How To Fix Your Stagnant Income By Asking Yourself 6 Hard Questions

This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode 62

you're listening to the six figure home studio podcast, the number one resource for running a profitable home recording studio. Now your host, Brian and Chris. Welcome back to another episode

of the six figure home studio podcast. I'm your host Brian Hood, and I'm with my amazing cohost, Chris Graham. Chris. Hey Buddy. How you doing buddy? I'm great brother. How are you man? I'm so, so good. Especially now that we just purchased our flights

to Winter NAMM in Anaheim. Chris, are you looking for to this aisle? Man, I'm going to get my gear slut on so hard. It's gonna be awesome. So if you're going to be at NAM, Nam, for those of you who don't know is this gigantic sort of festival of audio and visual people and you go there and all the companies have booths or they're selling their gear and it's kind of awesome and terrifying and a bunch of audio engineers come out. A bunch of audio bloggers and podcasters and youtube and sorta like this giant party that we have as a community each year. I'm only actually been to summer NAM in Nashville before, but we're going to be out there. If you're in the neighborhood, if you're out in la, that area or you're going to be out in the Anaheim, California area, reach out to us via instagram or via the email address podcast at the six figure homes to do that.

Come my instagram is Chris C H R I S underscore Graham, g r a h a m brian, hit him with your instagram's. Instagram is Brian Hood. That's h zero zero. D Brian h zero zero d when you get married or you and your wife going to actually change your name to hd. Zero, zero. D because you could know I joke about combining our last name. Her last name is newell. My last name is hood, so we're going to combine it to be new hood. I like it. No, it sounds good. That's very progressive though. It is. Anyways. Yeah. Reach out to us if you guys are in Nam nom ma'am. I'm just kidding. How Long A. Anyways, yeah. We would love to hook up with you guys. We'd love to meet and yeah, we're just excited to go out and hang out and make friends with people so his up.

We need to find some way for us to do some sort of six figure home studio hanging out. I don't know what we're going to do yet. Chances are just because of the way we do these episodes where we record way in advance. Yup. At the end of some episodes somewhere, I will mention myself, I will mention what we're doing and how we're doing it or whatever. If you're not already a part of the six figure home studio facebook community, which you can get to by going to the six figure homes studio.com/community is a free facebook group. We'll be talking about it there as well. We're going to find some way to do something as a community. I don't know if it's just hanging out at some specific spot inside of winter now. Who knows? I don't know what we're going to do yet, but we'll figure that out, but we will definitely, definitely be there.

It would be nice if a fan of the podcast had a cool recording studio in Anaheim that we could all meet up at, so if that's you and you to have a party,

let us know. Yeah, so that would be. If you are a mastering engineer and you have a nice space somewhere, think about all the recording engineers that you could have coming into your studio and making connections. Yeah, that'd be great. Those are all potential leads. I'm just saying there's a benefit in there for you. Not to mention all the potential friends you can make and I didn't want to say it, but Chris Graham has a damn cat on the camera right now. He's rubbing his face up against the mic. Get outta here with that. I'm aware. This is our new kitten. Dr Rolley Sinclair. I was trying to hide this from our community. Chris Graham is a cat person. I have a cat person, Chris Graham, as a cat person. I'm trying not to hate them for it. I rarely know. Anyways, we done for our kids. It's amazing. You can do anything you want to this cat and he doesn't mind and our kids do, so it's wonderful and you can send all the hate mail to podcast@thesixfigurehomestudio.com for all the animal abuse Chris Inevitably puts upon his cat.

Well, it's mostly just my daughter's snuggling with him and squeezing him like a teddy bear. It's pretty fun. Oh, well. Anyways, Winter Nam will be fun and I look forward to doing whatever we end up doing and if not, just look out for Chris and I. Chris is the Big Bald, beautiful man in glasses. I am the big beautiful glasses man that looks just like Chris, except I always wear a Mars hat because I'm a nerd. Mars, Mars. I don't know what else to say about this. I'll have a purple shirt on that much is rest assured. If you see a guy with the purple shirt, it's me. I'll be at. I'll be the only guy there with a purple shirt on. Yeah, if you guys have any ideas of things we should do as a community or just us. Chris and I were traveling together out there, if you have any ideas of what things we should see and do and people we should meet and if you want to meet up with us, just email podcasts@thesixfigurehomestudio.com.

