Business Podcast | NY-Times Best-Selling Author Gretchen Rubin | How to Optimize Your Daily Productivity & Satisfaction Including: How to Write a Book, the Importance of Having Multiple Screens, Note-Taking 101 & More

Audio Transcription

Two men, 13 multi-million dollar businesses, eight kids. Get ready to enter the Thrive Time Show. All right, Thrive Nation, welcome back to The Conversation. It is The Thrive Time Show on your radio and on today’s show. This show might be short if our next guest does not pick up the phone. Her name is Gretchen Rubin. She’s a New York Times best-selling author. It always gets a little bit nerve-wracking. Especially the bigger the name is, like the bigger the guest. Should we call her? I think we should. Okay, let’s go. I’m gonna do it. Here we go. Okay Usually if somebody wants to pick up the call they’ll pick it up There’s yes, well Gretchen, how are you? This is clay Hey clay, how are you? Well, I you are an answer to prayer. I have read your stuff. I love what you do. I love your maniacal obsession in the research. And so I am super excited. I’ve been praying to have you on the show. So hopefully there was some divine intervention that made that happen. Excellent. I’m so happy to have the chance to talk to you. So this is great. And as a result of several recent poor life choices, she is now on the Thrive Time show. Gretchen Rubin, how are you? I’m so happy to be talking to you. Thank you. Well, hey, I want to, I, the listeners out there that aren’t as familiar with your books as I am, I want to start at the beginning, before you were a bestselling author, when you were a lawyer. Yeah. When did you decide to become a lawyer and why would you want to do that to yourself? You know, I went to law school for the same reason a lot of people go, which is I was good at research and writing and I thought I didn’t know what else to do with myself and I thought, well, it’s a great education, it’ll keep my options open, I can change my mind later, it’s good preparation for a lot of different avenues. And so I hadn’t really thought much about whether I wanted to be a lawyer. And in fact, if you want to be a lawyer, going to law school is a great way to become a lawyer. I know many people who wanted to be lawyers and that’s a great thing to do, but it’s not a great thing to do if you just don’t know what else to do with yourself. But I had a great time in law school, I had a great experience, and I was clerking for Justice Andrew A. O’Connor when I realized that I actually wanted to be a writer. I want to just, what you just said is so profound. I coach businesses all over the world. I’ve worked with UPS and Hewlett Packard and big companies. And what will happen a lot of times, Gretchen, is you’ll meet the CEO of something or the executive of something or the VP of something and they hate their career, but they don’t have the courage yet or the motivation yet or whatever that is. They don’t have that yet to actually quit and do something else. And you actually had a law degree from not just any school, but from Yale. I mean, you were working with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor from 95 to 96. I mean many could say you were a rising star, you already were a star. Where did that courage to quit the career you didn’t love and move on to something else come from? You know I was really lucky because I think you’re right, a lot of times people know what they don’t like but they don’t know what they want. I was really lucky because I’m kind of a person who I get very, very interested in things and will do a ton of research. And that’s happened to me my whole life. But while I was clerking, I became obsessed with like this idea. I was walking during my lunch hour one day and I was looking up at the Capitol Dome and I thought, what am I interested in that everybody else in the world is interested in? And I thought, well, power, money, fame, sex, it became this thing, this idea that I started to research and research and research in my free time, and eventually it occurred to me, this is what a person would do if they were going to write a book about it, maybe I should write a book. And so at that point I felt this tremendous pull. You know, it’s like when the Death Star has the Millennium Falcon in the tractor beam, and it’s like, you’re going to go. I felt the pull toward me, and so I think that made it a lot easier for me because it wasn’t like I was so dissatisfied with what I had. It was that all of a sudden there was something I really, really, really wanted to do. And so that felt very affirmative. And so then it was a question of like, well, how do I do that? That was a huge challenge, but I knew what it was that I wanted. And I think that makes it easier in a way than people who just know I want something else. I don’t know what that looks like yet. You were hearing in your mind the Empire, the Empire, the Darth Vader theme song that… Yeah, yeah. You’re feeling the tractor beam pulling you in here and I heard you actually say, now you can retract the statement if you want, but I heard you on one of your podcasts, which you’ve done hundreds and hundreds, I heard you say that you actually got to a place where you would rather fail as an author than to succeed as an attorney. Is that correct or am I misquoting you? Yeah. No, I just decided I need to give it a shot and if I fail, I fail, but I need to try. And so you made the jump and a lot of people say, well, what’s the linear path to become an author? What is the step one, step two? So I heard that you basically have to renew your license. I coach a lot of attorneys, work with a lot of lawyers, and you have to keep your license, your certifications current. And I guess that you had something coming up and you decided just not to renew it or not to pay the fee or something, and that was your jumping point. Can you tell the listeners about that? Well, another thing that made it easier for me is that my husband was also going through a big transition and he had decided to leave law and go into finance. So we were both, we both were in legal jobs and we moved from Washington D.C. to New York and as part of that move we were going to get new jobs. He was going to get a job, I was going to try to get an agent and get a book contract and so we were starting in New York in these new paths. And the day came exactly as you say when we got a letter from the New York Bar, one of us did, I forget which one, saying you owe us bar fees because you have to pay your bar fees to be in good standing It’s expensive. This is not like 25 bucks. This is like you’re really paying and I said to my husband Gosh, should we pair bar fees? And he’s like no You know and I was that was the moment when we were like, you know what? We are really we’re moving on now I found out later that if you like make up your bar fees and do continuing legal education, you can probably get back in. So it wasn’t as abrupt and definitive as it seemed at the moment, but at the moment, it felt like, okay, we’re doing this. But it was helpful to have somebody else with me. I was doing it, and we were just like, we’re gonna start over, we’re gonna give this something else a shot. How long have you two lovebirds been married, by the way, you and your husband? How many years at this point? 24. 24? I appreciate you guys stopping making out to go ahead and do this interview, by the way. I can just feel the romance. I can feel the love there. So I want to ask you this, though. So you guys, I mean, you guys have been partners. I’ve heard you talk about this, that he’s very supportive of you. You’re very supportive of him. It’s a neat story. I’ve been married 17 years to the same incredible lady. You’ve got us beat, though. 24 years you guys have been together. As you guys were jumping into this new career together, I’ve heard you say, and other people say, the hardest part of becoming an author, as a career, is finding a literary agent that believes in you and your work. And I’ve heard you brag about, I believe her name is Christy Fletcher. Can you talk to me about the, talk to us about the struggles of finding a literary agent that actually believes in you and somebody with the kind of character and caliber of Christy Fletcher? Exactly right. I think this is a big surprise for many people who would like to be published authors, is that really, I think, the most challenging part, perhaps, at least in today’s environment, is getting an agent. Because once you have an agent, your agent shepherds you through the process. Your agent has a lot of information, a lot of contacts, they have a lot of views, they have a lot of experience, they can really be your cheerleader and your guide so you have that help. And to get an agent, you have to show that you have work that your agent thinks that he or she can successfully represent. So you also just by that stage have something that is in good shape. But it’s very hard to get a literary agent. And what a lot of people don’t understand is you really don’t have the option, if you want to be traditionally published, and that’s what I’m talking about by a publishing house, you can’t just send it to the publisher. You don’t have that option. They will not look at something that just comes in from a person. It has to come through an agent. So it’s a necessary step. It’s not something where you’re like, well, I don’t care about having an agent. I’ll just negotiate my own contract. No, they won’t even look at it. If you want to be traditionally published, nowadays lots of people self-publish and that’s becoming more and more possible and there you really are doing it yourself and that’s one of the advantages. When you’re ready, it’s Sunday at midnight, you can start that process if you want. But having an agent is difficult because you have to get the attention of an agent first and they have hundreds and hundreds of people studying them stuff and you also have to show them that you can write a book that they think that will appeal to a lot of people and that they can sell successfully. And it’s weird, it’s a weird thing, they’re very hard to reach, they’re deliberately hard to reach because otherwise everybody would be hounding them all the time. They can be kind of hard to reach, it can be kind of hard to figure out, well, who’s the right agent for someone like me. One of the things you can do is you can literally look in the acknowledgments pages of books that you feel like if you’re writing a book it’s in the spirit of another book. You can look because people will usually thank their agents and you can say like, oh well I see that this agent is coming up over and over in books that I think my book is sort of similar to. Maybe that would be a good person to approach. If you have contacts, this is why a lot of people go to things like writers’ conferences, because they hope that they’re going to make connections with agents. I had a connection through college. I had a very distant connection, but it worked out. Christy and I were both very much starting out at the same time, so we really grew up together. I feel incredibly fortunate, because we’re so well-matched in terms of our interests and our tastes and our appetite for innovation, and she’s really pushed me very hard and been very supportive of me doing things. Some very traditional literary agents are like, if you’re not writing a book, you’re wasting your time. And they wouldn’t have wanted me to have a blog when I started my blog 10 years ago, or they might not have understood why I would want to have a podcast. Whereas Christy, she has such an appetite for that kind of thing. She loves experimentation. She loves to see risk and failure. She loves data. So she’s really pushed me instead of like cautioning me to try new things, which has been great because I’m still a very traditional writer. I feel like that’s my primary identity. I agree. I go to a library in my neighborhood and write on my laptop for three hours. That’s my favorite thing to do and that’s the most important thing to me. But I do a lot of other things as well now. You know, Jack London, the famous best-selling author, this guy decorated his office with all the rejection letters. He almost made it like his wallpaper. Do you remember how many rejection letters you received before you reconnected with your friend from college, or did you connect on the first try? It wasn’t the first try. I don’t remember. There