206: How Pat Flynn Turns Content Into Multiple 7-Figure Businesses

For nearly two decades, Pat Flynn has been creating content. What’s interesting is how that work has fueled multiple 7-figure businesses.

Over the years, he’s launched and scaled companies across education, media, software, community, and physical products—from Smart Passive Income and SwitchPod to niche websites, podcasting tools, and more recently, a Pokémon YouTube channel that pulls in 10 million views a day.

What ties all of these ventures together is the way Pat builds them. Through his Lean Learning philosophy, he’s able to use content to test ideas, reduce risk, and explore a wide range of opportunities while still staying super focused.

In this episode, you’ll learn exactly how Pat’s able to start so many ventures, his approach to mastering any skill, the merger that freed up his time and allowed SPI to scale, and the viral short-form content strategy that’s driving millions in both views and revenue.

Mic Drop Moments

• “ A lot of people say, ‘Pat, you were an overnight success with this Pokémon channel.’ And I was like, I started on YouTube in 2009, you’re just seeing year 12.” – Pat Flynn

• “ Let the data tell you what’s working and what’s not. And the only way you can get data is by creating.” – Pat Flynn

• “Most people quit right before that inflection point.” – Pat Flynn

• “80% of my time is dedicated to the things I’ve already said, yes to. My responsibilities, the things I’m committed to, my businesses, etc. 20% of time is dedicated to scratching an itch, play, creativity, experimentation, such that if something were to fail in that 20%, it’d be okay. I’d still have the 80% lifting me up and pushing me forward.” – Pat Flynn

• “One of my videos has 28 million views and became the number three trending video on YouTube two days after it came out. That one single video alone, which was filmed in 2022, has generated over $100k and over 100,000 subs.” – Pat Flynn

• 00:00 Intro
• 00:35 Finding the Fun That Fuels Momentum
• 03:00 Why Pat Abandoned Blogging
• 04:06 The Problem With Audio-Only Podcasts
• 04:49 10M Views/Day from Pokémon Short-Form
• 06:40 Letting Data Drive Your Content Strategy
• 11:05 The Mental Shift That Separates Creators Who Win
• 14:51 The 20% Rule Powering Pat’s Side Ventures
• 21:33 The 12-Minute Workflow Generating $25K–$40K Videos
• 24:49 The Smart Acquihire That Became SPI Media
• 32:44 Designing Your Business Around the Life You Want
• 35:40 Just In Time Learning vs. Just In Case Learning
• 42:31 How Community 3.5x’s Your Odds of Success
• 46:22 Micro-Mastery to 10X Results in ANYTHING
• 53:31 Using Voluntary Force Functions to Take Massive Action
• 01:02:21 Pat’s Advice to New Entrepreneurs
• 01:03:12 What No Longer Works in Content Creation

Brad Weimert: Pat Flynn, you are an OG in the podcast space. Sh*t, you’re an OG in the blog space. Then you launch a physical product, you launch a media company, you launch a Pokémon channel that has 2 million subs, basically, and 2 billion views. And then you wrote a book about learning less. You’re all over the place. What is one lesson that you’ve applied across all of these different things that has allowed you to stay focused and not just get distracted?

Pat Flynn: Yeah, I mean there are a few things. I mean, this is the whole concept of the book is how to take everything that’s coming your way, all the energy you have to put out there in the world, and focus it like a laser, but not just for one thing all the time, forever, which I tried to do. I tried The ONE Thing strategy, like a lot of people talk about, Alex Hormozi, Gary Keller, Jay Papasan, their book, The ONE Thing. Like the one thing, I cannot do that. And I think like many entrepreneurs and business owners, we have these itches that just like draw us in, and we have to be able to manage that and still have time to play and experiment. And that’s what I’ve done. I’ve always found the fun, and that is the principle that has always pushed me forward into success across all of this stuff.

I’ve always found the fun. I like to call myself the Pat of all trades, master of fun. Not the jack of all trades, master of one. And that has been probably more prominent than ever than with this Pokémon thing that I’ve done recently, that a lot of people now know me for. It’s actually the biggest thing I’ve ever done, and it’s the most wide-reaching thing. But even back in the day when I started out as an architect and then got laid off and started my architecture business, it was just showing up as me. That has always been the thing that has pushed me forward, right? Not trying to be like anybody else but finding the things that are unique about me and only being able to find those things out by taking action, by failing, by falling pretty hard, but getting back up and continuing to move forward.

That, and really just understanding what my priorities are, I think, this is another thing that a lot of us struggle with, with where do we put our time? And if we mostly take audits of what we do, we might find that a lot of our time is being spent in places that don’t really matter or just seem to have drawn us in without really getting results, but maybe because of what somebody once said to do, or maybe an initial win that we had. But you can’t stay complacent. You got to kind of continue to move forward and drive yourself into new directions to, A, find that fun but, B, find those results because things change fast. Things are moving all the time.

Brad Weimert: Well, I think to that end, you produce a tremendous amount of content, and now in kind of a variety of formats, one of the things that people find difficult is trying to be present across lots of platforms. Of the platforms that you’re on, whether heavily or not, what is one platform that you would drop today altogether, which would you think would actually allow you to grow faster, and why?

Pat Flynn: Yeah. I mean, I’ve dropped the blog already, right? Writing was the way to generate traffic, to get in front of people, to prove your expertise, to share information that nobody else has seen before. But the problem is all the information that everybody could ever want is already there. And it’s not written content that people are consuming now. It’s video. So, video is where I’m putting most of my efforts and energy. I feel like if I had to slash another one from all the possibilities and different platforms that I could be on, it would probably be the audio-only format. And it’s weird for me to say that because I am, like you said, an OG in the podcasting space, started in 2010, almost at 1,000 episodes.

But when it comes to growth and finding new people, the audio-only podcast doesn’t do a good job of that because the audio-only platforms don’t have a discovery mechanism. This is why you see a lot of audio podcasts going onto YouTube because YouTube is where that discoverability happens. So, I would say if you’re going to do a podcast, try to add video on top of it. But if you’re doing audio only, that just might be a way of holding you back from growth. That being said, the audio podcast and the reason I still continue to do it, it provides depth. It provides long periods of time for me to build a relationship with the audience who has already found me. And I have that luxury of having an audience who has already found me.

But, man, the video stuff is so much fun, for sure, especially the short-form stuff. I wasn’t all about short form initially. I always thought it’s sort of like Halloween candy, right? Like, people come to your house, they get the candy, and then they leave. It’s like, how can you build a relationship with them? But then I started to think about it and experiment with it. And I was like, “What if Halloween was every day and every day the same people came to your house to get the king-size Snickers bar that you had to offer?” Okay, now you’re building a relationship. Now they know who you are. It’s not one 60-minute video, it’s sixty 1-minute videos across two months. You could still get the same results, but it’s a little bit different in approach.

