How To Create True Success In 2021 & Beyond with Miles Beckler

Eric: Hey Miles. Welcome to the show.

Miles: Eric, good to be back my man. Thanks for having me.

Eric: Yeah, no worries. Thanks for coming. And I looked back and checked, it was exactly two years ago when we talked. You were episode 114 and it was released in January of 2019. A lot has happened since that time.

Miles: A lot has happened. That is absolutely an understatement I think.

Eric: Mm-hmm (affirmative). So, before we get into things that people aren’t interested in like how they can get visibility on their website and make more sales and things like that, a little bird told me that you may have a very amazing popcorn recipe.

Miles: Absolutely. It’s wifey’s popcorn recipe. So, cook it in coconut oil obviously. And then you pop the corn. From there you add more coconut oil instead of butter and then we add turmeric and we add the yeast flakes. There’s two types. The unfortified yeast flakes. She goes with red crushed pepper on top of that and then you sprinkle on some chocolate and then the chocolate melts into it and it turns into this gigantic ball of awesome for … Whether it’s Mandalorian or Ted Lasso or whatever you’re into, it fits the bill.

Eric: I’m surprised by the turmeric and the chocolate. Obviously, I’ve done nutritional yeast and sea salt. That’s a classic.

Miles: Oh yeah.

Eric: Turmeric, huh?

Miles: Step it up man. Yep. And then you know you’re doing well when your fingertips turn turmeric-y yellow at the end. Like the next morning you’re like, “Why are my fingers discolored?”

Eric: Why is my couch all yellow? Yeah, turmeric-

Miles: You get it.

Eric: That’s a danger zone. That reminds me of another popcorn that I’ve tried which was all covered in spirulina, which also very healthy and great. But of course, your fingers end up all green after the fact.

So, we normally ask our guests to give the 30,000-foot view. I’m saying this out loud because I’m hesitating doing it because we’ve already done it. But you probably have a really quick elevator pitch. It’s probably a good thing for us do.

Miles: Totally. I made my first money online in 2003. That’s like 17 years ago. Essentially spamming Myspace. Doing everything the wrong way. Not building lists, not building a brand. That fell apart when they got bought out by Fox News. They turned off my links. Wife and I co-founded a website in 2009. That website has reached 40 million plus people. It’s in the spirituality and meditation space. Pretty much all WordPress, organic content marketing and then we added on some social.

In 2016 I started teaching everything I learned from the failures from ’03 to 2010 and then from the successes from 2010 to 2016 and that’s now my YouTube channel which is the Miles Beckler brand. It’s got 160,000 subscribers. A few affiliate case study sites and a few other things going on but that’s the gist of it.

Eric: Perfect. The reason I reached out to you… Actually, I receive this question a lot, but the straw that broke the camel’s back is a friend of mine emailed me a week ago and was like, “Hey, I got my stuff online and I’m starting the process of building my business and I’m looking to now either hire somebody or find a way to get visibility to my site and get the ball rolling on my business.” And I was feeling very like not the right person to answer that question and also recognized that I get that question a ton.

And I also considered that this is probably a situation that so many people are in because nowadays it is so easy to get a site online. We have all these tools available to us so people can do that really easily but then the question is, “Okay, well when I get my site up, what now?” And that’s really the bigger part of the piece of running and building a business. And so that’s when I reached out to you. I was like Miles would be a great person to answer those questions. So, where’s your first touchpoint on that?

Miles: Well, I think I would go as far as with you were like oh, there’s all these options. It’s easier than ever to publish content. It’s more overwhelming than ever. There’s too many options. And you maybe stumble into somebody like Gary Vaynerchuk who’s like you have to be everywhere. You have to be on TikTok and Pinterest and duh, duh, duh, duh. And people attempt to follow that and I think he has really good intentions but then they hit burnout. And it’s one thing to have an idea for a business or to even craft a product. Like oh, I could create a product on how to tie your shoes or how to tie a bow tie.

It’s a whole ‘nother world to sell the thing and to market the thing and to build an audience of people. So, I think it’s probably worthy of kind of breaking apart sales and marketing from each other. In order to sell something, you have to have something of value that somebody else what’s to transact for. But the whole world of marketing is everything that happens before you present that user with the opportunity to purchase. And that to me is actually where the game is won or lost and it’s kind of the more difficult side of things. And it’s the part that a lot of people don’t think about at first.

They just think product. Like oh, I can just come up with this product and I can go … Whether it’s the Alibaba folks. Like oh, I can go get rubbish plastic from China and resell it and look at these markups I can get. But everyone has access to this. There’s the whole world of PLR which is just terrible. It’s pre-written stuff. It’s rubbish. It’s people selling rubbish to other people and then you have all the me too scams. It’s like, “Oh, buy into my marketing thing and then go sell the same marketing thing I sold to you.” It’s really easy to figure out the product.

The tough part is kind of what the question was around, is the marketing. And I look it as from two phases. Number one is growing your audience and then number two is growing trust with that audience. So, growing the audience is helping people who’ve never heard of you and they don’t know who you are. You might be able to help them with a problem. You might have a solution for them. You might have answers for them. But they’re actively searching. Generally, they’re searching on YouTube or Google. Two biggest search engines in the world. They’re searching for answers to their problem. And the question is, do you show up?

And your product might be the thing they’re “looking for”, but if you don’t meet them where they’re at, at that search phrase they asked or that question they asked and answer and then continue to help them and give value and really help them move towards the transformation that they seek in their life, if you don’t kind of meet them and guide them through those phases before asking for a transaction, before asking for the sale, they’re going to click back and go find someone who does.

And so, what we’re seeing in the world of marketing today is those who are giving value at scale, those who are leveraging platforms to really grow large audiences of raving fans through helping them actually transform their lives before the transaction are absolutely winning today. Not to say that you can’t create a YouTube ad or a Facebook ad and go straight ad to sales page to checkout.

Eric: Which is actually what we talked about on our last podcast.

Miles: Totally. And it’s technically possible and it sounds easier but it’s so incredible difficult because of the nuances of copywriting, of sales copy, of the funnel strategy, of how do you get somebody who doesn’t know you, doesn’t like you, doesn’t trust you to pull out their credit card and buy something? It’s actually one of the most difficult things in the world to do. So, I personally love building businesses based on give tons of value. Jay Abraham called it the strategy of preeminence.

And once you get to a certain point where you’ve reached so many people, you’ve given so much value, and then you’re like, “Oh, by the way, if you want to buy my eBook or if you want to buy my course you can get it here,” the floodgates are open and that’s where you have $10,000, $20,000 days because of all of the stuff you did before the sale. It takes time and energy.

Eric: Yeah. So, it sounds like you’re advocating for … There is a lot more legwork and building time that people should be prepared for. And also, side note here, which is case in point for you, the guy that reached out to me is a Buddhist monk and he lives at a monastery. And I recommended to him that he checkout your site and responded back. He was like, “Oh yeah, I’m already taking one of Mile’s free courses.” So, I’m like, that’s why I … Because you obviously … He found you. That’s what you’re talking about. At the time that he had the question, through whatever you have been doing, somehow, it’s been successful enough that you came up.

Miles: And so, this is the power of brand. So, if you think about it, I have two little victories in there. Thank you for sharing that. It’s an honor. Number one was him finding me. Which means whether he turned to Google or whether he turned to YouTube, he was searching for whatever answers he was seeking and my content showed up. And at this point, as of today, I’ve put out about 630 videos give or take in just over four years. That’s an average of a video every about two and a half days for four years straight.

