John: Who is ready to rock today, Fire Nation? I hope it’s you because we have an audio masterclass, and this one is about you turning your blog into a freedom machine that produces passive income. Who doesn’t want a freedom machine that produces passive income? I want all of those things. I want them right now.

Jon Morrow is gonna be the person that breaks it down for us because he’s been doing this for over a decade. He’s built four of the world’s most popular blogs without even being able to move from the neck down. This dude is so inspiring. I just saw him speak, recently, at a conference, and he brought people in the audience to tears at times. Today, he is going to talk with us about you creating your freedom machine that produces that passive income. Again, he’s coming at us, tons of experience. He’s the CEO of Smart Blogger. And as soon as we get back from thanking out sponsors, we’re gonna dive right in.

So, Jon, say what’s up to Fire Nation and share something unique and interesting about yourself that most people don’t know.

Jon: Hello, everyone. Yeah, Jon Morrow. And when I was a child, even today, I have extremely sensitive fingertips. But when I was a kid, I used to go down the hallway in school, and I could pick the combination locks on lockers just by touch. And I used to go down the hallway and open everyone’s locker while everyone was in class. And then when they would come out of the class, everyone would come in both sides of the hallway, all the lockers were open.

John: Oh, my God.

Jon: Yup. That’s something people don’t know about me.

John: Well, I’m glad that you didn’t turn into a professional heist artist, but I feel like you definitely could’ve been on one those shows like – what was it? Oceans Eleven. You could’ve been the guy they just bring in, and you’re just opening it up because of your sensitive fingertips.

Jon: I probably could’ve gone into that. Yeah, I probably could have.

John: Wow, that’s crazy. Well, Fire Nation, as you heard in the intro, we’re dropping some value bombs today on an incredible audio masterclass. How to turn your blog into a freedom machine that produces passive income. And Jon’s always had a way with words. That’s why he’s just had so much success with his blog and his courses and all this stuff. And we’re actually gonna be going through a bunch of things, today, around that topic. About turning your blog into a freedom machine. How great is that? A freedom machine that produces passive income.

But first and foremost, Jon, we do have something that we’ll mention again at the end of the show as well, but I wanted to just kind of let people know that there is a pretty cool opportunity for them to get a little more information about this freedom machine that we can share on this podcast. So, if they head over to eofire.com/freedommachine, what’s gonna be hanging out at the other end of that URL?

Jon: So, yeah, we have a free training for you guys about exactly how to start a blog on the side. So, even if you don’t know anything about blogging, and you’re not doing this stuff full time – or even if you are, it works either way – how to start a blog on the side, grow its traffic in the background, and grow it to at least $1,000.00 a month of passive income that’s just coming in like clockwork.

John: Fire Nation, this is a free training. And I’m not saying that my other guests that, maybe, offer free training don’t overdeliver because they typically do, but Jon Morrow takes overdelivering to a whole new level. This guy just overdelivers, and I think that this absolute free content is better than 99 percent of any paid content you’re gonna find out there.

So, just make sure that you do check that out: eofire.com/freedommachine. This free training is bonsai. You gotta take advantage of this, Fire Nation, and consume this great content. Who doesn’t want a freedom machine? Why do you think I called The Freedom Journal, the freedom journal? Because if you accomplish your number one goal in 100 days, you’re on your way to freedom. And this is just another example of how you can turn your blog into freedom, into a freedom machine that produces passive income. So, Jon, let’s get real with Fire Nation. Let’s really whittle this down to the core. How realistic is it to make passive income from blogging?

Jon: It’s certainly realistic, but it’s a lot harder than most people think. So, it depends on your definition of realism. When I asked the majority of people, how long do you think it will take to do this? They say, “No question, I’ll have it nailed in three months.” That is actually unrealistic. And it’s unrealistic for anything because whether you’re starting a blog or a podcast or whatever your business is, you’re obviously going to have to take up some new skills. You’re going to have to learn. You’re going to have to practice. And the idea that you can go into something just cold and be good enough at it to make money, regardless of the business, that’s unrealistic.

