Pat Flynn: Build Faster. Learn Leaner. Pat Flynn’s Secrets for Action-Takers

Where do you see school from preschool all the way through higher education, changing to accommodate this new world that we're in? What I would love to see is more integration of a person's interests and skills into what their careers could potentially be. Having people find out who they are earlier and what they love and what they enjoy. Maybe not necessarily what do you want to be calm when you grow up, but rather what do you enjoy? What are the things that spark you up? Pat Flynn, author, entrepreneur, podcast host, and creator of Smart Passive Income. His new book is Lean Learning, How to Achieve More by Learning Less.

I'm a storyteller at heart. I love putting my own personal experiences into my books. It's how I connect with my audience. I'm not a professor at some university. I don't have a neural science degree or anything like that, but I have real life experiences and I've learned a lot and have shared these things I coach based on these experiences. It was the coolest thing ever and I'm literally getting goosebumps thinking about it right now because... What's one of your favorite stories from the new book? So I'm a storyteller at heart. I love putting my own personal experiences into my books. It's how I connect with my audience.

I'm not a professor at some university. I don't have a neural science degree or anything like that, but I have real life experiences and I've learned a lot and have shared these things I coach based on these experiences. I want to start with the story that's at the beginning of the book, which actually relates to my kids and his preschool class because I live in San Diego and if you don't know this about San Diego, San Diego is a giant ant hill. It's like literally there are billions of ants underneath us. So if you leave any food out, especially in the summer months or in the spring, early spring, you're going to be infested, absolutely.

That's exactly what happened to my son's classroom one day during lunch, in fact, and it just kind of ruined the entire day. So instead of like evacuating and doing this stuff, the teacher, Miss Jenny, she did an amazing job brainstorming with the children right then and there. They had this problem. They wanted to solve it. She being the guy knew exactly what to do. And I loved this about the school. It was like a newer school, more progressive, more entrepreneurial in the way they teach. And the story really spoke to me as an entrepreneur myself. Anyway, she spent the whole afternoon brainstorming with the kids different ideas to solve their lunch problem because they couldn't eat outside.

It was too hot. The ants were infesting the inside. What do we do? She spent the whole afternoon getting ideas. And some of these ideas were absolutely ridiculous. Like one of them was we should just eat at Chick-fil-A because there's a Chick-fil-A right across the street, which wouldn't have been economical. Another kid said, let's just eat the ants. Probably not going to happen. And there's not enough nutrition in that. But eventually, all the ideas were there. None were left out. And then they just kind of together nailed down one idea left on the board. And it was to build sunshades, which is the only possible thing they could do with what they had available.

So I got to email that evening when the kids came home and they were all excited because we're going to build something we didn't know exactly what they were talking about until we got an email from Ms. Jenny that said, hey, if you have any old blankets, if you have any old PVC pipes or things like that, can you bring them to class the next morning and we're going to be building something we didn't know exactly what it was. Well, we brought all these things and we just let the kids be. We picked them up later that early afternoon and we saw these sunshades that were built kind of like a big L and they had like a tarp on them.

These were these blankets. And what they did was they built these themselves and they just created shade in the playground so that they were able to eat outside away from the ant infestation on the inside and not be burned by the hot California sun. And now this might seem like an obvious thing. But when you're four or five years old and you go through the experience of seeing a real life problem like kind of ruin your day and then you are brainstorming along with others and collaborating to come up with a solution and then literally the next day, build that solution. I mean, it was the most mind-blowing thing to see as a parent.

We were all taking pictures. It almost reminded us of those like step and repeat patterns. You see it like the Oscars kids in front of their little banners, but they weren't celebrities. They were our kids and they were celebrities that day because they were so happy about what they built. I mean, that lesson to find a real problem and just build the solution and do it kind of messily and not perfectly. They didn't study construction. They didn't even go through a bunch of lessons on how to build things. They just got their hands dirty and built these things with duct tape blankets and PVC pipe.

And it was the coolest thing ever. And like I'm literally getting goosebumps thinking about it right now because this is so different than what we're usually taught and what we've been conditioned to learn and how we've been conditioned to learn, which is by either reading everything about something before doing the thing or creating a ton of committees to just kind of talk about it forever and then never get anything done. And we as adults, we've fallen into those traps. We've lost our curiosity and our ability to just kind of figure things out on the go. And what's amazing is we live in this world now where all the resources are there, right?

Back in the day, right, Encyclopedia Britannica. Remember Encyclopedia Britannica? If you had one in your home, you were basically higher class because you could afford information. That other people could not. Now, our information that we need is all right here in our phones. We could look up how to do anything. If information were the answer to our problems, we'd all be where we want to be, but we're not. We're actually overwhelmed with information now. We are we are almost obese with it. It's like we're at a buffet line. And not only are we just like continuing to eat all this information that's being fed to us, we're being force fed information in these algorithms that we didn't even know we needed.

