Jon Goodman
Appearances
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
What your customer, what your client actually needs to succeed is a relatively low level of information. You really don't need to know that much. Therefore, there is a significant point of diminishing returns when it comes to industry-specific knowledge. And so these leapfrog skills really, wealth management, presentation communication skills, behavioral psychology,
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
So let me tell you, let me go quick because I know you want to go fast. So let me tell you about how you gain these skills, then the process of it. Yeah. Call this leapfrog learning. And so if you accept the fact that you really only need to build a mediocre to low level of this new skill set, then you understand that you can actually do it really, really quickly.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
And so what I recommend is you don't have to always be in one of these phases, but you take 60 days. And you decide on which skill to learn. And there's two parts of it. Number one is 60 days to learn it. And number two is teach it to somebody else. Because the best way to learn is to teach. And so I'll give you an example.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
I really wanted to wrap my head around artificial intelligence and automation. But in a very specific way, a number of years ago, what I wanted to do is I wanted to know about how artificial intelligence and automation is going to redefine job roles specific to the coaching industries.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
What skills it's going to choose for. What's going to become obsolete? And I wanted to learn that because we were building our software platform, but I was also just personally interested in it. And so for 60 days, I went and found every single book I could possibly find on the subject. At that time, there were about seven on redefinition of job roles for artificial intelligence.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
And I spoke to people and I listened to podcasts and I joined the Reddit communities for AI and automation. And I obsessed over it for 60 days. And then at the end of the 60 days, I created a Google document with my findings. Basically, I created a white paper saying, here's the skills that are important. Here's what I found. Here's great quotes. Here's great resources.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
What's up, Rudy? Good to see you, man.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
And then I sent it to five friends. And that was it. I did the same thing with building our family's wealth philosophy. For 60 days, I read as many books as I could find about... Well, the first thing that I did is I had to educate myself on the definitions. So I read one book that basically taught me the history of money... how debt works, how credit works.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
At that point, I knew all of the main terms. I knew the main background, right? Not going to work in the industry, but like I understand the lingo. And then I went and read a bunch of books. I'm a reader. You don't have to read. But then I went and read a bunch of books on what people who work in money, how they actually invest their own money.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
And I spoke to as many people from as many different camps as possible, from real estate to cryptocurrencies to regular stock investing to whatever, right? And Alice and my wife and I had conversations throughout. She was listening to podcasts and things at the same time. And then what we did at the end of the 60 days was we said, okay, what's our family's philosophy to this?
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
For us, personally, it's actually accepting, we are unwilling to accept even the littlest chance of catastrophic risk. And we will give up tremendous upside benefits in exchange for eliminating even the littlest bit of catastrophic risk. The four buckets that we're going to invest into. And then what I did is I created a presentation out of it.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
And I presented it to my mentorship and I presented it on my podcast. That's it. Yeah, I love it. The next one.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
Where are my blind spots? What am I missing? What am I getting right?
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
It's called The Obvious Choice, Timeless Lessons on Success, Profit, and Finding Your Way. what happened was that in 2021, business, for the first time ever, was not doing that great. In and around the same time, my wife got diagnosed with cancer. I needed room to breathe. I fired everybody. And I started over once we found out that my wife was going to be okay.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
And I had that amazing opportunity after 10 years and success in business, helping over 65,000 people directly who we've helped with our products and services. Knowing now what we know starting over. It's been fun. It's been explosive growth. And so what this book is, is this book is the 15 greatest lessons from that period of time.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
And the main thesis is pretty simple, which is you got to know what game you're playing. And you have to understand the rules of that game. And games are simply different. They're not better than one than the other. For example, this is just one of the examples in the book, the game of trying to be an influencer online, an influencer, a creator, an entertainer, it's all the same shit.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
Yeah, I mean, all the important parts of my life. I'm a dad of two. I have my third child on the way, two boys. I spent the last 12 winters abroad, so I traveled four to six months a year every year for the last 12 years. Lived basically everywhere throughout the world, from Canada, so escaped the winters. Come back in the summer, my home's Toronto.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
They're synonyms of one another, right? The game of trying to be an influencer is different from the game of building a business. Mm-hmm. And neither game is worse or better, but they have different rules of engagement, odds of success, time horizons, and reward mechanisms.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
And problems arise when you conflate one game with the other, when you desire the rewards of one, but you're playing by the rules of the other. And what's happening right now is that a lot of people are playing the look at me online, I want to win the internet game. When really, like your goal on Instagram is not to be famous on Instagram.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
It's to perhaps leverage that media to achieve some other desired outcome. Now, I would take it a step back and say, what's your desired outcome? Is that media even the best way to achieve that? Maybe yes, maybe no. If so, are you using it in a way that serves your goals and not the goals of the social media company?