And right now, you didn’t mention this in the intro with another thing that I have, which is a short-form channel about Pokémon, which now gets about 10 million views a day across platforms. Same video, by the way, posted on TikTok, posted on YouTube, Instagram reels, Facebook, and now also Snapchat, 10 million views a day from a video that takes me 12 minutes to edit. And that has provided another revenue stream. It’s provided me access to people that I would’ve never gotten in front of before. I just got back from Ford Field. The Detroit Lions invited me out to open Pokémon on Ford Field during the game against the Vikings a couple of weeks ago. Kiké Hernández from the Dodgers reached out to me and said, “Hey, I like your channel. I’m getting into Pokémon. I want to learn more about it.” And this is a World Series champion from the Dodgers who reached out.

Brad Weimert: Amazing.

Pat Flynn: It’s insane, dude. It’s absolutely insane.

Brad Weimert: Well, I mean, look, we have to tell the story of how you got into creating a Pokémon channel. And I want to get there, but the numbers are staggering, right? And very quickly, your core channel went to, well, you’ve got two, right? You’ve got the Shorts channel, and then you’ve got Deep Pocket Monster, both of which have tons of subs and now billions of views, which is insane to me. I want to talk about that path. But part of that path is the Pokémon channel is fundamentally a different type of content than what you’ve ever done, right? You’ve got these long-form, hour-plus videos that you’re doing that are challenges, and this whole narrative arc that’s like a movie or TV, and you came from teaching people business.

So, what are a couple of things that transferred directly when you launched this new channel and worked? And what are a couple of things that didn’t transfer and were totally different?

Pat Flynn: Yeah. I definitely had an advantage in 2021 when I started the Pokémon channel for a few reasons. Number one, from the business world and being on YouTube since 2009, I understood YouTube. I understand the importance of titles and thumbnails, and just to kind of bring people in, and get that click. If you don’t get people to click, your video might as well not even exist, right? So, that’s really important. And so, understanding the analytics and what worked there, understanding how to create a great hook, and then not only the click portion of that, but the stick portion, click and then stick, the retention, how to hold people’s attention, how to create open loops. These were things that I started to implement right away in more informational videos initially on the Pokémon channel.

But the evolution, if you want to call it that, of the content on the Pokémon channel demonstrates stuff that, again, I’ve learned in the entrepreneurial space, which is let the data tell you what’s working and what’s not. And the only way you can get data is by creating. Again, this is why I like short form because you can create a lot in a very short period of time with really no penalty for overproduction. Whereas on the long form stuff, it does take a little bit more time. But initially, it was more informational stuff, stuff about the history of some of these cards. I was brand new to the hobby. I didn’t grow up with Pokémon. I didn’t know anything about it, by the way. So, when I was creating it, I wasn’t pretending to be an expert.

I was just like, “Hey, I’m learning, and I’m sharing what I’m learning as we go,” because I know how to create educational content. I had never created entertainment-based content before. But the videos were me buying these mystery boxes on eBay and kind of opening them up. This was like my first attempt at entertainment videos because it was kind of a fun thing to see me spend like $500 on a random box on eBay, open it up, and usually find a lot of trash in it, right? Just leftover cards and display how much money I lost. And people were really thrilled about the fact that I was losing money. And it was really interesting about that. But it was all videos that were providing some entertainment value within it.

In one of those videos, I think our third mystery box video, looking at the retention graph, I saw a flat line, and it was flat for about six minutes straight. And in the world of retention, if you’ve gotten people’s attention for that long, like figure out what happened there. And in that video, I opened a mystery box that had a Pokémon binder in it. I was like, “Whoa, this is really interesting. When there is a binder on screen, and I’m flipping through the pages, people are stuck on that. Cool. What if in the next video, I just purchased a person’s binder? What happens if I just do that? Great.” The next video exploded. I think 400,000 views in a couple of weeks from just purchasing like a $1,000 binder from somebody and then opening it up and having that be it. The retention graph was flat most of the way.

I did another video with my son. This is part of the reason why I got into Pokémon. My kids got me into it, so they were into it too. They get involved in the videos, and they play these roles and help me out in the back end of the channel as well. But in one video, my son challenged me to this duel where I had to do a trick shot, like, dude, perfect. I had to flip a card into a card holder across the way, and if I didn’t do it in the right time, then I’d lose this card. People were like stoked on that video, the challenge part of that. And I was like, this is really interesting. I never thought I would do like a challenge, but what if I combine this challenge thing that worked with the binders that worked?

So, that was the birth of me going around town and finding a way to complete these sets of Pokémon, which usually have a few hundred cards within a certain period of time. And this is now the bread and butter of the channel. I wouldn’t have gotten there from the beginning because I didn’t know it was the data that told me to do this. And now these challenge videos have become, like I said, just our pillar videos and have seen, I mean, one of them has 28 million views and became the number three trending video on YouTube two days after it came out. And it alone, that one single video alone, which was filmed in 2022, had generated over $100,000 and already over 100,000 subs. One video accounting for a silver play button, from the data.

And again, that’s a carryover from the entrepreneurial world of understanding the data, learning from it, diving deep into that. The other part that really intrigued me from the entrepreneurial world that I definitely brought over was the storytelling component. Whenever I got on stage, that was the only time I really “performed” in my entrepreneurial world was when I got up on stage. And on stage I learned how to tell story, to hold people’s attention, to again, create open loops. I’ve gotten coaching for speaking. I’ve made over a million dollars being a public speaker since 2011. I brought over that storytelling into these challenges, and we are diving even deeper into it, learning about screenwriting.

And what’s really interesting, you had mentioned these are like one-hour, two-hour-long videos now. They weren’t initially. People are watching on their television. 70% of our audience on Deep Pocket Monster are watching on a television. They’re putting it on while watching dinner. We premiere these videos like a movie. I’ve heard a lot of people put them on while they go to bed, which is, I’m like, initially I was like, “Oh, I put you to sleep. That’s not good.” But I’m like, “That’s good for watch time, so yeah, please put me on at night.” So, again, these are kinds of things that I’ve carried over from the entrepreneur world. Not to mention finding a team and learning how to delegate and putting my best self forward and allowing me to do that while having other people do a lot of the other work that I don’t want to do, those are things that I’ve carried forward as well.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I mean, I would have to imagine the business background gave you the capacity to do this much, much, much faster. Now, it sounds like you also found a couple of things really early, but those are things that a lot of people probably would’ve missed really early.

Pat Flynn: Right. A lot of people say, “Pat, you were an overnight success with this Pokémon channel.” And I was like, “I started on YouTube in 2009. You’re just seeing year 12, where I started something new.” So, you’re right. It was a lot of things that I’ve learned. I think the other biggest thing is I’ve had 10, 11 years to mess up, to get in front of the camera, to learn that you don’t have to be perfect, right? That’s the other thing. Fail fast is what they say. And so, I just started creating. And the more I create, the more opportunities are out there. I feel like it’s kind of like fishing. I love fishing. It’s the thing that I do to escape the digital world and be out in nature. And every time you throw a bait out there, there’s a chance for the big fish, and you reel it in. If you don’t get anything, what do you do? You cast again. That’s it.

