Hello and welcome to the Resilient Entrepreneurs podcast. Quick question, how many times have you bought a goal planner, a diary, an exciting calendar with a view to getting more organised or more productive? It'll keep me on track, focused. Well, good on you. And did it work for you? Personally, I have six or seven annual planners in the planner graveyard and I'm not really sure how long they helped me for, maybe a month or so at a time.
Well, today's guest has a new approach to planning and planners and he's a little goal crazy. Jason van der Veer is the inventor of the goal crazy planner. He hosts his own podcast, the Goal Crazy Podcast, and he made the brave decision to step away from his family business to go into business for himself. Now he's embracing crazy. So let's find out what that really means.
Jason, welcome to Resilient Entrepreneurs.
Hey, thank you! Yeah, I'm really excited to be here with you guys. You ladies.
We don't mind either way. Thanks, Jason. We appreciate you being here.
So can you tell us a little bit about what we need to know about your backstory to understand who you are now?
Yeah, so before I started Goal Crazy, I worked for my family. My dad is a car dealer in Akron, Ohio. So if you're ever in Ohio, you'll see our last name all over the place. We have a handful of different dealerships. So our last name, VanDeVere, there’s VanDeVere, Chevy, or Kia, or Buick, just around town. So I was working for him at one of his dealerships, basically on the path to become a car dealer. So my dad is the third generation in our family to be a car dealer. So I'd be the fourth generation to be a car dealer. And the program that he had me going through essentially was to work in every department for several months, maybe even some of them several years so I could learn the whole business. But as I was going through there, I would say I learned a ton. It aligned with my personality type, which is highly extroverted. So the sales environment was great but it's just not something I was excited about. Like if we're going to talk about planners today or some of my other entrepreneurial things, I could talk about that forever. But if I meet somebody in the car business, I'm not excited to talk about it. And not that that's why I left, but there wasn't a natural passion there.
And Vicki, you were talking about how you have some planners in the planner graveyard, right? And when I was going through this process there, I was getting really deep into the self-help, personal development, and I was trying out all of these different planners and it's like they all had the right copy to sell me the planner right like yeah this is what I want, they had all the keywords but then I would get it and it just didn't deliver on what I wanted.
So it became maybe an obsession or something I was really excited about were these planners and I wanted to make my own planner that I felt like would solve this problem. So eventually I decided to leave the car dealership and one of the reasons why the word Crazy, why that's in the title is everybody told me it was the craziest idea to turn down the opportunity to become a car dealer and have this it seemed like a guaranteed road to success, at a young age to go sell planners, which now planners are kind of this trendy thing where a bunch of authors and people are launching them. But six years ago when I was doing it, everybody was like, no, no, no, it needs to be an app, nothing paper product. It needs to be an app. So they all told me it was a crazy idea. I did it anyway. Very glad I did.
I spent over seven months just interviewing successful individuals. whether it's entrepreneurs or authors, just people who did something neat. And I was trying to figure out how they set their goals, organized their time, held themselves accountable to accomplish them. And then I made my design for my planner and I ended up hosting seven focus groups then where I would take people through the design to figure out if it worked, what made sense, what didn't make sense. And after somewhere near the last couple, it was just working. And then I launched Goal Crazy, I officially started selling them in 2019.
You jumped from something very established to something very new. and I guess the question is, what did it take for you to make that decision? Backing yourself to do what you truly knew was right for you.
Yeah. So I think this was something that was stirring on my heart a lot. Like this is what I wanted to do. And for a while I thought, well, what I should do is I should wait maybe 10 years, 20 years, become a successful car dealer. Then I'll have, then I can just leave that and go help - a lot of times you'll see these authors who they had this big business, then they left it and wrote books about how to run a big business. So it was like, okay, I can go do that, right? Go be the successful car dealer and then go do what I really want. But eventually it was kind of like, do I really want to wait 10 years to start living the life that I want? I hope to be alive in 10 years either way. So it's like, do I want to just be starting my dream life, or do I want to be full blown in the midst of it in 10 years and get started on it now?
And then when I tried to really realize what is holding me back from doing it now. It was, yeah, it was just my fear. It was like I knew what I wanted to do. I just needed to try it.