And so we are lethargic. We are not having any time to actually take action and do these things. And I wrote Lean Learning because my kids are of teenage age now. And I want to prepare them for the future and the world that they live in now too. And everybody else who's also feeling a struggle or feeling behind, it's like, if you just have a framework to actually do the things and not just confuse information for just in case information, but rather find just in time information, we're able to have more time, learn on the go, make mistakes. I mean, there's so much to unpack with how you and I were conditioned to learn, right?

Like learning from mistakes, failing is good. Like, these are things that we need to adopt now today to be able to get to where we want to go. So I mean, I could talk for hours without you can come back in. So I'm going to let you come back in. But the story of my kids, I mean, they and I and my wife and I, we have seen dramatic differences in how they approach problems and challenges in their lives because of just their ability to know that, well, the answers are there when they need them, but they have to put things in action to see what works and what doesn't. Yeah, I know you are a fan of the story of, yeah, the war of art as well, because I was listening to an appearance you made on another show and you referenced that book.

But when you were talking just now, it reminded me of this because in this new world that we live in where we are inundated with information, right? I mean, there's no shortage of inspiration to get excited about things on YouTube, on social media, wherever, whatever channel you want to go look at. But it's almost what I'm hearing from you is that consuming all this information without taking action is a form of resistance, right? It's a way to procrastinate. It's a way to not take steps towards actually reaching your goals. It's a false form of creation is the learning about the thing you're creating.

I mean, I fell into that trap for so long when I started out with business, I was subscribed to 30 different podcasts and trying to listen to all of them. I felt bad if I missed some of those episodes. How in the world was I going to find any time to do anything if I was so focused on just the consumption, but it felt good in the moment, right? All those little golden nuggets piling up to what though? All I would need would be one thing related to the next step. And then I could actually see some progress. It reminds me of another story I tell in the book. When I was an architecture, I used to play golf every weekend every Sunday, 6.30 AM in Alameda, California.

And I had two buddies of mine who were in my office with me, Terry and George. And they couldn't be more different. Terry was that quintessential golfer who subscribes to golfing magazine. They have a putter at their desk. They're watching golf channel. And I know as a golfer that sometimes and many times getting too much information from too many different sources means your shot is just going to be terrible. And that's exactly what was the case for Terry. He was learning too much. And you can even hear him when he was preparing to swing, he would mutter the newest latest strategy or tip from golf magazine to shoot.

And of course, he would just shank it. And then George, like you wouldn't even know he played golf, although he got lessons, which was an amazing step. Find somebody who's done it before and who could teach you their ways. And you just have that one source to learn from. And then you don't let any of the other outside noise come in and start to cloud the learning that you just need to do to put your head down and just go. And he just crushed it. He became eventually a scratch golfer. And I learned in the way that he does, which is to find out what you need to do and then do it and learn from somebody who's done it before.

He also practices something called micro mastery, which I really love. A lot of us when we're trying to learn how to do something, we try to learn all the steps and we try to do everything. And number one, again, that slows us down and stops us from seeing results. And a lot of times when you plan out a whole thing, it's just a plan. It's like a business plan. Business plans don't work very well because it's just a guess of what's going to happen. You only know what's going to happen after you take action and then you can pivot and adjust from there. But micro managing or micro mastery is taking a small component of the much bigger hole and then hyper focusing on that for a period of time.

So in golf, for example, when I took lessons, we weren't doing everything from putting to using the driver to mid range to long put short putts all in one day. We would take a whole month on just putting and even in a single lesson, we would focus on just how to read greens. And every time I would learn those things much better and that skill would stack on itself and then allow me to master that thing much, much better. It's in a way kind of like slowing down a little bit and hyper focusing that effort versus spreading yourself too thin, which is what all of us are doing. And you had mentioned like the ability for us to so easily get inspired by so many other things and other people right now, because we're on social, because we're on shorts and reels and TikTok, it just takes one flip of a thumb to then have your brain go, Oh, I like that, let me try that.

And you're now saying, yes, to this new thing by uncommitting to the thing you've already said, yes, too. And it's just this downward spiral that we're all living in. It's the thing I'm most afraid of for my kids is this lack of focus. And it's not even just a distraction thing. There's been a lot of amazing publications out from people like near A.L. about distractions and things like that. Jonah Berger, another amazing author about distractions. It's not just about that. It's a reframing and focus on why are you doing what you're doing right now? And does it matter? And I think a lot of us, if we could just at least unprogram ourselves from from this matrix that we live in and go, okay, what actually are we doing here?

And what should we be focusing on? I mean, our lives would be so much better. Yeah, I had a professor in business school, because I think business is an interesting way to examine this idea, because so many people now they feel like they need to learn all the skills at once to get a business started. They're trying to build the audience and build the email list and figure out the service they're going to sell in two years and they get overwhelmed by trying to take all the steps it wants. This business school professor, he said, I really believe in creating a business plan for a new venture. He said, but you should make that thing as fast as you can just to get the ideas down, because most of it is not going to work out the way you thought it would.