And it’s just like that with content. Whereas most people, they spend all this time creating the perfect bait and the perfect cast with the perfect weather and the perfect barometric pressures. They put one cast out there, they reel it in, they don’t get anything. What do they do? They think they’re a failure. It’s like they give up, and it’s like, no, I’m going to keep casting because you never know that next video or piece of content you put out there could be the one that explodes.

Brad Weimert: Well, I think one of the interesting things about that analogy is that for a fisherman, it’s predicated on enjoying being in the boat and casting for a lot of them, right?

Pat Flynn: Right.

Brad Weimert: And so, in business, you’ve got this thing where I think a lot of the time, and I actually firmly believe that it’s very difficult to find your passion. And this idea of like wait until you find the perfect thing to do, you’re just never going to do anything. Like, I think you just need to just work. And if you find the perfect thing or you find your passion along the way, great, but in the meantime, you do have to push yourself. You do need to keep recasting, you do need to keep redoing. But it doesn’t seem like your general arc leans into push, push, push, push, push all the time because you’ve done a bunch of different things that seem to scratch and itch.

So, Smart Passive Income, you grew, and I watched you grow that, and a number of my friends that you know as well. But then in 2016, you were like, “Hey, I’m going to make a physical product,” which seems like a bizarre thing to do when you have a fully digital blog, podcast, digital product company to say, “You know what? I’m going to do something completely different.” And it was SwitchPod, which is a tripod that sort of slides into a selfie stick kind of, but for creators.

Pat Flynn: Yeah.

Brad Weimert: How does that track? How do you think about jumping into a completely different thing? Is it a passion project? And is it a push-pull thing for you? How do you allocate space for that?

Pat Flynn: Yeah. I mean, look, I’m not obsessed with video equipment. It wasn’t a passion of mine, and I agree with you. If you look for that thing that is when all the planets align, it’s just never going to happen. So, you have to go out there and try things. At least have an interest in it, though, of course. And I had an interest in video. I was at a video conference with my good friend and videographer, Caleb Wojcik, and we were watching everybody film themselves with these gorilla pods, the sort of like the legs that look like a bunch of balls connected to each other. And they were kind of bending it in a way and holding it kind of weirdly. And it’s like, that’s not what it was built for. There has to be a better way, but there wasn’t.

So, we decided that we were like, “Okay. Well, do we want to actually go through the effort of creating a physical product and going through manufacturing and patenting, and all the ins and outs of that? We have never done that before. Why would we go down that path?” Because we’re curious. And because I had the time to experiment. Because here is what I’ve done. I’ve created a rule for myself. And this rule is the 20% itch rule. We were talking about scratching itches earlier, right? The 20% itch rule, and this is something I’ve put into my life is this: 80% of my time is dedicated to the things I’ve already said yes to, my responsibilities, the things I’m committed to, my businesses, et cetera, that need me. 80% of my time is dedicated to that.

20% of time is dedicated to scratching an itch, play, creativity, experimentation, such that if something were to fail in that 20%, it’d be okay. I’d still have the 80% lifting me up and pushing me forward. However, is it ever a fail because I’m learning? Not really, but also, what if it did work? What if it did work? What if it actually succeeds? And in this case, with a SwitchPod, after two years of prototyping and going out to conferences and asking other YouTubers what they like, dislike, going from plastic to 3D printed to a handcrafted one to then putting this on a line, we launched in February of 2019. We had 4,300 backers. We had $418,000 earned in 60 days with a campaign on Kickstarter.

So, it was a massive success. The product still exists today. It’s automated. This is the analogy I like to use when it comes to my work because a lot of people see, “Pat, you’re doing all these different things. How is that even possible? You are juggling too many balls.” If I was juggling balls, then yes, eventually many of them would fall, but I’m not. I’m spinning plates. Imagine, you know those people who like have a stick with a plate on it. They spin it around. You can only do one at a time to start that momentum, and I’m spinning that plate, I’m spinning it. I’m getting it to a point where it now has momentum on its own to let go for a bit, but it’s still spinning, so that I can get another stick and a plate and move that one up. Oh, now that one’s spinning this physical product.

And I have a team. I have automation. I have a third-party logistics program such that when I see an order come in on Amazon, I don’t have to do anything. Everything gets handled already because I’ve gotten to that point where the systems are built. Same thing happened with SPI. Everything has been offloaded except the things that only I wanted to do, which was get on a podcast and write emails, and record content. Everything else is happening from a team that I’ve built, and that is how I’m able to do all these things. I’m spinning plates because, again, I have that itch that I want to scratch. I want to scratch one at a time and get to a point where I give it enough time to succeed. And if it doesn’t, that’s okay.

I’ve attempted software projects prior to the SwitchPod that completely failed, but I learned from that. And those aren’t wasted moments, and they weren’t moments where it like took all my energy because I still dedicated most of my time to the 80% that I was committed to. So, that’s kind of how it works.

Brad Weimert: So, from a maintenance perspective, an automation or business building perspective, that totally makes sense. I think the challenge that I see people run into, myself included, is this notion of clear, pure allocation for that 20% for scratching an itch or having fun. First off, most entrepreneurs are terrible at allocating time effectively because they get into go mode or they’re not, right? There’s sort of this extremist mentality. I know a little bit about that. The question, I guess, for that is, at what phase of your growth career, whether it’s a subscriber count or it’s a numeric or it’s time and business, at what phase did you give yourself the freedom to say, “20% of my time is going towards scratching an itch and having fun”?

Pat Flynn: Actually, there were a few moments in time around the 2015-2016 era where I discovered that this was a thing that some people do. I mean, if you look at the way Google treats their employees, they have 80% of their time is used for the job description that a person has there, and 20% of time is used for the exact same thing. And this is where tools like Gmail were created to use the resources that Google had to try to create something new, to invent, and to again scratch itches. My good friend, Ramit Sethi, from I Will Teach You to Be Rich. I learned from him that he reserves every Friday to allow himself to try new things.

Monday to Thursday, 80% of the week is used for doing what he needs to do. Friday is his play day for marketing experimentation, for creating new things, for coming up with new ideas. And because it’s in that specific time period, he’s able to say discipline enough. And that for me was a sign that, okay, if I’m going to do this and I want to not just do the one thing, I need to control this, right? I want to play, but it’s a controlled play. I need to really be disciplined when it comes to the calendar. So, for me, Friday is play day still. I kind of do what Ramit does. Some people use their calendars and time block things a little bit better and are more disciplined enough to do this on their own.

Most people aren’t, like you said, but it is really important to honor that time that you say you’re going to do things. And that’s something that I’ve had to learn how to do very quickly, or else I wouldn’t be able to either, A, have enough time to play like I want to, or play too much. And some of the other things that were supposed to require my work didn’t have me, which has happened before, too. So, again, it’s a push and pull. It’s a balancing act, if you will. But that has allowed for a lot of these fun projects to happen. More recently, it was this short-form sort of experiment. I gave myself 60 days to create a daily video for 60 days.

