How to BEAT 95% of People WITHOUT Being a Genius ⚡ Jay’s SCOOP | Ep. 431

0:00Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast for marketers. We share quick tips, things you can do right now, and then we add a little bit of chaos at the end of every episode. We also keep it short, like this intro. Let's check it out. We are back for Do This, Not That podcast presented by Marigold. And normally I come on here and I share these random marketing tactics. You test them, maybe they work. Hopefully they work, maybe they don't work. But once in a while, I like to share things that I've experienced or that I've kind of figured out a little bit for my own career. and maybe they will have an impact on yours because all this stuff is pretty hard.

0:36And there's this one concept that I think has been more impactful for my career than anything else. And it's this idea of being consistent and accountable. And it's not what you think, okay, when you hear those two words. But let me back up a little bit. So I have a horribly bad habit of always talking down about myself. I do. I'll say, oh, I'm not smart or I have no idea what I'm doing. and there's always a noise the people around me because they either think that I'm fishing for a compliment, like, Jay, stop it, you're smart, whatever, which I'm genuinely not, where they just find it weird and annoying and they're like, what is your deal?

1:16Stop saying that. I personally, I like saying it because first of all, I believe it to be true. I don't think I'm the smartest dude in the room. I also think this idea of sometimes being self-deprecating, it's nice, it gets people comfortable, slightly funny once in a while. And I'm being real. I'm not doing it to be funny all the time. I'm just being real. And so the reason I share that is, um, I, when I went through school, for example, I was, I didn't do great at all. I got wait-listed four times. Okay. Before I got into the university of Florida, I have no idea how I got finally accepted. It was like probably the last possible day on earth.

1:51My SAT score was an absolute joke. I had to take statistics three times in college just to get a C for it to count. I mean, I could not crush it at all. I actually think, though, knowing that I was not going to be some sort of NASA space program engineer was kind of a superpower for me because it forced me to figure out these two critically important things that radically changed my career, my business, basically my life. And this idea of being consistent and accountable. Now, I'm not talking about being accountable, being there for your family or whatever. You should do that. Okay, hello, that's kind of obvious.

2:36No, I mean something different. Let's talk about accountability. How do you hold yourself accountable to learn new things for your career or business? How do you hold yourself accountable to actually learn something new for your career or your business? Or do you do anything specific or do you just wake up every day and you kind of bust your butt and you do what you have to do? You work on maybe the client campaigns, you're working at your product out the door, you work on whatever, and you learn by doing, right? You learn by doing it every single week. You're just doing more and more and you're doing your best to stay up to date on stuff and you're trying to meet new people, but you're just learning by doing.

3:18And by the way, when I talk about learning, I don't mean that you read an industry email newsletter once a week, or you go to an industry website once a week. That is not holding yourself accountable to learn new things. Here's the gig. Every single person, I don't care if you just graduated college. I don't care if you are, you know, 40 years into your career. I don't care if you're a manager, a senior vice president, a CEO, a founder, doesn't matter. Every single person needs to have something that they must do every single week. This is what I believe. This is what has helped me. Okay. Something that they do every single week that holds them accountable to learn.

4:01Okay. About their craft, their industry, uh, their profession, what it is that they're trying to do for a living that you might be putting out a podcast episode once a week. Maybe you publish a newsletter once a week. Maybe you do a weekly social media post once a week. Maybe you put out YouTube series once a week. Maybe you just send an email to your company or the team that you're on, your marketing team about the outlook and industry updates for the week, right? But you're sitting there like, Jay, no, no one's going to listen to a podcast I put out there. No one will ever read a newsletter from me.

4:34I'm a random person. No one's going to engage with my social posts. I'm going to get like one like if I put out the new industry trends out there? Who am I? And you know what the answer to that is? Who cares? It's actually not about that. Having this weekly thing that you do forces your hand to read stuff, to find stuff, to network with people, to learn stuff. And you can decide how heavy or light of a lift you want this weekly thing to be. Okay. So obviously a podcast is a heavy lift. All right. Getting a newsletter out is a heavy lift. And maybe I can't even, this is ridiculous. What you're saying is ridiculous.

5:16I don't even understand why. Maybe even getting LinkedIn posts out every single week is hard. Okay. What about just sending a Slack message? Okay. Your Friday Slack message to your entire team where you are saying them every week, I'm going to send you this message. You go to your boss. You say, Hey, I want to send a Slack message every week about some new industry trends that are going on out there. So everyone could stay up to date and you're going to send out every Friday to coworkers. All right. And all you have to do is look at three different websites in your industry, bring together some links and you send it out.

