How to Actually Move Your Online Business Forward in 2025: Lean Learning Method

Sam Vander Wielen: I don’t know about you, but do you ever feel like when you open your phone or open up any social media app, you feel like your brain is at like an all you can eat buffet of tutorials and tips and hacks and trends and strategies and TikTok videos and Instagram reels and all the things you’re supposed to be doing, but you aren’t and you feel so overwhelmed, so stuffed with the shoulds that you like, can’t even move, let alone execute anything in your business and move it forward.

Pat Flynn calls this the Information Obesity epidemic, and his new book, Lean Learning says that the cure is an information diet. To learn less, implement faster, and win bigger.

And I’m telling you, after my conversation with Pat, I couldn’t agree more. We are so overloaded with information. I know that from my perspective, what I was hearing Pat share in a lot of this episode really resonated with me as somebody who probably spends more time on social media than he does, and really like thinking about just how much we all absorb. And I know you, I know you’re trying to like be the best business owner that you can get your thing up and running. You’re trying to learn all the things and you’re meaning well, like you’re trying to do it right. But at the same time, you’re not seeing the progress that you want. And as I brought up to Pat in our interview, I know that what this shows up as in your life, in your business is a lot of frustration, a lack of clarity, a lack of spaciousness, which I know you really want. And frankly, just results, right? You’re, you’re, you need the results. And so then you will contact people like me and say, what business coach did you work with that ended up getting you here? And I’m like, I didn’t. That’s the thing. And so people are always so shocked to learn that it wasn’t a piece of information, it wasn’t a hack, it wasn’t a tip, a strategy or a book that taught me or a lot of people like me to build this kind of business. Instead, it was learning as much as I needed to learn. Implementing it and reading the data, taking the feedback, iterating, and then going forward and moving forward again.

So if that sounds like what you wanna learn about today, I think you’re really going to enjoy my conversation with Pat Flynn. Pat is a father, a husband, and a lifelong learner from San Diego, who has built a reputation as one of the most influential voices in digital entrepreneurship, that’s for sure. Through his diverse portfolio of businesses, award-winning podcast, newsletters, YouTube channels, and thriving online communities, Pat reaches and inspires millions of people each month. He is the founder of SPI, an online community for digital entrepreneurs. Co-inventor of the Switch Pod and host of the Deep Pocket Monster YouTube channel, as well as the founder of Card Party, a large scale live event for the community of Pokemon collectors. What he’s done for the Pokemon community is so cool.

Pat also serves as an advisor to dozens of companies and is a sought after keynote speaker. In his free time, he enjoys fishing, collecting Pokemon cards and rewatching the Back to the Future trilogy, which if you listen all the way through, you’ll get to hear which one was his favorite.

Pat is also the author of the brand new book, Lean Learning that just came out on June 3rd, so we’re gonna be talking a lot about his book today.

Without further ado, let’s hop in to my conversation with Pat, and if you haven’t already, after you listen to this episode, I’ll link in the show notes down below, I was actually lucky enough to be on Pat’s podcast a few months back, and I’ll link to our conversation below so you can listen after you listen to this episode. All right, I’ll see you on the other side.

Hey Pat, welcome to On Your Terms®.

Pat Flynn:  Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Sam Vander Wielen:  I’m so happy for you to be here. So I was hoping you could kick things off today. I’ve already given listeners a little bit of info about you and the book. If you wanted the listener today to take one thing away from our conversation, from what you shared today and you know, ultimately about your book, what would it be?

Pat Flynn:  I love how you’re starting with the end in mind. I, I love that. The truth is we have access to all the information we could ever need to accomplish. Anything we want to accomplish. It is out there already, and what’s hard is we are not programmed, our brains aren’t evolved to consume all this information. We’re treating information as if it were a scarce resource. Right now, we are absorbing it in a just in case manner. And my goal is to help people understand that you are much better off. You are able to achieve more results faster if you focus instead on just in time, learning, not just in case. And this is very difficult because we have fomo. We wanna miss out you. We don’t wanna miss out on things. However, I promise you that when you micro focus on the next step that you’re working on, whatever it might be, you know you have this big goal, you have a North star, that’s important. But whatever the next task is, find the best resources and the best people to surround yourself with about that. And move on, then from there, knowing that when you reach level two or the next step, that information will be there. I promise you it is there and by the time you get to it, it’s probably gonna be even better than if you were to try to absorb and collect all of that now. And that’s the big idea here, just in case, is really just a formula for being unfulfilled, not feeling like you’re getting results and everybody else moving forward while you stay behind.

Sam Vander Wielen:  Yeah, absolutely. I kept thinking, when I was reading your book about things being so obsolete, like you spend all this time obsessing over this information and by the time you go to implement it, especially in our industry. Yeah. The industry has moved on. You know, my, my husband is a game theorist and he, when he hears about kids learning about code or something in kindergarten, he’s like, by the time they’re in college, this isn’t even going to be the code. Like, why are we, and it’s cool to train our brains this way, but. Also, it kind of seems like a waste of time. Pat Flynn: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I mean, we are even programmed in schools to yeah, absorb everything and then take a test on it and then like where does the application happen? It happens much, much later. I’m excited though because I think people are waking up to the idea that we need implementation, we need action there.

There are some schools being built, at least around the San Diego area that are trying to implement a more half traditional school, but then the other, uh, half of the week is actually apprenticeship, you know, going out there and, and working for a business or interning and getting real life experience so that you can actually see these things play out and learn kind of in the field that you might have curiosity and interest in, or even learn that you don’t wanna go down, down that direction and much better off to learn that now, uh, and sooner than later after you’ve put all this time into it. Like when, when we talk about starting businesses. A more traditional way of approaching that is, okay, well I gotta go to business school and I gotta learn all these things first, and I gotta understand all of the components of it. But how much of the entire business spectrum do you need to take action and start learning just a small sliver?

Um, and this is how I started my business, my first business back in 2008. I got laid off from, uh, an architecture job that I loved. And I, in order to survive, decided that I was going to put my notes for a particular exam on a website and, and sell them eventually. And I had never done that before. And again, the, the same thoughts came into mind.

