The Salesforce Career Show
The podcast dedicated to helping you HIRE, GET HIRED and SOAR HIGHER in the SALESFORCE ecosystem.
Enjoy these live recordings of The Salesforce Career Show from X Spaces and YouTube's JoshForce. A guest + AMA format hosted by Josh Matthews, founder of Salesforce Staffing, LLC, Joshforce and The Expand Exchange and Vanessa Grant, Dreamforce speaker, 9X certified BA, consultant and social media darling. Recordings are 3x per month.
The Salesforce Career Show
Plan Your Year for Success in 2025: Tools, Strategies, and Career Insights
In this episode of the Salesforce Career Show, hosts Josh Matthews and Vanessa Grant are joined by a panel of experts, including Fred Cadena, Mike Mikula, Eric Cook, and Josh LeQuire to discuss effective strategies for planning a successful 2025.
From practical tools to personal growth insights, this episode covers how to set meaningful goals, optimize productivity, and navigate challenges in the Salesforce ecosystem.
Wherever you are in your Salesforce journey, this episode is packed with actionable advice on planning your year effectively, staying focused, and achieving your goals.
We talk about:
- Top tools for task management, goal setting, and personal organization.
- Insights into the Tony Robbins RPM (Rapid Planning Method) system.
- How to manage energy, focus, and time for peak productivity.
- Career development strategies, from networking to personal branding.
- Building accountability systems to stay on track with your goals.
- Using reflection and retrospectives to improve year-over-year performance.
Tune in to learn how to make 2025 your most productive and fulfilling year yet!
This episode is brought to you by Josh Matthews: thesalesforcerecruiter.com
For more terrific content, join our social network and get connected to our Salesforce community.
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Chapters:
00:00 - Introduction and Setting the Stage for Planning
12:45 - Top Tools for Organizing Your Year and Enhancing Focus
27:50 - Evernote, OmniFocus, and Tech Tools for Productivity
42:15 - The RPM System: A Results-Oriented Approach to Goal Setting
55:30 - Energy, Focus, and Time Management for Long-Term Success
1:10:45 - The Role of Retrospectives: Learning from Successes and Failures
1:25:00 - Personal Growth in the Salesforce Ecosystem: Career and Life Goals
1:40:15 - Wrap-Up: Accountability, Fun, and Building a Productive 2025
And now the number one audio program that helps you to hire, get hired and soar higher in the Salesforce ecosystem. It's the Salesforce Career Show with Josh Matthews and Vanessa Grant Guys, thanks everybody for showing up today.
Josh Matthews:Again, it's kind of a funky, funky day to host a live show, and I can't thank you guys enough for jumping in to join me on a topic that I really enjoy, which is planning and goal setting and how to do it, and I'm just going to preface this by saying look, most people you know, if you're 30 or over and you're listening to the show, which is the vast majority of our listeners you've gone through planning. You've heard about goal setting. You've probably done it once or twice in your life with varying degrees of success. Some of you guys are absolutely incredible at it and others maybe not so much. Some are great at planning, others are great at doing. Not everybody's great at both and, just so you know, I'd rather be a doer than a planner who doesn't do right. I mean, I hope that makes sense to everybody, but hopefully we can share today some of the things that we do ourselves to really get into the mindset of wanting to set a destination for our career, for our life. This includes life balance. It could be anything right. This show is not about New Year's resolutions and all that stuff. Everybody knows that New Year's resolutions don't work more than 90% of the time and we're going to hopefully fix a little bit of that and we're adding Mr Fred Cadena to the stage. Welcome, fred, it's good to see you, my friend. Thank you, happy New Year. It's a rare occasion that Fred's not on an airplane, so it's pretty dope to have him. And Fred, just to catch you up, we're talking about planning for the year. How can you make it so that 2025 is? I mean, maybe if you have an incredible year, maybe it's a duplicate of 24, but I think for most people they're going to want something a little bit more out of 25 than maybe they got out of 2024. And we're going to go into that.
Josh Matthews:But first, brought to you from the salesforcerecruitercom Salesforce staffing LLC. We do have a few jobs available right now. We just got very busy. We have five openings currently. One is for a lead consultant for a nonprofit SI practice, a group that we love. We've staffed about a third of them. Very close relationships with the leadership there. People who go there tend not to leave right. It's one of those places and in this role you'd have about three or four people under you and you'd be working on NPSP and nonprofit cloud projects.
