Act On Your Passions, Just Not All At Once (Ravi Gupta & Amanda Northcutt)

Todd Henry [00:00:00]:

On the morning of November 3rd, 1948, a tall American woman stood on the deck of the SS America and looked out at the coast of France for the first time. She was 36 years old. She was traveling with her husband, a diplomat who had just been posted to Paris, and with their old blue Buick down in the hold. She had studied history at Smith. She had written advertising copy in New York. During the war, she had worked for the OSS, the outfit that would eventually become the CIA. And that is where she met her husband. What she did not have was a career or any particular direction, or by her own cheerful admission, the slightest ability to cook.

Todd Henry [00:00:41]:

They drove inland that day and stopped in Rouen at a restaurant called La Couronne. Oysters on the half shell brought to the table in still sputtering pans of brown butter, a green salad, her first real baguette. Years later, she would call it the most exciting meal of her life. And she said that after that lunch, she never turned back. Now that's where the story usually stops because that's the part that makes a good movie, right? A woman tastes a fish, a woman finds her calling. But the interesting part is what she did next. And it's not romantic at all. As a matter of fact, it's procedural.

Todd Henry [00:01:16]:

She enrolled in Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and they put her in the class for housewives. She argued her way out of that room and into a year-long professional program where she was the only woman among a group of former GIs studying on the GI Bill under an old chef named Max Brugnard. Class began at 7 in the morning. She cooked until 11, went home to make her husband an elaborate lunch, and came back for more. One thing, one year, in a room full of people who were already better than she was. Then came the decade that nobody puts on a poster. She and 2 French collaborators set out to write a French cookbook for Americans, and her real work turned out to have very little to do with cooking. It was translation.

Todd Henry [00:02:00]:

She knew her readers. She knew the expensive ingredients like black truffles would scare the reader off, that broccoli was gonna show up on the plate whether the French approved of it or not, that American home cooks use mixers and garlic presses, and we're not gonna stop. So she insisted that the recipes be written for the kitchen Americans actually had and not for the kitchens she had learned in. The publisher they were under contract with walked away. One editor told her that Americans did not want an encyclopedia. They wanted to cook something quick with a mix. They put it in writing that the book as it stood would be too formidable for the American housewife. 10 years of work handed back.

Todd Henry [00:02:39]:

A friend sent the manuscript over to Knopf where an editor named Judith Jones read it, cooked from it, and then fought for it against the skepticism of the people above her. The book was Mastering the Art of French Cooking. It came out in 1961, 524 recipes, and it changed the way an entire country ate. The woman, of course, you've probably guessed by now, was Julia Child. She was 49 years old. It had been 13 years since that piece of fish. Here's why that story matters to me. We tell it as a story about passion, and passion is the cheapest part of it.

Todd Henry [00:03:17]:

Passion took one bite. What took the next 13 years was choosing a single thing, giving it edges, learning it on purpose, and then building something that could carry it to someone who was not her. Most of us are not short on passion. Most of us are short on containers. Somewhere in you, there is a list you've probably never written down. It's an instrument you want to learn, a language, a novel you want to write, the thing you keep telling yourself you will get to, and it grows quietly. It gnaws. And every few months, something reminds you that it's still there.

Todd Henry [00:03:51]:

Today, we're going to talk about what that is and what you do with it. My first guest is Ravi Gupta. He calls this the Invisible List, and that's the title of his new book. We're gonna talk about how you tackle one passion per year, taken seriously, and carry it all the way until it's finished. And then after Ravi, I'm gonna be joined by Amanda Northcutt. Amanda helps people take their expertise and scale it to the world. Sometimes your life expertise has never been named, codified, and packaged in a way that other human beings can actually One of the guests is gonna talk about the debt that you owe to yourself. The other is gonna talk about the debt that you owe to people you could be helping.

Todd Henry [00:04:29]:

Both of them are gonna tell you to pick one thing. This is Daily Creative. Since 2005, we've served up weekly tips to help you be brave, focused, and brilliant every day. My name is Todd Henry. Welcome to the show.

