843: DON'T get married!

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Hey, what is up?

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Welcome to this episode of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.

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As always, I'm your host, brian Lofermento, and this is a Solo Sunday episode where I'm just excited to just think with you and just talk with you about the concept of permanence and things that are temporary.

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I'm summing this up as don't get married.

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I'm excited about this one.

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Let's dive in, all right.

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So if you saw the title of this episode and you thought to yourself, brian, that's the message you want to share with us today.

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I'm not talking about marriage as far as love and life.

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I am talking about how married all of us get to so many different things in life and business.

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What I'm really talking about is we get married to our ideas, we get married to our businesses, we get married to our identities, and I've been thinking about it so much lately.

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The more that I interact with so many of you entrepreneurs and so many of you amazing entrepreneurs out there, the more I realize that it's actually a dangerous topic of getting married to all of these different things, and I've always been a big fan of the concept.

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It's a very simple concept.

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It has served me so well at so many different points in my life through the good times and the bad times.

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The concept of this, too shall pass, and especially when I've been going through difficult times.

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I'm thinking back to 2019, I think it was when my grandmother passed away.

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She lived until over a hundred and that was really tough.

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Her passing, of course anyone.

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When we lose people in our lives, it's really difficult.

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I think back to 2020, which was obviously a difficult year for all of us globally because of the pandemic really shook life up in so many different ways.

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2021 was a difficult year for me.

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2015, I mean I can recount the times in my life because they're major life milestones of family members passing away or big life changes or moves.

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There's a lot of difficult things that we go through in life and in those moments it's always served me of.

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This too shall pass, which, for me, it's just a very solid reminder of, yeah, things happen and things are very present in our lives when we're in those things, but they will pass inevitably.

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Everything passes in life and that's really at the crux of today's episode when I talk about don't get married.

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Don't get married to your business, don't get married to your ideas, don't get married to your identity.

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It's really that trifecta that I'm going to focus in on here today when I refer to don't get married.

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And we are going to start with ideas.

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Because when I talk to all these incredible entrepreneurs that we have on the show and I'm so grateful, I am so very fortunate and, yeah, grateful that all these incredible entrepreneurs come on here to serve you all, we have these real-life conversations to serve you, and I get to interact with all of these guests off the air, not only before our interviews, over email and our communications, but even after we hit record.

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It's so much fun to just get to spend some time hanging out with these amazing entrepreneurs and what I so consistently realize about them is they're not really married to their ideas.

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They are so open to the possibility of being proven wrong.

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They're so open to the possibility of things not working out.

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They are so open to the possibility and the likelihood and really the inevitability that they'll pivot.

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And I know this because they've pivoted before and in talking to them I know that they've accepted they're going to pivot again.

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And when I contrast that to so many newer entrepreneurs that I talk to, and especially a lot of wantrepreneurs if you're still a wantrepreneur and you're tuning into today's episode.

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I am full heartedly calling you out here today because it's easy to convince ourselves that, whatever ideas that we have, that they have some sort of degree of permanence, when the reality is they don't.

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Pretty much nothing does I promise you in this life, very, very few things I'm talking less than five things in our lives have any sort of degree of permanence.

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Pretty much everything that we think of, everything that we identify with, every single thing in our lives, chances are it's permanent.

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Sorry, it's temporary.

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It's not permanent.

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Gosh, did I just mess up that clip right there?

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But that's the key takeaway here is that all of these things are temporary, and I think that when I talk to newer entrepreneurs, or especially when I talk to entrepreneurs, they've tricked themselves into thinking they need to get married to their idea, or they need to get married to their idea, or they need to get married to their business.

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And that's why they get paralyzed by seeking out the perfect decision.

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They get paralyzed by convincing themselves I got to get this business idea right, or I got to get my branding right, or I got to get my business name right, or I I need to get my offer right, or I need to really hone in on my perfect customer avatar or my pricing needs to be right.

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Quite frankly, if you're married to all of those things, you are going to be paralyzed by perfection.

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You are going to want to get all of those things right, and understandably so, because if you believe that they're permanent, those are all things that we need to get right in business.

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But the good news is you don't have to get married to and actually I'm explicitly telling you in today's episode, just from my perspective this is just my 16 years of entrepreneurial experience and maturity going into this is don't get married.

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Don't get married to any of those things that I just listed.

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Don't get married to any idea.

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And take it from me personally.

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There's so many times in my own entrepreneurial journey where I was like this is it, this is the thing, this is what I've been meant to do, this is the thing that will change the game for me.

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This is the offer, this is the product, this is the service, this is the company name, this is the marketing channel, this is whatever it may be.

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I convinced myself this is the thing and guess what?

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It may or may not have worked.

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I may have had a smashing success in many regards to many of those things that I just listed with you, and a lot of things that I've worked on have been successful, but, quite frankly, they've all shifted.

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If you go back in time 10 years in my entrepreneurial journey, I'm running different businesses now.