I had gotten ahead on a lot of things, so that I had time to do this. And this is again, something that creates room for me to play, such that I could create a video every day. And I remember I got to day 30 on this daily video experiment. This was me opening a pack of Pokémon cards, didn’t show my face, didn’t want to link to it from any other channels. I just wanted to experiment and play on TikTok and Instagram, and YouTube. And on day 30, I wasn’t getting a lot of views. I was getting maybe 500 to 1,000 views. A couple of videos hit 3,000 to 4,000, but it wasn’t really gaining momentum. But the goal wasn’t to get a ton of views. The goal was to get to day 60, because that is the thing I could control.

I can’t control the algorithm. I can’t control how people will respond to these videos, but I can control hitting record and then hitting publish. So, I was only halfway there despite not getting the views that I wanted. But even by day 30, stuff already started to happen. This is Lean Learning in motion. The videos that once took me 45 minutes to an hour to do every day, now only takes me 12 minutes. I was able to develop the systems, the templates. I used the same sound bites, I used the same audio clips, all those kinds of things. Repetition, creating a framework. This show that I created called Should I Open It or Should I Keep It Sealed, was the format. And I knew just going into it every day, that was going to be the format.

Opening a different pack. If it’s a good card at the end, a good song plays. If it’s a bad card, a bad song plays, and kind of people make fun of me for. It’s mostly bad cards, by the way that I open. Anyway, on day 35, now with also 30 points of data by this time to know what worked and what doesn’t in those 30 days. Day 35, one of those videos hit 750,000 views, and I haven’t looked back since. And imagine if I had given up by day 30, it’s almost like that cartoon of that minor in the ground who’s like one chip away with his pickaxe to the gold or to the diamonds on the other end, right? Where I’ve just given myself enough time. Most people quit right before that inflection point. So, giving yourself enough time and worrying about the things that you can worry about and should worry about and letting the other things happen as they need to when they come as a byproduct of that is really the game.

And so, now 484 daily videos in, the videos now take me 12 minutes to edit. Like I said, I can accomplish an entire week’s worth of these daily videos in a single day, so I can get my time back. Again, batch processing has been key for getting some time back as well. The videos across the board per month are getting, again, 10 million views a day, 300 million views per month. I’m at about 6 billion views across all channels at this point. The brand deals, I’ve done some brand deals with companies that have been to the tune of 25K to up to 40K for a 60-second video. And in general, the ad revenue per month coming across all those channels are in the 25K to 40K range from a 12-minute video that takes me to 12 minutes to create every day. That’s it. I could just live off of this, but I’m having so much fun, and it’s creating all these opportunities, and it’s just proof more of the things I teach that this stuff works.

Brad Weimert: So, yeah. I want to talk a little bit more about the monetization of the Pokémon channel, why you’re doing it, what you get from it personally, how it spun out. But the intermediate step there was SPI Media, what was announced by you and your partner there is a merger. Tell me how that deal went down, why you did it, and why you allocated time for it, because that was sort of between. It was right before launching the channel, right? The Pokémon channel.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. This was 2018-2019. There was a deal that happened. So, to go back a little bit, in 2008, after I launched my architecture business, that was my first business, helping architects pass an exam that still exists, by the way. I haven’t touched it for almost five years. And as long as the maintenance of the website’s there, it still generates revenue for me, which is pretty cool. So, passive income for sure. But, fast forward, I started writing books. I started to create online courses in 2017, and I had hired an agency. This agency was run by a friend of mine, Matt Gartland. Winning Edits was the name of this agency. And essentially, they were my team. I was one of their few clients, and I was taking up most of their time.

I was paying them a lot to publish for me, to do a lot of the things that I didn’t want to do. I just wanted to create, and they were able to handle all the rest. And it just made sense to, over time, as Matt and I built a relationship with each other, we just had the idea of like, what if I was your only client? What if I just did an acquihire where essentially, Matt, I just pay you to buy your company, and really I’m just buying the team to just continue to do what they’re doing for me, but now I just own them. And you come in, and you maybe become CEO of the company so you can run it with the team that you’re used to running, and I can just be the talent behind the camera and behind the microphone.

And it just made sense to me because I was paying an agency fee on top of the per-hour basis for those people. I could just absorb that, pay Matt a lump sum, and then everybody would be on team SPI. It would feel more like a tight-knit unit. I’d pay essentially less than I was because of I’m not paying the agency anymore. And I would just be closer to everybody, and we can work together, and I’d be the only person they would be thinking about in terms of their work. And that was great. It allowed me to remove myself from the business almost entirely, minus just a couple of things I wanted to do. And that’s where it really shifted from Pat Flynn being synonymous with the brand, which it still is in a way, but it was the media company started then.

That was the media company. We’re creating media. We want to maybe eventually turn this into something that then invites other players into the space to publish on the blog, to come onto the podcast to share their expertise. Almost like if I was Tony Stark, then now we have the Avengers and we can all work together as sort of a team. And we’ve brought these experts in. We started a community in 2020 after the pandemic. There was a big rush of people just wanting to connect with other people in this space. People were craving it. This is where we saw tools and apps like Clubhouse come about because people were craving connection, because we were all stuck at home. So, we built SPI Pro, our very first membership community, and we launched it to existing business owners in our audience.

So, we had 500 members come in to pay an annual fee or it was a monthly or annual fee, and now we had recurring business in our educational brand and media company for the first time with members and community who came in, not just for the content that was there, but because of the other people that were there. And again, the team that I had acquihired came in to help run that so that I can continue to just show up and I do show up in office hours and do talk to people in that community, very often, but still I’m able to do the things that I want to do, and the business continues to run, which then allowed me to have time to try the Pokémon thing during that time, which started during the pandemic with my kids. So, that’s kind of how we connect those two things together.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, that was sort of where my head was, but interestingly, the way that it was positioned online was not an acquisition, and through like a litany of different articles, it was a merger. Was that a deliberate choice to position it that way?

Pat Flynn: I think that’s just a choice of words. I mean, to me, it was just an absorption of the company. Acquihire was a term that I learned later on. I mean, essentially, it was a merger of the two companies, but Flynn Industries, which is my umbrella company, owned Smart Passive Income. Matt had Winning Edits. Flynn Industries bought Winning Edits and the team, and we just decided to go, okay, we probably need to separate this from Flynn Industries because you’re doing all these other things, so let’s turn it into SPI Media, LLC. Matt became the CEO and took some equity in the company as well. That was part of the payment plan in terms for absorbing the company. So, yeah, I mean, technically it’s perhaps better to call it a merger, but I just wanted the team really more than anything.

Brad Weimert: Well, I think the reason that I dig into the specifics of it and the nuances because I think a lot of people, a move like that makes a lot of sense, where you were in that moment. And I think there are a lot of different moments in an entrepreneur’s arc where it makes sense to look at acquisition or merger of some other set of resources. And some of them are really logical, and some of them aren’t. And sometimes they just feel really heavy. So, the idea of like, “Oh, I’m going to go buy another business,” feels heavy to a lot of entrepreneurs, whether they’re at a million dollars or 5 million or 15. And as you start to get beyond that, it starts to be laid out for you more, and you have more capital to do those things.