Ravi Gupta [00:04:47]:

My general sense is that Everybody has this accumulation of things that we call hobbies, but they're really passions that we've long wanted to do, right?

Todd Henry [00:04:59]:

That's Ravi Gupta, author of the new book, The Invisible List.

Ravi Gupta [00:05:03]:

So it could be play the violin, learn Spanish, salsa dance, tango, surf, whatever. And that list tends to grow with time as we get older, and it eats away at us, right? We see the person We read a book that's eerily similar to the book we want to write, or we see somebody dancing in a way we want to dance or speaking a language we want to speak. And it just gnaws away at us. And we just accumulate this sort of debt to ourselves that often never gets repaid. And so you, you grow these disappointments. And what I am doing in the book is walking people through my own experience with this. When I left a job where I was working 24/7 for other people, And had to take stock of my own list and say, all right, I need to attack this systematically for a lot of different reasons. So it's part memoir, but it's really part how-to.

Ravi Gupta [00:05:57]:

It's really about guiding people through their own process of getting their lists on paper and tackling one item a year, which is, I think, my biggest sticking point and the most important element of this whole process.

Todd Henry [00:06:12]:

So I wanna get to the timing element, the standard unit of change and why that's important. But talk us through when this first became evident to you and what was the first moment that you realized, oh, I actually have this invisible list of passions or things. And then what was the first thing that you tackled yourself?

Ravi Gupta [00:06:31]:

I think it, there was no one moment, but I think towards the end of my time, I used to be a school principal and superintendent of a network of schools down south, and I was serving mostly low-income kids from some of the toughest hardest-to-reach neighborhoods in the country, in places like Mississippi. And I realized over time that I had watched them do miraculous things, but I myself was getting smaller, or at least in terms of the things I was willing to try myself or experiment with. And so as I was getting less impressive, my students were getting more impressive. I was shrinking as they were growing. And so when I finally left that job and was totally burnt out, I had a series of moments that made me realize just how powerful this pull was. But the most important was I was at a wedding of a friend and I was just watching people dance on the dance floor and I was watching them salsa dance and I was like, I have had so many fits and starts of salsa dancing and I need to do this. And that was my first realization, but there were many.

Todd Henry [00:07:42]:

I had a similar experience recently. I was, so my background is in the music business and I was a singer-songwriter, but I was what you could call a strumming dummy, meaning I could competently play guitar. But if you handed me an electric guitar and I had to play a lead solo or something, like I was like completely incompetent as a lead player. And I realized like I had this deep love of music and I watched my friends and all of them who were about the same level as I was 30 years ago. And many of them have gone on to master the guitar. And I'm like, why have I not just dedicated some time. I have all the basics of knowing how to play. I probably could do this in a relatively short amount of time, but it's just the discipline to sit down and do it.

Todd Henry [00:08:22]:

And interestingly, even before I came across Invisible Lists, like I declared this was the year I was going to become proficient with the fretboard on the guitar. And I said, this is the year. And the year is the standard unit of change that you talk about in the book. You talk about the year as the ideal sort of timeframe for us to do something. Why is a year the right amount of time that we should focus on something?

Ravi Gupta [00:08:45]:

Well, because I think a year in almost every pursuit is the perfect amount of time from go from a true beginner to what we would generally classify as intermediate. Now, intermediate can be an amorphous concept, but actually in a lot of domains it's defined. So one of my years was surfing, and actually there's like a numbered system in surfing. And if you're above a 3, you're intermediate. The same is true of tennis. 3, 3.5 is generally considered an intermediate tennis player. With languages, There's numbers associated with what it means to be conversational, which is what I think of as intermediate in languages. And in almost every one of these domains, you can get there in a year, but it has to be a fairly intentional year.

