Distraction Can Be Good

This is the Daily Boost Podcast with Scott Smith. What's happening? Come on in. Happy, super fabulous, fun Friday. That's what we'll call it today. Why not?

And for lack of a better term, lack of a better description, lack of better... What do they call it? Clickbait as a title? It's like distraction time. We're going to talk about distraction.

I have been massively distracted. But sometimes I think we can predict distraction, and I also don't think it's always bad for you. In fact, I found good ways to use distraction, so...

That's what we're talking about today and a whole lot more, too. It's me, Scott. Good to have you. Thanks for stopping by. Kind of a crazy week for me.

You know, I'm going to be helping my buddy, Croy Sather, do his Death Valley Crossing, the Badwater Crossing. We leave on August 5th in the morning. Good news. It looks like we leave at 117 degrees and it goes down to about 106 by the time we finish.

55 hours later, hopefully, if he gets to the finish line. What a distraction it's been. I knew it was going to be, and it has taken on a whole new life. It really, truly has, and it's been good.

I'll talk about that here in just a little bit, and you'll see why it was actually good to go through distraction. Also, some thoughts. I had an interesting conversation this week with a client about marketing in his business, and another one close to that conversation, marketing in their career. Very interesting thoughts.

I'm going to flip you around on that and give you a different way to think about it. I'm going to start with Mark Cuban. Mark Cuban has said some pretty wise stuff. He said some pretty stupid stuff.

But what I find is we all say wise stuff. We all say stupid stuff. Some people have more TV cameras in front of them. That's all. The internet has made it very easy for people to say wise and stupid stuff pretty much all in one sentence.

And I'm part of that. I can do it all in one podcast. But as we get into this today, Mark Cuban has said some pretty good things. I want to lodge this in your head depending on where you are, okay?

If you're working to do something, if you're building something, anything, could be a business, could be a career, could be a relationship, could be a home, doesn't really matter.

You got to keep in mind that somebody somewhere is probably working 24 hours a day to take it away from you. Now, are they trying to come and take it from you? In some cases, yes. There's some bad actors out there, but most cases, no.

They're just creating a better product, a better opportunity. They're providing more value to their boss or to their customer. And that's how they're going to take it away from you.

So it's not a bad thing. It's not a zero-sum game. They're just adding more value. And therefore, if you don't add that value, you're going to lose. It will be taken away from you.

So that's why we say if you're not growing, you're dying. Because if you sit still and what you're doing, thinking about it, just thinking, hey, I got it covered, you're going to wake up a year or two from now, if not less, wondering what happened to what you had.

Maybe you've experienced that before. Mark also says it's not the dreaming, it's the doing. If you spend your time dreaming, you'll never grant yourself that opportunity to see what you're capable of accomplishing.

As a guy who spends a lot of time in this world, I dream and I do a lot. I think of a good mix between the two. I just go. And I've spent many, many times, thousands of hours coaching people.

I think I have two, three different kinds of coaching clients. I have the absolute dreamers. They're never going to do a damn thing. I know it when they come in.

Well, I don't always know it. I hope I can talk them into it, but they're just not going to. I have the doers who are so into doing, they never stop to think. They never get creative.

They never clean up their mess. They just go so fast, they make a mess for themselves. I hate that when that happens. Slow down. Take a breath, man. Take a beat.

And I have the people in between. The ones who dream, who do, but they do it with their head really screwed on right. Those are the people who really get what they want. It doesn't matter if the glass is half empty or half full.

All that matters is you are the one pouring the water. That's how I see myself. In the motivational world where I spend a lot of my time, a lot of people come to me with that glass half full, glass half empty thing. I don't even care about that.

I just don't care. I just know if I'm in control pouring the water, it just doesn't freaking matter. It just doesn't. There are a lot of ways to think about that metaphor, but you got to go further than that, right?

Be in control of what you're doing. Wherever I see people doing something the way it's always been done, the way it's always supposed to be, following the same old trends, well, that's a big red flag for me to go look elsewhere.

