1089: Mastering New Skills and Information Overload through Lean Learning with Pat Flynn

Pete Mockaitis
Pat, welcome back!

Pat Flynn
Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m super excited to dig into the wisdom you’ve got for us in your latest book, Lean Learning: How to Achieve More by Learning Less, which is almost blasphemy here on How to be Awesome at Your Job – learning less. Pat, explain.

Pat Flynn
Yes. Well, it’s about learning the right things, not everything. And here’s what I mean by that. We all grew up, or at least I did, thinking that the more information you knew, the better. Because with more information, you were more powerful, you were more useful, you had more utility, right? And that was the case for such a long time until now, because now we have access to all the information that we could ever need and beyond.

However, we are still fine-tuned to absorb information as if it were scarce, right, as if it were a scarce food source. We see it, we’re like, “Ooh, let’s get that. And get more food and more food,” because it’s a survival sort of mechanism, right?

But now we’re at this buffet line of information. And not only are we stuffing our plates full of everything and everything that we may or may not need, we’re also getting force-fed stuff into our throats from algorithms and other things that believe they know more than we do what we need, and that we’re all seeing that and experiencing that on all these platforms.

So, lean learning is really about learning from the right resources at the right time for the right things, trading just-in-case learning for just-in-time learning, as I like to call it. And it’s how I’ve been able to accomplish a lot of different things across many different fields in such a short period of time.

And I believe that this is where we need to go when it comes to figuring things out, not by trying to figure out literally everything there is to know about something before taking action, but choosing action over information and using that action to actually give us the right direction to move forward.

Pete Mockaitis
Boy, there’s so much there. Thank you, Pat. it’s so funny. Well, when it comes to just-in-time learning, this phrase I’ve been familiar with for some time, and it’s kind of meta, actually, because here you are Pat Flynn on me, Pete Mockaitis’ podcast, talking about lean learning and just-in-time learning.

And, in fact, the most just-in-time learning experience of my life was going to your Pat Flynn podcast tutorial, YouTube playlist, watching a video and then doing exactly what you said. And then watching the next video and doing exactly what you said, it’s like, “Okay, on RSS feed. All right. Let’s see. So, Pat says this. Okay. Let me fiddle. Oh, hey, I got an RSS feed. Okay. Cool.”

And so, literally, step by step, I was learning seconds before doing the thing that I needed to do to achieve the thing I was trying to achieve.

Pat Flynn
Right. Case in point, exactly. And this is the thing about lean learning. It’s figuring out what your next step is, learning about that, trying to fight the urge to learn everything and feeling like a fear of missing out, right? The FOMO really plays a role here with trying to learn everything, because everybody’s talking about all these new things and dah, dah, dah, you don’t want to get left behind.

But, really, it’s about trusting the process and understanding that, when it comes to step two or step five or step 10 down the road, that there will be resources for them when you need them. You don’t need them now, though. And that’s really hard to say no. Saying no is really the strategy for a lot of this stuff.

It’s similar to Elle from “Legally Blonde,” who was played by Reese Witherspoon, who chose and had the discipline to say no to going to the fraternity parties so she could study for the bar exam, so that she could go to Harvard and see her ex-boyfriend there. If you’ve ever seen “Legally Blonde,” you know what that means. If not, you probably have no idea what I’m talking about.

But, anyway, discipline is a part of this as well, honoring what you put on your calendar, honoring the idea that there are resources out there that they’re going to be there for you when you need them, but you don’t need them all right now.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s really interesting to note that we do have this compulsion toward more information. And I think I noticed this the most during COVID because it’s, like, we all wanted information. It’s, like, there was some uncertainty, which is true whenever you’re doing something new, but there’s uncertainty there, it was high stakes, and we didn’t know what the heck was going on.

But CNN and others were all too happy to continue providing you with whatever they had, any expert from any place, they’ll be there, they’ll be talking. And I think we saw that in terms of, like, the viewership of news was way up during that time. And yet, science will also suggest that hearing about spooky, unpleasant things continuously for hour upon hour upon hour is not great for our productivity or our mental health.

