#278: How I’m Approaching The Rest of 2025 (Behind The Scenes)

Jay Clouse [00:00:14]:
Hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. I wanted to take you behind the scenes this week in the lab. Every month I do a retro where I look at the months that just passed, things that went well, things that didn't go well, things that I'm changing because of that. And I wanted to share a version of that here on the channel and on the podcast feed, hopefully by learning more what's going on in my head, not only do you feel a little bit seen and understood, but maybe it gives you some insight and unlocks something for you in your own business as well. So really what I want to look at is the last quarter of the year here. We're through the first three quarters of the year, we're 75% through, and I want to look at my business, how it's performing so far and where we're heading. So as I look at the business, it's earned just under $600,000 this year so far, which means that I'm tracking a tad below last year's revenue.

Jay Clouse [00:01:12]:
And you probably relate to this. I expect growth all the time because growth is what we're going for, growth is good, and. And when things are successful, growth happens. I think the business has grown an average of like 74% per year over the last five years, and I always expect that to continue. So when I'm tracking below last year's growth, it really begs the question, you know, what is going on? And it's been difficult for me psychologically, but when I really dig into it and interrogate why that is, the answers are actually super clear and super obvious. Last year I spent three months at the beginning of the year building and launching a new product called Creator hq. This is my notion operating system. It's like having a personal assistant.

Jay Clouse [00:01:59]:
If you can't afford a personal assistant. It's how I manage everything in the business. And I productize that, made it available for sale and it was the most successful launch I've ever had. So last year that product alone earned about $100,000 towards the bottom line as a new product, and I didn't do anything comparable to that. This year there have been no new product launches. Instead of new product development, I have done book proposal development. I've spent like five or six months working on a book proposal that hasn't finished the process yet. Hopefully, you know, that book proposal is interesting to publishers and I get a book deal and.

Jay Clouse [00:02:41]:
And that is revenue that would count towards this year's growth, and that would probably make this year a Better year than last year if I'm doing my job well. But so far that has not materialized. We're not there yet. I've also reduced sponsorship on the channel this year because as I'll talk about here in a second, I've just realized that I am constantly making trade offs and resource decisions in the business and I want to make sure I'm being smart about those decisions. And what I realized is that sponsorship operations is a non trivial amount of work for me and or my team and for the revenue it brings in, for the impact it has on viewer, listener, reader satisfaction. I've just gotten a lot more choosy with my sponsorships. It's not worth doing really tiny campaigns with a brand that I don't love for the amount of work that is needed there now. We have some great supporters in the business on the sponsorship side.

Jay Clouse [00:03:44]:
1 of 10 has been great to us. Uscreen has been great to us. Circle, Kit, Kik, Cari. We've had some great sponsors that have done long360 campaigns with us. And that's more of what I'm interested in is companies that have a really high bar for quality, they treat their customers really, really well, which means they treat my audience really, really well. And that campaign is big enough that it warrants the amount of effort necessary to do it and do it really well. So that's where I'm coming into this from, is Q4 feels like this big deal to try to get back on track. But really when you look at it, it's very clear what has happened this year.

Jay Clouse [00:04:26]:
There's some really big bright spots. You know, the lab has continued to grow. I'll talk about that here in a second. But the lab has been and continues to be the biggest revenue driver in the business. And we have put a lot of effort into making that community experience even better this year. Before I get into that, I also need to visit the fact that this year I really realized that my way of working is totally broken. We had our daughter last year, she was born in the summer and I took two to three months off, about three months off for paternity leave. And that left a couple of months at the end of 2024 to go back to business as usual, whatever that means when you have a baby.

Jay Clouse [00:05:12]:
Before we had the baby, I didn't exactly have a lot of free time. You know, I was working morning till night and, and then with the baby. During paternity leave, I didn't take any calls. I basically just continued to publish long form content Writing the podcast, but moving back into business as usual. I had to refill my time, but now I had a giant new part of my life that I wanted to put more time towards. And not even just time with the baby, but presence with the baby. So it's not even that I lost working time. I lost a lot of thinking time.