Blogging is like anything else. You have to be good at it to make money at it. And typically, our students that do the best – it takes anywhere from one to three years, on average, for someone to get to the point to where they can make a full-time income. But $1,000.00 a month is much simpler. We’ve had people do that in as little as six to nine months. But it does take some time, and it definitely takes effort. And if you’re willing to put in the time and the effort and you don’t view it as just an easy way to make money, if you view it as starting any other type of business that you might start on the side, it’s as realistic as anything else.

John: So, making passive income from blogging, Fire Nation, it is realistic if – and this is a big capital if – you put in the time, you put in the effort, and – I wanna add something in here as well – you follow a proven system. And that’s exactly why I bring people like Jon on the show because, guess what, Jon has a proven system. How’s it proven? Because he’s done it again and again and again over – how many years now, Jon, have you been actually making this kind of stuff happen?

Jon: It’s insane, it’s been over a decade.

John: Wow, ten-plus years. That is insane. And you’ve seen so many things change over time. And what I love about you is you are always staying on that cutting edge. You are always staying ahead of the curb. You’re figuring out what’s happening next. And we were kinda talking a little bit before the episode started about having fun and what do we do for fun, and Jon’s like, “You know, for me, sometimes fun is just staying at home and finding out what’s going on behind Google’s new algorithm or search engine or da, da, da.” I was like, “That might be fun for you, but I can’t say that’s honestly super fun for me.” But that’s what makes Jon Morrow, Jon Morrow. And that’s what makes this freedom machine training so amazing.

So, you gotta put in the time, Fire Nation, you gotta put in the effort, and you have to follow a proven system, like don’t start from scratch. And especially when that proven system’s free. Head over to eofire.com/freedommachine. So, Jon, I wanna ask you something before we move on to the next section here, and that is passive income. I think a lot of people have questions, or they just don’t really understand exactly what passive income means. So, what does that mean to you and the world that we’re talking about here, which is from blogging?

Jon: So, I think the important thing to focus on is your actual hourly rate is really what it comes down to. Whenever anyone talks about passive income, even if you’re like a landlord, for example, the idea, the dream, is that you have all of these properties with people paying you every month, and you sit back, and you don’t have to do anything to collect the money. In reality, that’s not realistic. Problems happen with the properties. At the very least, you have to spend time managing a property manager who manages your properties. So, yes, you can cut down the amount of time, but it’s never going to be zero.

So, what I actually look at and calculate is, how much am I making per hour? So, if you can get your business to where you’re making $100.00 an hour, that’s starting to be pretty good. To where you’re making money, and you have a machine that’s running, and all you’re doing is managing the machine. That’s pretty good. And let’s say you work ten hours a week to run your machine, your machine is working 24 hours a day, and it produces $1,000.00 a month. That’s pretty good for most people. That can even be life changing.

Now, when you get really good – nowadays, I have $10,000.00 hours that I do, where I’m making over $10,000.00 an hour doing something. When you get to be really successful, that’s the way it works. And that’s the way people become millionaires, by the way. Making tons of money as you gradually, over time, eliminate your low hourly rate activities. You either assign those to someone else, or you use software to automate those activities and your hourly rate just gets higher and higher and higher.

John: Fire Nation, this doesn’t come, again, overnight, but it does come over time. Jon just mentioned that $10,000.00 per hour that he can now get to from time to time, that’s passive income. Because even Jon, he likes to drop dollars here and there on certain things, but it’s kinda hard to spend $10,000.00 an hour. So, that’s when it starts turning into this passive income because it just becomes more than what you’re actually expending.

For me, just two weeks ago, I’m out in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, I’m at this event put on by Lisa Sasevich. The event’s called Speak to Sell. So, guess what, I was there speaking to sell. And what did I sell? I sold a $2,000.00 podcasting launch formula, which is something that I’ve been working hard on over the years. I created Podcasters Paradise, and I have the Podcast Journal. And so, I have all this proven commodity behind me so that when I’m up on stage and I’m offering this product, now, to an audience at the end of my hour, hour and a half talk, and I then had 54 people step up and go and immediately purchase that $2,000.00 product. Guess what, in those 75 minutes, I made $58,000.00.