Pat Flynn
No, no, this is why I don’t watch the news. It is meant to hold your attention. It’s a lot of negativity that just kind of like makes you feel like, “Well, okay, the world’s going downhill, so I might as well go along with it,” versus, I try to surround myself, when it comes to inspiration around people and items that are positive.

However, even though that can be great, it can also work against you, too. Yes, there is such a thing called over inspiration, not just an overwhelm of information, but an overwhelm of inspiration. And this is why I, when I sit in the car, this might sound weird, but when I tell you why I do it, it might not sound as weird anymore.

But when I’m in the car, I don’t have anything playing. I don’t have the radio playing. I don’t have any music. I don’t have a podcast playing like I had for years. I always thought that if I had a spare moment in time, I had to insert something new that I had to learn that I may or, again, may not need at that time just so that I was feeling productive. If I wasn’t doing that, I wasn’t setting myself up for success. Automobile university as they call it.

Now I keep it silent because it gives me what I like to reference as shower time. If you know shower time and you have shower thoughts, you know that those are some of the moments in your day where you have the best ideas, you’re able to think, and because there’s nothing else to do in there, you’re taking a shower, so there’s literally nothing else to do.

So, I like to have “shower thoughts” in my car, and it gives me time to decompress. It gives me time to go deeper into thought about things that I’m already thinking about versus getting over-inspired by this new, fancy, shiny thing that everybody else is talking about. We don’t have that time anymore because everything is being filled in with extra small more endorphin-related things.

So, that has been a key as well to allow yourself to go deeper by saying no to these other things even though they are not necessarily all negative.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. So, it’s kind of like the trade-off or opportunity cost is present there such that we may well be better served in some minutes, having some silence, some processing, some synthesizing, some creative, “Aha! Eureka!” moments, as opposed to more information because we may very well have plenty already.

Pat Flynn
Correct. Yes, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
And I was going to ask, you almost already answered that. I think sometimes we’re learning not necessarily for the purpose of taking action or implementing, but we’re learning because learning is, in and of itself, fun, interesting, enjoyable.

Pat Flynn
It feels good. It feels like you’re making progress, too. If you’re reading a book and the book is about a topic you’re interested in, oftentimes, it feels like you’re already making progress even though you’re just absorbing information.

But what often happens after you finish that book? You forget most of it and you maybe not ever take any action on it. Versus, what if you read a book like this? You read a chapter on taking the next step and then you just put the book down and took the next step, right? And then what?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, and I think what you’ve already done here is we’ve accomplished a real good, a thing to be aware of, it’s like, “Wait a second. Am I…? What am I doing here?” I think just, like, triggering that awareness, that mindfulness, that presence of, “What am I doing here?” is very powerful.

Pat Flynn
Yeah, one of the chapters in the book is called “Un-automate Everything.” We’ve automated too much. I mean, similar to, like, if you automate all the subscriptions that you have from Netflix to whatever, you’re going to realize that you’re spending $400 a month on stuff you don’t even use anymore.

Same thing happens with where we put our time. We’re automating, “Oh, yeah, sure. I’ll just listen to a podcast because I’m in the car now. Just because that’s what I always do.” But you’re not realizing the “cost” of that, if you will. We are automating a lot of things that we should be thinking about.

So, what I like to do is just kind of declare bankruptcy on where our time goes and start over, and then start only placing things into your life that you want to learn about, that are only related to the things that are right there in front of you, that you want to learn about.

Knowing, again, that you can always go later, creating compartments of time to focus and learn and go deeper into those things, realizing that, okay, you’re going to reach that endpoint to then be able to make a decision whether or not you want to continue or not. I mean, probably the first example of this in my entrepreneurial career was how I wrote my first study guide for my architecture website.

I didn’t know everything about writing and publishing a study guide. In fact, in doing the research on figuring it out, all that stuff, I got overwhelmed. And that’s what most people do. It’s, “Yes, I want to start a business. Let me think of all the things I need to do now from incorporation to marketing, to content creation, to social media. Oh, my gosh, I’m overwhelmed. I’m not going to do anything.”