So, it’s that body of work I did over the last four years that met him. And obviously there are some nuances on YouTube SEO and that game. And I played that game and I’ve gotten incrementally better. But then there’s your willingness Eric, of sharing my name. And this is the power of brand taking over and people don’t think about this enough. A big part of why you were willing to share my content, I think, and you can confirm or deny this, is because I don’t pitch in every single video, is because I’m not always going for the sale.

You know that I’m a safe person to refer for someone wanting to educate themselves because you know I lead with value and you know that my intentions are in the right place by watching what I’ve been doing. It’s not that we know each other deeply. We’ve had dinner together. We’ve had two podcasts. But ultimately, it’s through you watching my actions over four years and being like, “Dude, Miles is not going to spam him. Miles is not trying to sell scams. Miles is literally giving to give.”

So, it made you willing to share me, which is where as YouTube grows my audience, those people who find me share me on Reddit, they share me on Twitter, they share me via email, and that’s doubling my growth rate at this point in time. And that’s kind of the big, big win and it just takes doing the work for long periods of time to prove that you are one of the honest people with integrity in the space. Because most people don’t have integrity, which is sad but true.

Eric: True. Yeah. And I definitely echo what you said and support that. And to me it’s just an easy outsourcing thing. It’s like, I know all the areas where I’m strong and I know all the areas where I’m weak. So, if somebody asks me a question and I know that you’re giving out all this great, valuable content, why should I spend my time giving people a fraction of what you do when I could just send them to your stuff and it’s all available for free and they can, to their heart’s content, learn as much as they want to or as little as they want, whatever. It’s a resource. It’s a resource that I can use to help people.

Miles: And it gives you a little bit of social cred. But to turn this back for the listeners, the reason why I started putting out my content was because of the number of people saying, “How’d you guys build your business? Can I buy you coffee? Can I buy you a meal and explain it?” And I was repeating myself. Literally I was saying, “Okay, here’s how you go. You build an audience and search engine and content marketing.” So, finally I was like, “Well, I should probably record this and put it on some sort of a platform where it could live on forever.” Which eliminates Instagram and Facebook because it doesn’t live forever. And create essentially a library of content that people could find and go through.

So, in one sense it was self-serving, but for the listener, in your business, in the world you’re playing in, there’s all kinds of presale questions. There’s all kinds of how does this work, what is that, what’s the best this for that. These types of things are what your audience is searching every single day. Google gets something like seven billion searches a day which equates out to over two trillion searches per year. Those numbers are so big they don’t even make sense in our brains. YouTube has two billion monthly active users. And these users are searching for answers to their questions.

And if you’re in the gardening space and you do gardening, they’re looking for, when can I put my kale in the ground and how to start tomatoes indoors and they’re looking for all of these things. They might not want to buy your whole course yet but if you meet them where they’re at, that’s what the body of content can do. And that’s why I love and I prefer to partner with a search platform. Because when you create the content once, it can live on for years. So, videos I made in 2017 are still bringing audience members into my ecosystem today. Blog posts my wife wrote in 2010, 10 years ago, are still bringing traffic and still bringing subscribers into her world this very day. So, you get a compounding effect on everything that you publish.

Eric: Yeah. And one element that you kind of breezed over in that description that I think is worth highlighting is you started this journey by recognizing what people are asking you for. And going back to your earlier point about there’s so many things out there where people are trying to pitch you entire businesses, like cookie cutter businesses that you can just go and take and do whatever.

I think people can be successful with that and they have, but I think for what we’re talking about it’s a good piece of advice to say, what are people actually coming to you and asking you for? Already, before you’ve even thought about a business. It’s a confusing thing for me when I hear a lot of people who say they want to start a business and yet I see people constantly coming up for them to something and they push them away. They’re like, “No. I don’t want to do that. I’m doing this other business thing.” So, I’m just like, start with what people already want for you and that’s the point.

Miles: Another way to think about it is what can you help people with? Right now, today, what could you help someone do? Because making money online, or in any business, we’re selling transformation. You could probably even simmer it down to we’re selling happiness. So, skin care is actually happiness. They think they’re going to be happier with that skin care brand. Physical gadgets. It ultimately comes down to that. And most people can help somebody with something. And I see it a lot in my audience is someone’s like, “I’ve been doing this stuff for 20 years. I’m so over that world. I want to do something totally new.” And I’m like, “Oh my goodness. But you’re so good.” I don’t care if it’s plumbing or whatever, there’s a whole world of people searching YouTube for plumbing stuff and there’s a whole business that could be built around that right here and now. So, looking in one’s self like, what have you been doing? What have you been working on?

And a lot of people are like, “Well, nothing. I haven’t been doing anything.” It’s like, “Well actually, you’ve probably been playing video games.” And the world of e-sports is going to be one of the next trillion-dollar industries for sure. It’s much more abstract. And people think that it has to be in this world like you coded a software platform that fits on … And I’m talking about making … And they’re like, “Oh, clearly I have to go into that world and I don’t know anything about that world.” But the random niches down to designer shoelaces.

I know a guy who has a designer shoelace website that is dominating. You know what, he really loves shoes. He’s one of those guys who loves … It’s a part of him. So, he built a business. I got a lady. She’s in her 60s. She’s into quilting. And she teaches quilting. I got friends who ride horseback. They have fitness for dressage rider website where they teach a specific type of horseback rider a specific type of fitness so they can become better riders. And there’s a million and one tiny niches. And we live in a day with our cellphones, people are watching videos on their random obsessions.

Whether it’s dressage horseback riding or designer shoelaces, that’s where people’s time is spent consuming. And when we just shift from consumer to creator, and we become the person who starts publishing the content, viewers can find our content. The audience can grow from there. And I would much rather help people understand that the real value is go build the audience first. Don’t build the product. Don’t start there. Go build the audience. Go give a service. See what you can do to help. And then just ask them, “What would you like me to create for you?” And they will tell you clearly, exactly what they want you to build.

And I know you hear this from your customers with MemberMouse. You start with one course, it works finally. It took a lot of trial and error to get there and then the second course comes and the second course does way better than the first. And then the third course comes and it does better than the second. Because there is a process but they have this audience of people who trust them and they gave the credit card and they trust them. And that trust is everything.

And if someone’s out there like, “Miles, but no, no, no. I really have no idea how I could help people.”, you can go look at competitors, people who have created a result that you desire, you can go into their Facebook groups. You can go to Amazon and look at the book reviews and you can look at what people loved about certain books and what people hated about certain books. You can go into subreddits and Facebook groups to see the conversations, even on old school forums, people are talking about. And you can learn what people are looking for from your competitors and you could just start creating content right there.

Eric: Yep. And the thing I love about … There’s a transition happening in our conversation right now. I kind of started it off by asking you a question that was a tactical question. But as we’re getting deeper and deeper into what the answer actually is it becomes less about tactics. It’s more about organizing your lifestyle such that it has these natural byproducts that are a value to other people. And it’s a different thing to wrap your head around because I think people approach wanting to start a business for different reasons and I think one of the common cases is that they’re like, “I need to get something now. I need to get some money now so let me go sell something online and get the thing.” Which is kind of a disservice to one’s self because it doesn’t put your perspective in the right place. So, I think that people really should be prepared for this is a longer-term thing.

