11 ‘Bad Habits’ That Actually Built My 7-Figure Business

  Sam Vander Wielen: Every time you open Instagram or LinkedIn, there’s another post telling you what you should be doing. Perfect 6:00 AM morning routines, content calendars planned six months out, tracking every metric, hustling to get on every podcast, being on every platform all the time everywhere and you wanna build a business that actually works, a business that makes real money, that lasts, and that you’re proud of without tanking your cortisol.

But here’s what I think is actually keeping so many people stuck. You’re trying to copy what successful founders say they do instead of looking at what they actually do behind the scenes, and the two are often very, very different. I know because I’m one of those founders. And when people meet me in real life, the thing they always say is, “Wait, your business is so chill and simple. You don’t do any of that stuff that everybody says you’re supposed to do.”

So today, I’m giving you the real list, my 11 bad habits that actually built my seven-figure business. The stuff I do, don’t do, and intentionally skip that I think is the reason that this whole thing has worked at all.

I wanna take a moment to welcome you to On Your Terms@, or if you’re new here, thank you, thank you for starting to listen, and if you’re a returning listener, thank you so much for joining me here each week on the podcast.

On Your Terms@ is a podcast for online business owners who want to be as present in their lives as profitable in their businesses. And I can’t think of a better way to be either profitable in your business or present in your life than breaking the rules and doing your own thing. You know, it’s kind of the whole reason why I named the show On Your Terms®

I want to encourage you to do things on your terms. I do things on my terms, that’s for sure, but I probably don’t share here often enough about just, like, what that looks like for me behind the scenes. So I think today’s episode can be really fun for that.

I also just wanted to take a moment and ask if anybody listening is also going to Craft and Commerce in Boise next week, because I will be there and I would love to meet you, so let me know. I’ve thought about maybe hosting a little bit of, like, a coffee meetup or something for people. Um, a couple of people have reached out already.

If you get my emails or if you follow me on Instagram, just send me a quick message and let me know if you’re gonna be there, and then I’ll try to get something coordinated if enough people want to get together for coffee.

Also, I’m gonna be taking a short summer break on the podcast later this summer. Um, and so I thought this was a good time to remind you that it’s always good to get my weekly emails, Sam’s Sidebar. Um, so you can just click the link down below to sign up for Sam’s Sidebar now. I never stop with Sam’s Sidebar, so no matter what else is going on in the business, it’s the one thing I retain for myself and I make sure that I keep writing.

I love it so much. So every single Tuesday, you get a fresh issue. And you wanna make sure that you’re signed up for those using the link down below.

I’m so excited to share these 11 bad habits that I think have led to a lot of business success for me because I actually got this idea from my friend Mallory Rowan. She has … First of all, Mallory posts the best carousels, I think, on Instagram, so you have to go follow her. She shares fantastic content, um, about avoiding burnout and business, and she’s an incredible entrepreneur and speaker.

But I, I love her carousels ’cause she’s just very creative with them and, like, she always, like, flips … Like, she has very catchy, like, titles and things and flips things on their head. And so the other day I saw she had one about, like, bad habits that have made me successful, and I texted her. I was like, “Mal, can I use this for a podcast episode?

‘Cause I think this is such a good idea.” So definitely go follow her. I’ll leave a link to the original post that inspired me to even make this episode, um, in the first place. But I think that flipping these little bad habits on their head is gonna be a lot of fun.

The first bad habit I have, and I probably am not alone here, is that I ghost my Instagram stories for days or weeks at a time. Truthfully, if I was running my own social in general, I would ghost the whole thing for probably long periods of time. I’m definitely very lucky that I have the Shine Studio social team posting for me.

I obviously have to create a lot of that content upfront, and they’re posting, but I’m not having to be in there every day, like uploading the content and all of that and making it look pretty. But I am primarily responsible for stories, and then any DMs that are really needing me or somebody that I know or somebody trying to make a connection, something like that.

If you would’ve asked me a couple of years ago, I would’ve told you, like, I had a hard rule about being there every single day, never letting that little, like, 24-hour lapse, you know, show or something like that, and I definitely have gotten a lot more comfortable with that. And the reason that this has gone from a bad habit into something that I think is such a fantastic, like, growth tool for my business, is that by taking these breaks and getting away from platforms that are so, like…

If you’ve read my book, you know that I call this toilet content. It’s just, like, content that you’re just, like con- pumping out, but it’s constantly going down the drain. And by getting away from it, it gives you this- Two things. It gives you time to actually spend doing things that move the needle in your business, and it gives you a lot of white space, and that was just something that I never valued before like I do now.