Give us your ideas, give us your feedback, give us your pitch as to why we should come to your studio. If he wants to come hang out your studio and we would love to meet. We just wanna meet some people. Just wanna hang out. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Friends, friends. All right, let's move on to the episode topic today. Today's episode is a heart episode to record because we have to make some awkward turtles, you know, little awkward turtle where it's like you say something awkward and then everyone in the room goes quiet because they know it's true, but it's still mean. This is the episode where we have to kind of like punch in the gut and say you may be misguided and if you're not really falling when I'm talking about here, Chris, give us a quote. Give us a court real quick and that basically sums up this entire episode here, so if you're having trouble moving stuff forward with your business, it's only one of two problems. Either something is wrong and you don't know about it or something is wrong and you're refusing to acknowledge it. Yes, that is a huge problem for anyone anywhere. Chris has this issue. Yeah, I have this issue. We all have this issue in some way, shape or form, but it is extremely important that you understand and internalize it. I'll say it one more time, Chris, just so we really, really take it in because it took you two times for early to set in. If you're having trouble moving your business forward, it's only one

of two issues. Either something is wrong and you don't know about it. You're doing something wrong or you black something and you're totally unaware of that or something is wrong. You know about it and you're refusing to acknowledge it. Yes, and so this episode we're going to actually talk about a few things that maybe holding you back that you don't know about, and now since you know about it, you can take steps to address those or you know about it and you just aren't admitting it to yourself. You refuse to face it. You're just like the ostrich with its head in the sand. You're just hoping that problem goes away. Spoiler, it never goes away. Yeah, so this brings up an interesting topic, which I think about all the time. So this sort of refusing to acknowledge something's wrong, not just the people around you, but to yourself.

When we as humans do this weird thing, not unlike ostriches who stick their head in the sand to protect themselves, which doesn't work, or opossums. If you don't know what an Apollo possum or is it possum? Well, possum opossum. I don't even know. Don't judge me. I only know about mastering. I'm just asking the question that everyone is asking right now. Continue on this Brian. Let's call them possums because that's what we call them here in Ohio. Got It. So we've got one that lives in the neighborhood here that my family saw the other day. My wife is taking the trash out and there's a fence right next to our garage and she looks up and three feet from her head. There's a giant, probably 30 pound possum staring at her. But possums, when they see something scary, they either freeze and don't move or they play dead.

They literally just lay down and pretend to be dead. You were literally poking it with a stick, right? Yeah. So the possum froze on the fence and we brought out the kids and we're like, look at this insane looking crazy animal with little human hands and a gigantic rat's tail. And we were like, fascinated by it. So I took a stick and just sort of gently touched it to see if it would move. And it didn't do a thing. The next day I was walking to my office through a park and it's the same possum just lie in there because he saw me and he was like, oh, I'll just lay over. I'll just lay down and pretend them dead. So what's insane about that as humans, I've other habits, we do these things where we deny reality and we refuse to admit to ourselves that something's wrong or something.

We're doing this wrong because it would challenge our view of our own self. And in a situation like that man, like it's so many people's businesses don't move forward because they just refuse to admit to themselves the truth itself lie and what we really need to move our businesses forward. What we need to move forward as men, as women. You fill in the blank. We need to take some self truth serum and look our own selves in the eye and say, I've been refusing to admit that my finances are a wreck or I've been refusing to admit that I have to learn how to market or I will have to go get a real job or, you know, fill in the blank. There are all these things that we just refuse to acknowledge. And you know, we hate this because ultimately us as audio engineers or technicians, as producers, we interface with technology and we just want to know, oh, I'll just learn a new thing. Oh my problem is always what I don't know.