So, when I wrote my book, I knew that I’d, at least, have to have something written. So, besides the design of it, the formatting of it, the marketing of it, the how I was going to even technically sell it, I put that all aside for what I knew the first step was, which was to just get everything onto paper or, at least, in that sense, Microsoft Word is where I wrote that.

And then 77 pages later, a couple weeks later, I had something, something that I didn’t have before. And then I was more motivated than ever to keep going because I was making progress. I needed to know now how to take this thing that was just a long essay-looking thing into a format that was usable with blank spaces to write in and workbooks and all this kind of stuff. Great.

I found a YouTube video at the time that showed me how to format a Word document to have it be horizontal and some more landscape, if you will, and look nice. So that’s what I did. It took a day and that’s it. So now I had the final product, the PDF file. I was like, “Okay, cool. Now I need to sell this.” I’ve never sold anything online before. I had a website, but I never sold anything. I didn’t know how to do this.

A question that is a guiding question in the book that I always ask myself, and I recommend people to ask when trying something new is, “If this were easy, what would it look like?” That question comes from Tim Ferriss and it’s guided me so much and it guided me back then. And I found, from a person who had already sold stuff before online, the answer.

It was a tool called E-Junkie, which doesn’t exist anymore, but there’s a lot of tools that are similar now where you can upload a product, get a button in exchange and put it on your website so that when a person clicks on that button, they pay and that thing gets sent to them automatically. I set that up in half a day. I was much further ahead by taking it piece by piece and learning as I was going.

And, finally, then I was like, “Okay, now I need to learn how to write a sales page because I need to convince people who are on my website to click that button and buy my study guide about this architecture exam I was selling.”

I’d never written for copy before. I never figured out how to try to convince somebody to buy something based on words I was saying. There were entire schools dedicated to copywriting. My first inclination was to go to one of those, but $18,000, no, I don’t have the time and/or money to do that.

It’s funny how we often think that, in order to do a business, for example, you have to go to business school and you have to do all these big things that cost a lot of money. But again, if this were easy, what would it look like? I was recommended a book by a friend of mine called Moonlighting on the Internet by a guy named Yanik Silver.

And he said, “Pat, you don’t even need to read the book.” And I said, “Then, why am I buying it?” “Well, there is an appendix in the back of the book. It’s a Mad Libs-style sales page. You can just put your product in there. You can put your benefits and the features of your product, and you’d have it.”

That was the sales page I used, from that book, literally Mad Libs-style, that I used for seven years that helped me earn over a million dollars off of that e-book. And, again, not from learning everything and outthinking myself, but by taking it one step at a time and learning from the right resources at the right time from the right people.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, now that’s really cool. So that question, “If this were easy, what would it look like?” is a useful question because it shifts your brain from wherever you were, “Let’s go to copywriting school,” into imagining the easy things. And, sure enough, “Oh, I guess, when you go down that road, you discover, oh, there is a resource, there is a tool, there is a person, there is a something, that has already done a lot of the hard work for me, and I can just piggyback off that goodness.”

Pat Flynn
Yeah, they’ve already made the mistakes that I would have made if I had just gone down this path myself. They have mentorship opportunities to help me get it right. They have podcast episodes, whatever it might be, right? You can find those resources when you need them, because they are there. They’re everywhere.

Pete Mockaitis
And I want to clear up a little bit. I think if, tell me what’s your take on this one, Pat. If we know full well, “I am learning something for the purpose of my own entertainment. And I know that this is not productive and this is an alternative to playing, playing a game of Pokemon, or this is an alternative to watching a Netflix TV series. What I’m doing is…”

Let’s see, I just discovered a new YouTube channel, Kurzgesagt, in German. So, the word is German, it just means, like, “in short.” And it’s just like, it’s been over a thousand hours making these animations, explaining stuff. I was like, “Wow, where has this been on my life? This is so fascinating.”

And so, if you know, “I am learning as a form of entertainment, and that’s what I’m doing. I’m not entertaining any delusion that this is a productive means of driving forward achievement of some objective or goal is,” is your take is, like, “Yeah, that’s cool. As long as you know what you’re doing”? Or, is your take, “Oh, no, no, that’s still working against us”?

