I noticed, Brad, I don’t know if you’ve noticed the same thing. When I reached, I’m 39 years old. This, I really started to notice it when I was about 35. And I say this to people and they’re like, yo, I noticed that when I was 25. So like, whatever. I noticed it when I was 35. I’m slow. Humans seem to. A lot of the humans around me seem to have stopped evolving. They’re working. They seem to be working very hard and yet getting nowhere. And it’s not for lack of good information, it’s not for lack of work ethic. They’re just kind of going through the motions every single day, hitting up against this almost invisible line that they can’t jump over.
24:04
Jonathan Goodman
The best parallel that I can give for us, you know, health fanatics, I guess, is you go into a gym and you look around you and there’s a lot of people that are working very. And there’s a lot of people that have been working very hard for a very long period of time that have not been able to transform their body in a way that they are happy with now. Great. That they’re still going, their health markers are going to better. But if you ask them why they’re in the gym, they’re probably not there to improve their basic health markers. They’re there because they want to look fundamentally different than they are. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, I’m not commenting on. It just is that’s why they’re there.
24:39
Jonathan Goodman
And yet they have not been able to make this change despite being there for a long time. And what I think is that actually the search or the path to seeking 1% better daily improvements or small marginal improvements over a long drawn out period of time, actually, I think is not how we get better. I think mathematically the math checks out. I think that if we do it for long enough, we’ll hit the inflection point and the line will start going parabolic. But, but the human brain doesn’t really work that way. It’s too slow. Like, what am I supposed to be doing 1% better every single day? How many different things am I supposed to be doing? 1% better. How long will this take? What will the outcome be? Well, I recognize it when I hit that inflection point.
25:29
Jonathan Goodman
Like, there’s a lot of question marks, almost too many for me. And what I think is missing are Relatively short, yet intense, extremely focused periods of obsession flanked on either side with consistency. I think consistency is how you stay in a place. I think obsession for short periods of time is how you jump or leapfrog or take that quantum leap to the next level and actually transform yourself. And I have found this with, I mean, this is interesting because it’s not the book that I’m coming out with now, but the next book that’s coming out with in 2026 really dives into this principle where I view my life as a triangle that has three lines of it. You’ve got money, you’ve got relationships, you’ve got health. Each one of those things is a line.
26:21
Jonathan Goodman
The process of betterment over the course of my life is systematically thickening one arm of that triangle at a time while not letting the other arms collapse. And so I might not be actively focusing and obsessing one thing at any given time. Sometimes I’m just in steady state, which is totally cool. Other times I’m in a period of like 8 to 12 weeks where it’s like I, this period right now is obsessing about my fitness and my health because I know that if I obsess over it, you know, hire a trainer for four days a week, measure my food, sleep better, right? Focus on my sleep. That’s not something that financially or temporally I can sustain forever. But if you do that for 12 weeks, your body and your mind and your habits will be transformed, your self identity will be transformed.
27:19
Jonathan Goodman
And it becomes much easier then to maintain a steady state around that new what’s called a homeostatic set point physiologically, but also with your habits, also with your self identity. I found that it’s the same with money. I found that it’s the same with relationships. And so what I’ll actually do at any given time is focus and obsess over one element on making that better, knowing that the other things there’s going to be time for. Because the hard part is always like, oh, I’m pushing really hard on my business. But now I feel guilty that my fitness is not getting that same level of attention.
28:00
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
28:01
Jonathan Goodman
Oh, but now I’m crushing my fitness. But hey, the people I love are kind of missing out. There’s always this guilt for the thing that we’re not doing. And what this has helped me do is kind of mentally to myself say, yo, there’s seasons to this shit. I know that this is the season that I’m in right now. I know that there’s going to be A season for family. And so I’m going to maintain the relationships that I have with myself, family. And I have checklists for that, literally. But right now was a season for work. Right now is the season for fitness or health. The other stuff gets maintained so that I can push that forward, so that I can thicken that arm of that triangle.
28:41
Jonathan Goodman
And then I’m going to thicken the relationship side, and then I’m going to thicken the other side. What I found is that most people just try to do all of these things at once, and there’s never enough focus and obsession. It’s almost unhinged, this approach. But I think it’s the only way to reliably and systematically get better in all of the important parts of our life over time is this seasonality approach.