But I think in those earlier stages, multi-sevens, low eights, you’re in a position where, like it just feels like another task. And so, I was curious about the genesis of it. Was it part of the plan to do that for the launch of Pokémon, or did they just happen to coincide?

Pat Flynn: No, it just happened to coincide. Pokémon wasn’t even, like, literally not even on my radar at that point when that happened. The sort of chess move that we were playing was building out the team, getting it to a point. And then really the community stuff started then, and it was so that the community could grow and run, and we can have these community-powered courses. There was a shift in the world of education from just like, do it yourself to done with you or done with each other kind of thing. And these cohort-based situations were coming out, these cohort-based courses were trending at that time, and we needed support to run those. And so, we hired some people who were specialists in curriculum and specific to community after that.

That was our next hire after I acquired the sort of production and the team that Matt had, which was mainly writers, publishers, a tech person, and support, which was again, very much needed. But with where we were going, we needed to hire even a few more people. So, currently, we still have SPI. It is running with four full, or excuse me, nine full-time employees. And what’s been really great about that is a lot of people look at our paperwork and go, “Wow, you are spending a lot of money on team and employees.” And we are. But I value the people that we have and the team that we have. And I’m very fortunate to be in a position to be able to offer them things like health benefits and time off. And we work four days a week. We have a four-day work week, which has been tremendous and actually has allowed us to be more productive, which has been really cool.

So, this is where, again, supporting the lifestyle of having Fridays, the 20%, right, to be able to scratch that itch is actually baked into our business model and the way that we run the company. I mean, people are like, “Pat, you could get rid of the entire team and you can just do the bare minimum and probably generate more revenue because you’d have less overhead and you have this affiliate income coming in.” And I’m just like, “We’re in a good position now and we are helping a lot of people, not just my team members, but we’re able to serve more people, which is my goal here, to serve people with the work that we have and the education that we have to offer on top of the community.”

Brad Weimert: So, maybe more profit if you didn’t have that overhead, but less fun and probably less community and culture. That’s what I heard.

Pat Flynn: That’s exactly right.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. For me, like it’s a huge deal for me to have an office and an in-person location in an area where we can get people together to collaborate. Time and a place to work remotely and there are certain roles that it’s less relevant to be on site, but there is nothing like building a community together and working in a collaborative environment like that.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. And kudos to you for having a physical space. We all work remote on my team and we just got back from a team retreat. And every time we’re together, there’s just an energy that is unmatched online. No matter how many huddles or Zoom calls you have, you just can’t match that. So, I agree with you on that for sure. So, yeah, team is important. And I think the lesson here, you have it your way, and that’s important. I’m doing it my way, and I think it’s important to try things to get to a point where you can run the business the way you want and have the life that you want on top of that. I wouldn’t want a physical space that I’d want to go to every day because that would take me away from my family and my growing kids, and that’s important to me.

And so, this is taking us back to a term that was very popular when I started, and that is lifestyle design. Tim Ferriss has sort of made that popular with The 4-Hour Workweek, and I feel like it took on a term that just became kind of cliche and kind of overused, especially in the business space. And the laptop lifestyle became synonymous with that, the beach kind of pina colada sipping business owners, nomads. Kudos to people who still do that. That’s amazing. But it’s important to know what is your why, not just in business, but in life and design around that as much as you can.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Well, to each their own. I think one of the reasons that I like how you articulate your message and communicate to people is that it’s thoughtful and by design. And a lot of people conflate this notion of lifestyle design or business design, and just lifestyle, and they sort of fall into it, but it’s a very sloppy mechanism that happens. Then they rationalize the lack of productivity or the excess of leisure time through the notion of design, but they didn’t really design it. So, it’s good to talk to somebody that has actually architected it deliberately and makes those choices. And I believe you do. And to that end, or as a part of the journey, you just wrote Lean Learning, which is a book about getting results by learning less.

That was, to me, I spend a lot of time thinking about just in time learning versus just in case learning. And I struggle with it to some extent. but can you give me that framework or tell everybody that framework and kind of tactically tell me how that plays out in your world?

Pat Flynn: Yeah, I mean, look, times have changed when it comes to our access to information. Back in the day, if you had access to information, you were more well off, you were going to be more successful, right? The smarter you were in class, the more likely you were to succeed. It’s why we hoard information and always have, and we still continue to do so, yet our access to information is different now. We’re at a buffet line of information and we still treat it like it’s a scarce food source, because in a way, our brains just aren’t evolved to absorb this.

Like, back in the caveman days, right, you’d see a food source, you’d hoard it because it’s survival. You might not come across another food source for a while, so you’d absorb all those calories. And we feel the same way with content now. Unfortunately, we live in this world that is a buffet line. And not only that, we’re getting force fed information. When you go to YouTube and you search one thing, the next time you log into YouTube, you’re going to see a hundred pieces of content about that thing that are really great, that are going to pull you from this way and that. So, I think it’s important to understand how to manage the information influx that we’ve had.

And what this really means is, is deciding the difference and understanding the difference between just in case learning and just in time learning. Just in case learning is, for example, going into the car and putting on an audiobook just because you have that time or putting on a podcast, right? Automobile University, as I think Zig Ziglar once called it. And that was how I used to learn. It was just like, any moment in time I have, that’s free. If I’m not learning, I’m not being productive. But the truth is, you can be over inspired, you can overlearn because the more you learn, the more you might get pulled in different directions away from the things you’ve already committed to or what you know your next step is.

And so, just in time learning is this. It’s (a) understanding what your next step is. That’s really important. And if you don’t know what that is, find out, ask people, look at resources. Other people have gone down that path before. What is the literal next step that you need to do? And then (b), learn what you need just to take that next step and next step alone. And (c), take that next step and learn from the actions that you’re taking. And yes, you will fail, you will make mistakes. You will learn as you go much faster than if you were to absorb everything there is about this entire path that you’re about to go down. And then take action and probably forget.

And by the time, the cool thing about this is a lot of people feel like, well, I need to learn the whole process first, or else I’m not sure what’s going to happen. But the truth is, if you focus on that next step, you can move faster. And by the time you get to the next step, step two, there will be resources there available for you for that. And not only that, they will likely be more relevant and timely because you need them at the time that you need them. Most of us read books and we read the whole thing, and then we take maybe one implementation step, right? What if you just knew exactly what you needed help with, found that chapter in a book that was about that thing, and then took action on it? You can move forward much better.

For example, back in the architecture website that I had, which helped architects pass an exam, the very first product I created online was an e-book to help people study guide. And I had never sold anything online before. I’d never written a sales page, I’d never marketed anything online, but I remember I was like, I had this PDF file. I’d written it, it took about a month to write, and I found a website to help me put this on a delivery mechanism where I can just get a button and put on my website. But I needed a sales page. I had never written a sales page before. So, my mind went back to old habits and I said, okay, well, I need to become a copywriter. I need to go to school for copywriting, right? I need to spend tens of thousands of dollars on these programs to be a copywriter, and then I can write this copy. But I found a resource and it was easy.

