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In today’s podcast we’re going to talk about how to avoid one of the biggest causes of procrastination in business, shiny object syndrome.
Too many people don’t make progress in their online business simply because they never truly finish a project.
In this conversation we’re going to talk about 4 critical strategies for prioritizing what to do so you can get more done and avoid the mistakes we made when starting out with our online business.
You will learn
- Why shiny object syndrome is a great way to feel busy. (but not make money)
- The reason you need to finish one project before starting another.
- How we’re using the AAA strategy to streamline our production.
- Why you need a mastermind.
- The importance of systems to decide what you need to be working on.
- How to use voting and surveys to improve sales and product ideas.
- Why you don’t need to reinvent the wheel.
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show
- The Flip Your Life Community
- Get in touch with us
- Pat Flynn’s episode we mention (AAA)
- Elementary Librarian
- US History Teacher
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!
Listen to what others are saying about Flipped Lifestyle
I was listening to your podcast from last week on my run today and it inspired me to share a couple of sacrifices I have made lately to fund my online business. I figured I wouldn’t be doing any triathlons for a while so I sold my vintage, 2002 Trek Time trial bike last week. Yesterday, I cancelled my satellite radio subscription, $300; you are so right, in the long run, these won’t be missed. I need to invest in the tools to make this online business thing happen.
Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air!
Can’t Miss Moments
Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family.
You can connect with S&J on social media too!
Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show!
If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week!
Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all! On today’s podcast, we’re going to tell you how to avoid Shiny Object Syndrome in your online business.
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Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
SHANE: What’s going on guys, welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast; great to be back with you again this week. Last week, we talked a lot about overcoming perfectionism in your online business, how you cannot use perfectionism as an excuse for procrastination. Jocelyn said that was her big thing that she had to struggle with, she had to fight with; this pursuit of perfectionism and how it holds her back sometimes in online business. This week, we’re going to flip the script and we are going to come after one of my biggest struggles and that is, Shiny Object Syndrome. That’s where you have so many ideas and so much mud on the wall, you just can’t even figure out what to do next and Jocelyn says I’m like a little squirrel chasing all these little ideas around in our online business. So, we’re going to talk about how to overcome Shiny Object Syndrome, how you can prioritize exactly what to be working on in your online business. What is that next step that you need to take care of but first, we have a very interesting story that we want to share with you from an audience member.
JOCELYN: All right, each week on our podcast, we share something that comes from our audience. Sometimes it’s a review, sometimes it’s a success story and this week it’s actually a sacrifice story. A while back, on our Flip Your Life group, we put out there, “What have you sacrificed in order to gain traction in your online business?” One of our participants in Flip Your Life, his name is J.J. Mayo and he said, “I was listening to your podcast from last week on my run today and it inspired me to share a couple of sacrifices I have made lately to fund my online business. I figured I wouldn’t be doing any triathlons for a while so I sold my vintage, 2002 Trek Time trial bike last week.” That probably means a lot more to some of you guys –
SHANE: That’s probably a really cool bike but we don’t ride bikes.
JOCELYN: Yeah, so he says he put it on Craig’s List and it was gone in one day for $1000; so that must have been a pretty sweet bike. “Yesterday, I cancelled my satellite radio subscription, $300; you are so right, in the long run, these won’t be missed. I need to invest in the tools to make this online business thing happen.” We were so excited to see this story and we really wanted to share it with you because a lot of times, we talk about things that we sacrificed in the beginning. I mean, we have given up a lot of different things; we sold our house to buy a smaller house, all to make this online business thing work. So, if you are out there thinking that you are alone or that nobody else is doing this, there are people out there who are giving things up in order to make their dreams come true. So, look around your house, look around your garage, see what you can sell, what you can get rid of in order to get money to move this online business thing further. You can do this.
