The Side-Hustle Dad

Ep27
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Series Recap
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​[00:00:00]

Bryan Steele: I hope you enjoyed that series where we went through The E-Myth Revisited. Talk about the three roles that every entrepreneur has to fill, especially early on when it's just you. You've got to wear all the hats. So how to balance those, how to fit those in. So if you missed those episodes, go back, listen to those three.

~I think you'll find them valuable. Today, I want to get a little more behind the mindset and, and share a story with you. Months ago, uh, maybe even years ago at this point, I was scrolling through, uh, my social media feeds as we all do, downtime, just relaxing, and a picture popped up on my feed. It was somebody who I had been hoping to work with, smiling in a photo, uh, excited, talking about how they were working with a competitor, and they were pumped up, they were fired up, and I had talked to them.~

~Or... Yeah. No, I'm gonna start over~

Comparison Trap Story
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Bryan Steele: I want to start today with a story. I was having some downtime, scrolling my phone, social media. I don't get on social media a lot, but sometimes just to relax when I'm sitting, nothing else to do, it's, it's too easy. I have a habit, honestly, to pull out. And I was scrolling through pictures, and I saw a picture of a smiling [00:01:00] person.

They were excited. It was somebody I'd been talking to and was hoping to work with. And they were excited to announce that they were working with one of my competitors. You know, they were there together, pumped up, announcing it to the world, what you normally do on social media in that situation. And it kind of knocked me off kilter a little bit, to be honest.

And I was disappointed. I was looking at this other person going, "Why, why did they get the opportunity? Why not me? Why'd they turn me down? I'd, I'd been talking with them." And it was difficult for me to swallow. And the, the quote is often attributed to Teddy Roosevelt, "Comparison is the thief of joy." May not have been him.

No one actually really knows. But we know that to be intuitively true. It's so difficult to get away from.

Social Media Spiral
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Bryan Steele: You put in a couple hours of [00:02:00] work on your side business. You do some great quality work. Then you sit down, it's late at night, kids are in bed. You scroll through your phone for a few minutes as you're, you know, winding down, and you see that your competitor just bought a new truck, or they opened a new office location, or they're so successful that they've hired a staff member.

And it just spirals you, and you're just like, "Oh, I'm never gonna get there. I'm never gonna make it." You start to compare where you're at, where your struggles are. You just look at that and you go, "It's, it's not gonna happen for me." Now, I want you to notice something here. This situation changed nothing about your business.

You still put in good quality work. You took your time that you had carved out, and you did the job And you were proud of that. You were excited about the progress that you've made. Maybe you were doing [00:03:00] some client work, maybe you were sending out some proposals. Whatever it might be, you were doing the work in your business, and it was good.

But then you look at what somebody else has shared publicly, and it completely shifts your perspective. But nothing about your business has actually changed, and that's the danger with social media. It is so easy for us to look at that platform, get on there, and then think that we are not successful because we see somebody else's success.

But there's a lot of factors that go into that, and I wanna cover those with you today.

Highlight Reel Reality
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Bryan Steele: You see, we all know that social media is the glossy storefront. ~It is a marketing place. It's a place where you go to highlight good things.~ You don't bring out the warts of your business or the struggles. Maybe sometimes, ~uh,~ in a personal story, you might share some of those, but by and large, social media is you putting your best [00:04:00] foot forward because you want to attract people to you to want to work with you.

And we have to be careful That we understand it's a highlight reel, and the highlight reel leaves out other things. The debt, the strain in your families, ~um,~ the health problems that you're ignoring, or maybe even that the business that you're looking at isn't even profitable right now. You have to put all of those things in perspective because you are running your own race.

You cannot run someone else's. I wanna say that again. You are running your own race. Do not run someone else's. There's a lot of circumstances of factors that impact where somebody is at right now and where you're at, and it's not your job to control any of those things.

Different Starting Lines
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Bryan Steele: They may have had a different starting line, a head start, maybe [00:05:00] some industry experience you didn't have.

~Uh,~ they have an existing audience, a network that they inherited from their day job. They may have different financial starting points. Maybe they got seed money or investors that they had to turn over equity in the business for. Maybe their spouse makes a ton of money, so they get to spend more time working on their business.

Got severance, like a, you know, wealthy aunt or uncle just left them a bunch of money, and they used that to start up their business. Maybe they never had any debt. Maybe they have a ton of debt. All of those things can have an influence on the starting line. They may have different obligations. You know, if you have two kids under five years old in the house, that requires something different of you than if you have two kids that are off in college.

Your capacity is totally different. Your situation is totally different, and it's, it's just a part of things. Maybe the job is changing, and maybe you have a different finish line. They may have different goals that they're chasing for [00:06:00] their business than you do, and that's causing them to make different decisions and different behaviors.

Maybe they have taken on a bunch of, ~uh,~ help. They've hired in more people, so they're not necessarily making a profit as much, but they're able to scale up quick because of the goals that they are chasing, which you don't know. You don't know what their situation is. Comparison where- Comparison with somebody else only works if all of the variables are consistent, right?

~I'm, I'm going back to my engineering background. All of those things have to be the same for you to really make a true comparison.~ When you start to put different variables into the equation, it's going to change the outcome. And so I wanna highlight that for you because you are running your own race, and you can't run somebody else's race.

~So that's the first piece of the mindset to put in when you see something on social media, when you're scrolling and you start to feel that desire to compare yourself to somebody else's success. You are running your own race, and I need to tell myself that just as much as I need to tell anybody else.~

~So what I want you to do now is to think back.~

Define Real Success
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Bryan Steele: I wanna give you tools to overcome this because it's important for you to understand what success really is Because we already defined it. We set it up at the very [00:07:00] beginning of this podcast series, you just didn't realize it. The first is, are we moving towards our goals faster now than without this business?

Without this side hustle, are you getting there faster? Are your extra $300 a month getting you to pay off that car loan two years quicker? Is that extra $1,000 a month being invested in your kid's college education quicker than you would otherwise? ~Is it freeing up your space? Is it providing opportunities to cast a vision for your family?~

Put those things in perspective. If the business is getting you to your goals faster than you could otherwise, it is a success. It does not matter if it matches your expectations from before. It does not matter if it matches the pace of somebody else. If it is getting you quicker than otherwise, you have a successful side hustle.

[00:08:00] Part two of this success equation is, does the business fit within your existing constraints? We talked about how much time you really have to work on this, where you can carve out space in your life without impacting your family, because that's the second piece. If you're able to do this, if you're able to move towards your financial goals faster, and you're still able to maintain strong relationships inside of your family, you're not sacrificing those, you're letting the business operate within the constraints you gave it originally, that is success, and you can always go back to that.

~Look at it weekly, monthly, daily if you have to.~ Am I getting to my goals faster, and can I do it within the constraints that I gave the business? That, my friend, is success. That is the race that you are running. I hope this is helpful.

Next Week Money Talk
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Bryan Steele: I'm really [00:09:00] excited to tell you we're gonna get practical next week.

We're gonna start talking about managing the money in your business. ~We've talked about setting up separate accounts and things like that before, but we're really gonna start talking about~ how we use that money, where it goes, how the money flows. So hope you will join me for that one. Look forward to seeing you next week.

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