weren’t that many, fortunately. It was a pretty… Well, you’re a big deal. You’re a unicorn, naturally. No, but one person said something that was really interesting to me. I never forgot it because I thought it was the stupidest observation I’d ever heard, but now in retrospect I understand what she was saying. She said, this is from my book, Power, Money, Fame, Sex, a User’s Guide, which was the book that I went out to get an agent with, and she said, there are too many ideas on a page. And I was like, how can there be too many ideas? Everybody should have as many ideas as they want. I was patting myself on the back for having so many ideas. But now I understand what she meant, is that I have a very dense style and I have to really, it’s too much. It’s not, a reader doesn’t want to go through at that level. And I’ve had to learn how to loosen up my style, open up my style, not to throw in every quotation that I’ve ever read in my whole life that I love. In retrospect, I realized that she was very wise. I was just too ignorant to understand what she was getting at. Fortunately, Christy thought she could work with something that had too many ideas on the page, so it all worked out. That was a very memorable rejection that I got. There were others which I’ve blocked out. You can kind of track with your podcast and my podcast, we can kind of track how many people download our podcast. As we’ve moved into the top five consistently on the business section, there’s a lady, have you ever met Ifat Jindal with Foundry Media? Have you ever met her? I don’t believe so. Her company, Foundry Media, represented Elon Musk’s book, and there’s a lot of books in the top ten. Oh, sure, I know Foundry Media. Yeah, and the thing is, I get rejected by EFOD about every six months to be my agent. And so recently, I actually made cars. Very recently. This morning, I made all of our employees, Gretchen, I made all of our employees park their cars in the shape of her name. Yep. And I’ve sent that to her. And I’m just going to continue. We drone videoed it from a mobile phone. I can’t tell you, and for anyone out there, I’ve had over a hundred rejections. I’ve written a lot of books. And you know how it is, when you self-publish, you go to a conference, people will want to buy 1,000 books. And you make good money. But to get a good literary agent, there’s a rejection there. And so I just, if you’re out there and you want to write a book, you’re going to get rejected. It’s just going to happen. But hopefully, the cars in the shape of EFOT’s name, YFAT, will get a winner over this time. We did it. That, you get A++ for originality. That is great. Oh, we’ve fully droned video over it and everything. I’ll send you a link when we hop off today. You’ll enjoy it. Oh my gosh, please do. I’m dying to do that. I will do it. Now, Gretchen, I want to ask you this, because your first book that you wrote, Power, Money, Fame, Sex, a User’s Guide, that particular book, if you’ve ever read any of your books, you’re out there listening, if you haven’t read one of her books, listen, if you just want to say, I like your podcast, what should I do? Buy one of her books. I don’t care what book you buy, buy a Gretchen Rubin book today, buy the book. I’m serious. You got to buy a book. You got to buy one of her books and you’re going to see a woman. I mean this in a kind way, not a backhanded compliment. You maniacally obsess and research about a subject to the point that I think anybody out there would have stopped halfway through or a tenth of the way through. And then it’s almost like when you read your book, it’s like, I now know everything about this subject and I’ve summarized it for you. I mean, it’s so easy to read, but you’ve done so much research. So I just want to ask you, I mean, what makes… You’re so nice to say that. That’s like one of the nicest things anybody’s ever said. No, it’s serious. I feel like it’s a gift. It’s like you’ve read everything there is to know about John F. Kennedy or Winston Churchill And here it is. Yeah, it obscure books. So I want to ask you What made you first want to write power money fame sex a user’s guide. It’s an incredible book What made you first want to read that book or write that book research the book? Well, you know, I like I said I just had this moment where it like hit me and it was like a linked idea in my mind. It was like power, money, fame, sex. And I remember I was at a cocktail party in DC and for some reason, Walter Isaacson was there who was like way, way, way more important than I was. But somehow I got talking to Walter Isaacson and I was like, oh, I’m thinking about writing this book, power, money, fame, sex. And he goes, nope, you can only have three. Red, white, and blue, you can only have three. And I’m like, power, money, fame, sex, which one would you leave out. There’s more. Can I interrupt you just for one second? I’m so sorry to interrupt somebody who’s in the Oprah Top 100 here. Walter Isaacson, for anybody out there who doesn’t know, he is one of the best authors of our generation, and he has been the guy behind books that… it’s like Steve Jobs 2011, if you’ve ever read it. It’s unbelievably researched. Leonardo da Vinci, 2017. So when Gretchen throws out Walter Isaacson, I just want to make sure everybody understands, Walter Isaacson is a big deal. I think you’re probably a bigger deal, but he’s a big deal. Back to you, I’m so sorry. Just want to make sure to give you the context. Yeah, no, he was an incredibly big deal and I was so scared to talk to him. I was like this little, you know, I was like, that was when I was still clerking. Like, I was just like, this is the book that I wanted to write. And so I was incredibly excited to be talking to him. So then it was like, oh my gosh, Walter Isaacs is telling me to drop one, but I’m like, there isn’t one to drop. I have to have all four. So it was really this idea that just hit me and I wanted to figure out how they fit together. I wanted to understand. I’m always a person who loves weird formats of a book. I like things that are told in an unusual way. My earlier books all did that. My later books have been much more traditional narrative because I find that that’s a better way to reach people actually. I can do unconventional things like on my blog now. If I want to make a list instead of writing paragraphs, I can do it on my blog. So I get it out of my system that way. I love the book, if anybody remembers the book called The Preppy Handbook, which is this book in the 80s that was written like a guide about how to dress like a preppy person. It was kind of part social criticism and part actual how-to guide because it was all very true and accurate and that was part of what made it fun. But then it was also kind of a critique of the whole idea of what it was to be preppy or to be waspy. This book just enthralled me. I just thought it was so brilliant and so funny. And so I was really trying to, when I was thinking of Power Money, Fame, Sex, I was very much channeling that kind of framework where it was like, if you want to tell people how to use power, how could I do it in a way that would seem kind of like a joke, but also kind of not like a joke? I don’t know if anybody in your audience who works in Washington, D.C. One funny thing about Washington, D.C. is people have flags. If you go into a big person’s office, they have a flag in their office, and there’s this whole thing about how many flags do you have? What are your flags? Do you have a flag? Do you not have a flag? And it’s just like, what’s up with the flags? We’re in a government building. You can just assume there’s a flag in the back of everyone’s head. But anyway, so it’s full of little funny things like that. And so, yeah, so that was a really fun book to write. Oh my God. It was like the opposite of the Happiness Project. It was really good preparation for the happiness project. Well, here’s the thing. You obsess about ideas, and I’ve been obsessing recently about this concept of the hypothesis. It’s a figure of speech where Donald Trump always says things, and he’ll say, I’m not going to say this, but some people have said this. So I’m just going to practice on our listeners out there. I’m not going to say you’re a bad person if you don’t buy a Gretchen Rubin book right now. But I’m saying some people have said, some people have said I wouldn’t go as far as to say, I would never. I’ve gone on record of saying, but you would, some could say. So you got to go check out one of her books. Some could say that some have said. No, Gretchen, you’ve written books with incredible research about JFK, incredible books about Winston Churchill. Can you, JFK, Winston Churchill, why did you decide to deep dive into their lives? Because they’re both, it seemed like Winston Churchill was great at everything, it was like he lived 500 lives, it was crazy. He lived dozens of lives simultaneously, hundreds of lives, it didn’t even make sense. And JFK was a very complicated human a lot of you know In a yang there can you talk to us about those two books and what? Made you want to deep dive into their very complicated lives Well, I think you put your finger right on what drew me to them as subjects Which is really when I think about all my books What I’m really interested in at the fundamental level is human nature. Why are we the way we are? How can we change if we want to change? What makes somebody the person they are and make the decisions that they make? And what I love about Churchill and Kennedy, as you point out, for both of them, they’re larger than life. These are exaggerated figures. Everything in human nature is blown up to just a gigantic proportion and there’s just volumes and volumes and volumes of what he said and what he did and what he wrote and what he thought and interviews and observations. And Kennedy, as short of a life as he lived, oh my gosh, I’m like, how did the guy do anything but have a picture taken? Because there’s so many pictures of the guy. And also, he has tremendous people writing about him and accounts and his own books and his own writing and his speeches and government documents. But they are these very complicated figures and I think it’s just fascinating to study them because a lot of times you see in them more clearly things that many people have but just not to the same elevated degree so it’s harder to see. But with these people who are so kind of well documented and so clearly outlined, it’s easier to see human nature at work. When you researched John F. Kennedy, he was such a complicated person. And for anybody out there who hasn’t read the book yet, can you tf why somebody would want to read your book about John F. Kennedy? Because I found it to be very fascinating. And again, you read, and I don’t mean this in a backhanded compliment, you read some weird stuff. I mean, you read some obscure things. You’re going to the library. You’re the kind of person where you’re like, ah, time out, Gretchen, we need to come out of the library. Come on out. You just keep diving. I read a lot of weird stuff. Yeah, so why would anybody want to read your book about John F. Kennedy? Well, you know, here’s the thing about my books, and I finally, I did not want this to be true, but I found it to be true. I found, I wrote my books thinking, my books are like the starter book. If you don’t know anything about Winston Churchill, if you don’t know anything about Kennedy, my book is going to be the book that’s going to convince you you want to go read a ton of biographies and histories because you’re going to get so intrigued because my book is going to show you how fascinating this character is. What I’ve learned, because you only know your audience when it’s too late, when the book is already out, is that actually the people who like my approach, like my book, are the people who already know a lot about these characters, who really are very, very knowledgeable. Because what I do in the book, it’s called 40 Ways to Look at Winston Churchill and 40 Ways to Look at JFK, is in 40 ways I look at them through different perspectives. So it’s not a straight narrative that goes from birth to death or goes from the blitz and then there’s flashbacks or something like that. In each book, the first chapter is the heroic version and it’s completely factually accurate. Everything’s factually accurate. It’s just like if you were going to give the best possible account, this