Hey guys, I’m in the car on my way to meet with a friend for breakfast, but I wanted to record this morning to share something pretty special with you all: the Burn It Down exercise.
Basically, the idea is to imagine that you were to suddenly lose everything and start over from scratch. What would you do?
Now, in this thought exercise, money is not an issue. Don’t worry about bills, or overhead, or even paying off debts. If you could do anything, start any business, what would you do? What kind of business would you start?
Whatever your answer is, that’s where your passion really is. And if you follow that passion, you can change your life for the better. Believe me, I’ve done it myself, and I’ve seen this method lead to fantastic growth for many of my students and coaching clients. It’s a great way to design your own life, and I recommend using the Burn It Down exercise about once every six months.
Listen and learn:
What’s inside:
- The Burn It Down thought exercise.
- If you lost everything tomorrow, what would you do?
- Find your passion as an entrepreneur.
- Design your life around the answers.
Mentioned in this episode:
Transcription:
Download episode transcript in PDF format here…
What’s going on, Joe McCall here, REI in your car. I hope you guys are doing well.
I’m driving right now to meet a good buddy who is from, well, he’s is in Idaho, from Idaho right now, but he is moved like 15 times in the last 10 years. Just he’s one of those guys. His kids are older and him and his wife can live anywhere they want. And so they just like wherever the wind takes them, they’ll go. They’ll either Airbnb for somewhere, for a couple of months or rent a place for a year and then move when the weather gets cold or hot or whatever they feel like. It’s pretty cool. Real, nice guy. His name is David, so I’m on our way to have breakfast with him. I just finished a two day workshop teaching internet, marketing funnels and and marketing stuff, and it was so much fun, man. I loved it. I had about 15 guys there and about eight different eight or nine different companies, and it was so much fun. It’s the first time I have ever done a workshop by myself teaching, marketing, teaching funnels from a internet marketing perspective, right? I still teach. I love teaching real estate marketing. I kind of get seller leads.
This is the first time I’ve done a workshop teaching how to sell services and consulting and products, books, that kind of stuff, which is really what I love doing. I love the publishing business and educating and helping people just got a testimonial the other day from one of my students who was so awesome. I have a program in one of my programs is you can sell your deal to me. I’ll buy it. I’ll pay you five grand for your deals, you know? And so this guy called me and had a deal is a good deal. And I said, Listen, you can like, I’ll buy this from you. But this is such a good deal. You should be able to make a couple of phone calls and sell this thing yourself. Why don’t you just like, do that?
So I actually talked him out of selling me the deal. I don’t know why, but you know, whatever. I was just wanting to help this guy and you know, it’s going to take me some work. I was real busy. But anyway, he texted me a picture a week later of a check he made like $8500 on this deal, just making a couple of phone calls. Man, I was so happy and excited. Like, Here’s the cool thing why I’d love doing the podcast, the videos, creating courses and books and publishing content like this. I get to help people like him, you know, make $8500. That is significant, right? That’s like an entire month’s salary. That’s like working 40 hours a week times, four weeks. That’s like working 160 hours and depending on how much you make. That could be like two hundred and sixty hours. So I thought that was just so cool. Man, I love, love, love this business. I get more jazz and excited about teaching people how to do their first deal. How did it multiple deals?
So anyway, that’s kind of what’s going on on my front. I just finished this workshop. I’m definitely going to do one again. I don’t know when yet, but I mean, I wouldn’t mind doing one of these workshops once a month, maybe once every couple of months. But I’m meeting one of the friends that was at the workshop here in a few minutes at a coffee shop, and I’m driving to go meet him right now, and he was at the workshop. But one of the things that I’m going to be walking him through that I’ve done this for myself many times and I’ve done it with coaching clients in the real estate space. In the publishing internet marketing space is it’s called the burn it down, exercise the burn it down exercise.
If you were to lose it all and start all over from scratch, what would you do? It’s a great exercise to kind of go through, right? And and here’s the trick to it. Money is not a concern. Money’s not an object. Like, let’s just say you have zero debt and you don’t have any overhead or bills to pay. What would you just what kind of business would you create and start? What would you do that would really get you excited that you would be excited to run and would be a lot of fun? What would your passion be?
Now it’s all, not all beds. You know, what do they call roses and petals or whatever? Because obviously sometimes you know you’ve got to put in the work that we don’t like because that’s what we got to do. And if we want to put food on the table, you know, we got to dig ditches and clean toilets once in a while, right? But if you were to start a business and this is why I love information marketing so much, why I love entrepreneurship, because we kind of get to I believe God controls our destiny, right? But we kind of get to write our own story almost like we get to decide what we want to do with our lives. And we’re not beholden to a boss that we have to ask permission if we can leave early or come in late or take the week off like we can do whatever we want. And like, we can write our own paychecks and we can start a business and make a lot of money. Doing all that stuff because we’re the entrepreneurs that move the world, we’re the entrepreneurs that take these risks. So come on. I love it. It’s so much fun.