Yeah, that's so brave and it's actually quite rare. I mean, Vicki and I talked to so many entrepreneurs on this podcast who start entrepreneurship in their 40s and 50s is actually more common at that age group than any other. And I'm excited by the idea of younger people jumping into entrepreneurship at an earlier stage. And like you said, not waiting, living their dream life now. What were those early days like for you when you first launched the business?
It was really rough. So probably like the first two years, I didn't really even make money from the business. I was selling tens of thousands of them, but just figuring out the right way to market and grow and probably even getting over my own internal beliefs of the right way of viewing money and what I'm worthy of earning. I was just spending it to figure out how to really get the business to grow. So that was really difficult.
I was blessed that before I left the dealership, so one of the other businesses I have is, I run properties. So I bought in this four-unit apartment building and I could live in the one apartment and rent out the other three and it could provide me a place to live and make me enough money to survive. Now, this was like stripped down lifestyle, right? Like peanut butter, noodles, not really going out, doing very much fun stuff. It was a grind, but I think if I didn't go through that season, I was young, I'm still young, so I'm 29, but I was maybe 23, 24 years old when I was going through this. And if I would have figured it out immediately, I think I would have just spiraled out of control because I was super immature. I was basically a few years out of college. I would have just spent this immature kid with an injection of money, which would have probably made me way more immature. So it was really hard at the time, but looking back on it, I'm so glad that it happened because it formed me into, still have a lot of forming to do, no doubt about that, but it just helped me grow up and just helped me learn a lot of lessons that I thought I was a genius at the time and probably had to realize I wasn't so that I could start learning how to get better.
Yeah, we all think we're geniuses at that age, don't we?
Yeah, and it still goes right now. It's like you'll have these good months where it's like, yeah, I'm a genius. I can sell anything this and then it's like you'll have some weeks where things are not so well and it's like, I have no clue what I'm doing. Eventually you start getting some consistency and learning some things that definitely work but it's part of the process.
It is and it is a process, very much so. I'm curious more about that rental market hack, a little bit of a life hack that you are using there. And I've heard lots of other people and I think this happens a lot. So our audience is all around the world, of course, and it's more common in the US to do this. But to buy the multi-unit properties, live in one, rent the rest and then using loans to then continue to build on that. Talk a little bit about how that works. I think it's a really interesting concept.
Yeah, I would highly recommend it for anybody, especially when you're young and you can live somewhere like that. So I had a four unit, which I think one of the benefits, lots of times people start with the duplex and you live in one, rent out the other side, but it's hard to actually make any, to be cashflow positive with that. Maybe you can get the rent from the other side to cover all of your expenses so you're living for free, which that's great, or maybe you're just living and paying a couple hundred dollars because your mortgage payments a thousand dollars you rent the other side out for 800.
But if you go to the four unit depending on exactly how the deal is and the price points and the rents but for that I only needed to rent out two of the apartments to cover all of my expenses and put some money aside for repairs. So then I could have the fourth one to live in and the other one to just go into my pocket. So I would highly recommend it and I think the multifamily
works and if you're an entrepreneur, sometimes it's hard to get loans.
I don't know how that is in other countries, but here in America, if you started a business today and you're fully self -employed, it's probably going to be pretty hard to get a loan, right? Because very high-risk. So the interesting thing with the four unit is I couldn't get approved for a very large duplex, and that's what I originally looked for, but I could get approved for a four unit because I could use the income from the other units as my gross monthly income to then get approved. So I was able to get approved for a bigger place and that got me over the hurdle of not having a long track record because I was young and I could get a place.
It can snowball very quickly from there because so now I have, I'm up to 34 apartments, so it's grown, but I moved from there when I got married. We did it again with the duplex. And then we just moved just in February and now we have a real house. You could just get so much further ahead if you can go 10 years of your life without paying rent and actually making money off of where you live and building this asset, it's a lot easier to get ahead than if you, look I love people renting, right? That's just what earns myself part of my living. But, yes, it's better to get ahead if you don't have to do that forever.
Well, thanks for that tip. I think that, I mean, it's more than a tip. It's such solid advice for somebody who has that mindset. I would dare say it's not for everybody. It's high risk. And you came from a background, as you've described, of a business, of entrepreneurship, of a successful family business. So no doubt that gave you some inner strength and courage and just awareness of how these things work. So I really love that you shared that and thank you. Thank you for sharing it. My other interesting point is you're making enough money to keep you going for a lifetime, that could be your business, yet you've decided that you want to build a business that's separate and no doubt more than one.