And so I think that this thing that I would have told you is, like, a bad habit, and I would have told you, “Hey, you have to be on Stories every day. Like, be present. Make sure people know you’re active. Like, they should be getting to know you. Show them behind-the-scenes of your life.” Definitely now me would tell you that’s actually a good thing for you to do, to give yourself some white space and to allow you to focus more on bigger picture issues in your business.

If you’re not, for example, posting long-form content somewhere else, that would be great that you’re not showing up on Stories because take that time and develop something like a YouTube channel or a podcast or a Substack or a blog, something that’s going to have longevity in your business.

I’ll share with you one little tip of how to turn this bad habit into a good habit. So my friend Natasha from Shine Studio told me this once. And so essentially, if you post Instagram Stories on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, because of the 24-hour nature of Instagram Stories, you essentially have the whole week covered.

So Natasha was saying, like, she’ll go on on Monday. She’ll post Instagram Stories, let’s say, at, like, 11:00 AM Eastern. Well, they will not expire until 11:00 AM on Tuesday, which means that only for half the workday you don’t have Instagram Stories on Tuesday. You post them again on Wednesday. They go into Thursday, right?

Now you have Wednesday and Thursday covered. Then you post it on Friday. You’ve got Friday and Saturday covered. Sunday tends to be such a slow day on there anyway, so it doesn’t really matter, and it lets everything expire in time for you to go and do it on Monday morning again. So I have actually found that that has yielded the same exact results, and I would say that if anything, it actually improves your Instagram Stories because when you know you only have to do three sets, it can really let you focus and make them actually good stories, which is where most people go wrong with Instagram Stories.

They just kind of, like, randomly post stuff, or they re-share things, or it just has, like, no actual story element to it. So if you pick a day to, for example, share something about your email, another day to share something about your long-form piece of content, another day to maybe celebrate a client win, like, you have your whole week covered for your business.

My second bad habit is that I have never had a content calendar planned super far in advance. I have tried, and I have spent an insane amount of money buying all of the tools and gadgets and gizmos that were supposed to fix me and make me more, like, organized and productive. Spoiler alert, they don’t.

So it f- I, I actually think that, you know, some people work really well in, like, having a whole quarter’s worth of things planned in advance. Also, I think some people’s businesses or maybe even topics, like, lend themselves a little bit easier to that. But as I’ve gotten more into- Like, especially creative storytelling or personal narrative, like personal essay kind of stuff, it’s a little hard to be like, “Hmm, I wonder on October 17th, like, how am I gonna be feeling and what’s gonna be happening?”

And it’s a little bit difficult to write in that way.

Just kind of giving myself a, a break off of not being the kind of person that has this, like, insane content calendar planned in advance lets me feel more creatively inspired and lean into my story and my day-to-day life and, like, what’s going on.

And more than anything, I was just talking with a friend about this yesterday, it gives me time to actually live enough to have something interesting to write about. Because if you’re somebody who likes to write the way that I do, which is essentially that, you know, I could write a story about a paper clip in a grocery store and then somehow turn that into, like, some sort of business lesson, I need to go to the grocery store to see the paper clip.

Like, I have to do stuff, right? And if you know that that’s, that’s you or that’s maybe even how you want to start writing is, like, you wanna write about experiences that you’re having more, you want to, like, I don’t know, almost use, like, the capturing content of, like, m- like maybe documenting content of what you’re out and about doing, um, and that’s, like, the basis of your content, well, you have to be out doing those things in order to have something to write about.

I’ll also just tell you, like, I’ll save you, like, a good five years in business to tell you right now that you are a creative person. Just by being here, by doing this, by, like, doing everything you’re doing, you are creative. And something I didn’t appreciate until very recently, and I wish I would have earlier, is that I need to treat myself as a creative person, and creative people cannot just be producing all the time.

They have to, first of all, have, like, what’s called fallow periods, where they are a little just, like, I don’t know, it’s almost like the mourning period, I feel like, of, of a creative, where, like, maybe you’ve birthed something, you’ve put something out, maybe it’s your business, maybe it’s a new podcast, maybe you just did a big speaking gig, and then there’s this period where you kind of have to go inwards again and, like, experience enough life to have something to write about.