And he said, when starting something new, he said, I really like the idea you crank this thing out just to give some direction to what you're trying to do. It's just a general blueprint. And then go start doing it for six months, and then go write it again, because then through the action, you will have an idea of what needs to be planned. And then you can look at it step by step and just focus on each step in the journey rather than trying to wrap your head around the whole thing at once. Exactly right. That's exactly what I'm talking about. Case and point, my first actual digital product that I ever sold online, this was after I got laid off from architecture, I started an online business helping architects pass an exam called the lead exam.

And I had this opportunity. I had an audience being built. People were finding my website through keywords and Google, people were sharing it on architectural forums. And a buddy of mine who was in business said, you need to write a study guide and publish it. And I said, I have no idea how to do that. That sounds overwhelming. What do I price it? How do I design it? I have no idea this is so overwhelming. I think I'm just going to keep blogging and making a few dollars every day on Google AdSense. And he said, no, like, write the book and then figure out the next step after that, because none of this other stuff matters about design or marketing or selling until you have the book.

So just spend the next 30 days and crank it out. So that's what I did. And even in that process, I said, okay, well, let me hyper focus on that. I'm going to figure out what makes a good study guide. Let me find some other ones. Let me write this thing in the best way possible. And Nick, after I had finished that last word, it was about 100 pages. I mean, I was desperate to figure out now that I have this, how do I sell it? And I knew exactly what questions to ask. I knew exactly who to go to or at least get pointed in the right direction. And I found an easy way. I found a tool back then called eJunkie, which no longer exists, that I could upload my book to was again, a PDF file.

And it would give me a button that I could just put on my website. Well, I don't know how to put buttons on my website. I just built my blog. I never, I don't know how to do this. Okay, well, that's the next step. Who knows how to put buttons on websites? Okay, cool. My wife calls her friend, Mel, who is a web developer for another company who she went to college with. And she was just like, Hey, Mel, can you help my husband figure out this button thing? And he did it in five minutes. Cool. And then the next day I started generating revenue. And that first month, I made almost $8,000 from a $19 in 99 cent ebook that was sold on a platform called eJunkie that I just learned about.

And money was coming into my PayPal every single day. And it was just again, if I had tried to figure out all that, a, it would have overwhelmed me, B, it probably wouldn't have been the path that actually unfolded. Because like you said, I mean, the same thing happened when I invented the switch pod, a tripod for vloggers, I had never invented anything before. I didn't know how to manufacture or anything about molding or selling. But like you said, I knew what we wanted to do. And we knew what we wanted to happen. I wanted to sell this thing. Okay, well, let's build the prototype. What's it was even going to look like?

I don't know. Let's cut these things out of cardboard and just play and get curious, just like the kids did in that classroom and figure things out. Okay, we got this thing now that it looks like a tripod. And the idea of the switch pod is the three legs combined into each other to create a handle. And so we built that we then went to YouTuber conferences and we said, hey, hold this. What do you think of this? If it did this and held your camera, do you think this is too big or too small? Again, we didn't worry about finding out or doing all this research on what's the optimal height and angle for all this stuff.

We literally just gave it to the people who were eventually going to buy this thing and lo and behold, in February of 2019, we launched this product called the switch pod on Kickstarter. And that's a crowdfunding website. We didn't know anything about Kickstarter. So what do we do? We went to a conference that had a couple people who were keynote speakers who had sold physical products on Kickstarter. And then we ended up having a dinner with them and having a chat and asking questions going directly to the source. And we were able to learn all the mistakes that they made and avoid them. And in February of 2019, we launched the switch pod on Kickstarter and had in 60 days earned $415,000 with $4,800.

And that product now is selling automatically on Amazon every day now. And again, it's just a case for lean learning. We are learning our way by just finding the information we need for the next step and then doing it and then adjusting as we go. And a lot of times when I teach this to people, they're like, but what if this happens? This is so scary. It's like, but what if this does work? And you're likely to figure out, you trust that the resources and the help are going to be there along the way. And that's the thing that's now different between the world we live in now versus the world we used to live in before.

You had to gather that information because you didn't know it. You didn't know if you were going to be able to find it. Now it's absolutely there. And now it's an idea of, okay, I don't need that right now. But when the time comes, I know where to go. But for right now, this is what matters. And let me hyper focus on it. Right. So whether it's with the book or the switch pod, you didn't need to create the website for the product that didn't exist. You're just focusing on that first step. And this was the main thing I got from the book, which I think is a great insight for anyone who's trying to do something new, create something, bring an idea into reality, is that just focus first on making the thing.

You don't need to have all the infrastructure ready to go at the beginning. And just like you said, once the book is written, then we're going to figure out how to put the button on the website and maybe build the website. But we don't have to have a grasp on everything because it's hard to know what you're going to need before you've actually written the book first or made the product. Like lean anything means like what's the quickest way or the least heavy way, I guess you could say to approach something. I know you have a lot of entrepreneurs and people who want to be entrepreneurs in your audience.