The beauty of real estate is it's so tried and true. So if you're a younger person and I'm young, so time is on my side as far as starting these loans when I'm buying a property, I can have all of them paid off before the age of 50, which is a wonderful opportunity that I have just because of my age. Rental properties, it's very consistent. Where my e-commerce business, I've been very blessed to have put in the work to get it over the hump to really be consistent. But when I have a family and my wife doesn't work, we have two kids, it's like just knowing that we have the passive income that's just so tried and true from rentals brings us so much peace of mind for me providing for our kids that look, if something crazy happened to my planner business or something crazy happened to me, my wife still has this asset that it's not 100% passive. I do manage it myself. I have an employee and he helps me. But it's a lot easier to run that than my wife trying to run my ecommerce business, if you follow me on that.
Yeah. I was going to ask, I'm like, are you the landlord? Do you have to answer the calls at 3 a when a pipe bursts? Like, what's the downside?
First they would call my assistant, I'm sure he would be asleep and it would find its way to me. But I am, and there's, like you said, there is a risk. You can hire a management company to do all of that stuff and take the risk for you, but they also want their share of the pie. So then it's just yeah, risk and reward.
So back to your planner business, what advice do you wish someone had given you before you launched it?
Before I launched it. The thing is probably people gave me all the advice that I needed to, and I just didn't listen. And I would like, I'll give you an example. Everybody kept telling me, grow your email list, that's what you should be focusing on. That's the name of the game. It took me years to actually decide to do that. I read book after book after book that would say like, that's what you should be doing. And then I would think, no, no, I'm going to go straight for the sale or I want to focus on just Amazon. And maybe I just had to go through that to learn it, but listen to their advice, whether you think it's right or wrong. Yeah, probably also, maybe I would give myself more of a warning that it was going to be hard. But if I knew how hard it was, I might have thought more about, should I leave the dealership? Shouldn't I leave the dealership? So it might have been a blessing to not really know what I was getting into and just go for what I wanted.
Yeah, I think that innocence in the beginning actually serves a lot of entrepreneurs really well because if you knew everything that was coming your way building a business, you'd probably say no thanks!. But it's that journey that is the most fun and exciting and thrilling and frustrating and devastating and all the emotions. But if you don't go through it, then you don't learn the lessons. So we're all about the lessons and embracing failure around here. So, what's your attitude towards failure? How do you feel about failure? And have you had any big stumbles that you're willing to share?
Yeah, I'd love to say I have a very positive attitude towards failure, but I don't want it at the same time. But big stumbling blocks. What example do I want to go into? Probably with my Goal Crazy business. During COVID, I get inventory from China. So it was really hard to get inventory from China. And for a while I was like, okay, am I going to have to just shut down this business? What am I going to have to do? But they always say there's a flip side of every failure or negative, there's something positive. And then I launched my coaching business, group coaching, somewhere around there I launched my podcast, launched some digital products. I ended up making my business a lot better so that once COVID went away, I was a lot better at it.
Okay, let me go back to my real estate here. So when I first got into real estate, I was really afraid of any sort of problems that the tenants would have. You brought up a pipe breaking. I was terrified if I ever got a call from any of my tenants. And I used to pray I hope there never to be any problems with my rental properties. Now there's been countless problems happening. I've had three times a tree fall on the roof. I've had apartments flood. I've had just a bunch of air conditioners break at the same time. Things that were so frustrating at the time and for a while it seemed, why is this happening to me? I feel like I'm doing the right things. Why am I having all these bad things happen? But in a way, it's because I've had all those problems come up. I've learned how to actually deal with them, where now I have an assistant who takes care of 80% of everything.
Maybe earlier I was hoping that I'd have this business with no problems. But the reality was that I was given something way better as I was actually taught how to become a landlord. There's no way I could ever have gotten to 30 apartments if I never had any problems with my properties. It's like now I can go tour a property. I can know roughly how much I'm going to have to spend in maintenance and how much different things will cost and how to handle it if it does come up. And I can run a business effectively versus if I never had any problems. Yeah, I don't want any problems, but there's just so many lessons. We're kind of going back to earlier how that time period where Goal Crazy wasn't really making money. It's like I needed that. So I still just need to learn these things and most of the time the lessons come from problems.