I remember that right after my book came out, I told my agent, like, “I wanna write another book, like, right now, and I have an idea for the story.” And she said, “I think that you’re living the time period that you’re going to write about one day. But you need to live a little bit more. Like, you just wrote about everything you did to build this business.

You gotta go out there now and do some more stuff, right? And, like, have some more experiences to write about.” So if you’re also the kind of person that maybe beats yourself up for not having a content calendar, that might be a bad habit that just works for you because of exactly what we’re talking about.

My third bad habit is that I share the good, the bad, the ugly, and the in-between. I am really honest about pretty much everything, you know, to, to a point. I mean, obviously, like, my friends know, people who know me day to day, they know there’s so much I’m not, not writing about and not sharing about. But I do share about hard things, right?

Like, I have shared about hard things that have been going on. And that can be a bad habit in the, in the way of, like, either oversharing, um, or in my experience, like, as my business got bigger, one of the things I didn’t anticipate was then getting so much feedback. And I never also thought about, like, being a person who talks a lot about grief, and then realizing, like, “Oh, that’s going to invite everyone to share their grief story with me,” which is lovely on the one hand, right, in the, in the sense that people are looking for people to connect over this because we don’t talk about grief enough, right, like, for example, and lots of other things.

And so then when people see themselves in your story, they wanna share that, and, and hopefully too, that’s, like, a sign that they feel comfortable enough and trusting enough of, of me or whatever I’m doing that they can share that with me. I don’t think that what people also realize though is that, like, I’m sending my grief story, but then I’m getting like a thousand back, and so it’s, it’s a lot. It’s a lot to take in, and that was just something I had never thought about before.

I think the reason that this has ultimately not been a bad habit though is that it has earned me a lot of trust. I always find it so interesting that, like, every single day, no matter where I look in my business, whether it’s in my inbox, in my DMs, wherever, everybody tells me how, like, down-to-earth or real or honest or like, these are just kind of all the words that I get, which is like, I don’t, I don’t think that about me because f- from my perspective, I’m like, “I’m just being myself.” Like, I don’t … I’m not, like, trying to be authentic. I’m not trying to be real or, like, down-to-earth or honest even. It just comes out ’cause I’m from Philadelphia, and I have no filter.

It’s terrible. That’s a, that’s a bad habit. It’s actually just a bad habit. That’ll be in the next episode. But I think that because of that and, like, because of the way our industry is, I guess, like, that, that has earned me a lot of trust. And so it’s always interesting to me because when I see these comments about myself, I’m, for one, thrown a little bit for a loop ’cause I’m like, “I’m not doing anything on purpose.

I’m just being myself.” But then I also think about how that c- that’s kind of a sad statement of like what else must they be experiencing on the internet that it’s so refreshing just to see someone be themselves. Like, that’s so sad from my perspective, and that’s why I think this is a bad habit that turned into a good one.

Bad habit number four is that I used to say yes to nearly everything. This is not necessarily something I do now, but I think that this was a bad habit that I had for a long time that was actually a big contributor to my success. Because saying yes to nearly every podcast request that came in, every speaking opportunity, every, like, chance to meet somebody for a virtual coffee, even if I didn’t know if that podcast didn’t have the perfect audience, that speaking gig wasn’t my exact niche, you know, or whatever, I just said yes to everything- And I think that it did so much for me.

It, first of all, it let me get so many reps in. Like, it’s great to go on so many podcasts early on and say yes to everything, hustle for everything, try to get on every podcast that you can so that you get so much experience answering questions, being comfortable on camera, talking about your story, kind of figuring out, like I think once you do enough of them, you figure out like, “Oh, when I talk about this thing, people get really excited, so like, that’s kind of my thing.

Like, I should bring that thing back up, right? And I’ll become known for that thing.” But it also leads to a lot of really cool connections. I feel like some of the people who I took, I, like kind of bets on, I guess, the way that I would put it i- in the beginning, where I was like, “I’m not really sure if this fits, but I’m just gonna say yes anyway and see where it goes and be open and curious about it,” led to some really great friendships, amazing interactions with like whether it was the, um, people who attended a conference or the host of the podcast, and led to a lot of connections.

