David speaks with Jonathan Goodman, an author, entrepreneur, host, and a leading expert helping people grow and simplify their businesses. He is the creator of the Personal Trainer Development Center ($35M+ rev) and host of the Obvious Choice podcast, a top show for coaches, entrepreneurs, and small business owners. He is the author of multiple fitness and business development books, including Viralnomics, and has sold tens of thousands of copies of his books, training programs, and courses. In his latest book, The Obvious Choice: Timeless Lessons on Success, Profit, and Finding Your Way, Jonathan teaches you how to win in business without feeling like you have to win the internet.
They talked about:
🍂 The bittersweet beauty of writing
🌿 Creating the right environment for success
🌀 The power of strategic distractions
🔥 The importance of committing to your passion
🎯 The secret to becoming the obvious choice
🏆 Why simplicity wins in business
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🎧 Listen on Spotify:
📹 Watch on Youtube:
📄 Show notes:
[00:00] Introduction
[05:02] Lessons from 13 years of seasonal migration
[08:46] Why shorter days can feel so long
[10:08] Why summer habits don’t survive winter
[13:41] The important role of intentional breaks
[17:09] Why sitting still might be draining your energy
[20:40] Do less to achieve more
[24:15] Embracing imperfection leads to better decision-making
[26:40] How to choose your true calling
[31:31] How Jonathan found his passion after years of distraction
[34:04] Lessons from optimistic ignorance
[38:09] How momentum beats perfection
[40:10] Why referrals are your business superpower
[45:12] The secret to growing offline influence
[47:39] The hidden ROI of thoughtful gifts
[50:57] Why quality gifts build lasting trust
[56:03] The best marketing isn’t about selling
[59:27] How to find the right target market for your product
🗣 Mentioned in the show:
Airbnb | https://news.airbnb.com/about-us/
Overwatch | https://overwatch.blizzard.com/
Dr. Gloria Mark | https://gloriamark.com/
The Informatics Lab | https://www.informatics.uci.edu/explore/faculty-profiles/gloria-mark/
University of California, Irvine | https://uci.edu/
The Attention Span | https://amzn.to/4gR7kZz
Candy Crush | https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.king.candycrushsaga&hl=en
NaNoWriMo | https://nanowrimo.org/about-nano
Reddit | https://www.reddit.com/
Amber Reynolds | https://www.theptdc.com/the-obvious-choice-podcast
Ren Jones | https://www.theptdc.com/the-obvious-choice-podcast
Goodhart’s Law | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law
Nathan Barry | https://nathanbarry.com/
Steve Thomas | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Thomas_(ice_hockey)
Multiple Streams of Income | https://amzn.to/4fzwkDL
Robert G. Allen | https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Robert-G-Allen/8857
Napoleon Hill | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_Hill
Mike Doehla | https://mikedoehla.com/
Stronger U | https://strongeru.com/
The Obvious Choice | https://amzn.to/42eJ7IG
Charles Bell | https://nl-nl.facebook.com/charlesbellelitecoach/
John Ruhlin | https://johnruhlin.com/
Giftology | https://amzn.to/40wPohH
Penguin Books | https://www.penguin.com/
Gary C. Halbert | https://thegaryhalbertletter.com/home/
👤 Connect with Jonathan:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/itscoachgoodman/?hl=en
Website: The PTDC | https://www.theptdc.com/
Weekly Newsletter: 5 Reps on Friday | https://www.theptdc.com/newsletter-subscribe
Latest Book: The Obvious Choice | https://amzn.to/42eJ7IG
👨🏾💻 About David Elikwu:
David Elikwu FRSA is a serial entrepreneur, strategist, and writer. David is the founder of The Knowledge, a platform helping people think deeper and work smarter.
🐣 Twitter: @Delikwu / @itstheknowledge
🌐 Website: https://www.davidelikwu.com
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📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/delikwu/
🕺 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@delikwu
🎙️ Podcast: http://plnk.to/theknowledge
📖 Free Book: https://pro.theknowledge.io/frames
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🖥️ Decision Hacker: http://www.decisionhacker.io/
Decision Hacker will help you hack your default patterns and become an intentional architect of your life. You’ll learn everything you need to transform your decisions, your habits, and your outcomes.
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The Knowledge is a weekly newsletter for people who want to get more out of life. It's full of insights from psychology, philosophy, productivity, and business, all designed to make you more productive, creative, and decisive.
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📜 Full transcript:
Jonathan Goodman: There's no other thing in my life with writing books that provides me the same beautiful combination of frustration of conflict, of exubilation, I wake up every single morning at 5:36 A.M and I write for two hours. And at the end of it, my wife wakes up and she said, how did it go this morning? And I say, Shit, I'm a failure. I'm never going to make this work. And then I wake up the next morning and I'm excited to do it again. There's nothing else in the world where that exists for me. That's how I know that books are my thing.
This week, I'm sharing part of my conversation with Jonathan Goodman. John is the creator of the Personal Trainer Development Center. He hosts a popular podcast, The Obvious Choice podcast. He's written, multiple books. He's incredibly prolific.
He's got a book coming out, but he's already written the next one. I will have all the links in the description and show notes below, but he's written Ignite the Fire, Viralnomics, and now The Obvious Choice, among others. He's spent over 20 years teaching people how to build fitness businesses, how to get fit themselves, how to build better lives.
And, you know, if I might say on a personal note, John is someone that quite quickly in the last few months that we've become acquainted, become something of a friend and someone that I deeply admire. Specifically because I think there are a lot of people online in the world that frame or position themselves along similar lines. You know, there are fitness influencers, there are business coaches, there are people that frame themselves as people that can tell you about these things.
What I find incredibly interesting about John is, John is out there talking about these things, helping people to build fitness businesses, helping people to get fit, helping people to be better business owners.
He's doing it for the love of the game. He's someone that in my mind just genuinely cares. He's walking the walk, talking the talk. He's a father. He's a family person. He's out there doing all of those things for himself, not just for the sake of becoming an influencer, not just for the sake of selling things or making money. He's doing it with some deep sense of earnestness.
And I think that came across, certainly to me, in all of our interactions, it will certainly come across to you. You're going to hear us talking about a wide variety of things at the intersection of life and business. We talk about the joy and pain of writing books, as John has written several.
We talk about travel and what it teaches us about life balance. We talk about productivity, we've both at various points struggled with productivity, how we found some tips and tricks to be more productive, how the environment that we have can influence our level of productivity. We talk about the importance and the role that intentional breaks can have, how to be more efficient by doing less, whether or not you should take advice that the trap of trying to take all advice and why some advice might not be meant for you.
We talk about the trap of success and how being good at everything can have some pitfalls. We talk about the importance of committing to your passion. And then we talk about a lot of business adjacent things. So like the best way to sell a book. John shares some incredible secrets both from his experience and from things that he's come across about sales and marketing, the secret to becoming the obvious choice as a business owner that's seeking customers.
We talk about how to win customers hearts with simplicity and originality. We talk about the importance of understanding your customer needs.
So I think, If you are someone that is adjacent to entrepreneurship in any way, if you run a business or want to run a business, if you want to live a better life, if you want to get better with your fitness, I think there will be something in this conversation for you. You can get the full show notes, the transcript and read my newsletter at theknowledge.io and you can find John online on twitter @itscoachgoodman. His personal website is theptdc.com. There's a lot of great stuff there.