Jay Clouse [00:05:49]:
In some ways, you could say that having a baby, there is more thinking time available to you because there's a lot of stuff you're doing that's kind of mindless. You know, changing a diaper, preparing a bottle, kind of rocking back and forth to sleep. And you can use that time to think about the business or you can be more present with your daughter. And of course, I would prefer the latter. So what I realized is the way I was working just isn't working. I tried to brute force it last year and I did brute force it. You know, waking up a little bit earlier, working later, less sleep is just part of having a baby anyway. But that's not sustainable.

Jay Clouse [00:06:26]:
Am I going to do that until she goes to school? We have chosen not to do daycare, and so either my wife or I are taking care of the baby all the time throughout the day, and it just doesn't work. So we've had to work this year on changing the way my wife and I co live, co parent, co work here in the house because we have this blessing of being able to be with our daughter all day, every day. But that comes at a cost to your time in the business. So this year has been a big shift into priorities. Basically. One other thing was just communication. My wife and I needed to get better communication about who is responsible for the baby in this moment. Because we're both at home all the time, we want to be around each other, but if we're both around each other with the baby, we're both like half parenting, half working.

Jay Clouse [00:07:21]:
And so my friend Amanda Goetz really recommended to me. She said, block out your days and have some just known times that you're responsible, she's responsible. And then you can guilt free get out of the house and go for a run or go to a coffee shop or paint your desk, as my wife is doing right now. And so we've really had to work on that communication and planning ahead of the week, which is hard because a lot of the reason we are drawn to entrepreneurship is making your own schedule. And for me, the best way of making my own schedule is just to have nothing on my calendar ever. But that doesn't work as well as you think it might. So, on the priorities front, I really had to dial this in because I can't do everything. I can't even do as much as I used to be doing.

Jay Clouse [00:08:09]:
Priorities need to change. So the number one priority is, has been, will be, for the foreseeable future, the lab, our membership community, it just reached $500,000 in annual recurring revenue for the first time. So if I take care of the lab, the lab takes care of the business, the business takes care of me. And so the lab is our number one priority, is just making that experience better and better all the time. I'll talk about how we're doing that here in a second. And this year, priority number two has been the book project. This is hard and this is scary because most of the time you want to take on what are called asymmetric bets, bets where the downside is capped and the upside is very, very high. And I would say that books are kind of the opposite of the asymmetric bet that you typically want to take, because the downside is pretty high.

Jay Clouse [00:09:02]:
It's a lot of time and resources, whether it does well or not. So the downside is actually very, very high. And the upside is uncertain, for sure. But for most people, the upside is not super high. Most people are not Mark Manson, they're not James Clear, they're not Morgan Housel, they're not Brene Brown, they're not Elizabeth Gilbert. These are huge outcomes, and of course, I aspire to that, and I am perfectly happy to put out into the world that that is the outcome that I want for this book, but it's super uncertain. But what is certain is, no matter the outcome, it's going to be a huge amount of time and effort to do that really, really well. So that is priority number two.

Jay Clouse [00:09:47]:
And to make that a priority, I've had to really say no to a whole bunch of other stuff, because everything else takes time and it takes away from that priority. A couple things that I've decided that I'm not doing. I was actually exploring a new product that was AI powered and kind of simulated me being a teacher in your pocket. I think education is going that direction. I think I will probably have a product along those lines at some point in time, but this technology didn't quite seem ready and. And I wasn't ready to commit to the timeline required for that project. I'm not doing any more interviews personally, meaning I'm not going to be interviewed by other channels and podcasts for the foreseeable future. It's a Big time commitment.

Jay Clouse [00:10:34]:
And increasingly those interviews have turned to the subject of the book that I'm writing, which is about trust and it's exciting. I'm glad people want to talk about it. But I'm still very much doing a lot of research here and I'm figuring out a lot of my thoughts. I'm not ready to talk about this and put it out there yet. Cause there's a ways to go. Until I really feel like all my thoughts are in order on the subject, I'm not gonna do any more speaking. I get asked to do speaking gigs quite often. In a previous video I shared that speaking can be one of the most lucrative revenue streams you can offer.