is what you would say. All true. And then the second chapter is like if you wanted to paint the worst possible picture. Again, completely factually accurate. Nothing in there is up there or not true. Just as an example, what would be something in your chapter or your book where you go, JFK, if you wanted to paint the worst possible picture possible of John F. Kennedy, because that’s a controversial idea. What would be where you’d say, this guy, he could be the worst because, and he could be the best because. I’d like to get your take on that, because this is very intriguing. He’s shallow, he’s a philanderer, he’s a daddy’s boy, he’s manipulative, he’s, you know, he’s not all he’s cracked up to be. You know, he’s constantly… Can you please explain the word philanderer? When you say philanderer or manipulative, can you kind of give us just a little, a little detail? Because someone… Oh, he cheated like crazy. I mean, by today’s standards, it’s astonishing to think the mischief that he got up to, which, you know, it’s extraordinary. On the other hand, he inspired a nation. He lives in memory the way… I mean, the whole, my whole book really is like, what does it mean to live in memory? What does it mean? He represented an ideal to people. That’s almost impossible to do, but somehow he embodied this idea. He was able to speak truth in a way that resonated with people in a way that we still can quote him and hear his voice in our ears. He stood for something. In a way, he didn’t live up to the ideal that he presented, but he was able to somehow present it. And I think that’s really extraordinary. And to try to understand why and how at that time, what he did was he was able to do that is really hard to do. Because I think so many people try to step forward and articulate an ideal, but people are, they don’t really get it. It doesn’t really resonate. Or they’re like, yeah, you know, you just are making speeches or like, oh, whatever. But then for somehow some people are able to say it in a way that everybody hears it and is moved and is changed and that he was able to do. So he had many, many flaws and limitations, but then he also achieved greatness in his own way. Winston Churchill. Same thing with Churchill. Yeah, Churchill. Can you just kind of tease us about, because there’s somebody out there, you know, they’re just on the verge, Chuck. People, people, they say, you know what, I’m going to spend $19 on rando purchases at Starbucks today. I don’t know whether I can spend $19 with Gretchen Rubin. I have to have some traction here. Orange mocha frappuccino. So, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, what would be the best and the worst? What kind of stuff can we find in this book? He held every important office. He was part of every important event during his lifetime. He was completely dedicated to his country. He was a brilliant writer as well as a brilliant statesman. He had a vision that in a way he led the entire West. You read what he said. Again, the thing that I really learned as a writer from Churchill is he could be grandiloquent and he would use these words and these super fancy Latin things, and he would talk about, you know, and then when he needed a hammer at home, we shall go on to the end. Give us the tools and we will finish the job. He would bring it right down to a single syllable. He knew how to communicate to people. And again, you know, and then people sometimes write to me and they’re like, oh, but he’s so tremendously flawed. And they recite to me all the evidence that I put in chapter two of my own book. I’m like, I wrote that. Yes, I get the good and I get the bad. I think it’s fascinating. It’s also something I have to say, even though it sounds very boring. My books are also really about the nature of biography, which is you believe that you understand a version of a person because somebody’s told you that version, but there are choices that are being made and there’s evidence that is not known. A lot of times biographers will talk about motivation. Well, unless somebody tells you their motivation, you don’t know what it is and they could be lying or they could even be lying to themselves. We don’t really know why people do the things they do and biographers are incredibly reckless about assuming that they understand why people do what they do. We know in life a lot of times people do things for the weirdest reasons. You don’t know why people do what they do. And so, anyway, it’s about the problem of trying to tell someone else’s story, a final version of someone’s story. A funny thing that happened with the Churchill book is, one of the things I write about is how he had pink silk underwear, which is just not what you would think about Churchill. And so I got this very indignant letter from some kind of former military person in the UK, scolding me for coming up with such a preposterous thing. And I’m like, by the way, look in the memoir from Churchill’s own daughter, Mary, she’s the one who writes about it at great length. So again, you might be like, who’s the last person on earth who would wear pale pink silk underwear, Winston Churchill? Well, he did, you know, and there’s his daughter explaining why. And so, you know, so that’s what fascinates me about biography is the unexpected and like, how we can tell how we can’t really we don’t we can’t really tell a final version of someone’s story. I think that’s why people who know a lot about a character are interested in mine because it’s like you could look at it this way, you could look at it this way, you could look at it this other way. They like that because they already know a lot. Well let me tell you my secret motivation for having you on the show today. I personally am selfishly excited about your books and I love the process with which you write books and I feel like if there was a female version of me, it would be you. And I mean that in a good way. I obsess about topics. And my partner and I, that’s how we’ve been able to build these 13 multimillion dollar companies that people know us for is because we just obsess about like dog training or haircuts. For not forever, for about two years. And then we build a brand and then we scale it. And so that’s why I know what you ate for breakfast today. And I’m just going to ask you for the listeners out there who don’t know, what did you eat for breakfast today? Brambled eggs, which I’m sure you knew. Right, because you eat the same thing every day. I do. Because I’m not healthy. I obsess about one thing, and it’s Gretchen Rubin, what makes her tick? So I want to ask you, Gretchen, and I already know the answer, but I just want to, for the listeners out there, because this is, I mean, it’s cathartic for me because I love your process. I just love the way you do life. It’s awesome. When you’re writing a book, what percentage of your day is spent taking notes? You know, that’s very, it’s hard to say because it ebbs and flows, like depending on, like taking notes, it’s like sometimes I read a book and like I’m gonna take hours and hours of notes because the book is so full of information and then sometimes I read a book and maybe there’s like one thing that I would write down. Um, but you’re right. I take, that’s a big part of my work process and it actually takes a lot of time, is note-taking. I read a lot because I love to read, but then a lot of times, especially if I’m doing research for a book, so I’m reading about something specific, there might be just hours of note-taking. That’s how I start coming to my own conclusions, is I’ll take notes and that’s how I learn it and then I start having questions and thinking like well maybe these two things are associated or so yeah that’s and then and then it’s nice because then when I’m actually starting to write a book I already have like a bunch of stuff already written because I’ve already started to kind of digest it I’m never starting from like total zero. Eric Chupp you are in we’re in the man cave studios now Gretchen I know that you live in a very populous area you live in New York I live at what I call Camp Clark and Chicken Palace, which if you’re ever looking for a vacation destination, it’s like a 17 acres of woods and trees. We live behind a wall. We have the silky chickens. You have some new ones? I see some new chickens out there. I do. I have four new chickens here this week. Gretchen, that’s a guilty pleasure. I buy four chickens every time I can. Wow. And so I kind of, we live the opposite in terms of the actual place that we live. But, Chep, you’ve seen the books there in the studio. Do I not just destroy books with notes? With notes, with coffee stained with water, dropped in the back. You would not believe what some of these books look like. They’ve definitely been gone through over and over again. So I heard that you take notes like this. But don’t you find, Clay, that it helps you later, like if you have to go back, because you can find just what you’re looking for because you’ve marked it up. Some people feel like it’s somehow heretical to mark up a book, and I’m like, no, that’s a way to love a book. That’s a way to appreciate a book, is to mark it up. It’s a way to love a book. It’s a way to love a book. Now, okay, so I want to ask you this now. So as far as with your books, do you take notes in the margin? Do you put tabs on them? What’s your move for taking those notes? I’m so excited. So a lot of times I read library books. And so library books, I use the sticky note, and then I will put the sticky note in and if I need to write a note to myself about why something’s important, I’ll write it on the sticky note so I can not deface a library book. If it’s a book that is mine, then I dog ear it and write all over the part. That’s right. Now the reason why you’re reading library books, I wanna make sure the listeners understand this, you’re reading some obscure stuff. I mean, technically speaking, Gretchen, you’re reading some obscure crap. I mean, stuff that nobody else is going to read, right? I mean, do you not read books that nobody else is checking out? I mean, you check out the book and you’re like, really? Is that the book you want? I mean, you’re reading some stuff that’s not in print. You’re not reading best-selling books. I mean, you really go deep. I do. And I do love the library for that. And I love that you can get things online that are, like, very, very obscure. Because I do. And then I do a lot of things to, like, if a book is recommended in a book that I like, I will often read that book just because I’m like, well, it was important enough to come up in this other book. Sometimes I go through these book chains. I look at my library list. I’m like, I have no idea where I heard about this book, but I’ll give it a shot. Another thing I love about library books is you can be very reckless because you just return it. I’m like, I’ll just stick it in my bag. If I don’t like it after five pages, I’ll just return it. Whereas if you buy it, you feel like, you know, you’ve got to really kind of think about that for a minute. Yeah, but I love reading weird stuff. I love like finding some weird book that nobody’s, or like a book that’s a classic but that nobody reads. Like I just read Florence Nightingale’s Notes on Nursing. It was like an incredibly important book in like the history of the world, but nobody reads it anymore. So I was like, what did Florence Nightingale actually write? And that was kind of interesting. This is an awesome interview, Gretchen, you’re a wealth of information. I wanted to ask you, you said that you spend three hours a day or something like that at the library, is that right? If I’m doing like original writing, like I’m not always in that cycle in my process, because like right now I have a book coming out in March. So the book’s done. I’m just like writing the back copy and all that stuff, looking at the first past pages. But when I’m actually writing an original book for the first time, then I spend three hours in the library. Okay, absolutely. I wanted to ask you about that. What does that look like? So you sit down, walk us through, you know, you open up the laptop, is it a mad dash, or are you just getting all the ideas? Real quick, let me cue up the music. Gretchen, I know this is inappropriate, but I’ve installed, without you knowing, a microphone in your cranium. And so when you go to the library, this is what she hears right away. She gets in. Here