So this episode is basically us trying to give you that hard truth on a platter and just hand it over to you. Because one thing I've noticed more than anything as someone going through premarital counseling right now is it's so much easier to hear advice and think about how that pertains to some other person instead of how that pertains to you. So what I want you to focus on is how does the things that this podcast are talking about, how does that apply to me? Not to the other people in my life, but has that applied to me because it can be so easy to hear something and be like, Oh yeah, that studio down the road just like that I got is so stupid. I don't know how he doesn't see that when reality, there's like 30 things wrong with you that you have to look at. Yeah. It's so hard to do that because again, our brain is really good at associating advice with someone else and not ourself, especially hard

truths. Yeah. I hate to quote the Bible like two or three times a month to you guys, but there's a great sort of verse there or Jesus is talking about this stuff and he says, I'm going to totally paraphrase this, so to quote it chapter and verse. So he says something along the lines of like, stop freaking out about the SPEC and the other person's eye when there's a plank in yours, and so the idea there is Jesus is talking about this nature of humans to be like plank. It's fine. That's under our control. I've got this. This was back in his eye and so we do this all the time like nobody except maybe somebody with asperger's doesn't struggle with this. We all struggle with this and what I have found as I've been able to move my own life forward, to move my business forward is that my ability.

I shared this quote all the time on the podcast. It's worth repeating 70 billion times. My ability to eat reality for breakfast without getting sick is directly correlated with my success in my business. Yes. I think it comes down to emotional intelligence. Yeah. We've talked about this before on the podcast Eeq, the other Eeq, not equalizer, but emotional graphic. Parametric or got it here, know it's the ability to emotionally handle those hard truths, be able to address them and then make positive changes to address those things. Side Note, audio engineers, not just in their careers, but audio engineers are notorious for this, particularly in my industry as a mastering engineer. We've talked about this in the podcast in the past where this sort of temptation of like, well, I'm going to buy those really ridiculously expensive five or $10,000 compressor. That's only good at doing a couple things and then using it when you don't need to use it just to justify your purchase of it and in fact making your work worse.

So case in point. If you're an audio engineer and you just bought prep the gear sled alert Brian. Yep. Here it is. Just bought a norman, you seven, three grand or something. Norman. We'll see you a headlamp. If you can give us free mix, that's fine. That'd be fantastic. Yeah, so I'm still gonna go with. I won't say the model. I'm still going to have my current Mike. I love it. Anyways. Oh my God. You just got that $3,000 mic a vocalist comes into the studio and it is painfully apparent that that mic doesn't work with that vocalists tone. Well, I got to get my money's worth. Chris. Got To get my money's worth. So you use the mic. Anyways, that's sort of what we're talking about. This refusing to acknowledge this isn't the best decision, but there's this other like weird emotion that's making me make bad decisions and making my work worse.

Yep, and a lot of this is something called the sunk cost bias. Yes. That's exactly what it is. You spend so much money into one thing, so much time, so much energy, so much emotion you put into one thing that you refuse to acknowledge that it's not working, and so hopefully this episode will give you some of those Aha moments that you can start taking steps to address and maybe even pivot what you're doing in your, in your life. So let's get into some of these questions that people refuse to ask themselves because we have just a list of questions here. We're going to go down each one of these, one by one, and I want you to ask yourself this question essentially because people refuse to ask themselves these questions, including us sometimes, like there are different areas in my life that these exact questions I have not actually asked myself.

So this is a bit of a hypocritical episode in some regards, but there's just so many different areas you could ask yourself this. So let's just go down these one by one and start tackling them. Yeah. So as we read these, take a moment, feel free to use that pause button on the podcast and let yourself think about this, our reaction when we're asked a question where we don't want to acknowledge reality is to very quickly respond. So that's not me, that's not me. Nope, that's not me. That that lack of pause is concerning. So your, your homework on this episode is we're going to ask the question. We're going to pause for a second, ask yourself the question, and there should be a pause in your own mind before you allow your mind to respond. If your mind responds as fast as that, that's probably the right question that you need to ask yourself again and again, because you're refusing to acknowledge it. We're going to leave a five second blank after every question where you have to pause the podcast for even longer than that and then continue on. So here we go. First question, whatever you're doing in your life, mixing, mastering, recording, tracking, producing, whatever you're doing in your audio, career or hell in your life in general, ask yourself this question, is this what I was made for?

That's a tough one. Let's talk about this one. Is this what I was even made to do? So there's three responses you could have. Yes. I don't know,

and no.