Jay Clouse [00:11:06]:
But if you aren't being paid to speak or not being paid well, it's actually a huge cost. The time thinking about it, preparing the materials, practicing the materials, the time to travel and go out of your business to do this, it's a huge opportunity cost. So I'm not going to do any speaking for the foreseeable future. Then I'm thinking about pausing the coaching tier of the lab. This is the VIP tier. The difference between standard and VIP and the community is that VIPs get extra one on one time with me. And when I look at my calendar and where I have calendar blocks that I could possibly take away, coaching is one of them. So I'm considering putting that to the side in the near future just to clear up some more time on the calendar.

Jay Clouse [00:11:51]:
I enjoy doing it and those clients really get a lot out of it. But it is one area where I can see I could reclaim time and that time can be compounded for me. I think I'm going to take less sponsorship here. On the YouTube channel, we typically have one integration per video and that has been fine. That has been okay. But creating a video integration, a video ad integration is much more resource intensive and time intensive than a newsletter integration or a podcast ad. So I think in the immediate term I'm going to pause that and simply talk about some of the offers that I have, namely Creator hq, the Lab, which I've already talked about here in this discussion and believe that the people who are watching this video or listening to this podcast, they're going to hear those things, grasp onto it, look into it, and if it makes sense for them, they will move forward. And then I had another product idea that I've been working on for a while, helping creators like you develop your signature product.

Jay Clouse [00:12:52]:
It's something that I've done a lot in the lab with our members There I think I can productize and sell this really effectively. But again, where's that time going to come from? I think because the lab is priority number one, the book is priority number two, all of those things need to go away in the immediate term. Everything that is not those things. Which brings me to the next question of resourcing. I'm thinking about resourcing in the business quite a bit. And here's what I mean by that. I will oftentimes look at other creators and their output with awe and wonder. In fact, a couple years ago at Craft and Commerce, Cody Sanchez showed up to a speaker dinner.

Jay Clouse [00:13:32]:
And I went up to Cody and I said, I just want to let you know that I'm so impressed by the output of your content. And she says, well, thank you so much, but all of the credit goes to my team. She has a team of I think more than a dozen people. And she said at Crofton Commerce that she spent over a million dollars on content that previous year. And that was two years ago. So it was just very telling that I look at creators like Cody as the bar, the standard that I'm trying to meet. But she is resourcing that output to a much higher degree than I am and than I am willing to. And that's the big thing.

Jay Clouse [00:14:10]:
I have really thought deeply this year about the future of the business. And I was at this crossroads of do I hire full time people, staff up and try to grow through headcount. And I think it's undeniable that if I hired good talent full time, they would pay for themselves, the business would grow. But I don't know that I want to do it. And in this period of time, I know that I don't want to do it. I would prefer to focus my energy on the book project than team building because again, team building is its own investment of time and energy. And of course there's a whole bunch of ways you could do this. I could hire an operator or even close to like a CEO type to help on the team building side and to free me up.

Jay Clouse [00:14:57]:
And there's wisdom there. And people do that and they're successful, more successful than I am, and maybe I should do that. But in this season I just don't want to. And if I'm not willing to resource my team and the efforts that we're taking to the degree of the people I'm comparing myself to, I really can't compare myself to those people. Maybe you can relate to that. I really can't compare myself to somebody who is utilizing far more resources than I am to get output greater than mine and expect myself to keep pace with that. So it really begs the question, what do I do with that? Because I am still a very ambitious person. Having a daughter didn't make me less ambitious, but.

Jay Clouse [00:15:41]:
But it did make me think about my priorities. And so this is something I've really been wrestling with this year is what does ambition look like to me? And it's got me thinking a lot about how I can choose the games that I want to play to win on my own terms, you know, and that's the key thing. On my own terms. I want to be the best of the best at something. I want to be world class at something, but I want to be world class on my terms. I don't want to be world class in a way that requires me to build a business that I don't want to build in a way I don't want to build it. So a lot of this year, candidly has been almost treading water, you know, trying to keep pace with what I've done in the past. But clear more space to look around the landscape and figure out where do I actually want to put my chips? What is my next move? It's hard to have those thought processes without clearing time for it.

Jay Clouse [00:16:38]:
So this year has been a lot of clearing time to think about the next couple of moves that I want to make. And as I shared with you, the book is the big move that I've been making in this season on the resourcing front as well. We're making some changes to our YouTube team. I'm stepping back into the role of producer. The channel just doesn't financially support a third party producer. That's not me and editors below that person. Our output, the revenue created by the channel just doesn't support it. So the hard thing is that means that there's more on my plate to get videos out.