Mark said that, and I believe in that. If you're stuck in your ways doing it the old way, and the old way is good, like right now with AI, if you are still holding fast that, ah, I'm not going to do AI, okay.

I don't have a conversation with you because I know it's coming. There's nothing we can do to stop it. And it's a wonderful thing if you use it right. It's all going to settle in time, but it's coming.

You can't stop. Why is it coming? Because it makes life easier for people and people just want easy. So if you're doing it the old way, I don't do business with any company who's not AI first.

I just don't. It's too much trouble. I'm not going to invest in anybody in my business who's not doing that. And if you come to me and you want to work with me, you better be AI first because I just don't have any interest in you.

If you're not AI first, if you're a client of mine, I'm really happy to make you AI first. I'm like, come on, I'll show you how, okay? Every no gets me closer to yes. No's are part of your story.

If you're working hard, it's going to lead to many yeses. And those are going to be great opportunities. This is so difficult. In fact, the whole motivational thing that I got into many, many years ago probably stemmed on this.

Because we ran into that, right? Because whenever you start to do something, you hit the wall. Why is it so hard? Why is it so difficult? Because if you keep going, you're going to find the yes.

You're going to succeed. It's not going to be easy. I don't care if it's fun. I don't care if you love to do it. I don't have a lot of... I used to be into woodworking.

I was in it for maybe three years. I stopped. You know why? I stopped. So it's hard. I'm not going to sit on a hot garage and make it hard and difficult and cut myself and breathe sawdust and have to work so hard.

Everything you do, whether it's a hobby or even cooking dinner, even if you enjoy it, it's very likely going to be difficult, right? Business is no different than that.

It's going to be challenged. So you either just kind of suck it up and enjoy the challenge, enjoy the suck as they say, or don't do it. But if you don't do it, you don't get to do anything because everything's going to be kind of more challenging than you think it's going to be.

Some people don't want to hear this. It should be easy. I don't live in that world. Why? Because I tried to live in that world when I was younger. It just didn't work.

Got to work hard. So in the distraction I've had for the last couple of weeks, boy, you got to be careful what you focus on. My Death Valley trip has been just that a major distraction. I knew it would be.

I predicted it. And it has delivered. A massive distraction from everything I should be doing. At the same time, you know, I mean, it's difficult to plan is what I mean by that.

And supporting Croy emotionally and logistically has literally been hours a day, seven days a week. The guy's on his own. He needs some help. And that's why I stepped up to do it.

I said, OK, here we go. He's got three other people helping, but I'm the guy playing that role. It's been expensive. I'm shooting the behind the scenes camera stuff and I got a nice camera.

It's a lot of fun, but it's a challenge. It's expensive to rig up a Death Valley rig. And then out of the blue, what happened is I'm having fun planning this and everything else is getting in the way.

My camera dies. It's not a cheap camera. It's an expensive camera. It's been great for five years. It's been sitting on my desk. Hardware issue. Can't fix it.

You should have seen the look on my wife's face when I walked in the living room. I said, Best Buy has a replacement for my camera. I'll be back. An hour later, I walked back in with about a mortgage payment worth of a camera.

What are you going to do? I'm grateful. It's a blessing to be able to do it. Timing, right? Whatever you choose or choose not to do, it's going to have an impact on your life.

It doesn't matter. So I don't know where you are today. I don't know what you're fighting through trying to get. If I could get anything in your brain today, I'd be like, man, I heard Scott today.

The suck is just going to show up. It is. And it's all your perspective and how you deal with it. if you just understand you really never have control over anything, all you have control of your actions.

And even then you don't have total control over that. It's kind of easy to sit back and say, okay, let's see what happens here and let's do the best I can.

Hmm. Yeah. I was surprised to learn something this week that there's a, a very high level psychological thought that I thought was easy. Cause I've thought this way forever.

And that is that when you do nothing, you're actually taking action. There are ramifications for what you do when you do nothing at all. A lot of people say, well, man, I'm just kind of hanging out doing anything. Why is my life falling apart?