she goes. Oh, good. I like it. In the library. So when you’re in the library, what are you thinking? Walk us through that. Well, I like to go to a desk. In my library, there are desks throughout the stacks. And so I go to a desk that’s all surrounded by books, but there’s nobody around. It’s in a corner. And I have a laptop and a little mouse so I plug in my mouse and I will sit down and I’m never starting from zero because I have all these notes so usually I have a plate I will I will say start here every time I’m done so that I remember where to start and I will go back a couple paragraphs and get myself back in my mindset and then I’ll start writing again. Very cool. Are you wearing headphones? No. So you’re just taking the aura? I’m just checking the internet. You’re taking in the aura. Just chucking it all in. Yeah. Questions have been answered. This is huge. Now, you are somebody who reads these books. You love to read books. And I recently heard that you loved the book Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. So I, Chup, please share with Gretchen, how does the decor of our office, Gretchen we have about a 20,000 square foot office in Tulsa, Oklahoma. There’s hundreds of employees, and so I have a big old, at some point you gotta fly to Tulsa, I wanna shake your hand and apologize for not being a better interviewer. But we have a 20,000 square foot facility, and Chup, how would you describe the patina or the decor or the ambiance of our office so she can mentally picture it. You stole my word. I was going to say lots of patina, lots of swag, you know, old barn wood on the walls everywhere, positive quotes, big wins from big figures in the business world, and just positive encouragement, Edison bulbs, always overhead music going, the rich smell of pinion wood burning somewhere throughout. So very, very swagalicious, that’s how I would describe it. I’m very intentional about my ambiance and decor. And so when I heard this book, Pattern Language, you were talking about it on a couple different podcasts. I immediately am like, I got to get this book. And it is awesome. It’s like the Holy Grail. Talk to us about Pattern Language. So Pattern Language is this very kind of unconventional book. And it looks at patterns in kind of built environments that people find appealing. So it’s not about like, this is the Baroque style or your office desk should be X feet wide. It’s things like child caves, staircase, staircase, a stage terrace overlooking life, um, waist high shelf. It’s about these patterns about what makes people feel good in an environment. And what happens to me, and maybe you had the same experience is that when you read it, you start understanding why some places feel more comfortable and appealing than others. One of the things he says is, ceilings at different heights. People tend to feel more comfortable in a place that has ceiling at different heights. And if you walk into an office and you look and the ceiling is all the same height, you realize it feels like a flatter environment than if there’s an area where it kind of goes up. Or if you go into a restaurant and you see, oh, or like you walk into someone’s home and that like the hallway is slightly higher or even lower than the rest. You feel it just feels more interesting or like cascade of roof. You can look at a Japanese temple and a seventeenth-century farmhouse and, you know, 1970s house in California. And you’ll see, wow, if I see a cascade of roof, I just feel like that’s a more appealing design to me. So I loved it places that seemed cold to me. I wish you could come to Tulsa and see how this book has impacted me. I wish you could see. What have you done? What have you done? Well, our men’s grooming lounge, it’s called Elephant in the Room. If you get a chance to check it out today, it’s called eitrlounge.com. My partner and I, we have 400 locations of OxiFresh, it’s our carpet cleaning franchise. It’s the world’s greenest carpet cleaning company. So we use a tenth of the water of anybody else in the world. It’s very organic. Wow. Eco-friendly. Our second business is called Elephant in the Room. And we did the whole different ceiling heights. And it’s amazing how many people walk in and go, wow, I love that cloud. Or what do you call that thing? It’s just neat and it’s just amazing how these little moves can really impact. And you actually went as far as to, now if I’m wrong, you say, Clay, you are the wrongest man ever, but did you not live in like a former water tower? Is it my correct here? In my office. My office is a former water tower. Can you talk to us about the mojo and the energy that you feel when you walk into the Gretchen’s Palace of incredible best-selling books. I mean, when you walk in there, I mean, you just, do you not hear the Rocky theme every day? I mean, it’s got to be awesome. The Water Tower of Power. Yeah. Oh, I like that. The Tower of Power. I got to use that. Well, if you have a 20,000 square foot office, I have like the opposite of that. It’s teeny, teeny, teeny. It’s at the top of my building. I live in New York City, and a lot of times in New York City, they have water towers, and that’s to create pressure for showers and things like that. For whatever reason, before we moved in, they had taken our water tower out and the person who lived in our apartment before us had asked if she could build a storage unit on the roof where it had been, and they gave her permission to do that or she paid or whatever, so she built this little room. So when we moved in the apartment, I thought, oh my gosh, this is great, I can turn it into my office, because it had three windows in it and it had heat, so I put it in an air conditioner and it’s just this little tiny office, but it’s just it’s like my space capsule, you know, it’s like plenty big for me. And it’s kind of nice because it’s pretty easy to sort of keep it organized and clean because it’s very, very small. And like if it gets cold, it’s easy to heat with a heat and the space here is just tiny. But it’s separate from the rest of my apartment, which kind of psychologically I like, I’m kind of on I’m on I’m on the roof of the building. I love it. You are you. Gosh, I want to go to your water tower. I want to see it. I want to ask you what it costs. I will say for me, my office costs me $27,000 a month for 20,000 square feet. There’s a lot of employees there. Oh, wow. Holy smokes. I don’t know what yours costs, but in Manhattan, I mean, it’s expensive. I mean, it’s expensive. It’s just part of my apartment. It’s considered part of my apartment, so it’s just part of the cost of my apartment. Even better. So you and your, does he work there too? Do you work there with him? No. No. No. That was quick, no. So I want to get into your office in a non-weird way. You go there and you have three monitors. And if you’ve changed since then, I apologize for misquoting you. But you have three monitors. I’ve kind of visualized it. You have three monitors. Can you talk to me about why you have the three monitors and how that helps you? So I have like a guy who’s my IT person, you know Who helps me with my computers and my backups and my phone and all this stuff and he and so he’s I work with him For a long time, so he knows my work style very well And he’s and this was years ago and he said to me I think you should get a second monitor and I was like, no because I don’t multitask. I don’t want to get distracted I don’t want two monitors. But then I read an article that said that for information workers, which is what I am, that if they had a second monitor, they actually saw a very noticeable increase in productivity, that it wasn’t something that was a distraction, but that it actually really helped you save time. So I called up my guy, Charles, and I was like, okay, Charles, you’re right. I’m going to try a second monitor. Literally I’d had the second monitor for one day when I was like, okay, come back, please, I need a third monitor. Because it’s so dramatically affected my productivity. Because I could have my email up, and if I’m working on a document, but I need to consult an email, they’re both up. Or if I need to look at something online, that’s easy to do, I can move among documents. I tend to have note-taking. I might be working on a draft, but I also need to have my notes open. And so now I can have them both open simultaneously. So it saves me a huge amount of time of like opening and clicking, and I can just have everything on. And you would think it would be very distracting, but in fact, I find that it’s not distracting. It’s actually helps me to focus because I’m not distracted by needing to click. I can just have what I need up. Have you ever read the last lecture by Randy Pausch? Oh, sure, of course, yeah. My dad died from ALS about two years ago. And my dad was a huge fan of Randy Pausch. And so it’s kind of weird, but my dad introduced me to the book in 2008, I believe, 2007, maybe 2008. And Randy Pausch, you know, he was a guy for the people out there who doesn’t know, he was terminally ill of cancer, I believe. And he made a list of things that would save you time if you implemented them. And one of the things he talked about, and this is a Carnegie Mellon professor, he said, if you had two monitors, it would save you a lot of time because of exactly what you just said. And so I was introduced to the idea of two monitors from my dad. And I know it doesn’t seem like a dramatic thing, but it saves people a Gretchen like an hour a day, if you have two monitors. It does. And then if you add that up, so my dad got sick with ALS, I would have the time to visit my dad because I didn’t spend eight hours a week minimizing windows. Yeah, exactly. And I just want to encourage everybody out there. It’s powerful. And you have come up with ways to make people dramatically happier. Ways that we can all as listeners become dramatically happier. And I’d like to kind of deep dive into that because you have these little simple hacks that you’ve researched and studied and you’ve got to a place where it’s, you give people a whole lot of different ways that they can be happier. And one of the things you talked about was having your own commandments. These commandments. And I heard you talk about your 12 commandments. Maybe you’ve updated, maybe you have 13 now. No, I have 12. So what I would like to do is first, can we talk about commandments and why it’s good for all of our listeners out there to have. Because a monitor, just having two monitors can save you like an hour a day. But these commandments can make your life exponentially happier. Can you talk about the importance of why all of our listeners need to write down their own set of commandments? Well, you know, I think to be happier, you really have to think about, you know, what do you want from your life and what are your values? What are your interests? What’s important to you? And the thing about, and it took me months to write my commandments. I don’t think this is something that a person could like just sit down and bang out in an hour. So what I wanted to do with the commandments is to articulate my values, what I really wanted to live, not like make your bed every day, which I do, but deeper, more transcendent values, but also in a pithy way. Because if you have a mission statement that’s a paragraph long, you’re like yada, yada, yada, but I wanted it to be very succinct so it would stick in my mind better, that I could review them quickly and really have them echoing through my brain as I went through my day, every day. And it was interesting to get to 12, because sometimes there would be more and sometimes there would be fewer, and then I would think, well, these two things are actually just different ways of saying the same thing. So part of it was that it was very creative. It was sort of fun to kind of think, well, how would I really distill down what’s most important to me? And I’ve heard of people doing it themselves, because it is a really fun, creative thing. Or they do it in a Bible study group, as a group exercise. Or sometimes people do it for their children, because they want to say, I want my children to see what’s important to me. And what’s funny, because people will often send me their personal commandments, is that you can read someone’s personal commandments, which is probably the whole thing, is like a hundred words, and you really get a good sense of them. What they’re