5:49All of a sudden, what is that doing for you? What is that doing for you? What that's doing for you is it's forcing your hand to be out there trying to consume this information. And on Thursday night, when you don't have that Slack message ready to send on Friday, you're going to say, wait a minute, I got to put my brain rot down on my phone and I got to get off TikTok and I got to find the three things I'm going to send out to my team because I said, I'm going to do this every single week. Then you start reading a few articles instead of the garbage scrolling. You put that together. You send it out on Friday.

6:22The people on your team are like, wow, this person's really with it. They're really on top of things. And then when opportunities come up in your organization, they're like, oh yeah, Sally's the one who sends out the thing. She knows what's going on. She's awesome. Okay. You can do so many different formats of this. You could post once a week on Sundays saying the Sunday stat on your social media feeds, whatever the status that you find for the week. It doesn't matter. Okay. When I started, for example, my email newsletter, I thought getting lots of subscribers was the goal. A few months into it, I realized something though.

6:57It was never, I think it doesn't matter how many subscribers I got. What I realized was because I had a weekly newsletter, I became exponentially better at my job because I had to go out and learn stuff. Because for a zillion years before I had a newsletter, I was just learning by doing the work for my clients. I wasn't learning by actually trying to learn anything because once school ends, nobody's forcing us to learn. No one's holding us accountable. Once I started to hold myself accountable, that is when it all clicked. And here's the real deal. I'm deep into my career. I'm in year 27. Okay.

7:34A lot of you are not out there in year 27 of your career. And I will tell you this, you will blink and you'll be into year 10 of your career. And you're like, Whoa, what happened? How did I get here? And you're not going to have learned a lot. And here's the difference. Here's the second piece of this thing where it all falls apart. I'm not the smartest dude. I'm being real. I'm not. But what I figured out, there's a way to beat 95 % of the people on this planet. You could beat everybody in your high school, okay, that had way better grades than you, went to these big, fancy colleges, got all these graduate degrees.

8:10Trust me, I've seen it. I've seen all of that. Okay. Everybody that I know that went to Ivy Leagues or almost all that went to Ivy Leagues, all these fancy schools, they're doing garbage. Okay. Sorry to them. They're doing garbage. And here's how you win. You could beat 95 % of these people by doing one extra thing. and that's being consistent. When I talk about consistency, let me give you some random stats that's true. Okay. These are all sourced. I can give you the sources. Who cares? 90 % of podcasts that start never make it past episode three. 15 % of people actually that start an online course, finish it.

8:45Nobody finishes it. When you have up reading books, 40 % of books that are bought are never read past chapter one. All right. 83 % quit journaling at within 30 days. 70 % of people abandon budgeting apps within 90 days. How about Duolingo? 92 % of Duolingo users quit within one year. Okay. How about marathons? One in five people who register for a marathon never even show up. And here's the gig. You're saying to yourself, but I have so much going on. No, you don't. You don't have so much going on. Everybody has so much going on. I have kids in my house. I'm taking care of my mom who's not well.

9:21I have to do this. I'm a yoga instructor on this side, blah, blah, blah. Who cares? Everybody's got stuff going on. You can't find 15 minutes to put together a Slack message to your team. Okay, you can't find 30 minutes to a social post every single week about new stuff going on. Yes, you can. And when you do it, here's the secret. You can't stop. Not after three months, not after six months, not after two years, never. That's the consistency part. That is how you win. Because what everybody does is they stop. They're like, oh, it's been three months. Nobody's reading what I'm putting out there.

9:56Nobody really cares. I don't really see the benefit of it all. And they stop. And that's where the opportunity dries up, okay? That's where you holding yourself accountable and learning dries up. And that's where everything falls apart. So the secret sauce for me that I have found for my career to win when I know I'm not the one who understands everything going on because the brain cells aren't there. Too bad for me. What I know is if I hold myself accountable and there are things that I have to do every single day, week, month, and I don't stop and I do them, I'm going to know a lot of stuff.

10:35And then people are going to think I know a lot of stuff and I'm just going to keep pounding it out there and pounding out there. So this idea of being accountable and consistent is secret sauce stuff for your career, for your life, for all of it. I know this episode was very different, but I like to share this stuff because you know what? We all need to figure out, we all wanna win. We all wanna get ahead. We wanna do stuff. And just by putting down the brain rot on our phones, you don't need to see every Instagram story. You don't need to see every TikTok reel. You don't need to see every meme.

11:05Find that 30 minutes. Wake up 30 minutes earlier. Find the 30 minutes in your week to allow yourself to learn, to grow, to do more, it will change everything. Listen, I appreciate you being here. I'll probably get horrible reviews for this thing, for this episode. That's okay, I get it, but it's an outlet for me to kind of just share whatever brain rots in my brain. So appreciate you all. See you at the next one. If this didn't stink, leave it a review. Thanks. You did it. You made it to the end, but wait, the party is not over. Listen, I wanna keep hanging out. Subscribe to this podcast, And if it wasn't the worst podcast you've ever listened to, give it a five-star review.

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