29:10
Brad Weimert
Well, I think that. I mean, I think it ties very much back into the testing cycle approach. Right. So two things. One, I think if you don’t have, if you don’t keep the consistency and have the discipline to have that consistent baseline, your little entrepreneurial spurts are going to be misdirected, misguided, and go nowhere good. You’re going to be all over the place. But two, through that static approach, if you take that two weeks or month sprint for the obsessiveness around one topic, that’s where you get a deep understanding of the next thing. And I think through different seasons of life, you know, or through different topics, you need more or less energy towards a given sprint, right? Sometimes it’s enough to watch a few videos on something to get it right, for it to be an hour. Hey, I’m going to get it.
30:01
Brad Weimert
And then I’m just going to put this in motion. And maybe that test is just, you know, I learned a new exercise to try to strengthen a certain thing, and I’m going to put an emotion for a month and see where it is. But if you don’t put that, if you don’t put an endpoint to it to reevaluate and see whether or not it was impactful, you will find yourself five years later doing the same dumb shit, even though it didn’t add any value. And then it’s just taking up time.
30:28
Jonathan Goodman
You know, the spotlight. There’s a few things here, right? Like the spotlight effect. You know, whatever you shine a spotlight on is what you focus on. But then there’s good hearts law. Have you ever heard good Hertz law? It’s one of my favorites. He it states that when the measure becomes the goal, it ceases to be A good measure. And. And I mean, I love that pertaining to things like superficial engagement metrics on social media, for example, follow accounts. When those measures become the goal, they cease to be good measures. You know, they are. They are instrumental goals, not final goals. They are perhaps depending on wherever we want to go, they’re an indication that we’re going in the right direction Sometimes, not always, but they’re certainly not the goal. And there’s almost too much focus on. I think.
31:13
Jonathan Goodman
I think what you’re hitting on there. Yeah. Is comes down into measuring the right thing. You know, do I care, for example, to go back to social media? Because it’s something that I find just frustrates the hell out of all of my entrepreneur buddies, is all of them that run great. What was it. What was the thing that Ryan Holiday said years back? I’ll never forget it. He said, I’ll paraphrase it, but he was like. He was like, every New York Times bestseller wants to run a great company. Everybody who runs a great company wants to be a New York Times bestseller. It’s like everybody who does something really impactful and important and successful wants the social recognition for doing that thing. Everybody who has social recognition wants to build something that actually is meaningful and impactful. And so it’s this.
31:59
Jonathan Goodman
It’s this weird kind of world that we live in. But like, you know, on Instagram, for example, which has always been my main platform because I come from fitness, you know, I could put out a post on any given day that’ll get 10,000 plus likes. It’s not hard to do once you have a baseline of an audience, once you know how to craft messages. But what’s interesting is that a couple of years ago we started to measure. This is for my mentorship company. A couple years ago, we started to measure a different metric, which is how many inbound DM requests do we get inquiring about our service as a result of my content? And then we became more sophisticated and now we actually measure.
32:39
Jonathan Goodman
We still measure that, but now we actually measure how many inbound DM requests that actually convert to customers based off of the type of content that we’re sharing. And what’s interesting is that we actually began to notice a pretty significant inverse correlation between engagement and our actual desired outcome metric that led to tangible business outcomes that were positive. And so you see, on my account, you know, I think. I think every account has some combination of viral value and depth content. You know, viral content, yeah, sure. You need a baseline number of eyeballs that are going to see your thing. But very few people see a viral post from somebody and they’re like, that’s going to be my guy for this, that’s going to be my product for this thing.
33:24
Jonathan Goodman
Because we all kind of intuitively know that in order to entertain around a subject, you only really need a pretty 101 level superficial understanding of that subject, right? There’s, there’s, according to the category pirates, in this book, Snow Leopard, which I think is the most underrated book about content and personal brand that’s out there in the world, they talk about the difference between obvious and non obvious content. Obvious content is the type of thing that’s always going to get you a bigger response. Non obvious content, you’re not going to get as much of a response, but you’re going to kind of have all the stuff bubbling underneath the surface. Like who responds to stuff. It’s either people who like you way too much or people who don’t like you too much.