And if you love this episode, please do share with a friend and don't forget to leave a review on spotify or apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts because it helps us tremendously to understand what you love and to do more of it and also to reach other listeners just like you.
Jonathan Goodman: Everything is two times as expensive like, I get a coffee and a sandwich and it'd be like, $27.
David Elikwu: Is Canada quite affordable relative to the U.S.? I'm still waiting to go.
Jonathan Goodman: You know, it depends on where you go. Canada is so spread out and so different and really only has two, maybe three, like major towns. Toronto is one of the most expensive cities in the world. Like, a townhouse around the corner from us that backs onto the railway is 1.7 million dollars.
It's Toronto, but like, then my brother lives in Nova Scotia, which is one of the province islands on the east coast. And you know, a four bedroom house in a great neighborhood across the street from a big park in a great school district, whatever, is like $350,000.
So it's just, it's so radically different. Like if you live in one of the hubs. Food and stuff is always really expensive. I mean, Canada is becoming a very difficult place to live economically, I would say.
David Elikwu: I think you spend something like at least four months in the year traveling. What, first of all, like, why do you, why do you do that? Why do you enjoy it? Where do you go? How do you choose where to go? And you also have kids. How do you figure out what to do with them as well?
Jonathan Goodman: Yeah, I have a seven year old and a two year old and my wife is pregnant with our next as well.
David Elikwu: Wow, congrats! Amazing.
Jonathan Goodman: You know, what do we do with them? My two year old, we drag him along, is the answer. My seven year old is in public school in Toronto, and then we unenroll him. And then we have like, right now, actually, our nanny is a teacher and was a teacher for 20 years. She's from the States, but she actually got injured and isn't here yet. So we put him in a school here, basically, like three days a week, two days a week, and then we do homeschooling with him a little bit as well. And then there's just, like, in between school all over the place. You know, hey, it's fourteen to one Mexican pesos to Canadian dollars. How much did we just spend in Canadian dollars? What kind of change is there? That type of stuff.
And so it's worked out pretty well. He's in grade two. Every year we take it year by year is the answer. And it's worked out pretty well so far.
This is year 13 that we've done winters away. And so I've spent a minimum of four months abroad every year for the last 13 years. And I mean, you ask like, what I gain out of it. I mean, number one, I escaped the Canadian cold. So that's an added benefit. Physically health wise, I've actually done some back of the napkin math of how much in between movement you lose by virtue of it being cold and snowy and the weather being crappy outside. And it's astonishing. You know, for example, like when I used to have an office, I built an office now at my home outside, but when I used to have an office, I'd bike 15 minutes to and from. It's just a personal rule that I have that I would never work anywhere that's more than a 15 minute bike ride from home. But 15 minutes either way, let's say the weather's really bad in Canada five months out of the year, so 15 minutes, that's 30 minutes a day, five days a week, that's two and a half hours, times a month, back of the napkin math, you're talking 10 hours of movement a week. That is simply gone, 40 hours a month, 200 hours a season. I mean, if you calculate that over 10 or 20 years, you're talking like 20 days of movement that is just gone. And so I think about the decisions that I'm making today and whether my future self will help me for those decisions. And a lot of them have to do with health and fitness and not necessarily a 45 minute workout.
But what am I doing in between those workouts? How can I optimize the amount of activity and healthy active living in between those workouts and getting sunlight and being in a place where I want to go for walks, or if you go somewhere you don't get into a car.
Wherever we live, even abroad, walkability is actually a very important decision maker and where we choose to live, like, Okay, I want to go to an island in Greece. Well, where, what island do you go to? Where do you settle on in each in that island? Like, how do you choose?
And so what I'll actually do, just as one example, when we lived on Crete in, in we lived in a little town called Amoudara in Crete, which is, you fly into Iraklion, it's like 30, 40 minutes basically out of there. It's like a nothing town. We were there in a shorter season. It's a local tourist town, kind of, but the only co working space on Crete at that time was in Amoudara. So I found that, I set that as the Airbnb pin. And then I looked for Airbnbs within a 15 to 20 minute walk of the co working space and use that as how we decided would live. And then, yeah, you, you find stuff wherever you are. There's parks anywhere. There's restaurants, cafes, whatever, anywhere. That's how we kind of decide when we're going to different places in the world. And then you know, with the family, we try to move around a little bit less, I guess, then.
David Elikwu: It's funny, something you mentioned reminded me of something I was thinking about. I think it was just yesterday. Ironically, I was on someone else's podcast, and I think I was just about this idea that, first of all, I am surprised at the extent to which the darkness, particularly I, you know, we mentioned I live in London. The darkness really affects me. And I would think, you know, in, in lots of other contexts, I think of myself, maybe it's quite resilient. I wouldn't think that, Oh, I'm someone that's going to be massively affected simply by it being dark so much earlier.
But I think in lots of different ways, first of all, on my mood, sometimes. There are times I catch myself, you know, just feeling a bit glamour. And I'm wondering, is it like business isn't doing well? Is it something there's some tension in what I'm doing? And then I realized I look outside and it's 3:30 in the afternoon and it's just black, it's, it's dark.
Jonathan Goodman: Right, right.
David Elikwu: Just touching on what you were saying as well, in terms of going out and how that influences exercise, you know, I have some scales and they connect to wifi. So it just tracks their stuff. I don't always check it. I go on the scales every day.
Jonathan Goodman: What's this scales like, for weight? like,
David Elikwu: Yeah, weight
Jonathan Goodman: weight? Oh, okay. okay. Okay, okay, okay.
David Elikwu: So just, I'm, I'm trying to lose some weight at the moment.
Jonathan Goodman: Sure. No, that's fine. I just, I don't know if, like, you're wacky, like, it's funny whenever, like, people who speak English make fun of British for their English. It's like, I will have you pay attention to the name of the language that you're speaking and the name of the country that I live in for who is actually correct in the words that they're using to speak this language.
David Elikwu: So obviously I've been trying to do this, this fitness journey. thing and I was looking back at, so I can see for the last four years, you know, the, the tragic up and down roller coaster of me every year trying to lose some weight and then putting on some weight. And it's always quite consistently starting from around this time of year, like ironically, just in the coldest months that suddenly I just put on a ton of weight.
It also tracks with, I stop weighing myself around that time, you know, I go home for Christmas and then I come back and I'm not really, by the time I then start tracking again, my weight's gone up since so hopefully that changes this year, but it's this idea that
Jonathan Goodman: Is home for you in the UK.
David Elikwu: Well, no, it's also in the UK. It's also in London, but my parents are like, an hour or so hour or two away. Enough distance that I'm not gonna bump into them on most days, but it's still some intentionality, yeah.
Jonathan Goodman: I mean, I think, I think people take that for granted. The power of in between movement. You kind of have to engineer your life to optimize for that. You're not going to notice it on any given day. I mean, that's the difference between consistency and intensity, isn't it?
It's like, you go to the dentist, that's intense. You know, you go there for cleaning. Consistency is brushing your teeth. Can you miss a day? Yeah. How many days can you miss? No idea. How long do I have to brush my teeth until it makes a difference? I have no clue either. But if you don't do it consistently for long enough, no matter how many times you go to the dentist to get it cleaning, your teeth are going to rot.