Pat Flynn
I say have fun with it. Have fun with it. Enjoy it. In fact, there’s an exercise in the book that helps you understand which parts of your life you are putting your time into, whether it be something vocational or something hobby-like or maybe a waste of time. It’s called the inspiration matrix to see where, in fact, you’re putting your time in.

For most entrepreneurs at least, who I speak to, they have zero things in the hobby box. They are not putting any time into things outside of their work because they’re so entrepreneurial and career- focused, where it’s very important to have other things and hobbies. For example, for me, it’s fishing.

And for me, fishing is an escape. It’s to get back in nature. It’s a way to remove myself from all the entrepreneurial stuff and the emails and all the things I need to do, and the meetings. And it just gives me breath. It gives me space so that I can go back into it even better. And I love that. And I’m learning about that. I’m obsessed with learning about fishing.

But it’s far enough removed from my entrepreneurial stuff that it’s not going to get in the way of, “Oh, I should do this over here instead,” and kind of derail the plans that I initially had or the tiny experiments that I’m working on right now, right?

However, that being said, I still use lean learning in my fishing. In fact, I want to be efficient in my fishing because I only get to go maybe three or four times a month, and I want to make sure that I’m maximizing my opportunities when I cast that bait. In fact, I use a strategy that I talk about in the book called force function to recently learn something in fishing.

So, there is a particular fishing lure called a jig. It’s a large hook with some like skirt-like material on it and you kind of move it up and down. And it’s a very hard bait to fish because it often, just, it’s hard to utilize and you can go hours without getting a bite. But when you do, typically, you can catch bigger fish and it’s just much more fun when you do, when you get a strike because you kind of like really, really set the hook, but it’s difficult.

So, I remember for the longest time, I always wanted to catch a fish with a jig, and I would cast a jig on and cast it out there and get nothing for like 20 minutes, and I go, “Yep, see? I’m not good at this. So, I’m going to put it away and go back to my old reliable drop shot rig, which I’m way more confident in,” and I’ll get fish. And I’ll say to myself, “Yep, I’m not a jig fisherman. I’m never going to be good at it.”

But one day, because I, again, really wanted to learn how to do it, I went out on the boat and I brought nothing except jigs. There was literally nothing, no other kind of fishing that I could do other than jig fishing. So, started the day, went 20 minutes like I normally do, and started to question the whole thing, “Oh, my gosh, I’m terrible at this. I’m never going to get a bite on a jig. I’m going to go cast something else. Oh, wait, I can’t cast something else.”

“I’m forced to just fish with this. What am I going to do, go home? No, I’m out fishing, like a good day of fishing. Even if I don’t catch anything, it’s still a good day of fishing.” Hours go by, I get nothing. And then, finally, in the afternoon around 3:00 p.m., I finally get a bite. I didn’t land it, but I felt something on the other end, and I knew it was a fish.

And by the end of the day, I ended up getting two fish, and now that’s my go-to bait because I forced myself to do it. And that’s a lean learning strategy because we often will walk away from those things that are a lot harder, things that we’ve never done before, just to go back to our comfort zone. But sometimes you need to get forced to do those things and add a little bit more pressure to get the results you want.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Pat, let’s dig into some of these, the top tools and strategies that folks are finding most transformational inside your lean learning philosophy. Lay them on us, what do you think has been the most powerful for folks?

Pat Flynn
Yeah, so force function is definitely a big one. We’ll just kind of continue that conversation. Now, if you’re not fishing, maybe you want to, for example, learn a language. That reminds me of an episode of a show that Tim Ferriss did back in the day. It was on Apple TV, but it’s no longer in existence.

He did a show where he was trying to quick-learn certain things. And in order for him to learn how to speak Tagalog, which is the Filipino language, or the main Filipino language, there’s many dialects, but he ended up booking an interview with a Filipino news channel that was going to be conducted in Tagalog.

And he had a certain amount of time to just learn how to get it done because that date was coming, right? And that’s a great force function. Having a publisher tell you that, “You have a due date for your manuscript” is a great force function to have you get up and start writing.