Because, you know, something that I would love to tell my, my like early stage business self too is that you never know who’s listening, for one, and two is that you don’t know who these people know. And so it’s really interesting, like some of the networks that I’m in now, You might look at these people on the surface and think that they’re quote-unquote small, right?

You might think they have a small audience or small podcast or small conference or small business even, and yet in some of those cases, it’s actually not true. It’s like they’re, they’re just, I don’t know, these like sleeper hit people behind the scenes.

Other times it’s like I know a lot of people, I can think of many offhand, who have like these incredible podcasts who might not have the millions of downloads, but they have a lot of downloads, a lot of, uh, loyal listeners more importantly, and they don’t really have social media.

They’re really not on social. They’ve built networks other places. And so people might go and judge them on this kind of like one arbitrary thing, but in fact, they have a huge audience or, or a, a very deep like connected audience, right? And so it’s really interesting because you just don’t, you don’t know always, and then you don’t know who they know.

And so I’ve been on some smaller shows that have really, um, amazing connections with their audiences, and it turned out, unbeknownst to me, that some really like high-level people listen to them who have bigger podcasts. And so when everybody asks me all the time like, how do I get on these podcasts that you’ve done?”

Or like, “How do I start getting onto these?” I don’t think people realize how incremental it is and how step-by-step. And so y- you right now might have to start out either starting your own podcast, as, as my friend Natasha says, “You have to create your own stage if somebody’s not inviting you onto theirs yet,” um, and then that’s how you get invited.

Or you have to just really be humbled to like start out as small as possible and just keep working, working, working. Truthfully, that’s what I did.

My fifth bad habit is that I shut down every in-person event that I’m at. I am the last one to bed, which is absolutely hilarious if you know me, because normally I wanna be in bed by 9:00. But when I go to all these in-person events and conferences and, like, cool, um, uh, mastermind meetups and all this stuff that I’ve been doing this year, I am the absolute last one to leave.

Like, I’m the one that after we’ve all been out late, I’m like, “Let’s go to the fire pit out back in the hotel,” and, like, I’ll chat, and I’m up with them so late. As much as it kills my sleep score, and I hate that part for me, and I’m really tired for a long time after I come home, it has become, I think, a good habit, because it’s led to a lot of time with people that has led to some of my best connections.

People… For whatever reason, people make a lot of assumptions about me, and it has been… is really funny to, like, I don’t know, break down that wall in that sense and, like, show that I’m a decent hang. Like, be like, “You know, I’m, I’m not, like, a lawyer.” I don’t know. Like, people just have, like, this stuffy, like, uh, maybe sense, I guess, if they don’t really know me from the outside.

And so, I think that’s when people are like, “Wait, you’re kinda funny. Like, you’re, you, like, don’t care about being a lawyer and, like, you don’t talk about this stuff.” I’m like, “No, I, like, really don’t care.” So I think it’s, I think it’s really interesting just to, like, have that… any situation that you can put yourself in where you get to, like, break bread with people, essentially.

Like, a, a more relaxed experience. Um, so don’t… Like, even if you are the kinda person that wants to crawl back to bed and, like, go back to your introvert hole or something like that, I think that pushing yourself a little bit outside of the comfort zone has been so, so worth it.

My sixth bad habit is that I don’t track my metrics the way that people think I should or probably think that I do, given the size of my business. And I also think people make a lot of assumptions about my personality being, like, very type A, like, data, numbers-driven, and I actually tend to probably avoid it more, more than I should.

But I know my audience really well, and I also wanna be more in touch with my creative side. So, uh, maybe this is a bad habit, but I don’t want to be so obsessed with the metrics that it ruins my ability to create content that I think is good for you,, that I know that you want because I’m listening to you.

I’m reading your DMs. I’m reading your emails. Like, I’m s- I’m having conversations with you in person. I’m watching what’s going on in the space. So, like, I don’t necessarily wanna look at the metrics and be like, “Uh-oh,” like, “If I talk about this topic, it doesn’t go well.” Well, I still know that people in my audience want it because I’m listening to them

You’ll also see this sprinkled throughout the next couple of tips, but I, I just, I don’t… You know, as m- as, like, as into the details as I am in my business and, like, especially with marketing, like, I get really into, like, the strategy and I think about it and I see everything. I can see every typo from, like, 60 miles away.