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
Because again, you're playing different games. The goals of the social media company is for you to create as much free content as possible and be on there as long as possible. Your goals are probably... to spend as little time and money and effort as possible and get the hell off and have it serve your business.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
And so nobody's wrong, but the insights that they're going to give you is clearly going to align with their desired outcome. And so you cannot measure your success on their platform based off of those insights. It's just one example.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
Yeah, so the book is Kindle, Audible, hardcover. It's published by HarperCollins. You can get it anywhere you get books. Order a copy of the book. Order a copy. I don't care what format. Order a copy of the book. You can find me on Instagram or Twitter. I'm at itscoachgoodman.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
During all that time, yeah, I mean, I built up a whole bunch of businesses, basically congruent businesses that are complementary to one another for people who work in the health and fitness space. So everything from coaching businesses to we've got a software company with about 40,000 users. I wrote the textbook for online fitness.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
And if you don't love the book when it comes, you can send me a message and I'll refund you 100% of the money you spent on it. And send him an angry message. A really angry message. Read letters. I promise you it will ruin my day. Send me the angriest message you possibly can. But I'm serious. I will send you back 100% of your money. So you have no reason not to pick up the phone.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
Well, I can condense it, but I mean, the stories are what makes it memorable. Stories are what helps people apply it.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
I've self-published 11 books, hosted five conferences, created eight digital products, produced and sold information in about every way you could possibly produce and sell information, generated in and around $35 million in sales, average about a 60% to 65% profitability.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
And what's unbelievable about these skills are multiple things. If you work for yourself, you're going to easily stand out amongst your industry because most other people in your industry are going to do the easy thing. And the easy thing is always to learn more about something you're already good at or add something on to knowledge you already have.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
Stories about you, Rudy. I have stories about you that I will share one time.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
Who is this? This is like 2000 years ago. Yeah.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
why I didn't do it but think about like this is like pure butterfly effect right or sliding doors like yo if you got on that bus how would our lives have been different I mean I didn't know you from anybody else
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
Sure, and I would love for you to be there and hang out and ride scooters and build stuff with you, but imagine what would have happened if we were to work together then. Maybe I'd be sitting in a big green chair beside your big red chair. Who knows?