Yeah, thank you for sharing that. And I can't help but think that this part of the conversation really is leading into how to plan for such eventualities. Do we need to plan for those times and tell us more about your planning mindset?
I put plans in place for when mistakes happen, but I think when I have goals, and I'm sure you guys can relate to this, like if I have goals that are really impactful and meaningful to me, in a way, it makes some of my problems less relevant. It's like if I'm terrified of not having enough money, it's like, okay, but if I have this goal of this is how much money I want to earn this year and it's more than enough, it's almost like I need, I can stop worrying about, well, what if I don't have enough? It's like, nope, here's the goal, this is where my focus is gonna be.
So I think when you have those, and if you can do the deep work to really figure out what you want to do in your life, it lights a fire inside of you.
When I was at the dealership, I was doing all the things that I should do or that I need to do, and that's great, right? But when I left it was like, I'm doing what I want to do. I didn't want to figure out how to get a tree off of one of my rental property roofs, but at the end of the day, I did. I wanted to become a landlord and that burning desire and the goal of where I wanted to go, made those problems less relevant because it was all on the way to where I wanted to get to.
Yeah, this is great. This is what I call crowding out. If you have a worry or a fear, you crowd it out with the stuff that you do want to do and that you're already taking action on. So it's not like you're pushing anything away and saying, that's bad. I can't have the fear. I can't have failure because that's an inevitable part of life. But when we put more into the bucket of the stuff that we can do to achieve our goals, then like you said, it becomes less of, it takes up less space in our head.
I also think it's that what you focus on grows. So the more you focus on problems, the more problems you see, but the more you focus on goals, your mindset stays there. I love that.
I was just going to ask, what do you say to and how do you coach people who know that they have a burning desire for something yet they just don't see the either they don't see the path there or they've just spinning their wheels. They're not getting there. They're not achieving it.
I feel like there's two parts to that question, right? So I think the first part is I don't think you have to have the whole thing figured out to get started, right? If you know the end point and you know one step, just take that step, the next step will get clear. It's constantly asking myself, what's the next indicated step? But in lots of times the others, what the step might be, and I think this will answer maybe the second part of the question is, I always try and find somebody who's already accomplished what I want to do. I used to have this, well, still have this mentor, who's a car dealer, Jim Schorke, they own like 20 dealerships, big car dealer, but he would always tell me like, Jason, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, right? So if I can find somebody who's already accomplished what I want to do and ask them how they did it, boom, there's my straight line on how to get there.
So I think as I'm starting any new goal or venture, one of the first thoughts that goes through my head, or if it's one of my clients and they're starting something, it's who do you know who's already done this? Take them out to lunch go buy them a lunch go buy them a coffee and ask them how they did it because they can give you the the straight line on how to get there.
So if you don't know all the steps I would probably start there is your first step and they will probably give you the second step and then just keep trusting that the next step will present itself.
Because a lot of times I will try and plan out the whole process from here's where I am here's the goal for this quarter. I map out this whole process, but I've never had that plan happen how I thought it would. You take the first couple steps and I was like, no, no, this is the better route, right? Or, well, this just isn't even relevant. Now I need to go here. So I feel like now it's more figuring out, getting very clear on where I wanna go. The first couple steps, having a somewhat high level plan of the middle steps isn't a bad thing. I think that's good, but just trust it's gonna get clear as you start going. I'll tell my clients and I've ranted out on my podcasts all the time, action brings clarity. It's like, just take one step, the next one will bring the way clear action, brings clarity.
That's exactly right and often we fear taking the action because we overthink all the things. So I love that your concept have the big goal in mind and take the first couple of steps and the rest of the way lights itself. Because yeah, you figured out and sometimes there's many different paths to take and it can be hard to choose and maybe one of them is right. Maybe none of them is right. Maybe all of them are right. And it's the taking the action and the going forward that really is what leads to success.
So what's your vision of success? What's your big crazy goal for yourself?
Probably one of my big crazy goals, now I didn't say this is like a vision for success for everyone, this is like one of my big crazy goals is I want to continue to grow my goal crazy business so that I can one day have Certified Goal Crazy coaches. And one of the other big goals I have that will be happening in the next year is writing a book. So I'll have a book coming out next year, but that is one of my big goals.
But what do I think success looks like?
I feel like it's having fun doing the things you want to do where yeah, it's not like I'm seeking out what's gonna make me the most money, it's having fun and yeah, how am I gonna serve others?
