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Answering Questions About My Book From The Pro Group
Chris Do breaks down the painful but profitable process of self-publishing his book, from pre-selling on Kickstarter to retaining 100% of the profits.
Chris Do
Founder, The Futur™ · August 14, 2020
The Fear of Permanence
A tweet is ephemeral. A video lives on a server, its relevance fading with the algorithm. A book is different. A book is an artifact, a physical object carved from trees and bound with intention. It sits on a shelf. It evens out a wobbly table. It becomes landfill.
This is the fear of permanence. And for Chris Do, a prolific creator who produces countless hours of content, the idea of writing a book was, in his own words, “super scary and daunting.”
It’s a paradox many creators face. The constant output of digital media feels fluid and forgiving. But a book feels final. It’s a statement of record. Committing ideas to print carries a weight that a post or a story simply does not.
“When it comes to a book, I don't know if it's the stature or the permanence of it,” Do explains. “You've hurt trees to make something that I don't want to be just landfill.”
This hesitation didn’t come from a lack of ideas. It came from a deep-seated fear of not being good enough, of creating something that didn’t justify its own physical existence. It’s a fear that paralyzes countless experts who have immense value to share but cannot take the first step toward immortalizing it on paper.
The solution, for Do, was not to wait for the fear to subside. The solution was to create a system that made moving forward a necessity.
The Kickstarter Trigger
The idea to write a book, Pocket Full of Do, was not one Do initiated on his own. It was born from the persistent requests of his audience on YouTube and Twitter. “Kristo you need to write a book,” they said. Eventually, he gave in.
But he didn’t simply start writing. He decided to apply a core business principle he teaches relentlessly: **pre-sell something to know there’s demand for it**.
This is a critical strategy for any creator. Too many people are seduced by compliments. They hear friends say, “Oh, I love your shirt, I’d love to buy it,” so they go make 200 of them, only to find the compliments were just that: compliments. Now they have dead inventory and a painful lesson in business.
“In the educational space, especially if you're thinking about authoring a course, doing a a workshop, you should do a pre-sale,” Do advises. “It's a concept that's very familiar to people who are in the space.”
With the help of his team, including designer and editor Greg Gunn, Do created a few sample pages and launched a Kickstarter campaign. The goal was set at $25,000. If the campaign raised less than that, it simply wouldn’t be worth the immense effort required. It was a clear, data-driven test of market viability.
The good news came quickly. The campaign hit its $25,000 goal within the first week. It sailed past stretch goals of $50,000 and ultimately ended around $75,000 in pre-sales.
The bad news? As Do puts it, “Bad news, I have to write a book.”
The Kickstarter served two functions. First, it completely de-risked the project financially, providing the capital for printing and production. Second, and more importantly, it created an unbreakable commitment. People had paid. Trust had been extended. There was no turning back.
The Power of Public Accountability
The success of the Kickstarter transformed the project from a private ambition into a public promise. This, Do argues, is one of the most powerful motivational tools available.
“When you make a commitment and trust has been given to you, that is sometimes enough to keep you moving forward,” he says. This is the essence of **public declaration** as a forcing function for growth.
Do compares it to the vows of a traditional marriage. You make an eternal promise in front of your family and closest friends, the people whose opinions you value most. That public pledge becomes a powerful anchor during the difficult times that inevitably arise in any long-term relationship.
“There are points in which you're like, I don't know if this works,” Do admits. “Choosing that easier path would make my life temporarily better, but sticking through it, figuring out how to solve those problems and those promises that you make actually make you a better person.”
Writing the book was a painful process. It took what felt like nine months, a period filled with self-doubt and the nagging feeling of repetition. “I felt like I was saying the same thing,” he recalls telling his editor. “Maybe I only have like 10 things to say, I'm just finding different ways to say it.”
The pressure from the public commitment was immense. Supporters who had backed the project in December 2018 were waiting. As months turned into a year, the complaints started to mount. “Greg had to field his many shares of complaints like, what the heck, this is a scam,” Do confesses. The a crucial concept he covers in how personal brands build trust.
It was the weight of that public trust that forced him to push through the pain, the fear, and the creative blocks. The book wasn’t just for him anymore. It was for the thousands of people who believed in it before it even existed.
That is not a small thing.
The Publisher’s Dilemma: Control vs. Credentials
One of the most significant decisions for any author is whether to seek a traditional publisher or to self-publish. For many, a contract with a major publisher like Penguin or HarperCollins is a powerful credential. It’s a stamp of validation, an external signal that your work has met a professional standard.
“It's almost like saying I graduated from med school,” Do explains. “For a lot of people, it's a feather in their cap.”
Traditional publishers also handle the complex logistics of design, marketing, and distribution, which most authors lack the bandwidth or expertise to manage. But this convenience comes at a steep price: a loss of control.
This is not the way of The Futur. “The Futur way is to do the hardest, most difficult way and to do everything on our own so that we can use it all as a learning experience,” Do states.
Self-publishing, while fraught with challenges, offers two non-negotiable advantages for creators who want to build a business around their ideas.
First is creative control. A publisher’s primary goal is to produce a profitable book. This means they often make decisions to cut costs, which can compromise the author's vision. They might dictate the size, paper quality, printing methods, and binding. For a designer like Do, this was unacceptable.
For Pocket Full of Do, the team made specific, premium choices that a traditional publisher might have vetoed:
- Pantone Colors: Instead of a standard CMYK process, they used pre-mixed Pantone Matching System (PMS) inks for a brilliant, intense hot pink and blue. This costs more.
- Soft Touch Cover: A specific laminate that feels smooth, has a nice “hand,” and resists fingerprints.
- Hot Foil Stamp: A black-on-black foil stamp for a subtle, premium finish.
These were not just aesthetic choices. They were an extension of the brand and a commitment to quality for the audience that had funded the project. A publisher would have likely pushed back, changing the cost and the very nature of the product.
The second, and arguably more powerful, advantage is financial. “A typical publisher might give you anywhere between 10, 15, maybe 20% if you're like a known person, and they keep the rest,” Do points out. “For every book that we sell, we are basically making 100% of the profits.”
To put this in perspective, Do cites the example of Michael Bungay Stanier, author of the self-published bestseller The Coaching Habit. Stanier sold over 800,000 copies of his book after traditional publishers rejected it. “Let's pretend for a minute he made ten dollars per book,” Do calculates. “You do the math... that would mean he would have eight million dollars from writing a book.”
This is transformative. It demonstrates that the path to truly rewarding teachers and creators for the value they provide is often outside the traditional system. To earn the same amount of money through a publisher offering a 10% royalty, Stanier would have needed to sell ten times as many books, an almost impossible feat. Self-publishing allows creators to build a sustainable business on a smaller, more dedicated audience, a key lesson found in how businesses attract their ideal clients.
The Anatomy of a Mistake
Doing everything yourself means you learn everything yourself. It also means you make every mistake yourself. The journey of getting Pocket Full of Do into the hands of readers was a masterclass in logistical hurdles and unforeseen complications.
The first edition sold out, and for the second run of 10,000 copies, the team decided to use Amazon for fulfillment in North America. This introduced a new set of rigid rules and, inevitably, a critical error.
The problem was the barcode. Months before the book was finished, a barcode was generated in Amazon’s system with the wrong product description. When the physical books finally arrived at Amazon’s warehouses, the barcode on the books matched an old, incorrect digital entry. Amazon’s system flagged it as an ebook, a product that had never been sold on their platform.
“That opened up a whole can of worms,” Do says. The monolith of Amazon, which sells a “gazillion books a day,” has little flexibility to deal with small creators' unique problems. The seemingly simple fix of updating a description became a bureaucratic nightmare. The alternative was a logistical horror: printing new barcode stickers and manually opening every shrink-wrapped book to apply them. “I don't want to deal with that,” he laments.
This was just one of many lessons learned the hard way. Other painful obstacles included:
- Book Design: The first edition was too thick for its dimensions, making it difficult to hold open and read. The second edition was made slightly wider and taller to increase the margins and improve the reading experience.
- International Shipping: Shipping overseas proved to be a minefield. Inaccurate addresses, failed delivery attempts, and books being returned to the sender created a financial and emotional drain. “Now we've spent more money on shipping the book than we have in terms of the money we could have made on the book,” Do explains.
- Local Nuances: The team learned they needed local partners in different countries to help with fulfillment. A local distributor would know that an address was transposed or formatted incorrectly, preventing a failed shipment before it even happened.
These mistakes are not failures. They are the tuition you pay for the education of entrepreneurship. Each problem revealed a flaw in the process, providing invaluable data for the next project. This is the growth that comes from doing things the hard way, a theme Do often revisits when discussing the realities of building a business.
The Craft of Simplicity
Beyond the business and logistics, the book itself presented a deep creative challenge: how to distill a lifetime of lessons into a format that was potent and accessible. Do’s goal was ambitious. “I admire and respect writers who are able to use the fewest number of words to describe the most complicated ideas in the simplest way,” he states. “That was a real struggle.”
