The Skill That Separates Those Who Succeed From Those Who Fail

This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode 85

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

the six figure home studio podcast. I am your host Brian Hood, Aka the hostess with the most as Aka. I don't have anything else that rhyme, so I'm not that clever. I should've prepared some things before this. I'm the hostess with the second most is. Yeah, and my cohost is for the second most is Chris not wearing a purple shirt. Graham. Chris, how you doing today man? It's under the sweatshirt today. Oh, you've got a sweatshirt on? Yeah. I should actually wear a sweatshirt myself to simply because my new AC unit is just killing it right now. It's freezing in my house and it's like, you know, 85 90 outside. It's not too bad, but it's still hot outside.

I'm debating whether to make a joke about that being cool. Oh, I'm not going to make that joke.

She just did. No, I didn't. No, I didn't. Oh, okay. That's the safe way to make a bad pun joke right there is just to make it without making it all right. Yeah, so I'm thinking about making a pun and has something to do with this. It's the self-aware dad joke that's like a next level of dad joke that has just been invented today on the podcast. You heard it here first. Chris, have you been man and I before you answer, I already know the answer and anyone who's been following you on social media knows the answer. How have you been buddy?

Well, back to what you said a minute ago about that type of Pun joke being like an inception type pun joke. Well, here's how I've been last week Mr Andy Jay Pizza and I went to Hollywood. That's not Hollywood, Ohio. That's how I know California, California to interview one of the stars of the movie inception, Mr. Joseph Gordon Levitt.

I hope you didn't talk to him like that a single time under the whole time. And so it was awesome.

So like I went with Andy, Andy and I worked out a deal where he's going to be helping me with one of my businesses. Stay tuned for more details on that. It's gonna be awesome. And I showed up with the mixed spree that we've been talking about and set it all up and recorded an interview between Andy and Joseph. Gordon Levitt, Joseph Gordon Levitt. If you don't know, he's an a lister actor. He was in the movie inception. He was in one of my favorite TV shows of all time. Third red from the sun. It was great. Mixed Berry killed it. I'm not like, we took a sponsorship from them just for a few episodes because we are obsessed with their product, but it really was amazing to just be like, I press the record button and I have nothing to worry about. Not going to clip. Yeah. Not going to crash. And Joseph Gordon Levitt is not going to get mad at me.

Yeah. So the mix pre three being Hollywood approved because Joseph Gordon Levitt, also known as Jg l, I don't know if he's ever known is that he should be, he was recorded through the mixed [inaudible] and I assume no issues happened.

Zero. It was awesome to just be like, I'm going to calm down and not worry if anything crashes. Well,

I will say mine is still sitting on my desk with cord bundled up and I still need to hook it up, but I will report back as soon as I do. I promise. I'm just, I am such an anti gear nerd that I don't even want to set up brand new gear that I got sitting at my desk. It will happen and when it happens I will report back

in. The world will be right. Fantastic. Well, so here's what happens. So we hung out with Joseph Gordon Levitt. He was so cool.

He just seems like a cool dude. I just, I've always liked him and I don't even know him. Yeah, I really liked him a lot. He called me by name, which made me, made my heartbeat. Butterfly flies in your heart. I've been watching you since you were in the movies. Angels in the outfield back in the early nineties I forgot about that

man. Baseball movies from the 90s anyways, so he has a company called hit record that's a collaborative space where people come together and make stuff together. Pretty cool. Super Cool. His team, it hit record was incredible and here's where the story goes off the rails. Oh, we went out to lunch at a Russian dumplings place.

Just sounds like a bad idea. And here's the thing, like without any context, without knowing anything else. If you just told me I'm going to a Russian dumpling place, dumpling, sorry, I'm from the south dumpling Russian dumpling place in Hollywood, I'd be instantly on the defensive and say you shouldn't go there. That's not a thing you should do. Chris. We did. Whose choice was this by the way? Who is the one that said, oh, this is the place we got to go.

Cumulative thing. But we went there and they may have been the culprit or it may have been the Sushi I had on sunset strip later that night. Or random choice. Yeah. But Andy and I decided to go catch a comedy show at the comedy cellar and we saw like David spade and Crystal's Aaliyah. You got a star filled week in Hollywood, man. Yeah. There was just a whole bunch of like unbelievably famous comedians. All had like 15 minute sets. That's like one of my guilty pleasures is Joe dirt. Same. It's like one of my favorite movies ever. So I'm sitting there in the comedy club and I'm like, I feel funny. And uh, then later on that night, some things happened when I went to use the restroom. And then over the course of the next week probably had the same thing happen maybe a hundred times.

That's the most kind explanation of incessant diarrhea anyone's ever said on a podcast. I lost six pounds in seven days, dude.

We had to call the squad twice. I had to go to the hospital, I had to get pumped full of fluids. Oof. I contemplated my own mortality on several days occasions. It was a mind opening experience. I've never ever been anywhere close to that sick before.

Usually food poisoning is like 48 hours and you're done. I've had it before. It's sucks, but you get through it. I've never seen one lasts for this long and it actually put up a red flag to me because when I was in Europe in 2015 I ate some like questionable Shwarma in Budapest, just off the street. It's like a street vendor. Which street food? I love street for diving at anywhere. I ate a ton of free food and Italian while I was there and didn't get sick at all. But this gave me, I thought was just food poisoning. But no, it lasted two weeks. Oh, of that exact same thing you dealt with, except it wasn't food poisoning. It was, I guess you could call it a form of food poisoning, but it was a parasite, a parasite. And that's what I thought it was. And it wasn't that thankfully, or at least it wasn't at the time you got checked out for it. But I'm glad you're okay man. I know we missed the podcast episode last week and there shouldn't be a gap for any of our listeners, thankfully, because we banked these ahead of time, but I haven't got to talk to you in a while. I feel like,

yeah man, it was rough. It was definitely like there are moments when I was like delirious, like drunk. I don't drink. I never ever, ever, ever get drunk. So it was weird. Like I was with handy in Hollywood at our airbnb and I had to like knock on his door in the middle of the night and like ask for help because I was like, I could pass out at any minute. And then they call it the squad. And

what is the squad? You mentioned it a couple of times. I don't know what that even means.