I gotta learn how to do everything here. And I was just kind of learning my way to overwhelm and confusion. And so thankfully, I had what I call a force function forcing me to take steps and actually make decisions. Um, back then it was involuntary. Uh, now in the book I talk about purposefully putting yourself in those kinds of situations with some heightened stakes, some heightened pressure to finally take action.

But back then I had to survive because I was moving back in with my parents. I had just gotten engaged. So I had every reason to do things that were outside of my comfort zone. So this book, this, this ebook, uh, that I published for architects. There were so many parts of it that were gonna be overwhelming. How do I market this thing? How do I format it? How do I even sell it? What? What’s a sales page? I don’t know how to do any of this stuff, but all I knew is I had to write the darn thing, so I just wrote it. I just opened up Microsoft Word and wrote the whole thing, and then it was done, but it wasn’t done, done. But I had all the words there. Now I needed to know how to format it. I never done that before, but that’s the focus. So let me watch a few YouTube videos on how to format this thing and make it look good. And then I learned how to do a two column more, um, you know, landscape design for this guide to help people kind of use it as a workbook.

Great. I have the book, it’s done now. It’s a PDF file. How do I sell it? I have no idea, but let me ask some people who’ve done it before and just get right to it. And they introduced me to a tool called EJunkie at the time, which allowed me to upload my PDF file and then get a button to put on my sales page.

But. I didn’t have a sales page. I didn’t know how to write copy. So again, I asked around and said, if this were easy, what would it look like? Well, I would just take an existing template and plug and play my product into it. And I found a template in the back of a book called Moonlighting on the Internet by Yanik Silver, and this book had 25 to 30 different ways to make money on the internet.

I didn’t need any of that stuff. I just needed the appendix in the back that had this mad lib style sales page. That I then copied and put on my website and plugged and played my, my product. And that had generated over seven figures in the next, uh, seven years from learning on the go, not learning everything, and then probably not taking any action at all.

So that’s just an example of Lean Learning, kind of, you know, in the early days before I even knew how to define it.

Sam Vander Wielen:  Yeah, I, uh, what I hear you saying, and what I like consistently took away from your book too, is that you, you were learning as you went, right. And implementation was really the only way you were going to learn.

And I think it’s interesting because I couldn’t help, but as I was reading your book, keep thinking about the reason that people are consuming so much information, continuing to take in so much information, look like, seek out that information, is because they think that there’s going to be this like. Clear, super easy, fast, three step strategy to start a business, for example. But when you talk to people like you, when I respond to my emails, I’m like, people always say, what course did you take? What business coach did you work with? And I’m like, I just did. Right. And that’s, that’s so much of what I took away from your book too.

Pat Flynn: Thank you. The, the, the other part that we’re struggling with, just again, as humans is, is we’re treating information. Like a scarce resource, like it’s food.

Right. And so if you imagine us a long, long time ago when you come across some food, you, you, you hoard it because you might not find more food later.

And that’s how information used to be because we didn’t have it. Right. Uh, it’s like the Encyclopedia Britannica, we have. Uh, or we once had in our homes, if you could afford information, you’d have it in this encyclopedia and therefore you were smarter. If you knew more in class, you were rewarded. If you, um, just had knowledge, you had power.

But now we all have access to literally the same information now, so that’s not the power. If information were the answer, then we’d all be where we wanna be. It’s how you navigate this information, how you navigate your brain to say no to things, uh, as they come across your plate. Right? We have this thing called fomo, fear of missing out, which is definitely something we’re battling when it comes to the consumption of everything because the next thing we consume, like you said, might be the next best thing, or it might be the thing that we needed to unlock what we needed to, uh, to, to achieve what we wanna achieve.

Um, so the, for, for a while there was a strategy called Jomo to counter that and Joy of missing out. But I, I don’t like that. I always thought that was weird because I’m just pretending Right. I, I’m faking it, that I am joyful, that I’m missing out. That’s just a false. The strategy that I’ve come up with is the joy of opting out.

The stepping forward and saying, you know what? I see that, I realize it’s there. The new information, the new book, the thing everybody’s talking about. I acknowledge it. But not yet. I don’t need this right now because this is my focus. So what it does is by opting out of something, you are recommitting and saying yes again to the thing that you know that you should be doing.

And hopefully you have sort of a deadline or you know, a certain number of days that you’re working on that thing to get to a point where you either persist or pivot from it. But, um, the joy of opting out has been huge for me and what I do to counter, again, that fomo that comes as is I put new things that come across my plate because I am, I am like curious.

Uh, I put them into Notion and I’m like, I’ll, I’ll go back to them later if I need them. I never go back to them. It’s literally just a mechanism for me to move forward from this noise that’s out there. Um, and by the time I need information about that, there’s better, newer, more relevant stuff. Anyway, so again, another case of just in time learning, uh, being much more valuable than just in case.

Sam Vander Wielen: Yeah, for sure. Okay. So I know that like, you know, a lot of the people who listen to my podcast, a lot of my customers, you know, they’re coming to me for legal stuff to start their online business and so they are the type of people who are like, I need to know everything in order to move forward. They’re pretty freaked out that they could be missing something, but they also are so overwhelmed with information and oftentimes they can’t. Kind of see the connection between those two things. So if someone is feeling, you know, starting to notice that maybe they’re listening to this conversation, they’re like, okay, I have been taking in way too much, I, I’m maybe missing out on the implementation piece.

What do you tell that overwhelmed person like. This is, if you were to sit them down, you were to have a information therapy session? Yeah. What would be the first thing you’d tell them to do?

Pat Flynn:  So the first thing would be a question. And this question was actually given to me by a good friend of mine, Tim Ferris, who, uh, has helped guide my curiosity and, and has helped guide me around the over complication of everything that I tend to do.

And that question is this, if this were easy, what would it look like? Uh, the acronym is It We Will, so if this were easy, what would it look like? And just simply thinking about that question and using it as a filter as you take action and, and before you move forward, can immediately start to help you choose and audit.