Ravi Gupta [00:09:24]:

And what I found, and I go through this one year after another in the book, is these years tend to rhyme with each other no matter what you pursue. You come out the gate strong. There's this thrill you get at the beginning when you're just learning something for the first time and You're making these huge leaps day after day, week after week. There's always this messy middle where you've now tapped out on the easy wins and you've got to do some of the harder ones that take a lot longer. And you might get injured, you might get writer's block or whatever, but that tends to happen about midway through the year. And then you got to dig deep. And around this time of year, actually, like I have a writing workshop and this is around the time that people need to get serious. They might have been procrastinating over the summer or had writer's block, and now you're staring down December 31st, and if you lock in on your habits and learn deliberately from here on out, people tend to get not just to whatever their goal was for intermediacy, but they usually get a little bit beyond it.

Ravi Gupta [00:10:23]:

And that's why I like a year, is like in almost any domain you can get there in a year. I also like years because we organize our lives around them. When we're kids, we're in first grade, second grade, third grade, right? We have themes for years. We look back and remember them. First grade was the year I met, or 6th grade is when I moved to a new building and met new friends or whatever. So we remember it. It's a way that we can do what they call time dilation. But as adults, each year, like, it leads into the next.

Ravi Gupta [00:10:49]:

It's hard to remember what did I do in 2018 versus 2019? And that is demoralizing in its own way. Like, you should have chapters to your life. And if you think of each year as having a theme and an end goal in mind and some kind of ambitious, beautiful project at the end, Not only are you more likely to achieve that thing, but you're also more likely to remember the year in a very positive way.

Todd Henry [00:11:11]:

This kind of gets to another thing you talk about, you write about in the book, more advice that you give that I think a lot of people who are listening to this, creative people, we have a lot of passions, we have a lot of interests, a lot of things we wanna learn, but you recommend an anti-dabbler approach, right?

Ravi Gupta [00:11:26]:

Yes.

Todd Henry [00:11:26]:

That you focus just on one thing, only one new passion at a time, rather than spreading that across multiple interests. Why is that important?

Ravi Gupta [00:11:33]:

Yeah, I'm almost psychotic about this. I, it's hard to pull me, like if a friend is like, hey, go fishing with me or whatever. For a long time, I wouldn't even do random stuff like that because I don't like to just do something random for a day. Right. I've softened a bit on this in the interest of just being good to my friends and being social. But a good example is recently I lived next to a very good kickboxing place and I just was like curious. I went in and I just tried it out. And I loved it, but I was like, I can't go back until next year if that is the thing I'm gonna do, because it's already crowding out what I'm doing this year, which is Italian cooking, and I'm somewhat behind on my goal for this year.

Ravi Gupta [00:12:10]:

So I can't really let anything else new in. And I don't like, I, in general, I think it's alluring to be like, I'll just take 3 classes of this, or I'll go on vacation and I'll try surfing for 2 days or whatever. But that's fine if you just wanna be entertained for a very short period of time. I wanna go on a date and do one of those paint-by-numbers classes or something with somebody, or maybe a pizza on a date and it's fun. But if you truly wanna learn something, these dabbling experiences actually can get in the way and actually can trick people to, into thinking they're actually making meaningful progress when all they're doing is treading water.

Todd Henry [00:12:44]:

I do think that also the temptation you mentioned, you always hit a rut part of the way into a project. The temptation is always when you hit, Scott Belsky calls it the project plateau, right? Where like things suddenly get difficult. You're excited at first and then things get difficult. And the temptation is to jump to a new project.

Amanda Northcutt [00:12:59]:

Yes.

Todd Henry [00:12:59]:

Because it's new and it's shiny and it's exciting. But to your point earlier, we have to stick through those seasons and learn how to navigate through those choppy waters in order to get to the place of real value on the other side.