Some people say, I'm just going to take a break and relax. And yet something else happens. But the key here for you to remember is some people don't actually, they've never thought about it. The majority of people have never thought about the fact that because they did nothing, bad actions happened to them.

Why? They just don't know what's going on. So make your choices carefully. If that's going to be the case, I'd rather take the action and be in some positive control, right?

Plus, have you noticed everything takes time? This massive distraction I've had, you know, I'm writing a book. I really am writing it. People say, really, Scott?

Yes, I'm very much into it. Got to finish my first full edit. My wife reminded me that I haven't touched it in two weeks because I've been distracted by this Death Valley thing.

Fair. But it turns out the distraction was really good because when you write a book, you write kind of right brain. You dump it, dump it, dump it, dump it, dump it. And you kind of stay out of left brain.

You stay out of the craftsmanship of actually doing the project. You try just to get the stuff on paper and then go back and start crafting, which is where I have been in the first edit I've been working through.

So in that time period, in the past two weeks that I have not been able to go back to it, I've had a lot of time to think about it. I've had a lot of conversations based on what I've been writing. I've had coaching calls where I've been kind of testing some of the theories I've had in the book, and I've noticed they've responded to things differently, and some of the areas have been demoted deeper down in the book or even been eliminated from it, and new areas have come back into it, all because I did nothing with it.

So distraction was really good. Left brain had a chance to do the work. And last time, my wife said, teasing me, kind of, sort of. So when are you going to write that book?

You're going to be gone to the desert for a week. I said, honey, I'm in the desert for a week. What else am I going to do? Plus, I have 10 hours of flying time.

She goes, well, you're going to be in Vegas for two days when you get back. Relax, you can write your book there. I said, nah, it's not going to happen. Nah.

What are you going to do in Vegas, honey? She said, I'm not going to tell you. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Maybe pan and tell her. That's about it.

And one more thought as I get out of today's show into the weekend and drop some wisdom if I can on you. And this wasn't mine at the beginning of the week. This was what people dropped on me this week. So I worked with a couple of clients, actually hit two of them, getting distracted by all kinds of stuff.

And like me, they need something. Now, one of the clients was a professional person. I work with a lot of those folks are, you know, mid-career, fairly high up the ladder in management leadership, earning a pretty good income, you know, right where you start getting really, you get locked in, you get hit.

And the other one was an entrepreneur running their own business. And in separate conversations, this is all about, well, let me tell you how it happened. The client that's running his own business said to me, well, all I need to do now is I just need to plug the marketing piece in.

I just need to plug the marketing piece in. And this is after a long time of building everything except the marketing piece. In other words, instead of building the audience, right?

And the other one, the professional kind of said the same thing. Well, I've done all the stuff. Now, I guess I just need to send the CV out, send the resume out.

And in both cases, I instantly said, no, that's a big distraction what you've been doing. That's where you should have started. The most important thing you ever do running a business or looking for an advancement in your career is actually the marketing part of it. If you do nothing else, throw stuff against the wall before you do anything and keep throwing it.

And as you throw it, you're going to do stuff. It's going to get better and better and better. What you're going to find is endless opportunity, even if you're not ready to handle it.

And sometimes that's the best thing because ever had those calls when you get a call and you're not really ready for the call. And so you're just kind of being you and suddenly you have a real conversation and opportunity just breaks right in front of you.

So that's the last point in the distraction call today. Call? Podcast thing. Is that sometimes distraction is necessary. Sometimes you need it. Sometimes it's really worthy.

Sometimes it brings you ideas that really change your world and gives you time to do things. Don't be afraid of it. It's going to happen anyway. It's just a human thing.

But if you're so distracted that you're not doing the thing first, because there is a thing you're supposed to do. And if you're building your career or you're building your business, I can tell you, having good marketing and lead flow and sales, sales meaning either you get a job or you get a customer, that's the number one thing. Nothing else really matters. It really doesn't.

I cannot tell you how many people have ideas sitting on the shelf, careers sitting on the shelf, because they never took care of that one thing. Is that all I got to say?

That's all I got to say. Have a good weekend. Love you here. And I'll see you Monday on the Daily News.