Questions from a Subscriber
The Amplified Impact Podcast
September 21st, 2023
I’m excited because today’s episode is all about your questions.
I absolutely love when you reach out, whether through DMs, emails, or comments, and today, I’m tackling some of the intriguing questions that recently came my way.
First up, budgeting: I’ll share my favorite budgeting method that doesn’t require me to love math.
Gym playlist: I don’t listen to music in the gym, and I’ll explain why.
When to pivot or stick: The million-dollar question in entrepreneurship. I’ll share my perspective.
Athletic Greens: Find out why it’s a no-go for me.
Content creation: I create a lot of content, but what’s the long-term plan? I’ll discuss how my approach might change.
Comfort food: Discover my go-to comfort meal and activity.
Next decade goals: My primary goal for the next decade and beyond, plus a special hint about writing a book.
I didn’t get to all the questions today, but stay tuned for more Q&A sessions in the future.
And, if you’re up for it, we might even do a live Q&A. Let me know if that sounds exciting to you.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“One of my goals with building a brand was I want to be able to have opportunities when I leave one business, to go start the next one or have opportunities come to me. I want to have that staying power where people recognize who I am, and that needed to be underneath my name.”- Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino:
Yo, what’s up, everybody? So one of my favorite episodes to do is when you guys send in questions or you have comments or you DM me and, you know, you reach out in some kind of way. And I’ve said, in previous episodes, if you reach out, you DM me. There’s a good chance I will answer your question here on the podcast. And we had a listener actually follow up, and they sent me an email with a whole bunch of questions. So I’m going to dive in and answer because I was just cruising through these and I didn’t spend a lot of time reading through the list. But there’s some really interesting questions in here, so let’s kick it off. Number one is, as someone who does not love math, what is your favorite budgeting, software or method of managing finances, both for personal and for business? So that’s a good question. I do two things.
Anthony Vicino:
One is I’m not really a math guy. I don’t love looking at spreadsheets. I don’t love looking at numbers. So I take all of my bank accounts, my credit cards, all, everything, and I funnel them into an aggregator. The one that I use is called Monarch. There’s all sorts of those. There’s mint there’s. I think personal capital status is another one, but Monarch is the one that I use.
Anthony Vicino:
It works well. I also have my CPA who manages my finances. He can produce a personal financial statement whenever I need it, which is pretty frequently with real estate. Sometimes the banks reach out, and every year they’re going to reach out and they want to just keep tabs on your financial situation. So that’s another way that I do it now, in terms of tracking my finances and whatnot, it’s one thing to be able to log in and at a glance, see all your accounts and see where everything’s at. But I find that when I do that, because I have so many accounts, that the meaningful stuff can kind of get lost in the shuffle. And so the meaningful stuff that I’m really concerned about is, okay, how much money am I really making every day? And how much am I spending every day? Because wealth is that ratio between what you make and what you keep. The goal then is to increase what you make and increase what you keep.
Anthony Vicino:
And so we got to be very cognizant that as we earn more, our expenses aren’t creeping alongside of us. And the best way that I know how to do that has been to just manually keep a financial journal, where every morning I just log in, say, to Monarch, and I look at my accounts and I just see like, okay, what did I buy yesterday? How much money left my bank accounts, whether that was for coffee or for lunch or I bought this fancy thing, whatever, and I just write it down in the journal. Now, usually on any given day, I might have somewhere between three and ten transactions. So it’s not going to take me a long time to write that all out. And then I write out, how much money did I make, so how many deposits did I receive across all my different business ventures and whatnot? And I just write that down. Usually that can vary as well, but you’re never going to have more than, like, a couple of dozen things that you need to write down. And if you do, that could be a really good sign. One, that you’re spending too much, or two, that you have really good income streams.