Oh, we called nine one one. Wait, why do you call nine one one the squad? I've never heard this in my life. That's a good question. It might be like an Ohio thing. I don't think that's anyone else in the world says that accepted. That's also possible that yeah, they came in and I've never been dehydrated like that, but I was just like loopy and much funnier than normal. It was weird. And so to kind of like push through the story, it was a very educational week. I'd never been to Hollywood before. I had no idea what an awful place.

Oh yeah. It's a trash hauler and we're not just talking bad about it. Anyone in La, we'll say the same exact thing.

Yeah. If you're walking on the sidewalk on like the Strip in Hollywood, there's actually more gum than there is cement on the sidewalk. I believe it, man. So thinking about the type of person that's like chewing gum and it's like, you know what? I could turn my head and spit this into the curb or the grass or whatever, or even a garbage can or a garbage, I'm just going to spit this on the sidewalk where someone's gonna step on it. Like what? Who does that sums up Hollywood in a nut shell right there. Yeah, it does. I just like, I would not turn my head for the sake of any other human being. And there's more stories about how terrible Hollywood is, but frankly, there to PG 13 for this podcast of things that I saw. I can't wait to hear about this offer. Yeah. Oh, it's so gross. So anyways, I had an interesting week. Yeah. Somehow I flew home in the middle of this food poisoning. The flight home was actually pretty easy. So we called nine one one they got me in a bunch of pedialyte, started feeling much better. It got on the plane, got home and then crashed when I got home. And it was a, it was scary. My kids were freaked out cause it like, who's this guy that

looks like our dad that came home that doesn't know how to talk his daddy on drugs? That's what it looked like. I mean, it looked like I was very, very, very drunk and it was weird. It's one of those things, I'm sorry guys, we're almost done with this, but it was one of those things where I'd be like, oh, I'm fine. I'm fine, I'm fine. Oh, I think I'm going to die. Yeah. And you know, just like very, very quick changes. When I had that parasite it was, there'd be times where I just felt amazing. And then out of nowhere just, Oh, it's an emergency, I got to find a bathroom. Right. This absolute second, and I will just say this, I had a 1213 hour flight home from Germany through Iceland into Boston that I had to do in the middle of this because it was at the end of my trip that this happened. And I'll just say that my trip home was not smooth and I don't want to talk about anything else besides that. Let's change the subject, Chris. Okay. All right. So today's episode after that long rambling Intro, there's just so much we had to talk about Christmas too much we had to catch up on. And you know what, if people don't want to listen to us chat as friends, then if they can't listen to us at our worst than they don't deserve a set our best. But you can go straight to Hollywood.

Get it. Y'All. Cause like Hollywood's kind of like, oh, there it is. Today's episode is, I don't know how else to explain it. We'll have a better title than when I'm about to say, but today's episode is about delayed gratification and how that affects us as entrepreneurs, as human beings, as business owners, as audio engineer's his home studio owners, as men, as women, as humans, as bald and haired. It affects us all in very similar ways and we're going to talk about some different ways that pans out and why delay gratification is so damn important for us as business owners. Totally. I know this might not sound like the most interesting episode. I'm surprised that we've been able to say this so many times about so many episodes. This is a skill that if you do not possess, you will not be successful, period. Or at least not for long.

Yeah. You might have a flash in the pan of success, but you'll ruin it. Yup. It is one of those skills that without it, you don't have a shot. So that's, I think one of the fun things about this podcast is there's a lot of blind spots you could have. There's a lot of skills you could lack when you're trying to build a business, and this is just one of those ones where you gotta have it. You got to figure it out. You gotta lock it down. Just separates the men from the boys or the girls from the women or the rich from the poor. Yeah. This is like the great divide. If you cannot get this part right, you are severely limiting yourself and you're upside as an entrepreneur or really in any facet of anything you do ever in your life. I don't know how else to say how important delayed gratification is, and I think we talked about on the time on the podcast, one of Chris has Chris Isms as he likes to repeat over and over again like he's talking to himself from 15 or 16 years ago or this is an advice buffet.

Another one he likes to say a lot is we talk about being your future self's best friend and

every single time Chris says that that's exactly what we're talking about here is delayed gratification. Yeah. So there's a lot of ways that this plays in as we get ready to dive into this. But the whole being your future selves best friend is this idea that no matter what you're doing you are either borrowing from your future self, like depending on them or your helping your future self and the people who help their future selves the most are the most successful people. It's that simple. So this idea of delayed gratification is super interesting. So I want to get us started with a story. There was a study done a number of years ago about children and what would happen is the children, they got a bunch of children in this study and they, they brought them in one at a time and the scientists or whatever walked into the room.

This is put on by Stanford. By the way, this is a Stanford study. I'm probably gonna get some pieces of it wrong. So bear with me here and you can go look this up online if you want to read in detail, but the gist of the story, I'm sure you will get right Chris. And so the idea was a kid would walk in and they would put a marshmallow on a plate and they would say, here's the deal, Billy. And Billy was like, you know, three, four or five years old. If you can wait 10 minutes before eating that marshmallow, we'll give you a second marshmallow. We're going to leave the room. If you eat the marshmallow, that's the only marshmallow you get. And they ran this test again and again and again. And then they monitored those children throughout their lives. We're talking like decades, decades.