But it's, it's kind of hard to measure in the moment. You know, intensity is a workout in the gym. Consistency is the movement in between. You need both.
David Elikwu: And it's definitely something I take for granted. So the other thing that came up is funny enough, so I play video games on occasion. I play a game Overwatch. And that's pretty much the only game I play, and I was telling someone that I was getting a PS5 just to have a better experience playing this game, and they were like, but you only play one game, doesn't that seem like a waste? And I was like, this isn't something I do habitually, the specific reason I like playing it is because you play a game and it only lasts about 10 minutes or so.
So it's actually just a good break in between doing other things. So, you know, as I'm working and my mind is very active doing whatever, it's a good time boxed. Let me switch off or context switch, and then I can come back to working. So I literally just switch it on a play and then switch it off. But my place, so I had a PS4 up until just now, I didn't switch it on until August and I last switched it off December of last year, so just before I went home for the holidays, and I was trying to think of why was it easy for me not to play for the majority of the year, I didn't even touch it, and then suddenly, well, first of all, I was working on a book project, so okay, life was getting a bit tough, I needed some kind of stress release, but then I'm only playing now more than I have the entire year, and I was like, oh, it's because during the summer or the warmer months, when I want to clear my head, I go for a walk. I just go outside and that's such an easy thing to do. And it's so easy to have this habit. You know, if I'm trying to build positive habits, it's a lot easier to build that when it's warmer. And you don't necessarily think of that as being the reason. But you can just do it instinctively. Whereas now when it's cold and it's dark, if it gets to three o'clock and it's already dark, I am not thinking, oh, let me go for a stroll. I'm gonna have to wear my gloves, gonna have to wear a jacket. And so it's interesting how, you know, some of these environmental factors can also then shape our behavior, even when we have good intentions of, you know, here's what I want to do, here's how I want to live. Suddenly, you know, your behavior can actually be shaped by your environment in some of those ways as well.
Jonathan Goodman: It really needs to be designed for. Have you ever been turned on to Dr. Gloria Mark's work?
David Elikwu: No, I haven't actually.
Jonathan Goodman: She's fascinating. So she is the, she heads up what's called The informatics Lab at the University of California. And so her area of study specifically is attention span and focus and how that interacts with technology.
And so she wrote a book called Attention Span and we share, the reason why I was turned on is we share a literary agent. And so my agent was like, yo, you would love this woman. And I interviewed her and read her book and she's great. But what she actually talks about is exactly what you were saying, you know, you mentioned something about how you play video games almost as like a break for work and you actually do it perfectly these cognitive snacks.
She is very protective around, you know, you should waste time. Wrote tasks are actually very, very useful cognitively and, and the same thing, you know, movement snacks, I call them, like, I'll go outside in my office and I'll rake leaves for 20 minutes, for example, mow the lawn or do some gardening, you know, light gardening or whatever. And but also flip through my phone and social media doing things that you kind of hear all the time that they're a waste of time, but they're actually not. Your brain needs time to relax and a lot of the problems that we have, you know, I noticed this. I don't know if you notice this, David, tell me if you do.
At the end of the day, some days I feel brain fog and I feel like I'm burnt out. And then other days, at the end of the day, I feel energized and on fire. And it doesn't seem to correlate with the amount of work that I got done that day. What it seems to correlate with is actually how many different things I did that day.
And so I have found that the amount of times that I jumped to a different task or task switched using Dr. Mark's language you're focusing on project and then you just check social media or I'm talking to you on the podcast, but I'm kind of like going through like, Instagram, even though, you know, you don't notice, maybe you notice, maybe you don't notice. All that my brain is doing there is pulling up new mental schemas. It takes us somewhere around 22 minutes to get into something else, it's cognitively very taxing energetically to jump to something else. And so instead, so to protect against that, where we're being constantly distracted, if you're focusing on something and you need a break, it's actually much more healthy to set a timer like you did, 10, 20 minutes, whatever it is, and then play video games, play in her studies, it was Candy Crush. Basically, wrote tasks that allow you to be minimally engaged. Could be going for a walk. Could be playing video games. Could be scrolling through social media, right? So long as you have kind of an end time. She actually talks about how useful that is. But not if you're switching back and forth between it.
It's a way to almost keep your brain in one mental schema for longer and switch less. And I found that when times are going well and I'm focusing which is not all the time, of course, but when times are going well, I find that I've been able to stick to that. And when I'm really brain foggy and exhausted at the end of the day, I'm like, Oh, you idiot. This is because you managed your email poorly. This is because you were working on the book, but then you just kept checking Twitter idiot.
And so it's useful to be reminded of that. But I love the fact that you jumped to video games for ten minutes. So long as you're not doing it for five hours, you know.
David Elikwu: Yes, yeah Okay, let me take this in two directions quickly. But I think this is also a useful segue into your life as a writer. And that's something I definitely want to get into we'll also talk about your background. But I'd love to know a bit more about you know, how you schedule your time because I think you've already started working on your next book. So It's incredible how how exactly so how prolific you are, but just to to go on this I'll take it in two directions and then I'll share one random thing that I learned for myself and I only say it to the extent that it's useful to anyone listening.
So just going from what you were saying, I definitely empathize with that and I find that it is incredible how often someone might ask me at the end of the day. What did you do today?
I will say I have no idea. I was sitting at my desk the whole day. You know, I have a little home office here and I was working hard, I think, I hope. But I was bouncing around between so many things. My attention was going here and there. At various points during the day, I might have been firefighting something or other you know, I've got my notebook here on my desk, and perhaps I did write some of the to dos of some of the main things I needed to do. By the end of the day, I don't even remember the stuff. I'm gonna have to check my notebook if you ask me, what I did or how good the day was.
So I think that's one part of it that definitely resonates for me. But the other thing is, interestingly enough, I find there's a difficulty or a balance for me. And this might be my personality, so this is where I'd love to hear, you know, how you do some of your routine. Where, personality wise, when I know I have things to do, my tendency is to borrow in. Okay? I wake up in the morning, I come straight to the office, I make some coffee and I'm gonna sit here for the next however many hours until stuff gets done. I might waste a bunch of time during that time, and it might not be as productive as I would like, but I'm gonna sit here and I'm gonna make sure things get done.
But what I find interesting is, so last month I do this thing every November. You might've heard of it called NaNoWriMo, National November Writing Month. It's like a yearly challenge to write 50,000 words in November, but usually that's a novel kind of thing. So I'd been working on a book earlier this year and I worked on that till October, and then I switched to this novel project for November. But what was interesting about that, is that there were days where maybe I would co write with some friends and we'd meet up in central London. And what I found is some of those days where I'm actually doing three, not necessarily doing three things in the day, but moving context three times in the day. So in the morning, I go over here and I meet a friend and we met we got some donuts and we sat down and did some work. And then we went to a business event, an entrepreneurship event. And then after that, we sat down and we did some more work. And then after that, I came home and then I did some more work. And in each of those sessions, I still had that fixed time. But somehow, because I was moving around in between, I don't know if it's just the locomotion or it's the context switching, but I actually had more energy and each of those sessions cumulatively, I got a lot more done than let's say the day before, where I was sitting at home the whole time, just trying to force myself to do loads of work.