Having a presentation at a certain date in front of a crowd at a conference is a great force function to help you learn how to become a better public speaker because you’re going to, there’s only a limited amount of time to tell yourself, “No, I can do it later. I can do it later.” No, you can’t. You have to do it now, right? So, that worked really well.

Another method of speed-running skill acquisition that I love is called micro mastery. It’s taking this big thing that you have that you’re doing and finding small little components of it that you can get better at that you can then stack on top of new things that you focus on for limited periods of time.

Going back to public speaking, a great way that I learned to become a public speaker was not just getting booked on a stage, but it was actually micro mastery, where I’d go into different presentations really hyper-focusing on one thing that I wanted to do better than anybody else and better than I’ve ever done before.

There’s a million things to do with public speaking to get good as a professional speaker from how you open, how you project your voice, where you stand on stage, what do you do with your hands, what do you put on the slides, how do you end, how do you pause, like all those things. There are so many.

But by focusing on, for example, just, “How do you start? What are the first words that come out of your mouth?” Let’s watch a hundred different TED Talks, but let’s just watch the first 30 seconds of each of them to see which ones have the best opening and how I can kind of learn from that.

Let me get training from other public speakers on how to open a show or open a presentation like that. And you can micro master that and, therefore, every future presentation you do, you’re going to have that skill. I got to the point where I was micro mastering what I do with my hands.

I was watching TED Talks and just watching people, “What do they do with their hands?” And they make these big grandiose gestures in moments that have big points to be made. And sometimes they go really small and kind of bring their hands closer to their body when they’re being more vulnerable. These are things that I learned only by absorbing and learning in a hyper-focused fashion, maybe two weeks at a time.

It reminds me of my buddy who is an ultra marathon runner. I called him up one day and I was like, “Hey, what are you doing?” And he’s like, “Well, I got a camera crew over at my house.” The ultra marathons are crazy. He runs like 15 miles a day just for fun. I think he’s crazy. But these marathons that he runs are like 50 miles or more.

And he had a camera crew at his house who had one of those super-duper slow-motion cameras who was filming the contact of his heel to the ground. He wanted a slow-motion footage of what his foot was doing to grab the angle of attack and all these other words he was throwing at me to, like, just get incrementally better at how he hits his heel on the ground when he’s running.

But when you think about it, it’s like, “Okay, well, that’s just like one moment in time,” but across 50,000 steps, I mean, that adds up to huge differences over time because he’s, again, a high performer and a high-caliber runner. He wants every little advantage that he could get. And so, he spent about two weeks focusing with, like, physics people. Again, it was way beyond what my understanding of all this stuff.

But he found the right angle of attack and the right way to run so that he could save a little bit more breath and time, and dah, dah, dah, so that he could just get seconds back over the course of many, many miles.

And that’s just a cool demonstration of just, like, what happens when you take a small moment in time, focus on something, a little micro thing inside of the thing that you’re doing that’s much bigger, and that then becomes a part of you so that you can kind of become a master at it over time by continually stacking those skills.

To finish up, we can go the opposite direction. I like that, instead of thinking about the micro, we can think about going bigger. And a lot of times, going bigger is very scary, but you can go bigger just for a small period of time to get really, really big results that will last a lot longer. And this takes me back to when I used to row. I used to row at Cal where I went to school and I was on the lightweight rowing team on crew.

And one thing that you do when you’re in a race to get ahead of the other boats is, yeah, you could just kind of run your race and kind of just pull fast as you can. But in order to kind of sprint ahead of a boat next to you, you implement what’s called a power 10. And that means the coxswain will offer the command, the coxswain sort of the small person on the boat that kind of commands the rowers.

And he’ll say, “Okay, power 10 in three strokes, two strokes, one stroke. Go!” And for 10 strokes, and just 10 strokes alone, the rowers on the boat will give it their all. Just 10 strokes. Somehow you find extra energy to offer. For just 10 strokes, it’s not forever. If you were to go hardcore all out for the rest of the race, you’d pass out, right? It’s too much.