34:13
Jonathan Goodman
It’s not the quiet majority in the middle, you know what I’m saying, that are ever going to buy your services. And so you’ve got to be very careful, is what I’m saying, by what you measure and figuring out that’s the game that you have to play and identifying those metrics.
34:32
Brad Weimert
I mean, that ties a lot of things together that we’ve been talking about though, because in the beginning, back to the divergent paths, just fucking do something, right? And what that means is don’t allow the right metric to get in the way of tracking a metric and pushing forward. And that’s true of social, it’s true of email marketing, it’s true of product market fit, right? It’s true of picking the right product. But you need a check in, right? You need a benchmark of when to run these cycles and when to assess. Is this the right metric and is this metric getting us to the outcome? And if you don’t put those things in place with all tests that you run, you will find yourself down the road doing something that was misaligned with the outcome that you’re after.
35:16
Brad Weimert
And you’ll be like, shit, I’m putting out 100 pieces of content a week, a day, a month, whatever, and I’m hitting that metric and we’re not making any sales, right?
35:27
Jonathan Goodman
And I don’t like the way that my life is going. And then you look at where the information came from, you know, the source of the information that made you think that you need to put out a hundred pieces of content. Let’s say, you know, I call it business porn. You know, a lot of the content that we see in our feeds these days, it’s just that it feels good. It tweaks this weird center in our brain. But then you look at where the source comes from and you’re like, what, I would change places with that person? Well, maybe not. But I think it’s very important to consider. I was at this event a couple years ago, Brad, and on stage was this woman who was talking about.
36:08
Jonathan Goodman
I mean, she had a fabulous business and she was talking about her funnels that funneled other people to a funnel and then that funneled other people to other funnels. And look at all these funnels doing funnel things. And then here’s, you know, our content and our ads for this funnel. But then we have, you know, for the other funnel, other content and other ads. And, you know, what she said made sense, and it was really smart and it was really well put together, and she’s done well, and that’s great for her. But I. I looked around at the other attendees eyes, and they were just as glossed over as I was.
36:39
Jonathan Goodman
And all that I could think was that they were thinking the same thing as me, which is, y’all, if I gotta do all this shit just to make a living, count me out. And. And then I thought deeper about the problem. And I knew this woman on stage, right? And she’s, you know, she was 40 some years old and she has no children. She has a boyfriend, and she lives in California. And then I looked at the guy next to me, and I was chatting with him. So I knew this. And the guy next to me had three kids under the age of five. And so the information that this woman. The fact that this woman has decided not to have children, that’s on stage. It’s totally cool. It does not render her information or her success any less valuable or important or impressive.
37:26
Jonathan Goodman
But it is a very important data point through which to filter the information through that she’s speaking about on stage. Good information is not necessarily good advice. And so a lot of the information that we get online, to be honest, comes from people that are pretty nihilistic in our business world. They are very rarely family people. They often will put out things like skip your friends weddings. You know, you have to.
37:58
Brad Weimert
Don’t get mad at Alex.
38:00
Jonathan Goodman
I didn’t name any names. You have to give up a lot of things in order to have success. And a lot of this came from. A lot of this comes from, you know, the. The. The Warren Buffett, the Charlie Munger isms. You know, if you go back and what was one of the things that Buffett says like the most successful people say no to almost everything. And that might be true, but I’ve read a lot of biographies on the man. I probably read seven different biographies on Warren Buffett. And I’ve come to the conclusion very clearly that his definition of success is radically different than my definition of success.
38:40
Brad Weimert
Sure.
38:41
Jonathan Goodman
Which is totally fine. But my opinion is quite different. I think you should say yes to just about everything. I think you should go through very defined seasons of your life. Will you blindly say yes to just about everything in order to expose yourself to different things you would not otherwise expose yourself to? This idea of if it’s not a hell yes, then it’s a no. I think is terrible advice for most people. People. It’s terrible advice for me because it’s always going to be a hell no. If it’s uncomfortable, it’s always going to be a hell no. If it’s different. That does not mean that it’s not important. That does not mean that it’s valuable. It might mean that it’s just existing in a blind spot or outside of the patterns that I’m already in my life.