And you know, it’s intimidating if you’re just getting started. I get it right. But once you’ve been there, you’ve been on the other side and you realize how easy it is to make money and how easy it is to start a business and generate wealth. And, you know, create jobs, stimulate the economy. You know, I have a friend who is reluctant to get the jab. We’ll just put it nicely. And his employer is telling him, Hey, listen, you might not have a job if you don’t get the 4C ouchi, if you don’t get the jab. And I’m really mad. You know this whole thing, you know, forget about whether you’re pro vaccine or not. No, nobody should mandate it and require it. I mean, what are the what do they say? It’s my body, my choice. Why doesn’t that apply now? So we shouldn’t be forcing people and making them lose their jobs and lose their livelihood because they don’t want to get the jab? Oh, it makes me mad.
OK, but here’s my point in bringing that up, my friend. Like, if he does lose his job, man, I’m not. I’m not worried about it. I can. I can help him create some income on the side. I could. I don’t want to hire him, but I could if I had to, right? But he could. I could show him how to flip houses, flip vacant land and help him get right back on his feet really, really quickly, which is exciting. I mean, I know he’s stressed out and worried, but I want to tell him, like, don’t worry about it, it’s going to be all right because if you did lose your job, I got you back and I’m got, I got your back. And I’m going to help you. And even if you have to work for me, right, let’s start a business together. Let’s go into a new market and he’s going to be fine, in fact. Yeah.
Well, anyway, so bill, burn it down. So if you were to lose everything and all of a sudden now you’re you just got fired because you didn’t want to get the jab. And you know, if I don’t get me started on this, I wish I would have brought it up. Now I’m all mad. You know, who knows what the government is going to do next, right? Like, you know, it could be like, Oh, should I go down this path? What if they say someday? Like, You know what, if you don’t get rid of all your guns, you’re going to be, you’ll lose your job. So they have gun mandates, you know, they have mandates. If you’re oh, never mind, OK, I’ll miss that.
So but let’s say you lost your job and now you’re starting over from scratch and what kind of business would you build? And the great thing about this exercise is it really forces you to figure out like, OK, what do I like doing? What do I love doing and what do I hate doing? Like, what about my business? Absolutely sucks, and I don’t want to do any more of it. I want to get rid of it. I want to do this and I love this. And so I’m going to go through that exercise with my friend here. I encourage you all to do the same thing. OK? And again, money is not a concern. So forget about, you know, your how much money you have to bring in for overhead or employees or, you know, your health insurance or forget about all of that. What kind of business would you really, really love doing?
I’ve seen literally lives transformed and changed from doing this exercise, and I’ve done it many times myself. In fact, at the workshop, somebody asked me, Joe, hey, listen, if you lost everything and somebody dropped you off in an area, you know, it doesn’t matter necessarily as much with the internet marketing like where you live. But like, nobody knew you, right? They dropped you off in a new island and nobody knew you and you had to start over from scratch. What would you do? And it’s a great question. I love and I started really thinking about it, and I shared kind of what I would do. And man, it gets me excited because what I would be doing would be exactly what I love. And I know this business well enough that I could within two, three, four or five weeks could easily be making 10 20 grand a month. Right. So it’s like, yeah, that’s awesome. And then it can keep on going from there, depending on, you know, what kind of business you want.
So it’s what you got to design your lifestyle first, right? So like, what do you what do you want your life to look like and then design a business around that? And that’s kind of what this exercise does. So burn it all down. All right. You want to go? Maybe you don’t like doing wholesaling or you don’t like being reliant on rehabbing. It’s too much work you don’t like. You know, managing contractors is like an adult daycare. You know, you’re sick of the city, you’re sick of the the codes and the the inspectors and the realtors. And like you, what would you do if you threw it all away and start writing that stuff down?
It’s a good exercise to do every quarter, maybe every six months. And yeah, so maybe I’ll let you know how this meeting goes when I’m done, I’m here at the parking lot. I need to get in and we’ll see you guys take care.
Hey, stay tuned. If you want to go to my next marketing workshop, I’ll be letting y’all know about it. I didn’t really talk much about it. But I’m going to be doing it again, and I’ll be sharing more information and podcasts and emails and videos and all that good stuff.
We’ll see you guys take care. Bye.
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