Hey friends, you're tuned in to the learn or be learn podcast a show where wisdom meets curiosity in order to discover the human experience. I'm your host, Shiva D. And remember, you either learn from or you learn from. Now, let's get back to the show.
All right, welcome back, everybody to a nother great episode. This is Episode 93, another enlightening Nomad series monologue episode. And if you're wondering about the guest episodes, they are coming soon, there was, you know, a lot of travel lately. So it's been a bit more solo episodes between me but we have a lot of great guests planned. If you saw my Instagram. I'm so thankful for the community that's growing, I had over 65 messages of people reaching out to want to be on the show, which I'm so grateful for. I remember like three years ago now, when I started this, I was doing all the reach out to us. Obviously, you get rejected sometimes from people goes to you, some people don't show up on the recording date. And you start going through all that. And just to see how far we've come and see people how many people are intrigued to be on the show. And how many of you listen, and I'm just very grateful for without any more time, let's just jump right into this episode. Actually, real quick thing, I am working really hard on season two, we are moving to video podcasts, I am building the team, we're going to build a community. Once I have some, once I have the team helping me out with some of the smaller logistical stuff, like I said, 65 people reaching out, it's a lot of it's a lot of paragraphs of people send big paragraphs of like, Hey, this is I love what you do, this is what we do, I'd love to be on the show. And it's like, I have to read all of that and kind of look into the guests and see if I want to have them. And you know, a lot of these types of things will be streamlined. Especially when I have you know, an editor and all sorts of stuff on my team, a few looking at a few people to hire, have them join the Learner B learning team. And once that's in place, I'll have more time to focus on you know, growing this community having you all more involved, not just listen, if you want to be of course, I understand that one of the beauties of podcasting is this intimacy of what we talk about and you know, your chance to listen, wherever you are doing whatever you're doing, whether you're driving or vacuuming or something right. Without needing to be face to face, right, you get that intimacy without a with comfort, I guess is the beauty of podcasting. But you know, I'm building the community for those that are interested and I'll totally be updating you guys. If you're curious, you should find me on Instagram, all the stuffs in my show notes, all the links and whatnot, websites being built as well. But you know, if you're looking for updates, Instagrams, the best place to go, LinkedIn would probably be next I am working on a couple other socials with the team. So we are growing here. And I just wanted to give that little update, because I'm very excited about 2024 and what we have planned. So without further ado, let's just jump right in. Okay, so this is learn how the grades make things happen so effortless, effortlessly. Well, also small little side note, but big news for my thummell community, the Indian Tamil podcast community of my native language, I have actually started a nother podcast in thummell. To enter that market. I met a couple cool friends. And we you know, hit it off while I was in India for six months. And next thing you know, he wants to do a podcast and we resonated very well with each other our conversation flows, the ideas we had. So everything flowed really well. So I decided to give him a shot. I was looking for a co host anyways, I had that idea in mind for a little over a year. And you know, we clicked and I'd give it a shot. We spent the last month or so building it and now the podcast is you know, out with five I think we've worked on five episodes now. And it's audio video podcasting. And it's called the jazz podcast j s Jazz. It's our initials for everybody on the team. It's me, I'm the s Shiva. We have Johnson. He's our editor and social media manager. Then we have a jay he is the co host and he's a bodybuilder and huge in the fitness community. And then we have me Of course so if you are a native English speaker I know that's probably not very many people that listen here, but if you are, you can go totally go check Get that out if you're excited, or if you're interested or curious, if not, you know, the English one is still here to stay, and it's going strong. I just wanted to enter that market as well, I do have plans to enter the, you know, media industry of Tamil Nadu in India as a whole. So, I love this mix of English and Indian communities that I can interact with. And you know, I'm always learning and growing here, so I just wanted to also add that update. But that's all to say that this episode is actually inspired by that episode, episode five that we recorded about the idea of how much effort it takes to make something look effortless. Right, so this idea of illusion of effortlessness. And I think it's important too, because I think many people