like deep, deep, deep inside. Not what they’re like on the surface, but you’re like, I know where this person is coming from. I know what their struggles are. I know what they value because it’s in the personal commandments. And what’s funny is that some people’s commandments are the opposite of other people’s. Like some people’s it’s like, do it now. And somebody else could say, wait. And one year my sister and I had the word bigger as it like kind of as a theme and she had the word smaller these are our personal commandments that kind of a related is this Elizabeth you’re talking about your sister Elizabeth yes that’s my sister she’s my podcast yeah okay I’m so sorry to cut you off I just make sure the listeners know because you guys do that we have a podcast I want to make sure okay so you and your sister I mean are your commandments very different they very different they are different yeah but because mine are so specific to me. I mean, literally the first one is Be Gretchen. So that people will often say like, oh, I should use your commandment. Like, no, you have to substitute your own name. But yeah, it’s this idea that it really has to come from what’s most important to you and also kind of what your failings are because a lot of my – several of my commandments are really about reminding me to kind of push myself to expect more for myself. One of mine is no calculation, because my spiritual master is St. Therese of Lisieux, even though I’m not even Catholic, but I love St. Therese. And she said in her memoir, when one loves, one does not calculate. And the thing about me is I’m a being counter. I’m like, I did this for you, so you should do this for me. I took my turn, now it’s your turn. Here we go. That’s not a good way to be. Come on. Come on, that’s a good way. That’s the way I am. That’s the way I am. Close to the bone. I want to be like, no calculation. Personal attack. Like, you know what I mean? Because otherwise, because it sort of like reminds me to go against that a little bit. Right. Now, what I want to do is I want to read each one of your commandments. And I’d like for you to give us a quick summary of what it is. Here we go. Okay. Commandment number one, we talked about it, be Gretchen, which is a substitute for your name. Commandment number two, let it go. What does that mean? Which is like, there’s so many things where you’re like, just let it go. This is not my business, this is not my problem, it doesn’t matter if this gets solved. I don’t have to, I can leave that comment unsaid. Somebody said, in a happy marriage, like three things are unsaid each day. I’m like, just let that go. You don’t need to comment. You don’t need to say, I told you so. You don’t need to say, why didn’t you or why won’t you? Let it go. A quick apology on behalf of all men out there. Basically, I’ve discovered my wife is usually right, but not until somebody from the business world tells me. So my wife will make a very astute, very masterful, very wise recommendation. And I’ll say, oh, come on, come on. Yeah, your tone was so negative, unbelievable. And then I’ll go talk to like Lee Cockerell who managed Walt Disney World for 10 years. He’ll make the exact same statement. Then I’ll come back to her, Gretchen, usually 18 to 24 months later, and I’ll say, Vanessa, Lee told me this. He had this brilliant idea. And then she’ll say, I told you that 24 months ago. And I’ll say, that’s true. But that was not talking about the past. So, okay. Now the third is, act the way I want to feel. What does that mean? Well, this is a very interesting psychological phenomenon that we can all take advantage of, which is we feel that we act because of the way we feel. So like I’m yelling and slamming doors because I’m angry, but to a very great extent, the brain assumes that we’re feeling something because of the way we’re acting. So the brain is really like, wow, people are yelling and slamming doors. I guess there’s a lot of anger in here. And so you can really take advantage of this by acting the way you wish you felt. So if you feel kind of low energy, act with more energy, talk with more animation, move more quickly, kind of force yourself to run down the stairs and you will start to feel more energetic. Or if you’re feeling kind of reserved and you don’t really want to deal with anybody, go out there and really, you know, really kind of force yourself to be overtly friendly, really go out of your way to meet people’s eyes and, you know, have conversation. That will give you that feeling. If you’re feeling angry or resentful to somebody, start thinking like, but I’m grateful for this person. Why do I feel grateful for this person? And as you begin to like that, I really appreciate that you always get that report in on time. Like that really makes my life easier that I know that I can count on you to always be timely. You will start to feel yourself, these emotions coming, and they’re authentic. You really are truly feeling them. It’s just that you’ve engendered them in yourself by changing your behavior. It’s hard to change our emotions. It’s much easier to change our behavior. And by changing your behavior, you can change your emotional state. Hypothetically, not at all happening now, but in a parallel universe, if you were to interview Gretchen Rubin and you would be out of your mind nervous, what you would say is, I am calm. I feel confident. I am not at all nervous. I have not, I’m not overwhelmed by the gravity of interviewing somebody who’s sold three million books, and so I must ask you, number four. So do it now. What was the commandment, number four, do it now. What does that mean? Do it now means a lot of times, it’s just easier to go ahead and do it now. Getting my flu vaccine, last year I’m embarrassed to say, I kept wanting to do it, kept wanting to do it, put it off, there’s a better time, it’s going to be more convenient, and the whole year went by. And this year, I’m like, just do it now. Do it now. Go there, get the flu vaccine, and just get that noise out of your head and get the advantage of getting the flu vaccine. So it’s like, don’t, without delay is the best way, almost always. And so it’s like, try to get things done right away. It’s just easier. Should you want to have a guy on your podcast that would talk about how it took him three attempts to get a vasectomy. I would be happy to talk about that. Because I put it off. We have five kids. We have five kids. And I’m not kidding. We wanted to have five kids. And my wife said, you have to have a vasectomy. And I put that thing off for the longest. I almost became a celibate monk. I mean, Chuck, I was living on the couch. You didn’t put it off. You fled the scene of the doctor’s office. Gretchen and I would show up for the procedure. And the doctor would say, OK, you dropped your pants. And I’m like, I’m going to go to the bathroom. And I never came back. I did it three times. He called out the window. True story. I paid full price twice where I never delivered. So that’s a separate conversation. Well, I think a doctor should have been able to do a better job with you. I think that there could have been a little bit more of like an understanding of how you needed to be talked to in a way that would help you with that situation. A red dart in the back of my head. Well, I felt mentally violated just by having an appointment. That’s what I felt. Okay, so be polite and be fair. What does that mean, number five? So I had a boss early in my career, she was this incredibly fierce, stern, tiny woman, and I was getting a big promotion and I was nervous about whether I was going to be able to do it. And I said to her, I’m nervous about whether I’m going to be able to do this, but I’m going to be managing people who are much older than I was. So it was kind of very intimidating in that way. And she looked at me and she said, be polite and be fair and you will be fine. And I have realized in life that that is very profound. If you are polite and you are fair, that gets you a long way to doing the right thing. And so I just always remind myself, be polite and be fair. Enjoy the process. What does that mean? Oh, this is something my dad always says. This is this advice for my sister and me, which is, if you enjoy the process, then life is good. You know, like then you’re enjoying what you’re doing. And but if you’re always counting on a result and you’re miserable along the way, then if you don’t get what you want, then like it’s all been a huge waste. And then even if you do get what you want, you’ve had all this time that you have not enjoyed or appreciated. And he’s always, it’s like when you have really little kids and they’re driving you crazy, enjoy the process. Or like, my sister is a television writer. She’s like a showrunner. She’s got a huge, demanding job. And she has a sign above her office that says, it’s a fun job and I enjoy it. To remind herself, this is what I wanted. This is what I asked for. This is what I like. Enjoy the process, you know, remember. And so, you know, like when I’m getting criticism from my editor, I think, enjoy the process, this is part of the process. I love this. For anybody out there who wants to read all 12 of your commandments, what’s the best place where they can find them all? Where would you direct our listeners to go to? Go to my site, GretchenRubin.com, and just search, and you will find it, because I’ve written about it several times. It’s an idea that people are really interested in, so I’ve written about it a lot. And I also have examples of other people’s commandments, because I think sometimes people get ideas for their own commandments by seeing what other people choose, and that is totally fine. You can look around the world and get ideas from other people, absolutely. Just like many of mine are quotations or inspired by other people. I think that’s a great way to get some of your commandments. Well, out of respect for your time, I have three final questions I want to ask you. And I heard you say during one of your interviews, you said that you would prefer, and if I’m getting out of context, I apologize. You said you’d prefer for every day to be the same. I feel like I’ve said that to Eric and to all the members of our team at least thousands of- I was going to say at least every day. Really? Oh, yes. I literally wear the same exact thing this is true every single day I wear a hat that says boom I wear a jersey on the back of it it says my wife’s name Vanessa because I want to make sure I focus on what matters and I every single day yep and so can you talk to me about what you meant by that statement because when I heard you make that statement I thought we’re the same person no I right it’s like I love routine I love habit No, right? I love routine, I love habit, it makes me feel energized, I love feeling like everything’s in the right place. There’s decision fatigue, you don’t have decision fatigue about what to wear because you wear the same thing every day. You’ve decided what you want to wear and why, it makes perfect sense for you. You’re doing it. I would love to sort of, I get up at 6am every day because it’s pretty easy to set the time I would love to go to the library every day at the same time or do my email every day at the same time, but I’ve got to do an interview or I’ve got to report. Sorry about that, Bernadette. Sorry. No, it’s just part of it. But if I could be a Benedictine monk and have that kind of… In a water tower? I love those hours that they have. It just so appeals to me. Okay, so your newest book, and again, you’re working on another book, but your newest book is called The Four Tendencies. Can you share with the listeners about what this book is all about and why everybody, and I’m not attacking anybody, but I’m saying if you don’t buy this book, one would question what you’re putting, where typically people might put a soul. People have said. People have said. We wouldn’t say it. We wouldn’t say it. So with The Four Tendencies, why would all the listeners want to check that out? Well, what it does is it’s a personality framework that tells you whether you’re an upholder, a questioner, an obliger, or a rebel. And there’s a quiz on my site if people want to take the quiz and find out what they are. It’s at GretchenRubin.com. But what’s helpful about knowing your tendency is then you can really set things up. Like if you’re having trouble changing a habit or you’re feeling frustrated