Jay Clouse [00:17:17]:
Does that mean we produce more videos or less videos than me as producer? We'll find out. But we're changing the team a little bit. Our thumbnail designer, who's been with us for a very long time, he got a full time job opportunity, a great full time job opportunity that there's no way I could compete with. Which means that we're also hiring new thumbnail designers on the channel. So it's an exciting future because we get to play around. You know, early on in the channel, I felt like we were innovating quite a bit with the format of remote interviews. And as we tried to formalize our process. We were innovating a little bit less and so now I'm putting it on my shoulders to innovate more again and we'll see how that goes.

Jay Clouse [00:17:57]:
It's at least fun. I'm trying to bring more fun back into the work real quick. If you've enjoyed this so far, I would love for you to subscribe to the channel, to the podcast, to leave a comment below. That goes a long way in helping us to grow. Next up, I want to talk about content strategy. If the lab is priority number one and the book is priority number two, what does that mean for my content strategy? Well, I have decommitted from short form social media content quite a bit. For a very long time I was posting daily on LinkedIn, I was posting daily on X, if not more than daily. And for a while I was playing around short form video, trying to post that daily to Instagram as well.

Jay Clouse [00:18:47]:
There's nothing wrong with that. In fact, I think that's what those platforms demand to get the most out of them. But in the season where I'm changing my priorities, trying to get more out of my time, trying to clear space, that means that I'm changing my content strategy a little bit as well. So what I've come around to is that I want to double down on long form content, mostly writing. I think writing is becoming an even greater skill in the age of AI because a lot of people are using AI to not only write for them, but to think for them. I think that's a huge risk to the AI revolution, if you will, is that it makes things so easy that we now outsource a lot of our thinking to the machines. And that is not how you become a better thinker. Writing is thinking.

Jay Clouse [00:19:40]:
And so if I prioritize getting better at writing, that means that I'm implicitly prioritizing getting better at thinking. And I think thoughtful people that we want to learn from are going to have an even greater premium in the AI world. As a quick aside, here there is a whole world of study beneath a guy named Rene Girard, and he was a fairly modern philosopher. His whole thing was this idea of mimetic desire, meaning that we desire the things of the people around us that we see them desiring. Here's this concept of models people in our life that we look at and we model their behavior and their desires in a world with increasing AI. I don't think the human predisposition to model after other humans and want to be like other people. I Don't think that goes away. It might be harder to become that person, it might be more scarce.

Jay Clouse [00:20:41]:
But I think that's very much going to continue to enter the picture. And especially in a world where humans feel more replaced, replaceable than ever, they're going to look at other people who have transcended that replaceability and say, how can I be like that person? And I think those people will be people who have very clear perspectives. They're very thoughtful, they're very smart, and they're great communicators. And so that's what I want to continue to invest my skill in developing. That means if I'm doubling down on long form, I want to figure out a couple of things. I want to figure out how to get more out of those assets. So if I'm writing long form writing, I want to find ways to make it easier to transform that long form writing into a script for a video, into a podcast episode. A long time ago, I saw just how smart Dan Ko's content strategy was.

Jay Clouse [00:21:40]:
He would write an essay, then he would record a video, basically using that essay as a script. And then he would strip out the audio from that video as a podcast. And now a Spotify video, you can just post that whole video as a podcast. And that's a really smart way of going about it that I want to play around with and get better at. I'm also looking at how can I resource my team to take some of this long form insight, this long form writing, and turn that into effective performative short form content? You know what's really interesting is it used to be that LinkedIn and Twitter were basically the same. If you were good on Twitter, you could grow on LinkedIn very quickly and vice versa. But I think increasingly LinkedIn is more similar to Instagram than it is to X, because LinkedIn wants visual hooks, it wants visual content. And so the content that you would put on Instagram or LinkedIn images, carousels, those are very portable across those two mediums.