I think one of the mistakes I went through through a lot of years was whenever I'll set goals, I'll try and figure out how am I gonna make my life better? What am I gonna accomplish this year? What are the habits I'm gonna start? And accomplishing goals is rewarding in itself. I don't feel like I don't know maybe if you've had other people say this or not or you've experienced it, but I don't feel like hitting most of my goals hasn't been as rewarding as I necessarily wanted to I almost feel like it's kind of the feeling you get when you finish a TV show series Where you want to know how it ends, but then it ends and you're like well now what? Right, I wish I would have just enjoyed the journey when I was figuring it out, so I feel like one of the shifts I went through a couple years ago was realizing that in a lot of ways, I was focusing wrong. It shouldn't be about what am I going to accomplish this year? How am I going to make my life better? It's how am I going to help others this year? How am I going to make their lives better? What habits am I go ing to help them start? And there's something that's so much more fulfilling about that. And you're never going to help everybody. And if you do, that's a good problem to have. You'll figure that out. But then it's just this bigger thing, something that's bigger than me that I continue to work towards rather than just trying to feed my ego because I accomplished something I wanted to.
Yeah, it's a beautiful way to go through life and to build a business. And it's a big one that we also believe in is adding value. How do you add value? How do you create an impact in the community, right? We often talk about the ripple effect, what we do and how it supports others. That's the whole purpose of this podcast in itself is to be the go-to resource for people who are struggling, they just want a little bit of a lift up or they want some tips and tricks or some techniques they want to learn from an expert like you.
So can we drill down into the goal setting expertise that you bring to the table and what makes a Crazy Goal unique? What's different about a Crazy Goal and how does it help us get to the impact that we want to create?
Yeah. I love this question. I'm going to tie this back to what you were bringing up earlier of people who just buy tons of planners that are out there. And I think one of the reasons for that, and this will all connect here, is I think lots of times people think it's, they feel like it's easier to go out and just buy another planner that's somehow going to solve all their problems.
They don't have enough time. They have all these goals. And it's easier to just go out and buy another planner, hoping it's going to solve all your problems than it is to do the deep work to figure out what do I really want to do with my life? And it's kind of like once you know the answer to that question, everything else is easier. The goals are easier, but you naturally will have more time. Because I think most people, they don't know the answer to what do I want to do with my life. So then they're just doing things, or they're trying to find it by trying a bunch of things. And maybe that's part of the process to figure out what you want to do. But otherwise, they just way over commit themselves. They're not happy, they're still asking themselves that question in their head, what do I want to do? And they keep trying to do more. So kind of like an interesting thing that happens, I think, with my planner. And definitely when somebody signs me on as a one-on-one coach is they want, they sign me on or they buy my planner because they want to accomplish more. But the reality is, is I help them accomplish way less. I just help them figure out what's the impactful things. And you're going to realise that when you do that, you're going to get way more results - focus on the one thing that really drives the needle forward than so many other little things.
So one of the big things that separates my planner from the others is it starts with a really in-depth, I call it my life crash course, but it starts with an in-depth self-audit of where you're at in your life right now, what's working, what's not working. You then clarify your dreams, you break them down to long-term goals, short-term goals, and I really help them identify what their most impactful goal is.
And when you can get clear on that, what's your most impactful goal, it gives you the ability to say no to things, which is huge. You can say no to things, it frees up a lot of time. And then it lights this fire inside of you like we were talking about earlier where now all of a sudden it's you're willing to take risks because you know what you're after and it's worth it. And problems aren't as they don't throw you off as much because you're still going after something that you really want. So that's probably one of the big things that separates my planner aside from the others is the life crash course. I believe I have the best planner spread, but that's up to everyone needs to find what works best for them.
However, another thing that I think is really powerful is I have people in the planner create a scorecard. So it comes with the planner. Basically, for every habit or goal that you have, I always believe there's a habit on the other end that's going to help you get there. Your successful behaviours will lead to your successes, or your unsuccessful behaviours will lead to your failures. So whenever I set a goal, I was trying to figure out what's the successful behaviour I need to do every day that's going to move me to this goal that I want. And I come up with a, I create a scorecard for myself in a way I plan out what my ideal day look like with my successful behaviours that's gonna move me towards my goals. And then every night I go through my scorecard. I can show you, but I know you're not gonna see the video for people listening, but I go through it on my planner and go through, all right, here's the 10 components that would make my ideal day. How many of them did I do? And if I did seven out of the 10, I had 70% day and I give myself a grade and it's just an easy way to constantly remind myself of the successful behaviours I need to be doing to get me to my successes and making sure I'm on track for that. So hopefully you could follow along with that even though I can't really show it to you guys here through a podcast.
