How To Grow Your Business By Nurturing These 4 Positive Mindsets

This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode 97

Whoa.

You're listening to the six figure home studio podcast, the number one resource to running a profitable home recording studio. Now your host, Brian Hood and Chris Graham. Welcome back to another episode of the [inaudible]

figure home studio podcast. I am your host Brian Hood, the guy that listens to every single episode we've ever aired except for the one episode, my best friend, Trevor, episode 71 you didn't listen to that. It's great. You should check it out. It's one of our most popular episodes of all time. Some of that's cause. Trevor's a genius. Yeah, so that's my best friend's episode that happened when I was in my honeymoon. I'm here with my bald, beautiful purple shirted fluoride co-host. Hey Christopher J. Graham, the man who never listens to his own podcast. Chris, first of all, how are you doing today? I'm good. I did listen to [inaudible]. Second of all, named the last two episodes of the six figure home studio podcast that you actually listened to named the last two full episodes you listened to.

They would've been the ones right after you got back from your honeymoon. And I was like, Brian, I should help with editing the podcast. And then you were like, no Chris, stop it. You're slowing everything down.

That was around episode like 76 or 77 so it's been months since you listened to your own pod?

Yes. So like I talked to probably five or six people that listen to the podcast every day, either through a coaching call or they like set up a phone call cause they wanted to get a mastering quote and I find myself constantly saying like five times a day. Oh I might've mentioned this on the podcast. I don't remember. But anyways, and then say something because I don't have any idea. Like what have I said? Like do you guys even know that I have a tail? I'm one of those weird humans that like actually has a tail.

What the Oh, he's kidding him lying. You're fucking like tail. Oh my God. So see, you're the guy that never listened to the podcast. You don't remember what you talked about? I do, but I don't know if it made it to air. You know, we might've cut it out or something. I Dunno. And I cut a lot of stuff. Thank you. No, I don't really, I do put notes sometimes. I had dinner with Sean last night. He's the guy that edited the first like 30 something episodes of this podcast. So he was in town. He's a Canadian. I love that guy man. I was thinking about him this morning. That's weird. Yeah. So I had dinner with him last night. Shout out to Sean, but we were talking about, he's got a new business he's working on, on top of a studio business that is like a photo booth business for like weddings and events and stuff. So like you know, it's, it's interesting business model, but like during it, I'm like quoting specific episodes for him to listen through the numbers and stuff because I do know our episode backlog really well.

Yeah, I don't, I don't know it very well at all. That's hilarious.

Yeah. So here's the thing is it's super helpful because like if someone asks you a really complex question that would take like 30 minutes to fully explain, I can be like, you know, we just put out a two part episode series on that. You'll just go listen to you know, episode x and y.

We recently mentioned on episode, I don't even remember which one, but exhibit a email templates, you know, setting up like signatures that you can use when someone asks a question. I need to do that with our podcast and be like, oh, somebody else asked that question here. Check out this episode of the podcast. It addresses. That was like five episodes ago, episode 93 how you can work on your business instead of in your business. Part one is where we talked about that. Good advice in that episode. My wife constantly makes fun of me because I have a phrase I use and it's the other day for most people. The other day you have a phrase that says, I'm talking to myself 15 years ago that two mile 16 in conversation with my wife or anybody else in real life, I'll say the other day all the time, which for me could mean at any point in the past since I've been alive. But for most people means like within the last half of a week, the other day when I was a seven year old. Yeah. So I could be like the other day when I was learning how to ride my bike without training wheels. Uh, and she makes fun of me anyways. This isn't good content.

Let's move on to something funny and interesting. Yeah. So that episode last week, honestly, was probably one of the most important episodes we've done because it's all about toxic mindsets that we need to absolutely obliterate, oblivious and deliver a new word today. [inaudible] not even going to say obliterate ever again. We need to obliterate negative mindsets from our lives because they, they are a massive detriment to our own businesses.

Webster's dictionary defines, obliterate as to obliterate with a Samurai sword. Correct. Anyways. That was an awful joke. That was not funny. Yeah.

Okay. Anyways, we're going to move on and pretend that that didn't actually happen and we're not gonna let that out either. And people are going to realize how bad your dad jokes actually are, whether you're laughing at me or with me, I don't care. So last week we talked about that. This week we're going to talk about positive mindsets that we need to nurture in order to accelerate the growth of our businesses. Now here's the deal with this episode. We did a little research ahead of time. We were like looking up some different mindsets that we want to cover and all my God, the Internet is full of trash around the subject. It's full of guys in suits and red ties and hair slicked back peddling new. Some bullshit. Like that's kind of a negative outlook on this. So I don't know if I maybe have a toxic mindset that I need to get over, but when I see that stuff, I cringe so hard. So we're going to try to make this as applicable to your business as possible and we're going to try to skip all the cheesy crap surrounding positive mindset. Did you just say applicable? Yeah, not applicable. I said an applicable, yeah. Did you put an l in there? Applicable, applicable, applicable. That's a part of all applicable or applicable? Actually, I don't know which way you say applicable.

I think it depends on what side of the Atlantic Ocean you're [inaudible] you're

from today on English with the Bros, so before we get into that episode today we're going to talk about two sponsors that are special. Actually, we don't have sponsors for this podcast. We never really had sponsors for this podcast. We have two separate businesses that we like to tell people about because they are extraordinarily helpful for running a recording studio business. I always go for yours first, so I'm going for mine first today. Chris, the first business that we think will be extraordinary helpful if you are a busy studio owner. If you have a lot of projects you're dealing with and you

wait a minute, wait, wait. You don't have to be a busy studio owner to get a ton of value out of this. If you get a ton of revisions from clients, even if it's just one client, this is a tool you should have.

Well, okay, so the busier you are, the more benefit you're gonna get from this. But whatever this is true. Yeah. So here's the deal. You send files to clients, they give you emails and texts and Facebook messages back over revisions and now you have a long list of revisions to do and they're all spread about different places. And even if you have a good business, they're all in your email. And then you have to go and copy those into another sheet and mark them off when you're done because you're going through your door and you're trying to find where the timestamps are that they put. And they might have written them wrong. It's a nightmare. So file past.com is a company that I launched with my best friend, Trevor, CTO of sound, stripe.com and we built this as a file sharing platform built for recording studio.

