Reflecting On The Transformational Nature Of Entrepreneurship with John McIntyre

Eric: Hey, John, welcome to the show.

John: Thanks for having me, Eric.

Eric: Yeah, it’s my pleasure. So, this is a kind of one of the surreal experiences of our kind of internet-based world is I’m in Santa Fe, you’re in Australia. You’re wearing a hoodie sweatshirt with a wool cap. I’m wearing as little clothes as possible because it’s 90 degrees here and it’s cold where you are. So, it’s just this interesting experience of seeing each other in these different environments.

John: Right. I mean, when I speak to Americans, they’re always surprised to hear that Australia actually has a cold weather.

Eric: Right.

John: So, I’ve got, I don’t know what you call these, hobo gloves. I’ve got the beanie on. I’ve got a scarf, which you can actually see.

Eric: Yeah, we can see that. It’s great. I get the full picture now.

John: Yeah, yeah. And then I got my snow pants on. I got thermals underneath. I’m dressed up, thick socks. It’s cold.

Eric: No, I know what that’s like. Where I’m living in Santa Fe, in the winter, it gets negative 10 below zero here. The only heating source I have in my house is a fireplace. So, most of the time, I’m just living in my thermals and a hat and a scarf all the time. It’s actually kind of nice.

John: I like it. I mean, it’s comfy. You sort of got all this padding all the time. It’s a bit annoying when you have to get changed because you get to take off four layers and…

Eric: Right. Or take a shower.

John: Or take a shower, yeah.

Eric: Yeah. I mean, I can understand why people are confused about Australia being cold because we never see kangaroos with sweaters or koalas with hats on. Clearly, they’re not cold.

John: We even have snow resorts. And you’d probably see a wombat. Do you ever hear of a wombat? It’s like a big boulder with legs. They don’t wear hats either and you’d find them in the snow. So, you go on snowboarding and skiing. People are surprised that Australia actually has mountains big enough and enough snow. It’s not much snow. But you can actually go snowboarding or skiing here, chairlifts, everything. It’s crazy.

Eric: This podcast is sponsored by the Tourism Board of Australia.

John: Talking about all the stuff that people don’t really come for. You heard about the beaches. That’s what everyone knows.

Eric: Mm-hmm (affirmative). The coral reefs and all that. Cool. Well, the first question I have for you is let’s just get a brief overview of you and what you do.

John: So, this is the short story. I mean, really, I’m a copywriter specifically email.

Eric: Yeah. I want the long story.

John: Well, the long story is, well, in 2000 and, I don’t know. When I was sometime in high school, I think, or the end of high school, I read The 4-Hour Workweek, like a lot of people who seem to end up in this world of ours. Didn’t really get around to doing anything with it for a few years. Got caught up partying and just doing what a lot of people do when they’re 18. A few years later, I had just been overseas. I’d come back to Australia. I had a job which is doing some SEO for someone. I just didn’t want a job like a lot of us, right?

So, I started browsing online for different things and eventually found an opportunity in the Philippines with Dan Andrews and Ian from Tropical MBA, which a few people know. The offer was to live and work in the Philippines for free. So, it was funny, at first, I didn’t apply, thank God. I did that the whole thing we do, it would disqualify us. I’d never get that. Then in the end, I actually listened to the Eminem song, Airplanes Part II, he has a feature on it. And the lyrics in that got me, “Yeah, screw it. I’ve got to apply to this thing.”

So, I applied and then got this job. So, I bought a one-way ticket, moved to the Philippines. That was in 2011. The idea is I’d be an intern at this resort. I’d get paid in food and a room. So, it’s two resorts, one of them is on the beach. I was there for a year. And the whole idea was while I was there, I would somehow start up some kind of side hustle of my own business of some kind where I could make money. And I think towards the end of it, it’s a while ago now, towards the end of it, I discovered copywriting and was doing all my own stuff. I did some stuff for a friend as well, here in Australia.

Eric: When you say you discovered copywriting, is that because they had that as part of the stuff that you were doing for them?

John: No. One thing I didn’t mention is I started a typical, just a content website, like an AdSense kind of thing with lots of articles about juicing of all things, fruit and vegetable juicing because I was into that quite a bit, at least, when I was back in Australia. So, I had this website. I had got a decent amount of traffic. It made money with AdSense, got smacked by Google.

And then, while I was in the Philippines, I created an info product, which looking back, I don’t think I had any business creating because I was just 21 or 22. And I created this course called Lose 10 Pounds in Two Weeks, I think, because that was the Google keyword at the time. I wanted my fans. And I just put a bunch of juice recipes in it. There was no, like I’m not a dietitian. I’m not a nutritionist. I didn’t have any experience designing diets. I didn’t know if it was actually healthy. I just knew that other people did juice for us. So, probably, not the best moment but I think I sold a few.

But anyway, that got me building an email list and then creating a VSL, a video sales letter, and just doing all the things that require copywriting. And so, in that process, I discovered a bunch of copywriters, Gary Halbert, all these big guns. And the books and handwriting out sales letters, which a lot of people do, also emails. And then, so how it sort of morphed into mainly email copywriting and email marketing was Dan, the guy who’d done the internship, he started doing this sort of high-end business seminar in the Philippines.

So, you’d get 10 or 15 people from the US and Australia and the West to fly into the Philippines. And you’d have a kind of a week where you’d have seminars. You’d go out to the clubs at night and do different things like that. While he was there, we’d always chat, right? So, while he was there, he asked me to do a talk on email marketing with people that were there. So, I did that, he was happy.

And then he said, “Mate, why don’t you write some emails for us?” And so, that was what started it. So, I did a project for him. And it’s funny at the time, I mean, we can go into this later if you want, but like the mindset of, I was so new to this whole world that I couldn’t believe. I just didn’t understand why someone would pay any kind of money for me to write some emails for them. It blew my mind at the time. It makes so much sense now. But at the time, it was a huge like, “Oh, that’s amazing.”

And so, from there, towards the end of that year, I moved to Thailand. Dan, he had a podcast, we did the podcast. And then we talked about email marketing that led to other clients who wanted the same thing.

Eric: Do you think that there’s something innate in you that kind of tends you towards being good at copywriting or is it something that anybody can do?

John: I think it’s a bit of both. I grew up playing the guitar. And a lot of people said they’d love to play the guitar, they’d love to play the piano. And my answer is always, “All right. Well, just practice for half an hour a day for six months or a year, and you’ll be able to play it.”

Eric: Sure. Yeah.

