The Transcript

How to Be a Terrible Employee, Build an Audience, and Travel the World

Voiceover: Welcome to Hack the Entrepreneur, the show which reveals the fears, habits, and inner battles behind big-name entrepreneurs and those on their way to joining them. Now here is your host, Jon Nastor.

Jerod Morris: Welcome back to Hack the Entrepreneur. I’m so glad you decided to join me today. I’m your host, Jerod Morris, but you can call me well, Jerod, because that’s what everyone calls me, since my name doesn’t lend itself to a catchy nickname like Jon/Jonny.

Oh, and you might be wondering why I’m talking to you right now instead of Jonny. Well don’t worry. It’ll become clear soon enough.

My guest today is a dad, husband, drummer, and entrepreneur who builds awesome stuff online and helps people with their lives and businesses. He spent his early years travelling around Canada while playing in punk rock bands, which taught him the DIY work ethic of if you want something to change, you have to do it. Get it done, or stop complaining about it. This is a work ethic that he still swears by.

He is the host of Hack the Entrepreneur and co-host of The Showrunner podcast and Podcasting Course. Now, let’s hack our very own Jonny Nastor.

Jonny Nastor: You know that we have great advertisers that support the show and keep it free for you. One of the reasons why advertisers love Hack the Entrepreneur is that they know the show has awesome listeners like you. Right now, we’re running an audience survey to help us know more about the Hack the Entrepreneur listeners. Your answers help us find advertisers that are well matched to you, your interests, and the show. That increases that chance of having happy advertisers, which means happy listeners. Everybody wins.

Please got to PodSurvey.com/Hack to take the survey. It ll take you less than five minutes. The survey is completely anonymous, and when you’re finished, you can enter your email for the chance to win a $100 Amazon gift card. We give away one every single month. Even if you’ve taken a podcast listeners survey before, we hope you’ll take ours and support the show.

Once again, go to PodSurvey.com/Hack. Take the survey, and help the show. Thanks for helping us find the best advertisers so that we can keep the show free for you.

Jerod Morris: Welcome back to another episode of Hack the Entrepreneur, and we have another brilliant entrepreneur with us today. Jonny, welcome to the show.

Jonny Nastor: Wow, thanks. Thanks for having me, Jerod.

Jerod Morris: Absolutely my pleasure, absolutely my pleasure. So let’s not jump straight into it, shall we? Because before we begin this interview, I think we should let everyone know why you decided to hand the reins of your show over to me for this episode, because I believe some congratulations are in order.

Jonny Nastor: I don’t know what we’re going for.

Jerod Morris: Wow, I was going to have you say that it was your hundredth episode.

Jonny Nastor: Oh, yeah, well it is my hundredth episode. Sorry.

I had this weird thought around episode 20 of, When I get to episode 100, I’m going to hack myself, and then I forgot about it for 80 episodes because it was a lot of work. As I started getting closer people on Twitter and people would email me, like listeners, and they’d be like, You know who the perfect guest for episode 100 would be? A few people said someone else, and I’m like, Well, whatever, Gary Vaynerchuk can wait, is what I thought. And he is coming on next month, but he’s not getting episode 100. Sorry, Gary. But it was me, because I guess people want to know about me.

Jerod Morris: Yeah.

Jonny Nastor: So here we are, episode 100.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, its natural. It’s a little bit different being on that side of it, huh?

Jonny Nastor: It is, it’s different. But it’s cool. I can’t believe I started less than a year ago, and I’m on episode 100. It s a big body of work. It’s a lot of conversations. It’s 100, well 99, conversations with smart entrepreneurs, and then one with me.

Jerod Morris: Oh I thought you were going to say and then one with me.

Jonny Nastor: No, with myself. So it’s like, Wow, here we go.

Jerod Morris: Well, I appreciate the opportunity to do this, and I’m excited to jump into it, so now, let’s jump straight into it.

I will ask you the question that I have always wanted to ask you since I started listening to your show way back when. That is, what is the one thing that you do that you feel has been the biggest contributor to your successes so far?

How to Pursue Things You Want (to Ensure That You Get Them)

Jonny Nastor: Ooh, good question, Jerod. You’re going to hear that a lot. It’s funny, answering these questions, because I never thought of answers as I was figuring out the questions.