Yeah. And wanted to see if there was a correlation between the children who were able to exercise restraint and the children who weren't. And what happened was there was an astounding level of correlation between the kids who are able to delay gratification and the kids who were not, and the kids who were able to delay gratification were far more successful, made far more money. And the kids who were not able to do that didn't fare as well. So this is interesting and especially for me as a father, you know, this is something me and my wife think about a lot of trying to teach this skill of delayed gratification to our children. Lucky for us, this is something our kids had been pretty good at from a very young age and we've tried to as much as we can and still this idea of like, hey, if you learn how to wait you can get more marshmallows.

So we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about a whole bunch of different ways that this can impact you as a studio owner and hopefully this is helpful for you guys. Hopefully this is something where you guys can apply this and spot in your own lives if there are areas where you're not able to exercise delayed gratification. So I think you put it really well when you said you're either borrowing from your future self or your being your future self's best friend. And I think another way of putting it as either borrowing from your future self or you are investing in your future self. And that's really how this sums up. And I think that's a really good example to go to first is debt and investments. Yep. Because this is just something that's super easy for us to look at and pick apart and talk about when it comes to delay gratification. Because this is an example that all of us face in our adult lives. We all face one of two realities. One is

we take on debt, which is literally borrowing from your future self because that debt comes with payments and those payments have interest on it. And so you will always pay back more than you borrowed. So you are forcing your future self to work harder in the future so that you can experience something now that you could not afford to pay for. And that in a nutshell is the epitome of not exercising restraint, not being your future self's best friend. And this is why I'm so against debt, Chris. Now we're talking before the episode started about debt in general because this is something that's been a huge part of Chris's year as knocking out all of his debt. And I just think that in all areas except for maybe a home, I think debt is a terrible, terrible idea. You know, you're welcome to speak into this Chris because you probably have an alternative opinion to me, but I just hate debt.

Well, I have migrated more towards your position. You know, I've talked about this on the podcast in the past, but I like many people ran my business on debt. So I would try to make investments with my debt that would speed up the growth of my business and which on paper, which is interesting and I want to go down this rabbit hole, but on paper, fueling your business has growth with debt, makes more sense because of something called leverage, which we're not going to get into, but that's on paper. And what happens on paper rarely pans out in reality. And that's kind of what you experienced. Well, I was lucky it worked for me. I was able to dramatically speed up my business has growth. That isn't to say I didn't make a ton of mistakes and I wouldn't do a lot of it differently, but I have begun to share your belief, maybe even more radical than what you believe.

This idea that it's not my right to borrow from my future self. My future self isn't mine. And so as I've been chewing on that, I would say there's only a few places or debt. Makes Sense. I would say definitely buying a house is one of them. And I would say education, um, is another one, not 100% of the time. You know, a bad education for debt or an education that won't make you more money is really, really silly. But you know, when I hired Graham Cochran is my business coach. I used some debt to do that. I didn't have cash in the bank at the time to pay his fees, but it was a great move. I'm really glad I did that. So I would say that there are some occasions when debt is appropriate. I want to push back on this a little bit though.

B, go ahead. Go ahead. I talk about this with schools all the time, how our education model is completely erect and is going to implode at some point in the next decade. Agreed. And it's unsustainable and it's a bunch of bullshit, but that doesn't mean that education is bad. It just means that the way we're funding education right now is absolutely absurd, especially cause it's just being fueled by debt and the prices are skyrocketing and I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole, but I will say that the only reason debt feeling your business worked out for you, which I would even argue against because you at the start of this year, you had a lot of debt that you had to now get rid of. That to me doesn't sound like it's working out. I know it worked out, but there was side effects to that that were negative, but the only reason it worked out for you is because you had delayed gratification than other areas of your life.

Yeah. And there was a really good conversation in the six figure home studio community where somebody was like gassing, which is a nerdy audio term for gear acquisition syndrome. They just turned into a verb. They wanted to acquire a piece of gear and they were talking about how this piece of gear just was so much better. It's like some monitors, some expensive studio monitors and how they really wanted them and they heard them and everything sounded so much better on them and, but there were like two or three grand and he wanted to go into debt for him. And everyone was like, yeah man, that's the most important part of your chain. Go for it. And I left a comment, and this sums up my views on debt substantially. Debt itself can be a good thing if used properly. The problem is the type of person that goes into debt to fund their gear or something else.

That is a lack of delayed gratification. That is a sign of someone who is going to not have delayed gratification in other things in their life and their business. So in your case, Chris, you're freak of nature. You, I won't even say it was a delayed gratification thing, it was actually a strategic move using debt to fund your business and there's some pros and cons with that and there's a lot of danger that comes with that, but it worked out for you because you are such a good friend of your future self. You are your future self's best friends. Whereas someone who's buying gear with debt, likely that type of person is going to have other areas that they're struggling with. Delayed gratification. So it's not across the board but it is a strong, strong indicator that that type of person is going to be their future self's worst enemy. And that's why I'm so adamant against debt and almost every area.

I like where you're going with that. What you're saying is that if you are good at being your future self's best friend than debt is something you could consider. If you have a bad history of screwing your future self debt is going to be a very bad choice for you. And there's sort of like a maturity thing there of trying to figure out what your inclinations are and whether to explore that. I would say if it's education that will be profitable, that that debt is a good choice and we use audio school as an example all the time. Well let me just say this though, is the type of person that is not willing to save money,

delay their gratification to purchase that education. They are likely not the type of person who will use that education to their benefit. That's kind of where I'm at on that stance.