So you send a file to your client, your client can leave timestamp provisions directly onto the track. And so when you open that file up in file paths, it gives you literally a checklist of revisions to do that. You can mark off and hide and it gives you the timestamps exactly in the point when they left them supervise [inaudible] tool. And then also if they still owe you money, you can put it behind a paywall. So they cannot download their tracks. It's stream only. They can only stream their songs until they pay you. If you want to sign up for that, go to file pass.com and Chris now tell people about your business because it's just as helpful as file pass. And it's for the exact same type of person.

Exactly. So let's say you finish a record for a client and the client is like, hey, this mix of sound great. All 10 songs are awesome, but could you do a vocal up for every song, one decibel vocal up? You're like, yeah, no problem. That's easy. Oh crap. I have to balance every one of those mixes. Wouldn't it be nice if you had an app called Bounce Butler that you could say, Hey, I've got all these sessions that need bouncing. Can you bounce them for me in texts me when I'm done? That's what bounce Butler does. Here's the thing about bounce butler. It's in early access right now, so there's only a limited number of people that have access to it. We're still polishing it for the masses, but the people that have used it have all had basically the same thing to say. And I got an email today from a guy that was awesome. He said, bounce Butler is kind of like having a dishwasher. Once you have a dishwasher, you can no longer not have a dishwasher. Dude,

that is so true. So Fun story about that. As my first studio had no dishwasher, I would spend literally like 30 minutes a day doing dishes, which is about in line with how much time you'll spend at the very minimum, like bouncing shit down every day. And as soon as I moved to the place that I'm at now, it had a spot for a dishwasher. I went on craigslist, bought a used one. It's worked fine the last seven years and I will never, ever, ever go back to hand washing dishes again. So I can tell you right now, I will never, ever, ever go back to bouncing stuff down with outbound speller. That's dope. Yeah, go sign up for that. Automation is addicting, which is why I made a business out of it. Yay. All right, so let's move on to today's episode topic and that is nurturing positive mindsets or here are four mindsets that you need to nurture in order to push your business forward.

Let me launch into this, Brian. Yeah, go for it. My friend, I had a thought this morning and I've been working on this for the last week or so. I've been doing the business coaching thing on the side. I do it about once a day, Monday through Thursday. It's like, you know, I spend an hour, hour and a half or so working on it. It's Super Fun and what I have found is that I'm growing as a result of learning how to ask better questions to help people grow their businesses. One of the cool side effects from that is that my wife and I have gotten better at fighting. We've gotten better at me asking the right questions to do needs discovery to figure out like what's the actual root of our struggle right now. And it's been unbelievable and it's been challenging me because I see myself as a mastering engineer. That's like what I do full time. The business coaching thing has been super fun, but I'm growing way more through coaching other people than I do through mastering, which isn't surprising. I mastering for like a decade. I'm good at it. There's not a whole lot of like,

oh, didn't, whoa, that was surprising. There's not a whole

a lot of that anymore. And I was thinking about this for our community about how important it is to make sure that you're doing work that grows you and growing you in a lot of ways has to do with this kind of mindset, mentality, mindset, mentality, mentality, mindset, whatever. But this idea that there are things that you need to nurture in your soul and your heart that will make you a better human being and need to find ways to do that day in and day out so that you grow. One of my good friends is really fond of this saying that he used to be involved in this organization called young life. It's a big part of my life and one of the popular sanes over and young life is if you're not growing, you're dying. So it's the same for us as business owners. If you're not growing, you're dying. And that's not just from a profit standpoint, but much more so from a mindset standpoint. If you're not growing as an individual, you're dying and it's really, really hard to build a business, let alone grow a business if you are personally not growing all the time.

And that's why this is the second part of this series because it's really hard to grow and nurture these positive mindsets if you have those negative mindsets we talked about last week, eating away at your inner thinking. And so make sure you go back to listen to episode 96 where we talk about the first part of this, which is eliminating the negative mindsets. So the first positive mindset in our list today is an abundance mindset. We talked about last week, the scarcity mindset. This is the exact opposite and this is what we need to nurture in order to have successful. So Chris,

you're going to give us a 45 minute answer on this, but what is an abundant mindset? All right, well here's my story. When Alison and I were first married, we were shopping for a house, but our lease on where we were currently living was up. And we met a friend who quote unquote had an extra house on their property. I just got an extra house. Yeah, it was seriously like the story was man, you know, like it was in high school and I was his young life leader. I was like his mentor and he was like, yeah, you know, a couple of years ago my parents business started going really well. So they bought all the houses around our house and burn them down. And build a really big house. Well it gets better. And then we picked up all our stuff one day and we walked into the new big house and we don't use our old house anymore.

It's just sitting there empty. And I was like, Whoa, hmm. Well my wife and I, our lease is up and we're trying to buy a house and we need somewhere to live for just a little bit of time while we shopped for a house, can we live in your house? And he was like, we're gonna talk to my mom. And she was like, yeah, go for it. Just pay the utilities. And we were like, yes. It was a really nice area of town. It's in new Albany, Ohio. And this began a really amazing relationship for me with this family. And it was amazing for me because they were successful entrepreneurs. And I think I've mentioned them on the show in the past, but I was living in this house. This is the dentist. The dentist. Yeah. So what happened was I came upstairs to take a break and I looked out my back window on a Wednesday afternoon and he was in our backyard.

We had a pool in the backyard. It was a great house, and he was playing with his kids on a Wednesday afternoon at the pool and I froze in my tracks and I thought to myself, is he allowed to do that? Doesn't he have it? Why hasn't he had his business right now? He was demonstrating an abundance mindset. Mark and Shane blew our minds one day when we were talking about this and they said, well, the first thing you got to understand is you've got to have an abundance mindset. There's so much money on earth, there's so much, there are so many resources, and this is completely the opposite of this mentality that we talked about last week. This idea that there's a very limited amount of it. They make a lot of money and they were sharing with us this idea that you can't look at the world as a scarce environment.