The actions that you’re doing or, or about to do, and that can get rid of more than half of a lot of the things that you’re probably going to do. It’s, it’s sort of a, a similar way of approaching a business in terms of an MVP, right? What’s the minimum viable product to still provide the value we wanna provide? Nothing else matters, and then you can build on top of that later. So that’s the first question.

The second thing, and there’s a whole chapter in the book, as you know, about finding other people around you, right? And there’s three different levels of sort of. What I like to call champions, people who are there to champion you and your success.

There’s the emotional support from friends and family who may not know exactly what you’re doing, but connecting with people who do support you in that regard are, are, is really important. My wife was huge for me when I got laid off and emotional support. Um, and then there are the peers and colleagues, people who are going through the motions with you.

These are amazing resources for you to pass information back and forth and help each other out together and living in a world where. We understand that we kind of have this abundance mindset, right? I think that’s really important in in, in this world as well, where we’re not at a PO at a poker table where if you are winning, that means I’m losing.

 In these communities and colleagues and peers, everybody can win and we can all help and support each other. And a rising tide lifts all boats if, if you will. Um, but the most important part, and often underutilized, maybe because it’s a little scary, but it’s the one-on-one mentorships, like having more of an apprenticeship type of model for somebody with somebody who’s gone through the motions before, finding one person who maybe is in a part of life where you wanna be or who has on the other side of the thing that you’re doing and just learning from them because they’ve already made the mistakes and in many cases, they want to teach. They wanna help people not go through the same struggles that they went through. And finding mentors for the thing that you’re working on. For example, I found a mentor when I was learning how to public speak.

Right. And there were millions of people that I could have learned from. There were a a billion videos I could have watched. There were tons of books I could have read, but I went directly to somebody who I enjoyed his style of speaking. Um, and we connected at an event. And then I just hired him to help me become a world class speaker.

And since then I’ve, I’ve earned over seven figures on stage, uh, before. Um, and so again, in terms of what do I do? Going to somebody who’s done it before can help you navigate those important questions. And then the last thing to do would be to maybe take an audit of all the questions you have. And then presenting that to, for example, the mentor or the person that you’re learning from, uh, can be great or your peers and just saying, Hey, am I crazy here and thinking about this?

And I know with the legal stuff especially, we wanna be definitely careful, which is why you are an amazing resource ’cause you understand this stuff, a new person doesn’t and they can just have the one resource to learn from. Um, and invest in that. You get an ROI back, um, which I know your students and customers do.

So, uh, yeah.

Sam Vander Wielen: Yeah, that’s, I think that tip alone could help so many people in, I don’t know, just reducing some of the noise, clearing the clutter. I call it pruning in the, in my book. Uh, so I talk about just like it helps, like if you are that person that feels better when you clean your desk and then that makes you, you know, produce more productive work.

That’s kind of what I do with taking in information. I prune and prune and prune. Yeah. I was actually curious what you thought. I got a lot of crap. For a video I did on, um, Instagram a few months ago that I talked about how I wrote a business book, but I hadn’t actually read one and people gave me a lot of grief for this.

Because they said, oh, you have a lot of nerve writing a business book. And I was like, why? Like, what? I, I thought it was so interesting. So I was curious what you thought about this. Like what’s the thought process there? That I was supposed to read a bunch of business books and then that, would become like, I think that only would’ve led to a bunch of overwhelm.

And also my book was about what I did in practice. Yeah. And what I really did.

Pat Flynn: It’s such an  interesting, visceral reaction from an audience. And I’m glad that you are seeing this as sort of like weird and not kind of taking it personally. Yeah. But more just curious about it. And, and I’m very curious about it too.

However, I would imagine and, and maybe my thoughts go into, um, you know, just, like number one, if you let, let’s just say you read multiple business books, then you would’ve incorporated a lot of other people’s thoughts and ideas into what then became your book. So it was actually a benefit for you not to, you know, create more noise and maybe get some outside influence or subconscious or conscious, you know, consciously putting that into your own book when Yeah.

You know, and that like a lot of comedians, for example, worry about going to other comedy shows because they don’t wanna steal jokes even subconsciously from, from others. Um, so it’s this like careful balance between inspiration and, and, you know, overwhelm and, and perhaps even mimicry, uh, down the road.

So that, that’s, that’s one point. But number two, I mean, you could easily position that as in fact qualifying you.  know, write something unique and, and different.

It’s just, yeah. I’m trying to think of an analogy for that. I mean, just because. I’m not a vegetarian, doesn’t mean I can’t cook an incredible

Sam Vander Wielen: Mmmhmm.

Pat Flynn: Uh, vegetarian dish ’cause I eat all kinds of food. Right. I don’t know if that’s the best analogy, but, I’m glad you didn’t listen to that’s, and you know, there’s always a way to spin things and the mob tends to spin things in a way that makes them feel better. It’s probably also a reaction to, hey, like  You didn’t read a whole bunch of business books and you wrote one, and you did something incredible without having to learn all this stuff and, and, and, and spend time doing it. Um, whereas the audience is in consumption mode, um, and not achieving anything I. So it’s probably more of a trying to, it’s more of a bucket of crab situation, right?

Like if you have a bucket of crabs and you see, uh, you, you can always leave them there and none of ’em will ever come out because as soon as one tries to crawl out, the other crabs will take their pincers and pull ’em back down. And that’s kind of where we live in, we, I. Or mostly in a world where people don’t want to see other people go beyond where they’re at because it makes them feel inadequate.

I think that’s what was happening there.

Sam Vander Wielen: Yeah, I could see what you’re saying because then that would make you feel really self-responsible for actually having to go out and implement. Like I thought it was such a funny attitude to think that you learn about business and therefore have the right to write about it by reading other people’s takes on business.

Yeah. I was like, did, I went out and built a seven figure business also, you and I have both educational and professional experience. Right. And you, you’ve created multiple businesses and done multiple things in your life that have led to this point. It wasn’t a bunch of other people’s books, right, that you read.