This commitment to the **economy of words** defined the book's structure. Each lesson is contained on a single page, paired with a graphic design element that acts as a mini-poster to illustrate the point. This format forced a rigorous editing process, pushing and pulling ideas until they could be communicated with clarity and brevity.
He was writing for a very specific person: a younger version of himself. He wanted to create the book he wished he had, one filled with high-level ideas that could save a young creative from years of future pain. This contrasts sharply with many business books that take one or two concepts and stretch them across 300 pages with endless stories and repetition.
“I'm the kind of person who likes big ideas, high-level thinking backed with some research, but I don't need 45 stories,” Do says. “I get it and I get it quick.”
The most painful part of this craft came during the recording of the audiobook. As he read his own words aloud, he was horrified. “This sounds terrible. What monkey wrote this book? Oh, this one,” he recalls thinking. The experience was so draining he almost didn’t want to finish.
It was a conversation with legendary brand consultant and author Marty Neumeier that provided a breakthrough. Neumeier, a perfectionist and master of concise writing, shared two critical pieces of advice:
- If it doesn’t sound right, change it. When recording an audiobook, don't be a slave to the printed text. “Nobody is literally holding the book and comparing it,” Neumeier told him. Rephrase sentences so they flow naturally when spoken.
- Write for the ear. After his first audiobook, Neumeier changed his entire writing process. He began writing by reading his words out loud to ensure they sounded right. This fundamentally improves the flow and clarity of the prose.
This insight was a revelation. To be a better writer, you must speak your words. This process closes the gap between the idea in your head and the experience of the reader, ensuring your message lands with the intended rhythm and impact.
From Plagiarism to Curation
For aspiring writers and creators, one of the biggest initial hurdles is the fear of plagiarism. Where do ideas come from? How much can you borrow before it becomes theft?
The truth, Do argues, is that everything we create is a remix. “Everything we do, believe it or not, is in some form copying things that we've learned from other people,” he says. “Language, the alphabet, the fonts that we use... it's borrowed by and made by somebody else.”
The key distinction lies in intent. Plagiarism is the intent to steal work and hide the source for personal gain. Ethical creation is about honoring sources, giving credit, and adding to the conversation.
A simple rule of thumb: if you’re not sure, ask yourself how you would feel if someone did the same thing with your work. Would you feel honored or cheated? Your gut reaction is your guide.
In the world of social media, this line is crossed frequently and blatantly. Do identifies two common forms of unethical content sharing:
- Cropping Credit: Users will take a carousel or image and intentionally crop out the original creator’s name or handle. The act of cropping proves the intent is to hide the source, not to honor it.
- Re-Typesetting Without Attribution: This involves taking someone else's exact text, reformatting it with a new image, and passing it off as original. A vague “inspired by” tag buried in a long caption is not sufficient credit. It’s a deliberate attempt to mislead.
This behavior comes from a place of insecurity. “You fear people will love you less, that respect you less, and not give you any credit,” Do observes. But this is a shortcut to a short-term career. True authority is built not by pretending to be an oracle, but by becoming a trusted curator. Your value is in finding and sharing the best content for your audience while simultaneously honoring the creators. Finding your unique voice is a central idea Do covers in building content that connects.
The path forward for any aspiring author or thought leader is clear. Don't steal. Instead, synthesize. Take the ideas you learn, filter them through your own experiences, add your unique perspective, and give credit generously. That is how you contribute, not just copy.
Your Content Is Your Kickstarter
So, you want to write a book three or four years from now. What should you do today? The answer is not to start writing the book in secret. The answer comes from marketing guru Seth Godin. “Today if you want to be a writer, don't write your book first and then build an audience,” Do paraphrases. “You should be building your audience before you write the book.”
Your audience is your validation engine. They will show up for you, support you, and, most importantly, tell you which of your ideas are actually helpful. Your content is the proving ground for your future book.
Do is already applying this strategy for his next potential projects. On Instagram, he creates 10-slide carousels organized into categories like mindset, business, and marketing. These are bite-sized versions of the lessons he might one day compile into a book. The performance of this content provides real-world data on what resonates with his audience.
“I can then take the highest-performing, best-received carousels and take those and make 10 pages of a book out of it,” he explains. “I know it works because think about the attention span of people on Instagram.”
This is the modern playbook for authorship. It’s about de-risking the creative process in the same way a Kickstarter de-risks the financial process. Don't guess what people want to read. Show them.
Start small. Start today. Your first step isn't to write a chapter. It is to take one idea and share it.
Write a tweet. Then a paragraph on LinkedIn. Then a short blog post. Every piece of content is a rep. Every like, comment, and share is feedback. You are building your book one validated idea at a time, all while growing the audience that will one day be eager to buy it.
Stop waiting for permission. Stop waiting for the fear to disappear. Start building in public, and let your audience guide you toward the book they are waiting for you to write.
TRANSCRIPT
happy friday everybody congratulations and if it's saturday for you happy early saturday i suppose today we're going to be talking a little bit about this book that i wrote it's called pocket full of dough this is the first edition i have the second edition here but we're going to do things a little
bit differently now in case you're new to the channel my name is chris doe and welcome and today we're going to be doing ama which stands for ask me anything but we're doing it a little different because i'm joined by my future pro family and one person in particular misty gonzalez and i'll
be sharing a little bit from the book and opening it up to questions from the pro famine community i just want to let you guys know because it's been asked quite a bit when's the new book coming out in terms of the second edition the first edition was sold out and we also
have greg gunn on the zoom call with us today and he was responsible for picking these colors which i really do love i mean if i don't know what colors to pick i'm gonna go to the color guy himself and he picked this really brilliant i don't know how to describe it like
a super intense hot pink and really intense blue so i think the colors really pop and without further ado i want to welcome the rest of my team and my family here including mark and jonah who's doing the editing misty how are you doing today i'm awesome thanks for asking you certainly are
awesome now missy for people who don't know who you are can you give us an introduction sure i'm misty g and uh i'm an environmental designer and a business culture of health strategist and i'm also part of the profam which i'm i'm grateful to be a part of and uh that's how i
got here yes you are and i like seeing you in the light you're kind of basking in the light you look different today but you say it's just because it's brighter in the room okay so let's set up the context for why we're even having this conversation i think you're a part of
a different community and you're like hey there's some questions maybe we should talk about the book and so why don't we just jump in sure so um i'm a moderator for the business fundamentals subgroup in pro group and we've been doing or started to do q and a's for uh different authors that
we find inspiring and we want to know more so um we some thoughts were shooting around about doing a q a with you about pocketful of dough and so here we are we made it happen yeah we made it happen and it just happened like i think in less than a week you
said let's go and here we are so what should we talk about and i also want to encourage people who are watching live with us on youtube to go ahead and drop in comments especially if you've read the book or you're curious about an idea and i'll see if i can find a
passage in the book that may or may not address it but also for my profam who are on this call i think there are 28 people on this including myself feel free to join us in any any capacity that you want this is a conversation it's casual it's casual friday i'm just thrilled
that i made it right we made it past this week so i'm in kind of wind-down mode preparing for the weekend so where did we begin misty well my question is what inspired you to write this book oh okay so what inspired me to write the book i have to say that even
the idea of writing a book is super scary and daunting and not one that i would normally initiate on my own i think through the many videos that we've produced on youtube people have asked like kristo you need to write a book or they would say this on twitter and eventually i said
i said yeah i gave in to the idea maybe i should write a book and the way that i was going to write the book is the concept that i want to share with you guys which is to pre-sell something so that you know there's demand for it there are a lot of
people are going to tell you oh i love your shirt your hat can you make me one i'd love to buy it then you go make 200 of them and they're like hey you want that shirt no i was just giving you a compliment and now you have inventory and things you don't
know what to do with so in the educational space especially if you're thinking about authoring a course doing a workshop you should do a pre-sale it's a concept that's very familiar to people who are in the space so with the help of greg gunn and min i wrote a few sample pages and
then they built this kickstarter campaign for me and i think our goal greg and greg's on the coffee can clarify for me i think our goal was to sell 25 000 worth of books because it was less than that to me at least it's just not going to be worth it i don't
want to write a book for like 10 people it just doesn't make sense and thankfully i think within a few days maybe the first week we hit that 25 000 mark and then we would we did our stretch goals which is like i think 50 or 60 000 and then we hit that
and then i think we ultimately ended around 75 000 in sales which was good news bad news people do want the book the goodwill that i've been sharing and giving to people did earn some reciprocity and the love and appreciation i really felt that bad news i have to write a book and
it was very painful and greg is my editor he was on top of me he's like chris where's the book i can only stall for so long and it was so painful to write this and i'm glad it's done because i don't want to do that again for some time what was the
most enjoyable part of writing the book for you giving it to greg to say do something with this okay i told you before but the graphics are particularly delightful they really are oh thank you min and i worked on it and we we knew that the writing was going to be okay but
hopefully the design will make it better than okay above average is what we're striving for here so we we would lean in on our strengths so opposite every every page is an is a piece of design with typography and graphics to help illustrate the point and they're like mini posters and misty once
having read the book now understand why this is behind me because those are actually proof sheets from the printer so this one is the proof sheet here and this down here is actually a poster that we made using still screen inks oh cool yeah the stories are good too it's very relatable it's