It's not. At one point it was, but it ain't anymore. And it was a life changing moment for us to think about. It's the opposite of Fomo when he was hanging out with his kids on a Wednesday afternoon and he wasn't thinking like, oh, I'm going to miss opportunities. He was thinking, yeah, screw that. I'm going to do what will be good for me and what would be healthy for me for the longterm. I'm going to go hang out with my kids at the pool on a Wednesday afternoon. He did that every Wednesday afternoon. It was freaking amazing and that's where I learned the most about business was in that moment of looking at mark and being like, Whoa, that's a totally different mentality than I have about my own work. So just to kind of really paint the picture here between the scarcity mindset and the mindset, because these are

two opposite sides of the spectrum here. A scarcity mindset is if you are an entrepreneur and even a successful entrepreneur can still struggle with this. If you are an entrepreneur, you can never take time off. You always have to hustle, hustle, hustle, hustle, grind, because you're always missing out on opportunities because if you miss out on this opportunity, you won't have another chance. Again, that's a scarcity mindset and if you're a fan of Gary V, I love a lot of what he talks about, but that dude has a scarcity mindset. He encourages a scarcity mindset when it comes to opportunity because it's always on, always on, never off, because if you're ever off, you'll miss out on massive opportunities. That is again, the scarcity mindset. An abundance mindset is this right here is this dentist in his backyard on a Wednesday afternoon in a pool with this kids enjoying life because he knows he can always find ways to make enough money.

He only has so much time that he can have with this kid that is truly a scarce resource is the amount of time he has with his child, especially that age. So the way we look at our businesses, there's a lot of ways this sort of stuff plays out. If you have a scarcity mindset, which we talked about last week on the last episode, am I going to go too into depth with this year? If you have a scarcity mindset, all of your competitors in your area are now your enemy. Do you have a scarcity mindset? Every single band or artists in your area you're fighting over? If you have an abundance mindset, every single competitor in your area is actually your friend. Someone to collaborate with, someone to trade ideas off of, to build a community around every single band in your area. If they don't go with you and they go with someone else, that's fine. That person might be actually be a better fit. If they come to me, that's great. I can do a great job on them. It's just a completely different way to approach the same exact scenario. It's looking at it through two completely different lenses and if you have an abundance mindset, you can look through kind of a negative scenario, throw a much more positive mindset and this is so much more healthy than a scarcity mindset.

Yeah. An abundance mindset is essentially a positive outlook. On your ability to make ends meet. A scarcity mindset is fear-driven and it's fascinating. This is complicated stuff and I don't claim to completely understand an abundance mindset. Brian, I think you'd probably agree with that. I think you probably have a little bit more of an abundance mindset than I do. I'm not bragging like I'm complaining right now. Yeah, it's something that's difficult to work through, but it's an extremely healthy thing. And here's the catch. Here's the really, really important catch. If you're a creative, if you work in the arts and if you listen to this podcast, you probably do. It's very hard to make good art without an abundance mindset. If you are fear-driven so will your work be? That was a weird sentence. Awful wording. [inaudible]

but I get what you're saying. This is like a route that we'll go deep into your life. Whichever way you do it, if you have an abundance mindset affects all aspects of your life, your relationships, your business, everything, your money. If you have a scarcity mindset, it affects all areas of your business, your money, your relationships, your everything. Everything. I want to underline this idea that your creativity is affected by a scarcity mindset and your creativity is enhanced and increased by having an abundance mindset. And so I think one of the questions we're probably going to get from people on this and one of the questions I kind of still have about these mindsets is how do you change your mindset? How do you do that? I don't know if there is a perfect answer to this. I think just being aware of, it's one thing, having the self awareness to know which type of mindset you have, whether it's abundance or scarcity.

I don't think anyone is either way. 100% I agree. Like I like to think, I don't struggle with scarcity mindset, but there are still a certain things in my life that I'll catch myself on. Like I might be jealous if someone has success at something that I want to have success in that I don't have success in, you know, and that scarcity mindset. And then there's times where something should bother me, something I should be mad about, but I'm not because of a healthy abundance mindset. And down the road, that can lead to a lot of great things because instead of burning a bridge because someone copied you or someone took inspiration from you or something and says you foster that relationship and there's going to be so much more that comes from that then. And you know what I'm talking about too, Chris, you got that look in your eye.

Yeah. We're not gonna talk about it here, but yeah. Yeah. We had a situation with a friend where they did something that Earth does hurt me a little bit and Brian didn't care. And Brian's outlook was healthier. I took offense because of my scarcity mindset. And let me share a story related to this. When I was a little kid, we had a garden in my backyard. Huge Garden. It was probably like a quarter of an acre and we'd grow like pumpkins and carrots and corn. One year we grew giant Pumpkin's I'm so jealous cause like this one thing I want, I've never cut my own grass because both places I've lived in this place that I have now has no land. It's just downtown Nashville. I have a concrete yard. The only land that has is beneath the foundation. Yeah. And then the place I lived before my studio in Alabama, it was on 10 acres, but the landlord cut the grass with a tractor.

So like I have no responsibility, but I also have never had a place to be able to plant a garden. Yeah. So I grew up with a garden and there was a lot of benefits to that side. Note on that story real quick. We grew giant Pumpkin's. One year the Pumpkin's were over a hundred pounds and we made a jack-o-lantern for Halloween out of one of these pumpkin's. And we made it. And then when my parents weren't looking, I went under the front porch where we put it and I lifted the lid off and I climbed completely inside of it and put the lid back on. And it was like one of the coolest things I've ever done as a kid. Loved it. Wow. But one of the kind of like really important moments in my life was we were learning about gardening and our garden. And I forget what my mom or my dad, but I was really into carrots.