compare their day one to somebody's day 10 Or year 10. Right? We see, for example, maybe one of you wants to start a podcast that's listening to this, but you might be comparing it to me right now, which is I'm on what over day 1000. Right. So you're comparing very different metrics here. And the same way, if I were to compare Jordan Harbinger, or Joe Rogan, or Jay Shetty, right? They have so much more years on me, they also have leverage of status and money and all sorts of things, right. So you can't really measure one to one with others other than yourself. I think that's actually the best metric in order to keep growing. But I think it's an illusion where we all see, you know, for example, I might post on my Instagram, for example, I posted that I had 65 people reach out. And for those who you know, don't keep up with me day to day or week to week or even month or year to year, they probably saw that was like, wow, he's growing fast. He's growing already. Right. But what what they don't know is I've spent over 1000 days to get to that point, which is even which isn't even high baller big roller, big fame. Anything, right? But it is, to me a big accomplishment, especially from where I started. But it's not like I had a million people reach out like Joe Rogan probably does. Right. So it's, it's all perception. And there is an illusion of effortlessness. When people see it, and they're like, Wow, this his podcast looks really good shows looks really good. The graphics look great. The audio is pretty good. He's got an intro and outro that sounds somewhat professional. Right? You start seeing these things, and I'm gonna switch to video podcast and I'll have a team. So look, it'll look good. But the thing is, what people don't realize is that the days of doing it all alone, or I think what was episode five, I remember I think was the one with AJ or Rodney Allen, the artist. He actually ended up quitting to pursue being father. He sacrificed that for his kids. Very noble of him. But when he was doing that, I remember, this was back when I was first learning to edit. So it took me eight hours to edit that one hour episode eight hours plus. And right when I hit save, and export, I hit export because I was done editing. And it crashed because I was using Audacity, the free software. And it crashed. And I was so starstruck, my jaw dropped when I lost everything. And I was so frustrated, I closed my laptop, and I was like, Alright, I'm not gonna look at this till tomorrow. I'm going to try again tomorrow, because it just made me so pissed to see it. And I was like, okay, you know what, I'm just gonna go do something else. And you know, from there to where we are, now I can edit an audio episode in like an hour max. You come a long way, you know, and then now I know what to look for in an audio editor to have somebody do it for me, and video editors. So, you know, it's people don't realize how many steps it takes to climb the mountain until you actually start climbing the mountain. I didn't realize how hard YouTube was until I started making video content, I realized, oof, I think I'm gonna have to wait and get somebody on my team to make this a little bit easier to process. All that being said, I do believe there is I think it's one of those things where we often many people don't look behind the curtain or get a chance to even look behind the curtain you just see the final product and realize, well,
you know, Lucky good for them but like what about me and you start making this comparison but like we said, you can't be comparing your day one to somebody's day 10 or 100 or 1000, right or 10,000 Even so, it's it's one of those things if you want to make progress, the first thing you got to do is just jump and you know from the episode before when I talked about burning the boats, it's one of the biggest things you can do is just burn your plan B. Focus on Plan A put all your energy on one thing and grow it to them. X. And I understand a lot of us have other commitments, we maybe we have a nine to five, or maybe you have to, you know, pay rent. So you need that nine to five. And I totally understand all that. Right. So like this whole podcast thing is my side hustle, I spend every, every hour I can I spend on it. And once I've kind of built the team and built the system, I can work on more overview bird's eye view stuff on the podcast, right, growing the community, beyond other podcasts as a guest rather than a host being, you know, reaching out to more sponsors, things like that, where I can work on the business, not just in it, I am also the artist of this business in particular. So this is a very unique example. But I do believe artists and entrepreneurs are closely linked because it is, in a way, right, which is a whole nother topic. But in a way I do believe artists and entrepreneurs do find themselves in similar boats. And all that to be said is there's no such thing as effortlessness, everything takes a lot of effort. I love when people say, you know, bring up an idea like that. Yeah, that'd be really hard, though. And I'm like, Yeah, but what isn't? What isn't hard, right? Choose your life is hard. For one of two reasons. I used to say that quote