It wasn’t the information you took in, it was all the implementation. In your book, like that’s what lends so much of your legitimacy and your, and like I, I also couldn’t help as I was reading your book, thinking like, I was curious whether, this was very obvious to you, but like taking this 30,000 foot view of, of the part of your life that you’ve shared with us.

Like you just see how all these little things added up to bring you here today. Right? Whereas maybe when you were in the moment getting laid off, you were like, this is not gonna be helpful. And here it is. Yeah. It’s super helpful.

Pat Flynn: A hundred, a hundred percent. I mean, I mentioned this at the end of the book when I talk about the power of teaching as a way of learning, right?

You don’t have to be the world’s leading expert. To share information, create frameworks around the things that you’re doing, which then reinforces the things that you’re learning, and by writing Lean Learning, I was able to extrapolate years of how I approach things, because people always ask me, how are you able to seemingly just do really well with everything that you get your hands on?

And it’s this, this way that I’ve approached, uh, these things to be able to fail fast and make mistakes, and the mistakes don’t derail me. They become the guardrails that I kind of work within. Um, so by creating these frameworks and, and, and, and, and, you know, being forced to, because I had a manuscript do to write it in a way that was compelling.

It actually made me learn even more about myself and, uh, dispel and, and, and, and actually create frameworks around the things that I’ve always been doing and now am able to implement even faster because I, I just go through the same process that I’m now learning it because I’m teaching. Uh, and it, it’s so interesting and yeah, it like, that’s why, like I tell people, I’m not professor at some university studying marketing or psychology.

I’m not like a Malcolm Gladwell who’s doing a bazillion hours of research on this stuff. I’m just like you, but I’ve lived this and people wanna know how I did all this from the architecture business to one of the top podcasts in the business space in the world to, uh, Pokemon YouTube channel with 1.6 million subscribers in four years to a shorts channel that now has over 2.5 billion views in less than a year, a separate channel to an invention.

Uh, all these things. Well, this is how, um, and this is how you can too, because I’m not a genius. I’m not special. I wasn’t born into this, but we can all learn it. And, and, and the way to learn into it is to actually. Unlearn how we’ve learned. It’s, it’s, it’s kind of, as I talk about in the book, unsubscribing to everything and then resubscribing only to those things that matter that are gonna push us forward.

Sam Vander Wielen: Yeah. Bit of an information diet. I’m, I’m looking at one of those. I think for myself this summer, I’m like, I need to stop seeing everything. It’s just, it’s a lot. It’s a lot to take in. I was curious how you’re implementing what you taught us in the book into your book launch strategy.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. So again, if this were easy, what would it look like?

Yeah. For me, as a person who is really comfortable behind the microphone and somebody who has a lot of access to other podcasters, people who have been a, a guest on my show and other people who’ve written books, and I, I, I featured on my, my channel, uh, such as this case, um, it’s so easy for me to just reach out and ask for a favor in return.

And there, there, there was no struggle there. And I’ve, this is now I think, uh, podcast number 50. That I’ve done and it’s very easy for me to do. Now, that’s not everybody, this is just what is in my love language already. So I’m able to kind of just do it because I love it and it doesn’t even feel like work to me.

So that’s, that’s sort of part number one. The sort of virtual podcast tour versus something that might take a little bit more time or be more intensive. Um, you know, there are a lot of things, and you know this as an author as well. There, there are a million things you can do to launch a book. Um, having an email list has been really key.

Mm-hmm. You know, working for so many years to build a. Uh, a personal brand and connections with my audience, and then not feel bad about asking for a person to purchase this because I’ve developed so much material that has helped them over time. This, this doesn’t feel salesy at all. It just feels like a natural conclusion to the conversations that I’ve been having with my audience, uh, for years.

Um, another method that I learned, again, if this were easy, what would it look like? I would go to somebody who has launched books and has, has helped a lot of clients, you know, reach the New York Times Bestseller List and has worked with a lot of friends of mine, like Lewis Howes. Uh, a shout out to Rory Vaden from Brand Builders Group.

He’s somebody who, uh, is very knowledgeable about book launches, so I paid to go and learn from him and somebody who has gone through this process before. And one thing I learned from him. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind me talking about this, is this idea of, uh, what he calls bis, B-I-L-L-F books in lieu of fee.

So instead of speaking on stage and asking for a speaking fee, you kind of use your books instead and say, Hey, would you want to have me on stage? Sure, this is what I normally charge, but because I have this book coming out, I would accept if you purchased this many books that is around the same price.

So I’ve done a few talks where instead of my speaking fee, there are, uh, 500 books purchased or a thousand books purchased, and that way I’m able to get, you know, much more volume in a much shorter period of time now there’s a lot of nuances and ins, ins and outs around this. Uh, timing is important. The way that you kind of, you know, process these book orders is, is, is important way to do it too. Um, but those are easy ways to get books in front of people through the relationships I already have, through the stages that I’m already gonna be on anyway. Versus, okay, let, let me do this other strategy that is out of my wheelhouse that is not in my sort of love language. And, uh, that that’s a way that I’ve been doing Lean Learning.

I mean, even the way there’s a book was written involves Lean Learning. Mm-hmm. Because I would purposefully put deadlines into place. Um, and, and they were there, not artificially, but with the publisher to have things in their hands by a certain time. So I couldn’t spend too much time getting overwhelmed or overlearning.

I just had to do the thing and get it, get it written. Another strategy I talk about in the book is time blocking. Now, time blocking isn’t anything new as far as putting blocks of time on your calendar, but it’s the way you mentally think about what time blocking actually means. I try to position it as you’re literally blocking out anything else, like a shield from entering that space and time with you?

So for me, in my writing process, I had blocks of time on my calendar where I spoke with my family and people around me. They knew not to interrupt me during those times because I wanted to shield any distractions so I can get into that flow state and actually, you know, do some deep work within that. So Lean Learning is a. Sort of result of lean learning. Very meta.

Sam Vander Wielen: Yeah. Putting it into practice. Yeah. I think one of the big, like the tips that’s going to hit people the most from your episode so far is about finding like, I’m always careful to be, I mean, I will tell people, like if I speak to you about legal stuff, like great, I, I’m not trying to toot my own horn, but then like, kind of cut it off because otherwise you’ll start, you’ll keep collecting information.