John: In some ways, it’s as simple as that. But then at the same time, some people have a certain knack for it, right? And so, practicing is easier for them and they enjoy it more. It comes more naturally. It’s the same with writing, where it’s funny, I think, it was Matt or I was talking to someone else, but I’m probably more of a natural. If it was someone else on my email list, I’m probably more of a natural speaker, which is why I built my own podcast, and I’ve probably done hundreds of podcast episodes. And I think I gravitate more naturally to this kind of medium. But writing comes fairly naturally to me.

So, I think, that kind of thinking, the creative thinking and simplifying a complex product or a complex topic into a really simple metaphor, it comes easily. Some people just have that ability. Can anyone do it? Maybe, probably like the guitar thing. If they have a knack for it, they’re going to do a lot better. It’s going to happen a lot quicker. If they suck at it and they suck at communicating, I don’t know. They’re just going to have to work harder and they might not enjoy it as much, which means they’re not going to work as hard, so.

Eric: Well, I think there’s probably more of a multifaceted, like if we really break it down, like what makes a good copywriter, there’s a lot more facets to it than just being a good writer. Because before you can even output words, there needs to be an internal understanding. Like you said, you need to break things down into core concepts and you need to understand how those concepts relate to one another.

For example, one of the primary jobs of a copywriter is you’re not writing for yourself. You have to understand what you’re trying to promote or pitch to somebody. But then, you also have to understand the mindset of your audience. And you have to work to communicate your understanding of the thing you’re trying to pitch in terms that the mindset of the audience we’ll latch on to which there’s emotional intelligence as a component of that. There’s a little bit of psychology. There’s appropriate word choice and words can be varied based on the community or the country of the person, the market you’re speaking to. So, I feel like it’s a lot more nuanced than people may at first glance realize.

John: I mean, you could extend and expand this to business. One of the things I do now is I coach copywriters, both one on one and also, I have a course, different training programs that I do with them. And working on a webinar this week for them. And one thing that I’m trying to get across is copywriting, especially if you’re going to do it freelance like I’ve done it, sort of on your own, copywriting and even everything you mentioned, like the research, the empathy, the emotional intelligence, that’s a chunk of what you got to do. But if you’re on your own, you’ve also got to understand sales. Can you get on the phone with someone? You got to understand what’s worked to me is probably what you call positioning and branding.

How do I position myself in the market of all the different freelance copywriters that are out there so that I have an advantage? How do I do Facebook ads? You’ve got to do all these different things. How do you do your finances? How do you make sure that you’ve got money coming in each month? How do you use Xero or FreshBooks? There’s lots of things and especially if you freelance, like sales and knowing how to structure a deal and knowing how to ask for more money and what kind of clients to go after to make more money. It can often make a much bigger difference than reading another five copywriting books.

Eric: Right. Going back to your piano and guitar metaphor, I mean, it’s kind of like when somebody goes to school to get a master’s in music performance. I mean, pretty much, every single major you study in college, none of them teach you how to do the business. Like, everybody is supposed to graduate and then make money but nobody teaches you how to run your own personal business which everybody has to do if you want to be selling anything.

John: It’s a little bit like, I was just thinking at school, like I think Matt said you’re into meditation and you’re always into tea. There’s things that you learn later in life, finances will be one of them. Another one would be social skills or emotional intelligence that they teach about geography and science and math and English in school, but they don’t have like a social skills class or at least, most schools don’t, where they’re teaching you about empathy. They’re teaching you about how do you name emotions. How do you find emotions in the body? How do you become emotionally expressive? How do you resolve conflict? And these are all really valuable skills that no one ever really teaches them to you, at least formally, unless you go out later in life and go and try and learn them.

Eric: Exactly. And I think that if you don’t learn them, there are ways that you can proceed and move forward with your ventures. You have to constantly rely on external support in order to be successful. I often find myself saying when I’m working with first time business people, I run MemberMouse, a membership software company, and so, a lot of times people want to use the software, but they haven’t even started anything yet.

So, there’s a much bigger conversation that they’re entering into that they may not actually be considering. And a lot of times I find myself saying to people, “You need to be clear on what you have to offer first, before you think too much about all the techniques and the strategies for how you push that out to people.” And I have a more intuitive sense about that than I have any sort of like, I didn’t get that from a course of study. I didn’t listen to other people who said that that’s from my own personal experience. So, I wonder, if looking for corroboration from you or a different perspective, do you also see it that way or do you have a different perspective on it?

John: Well, I was chatting with, I don’t know what her title would be, a woman just this last weekend. She does high-level mediation, high-stakes mediation. And she’s, like probably a lot of people you work with, she wants to make her own kind of thing where she, instead of working for other people, she’s helping other people make money and get rich, she can do it for herself. So, she says, “Well, what do I do and where do I start?” and everything like that.

And she wants to know how much I charge for my services. And it’s like, none of that really matters right now. This is what I told her. I was, “Yeah, none of it really matters. The most important thing is, are you solving a real pain point?” Like you said, are you adding value? I mean, this is a classic business thing. You got all these tools and things like that, but it ultimately comes down to solving a problem in a way that hopefully, other people aren’t solving it.

The way that I remember someone else explaining it, which really resonated with me, was that marketing is the fire or it’s the fuel for the fire, it’s not the fire itself. The actual fire is the problem you’re solving. And then marketing is you’re pouring gasoline on the fire. And so if you have a tiny little fire, because your problem’s tiny and no one cares, doesn’t matter how much marketing you pour on top, it’s going to be really hard to blow it up and make it big. On the other hand, if you have a really big problem and it becomes a big fire and then you pour gasoline on it, well it’s going to be a lot bigger. It might even have an explosion or something like that.

Eric: Yeah. It’s interesting because I know that there’s multiple ways to skin the cat. There’s multiple ways to solve the problems that business and entrepreneurship raise for people. And that’s one of the interesting things about entrepreneurship in general, I think, is there’s no way to go about it without it raising questions. It will naturally make you think about how to solve problems. And ultimately, I think that those problems ultimately come back to you too like, where do I need to grow? How do I need to be different in order to get the success that I’m looking for?

John: Yeah, it gets a bit better because it’s like, well, it’s not just about solving problems. You need to look at, I mean, one thing in this webinar that I’ve got going now is teaching people to focus on, you could say that Dan Sullivan from Strategic Coach calls it your unique ability, but for me, you go at anything. It’s really just a combination of like, where are your unique talents? Where are your unique gifts? Where are your interests? And to find something in that area that sort of starts to pair those things together and solve a problem because you’re going to be a lot more motivated that way. You’re going to be more interested. It’s going to come more naturally. It’s the whole thing, right?