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They've rebranded, they've taken on different names, I've slightly refined those offers, I've changed my price points, I've gotten better at sales, at marketing, at customer fulfillment, at delivering results.

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I've gotten better at all of those things.

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And so 10 years ago, if I got hung up on any of those, I would have robbed myself of action, I would have robbed myself of evolution.

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I would have robbed myself of iterations.

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I think that's really the truth to life and business is that all of this stuff is just an iterative process.

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It's so much at the core of what I've experienced and what all of our guests share with you and really behind the message of me encouraging you and asking you and inviting you to not get married in business, because it is just going to be iterative.

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Whatever you think you're deciding, whatever it is that you are pouring your heart and soul into in so many hours and I respect that I don't think you should change that.

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I think you should continue to go all in.

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I am a big fan of 100%.

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Anyone who knows me personally knows that I'm either all in or not in at all, quite frankly.

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And it's because I go all in.

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I have so much passion and personality and energy that I put into every single thing that I do that I can't go half into something.

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I'm just not capable of it because I'm too busy putting all of me into the other things.

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But there's a big but in today's episode.

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But you cannot mentally convince yourself that that's the thing.

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You cannot mentally get married to any of these things.

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You have to be open to the notion of being wrong.

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You have to be opened to the possibility of it not working out.

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And that's such an important thing for us, not only as entrepreneurs but of course, all these Solo Sunday episodes.

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They also extrapolate into everyday life, because I think that the older we get, the more mature we get.

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I actually think this is the very concept behind the notion of wisdom.

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I think that the older and wiser we get, the more we get unattached to outcomes, the more we get unattached to so many of these things, because we start to learn that things are temporary and it's why just go to your local park, go to a coffee shop, go to a nursing home, call up your elder relatives and talk to them about life, because they've lived it.

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They've seen how temporary this life can be.

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They've seen people come and go and I'm in my mid thirties now and I see it.

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I've had people, unfortunately, come and go in my life, whether it's through them passing away, whether it's through just different chapters of life, I've seen that even the people who are steadfast in our lives our grandparents, our aunts, our uncles, whoever it may be we've seen that those are steadfast, permanent fixtures in our lives, all through childhood and, if we're fortunate, into adulthood and hopefully for a long time into adulthood.

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But we inevitably realize that even those most permanent blessings in our life, even those are temporary.

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And so what makes us think that our business ideas, our marketing campaigns, our business names, our brands, the way we operate, what makes us think any of those things are going to be permanent?

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The reality is is that they're not.

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And so if you're sitting here thinking, Brian, I didn't expect this to be such a morbid episode on a solo Sunday.

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Well, the reality is, I hope it's not morbid.

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In fact, the exact opposite is true.

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I hope that this is freeing.

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I hope that it gives you the mental clarity and to free you from the shackles of putting so much weight on these decisions, knowing that every decision we make in our businesses and in our entrepreneurial journeys, they actually are temporary and so we've got a lot of room to mess up, because even if we do mess up, it's just part of that iterative process, it's just part of that evolutionary process, it's just part of our growth.

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Messing up is part of all of this, because messing up failure, any sort of outcome, we could flip all this on the good side I'm not going to today but all of those potential outcomes and failures and we get it wrong and it just didn't work out.

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All of that is temporary.

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That is amazing.

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You're not married to your failures.

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You're not defined by your failures.

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You're not married to the things that you tried and didn't work out.

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You get to move on and that is such an incredible thing about life and such an incredible thing about business.

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And so when we talk about business decisions and ideas and our business names and our entities and our branding and our messaging and our offers and our who we serve and the way we serve them.

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Guess what?

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All of that stuff is temporary and that is so encouraging for all of us.

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Don't get married to those things.

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And I want to take this one step further here today.

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I'm sure that you've got the gist of this.

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So if you're still tuned into this, I so appreciate you being here and investing in your own personal growth and development.

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Because I'm sharing these things with you, not because I like to hear myself talk, trust me, a lot of times.

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It's why we've really transitioned.

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For a lot of you who have listened to a long time, you know that it used to be three days a week where these solo episodes, but I'm grateful that I get to be here one out of five episodes a week with you, where it's only me.

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But I do this because I want to share my 16 years and growing of experience with you, and part of that has made me realize how much we also get married to our identities.

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We wrap ourselves up in so many of our various identities.

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For me, for example, it was when I started my soccer blog.

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I wanted to be a soccer entrepreneur, I wanted to be an executive in the world of soccer and I was really married to that and it started to cloud my vision of how I wanted to take Premiership Talk, which was my first business I started all the way back in 2008, which grew into a global success three and a half million readers every single month, we won awards from the English Football Association and people knew my name in the soccer world former professionals, current professionals, managers, player agents, executives at clubs I mean.

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Every summer I spent with the CEO of Manchester United.

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Who at clubs?

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I mean.

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Every summer I spent with the CEO of Manchester United, who at that time, was David Gill, my good friend, chris Shout out to Chris.