So I hear you giving very similar advice to saying like, find your person, you know, and find, I think the, what I’m taking away is this quality over quantity. It can really help you reduce, also reduce decision overwhelm because you’re getting maybe different takes on things. But then if, if we’re, we are looking for that person, that person we kind of look up to, maybe that person that’s a little ahead of us that we’re taking advice and feedback from.

How does someone go about that? Especially in today’s industry where you have a lot of people, I couldn’t help but thinking this while you were, while I was reading your book about you have a lot of people online who are claiming to be experts about things that they are not, and it’s very hard for people to differentiate Yeah. Between who is and and who they should look up to. Right.

Pat Flynn: Right. I mean, the moment you start searching. For something, you’re going to get advertisements from all these gurus who are gonna say that they have the answer, right? And so before you make any buying decisions, before you make any learning consumption decisions even, I would try to find people who have learned or who have gotten help from them already.

So kind of like referrals, right? Who else has worked with them and what are, what are their results like that that’s normally where I go just to just determine whether or not it’s worth moving forward and learning from somebody or not, is how have they helped other people and how are they doing and are they where they wanted to be and what was that experience like?

Right? Like if you know I’m hiring somebody in my company, I want to know how other bosses have had that experience with that person so that I know what it might be like, uh, working with this person myself, so that that’s the way to go about it. Getting involved in those communities that those people have normally, they might have communities or there’s different places where their people come together.

It might be a live event, it might be a, a live stream. It might be online, offline, wherever it might be. When you get involved in those communities and spend a little bit of time, even like a week just to kind of go around and start meeting people, you start to get a feel for what this person actually has done for people.

And that’s what I often do and that’s how I got into the Pokemon space. I didn’t just start by uh, building a YouTube channel and just like trying to find my audience. I went to where those audiences were already and that did a couple things that helped me understand that I love these people and I wanna provide value to them. And I, and, and I can learn their language and kind of what they like and dislike, but it also helped me understand who else was in here that they’re looking at. Who, what other creators are they going to? And some of them were ones that I could really connect with and I became friends with.

Other ones I wanted to stay as far away from as possible. And you start to get a lay of the land in this space that you’re in and that, that’s been really helpful for me. So when trying to find a mentor, um. Learning from them in a more micro level. It might be anything from a video and implementing that or, or a podcast episode to smaller, more cohort based type programs where you can learn and not invest too much, but a little bit of time to get a result and hopefully you are getting those results. And then once you start to see that there’s a person out there who you really, really vibe with. You wanna be the person that they think about, that they wanna take under their wing. And so if you can become a star student, that’s a great way to do that. If you can show up and even volunteer at their events. That has worked with me. People volunteering at my events like. I see that, I recognize that and I want to help them because they’ve helped me. So a value first approach goes a very long way. The last thing you wanna do is go, Hey, I like your stuff. Can you teach can I can, can you take me under your wing? Um, if that’s the first part of the conversation, you’re, you’re done for, right? And the other thing is like. Recommendations from friends and colleagues that, that you know, are where you wanna be or who are doing great things. Just saying, Hey, who are you learning this from? This is how a good buddy of mine, Mike Pacchione, became the sort of like entrepreneurial, um, speaking coach. He’s, he’s made the circles around the entrepreneurial space because we’ve all enjoyed working with him and we all recommend him for speaking.

Um, he, he’s amazing and, and I hired him as a coach for me when I was learning how to, how to speak and wanting to become world class at that. So, uh, yeah, that, that is a wonderful question because oftentimes, again, we can overthink these things and a lot of times we just need to go, okay, if this were easy, what would it look like?

Well, I’d see who else has worked with them and see if it’s a vibe, and if it is, awesome. If not, I’ll move on to somebody else.

Sam Vander Wielen: Mm. Yeah. This is why I call the, uh, all have what she’s having effect or the all have what he’s having where I’m like, I want more of that. Like what he is having, you know, I like his values. I, I tend to look at like how someone living their life, you know, because I’m doing business stuff. I’m thinking, does their life kind of reflect, like, if somebody looks like they’re working all the time or something like this, I’m like, that’s not really what I’m going for, so why do I, I don’t want to learn from them because I don’t want. What they’re having, you know?

Pat Flynn: Right. And this is why Michael Hyatt is a big inspiration to me because he’s a little bit older. He runs a business, he has sold businesses, but he’s so involved with his family in his business and the way that he and his family, I’ve seen it. I’ve been with their family.

Hmm. Just the love that they all have and the help that they’re giving one another like that. I want that with my kids when they’re older. My kids are 15 and 12 right now, and we’re doing everything we can in our power to continue even through their teen years, to have an amazing relationship with them. And it’s working so far, which is great. Um, but I get a lot of inspiration from Michael, not because he’s just a world class business owner and CEO, but because of the way he’s a father and the way he shows up for his wife Gail. And that is really inspirational to me as well.

Sam Vander Wielen:  Yeah, for sure. I think, you know, I was curious what you would say to the person who reaches out to me often who will say, my business isn’t working, like this thing is not, is like, is this thing on, but, so I’m going to go out and hire a business coach.

Who do you recommend? Mm-hmm. And I’m always like, oh, that’s not, that’s not the question. Correct. You know, to me. But I’m curious what your response is.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. That, that’s hard because yes, you probably like me know a bunch of people that could help a lot of other people, but the recommendation. Can, can be worrisome because you might point somebody to like, it’s like a dietician, right?

It’s like, okay, we all consume things in different ways and we all learn in different ways. If I just say, Hey, here’s the person who helped me. You could have a completely different experience. So there’s gonna be a little bit of reconnaissance that has to be done first in terms of, well, what is not working because.

You might find that it’s simple, it’s maybe just a couple tweaks and you’re missing something. So you need a person who’s maybe more business and strategic who just sees that there’s some disconnects between, you know, your top of funnel and middle of funnel and then your close versus you might have all the pieces in place.