Yeah, I love that. I've never heard anyone say anything like that before like create your own daily scorecard. It's brilliant. I really like that concept a lot. And do you feel like that does help you get towards your goals faster?
It does. It's just, cause otherwise it's easy to put things off or to think you're doing it. Like, well I'll start, I mean, working out is always an easy example for goals. Like, I'm doing that some, but when you have to definitively tell yourself yes or no every day, it just helps make you intentional. And it's like, look, if the past three days in a row, I haven't done it, I need to change something that I'm doing. Otherwise it's not going to just magically happen tomorrow. So I think it brings a really strong level of accountability. But what makes it even stronger is, so I have for myself a group of other people who use my planner and we all text each other our scores every night from our planner. And if we all had a 10 out of 10 day, we can congratulate each other. If you have a two out of 10 day, we can encourage you to do better the next day or tease you a little bit about it, whatever. But it's just fun. We all know that I have my scorecard and it's like, I know if I do these 10 things. Here's my scorecard for those who can't see it. I have this scorecard and it's like, I know if I do these 10 things, every day I'm gonna get to my goals. My successful behaviours will lead to my successes. So all I need to do is make sure I do them every day.
I can only imagine that doing that even after five or six days would empower you significantly because you'd be seeing your success. You'd be congratulating yourself, even if it's not an informal like, hey, well done, pat on the back, Vic. But it would be just a psychological like, hey, yeah, I did that. Yeah, I did that. I'm rocking it. I'm the star. I can do this again. It's just the evidence every single day that you're actually doing what you said you were going to do and it's achieving something.
Yeah, it's powerful. Even if you have a two out of 10 day, it's like, I still have two wins today, right? It's not like, this was a terrible day. It's like, I had two wins today and trying to get 10 tomorrow, but at least I had two that I can celebrate today. So yeah, exactly your point, Vicki.
I love it. I love that level of accountability to yourself. And I love that you've even included it with a group thing so that you're accountable to others because that definitely steps it up a notch. It's easy for you to be like, well, okay, I had a two out of 10 day, But you've got to tell somebody else that you had a slack day. It's a lot harder. So it definitely encourages you to keep going. I love that. I think that's brilliant. This is such great actionable advice, which always gets me excited on this podcast so we can share with our listeners some ways to really truly improve their life. And we thank you for all that great advice you've just given us, Jason. And we like to take an opportunity to flip the script a little bit here and give you the chance to put us in the hot seat and ask Vicki and I a question. You got a good one for us? You host a podcast, so I expect you got questions.
One of the things that gets me really curious is people's dreams. And I think for you guys, how important have your dreams been throughout your career? I imagine this podcast was a dream of yours, but how important have they been for you? And maybe even was there like a moment where you decided, I'm gonna start going after my dreams in my l ife.
Yes, dreams have been the driver for me in my life. And when I'm not aligned to them or I feel like I'm not fulfilling a dream somewhere, I get this real tangible sense of disquiet and I feel very restless. And it quite often happens around birthdays because birthdays is when I reflect on my progress and where I'm going and halfway through my life and blah, blah. And so yeah, I think dreams have been a super important part of what I do and who I am. And I'm just one of those people that can't do what I'm not meant to do. I just, every bone in my body just resists and it feels miserable. Every next day will be even more miserable because I know something's not right. And even if I can't articulate it at the time, it's what I used to call the gypsy wind of change, I'd have to move on. And a part of that I think was unresolved stuff, whatever that stuff is. And I've certainly over the years through personal development worked on that stuff. And so there's less need to be the gypsy, yet the wind of change still wafts along and I think something in the air, something to immerse myself in, something new to learn. I'm a lifelong learner, so dreams have been a big part of that. Absolutely. Thank you for that question. I love it.
Yeah, it's a good one. Okay, let me see if I can follow Vicki. I should have gone first. She makes it hard to follow.