i like your your portions of the book where you talk about your personal experiences and how they relate to the stories that you're telling that's uh it's really delightful to read oh thank you very much one of the other challenges that i had with writing the book is i i wrote these kind
of um in in different spurts so three months into it i felt like i was saying the same thing and i had to ask greg make sure i'm not just repeating myself maybe i'm out of ideas because he had a target number of pages that we needed to hit so that would feel
like it's substantive enough to justify even putting it into print in the first place so once we went back and started editing i realized that my idea is overlapping so maybe i only have like 10 things to say i'm just finding different ways to say it i didn't notice it worked yeah there's
a question in the chat from asking how did you work through the pain how did we work through the pain i think when you make a commitment and and trust has been given to you that is sometimes enough to keep you moving forward and so we we talk about this a lot as
a way to keep yourself motivated to make a public declaration of the things that you're going to do and tell your your most dearest closest friends who are going to hold you accountable that this is what you do i think this is one of the reasons why one aspect of traditional marriage works
really well because you're you're pledging you're making this promise this eternal promise to to love and to hold and to honor and to cherish one another till death you do you part in front of your your spouse's family your best friends the people you care the most about and i think that's what
helps you to get through the tough parts anybody that's been married or in a in a serious long-term committed relationship knows that there are points in which you're like i don't know if this works i i'm maybe there's an easier path and choosing that easier path would make my life temporarily better but
sticking through it figuring out how to solve those problems and those promises that you make actually make you a better person so i don't think it's any different growth it's growth right jonah's asking me to record is that right jonah yeah and zoom okay i'm gonna record it right now to the cloud
and we have a question from pixel games on youtube asking what is the book what is the book about the what is the book about that's really good so i think this book is look at the printing on this is a summary of the things that i've learned in my life and so
it's a distillation of a lot of different principles and it's organized into seven chapters it talks about relationships creativity beliefs pricing sales and negotiation marketing and mindset i think initially when greg and i were talking we wanted to chop the book in half about creativity and business and it started to lean pretty
heavily into business and mindset so it didn't feel quite right so we we chopped it into more smaller parts right so the things that you hear me talk about on social media on twitter on instagram and on youtube i've done the best to distill it into something that you can read in in
one page so each lesson is contained to one page and it was very very difficult to do that some some ideas are very simple and only required a few sentences and that didn't feel right and some ideas were too long so just through this process of pushing and pulling that we got it
to to be able to be communicated one page i'm not saying i achieve this but i admire and respect writers who are able to use the fewest number of words to describe the most complicated ideas in the simplest way and that was a real struggle because that's who i look up to and
i like this idea of the economy of words as a late uh bloomer to to reading and i was sharing with misty before we went live that i think i've read more books in the last two years than the previous 46 years combined and i i've noticed patterns i noticed people who are
really amazing writers every word they put on the page counts and then people who feel like they have to write a big book they really only have maybe one or two concepts in the book and they just go over it again and again and maybe that's what people like but i'm the kind
of person who likes big ideas high level thinking backed with some research but i don't need 45 stories i don't need 16 versions of your personal story to explain something i get it and i get it quick so i i tried to write a book for somebody who if they were in my
position with a similar mindset and makeup but much younger that they could pick this up and say look wow okay i can save myself from some future future pain but just taking this advice to heart and incorporating my life and my business there's a question in in the zoom chat from gage mitchell
he's asking what your thoughts are on self-publishing versus a publisher or an agent very good question there i think most people like to be published by a reputable publisher because it gives them confidence it's a part of your credentials to say that i was published by harpercollins or whatever penguin books because you've
admired the authors and the publisher for the different books that they produce and it helps to validate who you are and you're accomplished it's almost like saying i graduated from mex school i was published by this publisher so for a lot of people it's a feather in their cap plus a lot of
people don't have the bandwidth to really design and figure out how to market their books how to figure out distribution but that's not the future way the future ways to do the hardest most difficult way and to do everything on our own so that we can use it all as a learning experience
and there are some benefits and there are definitely some disadvantage to that and i'll speak to some of them excuse me the disadvantages you're learning everything everything's fresh and new and you're going to make lots of mistakes it's going to take a really long time and you're trying to figure things out and
greg has spent hours and hours researching how books are made how they're sold testing or vetting different print vendors figuring out the price price per unit shipping cost and and just not knowing if this format is good or not and that's all that we do on our own and we've made mistakes and
we continue to make mistakes but it's all part of the growth process the advantages are minifold you control what you write you control every aspect including how much it costs to print now as a book publisher their main goal is to to make a book that people want to buy and to make
money that's their main goal make a book that people want to buy that they'll make money on so sometimes they may make decisions on the size the quality of paper the printing the binding all that kind of stuff and that's not something that we wanted to do so for example this is the
first edition here so the color's a little different for addition too you'll notice that the colors are really brilliant and that's because greg and i we chose pms colors pantone matching colors right so that it's ink that they mix versus doing a cmyk print which is an approximation of the color mixing inks
cost more and it almost came down to love with hour where greg said chris this is a here here's the bid and we're going to go to press and i told him no no this is not a cmyk job it has to be pms it changed the cost we wanted to do a
soft touch cover which i like because it's this hybrid where it doesn't leave too many fingerprints it's smooth to the touch it feels it feels like really nice it has a nice hand as they say in the printing world and then to do this foil stamp this hot foil stamp which gives you
that that cool murder like black on black look right and that's what we want to do the other advantage here is money um you a typical publisher might give you anywhere between 10 15 maybe 20 if you're like a known person and they keep the rest and they give you some books and
it depends on your negotiations so you can't even have access to your own books which is kind of weird and those things kind of bug me so here's the deal for every book that we sell we are basically making 100 of the profits meaning we get to keep that we could use that
to invest in other things to build more classes to write the second book or to do whatever it is that we want so you can say that you could you'd have to sell i guess if you're getting ten percent one-tenth of the books that's sold through a publisher and make the exact same
amount of money let's put this in perspective we had michael bungay stanier on our show he wrote the book the coaching habit and he told me he sold 800 000 copies of that book and he's self-published so let's pretend for a minute he made ten dollars per book let's just pretend geez you
do the math you add basically a zero to that number eight hundred thousand that would be mean he would have um eight million dollars from writing a book and i think that's wonderful because as a person who spends time creating ideas to help people it's nice to see authors and teachers really i
think michael's a teacher to make that kind of money like you could work in universities and public schools all your life and not even come close to that kind of money and if we say like teachers and doctors are the most valuable people of our society especially teachers why isn't what they make
equal to the contributions that they give and we should reward those people and luckily for michael he published himself and he told me nobody wanted to publish a book it's the same story nobody wanted to publish my book so he did it himself um daniel de jesus is asking how did you come
up with the title oh good question um i'll tell you a little personal story here the personal story is i i'm a first generation refugee immigrant this country english is my second language i had a hard time fitting in and the issues that we are talking about today about equality inclusion uh in
terms of the black lives matter movement those are things i felt as a foreigner coming to this country and i was grateful to be uh in a in the land of opportunity of of milk and honey if you will but i i was treated for most of my life as an outsider and
it created uh schisms in my own my own identity i struggled with am i am i good enough do i belong here why do i always feel like an outsider i always feel like an outsider and i never fit in so there was some some self-hate in there and i was really kind
of embarrassed to be a vietnamese american i wanted to be like everybody else because i was tired of people treating me differently pushing me around and and other things things to get violent too so i just want to put that out there so it was through a long process of learning to love
who i am to love my own culture my own language my own identity that i found myself and so today i have this name doe which before i would hide from because everybody that was in from primary school through junior high was like what nick what kind of name is doe and they
would figure out especially the boys figure out very creative ways to make fun of me and it hurt emotionally i was not so strong enough at that point to deal with that so today i get to embrace my name to embrace my culture and who i am and so it is a pocket
full of dough it's like you want to have some money in your pocket yeah yeah pocket full of dough your name sounds like money how can that be imagine yeah you know and then my friend mark manasala who who asked me is he's he's a funny guy so he's like what's the greatest
nation on earth like i don't know he's like donation so there's like so many like like here's your daily dose and there's like so many creative ways that you can go with this so the opportunities for the second book are endless i wish it were easier to come up with the rest of
the content than the titles for the book but that's it so we knew it needed to be small we needed we knew that it needed to be compact and hopefully to give value and from the people who've read the book who've sent who are kind enough to support us on the kickstarter who
are patient enough to deal with our shenanigans they have sent me messages online and through dm saying how how they felt like the book is really powerful how it's helped them i won't name any names so sometimes people even go through states of depression and anxiety and they tell me they just go