If you’re doing something you don’t care about at all, it’s going to be a lot harder. But what the caveat said, I think this whole follow your passion thing can be a bit destructive too. Because people think sunshine and rainbows all day, every day and it’s all easy and it’s never going to have a hard moment. I’ve seen that in my own life too, where even that can be a very destructive mindset because then, you don’t do the hard stuff, which there’s always hard stuff.

Eric: Now, something that seems almost to be built into the entrepreneurial path is the journey of personal transformation, which we’re kind of touching on a little bit here. And when we spoke earlier, you shared a bit about your own journey. And I would love to dive deeper into that. And as someone who found success as an entrepreneur building a company, helping others succeed and even being invited to Richard Branson’s private island, it seems as though, the more your outward successes increased, the more your internal unhappiness or dissatisfaction was amplified and this is your own personal journey.

I happen to also resonate with this. We have this vision when we start something that success is the thing that we’re shooting for and that when it comes it’s, like you said, going to be sunshine and rainbows. But the fact of the matter is, my personal experience is the more success we get, the more problems we have. Like, “It’s more money, more problems” quote from the great philosopher. So, can you share some more about this and how did things begin to shift for you after coming to this realization?

John: Well, I guess, when I first got into this or decided I’m going to make an online business. I’m studying on a university and following the normal path or at least the normal in our culture path, it’s not really normal. I’m going to do this business thing, instead. I’m going to go find out how to start an online business, Tim Ferriss style, or online and then I can live and work anywhere. And it’s going to be great when I get there. You don’t really think about thinking all this through, but the assumption is that it’s right there. That is the life, if I can do that.

It was around 2014, I think, in Thailand at the time, and I’m like, “Well, all right, well, I’m here.” I wouldn’t say I’m rolling in it, but I’m making a fair amount of money, especially for Thailand at the time, and I can kind of do what I like. I’ve got everything I need, good food, good apartment. I’ve got great lifestyle. It’s like, what else is there? And that was what then led me to connect to the Richard Branson thing and go to that and say, “Well, maybe that’s the path. I need to go and change the world or save the world” kind of thinking that if I do that… It’s the same pattern, right?

If I do that, that’s going to be the thing that changes everything. It probably went on for a couple of years. And I think what shifted things, well, I mean, you can dwell on the problem a little bit more. It’s feeling like, you’re working really hard and it’s the whole thing where like, especially when people look at you, I’d go home and talk to my friends. And you can tell that a lot of people are really impressed. They’re like, “Wow.”

When you have a normal job and you make a paycheck and you sort of got to ask for permission to take holidays. And you go overseas once a year, if that, to meet someone who has an online business with no boss or at least as their own boss and they get to do what they like, you can see that people are like, “Oh, my God,” like it’s so far outside the realm of what people think is possible for them. And they’re super impressed. And the assumption is, well, you should be happy. Or you start to feel like, well, I should be happy because well, I’ve got all this stuff. And I think we put that pressure on ourselves.

And then you realize, well, but I don’t feel that happy. Like I’m not as fulfilled or as satisfied or as good as everyone seems to think I should be. And that can even trigger a bit of guilt because you think what’s wrong with me? You start to get, what’s wrong with me? I’ve got all this stuff. I’ve got this great life, but something’s missing. It’s that is this it kind of a thing, and it’s really common.

As you know, I’ve spoken to a lot of people, a lot of entrepreneurs. And I think part of the reason for that is that it’s very easy, especially when you’re, I don’t know. Well, I wouldn’t say high achiever, but the kind of person who has lots of goals, pushes forward and things like that. It’s very easy for that personality type to have an emotional problem. Some unresolved issue in their psyche and then to try and solve that with more achievement.

Eric: Well, dissatisfaction is very common. But what’s not common is taking a step back, breaking the pattern being like, “Hey, maybe the problem is that I keep pushing out the potential satisfaction into the future after achieving something.” Because after a time, breaking the cycle is when I think another type of journey starts. When you take a step back, you’re like, “Wait a second, I’ve had this experience where I’ve hit these goals over and over again. I remember the fact that when I said I was going to hit this goal, I would be happy and it didn’t happen. Okay, maybe that was a fluke.” And then it happens the second time and a third time and whatever.

So, the ideal is that at some point, you recognize there’s a pattern and that satisfaction and happiness isn’t going to come from achieving something. If you don’t recognize that cycle, then all the way till you die, that’s going to be the constant pursuit. What was it that helped you kind of break out of that cycle and actually start to see, “Okay, there’s something else going on here”?

John: I read a book called The Presence Process back in the end of 2015, when I was in Colombia, that sparked a whole… Do you know when you read a book, and I don’t think that book’s the best book for this. Have you heard of this book, by the way?

Eric: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

John: Yeah. I don’t think that book’s the best book to get into that topic, which we can get into in a second what it’s actually about. But when you read a book and it sort of changes, it just sort of puts you on a different path. And if you didn’t read that book, you’d be in a very different place. That was one of these books to me. I read that book. It’s about being present, obviously. But it’s really about processing emotions and integrating different emotions, emotional traumas from the past. And so, as you do that, things start to change.

The next year, I moved back. I think I was in Germany for a few months, and then decided to put all that on hold, put the business on, not on hold, but to sort of scale it back. Move back to Thailand and make music, thinking, “Well, maybe I need to go and make music because I really love to make music. If I do that, maybe that’s…” Still following this pattern, right? I’m still changing. But now I’m like, “Well, maybe business isn’t working so let me try music.” Music was good, but it’s very difficult to make money with it. That was one challenge that I had to live a certain kind of lifestyle. So, there was that and then tried another thing and where I’ve gotten to now, that’s still ongoing.

Where I see it now, which people who meditate would probably understand this, you start to see within yourself that it’s not the world that’s necessarily making you unhappy. Now, there’s a caveat to that, some people are in very bad situations. So, the world can be the problem, the external world. But often, what really messes us up is what’s going on inside us.

For me, where I’ve come to with it, is a lot of it’s just trauma from childhood throughout our life that we’re still carrying with us. And we’re still carrying it not just in our mind and our thoughts and the way that we think but in the body. I mean, this year’s been a big journey into something called somatic experiencing, which is by a dude named Peter Levine, a book called Waking the Tiger, which is about how animals in the wild don’t get PTSD. They don’t stress out the way humans do.