So I'll speak to it in that language. Instead of a very common question I get is somebody who teaches businesses, Pat, what should I do first? Should I create a course? Should I build my website? I need followers on social media, right? Like that's what I need. No, that's like step 789. What you need to do is figure out what is it that you're going to help people with? So here is what I like to call 111 strategy. This is lean learning for entrepreneurs right at the beginning. Find one person who has one problem and get them one result. Just one. You can't get any more lean than that. And if you're like, well, that's not a real business.

Of course it's not yet. But if you can't find one person, how are you going to find a hundred? How are you going to find a thousand? So find one in a niche or network or community that needs help. So this is again, training as you go. Well, you need to narrow down what your interests are and what communities to get involved with and who to look for like that's going to be education in and of itself as it's unwrapping. Number two, finding a person in there who has a problem. Now you're learning about how to ask the right questions to investigate to understand what the problems are and the pains, but also the desires and the wants and needs are.

And number three, when you help that person get a result, you're in real time learning how to get them the result. You're also learning what the obstacles are, what challenges they may be facing where they're pushing back so that again, eventually down the road when you release this thing as a course or a book or mentorship or coaching, consulting, whatever it might be, you now know what it's like to have once worked with a person who has gone through that trouble. And then finally, the biggest thing for entrepreneurs especially because the biggest thing holding them back is, well, how do I know if this works?

We don't have the confidence that we need. And if you don't have confidence as a creator or somebody making something, then how are you going to expect others to be confident in what it is that you're making? So the easiest way to get that confidence is to again, again, get that one result for somebody because yes, you get a testimonial and that's awesome that you can use for marketing later, but you will now unlock that confidence that what you're doing actually works. And now you can turn it into the thing that you want to then multiply and scale up or very common, you might find that you absolutely hated it, which is also good too.

You're going to find that you don't need to worry or waste time to create a course about the thing that you actually dislike now that you've actually participated in the thing. And that's very common too. And that's a good thing because then now you can put it aside and move on to the next thing or try something different. It doesn't mean you fail, it just means that's not the right path right now. And we're going to move on to a different one. So again, I think you nailed the strategy and the sort of gist and thesis of the book. And there's a lot of little tactics and little strategies here and there.

I think it's important to, for example, major part of the book is finding the right people to surround yourself. There's the sort of emotional support that you can get from friends and family who have no idea what you're doing, but they're going to be there for you. You have your peers and colleagues who are in it with you and you can share ideas with each other, get masterminds and little groups together. And there's of course the more personal mentors that you have who can guide you and give you more specific advice. Again, this is what I would exactly want my kids and anybody learning anything, my own students as well, how I want them to approach the world that we live in.

Because the truth is, I mean, with AI just sort of leveling out all information for everybody, it's the ability to now learn new skills more quickly and adapt. That's going to be the most valuable. Right? Absolutely. Gathering that information is not valuable. Right. Right. And be able to absorb new information quickly, efficiently, and then be able to apply it in the real world, just like your young students there who were in, they were in kindergarten, right? And then the opening story for the book. A preschool, actually. A preschool. And so they're learning that. I mean, that's it. That's learning the stuff where it's like, okay, problem, brainstorm solutions, and then we're going to get our hands dirty and see if we can fix it.

And we learn through the process and then adapt based on actually doing it. And then maybe you need to make changes and try it again. But they're in there doing it straight away. My big question, because I've been talking to people about the Lean Learning book and getting feedback from different people about these ideas that are in there. The biggest question I've gotten back regarding the book is how do you find the balance? Because we need to learn from different sources, right? If somebody does want to go learn how to learn more efficiently, I think your book would be a good place to start, right?

But that's taking in information. So how do we find that balance in learning about something and doing it? It's a four step process that is laid out in the book. You number one, learn what your next step is. Like you have to figure out what that is. And maybe that means asking a mentor or finding a person to sort of learn from or get inspiration from. Number two, then just learn everything you can about that. So another story I talked about in the book is how I started to learn, how to speak on stages, something I was definitely afraid to do. And so I put myself in a situation to learn as quickly as possible in something I call a voluntary force function.

And this kind of happened without me planning it, a friend of mine reached out to me who had an event keynote speaker had dropped out with two weeks to go and then asked me to come and speak and fill in the spot I had never spoken before. But this was a good friend of mine and I wanted to help them. But I also knew this would force me to learn how to do this fast. And so as soon as I said yes, and after kind of like heading off all the sweat I was having, I got to work. So where do I go? Okay, so I started to ask some friends who had gone on stage before and asked them, where did you learn how to speak like that?

And I got recommended the same book by at least four or five different people's called Stand and Deliver by Dale Carnegie. So I read that in like a couple days. And that helped me absorb the right information because I was getting sources from the right people and they were all saying the same thing. So I absorbed that. Next, thinking about, okay, what is the most important thing that I do when I'm on this stage? I deliver value. Okay, who's in the audience? How do I deliver value to them? They're all bloggers. So what is value to a blogger? Getting found, standing out from the crowd. So that's what I made my entire event or presentation about was standing out of a crowd.