SHANE: That’s one of the great things about your Flip Your Life program is we have this community of people that come in. We are actually in the Facebook group every single day and we are prompting them with tips that they can do, things that they can take care of in an online business to really go the next level, we talk about sacrificing and it wasn’t just JJ’s post; there was 20 other people that probably posted something they gave up last week to make enough money to buy a new tool or to free up enough time in their schedule; something they sacrificed, maybe a hobby or something where they could work on their online business and that’s a great thing about that community is that it’s just a bunch of people in the same place trying to achieve the same goal of making it online where they can have enough money extra to give them some margin in their budget, maybe quit their job someday like some of our participants have and just provide accountability. When you are sacrificing something, it feels like you are giving that up but when you are doing that with other people in a mastermind group or in a community like Flip Your Life, it really helps to keep you moving forward, to keep making those sacrifices, to keep going after those wins until you do make it online. If you’d like to check out our community and check out our Flip Your Life program, you can do that over at Flippedlifestyle.com/Flipyourlife. We would love to have you in there, love to hold you accountable and love to help you take your online business to the next level. Also, if you have a success story or a sacrifice story, anything that we have done through our podcast, our blog posts or any other program that we offer that has helped you succeed in your online business whether it’s your first sale or even just creating a plan where you can get your online business started, we would love to hear that from you. Just head over to Flippedlifestyle.com/contact and send us a message and maybe we will share that on the air just like we did JJ’s story today. All right guys, so let’s jump into this Shiny Object Syndrome and break this down really what this is and why it is a huge problem for a lot of entrepreneurs especially for me. I really struggle with this that our actual brand, the first thing that we ever created when we were creating our business; right now our business is officially called Sams Digital LLC; sounds all official and –
JOCELYN: Very professional.
SHANE: – very professional but actually, at first, didn’t know what to call our business that was sitting like behind all of our other websites. So, we called it – what was it; shiny object –
JOCELYN: Shiny Objects Media.
SHANE: Shiny Objects Media and we had a little squirrel that was holding a nut that was like a diamond. It was shaped like a walnut but it was a diamond because we just thought that would be funny to hold our attention but then, people started getting that it looked kind of weird so we changed it to Sam’s Digital. But that’s how much I struggled with this when I first started out. Shiny Object Syndrome is that I have a thousand ideas and I start as many of them as I can but I never finish everything and right when I start one idea, another domain name pops in my head or I get this idea for a new product but I haven’t even completed the product before.
JOCELYN: Or you are listening into a podcast and somebody has a really great strategy and you want to employ that right away.
SHANE: I have to go out and create this entire ad campaign even though I have never created an ad campaign or whatever. So, Shiny Object Syndrome is a really bad thing. It’s a lot like perfectionism and it’s going to hold you back and make you procrastinate in a weird way because you are going to do something, you are going to start a project, you are going to work on it for about a week, get a new idea and then start a new one. Get a new idea and then start a new one. So, all of a sudden, you are going to have ‘ten different pots on the stove,’ as Jocelyn always says and you’re not cooking anything. It’s just a bunch of pots on the stove. When I first started out, I started five different websites the first week probably just to throw as many ideas on the walls I could and just to see what would stick and really nothing was working. I was gaining no traction. It’s a miracle that we ever got that first 11-cent click as little as I was putting into each individual site because I was trying everything. I was trying to do a daddy blog about our kids, I was trying to make a thing where I was posting worksheets up for teachers, I had a coaching site but it wasn’t CoachXO, it was called Chalkthrus.com and it was absolutely terrible.
JOCELYN: You had a Bible site.
SHANE: Yeah, I was sharing a Bible verse everyday or something like that, I had – what else did I have? I don’t know, I had a work-out-at-home thing called ‘Dad’s home gym’ which was hilarious because I stopped working out a week into the program because I hated it.
JOCELYN: I think we should probably stop listing domains; we may be here for the next 20 minutes.
SHANE: Yeah, I think we still own 35 domains but at one time, we had 75 or something like that because every idea that popped into our head, we took it.