39:30
Jonathan Goodman
And if you know, are in a new place, for example, physically or metaphorically, or you left a place and then changed because you went through an evolution and then you return back to that place and you have to learn how to exist in your previous world as a new transformed person. You have to figure out a way to explore it differently. If you’re in a rut, if you’re feeling burned out, if you’re feeling broken down or bored out by the day to day of your existence, you have to figure out a way to expose yourself to new people and new things and new ideas and new patterns and new experiences, you’re never going to do that using day. If it’s not a hell yes, it’s a no heuristic.
40:15
Brad Weimert
Yeah, well, so I hate you because I have like 8,000 places I want to go with this. And I’ll do. I’ll recap and I’ll give you some thoughts. But yeah, the. Yeah, definitely the. Look, I have a. A number of friends, but thankfully, but one in particular.
40:36
Jonathan Goodman
I have one. I have one friend.
40:38
Brad Weimert
No, you’re like my father. I have like my father. He’s only friends with my mom.
40:42
Jonathan Goodman
You know, Aristotle’s got a ladder of friendship, right? You’ve got, you’ve got your Two friends. Then you’ve got your. Call them, your acquaintances, you know, people who you cross paths with, people who you exist in communities and you share hobbies with. Then you’ve got your deal friends, you know, your hobby, your people that you are colleagues with. Like you and I are deal friends, you know.
41:04
Brad Weimert
Yep.
41:04
Jonathan Goodman
We like each other, we always enjoy each other’s company, but that’s what the relationship is. None of them are good or bad. But what the studies show very clearly is that the quality of life improvements through friendship really actually begin to taper off very significantly after you have one spouse and one true friend. You actually don’t really need more than that. That. So I have one true friend.
41:35
Brad Weimert
Well, I have, I, I look at sort of inner circle. So very close friends. Friends, acquaintances and then close acquaintances. Those are kind of my buckets that I think about.
41:49
Jonathan Goodman
And then you’ve got parasocial friends, which is a whole different beast today.
41:52
Brad Weimert
But, yeah, so, yeah, to my point, the. I’ve got a, a friend that’s a very close friend who is in the extremely wealthy category and he’s 10 years older than me and routinely I see him doing things and I 100% should not be following his lead. I should not try to live how he lives. I should not make the decisions that he’s making right now. He should not be my role model in most things because he’s 10 years ahead of me and he has a fuck ton more money and he’s in a very different place in life with family, etc. That’s very important. And I hope it illustrates the point that you were making, which is you need the source.
42:37
Jonathan Goodman
I’m really interested in that, but I’m having trouble, like how he’s living. Understand it. Yeah. Like, what’s an example of something that he focuses on that’s perfectly reasonable for him to focus on that is not something that you feel like you should be obsessing over at this time.
42:52
Brad Weimert
Well, look, I’ll give you a couple. His criteria for financial investments necessarily should be totally different than mine because his risk tolerance at this point, if he’s worth many hundreds of millions of dollars, should necessarily be different. When he throws a million dollars at something, his criteria should be different than mine. Right. Also, if he wants to take a trip to London on the fly on a Wednesday night and come back on Friday because he is 10 years my senior and has a different type of business that runs differently without him, I have a different filter. I should put that through you know, he’s also got adult kids at this point. So his criteria for sort of how he lives socially and where his focal point is going to be different than mine, right?
43:37
Jonathan Goodman
Yeah, but all of this, I mean, that’s what we spoke about. That’s why I’m not there with you physically right now. I mean, one of the main reasons is, you know, I was going to be in Austin, right, for this, But I have two young kids, 7 and 2, and then my wife is pregnant with our next. And I mean the filter, like there are so many expiring moments that pass by so quickly when kids are this age that even being gone for a week, you come back and you’re like, how did like you change? Like, I missed that period of my life when you were slurring those types of phrases. Sure, that’s a lot to miss. So adult kids, I think is actually a undue stated, huge deal in life.