or burned out or you’re procrastinating on something, knowing your tendency really helps you figure out exactly what to do differently. It’s not just like throw spaghetti against a wall, and it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution, because as we all know, the fact that something works really well for somebody else doesn’t necessarily mean that it works well for me. And a lot of times people blame themselves for that. I’m like, no, no, no, it’s because people are different. So if this doesn’t work for you, here are these other things to try. And the fourth tendency, if you know yourself, then if you know other people, so you’re working with somebody who you’re like, I don’t understand, like, why are they driving me crazy? Like, why are they doing this thing that makes no sense? Why aren’t they responding in the way that I would think they would respond? A lot of times if you understand their tendency, it’s much clearer why they see the world the way they do and why they’re behaving the way they do. And so then you can just reach a place of harmony and efficiency much more easily because you’re not trying to say, well, you’re right, I’m wrong. Or thinking I’m wrong and you’re right. You’re just like, okay, well, given our different perspectives, how do we come together in a place that works for both of us? And that’s a lot easier when you have a vocabulary and kind of understand the underpinnings of what’s going on. In your book, I mean, you break it down. You talk about how the questioner resists the outer expectations, but meets their inner expectations. I mean, you get into deep dive about the obliger, the revel, the upholders. It’s a phenomenal book to understand the way that people think. And I just, your research is so intense and so in-depth. I feel like you’re giving us two years of your life of research and you’re condensing it into, you know, a couple hundred pages, 300 pages. How long did you spend researching the four tendencies before you released that book? Well, I had, my previous book was a book called Better Than Before, that’s about the 21 strategies that people can use to make or break habits. So I actually figured out the existence of the four tendencies as part of studying habits. Because I was like, how do you explain these patterns and how people can and can’t change habits? So that led me to the four tendencies. And so I wrote a chapter in that book, but that was one of 21 chapters because it was just one of 21 strategies. And after Better Than Before came out, I was just deluged with people who were like asking me questions like, I need to know this, I want to teach a workshop, like I need more and more and more and more. And finally I thought, oh my gosh, I really need to go in. And first I was going to like write a little PDF and then I was going to write a pamphlet. And then I’m like, no, I have to write a whole book because people were asking me such kind of like really thoughtful, deep questions and asking me like, how would you approach a different, you know, I’m a doctor and I can’t get my patients to take their medication or I work with somebody who won’t meet a deadline even though they’re perfectly capable of it or you know why does this person keep like every three years suddenly quitting their job with deep resentment like what’s going on and so it just turned into a book so it took me about two years to write the book but I’ve been thinking about it for much longer because it was part of better than before so probably like four But I made it up so I couldn’t really, I couldn’t like go to the library and look it up. I had to like try to indirectly find stuff and so I was looking for movies and books where you see the tendencies and looking for like indirect you know like studies of conscientiousness. Like what does that mean? It was hard. It’s hard to come up with something original because you can’t, you can’t really do your research. Gretchen, we like to end each and every show with a boom and for the people who listen to our show, the hundreds of thousands of listeners, boom stands for big, overwhelming, optimistic momentum. And I know it’s a lot to ask but would you be willing to bring the boom? Partake in a boom? We’re gonna say three, two, one, then we’ll end with a boom here. Chup, are you ready? I am prepared. Clay Starr, former schoolteacher turned millionaire, you ready to go sir? I am ready. Okay, and Miss Gretchen Rubin, are you ready to go? I am ready. Okay, here we go. 3, 2, 1, BOOM! I met you guys because of Clay Clark at these conferences that he was talking about. But something he just opened up the flyover family here is this business conference. Now, Clay is, you know, he’s kind of got the side hobby right now of these reawakened tours of like you know saving America and all that stuff. But his real like incredible skill, passion, everything else is business. You guys actually work with him as well. Tell us a little bit of experience with working with Clay on a business conference level. Well yeah we’ve been working with him for the last five years and we’ve been to how many business conferences? Oh I don’t know a lot. Yeah we’ve been to a ton of his conferences we’ve spoke at probably half of them. Each time there’s takeaways. Each time we go there’s something else, there’s more information. It’s good to be refreshed. I mean, each time I feel like we take something away and we gain. Yeah, we do. We gain more knowledge, more of his wisdom. It’s awesome. It’s so awesome. Because he’s been working with so many different industries and on systemizing every single part of them that sometimes it takes a few times to hear something, right, just like the Bible. You hear it enough and then finally you’re like, oh man, that stands out. All right. Turn to the other side. No, it’s been good though. Um, and, and they keep getting better and better and better. So it’s just good to just hear him and he rocks the mic. He puts on a really good conference. Uh, it’s really actionable information. It’s not just pie in the sky. Uh, nonsense is really actionable. I’m Rachel with Tip Top Keynote and we just want to give a huge thank you to Clay and Vanessa Clark. Hey guys, I’m Ryan with Tip Top K9. Just want to say a big thank you to Thrive 15. Thank you to make your life epic. We love you guys. We appreciate you and really just appreciate how far you’ve taken us. This is our old house. Right, this is where we used to live a few years ago. This is our old neighborhood. See, it’s nice, right? So this is my old van and our old school marketing. And this is our old team. And by team, I mean it’s me and another guy. This is our new house with our new neighborhood. This is our new van with our new marketing. And this is our new team. We went from four to 14. And I took this beautiful photo. We worked with several different business coaches in the past, and they were all about helping Ryan sell better and just teaching sales, which is awesome, but Ryan is a really great salesman, so we didn’t need that. We needed somebody to help us get everything that was in his head out into systems, into manuals and scripts, and actually build a team. So now that we have systems in place, we’ve gone from one to 10 locations in only a year. In October 2016, we grossed 13 grand for the whole month. Right now it’s 2018, the month of October. It’s only the 22nd, we’ve already grossed a little over 50 grand for the whole month, and we still have time to go. We’re just thankful for you, thankful for Thrive and your mentorship, and we’re really thankful that you guys have helped us to grow a business that we run now instead of the business running us. Just thank you, thank you, thank you, times a thousand. All right. And now, ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to bring up my good friend Ryan Wimpy, my good friend Ryan Wimpy, and his dog, Odin. This dog has the ability to eat me, so I’m sort of concerned. I’ll pass the mic to you, and Odin, you can have your own mic if you want, whatever you want, Odin. Okay, I’m a little bit afraid of Odin. Hi, I’m Ryan Wimpey. And I’m Rachel Wimpey, and the name of our business is Kip Top Training. Our business is a dog training business. We help people with behavioral issues and teach their dog how to listen. When I was learning to become a dog trainer, we didn’t learn anything about internet marketing or advertising or anything at all. It’s just dog training, and that’s what’s so great about working with Clay and his team, because they do it all for us. So that we can focus on our passion and that’s training jobs. Clay and his team here, they’re so enthusiastic, their energy is off the charts. Never a dull moment. Spirit drive. We’ve been working with Clay and his team for the last five months, two of which have been our biggest months ever. One, our biggest gross by 35%. cards, new logos, scripts for phones, scripts for email, scripts for text messages, scripts for everything. How I would describe the weekly meetings with Clay and his team are awesome. They’re so effective. It’s worth every minute. Things get done. We’ll ask for things like different flyers and they’re done before our hour is up. So it’s just awesome, extremely effective. If you don’t use Clay and his team, you’re probably going to be pulling your hair out or you’re going to spend half of your time trying to figure out the online marketing game and producing your own flyers and marketing materials, print materials, all the stuff like that. You’re really losing a lot as far as lost productivity and lost time. Not having a professional do it has a real sense of urgency and actually knows what they’re doing when you already have something that’s your core focus that you already know how to do. You would also be missing out with all the time and financial freedom that you would have working with Clay and his team? We would recommend Clay and his team to other business owners because they need to be working on their business, not just trying to figure out the online game, which is complex and changing daily. So, no one has a marketing team, too. Most people don’t, they can’t afford one, and their local web guy or local person that they know probably can’t do everything that a whole team and a whole floor of people can do in hours and not just weeks or months. There’s a definite sense of urgency with Clay and his team. I used to have to ride other web people, I mean really ride them to get stuff done, and stuff is done so fast here and people, there’s a real sense of urgency to get it done. Hey, I’m Ryan Wimpey. I’m originally from Tulsa, born and raised here. I’ve definitely learned a lot about life design and making sure the business serves you. The linear workflow, the linear workflow for us in getting everything out on paper and documented is really important. We have workflows that are kind of all over the place so having linear workflow and seeing that mapped out on multiple different boards is pretty awesome. That’s really helpful for me. The atmosphere here is awesome. I definitely just stared at the walls figuring out how to make my facility look like this place. This place rocks. It’s invigorating. The walls are super, it’s just very cool. The atmosphere is cool, the people are nice. It’s a pretty cool place to be. Very good learning atmosphere. I literally want to model it and steal everything that’s here at this facility and basically create it just on our business side. Play is hilarious. I literally laughed so hard that I started having tears yesterday. And we’ve been learning a lot. We’ve been sitting here, we’ve been learning a lot, so the humor definitely helps. It breaks it up. But the content is awesome, off the charts. And it’s very interactive, you can raise your hand, it’s not like you’re just listening to the professor speak. The wizard teaches, but the wizard interacts and he takes questions, so that’s awesome. If you’re not attending the conference, you’re missing about three quarters to half of your life. You’re definitely… It’s probably worth a couple thousand dollars. So, you’re missing the thought process of Clay Clark or Dr. Zellner or any of the other coaches, getting in the thought process of how they’re starting all these businesses, to me, just that is priceless. That’s money. Well, we’re definitely not getting upsold here. My wife and I have attended conferences where they upsold, where it was great information and then