If your response is yes, and it took you a second to think about that. Great. Fantastic. If your response after a couple of seconds was, I don't know, that's also fine. That's totally fine. If your response was no, that's a super healthy thing and that's the first step towards figuring out what you were made for. Yeah, that's huge. That's absolutely amazing. If your response was yes, after taking some time to consider it, hey, that's awesome too, but I still think there's a lot to consider it. You can't just have a snap. Yes. Answer and just say I'm done. I can move on to the next question. There's a lot to consider here and some of the things, if you go back to episode number 58, we talked about the three roads to six figures. We talked about three different business models there and the pros and cons for each.

Consider this, if you are a mastering engineer and after listening to that episode, you determined that you have no capability of generating enough leads to generate enough paid projects to make a career as a mastering engineer work, then chances are you are not doing what you're made to do and that it may be time to consider pivoting to a different sort of business model, whether it's a recurring income business or whether it's the high income, low volume type of business that I do, which is with recording or mixing. Totally, and so that's just one of many angles to consider when you're going to answer the question, am I even made for this? Love it. What's the next question? Brian? Hit us. Next question is kind of a followup. Just say you are made for something. Say you are made to be a mastering engineer, as Chris Graham has clearly made to be mastering engineer. Everything in his brain is created to be a mastering engineer, but now you have to consider this question, am I good at this?

Are you good at this? Because say you are made for something that doesn't mean you're actually good at it. Have you put in the blood, the sweat, the tears, the time, the effort, the energy on actually becoming great at something because if not, you are just like the millions of people in the world with tons of potential, but no realize potential. You haven't actually put in the work and effort to capitalize on that potential. It's just stored potential. It's not actually realized. Yeah, and there's a temptation there to know in your heart, you know, this is what I'm supposed to do, but not being willing to put the work in to do it. Just because you know Michael Jordan was made to be a great basketball player, but that didn't mean he just showed up and didn't practice. That didn't mean that he didn't spend hundreds of thousands of hours shooting free throws in an empty gym with nobody yelling for them and nobody's screaming his name. And just to kind of give you some context on this, if Michael Jordan were four foot six and 280 pounds, he's probably not made to play basketball no matter how much work he puts in. So his answer would be no, I'm not made for this. But because he had the bill, because he had the athleticism, he was made to play basketball. That was a great career choice for him, I would say. But he also was good

at it because he put it in the work. Yeah. He wasn't good at it until he put in the work and when we got cut from his high school basketball team, something like that. Yeah. Crazy. So consider that. Have you actually put in the work to be good at this? Because you can be made for something and still suck at it terribly. So let me tackle this next one. Yep. Yep. Go for it. Awkward. Pause and all. Am I missing a crucial skill?

So what do we mean by that? There's what we do and there's the way that we generate clients for what we do. There's the way that we make ourselves efficient enough to make a high enough income so that you can actually afford to live. There are all kinds of skills. There are many, many hats that you need to be able to wear. Yeah. Which we cover throughout this entire constantly last 61 episodes. Yeah. So I want to go back to what I initially said about this episode. You're either doing something wrong that you don't know about or you're refusing to acknowledge that there's something that you're doing wrong. So the, am I missing a crucial skill? I think it's easy for people in our, you know, sort of demographic and profession, like we're attracted to this industry because there's constantly new and fun things to learn.

Oh, cool. A new compressor. How do you use this one? Oh, cool. A new. Oh, weird. Oh, it's wet. Dry. Awesome. Cool. I can, you know that's fun and it's easy to get stuck in just acquiring new skills and ignoring the most important skill that you need to learn to move yourself forward in. That kind of goes back to episode number 38, or are we talking about 10 x Your Business? By identifying and eliminating your single point of failure, there could be one skill right now that is your single point of failure that if you could learn that skill, if you could acquire that skill in master, that one skill, it could take your career to the next level. Okay, so case in point. Let's say you're a mix engineer and you love guitars and you love drums and you love base, but you don't really care about singing and you're landing all these clients with singing on the songs and the drums.