JOCELYN: By “We” you mean you.
SHANE: By “We” I mean me. Jocelyn had to do a little intervention there to stop the domain name purchasing.
JOCELYN: I have five domains maybe and for an internet marketer, that’s not a whole lot.
SHANE: I got about 30 that I’m still hanging on to because I’m gonna do something with them someday, dadgoneit. But the moral of the story is, Shiny Object Syndrome is a great way to feel busy. It’s a great way to feel like you are making progress. I mean, look at me, I’m a startup, I’m a serial entrepreneur, I’m starting businesses every week but the problem is, nothing is actually happening in the business.
JOCELYN: Yeah, if you have ten websites and none of them are making any money –
SHANE: You’ve probably got Shiny Object Syndrome.
JOCELYN: Exactly. So, on the other hand, I’m a very sequential person. I like to finish one thing before moving on to the next and I’m also what’s called ‘intrinsically motivated’. We are getting into some psychology here on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast and yes, I had to look this up on Google before we started the show. But, that just means that I don’t necessarily have to get some type of an external reward or a benefit for getting things done and this is really beneficial in online business because I have the ability to work and work and work even though I am not really seeing an immediate benefit. So, in online business, doing things in a sequential way really works best.
SHANE: I am not the sequential person and I am intrinsically motivated that I can get obsessed with something but it’s for a short period of time but I need that feedback or I am going to trigger and go to something else. If I work on a website for a week or a project for a week, if I get bored with it or something is not finished or it’s not launched or somebody has not paid me for that in a pre-launch or something like that, I very easily put that aside and then move on to the next thing and that’s really bad to do because if you try to start five projects at once, you’re probably like me and at first you think, ‘Well, I’ll just wait until something hits and I’ll finish them all at once if I can just multitask.’ But, that’s really not what’s true. You are not able to multitask online in these different online businesses. One of the most important things that we learnt or that Jocelyn taught me, actually –
JOCELYN: I like that, thanks.
SHANE: You like that? Is that you have to do things – you have to finish one project to completion before you move on to your next project to see if that actually works. A great illustration of this is something that we learnt called A-A-A and we actually learned this from Pat Flynn, he learnt it from a book. He actually talks about this on his podcast; I’ll try and find that episode and send it to you but the moral of the story works like this: if you got three projects, if you’ve got A, B and C, so your Shiny Object Syndrome has kicked in and you’ve got all three projects going at once. Well, if you work on project A for a week, and project B for a week, and project C for a week, and it’s going to take you three weeks to complete any of these projects, well, after three weeks, you’ve only got one part of every product done. You have nothing completed, nothing for sale, nothing to show for your labor. You’ve still worked for three straight weeks but you have nothing to do for it. If you had just spent that same three weeks and went A-A-A and you completed A and you put it for sale, now you can see if someone’s gonna give you money. While you are waiting for the results from A because it’s finished, you can go B-B-B and now you have A and B finished after six weeks; two products for sale and then you can finish C so you’ve got that nine weeks. So instead of waiting nine weeks for completion, because if you worked A-B-C three weeks, nothings done, A-B-C six weeks, still nothing is done, you’re not even gonna have a completed product for almost nine weeks. You are going to give up, you’re gonna quit and nothing is going to come of it. If you had just went A-A-A, if you had just finished that product and got it over with, now you are going to have something to show for it, you are going to get that extrinsic reward, it’s going to motivate you to do the next project. Jocelyn, when she started her first website, I had ten going, she did one, which I did buy that domain for you and force you to start it by the way.
JOCELYN: Yes, all of my success is thanks to you.
SHANE: All your success is clearly because of that spark but she finished that first project and that’s why she had so much success.
JOCELYN: Yeah, that’s just the way that my mind works and it’s just the difference between us and it’s actually a really good relationship because I always say that I would never start anything and Shane would never finish anything. So, it works out really well that we are together and that we can really complement each other in that way. Sometimes it is problematic and we do have our differences for sure.