Yeah. And so we use audio schools and example on this. A $70,000 student debt bill on audio school for fail sale. Yeah. Unless it's going to help you get customers and clients quickly. Not a good call, I would say. Well one thing to note about

that is this isn't quick side tangent. My hatred for fail sale, which I'm not going to say their name because they might sue me. I don't know how this works. My hatred for fell sail university,

I believe it's pronounced soul fail, fail.

Ah, either one. So fellows, great to solo fail university. My hatred for them is for people who are going for audio engineering degrees to run a freelance recording studio. If you are going for like film or TV or some other like large industry that has actual jobs, then it might make more sense, but I'm going to go out of that right now cause that's a conversation for a different day. I just wanted to make my piece on that subject, but back to the dead thing. You're talking about funding, education with debt. You were continuing on that.

Yeah. I'm a big believer that the best investment you can possibly make is in yourself and because the best investment you can make in yourself is the best investment you can make.

Because

was that that often a reasonable, I wouldn't go, you know, $1 million in debt for something like that on the off chance that you will learn the skills that you need to make that million dollars back. But I'm so big on coaching. I think that's one of the most important purchases anyone can make. This isn't a pitch. I'm actually not taking any more coaching students right now. I'm full up until further notice. Nice. Oh my gosh. I am just, if I could go back and preach at my younger self from 16 years ago, I would be like freaking get a mentor, get a coach, find somebody who has market skills and by market skills I mean like knows how to take their skill and make money with it consistently. I would say that some of the most important investment you can make books. We've talked about this in the past. Would I go into debt to buy some of the books we've recommend? You Bet your ass

as I would. You shouldn't have to because it's like 12 it's 12 bucks. If you, you can't afford the books. There's a whole other underlying issue and I think we should probably move into that cause this whole episode isn't just about funding education or gear. There's a lot to delay gratification. I don't want to sound too self righteous here with that because there's the danger in it. I will say to even kind of push back on what you're saying is I think some people look at education as the silver bullet when it's not. I think education used wisely is the true thing and I think delayed gratification and the willingness to put the work in our tied hand in hand. Whereas borrowing from your future self, not being able to use delay gratification, that's the type of person that will spend money, even debt on education and then never do anything with it at all. You're not wrong there. I think there's an appropriate level of education for everybody. I spent a high five figure amount of money. No. Yeah, high five figure amount of money on education in my life. Maybe even six figures. I don't even know. I lost count because I was paying thousands a month for a coach. I have paid thousands and tens of thousands of dollars for courses and stuff. I spent a lot of money on education in my life, but I worked my way up to it and it, I funded it through my business

and you're a doer. When you learn something, you apply that into action. True. And I think that's one of the reasons coaching is so interesting. Again, not a pitch, but one of the reasons coaching is so interesting is because a coach is going to hold you accountable in a way that a book will not.

Yup. I spent five grand on a group coaching program at the end of last year and here we are in June and I'm still working almost every day on the tasks they've given me on my roadmap. That's how I handle that sort of investment. I'd take it seriously, but let's move on because I didn't mean to talk this much on education, but this is a huge part of it and you know, if you can invest in yourself in education and you can put the work in on what you learned, that is a great way to delay gratification because the work you're doing now and the stuff you're learning now is going to pay dividends in the future. But it takes a long time to get there. And that is the power of delayed gratification is experiencing that small tiny wins over a very long amount of time and then they add up to a very large percentage and we look into investing.

Let's just talk about retirement investing because this is an easy example as well. A friend of your future self as someone who has started investing in retirement at like age 18 or their early twenties very few people do that but when you get to age 60 you are so grateful that you did this consistently through your entire life cause now you are set for retirement. If you ever retire, which I don't want to talk about that I'm never going to retire, but you are set for your retirement years financially because you did that. The photo of your future self is the one who waits until you're age 50 to even think about starting to invest for retirement because now you're almost too far behind her, probably too far behind ever ketchup. There is not even just being your future self best friend when it comes to like investing in general as being your future self's best friend.

But it's also a timing thing where you're consistently doing it over a long amount of time and it feels like you're making no progress because what's 100 bucks a month going to do for your retirement or what's 20 bucks a month going to do for your retirement and who cares because it's, you know, 40 years from now. But being able to see that retirement account grow slowly but surely as you invest in that over and over and over again, the compounding interest slowly raises into to the point where you start seeing massive gains on that and that's really it when it comes to investing in yourself and experiencing delayed gratification in all areas of your business and all the stuff we're talking about. But let's move on here. We think we've talked about the investing thing enough. Let's talk about another area that delay gratification is extremely important. Chris, working on your business.

Yeah, we talked about this all the time. I think one of the single most important things that you can possibly do for your own success is to set aside time each week, specific time each week. For me, when I first started growing my business, it was Wednesday afternoons. I would take no client work Wednesday afternoons and I would work on my business, not for my business. That would mean I'd be building systems, I'd be doing marketing. I'd be finding ways to become more efficient, be finding ways to make sure that from that point on, my business was going to run more smoothly, which raised the number of songs I was able to work on in a given week, which allowed me to make more. So when you spend enough time working on your business, your hourly goes up. It's just that simple. Working on your business is tough and there's delayed gratification there because you could be working on client work, it could be working in your business, earning dollars today, but working on your business where you're putting work into systems and marketing and getting more leads in the door and all the things we've talked about in past episodes.

When you work on your business, you are able to start disproportionately earning more per hour in the future. So it's a payoff. Yeah. It's one of these amazing, amazing things. Or if you haven't experimented with just, I would say start with three hours a week, set aside three hours a week and if someone like wants to come over or if somebody wants to meet or someone wants to work with you, say, I already have a previous commitment from this time to this time, I can't, I'm busy. I'm scheduled. If you're not using a calendar already, that might be an even better place to start. Yeah, yeah, absolutely do that. You're out of your mind if you're not using the calendar to manage your time with your business. But when you start to do that and you start to see the power of building out systems and finding ways to make your business run well also when I would read business books initially it was during those three hours and when you start working on that, the level of your hourly wage starts to go up and up and up and up.