Ravi Gupta [00:13:12]:

Totally. And you're right, like it's addictive, especially if you've done this a few years, it's addictive to start new years, but you have to think of that as the reward at the end of the hard-fought year, right? There are 2 rewards. If you do this right, the end of the year is so fun because you will have finished something. And usually that means there's some kind of awesome bow that you tie. It's the book you wrote, or for me it was a pop-up restaurant that I host for my friends, or entering the tennis tournament or whatever. And then no matter what happens with that thing, whether you lose the tournament or people don't like your food, or the book gets a horrible review or a good review, whatever, you then get propelled right into the next thing. You don't really look back too much and you say, okay, all right, I'm doing this next thing now. And you could decide, I've now done this, I think 8 years now.

Ravi Gupta [00:13:57]:

You could decide what to keep moving forward or not. There's no hard and fast rule about stopping any one thing. But the rule is whatever the new passion is for the next year, when you have to make tough choices, that should come first. So for me, if I'm behind on whatever my cooking goals are, for example, then I can't really justify going on a surf trip and spending every day doing that instead of cooking. And if I do that, then I need to be honest with myself that I'm violating my own protocol and sacrificing my learning for my new year. And there's a whole puzzle to it all that I articulate later in the book, which is how do you fit together one year after another so that they don't compete with each other? So there is some nuance to that.

Todd Henry [00:14:42]:

I do wanna talk about designing for reality, right? Because you mentioned, like, for example, surfing. My son, my middle son, is in college and he just started learning how to surf. But if he said, I am going to become an intermediate surfer this year, I'm gonna actually become proficient as a surfer, but we don't live anywhere near a beach. Right.

Ravi Gupta [00:15:02]:

Right.

Todd Henry [00:15:02]:

He does go to school within a few hours of a beach, but like, that's not necessarily convenient. So he could say that, but to really be able to do it would require some significant life change. So how do we, what's the framework through which we should put these passions to determine, should I do this now or is this maybe a later thing? For me.

Ravi Gupta [00:15:20]:

Yeah, framework is the right word. I, I use the word framework because for each of my years, I almost think of them as archetypes. I have archetypes for what I call anywhere, anytime skills and passions, which are things that are low resource, whether it's time or money, and you could do from anywhere. So writing your novel, 20 minutes in the morning, maybe an hour in the morning if it's a good day. For some people that could be cooking just in your kitchen with YouTube videos, right? So it doesn't require a lot of money. You might be doing some version of it anyway. You're just doing it more deliberately. That's an anywhere, anytime skill.

Ravi Gupta [00:15:50]:

Versus on the other side of the spectrum, we have what I call skill baddicles, which are like, I am retired, which is a big community of people I talk to, or I got laid off, or I just sold, or in a better scenario, I sold my company, or my kids moved off and went to college. And that's an opportunity to say, okay, with all this new time I have and flexibility, that's where you wanna tackle the big one. Right. And the big one could mean you have to go to Costa Rica for 6 months, or have to go to Costa Rica. You get to go to Costa Rica for 6 months because you're retired and you've saved up money, you have flexibility, or you have your severance package or whatever, and you're, you're just applying to jobs. You might as well do it there. Your lease is up and it's cheap to live there anyway. Go do it.

Ravi Gupta [00:16:37]:

And one of the things I have people do early on is articulate a long list of items And just slot them into the archetypes. So you almost can mentally time travel to say, okay, like in some cases you can anticipate it. My kids graduate from college this year. In other cases you can anticipate it, but you just know what'll come. You'll be like, I know I will eventually fly airplanes, like to use an example of something that would probably be a skill baddical skill. And I'm just at peace with knowing that I'll get there eventually. But this year I'm gonna do something that I can do anywhere, anytime, because I just had a, an infant or something and I can only sneak 20, 30 minutes at a time. So I'm gonna write my screenplay this year.