SHANE: You should hear the outtakes of these podcasts you are listening to; I’m just saying, we got a good editor. I’m just saying.
JOCELYN: Right. So, yeah I mean, we do have our differences and there are some days that is not always sunshine and roses but for the most part, we use those differences to help us move forward in our online business and so that’s what we are really here to talk about today. All right, so I’m gonna take what we were talking about just a few minutes ago, the principle of A-A-A and I’m going to tell you what that looks like in real life because that’s actually what we are in the middle of right now. We have three projects going on right now, we have this website, Flipped Lifestyle, we have my Elementary Librarian website, and we have the U.S. History teachers’ website. All of these websites need a big project done in the next few months.
SHANE: And why is that?
JOCELYN: Well, we have summer coming up and that means that that is our busy season for both of our teacher websites. So, because we need to dedicate a lot of time to our teacher websites coming up in June, July and August, we need to put a lot of work into Flipped Lifestyle right now so that we don’t have as much work to do on it over the summer.
SHANE: So, in April, this month, we are picking Flipped Lifestyle as A. We are going to go A-A-A-A for four straight weeks. We are batching podcasts, writing any posts that we might put up, we are scheduling a bunch of things to roll out over time because we want to make sure that we are still serving our audience, you guys, over the summer while we are working on these other projects. So by April 30th, we are going to have Flipped Lifestyle completely automated all the way through August that way we can make sure it’s off our plate and all we have to do is take care of your Flip Your Life group and our participants in that course and then interact with you guys on email and on social media. We can do that every day really quickly in the morning but all of our content is completely created, it’s completely done, we’ve removed that off of our plate and now that it’s finished and it’s completely automated, then we can move on to B in May, which is –
JOCELYN: Elementary Librarian. We’re going to work on it in May so we are going to dedicate the entire month of May to getting that site cleaned up and ready for the next year of lesson plans and posts and things like that. Then in June, once Flipped Lifestyle and Elementary Librarian are both automated and ready to go for a little bit, then we are going to turn our attention to the history website and get everything ready to go for it. So then by the time July rolls around, we’ll be ready to jump back in to all the things that we normally do. So it’ll be more multitasking at that point but the reason that we’ll be able to multitask is because we put that work into automating and batching content for our other sites in the months prior to that.
SHANE: And we have to get those finished because let’s say that we only spend like – we are going to do one week and then we are going to do a couple of weeks of work on Flipped Lifestyle, then we’ll work on Elementary Librarian for a week, then we’ll work on the history side for a week. If we were to do that, then we’re going to be so stressed out and so overwhelmed and just every week in May, something is going to come up for Flipped Lifestyle that we didn’t do. That’s going to take away time from Elementary Librarian, that’s going to put the history site on the backburner and then in June, it’s the same thing. Everything is going to be just this big cluster of mess of stuff to do every day. We are going to be stressed out, we’re going to be switching gears all the time and basically we know from experience that by July 1st, we could have had all the three websites completely automated for three more months and we would not have any of it done and we would still be working from week to week, day-to-day, just trying to stay above water. So, that’s a great example of how you take A-A-A and you pick the most important thing and we usually pick things of importance. We are going to tell you how we do that here in a minute and it will kind of apply that back to why we’re choosing Flipped Lifestyle first, Elementary Librarian and the history site but there’s a certain way that you have to prioritize things to make sure you are getting the most important things off your plate first and then moving forward to the things that you need to do next. So, what we are going to do with the rest of this podcast is we’re going to give you four strategies, I guess, to show you exactly how to choose what to prioritize in your online business. How to pick what to do next and how to overcome the Shiny Object Syndrome, get all these ideas off your plate and pick things that are going to make you the most successful and make the most money.