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We used to travel across the United States when United was here in the States and we would hang out with a lot of the players and the executive, david Gill, was a big-time executive in the world of UEFA, and so this is how I don't name drop that.

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I name dropped it just to show you.

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This is who I thought I was, this is what I was married to.

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I didn't want to leave that world, even when I was getting burned out, even when I saw the tides changing in the world of media coverage and in the world of blogging, and especially in the world I mean from 2008 to 2013,.

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Really, I saw a huge shift in the way that online advertising was changing and I was at the forefront of many of the ways that it used to be, of negotiating sponsorship deals and advertising deals with these big global brands like Umbro and other brands in the world of soccer I'm trying to think of some of the bigger ones.

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Nike was, I mean, that was my biggest ever 48-hour advertising deal.

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But I saw Google AdWords and Google AdSense was rising.

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Facebook ads became a marketplace.

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So many of these advertising changes were happening and here I was married to the identity of who I was and how I was operating and all the things that I was doing.

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That I struggled when I transitioned and broadened into a marketing agency, which I opened my doors to in 2012.

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And I really honed in on my core competencies of marketing, of business development, of search engine optimization.

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It was a mindset shift and it was an identity shift and then in my head I became that I wanted to become the marketing person I wanted to be known for those skills of mine and that became my identity and so much of it just continued to shift and I saw, the more that I got married to my identity the more that it actually limited me, and so I'll never forget, in 2016, when I wanted to start this podcast, I felt very weird talking to people about me becoming a podcaster, because people were, like, aren't you an entrepreneur?

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Aren't you the CEO of a marketing agency?

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Like, how does this fit into all of that?

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And I put it off for a while and a while and a while until finally, in late 2016, I decided let me become a podcaster as well.

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Let me tack that on.

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It doesn't detract from what I do as a CEO, as an entrepreneur, in my agency.

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It doesn't do any of that.

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In fact, it actually enhances it.

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I mean, I'm sure you can all imagine that, having the amount of interaction that I have with all of these incredible entrepreneurs, it makes me a better entrepreneur.

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It gives me an unfair advantage in my role in my other businesses is because I'm gleaning all of these insights, and so today I'm very comfortable with all of my identities and I'm not married to any single one of them.

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Yes, I'm the CEO of various businesses.

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Yes, I'm an external advisor to many other businesses.

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Yes, I'm a podcaster.

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Yes, I'm an author.

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Yes, I do public speaking.

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Yes, I'm an uncle, a son, a brother, all of these things.

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I carry all of these identities with me, but I'm not married to them.

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I want to be the best of all of those things and I strive to be in every single day.

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I commit to doing my best in all the ways that I possibly can.

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However, I know that if I see rising trends in the world of podcasting, or in the agency world, or in the consulting world, or in the non-profit world, or the for-profit world, or the agency world, or in the consulting world, or in the nonprofit world, or the for-profit world, or the sports world, or whatever it may be, I'm not married to those identities.

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And I'll tell you what.

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It actually helps me to be a better CEO, a better podcaster, a better agency owner, a better boss, a better teammate, a better all of these things, because I understand how transient all of these things are.

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They come, they go.

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This too shall pass, and I'm going to ride all of these waves fully throughout all of that, not married to it, but knowing that all of this is building me up to whatever it is that I'm going to do in the future.

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And I think it's important for us to attack life, to attack business, to attack our projects, to attack everything through this lens of we're not married to any of these things because they're not permanent and we're always growing and we're always evolving.

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And that gives us that flexibility to try, that gives us that flexibility to try, that gives us that freedom to fail, that gives us that freedom to experiment and it gives us the ability to grow and to evolve and to iterate.

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So I don't know where you're at in your journey, but I genuinely do hope that this hit you somewhere where you needed it and somewhere that it resonates with you and encourages you to leverage those experiments, to leverage that freedom to explore and to evolve and to iterate, knowing that we're not married to our results, to our outcomes, to our current ideas.

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It's all just part of a very long journey where all the things shall pass.

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That's it for me in today's episode.

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You already know that I'm already excited about all the coming week's episodes.

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We've got three great guests for you this week.

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I'm personally very excited and we're really rounding out Honestly here in May.

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We've just got incredible guests for you all the way through up until the very end of the month and don't worry, because we're not losing steam into June.

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We are quite far in advance, because summer is coming and we want to bring you fresh episodes, so pound that subscribe button.

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We've got five new episodes a week coming to your airways, as always every Monday, wednesday, friday, saturday and Sunday here on the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.

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Hey, it's Brian here, and thanks for tuning in to yet another episode of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.

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If you haven't checked us out online, there's so much good stuff there.

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Check out the show's website and all the show notes that we talked about in today's episode at thewantrepreneurshowcom.

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Initiate a live chat.

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It's for real me and I'm excited because I'll see you as always every Monday, wednesday, friday, saturday and Sunday here on the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.