It’s an affliction that I learned in law school. But I, I actually don’t sweat the small stuff, I think, as much as people think that I do. And so part of this, like, metrics thing, I think, comes a little bit from, like, I’m not going to suffocate these numbers and drive myself crazy. Like, I’ve come to terms with the fact that things go up and down in entrepreneurship, whether that’s your revenue or your followers or your subscriber count or Instagram’s in today and tomorrow nobody’s responding.

I’m just not going to obsess over the metrics, ’cause at this point I feel like I’ve just reached a point where I’m like, “You know what? It all works out.” Like, it’s all gonna come out in the wash and it’s gonna be fine. And I think I would give you the same advice that somebody would give you about your stock portfolio, and that if you look at it every day, you’re just gonna drive yourself crazy.

And I know that there’s probably a lot of people who disagree with this and are– and there… I know personally so many people who are like, “You have to be… If you don’t know your numbers, you don’t know anything. If you don’t know your metrics…” And it’s like, I know the numbers I need to know. I know we’re profitable.

I, I look. I’ve got my eyes on it. I just don’t, I just don’t get so obsessed with it that it ruins, like, what I really care about in the business.

My seventh bad habit is that I don’t edit my work very much, which I imagine as I said this that some people listening are probably like, “Yeah, I know.” So look, here’s the deal.

I have a lot of content to get out, right? Because I chose, I chose to do the business this way. I have a weekly newsletter called Sam’s Sidebar that goes out through Kit every single Tuesday, and is always about marketing and, and online business strategies, and that’s a beast to write. I have got a Substack called Beyond Business that goes out every single Wednesday.

It’s usually around 1,000 words or more., That’s a beast to write and is usually written with me, like, crying while I’m writing it half the time. So it’s like, it’s a lot. And then I have this podcast that I produce, one episode every single week. I’m on numerous other podcasts or doing interviews or teaching trainings every single week or month.

It’s so much. Like, I do so much content. Obviously, every month or so I’m doing this, like, kind of big, big batch of content for our social team. I produce a lot, and if I edited my work the way that some people who are nasty and respond to my work sometimes would want me to, I would never get anything out the door.

And so I think this is really where you come to a fork in the road.

As a creator, and you have an option as to whether or not you’re, like, you’re committed to, let’s say, producing your newsletter once a week or producing your podcast once a week, or do you wanna be the kind of person that produces a podcast when it’s reached some level of perfection that you don’t, it probably truthfully will never reach, and so you’ll be inconsistent, and so therefore you’ll hardwire your failure anyway, right?

So the way that I look at this is like I know that consistency is key. I also know that if somebody is bothered by the fact that like, I don’t know, I ended a sentence on a preposition or I didn’t c- like do something correctly in my sentence structure, I have no idea. I have no idea, and if that bothers you so much that you’re not willing to work with me or buy my product, which are spotless by the way, because obviously I treat those with a different level of intensity than I do on like a weekly email, you know?

But if, if that’s the kind of person, then like that person’s probably not gonna want to be in my community anyway, because part of my thing is that I’m going to encourage you to stop leading with so much perfectionism, and I’m going to gently, lovingly shove you out of the nest like a little baby birdie and say, “It’s time to go.

We need to get this business off the ground. We cannot research whether or not an LLC is a good idea for you for the next 12 months. And so, like we gotta go,” you know? And so somebody has to do that, and I hope that in a way I model that for you that, you know, I, I think the majority of my work is perfectly fine.

It’s not ending up in a, in a published journal anywhere or something like that, I’m not saying that. But if there is a mistake here or there, that’s just something you’ve got to let go. Like, who is judging you besides yourself? That’s, that’s really the truth of it.

I always think it’s funny, like it, it’s very rare, but when somebody does reply like something like that, I’m always just like, “That’s so funny that out of that whole thing, that’s what you chose to respond to, and that like first of all, that you’re someone who I guess alleges to be building a business and that’s why you’re getting my emails, and like how do you have the time?

And like so I hope your business is doing so well that you have like so much time to be proofreading my work.” But also that you can’t see the forest through the trees of like she just provided me this like nugget of gold that like she’s a- she’s accomplished, and I- I’m here ’cause I guess I wanna be, like have my business look like this.

And so like that’s what I took away from it. I just think that’s very, very telling from my perspective.

As I’ve gotten more serious about my writing, especially with my personal writing on my Substack, I have started doing one thing and one thing alone in my editing that I didn’t even do before. Um, I barely, barely read it over before.