And I never would have imagined that what I make per hour would have been even possible when I started doing this. Like I never would have dreamed it. That is such a powerful thing, but it takes this discipline to say, I know there's some anxiety or on the projects I want to work on now. I know there's some anxiety about wanting to finish so I can get paid or wanting to finish so that I can get the next project started so that I can get paid. There's a lot of discipline there to say, no, it's not in future selves. Best interest. We wanted to be his or her best friend. We need to spend this time now so that we can benefit from it later. I think one of the

biggest struggles people have with especially this specific thing that we're talking about or really anything with delayed gratification is it requires that you do things that you don't want to do.

[inaudible]. That's the biggest issue with delayed gratification because we'd rather be watching another youtube tutorial on the newest hottest plugins from slate. Did you know that everything will change, Chris?

Everything will change on June 18th actually I think this podcast airs after everything has already changed so I wonder what has changed is that there are everything bundle. I don't know. Yeah, that's probably what it is. I just got like six emails from slate and all it just said was everything will change on June 18th by the time this episode airs. I will already know how the world changed. My guess is a type and there's nothing that special about it but maybe I'll eat my own words anyways. It depends on if they pay us or not. If I pass as a sponsor then I'll cut everything I just said about

or maybe I won't. Who knows. But yeah, you want to like look

through all of these interesting new plugins coming out or all this gear or another tutorial on how to do a compressor or whatever or whatever you consider the fun part of mixing, which is the thing you want to do all day every day. But the issue comes down to instead of doing things that are not going to push your business forward, that's not being your future self's best friend. You're being your future self's best friend is working on your business. That shit

that you don't want to do, but you know, it'll help yourself. And that's the biggest issue. Bingo. There's an addiction there. And that addiction, I think is to pat yourself on the back. People can't see you right now, but you're patting yourself on your shoulder. I'm patting myself on my back there. You got shorter ish back. And so for a lot of people I think they're like, Whoa, I gotta make a snare. Sound good right now so I can pat myself on the back, got to make a vocal sound nice and smooth and buttery so I can pat myself on the back. They just get so fixated on must earn accolades for self. And when you only do that, you have to have this transition and be like, you know when you should pat yourself on the back. It's not when you do good engineering work you should have a little bit, you should pat yourself on the back when your business is running more steady, when your business is more efficient and when you can be like awesome, I am that much closer to being sure I can do this for the rest of my life as opposed to like one time I made a snare sound good and then I had too much debt and not enough income and I went bankrupt and had to close my shop and now I do something I don't like for a living.

I think a big part of making yourself to these things, and we've talked about this on past episodes, is the accountability thing. Like we have [inaudible] which is our mastermind group. You have or at least have had business coach in your life. I have also had a business coach in my life. I have a coaching program that I'm a part of. There's some forms of accountability outside of my wife holding me accountable to certain things like, ah God, that's so cute. You're also my accountability Brian. We're accountability buddies. I know. I feel pretty good about that singing section right there. That was not as bad as I normally sound. Maybe James will throw auto tune on it. We'll see. It doesn't need auto tune Brian. Okay. Yeah. Um, yeah, some sort of accountability because if you don't have anything holding you accountable to something, like I'm even susceptible to not getting stuff done because my tendency, my default is to want to do what I want to do, not what I need to do.

And without any form of accountability I would just won't do it. And so like that's probably the biggest thing that's helped me be my future self's best friend is finding some form of accountability in my life. Yeah. Well and some of that I think is just finding someone that you can share your wins with. You know, for me when I smart can change fix area, who were my business mentors? They're both dentists. They're both wildly successful. Would you call him Dan Tours? My uh, they had a dog named molar, which I thought was just adorable. That's adorable. I love that. They're like all in on that dentist lifestyle. Yeah. His is probably worth more than my house. It was just so fun when I first, they held me accountable in many ways. It was so fun when I would go and you know, have a victory, have something that I had solved or a system I created and you know, we're head hit a certain level of income each month to be able to just go and talk to them about it and be able to be like I had when I had to win, how to win and then to get feedback of like them telling me things like raise your rates Chris.

And he'd be like, no, I'm too afraid. And it was just, it was a good thing. But anyways, I think we should move on. I think there's another section where you can be borrowing from future self. You can be not being your future self's best friend and that is fitness

or fatness depending on where you're at. Am I right?

There we go. Yeah, yeah,

yeah. Fitness is one of those things. It's like the elephant in the room and we've talked about it on the past on episode number 74 where we talk about our five favorite ways to prevent stress and anxiety. One of those ways is just taking charge of your health and fitness and this is another one of those areas that we almost every day we'll find, and I'm still guilty of this myself, I'm not perfect. I almost every day there'll be some sort of decision I have to make that as either I'm going to borrow from my future self a k I'm going to satisfy my sweet tooth today and my future self will pay for it. A Cam borrowing from my future self or I make the decision to be my future self's best friend and invest in my future self by working out or eating healthy or just doing something today that will be beneficial to my future self. And that is the constant struggle. But every single day I just try to make more good decisions than bad decisions. But people don't understand this from that perspective of delayed gratification because fitness food, these two things, just overall health are this exact same thing with delayed gratification. It's do you want that donut? Because you're going to love it right this second, but in like literally 12 minutes you're going to hit yourself.