But if you kind of just coasted and just kind of merrily went along, you would be beaten. So, in order to get ahead, you, every once in a while, offer a power 10. And in your life and in your learning, whatever it is you’re doing, you can do a power 10 of sorts.

If you’re podcaster, for example, like you and I are, Pete, a power 10 metaphor, or example, would be like, “Okay, well, I publish a podcast every single week. However, this one week in September, I’m going to call it marketing week. We’re going to have a podcast every single day of that week. And we’re going to promote it. We’re going to hype it out. It’s going to take a lot of extra work.”

“It’s going to be a lot of extra energy, but just for a period of time to get better results because we’re going to have more people listening, more people downloading. We’re going to create a whole event around it. We’re going to have a special guest. They’re going to promote it. All this stuff happens. And now we can see bigger results because we’ve inserted additional effort and pressure for a limited amount of time.”

Think about a hackathon. When coders go into a hackathon, again, it’s like, “Okay, 24 hours, you’re going to code something new that you’ve never coded before. Great. Go, get the Red Bulls, the Monster drinks, the pizza. You’re up for 24 hours.”

And that’s how a lot of the coolest, different pieces of software have been built because they focused on it for a short period of time, additional pressure, additional focus for a period of time. And then you go to sleep for two days to make up for it. But this is how you can get ahead much faster.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, so much good stuff there. And I’m thinking that the force function can even feel sort of low stakes. It’s, like, you’ve got a gym buddy, like they’re going to be at the gym, and so it’s not the end of the world if you don’t show up but there’s a human being, you know, a friend is like, “Dude, so I’m here and you’re not. What the heck?”

Or, just sort of any kind of accountability, a regular meeting with another human factor, there’s some forcing goodness there. And I love that example of the of the feet hitting the ground for the runner because, as you’re trying to think about, “Well, huh? Well, if I’m being lean with my learning, what’s really, really worth learning? Oh, maybe it is things that are done thousands of times over.”

We’ve had guests talk about how transformative improving your typing speed is for the professional because you do a lot of typing, and so that’s the case. Or, talk about the coders, sometimes they’ll go deep into creating a tool which will save them, “Oh, this will save me, like, three minutes a day, times hundreds of days, oh, that’s worth a few hours making that tool. That’s going to pay off rather handsomely.”

Pat Flynn
Yeah. We tend to think of getting better as just like doing the thing over and over again. And, yeah, you can get a little better by doing it over and over again, but think about the way that a band conductor makes their song better in the band. They don’t just play the same song a hundred thousand times to get better. They stop when something goes wrong, and they go, “Okay, trombones, that run that you just did there sound a little mushy. Okay, trombones, just the trombones, play those eight measures. Go.”

They hear it, and go, “Okay, we need to do this one at a time.” Again, breaking it down, “Okay, Jimmy, you play a run until you get it right. Okay, good. Now, Max. Now, Janine. And then now let’s all do it together. And now we can move past that because we micro mastered that. We can move past it now and work on the next part that might need help or the next part that might need to improve.”

Such a perfect way to start improving and it’s not by just doing it over and over and over again. It’s finding the one little thing that needs help, mastering that and, over time, those things can add up.

Pete Mockaitis
There’s also a forcing function built in there because if all the band members are aware that this could happen to them, they’re going to want to bring their A-game so that they’re not zeroed in on and embarrassed in front of everybody.

Pat Flynn
Yes. Additional pressure is required. Yet, most of us want to live in this little comfort zone where nothing ever happens. So, finding additional pressure works. You were talking about physical fitness and having a gym partner. I have a trainer. His name is Jeff. He lives in Columbus, Ohio. I live in San Diego. He’s going to call me on FaceTime at 7:30 p.m. this evening. Whether I’m in my garage or not, I’m to be ready for it because that call is coming.

And that alone is enough for me to go, “Okay, I’ll put my shoes on. Let’s go.” And then I do it. And then when I’m in it, I’m fine. But I just need that encouragement and knowing he’s going to show up there for me, which is what I pay him to do, is great.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’d love to hear your take, as folks who are jazzed about your lean learning approach and start going down this pathway, are there any mistakes or watchouts or pro tips you’d offer to folks?