JOCELYN: All right, the first thing that you need to do is you need to have an individual or some kind of very small, mastermind group to give some feedback and somebody who balances you out. You don’t want to choose somebody or an individual or a group of people who jump from one idea to the next because that’s not gonna help you. That’s just going to add fuel to your fire.
SHANE: If you find a website that’s like, ‘Serial entrepreneur mastermind group’ do not join that because you don’t –
JOCELYN: Run.
SHANE: Run as far as you can.
JOCELYN: Or shiny object mastermind group.
SHANE: Shane: Get out of town.
JOCELYN: So just like we were saying with the two of us, we balance each other really well because I am not a shiny object person and Shane is a shiny object person. So it works really well. You know, he starts the ideas, I make sure that he does the follow-through or both of us do the follow-through. So, that is a great kind of relationship to have. So, we really highly recommend that if you are somebody who follows shiny objects, you need to find someone who does not. You also need somebody who’s going to be super-honest with you and this is kind of hard to do and it’s the way that Shane and I operate. We are very honest with each other and sometimes it’s not always pleasant. We both know that it’s for the greater good so we really try to be respectful and listen when the other person is like, ‘No, this is not the right way to go.’ So just make sure that you find someone out there who complements you in that way.
SHANE: All right, the second thing you have to do is you got to develop a system to find out what is the most important thing that you should be working on in your online business. You know, if you are jumping from task to task and you are looking at all these things that you want to do for your website, all these ideas that you have, and you are spending one hour designing a logo for this website, you are designing another hour where you are trying to make the color scheme right on this other website that you got going and then you jump back to the first website and then you got to write a blog post but you get bored and you switch over to the other one and you write a blog post and you’re trying to create content and then you are trying to schedule out social media posts for one website and then you are trying to do another one and so you go by all these tools and you are trying to set all this up – if you are just jumping back and forth from task to task and you are working on all these different things, you could spend 20 hours in a week designing four logos and creating five blog posts that really don’t do anything but just create some random content or you could spend an hour on each social media account for every website that you’ve started. You’re going to spend 20 hours doing a bunch of menial tasks for a bunch of different things that are not going to get you any closer to making money. So, a great way to look at this is that every task, every post-it note, everything you write down when you are trying to be all Shiny Object Syndrome going on, is, is this getting me closer to making money? What talk could I be doing right now that could get me closer to creating a product or selling a product or someone giving me money for my service?
JOCELYN: And the way that we do this is with a spreadsheet and you don’t have to do it this way, you can write it down, whatever makes the most sense to you; but we just list out every project that we think we could possibly do, that could possibly be profitable and what we do is we put a completion date by that because a lot of our businesses are seasonal and we know that products need to be done by a certain date and so we’ll write a date down. Then we’ll write down an estimated revenue stream; so how much do we think this product could possibly make and using that, the dates along with how much we think it could make, we make a priority list. So, we just put a number one, two, three on the sides of those things and that’s how we decide what’s the most important thing that we can work on next.
SHANE: And the spreadsheet’s great because you get to throw all the ideas on the paper. You just have this brain dump of all your Shiny Object Syndrome. When we did this back in – when did we do this? In February or something?
JOCELYN: Something like that.