I love carrots. And the carrots were starting to sprout up and my parents were teaching me about weeds. That is a carrot. That's a baby carrot right there. So don't pick that. But that thing next to it, that's a weed. You don't want the weeds. You do want the carrots. So you want to pull the weeds and leave the carrots. I think this mindset shift is sort of the same when you begin to identify these different mindsets and start to recognize that one is bad, this one is good. You start to notice that in your own life and be like, oh, this happened 10 seconds to go in the podcast for me. Or Brian was saying something. I was like, oh gosh, I did have it scared that was a weed. Uh, I had been thinking in a bad way. So I think that's the benefit of learning about these different mindsets.

And another thing is I think if you just heard what Chris is talking about, how he had that Aha moment of just having a scarcity mindset moment. I think a lot of it comes down to who we associate ourselves with. We've talked about this so many times in the podcast, but if you surround yourself with people that are absolutely toxic, you are going to, as a byproduct, be a much more toxic person. It's so hard to break out from your social circle. Weeds beget weeds if you don't pick them. They have babies and those babies have babies, so I don't remember what episode we talked about this in the past, but we have talked about in the past how to surround yourself with better people, what to do with the people in your life that you shouldn't really have in your life and how to kind of assess your circle.

I don't know what episode that was. I don't know if you've even had a full episode about this, but it's somewhere in the past 95 apps. I love that concept that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. So for me, I am a combination of Alison Graham, Brian Hood and Andy j pizza. I was, I say Andy j pizza has gotta be in that list and to some regard to a lesser degree cause I don't like share an office with them, a house with them or a podcast with them. I've got a friend, Brandon Reich and another friend John Zapping and another friend Collin Rigsby. All awesome dudes. And we hang out and they normalize awesomeness for me. Yes, exactly. And it's really hard, especially as an entrepreneur. Like I had dinner with Sean last night, hopefully it doesn't mind me mentioning this, but he was just saying how it was great to be around.

He had lunch with Trevor yesterday or coffee with Trevor, my a friend and cofounder own file pass. He had lunch with him and Sean was just like, man, it was so good to be able to sit down and just talk business with you and Trevor All day, you know? Because he's like my circle in where I'm from up in Canada, land Vancouver. I think it's just so hard to find people to connect with it, care about business, because when I talk about business to my friends, their eyes just kind of glaze over. So it's not just mindset, it's anything that you have interest in. If your circle is not interested in it, it's really hard to foster growth in those areas. With the guys I'm coaching, I've been calling that entrepreneurial loneliness that can be very lonely to be an entrepreneur, especially when everyone around you is like, why don't you just go get a job at the bank?

We all got jobs at the bank. Why are you taking this crazy risk? But anyways, yeah, entrepreneurial loneliness is real and I'm sure some of you listening to the podcast that there's been a little bit of a bitter sweetness thing happened where you've been like, oh, I'm growing awesome. Learning how to grow a business, and some of my friends think that's dumb and I'm processing. Yeah. Well, let's move on to the next one, Brian. What's the next positive mindset? Next positive mindset in our list is the gratitude mindset. I'd say this is probably one of the ones I struggle with the most. Define a gratitude mindset. I would say gratitude mindset has a lot to do with finding the silver lining in a situation, and the opposite of that is you're focusing on the negative of like, hmm, this thing happened and I'm only gonna focus on the bad aspect of it.

But there's probably a good aspect to it as well, and I'm trying to think of like a good, like folksy story about this for you guys, but nothing's coming to mind immediately. If I'm looking at the negative mindset list from last week's episode, I'd say the closest one to this is probably the victim mentality where we talk about always being the victim. I think the gratitude mindset is where you focus on not the bad stuff having in your life, not all this stuff that people have wronged you in. It's actually focusing on the good things that have happened and being grateful for those things. So a good example from my own life, I'm thinking of one now is I was diagnosed with add as a teenager and my takeaway, thank God from that was I have add and I'm more creative than most people as a result of my quote unquote disability.

The flip side of that would be, I've got any dean, I just can't focus, so like I need people to help me. Exactly. The other thing is with a gratitude mindset, I will never regret hanging out with someone who's just constantly thankful and has gratitude for everything that's happened to them or have anything that's someone who shows gratitude. That's a person you want to spend more time with. I used to have such a bad issue with complaining to the point where God bless them, my friend Trevor, this is years and years ago, this is probably five, six years ago, set me down. I was like, dude, you need to learn to stop complaining about everything. You'll complain about the service at a restaurant or complain about the food. You'll complain about the wait in line somewhere, your complaint about anything and no one wants to hang around the type of person who constantly complains about everything in every scenario that it takes all the joy out of everything.

So if anything, I really think just having a gratitude mindset is going to make you a better person to hang around and be much more attractive friend for people. I think if you struggle to make friends, this could be one of the issues you have is if you're a negative person, people just don't want to be around you. We talked about this in the podcast. I forget which episode and I'm not going to tell you which one, cause we're probably not gonna remember, but there's a story about him. I remember you might about George Lucas and star wars and how Luke Skywalker at k, Mark Hamill got in a car wreck and got a face scar. George Lucas was able to be like, we can make this work. I think we can make the story better by making the scar makes sense. There's kind of a gratitude mindset slash like a macgyver ism. One of my favorite shows as a kid is mcgyver and macgyver a played by Richard Dean Anderson, fellow alumni of the Ohio University, Athens,

Ohio where I went, he was on the show and he was sort of like a secret agent, but like the opposite of James Bond and that James Bond had lots of toys like lots of tools he could use in the field. Macgyver had no tools other than some duct tape, some chewing gum in some cases and a Swiss army pocket knife, which I've got my little Swiss army pocket knife, the same one he had behind me. It's one of my favorite things and you put him in a situation and he'd be like, Oh, I'm going to solve this toxic chemical radioactive leak with chocolate bars. He would just, that's an actual episode and he would find ways to solve these crazy problems with like, yes, we have chocolate. Chocolate can cancel out acid, which means I can fix this problem. Thank God we have chocolate. That abundance mindset, that gratitude mindset that macgyver had was so inspiring to me as a kid to be like, Huh, boy, he can really solve any problem by using what limited and scarce meager resources he has available to him and he doesn't like freak out.