MMM. There's a really, really great book by chip and Dan Heath called the sys of,

well I'd never heard of this one. I've heard of chip and Dan Heath. We talked about them all the time on the podcast for their other,

I have recommended this book to you. Really. It was in Nashville when we were hanging out for Summer Nam along long time ago. But anyways, this book is incredible at decisive is all these tools you can use to make better decisions. And I was just so smitten. I love those guys. And they sent me a prerelease. I like begged them, Hey, I've read all your books, I read lots of business books, please give me like a prerelease copy and I will write a review. And I did. So they sent me a copy before it came out and one of the best pieces of advice in that book, you're going to love this, Brian was called 10 10 10 I love any framework. I love frameworks. Yeah. Oh, this is such a great framework. And the idea is when you have a decision to make, you should say, how will I feel about this decision 10 minutes from now, 10 days from now and 10 years from now. That's so good. Oh, it's so good. So it just brings, if you're like, hey, should I buy this stupid vintage preamp well, how would you feel 10 minutes after you bought it? How would you feel 10 days after you bought it and how would you feel 10 years after you bought it and all of a sudden you're like, wow, 10 minutes, I feel great in 10 days,

buyer's remorse is going to sit in.

Yeah. Buyers or Marissa said in 10 years I'd be like, Dang it. Why did I buy that? I don't ever use it. Yeah. That's a really good framework. So yeah, that framework is really, really good. I A couple ideas. If you are thinking about treating your future self better, here's two pieces of advice I think you can apply. One, go to a really, really nice Vegan restaurant and order a meal are, they're very, very nice Vegan restaurants. Oh yeah. All the ones here in Nashville or like Kinda grimy. They're delicious. They're just kind of grind me. That's, I don't know, that's just kind of a Vegan way that I would say that's a good Vegan restaurant. If you have to wear a tie to a Vegan restaurant, that's not a real vegan restaurant. No, it's not. I take it back. There's one place in Nashville called an Avo or avocado.

Yeah, it's delightful and that's a nice one. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So if you're in Nashville, go to Avo in Columbus, Ohio. There's a place called commune that is amazing. I feel like there's a lot of negative connotations with the word commune. No, I dunno. It's always like culty sounding to me, but whatever it is a little culty sounding. There's another place called North Star cafe that has some really awesome vegetarian options and then right by me ty grill, there's some really, really great vegetarian tie options. There's a point somewhere here, Chris. Yeah, there's a point. Go to a really, really fantastic Vegan restaurant. The best you can find. It should have so many five star reviews and just get a really nice expensive meal and eat it. You probably have not had a meal with no meat and you probably don't know what it feels like.

I love this. You're like shoving your vegetarian agenda into this episode. I'm using my platform to advance my hippie ways, but this would be one of the things I would advise. Try that and see how you feel. Most people have never not had meat in a meal, and I would say, sorry, I'm like sort of evangelizing here. Our ancestors from long, long ago did not eat meat every single meal and we're probably not built to do that. I'm not saying you have to be a vegetarian, but just go try a really good vegetarian meal. See how you feel. If it's a good restaurant, you will have your mind blown at how good it is. Andy and I went to this incredible place called pure vida in just, let's see, West Hollywood, and it was this unbelievable experience. One of the best meals both of us at ever had.

Maybe that's the one that gives you food poisoning, Chris? No, I'd already had it at that point. Okay. But yeah, if you go to one of these really good restaurants, it just broadens your horizons and makes you think about health differently. So you're just saying, this is just in regards to the 10 10 10 framework with your health. Just try it. It doesn't have to be expensive, by the way. I think if you did the expensive thing financially, the 10 10 10 would not work out in 10 minutes. I'm going to love myself in 10 days. I'm gonna be like, Shit, my bank account, I'm too scared to even check it. It's been like 1520 bucks on a meal at a nice Vegan restaurant. My next piece of advice would be if there's a good yoga studio by you, most yoga studios, I know this is so hippie guys element in all of your advice is a super hippie and be like things you just started doing like last month. Well Yoga I've been doing for more than a year at this point. Okay. But I'm going like every other day to a yoga gym now and I love it. Most really good yoga studios will give you your first class for free.

Yeah, cause it's like we talk about this on the previous podcast but it's like give your best stuff away for free. Actually I heard it on Graham Cochran's podcast. It's bingeing it this morning and he talks about drug dealers give away their best stuff for free because they know you'll come back for more.

Yeah. So I would say try things and to great things to try or go take a free yoga class

because delayed gratification by the way, does not have to be a chore. Yeah, you can make it fun. I think that's kind of the point you're making here. Chris is like, you can eat really, really good healthy food and enjoy it and also be your future self's best friend. Yeah, you can do really, really fun fitness related activities and enjoy them now and be your future self so it's not always a trade off and I think that's a really good point to have here.

Yeah. If you do the Yoga class thing, you might want to call them and tell them you've never done yoga. If you show up for the wrong type of class, you will not have fun.

There's one here in Nashville actually they have, some places are probably like this, but the one I'm thinking of now, they actually have beginner classes. Yeah, go to a beginner class once or twice a week and that's like where you can get your intro to yoga and then you can kind of work up to it. The bigger and better classes. And let's move on to these last couple here at Chris and then wrap it up here. But mental health, a lot of mental health related things involve some delayed gratification in being your future self's best friend. How does this look, Chris?

Man, dude, so this is the one I struggle with the most. I pushed myself when it comes to work and I love just being like, I'm just going to fucking go for 10 hours in a row. No bathroom breaks, no water, no decent food. I'm just going to like, I'm going to squeal to a halt at the end as my body and mind shuts down and then I'm going to be a real unpleasant husband and father for the rest of the evening.