It’s something that you’re fitting into your life in a more natural way such that you can add value to other people. And like you said, the result of that will be building an audience and once you have an audience they’ll drive the ship in a way in terms of what they want to buy from you. In fact, I’ve seen people who didn’t even intend to start a business. They put content out there and people like, “Can I just give you money? Do you have a donate button somewhere?” So, it’ll happen on its own.

Miles: And now entire platforms like Patreon or OnlyFans, these things are facilitating what you just talked … It’s like the evolution of can I just give you money? And Substack is another one. Like a newsletter. Like I just want you to send me your ideas once a week type thing. I agree with you, to kind of rewind a little bit, about the shift from tactical to strategic. And a lot of people are so intensely focused on the tactics. It’s like, “Well, what do I click on Facebook? What’s the right interest and how long of a video is the right length of a video?” And I realize now, after hundreds of videos and teaching 160,000 people what I know, I realize that it’s much more about the strategy is where the tactics come from.

So, with a strategy in place, and I would say the strategy of preeminence, which is from Jay Abraham. You could search it on YouTube. Free videos on it. And it’s essentially, if we give results to people first, then everything we want will be able to open up after that. Their willingness to buy whatever it is in the future. Or just click a donate button, sign up to our Patreon community because we’re just helping them.

All of that happens based on us being willing to give to them. So, the strategy should be like okay, well if giving value to others is what ultimately primes the pump for the sale, if that’s actual marketing that builds the beliefs and gets them ready to actually buy, then what are the components of that? And it’s reach more people and it’s give more value to more people. How do we do that? And I love how you put it. Organizing your lifestyle, I think is the phrase that you used, give or take. So, you and I are having a conversation today. Got on the calendar. We’ve organized our lifestyle. We’re just having a chat. I love getting to connect with you. This is a really cool moment. This is not a job. This is a blessing. This is a really cool experience. And this is what creators are doing. When you see the YouTube collabs, when you see the guest posts at work. The people who are winning in the 2021, 2022, 2023 economy are the creators and those who are willing to just show up and to get new ideas in new ways from guests that have brand value to go out. Boom. That’s great.

Because I’m going to email my list this podcast, which is going to give you access to my list again. And you’re obviously promoting. This is on your podcast. It becomes this co-creative experience, but it’s like a co-creative lifestyle experience that opens us up to a trajectory of audience growth and trust growth, which as we’ve covered repeatedly, that is the predecessor to making sales. Okay. Let’s go do it. Like okay, that’s the answer. Check. Podcast is done. I mean, it’s not because there’s some nuances to it, but strategy. So, out of that strategy, then the tactics. Okay well, do you like having conversations with other people? Do you feel like maybe you’re not the expert and you’d rather get the expert idea out of people? Are you kind of a ham like me where you like to do the song and dance on camera? Or like my wife, she loves to write. She’s great on camera at this point, but she really enjoys coming up with a thesis, outlining it, working with a blog post for sometimes weeks on end to really get that blog post where she wants it. That drives me insane. But it’s her style. And it’s the fact that she’s published 1,000 blog posts over 10 years that her websites reach 40 million plus people these days.

So, there’s a lot of ways. That’s where the tactic comes out. So, the strategy is give value, build audience. What’s the tactics from there? Generally, I think people should limit themselves to blogging, podcasting, or YouTubing effectively.

Eric: Can I pose a theory on that?

Miles: Yeah, please.

Eric: I think that people connect with personalities and I know for me when I … I was an introvert. And I still am to a certain extent. But when I started doing podcasts and videos and whatever, there is some resistance that I experienced during that time. And I think it would be easy in the early stages to misinterpret resistance to, “Oh, I shouldn’t be doing this. This isn’t right.” The thing is that there is … You’re talking about 2021, 2022, et cetera. More and more we’re in a world, especially with the quarantine and COVID situation, that is literally a digital community.

What do we like about community in person? We like relating to people. There’s somebody who has a particular personality. We go to that person when we want to laugh. We go to that person when we want to have some wise advice. And this is what we’re seeing reflected in the digital communities. It behooves you to be yourself. And it’s such like this kind of bumper sticker … Even less than a bumper sticker statement because it’s not really saying anything. But the thing that really captivates people is when people are authentic.

And authenticity is a discovery process. You talked about your journey and you kind of broke it up into two decades. The first decade was about failure, the second decade was about success. Another way to look at failure is it’s trial and error. It’s the discovery process. It’s, “Oh, let me try this and see how I feel about it.” You also reflected on Melanie’s journey. She started off with writing but now she’s great on video. Once you put one step in place that will lead you to another step that maybe if you tried to jump for that step at the first time it would not have worked. You would have lost motivation. So, I’ll stop there. What do you think about that?

Miles: 100% agree. There’s a book I want to recommend that popped into mind. It’s called The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. And for every creator in the world … He’s a novelist and one of his novels got picked up and optioned as a movie, The Legend of Bagger Vance. And he’s very honest about the resistance with a capital R. And it’s our enemy. It is convincing us to consume another video. It’s telling us we need to learn how to do this first before we go make the video. In YouTube I see it all the time. It’s the person who goes out and spends $3,000 on a DSLR, lighting setup, microphones and they’ve never made a video. Whereas, I started on my $250 rubbish cellphone, not even a flagship phone, and I just started recording videos. It’s understanding that just flat out doing the work is the work and we have to show up every single day.

Eric: Right. And how many viral videos are on DSLRs?

Miles: Right. No clue. They’re all vertical, terribly held, shaky cam on a cellphone in the moment. It’s that idea of what’s the best camera for a photographer? It’s the one that you have on you the moment you need it type thing. But with the whole authenticity, it is a buzzword. And what does it mean to be authentic? And what is the self? For me it was very much a discovery process and an evolution process of a willingness to show up and to iterate and just make my video, but I’m going to watch my video. And did I say um, uh, um, uh a billion times? Okay.

And then learning to be a little conscious while talking stream of consciousness of the words coming out of my mouth while still staying on track. That is a skill that took me hundreds of videos to master. And people will watch my videos now and be like, “Damn. I got to do that?” It’s like, “No, no, no. Click on videos, sort by oldest, and watch my first video when I was rigid, I was awkward, I was clearly uncomfortable.” My second video I was at the beach. I was yelling at the camera because I thought the waves were so loud that I was physically yelling. It is so awkward.

And I’m leaving them. They’ll be there for infamy because it’s the honest path. And like you said, the first 10 years, “failure”. But it wasn’t failure. I was learning ways that didn’t work. And eventually I learned so many ways that didn’t work, Melanie and I stumbled on something that worked. It was the proverbial audience, market match. It was the content and the audience finally clicked. And then we did the smartest thing ever. We did that same thing over and over 1,000 times. And this is the part about true success as a creator. It’s really actually extremely boring once you figure it out. I’m still making talking head videos. I published a video today. It was a technical video about Pinterest marketing. And I don’t love showing the video. My virtual assistants are doing all of it. But I take time out of my schedule to, okay, click here, and this is how you set up your image, and this is what your boards are. I did that for my audience.

And it’s that willingness to show up and do the boring work, the monotonous work over and over and over 1,000 times. Because entrepreneurs by definition, we’re creatives. We have lots of idea. And at one point when I learned WordPress it was like, “I have the magic. I can make a website about anything.” So, what did I do? I went and made 32 websites and I gave none of them enough attention to actually reach escape velocity. They all came crashing back to earth because they didn’t have enough force behind them. And it’s that willingness to go all in on one audience, one brand. Out of curiosity if I may Eric, how long have you been doing these podcasts? When was the first podcast published date wise?