So I'd love to get your thoughts on that. The last thing I'll mention just because you mentioned it with energy, that I found for myself is, I wear glasses. Not all the time, because my eyesight's usually fine. But, It's usually for screens. I think I have the opposite of what most people have. So, when things are up close for me, my eyes kind of go double a bit. But I was having, you know, just generally, I didn't think of it as an issue, but sometimes in the evening I'd get really tired, maybe around 10 o'clock or maybe a bit earlier.
And I actually just realized it's Eye strain. I had no idea. Like it's crazy that I just realized a few weeks ago, I could put my glasses on in the evening and suddenly I have so much more energy.
Jonathan Goodman: Interesting. Interesting.
Jonathan Goodman: I have heard that that is something with other people for sure that, they don't realize how hard they have to work to focus on something. You know, all of it, all of this is just energy.
I mean, that's all it is. It's energy. You only have a finite amount of energy, you know, certain things that you do, I think, can create more if you're working your best way. But you know, it does go away depending on what you're doing. And so you have to be careful to protect it. I don't know. I mean, would you ask about writing? Like, how do you, how do you focus on that?
David Elikwu: How do you manage your, your energy? And cause you, you are quite prolific in terms of getting the work done. And it seems like you have a good. Okay, all right.
Jonathan Goodman: I mean, I am the laziest, ambitious person you will ever meet. I am primarily motivated by not wanting to do much. And so I love coming up with ideas. And I've kind of come to appreciate that if I get like an hour and a half to two hours of good work a day, like it's a good day.
And so I optimize for that. I cannot do that much. Maybe I used to be able to. I'm 39 years old. Maybe I just don't have the energy. But also, you know, I have two kids. I've got parents I want to see. I have fitness that I want to do. And I also love to read. I love to read fiction. I love to read. So like, there's a lot of other things pulling at my time, which I think a lot of the time with perhaps young, ambitious people, they almost have too much time. And it would be better if they actually constrained their time and built more structure around that, because you're never going to be more efficient and get better work done faster than sitting in a coffee shop with 10 percent power left on your laptop with no charger.
And so can you manufacture that for yourself to some extent, it might be frustrating, but like, there's some usefulness in that. I can't do any focused work, really, by the time that my family wakes up in the morning. By eight o'clock or so in the morning. I'm pretty much done everything important that I have to do.
And so that's a really useful constraint, because if you think about what happens then as second order consequences from that, number one, I have to be really, really good at prioritizing my one thing. What is your thing? What is your thing that you think that you can become truly world class at that you want to be great at?
How can you design everything else that you do to support that one thing that you do. Most of the reason why people never get ahead these days, I think, is not because they don't try to do anything important, not because they don't know what to do, not because they're good, it's because they do too many damn things at the same time and they never focus on one thing that they can be great. And except the trade offs because becoming a grown ass adult is accepting trade offs. And accepting the trade offs that because I'm so focused on my books as the one thing, my businesses are not going to grow the same way, for example, and so they have to serve another function and, or I give away most of them.
So, you know, I own two other main businesses. I mean, there's kind of a third, but I own two other main businesses that are really active businesses that are doing pretty well. And in both cases, I own a hundred percent of the business, but I have a core operator who has a huge amount of the upside and most everybody involved in working in the business is paid largely based off of very, very, very generous incentivization commission or profit sharing structures.
And as a result, then, they have a lot of ownership in the product, they have a lot of the upside in the product, which means that I can kind of chill out a little bit, so what I'm doing is I am sacrificing upside in those businesses, appreciating that they're going to still feed me more than enough that I'm ever going to need, but it's actually a terrible business decision, but it's a wonderful personal decision.
And so I've accepted that trade off because that is necessary for me in order to put really 80 to 90 percent of my time and focus and energy into the books. And so the first question, of course, is like, how do you figure out what your thing is? That's the question everybody asked me, and so I have a really simple process, which is, you write down, I mean, your notebook is a little bit too pretty, David I like these, I like really crappy dollar store notebooks because then you can scribble in them and not feel bad about it. I find that when I have a notebook that's too pretty and too nice, I try to be too perfect in it, and then it just becomes useless. So I like really cheap notebooks. And so I sit down with this cheap notebook, and I'll write down all of the things that I feel like I should be doing or that I might be doing, you know, write a book, door to door sales, affiliate marketing, start a podcast, whatever, all of these things that we feel like we should be doing, right?
And you can do an immediate gut check, usually, and because you really don't want more than four or five on that list, ultimately. So if you have more than that, you can do a gut check and you can just be like, and that's kind of one of those things that I feel like, this other guy tells me that I should do and maybe is good information for other people, but bad advice for me, like it's so clearly isn't in my natural attributes or skills or energies or whatever, right. Which is fine. There was a lot of good information out there that's bad advice, you know, and you have to be able to begin to recognize that and appreciate and respect other people that are just playing a different game than you are in this world. And celebrate when they do well and not desire what they have because it's not the game that you're playing.
So you write down, you know, these four or five things and then you go through a series of testing cycles that are two weeks long. And the reason that it's two weeks is, two weeks is long enough to test how you feel towards it and answer three questions that I'm going to give you. It's not long enough, though, to get any kind of a result that you can measure. Because what you're not going for as a result, what you're going for here is confidence in the process. That's what you need. If you wanted to get a result, you really had to give a year plus into each testing cycle, which you just don't have enough time to do. And so, in those two weeks you are all in on that thing, right? If it's like a podcast, for example, you're going to record a podcast every single day for those two weeks. You're going to exclusively study podcasting, listen to other people talk about podcasting, read books on it, go down reddit rabbit holes about podcasting. You're going to learn everything that you can and obsess about podcasting. And you're going to record every single day. You don't care if anybody listens. The three questions that you answer at the end of the two weeks are, do I feel like I could get good at this? Do I like this? And do I feel like this presents me an opportunity that's going to fulfill all of my needs?
Once you can answer yes to all three questions, you found your thing. Is that the best opportunity out there in the world? Maybe, maybe not. Would you recognize it even if it was? Like if I were to find the best opportunity in the world for me to do something content wise, business wise, whatever, would I even know if it was the best even if I found it? Like, no.
And so to look for the best is a ridiculous, it's a ridiculously foolish endeavor. Instead, what you're going for is confidence in the process to find your thing. Once you find your thing, you have to commit a minimum of three to five years in that thing. If you don't enjoy and love the researching about it, that ain't your thing. You should want to read endless books about it. You should want to join the Reddit rabbit holes. You should be upset. Like, like I can't stop listening to people talk about books and marketing books and writing great books. It doesn't, there's no end to that to my energy towards this. There's no other thing in my life with writing books that provides me the same beautiful combination of frustration, of conflict, of exubilation, like, I wake up every single morning at 5:36 A.M and I write for two hours. And at the end of it, my wife wakes up and she said, how did it go this morning? And I say, shit, I'm a failure. I'm never going to make this work. And then I wake up the next morning and I'm excited to do it again. There's nothing else in the world where that exists for me. That's how I know that books are my thing. Once you find your thing, you point everything towards that. You figure out your best time of the day. You commit that time of the day to that thing. Nothing else gets in the way. All of the other platforms, content, businesses, everything that you do, if you decide to do it, has to point towards the thing.