Sound Great. The bass sounds great, that guitar sound great, but you've refused to put the time in to learn how to do vocals as well. You're going to make bad mixes. It's the exact same thing with all the business skills that you need to build your business. You have to have some marketing ability, you have to have some social media ability. You definitely have to have some email ability, which is a whole skill in itself. If you can't converse professionally and clearly over email, you're going to have a hard time. Yeah. That's something we really don't talk about very often is the energy you put into emails. This is true because there's a certain way of typing. There's a certain way of sounding excited in an email, in a text form that you have to overdo. Really? Yeah. In order to come across happy that people sometimes miss, so that's a skill in itself that we'd really have time to talk about right now, but then we have the entire crucial skill of social skills, which we've talked about many, many, many, many times.

You can go back to episode number 13 when we talked to Billy Decker about skills, like it's clear as day how a social skills can affect your career and this is a crucial skill that a lot of people ignore. So is this one of this crucial skills that you are ignoring? Yeah, so I think one of the things here that holds people back on this one is that the types of skills that they might lack, that they're refusing to acknowledge, the refusing to acknowledge because learning that type of scale is completely different than learning a technical skill like you know, a different kind of audio routing system or something like that. Something that we sort of vibrate with. Well, there's going to be skills that you naturally gravitate to and that you naturally do, and then there are skills that you have to force yourself to learn, but you need to do so no matter what.

And so when you go back to, am I made for this? Yes, you may be made to do this, but you may not be naturally inclined to possess the skills that are required for that because no one is perfectly suited for anything. Sometimes you have to stretch yourself and get outside of your comfort zone to adapt to what you have to do in that arena. So if you need to develop social skills, but you are a socially awkward, Weird Little Guy, then you may need to press yourself a little bit and get into uncomfortable situations until they become comfortable and face your social anxiety until you can get past that. And I know it's easier said than done, but people are able to get past that well and let me take as kind of a fake story that I'm kind of making up here on the spot.

If you guys seen the show Ninja warrior. Yes. It's the show where there's essentially this incredible obstacle course and these athletes show up and they try to complete the obstacle course in the fastest time and get to the top of this. Like what does it mountain, Nori, Ami or whatever, where they get to be the champion. Can you imagine if somebody went on that show and it was just like jacked, like rip their shirt off muscles everywhere. Clearly they're prepared and they power through each of the events. You know, they jumped from board to board to board and they do the zip line thing and they climb the wall without using their feet and then they get to this weird little ramp thing that you have to run up and they get to the ramp thing and they're like, that's always the part that they fell on more than anything it is, but what if they got to the ramp thing and really the whole time or just pumped like, oh, it was made for this.

Oh Man, I'm just really not into this particular part of the obstacle course. You know what? I'm going to go back to the beginning and do the parts that I like again. Ooh, that's such a good example for anyone that's seen the show. You know how hard that ramp thing is. That's the one that honestly gets most people and if you can't just simply say, I don't feel like doing that, but can I just go through it all again? The parts I like and then you can let me through the next round. Like it just doesn't work that way. It's a crucial part of the obstacle course by which you can get everything perfectly and still fail the entire obstacle course. So funny story. So when I was in high school, one of the girls, she's one of the main Ninja warriors. She asked me to prom and I was so poor and I knew I couldn't afford it, so I just immediately shut her down and was like, no, because I was so embarrassed. I was like, I'm high, definitely, um, I cannot afford to rent a suit. And I felt so for, I like completely

rejected her, but only out of my own arrogance and embarrassment that I couldn't afford a damn thing. All right, let's move onto the next question here. And this is a question that is almost inevitably for those of you right now asking yourself this question, this is probably one of those questions that falls into the category that you know is a problem, but you refuse to do anything about it. And the question is this, am I in the right location for what I'm trying to do?

Think about it like I use this example in one of my courses, but you would not try to sell snow tires in Florida. You would not try to sell air conditioning units in Iceland, so why would you try to open up a commercial grade facility in Reno, Nevada, where the music scenes basically nothing. Why would you try to, or let's just say Lacy Springs, Alabama, where my old studio was, let's just say any small town. We're not saying it can't be done, but we're just saying you're not giving yourself the best shot and when you go back to episode number 28 where we had the interview with Warren Hewitt, he moved from this tiny little village in England all the way across the world to La, to Los Angeles, California, which is a huge move. It's a huge risk. It's a very expensive city, but he made the move and he ultimately benefited greatly from that.

