AMY PORTERFIELD: “I think there's a point that you need to cut bait and get in the game, cut bait and get in the game. And that means that you have to say, ‘Okay, I've taken the course, I've done the coaching, I've read the book, now how am I getting into the game and trying what I learned? Where do I get to experiment? Where do I get to get my hands in there? Where does it become tangible for me?’ And I'm going to ask you again, where have you been standing on the sidelines?”
INTRO: I’m Amy Porterfield, ex-corporate girl turned CEO of a multi-seven-figure business. But it wasn't all that long ago that I lacked the confidence, the budget, and the time to focus on growing my small-but-mighty business. Fast forward past many failed attempts and lessons learned, and you'll see the business I have today, one that changes lives and gives me more freedom than I ever thought possible, one that used to only exist as a daydream. I created the Online Marketing Made Easy podcast to give you simple, actionable, step-by-step strategies to help you do the same. If you're an ambitious entrepreneur, or one in the making, who's looking to create a business that makes an impact and a life you love, you're in the right place, friend. Let's get started.
AMY: Work @ Life, hosted by Sanja Licina and Maddie Grant, is a new podcast to my weekly roundup, and I can't recommend it enough. Hosts Sanja and Maddie explore the gray areas between work and life as they share data on relevant workplace engagement and culture topics: topics like new ideas on how to impact diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging today, and vulnerability in the workplace. I love those topics so much, so be sure to download Work @ Life wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, there. Welcome back to Online Marketing Made Easy.
I wanted to check in and see how you're doing. How is entrepreneurship treating you? See, I was just thinking about being an entrepreneur and all that comes along with it. And if you're an entrepreneur already, you know that it's so much more than owning a business, right? Or multiple businesses.
I think so much about being an entrepreneur is managing your mindset, and sometimes I think that's way more difficult than any webinar or funnel or whatever it is that I'm creating. The mindset of an entrepreneur is all about taking calculated risks and being comfortable with failure. It's about being resourceful and having the most mental toughness to pull up your bootstraps and problem solve when things don't go according to plan.
You've heard me say this before, and I'll say it again: failure only gives you the opportunity to grow and to learn from your mistakes, whether it's in your business or exploring something totally new. And sometimes when people tell me, like, “Failure only gives you the opportunity to grow,” I'm just like, “Yeah, yeah. Keep walking.” Like, sometimes I don't even want to hear that, and maybe you don't want to hear it now as well. And when things are not working, when you feel like every turn you make you have to troubleshoot and fix something, it's hard to feel like, “Oh, I'm growing. This isn't working, but I'm growing now.” Like, no, it's not easy to get in that frame of mind.
However, maybe you're not going to get into it instantly, but, hopefully, you can bounce back, and you can remind yourself you're growing, and you can remind yourself something that I say every single day: this is happening for me, not to me or against me. This is happening for me. Everything that happens in my life, I tell myself, I say it out loud, this is happening for me. Where’s the lesson? What am I supposed to learn here? And getting into that practice has helped me immensely.
So in this episode, I'm going to talk about a first for me, when I tried something totally new that got me out of my comfort zone. And let's just say that things didn't go exactly as planned, but I learned so much in the process. But this experience got me thinking about entrepreneurship in an interesting light, and I wanted to share it with you.
Okay. So, here's how it goes: Hobie and I, as a couple, recently bought our first NFT. Now, I’m not super into the crypto world yet. I would love to explore it more. I’d love to really understand what the heck I’m doing and make some smart, calculated decisions. But I'm just, just dipping my toe in the water.
And I'm part of the BFF community, which was created by Brit Morin and Jaime Schmidt. And they’re two serial entrepreneurs and investors who share a passion to help women rise to their fullest potential, and they created BFF, so you could check it out at mybff.com. I'm a founding member in this community, and it was my first kind of venture into the NFT world. And so I was able to mint my first NFT through my BFF. But then Hobie wanted to get in the action, so we decided to buy an NFT in Gary Vee’s VeeFriends second edition, second version. And so this wasn't too long ago.
Anyway, because we wanted to get into the game together, we started to explore. We did our homework. We researched. We talked to the right people. We listened to the podcasts. We did all the things. But then it was time for us to get in the game and actually take all that we've learned and what we've heard and the advice and get it into action. So we put some money aside for this, and after weeks of preparing to actually buy this NFT, that’s when VeeFriends the Series 2 NFT auction happened.