He solves problems. That's dope. So I would honestly, I would challenge people to look at your life, look at your choices you've made. Look at the people that are surrounding you. Look at the result of the life you've built so far. And I can promise you almost in every case you're going to find so much to complain about. Don't find the things in your life that you can actually have gratitude for, something that you can be thankful for. And if you can focus on the good and stop focusing on the bad. This is really the steps towards practicing your gratitude mindset. Yeah. For instance, when the show macgyver got canceled, I could've been really bummed. I could have thought it was really bad, but I got excited because he got a new role and stargate SG one on the Scifi channel and I watched every single episode of that in college and it was awesome. Richard Dean Anderson, what are you gonna do? What a nerd.

The nerdiest part of me is how well versed I am in the stargate universe. Uh, weird flex, but cool man. Try me. No, I don't want to. Yeah, don't, I'll, I'll crush you Brian. Wow. Okay man. Well, uh, on that regard, let's move on to our next mindset here. And that is the growth mindset. This is actually the exact opposite of what we talked about last week. The fixed mindset. Chris, do you want to talk about what the growth mindset is? Give people a quick overview. Well, I'm not very good amount of talking about mindsets. You know, it's, I don't think I could because it's just not something I'm good at. That's the fixed mindset. Mrs. Jones told me in fourth grade that I was bad at math. So I still believe to this day that I'm bad at math. The growth mindset is, pardon my French. Fuck you, Mrs. Jones. I'm going to get awesome at math. That's a growth mindset. I don't care what you have to say. I'm going to go do my thing, and that's rock and roll, man. Yeah. Growth Mindset is basically not accepting your limitations. It's not having this mindset that I

can only go so far in this skill and I can't go any higher. Growth Mindset is saying, if I put in the work, I can actually break through this self-imposed ceiling. I will say there's very few things in our lives that are fixed. I'd say your height is, or probably a fixed thing, you can't do a lot past puberty to really improve your chances for getting taller.

That's next week's episode. Ways to get [inaudible]

taller. You can figure that out. It'd be a lot of people, but when it comes to a certain skills and abilities and even mindsets, a growth mindset is the better approach because there are very few things that you cannot improve in your life.

So one of the other aspects of this growth mentality, this growth mindset is trying to find ways where someone's complaining about something. There's an attitude that part of your personality or part of what you're into is lame or is not good, and finding a way to make it work. This growth mentality, this is subtly related, but I think important to bring up. I'm thinking more about like elementary school from the quote I just had a minute ago. Was Ms. Jones actually a teacher you had? No, I should've said Mrs. Newton Fifth Grade. Oh my gosh. Did she give me hell? And one of the things Ms. Newton would have said an awful lot as well as all my other teachers is he talks too much. Same here, look at me now. You crazy old coots. I'm a podcaster.

We literally do this. I wouldn't say for living, we haven't really monetize this podcast. Maybe we will in the future, who knows? But we talk a lot. Videos, podcasts, interviews. We're on. This is a vital part of our businesses. While we haven't monetized the podcast, we do have other businesses filed past.com bounce butler.com the six figure home studio. I have courses I sell. Chris has Chris Graham, mastering.com he does mastering services. Chris does coaching. We talk a lot. So I think that's honestly, that's probably closer to the, what would that be?

I think that we just totally made a mistake. That's a separate mindset. I don't know what you would call that, but it is this idea of like someone said something was bad and you took them at face value. It's kind of a fixed mindset of like, oh, talking, you shouldn't talk. You should sit in your chair and be quiet and listen.

That's actually, yeah, so I think it is part of the growth mindset. If you have a fixed mindset, someone tells you you shouldn't talk, you talk too much, then your mindset is, well that's something that's wrong with me. A growth mindset is looking at something that someone has dubbed a problem that you have and you've actually found a way to make it a strength in your life. So that's another part of growth mindset versus fixed mindset. You're taking a problem and actually turning it into a power in your life. So look at all the things in your life that people tell you that is something wrong with you. And then think about ways that you can actually use that as honestly an unfair advantage in your business. If that's a strength you have, you can turn that weakness into a strength in some way, shape, or form.

I think we should call that the macgyver mindset. That's what my guy ever would do. He would take, you know, what appeared to be a weakness or, or didn't appear to be a strength and he would turn it into a way to save the day. And there's just something so cool about that. I'm obsessed with that idea, the macgyver mindset. Oh, I'm so happy to put that.

That's awesome. I don't know how to actually spell macgyver. They're pretty hard. Thanks Google. So we have the abundance mindset. We have the gratitude mindset, we have the growth mindset. So what are some ways that we can actually foster a growth mindset?

One of the biggest ways and Kudos for you guys listening to us ramble on and on about businesses. If you're listening to this podcast, you probably have a growth mindset. It's true. If you found this podcast and I'm like, ah, whatever. I'm just not good at business stuff and I'll never will be like, you probably weren't interested in this show to start with.

That's true. So I would say this is probably not the area most people struggle with.

Yeah, you're listening to his self-improvement podcast and you're probably in that regard, don't have a fixed mindset. You probably have a growth mindset, and that's massively powerful because here's the thing, if you have a growth mindset, you heard like your school teachers talk about like, you know

you're special, you can do what ever you want. If you put your mind to it. All of this is true.

If you have a growth mindset, if you have a growth mindset, you can do whatever you want and you can look at people throughout history and look at their growth mindset and say, yeah, holy crap. That was the magic being there. Perfect example is Elon Musk. He took on big banking and said, I'm going to make an Internet bank. Long story short, paypal, and everyone was like, you're crazy. That'll never work out. It's too much regulation. Uh, you know, you're not smart enough. It's not going to work. Hey, worked a lot. And then afterwards he was like, I really want to like send rockets into outer space. And eventually Mars and everyone was like, you're crazy. And there's a great story in his biography about, he was at a party reading a moldy Russian rocket book, a book about rocket science in Russian with mold on it. He was like sitting off by himself and that's such an amazing growth mindset that Elon Musk was like, Nah, Nah, Nah. I'm going to make this work. I'm going to acquire the knowledge, wisdom, and skills to be awesome at this. Oh, guess what? Space x number one rocketry company in the world and better probably than any other government in the world at sending Rockin citizens

face at this point. I want to point out two things. One. Your old teacher voice sounded like Pinocchio and too little fun fact. The COO of paypal has a, a venture capitalist firm that just invested 2 million in tip sound stripe. I read about that. Yeah, so if you go back to episode 36 where we interviewed Travis Darell, he's the CEO of sound stripe, and then again Trevor, the CTO, one of the co founders of sound stripe was episode 71 so Kudos to them. They actually raised 6 million total, but that was just one of their investors. That same venture firm has invested in space x as well, so that's a some fun business to be associated with.