And I knew how to speak on that. I just never had put it into a presentation before. And again, just kind of learning on the go and trust me, that deadline, that looming deadline of me getting up on stage forced me to not clutter myself with too much information because I knew I had to build and create. So that took two weeks to do something that I was definitely afraid of. And that unlocked now what I've done. 369 different presentations since then. And I've now gotten paid to be on stage, which is just absolutely mind blowing to me. But giving yourself a certain period of time, I talked about in the book, it depends on what you're doing, but a certain period of time to actually then take action on the thing after you've learned about it.

So then assess whether or not it is worth continuing or moving forward or absorbing even more information at that point. There has to be some time boundaries around this or else you're just going to fall back into the trap of over consumption, or you're going to fall into the trap of automation. Right? Sometimes you have to unsubscribe from everything so you can resubscribe to the things that matter. And that's again, a common thing I find, especially in the podcasting world you and I know as podcasters, a lot of people start to just turn into a machine when it comes to their show. And that's important to be able to automate as much as possible.

But then you lose the life in what it is that you're creating. And it's important to inject new life into it, both for you as the creator and the audience if you're podcasting every once in a while. So having check-ins, regular check-ins with yourself are important. I call them Wi-Fi's, why focused introspections to be able to the dad jokes. Other so many dad jokes in the book too, if you didn't catch that. Like the Wi-Fi, because if the Wi-Fi's out, you're going to be lagging. It's really bad. But that's who I am. Just my personality is in the book. And that point of persist or pivot, understanding after that period of time that you've tried this to assess whether or not it still aligns with your goals.

If you still feel energy for it, if you don't finding it and if not, it might mean moving on to something else and putting that energy elsewhere. What you don't want to do is put energy everywhere. And that's something that the book, The One Thing, really is good at uncovering this. The downfall of you having too many inspirations, too many things going on, which is why I do favor The One Thing. However, I don't know about you, but me, Nick, I can't just do one thing. I'm too curious. I want to try everything. And that's why I have this thing called the 20% itch rule, which is allowing yourself 20% of your time outside of your normal commitments and responsibilities to play, to experiment, to have fun.

And even if things were to fail in that 20%, you're still doing the things that you need to do. But you're also able to scratch that curiosity that you have that many entrepreneurs have, especially. And that to me is a good balance of 80%, 20%, so maybe Monday to Thursday, the things you're supposed to be doing Friday is your playday. This is something that Google does with their employees. They allow for 20% of the time to be building whatever they want and to just use the resources they have to create new things. That's how Gmail was created was in a 20% time. For me, the SwitchPod was part of my 20% time.

More recently, a Pokemon YouTube fascination has been a part of my 20%. And now I have a Pokemon YouTube channel with 1.5 million subscribers. And I knew nothing about Pokemon before hand. I lean learned my way into it. So what you're doing is a great example of this, where you have a lot of irons in the fire at any given time. But what I'm hearing from you is that it's about zeroing in on this one, figuring it out, lean learning your way through it until it is the project is effective or successful. And pieces of it maybe can be automated or streamlined in some fashion. Then through that, the 20% of playtime, maybe we find the next thing to layer in.

But then it's really dialed into that thing. And slowly, but surely, you're building up all these things. If you had tried to start SmartPassive Income and the Pokemon channel and write lean learning all at the same time, it ends in disaster. It ends in none of them being completed. It ends in disaster. Absolutely. I would not be my best self as a father and husband. I would not be my best self as a coach and entrepreneur and just probably unhealthy as a result too. And even a lot of people see what I do now. I've been doing this 17 years. I have a lot of, like you said, irons in the fire, but they were never done at the same time.

I started my blog in 2008, my YouTube channel in 2009 for the Pat Flynn channel, the podcast in 2010. My first speaking gig was 2011. My first book was 2013. My first online course was 2017. My first online community was 2020. These were all things that kind of led to another led to another. And a lot of people come in and go, okay, I want to build the ecosystem that Pat Flynn has. And it's like, no, you have to find where your energy is and put it into that now and then build off of that if you want to. And it's funny because when I narrow things down for a lot of my students who want to go big and go wide, I say, no, niche down, focus on this small thing.

The riches are in the niches, as I say. And more often than not, I would say, seven times out of 10, Nick, people who narrow down after wanting to go wide, stay there. They love it. They found their home there. They want to master that. They become the go to favorite, most recommended resource. They write books on that topic now, even though it's so specific. Like my one of my students, Wojcick is his name. He has a podcast called the fire science show. It's a podcast for people who are fire scientists and not like the magic kind, but like actual kind. That's very specific. All of his episodes get less than super specific, dude, super specific.

But he is the go to every person in this space listens to this podcast, wants to be on that podcast. Sponsors who want to get in front of these people at events like in person conventions, pay this person, Wojcick, five figures, more than he makes that his actual job, because he's got the audience now, because he's niche down and stayed narrow. So many times, as big as we want to go, sometimes narrow is the way to go. Like you can't plan for that. Like you only know that when you start and you do it, but if you start too wide, like we talk about, I mean, no energy is going to be focused anywhere.