I have a podcast. My podcast's sole purpose, its priority is to workshop ideas that I'm writing in my books. It's to test ideas. It's to force me to show up and present them and read them out loud to two other people who I trust and admire that are in my blind spot. My co host on that podcast, Amber, so I'm like a, you know, I come from a middle to upper class white Jewish family in Canada, Toronto, right? My co host on the podcast, Amber, is the daughter of a military family, single mother, son far along the spectrum living in the Bible Belt in South Carolina. And then my other co host is Ren, who's the black son of a preacher in North Carolina. Like they're there because I love them, because I respect them. And because they see things and bring metaphors and give insights to my books that would not otherwise be there. So my podcast is designed to make my books better. Anything else that happens that's good is a fortunate byproduct. I have no idea how many people listen. I don't ever look at the stats in the downloads. It's completely and utterly irrelevant to me because those metrics, that data does not correlate to my desired outcome from being on that platform. You know, Goodhart's Law states that when the measure becomes the goal, it ceases to be a good measure.
The measure cannot be downloads unless your goal is to be a famous podcaster. My goal is not to be a famous podcaster. It's to make the best damn books possible. And so I can't measure the success of my podcast based off of how many downloads it gets. I have to measure it based off of how good of a job it's doing helping me write the best damn books possible. And so that's just one example, but everything has to point towards that thing. Once you found whatever that thing is for you.
David Elikwu: Sure. That makes sense. And I think there were two questions I was going to ask, but I think you've partly answered the second one, which was going to be essentially, you know, because you're doing the podcast, but the podcast specifically helps you do your ultimate goal. And I was going to ask, you know, to what extent do those things need to overlap?
I think Nathan Barry has this idea of strip malls and skyscrapers where some people might do lots of different businesses but they're kind of all laid out alongside each other and they're all different businesses and he suggests instead that you should build like a skyscraper where all of the things stack up one on top of the other and they're all vertically aligned doing the same thing.
But the other thing I was going to ask is, how did you learn this and what was the process of figuring that out? Specifically because I think you were maybe 18 when you first became a personal trainer. And then you were 24 when you wrote the first book which ended up doing really well. But I think it could be very easy to say oh, I'm already good at this one thing I should go in that direction. Well now, I'm good at this thing I should go in that direction and lots of people, especially when they're competent and good at things can be pulled off in different directions based on, right now I'm passionate about this thing or right now I've just found out that I'm good at this thing.
How do you find that very early on as opposed to you know when everything's working.
Jonathan Goodman: I mean, the answer is I did not find it very early on. I stumbled upon it very early on and then I completely ignored the signals that it was giving me for a very long period of time and did a whole bunch of other shit. And then I found my way back to it.
I mean, you're right. Like you've done your research. So thank you. Yeah. I mean, a week after my 18th birthday, I was a personal trainer. I was studying kinesiology at university. So I worked at the university gym. So by the time I graduated university, basically ended my 20th year, I was a personal trainer full time. And I wrote a book for trainers at 24. But, you know, I reached a point that a lot of trainers get to, which is kind of unique, maybe a lot of other careers don't have this where I was making as much as you could make as a personal trainer. Like at 22 years old in Toronto, I was charging as much as you could charge. I was full with clients. I was referring my overload of clients to other trainers and I was the senior trainer earning a small salary. So like, I kept having this nagging feeling of, is this what my life is going to feel like, going to be like, it was fine when I was like 22 years old, you know, great, I'm young, I'm, I'm energetic.
But it kind of hit me. I was playing ice hockey. I think Steve Thomas is the only British ice hockey player, so, it's a sport where we strap knives to our feet and skate around on the ice, so I was playing ice hockey, and I got tripped, I got slew footed, which basically means somebody takes the stick, they push one skate into the other skate, and you kind of topple over, and it's just like a really cheap way to trip somebody, and you're like, eh, you jerk. So I got slew footed, I pulled a hamstring, and I was off my feet for two weeks. Which means I couldn't train, which means I couldn't make money.
And that was the moment when it hit me when I said, clearly, I need to figure out something else here. I don't know what it is. And so I just went deep into looking into anything. I studied residential real estate investing for six months. I built two business plans for smoothie operations. And then I came across this book that was a chapter in one of the books of many books I was reading at that time. I was just going to the library, just, I had tons of time reading. And it was this book called Multiple Streams of Income written by a guy named Robert G. Allen. I don't, I have no idea how good the book is, but there was a chapter in the book on something called infopreneuring. This is like 2010, the idea that you could sell your information and knowledge on the internet was mind blowing, it existed, don't get me wrong, you had like, Napoleon Hill, you had these types of self help gurus that were selling information, but it was very much behind the scenes. And so this guy was talking about real estate in there. He was talking about all kinds of stuff. There was just this chapter. And there was this image in that book and the image was this big circle that was meant to denote like the universe and around the circle were all the income streams that you can derive out of it. And in the middle of the circle was a book. And so his point was, you write a book and then you can derive all of these income streams around it. It was one of many ideas that I had at that time. And for whatever reason, it was the idea that stuck. It was the idea that I was able to keep doing without it feeling hard, even though it, looking back was very hard.
And I self-published it, then I had to figure out a way. I mean, I, I tell my story and say, you know, it's best defined by being in a state of optimistic ignorance the entire time. I think these days most people are pessimistically over informed. You know too much about all of the reasons why you shouldn't do something or all of the best ways to do a thing that you overthink it, or all of the other people already doing the thing. Like I wrote that book when I was a 23-year-old personal trainer for personal trainers. Not because I don't think that other people probably were saying the same things as me at the time, it just wasn't shoved in my face the same way. This was 2010, right? The book came out in 2011 when I was 24.
So I was optimistically ignorant. I had to figure out publishing. I was a 24 year old personal trainer in a small gym in Toronto. I didn't know any authors. I certainly didn't know any editors, but like, how do you find editors? Well, I don't know who editors are, but I know what books are. So I went to the bookstore. I looked up best selling fitness books. I looked up the names of the authors I sent some cold emails and I said can I meet your editor? Some of them made introductions and I hired one of the editors and so on and so on and so forth.
It was just one of those things that stuck where I think naturally, I was willing to figure out the next step, and it didn't feel hard, it felt natural.
There were a lot of things that did not, like real estate investing, for example. That were, hell man, yo David, if I started buying real estate in Toronto in 2010, holy shit, I would not be in Mexico, I'd be on an island somewhere. But it wasn't my thing. And so it stuck, but then I kind of ignored it. Then I became an entrepreneur. Then I built a business off of it. I built a blog that became the biggest blog in my space. I started my own business. I mean, I've put on five conferences, I've done eight digital programs, I've done three membership sites, I've built a software platform, I had a webcomic, I had a fitness webcomic where we sold merch.
I actually mentioned to Jay, who you know, I was like, I don't know if we'll use this anymore in content, but I just actually, for the first time ever, figured this out. I've actually built seven different business verticals that have generated a minimum of $100,000 in revenue. Like I've done just so many things over the years and most of them haven't worked or have worked okay but not great. Could have worked if I stuck with it. For whatever reason I just kept going back to books. This thing just kept hitting me over the head. And then one day I was like, Oh, idiot. There's your sign. And then I decided a couple of years ago, I was like, next stage of my career, I'm going all in on this.