Todd Henry [00:17:13]:

Yeah. I love the timing, by the way, of this book, because I think many of us are wrestling with, especially in the creative professions, we're wrestling with what I've been calling the first deconstructive technology of our lifetime, or really of human existence, which is artificial intelligence, LLMs. And we're really deconstructing the narrative of what is a human being for? Because every other technology really was about enhancing some innate human capacity. So a hammer or a machine or something. could do things better than humans, but it didn't really replace the need for human ingenuity and innovation. And now I think we're starting to ask questions. What is a human for when we have these, these, for lack of a better word, machines that can essentially do the work that we thought was uniquely human? What you're advocating here is leaning into the imperfection of humanity and our ability to adapt and evolve and change and grow, which I think also really reinforces a sense of purpose and identity that we don't get when we just let other machines do our work for us. Right.

Todd Henry [00:18:14]:

As part of that, the, the, you talk about the value of intermediacy, because I think many people who are ambitious, people who are goal-driven will say, I am going to become the best Italian chef in the world in the next year. Right. Yeah.

Ravi Gupta [00:18:27]:

I actually think it's okay to articulate a long-term mastery goal sometimes, like to be like, okay, I will eventually— in surfing, it would be surfing a barrel, right? Which you're not going to do in a year in all likelihood. It's okay to have that in the back of your head, but it is not okay to think that you're going to do that in a year unless you're like Tom Cruise or something, right? Like you just are innately obsessed with this and can just shut your whole life down and have some kind of innate sense of talent and unique ability. Most of us need to set ambitious but achievable intermediate goals. And that's beautiful, especially for Type A people who you might be an expert on something in your professional life. You don't need to be an expert at tennis. And actually there's no way you're gonna be an expert at tennis if you pick it up like I did in your 30s, right? And actually there's something beautiful about that. And it's AI-proof, like you're saying, like for most of these things, it gets a little tricky when you get to, when you're doing creative work for the outside world. What are you competing with? Like in the past year, like there's been like a sea of new AI-generated books and a whole debate about how to use AI in that world.

Ravi Gupta [00:19:31]:

But you putting that aside, like There's always gonna be somebody better than you at tennis. There's always gonna be somebody better at surfing. There's gonna be a better chef or whatever. And in none of those cases is AI in the conversation too much, right? What's AI doing to surfing? What's AI doing really to tennis play and even in tennis instruction or even cooking, right?

Todd Henry [00:19:51]:

Yeah.

Ravi Gupta [00:19:52]:

On the margins, when I'm learning to cook, I can ask GPT to help me, but it's not anywhere near as good or as fulfilling as the experience of my next door neighbor who's from Italy, who's a chef. Who, when we cook together, it's both like a much better learning experience, but more fulfilling than looking at GPT and going back and forth with GPT. Like part of what makes cooking fun is the conversation and the tactile experience and having your friends around and the social part of it. And even if AI were twice as good at helping me cook that meal than my Italian neighbor, which it is not, I will always go with the Italian neighbor because obviously if all I wanted was great food, I'd just order it from a fancy restaurant. That's not what it's about.

Todd Henry [00:20:35]:

Let's talk about that. Obviously in the book you talk about scope and sequence and strategies for figuring out how to learn and all of that. And so we'll let people read the book to get a lot of the details of how we make this happen. But I want to talk about something you just mentioned, which is the role of accomplices, having other people in your life, a peer group or someone, a supportive community To help you. Why is that so important? And how do we begin to find those people who can help us accomplish these goals?

Ravi Gupta [00:21:00]:

Yeah, it's paradoxical because I both advise people to create some distance from some of the people in your life who might stand in the way. Distance only as it relates to this thing. Obviously, I'm not asking people to become monks or something, but there will be a lot of people in your life who think it— thinks it's silly. To learn the guitar as a 40-year-old or to tango dance in as a new parent or something. And you have to shut those people out because often those naysayers are not really commenting on your capacity or ability to do something, but their own guilt over not pursuing whatever their own dreams are. But what you need to do is while you're simultaneously like Ensuring that you have some distance on these things from those folks is to then, when you're embracing your new passion, keep an eye out for new friends or old friends who, in a new light, like this happened to me with tennis. I learned tennis and I realized that a huge chunk of the people I already knew were fairly regular tennis players. I just wasn't paying attention to know this or really compute it.