Jay Clouse [00:22:45]:
So I'm really looking at how do I build better processes to turn my writing into carousels for LinkedIn and Instagram? How do I turn my videos into more carousels and short form video on Instagram and LinkedIn, maybe even TikTok. That's something I'm figuring out in this season. In my content, I'm going to assume high intelligence and ability. There's a whole giant competitive world of people teaching beginner creators. And that's not where I want to play. That's not really where I have been playing and I get frustrated because I want to be bigger. But the reality is the way to have a larger audience is to serve the biggest segment of that audience, which is beginners. And if you serve beginners, you're not going to serve a more advanced crowd.

Jay Clouse [00:23:35]:
And so I want to continue to serve the type of people who come into the lab, a more advanced creator, at least in their thinking, if not already in their business. So I'm going to double down on assuming intelligence and progress. I'm on the side of the people who are coming into my world, and I want to share more experiments. On a recent video, Colin and Samir had Stephen Bartlett come to their event Press Publish nyc and he shared a story about what he calls his failure team. He has a team of people in his business who are incentivized to run more experiments and fail more frequently because he knows more experiments means more data, which means better decisions, which means faster success. And of course, all of that compounds. But if you incentivize your team to only succeed, they're going to take fewer risks because failure is not success. So he incentivizes failure by having a failure team.

Jay Clouse [00:24:33]:
And what they want is a high rate of experimentation. Now, I heard this and I thought, I love that. That is the ethos of creator science. But I also thought, how could a solo creator like me or the people I serve ever compete with a Steven Bartlett who has a failure experimentation team? And what I came to is community. This is why the lab exists. The lab is built for creators to experiment and grow together. It's like having this large failure team if we do our part in running and sharing those experiments. And I get so excited by that vision.

Jay Clouse [00:25:16]:
I mean, the lab has always been. The vision has been knowledge share, knowledge share, knowledge share, knowledge share. Because if your decisions and your ideas are constrained to your team yourself, that's fine. But you're going to have such a better outcome, so much more potential if you also can learn from the mistakes and the successes and the experiments of other people. So you could hire and have your own failure team, or you could join a community like the lab and do your part, share your own experiments, learn from other people's experiments as well. So I need to embody that more. I need to create and run more experiments myself and pass that along. I can do that in my content too.

Jay Clouse [00:25:56]:
I think I should build better processes and ways to reach out to you and say, have you run an experiment lately? Do you want to share that with the creator science audience? On the podcast in our writing, our newsletter, I think that would be a great way to live out the brand and serve a lot of people. So that's the content strategy. On the product strategy side, I am just doubling down on the lab. Like I said, we broke $500,000 in annual recurring revenue. That's a big deal for us. We have done a lot in the business this year to improve the lab. Every January or February, we do something called a town hall. And at that town hall, I share, hey, here's what we did the last year and here's what we're thinking about the year ahead.

Jay Clouse [00:26:44]:
What do you think about this? Do you have your own ideas? And then after that, I send a survey and have people vote on the ideas that I put out there. So not only do we do that this year, but then we put into action all all of the ideas that we brought to the town hall. People voted on them, we rolled them out in order, but we did all of them. And so the things that we did this year that were unique and special, we did our first two day in person experience for the lab. It's called the Lab Offline. We did it in Boise ahead of Craft and Commerce. We had 40 members of the community fly into Boise, spend two days with us, Masterminding, working together. It was awesome.

Jay Clouse [00:27:21]:
Awesome. And more and more I want to do more offline events like that. We are doing an offline event here in Columbus, Ohio in November and we've done dinners at a bunch of other events too. So we've been doing more and more in person experiences. We also did two rounds of Mastermind creation inside the lab as part of membership. No additional cost. Masterminds Inside the Community. The first time around, I matched 60 people into groups and we just did this at the end of September.

Jay Clouse [00:27:50]:
The second grouping, we had 73 members that we put into groups. So huge benefit to the community to be hand picked, hand organized into these small groups of people who are doing similar things to you so you can have consistent ongoing sessions with them, support each other, learn from each other. It's become one of the most popular aspects of the community. And that's just an added part of membership. We did something called a lab report. So I created a form and asked people to share. What platforms are you operating on? What type of revenue streams do you bring into the business? And then based on the responses, we said, okay, what's working for you with that right now? So if you said, I'm on Instagram, we said, okay, what's working on Instagram? We got, I think 75 responses, all open text fields we went through, we summarized and we created a 70 page document cataloging all of the insights that people put together of what's working for them right now on these different platforms and for these different revenue streams. And we plan to do that a couple times per year.