You just need an accountability partner, and you might not even need a business coach, but having somebody from the outside. And this is why peer groups are great too, because they can often see things ’cause they’re in the trenches with you versus even a mentor sometimes. Um, they might just see like, Hey, you, you have everything here. You’re just procrastinating. Like you, you’re just putting it aside for these new things, which is what a lot of my students do. They’re over learning and getting too much inspiration.

So a lot of strategies that work for my students are actually just, turning things off and, and saying no to more things to say yes to, the things that they know they should be doing because they’ve gotten to a hard part in the process and are now sort of subconsciously walking away from it because it’s difficult now.

It doesn’t feel as fun as the sort of ideation phase, you know? And, and that’s where we need to have other people go. No, no, no. Come back. Just keep going. Do the work. You will get there. Um, the other thing is, is I think. A lot of times we live in this world. That’s, and, and especially a lot of my younger students and clients, I mean, they want results now.

Sam Vander Wielen: Mmmhmm

Pay Flynn:  I mean, they’re spoiled really is what they are. Mm-hmm. Um, and building a business does not happen overnight, and so oftentimes it takes more of a timed approach to finding success. So you’ve been in it for a couple weeks and you’re not seeing any results. Because you’ve only been in it for a couple weeks, how much time do you want to give yourself?

And it’s different for everybody else. How much time do you wanna give to this project that you’re working on to, at which point you then decide whether you wanna persist with it or pivot. And in many cases it might take six months. In other cases it might be like 60 days to two months. Um, case in point, I recently did this, uh, myself.

So I started a shorts channel. I wanted to just experiment with shorts and, and play around with it and see if I could come up with a formula to get. To get going on shorts and I said, I’m gonna just do a daily short form video for 60 days, and by the end of day 60, if I had gone daily, I would’ve won. That’s a win regardless of the results.

If we put our happiness and, and our, and our, our sort of pride in the hands of an algorithm in the hands of what other people say about the things that we’re doing and showing up for, I mean, that’s very, that’s a very dangerous place. To live because you don’t have control over that. But what can you have control over? You showing up and trying to get better every day at something. So for this short experiment, I said I’m gonna go 60 days. And go daily and just see what happens. By day 30, I was getting maybe a couple hundred views a day, and that wasn’t much. And if it was old Pat or younger Pat, I should say, I would’ve given up already.

Hey, I’ve tried this for 30 days. I’m not, I’m going nowhere. But a few things did actually happen. Number one, my editing time went from 45 minutes per video to 12 minutes. So even though I didn’t get results from the algorithm’s perspective, I was getting huge results in terms of the quality of my editing and how fast it was going and the efficiency behind it.

So even if I got to day 60 and even made it more efficient and didn’t get a lot of views, it still would’ve been a win for me, and I would’ve learned a lot of skills to then push forward into maybe the next thing. Um, so that’s number one. Number two, by publishing daily for 30 plus days, I was gathering so much data from YouTube.

Literal data on what was working a little bit better than others. So I basically discovered that through my videos. These were Pokemon videos by the way, where I was opening a pack a day. I found that the videos where there was a sticker, a price tag on the packs seemed to have more views than the ones that didn’t.

And this was a pattern that I wouldn’t have known. There was no research out there that would’ve told me this. It was only by doing it. And so day 35 comes around. I did a video that incorporated a number of things, including a sticker on a on a pack, and I actually showed the beginning negotiation process of purchasing that pack, which I found in a few other videos before that that people had commented and said, oh, I really like how you negotiated, or, that was really interesting to see in real, in real life.

Day 35 comes around. The video I published that day had 750,000 views. Imagine I gave up on day 30 because I wasn’t seeing the views, but I was getting better, and eventually I hit that tipping point where then all the videos started to go gangbusters. And now, uh, 293 days into this, I’m in 2.5 billion views across TikTok reels and shorts.

It has helped me land brand deals that have earned me over six figures, and I’ll publish a video and on average, get 1 million views per day. On that video alone, um, it’s turned into, it’s, turned into its own business.

There was no amount of learning that could have taught me any of this. It was only by doing and committing to a certain period of time to give it a chance.

And again, if I got to day 60 and I didn’t see those views, I would’ve still considered it a win.

Sam Vander Wielen:  Yeah. All those reps are what, like what led you eventually The, the doing was the learning.

Pat Flynn: Correct.

Sam Vander Wielen: Yeah. That’s amazing. I do think like often too, people forget that what you’re doing now, like those 30 videos you’re making now, you’re going to, there’s some lag time in my experience.

Like it’s all that hard work. I just wrote an email today to my list about how I did a, a four day, like $350,000 launch back in, um. February and people were like, what did you do during this four day window? And I was like, it was nothing I did in that four day window. It was all the stuff I did in the boring time.

Yeah. Before it. And then it’s this like whoosh effect, right. That comes in. Yeah. But I think to your point, people want the like, just tell me what I can do right now so it can also happen right away. Yeah.

Pat Flynn: it’s so true. And the hard part for us as creators is. Those get the clicks, those get that, that gets the attention.

If we were to just say, if, if we were to kind of in the title, you know, in the beginning part of it, say, Hey, here is a way to succeed. It’s gonna take you several hundred hours. But you will do well, but it’s gonna take you a lot of time. People don’t want to hear that. So for us as content creators, we have to learn to work within the playground we’re in, whether it’s YouTube, podcasting, blogging, whatever, emails we have to learn these things that get people’s attention.

So if email is the thing you want to do, what’s what I call micro mastery on just subject lines. Subject lines. If you can work and master subject lines for emails. That means more people are opening your emails, more people are seeing those call to actions. More people are reading them, better relationships, more sales customers, et cetera.

So micro mastery means spending a period of time, maybe two weeks, maybe a month, on just learning everything you can about emails, subject lines, and then it’s our job as creators to, you know, people might not like this, but you kind of have to clickbait a little in order to get attention today, however. It can be bad or good depending on how you follow up. If you click bait to get attention, but then you deliver and then you help a person, that’s okay. Some people call that legit bait, by the way.

Sam Vander Wielen: Mmmhmm.