Okay, so interesting thing about dreams is that I think I found my dream very early. When I was 16, I loved art and I ended up getting a job as a graphic designer and I was like, yep, dream job, absolutely. And I went to college to study graphic design and became a graphic designer. I worked for a newspaper, which was an amazing experience. I worked for a magazine, it's amazing experience. And I was living my dream career until I got made redundant and then had to figure life out as an entrepreneur. And it was kind of like there, I did not ever had a dream to be an entrepreneur. Like that was just a, it happened and I needed to figure it out. As a mom of young kids, there was a lot of figuring out for a lot of years. And then Vicki and I worked together on a project. Then out of that came Two Four One. And out of that and during COVID is when I think I started to dream again, which is amazing to reflect on because I haven't really reflected on this till you just asked this great question. But having dreams now is amazing because I feel more driven than I've ever been. I feel like I'm less of a worker bee just kind of doing the work and more of I'm excited about the things that I'm doing. I'm excited about hosting this podcast. I'm excited about some bigger dreams I have for the near future that I probably talked about a lot already, but I'm gonna be talking about a lot more in podcasts to come. I'm sure you're gonna be sick of me talking about it. But yeah, I'm giving myself permission to dream big, crazy, audacious dreams now. And it's really exciting, a little bit scary, but that good kind of feeling like I'm stretching, scary. And it's an amazing space to be in and I'm really excited about it. And I'm, really, really looking forward to what the future is gonna be. I think it's time to write down some goals. I think you're inspiring me in this podcast to write down some goals now, take the dreams and make them a little bit more tangible into goals and then figuring out the action. Because I'm doing the action, but I'm not writing it down and being a little bit more strategic about it, which I think is the lesson I'm taking from today that I think will be really useful.
I think I've discovered what the next Christmas gift is going to be for both of us, but it might be an early Christmas gift. I'm going to hop on Amazon and sort that out right now for us both.
Yeah, is your planner annual? Is it dated or is it like you can get it and use it anytime kind of planner?
Yes, completely undated and it's a 90 day planner. Figure out your long-term goals. Like you'll set 10 year goals and you'll figure out your dreams, but it'll break it down to your most impactful goal to the quarter and then the habits that are going to get you to that goal. So it's undated though. So if you get it today, there's no excuse why you can't start it today.
That's what I was hoping you'd say too. Cause I think that makes it so useful. I love that it's 90 days too. Cause if you said it was a year, I'd be like, Ooh, that sounds a bit, you know, yeah, I can do that later. I can do that next month. Right? It's easier to put off 90 days as you can, you know, get it done in 90 days. That's pretty exciting. I love that.
Yeah, we might start an accountability circle with a gold crazy planner in 90 day. Who knows? I mean, we're builders. Laura and I put Laura and I in a room together, Zoom room or otherwise, 10 minutes later, an hour later, we've built the next great thing. We talk about dreamers, we're absolute dreamers. We get together and we set each other off in the most amazing way. So such a good question. I really love it. What do you think, Jason, it takes to be resilient?
Hmm, I think when you have the clarity on what you really want to do with your life. I think the resilience will start to come. To me resilient I think of that you're gonna have to push through those hard times and no doubt it's going to come so when you're resilient you're gonna push through it and I think that driving force is you have the burning desire inside of you. So what does it take to be resilient? I think it takes you having a clear Why on what you're going to be resilient for.
Yeah. Like Simon Sinek said, start with why. Yeah. And then use a planner to figure out the rest. I love it. That's perfect. Tied in a bow. No, amazing. And you're absolutely right. I think when we have goals, we can get very clear on what we want and then push through the hurdles because they're gonna come. There's a guarantee in life that hard times are coming because it's all a roller coaster up and down and you'd have to have a reas on to keep riding and keep going and pushing through and staying resilient because
That's what we're all about as entrepreneurs. You have to be resilient. We know that as well. We called the podcast this because it's a huge mindset thing and the mindset is key. Personal development is key and taking action is another key thing like we talked about today. So Jason, I just wanna say thank you so much. What a great podcast, what a great conversation. We really appreciate your time and w
We will be sharing how to get a hold of your planner in the show notes, of course, for anyone who's listening and wants to get a copy. It will make it as easy as possible for you. So thank you, thank you, thank you.
This was really fun and thanks for what you're doing of spreading this message because you're helping a lot of people. I can tell you that you're helping me, so thank you.