David Elikwu: I was gonna say to what extent do you think that it's worth still you know aiming to be optimistically ignorant about, let's say a new project or a new thing that you're going in through, because just like you say, I think there's like guys these days is okay, you want to do this thing, go and figure out what the best practices are, go and learn from other people. And I think there's part of that that's still valuable, but there's also, like you say, there's incredible value in just going out there and trying something.
So as an example, you know, let's say I just wrote a book and it's something that I wanted to write, or I was, you know, pushed to write, I wrote it. And it's pretty much done. But now I'm like, should I still be spending time figuring out exactly how to optimize a launch and pushing back the launch date and, you know, trying to figure out the exact mechanics of all these things I should do, or is it best just to, to put something out there and just
Jonathan Goodman: You want to know the best way to sell a book is.
David Elikwu: What is it?
Jonathan Goodman: Write another damn book. It's the best way to sell a book. I, I'm, I'm coming out with a book soon, right? The obvious choice. That's why we're talking here. And the next book is due out, I signed the deal with the same publisher. It's due to come out March or April, 2026.
I've told my teams straight up, I do not expect things to really take off until the second book with this publisher comes out. It just, it takes time and if you keep delaying it, you're just pushing back that time. You don't know what you don't know. I'm of the opinion perhaps this is pessimistic, but I'm of the opinion that most of the people out there saying stuff on the internet don't know what the fuck they're talking about. Not because they haven't had success, but because the world is just way too complicated. There's quite clearly so many things that we don't know and don't understand the way more than we do.
And when you think about the nature of information, I've sold a lot of information over a lot of years to a lot of people, you know, 200, 000 plus customers and over 120 countries. Like I've sold information basically every way you could possibly sell information to the point where I understand the inherent issues with it, which is.
In order to sell information, it needs to be packaged. Packaged information does not tell the whole story. In order to sell how to do something, you've got to go through a process that probably is always going to be best defined by fucking around and finding out. And then you have success. And then what you do is you create a post narrative of what had already happened. You smooth out the edges, you create some sort of framework around that thing, and then you package it and you sell it to others, and there's usefulness in that. Of course, you can skip a lot of the steps, but what you're often missing is that the fucking around and the finding out was most often the most important part of the process.
And so, inevitably, what you need to do is, sure, find the best practices for a thing, but don't think that you should copy that at all. You take what's there and then you figure out how to combine it with your own unique experiences and kind of make it yours. And so I'll give you just one example, like the best customers in any business ever is a referred customer. Nobody can justifiably argue with me on that. They are easiest to convert. They generally have the best lifetime value and they've come in as a referral and so referrals are natural to them and the odds that they're going to refer others are much higher. So why do you almost never like, reflect on the information you see out there? Why do you almost never see information on referrals? In call it the business porn ecosystem where everything is superficial and cut off, right? It's not because it's not important. It's because it is HODU to talk about. Referrals are a social transaction. It's a psychological problem. It's not an economic transaction.
It's far easier for me to tell you what the algorithm is doing today or how to AB test a thumbnail or how to write this little five line, you know, "I help X achieve Y" as the bio on your thing. Then it is for me to teach you psychologically what makes people refer. Because they refer, if they feel like it makes them look good in their social circle to be the guy who knows about a thing. You basically need to design into your business a way that makes them feel like they look good to others.
An example is my friend Mike Doehla started a nutrition coaching company called Stronger U And then sold it for eight figures and retired in his thirties. And one of the main things that he did that was so brilliant is that, you know, oftentimes it's like, Oh hey, Janet send me a customer and I'll give you a gift card to a clothing store or a coffee shop or whatever it is. And when you talk about it in an economic sense what you actually do is you skew the social trade, and economically, that's always going to be a bad deal for the client. They know how much value they're giving you, and you're giving them an inconsequential nominal exchange of a gift, you know, in exchange for that.
You cannot, it's, gift cards and thank yous like that, and gifts are fine as a reactive measure, as a thank you gesture, but they won't do anything to proactively generate a referral.
Instead, here's what Mike did when his client was mostly weight loss. They did some weight gain stuff too, but it was mostly weight loss. And so, what happens is somebody's clothes will no longer fit. And so instead of saying to them, send me your customer and I'll give you a gift code to a clothing store, the minute that a client had a transformation where their clothes no longer fit, what he did is his coaches beforehand would find out what clothing stores their clients liked. Just over the course of conversation, they would find it out and they'd CRM, right? And then they would buy the person a gift code for like, 500 bucks, like a lot of money, because this person has spent thousands with them. And they'll send them a gift card and they'll send it to them and say, "Janet, so proud of you. Look, I know your clothes don't fit. Here, I just sent you a gift card to Lululemon for 500 bucks to buy new clothing. And hey, while you're there, why don't you celebrate it? You've done so well. Take a picture, post it on the internet, on your Facebook of you buying new clothes. Like, how amazing, what a great way to celebrate yourself."
Well, now what happens? Janet is at Lululemon. She's taking a picture. She's saying, "Buying new clothes 'cause I lost all this weight 'cause my clothes don't fit." Janet's sister, Janet's friend, Janet's colleagues are now messaging her saying, what the hell have you been doing? Oh, you know, I've been working with this company. Boom. Oh, right.
That's how they did it. Like that's how they did it. That's way better because what you're doing is you're making your client feel like the all star and giving them a time when they want to talk about themself in a way that's public, that social. So that others ask them kind of what they've been doing.
So, we had a summer camp that did this to us. That was funny. We put my son in a summer camp and this was so funny because it's one of those things where it's like, I kind of don't like this, but also want to pat you in the back because of how brilliant it was. So my son, Calvin went to this like week summer camp, you know, sports ball camp, whatever.
And at the end of the week. He won the community award. Okay. So he won the community award. Exactly. Nice, right. And then what I realized is that every kid wins an award at the camp every week. And the next morning, so he came home with this, you know, with this badge that said, you know, my son, Calvin won the community award at whatever super fun sports camp. And so that's cool. So, you know, he's proud we show it to my parents like stupid stuff that parents do, but like, that's not generating anything for the camp. But then you know what happened the next morning, David, I wake up, and there's a sign on our lawn. My son just won the community award at Super Fun Sports Camp. The camp goes around to the houses of every kid that had been at that camp that past week and puts a sign on the front lawn. One of those like, plastic signs with the metal things, right, that goes in. I'm sure that they do this every week. Every kid that goes to the camp.
Well, I mean, you could obviously just take the sign and throw it in the garbage, but like your son's not going to let you do that.
And so of course my neighbor, David and Rachel are outside and they say, Oh, you know, Oh, that's great that Calvin, how did you guys like that camp anyway? It was fine. It was good. Yeah. Calvin enjoyed it. Oh, great. They send their kids to that camp the next week. Brilliant. Like, I don't love the fact that they came and put a sign on our, on our lawn, but I could have taken it down.
Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. So, like, you can, but, but why do you never hear about that? Right. Why do you never hear about this kind of stuff? This is the kind of stuff I talk about in my book. This is how you become the Obvious Choice. This is the 90% of business that still happens through mostly offline word of mouth that's behind the scenes that nobody talks about.
I love it, man. I, I love looking at that stuff. And I'm like, oh, you savvy bastard.
David Elikwu: I was going to ask, is there a version of this that you either do and have done or could do for books or information online? Like if you don't have a physical type product where like, Oh, I can show you how much weight you've lost, or I can tell you that your kid had fun at this thing where maybe it's just like learning or something like that.
Jonathan Goodman: So, number one, skin in the game is important. Costly signaling. I think in this day and age where everything is so easy to do, everybody knows that you've got a media kit in your pocket. Everybody knows that you can spin up a website for free online. It's just too easy to do a bad job and an easy job these days. And so as a result, costly signaling, going out of your way to do something that everybody knows is harder than it needs to be, or more expensive, actually is a wonderful way to stand out.
I remember years back, we did an interview with somebody, so I sold the first ever certification for online fitness I built, right. Which was an online course, but it was the first ever certification for online fitness. And I wrote the textbook on that. Well, I remember we did a, a case study, like, testimonial with this guy named Charles Bell. Charles P. D. Bell was his name, he's in Arkansas. And I asked him, I was like, you know, how did you hear about us? He goes, I didn't know who you were. I'd never come across your stuff. I'd never read your books before. You were just one of the guys that I was looking at because I knew that I wanted to do this thing. And then I saw that you had a textbook. And all that I could think was, ain't nobody gonna go to that much trouble for some bullshit course. Ain't nobody gonna go to that much, we mail a physical textbook. Well what do we do a few weeks later? We send everybody these water bottles, right. This says Online Trainer Academy if you can read it. There's like, 15,000 of these water bottles out into the world.
The key when you're giving a gift, this comes from somebody whose name is John Ruhlin He wrote a wonderful book called Giftology. And John actually passed away suddenly this past year, which is really sad. But the book Giftology is a wonderful, absolutely brilliant book. What he says and what I followed is that you have to look at professional gifting, just as one example. I think gifting is underrated, but you have to look at professional gifting the same way as you look at any marketing expense. How do you optimize your cost per impression or your cost per thousand impressions? The same as you would via sending a Facebook ad or a social media post or whatever it is. And so what you're doing is you're looking for items that have high repeatability, ideally in times when people are going to be socially in places with others who could be your customers. And you're looking for something that is not that expensive, but you can give somebody the best version of that thing that they own.
So almost everybody has a water bottle. My customers are personal trainers. You use water bottles in gyms. Most water bottles that everybody uses are shitty plastic water bottles. This is a beautiful insulated water bottle. The time when I first started buying them, they cost me $13. And it is the best water bottle that you're ever going to own for 13 bucks. And so they get used. And they get used all of the time over and over and over again.
So that's one example where these things like you, for a number of years, you could not go to a fitness conference with personal trainers and not see five or six of these on the tables, like in front of the trainers. They're in the gym with other coaches, whatever it is. Oh, you know, I think I heard something about that. All that it's doing is just improving the lift of your ads, your brand. You're seeing it. People are talking about it naturally over time.
With the book, I'm going to spoil the surprise for you, but I'm sending VIP copies, right? with the book. And so they're going to arrive early January to influencers. And so we made 300 units of these things. And we made beautiful boxes, beautiful boxes with the books. We made this amazing package. And most people stop there or they include a handwritten note. I did a few things with it.
So number one is there was a letter that's mail merged. That's the same for everybody, but I'm inside the book. I hand wrote post it notes and put inside the book. Cause I want somebody to crack the spine. But I know that most people aren't going to read the whole thing, you know, somebody notable, whatever, isn't going to read the whole thing. But if I put a sticky note in the book and say you're going to love this one section, they're going to read that one section, right? And hopefully they like it. At least if nothing else, they've cracked open the book, which makes a big difference. So that's cool. A lot of other people do that. Here's what else I included in it. A metallic bookmark a with a quote from the book.
A metallic bookmark costs me $6 per unit. It flies for free, it weighs nothing. So the shipping costs are nominal because you're already sending a box. And a lot of people have bookmarks. A lot of people send bookmarks as part of packages like this, but they send shitty paper bookmarks that get thrown out. They cost 20 cents, right? For $6, I'm sending you the best bookmark you've ever owned in your life. And by definition, the bookmark has a quote. So, so the quote is a quote about fear. You know, failure is like a bee sting. Before you get stung, you're scared because you don't know how it feels. You hear that it hurts, but then you get stung and it does hurt. But you're fine, and you get up the next day, and then you're not so scared about it the next time. Failure is kind of like that. It's a quote that's general enough that you're going to want to use the bookmark. But it's a metallic bookmark. Nobody's going to throw it out. How many impressions now did I just buy with a $6 bookmark? Versus, how many impressions did I buy with a 20 cents bookmark?
And then the other piece of it is, every single package has one of these watches. Casio F91W. I bought 300 of these watches. I spent $10,000 on these watches. And, I think that Casio is the best watch in the world.
The book is about simplicity. The book is about solving the damn problem. Eloquently, profitably doing it in a way that is so simple and resilient that it doesn't matter what technological change comes in. You know, you think about the Casio watch, they created the first ever digital watch in the 1970s. It does everything that it needs to do. It lights up, it has an alarm, it has a timer, it's a good size, it's cheap. And as a result, they've sold the same ugly ass watch for the last 50 years. It's the BIC pen, it's Craigslist, right? It's a beautiful story, and it's a story that perfectly sums up the book, and I wear it every day and I talk about it all the time. It's like, cost me 25 bucks, again, flies for free. Nobody's gonna throw out a watch. So even if they don't read the book, right, people are going to be wearing the watch. People are gonna be using the bookmark. Sure, they're gonna be sharing a picture of it on social media when it comes because it's different. But then like, for months and years that follow, how many impressions did I just buy? How many invisible referrals did I just earn for an additional $30 per unit? And I actually, Parker Collins is paying for the whole thing, so, you know, I bought it for nothing.
But I was able to convince them, right, a very old school publisher, that this is actually a great use of ad spend. I was like, spend the money on this, don't spend the money sponsoring newsletters. Don't spend the money on Amazon ads. I'd rather you spend $50,000 on these packages than you spend $50,000 sponsoring newsletters that's going to hit one time and maybe sell some books. It's going to be hard because we're not going to be able to measure it.
But that's a couple examples of how, you know, I'm always looking for things that maximize the number of impressions. per cost dollar spent. And then I'm looking for things that are unique and tell a story, but also are the best version of something that's used all of the time, where people otherwise use something really, really cheap. And you send somebody like a beautiful mug to have coffee in every single morning? A $15 stone mug is going to be the best mug that they use, and they're going to have their coffee in it every single morning, because most people have cheap stuff like this.
David Elikwu: Jonathan. I love that. I love all of this. This is awesome. The bookmark one stands out to me specifically because,
you know, I have I have this podcast and I speak to people that have written books and even just as you were saying, I was thinking of the number of times, you know, I got a package from Penguin, Penguin books the other day some books from their authors. I've gotten loads of book packages. I've got loads bookmarks. I don't know where a single one of them is. I don't actually know where they are. I don't know what happens to them. I mean, obviously I treasure them and I, you know, I take the picture I, I greatly value sent those things. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Jonathan Goodman: You know how that came to me? I'm glad and, and I'm, and I'm excited to send you this bookmark and for you to use it all the time. But you know where it came to me? I'll tell you the story.