You know? My secret is to that Chris is I do everything you just said except I chat a lot of water. I drink like seven Candelabra Croix in one work day. That's like one an hour and I physically can't sit down for more than an hour and a half before I have to get up to pee. It's like you have to take breaks when you drink that much water. That's one way to get around.

That's a good trick. I mean, I know us audio engineers having water bottles anywhere near a gear, but simply drinking a lot. Just to force you to break up your work day and to make sure that you're hydrated. I have a very new respect for hydration. Having almost died from it. Yeah. Over the last week.

But what was the point you were making Chris, you were talking about your 10 hour work days, you'll go home, you'll be an unpleasant go home means Aka, I'm going to walk upstairs from my basement to my family upstairs. Essentially that's the end of your workday and you're going to be super unpleasant and that is a really good example of being your future self and your family's worst enemy.

Yeah. So this mental health thing I think is really about knowing, we've talked about this before with my jeep. My jeep is in 1998 jeep wrangler. It's amazing. Once that thing gets less than a quarter of a tank of gas, it starts running real rough, starts feeling like a different car. And so for me, making sure that I have enough gas in the tank means I'll solve problems faster and make better decisions. And for a lot of us as audio engineer's tough love. This is like the most common mistake I see amongst newer audio engineers is they'll send bad mixes, not because they're a bad engineer, but because they're like, well, I'm going to mix for 15 hours at 120 decibels. Good luck. That sounds like a really bad idea. By the time you know, the 15 hours rolls around and you're almost done and you're like bouncing with bounce butler.com almost ready.

I'm almost there. It's going so well. Yeah, we didn't get to talk about that at all, but we'll talk about that next week maybe. Yeah, but then all the sudden like their ears are shot. They're emotions are shot, their mental health is shot. They're making terrible decisions and the mixes were great like 12 hours ago, but at this point they're trash because they weren't their future selves. Best friend. They just, all they wanted to do was feel the satisfaction of finishing and then they wake up the next morning and they're like, oh, this sounds terrible. I to start again. Now they're 15 hours. Oh, next morning. All this sounds terrible. I guess. Got To start again.

That is the way to hell when it comes to mental health, like yeah, it plays out differently for everybody. Not everyone's like that. Everyone has their own battles when it comes to, and it's not all work related either. Mental health is a really complicated thing, which is why I hesitated, even put it on this list, but when it comes to mental health, it is strikingly similar to physical health in that some of the decisions we make today will affect us either positively or negatively, mentally in the future. Totally. And so if you are very, very selfish in the decisions you make, meaning you do what you want to do, no matter what the future consequences are, then the future consequences are. You're going to have some mental health issues based on the things that you've done today. And if you can make that decision, if you can set things up, either accountability or routines or some sort of physical limit or software limit or whatever you need to do to keep yourself from doing this self destructive things that are going to mentally hurt you in the future. It's being your future self's best friend. And I know this is more complex of a subject than I'm making it sound, but there is a lot to that when it comes to not doing self destructive things now that you're going to enjoy in the short term. But in the long term you're gonna pay a lot of consequences.

Yeah, this is huge. I think there are many more great audio engineers out there than there actually are, that only a few people are really, really great at it and all of those people have figured out how to be kind to themselves. They figured out how to not run themselves ragged so that they make bad decisions in their exhaustion. Exhaustion.

10 words today. I'm just like faggot. Either edit it or I'll just sound like an idiot.

Yeah, let's just leave it in. I've got food poisoning disease as long. Nice. But okay, let's move on to our last item here. Yeah. This is related to the mental health thing and this is relationships. I've talked about this in the podcast before and a couple of you have reached out to me in the past about just the whole dad fatherhood thing and how that's been helpful. I know a lot of us have young kids and one of the most important things to grasp with relationships is delayed gratification is you cannot possibly overstate its importance in relationships because there are only two ways to do relationships. There's hard, easy, an easy, hard, all relationships are hard and you can decide whether you want to do that hard thing first, which means you know, setting boundaries and being consistent and doing what you say you'll do by when you say you'll do it, just like the adult stuff like that. You can either do that stuff first and then have it be easy in the long run or you can say, oh, aren't just little Billy screaming in the grocery store because he wants a popsicle. Hold on. I'm just going to give it to them like okay, cool. While you just chose easy and every time you're in the grocery store for the rest of your life, a little Billy's going to scream because he knows he gets popsicle when he screams.

And for those of you who listen this podcast all the time, I recently got married just a few months ago and back on episode 73 Chris and I talked about the struggle of running a successful studio at home with your family actually recorded out while I was on my honeymoon and Chris Talks about some of these things in that episode. So if family relationships, if that sounds interesting to you, go back and listen to episode 73 I was really proud of that episode. That was really, really happy with how that one turned out. Yeah, and I recommend that in a lot to people cause there's a lot of questions people have about trying to run a studio with a family. I'm not the expert. I was basically the new kid on the block with my, I now have a family of my own, just me and my wife and you know, I'm now learning this stuff and I'm trying to do the heart easy way instead of the easy, hard way.

But sometimes the easy hard ways, the easy way to do it. So it's like, you know, I have, I struggle with this too. I'm not, Chris and I are not perfect and all the things we talk about, and that's one of the big things, especially with mental health that you have to accept, is that you will not be perfect in all the things that you tried to do. And if you expect that of yourself, you're going to keep beating herself up and it's going to cause a self destructive feedback loop of negativity because you're like, aw, I messed up because of eight. That cheeseburger, instead of getting like something healthy or damn, I messed up because I bought my kid this thing that I told him I wouldn't buy. I didn't let my yes be yes and my no be no. And now in the future, I know this is going to, you don't have to beat yourself up over this stuff and if you do, you're going to make it worse for yourself because you're going to hate yourself if you let this stuff get to you.