back and reread chapters and it helps them to get re-centered and just like wow this little book that did it for you thank you thank you for sharing that with me awesome um let's see holy cow hello hold on i have to say this chris h on youtube thank you very much for
doing the super chat he just dropped 100 bucks on us so i just want to read this message real quick chris i really appreciate that so he said he spent five years at frustrating nine to five job in the defense in defense before he found the future he knew that he could offer
something more on his own took the risk and negotiate a value-based contract to create an innovative virtual tool for a home construction company tripled his income way to go chris and added free time to us live what a win this is what we're talking about happy friday to you chris thank you okay
go ahead misty i'm sorry sure no need to be sorry that's an awesome thanks story glad to hear it rowena is asking overall how long it takes to how long did it take you to finish the book from writing and design and before being ready to publish greg gunn do you have your
mic ready i want you to answer this question because i'm gonna lie i want you to tell the truth okay why don't you start with your lie and then i'll correct i think it took like nine months is that about right oh yeah i would i would probably add add a month to
that really okay i thought i was overshooting there with nine months i was going to say four months see so that was gonna be the lie i don't know when exactly you started the the kickstarter launched in december of 2018. yeah yeah so that was a while ago but you know to to
actually produce the books and then get them um in our office that was probably three months alone and i think we started mailing books out in late late 2019. so let's just say this for the record for the record everybody that is a supporter who gave us money for for kickstarter to do
this book you have the patience of an angel of a saint so thank you very much i know that greg had to field his many shares of complaints like what the heck this is a scam kind of thing i apologize it's not greg's fault greg's a good guy he's not a scammer it's
me writing something is scary i have to tell you i don't know why but when i write a tweet when i make something for linkedin or when i make a video for youtube i just feel like it's very ephemeral it's here and it's gone but we know that's not true because it lives
on forever but when it comes to a book i don't know if the stature of the permanence of it that there's physical copies and you've hurt trees to make something that i don't want it to be just landfill or to help even out a table but if that's the case then use the
book for that purpose that's scary to put in print and i was scared that makes total sense you know the the poetry book that i wrote it's pretty short it took me six months to finish that i can't believe it i feel that i feel that right now for sure yeah you know
what we should do misty uh i i think you're doing a great job but i also wanted to to have p pro family they know how to do this just unmute yourself so maybe yeah you can message them like hey why don't you speak or maybe you guys raise your digital hand so
that there's some order to this so it's not like 10 people saying the same thing at once but i want it to be conversational uh this is ama this is a hybrid ama pro call so let's just do it like the way we normally do it okay there we are we have our
first hand raised so and no surprise there it's gonna be matthew matthew bring yourself online hey chris can you hear muka yeah loud and clear man cool i've got my copy of pocket full of version one with me here and just wanted to say i don't have many books but um it's really
nice to have like when i think of this i think of like a pocket full of your wisdom with me so like it's small enough it can go with me anywhere and i also think of the word dough is like almost like a starter dough for many you know recipes to come like
it lasts last through the time so it's very referential and as somebody who can't just read straight through something it's very accessible for someone like me so thank you thanks for doing that thanks for sharing first of all thanks for supporting us and thanks for that testimony i love it if you don't
have any many books that means even more i have many books i like i just bought like eight books that just came in yesterday so i i love books uh they make me feel smarter even when i don't read them they make me feel smarter so thanks for supporting us all right uh
misty maybe you can pick up oh i see real hands being raised now so is it miralda or also go ahead yeah i just want to ask you chris uh what's the chapter you enjoyed writing the most and which was was the most difficult for you okay um so let me answer this
in a couple of ways the pricing business negotiation stuff was the easiest for me to write it's the stuff that i talk about the most so that that was just a matter of like how much do i want to say and can we edit it down to one page the part that i
enjoy the most in writing is what it begins with and how the book ends and and if i can share that with you i'll just read a little bit of it okay and the reason why i enjoy it the most and uh well i'll tell you why after i read it okay so
i'm not like some expert book reader here so i'm gonna stumble this is the thing i hated doing in in high school so here we go i stand on a bridge between the life i have and the life i'm working toward every day i gain clarity over what my goals are take the
steps that are necessary and forgive myself when i mess up on my journey i try to help as many people as possible while doing no harm to myself or others and that's just kind of trying to help frame things and it's a message to myself but i know that when i tweeted something
out like that that it touched people and my goal is not just to write something that is cold hard facts because a lot of people can do that much better than i can researchers especially but to inject a little bit of humanity compassion to make somebody feel something and if i've done that
if you've read a book and you feel something and it touches some part of your body and emotion then i think i've done a good thing and and then there's closing thoughts and the closing thoughts are very similar too but it's it's just to kind of help you frame um and get your
mind in the right space and you could just read that and stop and think about that and reflect as as many people have told me before they said that this is not a book you just read from cover to cover you read you reflect you contemplate you think about it and you find
ways to apply it to what you're doing and if they're doing that then they're utilizing the book to its fullest quick question here from youtube they're asking how do i get a copy of the book we're working really hard on figuring this out like i said we make a lot of mistakes we
have now actually printed 10 000 books as the second edition uh first edition sold out so you can't get those anymore but second edition you can get and you will you will be able to get once we resolve this thing with amazon this time around we're we're leaning on amazon to do all
our fulfillment but they have certain rules and they're very rigid and we made a mistake about the barcode and it's creating all kinds of problems for us so hopefully very soon at least in north america america canada maybe mexico too i'm not sure we can get this to your in your hot little
hands after we figure that out we're gonna go to amazon europe i believe and thankfully we have friends in the philippines in sweden emily i'm talking about you and a couple other places where they're going to help us to distribute the books so the theory is i would send a box of books
to to other countries where they can then help me fulfill the orders and that's a big ask because that's not fun to do but that's the only way we can get these books out we've had a lot of problems with international shipping and i don't know what to do we we're not familiar
with all the postal addresses so what you give us if it's not 100 accurate what happens is they they ship it and they try a couple times to give it to you if it's the wrong address it's we're screwed and if you don't receive it eventually they send it back to us and
now you don't get a book so you're upset we're upset because we have a book that needs a home and we spent the money to ship it to you and we try again and it's like now we've spent more money on shipping the book than we have in terms of the money we
could have made on the book so we don't want to do that again it's super frustrating i'll give you an example i was in amsterdam i brought six books with me with packages that my my team my wife has prepared for me to ship out i'm in an in a post office or
one of those shipping stores fill it out pay the shipping i go back to la a couple of weeks later four of the books are back here in our office i'm like what did just what's just happened there so that's why we need help we need help with facilitating that because some local
person would be like yeah no this this this address is transposed it's not right this is not going to go anywhere and we wouldn't know that so there you have it okay okay nathan do you want to jump in with the with your question yeah you all hear me yeah we hear you
you're a little low though i'm a little low yeah then you hear me you hear me yes yeah yeah yeah we are good go ahead so this is this is somewhat related to something you just said um in terms of recording the audiobook um how was that did you just actually read the
book itself did you do a gary v style and just say i'll just say what i want off of memory um what were some errors about that that tripped you up i'm just curious about the whole audiobook recording process because i know you have other equipment so yes we have the gear we
have no shortage of gear we have shortage of talent and ambition sometimes but there's no shortage of gear here reading the audiobook was actually really tough and it was exhausting to do and then i realized how lame of a writer i am because when i was reading the words and i asked greg
greg do i need to read the words literally like the way it was written he's like preferably yeah that's what you do and then i read it i'm like this sounds terrible what monkey wrote this book oh this one and it was it was it was awful like i don't want to finish
it and it took a couple of recordings to get us through the whole thing and it's funny like when you read your own words it's like i can't even read it like without mispronouncing words and and getting the tone right but eventually we finished it and we got it out there because it
was part of the kickstarter project right we had to do it there was no way i could get out of it but funnily enough or funny enough i was having lunch with marty neumeyer and this was right after we had recorded like what is branding episode and we're having sushi we're talking and
he's like and he's a perfectionist you have to understand something about marty he's a perfectionist he's a designer all the way through and he wanted to get the right recording and he said that when he read his first book it changed the way he wrote he says that you know what he gave
me some advice he said chris if it doesn't sound right in your mouth just change the words nobody is literally holding the book and comparing it and it's okay you can change the phrasing so thank you marty for that tip and he said the second thing is after that he's like he never
wanted to write a book the the old way anymore he wanted to write the book and read it out loud to make sure it sounded right and that's the way that you're supposed to write a book so that was really helpful tip for me from somebody who's pretty prolific at writing and capturing
his thoughts and something i look up to in terms of that economy of words i was mentioning earlier so it's really good tip so if you want to be a better writer speak it out and then write that down and then clean it up that's one way or write with the intention of
reading it out loud i think it changes the way you write and it flows much better good advice so i'm taking it me too gage mitchell is asking what the bard code challenge was so that as we're writing our knowledge products or our books that we can avoid the snags yeah so here's