And so, the idea is as humans, we’ve shut down and not ruined, but we’ve shut down and gotten our stress system, our nervous system totally out of whack. And now we’re having mom or dad yells at us when we’re a kid. And then that charge, because we feel ashamed in that moment, we feel angry or upset, that charge, because it’s not released and expressed, it gets stuck. It literally gets stuck in the body.

And then, when we’re 25, or 30, or 50, or something like that, someone says something, “Oh, it hits that spot” and we react and it becomes this thing and all this stuff, just… you could think about, it’s like your body’s like a city, the energy or the emotion is like little cars that are trying to drive about the streets. If you got too much stuff in there from the past, it jams the whole system up. And this is why I think you look at how much people need to drink and watch TV and take drugs and all that, shop and sex and all the different addictions that our culture just has and reinforces…

Eric: Work.

John: Yeah, work, exactly. Achievement. Achievement is another way to distract yourself from it. All right, the next thing, the next thing.

Eric: I definitely resonate with everything you’re saying it. As you mentioned, I do have a strong meditation practice. I’ve been doing that for five years. And it’s a daily thing for me. Definitely, one of the main side effects of doing that is more of a present awareness in a situation, which to me, it’s ultimately, again, it’s meditation and having awareness is not about coming to a place where there are no problems. It’s about changing the relationship to problems themselves and bringing more of a discernment into a situation to choose the action to take rather than reacting.

And to your point, maybe you’re reacting from an unconscious place based on some trauma that’s held physically in the body. Maybe it’s, again, energy blockage in the emotional body, whatever it is. Something uncomfortable gets triggered by situations. And I think a real problem for the westernized societies in general, is this sense of entitlement where we’ve had it so good. We feel like good is all it ever should be.

So, if we experience something, I think people call this cancel culture or something like this where you experience something you don’t like, well, clearly, it’s wrong and it shouldn’t be a part of your life. Well, those people are on an unfortunate path and maybe they’ll realize it before they die and maybe they won’t. But if you think that life is about coming to a place where you experience pleasant emotions all the time, that’s not going to end well.

John: Yeah, that’s been a big thing for me lately is realizing that, you realize it through meditation as well, but all these things have levels of realization or levels of… You’re like, “Oh, I got that like a few years but now I get it even more.” And this is one of the things for me, I think, is like lately, I’ve been thinking about it a lot where the secret is really not in setting up your life so you never feel stressed or you never feel some bad feeling that you don’t like. It’s getting to a point where you’re comfortable. You’re fine. “I’m going to feel a bit stressed. Cool.”

John: Like, “Oh, I’m a bit afraid. Well, that’s interesting.” Let me just be present with that and feel that and express that however it needs to be. Even anger. I mean, I think anger can be a lot… I think, for me, I’ve had to deal with a bit of what I would say is shame related to anger. Because if you look at what can happen if a kid gets angry and the mom or the dad disconnects from the child when this happens, so withdrawal of love. The kid chooses between love and being authentic, expressing their anger. It’ll shut down the anger as a way to get love.

And then, when they’re 30 years old, they’ll get angry about something because someone will step over one of their boundaries, might be an intimate partner or someone at work or something like that. And the right thing for them to do would be to get angry, not in a violent way, but to be assertive and express that anger, but they don’t do it. So, it creates all these problems.

And so, it’s like you said, it’s this learning to go it’s okay to be angry. It’s okay to be really sad and cry. It’s okay to feel sickening shame and all these things have lessons and gifts and they’re all very healing in a strange way to actually go into them and feel them rather than trying to set up your life so you never have to feel any of them.

Eric: It is very healing. It’s like, imagine what happens when you block the flow of a river. The waters will overflow. It will cause destruction to the banks and whatever plants were living along the sides. It’ll create disharmony in the environment. Essentially, emotions are a flow of a stream. Our society is so mental heavy that we automatically try to place a judgment. These types of emotions are okay, these types are bad. And so, there’s this automatic built-in restriction on what’s appropriate to feel and what’s inappropriate to feel. The fact of the matter is, essentially, feelings are not rational.

How can something that’s irrational be good or bad? It’s like saying some plants are good and some are bad. I look out over the landscape here. It’s a natural landscape and it’s like, “Oh, that tree is okay but that flower is not.” It’s completely arbitrary. And when you try to mess with nature like that, it naturally will lead to imbalance and imbalance will always lead to destabilization. And especially with flows of energy. It’s like forest fires, right? If nature takes its course, little forest fires happen here or there, then that’s just part of what happens. But if you try so hard never to have fires, the amount of debris that can burn will build up over time. And then when that does happen, it’s going to be a huge blaze.

So, people who have repressed emotions, and it’s a very common thing, because yes, in our society, we weren’t necessarily taught to express them and allow them. But if they’re repressed, even really unconsciously, because even to get to a point where you know that you’re repressing them, it takes practice. It’s going to build up over time and it’s going to start manifesting itself in all different kinds of ways and you may not consider yourself an angry person. But one day, the right trigger will happen, the beast will be unleashed. Like all the years of repressed anger will come out. And it’s not going to be a fun experience.

So, it’s like, one way I look at is like being alive even, emotions are part of it. And some seem pleasant and some seem unpleasant. And life is just about allowing them to happen. And it’s like taking our medicine. And so, I would prefer to take medicine every day in little doses than to keep pushing off until one day, I’ve got to eat a whole pile of crap all at once. It’s just a different perspective.

John: Okay. Well, Gabor Maté, I don’t know if you know him, but I haven’t read this book but I love the concept called When the Body Says No. The whole idea is you can ignore it if you want. People successfully do that for a while. But eventually, yeah, you’ll get someone to do like one of these school shootings or they’ll get cancer or they get post-traumatic stress disorder or they have a panic attack. They have a complete mental breakdown. They get all kinds of digestive issues. There’re so many health problems that are actually caused by this kind of stuff, trauma.

Think in the trauma world, the trauma isn’t what happens to you, it’s something happens, someone cuts you off in traffic, that generates anger like a stress response. The trauma is the energy, the emotion of the stress response in the body. So, it’s the trauma, the energy that people are carrying that’s making them sick in a lot of cases. It’s like ignore it at your risk kind of thing.