they upsold us like half the conference and I don’t want to like bang my head into a wall and she’s like banging her head into the chair in front of her. Like it’s good information but we’re like oh my gosh I want to strangle you shut up and go with the presentation that we paid for and that’s not here. There’s no upsells or anything so that’s awesome I hate that. It makes me angry so glad that’s not happening. So the cost of this conference is quite a bit cheaper than business college. I went to a small private liberal arts college and got a degree in business. And I didn’t learn anything like they’re teaching here. I didn’t learn linear workflows. I learned stuff that I’m not using and I haven’t been using for the last nine years. So what they’re teaching here is actually way better than what I got at business school. And I went what was actually ranked as a very good business school. I would definitely recommend that people would check out the Thrive 15 conference. It’s, the information that you’re gonna get is just very, very beneficial, and the mindset that you’re gonna get, that you’re gonna leave with, is just absolutely worth the price of a little bit of money and a few days worth of your time. I always ask myself, it’s like. They’re truly just remarkable people. We love Clay, we love his family, everything they’ve done for us, it’s just been such a blessing, such awesome, awesome people. Yeah, they’re good people. We’d highly recommend anyone, if they can, it will be worth their time. Oh yeah, definitely. I always sit there, I’m like 9.30 in the morning, and I feel like we should be taking a lunch break or something, I’m like, snap, oh my gosh. I’m like, we take the first break, and it’s like 15 minutes, and you go again, it’s just, it’s like fire hose of incredible information. Yeah, it’s fire hose, man, it’s great. I’ve been to a lot of conferences in my life, and typically it’s like, you pay this much, or it’s a free thing, that is kind of more of a pitch for the next big thing. They give you like one nugget, so you’re like, oh, that was kind of valuable, and it’s kind of a pitch for the next thing, and then you get to the thing, and it’s like, really, it’s just a pitch for their $10,000 mastermind thing. We’ve been to those. Oh my gosh, yeah. We’ve been to those. I’ve been to so many of those. I’m not even kidding. The first time I went, I was like 98% expecting like, and the big pitch, you know, you can, personal mentorship for $50,000. I was expecting something. And no, the whole time it was just information, information, information, information, question, answer, question, answer, information, information, question, answer, question, answer. Super valuable. If you’re listening to this and you’re like, I definitely want to be part of that, if you’re an entrepreneur of any kind, got to be at this text business, the word business, to 918-851-0102, 918-851-0102. The next one coming up is in November. And don’t forget, if you have any interest at all in learning about this Tip Top thing, you’ve got to check these guys out. They’re incredible people, incredible business model. Tiptopcanine.com. Ryan and Rachel, thank you so much for coming on. JT, do you know what time it is? 410. It’s TiVo time in Tulsa, Oklahoma, baby. Tim TiVo is coming to Tulsa, Oklahoma, June 27 and 28. We’ve been doing business conferences here since 2005. I’ve been hosting business conferences since 2005. What year were you born? 1995. Dude, I’ve been hosting business conferences since you were 10 years old but I’ve never had the two-time Heisman Award winning Tim Tebow come present. And a lot of people, you know, have followed Tim Tebow’s football career on the field and off the field. And off the field, the guy’s been just as successful as he has been on the field. Now the big question is, JT, how does he do it? Well, they’re gonna have to come and find out because I don’t know. Well, I’m just saying, Tim Tebow’s gonna teach us how he organizes his day, how he organizes his life, how he’s proactive with his faith, his family, his finances. He’s gonna walk us through his mindset that he brings into the gym, into business. It is gonna be a blasty blast in Tulsa, Russia. Also, this is the first Thrive Time Show event that we’ve had where we’re going to have a man who has built a $100 million net worth. Wow. Who will be presenting. Now, we’ve had a couple of presenters that have had a billion dollar net worth in some like real estate sort of things. Yeah. But this is the first time we’ve had a guy who’s built a service business and he’s built over a $100 million net worth in the service business. It’s the yacht driving, multi-state living guru of franchising. Peter Taunton will be in the house. This is the founder of Snap Fitness, the guy behind Nine Round Boxing. He’s going to be here in Tussel, Russel, Oklahoma, June 27th and 28th. JT, why should everybody want to hear what Peter Taunton has to say? Oh, because he’s incredible. He’s just a fountain of knowledge. He is awesome. He’s inspired me listening to him talk. And not only that, he also has, he practices what he teaches. So he’s a real teacher. He’s not a fake teacher like business school teachers. So you’ve got to come learn from him. Also, let me tell you this, folks. I don’t want to get this wrong because if I get it wrong, someone’s going to say, you screwed that up, buddy. So Michael Levine, this is Michael Levine. He’s going to be coming. You say, who is Michael Levine? I don’t want to get this wrong. This is the PR consultant of choice for Michael Jackson, Prince, for Nike, for Charlton Heston, for Nancy Kerrigan, 34 Grammy Award winners, 43 New York Times best-selling authors he’s represented, including pretty much everybody you know who’s been a super celebrity. This is Michael Levine, a good friend of mine. He’s going to come and talk to you about personal branding and the mindset needed to be super successful. The lineup will continue to grow. We have hit Christian reporting artist Colton Dixon in the house. Now people say Colton Dixon’s in the house? Yes! Colton Dixon’s in the house. So if you like Top 40 Christian music, Colton Dixon’s gonna be in the house performing. The lineup will continue to grow each and every day. We’re gonna add more and more speakers to this all-star lineup, but I encourage everybody out there today, get those tickets today. Go to Thrivetimeshow.com. Again, that’s Thrivetimeshow.com. And some people might be saying, well, how do I do it? What do I do? How does it work? You just go to Thrivetimeshow.com. Let’s go there now. We’re feeling the flow. We’re going to Thrivetimeshow.com. Thrivetimeshow.com. Again, you just go to Thrivetimeshow.com. You click on the Business Conferences button, and you click on the Request Tickets button right there. The way I do our conferences is we tell people it’s $250 to get a ticket or whatever price that you can afford. And the reason why I do that is I grew up without money. JT, you’re in the process of building a super successful company. Did you start out with a million dollars in the bank account? No, I did not. Nope, did not get any loans, nothing like that. Did not get an inheritance from parents or anything like that. I had to work for it, and I’m super grateful I came to a business conference. That’s actually how I met you, met Peter Taunton, I met all these people. So if you’re out there today and you want to come to our workshop, again, you just got to go to thrivetimeshow.com. You might say, well, when’s it going to be? June 27th and 28th. You might say, well, who’s speaking? We already covered that. You might say, where is it going to be? It’s going to be in Tulsa, Russell Oklahoma. It’s Tulsa, Russell. I’m really trying to rebrand Tulsa as Tulsa, Russell. I’m sort of like the Jerusalem of America. But if you type in Thrive Time Show in Jinx, you can get a sneak peek or a look at our office facility. This is what it looks like. This is where you’re headed. It’s going to be a blasty blast. You can look inside, see the facility. We’re going to have hundreds of entrepreneurs here. It is going to be packed. Now for this particular event, folks, the seating is always limited because my facility isn’t a limitless convention center. You’re coming to my actual home office. And so it’s going to be packed. So when? June 27th and 28th. Who? You. You’re going to come. Who? I’m talking to you. You can get your tickets right now at ThriveTimeShow.com. And again, you can name your price. We tell people it’s $250 or whatever price you can afford. And we do have some select VIP tickets, which gives you an access to meet some of the speakers and those sorts of things. And those tickets are $500. It’s a two-day interactive business workshop, over 20 hours of business training. We’re going to give you a copy of my newest book, The Millionaire’s Guide to Becoming Sustainably Rich. You’re gonna leave with a workbook. You’re gonna leave with everything you need to know to start and grow a super successful company. It’s practical, it’s actionable, and it’s TiVo time right here in Tulsa, Russia. Get those tickets today at thrivetimeshow.com. Again, that’s thrivetimeshow.com. Hello, I’m Michael Levine, and I’m talking to you right now from the center of Hollywood, California, where I have represented over the last 35 years, 58 Academy Award winners, 34 Grammy Award winners, 43 New York Times bestsellers. I’ve represented a lot of major stars and I’ve worked with a lot of major companies. And I think I’ve learned a few things about what makes them work and what makes them not work. Now, why would a man living in Hollywood, California, in the beautiful, sunny weather of LA, come to Tulsa? Because last year I did it, and it was damn exciting. Clay Clark has put together an exceptional presentation, really life-changing, and I’m looking forward to seeing you then. I’m Michael Levine, I’ll see you in Tulsa. James, did I tell you my good friend John Lee Dumas is also joining us at the in-person, two-day interactive Thrive Time Show Business Workshop. That Tim Tebow and that Michael Levine will be at the… Have I told you this? You have not told me that. He’s coming all the way from Puerto Rico. This is John Lee Dumas, the host of the chart-topping EOFire.com podcast. He’s absolutely a living legend. This guy started a podcast after wrapping up his service in the United States military. And he started recording this podcast daily in his home to the point where he started interviewing big time folks like Gary Vaynerchuk, like Tony Robbins. And he just kept interviewing bigger and bigger names, putting out shows day after day. And now he is the legendary host of the EO Fire podcast. And he’s traveled all the way from Puerto Rico to Tulsa, Oklahoma to attend the in-person June 27th and 28th primetime show two-day interactive business workshop if you’re out there today folks you’ve ever wanted to grow a podcast a Broadcast you want to get them you want to improve your marketing if you’ve ever wanted to improve your Marketing your branding if you’ve ever wanted to increase your sales you want to come to the two-day interactive June 27th and 28th primetime show business workshop featuring Tim Tebow, Michael Levine, John Lee Dumas, and countless big time, super successful entrepreneurs. It’s going to be life changing. Get your tickets right now at ThriveTimeshow.com. James, what website is that? ThriveTimeshow.com. James, one more time before you go. ThriveTimeshow.com. If I got three strikes, I’ma go for it. This moment, we own it. And I’m not to be played with because it could get dangerous. See, these people I ride with, this moment, we own it. Thrive Time Show two-day interactive business workshops are the world’s highest rated and most reviewed business workshops. Because we teach you what you need to know are the world’s highest rated and most reviewed business workshops. Because we teach you what you need to know to grow. You can learn the proven 13 point business systems that Dr. Zellner and I have used over and over to start and grow successful companies. We get into the specifics, the specific steps on what you need to do to optimize your website. We’re going to teach you how to fix your conversion rate. We’re going to teach you how to do a social media marketing campaign that works. How do you raise capital? How do you get a small business loan? We teach you everything you need to know here during a two day, 15 