Pat Flynn: Um, versus real click baiting is, here’s this picture of this thing and it’s gonna promise you something, and then you never deliver on it.

Or you bait and switch and it’s like, Hey, you can have it, but now you have to pay a million dollars. Right. We don’t wanna do that too. And there’s, there’s a fine line that we as creators have to sort of balance between, you know, gathering attention. And then delivering on that value. Because if nobody sees what we’re we’re publishing or clicks through that email or clicks that video, then you know, we might as well not have even created it.

So that’s the struggle that I know you and I kind of as creators have to deal with. But um, again. Learning what the higher leverage, smaller things you can learn that kind of are the first domino that that can lead to the next, like subject lines or thumbnails for, for, for YouTube, um, or your two second hook in your shorts.

Uh, those things can then lead to a lot of success when you just focus on those little small things.

Sam Vander Wielen: Yeah, I like that you broke that down a lot because I often think like for example, that focusing on learning copy and being a better copywriter no matter what kind of business you have, is the best ROI, in my opinion.

I just think I, for the amount of writing I have to do and hooks I have to do and subject lines, but I like that you broke that down because there with that’s a huge umbrella. Yeah. And so I don’t need to become a master copywriter, but I do need to get better at these little micro things throughout my business.

Pat Flynn: Right.

Sam Vander Wielen: Yeah. Okay. So I was wondering if you could tell me what’s something that you’ve changed your mind about recently?

Pat Flynn: Uh. It is about the shorts. I thought shorts and short form video was a waste of time because I had an analogy that I spoke about on stage at Social Media Marketing World that was in favor of long form video.

And I still favor long form video. Long form video is, I mean, there’s a lot more revenue in that for sure, but more so you have more ability to build a relationship with people. And the analogy I used was, and I was so adamant about this short form videos like passing out Halloween candy. People come, they see your shorts, they get what they need, and they move on.

Right. They move to the next house. Mm-hmm. How often are we as trick or treaters thinking about the house? Unless you have the largest Snickers bar on the block, and then maybe people will think about you, but even then it’s just about the candy and that’s it. Not you, not the experience. It’s, it’s Halloween, and that’s what short form was to me.

I felt it was just a waste of time and I didn’t wanna add noise into that. And I didn’t think there was a way to build a relationship with people. Long form video is like, instead of Halloween candy. This is your restaurant. People come in, they have an experience, you sit them down. They have many courses during this meal.

They are sitting there enjoying it. They might invent, invite their friends back the next time, and you have this deeper relationship because of the experience they have with your video. And that, that was long form to me. It was like you were the chef at this Michelin Star restaurant, right? Versus Halloween candy.

And I was so adamant about that. However, I experimented with this shorts channel. Again, I just wanted to see if I could unlock the algorithm. I’m now at a point now where if I’m late for a video, people freak out. Like, where are you? I have a jingle that I created at the beginning of my shorts. It’s, um, Should I open it or Should I keep it sealed, is the phrase.

And I’ve hired a company, music, radio, creative. It’s not an AI voice. Um, a real singer to sing that in a more jingle, kind of like commercial style. It’s like, should I open it or should I keep it sealed? That jingle. Has now made its way all around the world. There was a DJ who, uh, mixed that into their set and played it in front of 15,000 people.

There are people who are using that jingle to create parody content. Like for example, the other day I saw somebody who was working at a mortuary. Pointing at a casket and saying, that jingle, Should I open it or should I keep it sealed?

It’s taken a whole new level, and this has allowed me now to actually build a real relationship, but it wasn’t because I created just a few shorts that were random.

I have a show with a format, with a daily expectation, and there’s fun. There’s, there’s, you get to know me by getting 60 seconds of me every day versus. You know, an hour of me one day. And yes, it can be done, but you have to show up and daily is the strategy for short. So I am now convinced I changed my mind.

You can build a real relationship with people by just creating 60 second videos, but you have to still have the same amount of time in front of them over time.

So you still have to show up, you still have to put yourself into it. You still have to be a human being. Where I see a lot of people getting it wrong is they’re like, okay, I’m gonna create this. My videos are also faceless, but I’m definitely in them. You hear my voiceovers on them, but a lot of people are creating these sort of very basic AI created faceless channels with an AI voice that’s literally just chat GPT with a voice on it. And they’re, they’re expecting to get millions of views and there’s now.

Influencers in the space of faceless videos that are just helping people pump out more crap out there and that, I’m still adamant about that. That’s not the way to go, but I have changed my mind. Short form is powerful, but you have to show up daily or very often, at least in order to, to do what you want it to do.

Sam Vander Wielen: Yeah, those people are jamming the phone lines, as I say, like it’s just making it really hard to get through ’cause they’re clogging up the lines.

Pat Flynn: The algorithms eventually know that those videos aren’t worth surfacing.  The ones I see, like when I think about the moments in time where I just allow myself to doom scroll, I do doom scroll.

I, it’s not like I’m saying like never be on TikTok, never, like I’m not anti-social media, but you have to learn how to control yourself on it. So I have blocks of time in my calendar where I. Schedule my distractions. I think it was Neil Al or somebody who, who said that like if you schedule your distractions, then you won’t be distracted when you shouldn’t be.

So I actually schedule when I’m allowing myself to just get down random rabbit holes on TikTok. And the ones that I find that are most interesting are. Not the sort of like flashy ones with a bunch of different cuts and all these loud noises. It’s a person who’s just like, Hey, something happened at the coffee shop today that I have to tell you about, and it’s like a five minute video about this interaction that they had with like a homeless person at a coffee shop.

And it was like, oh my gosh, like this is a human moment that’s now brought to light. No edits. They were just telling a story. So for me, I am even now more fully convinced that the most important skills in the future are not gonna be how much you know. It’s gonna be two things. How quickly can you learn and pick up new things so that you can adapt to how quickly the world is adapting and, and, and including and innovating new things.

And how well can you tell a story? I. A story that allows you to connect on a more emotional level, to be more relatable. And that’s why in my book, like I said earlier, I’m not a professor at some university or anything like that. I’m just me. But these are my life stories that hopefully connect with you out there who are trying to achieve something amazing in life and want to experience more joy and have more fun.