the deal we're not quite sure yet how this happened so i'm gonna make up a story and then greg can correct me if i'm wrong you'll notice here there's a difference here so i have the two books and i'm trying to stack them up here you'll see that the second book is wider
than the first book and a little bit taller that's because we realized with the thickness of the book and the size it was it was harder to split open and hold open so you can read the full spread so we were able to use that extra space to increase the margins here so
that's one thing you need to keep into consideration and when you're looking at your book to make sure that it opens up nicely and fits in your hand well so if you study a couple of books that you like just look at their margins they're pretty generous and you need to to kind
of be mindful of that okay the barcode issue is this is we knew potentially we're going to sell this on amazon before we knew we're going to sell it on amazon so we needed to get an amazon barcode so you go through the system it generates a unique thing you code i believe
this is like your fingerprint in the book world this is really critical or your social security number and then we needed to generate this months ahead of like finishing the book and the design and we forgot about it so that barcode sat there with the wrong description and everything so sitting in amazon's
system waiting for books and then once we got the books in i'm like greg let's get this going so we immediately pack up a bunch of books send it to amazon the bar code matches but the description is wrong or something is jacked at this point so it says they're in stock a
e-book version and and i told greg when did we sell an e-book version on amazon we've not done that so that opened up all can of worms and so we're still trying to work through that uh hopefully there's some flexibility here but i can imagine amazon's selling gazillion books like a day that
they don't have time to deal with like little people like us so it's been very difficult to hey can we just update the description and get this to work because the last thing we want to do is to print a sticker and slap it on can you imagine doing that the amount of
paper and materials we're wasting and the labor opening up all the books slapping those labels on oh i don't want to deal with that you can blame me is that the is that second edition the amazon printed version did amazon print that no no we don't use amazon printing same printer from the
first printer same what is that called soft touch paper same hot foil stamp paper the only thing is different it's wider and the colors are different pms colors pantone colors we don't want to use uh amazon on demand printing i've not had great experiences with that because they're they're just not high quality
just my opinion they will get there but they're not right now that's good to know thank you thanks for asking that because everybody's like dude he's cheaping out this time uh i wanna do you wanna jump in with your question yes but i'm nervous don't be nervous you do this all the time
you're doing great yeah but this is you know life okay so you talk about exposing yourself to new things as much as possible and i have to tell you a little story so that it makes sense why i'm asking i uh uh keep having nightmares about not finishing or forgetting about things that
would help me complete my work and then i go and google uh fear of forgetting things and then it turns out that it's okay to to forget things but at the same time uh learning new things and exposing yourself to new environments and so on will cement what you learn way better and
i entered the the pro group seven months ago and it's been a lot of failure and a lot of new and it it helped me deal with the fact that it's okay to uh forget some things and then to to have the inside that if you expose yourself to disney things you're gonna
be able to uh have them in your brain for a lot longer time and draw from them and make a lot more connections and i wanted you to i wanted you to [Music] to let me know why you advocate exposing yourself to new stuff so much oh okay that's okay great thanks for
sharing that story you did great by the way um why do i advocate exposing yourself to new things i i think i recently did a talk on this that the the more you expose yourself to new things the less you have to fear unless you have to fear the more things you'll try
and i think uh i watched this video and it said that there are only two fears that we're born with in life the fear of falling and the fear of fear of loud noises like if you're a little baby and there's a crash or boom sound it's startling and the baby might cry
and thankfully we're born with this instinct this fear of falling because yeah you walk across the bridge you're not going to want to step off of that you you you'll most likely be severely injured or perish but the rest of the fears that we have were fears that we inherited from the people
who brought us up and they they want to protect us from harm and to ease our suffering and that's generally what they want to do so they tell you things about um don't don't they give you all these rules to life like don't talk to strangers like don't take candy from strangers like
you guys hear that i mean they don't they probably don't say that much anymore but they used to say don't take candy from strangers because you're going to get abducted so now every stranger is a kid like somebody is going to commit a crime and then now we have this fear of people
so when we're walking down the street and it's dark we tell ourselves stories that they're going to do harm to us i mean there's on one side it's kind of being naive and not paying attention the other side is being overly vigilant and paranoid i think somewhere in the middle is probably where
you need to be you kind of just need to be aware of your surroundings but you don't need to fear every single person that comes in contact with you and it's like we have unnatural fears of flying unnatural fears of spiders because something happened and we tell ourselves this story another thing that
somebody shared with me recently is children are great observers and horrible interpreters like we're really acutely attuned to what's happening we see things we see that mom and dad are arguing and then there's just a disagreement but the story the interpretation we tell ourselves is it's because we're not good enough that mom
and dad are arguing because of something that we did and this creates a whole narrative that you keep with you for a really long time and to address these things so now we're adults and we have freedom we have choice and we can do whatever it is we want but now we're filled
with fear everywhere so no wonder it's natural for a lot of people to be afraid and the only way i know how to get beyond this is to expose yourself to most often an irrational fear you're afraid of something that isn't real and i i think it's one of these um these yogis
who said fear i think a satguru who said this is fear is a socially acceptable form of insanity because we're afraid of things that haven't happened like we have a collective agreement that if you're afraid of x y and z it's okay but if if one of us were afraid of purple rooms
with snakes coming out of the walls that we know it's not real we'd say yeah maybe you need to get checked out and it's kind of weird how that works it is really strange so if you're afraid of public speaking or being visible to people start public speaking start being in front of
people and then you'll probably confirm some of your early fears which is you're not very good at this and that it's uncomfortable and if you can stick it out it gets a little less uncomfortable and you start to develop the skills here's the thing that i know about myself i hate feeling stupid
i hate feeling like i'm not capable of doing something my motivation is to feel less like that so i have to acquire a new skill and only by challenging myself putting myself in those kind of positions am i able to acquire those new skills see because i'm not sitting around on the couch
thinking i'd love to one day learn how to do public speaking and actually be motivated enough to do it it's that i got this really strong push for my business coach you need to do public speaking and i said okay i'll do that so there's a commitment there i said i was going
to do it then you volunteered to do one and then they say yes and now you start to panic you start to prepare and as much preparation as you can have it's never going to be as good as you think and actually the pressure that you put in yourself to do well actually
makes it worse but you go out there and you do it and you're terrible i'm just going to tell you it's not going to be beautiful it's not going to be amazing you're going to be lost for words you're probably going to sweat you're probably going to have indigestion and those are parts
of it part of the process of doing anything that's new and worth doing and the difficulty of doing that creates natural barriers and resistance for other people not to do it there are far few far fewer speakers than there are attendees at a conference you see that ratio right at a conference it
might have 30 speakers and they might have 3 000 people in attendance and what happens with those barriers that that are kind of created in the mind is it creates scarcity scarcity is what creates value gold is only valuable because there's less of it on earth oxygen is plentiful most of times you're
not paying for it so trying those things moving in the direction of your fears is the thing that you absolutely need to do if you want to grow and and that's it it's kind of ironic and beautiful that the only way through it is through it well said i need to maybe you
need to write a pocket full of misti i'm working on it i'm working on it actually i haven't i have quite a few chapters uh finished so my goal is to finish my book this year beautiful when will you finish it december i made a commitment in progress by december so there we
go now you have it committed for a lot more people who are watching right at least at least the 30 or so people are on the pro call here and the 446 people who are watching on youtube live with us i do want to take a moment to thank i think it's chanel
or channel gilchrist uh for doing the super chat and he or she is saying hey chris and future family after finding your content and runs from flux in december they're able to start their own business as an identity designer so or pursue their career as an identity designer so congratulations best of luck
to you yeah that was an uncoordinated woo a little a little late on that one okay beautiful okay what else should we talk about r-r what do you what do you got for us jonah were you going to say something oh i was just going oh sorry i was gonna uh say a
question from the youtube chat but we can do it okay let's do that no good good i want to break it up between the pro and the in the future community go ahead so youtube a waste aways shaheed asks how should people start writing and share knowledge who are afraid of plagiarism okay
lots of things to kind of figure out through that one and i think that's a very real question so excellent question jonah good for picking that one up how do you start um my wife and i were talking about this here we are here's where we want to be the most difficult thing
in life is to take that first step we know we take that first step it moves us closer to that goal but taking that first step is really really difficult so the way that we make it easier is we just make the commitment smaller and the challenge smaller so your first step could
be i'm just going to start tweeting some big ideas i have out into the universe and then i'm going to write a paragraph and then i'm going to write three paragraphs and post it on medium or on linkedin and slowly but surely you're going to get there and then you're going to make
a commitment to writing some blog posts every other day and then every day and then before you know it you could become actually a pretty decent writer now in terms of the question about plagiarism i mean everything we do believe it or not is in some form copying things that we've learned from
other people language the alphabet the fonts that we use on our computers it's borrowed by and made by somebody else and these ideas keep building and hopefully we add a little bit to it to to kind of progress the idea forward i think plagiarism requires a couple of things it requires intent intent