That is just one of those things. I say 58,000 because that was my part of the overall commission. So, in those 75 minutes, I made 58K. Now, do I make 58K every 75 minutes of my waking and sleeping life? Absolutely not. But there are occasions when I do things like that, when I’ve done launches in the past, like you have, Jon, where over a couple days, we’ll break into six figures. But it’s from the work that gets put in up to that point that actually makes it happen. But there’s people out there right now, Jon, that don’t even have their site set up here, in 2018, and that’s okay because you’ve been focusing on other things, and you have other career paths that you’ve taken. So, what would you say today, in 2018, is the best way to get your site set up?

Jon: So, to get your site set up, this is one area where things have changed so much over the years. Once upon a time, what everyone used to have to do is you have to – you go buy a domain name. And people spend, I don't know, hundreds of hours searching domain names, trying to find the perfect domain name that nobody has thought of. Some people even have – chances are people are listening to this, they’re like, “Yeah, I’ve got like 30 domain names sitting [inaudible] [00:12:03].”

John: I’m raising my hands.

Jon: Yeah, that I’m not using. So, there’s that. Then, you had to go get a web hosting account. Then, you would have to download WordPress, get WordPress set up. You’d have to get themes. You’d have to get plugins. And it’s this long process that if you’re a beginner, it could take you months to learn how to do all of that. It’s very complicated. Nowadays, the best way to start is actually not to do any of that. There are new tools that make it so much easier to get started and to start speaking to people.

So, to me, the definition of starting your blog is the moment you hit “Publish” on your first post. That’s the definition of starting your blog. The quickest and easiest way to do that is to use a tool like Medium, medium.com, that was started by one of the co-founders of Twitter. This is not a fly-by-night thing. They have 60 million monthly readers, and you can start your own blog on there within five minutes. And if people like what you’re writing about, you could be featured to their 60 million readers.

Now, the disadvantage is that you’re not a new domain name, you’re not building your own site. But the advantage is you can get started publishing your ideas in five minutes and start getting feedback from the world about whether your writing something that’s interesting or not. And that’s hugely, hugely valuable.

John: And then guess what, Fire Nation, months down the road, if it takes that long, and you have a site set up, you can then take that content that you’ve created, and then copy and paste it onto Medium, and then you do the exact same thing. You put it on your website. So, now, you are having all of that on your website. So, then when you publish that next post, it’s going on your website, it’s going on Medium, it’s going on LinkedIn Publish, it’s going in these different areas that’s gonna get you the right traffic going forward and in front of the right people.

So, I just love that because it’s just the barriers, Jon, that stop people from starting. Its like, you don’t have to have all your ducks in a row. Those lights are never all gonna be green. That Martin Luther King quote is so true. You do not have to see the whole staircase to take the first step. Take the first step now. Even though you don’t know where you’re going, take the first step, get some feedback about what people like with your content, what they don’t, and then figure stuff out. But even with all that, Jon, there’s so much noise out in this world. There’s this dude that has over 2,000 podcasts. I don’t even know what his name is, but he just does all this content, all the time. How does a beginner stand out in today’s day and age?

Jon: So, to stand out – this is one of the biggest things that I think prevents people from starting is you and I – you go on Facebook, you’ve got everyone yelling at each other. You have your cell phone – there’s a study by the University of California at Irvine that people get interrupted, it’s like every three minutes, all day long, by their cell phone. There are advertisements. Everywhere we go, there’s just all of this stuff. Even on Facebook, it’s like three billion shares a day, on Facebook, of content.

So, if you’re a beginner and you look at that – and also if you look at all the other companies, the estimate is over $300 billion is going to be spent by US companies on content this year. 300 billion. So, you look at all of that when you’re a beginner and you’re like, how could I possibly stand out? I have things I’d like to say, but how do I break through all of that noise and get someone to pay attention to me? I think the answer is, number one, to do your homework.