Ravi Gupta [00:22:08]:

And so it brought me closer to them. But also it brought me closer to some other passions that I had nobody in my life, like surfing. I met a whole new group of people who now I go on surf trips with, or when I'm surfing the same break, we, we talk about life or wake up early together and paddle out together and they become true friends. And one of the great things about this is it gets you away from your screen and out there in real life meeting new people, which is so hard to do the older you get, especially if you approach midlife and beyond. The stats are awful about meeting And I've met so many new friends because of this. And some of the people that I'm closest to, I've met through camps and seminars and lessons and competitions and gyms and cafes, just writing. It's just, it really brings you together with people.

Todd Henry [00:23:02]:

Ravi Gupta's new book, The Invisible List, is available now wherever books are sold. So a couple of things that I want to make sure that you caught from this conversation. First, the year as the standard unit of change, because a year is long enough to take a true beginner to genuinely competent and short enough that you can still feel the clock ticking. Also, the anti-dabbler rule, which is stricter than it sounds. Ravi walked into a kickboxing gym near his apartment, loved it, and then told himself he could not come back until January because this year belongs to Italian cooking. And then the bow at the end, the tournament or the pop-up dinner or the finished draft, so the year closes instead of Dissolving. Now, I want to be honest about the turn we are about to make here because there's a seam and I would rather point it out than paper over it. Ravi is talking about things for you to do for no reason other than they are yours.

Todd Henry [00:23:49]:

However, we're about to introduce our next guest, Amanda Northcutt, who works with people who are building a business. Those are not the same project, and I'm not going to pretend that they are, but the mechanics are identical. And this is what makes this pairing worth your time. Amanda's clients are late-career experts who have spent Decades developing a particular way of solving hard problems, and often they can't even tell you what it is. She says that plainly in our conversation. Sometimes they don't know that they have a methodology. It's invisible to them. It's the same list one floor up.

Todd Henry [00:24:20]:

And her prescription is Ravi's prescription in a different vocabulary. Narrow it until it feels uncomfortable. Say no to work that you could do so you can be known only for the work that you should do. So if Robbie is teaching you to repay the debt that you owe to yourself, Amanda is teaching you to repay the debt you owe to everybody who needs what you know and can't find it because you never built the thing that would carry it to them. We'll be back with our conversation with Amanda Northcutt in just a minute. Stick around.

Amanda Northcutt [00:24:52]:

One of the reasons that we have a very successful young baby company is because we do work that no one else does.

Todd Henry [00:24:59]:

That's Amanda Northcutt, founder of Level Up.

Amanda Northcutt [00:25:02]:

Often subject matter experts who are trying to run their own sort of consulting firm or coaching firm, whether they call themselves thought leaders, creatives, SMEs, whatever the case may be, end up trying to piecemeal together different contractors and a tech stack. And we need a designer over here and a copywriter over here and a social media schedule over here, and we need an EA. But oh crap, how do I make these really high-level, really important board-level or advisory board-level decisions to take my business forward? How do I de-risk it? We are everything. We operate as like almost like a venture studio or a managing partner. We call ourselves— we're running an accelerator, basically. So we help subject matter experts get out of their own way and be elevated to their full potential as founders and CEOs while taking a massive view through their values and their lifestyle architecture requirements and the legacy and impact that they want to have long term.

Todd Henry [00:25:50]:

So this is fascinating because I am routinely in conversation with and also interviewing, or there are people on the radar for me who are ex-big co executives. We're talking like global CMO people who are like massive players in their organizations who then think, okay, I'm going to leave this job. And now that I'm late in career, I'm going to write a book. I'm going to go out. I'm going to teach other people what I've learned. And it's always really interesting to me because there are some people who do that and I think, wow, this is, it's a great idea. They have such a presence. They're going to be very successful.