44:20
Brad Weimert
Different phase of life. Well, I’ll wrap this up with the idea that advice that you get from people, if you understand that it’s coming through a different lens, that same advice can be totally terrible for you at one phase of life. But two years, five years, 10 years, 15 years later, that same advice that was terrible for you before might be spot on right now. And some of these things. And also that’s even assuming that you have the same outcomes that you’re after through these phases, but through these phases you also might just be driving towards a different goal. So one entrepreneur is trying to optimize for profitability. One is trying to optimize for scale. One is trying to optimize for lifestyle. So be careful where you get the advice from. And I take it all with a grain of salt, I think.
45:13
Jonathan Goodman
Oh, totally. I think, I think what you said about the three different goals in business is so pointed and so understated that to me defines the game that you’re playing.
45:26
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
45:26
Jonathan Goodman
And the activities. And the activities and the moves that you make and the people you compare yourself to and in the advice that you take. And it’s not that one game is worse or better than the others, but they have different rules of engagement, time horizons, odds of success, reward mechanisms. They have different trade offs. And once you understand, once you are able to rationalize and verbalize to yourself the game that you’re playing, you begin then to exist within the rules of that game and can optimize that game. But if you’ve never done that, holy shit, man, it’s hard. So I’D love for you to repeat that because I think that’s so important.
46:09
Brad Weimert
Well, I’ll give you an example with it too, but I said the optimization and there are many different things you could optimize for, but one would be lifestyle, which you’ve done a great job of. Another would be profitability, which I spend a lot of time on. A third would be scale and scale. The example here is venture capitalists or funded companies are purely focused on scale to the detriment of all else. And there’s lots of reasons for this. But when somebody dumps money in, you typically run negative for a long time and you have a run rate or a burn rate, which is how much money am I spending and when is it going to be all over? When am I going to be, when will I have spent all of the money I need to raise money?
46:48
Jonathan Goodman
How much can I get out of this, you know, before it’s all over?
46:52
Brad Weimert
Kind of how much can I scale before I have to raise more money? Right. Is basically the idea. And if you can prove that you’re scaling quickly, you can raise more money. But that outcome necessarily means that you’re not aiming for profitability, which means that your day to day activity is going to be different than the entrepreneur who is looking at just getting to be profitable and just making sure that their decisions are more calculated and not just throwing a bunch of money at the wall to test it.
47:17
Jonathan Goodman
I absolutely love it. And I think that is an aspect not spoken about enough for sure, because I, you know, I have found you can tell me whether you agree with this or not from your experience, but also with, you know, experiences of people that you’ve spoken to. I found that you can build reliably a business that is, call it 30 to 50% profitable, that generates 1 to $3 million a year in revenue systematically, reliably, without a tremendous amount of risk or trade offs. So long as you appreciate that there’s going to be an upper limit, most likely on that business model at 3 to 5 million or so. And so what I’ve decided is that I actually love that. It’s simple. I can put a core operator in charge, there’s no stress.
48:10
Jonathan Goodman
I can keep, I mean the profitability my companies is actually closer to about 65%. But like you can keep that profitability really high and then, you know, one of the businesses is a bit above that high limit. But the other ones, you know, what I’ve been able to do over time and appreciating that is say actually the goal is not to build this one company really huge. Instead it’s actually, you know, every few years, five years or so, let’s see if we can add in perhaps one more congruent complementary company business that adds into this. Right. And so, you know, like I’m at three and I’ll be at this point for another couple years and then maybe if I have another good idea, you know, I’ll add another one. I don’t need to.
49:03
Jonathan Goodman
But, but the point is that I have never looked at these things as something that could get to be eight figures plus in revenue. And I think, I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with that. But I think that once you get past a certain point, and I’ve recognized that point to be about 3 to 5 million, the, the trade offs that you have to buy into in, there’s going to be more risk. There’s going to be most likely a loss of control. Not always, but most likely a loss of control. You know, maybe outside investment, the profitability is going to be smaller as you scale, all of those things are going to happen and then it’s probably going to require more of your personal time, more of your lifestyle.