SHANE: We did this back in February and we wrote down all of these projects. So, Jocelyn had three and I had 30. So we wrote down all the things on the spreadsheet, all these different ideas that we had that we thought we could make a product to make money out of, it allowed me to get my Shiny Object Syndrome out quickly and not actually work on these projects and then once we went through this, I had Jocelyn there and we were looking at it to evaluate what was actually profitable, what can we do in the shortest amount of time to make the most amount of money and it was very easy at that point to just say okay, all these ideas still exist they are still on the spreadsheet but we are just going to work on this one, this one and this one until they are done. It was great when we did that because it allowed us to look at all of our ideas like a business. You got to treat your online stuff as a business. Everything is about the bottom line; you have to look at the actions that will help you earn a profit. Yes, you have to worry about helping people, you are providing value and doing all those things but that’s later in the products. You got to also stay in business, you got to keep your doors open or you can’t help anybody. So you have to say what is most profitable. This is going to come as a surprise as most of you but if you’ll notice in the list that we created earlier, Coachxo.com was not in that list and the reason is, all of the ideas that we looked at for Coachxo.com, while they were great ideas and we go back to them later and we may look at them, we figured out that Flipped Lifestyle, Elementary Librarian.com and our history teacher website, we felt like those were greater opportunities to both get a project done quickly and to have something for sale as fast as possible. So, we have no plans to push Coachxo forward or to even update it or to even work on that site right now because when we looked at this objectively, we threw all the ideas out there and it did not seem as profitable as some of the other stuff. So it got put on the backburner, that’s my passion project. That’s one of my favorite things to do; go talk about football and make new products for that site but objectively from a business decision, I had to say, this site has a better chance right now to make our family’s life better, to make our business grow and I got to focus on it.
JOCELYN: So far, we talked about having an individual or a mastermind group to help you get feedback and we’ve also talked about developing systems to determine task importance. The next thing we are going to talk about when it comes to overcoming shiny object syndrome is to let your audience tell you what you should be working on and this is something that we should all be doing. If you have an audience, even just a very small audience you need to get feedback from them. You need to be sending them emails, asking them what do you like, what can I provide for you next, what would you like to purchase from me and all of those types of questions that you need to be asking them. You can do voting; people love to vote for things. People love to give an opinion. If you have people following you on a social media page, throw it out there. ‘I’m thinking about doing project A and project B; which one do you think will be better?’
SHANE: Jocelyn does this all the time with sales; tell them what you do with your sales like when you get the votes. Just how you get the idea what type to sell on.
JOCELYN: So, sometimes I’ll send out an email to my list and it just says, ‘What would you like to see on sale; which of my products?’ and I let them click a button and that just lets me know that that’s what these people are looking for and it also helps me to target them when I send out a next email. This helps you to know when people are willing to buy, what they are looking for and it just really opens up that dialogue with your customers and that’s really what all of us are here for. We are here to provide value; yes, we are here to make money as well but ultimately, if you are providing value for your customers, then they are going to want to purchase things that you are want to sell them. If you don’t have an audience yet, you can do this through keyword research. You can look up, see what kind of words that your audiences are searching for, what terms are they looking for and that’s what can guide your content so that you can then built an audience.
SHANE: You can also join Facebook groups and things like that and join the conversation of people that might be potential audience members. You don’t have to go in and sell things; you are going to get kicked out of the group if you do that but you can just listen to people’s pain points and struggles and you’ll learn quickly what people in the space that you want to enter into are looking for, what they are trying to buy and see how they are actually doing things. So, that’s a great way to do it and we know a lot of you probably are just starting out, don’t have an audience but you can tell what people are searching for. If they are searching for it, they want to buy it, they want that solution to their problem and if they are talking about it in a forum, a message board or a Facebook group or something like that, then it’s probably a need they have that they need met. The fourth thing that we would say to do is to study other people in your space. What are they focusing on? What kind of products are people in this space that you want to enter into? What are they providing? What are they giving to their audience because more than likely if someone is already in the space and they are already successful, they have done a ton of research and they know what their audience and their avatar wants. So if you have that same avatar, if you have that same kind of audience that you are looking to communicate with, just see what other people are doing and go do that. You are going to put your spin on it, you are going to make it unique by your messaging and the way you talk and the way you deliver content but there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel; you just have to kind of make it more round basically. When wheels started out, I’m actually going to go into a soliloquy here of wheels – ready for this Jocelyn? I’ve been working on this.
JOCELYN: I’m not really sure.