Josh Matthews:We also have a couple different roles. Well, they're not different, a couple of the same roles Senior consultant, slash solution architect. You don't have to be an SA to apply for this job, but it pays quite well. It's about $170 all in, so not bad, really good for someone who's ready to be an SA. I think this organization and it's a small SI practice, it's fully remote they really like people who just have tons of drive and the ability to learn right. If you can demonstrate those qualities then you'll get an interview through me and maybe even a brand new job with a shiny new paycheck. So, senior consultants, I need two of them.
Josh Matthews:I also have a solution architect opportunity for an SI practice that focuses just on insurance, all kinds of insurance, right, medical, health, life property, marine, all that stuff. So if you've got at least a year or two of experience in the insurance industry and then you also are very skilled at architecting solutions for clients, then we want to hear from you. And then the last one is more of a technical role for the same nonprofit group I mentioned earlier. I'm going to have more details on that next year. So make sure you visit thesalesforceretreatorcom forward slash J-O-B and check out some of these opportunities. They're not all up, by the way, but a few of them are Okay. Enough plugging, let's dive in. I would love to find out, first and foremost, tools. I want to talk about tools. These are often software products, but not always, and I'm really interested in what kind of tools the members of this panel utilize to plan their week, their quarter, their month, their year, or to stay on track with some of their goals. Let's start with Josh.
Josh LeQuire:Go ahead, josh, yeah sure I'm a huge fan. I've been using Evernote for years. I kind of keep a running log every day with a little checkbox and some things I need to do to help me stay on top of things. So Evernote is kind of my secret sauce. I always use my Google Calendar pretty heavily as well. I actually look at my calendar and schedule time for myself, even if it's not time I'm meeting with clients or partners or vendors or consultants just time for myself. So I kind of take a very regimented approach of looking at the eight or nine hours a day I have and actually going hour by hour, if not minute by minute, to schedule my time. And I think just doing that at a minimum is super effective.
Josh LeQuire:But a lot of it also comes down to looking at a board of all the things I have going on. We use GitHub projects in our practice to look at our client projects, all kinds of initiatives. So I like putting things almost like it looks like a Trello board where you can put cards up and track things. So those are kind of the three things I use really just to manage my time, manage my schedule plan and look ahead. But that's really good for the short-term stuff, the long-term stuff. I kind of sit down and journal and think about this year, especially with the new year happening. Going through the exercise of journaling and thinking about you know what really matters to me, what do I want to accomplish, where do I want to focus is kind of the necessary precursor to using all those tools and putting those things in place. So that's, that's kind of my combination of tools that I look at and use.
Josh Matthews:I love it and I'll tell you, I'm a huge Evernote junkie, you know, and I've been using it for, I think, the year it came out, so it's like 12 years, 10 years, 12 years and I can search for stuff on there and be like, oh my God, this is like Lincoln Youth Football Board of Directors stuff from 2015 or something like that. It's crazy and it's fun because it's a little bit of a memory lane there, but really useful. It's practically free. You can get a paid version. That's going to open up a lot of opportunities.
Josh Matthews:One of the things I really like about Evernote is you can record audio. There are web clippers that plug into your Chrome. You can grab anything. You can take photos of your handwritten notes, drop it in there and it's going to read all of the I forget what you call it blah, blah, blah, whatever word reading OCR, thank you. And so it's super easy to find things Every single person that I interview and every single client that I talk to.
Josh Matthews:I'm not punching it into my CRM, I'm punching it into Evernote. Then I'll transfer it after I organize it. Drop some AI to clean it up a little bit and then I'll pop it in, but it makes it super easy and then you've got all of your raw notes from any conversation that you have, provided you take those conversations. Now I know that Fred and I, we talk, along with Eric, a lot about other tools that can be used to record conversations. So AI summaries, zoom offers it. There's probably 10 different products that are pretty popular, so maybe I'm a little bit old school there. But with that, let's go to Fred. What are the top tools that you're going to be using in 25 for your planning?
Fred Cadena:I was hoping to be in listen mode here because I want to hear what the new, latest and greatest tools are. I'm a big Evernote user as well. I tend to use Miro quite a bit for project planning and Kanban boards and that kind of stuff. I don't have a real good. I mean, I live out of calendar, right. I've got a lot of appointments, I've got a, you know you alluded to, I travel a lot, so obviously you know, sometimes I probably let the calendar rule my life too much. But I don't have like a good like general task list type of a tool, like, unless it's tied to some bigger project or bigger thing that I'm working on nothing. That's really kind of stuck.
