Welcome to Meaningful Work Remarkable Life. I’m your host Brook McCarthy, and I’m a business coach, trainer and speaker living and working on the unceded lands of the Camargo people here in Sydney, Australia. In this podcast, we explore the paradoxes inherent in working for love and money, magnifying your impact and doing work you feel born to do. We explore the intersections of the meanings we bring to work and the meanings we derive from work.
2024 was the year of experiments for me. And I think this period in my business started in about 2021, I would say. I was definitely experimenting. I’ve been an experimenter from way back. And all businesses experiment to an extent, right?
Every business is experimenting because unless they have a crystal ball, nobody really knows exactly what the outcome of something is. We’re making calculated guesses and we’re trying to hedge our bets. We’re trying to mitigate our risks. But at the end of the day, we cannot control the outcome. We can only control the activity. We can only control what we’re actually doing in business.
So 2021 was the year where I’ve really started, I really stopped rather trying to focus and double down on one thing only. And I think for a lot of us, a lot of creative multifaceted people, a lot of what I call slashies in business and a slashie is you’re a graphic designer and you’re an artist and you’re a writer and you make jewelry. You know, that’s a slashie. A slashie is somebody that’s got multiple different things going on. Um, you know, and perhaps they’re making money from more than one of those things. And 2021, I really stopped attempting to conform to this idea that you’ve got to double down on selling one thing.
You’ve got to be niched and you’ve got to focus on one program and you’ve really got to stop, you know, distracting yourself with other things. And I really embraced my my desire to have a multifaceted business because I’ve always, I’ve always had a multifaceted business, but I haven’t really embraced it. I’ve kind of attempted to hide it or attempted to minimise it. You know, there’s many, many years where I was making money offering particular services, but I wasn’t talking about those particular services because I kind of felt like they somehow detracted from my credibility. They were somehow, you know, making me look less credible.
So 2024, I really went hard on the experiments because I enjoy them. This is, this is, you know, how I kind of work. I like, I thrive in variety. I thrive in creative ideas. I, um, I’m 21 ideas before breakfast is not an unusual day for me. So I really went. And I specifically went for it in the second half of 2024 as well. And what happened in the, in the second half of 2024 was I stopped promoting and you know, stopped pursuing a business retreat that I was running with a friend and collaborator, so we’d put a lot of energy, a lot of time, a lot of focus into this particular endeavour and, you know, and then basically pulled the plug on it. So there was a lot of money, but more than money, there was a lot of focus and time that had been invested that wasn’t going to be recouped. And so I really got my hustle on in the second half of 2024.
And the point to this story, the point to this episode is that I enjoyed every minute of it. There is a correlation between joy and between profit. Because when we’re trying to, when we’re diligently working hard, but we’re working hard without joy, it is a hell of a lot less sustaining. It is not straightforward, it’s not easy.
We tend to need vast volumes of willpower and bribery and all kinds of, you know, complicated kind of psychology to manipulate ourselves into keeping our ass on the chair. Whereas when we’re doing something out of enjoyment and joy, it becomes regenerative. Right. It becomes sustainable. It’s easy to motivate ourselves. It’s not, we don’t need, you know, motivation so much because we’re enjoying it. We are genuinely enjoying it.
So from June, 2024, I ran a lot more content events. I ran the Amplify event, which was a three-day audio-only event delivered via Telegram. I ran that again in September. This time, I delivered it via WhatsApp. It was free. It was three days of audio delivered via WhatsApp, focusing on clients, courage, and cash.
I followed the Amplify event in June with a webinar. And then from the webinar, I went straight into my hustle and heart program launch. Now I’ve had a vexed relationship with webinars because, you know, they oftentimes feel like a lot of pressure to me. I find it a lot more enjoyable and a lot more fun to sell via email. Yeah. This is what I, what I love to do. I love writing. I love storytelling.
You know, I love words and language and I’ve run, you know, multiple launches over many, many years only through email, perhaps with a little social media sprinkled in, but you know, there’s been many, many years where I’ve actively avoided webinars because it kind of feels like, you know, it feels like you’re putting your eggs in one basket. It kind of feels like there’s a lot of pressure to do the big sell. And I also really don’t like that fluffy webinar where the whole thing is a sales pitch with maybe five minutes of value. There’s maybe two slides with a little bit of value on them. And then the whole thing is a sales pitch. I will, I much prefer and I’m much more comfortable, uh, teaching and training and kind of giving away, demonstrating my expertise, demonstrating that I know what I’m talking about, you know, deliberately kind of telling jokes and sharing stories that are designed to attract and repel people, you know, really kind of putting my self into my teaching and training. And then, you know, from there, people either decide they love me or, you know, or they don’t and they click away and that’s the end of that.
It was again a bit of an experiment and because of my attitude, because I had this attitude in 2024 of experimentation. There was a joy and a lightness and an ease and a curiosity to it. I, it was, I approached the webinars that I hadn’t done forever with a lightness, you know, with a lightness and a curiosity and an openness to how can I make this hugely valuable for people, but, and not, but delete, delete, delete, and how can I weave in the pitch and the cell without it feeling like it’s just, you know, it’s either a disjointed segue or the whole thing is a bunch of guff, you know, a big, a big sell.
So I run a webinar called Consistent 10K+ Months in June following the Amplify event and right at the beginning of the Hustle and Heart open cart hustle and heart program, open cart. And then I ran another one in August called Unforgettable. And this time the Unforgettable webinar was proceeded by my Life’s A Pitch challenge.
So I had the content events, then the webinar, and then, you know, selling into whatever launch it was that I was doing, I chopped and changed what I was promoting at the end of each content event as well.