There was a book called Moonlighting on the Internet by a guy named Yanik Silver from back in the day, which was 300 pages. I didn’t need the 300 pages of how to make money on the internet with eBay or anything like that. I just needed the appendix in the back that had a Mad Libs-style sales page that I could copy word for word and insert my own features and benefits and use that. Still the same sales page I use today came from that book and that generated over $2 million from a $29 e-book when I first started business because I didn’t have to go to copywriting school, I didn’t have to take the long route. If this were easy, what would it look like? That is the guiding question to help you figure out what your next step is, and then find the resources to help you on that next step.

Brad Weimert: This is where my brain goes with that and I have thoughts on this. But the counterpoint to this is that if you aren’t clear on sort of the end outcome or the typical structure get to the end outcome, very often, your first or second steps can move in the wrong direction or you have to redo them or unwind them. Now, one of the things that you just said through that story was, which is a really good way to respond to this is, maybe that’s true, but the fact of the matter is if you wait until you learn everything, the likelihood of you not taking the first step at all is significantly higher. And so, even if you have to take a step and have it be the wrong one, as you go to the next one or have to redo it, you still have more momentum and movement in that process than if you wait to learn the whole thing.

Pat Flynn: Correct. The feedback comes from the action that you take, not from what you learn, right? And that feedback is what’s going to guide you. Mistakes don’t derail you. They become the guardrails that you can now work within, right? So, that’s my response to that. I mean, it’s true. You need to know where you’re going, right? Or we’re just kind of haphazardly taking random actions. Sure, you want to know where you’re going, but you don’t need to know the exact path there. Just what’s the first step in that direction? Great. And metaphorically, you might step into a mud hole. Okay, take your foot out, don’t go that direction. Turn a little to the left and go past it and try the next thing, right? And then try the next thing. It’s how we learn. It’s how we learn as kids. And we forget about that as we go into school and we have to get perfect grades. And if you make a mistake, you’re a failure. All these kinds of things are ingrained in us now and we have to kind of unlearn that. And that’s really key. And for most things, the best learning comes from just taking that action. It’s imperfect action that helps you find your way.

Brad Weimert: In SPI, you mentioned that you leaned heavily into memberships, cohorts, collective learning together. In Lean Learning, you also emphasize this notion of focus, solo skill sprints. When do you decide what to collaborate on learning and what to dive into your own solo sprint to learn a skill?

Pat Flynn: Yeah, I mean, I talk about the idea of champions and having people to support you in various ways, right? You have your mental support from friends and family. If you have that, that’s wonderful and you can lean on that when you need it. You have your colleagues and peers who are doing these things with you, and should you need help or should you decide that you want to see from others how they’re doing it too, what other traps are they falling in so you don’t fall into the same ones? Which ones have you fallen in so that you can help them avoid the same ones? And this accountability kind of component comes into play. That’s really important from your peers and your colleagues, you’re kind of doing this together with them.

And in most cases, it is of benefit to find other people who are going through the same things you are because you can all kind of help each other. It’s like going to the gym. It’s much, much easier to go to the gym when you have your friend who’s going to call you when you wake up late because you don’t want to go and they’re going to force you to go because you need that. Sometimes, we need that in our lives to move forward. And then the third type of champion, the best one is your personal mentor, right? Your mentor who’s there and taking you under their wing, whether you pay for that or whether they are taking you under their wing because they want to help, that becomes a person who you then can rely on, on actual guidance, right? They become your navigation system in a way. Maybe it’s somebody who’s gone through that path before or they just happen to be an expert in that next step that you’re doing or across the board.

Again, I think it all comes down to what is your next step? Might you be able to do this on your own? Maybe. And if you need help, maybe you fail once, maybe you don’t, you want some help right away, then find the communities of people who are going through this with you and then get that help. I think it’s always better to do this with other people and to get that support and that accountability.

Brad Weimert: So, the idea is even within sort of a solo sprint to learn a skill, it still is super beneficial to have a cohort and leadership models or mentors around you to help with the accountability to push through.

Pat Flynn: Agreed. And we have data to prove this. When we teach business in our community, people who go through the cohort-based learnings that we do because people can go on their own. They have access to the courses at all times. But the people who go in when we say, this is the start date, this is the end date. Go through this together, show up every week, do your homework, those kinds of things. The ability for us to answer questions when they have them and for them to answer each other’s questions, they’re three and a half times more likely to succeed. That’s just fact inside of our community at least. And I think that’s just the representation of how we are as humans, that when we work together with others, we’re more likely to succeed.

And it really matters who you surround yourself with because, I think, was it Jim Rohn who said, you’re the average of the five people you surround yourself with, right? So, we’ve created this safe community for people to surround themselves with people who will lift them up and push them further, right? Of course, if you collaborate with others and you’re around negative people who are going to put you down and you don’t respond well to that, well, then it’s going to work against you, right? So, it does take a little bit of you knowing how you work best, but to be open to other people who can help you when you need it, especially, is going to be key.

Brad Weimert: So, I love that you wrote a book all about this because I think, one of the things that, first off, as you mentioned on the onset of the conversation about this, we’re in a weird place because information is everywhere now and people think that they’re supposed to learn as much as they can because historically that served us. And as you articulated, that’s not actually what serves you today. One of my questions consistently is what to spend time learning, right? What do you spend time on? What should you actually be focused on learning right now? You have a concept in the book called Micro Mastery, and so, I love that idea of focusing on one thing at a time to learn. The question is how do you pick what you should be learning and what you should be delegating as an entrepreneur?

Pat Flynn: Yeah, this is a great question because when you take something that you’ve just started and you want to get better at it, this is where you get high performance by going deeper into something, right? As opposed to stretching yourself too wide, you pick one thing and go deeper into it. How do you know which one to pick? And in many cases, with people that I’ve helped, not just in business, but in other aspects of life, sometimes it’s literally just throwing at a dartboard. Here are the things that I could work on. Which one do I choose? Gosh, you know what? That analysis paralysis is real. Let’s just pick something and go and give it some time just so that we can actually take some sort of action. In many cases, that’s the answer.

So, here’s how this works though. Micro mastery is taking a small component of the larger thing that you do and hyperfocusing on that for a period of time because then you absorb that, you learn it, you get good at that, you master it. Your resources that you allow yourself to learn from are about that one thing, and then you can move on to the next thing. And these things, again, compound on top of each other. I have a friend of mine who’s an ultramarathon runner. He runs like stupid, like 50 miles a day or something. I’m like, how do you do that? Like, your poor knees. But I’m old, so that’s what I think about.

Brad Weimert: And everything else, not just the knees.