So, just like Medium is a dramatically better way for a beginner to get started than WordPress is, I think that instead of just writing any thought that goes through your head, what you ought to do, in the beginning, is use tools like BuzzSumo, for example. They have a free trial, and you can go on there, and you can use it. You can type in any site in the world, and it will tell you their most shared content. It will tell you the number of Facebook shares, the number of Twitter shares, Pinterest, all of that stuff, LinkedIn. And you can look at any of the content in the past year, and you can see this is what was shared the most. And what you usually see is there are patterns.

So, for example, on my site, Smart Blogger, posts about writing get shared any – or they get shared much faster than any other topic. So, what that should tell you is if you were going to enter my space, if you’re gonna start a similar blog to mine, what you would wanna do is you would wanna write a post about writing and put it on Medium. Your chances of success would be much, much higher. And you can do that for any site, in any niche, and immediately come away with a list of topics that are proven, and you’re not guessing about whether people wanna read about it or not.

John: Fire Nation, these are tools that Jon uses, that Jon recommends to his paying clients. And that’s it’s so valuable that you are taking the time to listen to the type of content on Entrepreneurs on Fire and consume the right type of content from the right people. And this is exactly what this audio masterclass is all about, putting the right people in front of you at the right time. So, we have some more value bombs coming your way. This is the “Freedom Machine” episode after all. And as soon as we get from thanking our sponsor, we’re gonna dive right in.

So, Jon, we’re back and there’s just a lot of people. They work hard, and they put out the content, and their head’s down, they’re seeing, maybe, a little bit of feedback, a little bit of traffic, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. But they’re just kinda wondering like, am I speaking to a dark room? Am I writing to an empty stadium? And they just sometimes don’t know. So, do you know when you’re on the right track? How can we tell?

Jon: So, there are a lot of different ways. I think people get depressed when you write a post, whether it’s on your own blog or whether it’s something like Medium, and you’ve got no shares, you’ve got no comments, and you feel like that means no one cares about what you’re saying. And that’s not necessarily the case. So, we’ve experimented with this quite a bit with our students. Over the years at Smart Blogger, by the way, we’ve had 27,000 students go through our programs, every imaginable niche. So, we’ve gotten to see data behind the scenes about what means something and what doesn’t.

And what we’ve seen is that whether or not influencers in your space – so people with their own audiences. So, I’m an influencer, John’s an influencer. We have our own audiences, our own platforms. If we share your content, other people will go look at it. Influencers in your space are the best judges of quality content. So, the best thing you can do after you write a post is to email ten different influencers. This is called email outreach, is the industry term. You email them, and you say, “I wrote this post, I’m really proud of it, and I think your audience would love it too. Would you share it for me?”

If two out of ten of the influencers will share it, so that’s just 20 percent, then that means you’re on the right track. If they don’t, it means you’re not. So, it’s a really, really easy way to find out. You can just send ten emails, and you know for sure.

John: Fire Nation, email outreach. And a lot of people are scared of this, Jon, and the reason is they’re scared of rejection. They’re scared of these “influencers” telling them no. Well, guess what, Jon, me, every influencer you know, we’ve gotten the door slammed in our face so many times. We’ve had so many nos. You think that I’ve done over 2,000 episodes and I’ve asked over 2,000 people? No, I’ve asked over 50,000 people. And these are just the 2,000 people that said yes. It’s just a matter of numbers. It’s a matter of emailing ten, getting one response. Emailing twenty, getting two. Emailing fifty, getting six. It’s a numbers game, and that’s just the reality.

So, before we kinda move on to the next section, Jon, is there anything else you wanna say about knowing if you’re on the right track or not?

Jon: So, yeah, don’t let it discourage you. Chances are, what’s gonna happen, by the way, even if you just do everything I talked about. You’ve started up your own site on Medium, you go on BuzzSumo – which, by the way, I get no compensation from BuzzSumo. I recommend them. I just think they’re a genuinely good tool.

John: You should, by the way. They have a great affiliate program, I should know.

Jon: Yeah. I probably should.

John: I’ll connect you with Noah Kagan, and we’ll hook it up for you.