Todd Henry [00:26:25]:

it just kind of fizzles. It just goes away. I think there's some sort of assumption that because of my resume, because now here I am, that things are just going to go well for me because they've always gone well for me, right? Look at what I have done. And other people who maybe I'll look at, not side-eye, but okay, that's an interesting move. Okay, let's see. And they just absolutely blow up and they just absolutely kill it. And so much of the success that I see in those people is that they do, they have the infrastructure. To support the idea.

Todd Henry [00:26:55]:

And I think a lot of people, especially who are new to the space where they're trying to build a business around an idea, and like you said, legacy and some of these other things, it's not just about the idea. So much of it is about the ability or the infrastructure to support it. So I'm curious from your perspective, what is it that you have seen specifically that separates those who enter into a space where they have an idea they wanna share and it succeeds versus those who come in guns blazing and very quickly run out of ammunition. Sorry, my, I'm at the end of my metaphors here, but.

Amanda Northcutt [00:27:29]:

That's a great question. So there are 5 things that must be true in order to run a wildly successful, sustainable recurring revenue solo business of this type. This is a knowledge-based business, but you can swap out the components for a product-based business as well. You have to know who you are, your positioning, what painful, pervasive, urgent, expensive problems are you subject matter expert uniquely equipped to solve based on your wisdom, experience, passion, and expertise. Your positioning. Okay. Who has those painful, pervasive, urgent, expensive problems? Like what type of company and which individual champions and or buyer, if different in a B2B sales cycle, has those problems? And when are they having those problems? Who has those problems that you actually want to work with? And when are we arranging a meet cute, if you will, with your prospective customer in order to intercept them at exactly the right time where what you're selling is not a nice to have, but is a must have, we are going to bleed out and die. If we don't solve this problem.

Amanda Northcutt [00:28:27]:

So who are you and who's your client? And there's a lot of nuance in there, right? Number 3, what's your methodology? What's your intellectual property? What are your frameworks? How do you take those specific clients from that painful space to solution land? Right. Our experts all have intellectual property and methodology and frameworks. Sometimes they don't know it. Sometimes they don't know that they have a specific and particular way of doing things that they do. But it is in the definition of your methodology. And how you solve problems, that is a really core component. So who are you? Who are your clients? How do you help them? And then number 4, how are we— what are the wrappers we're putting around your methodology in order to create productized services again that we're selling in a B2B environment that earn recurring revenue? And then number 5, this is the hardest one, and this is the one that's— that has so many variables. So you always have to be experimenting is how do you most efficiently and effectively acquire best fit clients? Who are you? Who are your clients? How do you help them from a methodological standpoint? How do you help them from a widget practical standpoint in your product ladder? And then how do you make sure you're fishing in the right ponds to most efficiently acquire best fit clients? Because the classic problem that clients run into, that people run into that you're talking about, that differentiates those who are successful or not, it's like you're assuming that your network is large, but then you run through your network at some point and you end up being a yes man saying yes.

Amanda Northcutt [00:29:46]:

To everything because you can do it, not necessarily because you should. You are constantly in sales mode. You're doing different proposals for each client because they all want different things. You're not being prescriptive and being consultative about what they need. They're telling you, and you've become an order taker. And when you're an order taker, you've become commoditized, and you're probably charging by the hour, or you're maybe even based on the effective hourly rate of what you were making in corporate, which is a cardinal sin. So please don't do that. But that's really the dividing line, those who do those 5 things versus those who are flying by the seat of their pants and throwing spaghetti at the wall.

Todd Henry [00:30:19]:

What you're describing is a very common trap that people fall into. They, they build a practice rather than building a business. And those are very different things, right? So a practice means I am still basically tied to, like, the value I can generate is tied to my time, it's tied to my thought process. So I have to literally come up with a solution every single time a client approaches me versus I'm building a business with a product that can scale beyond my time and my effort. And I think many people think they're entrepreneurs, but they're not entrepreneurs. They're actually practitioners. There's a difference. And so what I love about what you're saying is you're trying to help people scale their impact and not just create a revenue stream that would disappear if they go away necessarily.