SHANE: Okay; so we’re gonna take wooden wheels. Wagons came out, they had wooden wheels but wooden wheels would break and they’d splinter and they were terrible. They were round, they worked when they weren’t broke in half on the side of the Oregon trail whatever, but then people came along and they said, let’s make tires, let’s inflate them with air. So we have tires now that work a whole lot better, when they do break, they are easier to fix. Then you have like older tires that were bad and modern tires got more like scientific, and they tread water off, and they work better and then now they have like self-inflating tires, tires that can’t go flat – nobody is reinventing the wheel literally. Each company, each iteration just keeps becoming better and better and better. So you can go out and see what’s working; go look at the wheel that the other people are selling and then just don’t reinvent it, just make it better. Don’t copy them, put your spin on it, make it unique, go take advantage of a part of the niche market that they are not reaching and you can go out and just learn to make your products that way because if your focusing on something that’s brand new, that no one has ever done, there’s probable a reason it’s brand new and no one’s ever done it because someone tried it and it did not sell. Companies do this all the time; I got a buddy that works for Pepsi and they always have like 50 drink-ideas that they’ve got at all time. That’s Shiny Object Syndrome. But what they do is, they just look at the market; like if Mountain Dew Orange comes out for Pepsi, well guess what comes out next? Coke sees that it’s successful and they immediately scrap all their ideas, they see a competitor that was working and they come out with Mellow Yellow Orange. Or, Xbox creates a game like Halo which is a shooter game; well, what does PlayStation do? They are not going to research a thousand other games to try and invent the new, greatest game. They just go release Call of Duty. So, a great way to overcome shiny object syndrome, you got a hundred ideas in the space, go look at someone who is successful. I would be willing to bet they are only selling one to three products, period. That’s where they are making all of their money, they’ve done some research, they have seen exactly what works and they have narrowed their focus down. So, if you have shiny object syndrome, narrow your focus, look what’s working, go do that. Just put your own unique spin on it. Don’t copy them, you can make your own product that’s you, your voice but narrow your focus down, get rid of all these other ideas by seeing what’s working in the marketplace right now for other people.
JOCELYN: All right, so that’s four ideas for helping you to overcome Shiny Object Syndrome and it’s going to kind of hard but you can do this. This is one of the things that I think a lot of entrepreneurs struggle with and if you are struggling with this and you got something out of these four ideas that we threw out there, come on over to Flippedlifestyle.com/podcast40 and let us know what you have learnt and how you are going to implement it going forward.
SHANE: All right, before we wrap up the show, we are going to do our can’t-miss moment for this episode and I think we have a couple of different ones this week. So mine is actually that Issac is on spring break this week. He gets a week off of school, he’s really excited because he always counts down the days till a break and he’s like, ‘I have nine days off’ and then the next day he’ll be like, ‘I’ve got eight days off daddy’ and he’ll just keep counting it down till he has to go back to school. But it was cool; the other day, the first day of spring break we got to wake up together, we were here at work, he didn’t have to go anywhere, Ana didn’t have to go anywhere and we just got to chill out in the morning. We read some books together and we got to relax on spring break. If we had a normal nine-to-five job, we might have to go to work and he might have to go to a babysitter so I wouldn’t be able to kind of enjoy his break with him. So, our days are very flexible this week while he’s on spring break. We’re trying to keep him here a little bit longer here in the mornings, relax and have some fun with them, play some games. We played Trouble the other day and I was the champion or Trouble –
JOCELYN: I was the loser.
SHANE: Jocelyn was totally last place, she couldn’t even get anybody out of the home square but it was just awesome to be able to just stay home with them when they have a break and spend a little more time together as a family.
JOCELYN: It’s also nice to not have to go anywhere this week. A lot of people are on vacations this week because their kids are on spring break but we actually took a trip just a few weeks ago when it wasn’t a break from school time and it was just really nice, because it wasn’t super-crowded –
SHANE: We don’t have to go travel somewhere if we don’t want to on the spring break period.