Jay Clouse [00:28:58]:
But it's super high signal helpful and my wife did an incredible job designing it. This wonderful document that gives people a real time look into. Okay, what can I do to be more effective on these platforms right now? As proven by other members of the community. We also released what I call the Trusted Partners Directory. This is a listing of service providers that members of the community have hired and will vouch for. So if you are in the lab and you want to find somebody who does ads or legal or accounting or finance or design, branding, all these things, many chat implementation, we have dozens now of service providers that have profiles in there. Tells you about them, the service they offer, the pricing, the timelines and lets you communicate with them directly. That has been awesome as well.

Jay Clouse [00:29:49]:
So we've added a ton to the lab to make it a better and better experience and we're going to continue doing that. Right now we're working on our 2026 calendar to figure out, okay, when are these events, when are we doing mastermind matching? When are we doing the lab report so we can get ahead of it? We're going to do two events next year is the goal. One in the U.S. one outside the U.S. it might be in Boise again ahead of craft and commerce. We're still figuring that out. But we're also going to do an event outside the US because our membership is super, super diverse right now. Because the lab is a huge priority, we we are updating the sales page again.

Jay Clouse [00:30:29]:
We update the sales page at least once a year, just trying to get it better and better all the time. We're putting together a full video trailer for what the lab is like. We're also getting more use out of the video we created from our lab offline event in Boise. We have this amazing video about that experience and that is not currently being utilized in any way. So the new lab sales page will highlight all of these areas that are new experiments, how that is a core part of membership, running and sharing your own experiments. Our online masterminds that we're doing twice per year, our offline experiences, those lab reports I mentioned, our Trusted Partners directory and hot seats, the one on one coaching calls that I do inside the community, all of this is now going to be added to the sales page to make it more clear as well as what the basic membership experience looks like, because we've upgraded that a lot this year as well. If you are not eligible for standard and vip, the basic tier is still great. After a quick break, I'm going to tell you about the progress on the book.

Jay Clouse [00:31:32]:
So don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. All right, to close things out, let's talk about the book writing progress that we have together. I have a finished book proposal. I should say a finished draft of a book proposal. I shared that with my agent. She's great. She's very well respected in the space.

Jay Clouse [00:31:54]:
She's been a part of some of the biggest published books in the last 10 years. So she's fantastic. And I'm thinking to myself, I'm gonna do everything in my power to make this book a success. In fact, that is my only mark of success for this book is I want to be able to look in the mirror when the book is done, not even just done, but when the book is being launched and say, did I do everything in my power to make this book a success? And I want to be able to say, yes, I did everything I could. Because again, this is an asymmetric bet of the wrong kind. And if it's going to be a huge amount of effort and time and resources, whether it's successful or not, I'm going to do that last 10% that is extra. You know, the last 10% that you get. So you're like, oh, I'm so tired.

Jay Clouse [00:32:43]:
I don't want to do this. I'm going to do it in every single way. I'm going to do everything I can to make this book a success. Because again, even though revenue this year is flat, maybe down a little bit from last year, I know that five years from now, I'm going to look back on 2025 and say, that was the year I got serious about writing a book. And I think my future is writing books. It has to start sometime. And this is the year that it's starting. So I am willing to take a step back from a revenue standpoint this year to set myself up for the future that I want to have.

Jay Clouse [00:33:18]:
And I need to be kinder to myself psychologically about that fact, because, again, this is gonna be the year that I said that was the year I got serious about the book. The challenge is finding time and energy because it's gotta come from somewhere. It's gotta come from family life, it's gotta come from the core business. The more it comes from the core business, the bigger a hit the core business takes. The generative new idea, new writing that happens in book form seems to come from the same place internally as writing a newsletter or scripting a podcast, scripting a YouTube video. And so I really can't in parallel work on the book proposal and work on my newsletter. Let's say the context switching is too high. So to make progress on the book, I really have to put aside real uninterrupted time.