Nothing is going to have a chance to come to fruition in any way if you don't dedicate and focus some time to it. Absolutely. Now I wanted to make sure to ask about this. Where do you see school from preschool all the way through higher education, changing to accommodate this new world that we're in, because it seems like the world's moving a lot faster than our education systems are? Very much so. I think it's a big change. I've always wanted to in some way, shape, perform being an agent of change in the world of education. Ever since this moment with the ants happen, I was like, there is a different way to learn this stuff.

There's project-based learning at this school. There are ways to learn through collaboration rather than studying and pitting everybody against each other. How could people start to work together more collaboratively? I don't have a crystal ball or anything like that, but what I would love to see is more integration of a person's interests and skills into what their careers could potentially be. There was some chatter here in San Diego about schools that were going to have a half-week in the schools learning foundational stuff, but then the other half of the week literally interning and doing the things.

I remember when I was in eighth grade, I went on a job shadow. I wanted to be a lawyer because everybody said it was like, you've got to be a lawyer. It's prestigious. I'm half Filipino and there's this Asian thing related to be a doctor or be a lawyer. I just chose a lawyer because I was like, oh, I've seen it on TV. That looks fun. I went into job shadow and I absolutely hated it. No offense to any lawyers out there. I love my lawyer, by the way. But I was just like, that I now know completely that this is not me. And having people find out who they are earlier and what they love and what they enjoy, maybe not necessarily what do you want to become when you grow up, but rather what do you would enjoy?

What are the things that spark you up and then feeding into that and giving them the tools they need and showing them the options that they have to then take that skill and that love and that joy that they have doing something and putting it out there in the world and becoming a good citizen using their best self. That is what I see school should be for. And for so long, we've been, and I think we all knew this school was built in a way where it was just like pumping out factory workers. And that's why there was a bell because you're training for that. Everything's different now. Learning is different.

On top of that, what is important to me and what I've seen a lot of schools now focus on, which I absolutely love, are the interpersonal skills that come along with learning a lot of this textbook related stuff. That stuff's still important. You still need a foundation of learning. And that is key. However, it is the empathy for other people. It's how to communicate. It's how to go on a stage and present and share your ideas, how to work collaboratively, how to solve problems in a way where you're not fighting or raising voices, but rather coming up with a negotiation negotiation skills. Oh my gosh, financial skills, budgeting.

These things should be table stakes now for the world we live in because a lot of these jobs that we are training for, like coding, are going to be obsolete because chat GPT and Claude can do that in an instant. And companies are not going to hire somebody that could potentially A have human error behind it, but also B just cost way more than a prompt and chat GPT. So what are these skills that are going to be useful? Well, it's the interpersonal skills in learning how to talk and communicate and present and solve problems, but also with whatever skills might be needed, understanding and learning your way into those quickly, which again is why this book is really important.

And I feel my contribution to this idea of being an agent of change, I had already started exploring different organizations here in San Diego, like classrooms in the future and a few other different organizations just to see what it would take to like change curriculum. There is so much freaking red tape. Oh my gosh, it is a absolute headache, everything that would need to happen. So I think it needs to happen at home. I think it needs to happen just as a society like we need to shift our focus and our ideas of what it means to learn and be useful. And also just hopefully in the end be happier and more joyful with what it is we choose to do and how we choose to do it.

I mean, I want that for my kids and for you and for everybody else to feel a certain flow state with whatever you're doing that also contributes to some way to other people at the same time. I mean, that's that's really what this is about for me. Well, and I think looking for those areas where you can find flow or you can find meaning and some enjoyment in the work, right? Where it looks, it looks like work to others, but feels like play to you. It needs to be integrated into school because trying to be robotic and do stuff that you don't have intrinsic motivation to do is not going to get you ahead in a world where AI will do the robotic stuff better than any human guaranteed.

And so we've got to find places where we are driven not by the external rewards, but some internal force that draws us to do this thing. And I would really like to see school move towards exploring those areas and to integrate more ship to work into that process, right? I mean, the reason I like your preschool story, even though I thought they were kindergartners, because it seemed almost impossible they were in preschool. What I really liked about it was that they had a deliverable at the end of that process. And one thing that we see right now at Test Prep Guru's with high school students, we've got a handful.

It started out basically the way you described it with the 111. There was one kid who said, hey, I want to be a business major, and it almost seems silly to me that I've never tried to start a business ever before. And I thought, you're making a great point there. And we were just working with this kid on on Test Prep, the SAT. But this came up in conversation, somebody related to me, I met with the kid and I said, you know what, let's run an experiment. Let's see if we can just put together a little business for you, we don't have much time because you're going to be applying to college in nine months.

But let's just see if we can do it. And it's not a story where suddenly he became a multi millionaire based on this little online service that he launched. But he gained an experience and then was able to talk about it in his college essays. And man, college is really responded to it because he wasn't just talking about it in a classroom. He wasn't just listening to business podcasts. He had done something. And I think that now that I see colleges responding to that, I'm hopeful that there will be a trickle down effect now into primary education and secondary education where that becomes a part of the curriculum.