Pat Flynn
Yeah, I mean, probably the biggest pro tip is you can’t do this alone. We were just talking about the importance of other people, but even finding other colleagues who are going through it with you, not necessarily a mentor or even accountability partner, but just other people who are doing it with you so that you can kind of inspire and feed off of each other’s energy. Those things are important. You speak the same language, right?

And then, of course, if you can, finding a mentor or a person who can take you under their wing or, at least, show you the ropes. Whether you have to pay for that or not, it is definitely worth it because they’ve gone down those paths before.

Another big mistake is this, again, this idea of, because we’re so socially connected, it’s very easy to see a lot of things in front of you that may be interesting, desirable, you know, bright, shiny objects, right? The draw is, well, we want to see that because everybody else is talking about it. It’s just human nature, so we can’t feel bad about that but we have to learn how to deal with it, the FOMO, the fear of missing out.

For a while, there was a tactic called JOMO, to battle this joy of missing out, which I think is just false. You kind of just kid yourself when you say, “Yeah, I’m happy that everybody’s talking about that and looking at that, but I’m not.” That’s just not real. The answer, however, is close to JOMO. It’s J-O-O-O, which is joy of opting out.

It is you saying to yourself, “I see that, I acknowledge it, and I choose not to spend time there because I’m going to recommit to the things I’ve already said yes to.” The joy of opting out. That is a proud recommitment that you’re making. The sort of plus one here is that you’re still going to go, “Yeah, that’s there, and I may need it.”

So, here’s the trick. You can put it away for later. Find a Notion folder or an Evernote folder or just a For Later folder of sorts and put it in there. And I guarantee you, 99% of the time, you’re never going to go back to those things. It’s just a mechanism for you to move forward from it. And what’s funny is, by the time you probably, if you do need those things, there’ll be another better, more relevant, and more recent resource for it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that reminds me of when you’re decluttering, you know, getting rid of stuff, like, “Oh, but I’ve got fond memories of this thing. And then maybe someday it could be useful.” I think my wife taught me this trick, it’s like, “Well, if you have good memories of it, you can take a picture of it on your phone and then you can look at the picture of it and enjoy those memories, and then get it out of the house.”

Pat Flynn
Yeah, the same memories. Yeah, I mean, that one’s a hard one for me as a collector at heart, a collector of Pokemon cards, it’s hard. It’s like, “Well, I kind of like this card. I’m going to keep it even though I should probably sell it, whatever.” But, yeah, if this sparks a joy, right, that’s the other sort of filter. And those filters are great. I think filters are really important. And again, the whole point is just be conscious about where you’re putting your time and effort, not just go through life in automation mode.

The other thing I’ll say is teaching. Teaching is a great way to learn. I had a friend of mine who lived in Hawaii, and he was wanting to learn how to play the ukulele. And, of course, Hawaii is the place to learn how to play the ukulele, right? So, we hired this really like grandmaster ukulele player who, after first few lessons, you know, he taught him a few chords to get started with.

And then the teacher told him, “Okay, now you teach it to your son.” His son was like 10 years old. And my friend was like, “Wait, no, I’m not qualified to teach. I just know like three chords. First of all, you’re the teacher, you’re supposed to teach me. You want me to teach my son?” And he’s like, “Yeah, because when you teach your son, you’re going to have to figure out a way to explain it that you will never forget.”

And he was like, “Oh, okay.” So, he taught his son and he learned these chords and was showing him how to play these chords and was explaining it in a way that a 10th grader or a 10-year-old could understand. And then, therefore, it was absorbed into his mind and he would never forget those chords, and he could move on to the next lesson from there.

You learn so much by teaching. It’s kind of meta because, even writing the book Lean Learning forced me to distill the way that I learn and approach things in a way that was more easily digestible for people who could pick up the book and read it and/or listen to it.

So, I actually learned even more about creating vocabulary around this, about finding the frameworks that would be memorable, which made it even easier for me to begin to understand them, which made it easier for me to now, again, talk about them in a podcast like this one. So, you don’t have to be the expert to teach.