Jay Clouse [00:34:11]:
I have to create time for it. And that's been the biggest challenge of doing this. Now, after I turned in the proposal, I got really great feedback from my agent and her assistant. And so there's some changes I need to make. But one of the biggest pieces of feedback was that they weren't sold on the title. I'm going to be a little bit vague here because this is very much not set in stone, but the challenge with the title is at this stage, it's like a YouTube video. In my mind. The title needs to grab attention, but it also needs to paint the right expectation of what you're gonna get out of it for the right audience.

Jay Clouse [00:34:48]:
And if people pick up the book and start reading it, they want a payoff pretty quickly. So I feel blocked currently to find the right title for the book so that I can then write the payoff in the introduction, because the introduction is also part of what we want to update. So the book needs to be aligned to the title. The title needs to be aligned to the book. I have a very strong feeling about what the structure of the book is, but finding a title that represents it accurately while also being attention grabbing is difficult for reasons that I won't get into at this time. If you are curious about the book project more deeply, I would encourage you to join the lab. I actually just created a book team space in the lab so I can share more specific detail with folk that I know who's seeing it and I can trust them. But that's the big challenge, is getting the title right and then being able to do the rest of the edits.

Jay Clouse [00:35:44]:
This became a little bit of a title by committee effort, which is challenging because at the end of the day, I need to be super happy with it. I want my editor to be happy with it, I want my agent to be happy with it, and I want it to get a really good response from the people that I bring it to. And I'm trying to write this book in a way that it transcends the business category and is more applicable into broader. I guess self help is probably what it lives in, but that means that it needs to speak in non business specific terms, but still relevant to business. I want it to appeal to men and women equally. And I gotta tell you, the title ideas I've had so far, the short list that I have, men gravitate towards a certain subset of those titles and women gravitate towards a certain subset of those titles and it's not the same subset. So it's a really tricky problem that is fun to play with but also impossible to solve with just intensity. Usually when we have problems, the way I scratch that itch is to just put aside a whole day, sit with it, work through it.

Jay Clouse [00:36:52]:
It's not that easy. Creative problems like this are not that easy to solve. You need to create the time and space you need to be consuming things that create new ideas for you. But ultimately it really does feel like there's a waiting component. There's like a priming your brain and waiting component. I try to solve with intensity. I have I think 500 title ideas right now in a document in notion, but none of them are right yet. It'll come, but when? I don't know.

Jay Clouse [00:37:24]:
So it's really hard because it has become the bottleneck. Nothing has been a yes from all sides. And to be honest, like it makes me doubt myself, it makes me doubt the project. But I look at this and I think hard things are the opportunity. That's why there is still an opportunity in books, is because there is a difficulty to doing the process. The traditional process, as frustrating as I can already see that it can be, there is a difficulty to the process that weeds people out, that gives you an opportunity that doesn't exist in other areas. So I'm going to stick with the hardness of this and figure it out. So that's the update.

Jay Clouse [00:38:11]:
It's been tough to focus, to reprioritize, to say no to things, to do less. It's so hard to do less. When my whole career to this point has been saying yes to things, committing to things, delivering on those things over and over and over, on time, on deadline. And I want to do things like create a new product or play around with like a low ticket ad strategy. All that sounds fun, it sounds like something I could do, it sounds like it would have a good impact on the business, but I just can't do all of it. And as a result the priorities I do have, the business feels like it's a little bit at a plateau. And my instinct is like, create something new. Get out of this plateau by creating something new.

Jay Clouse [00:38:55]:
But I need to focus. I talked to a guy named Alex yesterday. He's a physical trainer. And he said, you know, in weight training, there's a lot of plateaus that happen. And he told the story about when he was younger and his daughters were younger. There was a period where every day felt like Groundhog's Day. And he was so frustrated because it felt like life was kind of at a plateau. And that's exactly where I'm at right now.

Jay Clouse [00:39:19]:
But he said, you know, the plateau is where we dial ourselves in. The plateau is where you find discipline, consistency, routine. You figure out your way of doing things. And I really appreciated that message. So this season is about dialing myself in, dialing in the priorities that matter. That's what I'm thinking about for Q4. Hopefully getting proposal draft number two to the finish line here in Q4. I'm curious to hear what your Q4 priorities are.

Jay Clouse [00:39:48]:
I'd love to hear them in the comments. Leave them on YouTube, here on Spotify, or if you want to tag me on social media at J Claus. Wherever you hang out is great. Thanks for watching.