Jon: Awesome. But yeah, it’s just a great tool. So, once you do that, you publish your first post, you send your emails, chances are, you’re still probably not going to get your 20 percent, okay? I’ll just go ahead and give you a heads-up that the first time, it’s not gonna happen. The first time I wrote a post and I tried to get people to share it, no one responded back to me. Second time I sent out emails, I actually had one guy, who later became my boss, who said, “This is terrible. I can’t share it.” That was the entire response to the email. “This is terrible. I can’t share it.” Looking back, it was true.

So, realize, in the beginning, when you start doing this, you’re probably not going to be great at it. Now, over time, as your skill increases, so do your results. The difference between someone who succeeds and someone who fails is someone who sticks with it even past those first few failures, and they eventually get to success. And that’s what you have to do with this. It takes the average person at least six months of going through that process of writing, outreach, getting rejected, writing, outreach, getting rejected. Going through that over and over again, at least six months long before they get their first yes.

So, just keep that in mind. When you’re doing it, that doesn’t mean you’re stupid. It doesn’t mean you’re wrong. It just means you’re learning, and it’s a part of the process.

John: Jon, have you ever seen the movie Jerry Maguire?

Jon: I have, yeah. I love it.

John: Remember that scene, “Show me the money. Show me the money”? Well, I got a question for you, where does the money come from?

Jon: So, with a blog, and this is even true for most types of businesses –

John: Wait a second, did you like that segue or not?

Jon: It’s cute. I think we’re showing our age here a little bit, talking about Jerry Maguire. But I actually, yeah, I really love that movie.

John: It’s so good.

Jon: But yeah, the money comes from your email list. So, what I mean by that is here’s how a blog makes money. Everyone’s like, “Jon, you know, you talk about all this blogging stuff. Where does the money come from? Are you getting advertisers?” No. Okay. This is not about advertising. Advertising is fine. I have nothing against it.

But usually, the way the big money happens on big blogs is you write an article, step number one. You eventually get good enough, you get ranked in the search engines, so on Google. So, Google puts you on its first page for a term that’s getting traffic. So, you’re getting an ongoing stream of traffic coming to one of your articles. Step three is when people land on that website, you wanna offer them a freebie of some kind. So, a free report or a mini course, free videos, a case study, something like that. Something where you’re offering them a freebie in exchange for their email address. That’s just not obtrusive.

I’m not talking about doing anything that offends people. I’m not talking about windows popping up all over the place. I’m just talking about, usually, a little slider or a tiny little popup that says, “Okay. Here’s this freebie if you want it.” That builds your email list. And as you do this, with a blog, over time – so, Smart Blogger gets 5 to 10,000 people a month that are opting in just off of that search engine traffic. And it comes in every single day. So, that’s 5 to 10,000 people a month being added to the email list.

In general, the rule of thumb that I like to tell beginners is expect to make a dollar per subscriber per month is a good number to shoot for in the beginning. So, if you wanna get $1,000 a month, then what it means is you need about 1,000 email subscribers. And if you track your number of subscribers, in general, you can predict exactly how much money your blog will make over time.

John: So, the money comes from the email list, Fire Nation. Jon just gave you a great step-by-step system of how you increase that and what you can expect from that, etc., etc. I do have a question for you, specifically, Jon, because we were both at Social Media Marketing World. You gave a great talk. I was front row, taking notes. In fact, I refer to those notes because your area of expertise is not mine. So, I love learning from you. And it was just a great overall talk. But at the conference, overall, there was huge focus on bots and on Facebook bots.

And so, a lot of people are saying email list is becoming a tougher place than it used to be, but we’ve all been hearing that for years. It’s still a very focal point of our business, as well. But what are your thoughts on Facebook bots and messenger bots overall? Is that something that you’re looking into implementing, or do you hate it?

Jon: I, personally, don’t like anything with bots. But I do think they are going to be one communication medium with people in the future. And here’s the thing, every time any new platform comes out, whether it’s Twitter, or whether it’s RSS, or whether – people have been saying something was going to kill email for over a decade. As long as I’ve doing this, people have been saying email is dying. But you ask any successful business where the majority of their revenue is coming from, they’re going to tell you it’s email.