Eric: I think it was 2018. We release them every two weeks and we’re on episode 63. So, whatever that math is. But yeah, definitely at least two years.

Miles: Same thing over and over.

Eric: Exactly.

Miles: It’s the repetitions.

Eric: And I was talking to some friends of mine recently about interviewing. Them being interviewed and then interviewing other people. And I’d never talked about interviewing before. The tactics. And I was kind of somewhat surprised at what I’d learned because I had never talked about it before. But as I was speaking I was like, “Wow. If I’m actually breaking down all the things that have been accumulated and learned over this two-year period, it’s a lot.” And it was not consciously sought. It was just by doing it that it happened. Like you reflected on some of your first episodes. My first episode, when I edited it, I literally … You look at the Garage Band file and it’s all these so many hundreds of micro edits. Like all the ums, and the et cetera. Just editing it out and it looked like this huge, insane mess.

But I wanted to go back to something you said about you and Melanie stumbled upon something that worked. That is definitely accurate. And also, I want to caution people to not misinterpret that. Because it could be misinterpreted on this idea that oh, you discovered the thing and therefore the other 10 years you just wasted your time. And I kind of reflected the same thing in my story about interviewing on podcasts. No. The only reason you could even have stumbled on the thing was because of the preparation. Nobody wants to listen … Not nobody.

But I think societally people don’t want to listen to this stuff because it implies that there’s work to do. And then at the same time the thing that makes that “work” untasteful to people is the idea that it’s not going to be rewarding. But the thing is when you actually go through this process, the journey is the rewarding part because you actually transform your own life. You transform yourself. You’ve watered your own seed and now you’re the type of plant that you were here to be and there’s no other way to discover that than to go through the process and would you rather be who you were meant to be or would you rather just avoid discomfort and have somebody else spoon feed you who they think other people should be?

And it reminds of this … I’m watching the Lord of the Rings behind the scenes stuff now and there was this quote in there about courage and how this is a big thematic element of Lord of the Rings. And it’s because there is fear that there is courage. If you’re not afraid or you’re not resistant, you’re not courageous. Because you’ve got it. You’re like oh, whatever. So, I think it’s important to remember these relationships between things as we approach things that may feel uncomfortable.

Miles: And even in my history, that period of “failure”, at one point I was making about three, four grand a month for six or seven months straight. Thought I had it figured out. That kind of fell apart. At one point I had another launch that did over 10 grand. I think I had at least three or four brands that did five figure paydays. They just weren’t sustainable. They weren’t a business that was going to give me the long-term income that I could get mortgages on, that I could literally live the lifestyle I wanted to live confidently, pay out retirement accounts, pay off student loan debt, et cetera. And that was when all of the things … Because every one of those “failures” had at least five or six big time aha moments within them. And it was a process of three or four aha moments from this, okay, the house of cards crumbled down because I wasn’t building an email list in the first one. Okay. Second one, this, that, the other happened and it came down for another reason. Okay, but I learned these two or three things.

And then eventually, on that next attempt, because it was just a perpetual series of that next attempt until I figure it out. I’m psychologically unemployable so I am figuring out this entrepreneur game one way or another. I don’t care if it takes me 30 years, I’m going to figure this out. And then all of the little learnings clicked together and things started to move. And we remembered to build a list that time. We gave value first. The first years was about Miles trying to get something for Miles.

It was through realizing that didn’t work that we finally shifted to what if we just give all our value we possibly can to other people? What would happen? The traffic stacked up. The email list stacked up. It was like, oh my gosh, we’re actually onto something. Send them out an interview. What would you like? Would you like a meditation to buy? Would you buy a downloadable… Yes, they would. Okay, let’s try that. Boom. And it’s been this kind of process of now testing and discovering from there. But ultimately, I think it’s about being willing to delay gratification. And that is probably the biggest thing that creators who actually achieve success, their willingness to delay.

Because today, in the social media driven world, in the dopamine from the cellphone device, look how successful that person was on that one thing they did last night, it’s so easy to miss the 10 years that make an overnight success. And everyone’s looking at the event. The event of that viral thing. I’ve never had anything go viral. I never will. My stuff’s boring. But the cumulative growth of all 630 videos together means I’ve reached 8.5 million people because of my willingness to show up on an extremely regular basis and brain dump an idea to my cellphone, literally. And then one other thing is, when you mentioned about your interview skills getting better, better, better, when I go watch a video that I published within the last month or two and then I go watch my first videos, there’s this giant gap. And it’s like, my goodness things have changed. If you’ve ever had a niece or a nephew who you don’t see them very often, they don’t realize how much taller they’re getting. It’s normal for them. They’re growing micro inches per day. But when you don’t see them for two years and you go show up you’re like, “Good lord child, you’re growing like a weed.”

That’s what happens with our skills and that’s what you’ve done with interviewing. These little tiny things. You listen to yourself, you try new ways of doing things. Some things didn’t feel good so you stopped it, other things felt good so you kept doing it. Now you’re just doing more of the things that work and feel good unconsciously. And you’ve actually grown massively as an interviewer. And everyone wants that event. They want to be the good interviewer. And it’s like, okay, cool. Well here’s a proven process. Every two weeks publish a podcast for two years and odds are you’re going to be a better interviewer than you are today. If you’d like to speed that up, do a weekly show.

But you run a very successful software business, right? So, you’re doing what fits into your lifestyle. And if someone’s at home and they’re like, “Man, I really need to figure this game out fast,” I did 120 videos in 120 consecutive days. It was brutal for four months. It was painful at points in time for four months. Got through the learning curve quick. I learned how to suck at it and I got through sucking at it to where I sucked a little less at it. And then eventually I didn’t suck anymore and I was like, wow, I’m competent.

I’m not good at it yet, but I’m competent. I can get down the mountain on my snowboard without falling. I’m not ripping black diamonds yet but I can now get down a blue square without falling. If we take that approach, I love using physical sports as examples because I think people somehow think that going to the digital world is like, oh, it should be easy. Influencers are super successful because they X, Y, Z and go teach yourself how to surf. And if you’re not willing to go be next to the ocean and surf all the time, surfing’s never going to stop being hard because it’s really, really hard. But when you go live next to a surf break and you go out on the water every day come hell or high water, raining, snow, terrible, whatever, and you’re out there every single day, you’re going to get competent as a surfer very, very, very quickly.

Eric: Yeah. And there’s sports and other metaphors for every different personality type. Like some people will never even attempt surfing because A, they have no interest, and even if they do they don’t have the resolve to do all those things. But another example is like piano. And piano is a little bit different because piano you can sit down and you can be passable at something. You can make a sound. On surfing it takes a little more effort even to just get in the arena.

Miles: Paddle out. Yeah.

Eric: To stand up on the board and get on a wave. It takes a lot more. But piano is the same thing. Even though it’s easy to get started, it’s still a lifetime to master. And really all these things are. Everything in a way is a sport, an instrument. You mentioned delaying gratification earlier and I certainly agree with that. And it’s also about appreciating the process.

Miles: Yeah. Falling in love with it.