JOCELYN: The rates are a lot lower when we travel, so that is something that I like. It’s kind of bad when you are looking at other people’s pictures at the beach because you’re like, ‘Oh, I wish I was at the beach –’
SHANE: But then you’re like, I was at the beach a week ago.
JOCELYN: Yeah, we were at the beach a couple of months ago. So, my can’t-miss moment for this week is we actually to the kids to Mister Daddy’s which is little –
SHANE: It’s like Chuck E. Cheese kind of –
JOCELYN: Yeah, it’s like games and pizza and things like that. We just played games and there was hardly anybody there because –
SHANE: Lunch time.
JOCELYN: It was just a week day –
SHANE: Yeah, and that was when my brother, who is a teacher was on spring break so he got to come down and bring his kids. So we kind of got to take our time off and go hang out with them during their break whereas before, we always had breaks at different times so we didn’t actually get to hang out with them actually on those breaks.
JOCELYN: Yeah, so it was a good time and we’ve really been enjoying spring break. Hate to see it end.
SHANE: All right guys, that’s all we have for this week, thank you guys for listening. So take these last two podcasts, if you are struggling with perfectionism, put those strategies in place and don’t let that be a procrastination point for your business. If you are struggling with shiny objects, I struggle with it every day. I get out of the shower every day going, ‘I have three new domains I must buy’ and Jocelyn is like, ‘Don’t buy any domains today or I’ll take your credit card access.’ So basically, overcome those two things and move forward in your online business. Get something done whether it’s right, wrong or indifferent and you’ll be that much closer to making it online. Till next time, we will catch you all on the flip side. Thanks for listening.
JOCELYN: Bye.
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Sarah says
Awesome content….as usual. I have gotten s lot better, but in the beginning I always felt like I was chasing my tail because I would decide to batch social media posts for example then realize I needed the perms links for the blog posts to direct traffic or call to action. Then I would begin batching blog posts only to realize I needed images. If I had a sequence of steps to follow, I would not have felt so overwhelmed. So now I have procedure lists (exactly like I’m responsible for creating in my day job as a hospital pharmacist.) has totally revolutionized my productivity.
Evan says
Perfect episode for me–I totally have Shiny Object Syndrome. It’s so funny you posted this, because just this past weekend my husband said I needed to pick one thing and focus on it. I am trying to take your advice, and I’m happy to say I just got my first subscriber to my website (I’m calling it my own personal “eleven cent moment!”) Thanks as always for the great content. I’ve shared your info with lots of people I know, hope they take advantage of it as well as your course. Have a great day!
Julie Rains says
Thanks Jocelyn and Shane,
Enjoyed your podcast! I recently attended NMX in Vegas this past week. I met a lot of people who are like me…..wanting to make money online but struggling to even make a dime. I was surprised when Shane mentioned y’all had so many online businesses. My question is does it take multiply online businesses to be able to live off your earnings? I was told by several people last week at the event only a hand full of people are really making money.
Thanks for your time!
Julie Rains
Patrick J Roden says
Just got around to listening to Shiny Object Syndrome (been working long hrs) and my 1st action step was to UNSUBSCRIBE all the “make-money-online email newsletters” and narrowed my focus on you guys…
😉
Patrick
Shane Sams says
Ha! That is awesome Patrick. Glad you kept us around 😛
Michael Hawkins says
This was the perfect podcast for me. Shane: I laughed at loud when you listed all the domain names you have … and how every time you had a new idea, you ran to the computer and bought another one. Holy Cow! That’s ME. 100%.
I think I own about 40+ domains. How crazy is that.
Focusing on one thing is NOT my forte. I have to get better at it if I plan to be successful — in anything. : )
Thanks for the open, honest approach that you guys take.
Love it.
Joe says
Thanks for the shinny object insight Shane, I suffer from the same problem. Your examples provide a good process for overcoming this issue. Any chance of seeing a sample of the spreadsheet you referenced? Best wishes for your continued success.
Thanks,
Joe