to steal work without giving credit and it's hard to prove intention you need you need to know in your own mind and your body and your soul and your spirit that your intention is not to defame and steal the honor of other people but actually to respect and to give credit where credit
is due in the literary world i believe if you cite note and annotate major ideas that you borrow from other people that's considered a good thing that's a professional practice but if you don't annotate cite and reference other people you might get into a little bit of hot water but i think it's
really about your intention now you notice in our book there's no appendix uh where we cite everything that we got it's just too much i'm not that kind of writer where i have researchers working for me and saying like can you figure this thing out and in fact we had an editor working
with us i said i'm not sure where i got this idea from can you help me find it and i'm researching it myself and i can't find it i know everything i have comes from somebody else that's for sure a coach a teacher a professor a video i watch so i try my
best with the purists of intentions to credit where i can remember and as often as i can to help promote those people as much as i can and hopefully we've done an okay job but at some point if you go and note every single thing there would be a footnote and numbers and
quotes on everything that you write because where do these ideas come from so the best thing that you can do i think is to honor those people to to approach it the correct way not to try to steal from them but to also fold in your own stories your own lens and add
a little bit to the conversation and then the person coming up after you will do the same one rule of thumb is this if you're not sure if what you're doing is going to honor this person ask yourself if somebody else did this to you once you put in months of work writing
your book and they do it to you in the way that you're doing it to others how would that make you feel if you're okay with it probably it's all right and i just want to use this moment to really quickly clarify something that i see happening a lot on instagram that people
literally do this they they look at people's work their carousels and there's credit information at the top and the bottom you know what they do they crop it in so they remove the credit so you know by cropping in your intention is not to honor decide to to annotate your intention is to
hide the source and why do you hide the source you hide the source because you're not a confident person that people you fear people will love you less that respect you less and and not give you any credit well your credit is i help to find and curate the best most inspirational content
for my audience and i also honor the people that i'm resharing their work and the other version of this that we see that i want to caution you away from is to literally take somebody else's story and the way they phrase it and their words exactly and to re-typeset it and add a
new image and not give credit again and not to make it clear so some people will be very sneaky about this they'll write a whole long caption and they'll write inspired by this is not inspired by this is you just copying and changing it that's way beyond that and i've i've had to
respond to some people and they're like oh but i'm just learning is it okay if i'm just learning well is that really your intention if you're learning why are you sharing it i'm not sharing with you all the homework that i do like when i'm in class on all the scraps and the
junky things that i do no i'm sharing with you the end product of that learning so this is where you've you've gone way past what i think is that murky middle and you've you've you've waded right into the deep end of plagiarism and here's the thing it's going to come back to bite
you in the butt it really will that's a shortcut to a short-term career and the best way i know how to discredit yourself do we have more questions on youtube or oh we can go to rr okay rr what you got for us hello could you hear me yes my question is it's
kind of similar to the last question except for the plagiarism part so let's say you were you had an intention like a long-term vision to write a book three four years from now what are the things you can do to prepare yourself and so that you can maximize maximize you know the effectiveness
once that time you know comes great okay um here's what i would recommend doing and this is something i got from south golden see just did it right there got this from seth godin he says today if you want to be a writer don't write your book first and then build an audience
you should be building your audience before you write the book because they're going to show up for you and they're going to support you and you need to give value but also i think you want to validate the ideas are helpful to people not that you need to know if you're good or
not but to make sure that you're being an effective communicator and potentially a teacher so they go hand in hand so what you should be doing right now is you should be preparing this audience by writing some version of this book that you plan to write in small bite-sized pieces and i'll give
you an example in real in the real world here what i plan to do i just said i don't want to write another book but i'm actually secretly thinking about writing two more books right now so just thinking okay don't don't be like he said it no he has to do it no
kickstarter project yet but people who follow me on on instagram will see that i write these 10 slide carousel decks and i've been organizing them in specific categories like mindset business marketing design and so on and so forth and then i had this idea kind of like the way austin clean wrote his
books they're they're super easy to consume it's it's dense with super potent pieces of inspirational content but i can then take the highest performing best received carousels and take those and make 10 pages of a book out of it and i would collect the different volumes together and print a series of books
and put them together in like a book case a small one so that you can pull it out and you just want to read about things on marketing or mindset or business entrepreneurship etc you can just pull it out and you can get a mini lesson in 10 pages and i know it
works because think about the attention span of people on instagram it's very short and that you you could be theoretically standing at an airport or a book stand flip it open like oh wow that solves the problem i have today i think that would be really cool if each set of books were
designed in different colors so once you put them together in a slip case it's going to look really nice keep them together but that's one idea so what i've done is i've been breaking down and distributing the workload over long periods of time so that when i have to write it's not going
to be a lot of work and be overwhelming and i think that's an idea i'd encourage everybody here to think about and try in whatever form that makes the most sense to you it's like i get to shoot one scene of a movie i plan to make every other day and when i
step back i collect the best scenes together i reorder them and make it make sense and that's my film if only movies could be made that way they can't for a lot of different reasons but i think you can write like that and i think it's been really cool so for people who
who who enjoy the kind of content that i make that kind of like the wit and the visual style that i bring to the table they're going to be able to have this art gif entrepreneurship book that you can consume really fast that's really kind of like what i would think is the
textbook for the 21st century super easy to read very visual and and very potent in the in the economy of words so that's what i would recommend are oh thank you no that's not on you it's on us we're still trying to figure out what the next thing we can talk about so
we've been live streaming now for an hour i think i'm gonna stay on for another 25 minutes or so so we'll wrap up at 12 30. mostly because i'm hungry that's really all it is okay uh mahi has a question for us [Music] yeah i i uh hi chris hi misty i actually
don't have a question i just wanted to share that uh just i just bought the audiobook and to be listening to it why even while i was working i was listening to it and yet i could digest everything and i suddenly realized that i have been writing a lot of quotes and things
that you uh say usually and now it feels like you have presented us with a consolidated copy so that i don't have to search my notes and for some reason i was tearing up uh while listening to some chapters it was very emotional uh it reminded me of where i was and how
long i have come uh definitely with with learning from what you have taught and the community the pro group and everything and uh this thing i have here okay i don't think uh you can see it but yeah it says uh wolves don't lose sleep over the opinions of sheep and it's one
of my favorite quotes from the book and i just love it i just wanted to share this with you and i hope that we are able to get the books to india and yes i love the colors thank you very much for sharing and telling me that there are parts there that hit
you emotionally because that's the greatest reward that i can have because like i said i'm a pretty analytical logical cold guy but there is yet a human inside of me that yearns to connect with people on an emotional level and then when i'm able to do in moments like this i i feel
very gratified like yeah you're doing something right kid keep doing it i say kid i'm an old man what am i saying thank you thank you [Laughter] all right misty i don't think any of us think of you as old so old sadie yeah 80's yeah harris is asking what your preferred manner
of organizing your writing is paper versus apps oh that's a good question i think i prefer writing on a piece of paper but then i realize i'm just making a lot of extra work for myself so at some point um look at this here i'll grab it right next to me and this
is just some it's a stack of ideas and notes that i've been writing on lots of different things every time i have an idea i put it down on one of these pieces of paper and underneath that is a box full of these things and i just keep thinking to myself when are
these gonna see light of day they're not doing anybody any good here so now i'm like shoot i gotta get on on an app and start writing for real because then at least i can copy paste and share it quickly with people and eventually it'll save me a round of typing out my
notes the funny thing is when i write these things i'm very clear in my mind what the heck i'm talking about right you guys have all that this has happened to everybody you write this little tiger i'm like oh my god this genius it's gonna be so good a couple days from now
i look at him like what was i thinking like how is that even like what word is that again and the idea is gone so i know you i can't get away with that when i'm on some app i'm trying to write it's like that's just garbage i don't know what that is
um so definitely i'm moving more towards digital and there's a rule that i have is you just type and you don't stop typos grammar quotations who cares when when you write you just go for it i i think it's one of these books i was reading on how to write and they and
writers professional writers say like you might have an hour or two of good writing a day and that's it so when it's your time you write and you don't stop and when you're done you're done don't even try to force the other six hours you're done go do something else with your life
and i like that a lot of the things that i share and tweet on on on those social platforms is because i'm having an emotional moment at that moment in time i'm not just staring at twitter like dude write something come up with something right now make it good doesn't happen and the
secret to some of my limited ex success is this is responding to comments and questions sometimes gets me really fired up so when somebody's like oh that will never work christo that's so stupid here in whatever country i live in that'll never work and that made me write a response which is you're