Like, hey, Pat, you seem like you've got some natural talent and enthusiasm for podcasting and or writing. Could we work that into your curriculum at school and let and give some space here for you to experiment with that stuff? It's a dream, man. That's the absolute dream. Let them flourish, right? Let them flourish. I don't know why we can't do it. We should be able to do it. And you know, somebody who is more of a communicator, like let's set up a time to get them on a stage and prep a 10 minute presentation. And the flow state happens when you're just a little bit challenged outside of your comfort zone, just like one notch.

And that is the perfect space to learn that is the voluntary force function in action without risking too much. And I am 100% there with you on that. And seeing that, again, outcome on the other end is so rewarding. Something that I remember, like we were just kind of hoping we would have a nice job after college. That's the outcome that we were all looking for. And then I got that. And then I got laid off. I was like, just like I felt like I was getting stabbed in the back from everything that I was told, which is why I became an entrepreneur after that. Yeah, there's a lot of change that needs to happen.

Conversations like this are a great starting point. My book, I hope, becomes a conversation piece. I don't expect it to become the textbook for schools, although I'd love to put my hand up and say I'd love to help with that. Absolutely. As my kids are getting older and I'm going to have a little bit more time on my hands, maybe not, because I always have new projects in the works. But I think that this is so important. Probably one of the most important topics of discussion that I don't see a lot of other people talking about. So Nick, I appreciate you and what you're doing. And this example of your students, like starting a business is so key.

I've been following because my son's getting closer to that age. She's 15 now in ninth grade. I've been looking to see what is working today to getting into colleges. If he chooses to go down that route and you're right, it's a lot of the experiential related things that are happening now. So how do we set up our students for success with experience? Because people who are getting 1600s on their SATs who have 4.5 GPA are getting denied now. And how are we adjusting to that? Well, nobody is. But that's why I think it starts at home because you can start that now. But hopefully, like you said, trickles into some of the primary stuff.

I'm glad to see some of it happening with my kids' school. Hopefully, this inspires others to have conversations with their schools and to see what we can do to have more experiences with outcomes and learnings. I think I remember one day, one of the sunshade, everybody got to school and they were knocked over because it got windy. And so it's like, okay, well, actually, that's kind of dangerous. So what do we do? We can put sandbags on them or we can cut holes in them or we can use a different, like one of those netting, vinyl nettings to create shade, but you could still see through it and it lets the wind pass through.

It's like, now you're able to take the baseline thing you've built and build on top of it and learn with sort of a compartmentalized area of focus so that you can make that thing even better. Sorry, I get really passionate about stuff. I love it. I love it. I do as well, I'm also working on a book right now that overlaps with a lot of what we're talking about in schools and how to change how school works to meet where the world is at now. And one of the ideas that stands out to me is really important that you just touched on is that in school, we're taught this model of learn, study, test, and then the test is a verdict on whether you're good at it or bad at it and whatever the result is like we're moving on.

And that is not how somebody like you uses tests out in the real world, right? It's for you, it's a feedback loop or for these kids in the preschool, it's a feedback loop, right? They're going to and maybe replace the word test there with experiment, but they're going to experiment, learn, and then adapt from that and it keeps going round and round where you figure out, oh, we could use a different material for these sunshades. Oh, we could use the sandbags and then you're testing these new ideas and figuring out what works, what doesn't. And I would love to see that integrated into schooling, which is to get kids focused on experimentation rather than evaluation, which is what the current system is based on.

Yeah, the word verdict is such a good one because that's how it feels. We're either good, something or not. We either failed or passed. There's a verdict, but in the real world, oftentimes the feedback is not the verdict. It's just guidance. It's just learning, it's understanding, right? What is it? First attempt in learning is the acronym for fail. And that's so true. But I mean, especially for us millennials, I mean, I'm a millennial. We were conditioned. I mean, it was beaten into us. I mean, I remember coming home from school with a 95% of my math test, super proud of that. And my parents were going, what happened to the other 5%.

And I'd spend the next five hours literally crying because I was just sick of it, trying to learn the other 5% that I got wrong. How does that help me as a person and what I feel like I'm good at? It just feels like I'm not great at anything at that point. And I love my parents. They're still around, thankfully. And we have lunches. But that hurt. And that's why my wife and I have been trying to teach and adopt these strategies into our parenting style as well. We learn and adjust and we have to do it together as a society. And that's why these conversations are key and books like this and yours are going to be important to absorb.

And other people are going to get new ideas from that. And hopefully we can all see some movement there one way or another. Absolutely. Because it is the best way to unlock kids' potential for the future. We're leaving a lot on the table right now with non-encouraging kids to do this that can go better society in unique ways. I wanted to make sure to ask you, so this new book is through a traditional publisher. And I know you've done several that have, you've experimented with different mediums for publishing. And I get a number of emails about that through the podcast since we talked to so many authors.