Eric: Yeah. There has to be some enjoyment, otherwise you’re never going to make it. You have to be … Which comes back to the point about listen to what people are already asking you for. Find out what your value is as an individual. Do people just laugh when they’re around you and yet you’re trying to start this business where you’re selling marketing materials? No. Be funny. That’s what people get from being around you and you can make a living doing that and you should make a living doing that.

Miles: And it often takes us doing the wrong things that don’t feel comfortable. So, it’s a willingness to do these awkward things and be like, “Okay. I’m all fired up. I’m going to do YouTube. Miles, I love it. YouTube, I watched his channel, I heard him on that podcast. Great. I’m going to do YouTube.” So, they set up their camera and they record a video and they’re like, “Oh, that was really painful.” And maybe she has to do her hair every time and do her makeup every time and making a video ends up being a three- or four-hour ordeal. Well, you tried it. Maybe then the pivot is to podcasting. And it’s like, “Okay. I’m still passionate about this idea. I still want to talk about this. But how can I do it in a way that I don’t need that video component?” And it’s this process of try this, try that, adapt and evolve and adapt and evolve. One question my friends ask themselves a lot is what would it look like if this was fun and easy? And I think it’s a brilliant question and it doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy, but what would it look like if it was fun and easy?

So, for me, there’s this world of SEO called backlink building. And some people probably know about it and other people are like, “What the heck is that?” And it’s a way to increase the authority of a website. And there are strategies for it and some of them are do all this outreach and write these long guest posts for other people and all that stuff drives me insane but I know there’s a benefit in me building backlinks for my website at the phase that I’m at in this business. So, what would it look like if it was fun and easy? Well Eric, it would look like me having a conversation with a buddy along a podcast. So, being willing to show up as a podcast guest to give value has literally become my entire backlink strategy. And that’s how I took a tactic within a greater business strategy and I took that tactic that I was like, “If I do this, I’ll grow faster. How do I do this in a way that would be fun and easy?” And I tried lots of different ways to do it. I spent money on contractors and this, that, the other and literally being willing to show up and building relationships with people and asking to be on as a guest on podcasts is the fun and easy way for me to do it.

And surprise, surprise, I’ve done it dozens if not a hundred plus times in the last few years. And it’s working for me. And there’s these little things in every business, and rarely do we come up with that first. I don’t know if MemberMouse was your first idea…

Eric: Oh, no.

Miles: And I don’t know if this podcast was your first attempt at building it, but I would guess, and you’ve already clarified, it wasn’t. But you try this, try that, adapt and pivot, boom, and all of a sudden it was like, ooh, okay. So, I’m creating something. I’m getting feedback. I’m getting a little bit of traction in the search. It didn’t totally kick my butt. It wasn’t horrible. Okay. Now I’m just going to get better and I’m going to get better at that and better at that and better at that. And then the 1,000-iteration idea comes into play from there.

Eric: Yeah, I mean, the podcast, we didn’t even originally plan on doing a podcast. If you even go back to listen to the first episode it’s clear because we haven’t gone back and changed it. But it’s basically, we’re going to ask a few people this same question and see what they say and it was me having a conversation with somebody. And somehow it evolved itself. And even the name of what we were doing changed in each episode of the first seven episodes. It was one thing and then it was another thing and then ultimately it came to Subscription Entrepreneur. But there was no initial plan to have it happen this way.

Miles: And so many people are searching … I see it in my comments so much. They’re looking for the right way. Miles, just show me the right way to build a business and I’ll do everything that you say. And the truth of the matter is that every individual has their own personal right way. It’s a process of discovery is actually what it is. And there are some truths in there. The partner with a search engine. Either YouTube, blog, or podcast. If you just run with one of those three, you’re going to get closer, but then your method of doing a podcast or your method of doing YouTube is … You’re going to just have to find. And that’s where style comes in. That’s the whole idea of style and what that means. And that’s the cool part about it and that’s what ultimately puts you apart from everyone else. But I love hearing that you literally tried seven different names and seven different things, but you kept showing up. And people are like, “Once I see the exact path, I will then show up and I will start marching along a path.” And it’s like, that’s not how this universe works.

The universe shows you that one next step. And when you take that step you get to see the next step.

Eric: It’s the next one.

Miles: And when you take that step, you get to see the next step. And people are like, “No, no, no. I demand …” On Reddit. “I demand to see the whole path before I start. Miles, you said it was like this and it was different.” Well, yeah. Of course. I’m just showing you what worked for me and it’s remarkable.

Eric: It reminds me of the quote you said earlier about what’s the best camera. It’s the one you have, essentially.

Miles: Yep. 100%.

Eric: And it’s the same with everything. And this is something that even at our stage, whatever that stage is, we constantly have to be on alert for this. And it’s this aspect of ourselves which wants to procrastinate and we do it in very tricky ways. And we say, “Oh, well I can’t start until I have this.” Like say you want to start doing yoga and you’re like, “Well, I can’t do it until I get the clothes and I get the mat and I get this or that.”

Miles: The bumper sticker.

Eric: Yeah. Or I can’t do the video until I have this lighting and that camera or the podcast until I have this mic and that mic. The content is always the thing that people want. The fact that the big youtubers and the people who have successes on podcasts or whatever, they have a certain setup, the setup isn’t the thing that made them successful. Pat Flynn is a famous one but you can listen to his first podcast and it’s the same thing. All these people have their firsts and it’s the same thing. And I think it’s useful to see even with something like meditation.

One of the values of the Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda is you get to see that at a certain point in his life he was not enlightened. There were things you could relate to about his life and failings he had and frailties that he had and all this stuff. Because if you just constantly look at someone as a success and don’t look at the full picture and just really imagine the fact that they have this perfection about them, it’s going to create its own psychological stumbling blocks for you to start your own journey because you’re just constantly going to be worshiping these people and going to the store and buying a jersey with the name of this person on the back of it rather than becoming something yourself.

Miles: For me, I’m always going to leave those first videos up. I want that humble beginnings to be there. Because so many people idolize the event. They want to be there at the finish line. And it’s like well, cool. The finish line is 24.6 miles away and it’s a brutal process to get there. So, with Pat Flynn as another example … And I did a video where I analyzed a bunch of these gurus and where they all started. Pat Flynn started by … He was going through architecture school at Berkeley. He was keeping a personal web log of his studies to pass a LEED certified exam. And LEEDS is a green building that architectures can get. And he was just studying and he was putting notes for himself on a web log that we today call a blog. And then after he graduated and he got that degree, I think he got laid off from the architecture. Please give me a little leeway if I get his story wrong. You can find it on his site somewhere.

But he got laid off and he looked back and he’s like, “Man, I’m getting a lot of traffic from just this content I put up to remind myself.” And then he built a home study course for that thing. And out of that experience, which was I’m a student, I’m studying to be more successful at this, I’m just going to document my notes online. I got fired from the dream job. Maybe I could turn this into a web thing. Dude’s got an empire at this point in time. An absolute empire. And people look at his empire. They look at where he’s at today and they’re like, “I want that.” And I’m like, “Great. Study history. Go to the beginning and realize it was awkward, it was boring. He didn’t know it was going to work. It was adaptive. He just started publishing content.” And when we dig deep enough into everyone’s past, that pattern emerges.