You would think we're sponsored by sound stripe. We're not. We're a customers of sound.

I actively pay yearly for sound stripe because I use it so much. Yeah, I just wrapped like a week ago. It's stuff. Yup, and they're our friends, so we're going to spread the word about them all. You know what? Let's do a quick add spot for sound stripe. If you need royalty free music, go to sound stripe.com they have an unlimited plan. You pay monthly or yearly flat rate and you have access to their full library. Thousands and thousands of songs. Almost all of it made right here in the heart of the music city, Nashville, and it's fantastic. We use it all the time, so for videos, advertisements, radio, TV, all that sort of stuff. Just use it. They have Tesla as customers. They have whole foods, they have apple, they have a lot of big customers using it. Their music's good and the music's good. That's the big selling point.

Yeah. A lot of my friends are composers or engineers. My old personal assistant actually is on staff, salaried engineer at sound stripe. How many guys mixing music do you know that are on salary? That's a good gig. Seriously. That's funny. I was talking to our friend Brian who is a composer. He's one of the composers. Yeah, yeah. I just set him up with a bounce butler. Fun Story. Mid Roll ad for bounce butler. Hey, there we go. Brian composes about a lot of songs each month for sound stripe and then he has to bounce stems for mixing and that takes a lot of time and bounce Butler is now helping him do that. That's great. So sound stripe is powered by bounce butler, so you're trying to claim one day. All right, so let's move on to the final mindset on our list here. Positive mindsets to foster in order to grow your business and honestly have a better life.

This is not just going to help your business, it's going to help you enjoy your life a lot more. This final one, honestly, is probably one of the most favorite on this list because it's a book we've talked about all the time, but this is the go giver mindset. Brian, what would you say is the number one book on mindset shift that you've ever read in your entire life? I could say the go-giver now because it's appropriate for the go-giver mindset and it's a great book, but I'm not a person you can ever ask what my favorite anything was. I don't have answers for favorites. We're not the same in that regard. I have many times been accused by all of my friends that more than anyone they know I use to purlative so see what I just did there? Yeah. Yes. I constantly, I'm like, this is the best pat tie I've ever had. This is the best pair of glasses I've ever owned. That's just kind of my personality. Every time you get a new pair of headphones, it's the best pair of headphones you've ever had. Stay tuned for more on that. Okay. But the go giver minds is Great. The go-giver is a book that I just think all of you should read. Just go out and buy it. We probably should have like an Amazon affiliate link to give you, but we don't. I actually do.

I should too. But the go-giver, it's short. What does that like 90 pages like? You can probably read it in an hour and it's amazing. And the go-giver mindset, Brian, you tell us what is the go-giver mindset? So first and foremost go by the book. It's a parable. So this is a great kind of book for audible as an audio book cause they're just talking to a story. It's easier for your brain to stay hold. They're not giving me a bunch of technical information. The go-giver mindset is doing things in your life, in your business, in your surroundings, and never having a condition set to it. Never asking me what's in it for me. A go giver will do things for other people that they don't see any immediate benefit for themselves in it, and this has a bunch of effects, a bunch of side effects, one of which is you're going to have more people that like you.

Second of all, it builds reciprocity for people and if you have a mindset of just always saying yes to people to an extent, by the way, that can get toxic as well. If you say yes too much to where it is a detriment to your life. There's a different between saying yes to every project and saying yes to serving people. It's the opposite of being selfish basically as someone that has probably a scarcity mindset in a fear mindset, every single project they take on, every single task you take on every single person they help, they're not doing it unless there's something in it for me, I'm not going to help you unless there's something in it. For me, the go-giver mindset is I will help you just because I want to, just because I want you to succeed. So a go giver mindset, it's kind of a combination of an abundance mindset, a growth mindset, macgyver mindset.

You'll do whatever you can to help people, and again, the result is very intangible. It's hard to put a measurable result on the Go-giver Mindset. Here's what I tell people. If you have this sort of approach to life, you're going to have a 10 x return on what you put in. It may not be 10 x every time, but in aggregate, amongst all the things you do and all the people you help, it will be a 10 x return as long as you're not doing it for that 10 x return. So it's this really weird. Has to be pure. Yeah, it's so strange. But Chris, do you have any stories or any thoughts on the go giver mindset? Yes. And before you get into that, I want to point out that you people can't see this because Chris and I are in video chat here.

Chris has taken to just carrying around a baseball bat and just swinging around his office as we're talking on calls now. I like it. It's really weird to watch. It is weird. But yeah, I have this baseball bat that was my grandpas and I, I've had it since I was like five and uh, I brought her to the office and I like walk around and swing it all day. Lately it's been really fun. It gives me something to distract my add with so I could be like, hey, did look bad. Okay. The rest of you focus on work and it's really works really well. But go giver. See my add is being diverted towards the bat. Now I can stay on focus, stay on focus. Anyways, this book is thinner than my pinkie. It's a very thin book. We've talked about it before, but my story with this book is I read an article in business insider that was an interview with Graham Cochrane from before when I had met Graham Cochrane and Graham Cochrane credited it as like the most important part of his business and the go-giver mentality is this idea. It's basically Karma. If you send good vibes out in the world, if you serve people, good things will happen to you, which it just sound kind of stupid and hippy. But as a super logical person, I have seen this played out too many times in my own life to not believe it. Well, and here's the thing, you know Karma is like a Buddhist thing I think. I don't really know, but this idea that like if you do good, good will happen to you