Todd Henry [00:31:05]:

Is that an accurate way to describe it?

Amanda Northcutt [00:31:07]:

Yeah, you're absolutely correct. It takes looking through a different lens to create enterprise value in a business that was born out of your brain and that is reliant upon you. It's the systems, it's the infrastructure, it's in the externalization and codification of that knowledge base where you can really find the leverage.

Todd Henry [00:31:26]:

So let's talk about the difference between something that I think you call the follower fallacy, right? This idea that in order to do this, I need 2 million followers on Instagram, I need 1.7 million TikTok followers, I need all of my Twitter articles to go viral— X articles to go viral. Sorry, I'm still I still refuse to call it X, but whatever. What, how do you help someone shift their mindset from chasing reach to maximizing depth and impact?

Amanda Northcutt [00:31:54]:

If we remember, for millennia, business has existed before social media followers and before the internet, and it was based on human connection, trust, affinity. We've evolved those notions and, and they've translated to the online world. But I gotta tell you, I talk to people with gajillions of followers all the time, and they do not have the financial reward that they thought would follow from that. And so what I've learned is that there's very little overlap in the Venn diagram of what it takes to build a social media following versus what it takes to build a very profitable business. So businesses are successful when you have clarity, like surgical precision level clarity. And you know who you're for and who you're not for. And you are attracting people like the strongest side of a strong magnet you can think of, right? They're coming to you like moths to a flame because you are resonating with them so deeply. I've been thinking so much about resonance lately and how imperative it is that as a practitioner, as an entrepreneur, Your content is so resonant that it feels like you have reached inside your ideal client's head, pulled out their innermost thoughts, and reflected it back to them.

Amanda Northcutt [00:33:11]:

And that requires you to niche down. And that's also very scary to a lot of people to start saying no to opportunities, but it's in saying no and being clear and specific about what you want and taking action toward that in from both a marketing and sales perspective. But I just want to be super emphatically clear that business has worked long before social media. And if we go back to first principles thinking and human connection, and we are here to solve problems and help people, hopefully that will help incite a mindset shift around that. The followership is not a necessary prerequisite.

Todd Henry [00:33:44]:

So let's go back to Julia Child and the part of that story that we didn't discuss. Judith Jones did not simply accept the manuscript. She cooked from it. She tested the recipes in her own kitchen. She wrote a report arguing that this enormous, formidable, supposedly unsellable book had actually done something nobody else had managed to do. And then she made the case to executives who were not all that sure. Somebody had to be the accomplice. In these stories, there is almost always somebody who is the accomplice, but the accomplice cannot show up until the work exists in a form that could be handed over.

Todd Henry [00:34:17]:

That's the whole thing. That is what both of my guests have been circling today from opposite directions. Ravi will tell you that a year of deliberate practice at something that you're not good at is one of the few experiences left that cannot be handed off to anything else. Amanda said something adjacent from the business side of the ledger. She said the differentiator now is the human component, the resonance, the relationship, the specific point of view. So we're living in this strange moment where the output is getting cheaper by the week and the source is getting more valuable. In The Accidental Creative, I make the argument that brilliance is not an accident, but it's something that comes with practices and rhythms that you build around your work so you can be prolific, brilliant, and healthy over the long haul. Structure is not the enemy of the creative life.

Todd Henry [00:35:03]:

Structure is the thing that makes the creative life survivable. Julia Child could not cook at 36. What she did do was pick one thing, give it a year, then spend a decade building the container that carried it to everybody else. You already have a list. Give something on it a year. Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you like interviews in full with all of our guests, you can get them at dailycreativeplus.com. Just enter your name and email address.

Todd Henry [00:35:31]:

We'll send you a private feed where you can listen to all of our interviews Absolutely free in full. My name is Todd Henry. I speak and I write books. If you want information about either of those 2 things, just visit toddhenry.com. Until next time, may you be brave, focused, and brilliant. We'll see you then.