And I love the Mike Tyson’s of the world. That dude, in his prime, he’d come out holes in his shoes, no socks on, doesn’t have a robe on. He’s got a towel draped over his shoulder. And he just came out in absolute beast mode putting in work. And it was not about the shorts. It was not about the show. It was not about the song. He didn’t have music on. He just had a tone. And he just came out like an animal. And there’s something in that that … I played sports as a kid and you hit home run, you round the bases and you get back in the dugout and you get ready for the next inning because there’s defense. You sink a three pointer, you get back on defense because there’s work to do. It ain’t time to show off. There’s work to be done. And that work ethic has served me so greatly to just keep showing up. Get better. 1% better. How can I get 1% better on this? And if you do 100 videos a year and you get 1% better per video, you’re 100% better that year. If you do 200 videos that year, you are going to be 200% better than you were when you started. And it’s that frequency of showing up and doing the work that everything evolves around that.

Eric: Yeah, and I think sports is also a great metaphor too because no matter how much you’ve played a sport, there’s an aspect to the game that mirrors life, which is that there’s always something that’s going to be thrown at you that you cannot expect. The thing that you learn at being good at a sport is how to, one, be aware. Hyper aware of the environment. And two, how to react to it in order to achieve a goal. And that’s why really any fixed blueprint you can almost just immediately distrust it more than you can trust it because it’s just not going to help you. Maybe if it inspires you to start, that’s the best thing it can do for you. But it’s not going to be the thing that gets you somewhere. And I also want to note that I’ve noticed a number of times in this conversation you’ll say something like please give me leeway on this or whatever and I’m willing to bet that that comes from an experience point. You don’t think about it anymore but there’s been points in the past where you’ve said things and you’re making quotes and you have so many people watching you get comments and you’re like-

Miles: Trolled.

Eric: Trolled. So, it’s like a subtle protection mechanism based on experience.

Miles: Yep. And it flows naturally now. It just comes out. I’d love for the listeners to imagine if Tiger Woods came out and put out a course that said, “Guaranteed. How to turn you into a pro PGA golfer in one year or less, even if you’ve never played golf before.” People would be like, “Okay. He’s lost his mind. This is a total scam. There’s absolutely no way, no way, no way that someone who’s never played golf is going to get there.” But yet there’s a whole industry of, I call them fake gurus and greedy gurus, who literally piggyback and they make it sound like you can go build a hyper successful business in 30 days even if you have no experience. And I hope, and I think that those who are listening to this podcast, it is reassuring. Because a lot of people who are still listening, in the beginning you’re like nobody wants to hear this. And you corrected yourself, and rightfully so, because there’s this segment of people who they’re in the mud. They’re neck deep in the mud. They’re trying to go forward as fast as they can but they’re in mud and it’s so terribly difficult.

And they’re like, “If I just keep going, I think I’m going to get there.” And we are giving them what they need to reignite that fire. To be like you are on the path. This is the path. It’s painful. It’s awkward. Authenticity is not a beautiful thing. This is not an event, it’s a process. Keep going. And it’s so blatantly true to me now today after having taught every tactic for three years and 500 videos, I taught every tactic, and most people who watch my videos never built successful businesses. Like what? I gave it all away free. I was like I’m going to literally give away $2,000 course after $2,000 course for free on my YouTube channel so everybody has access and no one’s doing anything with it. And that’s where I realized, mindset. You’ve used that idea of resistance. There’s this internal self-talk that we all have. There’s the, “Oh, I need to go sharpen all of my pencils before I make my sales calls for the day.” The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. I listen to this book. I listen on Audible every single year. He has another one called Turning Pro that goes deeper on the second segment. It’s maybe two and a half hours.

I literally listen to it every single year because it punches me in the head about the truth of creating is hard. And our brain and even our physical bodies are going to be like, “No. You’re not creating today.” And we have to find ways to overpower that, to show up yet again to do it again and again. Because that path, again, again, again, that is ultimately how we achieve the desired outcome we desire.

Eric: I wonder if you’ve had this experience. I think one of the skills that we learn very quickly as we start to take any path consistently is something that I’ll call reframing at this time and I’ll relate it back to my experience with podcasting. When I first started podcasting for the first year, there would be a sensation that I would have in my body some period of time before the episode. At that time, I could call it anxiety, nervousness, fear, butterflies, whatever it is. But I didn’t let that feel … It was uncomfortable. That’s just a broader way to say it. I didn’t let it keep me from doing the thing. So, I did it and over time what’s happened is that … It’s not that those sensations aren’t present. It’s just that my relationship to them are different. It’s been reframed in terms of what they mean and now the way that I view them is there’s a different energy when I’m entering into a conversation with somebody. Like a little bit before time it’s almost like in my field something is preparing for that. And so, there’s these different sensations that are happening. And in a way they probably still feel the same way but because my mind doesn’t look at them and label them anxiety, it doesn’t spiral further into blowing them up into something that they’re not.

And I think that this is another important thing to remember because we say a lot of things like you need to delay gratification, this is a hard process. These are true but the thing is our relationship to them … Hard today is not the same thing that hard was before because we’ve developed a sensitivity. Like taking cold showers. I’m doing that right now. And when you first start doing it, it’s very much whatever. You try it.

Miles: Horrible.

Eric: This is something you can easily do. Go take a cold shower. But you do it for five days. On the fifth day you’ve developed a certain adaptiveness to the sensations that happen when cold water goes on your body for the first time. It’s the same exact thing.

Miles: Another way of describing what you’re talking about is the comfort zone. The idea of the comfort zone. Most people I’ve met on this path of creating successful business who also have successful businesses realize that the comfort zone is actually the enemy. That’s the 40-hour work week, give me my paycheck, just enough to barely survive, I’m going to watch Netflix and I’m going to drown myself in wine and weed, comfort zone. Everything is comfort zone in that reality.

Successful people realize that it’s those moments when we’re pushing the comfort zone, when we’re at the edge of our comfort zone and maybe a little out of our comfort zone, within reason obviously, that’s where growth happens. And building a business online is absolutely a personal development and a personal growth process. So, what happens is we start to, like you said, redefine those feelings. And when my wife and I got together, I sensed nervousness as excitement. I had already made the mental redefinition of that feeling in the gut of, ooh, something exciting is about to happen.

Whether it’s on our snowboards standing over a cliff about to drop this little chute to really go in, I sense that as and redefine that in my brain as excitement. And now, at this point in our business, in our lives, we actually seek out that feeling. We’re actually looking for opportunities … Again, within reason. But we’re looking for opportunities to push our comfort, to push our growth, to help us realize what we can do. This past March, just before lockdowns, I was in Peru. We were doing the Machu Picchu adventure and I decided to go surfing in Peru which has kind of strong, cold waves. And there was this moment out there, just out of my element, standing on the board in this ocean in a foreign land and I caught one and oh my gosh. I can feel the energy of that. And that moment of being so far out of my comfort zone, doing the thing …

I got tumbled many, many times. I literally caught one wave on that. And just that one moment of that zen experience of that moment, I get the same thing speaking on stages now. So, my YouTube videos kind of stopped giving me that feeling after a while. Like I said, I did my Pinterest videos, just show up, do another one. It’s definitely work for me at this point. But I’ve been invited to go speak on stage in front of 700 people. Ooh, okay. Same basic thing. I’m just sharing an idea. Me just talking. But now there’s literally 1,400 eyeballs staring at me triggering some primordial response of animals in the wild staring at me. And it got me absolutely charged. So, guess what, I now … Well, not now because conferences are shut down, but I seek that out. And there was a point when doing live videos on YouTube gave me that next level of buzz. And still doing lives on Facebook gives me that little buzz. And we start to seek them out because that’s the next level.