Pat Flynn: Right, right. I call him up one day and I was like, “Dude, what’s going on?” He’s like, “I have a camera crew at my house.” And I was like, “Oh, cool. Are you filming a documentary or something?” He’s like, “No. I hired a crew that has this high-speed digital camera that can like,” I don’t remember the frame rate, but it was ridiculous where he could zoom in on his heel hitting the ground, like this how micro he was getting. He was focusing on how he was attacking the ground and his angle of attack and just trying to get a slight fraction of percentage better on his stride. I was like, “That is insane, dude. Why are you focusing on that?” And he said, well, imagine how many steps I take during a race. If I can get this little thing a little bit better, that 1% better, as James Clear talks about in Atomic Habits, that will compound over time into so much back. So many results will come back as a result of that, it will be that much bigger because if you change an angle just slightly, the further out you go, the bigger that angle looks because it’s just wider, right? So, I was like, oh, my gosh, that’s crazy.

And so, when you think about businesses, for example, there are many components of business. There is sales, there’s marketing, there’s content, et cetera. Let’s go into email. But with an email, let’s get micro. There’s the subject line, there’s the open rates, and the first paragraph there is the click-through rates. Well, let’s just focus on subject lines. Let’s take one week and let’s go all hands on figuring out what are the best subject lines. The first domino that then allows a person to open the email to then allow a person to click on that link, to then allow a person to buy something, right? Let’s go early on in that funnel and master that. So, let me hire somebody who just knows copywriting so well and can help me with my subject lines.

Let me dive into my existing database of emails that I’ve written and discover which emails have performed better for open rates and why. Let me watch these four YouTube videos about open rates and subject lines so that I can just master that. And now that I’ve absorbed that and I’ve learned that and I implement, I’m likely going to see results on it and then I can move on to something else. And just the fact that more people are opening these emails means I’m going to get more sales. And then add on top of that, the copy inside of these emails, add on top of that, learning about conversion rates on checkout pages for focus on that for a month, and fine tune the buttons on that page and the testimonials that are in the sidebar, et cetera. So, you can see how just by micro focusing on things for periods of time, you can start to stack these things and see some incredible results no matter what it is that you’re doing.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I love that. There are a few massive takeaways on that. The one that ends up being cliche, but I like the running example is the 1%, right? You change something by 1%, the long-term trajectory is really significant or one degree, right? Very significant. The other is what you spend time on and how you pick what you spend time on. And I think that a trap that certainly I fall into periodically, I would be offended if somebody referred to it as analysis paralysis to me, but functionally, that’s what it is. It’s a sense of overwhelm of so much stuff.

And kind of more accurately or the way I think about it is I’m afraid to waste time. I know how valuable time is to me, and so I’m afraid I’m going to invest the time in the wrong thing and have no end or have not get to the end that I want. But through the path of doing that, I don’t invest dedicated time in certain things to find out. And so, often there’s more wasted time sort of toggling back and forth and making commitment on something, period. And the mechanism you just gave, I think is a really good one, which is functionally split test, and it’s run concise time bound tests that allow you to actually not only get a dedicated push and concrete feedback, but to end the test at some point in time, so you give yourself a release from the focus on the thing. I think that’s a really good path for people.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. Just like my 60-day shorts experiment, right? I had 60 days. That was a bound period of time. And when you think about it, like you get, especially as a creator, create. The more you create, the more you learn. And so, if you imagine somebody creating daily videos, for example, across a year, they have 365 moments of learning, of doing, of repetition, of getting better, of fine tuning. That little micro 1% grows much bigger, much faster. Versus somebody who, let’s say, creates a video once every other week because they’re so worried about being perfect because they keep lagging on the decision making because they’re worried about having that video come out. Maybe 26 moments of learning and opportunity for growth, far less, far less casts as well. But also, just a lot more time to just– and there’s a lot more at stake with those videos as well. If one of them misses, it’s like, oh, my gosh, I have to wait another two weeks till I get another chance, versus why– if one of my daily videos bombs, like, I don’t care. I learn from that and I just create another one the next day.

I only allow myself enough time to edit as well. That’s another thing that helped me out in the beginning that I didn’t talk about with this experiment is I only had an hour. If I had three hours to edit a video, I would’ve probably edited for three hours because of Parkinson’s law. Whatever amount of time you give yourself to work on something is the amount of time you will work on something. So, actually, you can use time as a tool and reduce that time to force yourself to make a decision and take action.

Brad Weimert: So, speaking of, one of the things that you talk about in Lean Learning are voluntary force functions. How do you think about– tell us about that framework and how that plays into these experiments that you run.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, I mean, when you have to make a decision and you have to kind of decide stuff, like you will, and if you don’t have to, then you’re going to continue to push it back, especially if it’s something new or uncomfortable for you. And the way that I succeeded in business was when I think about it, I was laid off. I moved back in with my parents. I did not want to go down that route. I was about to get married. I was forced to figure things out and actually make decisions that if I was comfortable, if I was still in my architecture job, probably wouldn’t have made. And so, I’m very grateful for getting laid off and getting put into that position where things were hard and tough because it forced me to do these things that actually turned into things that worked.

But that was involuntary. I involuntarily got laid off because of 2008, but I took massive action. How might I still take massive action and feel that pressure, but in a more voluntary point of view? Well, I got to put myself in these positions to feel a little bit of pressure because with that heightened pressure, I am able to more likely make those decisions that will push me forward. So, the big first time I did this is when I learned how to public speak. In 2011, I knew that I wanted to be a public speaker, but I was so afraid to do so. I kept saying no to opportunities, but I eventually said, you know what? If I’m going to do this, I just have to say yes, and I’m going to let that pressure force me to lean learn my way into doing this.

And so, I said yes to an event in 2011, in August, this was going to be my first event. It was going to be a breakout room, which was really nice. It was a little smaller. And then I find out two weeks before that the keynote speaker at the end of the event fell sick, and the founder of the event asked me to come and step in for a closing keynote. So, my very first talk was a closing keynote. My gosh, the pressure was insane, but it forced me to really sit down and learn and put all my attention into this. I found the one resource to learn from, which was Stand and Deliver by Dale Carnegie was a resource that a speaker friend of mine recommended, and that’s what I learned from.

And I put together a talk that wasn’t perfect. I didn’t have all the time in the world to create something, but I did something that, was an MVP or the minimum viable presentation, if you want to call it that. And that started my speaking career. And then I used micro mastery to learn how to get better over time. I decided that every talk, I wanted to micro master one thing. In this next talk, I’m going to master the first one minute in the intro and how I hook people. In the next talk, what do I do with my hands? I’m going to learn about what do I do with my hands and just watch a hundred TED talks, but not all the way through. I just want to see what they do with their hands and what seems to make an impact or not. So, I could absorb that and then apply it.

So that’s what I did. And now, I’ve generated over three and a half million dollars in speaking fees since 2011, across 350 different stages, all over the world. And they continue to get hired for talks even today, which is incredible. Something I never thought I would do because again, I was deathly afraid of doing that. There was a show that Tim Ferriss came out with on Apple TV. I can’t remember the name of it, but it really was him doing these force functions.

Brad Weimert: I think it was called Exceptional.