I also have like a freakish ability to write very quickly and like pretty, pretty cleanly because being a lawyer will teach you how to do that. But,, I did start doing one thing, which is reading it aloud. Reading it aloud, I think I learned this so much with, the audiobook when I did the audiobook for my, for my book.

When you read something aloud, you realize that it doesn’t hit your ear right. And so it’s helpful, like, you know, some people will tell you to write like they speak, and I know that not everybody loves that advice. It works for me because I think that that’s my style of connecting with my audience anyway, and I think the point is with what I write about, like when I’m writing about legal, for example, I want to make it more conversational because that’s the whole point.

If I wrote to you in lawyerly language, like, you would skip, go to the next person, because that’s exactly why you follow me in the first place, right? So reading it aloud sometimes is really helpful to be like, “Oh, that’s not how I would say it.” I also do this in the reverse. When I can’t figure out what to write, I will say it out loud and then write that down.

Um, so it really helps kind of working both ways.

Okay, habit number eight is a little bit of a departure about… than, like, what we’ve been talking about, but it’s really helped my business, and that has been spending a lot more money on fewer pieces of clothes and really focused on the fact that I really only buy, like, things that are striped, things that are green, and things that are blue.

And then kinda, like, all the neutrals. And then everything just goes together and it works, and I feel like my closet has gotten super streamlined. My outfits have gotten super streamlined. When I go to go on podcasts or speak at an event, I’m not filled with all this mental drama about what to wear. It’s just kinda like, “This is what I have.”

And people make fun of me all the time for wearing stripes all the time, my parents included, rest their soul. They constantly made fun of me for wearing stripes and, and I was just like, “You know what? It’s my thing.” And I don’t know, there’s just something… We talked about this in an episode recently where I said about how, like, as I’m, maybe as I’m getting older and, like, hit 38, I just have lef- uh, less F’s to give these days.

And I, I feel like this applies to the clothing. But this has really helped me in this, on a global level, this tip of just, like, streamlining, less decision fatigue, giving myself the ability to just, like, wear, re-wear, and, like, have a consistent theme. Totally fine by me. So the bad habit of maybe spending a little too much on a couple of pieces of clothes, I think has ultimately become a very good habit.

Actually spending less overall and reducing my overall consumption, which is always a goal for me.

My ninth bad habit is that I produce way too much content. I could win an award for, like, I think the amount of content produced. My friends make fun of me for this all the time and think that I don’t sleep. But I sleep very well, thank you very much. I think that this has become a good habit in a way because it has allowed me to get my reps in.

And so I know that everybody’s all, like, Team Reusing Content and Repurposing and all that. I have a few issues with it. So, like, I’m not against it in… by any means, but some of my issues with it is, like, that, one, the kind of content you write for one platform doesn’t necessarily work for another. So oftentimes it’s kind of a waste of time.

Like, the thing that you’re repurposing doesn’t perform on the other. Uh, talk to anybody who posts on TikTok and Instagram. You can have an Instagram reel pop off, and you post it on TikTok and it gets nothing, and vice versa.

So I do think there’s, there’s, like, that whole thing. The other, the other part of repurposing sometimes is that, especially for those of you who are maybe a little bit newer in business, I think it’s really helpful for you to get a lot of experience writing and talking about your thing.

Whether your thing is, like, your niche, your topic, right? And trying to learn how to speak to your customer, how to attract them. If you don’t get a lot of reps in, how are you supposed to know what works? Because think about it this way. If you do one piece of content, and let’s just be honest with maybe it wasn’t that great, right?

Maybe it was, like, not in their language. You didn’t know the voice of customer yet, or, like, you’re not that great yet at calls to action, or you didn’t have a great hook, right? By no fault of your own, you’re starting out. It’s totally okay. But let’s say that wasn’t that great. If we just keep repurposing that piece of content, it’s just like doubling, quadrupling down on this thing that is not that great.

Whereas if we produce a couple of different pieces of content, and you certainly don’t need to do it at the clip that I do, that’s for sure. But if you do, then you’re going to start to gather more data about what works, what feels more natural to you, what you like writing, what speaks to people, all of that kind of stuff.

And you’re gonna start putting two and two together and saying, “Oh, I’m kinda like… I’ve written enough hooks now,” like the first line of every post. Like, I’m kinda getting the feel for how they have to be structured. Like, I’m getting the feel for what they need to sound like. And, oh, I notice when my hooks are better, people actually open the post, or they watch the reel, or when my cover copy is better, like, they actually watch this video.