So the Life’s A Pitch Party is five days. I delivered it in February, 2024, as well as August. I changed the name from Life’s a Pitch Challenge to the Life’s a Pitch Party because it’s always been that way. Like it’s always had a really, I’ve enjoyed every minute of every Life’s A Pitch challenge that I’ve run and I’ve run it now about eight times.
You know, it does have this, uh, you know, this energy about it with everybody’s doing brave things and they’re getting out of their comfort zone and they’re getting responses and they’re getting opportunities and they’re getting meetings and you know, there’s a, there’s a real excitement that belays this where party is a much better description than a challenge.
So I had the unforgettable webinar in August. I tried also running a webinar for the first time without slides, which was fun, really fun, and I’m definitely keen on doing it again. I think there’s a lot of difference between getting a group together on Zoom without slides and getting a group together on Zoom with slides.
And then, you know, in between, of course, I had some breaks. So I, in July, I went to a yoga retreat by myself. I went to Blackheath with my partner and daughters. Uh, I went to Canberra with my extended family for a few days to celebrate my brother-in-law’s birthday. Uh, and then I went overseas in September, October to the UK and Spain. So there was a lot of experiments and most importantly, that attitude of, uh, curiosity of open-mindedness and of joy.
And how did I do that exactly? Cause I want this, you know, I really want this podcast to be practical, right? Like even when it appears we’re pontificating, going down, all matter of rabbit warrens, all matter of existential, you know, meanderings, I want this to be practical. So how did I practically do this? I practically did this by of course, replicating what I’d done in the past. Always starting with a template, always reusing, reducing and recycling what I’ve already got and what I’ve already done. Yeah. A lot of digital marketing is copy and paste. And that absolutely is true when we’re promoting something that we’ve already run in the past.
The other way that I did this from a practical perspective is every single morning, I took my responsibility to hype myself up. Seriously. Not a serious outcome, but a serious commitment, right? A serious ritual. Every single morning I played the music. I had the playlist happening. I had the song, if you’re interested, I thrashed, thrashed the song, Bulletproof. Uh, I’ve got to find the name of the singer now. It is a, um, a pure pop song, high energy. Uh, Leroux, I think it is the artist. I absolutely thrash that song to death because it got me, you know, it was almost like is it Pablovian’s dog response? It’s like hearing the song, I’d kind of trained myself to get excited and you can do it with any song, right? If you, if you want to, you can train yourself like a dog to celebrate on demand, to, to actually get excited on demand through that ritual of playing that song over and over again.
So I also committed of course to health and creativity. So this is part of what we do every single week in Audacious, in my Audacious Mastermind. Everybody commits to what they’re doing for their health and what they’re doing for their creativity. And these are, you know, much like joy related to joy, these are fuel for your tank, fuel for your tank to get you motivated, to get you joyful, to get you enthusiastic, to get you focused. Yeah.
And the other point that I’m making here too, is that because the 2024 and especially the second half of 2024 worked so well, because I was opening more conversations in more rooms, because I had the telegram group and the WhatsApp group and the Facebook group, the emails, you know, the, the, the conversations.
Weather turns when I got back from the UK, I don’t love the UK to be polite. And I don’t love cold weather. So I’m very much, you know, a creature who, when it’s, when the weather turns cold, I get sad and I kind of retreat. I hibernate and when the weather gets warm, you know, I get extroverted. So I got off the plane, it felt like I got off the plane and I just jumped straight into the deep end. I went straight to South by Southwest Festival in Sydney, which was awesome, I highly recommend it. Had an absolute great time with my friend, Kathy Rhodes, the Thought Alchemist and extroverted hard. It was like two extroverts on a mission. And this really paid dividends because I’m opening more conversations with more people in more rooms. And these experiments that I was running were laid on one on top of the other, on top of the other, the, the, the marketing campaigns, the launches, the content events, the free content events, the low price content events.
You know, the, the different things that I was selling at different price points, high price point, mid price point, low price points. It gave people an opportunity to swirl into my ecosystem, to enter my world and to swirl around and to have a real experience of me and hustle and heart, my business, and then to choose how and when and where they were going to do business. So the details of exactly how you do this, I think are far less important. Don’t use the how as a stick in which to beat yourself. Yeah. Because you can come up with the perfect game plan of, you know, layered marketing campaigns, and it doesn’t necessarily work.
Yeah. And I think for a lot of us, especially conscientious people, we get, we get so hung up on the details of what comes first, second, third, and should it be a Tuesday or a Thursday and should it be May or June that we forget and we, you know, we use this as a reason to never quite launch. Yeah. And the reason that 2024 was so fun was so profitable for me is because I didn’t slow down and overthink things. Yeah. When I realised actually, you know, the business retreat was not gonna go ahead and I, you know, I needed to, I needed to hustle, I needed to experiment, I needed to sell to make up for the lost time, the lost money, the lost effort.
You know, it was the attitude that made it successful more than the details. Yeah. Because yes, we can, you know, you can employ me, you can join my mastermind or employ me for coaching and we can get into the nitty gritty details for sure. But don’t think that you can’t start because you don’t know exactly, you know, the ins and outs of what to do and when. Yeah.
The point is opening more conversations with more people in more rooms will pay dividends and when we can add joy, when we can use joy to fuel us and when we can learn how to deliberately hype ourselves up to get ourselves into that joyful optimistic upbeat entrepreneurial creative resourceful resilient mind every single morning, this is when our joy turns into profit. This is when not only does our joy turn into profit, but we start having a hell of a lot more fun in the process. And this is the connection between joy and profit.
Real quick before you go, if this episode has gotten you thinking, gotten you excited, or has you changing the way that you do business or life.
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