on Jesus Christ says that the greatest is the last and the servant of all. So whether you're a Christian, a Buddhist, or just a person who reads business books, this is a great life philosophy. A good example for my own life was when my business started to really take off. Probably 2011 2012 is when stuff started to really hit for me. I thought, oh my gosh, I have all this business knowledge. I've read all these books. I'm on them. So humming along, I'm doing great and I'm going to keep all of it secret. I won't tell anyone of the business wisdom which I have acquired. That was kind of one of your fears come on the podcast, wasn't it? Yeah. It was like, well, what if I tell a bunch of people about all my business secrets and their competitors? They're mastering engineers and then they take my clients scarcity mindset right there, but luckily I had read the go giver at that point and this idea of, well, just tell everybody for free. That doesn't make a lot of business sense. Right? Except that my business is growing at least three times faster than it ever had at any point before. Mostly because we give away this stuff for free on the podcast.

Yeah, so the go-giver mindset is kind of like an offshoot from the abundance mindset. I'd say the abundance mindset is a pretty broad thing, but the go-giver mindset is a very specific part of that and so that's why we kind of made it a separate thing. In this episode, people are, I want to say inherently selfish. That sounds bad, but people tend to look out for number one and that seems to be the advice that gets thrown around more than anything in the world. I just checked out the audio book on my phone. It's literally a three hour audio book. It's two hours, 54 minutes. If you speed that up to 1.5 which is what a lot of people listen to this podcast at, that is literally like a two hour episode of a podcast, which is doable.

Side Note, if you are a reader, if you like reading, you probably read a lot faster than you can listen. Yeah, I don't, well,

I'm one of the weird people that is like a slow reader. I started a fantasy series. I'm a big fantasy reader by the way. I don't know if you knew that stuff. I've read like mega series, like 10 1213 book series will a time I read the whole game of throne series. Interesting. Real nerdy stuff. I read real slow. So like I'm on the book three of the Miss Bourne series right now and I started on my honeymoon in March. So these are like 800 page books I read every night before I go to bed. And this is how long it takes me. Yeah, so there's a little nerd alert. If we ever have a second like alarm, it'll be the nerd alert and maybe James will throw it in there. Anyways, I'm a slow reader so I actually can get through content faster. If I listen to it, it's better for me if I actually watch a video at like two and a half x speed.

So whatever it is, pick your poison. It doesn't really matter how you listen to this book or read this book. The point is that you do consume the content in some way, shape, or form, and then practice the content because some of the stuff, like people don't practice a go-giver mindset because they haven't read the go-giver yet. They don't know what the abundance mindset is. They don't know how to be generous or why to even be generous. Why would you share something with your competitor? It just doesn't make sense logically, but I think whenever you have a big mind shift moment, which maybe this podcast episode, it might be that book. I don't know. Until you have that big Aha moment, it's kind of like the entrepreneur's spark until something lights that little flame in your heart that you want to be an entrepreneur. It's really hard to build a business and I think it's the same way with this mindset stuff. Yeah, this is such powerful stuff.

When I read go-giver, I like, I grasped, I was like, this is going to change everything. This is huge. I don't know why I had such an unhealthy outlook about hoarding my ability to serve others or my knowledge or whatever, but you know, and this book is so effective, we could go on and on and on about it forever, but there's a couple reasons I think it works. These are theories. One, you look at Jesus talking about this, the Buddha talking about this, there's some element of like it's part of the base code of humanity. I think there's something about the way that humans are wired. It's compatible, very, very compatible with this. I think another reason this works is it keeps you top of mind for a lot of people. You know, my decision to join you, Brian, on this podcast, um, has kept me top of mind every week for thousands and thousands of professional audio engineers

as a mastering engineer. That's pretty nice. I like that. That's helped with my business. I will also mention though that this podcast probably wouldn't be very effective for you if you had a non go-giver scarcity mindset and didn't share all of your dirty secrets with us. This is true. Yeah. If I were less honest as it were, yeah, it wouldn't be as effective. Or if you held a lot back from like the, Oh I can't talk about that cause that's my secret sauce. If you were like that, people would probably hesitate to work with you a little bit more. That's true. Granted there is some secret sauce. There's some stuff I've held that really whoa have killed us. No, I don't hold back anything. That's the thing. I feel like there's a little scarcity mindset still in there, Chris.

Well, I was talking to a guy that I'm going to be doing business coaching with. I think today we'll see if it materializes. This one guy I've been talking to, and I mentioned this to him, I was like, you know, Brian and I get to understand our mass market guys. We're trying to make content that appeals to a lot of people and to help a lot of people, but there's a lot of stuff that we could talk about that only applies to a small subset. And so inevitably whenever you're doing any kind of coaching, you're helping curate the buffet of advice that we have, but you're also like, why don't we wouldn't mention this in the show because it doesn't apply to that many people, but to you it does this tactic or this technique or this philosophy is really important. Or if you're like me, there's probably some gaps in what you understand and, and what you know, and having a coach is really useful to address those issues specifically despite and be like, Oh, you struggle with this one thing, or you don't know this one truth, or you Andy j pizza has a, he uses all the time creative mythologies.

You believe a creative mythology that is just that a mythology. It's not real. An example of that could be like, oh, you can't make good quality audio using plugins on a computer. You have to use analog gear. That might've been true 10 15 years ago, but it definitely is not true now. Yeah, tons of hit records completely in the box. So there's plenty of stuff for us to talk about that doesn't make good fodder for a podcast. Sure. We're kind of off topic, but the go-giver mindset's incredible and that book is awesome. If you're one of these guys, let's listen to the podcast. You're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just tell me how I've grown my business. I'm not going to read anything. Are you kidding me? Books are terrible. I went to school. That's a fixed mindset. Yeah, it's a fixed mindset. My first reaction when I finished my first business book, which was the four hour work week, was holy crap, why didn't my teachers tell me that books could be useful?