And let me tell you, I did my homework before the auction, but in all my research, I never got the type of education that I needed until I actually got in the game and went to bid on one. So you don't need to understand how NFT auctions work to get the point of this episode, to get the point I'm trying to make.
The point I wanted to make is I had this huge aha moment, that after I went through this experience of bidding on my first NFT in an auction—and I'll tell you how it went—that night, when I went to bed hours later than I was planning to go to bed—it was past midnight, which is way past my bedtime. The reason it took so long, I'll tell you in a moment—but my head hit the pillow, and I thought I just learned five things—I went over the list in my head—five things that I would have never learned by reading, watching, asking. I wouldn't even know what to ask. I had to get off the sidelines and get into the action. The growth I had within hours outweighed all of the learning that I was doing, and I needed the learning. I wouldn't have gone into that experience without the research, without watching videos, without asking friends. But what happened when I got in the game, it changed everything for me.
So if you've never bid on an NFT before at an auction, here's how it goes down. Hobie and I knew that this auction was ending—I don't know—I think it might have been, like, 9:00 p.m. So the auction was ending at 9:00 p.m. So Hobie and I thought, well, we're going to bid two minutes before the auction ends so our bid is the winning bid. We had this plan. So I opened up my laptop. We sat practically, like, on each other's laps. We were so close to each other because we were trying to look at the same laptop. And at two minutes before the auction closed, boom, we put in our bid, and we just stared at it. We're like, this is a lot of money, right? So we stared at it. We're like, what happened? And all of a sudden, the timer went up ten more minutes. And we thought, what just happened? Why did the timer just—the auction’s supposed to end. And instantly, both of us thought, this is a scam. They're just adding time to the auction because they could just make more money. More people bid; they're going to make tons of money. And then we refreshed, and all of a sudden, the bid had gone up, and ten more minutes was added to the timer. We had no idea what was going on. Hobie’s like, a scam. This is a scam. We're not doing it. They're just going to run that timer up all night long and get all our money. And I said, “Babe, let's think that maybe we don't have all the answers. Why don't we look into this?”
So he quickly Googled “how does an auction work with OpenSea?” and all of that. And when you are bidding in an auction, what we learned is that every time a bid comes in, ten more minutes is going to be added if it's in the last ten minutes of the auction. So that’s just how it works. And it's actually really cool because it allows somebody to not lose the bid if they wanted to be the winner. Now they've got ten minutes to decide, are you going to do it or are you out? And so they give everybody an opportunity to be the last bid. And I really think that's great.
But we were so confused. And I wouldn't have known to ask somebody, “Hey, does the timer go up when you bid in the last ten minutes?” I wouldn't even know to ask that. You don't know what you don't know, and that's where action plays a big part. And so we troubleshooted through that whole thing. The thing ended up going till 11:30 at night. It was supposed to end at nine, but all the bids kept going, and we stayed in the action. We knew how much money we were okay with spending, and we stayed in the action, and we waited till we could win it, and we did it. And I was really excited for us.
And every time something didn't go—like, at one point I tried to bid, and I had the money in the wrong wallet, and I lost the bid. I'm like, what happened? And then I realized I had placed the money in the wrong wallet. Again, I would not have known this.
So this is not an NFT episode. And if you're not into NFTs, I'm not trying to talk you into it. And I just want to say that we put money in that we didn't need to pay the bills or put food on the table. Like, we were very responsible, just in case you were wondering.
But the point of this is you do not know what you need to know, like really at a really deep level, unless you get in the game. And my question for you is, where are you standing on the sidelines? Where are you standing on the sidelines?
Because I sell digital courses, I am the first to say that I think digital courses are incredibly valuable for your growth. In terms of anything you want to know, you can find a course, and you can learn step by step. I believe membership sites are important in terms of education and getting in there monthly. I love coaching. I have a coach. I have two coaches, to be specific. I love coaching. I love courses. I love books. I love audiobooks. I love podcasts. And I do it all, and I think it's all absolutely necessary.
And—notice I didn’t say or—and I think there’s a point that you need to cut bait and get in the game, cut bait and get in the game. And that means that you have to say, “Okay, I've taken the course, I've done the coaching, I've read the book, now how am I getting into the game and trying what I learned? Where do I get to experiment? Where do I get to get my hands in there? Where does it become tangible for me?” And I'm going to ask you again, where have you been standing on the sidelines? Is it that you've been wanting to do a webinar forever so you studied it? You got into module five of DCA, and you watched my videos three times? You know slide by slide by slide how to do it? And you've watched tons of webinars, and you've done all the stuff you need to do except the webinar? It's time to do the webinar, my friend.