Anthony Vicino:
So good for you. But what I find from this practice is that just by manually writing out, what did I spend yesterday, it causes me to reflect on, okay, was that a good purchase or not? Is that something in the future I need to continue purchasing, or maybe do I need to in the next time I go to get coffee, I realize, oh, when I buy a mocha, that’s $9. I could just get the regular coffee, $3, and I won’t feel quite so shitty about myself for drinking the chocolate filled sugar thing, sugar drink. So I find that to be a very, very helpful activity, and I do that every day. I like to do that in the morning, and I’ve been doing that for years. I find it to be the best way to keep your finger on the pulse of your finances, and a lot of people might think that’s overkill, but for me, that which gets measured gets managed. And I’ve played the game before where I put my head in the sand and I don’t look at my bank accounts, I don’t look at my finances on a consistent basis, and then bad shit happens. So it’s better to look at it.
Anthony Vicino:
Bring the monster out into the light while the monster is still small, and look at the thing and address it while you can, so don’t ignore it. All right, number two, what’s on your gym playlist? So this might surprise people, but I don’t really listen to music because I get the lyrics to songs just kind of stuck in my head, and then my ADHD hyper focused personality will just cycle through those songs on repeat over and over and over and over and over. And that is a problem for me because it crowds out all the other thoughts that I want to make space for, the silence that I want to make space for. I love music, but it just has this way of being like this infectious earworm, and so I don’t listen to music. When I do listen to music, it’s usually binaural beats through brain FM, which is just there’s no lyrics, there’s no real melody or rhythm. It’s just noise, effectively. I do listen to podcasts while I work out occasionally, but lately I’ve been trying to go into the gym when I do my workouts and be present, be focused on the workout and not get distracted. When I listen to things, the workout tends to spiral and become much longer than it needed to be.
Anthony Vicino:
And I’m not getting as much quality work in because I’m distracted. And so I’ve been trying not to listen to too much while I’m in the gym. How do you know when it’s time to move on from a project or a business? Or are you the kind of captain that goes down with the ship? Well, sometimes you do have to go down with the ship because you stayed on it for too long and there’s no way to rectify it. The goal is never to sink a ship. The goal is to recognize this ship isn’t going to get us across the Atlantic and then turn back for home while you still have time, right? That’s ultimately the goal. But if you made the decision to stick it out, then there comes a point of no return where your only option is to go down with that ship and then try to build the next ship and do better next time. Right now, how do you know when to pivot versus when to stay? This is the hardest thing to know in any business because starting a business requires a leap of faith. It requires you to believe that you can do something that other people don’t think is possible because if they did, they would do it right.
Anthony Vicino:
So you need to be kind of a rebel and outlier in your belief that something is possible that others don’t. Now, you get rewarded in entrepreneurship when you turn out to be right, but you don’t necessarily know definitively when you have been proven right or proven wrong. In the world of business, you can struggle for months or years to get traction and then one day everything turns around and you look like a genius. It can happen. Then again, you could struggle for years and decades and it never turns around. You look back and you’re like, that was just the wrong vehicle, it’s the wrong opportunity, it could have been all the wrong things. And it’s just so hard to know in the moment from your singular vantage point. And so this is where I think peer groups and mentors are very, very important people who just have more time on the mountain than you, who have more perspective, who’ve seen more things, or who at least have other data points that they’ve collected over the course of their life that they can help Pattern recognize onto your situation as much as possible because you don’t know necessarily what’s going to work and what’s not going to work and if you need to stick it out longer or not.
Anthony Vicino:
And so this is a very hard question. The best I can say is get yourself a group of people who can help you look at the problem objectively as possible and identify. Okay. Are the problems that I’m encountering right now, are they the type of things that I can fix that will if we have the right skills, right resources, the right business plan, executed over a long enough time frame, time frame, it will work? Or is there some fatal flaw that we’re just not seeing right? I think that’s maybe the best way to go about that, but it’s a very hard question. All right, number. I don’t know about the numbers here. Do you drink athletic greens? I don’t. Funny story here.
Anthony Vicino:
Athletic greens, I tried it once and it gave me excruciating stomach pains. So we never tried again. Never tried it again. You put a lot of time and energy and attention towards creating content. Like a lot of content. Yeah, I do a lot of content, but across Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, if you guys didn’t know, there’s a wealth of content that we put out every single day. So come follow me on all those channels and you can see we do a lot. The question here is just what’s your long term plan? Are you going to pull back eventually, or are you just going to maintain this pace until you retire or burn out? I don’t know.