Eric: Yeah. And to me, I mean, that’s a very disempowered place to be. Like, personally, if I look at it and I’m like, wow, I get upset if someone cuts me off in traffic. Now, what I’m about to say could sound like a judgment but it’s actually slightly different than that. It’s an observation. Because perceptually, if something so small as that puts me off my equilibrium, personally, I’m like, well, that seems to be a challenge. I would rather not be so easily disturbed in my state as to just like something little doesn’t go my way. So, to me, looking into that is the way to respond. Okay, well, why is this?

And the question of why leads to a journey. It doesn’t lead to a solution like we all want. It’s also about patience. Like, if you ask the question, why is this happening? What can I do? Even in starting a business, the disposition is to want a quick fix or immediate answer of how I can do this. But entrepreneurship is a yearlong thing. Why are we okay with spending years, some of us, successful entrepreneurs are okay with investing over years to get the fruits of their efforts. The people who want to get success after three months, it’s not going to work out. Same with personal development.

I mean, why do you think that with something as complex as the human psyche, the body, years of habitual learning, that one day you’re going to notice your issues and think that they’re just going to be resolved in two weeks or two months. It’s a process. It takes patience and commitment and society wants to give us the semblance of that there’s a quick out, “Oh, well, take this pill and it’ll be fine. You don’t have to do any work.” Do that at your own risk. Because acute situations are different if you absolutely need to. But there are people doing that that definitely, if they just had a little bit of willpower, it would be much better off.

John: Yeah. And that’s something that as I get older… I have a friend, he calls me out every time I say get older, because she’s like, “Don’t think in that mindset, man.” So, I started saying, as I get more experienced in life…

Eric: Yeah, yeah.

John: So, as I get more experience in life, the way I try and think about it, well, the thing that comes up for me is, yeah, this long-term thing where you realize, there’s not really any sort of quick path in the vast majority of cases for really meaningful stuff. There’s not a quick path, there’s not some quick thing, there’s not some 90-days to a six-figure business or to lose 10 pounds in two weeks.

And culturally, like it’s a big deal where it’s like when you go, well, Facebook and social media, we’re programmed to expect quick solutions to things. And so, it’s training yourself out of that and going it’s really trying to take this somatic experiencing stuff. They talk about regulating your nervous system. That what you really have when you’ve got these issues is a dysregulated nervous system due to the faulty wiring, basically. When the wiring was laid down in your childhood for the nervous system, it got all messed up. Okay, so you can regulate it. Well, how long does it take? Seven to 10 years.

Eric: Yeah, for sure.

John: You can learn about it in 90 days, but it takes a long time. More rewarding that way, I think too. You learn so much more. I mean, it is so cliché, right? It’s the journey that really matters, not… If you can just get there and take a pill and you’re done, you don’t really grow, you don’t have fun. It’s just it’s over too easily.

Eric: Growth was what was necessary to address the real issue, so you can’t skip it. But that friend who said, who reacted to you saying, “Oh, I’m getting older,” obviously, that triggered a fear in him getting older, because he doesn’t want you to say it because it triggered a fear in him and it made him feel uncomfortable to talk about it. But is it our job not to make people feel uncomfortable? That’s another thing. One of the challenges in society is that it promotes this fiction of comfort. It’s a sleeping dragon though.

John: There’s different ways we could go with that. There’s the comfort within society and then there’s the question of don’t make other people uncomfortable, which is another thing that’s tied into this. But I mean, to just the first one, with comfort in society, I mean, it’s so hard not to be guilty of this. Like, I like my bed. I like my warm showers. Yeah, I have a cold shower every now and then. But maybe, if I only had cold showers all the time, I’d be a bit tougher or something. But you get used to the comfort, to Netflix, to awesome food all the time.

Eric: Yeah, it’s very nuanced. But it’s not about denying comfort. It’s about allowing for discomfort. I think the problem isn’t comfort itself. It’s that we push away discomfort, like in the example of the concept of death or anything that really brings that up at any level. And so, it’s getting imbalanced is the issue.

John: Well, this is like the Taoist thing, the way, the middle way where you can only ever deal with comfort and you freak out if you don’t have it, then that’s a problem. But if you then go to the other extreme, “Well, I’m just going to just live in a park and never shower and eat bugs or something,” that can be its own problem. Unless it’s authentic. If it’s authentic, great but most people, it’s not going to be authentic and it’s just going to be a swing to the other extreme.

It’s like that thing when you don’t want to be attached to either one. You can have comfort and enjoy it but you don’t attach to it. You can also live simply but you’re not attached to that either. You can do either one. It really makes no difference.

Eric: What I practice at this time, because I’ve had these kind of ups and downs with my own journey as awareness becomes more a part of my life. And the thing is, just like we’re talking about in business, more money, more problems, more awareness, more problems, right? It’s like, just because you’re more aware, it’s like, well now, you’re actually aware of what’s going on, you’re not hiding things from yourself. So, more discernment is required and you have to choose what to do in circumstance. You have to use your higher intellect to decide what to do.

You’re not reacting anymore. It’s not an automatic system. You sense, I have emotions, I have thoughts and I see them all at the same time. What do I do in the situation? I know what this person is feeling. I know what I’m feeling. I feel righteous, but is that what I should do in the situation? Can I put this other person before me, etcetera, etcetera? It becomes more of a presence process, right? Like you have to look at everything.

John: I mean, one thing that’s interesting that I haven’t had that phrase, “More awareness, more problems” before. It’s a cool heuristic.

Eric: I haven’t either.

John: You can write a song about that. With this somatic experiencing, a big part of it’s about being embodied. So, you’re feeling your feet on the ground, you’re feeling your breath, you’re seeing what surrounds you. And what happens is your awareness will start to build. You become more embodied, more in this moment, inside your body, feeling your sensations. And what can happen is you start to go, “Shit, I’m feeling anxious.” You feel this tension in your gut, for example. You feel like your shoulders are really like, they’re holding tight and then all of a sudden, they relax. And you can feel like you’re getting worse.

Because you’re like, “What’s going on? All of a sudden, I’m aware of all this stuff that’s good.” But it’s like you’re not getting worse. You’re just becoming more aware of what was already there in the first place. And so, it’s almost like the process with these kinds of practices is you always have to go down first a little bit and then you start going up. It’s this one step back and then you go two steps forward.

Eric: Yeah. I mean, it’s kind of like why a lot of people experience on marijuana anxiety, because it’s a heightened sense of awareness. When you’ve experienced it, you may experience other people’s emotions where you hadn’t had the capacity to be empathetic and sense those things from people. And the one natural response to that would be to feel closed down or self-conscious because you’re not used to having this extrasensory perception. Because I think, naturally, life is actually like the opposite of the meditative and awareness process. It’s constantly working to dull our senses, distract us from what’s going on. And so, we become very disconnected. And then, we really lose touch with our humanity at that point.