49:50
Jonathan Goodman
And that’s perfectly fine if you know that you’re signing up for that, but you can’t. And some people change, right? Like some people start one way and then they change. As long as I think that they consciously do that’s totally cool. Where I think, where I have seen people fall into trouble is they don’t. And then they get to those sticking points in business, you know, that we all know whatever it is, 250,000, 3 million, 10 million.
50:15
Brad Weimert
And, and then they’re swayed by outside factors and not making a conscious choice relative to the outcome they’re after. Yeah, yeah, I think that, so I think that those benchmarks are good. I think that they’re very industry specific and I think there’s a lot of nuance there. But I think that generally speaking that’s a, it’s a good framework. Jonathan. Dude, it’s.
50:37
Jonathan Goodman
Oh yeah, we gotta go.
50:38
Brad Weimert
You told me to stop you at this time and I, I hate that I have to do this. I’m regretful that I have to do it already because I didn’t ask you any question that I came here to ask you. But I love talking with friends.
50:50
Jonathan Goodman
Hang out though.
50:51
Brad Weimert
That’s right.
50:53
Jonathan Goodman
I like it.
50:53
Brad Weimert
That’s right. Well, you know, next round we’ll Have a topo chico. And you know, maybe. Maybe put some tequila in it or. Or not, but it’ll be in Mexico or Austin or somewhere else.
51:04
Jonathan Goodman
You got to come back out to Sayulito. It’s been years since you’ve been here.
51:07
Brad Weimert
Oh, I. I just randomly ran into you that day. That was bizarre.
51:11
Jonathan Goodman
That was funny.
51:12
Brad Weimert
Bizarre.
51:12
Jonathan Goodman
It’s funny. You were at Mary’s Tacos.
51:14
Brad Weimert
I remember I was at Mary’s Tacos and Sayulita, Mexico, at a different event down the street. And I escaped the event to go surfing. And then as I was eating tacos and having a beer, you were randomly walking down the street. You’re like, brad. I was like, what?
51:33
Jonathan Goodman
That happens actually, like a not insignificant amount of time, like every season that I’m here. I mean, this is my sixth winter here, so I’ve spent more than two years total. If you put it together in this town. And, and it’s. It’s actually crazy how often I went into like buddies of mine that are just, you know, sitting there eating, talking tacos or so. And then we hang out, which is fun.
51:57
Brad Weimert
So you’ve got a book coming out. Tell me about the book real quick and tell me where we should point people to find out more about you.
52:03
Jonathan Goodman
The book is called the obvious choice, Timeless lessons on success, profit and finding your way. You can get the book anywhere and I would love for you to buy the book. It’s published by HarperCollins, so it’s available anywhere you get books. It’s on Kindle audio, hardcover. Buy the book. It is. You know, if you appreciated the fact that went a little bit deeper into these concepts, particularly like, what game are you playing? Understand the rules of that game. What are some foundational truths and timeless truths about business and about lifestyle and how they intermingle. Like, you’ll really like the book. I think it’s very different that way than a lot of conventional, call it business marketing books. It’s faux entrepreneurs. It’s for marketing salespeople within existing organizations. Anybody who’s not a.
52:54
Jonathan Goodman
Anybody whose goal is not to be a billion dollar unicorn or a full time influencer. You know, how do you. How do you. How do you win in business without feeling like you have to win the Internet, I guess is the best way to say it. So by the book, I am on Instagram, I’m on Twitter, I’m its coach Goodman on both. Would love to hear from you and you can message me anytime there. But also when you buy the book, if you don’t love the book, you can also message me and I’ll give you back 100% of the money that you spent on the book.
53:23
Brad Weimert
So hope it. Well, I’ve seen all the effort that you put into writing it and yeah, and I think the depth in different approaches to thinking about things are alluring and engaging for me. So appreciate your time, man. Until next time.
53:42
Jonathan Goodman
Sounds good. Talk soon, buddy.
53:44
Brad Weimert
That’s a wrap for today’s episode. Please subscribe and most importantly, leave us a review. It takes like 30 seconds and it makes such a big impact it helps other people find us. Also, you might not know this. You can watch over 100 episodes of Beyond a Million with guests like Grant Cardone, Wes Watson, and neil [email protected].