Anthony Vicino:
I find that creating is the thing that brings me the most joy in life. I love it. I love the act of creating, but it is a grind. It is difficult. And right now, I think what’s going to most likely happen is when we get to a certain size and a certain inertia and a momentum, we will start to pull back on how much we do. But there will still be a lot. And the goal will just be to think deeper and put out more high, high, high quality things. On YouTube, we have the high quality Channel, which is at Anthony Vasino.
Anthony Vicino:
And then we have the Amplified Impact Podcast, which is Daily podcast. And there’s not a lot of editing that we do. He’s looking at me right here. It’s pretty basic, right? So it’s kind of this mix between very high intention, high quality content that we do on certain channels or at certain times, and then there’s a mix of, like, the lower effort, not lower effort, but lower quality in terms of production value and whatnot, but trying to go for more quality. And that’s given me the opportunity to improve my skills, to think more about what I think on topics. But I think as I grow and this personal brand continues to expand, we’ll probably end up doing fewer and fewer things, but just more high quality things. So hopefully that answers the question. But I don’t know.
Anthony Vicino:
I love creating and I don’t really see an insight for that. And I love being prolific. I think one of the coolest compliments you can give a writer is like, that guy was prolific. I just think that’s, like, for some reason. It sounds really cool. I always thought about Isaac Asimov, who is, like, this famous science fiction writer. Everybody talks about how he’s so prolific, and I don’t know when I was at that kind of formidable not formidable, formidable formative age, I guess it hit me as, like, being prolific is a cool thing. So I don’t know.
Anthony Vicino:
All right, what’s your go to meal and activity when you’re looking for comfort? I eat a lot of pizza. I love pizza. But I find is that gluten, however, exasperates the symptoms or the manifestations of my ADHD. So I try to limit how much gluten that I eat, but I love indulging in pizza. It’s my favorite. All right, now there’s a whole bunch of other questions here, guys, but we’ll just wrap it up here. What is the primary goal for the next decade of your life and businesses? Oh, that’s a great question. I’ve mentioned before, I think, on this podcast, one of my goals in building this audience was in the past, when I would build businesses and then exit them, it was like starting all over from zero, from scratch, because nobody nearly knew who I was.
Anthony Vicino:
I’d built the businesses in a way where I wasn’t front facing. One of my goals with building a brand was I want to be able to have opportunities when I leave one business, to go start the next one or have opportunities come to me. I want to have that staying power where people recognize who I am, and that needed to be underneath my name. As a consequence, that means I needed to give up some privacy. I needed to be more public facing and share my story a bit more. So there was definitely pros and cons to that, but that’s the reason why I did it. The other reason is that I have this dream in the back of my head of writing a book that someday hits the New York Times bestseller list, which I think is the last list for me to hit. And I would just love to be able to do that.
Anthony Vicino:
In order to do so, I think I need to build a large enough audience so that the next book that we publish, whether that’s hyper focus or beyond the apex or whatever book that we’re working on, can actually hit that list. That’s one of the big goals. But in terms of what’s the next 10, 15, 30 years, I don’t know. Just keep creating, keep making things that fill me with energy and then hopefully bring people value. And if we can do that every day for the next 30 years, I think that we have an opportunity to make a massive impact on the world, and that just seems like a really cool thing to strive for. So thank you for the questions. I know I didn’t get to all of them, but I will try and make an effort to do a follow up episode in the future. But for the listeners out there, if you guys got more questions, other things that are top of mind you’re curious about, shoot it over to me.
Anthony Vicino:
And what might be interesting is to do a live Q A. At some point, maybe on Instagram or YouTube, we can do like a live, bring you guys all in. We’ll do something interactive. So if that sounds cool to you, leave a comment, leave a review, shoot me an email, let me know that that’s something you’d be interested in, and we’ll see if we can make that happen. So, as always, guys and gals, I appreciate you being here. I’ll catch you around these parts tomorrow. But until then, partner, stay hyper focused, my friend.
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