Which is hilarious because it's almost the only thing they told me, you know? Yeah. I was the guy back in my early twenties that would brag about not having read a book since high school. You know, books are so don't need to read a book. Open to busy vaping. That's a fixed mindset. I used to have a massive fixed mindset back then. Yeah, totally. Same thing. So the reason I bring this up with go-giver is that this is the easiest first business book to read. It's very, very easy because it's a story and stories are fun and it's not so much like first you're gonna want to access your mx restaurants and your DNS settings on your domain registrar. It's not stuff like that. It's a great story that you'll love and can apply to your life. It kind of like when we went back to episode 84 and 85 where we talked through that ebook from the freshbooks founder, the breaking the Time Barrier Free Ebook pdf that we went through as a podcast together with our community.

Those two episodes are awesome, but that book is so good because it is a parable. It's a story based book. It's not a bunch of tactical information. It's like here is a fake scenario that feels real and because it feels real, I can place myself in the shoes of that person way more easily than I can another article on like the top five things you need to do in your business. So that's the thing you've got to keep in mind with business books and we're kind of off topic again, but there are multiple kinds of business books. There are what are essentially textbooks that are super tactical, like first do this and then do that and then make sure this setting is set to off, blah, blah, blah. Then there are books that are parables, the e myth revisited as a parable that go-giver is a parable.

There's a whole lot of other ones that are a story and they sneak the truth in by hooking you with the great story, but there's no tactical stuff in there. Two books that Brian and I love that aren't necessarily super applicable to us as an audience would be automatic customer and built to sell by John Warrillow. We're both obsessed with those books. Those are not parables though. Oh, wait, note built the sells a parable. Automatic customer is not. Yeah, I heard automatic customer. I'm able to sell it as a great parable book. Automatic customer is not, so I just googled real quick business parable books to see what came up because why not? We're here. We're way off topics. I want to go here first one, go give her the second one. Richest man in Babylon. Great Book. Okay. It's kind of written in old English show.

It's a little jarring but you kind of get used to it. Especially the audio book built the cells on the list and the rest of these I have never heard of is the EMF on there. You must not on there. Actually this is just like Google's results at the top. So that's hilarious because e-myth has probably sold more copies than any other small business book ever. Yeah, with the exception, probably a four hour work week. They was like the only small business book in the nineties sort of, you know, it was like the only really big breakaway viral hit, but it's great. Anyways, we're way off topic, so yeah, we are. We are. Let's bring it home for you guys. The go giver mindset is the idea that serving other people and making that your priority ahead of all other considerations will eventually make you successful.

I completely endorse that and there's a piece of me that's like, that can't possibly be true, and another piece of me that's like, Bro, look around you. It's like you're living it and it fricking works, man. So experiment with this. Try doing something for somebody just to serve them with no plan on how to get paid for that. You know, obviously you don't spend the next month with the same guy, but like is there something you can do that would improve someone's life and it would serve them and then you have no plan to recoup on that. Maybe some of that takes you an hour. Try that, see how it feels and experiment with it. That's basically what the book says. Like the guy that's on this journey with this coach, he has a business coach and the book and he challenges him to start doing this on a small scale first.

And Man, it's so great. I freaking love that book, man. I'll say one more thing about this. If you make your entire life about you and nothing by you, that's a very unfulfilling life. And a lot of that is a result of not having a go giver mindset. So I really challenge people, make sure your life is not set up to only serve you, to only help you and screw everybody else. You know? Like if that's the life you live, that's a quick path to depression to be honest. Hmm. Yeah, that and you're probably not going to be good at art. You're going to have a hard life to be like, yeah, I'm just like share within my soul with my art. If like when I mix, I'm just trying to create this world and get away from me. This is mine. Like that's not going to work, man.

That's not, those two things are inherently incompatible. Music is so funny because it's kind of like you're showing off your beautiful soul, right? It's this idea of like this came from somewhere deep within me, this beautiful pure place that I don't nurture and that's full of cobwebs and stuff because I'm so selfish and self consumed. So moving away from that and this direction of like help people, help people, help people and figure out how to be the servant of all Mandy. That's some interesting stuff. It makes me nervous talking about it cause this is freaking plutonium like Nitroglycerin for your business. It is so freaking powerful. It's like crazy stuff man. It's not to be underestimated of all the things we've talked about

on the podcast. There's plenty of stuff that we talk about. All this advice buffet, all this advice buffet have with the go-giver, not with the go-giver. I mean I'm sure you can be successful in the short term by having essentially a bad attitude but being a dick about it, but a longterm sustainable success that can scale beyond your wildest dreams generally is going to come from being a go giver.

[inaudible]

so that is it for this episode of the six figure home studio podcast. There you have it. Four or five. I think I lost count. I think maybe we made went up halfway through four or five positive mindsets that you can nurture in order to grow your business. If any of those stick out at you as something that is particularly weak in your life, that is where you should start on this. Start nurturing that one and similar on the last episode, episode 96 if there's any one or two of those negative toxic mindsets that you feel particularly is your weak point, those are the ones you should work on eliminating first. Again, the 80 20 principle applies to all of this stuff. Focus on the 20% of the things we talk about that are going to get you to 80% of your results. Next week's episode is going to be a fun one.

We recorded that yesterday. I'm really excited about it and that's because yesterday as of the time I'm recording this outro yesterday, sound better.com which if you're not familiar with it, it's a platform that pairs up musicians with audio engineers and mixing engineers and producers and uh, all the like sound better was just purchased by Spotify for an undisclosed sum and that is going to bring up a lot of potential change in the music industry. The recording industry specifically, and I think there's a way that we as a community can potentially profit from an, at least in the short term, and there's a lot of stuff that we need to be worried about potentially in the future as well, related to this specific acquisition and the precedent that it sets. So that is coming out next Tuesday morning, bright and early at 6:00 AM we'll be talking about what that specific acquisition that Spotify purchased sound better. What does that mean for our industry and how can we profit from it and how can we protect ourselves as well. Super interesting stuff. Can't wait for you to hear it. That will be next Tuesday again at 6:00 AM until next time. Thanks so much for listening and happy hustling.

Oh.