How about this? You've been thinking about starting a podcast. You listened to my podcast episode with Jenna Kutcher about how to start a podcast. You’ve studied how I got to a million downloads a month. I just did a podcast episode about that a while back. You've studied other people's podcasts. You love podcasts. You're listening to a bunch of business podcasts. But you haven't started yours. When are you starting it?
It's things like that that I think really, truly make a difference, meaning you identify where you're not getting in the game. Having to figure it out through experimentation is priceless. It's that whole thing that Marie says, everything is figureoutable, right?
I'll say this: I had more of my questions answered from just jumping in and experimenting with my first NFT auction than I would have even known—if someone did a Q&A with me about NFTs and let me ask any questions, I wouldn't’ve even known to ask these questions, the things that I learned. And again, I went to bed that night thinking, “Holy cow, I have just learned so much.”
And it made me think of all of you. Like, where do you need to get in the game? And I will say, when Hobie and I were fumbling through this first NFT auction, we felt like kind of like idiots. We did. Like, we were kind of embarrassed because we were so mad that timer kept going up. We were making the timer go up, my friends. Did you get that? Did you pick that part up? Every time we bid and the timer went up ten minutes, we're like, oh, they're scammers. What's going on? We made the timer go up. We didn't know. So we kind of felt foolish. And that's okay. We didn't feel shame. We didn't feel guilt for not knowing what we don't know. We just were kind of like, ooh, we kind of feel silly right now. Oh, well. I don’t think it’s going to kill us.
And again, we know so much about bidding on an NFT now, that I feel accomplished. I called up Jasmine, who is very much in the NFT world, and I said, “I just went up a level. Tonight I went up a level.” And she was so excited for me because she's like, yes, this is how you do it.
So if you're multitasking, come back to me because I want to kind of tie a bow on this topic and remind you that this is about you, not about me, even though I told you my NFT story. If you're struggling in an area or you're chasing a goal, you're chasing a dream, and you're clear on what you want—if you're not clear on what you want, that's where we start. What do you want, my friend? You got to get clear on what you want. It’s the best journal prompt I can give you. But if you're clear about what you want, you've got your goals, you've got your dreams, then where do you need to get in the game now? Not a month from now. Not in six months. Where do you need to get in the game?
I just finished Subscribed. And for those of you who were in my Subscribed boot camp—may be the coolest thing I've done this year—you guys were on fire. It was my list-building boot camp. But for those of you who were in Subscribed, maybe it's that you need to finally get that opt-in page up, or maybe finally confirm what your original content is going to be every week and actually do it. There's so many areas where we need to get in the game that we're stunting our growth as an entrepreneur if we're not taking action.
And let me tell you, this applies to anything you need to set out to do. So launching your business, writing your book, starting your podcast, getting your lead magnet out into the world. Because when you have setbacks and you're forced to stumble through them, you figure it out. That's how I wanted to end this podcast episode. Guess what is on the other side of stumbling through action? Solutions, rewards, results. That's what's on the other side of this, my friends.
So, get in the game. Get going. Take action. Let's cut bait on some of the learning, some of the reading, some of the listening, some of the watching. Let's get into action. And the next thing you need to tackle will absolutely present itself when you do. There is power in being in the game, even if you are doing it in the most imperfect way.
So my sweet friend, the next time you find yourself in a situation where you're hesitant to jump all in and actually do something, and you're hesitant because maybe you feel like you haven't studied enough or you're not 100% ready, just remember, no time is going to be perfect, and getting in the game will give you the best education that you could possibly imagine. I can only take you so far with my digital courses and, please, dive into them, obsess over it, watch all the videos, download all my PDFs. But at some point, I got to pull you out of my course and throw you in the deep end and say, “Let's go. Start swimmin’.” And if I could do that, I would do it. I metaphorically am doing it right now. I'm pulling you out and throwing you in the deep end and say, “You can do it. You can swim. I know you can.”
Okay, my friend. I hope you loved this Shorty episode. I just wanted to share this quick story with you and encourage you to get into the action.
If you love what you're hearing, be sure to follow Online Marketing Made Easy on your favorite listening platform. And if you plan to get in the game and you know where you need to jump in, come on over to Instagram. I'm just @amyporterfield on Instagram. DM me and tell me where you're getting in the game.
I'll see you on Thursday for more entrepreneurial goodness, same time, same place. Can't wait. Bye for now.
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