So you’re gonna learn a lot by getting those reps in.

Okay. Also, as anybody who’s anxious can, I think, relate to, like, okay, so my husband Ryan, very anxious, wakes up anxious. He’s just an anxious person.

So am I. I’m not throwing shade. I love him so much, but he’s very anxious, right? And whenever I talk to him sometimes about his anxiety, he’ll be like, “My anxiety has gotten me so far, and, like, it got me tenure, and it helped me…” Like, and we all start to point to the things that our anxiety actually helped us to do.

That’s kinda how I feel about this tip with producing too much content because I’m like, as much as people criticize me for it, and it’s, it is a, quote-unquote, “bad habit” I think it’s also the thing that led to a lot of success because of this repetition thing I’m talking about, and also because it allowed me to be omnipresent.

So essentially, in marketing, you are trying to achieve omnipresence in your, in your niche, right? So you are trying to be like someone starts following you on Instagram, then they start getting your email. Once they get the email, they find out you have a podcast, and now I’m like in their ears, in their face, in their inbox.

Like I’m everywhere, right? Now, with, especially with me, they start seeing an ad, so now they’re gonna start seeing me at literally everywhere. People see me on the, uh, MTA apps in New York City even. I’ve gotten screenshots of that from friends. So yeah, you literally start to become omnipresent, and that is like the gold standard of marketing.

It’s the whole point of like, you know, you just start seeing something everywhere, or you start hearing, you’re like, “Everyone’s talking about that book. Like, it must be good,” right? We make these like mental leaps. So to me, this is like a bad habit that had a really ha- ha- like positive side effect.

My 10th bad habit is that I do not know the cost of every single thing that I pay for in my business. Now, this came up last week. This was so funny because in front of a group of like really big people, Nathan Barry, the CEO and founder of Kit, asked me, ’cause he heard me talking about, um, VideoAsk to someone, and he asked me in front of this entire group of people, “Sam, how much do you pay for VideoAsk every month?”

And I sat there thinking about how I could fake my own death in one moment because I was like, “I have absolutely no idea. I do not know.” I mean, the truth is that when you get to this point in business, I’m not intimately involved at the, in the, like, details of these like monthly costs and all of that kind of stuff.

But he was making fun of me about it for like the rest of the time that we were in Atlanta, and then when I went on his podcast, he brought it up. And I was like, you know, the point is here, I don’t sweat the small stuff, and I think the point is like I know what’s worth it and therefore I don’t care. And it’s not like the cost of VideoAsk, it’s not like, it’s not like it’s like $10,000 a month or something.

Like, we’re not talking astronomical numbers here. We’re talking low numbers for what I use it for. And so I think that this is just like a mindset that I have adopted, and like, so perhaps it’s a bad habit to not know the cost of every single thing that I’m paying for in the business. I don’t know how I would function if I did.

I would probably just like walk around thinking about these numbers. But I mean, f- to be totally honest, we use softwares and tools that I don’t even know that we’re using, uh, because there are so many things happening without me even being involved these days. So it’s, it’s just like literally not even possible.

I would also like to challenge Nathan. I wanna know if Nathan knows the cost of every single thing that Kit’s paying for. Forgot to ask him that. I was so shocked that I didn’t even ask him that, but I will. Um, I’ll get back to you guys. But you know, the point is that I know that it’s worth it, and that’s like, that’s the place that I make decisions from now, which I know that as you’re listening to this, you’re like, “Yeah, nice for you.

Like, I have to be really conscientious about my budget,” and I know. So I did know the cost of things, right, back then when, when I was in the beginning and, like, I was doing these things. But even then, I understood that I wasn’t carrying around the weight of like, “Oh my God. Oh my God, I’m paying $300 a month for Kajabi.

Oh my God. Oh my God, like, I have to make this work.” I was thinking about it more of like, “$300? Well, that’s like one little portion of one Ultimate Bundle, so, like, all I have to do is sell, like, one bundle every month and I cover this cost of where I’m hosting it,” you know, or something like this. And I just started to, I guess, expand that mentality of, like, not freaking out about the cost of things and just seeing more of the value of how much, like, paying for that tool is going to allow me to make more money in the long run.