It was after a workout with my wife and I, she was my girlfriend at the time, this is many years ago, and we were living in a place called Mount Pleasant, Toronto. We worked out at that, you know, it's a good life gym, we just did a workout, and then we were hungry afterwards. And we were walking up the street, and there were these two young women that were outside giving samples for the store. You see it all the time, right? They're giving samples outside the store, trying to get you to come in. They said tiramisu, and I said, excuse me, and they said tiramisu, and, and then I still didn't know what they were talking about, because I'm not French. They were like, and so they handed me a cup of something, and it turns out it's Italian that's how sophisticated I am, and they told me that it is a vegan, gluten free Italian joint that just opened.
Okay. Vegan, gluten free Italian food is not a thing. Like, you're trying too hard, you know what I'm saying? Like, like, I got nothing against vegans, I got nothing against gluten free, I got nothing against Italian food, but like, those three things kind of naturally don't go together. Regardless here's what happened.
Normally, when somebody gives you a sample and you're walking by, you take the sample and you keep walking. But I stopped. Naturally, without even thinking about it, I stopped. You want to know why? They gave me a metal spoon with the sample. They gave me a metal spoon with the sample. Convention dictates that you don't take somebody's metal spoon.
And so then I'm sitting there and I'm eating the, the vegan gluten free tiramisu. I don't know what tiramisu is, but I'm eating it. And it's like, not awful, but then you're standing there and you're staring at them. And so what do you do? Oh, so what's this place, right.
Now there's permission marketing. Now there's buy in, you know, using Seth Godin's thing. Like, now I've asked them now they have permission to tell me. So they tell me, you know, it's whatever it's gluten free Italian. It just opened. We're doing the special on whatever. And Alison and I kind of gave that like shrug like, yeah, sure. Why not?
So we went in and we spent $30 on like, no G or something. No G, no key. It starts with a G. I don't know. And so, you know, it was crappy. It was bad. And we never went back. You know, so, number one, of course, good marketing, no matter how brilliant you are your product isn't going to win if your product sucks.
But it got us to try it where we would not have otherwise tried it. And it's all because they gave us a metal spoon.
And so the question that I always ask now is like, what's your metal spoon? It's not going to make your product succeed or fail, but what can you do? What's the one thing that you can do at that point where somebody either is going to walk by up the street and go somewhere else or stop and at least give you a chance that's all that your product deserves or your service deserves. What's your metal spoon? What's that thing? And so, the metal bookmark is my metal spoon.
David Elikwu: I think I remember you telling another story as well of the guy who was selling, I think it was band aids or plasters as we call them in the UK in uruguay. And I loved, I love that story, but I think that's another great example of, I mean, I'll, I'll leave you to tell it, but just the idea that, reaching out to the right person in the right place at the right time and being very specific in, in who you reach out to can also have a massive difference as well.
Jonathan Goodman: There's a couple of things about that story that I love. Number one is just the importance of being lost. And so we were living in Uruguay at the time. Don't ask, I don't know why but we were living in Uruguay at the time. And so we lived in Uruguay for four months and you know, Uruguay is, number one, when we were there, no English, like none. And Montevideo a little bit, but like once you get outside, none.
And so we were just constantly lost and Montevideo, the streets are largely named after either important dates or important people. And they're really long as a result, you know, dehi ocho de Julio or general whatever, you know, Jorge LIOs or whatever, right? And so we had a paper map. The paper map showed too big of a space for the names of the streets, and so the names of the streets were constantly cut off. And because so many of the streets names started with general, whatever we had no idea where we were going. Like, we knew what street we wanted, but the map didn't say the whole name. It was general the dot dot dot dot dot on the map. And so we had no clue. So we were constantly lost.
Nowadays, of course, you can just use your phone and I encourage you when you're in places like this to not use your phone to actually stress yourself and struggle just a little bit. Like, how bad is it if you really get lost in your way during the day? Like, you're fine. You know, it will challenge you a little bit to figure it out, which actually is very pleasurable versus looking at this blue dot with your face down on the phone and following that blue dot and knowing where your stop is and then getting off.
So we would basically just get on a bus going in the right general direction. And again, the bus system wasn't really publicized. So we didn't know when the buses turned or anything, but we knew what direction we wanted to go to. And so if the bus turned, we just got off and walked a block and got on a bus that kept going.
So I was on high alert, like looking at everything around as we were on the bus. And at one point this guy gets on and he's got this like blue plaid button up shirt that was tucked into his jeans, kind of covering this little punch. And he gets on the bus and he walks right past the driveway. He doesn't pay, and he starts yelling, Tirita, which translates towe, which is I guess the word for bandaids. So he's yelling Tirita. I was like, band aids? Like he takes out this box and he's holding up an individual band aid. I said, band aids? Like, yo, in New York City, they're selling chocolate bars, right? You know, like, this dude's selling band aids. And all of a sudden, this woman calls him over and gives him a coin and takes a band aid, and then another one, and then another one. And within one stop, four people bought individual band aids from this guy. He gets off the bus. I see he walks across the street and waits at the bus stop, go in the other direction. And my guess is he was going back and forth.
And then I thought about it. Well, Montevideo, the women, at least when we were there, this is like eight years ago, still dressed up, it was very old fashioned that way, a lot of them wore heels, they were wearing dresses, but the streets are like broken cobblestone in a lot of places, and so these poor women's feet were all blistered and sore by the end of the day. What do they need? This guy was selling them the one thing that they need. You know, there's a famous Gary Halbert story, the famous copywriter Boron Letters and stuff, and the story, he was in this room where he was teaching copywriters, and he said, if I have a hamburger stand, what do I want? What's the single thing that I need more than anything else to sell the most amount of hamburgers? And one person put up their hand and they said, great taste. Another person put up their hand and they said, great branding. And he says, you're all wrong. What you need is a starving crowd. What you need are hungry people.
And so what this guy did, what Trita man did is he sold the perfect product at the perfect time to the perfect customer. And it was so amazing to see. And then I think about, you know, these poor people on like, the New York subway line that are trying to raise money for their kids basketball team, selling chocolate bars, or my son Calvin is in scouts at home and they did a fundraiser where they sold apples outside of the grocery store.
And all that I can think is, you can't do any better than that? You know, you're selling an item outside of a grocery store by definition, that somebody knows that they can get in that grocery store cheaper. Number one, you can't do any better than that. Number two, what lesson are you teaching these kids?
You're basically teaching them that if they're cute, which they won't be for very long, people will give them money. That is a terrible fucking lesson to teach a child, isn't it? Like that is not how you teach a child to market and sell. You know, all that I can think is like, follow the example of tirita man, you know, sell band aids to people who have got blisters. Like that's what you do. I don't know where you came across that story, but I love that story, man.
David Elikwu: Thank you so much for tuning in. Please do stay tuned for more. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe. It really helps the podcast and follow me on Twitter feel free to shoot me any thoughts. See you next time
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