All I'm saying is if you are refusing to acknowledge that you're in the wrong location for what you're trying to do, you're unwilling to move to a city where you're giving yourself a better chance. There are a hundred guys and girls out there who are willing to make that move and you are trying to now compete with all those people that are willing to take that sacrifice in order to give themselves a better shot. Yep. So if you are ignoring this problem and you're just simply saying, I can't do it, I can't do it, then you're basically putting your head in the sand and saying, I hope this problem goes away and while there is a possibility that you can get around this problem, just look at Chris Graham. He's in Columbus, Ohio. Not necessarily the best music city in the world, but it's not bad.

It's still a good city and me, when I started in Alabama, that's definitely not the best place to start a studio. There's always exceptions to the rule, but I don't think that we gave ourselves the best shot is I'm trying to say, and I don't think you're giving yourself the best shot. If you will refuse to acknowledge this question and refuse to ask yourself this question and really consider are you giving yourself the best shot for what you're trying to accomplish in the current location that you are in? Yeah, and there's a kind of an asterix there, and this is a new question we didn't have in our outline. The solution might be Internet literacy. Do you know how to absolutely dominate on the web? Yeah, because Chris Graham, you're in Columbus, Ohio. Again, it's pretty good city, but very few of your clients actually live in Columbus, so you found a way to get over that by developing skills in other areas like online marketing so that you could overcome that major, major issue in your business. Yeah. We're not saying it can't be done, but we're just saying that is definitely a question you have

to consider and if you're not willing to relocate, you have to be willing to do something to overcome that major, major challenge. Yeah, so great story here. Derek Sivers, who's just one of my heroes, he founded CD baby back in the nineties. He was one of the first people, maybe the first person to enable independent musicians to sell their music online. It was like a drop ship company, so you'd send your cds to Derrick and Derrick. We'll put them on his website and people would buy through his website. This is prepay pow, and then Derek would ship the cds to your customers. Huge deal. Derek story is amazing because when he decided he wanted to do this, he went to the library. He got a book on how to develop a website, no previous skills, no previous experience, and taught himself at the library, which anyone can do. If you're in a first world country, you have access to a library. Yeah.

Do you know that's the reason our government builds libraries,

so people who lack skills to move themselves forward in life can go there and teach themselves. That's the primary function and the primary benefit to society. I can also check out 50 shades of gray if I went to. So that's obviously advancing our nation. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean there's. There's absolutely an entertainment value that libraries offer.

I'm joking, I've never read that book

good, but its primary function is to make people dangerous by allowing them to self educate because any homeless person off the street can go to the library,

teach themselves literacy,

or at least get help with it and then begin to educate themselves on how to make a website or Yada Yada, Yada. And some do. It's amazing. So next question. Let's ask another hard one here. This one is tough man. This one is super tough. I've got a couple of different stories to illustrate this. So am I saying no to the less important stuff?

So one of my favorite books of all time, which ironically I never finished. I got past that, like exciting part of it and never finished it. It's Henry Ford's autobiography and when he's talking about how he actually built his business from the ground up, it's incredible. In the later years, any student of history knows he kind of got crazy. So the thing he talks about in that book is he says, the primary reason that people who struggle with money struggle with money is that they are quote, unwilling to walk past a small pile of money to get to a bigger pile of money. Gosh, think about that man. That is like,

oh,

to the gut, let's say one of my favorite quotes by him and it's like I'm guilty of this myself. It's like, just because you can make money with something doesn't mean you should. Yeah. And the thing he's trying to explain, there is something called opportunity cost that in many cases it's like, hey, you can go to the small pile of money and you can collect that money or you can walk past it and go to the bigger pile of money. Yeah. So Henry Ford could have gone and gotten a day job and made a small

pile of money every single year for the rest of his life. But he would have completely missed out on building Ford Motor Company. And was a webster charcoal Kingsford charcoal. Yeah. Kingsford charcoal. That's right. That's right. So yeah, this idea of are you walking past the small pile of money to get to the bigger one? This is huge, man. It is so challenging to do this, but I think the problem that audio engineers, most producers, people that are trying to make music for a living, what they often struggle with the most is simply Fomo, fear of missing out. You get in a situation and you're like, Oh man, I might be able to land this client, but I know if I do I won't be able to focus on finding real clients that I'm really passionate about working with. Oh, okay, let's do it. Like this sort of mentality of saying yes to the stuff you know, you should say no to means that you miss out on opportunities in the future.