So, that’s not changing. My percentage of revenue, that comes from me now, has not changed. So, are bots a part of things in the future? Yes. Will my company be doing bots in the future? Yes. On the other hand, is any of that going to replace email? I don’t think we’re anywhere close to that. And I’d actually be surprised if it ever happens. A good example of this is look at radio. When podcasts came along and free Internet radio came along, everyone said, “It’s gonna kill off radio.” Radio is still there, guys. There are still people that get paid millions of dollars to host radio shows. Now, is it as big as it was back in the day? No.

So, channels never die. This is a good rule of thumb to remember. A channel never dies. It just declines in influence. That’s all that happens. So, is email declining in influence? I think the answer to that is yes, it is. But is it dead? No. I think it’s gonna be a part of our businesses for a long time, and we’re just gonna add other things, like bots, into the mix.

John: Fire Nation, I really think you need to find what’s comfortable for you. What do you like interacting with? Do you like interacting with a bot? Well, then, maybe that’s something you wanna explore. Jon doesn’t. So, it’s not something he’s super excited about, but he’s still not gonna take it off the table. These are the things that we need to explore and try. But again, we know what’s been working now. For me, over six years. For Jon, for over ten years. We’ve all heard about the email killers. Guess what, it’s still around. It’s gonna be the focus. There’s other things you can do to add to, to supplement, to test out, to see what’s working. But when it comes down to it, look at the core of what’s working, and that’s what we’re giving you today.

Now, Jon, obviously in a perfect world, we’re automating everything. So, how can you automate everything?

Jon: So, here’s what I love about blogging. It’s actually possible to automate almost every part of the process. At Smart Blogger, for example, which is my primary site these days, the content is automated. So, I have an editor who goes and creates the content. I have writers who create the content. The editor edits them, everything is published. We have an assistant that goes through and adds all the images and formats everything and makes it beautiful, shares it on social media. Everything is automated to where – we publish a post most Thursdays. If you ask me on any given Thursday what the post is going to be, I have no idea. I have no idea. It’s just running without me. So, the content can be automated.

Your email list, you can automate that based on search engine traffic. So, if you’re getting search engine traffic that’s coming in every day and then you have a popup, a slide up, whatever you use to offer people a freebie and get their email, you’re getting email addresses on autopilot. Then, from there, the next step is to, then, use email automation. So, sending people an automated email series that, number one, delivers value; number two, builds their trust; and number three, gets them to take a logical next step that results in a purchase.

So, if people are on your email list, you send them email that makes them fall in love with you, and then from there, you offer them something they genuinely need that you have. From there, that way you’re making money on other products. So, in my business, we not only measure the amount of money that we make, we measure the amount of money that happened without us doing anything. And right now – and this is one of the metrics I’m always working on. We’ve got 50 to 60,000 a month that comes in on autopilot without me doing – I could die, and that money would continue coming in every single month.

And the higher you can get that number, the more profitable your business. So, the great thing about the blog and the reason why I call it a freedom machine is you can literally automate everything from producing the content all the way to money coming out on the other side. And will you have to step in and manage people? Yes. Will you have to keep an eye on things? Yes. If you’re running any business, you at least have to keep your eye on the ball. But you can automate so many steps of the process to where, at the end, money is coming out the other side, and you didn’t have to lift a finger for any of that sale. That’s where you have a passive income. That’s where you have a real lifestyle business that not only –

Everyone gets excited about getting rich or traveling the world. I’ve done those things. It’s great. But the even better thing is just knowing that you don’t have to worry about taking care of your family. Your family, whether it’s your close family or your parents or your friends. When my father was going through a rough time, years ago, I was able to help him out and buy him a car because I was making money on my blogging business.

And to be able to do that for your family and to do that without worrying about your own finances and to know that tomorrow you’re getting another check and the next day you’re getting another and that it’s just gonna keep coming in and coming in, even if you’re not there every second, that’s the most at peace you can possibly be. And to me, to have that peace is just a priceless, priceless thing. And that’s why I recommend as many people as possible set up their own passive income streams, whether it be a blog or anything else, this just happens to be the one I’m really good at creating. So, yeah, that’s automation. That’s why I believe it’s important.