hour workshop. It’s all here for you. You work every day in your business, but for two days you can escape and work on your business and build these proven systems, so now you can have a successful company that will produce both the time freedom and the financial freedom that you deserve. You’re gonna leave energized, motivated, but you’re also going to leave empowered. The reason why I built these workshops is because, as an entrepreneur, I always wish that I had this. And because there wasn’t anything like this, I would go to these motivational seminars, no money down, real estate, Ponzi scheme, get motivated seminars, and they would never teach me anything. It was like you went there and you paid for the big chocolate Easter bunny, but inside of it, it was a hollow nothingness. And I wanted the knowledge, and they’re like, Oh, but we’ll teach you the knowledge after our next workshop. And the great thing is we have nothing to upsell. At every workshop, we teach you what you need to know. There’s no one in the back of the room trying to sell you some next big get-rich-quick, walk-on-hot-coals product. It’s literally, we teach you the brass tacks, the specific stuff that you need to know to learn how to start and grow a business. And I encourage you to not believe what I’m saying, and I want you to Google the Z66 auto auction. I want you to Google elephant in the room. Look at Robert Zellner and Associates, look them up, and say, are they successful because they’re geniuses, or are they successful because they have a proven system? When you do that research, you will discover that the same systems that we use in our own business can be used in your business. Come to Tulsa, book a ticket, and I guarantee you it’s going to be the best business workshop ever. And we’re going to give you your money back if you don’t love it. We’ve built this facility for you, and we’re excited to see it. And now you may be thinking, what does it actually cost to attend an in-person, two-day, interactive, Thrive Time Show business workshop? Well, good news. The tickets are $250 or whatever price that you can afford. What? Yes, they’re $250 or whatever price you can afford. I grew up without money and I know what it’s like to live without money. So if you’re out there today and you want to attend our in-person, two-day interactive business workshop, all you got to do is go to thrivetimeshow.com to request those tickets. And if you can’t afford $250, we have scholarship pricing available to make it affordable for you. I learned at the Academy at Kings Point in New York, acta non verba. Watch what a person does, not what they say. Good morning, good morning, good morning. Harvard Kiyosaki, The Rich Dad Radio Show. Today I’m broadcasting from Phoenix, Arizona, not Scottsdale, Arizona. They’re close, but they’re completely different worlds. And I have a special guest today. Definition of intelligence is if you agree with me, you’re intelligent. And so this gentleman is very intelligent. I’ve done this show before also, but very seldom do you find somebody who lines up on all counts. And so Mr. Clay Clark is a friend of a good friend, Eric Trump. But we’re also talking about money, bricks, and how screwed up the world can get in a few and a half hour. So Clay Clark is a very intelligent man. And there’s so many ways we could take this thing. But I thought, uh, since you and Eric are close Trump, what were you saying about what Trump can’t, what Donald, who is my age and I can say, or cannot say. Well, I have to, first of all, I have to honor you, sir. I want to show you what I did to one of your books here. There’s a guy named Jeremy Thorne, who was my boss at the time. I was 19 years old, working at Faith Highway. I had a job at Applebee’s, Target, and DirecTV. And he said, have you read this book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad? And I said, no. And my father, may he rest in peace, he didn’t know these financial principles. So I started reading all of your books and really devouring your books. And I went from being an employee to self-employed to the business owner to the investor and I owe a lot of that to you and I just want to take a moment to tell you thank you so much for allowing me to achieve success and I’ll tell you all about Eric Trump I just want to tell you thank you sir for changing my life. Well not only that Clay, you know thank you but you’ve become an influencer. You know more than anything else you’ve evolved into an influencer where your word has more and more power. So that’s why I congratulate you on becoming. Because as you know, there’s a lot of fake influencers out there, or bad influencers. Yeah. Anyway, I’m glad you and I agree so much, and thanks for reading my books. That’s the greatest thrill for me today. Not thrill, but recognition is when people, young men especially, come up and say, I read your book, changed my life. I’m doing this, I’m doing this, I’m doing this. I learned at the Academy, King’s Point in New York, acta non verba. Watch what a person does, not what they say. Whoa! Hey, I’m Ryan Wimpey. I’m originally from Tulsa, born and raised here. I went to a small private liberal arts college and got a degree in business, and I didn’t learn anything like they’re teaching here. I didn’t learn linear workflows. I learned stuff that I’m not using, and I haven’t been using for the last nine years. So what they’re teaching here is actually way better than what I got at business school. And I went what was actually ranked as a very good business school. The linear workflow, the linear workflow for us in getting everything out on paper and documented is really important. Like we have workflows that are kind of all over the place. Having linear workflow and seeing that mapped out on multiple different boards is pretty awesome. That’s really helpful for me. The atmosphere here is awesome. I definitely just stared at the walls figuring out how to make my facility look like this place. This place rocks. It’s invigorating. The walls are super, it’s just very cool. The atmosphere is cool. The people are nice. It’s a pretty cool place to be. Very good learning atmosphere. I literally want to model it and steal everything that’s here at this facility and basically create it just on our business side. Once I saw what they were doing, I knew I had to get here at the conference. This is probably the best conference or seminar I’ve ever been to in over 30 years of business. You’re not bored, you’re awake and alive the whole time. It’s not pushy. It’ll try to sell you a bunch of things. I was looking to learn how to just get control of my life, my schedule, and just get control of the business. Planning your time, breaking it all down, making time for the F6 in your life, and just really implementing it and sticking with the program. It’s really lively, they’re pretty friendly, helpful, and very welcoming. I attended a conference a couple months back and it was really the best business conference I’ve ever attended. At the workshop I learned a lot about time management, really prioritizing what’s the most important. The biggest takeaways are you want to take a step-by-step approach to your business. Whether it’s marketing, what are those three marketing tools that you want to use to human resources. Some of the most successful people and successful businesses in this town, their owners were here today because they wanted to know more from Clay and I found that to be kind of fascinating. The most valuable thing that I’ve learned is diligence. That businesses don’t change overnight. It takes time and effort and you’ve got to go through the ups and downs of getting it to where you want to go. He actually gives you the road map out. I was stuck, didn’t know what to do, and he gave me the road map out step by step. We’ve set up systems in the business that make my life much easier, allow me some time freedom. Here you can ask any question you want. They guarantee it’ll be answered. This conference motivates me and also give me a lot of knowledge and tools. It’s just an approach that makes sense. Probably the most notable thing is just the income increase that we’ve had. It’s super fun, super motivating. I’ve been here before, but I’m back again because it motivated me. Your competition’s going to come eventually or try to pick up these tactics. So you better, if you don’t, somebody else will. I’m Rachel with Tip Top K9 and we just want to give a huge thank you to Clay and Vanessa Clark. Hey guys, I’m Ryan with Tip Top K9. Just want to say a big thank you to Thrive 15. Thank you to Make Your Life Epic. We love you guys, we appreciate you and really just appreciate how far you’ve taken us. This is our old house. This is where we used to live two years ago. This is our old neighborhood. See? Nice, right? So this is my old van and our old school marketing. And this is our old team. And by team I mean it’s me and another guy. This is our new van with our new marketing and this is our new team. We went from four to fourteen and I took this beautiful photo. We worked with several different business coaches in the past and they were all about helping Ryan sell better and just teaching sales, which is awesome, but Ryan is a really great salesman, so we didn’t need that. We needed somebody to help us get everything that was in his head out into systems, into manuals and scripts and actually build a team. So now that we have systems in place, we’ve gone from one to 10 locations in only a year. In October 2016, we grossed 13 grand for the whole month. Right now it’s 2018, the month of October. It’s only the 22nd. We’ve already grossed a little over 50 grand for the whole month and we still have time to go. We’re just thankful for you, thankful for Thrive and your mentorship and we’re really thankful that you guys have helped us to grow a business that we run now instead of the business running us. Just thank you, thank you, thank you, tens of thousands. So we really just want to thank you Clay and thank you Vanessa for everything you’ve done, everything you’ve helped us with. We love you guys. If you decide to not attend the Thrive Time Workshop, you’re missing out on a great opportunity. The Atmosphere Phase office is very lively. You can feel the energy as soon as you walk through the door, and it really got me and my team very excited. If you decide not to come, you’re missing out on an opportunity to grow your business, bottom line. I love the environment, I love the way that Clay presents and teaches. It’s a way that not only allows me to comprehend what’s going on, but he explains it in a way to where it just makes sense. The SEO optimization, branding, marketing, I’ve learned more in the last two days than I have the entire four years of college. The most valuable thing that I’ve learned, marketing is key, marketing is everything. Making sure that you’re branded accurately and clearly. How to grow our business using Google reviews, and then just how to optimize our name through our website also. Helpful with a lot of marketing, search engine optimization, helping us really rank high in Google. The biggest thing I needed to learn was how to build my foundation, how to systemize everything and optimize everything, build my SEO. How to become more organized, more efficient. How to make sure the business is really there to serve me, as opposed to me constantly being there for the business. New ways of advertising my business as well as recruiting new employees. Group interviews, number one. Before we felt like we were held hostage by our employees. Group interviews has completely eliminated that because you’re able to really find the people that would really be the best fit. Hands on how to hire people, how to deal with human resources, a lot about marketing and overall just how to structure the business, how it works for me and also then how that can translate into working better for my clients. The most valuable thing I’ve learned here is time management. I like the one hour of doing your business is real critical if I’m going to grow and change. Play really teaches you how to navigate through those things and not only find freedom, but find your purpose in your business and find the purposes for all those other people that directly affect your business as well. Everybody. Everybody. Everybody. Everybody. Everyone needs to attend the conference because you get an opportunity to see that it’s real.