In fact, many people would rather learn from somebody who’s just gone through a process versus the person who’s spent 40 years removed from the front lines of that thing and they’re now at a podium at some university speaking through many people versus being in it themselves. So teaching is a great, great way to learn.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. All right. Well, now let’s hear about some of your favorite things super quick. Can you give us a favorite quote, Pat?

Pat Flynn
There’s a few quotes that come to mind, “You can have everything in life you want, so long as you help other people get what they want.” It’s a Zig Ziglar quote. My son rolls his eyes because I say it so often when he hears me say that, but he knows it, and he sees it come true. So that’s one.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Pat Flynn
There was some research out of, I believe it was Ohio State University, I wrote about this in my book. There’s a lot of controversy around the idea of sharing your goals. And there was a study done a long time ago about the idea that, “Well, you know, if you share your goals publicly, you’re actually less likely to achieve them.”

And I think Derek Sivers from CD Baby was the first one to talk about this really publicly in a TED Talk a while back. He said, “If you speak your goals out loud in a social setting, like on social media, you are less likely to accomplish them.”

And the reason is because you are already getting those feelings as if you did accomplish them. People are saying, “Yeah, you got this. Good job. You can do it. I know you can do it.” You start to already feel good about it before you even take the first action. However, I think, in 2014, there was a secondary follow-up to this study that said, “No, that’s actually not true. It just depends on who you share your goals with.”

Yes, if you share your goals publicly to people who you don’t even really know or care about, you care about your audience, but you don’t really care about them from heart to heart, well, then, yeah, that’s true. You’re not going to achieve your goals because you’re getting those feelings.

However, if you were to share your goal to a mentor, to somebody who is a teacher, or who is going to be keeping an eye on you, accountability partner, but especially a mentor, you are many, many more times likely to do it because you don’t want to that person down.

There’s a loss aversion that happens. You don’t want to let your mentor down who you said you were going to do something for. And that study was really interesting because it kind of is the right sort of happy medium between sharing your stuff publicly but also not sharing it at all. Sharing it with a mentor or trusted person who you care deeply about.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Pat Flynn
Favorite book, as of late, would be Buy Back Your Time, Dan Martell. And there’s another good book that’s not out at the time of this recording, but maybe by the time this is published, maybe not. September 2nd is the release date. My good friend Chris Ducker is about to publish a book called The Long-Haul Leader.

And it does speak to this idea of, you know, instead of optimizing for scale and for rapid growth and all these things that we kind of grew up kind of trying to be, especially an entrepreneur with the hustle culture and faster and sacrifice everything for all these things, it’s more about the idea of optimizing for peace, for longevity, for both mental and physical health.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool?

Pat Flynn
Favorite tool, Poppy AI. I do use AI as a tool to help me get to the point of service to my audience faster. I never copy and paste from AI or just tell it to do something for me. However, I do use it to help me with my research.

If I have a lot of inputs and I need to understand these inputs much faster, I can go through Poppy AI to bring YouTube videos, social posts, other comment sections into one place and then start to analyze them in a more visual way. Other tools can do and accomplish those same things, but Poppy AI has been out of this world and has saved me so many hours of time.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Pat Flynn
Favorite habit is, before I buy something, I ask myself, “How would I feel if I bought this tomorrow?” That’s been fun. It helps. I’ve probably saved a lot of money, but also felt better about the purchases I make as a result of that filter.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s like, “Will I be disappointed if I didn’t have it yet?” versus, “Probably fine. Maybe let’s just find out.”

Pat Flynn
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you’re known for, a Pat Flynn original quote?

Pat Flynn
“I would much rather live a life full of ‘Oh, wells’ than a life full of ‘What ifs.’”

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Pat Flynn
SmartPassiveIncome.com or, of course, my book Lean Learning, available wherever books are sold – Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc. And I’m at @PatFlynn on social media.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Pat Flynn
What’s the one thing you could say no to right now that would help you get better at your job?

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Pat, thank you.

Pat Flynn
Thank you so much for this.