But I think it’s how I push myself when I see an opportunity or when an opportunity gets presented to me by someone else. I very, very quickly make a decision and take action and push for that opportunity to become real and to exist.

I really do like to take it to a story. The last time this really happened is with The Showrunner Podcasting Course. Brian Clark, CEO of Copyblogger, before Rainmaker.FM even launched, we had a random Friday afternoon phone chat for 15 minutes. He brought up this idea of a podcasting course with this guy Jerod who I had never met before, and it was in the background of this conversation. And then by the end of the conversation, I was like, Yes, and that course — that s, I think, a great idea with this Jerod guy. You should introduce us.

Yes, I’ll introduce you guys via email, right after this call. He didn’t. He’s a busy guy. But he loved it, right?

I waited until the next day, and then by the end of the next day, I actually direct messaged him on Twitter, and I was like, Brian, what about that introduction to Jerod?

Oh yeah, I totally, totally forgot. Thank you for reminding me. He did, and the intro came within five minutes of that email, and then there was basically no more conversation, no more questions with Brian.

I was like, We ve got to run with this. I ve got to meet this Jerod guy, and we ve got to see how we can work together, and then we ve got to put our heads down and just run with it.

I think that there are so many opportunities for things like this or ideas or projects to fail along the way if there are too many questions asked. There’s too much thought, even, sometimes put into the whole process.

I had no idea how we were going to launch. I had no idea what the course would exactly entail, but I knew that it was a step-by-step process that I could get through and that I would figure it out as we went, and especially working with you.

That’s how I did Hack the Entrepreneur, like over the weekend, at the cottage, reading Gary Vaynerchuk s book, and, I’m starting a podcast on Tuesday. I get home Monday, and Tuesday I’m doing it. Oh, I’ve never interviewed anybody. Oh well, let’s just do it. By Thursday, I was interviewing people, and I think that’s just it. Those opportunities come to us, especially when we’re aware of them and look for them, but we oftentimes spend so much time, and we weigh all the pros and cons. I’ve never weighed all the pros and cons of anything.

I think you lose opportunity and miss opportunities in life doing that too much. You have to learn to follow your gut or your instinct or whatever you want to call it and just run with it. All those opportunities won’t work, but at least you’ve tried, and at least you’ve pushed it through. It’s not me sitting here nine months later and being like, I wonder — if I launched a podcast called Hack the Entrepreneur, I wonder what it would be like. I wonder how greatly it would have changed my life, which it has, in the same ways.

So that is my one thing. Just running with stuff, and going for it.

Jerod Morris: Have you always been like that, or was there a specific event in your life, an opportunity that you regretted not taking, that drives you now when these opportunities come up? What gave you the ability, the mindset, to be like that, to think like that?

What You Can Learn from Punk Rock and Apply in Your Business

Jonny Nastor: I don’t think I’ve always been like that, at least not as much as I am now. Maybe a little bit. Early on, the first band I ever got to go on tour with, I was 17 years old, and I got to tour the country with them. I was in class, actually, and I heard somebody talking beside me about how they were going to tour with this band because the band needed a drummer, and I was like, Really? Those guys need a drummer? That’s crazy.

He was just like, Yeah, and I’m the drummer for it now. I’ve been picked, and all this stuff. I was like, Oh, that’s cool. This was before Facebook and stuff, so I just tracked down one of the guys in the band, and I was like, Is he really the drummer for you guys now? And you guys are going on tour? He was like, No, no. I mean, he tried out, but no, we’re still looking for drummers. I was like, Well, I need to try out. He was like, Yeah, okay, we’ll see. I was like, No, no, seriously, I need to.

I just pushed it. I pushed it maybe even to being a bit annoying at times, but I wanted it so bad that I wasn’t going to let the opportunity pass me by. And then from that, I’ve realized that’s how you have to be. You can’t be super passive in life. Things don’t get handed to you. Nothing’s ever been handed to me. I’ve never had stuff given and put on my table. I’ve really had to push for things. I guess I’ve gotten better at it. So yeah, that’s a weird answer.

It’s not innate within me, but I haven’t always had it.