right it'll never work because you don't believe it will work so how is ever going to succeed you've already committed to it not working so of course it won't work for you then that makes me think it's like why is one set of advice or information gold for one person and garbage to
another it's gold and garbage the same exact video has helped people to double or triple their income while the exact same video for somebody else is like this is garbage and never works see that inspires me to capture that thought and to ask that question to to my audience to my community and
get to them to start thinking about it isn't that strange we're all surrounded by books one person will spin it into gold one person will use it as a doorstop it's just the way things are okay you know what i was thinking misty i'm sorry i think i prematurely cut you off there
were you gonna say something not at all oh okay here's what i'd love to do in the remaining time we have about 20 some odd minutes left here with with one another let's forget talking about the book let's just talk about whatever we want to talk about as we always do in the
pro group let's do it forget about the format and the structure right you guys are like on super ace behavior today for whatever reason i'm not sure why normally we're like running around like woo let's just do stuff let's do it let's get there anybody you want to talk about anything open it
up something that's hot on your mind something that's uh burning a hole in your soul let's talk about those things no raising of hands should we just jump in whatever if you feel like you got something let's just have a conversation if you're in a quiet room i'm a jumping i'm not surprised
you want to go ahead of course okay so i was thinking uh you know you and i talked about kairos and this is concept i learned from costas from inside the pro group and i was realizing just now as i heard you speak that after i started going over my beliefs and changing
them because it was not a good mindset i started hearing you clearer and clearer and it's happening it's and i i was wondering uh i think it's uh it's a good idea after you understand where you're going wrong with your mindset and how you can improve then you're gonna start hearing and learning
as much more much more than you ever did before and everything is gonna start clicking mm-hmm and kairos is it means the opportune moment so i'm i'm experiencing more and more opportune moments excellent i love your energy today by the way not to say that it's different than your other energy but your
energy is very good i like it i just want to just talk about something that's kind of been on my mind recently i've been recently exposed to marshall rosenberg and he he is known for a book called non-violent communication it's a term i've heard before but i'm like what does that even mean
nonviolent communication why does it even matter right and i don't want to get into all the concepts because i'm still relatively new to learning the principles but it really aligns with something that i believe and my friend annalee was on this call today and she's like you know i'm not saying you're different
but you're getting better at doing this thing and i was like that's that's awesome that you say that and i cause i think i'm always evolving and changing so when you say different it's like different as compared to what yeah three months ago two months yeah i'm i'm an evolving work in progress
and i'm good with that here's one thing that really aligns with what i think and perhaps one of the reasons why i've had some of the success that i've had which is trying to be objective and it's not easy to be an objective listener to be an objective communicator and to be objective
with yourself and what do i mean by that if that sounds like yeah what are you talking about robot what are you doing here i mean that when we we describe ourselves our progress try to remove language that it sounds judgmental like you're casting judgment on something because who says you're the best
judge of anything that's kind of self-important don't you think so marshall talks about this he's like don't tell me i did a good job i don't really want to hear that because who made you the decider of good and if there's good then there's bad right so he said that a young person
came up to him after one of his lectures and said you're you're amazing and you're inspirational he says okay but tell me what you got from this because that'll help me and what what can you apply in your life that'll help me that's how i know if i've done a good job i
get to decide not you i love that it's like now normally when people come up to me it's like oh i love your talk and this and that great job so inspirational now i have to rethink like what's my interaction with them like because it makes you hungry and potentially addicted to other
people's adulation right so when you guys create something on social media like especially on instagram i get this all the time nobody loves my posts nobody's sharing it chris why do you let other people decide if you've done good or not you know it's good you know it's not and you keep working
on it yes some of the feedback helps you to decide i'm connecting with my audience or not but don't be chasing that it'll lead to a path of depression i'm almost sure of that so let's remove judgmental language let's remove evaluation and criticism let's just try to be very objective and the reason
why i bring this up is because joanna said many positive things but she said one thing that caught my ear immediately she said something about but not a good one so the word good is judgment on the one so i am just a work in progress i'm not good i'm not bad i'm
just working on it that's all and if you guys can work on that language the internal language i think you're going to start to find yourself to be a little happier a little on it less on edge and less writing that emotional roller coaster the high highs and the low lows i'll tell
you a little personal story i remember having this thought in my late teens one character that i always admired on television was mr spock i love mr spock he's a vulcan he's super logical he always did what was necessary and he was very misunderstood and cast as uh by his crewmates as cold
and uncaring but you knew that mr spock would without hesitation put his life down to save people and he famously said i think in star trek ii the movie and the wrath of khan he said the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one he just said that he said goodbye
to his friend jim and then he died sorry spoiler alert okay that was it that was it the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one and i thought in my life being an emotional uh teenager just like every teenager it's like everything is life and death to teenagers like she
didn't call me ah my life is over i wore the wrong pants to school everybody will hate me you know you ride those roller coaster and i was starting to think what a horrible way to live and on the opposite side is somebody would say something somebody you admired that you you you
had uh infatuation like you were infatuated with this person you looked up to them if they said good job i like you you're cool it was me like i'm gonna be on cloud nine for a couple hours uh please do not disturb and it was it was a it was a horrible place
i would go from like being super happy to like wanting to cry and crying so i i made a pact with myself look if i have to give up some of the happy penis to get rid of the sadness and the depression i'm gonna do that so i only want to focus my
energies on positive emotions emotions that empower me and i'll sacrifice a little bit of that pure aesthetic euphoric joy for some of the deep dark borderline depression suicidal thoughts i'll trade those so i'm gonna start to narrow this in and become this objective person and i've been on that path for some 30
plus years now and it's worked pretty well for me and now i find out non-violent communication in this one area there's some overlap i i for all the internet people are going to just hammer me on this because i know there are a lot of smart people who watch your channel who's going
to say you don't know nothing about nonviolent communication i just watched a video like a week ago so forgive me for that i'm just trying to share with something with you from my life that's helped me and if we can eliminate some of that subjective judgmental critical language to ourselves and to others
i think there's going to be a lot more peace and harmony i just want to echo what you're saying about non-violent communication it really does help because it's amazing when you stop to start and listen to how you're speaking to others and yourself mostly to yourself it it's kind of surprising some of
the things that you say and it's actually a relief to leave those things aside it's like carrying around a backpack of rocks that weighs 500 pounds sometimes you don't even know it i think that term you carry or you bring a lot of baggage is the little description of an idea right there's
a lot of stuff you're carrying around it's really heavy to take that with you everywhere you go and until we become aware of it the things that we inherit from our parents from our culture from our society and our community they're not necessarily designed for you specifically or you in the 21st century
and you keep carrying those ideas at some point you got to just let them go i love what neil degrasse tyson says about this his pursuit as a scientist is to search for objective verifiable truth and it's not always easy to find but it's a pursuit worth having and going on so it's
something i think we all need to do and an exercise that we've done inside the pro group is to ask yourself this question whatever thought and belief you have try to make an argument for it and an argument against it and let yourself decide based on the evidence and evidence only what you
should believe like my son um when he was younger he he was scared to talk to adults he really was so i would ask him hey go get dad a refill well then their policies to get a refill they're happy to do this for you to serve their patrons i said i don't
want to do that look how come kiddo it's like they're not going to want to talk to a kid like me and he's like probably nine like what do you mean okay what's the worst that's gonna happen he tells me they're gonna kill me dad why would they kill you for asking for
a refill so he had to speak his fear and i said let's make all the case for like the whys and the why nots and why it won't happen you see the irrational emotional stories that we tell ourselves like he's pretty good at observing horrible at interpreting and there he is his interpretation
is if a kid asks an adult for something he will be killed i had to expose him to that uh so you wanna i exposed him to that and he went out there and he did it he took forever to go get that refill but he came back and he was proud and
he was happy and smiling from ear to ear i said look you did it man you did it so now when we're at restaurants and we go out he's like dad i got you your your your toothpick your napkin your yeah can i get i got them a refill for you it's like
what a different human being that one little act changed one mindset that opened up a whole new way of thinking and living and behaving and then the next thing is easier too the next thing is afraid of that the next thing is easier cool yeah and so i put my children to torturous
kind of things like this all the time for example asking for what you want in life i know i'm a horrible parent report me soon right just report me okay there's one question here i saw from youtube and we're getting towards the end here so pro people if you want to get your
question out and want to chat with something get ready because we're running out of time kelly elizabeth not cut asked chris can you talk about how you've pivoted the future since the pandemic and the lockdown okay we need to address it i think almost every live stream we're gonna have to talk about
this in one form or the other let's talk about this we've made some changes and we're continuing to make changes i think it's silly not to react to the environment and the stimuli that you're given don't just anchor and say and put your head in the sand don't do that so what's happened