Um, because as I say, I’m, I’m the Pat of all trades, master of fun. That’s my, that’s my nickname now I guess.

Sam Vander Wielen:  I love it.

Before we go too, I was thinking how do you feel AI will or will not contribute to Lean Learning or people may be becoming more of over learners?

Pat Flynn: Yeah. Ai is leveling the playing field again, just like how we all have access to the same information. We all have access to now, uh, dynamic information through Chat GPT, Claude, and all these AI tools. So as people who are consuming things, again, we have to understand that we have access to all the information we would ever need. We need to be more disciplined. We need to actually take action on those things in order for us to find success, not continue to play this game of hoarding information.

Like it’s scarce because it’s not, it’s only gonna become more plentiful and harder to navigate. And not only are we at like a buffet line of information now, and we’re stuffing our plates full and we’re lethargic, we’re obese with information, we’re slow, but we’re getting force fed with these places in these algorithms, right?

We’re, we’re, we’re getting information we didn’t even know we needed. Force fed down our throats. So AI is just gonna help amplify a lot of those kinds of things if you allow yourself to just lose control over it. What this is, is a, it’s a way to stay disciplined amongst the, uh, overflow of information that, that we have access to.

That’s really what this book is about. But at the same time. You can use, uh, these tools as and, and utilize them in a way to help you, right? If it were easy, what would it look like? Sometimes the answer is literally plugging in the thing into Chat GPT and getting something back. For example, um, you know, if I’m creating an online course about something and I want an easy way to get to the outline of that course, I might just record an audio file, while in the car or something about what I want my course to do and all the things I would want inside in such a random order. It’s just coming out stream of consciousness and it’s like a 10 minute audio. I might just take the transcript of that, put that into the Chat GPT and say, Hey, Chat GPT help me extrapolate a outline for a course about this that I want to create.

Boom, there’s your first draft and you know, you could use it as is, but I recommend if you’re using ai, you know, make sure you look at the things that are given to you first before you publish it. Um, and, and put your voice into it. But that can be an easy way to get to where you want to go. Using these things as tools, not replacements, but tools to help you still be a better version of yourself that can work more efficiently.

That, that’s where I feel AI is gonna come into play. But AI is coming for all those industries where knowledge was powerful. Um. No longer. So we need to understand that. We need to know how to learn, acquire new skills much faster in different realms as they come about and as like there’s gonna be things that we’re gonna need to know that just aren’t even in our minds right now. Um. And the faster you can learn them, that’s more, that’s how you become more valuable. Whether you are an employee, picking up things faster is gonna make you more valuable than just knowing things. Um, and especially as a business owner, the quicker you can adapt and, and pivot and learn things, which again comes by doing, the more valuable you will be to your customers and to the world.

Sam Vander Wielen: Yeah, absolutely. Implement, implement, implement. For sure. Okay. For our final and hardest hitting question, how do you rank the Back To The Future movies? One, two, and three?

Pat Flynn: It’s literally in that order. This is a really, this is an easy question. Yes. One, two, and three. Although I would put them all up, I mean, it’s, it’s the best trilogy.

I mean, they, it’s, they all go together. I mean, it’s, it’s one story broken up into three different parts. It’s, it’s hard to. Say which one’s better. But I feel like the first one, the original, I mean, there’s, there’s so much history behind that. I, in fact, back here, you might, if anybody’s watching this, I’m pointing to something, it’s blurry back there, but it’s a 70 millimeter film reel of a Back To The Future trailer that was played in 1985 before the movie came out.

This is one of my most prized possessions. Um, and if you kind of like look at it like next to a light, you can actually see the, the preview. Um, it’s, it’s amazing. So yes, one, two, and three. There are good parts for each of them. I know a lot of people dislike three, but I think it’s creative. It’s a creative way to kind of tie the whole story together and if they ever make a four, I will riot.

Sam Vander Wielen: You want it to be done.

Pat Flynn: It’s done. Please don’t pull a Toy Story 4 on me with Back To The Future as much as I love Forky. Like it was done after three. It could have been done after three.

Sam Vander Wielen: That’s awesome. Well, I appreciate you giving us your perspective. The whole time I was reading the book, I was like, I wonder what he thinks?

Pat Flynn: Yeah there is some Back to The Future in there  as well. It’s, it’s very me And you again, it’s, it’s not, it’s not gonna go deep into science and research, which it, it does, it talks about that. It goes deep into relatable things that you’re going through in your life that you can then implement right away.

Sam Vander Wielen:  Yeah, your book is super relatable. So speaking of that, tell everybody where they can find you, the book, and where they should connect with you next.

Pat Flynn: Thank you again, Sam. This has been an honor. And, and thank you again for being on my show. You delivered so much value and I’m just so happy to have you as a resource for all the, the, especially the legal stuff, uh, that my audience needs.

So, um, kudos to you and again, thank you. So Lean Learning: how to achieve more by learning less. You can find it anywhere. Books are sold, of course, Amazon, uh, and then leanlearningbook.com. If you happen to be listening to this before June 3rd or the week of the launch, there are some bonuses potentially available for you there as well.

But, uh, whether you pick up one or none, I just hope that this, um, this, this conversation was helpful for you and it gets you at least thinking about how you consume because we need to have control over what we let in or else we will be out of control. I somehow was able to predict three, four years ago.

This would be probably the most important conversation that we would need to have today. Uh, when this book idea came about, I just knew, especially, I think a lot of it, I mean, the dedication to this book is for my kids. My son is 15. My daughter’s 12. They’re growing up in a completely different world than you and I did.

Um, and this is here to help them navigate and help us navigate as well.

Sam Vander Wielen: Yeah, for sure it does. So I hope everybody goes out and gets it. I will drop all the links down below. Also, go get Pat’s newsletter every week. ’cause I love your newsletter too. I read that every week. So yeah, we’ll share everything down below.Thank you Pat. Thanks for being here.

Pat Flynn: Thank you.

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.

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.