Yeah. It's like you find out that one girl likes you and you're just like, Eh, I guess I'll date her. Yeah. And then you miss out on the one that could've been your one. Yeah. Yeah. So if you really want to sum this question up in one episode is episode number 45 where we talk about how studio owners are multiplying their income and minimizing their headaches using the 80 slash 20 principle. I think the 80 20 principle is a really good thing to take a look at if you're saying no to the less important stuff because truthfully 80 percent of what you do every single day doesn't matter. And that blows my mind to still think about that. Eighty percent of what I do today doesn't matter. Eighty percent of what you do day, Chris doesn't matter the end of the day. It's not pushing anything forward.

Someone else could have done it better than you. There's like 20 percent of what you do every day. That is the most important stuff. And if you could find a way every single day to do less and less of the 80 percent, that doesn't matter and more and more of that 20 percent that does matter. You're going to 10 extra business. But we refuse to ask ourself the question of am I saying no to the less important stuff? And I can already look at my day so far today. It's three. Oh 1:00 PM. And most of what I've done today has been pushing papers, doing nothing, nothing that really matters. Nothing that's going to outlast me. So it's like this is a gut check for myself. This episode we're doing it is probably the most important thing I'll do today. Everything else has just been. And that is intense.

I think. You know, we talk about niching down a lot on the show. Niching down is saying no to the less important stuff. It is walking past the small pile of money to get to the big one. And I really want you guys to hear us clearly on this. If you have a recording studio or a website and you are pitching yourself as a recording, mixing, mastering, editing, sound effects, sound design, composition. Oh my gosh, I've seen so many of those studios on the Internet. Yeah, if that's you, this is the question you are refusing to ask yourself. Am I saying no to the less important stuff because you got mad fomo dude. And all you want to do is get every single possible project you could possibly get, and as a result of that, you're getting a lot of low

quality time wasting projects and that's why you make $5 an hour sometimes. And Man, this is really, really, really, really important. Deciding to say no to the less important stuff is one of the most important skills you can have. Asking yourself the question,

am I saying no to

important stuff is super important. So my advice to you guys that are struggling to get your businesses off the ground and you're struggling to go full time is it's totally okay to have your fingers in a lot of pies

at first

to experiment and to offer multiple services. But here's the problem with that. When you do everything, you don't really get a good taste of what anything really is. Mastering all day everyday is much, much different than mastering. After working with the band for four months on a single record,

that's 100 percent true. And if you're competing against Chris Graham who masters every day and you're the person who masters one track a month or one album a month, or just a few songs a month, there is zero percent chance you will do as good of a job as Chris Graham who makes this his night and day obsession, zero percent chance, and I will put my money where my mouth is there. Go do Chris Graham mastering.com for a free test master and he will prove it to you.

I was going to disagree with you and say that there's at least a five percent chance. But let's let the endorsement slide.

Yeah, yeah. There you go. There you go ahead. All right. Let's move on to our last question here. And I want to leave on this because this is honestly one of my big things that I try to get across to every person I possibly can. Let me ask the question here. Am I relying on motivation?

So unpack that a little bit more. What does that mean?

Yeah. So almost every one of us have hit this moment of motivation where we have this great idea. Maybe it was starting your studio, maybe it was building your website, maybe it was doing, mastering projects are starting a podcast editing studio after listening to episode number 33 where we talk about five studio niches ripe for the taking. Maybe that's you, and you have this huge spurt of motivation and you start doing all the things it takes to get that started. But eventually that motivation starts to slide away. And what happens is you skip a day of pushing that business forward and you skip a day of figuring out how this is going to work. You need to skip a day, uh, trying to get clients and then you skip another day and you skipped 10 days here and then 30 days and then before long

it fizzles out

and you stopped doing what you're actually trying to do. This has happened to every single one of us in one way, shape or form. And the only thing I've ever found to combat this in my own life is to just say, fuck motivation. Just

get it Outta here.