A tool like VideoAsk, the one that Nathan was making fun of me about, that is a tool that we’re using to engage with future customers, current customers, and it pays for itself. So, like, I literally don’t care how much it costs because it, it will pay for itself many times over.

Okay, last but not least, my 11th bad habit is that I am resistant to huge trends or going everywhere that everybody says they have to go. Like, if everybody’s, like, scuttling over here, I’m like, “I’ll be over there, and, like, let me know how it goes.” This is definitely how I felt about TikTok. You know that this is how I felt about Clubhouse.

I feel like I talk about Clubhouse and Just Salad more than anything here on the podcast. But I am just definitely resistant to these trends. And I guess that it could be a bad habit in the sense that there have been maybe opportunities that I’ve missed out on. Like, you know, TikTok ended up being a thing, turns out.

I thought it was, like, a trend in the beginning. Um, I didn’t like the idea that there was yet another platform that was based on short-form content that actually seemed even, like, less creator-based too, where it was, like, more just about literally flipping through and seeing as much content, like content monster, uh, platform, versus like, “Oh, I love what this one person posts and talks about on this platform, so I’m gonna follow them.”

And so I got that sense pretty early on and I was like, “I just … Like, what’s the point? I already have Instagram for that. Like, I don’t know what- what’s the point of doing another one like this?” And so perhaps that’s the bad habit side of it. But I ultimately think that this bad habit has paid off huge, because it has allowed me to stay focused, to stay organized, and to keep my business simple.

Which I can tell you, I’ve been doing, like, kind of … I feel like the second biggest, like, podcast tour round that I’ve done since my book came out lately, and- I am telling you, like, whether it’s with a literal CEO of, like, a $50 million company or with a coach with this, like, incredible community or whoever’s podcast I’m on, what they are most impressed about is how simple my business is.

And one of the things that we always talk about is how I’ve been able to keep it simple from not chasing down all of these shiny objects, whether that shiny object is the platform du jour or the product du jour, right? Or just, like, running around to where everybody said we all had to be or we, or else, right?

And I’ve just never been the kind of person that’s bought into that. It’s why as much as I like Taylor Swift’s music, I just, like, can’t get on board because it freaks me out how intense people are about it. Like, when people are super intense about something, I’m like, “I’m out.” And it’s just my, it’s just my personality.

I always say I would be the person at the start of every cult documentary that is like, “I knew it. That’s why I didn’t go.” Like, that’s … There’s always that person at the beginning of every cult documentary. That would be me. So yeah, I just, I’m glad that I leaned into this part of my personality, even though that has been really, really hard at a lot of times because I did have a lot of fear of being left behind or fear that I had made a, made a mistake or that people were gonna all forget about me ’cause everyone was gonna run over to TikTok and leave Instagram and, like, look how hilarious that boomerang came back around.

So yeah, it’s, um, plus one, I think, to kinda, like, picking your place, being consistent, and really, like, you know, living in alignment with your values, for, for lack of a better term.

Yeah, so those are my 11 bad habits. I mean, I’ve got plenty more where that came from, so you’ll have to let me know if you ever wanna hear more bad habits that I think have led to a lot of business success, um, or if this episode was even helpful. I really, really wanna hear from you, so my inbox- My DMs are open.

Just hit reply or DM me @samvanderwielen on Instagram. And thanks again to my friend Mallory Rowan, who I’ll link to down below, for inspiring this episode today. Um, it also is a good reminder that when you see something that’s really cool that somebody else is doing, you can just reach out to them and say, “Hey, would you mind if I did this?

It’s not gonna be, like, the same content as yours, but it’s inspired by yours.” And Mal was so kind to be like, “Absolutely, go for it.” And it, it just goes to show, you can always be inspired, but it’s good to give people credit and talk it out. With that, thank you so much for listening. I can’t wait to talk with you next week, ’cause next week we’re talking all about Instagram Reels and how to make Instagram Reels 101.

So I’ll see you then.

Thanks so much for listening to the On Your Terms® podcast. Make sure to follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. You can also check out all of our podcast episodes, show notes, links, and more at samvanderwielen.com/podcast. You can learn more about legally protecting your business and take my free legal workshop, Five Steps To Legally Protect and Grow Your Online Business at Samvanderwielen.com and to stay connected and follow along, follow me on Instagram at samvanderwielen and send me a DM to say hi.