The key to this is simply doing your best and trying to proactively work towards improving that over a long period of time because this is not a sprint. This is a marathon. Life is a marathon. Totally, and the stuff we talked about today on the podcast, delayed gratification thing. The key to making this work and anyone in our lives that we know that are successful around us has made this work. They're successful because they do this, they show up every day and they're not perfect, but over the long term they have more wins than losses and I think that's the key to making delayed gratification work is to not beat yourself up and not be a perfectionist, but just understand that we're all human. As long as we're making progress, then that's all we can hope for right now.

I love everything you said that Brian. I think one of the really important things that we can do right now that can change your life is transition our egos about what we pat ourselves on the back for about what progress means. And I think one of the ways you could do that is just shift to a different metric. Metric meaning something that a number that you use to measure success. So if you measure your ability to pat yourself on the back is how good the snare sounds in the last song that you mixed. Cool, but not a great metric. A better metric might be how many projects did you work on this month? How many projects did you book this month? How many songs did you finish and get an approval from the client on the first try. There's all these things and you have to come up with your own of transitioning to what you want to brag to yourself about.

That helps so much because if you find the right thing, you know for me it used to be, this is kind of cold, but I used to focus on like what was the dollar amount of sales I had that month and I would always want to have a PR, a personal record. And this was really steeped in my history in high school as a cross country in track guy, I was obsessed with like I'd like to beat people, but more than that I'd like to beat my own personal best, my own personal record to know that I've improved now that I've made some progress forward. So if you can sort of tweak in your own mind what's a healthy thing that you can start bragging to yourself about? When do you actually earn a pat on the back and making sure it's one of these things that you have to practice, self discipline, that you have to practice delayed gratification to do so that might be, you know, your dollar amount each month. That might be the number of sales that you make. That might be whether you actually spent time working on your business, not for your business every Wednesday for three hours or you know, it could be, you know, every Tuesday and Thursday for three hours, whatever it happens to be. Whatever goal that you've set that you know is going to move you forward. You can reorientate your own ego in a way that serves you. I patting yourself on the back when you do things that will move the needle.

I think a big part of making this work, and this is like a quote I like to use all the time, this is my brain aneurysm, did I say on the podcast all the time is motivation over routine. If you rely on motivation every single day, you're going to always be your future self's, worse enemy because motivation is not enough to keep you going in all these things we talked about today, and money in relationships, in fitness, in food, diet, mental health, working in your business, not on your business. Motivation is not enough to keep it going and all these things and all the things you need to do. To me at least, the only thing that works is two things. We talk about. One, which is accountability. But the second thing, the biggest thing for me is routine. Yeah. I have a set routine where these are the things I do with these times. There's no guessing. There's no decision to be made. I my gym shorts and my gym shirt out next to my bed because I know the first thing I'm going to do when I wake up is I'm going to put those on. I'm gonna go to the gym. And that's just what works for me.

Let me play devil's advocate here a little bit. Brian. I'm a creative and I'm like, you know, more of a free spirit and a really narrowly into routine. Uh, you know, I kinda come and go with the wind, if you will, because a, I'm better than everyone else.

I don't know if anyone actually talks like that, but it's one of the things that everybody works different. Everyone ticks differently. Everyone has different intrinsic motivators behind what they're doing and why they're doing it. But at the end of the day, every single person, even the most creative, airy type personality that I know, almost every one of them that is successful has some sort of either a accountability or be routine or both in what they're doing. And I don't know very many exceptions to that. And even as you find exceptions to that, I will not live my life based on the 1% of people who are the exception to the rule. I try to find what works for me and that's all I can say to that.

That's awesome man. I think one of the cool things about that too is I think the most creative people throughout history, they have a routine and the routine ensures that they can get to that special magical flow state space where they can do their best creative work. And I know for me that's it. Like I am excessively routined in some ways. You know, like when I show up to master, there's a really specific, you know, order of activities that I do that never ever, ever changes. I've done for thousands of days work days in a row. You know it's, it's the same routine. So that's another one of those things. You could pat yourself on the back for sticking to your routine. You know, one of these things you could self break

[inaudible].

So that is it for this episode of the six figure homes studio podcast memorial. This episode is very simple. Just be your future sales best friend. I want to try something new for this outro on the podcast just cause I like to change things up. I don't like to be predictable. I'm going to challenge our listeners. I have a task for you to do this week and it's, it's a simple task, but it's a test that might make you a lot of money. We shall see. I want you to do this. Look at your list of past customers, every single past customer you have ever worked with. Look at those who you haven't talked to in the last six months and then contact them, whether it's a text or email or DM on social media and just say, hey, how are things going with blank? Whatever the band name is or the artist's name is and see what happens and then report back to our Facebook community@thesixfigurehomestudio.com slash community that's the quick link slash community and let me know what kind of things happen from that.

I would almost guarantee that just by happenstance they'll say, oh, we're just working on new music now and I'm going to hit you up about a price for this project. If this list of people is more than 10 people, I would almost guarantee you're going to get a paid project from this exercise, so go out there and do that report back on our six figure homes studio community. Let us all know what happened in the next week's episode. We will be continuing on our story that we started last week, which was a really, really fun episode and where we really start to dig into the pricing process. How do we price our services so that we are not leaving money on the table and not just that we're not just trying to squeeze money out of our clients. Next week's episode, we talk about the skills that you can use to add more value to these projects so that you can charge more. We've got some really good stories tied to that episode, so it's not just a bunch of me and Chris talking through our advice to you. We actually have some, some good stories for that. So next week, right in early 6:00 AM we will continue that episode series. Until next time. Thanks so much for listening. Don't forget about your assignment this week and happy hustling.