Josh Matthews:So are you on Mac or are you? A PC guy.
Fred Cadena:I'm a Mac guy Mac and iOS.
Josh Matthews:Okay. Well, I'm going to recommend what I use for my task management system and it's called OmniFocus and it's just for Mac. It's not super cheap. It's maybe 80 bucks, I think. It might be like 70, 80 bucks a year. It is so powerful and I'll tell you the way that I organize it. I don't even know if I don't want to show everybody everything I got to do, know if I don't want to show everybody everything I got to do. It's a long, it's a really long list, but there's a. I learned this from a coach maybe seven years ago and it's. You can use this for OmniFocus.
Josh Matthews:For those of you who are not Mac users, there's another highly recommended product called Todoist T-O-D-O-I-S-T. If you haven't heard of that before, now you have, and it's not dissimilar from OmniFocus. One of the things I love about OmniFocus is being able to short key tasks. So I can just hit my option command space bar and then type it in what I need to do and I can tab over, flag it, drop in a due date how much time I think it's going to take different notes. I can do tags on it too, and you can even do location stuff with OmniFocus, so you can plug in stuff like, okay, I need to buy this, that, the other thing, three different things from Home Depot. Well, you're not going to even get a notification on that until it recognizes that your geolocation is near Home Depot. And then it's going to pop up and be like guess what, fred, don't forget to go buy these things, right. So very powerful, and I think Todoist has a lot of that too. But here's my trick with OmniFocus or any of these tools, you're always able to create like a file, right. So on mine. I'm going to open it real quick. I'm probably not going to share it. So on mine.
Josh Matthews:When I look at my projects, they're called projects. I have, for instance, sfs Salesforce staffing. I have training and implementation, productivity and planning my websites, content production, anything personal, anything to do with the house, anything to do with finances, but then under each of these projects, I create sub projects and it looks like this week and then queue, right, this week and queue, and then once a week. Every time you drop something into the inbox, then once a day, once a week, however you want to do it, you drag and drop it into the appropriate project.
Josh Matthews:And what I love about having a queue is you can really just like it's not going to get lost. It's for this project. You're going to get to it sometime, it's not priority. So this way you can have a very short list by dragging and dropping into the most critical things into this week's project and then the queue is where you go to populate next week or the following weeks thereafter. Does that make sense? It's pretty dope. I mean, I love it and I'm happy to share screenshots or something like that. Maybe in post-production we'll drop some of that stuff in.
Fred Cadena:It sounds awesome. I'm already looking at the website. I take it you've got the standard. There's a standard and a pro, pro, pro is about twice as much. You have the pro.
Josh Matthews:I do pro man, I do pro on almost everything. Just because it's actually not that much Like when I try and figure out proper planning could earn me an extra $100,000 this year. It could earn me an extra $150,000 a year. I know that's not the case for most admins out there, and fair enough, but the opportunity to grow, gain, acquire, accomplish is so critical. It's so important. I'm more than happy to spend a hundred bucks or 50 bucks extra, 30 bucks extra on the software so that I can actually use it in a way that's not going to be disruptive. I'm going to get a little bit better flow. It's a worthy investment, I think.
Fred Cadena:All right, well, I'm sold. I'm signing up as we speak.
Josh Matthews:All right. What about you, Vanessa? What are some tools that you enjoy? In the process.
Vanessa Grant:Yeah, for me, 2025 is going to be figuring out what tools work for me. I have to get organized and I've recently started working with a career coach. She's great. Her name's Erica Chestnut, if anybody's interested in looking her up. But she's working with a career coach. She's great. Her name's Erica Chestnut, if anybody's interested in looking her up, but she's working with me right now on what are all the things that I'm committed to figuring out over, like if I split it out in per week how much time each of those takes, and then also figuring out what my priorities are so that I can better adjust my capacity. I have long struggled as we've addressed several times on this show, with overcommitting myself and just being stressed out all the time, so I'm really hoping to find some balance in 2025. The things that I've used unsuccessfully I can talk about. I've used Notion let's not do that.