John: Well, but I mean then, the presence process is interesting on this and a lot of different other, and I call them, mystics or teachers will talk about this too. That life has a way of giving you what you need to grow in this moment. So, when you start to take this perspective of, instead of trying to make yourself feel good all the time, you’re going to start to look at your anger and your sadness and your shame and all the different uncomfortable things that we feel and you’re going to start to feel them, not think about them.

I mean, you can think about them too, but very much engaged with them in a felt sense kind of way. That’s what the presence process was about. You’re literally tasting and feeling and lapping up the feeling of this emotion is that becomes more and more automatic. You then start to embrace the different things that life gives you not as challenges that take you off your path but sort of life becomes the path.

Eric: Yeah, that’s exactly right. But it takes courage.

John: Yup.

Eric: You have to make a commitment to look at those things that come up and not run away. Because running away basically looks like, “Oh, when I feel something, I’m going to go drink this or eat that or watch this.” This becomes nuanced because it’s not about don’t do those things ever. But it’s about when you are choosing to do those things, are you doing them to avoid something? And if it’s to avoid something, that’s the path of destruction. Because something authentic, something that is actually you is coming up to be observed. But the choice rather than to engage with it is to distract from that fact.

John: And that’s discernment, right? And you make mistakes. You got this urge to do something and you start going, “Was this urge what I actually need to do or I want to do right now or am I just trying to get away from something uncomfortable?”

Eric: But let’s talk about mistakes. Because I think mistakes are one of these, is kind of, I feel like, a myth that our society puts out there to scare us from taking risks. Because is there anything that you’ve learned, where in retrospect, you’re like, “Okay, I tried like 100 different ways.” Is it that your perception now, could you have avoided those 100 different ways of trying something that didn’t work out exactly right? Or was it the fact that you did those 100 things, different ways that you come to the certain perspective you have now?

John: I think mistakes are, that’s how you learn. That’s evolution. I mean, look at nature. Evolution is based on mistakes. Evolution produces a whole generation of different variations. A lot of them will turn out to be mistakes. As in those animals won’t go on to reproduce. And so like life proceeds with mistakes. But this is where the trauma perspective is interesting. This is why people will probably have different tolerance levels for mistakes because if they made a mistake, depending on the family culture, the way they were raised when they made a mistake, how did their parents treat them?

And if they were treated like I was the worst thing in the world, then they’re going to be terrified of making any kind of mistake later. Because whenever they try and start a business, it’s going to bring up the fear of maybe some of that fear I’m a failure if I’d make this mistake. It’s bringing up all that stuck energy in the system. So, I mean, as you know, as well mistakes are the path. That’s how you learn. It’s inevitable.

Eric: Yeah, definitely the path. Now, you and I definitely share a lot of similar perspectives on this, which having a conversation with you. And I feel like I’ve been a little bit selfish during this episode, because I’ve just been having a conversation with you. I’m not necessarily thinking, “Oh, what does the audience want me to ask you to get out?” So, hopefully, me being selfish and just talking to you what I want to talk about is valuable to people.

But based on what we’ve been talking about, given that you’re a copywriter and you’re used to kind of tying these things and speaking to an audience that may be in a different mindset, how can we take kind of everything that we’ve been talking about? What would we say to somebody who’s maybe not on the same wavelength as us? They’re entrepreneurial. They want to start a business. That’s probably why they’re here in the first place, listening to this, but what if none of this is on their radar? Like, how is this helpful to those people?

John: It’s a great question. For a while… I mean, I’m into this stuff, I’ve been meditating for 10 years, on and off, sometimes. But it’s more of the emotional stuff since the presence process and then somatic experiencing. It’s been more probably on the emotional trauma or perspective, similar. And in that time, as I tell my friends about it, who are other entrepreneurs, sometimes there’s sniggers and laughs, “What are you doing, man? Why even bother? This is silly.” They just don’t take it seriously.

What’s been interesting is over time, I think, the more and more they’re coming around to the idea that this stuff is not just a little bit important, but it’s the center of everything. That if you’re an entrepreneur or you’re a husband or a wife or anything, the stuff that you’re still holding in your system, the trauma I’d say, that’s the perspective I have now. It’s trauma, it’s energy, emotion, beliefs, things that are stuck from a long time ago, from something your parents said to you when you were however old. It just builds up and then you layer on other experiences, it becomes this big thing. A lot of people aren’t aware of it. This will affect everything that you do. It affects how you relate to your intimate partner. It affects how you run your team. What opportunities you go after in your business.

For example, if you don’t have a healthy relationship with your anger, your anger is related to your healthy aggression and your life force. So, if you shut down your anger, and a lot of people do and they don’t even know it, they don’t know what they don’t know, that affects their ability to move forward in life, which is why there are so many people who self-sabotage, because they’re not in touch with their anger. They maybe feel guilty or ashamed about their anger.

The reason I mentioned that is that for entrepreneurs, you want to be the best person you can be. You want to be able to work as hard as you can. You want to be able to think big. You want to be able to make the most of your potential. Be as free as you can. And this stuff for me, at least, my experience and I’ve seen it with friends as well, this drives everything else. To me, this is the core of like mindset work. You can go and do a goal setting workshop, that kind of stuff has nothing on this more deep inner work. This work probably requires more courage because you’re going to have to give a face to all the stuff that most people know they’re avoiding but the rewards are so, so immense for everyone. That’s how I’d sell it.

Eric: Yeah, I agree. And for me, I think there was a major turning point in my entrepreneurial journey, which also ended up having to do with being more aware of myself. There were certain fears within me regarding my identity. I didn’t know who I was outside of my work. So, if I contemplated going on a vacation or whatever, my work would always go with me because if I left it behind, I wouldn’t know who I was. Because of some reason, at one point, I faced this and decided, “Okay, I’m going to go on this vacation, but I’m not going to bring my work with me. I’m going to teach my team how to do things without me.”

And what I learned through this experience is that I had a fear of not being in control. That fear was based on an illusion that I was in control to begin with. I was operating under the assumption that the only reason my business was doing anything was because I did it, right? And so, because of that perspective, I then made sure everybody checked in with me before things were done. And essentially, I was restricting my team from bringing their gifts to the table. And also, I was trapping myself into thinking, “I need to take care of this business.” Whereas, what really happened when I left was I was far less stressed. And my business did great without me and people could shine. And I was like, “Wow, this is great.”