all the time in this podcast, I still do. Life is hard for one of two reasons. You either are trying to get out of your comfort zone, or you stay in it. Because when you stay in it, life will get harder later on, because you realize that you missed your chance to go for your dreams. And the more time that goes by the less time you have for it, or energy or money or, you know, ability to commit versus if you write if you try now, try today, right burn the boats and jump. Well, that's also a different kind of hard it's stuff people don't always understand how I think I did an episode about how success is a lonely road. And that's one of many reasons is because people don't understand the struggle, the pain, the sacrifices it takes to get to somewhere, right? For me, for example, I, I do this podcast as much as I can. But my other dream is to be an entrepreneur, it's always been in my blood. I love business as a kid, as a kid I used to in the playground. So my family, you know, we didn't always we didn't always have money growing up. As a kid growing up, we were, you know, tight on cash and whatnot. So I never was used to asking for things or asking for toys or stuff like that I just never did because I just figured we wouldn't ever get them. That's just how it was. So I was always a very resourceful kid. I always. For example, I learned how to torrent and get like movies for free or mp3 songs for free and ebooks and all sorts of stuff. Jailbreaking back then oh, jailbreak the early days of iPod Touch or whatever and and when I finally got one at like the age of like 15, or something right back when was hard to get an Apple product, it was a really, you were seen as like super luxurious. If you had one at all, we would have those tiny little phones. And I know some of you know what I'm talking about either the flip phones or the little pom phones or tiny phones, right. So I eventually got an iPod Touch. I felt like so awesome. It felt so awesome to have one and jailbreak it and get a Spotify for free. I don't even know if it should be saying all this. But I would jailbreak and get Spotify for free and stuff like that. So I was always very resourceful, you know, maybe not the most ethical, but as a kid you do what you can to get what you need, right? And I never stole or anything. I mean, unless we're talking digital products in a way I guess I just incriminated myself slightly, but, you know, was harmless was the harmless stuff. I would never do anything super intense like that. But going back to the example I remember being in school, and this was back when I think I was in middle school or something and silly bands were huge. It was like the era of everybody wanting to trade silly bands and everybody buying silly bands. And what ended up happening for me was I you know, my parents, I just figured they would say no, with Twitch they usually did. So I I remember the way I went about it, which I did when I did the same tactic with Pokemon cards, with basketball cards with football cards. This is how I this is how I approached it as a kid, right? I'd go to the people that had a lot usually friends or somebody close to that I know you're more likely to get a yes from somebody you knew. But I also would ask people that I kind of vaguely knew, but you'd go to somebody that has a lot of cards that are a lot of silly bands, right? And let's take let's take one example. Let's let's let's just say my friend's name was parked Right, so let's say I went to this friend Parker, and I'm like, Hey, Parker, can I have? You have like 100 Silly bands? Can I have one silly band that you don't want? Or you have multiple of? That's what I would ask. Because being in those days, you'd have multiple of the same card or same silly band. It happened a lot. So that was my go to, and people just be like, Yeah, you know, once you when you have 100, and you're just like, whatever. It's like a charity case, right? You just get one out. And for me, it's a big deal, because now I have one. So then I would just keep doing that, like two or three more times different people. Next thing, you know, you have four or five, and then I would go and start trying to trade and what I would do, it was all about quantity over quality at that time, early on. So what I would do is, I'd be like, Hey, do you want this red elephant? Silly band? And they'd be like, yeah, it looks kind of cool. I'll take it. What do you want? And I'll be like, anything, man, I'll take your two worst silly bands. Or if they really wanted it, oh, negotiate be like, you'd sent them out. And you'd be like, okay, they he really liked it. So I want three of your worst ones or four of your worst silly bands. And when they have like 50 or 100, or even 30, right? They're the worst ones. You're asking for the worst ones that they have the least emotional attachment to them. The hardest trades are when you have the most emotional attachment to something, right? So like the tie dyed American Eagle, silly band, right? Or the or something really insane. Alright, so it's like, I'm asking for the worst ones, like, yeah, okay, let's do it. So give me like three, two or three. I kept doing that a few times. So you know, I'm at 