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
I would have owned you. I would have gotten you to sign contracts. Everything you produce would be mine.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
Okay, so... My background is personal training. And I realized very early on when I was personal training that the vast majority of people that I ever worked with really did not need anything complicated. And I think this is actually the case with just about every career. Like what you do and the value of what you do is important.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
Not because it's necessarily that important, but because it feels good.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
Your credentials, your education, whatever your study is very, very important. What your customer, what your client actually needs to succeed is a relatively low level of information. And this is the case for just about every career. Like if you want to solve your customer's problem, you really don't need to know that much.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
Therefore, there is a significant point of diminishing returns when it comes to industry-specific knowledge. that I think is underappreciated.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
Now, this isn't to say that you should not continue to develop your industry specific knowledge, but you have to understand that you're developing that largely selfishly for yourself because it's something you're interested in and less potentially to serve your customers.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
And so, you know, going back to my career, like I was a mediocre to low quality personal trainer when you looked at my knowledge of physiology, biomechanics, even psychology. But the reason why I was so successful as a personal trainer at a very young age is I was also a mediocre to low level at writing and behavioral psychology and marketing.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
And so if I continued to just go along the general path of continuing to get better just at personal training specific, like physiology, reading more studies, whatever, one plus one equals two. It's linear growth that actually starts to level off reasonably quickly, if you can picture this on a graph.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
But when I started to combine low to mediocre skill sets of these other what I call leapfrog skills, What happens is 1 plus 1 plus 1 doesn't equal 3 anymore. Now it equals 10. It becomes exponential. And so these leapfrog skills, really, I mean, I've identified five in the obvious choice in this book, but there are more. And so wealth management, presentation communication skills. Hmm.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
behavioral psychology, call it business writing, but like writing, business writing. And what's unbelievable about these skills are multiple things. Number one, they can be combined with any industry, with any industry specific knowledge, exponentially positive gains. It does not matter whether you're an entrepreneur or a business owner or whether you're an employee.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
What you're going to do is you're going to make yourself indispensable by learning these skills. And so if you work for somebody else, you're going to make yourself indispensable for them and can command a higher salary or move somewhere else if they're not paying you.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
If you work for yourself, you're going to easily stand out amongst your industry because most other people in your industry are going to do the easy thing. And the easy thing is always to learn more about something you're already good at.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
Or add something on to knowledge you already have, not because it's necessarily that important, but because it feels good to reinforce what you already know.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
That's probably what you people need. You don't want to be over the head with this shit. Yeah.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
And you've got to be able to, I don't know about you, man. I've hired a lot of contractors and consultants who are really bad at what they do.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
I'll add a third reason because I think you nailed the first two. I'll add a third reason why I found that people are pretty resistant to this. And it's imposter syndrome. And so can I tell a quick story?
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
So in college, my roommate smoked a joint, put a bunch of oil on a pan, was going to fry some potatoes, and then went and lay down and fell asleep. And what happened is that the pan got on fire. And when I walked in, my roommate is sleeping, to be honest. I don't actually remember. I probably smoked the joint with him. I don't actually remember. Either way, he was sleeping.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
I noticed a pot was on fire in the kitchen. And so I picked up the pot and I brought it outside to the driveway, which was very lucky, as you'll soon see. And then I went and got a big bucket of water and I filled up the bucket of water and I tossed it on the fire in the driveway. Now, if you're listening to this and you understand how to put out a fire, you immediately know how stupid I was.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
Because what happens is that oil and water don't mix. They naturally oppose each other. Now, if the oil's on fire, when you put water on that oil on fire, it basically blasts that oil away. Said another way, it makes a fucking fireball. You don't put water on a grease fire on an oil file. So I didn't know that, right? Luckily, I was on the driveway. The thing basically blew up.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
It was actually really cool, but it didn't cause any damage. OK, now imagine you're a firefighter and it's your first day on the job and somebody calls you and they say, we have a fire in the house. All of the other firefighters, you feel like you're not enough to them. Right. They've been there for a long time. They know all this about fire theory. They've gone on all of these jobs.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
Anyway, you get to the house and you're like, yo, that's a grease fire. And you take a dry chemical extinguisher and you put it out. And then you say to the family, the next time that this happens, throw some baking soda on it, cover it, turn off the heat source, wait for it to self-extinguish. And you post shirtless for calendar, kiss a baby, do whatever I expect firefighters do. Yeah.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
That person whose problem you solved is ecstatic. They don't care that it's your first day on the job. You knew how to put out the fire.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
Other firefighters might laugh at you. Maybe, probably not. But that's completely irrelevant.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
And so I think a lot of the reason why we always feel like we need to learn more about what we're doing is because we're stuck comparing ourselves to colleagues, which is Kind of a symptom of the world that we live in, where we're all in these really tight filter bubbles. The only people that surround us are people like us. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we compare ourselves to them.
Living The Red Life
Leap Frog Your Way To The Top With Jonathan Goodman
We're too close to our own world.