So, it’s not necessarily that that scenario will apply to people, necessarily resonate with them directly. But it’s an example of how when I’m unconsciously living in fear, how it impacted my business and how kind of taking myself out of it, it only took like three weeks to kind of disconnect and kind of come into a new relationship with myself and my business for things to dramatically change.

John: Yeah. I mean, we can change quickly like these kinds of things like that. I mean, for me, the takeaway is that I think people, and this is what meditation teaches you, right? Is cultivating a kind of awareness when you’re being reactive, when you’re operating according to some kind of pattern and when you’re acting freely. It’s hard to know that too, that’s not an easy thing. But anything you can do to become aware of these patterns and then to start to dissolve them.

I wouldn’t say that you’re guaranteed to make more money. Your business is going to be better but it’s going to put you more on whatever path or whatever is most important to you authentically. And if that is growing your business, then you grow your business. That’s what’s going to happen. So, you’re going to end up getting what everyone really wants, which is to be satisfied, to be fulfilled, to be happy just in yourself, not because you make X amount of dollars but because you’re just good. Your natural state is you’re good.

Eric: And I think the big illusion is that satisfaction comes when things are predictable. I know that tomorrow things are going to be this way. I’m going to have this. I’m going to do that, etcetera, etcetera. But the place that I’m at in my journey right now is dealing a lot with just surrender and acceptance. With that level of increased awareness and seeing all these different things happening within, without, it’s a relinquishing of control at a very deep level, to the point where I don’t know what I will be capable of each day, what I’ll have the energy for.

Because I’m not in a situation where I want to force myself to do something where my energy is not naturally flowing towards it. So, I write music as well. And it’s been something I’ve done since I was 14. The music is a good teacher for me in that it only comes when it shows up. Like, I can’t sit down and force myself to write music. I could, but it wouldn’t feel the same way. Like when I’m writing music, and it’s coming from beyond me, it’s kind of like a meditative flow state. It feels really good to be writing music and the thing that’s produced imparts a similar quality to somebody listening to it because of the process I was experiencing when I was writing it. But if I sit down and force myself to write music, it’s going to produce a totally different thing, if I can even bring myself to do it.

And so, I’ve come more to this point, like an acceptance that I can’t write music unless it’s coming to me. I won’t be able to operate a certain way in my business unless it’s indicated. And so, what comes with that is a certain amount of discomfort because whereas I used to be really good at, I’ve prided myself on making commitments and sticking to them. Like if I say I’m going to do something, I’ll do it.

And now, with a path being surrendering more and accepting, I realized that I actually am not the one who has the power to say what I can do or not do in the future. There’s a lot of nuance to this, like I can put something on my calendar for two weeks and say we’ll do a podcast recording. It’s coming to a deeper level of relationship with how things actually unfold and not needing to be the one that’s in control. Because maintaining the illusion of control takes an immense lot of energy, attention and focus. And it can end up burning me out if I do that.

John: Yeah, and this is the whole thing with and maybe it’s just as you continue on this kind of path, you really start to see all the ways that you try and control everything around you to make yourself, and we do it in a million different ways, to make yourself feel okay, right? So, we might be controlling our schedule. Again, there’s nuance, right? So, you still can control your schedule. But like we’re seeing how I modify, not really consciously thinking about, but like say, modifying my behavior.

We all do this in different ways so that people perceive us in a certain way so that they don’t get upset with us. I think people are out there who are completely authentic but they’re rare. And so, it’s this seeing all the different things we do in our lives to control what people think about us and to control our day, to control what happens to us. And this might be my dilemma for ages is, how do you connect these two? How do you both let go of control and yet still have a routine, for example?

For me, it feels like it should be a trivial issue. But I’d swing back and forth on this where I’m like, well, I want to wake up early, but then I’ll do that for a while. I’m like, “Yeah, I want to just flow?” I feel like I’m forcing my way through things sometimes. I want to just, like what you’re saying, just trust and I’ll do that for a while. And it’s been this… Or maybe I’m learning that maybe you never actually integrate these two things. Maybe there are different things for different times. But there’s this flowing with things and just following the muse. And then there’s Jocko Willink, Unmitigated Self-Discipline in all things kind of a thing. Maybe you don’t have to resolve them.

Eric: Yeah, exactly. Because I think the thing that wants to resolve them is the thing that wants to be in control. If we look at it like, oh, the acceptance that sometimes I naturally want to be disciplined and that sometimes I naturally want to be relaxed, nature has seasons too. If nature had this psychological complex, whereas when it was winter, it was like, well, why am I not summer anymore? And when it was summer, I was like, why am I not winter? Who nature is, is a combination of everything together and how it flows naturally. And that’s really the big question, who are we? Who am I? And when we let go of trying to be something and create our own identity, that’s when we really have the opportunity to become who we are because it’s a mystery.

John: Just got really deep really quickly.

Eric: Haven’t we been deep the whole time? I mean, I’m like, what are we talking about?

John: Now we’re getting into like, what this concept of the whole Eastern concept of no self.

Eric: Right.

John: All these thoughts in our heads about who we are are all BS.

Eric: This is another point of surrender while we’re doing this podcast. Because I’m aware that we had an outline that we were going to go through and we’re going to talk about more grounded things. And yet, I also am very aware that this is naturally where the conversation is going. So, I’m like, I’m of the mind where I’m like, “Yes, I’m going to totally go with this.” And I’m also observing the, “Wait, should I like not be talking about these things? Because what are people…” It’s all happening.

John: Yeah, I was going to mention this before. When I was doing my podcast every week, sometimes I’d have these five tips and it would be very copywriting tactical focused or whatever. And then sometimes, I’d have this meandering conversation a bit like we’ve had here about all kinds of random stuff that I had no plan to talk about. And I’d often get people who love this, probably not everyone loves it, but some people absolutely love it because it’s more like we’re just having coffee or a beer or something, tea maybe. And we’re just talking. It’s not serious.

Eric: Right. Especially, tea has taught me this having tea with people especially. It’s very interesting what happens when two people come together, especially two people who aren’t trying to make a point because it ends up that each conversation can be unique. When I was more in a part of my life where I was into controlling things, I had basically like scripts, unconscious internal scripts of things that I would say about myself and conversations that I will allow myself to have. But now, it’s like, if I’m talking to a person, the conversation that happens usually is new and things I’ve said in this conversation I’ve never said before, because I haven’t talked to you before.