Because if I just keep doing YouTube videos, it’ll get me somewhere but there’s more. And we as humans … Everything on this planet, there’s two states of being. It’s growth or there’s expansion or contraction.

Eric: Stagnation. Yeah.

Miles: Yeah. Growth or death, expansion, stagnation. There’s two states of being in the universe all around. So, it’s kind of like well, I don’t want to stagnate and die so I got to keep growing. How do I keep growing? And well, just what next? What next?

Eric: Yeah. And to your point though, always within reason. Because the what next, what next, what next if not kept in check too with some sort of grounding becomes its own problem and challenge. So, ultimately what we’re describing here is just painting a picture of the sport of this.

Miles: It’s a big game man. It’s a big game.

Eric: Yeah. And it should be fun like a game too. That’s an important component. If it’s not fun then you’re not going to play.

Miles: And it should be challenging like a game. Imagine playing chess with your six-year-old who just barely knows what direction a knight goes and you’re like, okay, checkmate in nine. Okay, checkmate in eight. This is boring. We don’t want to play at that level where there’s no competition. We actually want to play at a competitive level, which for me, in my career … We had built my wife’s brand in that space very, very successfully. I was like, I’m ready to take on that next challenge. I’m going into the internet marketing world, into the make money online world, which is the absolute most competitive and most difficult niche in the world to go into. Because you’re going up against the best competitors in the world. But I was ready for that. I still, I seek it out. I’m like, I’m going after Brian Dean for that keyword phrase. Yep, I outrank him there. I’m outranking ClickFunnels boy for that keyword phrase. I’m outranking all of them. And that’s my new game. That’s my new challenge there. And it is within reason. I’ve lost a lot of friends along the way man for doing things that they got a little too far ahead. They got a little too far over their skis in physical reality.

So, this is a precious opportunity we have on this planet. We have the opportunity to help billions of people right now with the freaking cellphone you have in your … The laptop and the cellphone. Everyone listening to this, technically, by definition has the technology required to improve, change, help billions of people in this day and age. It’s a magical time and opportunity for us. It takes a willingness to show up into the unknown and to do the uncomfortable process of learning how to become authentic in an experience of delivering value. And it sure as heck is going to keep us out of our comfort zone. But the rewards of it, oh my gosh, my life is … It’s incredible. I don’t even share much about my life because it would just be awkward because I don’t want to sound like that guy. But the rewards of this lifestyle are so worth on every way that I keep showing up to hopefully convince one more person to just go all in.

Eric: Yeah, the rewards of it are life. Living. Because there’s many ways-

Miles: Live a beautiful life.

Eric: Yeah. There’s many ways you could be plugged into the matrix and just asleep. And we’re not even just talking about business at this point. Also, the process of going through uncomfort and moving through it, we often hear this phrase of you are the company you keep or something like this. It’s very easy to meet somebody and they’ll say a sentence. You hear a sentence from them. You know if there’s a resonance there with that person. You know if that person has life in them or if they’re just constantly talking themselves down and deflating themselves.

And compassion, of course. And we do what we can to put things out and do our vibe. To put our vibes out. Of course, I’m not putting myself at a certain level. But when you take care of yourself, you take care of others indirectly. And all we’re talking about here is, going back to something in the beginning, is capturing the byproduct of you being good to yourself and exploring your own nature. Just turn the camera on, turn a microphone on, go out in a park, whatever. It doesn’t necessarily need to be online to help people.

But I feel energetically what’s coming this year is, like you were saying earlier, there’s a lot of opportunity. And there’s a lot of need too for people who are ready to make this transition to do it. And the transition that we’re talking about is simply share yourself wherever you’re at. Taking that first step. Because that is what’s going to … Each person is that flower and each person beginning to flower. And whatever stage the flower is. If you look at the field of flowers, there might be some fully bloomed, there might be some just on the way.

They all have their own beauty and it all adds to the collective energy of that place and that space. So, we should all be kind to ourselves and also encourage ourselves and push ourselves to question our boundaries. Because oftentimes they’re coming from us and we kind of have this psychotic thing where we have our own self-imposed boundaries but then we say something external is creating them. And then we become upset.

Miles: 100%. And today that’s the resistance. It’s because I don’t have a DSLR. If I had that, then I would. If I had that, then I would. You just study the brain. How the brain works. If we repeat a lie enough … And we’ve seen this on massive scales. When a lie gets repeated enough it starts to get believed. We literally fire and wire our brain to believe these things that are just completely self-imposed. And for me, one of the more interesting parts of my story that just popped into my head.

When I first started my YouTube channel, I tried to blog for a while, didn’t love blogging. It was at Kyle Cease’s Evolve Out Loud, two-day personal development conference in LA. He’s a standup comedian who now does personal development stuff. And he challenged us at the end of it to do something that scared the heck out of us for 90 days straight. 90-day challenge. And it was literally … My YouTube channel started for me to push myself to break the limiting belief that I’m not a creator. I had a limiting belief I was a behind the scenes guy only.

I ran the behind the scenes of my wife’s brand. You don’t see me on the website. My name’s not on the website. I did all the optimization. I kept the WordPress up. I learned all the bits and pieces. Hence, me teaching tactics because that’s all I did for seven years straight. But it was actually, I started my YouTube channel for me.

For me to push myself to grow. For me to just get these ideas out of my head. There’s a little like, “I’ll pull the rug out from under these fake gurus and I should get some respect for how smart I am in this world.” Full disclosure. Those are in there. They’re wrapped up in it. But really, it was like, “I got to do this man. I got to stop thinking about this. I got to stop thinking about building a brand around. I just got to go. I can help people. I got to get out of my own damn way so I can start helping people. Because everybody else on YouTube’s just putting up webinar pitches of rubbish content, teaching lies. I have to get out of my own way.” And once I kind of-

Eric: That could be a rap song by the way.

Miles: Get out of my own damn … Yeah.

Eric: Pitching lies.

Miles: Yeah. Once I broke that dam down, the flow has not stopped. It’s slowed. I do one video a week now instead of every day or instead of three a week, but it’s still there. I almost can’t not show up now and my life is forever changed for the better from it. And I’ve reached over 8.5 million people with my videos, just me brain dumping ideas to a cellphone. It’s remarkable.

Eric: Yeah. And also reflecting the earlier point you made or a comment you made about us doing this. To me, the benefit of this, there’s a resonance that happens when we have a conversation and that’s the joy of doing this. It’s that we resonate together and the fact that we’re saying stuff is kind of secondary. I obviously understand what I’m saying. You know what you’re saying.

But I could easily sit in silence with you because there’s an energy that we share together. But we say these things because we’re doing a podcast. But the experience for me at this level is like, oh, this feels cool to be in the field of somebody who … The resonance is the best way. You’re a note, I’m a note, and we’re vibrating in harmony at some frequency. It sounds cool. It’s nice to listen to. And I’m not talking about what we’re saying.

Miles: Having a little jam session. An energetic jam session over here.

Eric: Exactly.