Vanessa Grant:Other people have used them successfully. I remember Stacey Whitaker came on the show and talked to us about Motion, which is really cool if it works for you and I think a lot of it is. It's not that it's a tool that's going to work for everybody. It's finding the tools that work for you. So I know Notion works for a lot of folks. I know Motion works for a lot of folks. Neither of those has worked for me, I think. Probably I keep most of my stuff in Google Keep, but even then I don't use it as much as I should. My next step is going to be trying to create a Google Calendar and trying to block off time that way, but I'm still sorting through it.
Josh Matthews:Well, I think that's worthy and I'm pretty stoked to hear that you're getting some outside help, which is a very big deal. Right? Most of you have listened to the podcast where we had Trevor McAulder on. Trevor's my Tony Robbins executive coach. We've worked together for three years. He's taught me an awful lot. He's a wonderful guy. He keeps me on point, keeps me on track and, more importantly, gets me to think about problem solving in a slightly different way.
Josh Matthews:And this is really where planning comes in and some of the things that I'm hoping to cover during this little session, because all the tools in the world don't work. If you don't use the tools, it doesn't work. And it's a mindset thing and we'll get to that probably a little bit closer to the end, but it's definitely about mindset and, more importantly, a little bit closer to the end, but it's definitely about mindset and, more importantly, it's about how do you determine what is actually worth your time? Why is it worth your time? Who else is impacted, things like that. So we'll go into that in a little bit, mr McCool. By the way, mike, we never did a full introduction on you. Mike is super freaking smart, just like everybody else on this panel. He's a super smart guy. Can you give us a quick 10-second update on who you are?
Mike Mikula:So yeah, my name is Mike McCullough, salesforce architect, software engineer. I've been working in the field for over 10 years and was very glad to meet Josh and get feedback from him, so here, I am All right, buddy, and are there some tools that you like to use for planning?
Mike Mikula:So, professionally, I'm a big jira fan. Like whenever I'm leading teams, I love to use jira um. Or for like, for example, at home we use trello to manage all of our home projects, uh, but like for wedding planning, then we're going to flip back to spreadsheets, so like we use spreadsheets for everything in there and financial planning, um, but what's really interesting?
Peter Ganza:this year.
Mike Mikula:Oh, thank you, Thank you very much.
Mike Mikula:That's exciting. What's interesting, though, in the last couple of months is I kind of actually turned the professional side off of all this super planning stuff and just made time to play, and that's actually caused me to reach my goals 10 times faster than I ever have reached them just by finding things that I enjoy doing and giving myself to just be curious about them, like with AI. Like I went from just hey, I can take GPT and put an app through app exchange, but from scratch to I can have cursor, build an entire full stack app in like a weekend. Like just monumental shifts from just saying I'm gonna play. Or like Josh, when you gave me feedback about my resume, I was like cool, josh gave me an example of my resume, like what it could look like, and I was able to just take cursor and have it build an entire website with all your feedback and then open source it.
Mike Mikula:Right, like it's just creating time to play like has been, for me, the most interesting way to like set goals that could be a really fun session.
Josh Matthews:By the way, maybe we look at doing that just on youtube one of these days. I'd like that very cool. Mr gans, are you still with us?
Peter Ganza:I am, but probably not on camera. I've been having mad latency issues. My internet provider was kind enough six weeks ago to introduce latency. I was getting dropped calls.
Josh Matthews:That's okay. Do you have a response to the question, buddy?
Peter Ganza:I'm definitely with Vanessa. This is the year where I got to figure my shit out. I've been relying primarily on Google Calendar, to be honest, just because I've got Calendly and so I booked tons of my calls in there. Obviously, for that I'll go through the night before and just use kind of old school notes like built into Windows. I haven't converted to Evernote yet but I'm blocking out some time just to get stuff done. But I've also been finding that the new Slack feature they introduced some task capability. So with a bunch of my clients I've got Slack, you know shared Slack channels and I'm I hate any kind of you know major project management systems like getting down to the you know tasks and details and dependencies and all that kind of stuff. I run away from that. But I really actually like the way that they've implemented some task stuff in Slack and I've been finding that that's been actually quite useful.