John: Fire Nation, automation doesn’t come overnight. The freedom machine, it does not come overnight. Jon’s been building his automation empire for over a decade now. But guess what, we get to learn from him. We get to distill his genius down into this wonderful and free training that he’s providing for us: eofire.com/freedommachine. Fire Nation, picture me, I’m in the front row, just a month and a half ago, in San Diego, and I’m writing down notes while Jon’s giving his talk at Social Media Marketing World. I never stop learning. You should never stop learning. We can always learn from other people who have been there and done that, and it’s so critical. So, I really want you to take action on this.

And Jon, why don’t you kinda give us a sum up of this audio masterclass. What’s one key takeaway that you think Fire Nation should really absorb from everything that we’ve been sharing today? And then, we’ll say goodbye.

Jon: So, here’s the one thing I’d like you to think about. One way or another, over the next three or four years, you’re going to be working hard. You’re either going to be working hard in a job and getting a paycheck, or you’re going to be working hard building something that will eventually start working hard for you. And I think the second one is the smarter option. For years, the first half of my career, I worked as an employee for different top blogs. That’s how I got to learn how to do what I do.

But what I eventually decided is, you know what? If I stopped working today, I would stop getting a paycheck. That’s not a good feeling. What is a great feeling is knowing that that check is going to come in, even if you can only put in an hour or two here and there, that you don’t have to worry about it. So, if you’re gonna be doing the work either way, be working towards something that doesn’t just end if you decide to take some time off. Because I think that’s – not only does it just kind of suck, but it also – it creates stress, and it’s not a good way to live.

So, if you value peacefulness in your life, work towards something that can sustain you over the long term. Yes, it’s a lot of work. Yes, you have to learn a lot. Yes, you’ll have to stay dedicated to it, even when it’s difficult. But if you do, then in the future, at some point, hopefully it’s not too far, but on average, one to three years, at least for my group, you’ll get to the point where now, it’s coming back and taking care of you. And that’s a much, much better situation to be in.

John: Jon, you just dropped one sentence in there that was pure gold. And I’m sure you know that it was pure gold. But just in case, I’m gonna share it with you, and I hope that you definitely utilize this because this was genius. And Fire Nation, I wanna make sure that you get this because, man, this just speaks to the core of what we’re doing here. Work hard today creating something that’s gonna work hard for you tomorrow. That’s the essence. That’s when you wake up and you work hard and you put in a hard day’s work and you’re like, “Man, in some ways, I don’t feel like I got a ton accomplished today,” or X, Y, Z. You’re working hard now to create something that’s gonna work hard for you tomorrow. I just love that. That’s so amazing.

And Fire Nation, as always, you know that you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And you have been hanging out with JM and JLD today. So, keep up the heat and head over to eofire.com. If you type Jon, J-O-N, in the search bar, his show on this page will pop up with everything that we’ve been chatting about today. These are the best show notes in the biz, time stamps, links galore. Jon is a multiple time past guest of EOFire. Every time he’s dropped the actual heat, so definitely check out those.

And listen, the one call to action is you getting over to eofire.com/freedommachine. And guess what the key word is there, free. This is a free training for you, Fire Nation, to start taking control of your life, to follow a system and work hard now so that you’re creating something that’s working hard for you tomorrow. And Jon, I just wanna say thank you, brother, for sharing your truth with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you, and we’ll catch you on the flipside.

Jon: Thanks for having me.

John: Hey, Fire Nation. I hoped you enjoyed our chat with Jon today. Just an inspiring dude. And if you’re ready to just go forward and actually come up with a big idea or finally choose one of those ideas that’s been floating around in your minds and really identify which is the best one. Or even just clarify, just be like, is this one actually a big idea? I have the training for you. It’s gonna give you an answer to no matter which one of those three camps that you’re in, and it’s called Three Hours to you Big Idea. So, give me three hours, Fire Nation. By the way, give me zero dollars and give me three hours, because this is free training, and I will give you your big idea.

So, visit yourbigidea.io, not dot com. Yourbigidea.io and your big idea is just three hours away. And I’ll catch you there, or I’ll catch you on the flipside.