Jerod Morris: Well, no, it’s a good answer. I think as entrepreneurs, one of our greatest struggles is the fear of being wrong, of making mistakes, of failing, of going after that opportunity like you described and it not happening and it not turning out the way that we want and having to take a couple steps back. Can you tell me how to be wrong?

Jonny Nastor: Do and try lots and lots and lots of stuff, all the time. For one thing, you won’t remember the failures. If I have 25 failures and one success, I’ll remember that success. The chances of me having one success out of one try is really slim and small. So the more stuff I try, the more things I put out there, the more people I talk to, the more chances of one of them catching on and doing something.

You can forget so many mistakes. You can forget being wrong thousands of times if you have those brief moments of success. You can’t have those without showing up over and over and over and over again, right?

It s the whole Woody Allen, 90 percent of success — I think it’s actually more than that — is literally just showing up. It goes back to when there’s an opportunity that presents itself, don’t think about the fact that you’ve never done it before. Don’t think about the fact that, Oh, well, I don’t know. Maybe I’m not the right person. Who cares? Just go for it.

You are instantly not the right person and you are instantly going to fail the second you don’t try. The second you don’t put it out there and be like, I’m going for it. Then you’re guaranteed to fail, so why not try?

So I guess the best way for me to be wrong — I’m wrong all the frickin time, I really am — is to constantly be doing stuff. It affects me less and less and less, those errors, those mistakes, whatever you want to call them, those failures, the more things that I do. And when I used to try one thing a month, or the perfect thing seemed like it came along and I would try it, and it wouldn’t work, and I would go back to work for six months. Then it s like, I’m going to try one more thing, because maybe this one is right.

Now, all day, it’s just throwing stuff out there, seeing what sticks, seeing what works, and seeing what doesn’t. It s made it a lot easier for me.

Jerod Morris: I have a paperweight on my desk that I’ve had for a long time, and it’s a basketball with the quote, You’ll always miss 100 percent of the shots that you don’t take.

Jonny Nastor: Yeah.

Jerod Morris: Which very much echoes what you’re talking about right there.
So just in the short time that I’ve known you, I’ve watched you take Hack the Entrepreneur from nothing to this big, thriving, successful audience. I’ve worked with you on The Showrunner podcast to take that from nothing to a big, thriving, successful audience that has a course attached to it. That’s a lot of audience building and audience connection in a short period of time.

What do you think it is that you do that allows you to connect with audiences and build audiences as I’ve seen you do so much just over the past year?

The Secret to Successfully Building and Connecting with an Audience

Jonny Nastor: I’m going to give you this one, Jerod, and I’m going to say it’s being human.

Jerod Morris: Oh, interesting, that’s something new that I’ve never heard you say before.

Jonny Nastor: And when you say connection — everybody talks about connection and building this audience, I’m making this connection with lots and lots and lots of people — but they don’t want to actually make that connection, it seems.

By this, I mean, I would love to connect with all these people, but then somebody emails them, and Oh I don’t respond, and or they don’t connect with them on social media. They fail to be actually social. They just use it to promote themselves, and I think that’s really what it is.

I get emails all the time now that tell me it’s this genuine feeling they get from listening to me, which I think is me just being me, me really being interested in what and how these conversations go, and who I get to talk to, and then also in who’s listening. I really want every single one of them to succeed and to be able to live every one of their dreams, because I know that it’s possible as weird and quoi la as that sounds.

The Internet gives us this amazing thing that we can do really, really cool things and build huge platforms within short amounts of time if we do it right, if we connect with people on an individual level. If I can connect with one person really, really, really well, I can probably do that with thousands of people.

Jerod Morris: So, Jonny, as a Hack the Entrepreneur listener, which I am, I have to say that as I’m listening to the episodes, my favorite parts always end up being the parts where you get into talking about habits with the entrepreneurs and the habits they have that contribute to their success and what they do when they first wake up and just those habitual behaviors that help them become successful.

So I want to get into some of that with you, and I’ve been dying to know this question since I first heard you asking people this question, and it is, tell us about the first 30 minutes of your work day.

Jonny s Biggest Win to Date

Jonny Nastor: Nice. My first 30 minutes...