20 Silly bands, and 30 Silly bands. And now I have some buying power. So I would go in and be like, some people come to me they see like, I'd have a, you know, a wrist full of silly bands. So they make what do you have? So let me I show them like, hey, I really liked that purple snake. So it's like, okay, you liked his purple snake. I like that tie dye elephant you got over there. But damn, I really liked that elephant, I don't know. It's okay. I'll give you the snake plus, and then I'll pick a worst one. And that's when you start trading for quality. Right? So I would start doing that I do a little bit of quantity, a little bit of quality trades back and forth. Next thing you know, I have this massive, amazing set of basketball cards or, or silly bands. And I did the same same process with basketball cards. I did eventually, my friend group right like the six of us, I started with nothing they gave me like handouts, of like, there were stuff. And eventually, by the end of that summer, four months later, I was trading with the same guys for things. Such as like I had cards like Larry Bird, Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, I had the best of the best, because I just kept doing stuff like that. And I never bought a single card ever, never bought a silly band never bought any cards. And I just kept doing stuff like that. And, you know, it's, it's this is all just to say that, when you start looking back at who you were, I think it starts to make a little bit clearer who you want to be, right, who you dreamed of as a kid and what your natural talents were. But all of this is to say that I am definitely an artist, many people if you ask, they'll say he's definitely an artist, you know, he likes art, he's got the aesthetic, I I love graphic design. As a kid I love drawing and painting and all sorts of stuff, right? So I do have that artistic side to me. But I also have that entrepreneurial blood in me. And this was the the whole tangent was for that. Right. So all that's to say is I have my goals. And I understand that, you know, as long as I need, I will keep my nine to five, but the ultimate goal is to replace my nine to five with a growing business, and then also build this podcast business. And those are my ultimate goals. I say all this because this stuff takes a years of planning, I've had this in the word works for the woodworks for a long time. So you know, you have to create your own visions, and then work backwards and create goals for those visions, and then steps for those goals.
And then set deadlines for each of the steps or each of the goals and start attacking them one by one. And from there, you'll reach the next milestone and the next milestone and the next thing you know, you'll reach that vision, you replace it with a bigger vision, right. And that's your north star of where you're shooting for. Like, for example, I just told you to a mine, it's too, you know, it's entrepreneurship. And it's this podcast, right? The specifics. I don't really think I should share until I hit it. But those are the essence of what I work on and want to work on. So that's where all my time is. I think Chris Williamson, he's big podcaster now I've been following for a long time. But now he's pretty huge. And he talks about how you should focus on one thing, right and in a way this is my one thing, one to two I wouldn't go past more than two things. I think that's when your brain starts gets scattered. I know many people that multiple businesses and it just Alex or mosey says this all the time if you don't have a condensed then your mind is scattered on multiple different projects. So Well, this was a very interesting tension to like episode. But if you guys like this stuff of me just kind of sharing a little bit more, let me know, I think this was very different than normal monologue episodes, I just felt like sharing a little bit more about my thoughts and the idea of, of how much effort actually goes to make something look effortless, right? How many hours of blood sweat and tears it takes to make to get to the point where, you know, I'm at or Chris Williams is at Chris Williamson or Jordan Harbinger or Jay Shetty, or Joe Rogan. I mean, look at Joe Rogan. He's been doing this for over 10 years. So there's a lot that goes into it right to make something look effortless. So I think that was the main thing here. And I appreciate you guys taking the time to check this out. And I'd really appreciate you guys sharing this with somebody that you thought this was interesting. And they that you think they would think it's interesting or just giving me some feedback or hitting me up with the DM or email. Everything's in the show notes. And, and building this community and I can't wait to hear more about it and get more feedback from you all because I want to grow the show with you, not just for myself, but I want everybody to everybody that tunes in to get some value out of this. And I don't take the fact that you invest your time with me lightly. I know there's very many people you could listen to and the fact that you listen to me, I'm very grateful for So thanks, everybody. And remember, either learn from pregnenolone from Thanks, bye