Pat Flynn: I think you’re right actually. And there was only one season of it, just a few episodes. But I remember one of the episodes because he was trying to learn how to speak Tagalog, which is the Filipino language, and I’m half Filipino myself. So, I was very interested in how he was going to do this. The way that he set this up in the very beginning, also a great hook for a video, was in a month’s time, he was going to be interviewed on a Filipino news channel in Tagalog and he knew zero Tagalog, so he had to learn. This was part of the force function formula is there has to be a date and a moment in time where you will be tested on this thing, essentially, right? And so, you have to commit to that, and then you have to find the right resources to help you get there faster.

And for him, the way that he did this was he moved in with a Filipino family for a month and they did nothing but speak Tagalog. And he learned just kind of the basic words that he needed to know, right? He didn’t learn the entire dictionary. He learned what he needed to have a conversation, and he was able to do it. And it was really cool. And it again was a voluntary force function for him to take that action, have a little heightened pressure because that pressure goes a long way in helping us make decisions and stop kind of just dabbling and start doing.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Well, I love, I mean, I think that the overarching framework there is put yourself in a position where you are voluntarily putting pressure around you to produce a result or to take action. And it plays directly into Parkinson’s law, right? If you don’t create a time constraint, you’re just going to suck up all the space and not get it done in a shorter time. I think that, like, one of the things that I’ve learned in life through endurance athletics is the voluntary part is massive, because the more you exercise the voluntary muscle, the easier it is to exercise the voluntary muscle. If you have force functions that are put upon you that are involuntary, you are either the type of person that will produce well in that moment or produce poorly in that moment, right? So, there are some people that do well under pressure that don’t do well under pressure, but if you are consistently voluntarily putting yourself in difficult situations, you are conditioning a response to behave well under pressure.

Pat Flynn: Yes. Oh, that’s so perfect. It actually reminded me of this creator that I watched. His name is Harry Mack. He’s a rapper.

Brad Weimert: Oh, dude, I f*cking love Harry Mack.

Pat Flynn: Harry is amazing.

Brad Weimert: He’s like literally one of my favorite people ever.

Pat Flynn: He’s so flawless.

Brad Weimert: Unbelievable.

Pat Flynn: But he’s also not. He shows a lot of how he’s learned what he’s done. I remember watching a video where he was talking about how he seemingly does this sort of off the top of the dome as he says, he actually has a tempo for his beats that’s usually much faster than what he normally does. He voluntarily puts himself in a situation where he has to think even faster than normally, he does. So that when he is put on the spot and there’s a beat and it’s much slower, I mean, it’s just automatic at that point, right? And it’s just really amazing how our brains work like that. And like you said, if you kind of put yourself in that position voluntarily to have pressure, when you eventually are under pressure, it’s just going to be like, just like normal.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I love that comparison. Harry Mack, for anybody that doesn’t know is, I mean, by orders of magnitude, the best freestyle rapper that has ever existed. I don’t even think there’s anybody close. Like, it’s just ridiculous to watch him.

Pat Flynn: No. And he just keeps getting better with different layers and layers. And it’s just like, how are you doing this? And it’s because he just (a), he practices, but it’s almost like, so my daughter, who’s not a rapper, but she’s a piano player. And initially, when she was much smaller, when she was supposed to practice piano between her lesson, she would always practice the parts that she already knew, right? She would always practice the little licks that she was really good at because it sounded great. And I told her, and I knew this from band myself because my band director told me, this is like, if you want to get better, you have to practice the stuff that is hard, that you suck at. And so, now, I’m listening and I’m like, if she’s not struggling with her keys when she’s playing, I’m like, you’re practicing the wrong things and she gets it. And that’s, again, how you get better.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. One of the things that I’ve heard Harry Mack talk about actually is delineating practice from performance. And he has exercises that he does when he practices that is about struggling, is about messing up, and he’s pushing himself to do that. And you mentioned tempo specifically, which I hadn’t heard, but he does this word play Wednesdays, which is like an exercise where people just throw words at him when he is rapping and they pay for him to use certain words, but…

Pat Flynn: Yeah, on Super Chats.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, yeah, exactly. But you can actually look up videos about how he stress tests himself for that. And he’s got a few like how to freestyle videos, which is sort of great amongst all the crazy stuff he does. But I love that, man. Well, I love the book. Love the construct. I think that you’re very good at distilling concepts, in general, but I think for business people, it’s super, super important to think about the fundamentals that underlie creating business and building things and guiding your own time.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, really, it’s a time and energy thing. What it really comes down to is a time and energy thing. Where are you putting your time and how are you putting yourself into it? And I think if you look at the most successful people out there, you’ll find that they exactly know where their time needs to go. And in many cases, they just do what they do best and delegate the rest.

Brad Weimert: What advice do you have for new entrepreneurs starting out today?

Pat Flynn: Yeah. Get messy, create, count uploads, not likes. As my buddy Alex says, count uploads, not likes, because that’s what you can control. I interviewed MKBHD, the world’s most renowned tech reviewer on YouTube. He’s got, I don’t know, 16, 18 million subs now. I interviewed him when he was around 3 million subs and he said something that was very striking to me. He said that his first 100 videos were for when he had less than 100 subscribers. You have to create and just put it out there and get messy. And if I could distill it into this one phrase that I’ve said that a lot of people resonate with, it’s this, you’ve got to be cringe before they binge. You got to get messy. It’s going to feel weird and feel awkward, but this is the world testing you to see if this is a something you actually want or not.

Brad Weimert: What is one thing that everybody thinks works in the content creation game that no longer works?

Pat Flynn: I mean, things are always changing, right? I’ll try to come up with a better answer, but one pet peeve that I have that kind of relates to this is a lot of people will start a video by saying, welcome back to the channel, and they’ll talk about themselves, right? Maybe this is the answer. It used to be that you needed the highest credentials to feel like the expert, right? So, you’d start your videos. You start your content by saying, here is who I am. This is how qualified I am. These are my awards and accolades. Now, listen to me.

But I think most people now resonate with people who feel like they’re kind of just like them, but just a few steps ahead, right? I’d much rather learn from somebody who’s just done the thing that I’m trying to learn because they were so fresh from it, versus a 40-year tenure professor who’s talking about it, and they’re so far removed from exactly how it needs to be, even though they’re this professor and they have accolades and a master’s degree and everything and a PhD, like that doesn’t matter to me anymore.

And so, the accolades don’t actually– that is still helpful. That’s helpful for credibility. But in terms of growth and having people understand you, what really works now is just connection, relatability. Can you tell a story that a person can relate to and share the same language and understanding? That is going to be much more valuable because people want to learn from other people that are just like them. So, yeah, I wouldn’t worry and stress too much about, well, I’m not the expert. Nobody’s going to learn from me. You just need to be a few steps ahead and you’re already the expert for them.

Brad Weimert: Beautiful. Pat Flynn, thank you so much for carving out time.

Pat Flynn: Thanks, Brad. This is so fun.

Brad Weimert: Love it, man.