Miles: The opportunities are huge for people man. The collabs. There’s so much and it is those who are willing to take the time to create that are going to get all of the rewards in the future. And boy, it’s like the whole planting a tree phrase. The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago and the second-best time is right now. And I started my first video just awkwardly just where I was. It was a red leather couch in an Airbnb in Hollywood, California. Don’t want to know what happened on that couch before my video happened on that couch. I just started. And then I was like, “Oh well, that one sucked. Let me go see if I can make one that sucks a little bit less.” And I did but it also sucked pretty bad, number two. And on and on and on to the point where now the words can show up, the mental level of it can be there while the other level can also be there. And it’s just a process of discovery and-

Eric: Right. And you can just be present for it and you’re not actually necessarily thinking about it.

Miles: And I don’t have a pitch to, “Oh god, I sure hope Eric asks me where I can send people to get …” Not at all. I don’t freaking care. Because I know that just showing up and being me and doing what I do, people are like, “Man, all right, where is this dude?” And they search. I’m the only freaking Miles Beckler in the world. I don’t know. And so many people are like, “Okay, I’ll do that podcast if I can get something. I’ll do that if I can get …” And everything’s done to get, to get, to get. And boy, the biggest truth I’ve learned in life is when I just go give and I strategically give so that I can help millions of people … And you’re right. I could go volunteer at a food bank. I donate money to all kinds of things. There’s a lot of ways that we can create positive change. But through technology today, we can literally help millions of people, if not billions of people change and transform their lives.

I would argue that Tony Robbins has truly reached billions of people at this point with his messages and stuff. And the ideas and through the teachers he’s taught who teach type thing. And that’s the potential power of it all. And the only thing between me and being on a path to maybe help a fraction of that many people is my baloney that I have bouncing around in my head about this, that, the other, I need to see the whole path before I start or I need to get this before … Let’s get that out of there. Let’s see what can be.

Eric: And also, at the risk of making this a whole ‘nother hour long, I would say too it’s important to keep in mind … I’ve had this experience anyway, that it’s not really up to me where it all goes. There’s this quote from the alchemist … I think I said this in my last podcast episode too but whatever. It’s a good one. It basically is like, when you make a decision you’re simply jumping into a stream. Where that stream goes is not up to you but you put yourself in a flow. And I think that that one understanding can undo a lot of obstacles because you don’t have control over the outcome, you’re not concerned about it. I know from MemberMouse, I completely had no idea what I was doing the entire time and I still don’t really know. But what’s different now is that I know that whatever happened, since it wasn’t because of me and I’ve had that experience, I can be like, “Oh well, I just need to show up and do what I can do.” That’s it. Everything else will take care of itself in terms of how many people hear something or not.

And just because numbers are a big thing people pay attention to these day, one person is enough too.

Miles: So, many people have YouTube channels and they’re getting 1,000, 2,000 views on a video and they’re upset that they’re not getting 10,000 or 100,000 videos and it’s like dude, those are real people. Those are human beings. And email lists are another thing. Like go beat up your list. Go send that third email for cyber Monday to your 10,000 … Those are people dude. Like really? Those are human beings who took a moment to raise their hand to say, “I want more from you. I want help from you.”

And beat up your list is industry … That literally is industry terminology for the affiliate marketing world. And it’s that disassociation versus I’m going to show up. And there was a quote from a writer and it was like, “I only write when I’m inspired and I sit down at 9 a.m. every day to be inspired.” Or something. And it’s like instead of waiting to be inspired I just show up every day. I’m going to turn on that camera and I’m going to do something. And when I do, these little sparks of crazy cool, interesting things that I hadn’t really even thought about, but all of a sudden, the conversation goes over there. I think this conversation’s a great example of it. I think we’re off script. We’re kind of in a different area.

And I think there’s a segment of your audience and my audience who loves this kind of stuff and it doesn’t come out very often. And it’s because we showed up with a commitment to create something. Something unique, something beautiful. We’re going to be present and clear and really see what comes out of this. Wow. It went there. Cool. I’m more excited to share this now. And repeat, repeat, again, again. How do we just keep showing up to make that magic? To give that magic an opportunity to appear. And everybody’s looking at the magical output where Pat Flynn’s at today. “Oh, how do I make that happen?”

Eric: Right. Let me do that thing that he did.

Miles: Right. And it’s like, cool. Go to architecture school at Berkeley and take notes on a blog. Just start publishing something and see where it goes. I tallied them up, I had 13 failed blogs before the one that worked. Literally 13 hosting accounts, 13 domains. Crushed them all. One clicked.

Eric: And the showing up thing, that’s the thing that takes courage. Because even … To kind of get meta on this. Every single podcast I usually like to go off script. We never have a script, but we usually have an outline. But I usually like to go off it because usually it depends on the guest and if I’ve talked to them before, but there’s a period of time in the beginning where the gears haven’t necessarily engaged yet in terms of where that resonance is with this particular person at this particular time.

So, there’s a discomfort. I was feeling uncomfortable at certain parts in the beginning of this. I don’t know if anybody’s going to notice because of certain experience or whatever. I certainly notice. I’m like, “I’m speaking right now and it sounds good, but my energy is not 100% aligned with it yet.” And if I listen back, I’ll be able to tell exactly the point where it happened. You’re just showing up like two little kids showing up for a play date. One may want to play this. They don’t agree in the beginning and then at some point they come together and they’re playing the same game and then they’re just literally gone from this universe for like three hours.

Miles: So, there’s two vibrations. There’s two vibrational frequencies. Everything in this universe is vibration. And it’s where’s that middle point? And it’s kind of a start and stop. To go farther, we started and stopped this. We had a moment and it was like, “Oh wait, got to redo that intro.” And that got cleanly edited out. But there’s this process of waiting to find where that harmonic resonance is and then out of that something can emerge. And that’s what I love about podcasts.

And I think for a lot of people listening who, if you’re a content creator and you maybe don’t feel like the expert yet, you’re not … Because you have a lot of experts on your channel, which is great. Super helpful to get the expert opinions but there’s a lot of people that are like, “Man, I’m not an expert yet.” Go interview all of the experts. We kinds of expert people love talking. You’ll just find that. And you get to learn and you get those moments of clarity. And some of the conversations go smooth and some of the conversations go awkward and you just keep showing up, you get better at it, and you get the ones who were fun back on.

It can go somewhere if we/you keep showing up type thing. That’s the big idea. And I think we’ve got that. Just start and keep showing up. I think that’s the key.

Eric: It is the key. Simple and profound at the same time. So, we will leave that with people. And I think my intention with this was too, again … Something I appreciate about you … And I didn’t do this intentionally the first time with the first podcast because I hadn’t talked to you before. That podcast was released at the beginning of the year.

This one is released at the beginning of a year. And I think it’s the best place for you and your energy to be because you have this quality to your energy that’s like a fire, inspiration quality. So, I’m really grateful that that showed up, came out. And I appreciate that about you and I’m glad that everybody got to experience that. Because yes, there are a lot of opportunities so people can take a little bit of your little sparks flying off and go run with it and create something.

Miles: Thanks for having me on man. I guess we’ll probably just do this next December recording and we’ll get one out for next year too.

Eric: Sounds good.

OUTRO:

Thank you so much for listening to my entire conversation with Miles.

I hope you enjoyed this episode and are walking away feeling renewed and excited for the coming year.

Many thanks to Miles for coming on the show and being open about what it really takes to build a successful online business.

To get links to all the resources we mentioned, you can head on over to SubscriptionEntrepreneur.com/163.

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

If you enjoyed this episode and would like to hear more interviews with successful entrepreneurs, experts, and authors, be sure to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or Stitcher.

We have a growing library of engaging episodes with many more to come.

Thanks for being here and happy new year to you!