And Ram Dass has said something like this when him and his partner have done mushroom trips. It’s like you get to a point where it doesn’t really matter who’s speaking. The message is for the people involved in the situation. And whoever becomes a vehicle for the message, it’s not really that important. It’s just that the message is happening because of the people who are present in the conversation.

John: I like that. That’s why I like talking, talking to people like you. Stuff flows out of you. And that goes back to the mystery. I don’t know where it comes from.

Eric: Right.

John: None of us really know. Like your thoughts, if you actually watched your thoughts, where do they actually come from? You don’t think about everything you say before you… It just sorts of flows out automatically. Where is it coming from? I don’t know.

Eric: And that’s the beauty of the mystery is that it actually can become interesting for us to live our own lives. And I think part of the things that make our lives boring is we’re so filtered. When the mystery bubbles up, we’re like, “No, I don’t want the mystery. This is what I want to portray. This is who I am.” And so, the mystery is kind of suppressed. And the mystery a lot of times expresses emotion, like I’m feeling this upwelling of tears or I’m feeling joyful or I’m feeling angry. And if our immediate reaction to that is to push it down, then we’re basically saying we don’t want to live our life.

That’s a really interesting point. Whereas as I’ve found, I mean, I’ve become a lot more emotional when I say this sounds like I’m crying all the time. But when I say that, I mean, I’ve had some moments when I’ve just let my anger out, not in a violent way but in a contained, healthy way or I’ve cried various times over the last probably, quite a lot this year, five, 10 times, say this year. Right. Which is a lot for me coming from hopefully not crying for 20 years or something like that.

But as I do this, it sounds like it got to be really, it’s really sad. Again, you obviously cry because you’re sad, so it’s sad when you cry. But I feel so alive allowing myself to feel these things, to really get angry and then to express the anger, to cry and just cry for an hour, a couple of hours listening to sad music, for example. I think this is partly why people end up feeling so dead inside or they have to use drugs or adventure sports, they have to use these things to feel alive. This is another rabbit hole here. But as I become more emotional, I express and feel these things, you start to feel alive and it’s a great feeling.

Eric: It is. I’ve probably cried five to 10 times in the last two weeks. And it’s a different experience. It’s a movement of emotion. And it doesn’t always just happen from sadness. It happens from joy, beauty, love. It’s really the opening of the heart. Once the heart is open, emotions flow a lot more naturally. To open the heart is the journey of trust. Without trusting that we’re taking care of, the heart has a really hard time being open. If we’re denying ourselves then obviously, we’re the first line of defense against feeling taken care of, because we’re not accepting who we are.

And so yes, there’s a lot of “work” to do but that’s the whole point of life is to come to the point of satisfaction and contentment and this is what it takes. It’s well worth the effort. And because material gain of any kind is not going to bring lasting anything. So, it’s the hero’s journey. You set off on that path to get to Mordor. You don’t know the road. You don’t know what you’re going to encounter but you take one step at a time and you take whatever comes and ultimately, nothing. It never ends as long as we’re here.

John: That’s part of the mystery of it, right? Where you’re like well, you’re growing a lot. These are these paradoxes. This is like the high and the low, the light and then the darkness kind of a thing, the shadow, where you’re growing and growing and growing and changing and learning all this stuff. And that’s your human experience. And then on this other level, you’re also perfect. You can go into crazy spiritual bypassing if you start going, everything is perfect, everything is one, ra, ra. So, it’s balancing both of these things, being on this path and growing and engaging with the human experience. And then at the same time, recognizing your innate wholeness.

Eric: Yeah, because spiritual bypassing is not accepting what is, because it’s the idea that everything is supposed to be bright and light all the time, which is not the case. If there’s any restriction on anything, then that’s not the path of acceptance. So, in conclusion, that’s how you start a business.

John: I’d say you launch a membership website with MemberMouse.

Eric: Yeah. And you get advice from you on copywriting.

John: Yup. That’s how you write your sales pages. Yup.

Eric: Exactly.

John: Exactly that. Those five steps.

Eric: If you didn’t hear what the five steps were, well, listen again, they’re in there. So, yeah, I think now’s as good any place to kind of jump off. But before we do that, can you share with our listeners like where they can learn more about you?

John: Sure. Well, the best place is my website which is dropdeadcopy.com. I have recently deleted all of my social media. I’m sick of social media, basically. So, I’m not on Facebook or Twitter or any of the Instagram or any of these ones. I’m on YouTube just because YouTube is part of your Google account. So, there’s videos on YouTube, if you want to learn more about how to become a copywriter, different tips. There’s probably 100, 150 podcasts I’ve done on there with different copywriters and marketers. So, that’ll be the two places is my website, dropdeadcopy.com, or YouTube.

Eric: Hearing that, I’m really glad that we did the podcast on what we talked about because if we did it on copywriting, it’s probably stuff that’s already out there in one form or another, right?

John: That’s true. I mean, that’s the thing with marketing, you get emails, you probably get these questions from people, how do I do that? It’s like, Google it. There’s a million people teaching this stuff. There’s no shortage and it’s all free. If you search long and hard enough, the only reason you get a course is because it simplifies it and saves you a bit of time. So, this is more fun to talk about this.

Eric: Yeah, for sure. And I think we’re both at a point where we’re interested in having fun and doing what’s natural, I should say, is a better way to say it. Because the trusting aspect of doing what’s natural is that whatever is natural and good for us, it’s going to be good for somebody else. If we do something that’s unnatural to us, we can almost be certain that it’s not going to be good for anybody.

John: Yeah, this goes back to the authentic thing, to tie it all back together. It’s just being real. This might work for everyone, but it worked for some people and if they need some copywriting tips, they can go to YouTube. Go to Google.

Eric: Listen to your 150 podcasts.

John: Yeah, for a few weeks. Yeah, that’ll keep them busy.

Eric: Well, it was so great talking to you, John. I really appreciate you coming on and just being real.

John: Yeah. Likewise, Eric, this has been fun. Thanks, man.

Eric: Awesome. Thank you.

OUTRO:

Thank you so much for listening to my entire conversation with John. I hope you enjoyed this episode and are walking away with a more expansive perspective on life and entrepreneurship.

I’d like to extend my sincere gratitude to John for coming on the show and sharing so freely about his personal journey.

To get links to all the resources we talked about in this episode, you can head on over to SubscriptionEntrepreneur.com/158.

There you’ll also find the complete show notes and a downloadable transcript of our conversation.

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