I just want to get your latest thoughts on this because very few people have done both paths or multiple paths and you have. So I wanted to make sure to ask you about that. Yeah, in fact, the more common thing is somebody who has written traditionally who then goes self-published because they're just like they didn't like that experience. Mine is the opposite. I started self-publish. I did three books, self-publish. My Will It Fly book, how to test your next business idea so you don't waste your time and money. Very long time time though. I became a Wall Street Journal bestseller as a self-published book, which was incredible.

But now this is my first traditional published book. And a lot of people ask me like why did you do that? And there's two reasons because I have the audience like I could have made more money selling it in my own way, not have to share any of those royalties or anything like that. But that's not what it's about for me. It's about the distribution and more reach. Simon and Schuster, I'm so grateful for them and everybody had Adrian Acumen who have been helping me with this, not because they're able to do a lot of the things that I once had to do myself like find an editor and print it out. No, that's not the benefit.

The benefit is there is some clout that comes with that name as well as the ability to distribute it to places I couldn't get it before. And I am entering a new world here with this book. All my other books were specifically focused on entrepreneurship and I'm very proud of those books. But this is sort of one wrong outside of that in the world of education, self-help and personal development, which I don't have a name for myself for. I do touch on those things and there is a lot of notes of both entrepreneurship and self-help in the book. But I'm wanting to make a bigger impact in Castell Widernet, hence lean learning and how to achieve more, not just build a successful business by learning less.

And I'm hoping that people who enjoy books like Atomic Habits and Tiago Forte's books, I hope they enjoy this book as well. I think it fits the same audience in a different kind of way. It's a different approach to how I'm teaching this kind of stuff. Pros and cons. Pros and cons. I mean, there's so many pros and I've enjoyed the experience I've had to give up a little control on how I think things should look or feel in the book. And I understand that they have a lot of data and stuff to support that and have had to let go of some things. But I've also enjoyed a lot of it too and I've learned a lot.

And in the self-publishing world, I mean, you have a lot more control. You could take people on a journey from book to elsewhere and collect their email and support and nurture them from there. But I mean, these books are hard. I mean, are you finished with yours as well as it done or? So I have a draft. You have a draft. Okay. So you're still in the middle of it, Nick. Oh my gosh. Exactly. Right. So there's an editor who is sending me forthcoming feedback that I'm sure there will be plenty to do after that. Oh, it's the most rewarding thing that is one of the hardest things. So I want to just first of all commend you, Nick, because you've taken on a task that is not easy, especially in the world of education and what you're trying to do with it.

So I want to commend you for that and just tell you to keep going because there's so many amazing things that can open up for you as a result of that. I know that from my previous books and we'll see what this opens up for me. I am not in this to try to, you know, a lot of people are like, okay, is the big play here, like some, some educational agency that you're going to build on top of this. I'm like, no, I'm just, I need to get this message out. Yes, it does promote smart passive income on the inside for whoever's interested in entrepreneurship. But this is like the message that needs to be heard right now in the world.

And that's why I'm writing this, not because there's some backend offer of some thing in agency that I'm going to build that's going to, you know, get me hired by Fortune 500 companies or anything. If that happens, cool, but that's not why I'm writing it. I'm writing it because it needs to be heard needs to be spoken about. And again, thank you, Nick, because the opportunity to even speak about it on a platform like this is just, I mean, I already feel like I'm winning. Well, I love the book and it's always a pleasure to get to read something and really connect with it. And I have connected with your material for quite some time because you have so much valuable content out there, whether it's starting a business or a podcast and now on learning strategies.

But it really is a pleasure when it's something that I believe in and truly think this will help people get where they want to go if they read this. And so this is an easy one to give a full-throated recommendation for. Incredible. Thank you, Nick. Absolutely. Thank you for writing it. And Pat, where if people want to find you in the many places they can find you, let's have you just break that down real quick. Sure. So I'm at Pat Flynn on most social media channels and on YouTube, my website, Smart Passive Income is the sort of main hub for entrepreneurial stuff. But of course, the book is leanlearningbook.com or of course, Nick provides an affiliate link through Amazon or something.

Go through that, give them some love back and that's important too. So I'm sure you'll drop some links as well. But yeah, Pat Flynn, you can find me and love to see what you think about it. If you read it, check it out. I'd love to read an honest review as well from you. And again, thank you so much for the opportunity to share this and amplify the message. Absolutely. Yes. And the affiliate link will be down in the description so everyone can find that. And yes, check it out. And if you do enjoy it, like he said, leave a review on the book because I have learned that is tremendously important for books to tickle the algorithm on Amazon.

And it will help spread. If there's something that's good and you'd like to see it spread, that's a way that everybody can get involved and help that project along. Thank you. Well, Pat, thank you so much. I hope this is not the last time that we get to chat and that at some point I get to pick your brain on how we can do more of this stuff in schools to change how kids learn and yeah, make some of these ideas we're talking about a reality. Dude, let's make it happen. Thank you, man. Let me know when your book comes out. We'd love to support it. And we'll get you on my podcast, too. Fantastic, fantastic.

All right, Pat, I'm going to let you go. Thank you so much, man. Have a fantastic day. Okay, everybody, until next time, ask questions. Don't accept the status quo and be curious.