now unfortunately we have this giant office space that's almost 13 000 square feet that only two people basically work out of jonah and ricky so the they basically are they have the castle to themselves yes and the reason why they're at the office yep the reason why they're at the office and not
at home is the office is a lot bigger than their apartments that's it otherwise they can work anywhere they want the rest of the team is working remotely and we're making that permanent not for the next three months not for the next 12 months but we're just done we worked through the pain
of transitioning and it wasn't that painful because at that point most of the team was working remotely anyways just checking at the office we just committed to it how have we committed to this everybody in the office has cleaned up their desks taken all their personal belongings and they're all working from home
what have we done well that means that we've cut out a lot of the time wasted in commuting and in the book remote written by jason friedman and david hansen they talk about how offices are distraction factories and it is totally true and i have to tell you since the lockdown i have
never been more productive and worked as hard as i have because i realized most of my time was being broken up by meetings and somebody popping my office hey chris hey chris hey chris it's so prevalent that great gun and i are doing a youtube or a podcast series called hey chris where
he's just going to ask me interrupted questions like that the whole time so what happens is for me i go to work around 10 o'clock 11 o'clock sometimes i finish seven eight o'clock when i say finish that means everybody is done talking to me now i'll get to work and so my best
most productive time is after everybody goes home so it's gonna be anywhere between eight to ten pm now imagine taking that very hyper productive time and stretching it out from the beginning of my day to the end of my day i have never been more tired in my life mentally i'm just wiped
out and i couldn't figure it out for some time i was asking my wife like god are you feeling this she's like feeling what i'm like i'm a zombie i don't know what's going on it's because i'm doing 12 hours of concentrated deep focus work a day and not realizing what i've done
to myself so now i take deliberately very long breaks in in parts of the day when i feel like you know what i've done enough work i'm going to take a break so my wife will see me like after lunch sitting on the couch watching netflix and what are you doing i'm like
it's my decompression time right now and then i go back and then i'm charged to do it and so i have to learn how to regulate you notice now i'm not in the studio i don't i don't look as good as i used to and now you know how much lighting plays a
role in everything because a team their main job is to make me look good and this is me trying to do it on my own my lighting here and here and i'm working on it still right so the office is this is home for me and this is how we're doing this uh
but we've been doing this with the profam i think since 2014. so we've been at the zoom game for some time for all you new zoomers so that's some of the changes we made we're also changing our office because we don't need to hold on to twelve thousand thirteen thousand square feet so
we're going to be migrating to a smaller part of the building and potentially leasing out the rest of the building that's the idea for now that breaks my heart i don't want to do that but i also don't want to be stupid about this because i was saving the space to meet and
to meet you guys in person and to run workshops and events but we can't even do that so it seems pointless those are the changes we're making but otherwise the company is humming along just fine financially speaking we're exactly where we were last year so we're on track despite the economy heading into
potentially a depression all right that's good uh peter lamb why don't we do this question yeah yeah let's do peter i mean let's not do him but let's have peter speak and then let's have analy go next and then we'll wrap it up with that all right peter will not be done on
the show and yikes peter fire what's up all right cool how do i know when is the right time to ask for help because then when i was a student back in college i would always be asking for help right without trying to you know learn and research and do the stuff myself
but now i'm on the other end of the spectrum where i'm just like no i think i know what chris is going to say he's going to say this i should probably just do that but then i spiral myself to the point where i don't ask any questions even though i think i'm
stuck right so when is the right time to figure out this is when i need help peter gosh darn it that's an excellent question that's an excellent question because it's a question i've not heard before so congratulations winner winner chicken dinner you've done it my friend you've asked me a question i've not
been asked before very good okay this one's tricky man it is really tricky and i'll tell you this in a round and about way and let's see if we can get to the answer i gravitate towards people who are self-starters who take initiative who have a great capacity to learn and figure things
out on their own they're the people i enjoy being around the most because they always bring new things to me and we contribute to each other's learning i love that simultaneously there are people on my team who make all kinds of weird dare i say it not wise decisions and they're wasting time
and resources we're like why don't you just ask if we have that or if anybody knew how to do this so there seems to be a balance that there are some common sense things that you should probably start with in terms of understanding that you need to get alignment with the team for
example if you want to build out a new e-commerce portal and you think our website's going to be improved by that you probably should ask everybody like hey i'm thinking about doing an e-commerce portal i think we can improve the website and then somebody's going to chime in and say look peter we've
gone down that path don't go down there it's not helpful to us before you spend all that time and energy right because we want to be smart before we work hard so we want to get alignment and clarity on the goals and the purpose and to make sure this is something that we
collectively want to do and once you get there then go and put in the energy i think personally i find great pleasure excuse me i find great pleasure in figuring things out it makes me really really happy but at a certain point i get stuck and that's when i need help because the
law of diminishing returns kick in and now i'm spending eight hours trying to figure something out that i know somebody in my circle will have the answer to a great time to ask for help is to ask to be pointed in the right direction not how to do something okay so process that
for a second if you want to launch some kind of marketing campaign and you're not quite sure what platform or the general direction you might want to ask your community your peers social media who has experience in this and what has worked for you and then they said you know this chatbot thing
has been killing it for me i'm in this space and this is how i worked it that's usually all the information i need and then i go down the chat bot uh hole the chatbot rabbit hole and i just keep going down there and i'll figure it out when i get stuck i
reach out for help i've done the work i'll say look i've gotten this far now i'm hitting this roadblock do you have any insight oh yeah you know peter if you uncheck this and click on that option the world will open up to you again so that's usually where you want to ask
for help is to get pointed in the right direction awesome thank you that that was super clear okay great i hope that makes it to be a cut down let's do it all right annalee you get to bring us home take us home please hello hi and yeah i wanna i wanna ask
a question about a book but not this book maybe your next book i don't know yeah um i listened to a podcast uh where you were a guest i think it called finding founders oh yeah really yes yeah it was great and uh i heard you talk about like your life and your
story and i thought it was really emotional and a lot of inspiration and my thought was like are you going to write a book about your life okay this is where the shoemaker's kids have no shoes the advice i give is not the advice i take so here we go my natural gut
instinct is answer not for some time annaly because i just don't think my life is that interesting and not that not enough people care to know it right now i believe still that there's more work to be done in terms of teaching the world and at some point that story will become more
interesting but i do have ambitions to share this because i i think people people make the wrong assumptions about us all the time not that i should care but they do i see this happening on social media oh yeah chris has got that silver spoon up his you know and he's had everything
handed to him and everything was given and it's like yeah that's why he's like x y and z and then make up an assumption oh he's never done anything he's never had to struggle in his life he doesn't know what it's like to be poor boy don't you know anything you know so
that's that's like why i'm i feel compelled to like you know because people discover you yesterday that's the story that they tell themselves that here they are here you are like we don't we don't know that people like gary vaynerchuk has done what he's had to do to be where he's at we
just don't know so yes i would like to tell that story but mostly i i want to tell that story to honor my parents and i don't want to get too deep into those because i don't want to get super emotional but i i do want to say a couple of things i've
had them recorded on tape before i really knew what i was doing and recording them on video telling the story of how we came to this country and the decisions they had to make and it is a crazy story that i only started to dip my toes in on for the finding founders
podcast but there's a story i want to preserve to help future generations of those like my kids to know where we're from and who we are and and and what their grandparents had to go through yeah i think you can inspire so many people if you tell that story yeah i'll have to
wait for like when i can tell that so gee thanks oh sorry for that question no that's all right it's getting hot in here all of a sudden i don't know what's happened okay um i'll work on that at some point emily thank you for reminding me and eventually we'll i'll tell that
story and i think i'm gonna wrap up this show it's it's time to wrap up the show misty thank you very much for prompting me to do this and for playing the role of the moderator for this group i appreciate that and i appreciate all the family that's here uh yes i see
the energy there i i'm so blessed and and thrilled to to have you as part of my community as part of my my own support network and i'm i'm i'm grateful for you and uh i'll show up every day to try to make your lives a little bit better and thank you youtube
family for tuning in today i think that's it for me i want to say thank you first of all you guys unmute yourself and make a sound or something so people know that you're alive yes thank you very much you guys oh my gosh people's eardrums are broken right now you should start
by telling us all those parental uh nuggets you drop sometimes they're great you know what i would love to talk about parenting advice and that may be my third or 40th career here and we'll get into it man we'll do that okay you guys have an amazing rest of your friday or saturday
or whatever time you can tell our profam is super diverse men women gender non-binary all from all parts of the world and you can see some it's dark some it's light we just don't know what time it is so it's a super cool group i think one of you one of you one
of your groups has had a block party today right i thought i saw that so yay yay i wish i could have been there but okay so that's it for me thank you everybody jonah get us out of here drop some music or something bye everybody thank you thank you hi everybody i
i don't want to hang up thank you happy to do this we could do this more often
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