If I get that initial burst of motivation, the first thing I do while I'm still motivated is set up systems, processes, habits, and accountability. That keeps me going when that motivation runs out, because it's not a matter is if that motivation runs out, the motivation inevitably going to go away, but the habits and even bigger still is the accountability. Those things are still going to be around when the motivation runs out and those are the things that are going to keep you going. So Chris Graham, I have to ask, did you sign up for [inaudible] dot com as per our conversation on the last episode? I have not yet, but it is on my main do list and there's only 10 items on that so it will happen. Okay, so this is an example. If you go back to listen to episode number 61 where we talked about fear and what that does to us and how that holds us back.

If you go back to that episode, you'll hear towards the end of it where Chris talks about having a goal set and he has this big burst of motivation because it's the beginning of the year. Like most people, most people will sign up for a gym and then they'll go for a month and they'll never go again and then they'll have that $9 a month at planet fatness takes out of their checking account because they're too lazy to go cancel it, and so with Chris is still had this burst of motivation beginning of the year. I want him to then set up a system and put a habit in place by going to stick dot Com and devoting a certain penalty and putting accountability and a place to actually accomplish this goal. So all I'm trying to say is taking this burst of motivation and transforming it into a habit or a routine or a system or an accountability mechanism that keeps you going forward. Once that motivation runs out and if every single one of us can do that in all the new things, every single time you get a motivation burst to do something, if we can do that, it's going to make a massive transformation in our business, but if you don't ask yourself this question, if you are relying on motivation too much, then you're setting yourself up for a slow death. Yeah.

When you get the motivation, when you get this moment of clarity of like, that's what I got to do, the most important thing you can do in that moment is remove the friction that's going to slow you down over time.

Girl speaking my love language maybe

so that friction, you know like, Oh man, I'm jacked about this. How can I make this easier on myself? And this is sort of the ultimate concept in business and in just sort of financial success period, is that in order to have any level of success, you have to be future use best friend. People that aren't successful are not future them's best friend. They're sort of future them's worst enemy. And you look at people whose lives are a train wreck and they're falling apart. It's because their past self was their worst enemy. Their past self did things to screw their future self. They borrowed from their future self with no ability to pay them back. And so I love what Brian saying here about relying too much a motivation. That was definitely my story when I started the mastering business. I was just like, yeah, okay, master as many songs as possible, but I hadn't built any systems yet. And doing work when there's no systems is freaking exhausting when you do the same thing every day. Which for me was mastering music. It wasn't until I invested the time to remove the friction that I really started to be able to invest in growing my business and doing things that would take me to the next level. So that

removing friction for future you is the only way for future you to be more successful.

So that is it for this episode of the six figure home studio podcast. I want to leave you with these six questions. Again, I just copied and pasted from earlier in the session, going back over these six questions, I want to encourage you wherever you are right now, if you're in a car, pull over. If you're just sitting at your computer or doing some laundry or something, menial right, these six questions down and review them. Actually sit down and think about these things right out if you have to, and not just one time, but revisit it over time. Try to set this maybe on a posted note next to your computer, something that you sit by every day and pausing. Consider these things because if you can consider these six questions and you honestly eat reality for breakfast every single morning, you're giving yourself so much better of a chance to make it in whatever you're doing. So here are those six questions again, one, is this what I was made for?

Two,

am I good

at this?

Three, am I missing a crucial skill?

Four,

am I in the right location for what I'm trying to do?

Five,

am I saying no to the less important

stuff in six?

Am I relying on motivation?

So pause. Go back, write those down and find a way to incorporate this into your monthly planning or your quarterly planning or your yearly reviews, even in, not just in your recording studio, but in pretty much everything you're doing. A lot of the stuff we talk about can be translated to different aspects of your life, so don't just stop with whatever you're doing in your studio. So next week's episode is another one of those episodes where we speculate on the future of trends we see in the music industry and how you can capitalize on those trends. And that's all I'm gonna. Say about that. So next week, Brighton, early Tuesday morning, 6:00 AM, that podcast episode will drop. And until then, thank you so much for listening and happy.