Josh Matthews:Very good. Well, thank you for sharing. I'd like to share a couple of mine that make a massive difference from a productivity standpoint, and I'm going to lean into this a little bit and just say where did I find out all of this stuff? Well, I found it at asianefficiencycom, and Asian Efficiency is a group of people that have a podcast. They've got a podcast called the Productivity Show. They share all sorts of tools, ways to be more efficient, ways to be more focused. They focus on something called a T framework, which stands for time, time, energy and attention, and in general, most of us are pretty good with one of them and pretty bad with one of those areas, and it's rare that we have all three. So some people have lots of time but they struggle with focus, and other people have lots of energy but they struggle with time or they struggle with focus as well. Focus tends to be the biggest thing, plus time right. And then there's the energy things like how do you have enough energy to accomplish everything that you want? A year. So I'm a lifelong member of theirs. I don't know what it costs now. I joined about five years ago for like maybe seven 800 bucks, and they have these little two minute, five minute, 10, 12 minute little training courses. So I definitely recommend Asian Efficiency and it was there that I learned about OmniFocus and I learned about Evernote and I learned about one of my favorite tools. I've used it for years.
Josh Matthews:It's called TextExpander, and TextExpander is not for planning, but it is an efficiency tool and if you want to get a couple more hours out of your weeks, you would download it and buy it and fill it out. You got to spend a couple hours kind of populating it, but now I can just short key Boom, there's my name. Boom, there's my EIN number. Boom, there's my signature. Boom, there's my. Okay, you're going to be a guest on the show. Here's everything you need to know. It can be super long. You can send three page document and short key it. My zoom links, you know it's. You know semi colon M or something like that. And I can, just as I'm working on LinkedIn with emails and text messaging messaging. If I just switched to that keyboard on my phone, I can use it, or it works with my regular keyboard on my laptop as a plugin. So I strongly recommend Text Expander. It will save you. I think it'll save you at least a hundred hours in the next year, a hundred work hours. More importantly, it will keep your attention and you'll be how do I put it? You'll be less distracted, so you can just fly through the work a little bit faster and that, just plain old, feels good. So I definitely recommend TextExpander.
Josh Matthews:Something else this is again not about planning, but it's helpful to use while you're in planning mode, and that is Pomodoro. Pomodoro is a fancy name for a timer, a tomato timer, and most people you know you can buy them at the store like a little egg timer, but then you got to listen to click and that's no fun. So I have one that's just built into my you know, it's just in my operating system on my MacBook and I can just go up to the shortcut bar and turn it on, and I generally have it set for about 30 minutes and what it allows you to do is you turn it on and that's it. You're in focus mode and you're just going to do the one thing. This is a big thing.
Josh Matthews:Asian efficiency talks about a lot. Just do one thing, one thing at a time. Every time you switch to a different task, it can take up to 10 minutes to get back in the flow. If you do that twice an hour, that's 20 minutes of lost flow and that means now you're working until eight, nine, 10 o'clock at night, instead of five or six, right? So the idea is to get the most out of your time, and I really believe that the Pomodoro timer is great. It plans for you your breaks and you can set it for whatever you want. Usually it's like 25 minutes, five minute break, four minute break and after four sessions you get a 20 minute break and in a way, you're kind of planning in a little bit of that fun. Josh, right, like you can go, okay, I'm going to go take a little walk around the block and get my blood moving again. So I like all of those.
Josh Matthews:And then the last tool that I really like and I've got a couple others I could probably share is called the New Year Calendar, and I think it's spelled N-E-U. Let me double check that. New Year, yeah, n-e-u, n-e-u Year Calendar. Neu, neu year calendar. This comes, it's a calendar. You hang it on your wall. There are a number of ways that you can hang it by string, by tacks, all the clips, like all sorts of things, and it's big, it's like four feet. It's like four feet by three feet or something like that. It's very large and it's the whole year at a glance. No-transcript.
Josh Matthews:A lot of us major in minor things. A lot of us get 90% of five projects done and never close the loop. I mean, nothing's going to feel crappier than having five projects and none of them are done. Right is going to feel crappier than having five projects and none of them are done. So the idea here is you got a project or a work task for the day, just start it, do it, don't stop until it's done, period.
Josh Matthews:This is very hard to do for some people. I can tell you. For someone who's moderately distractible, like I am I'm not full-blown distractible, but moderately it's super helpful because you just look at the wall. You just look at your wall and be like why am I working on that thing, which I know. When I sat down to plan, I told myself that's not important, it's just not, it's fun. I'm going to get some dopamine hits off of this project. Is it going to further the success of my candidates, my family, me, anything like that? Well, hell, no, it's just not. So I strongly recommend people investigate the new year calendar. All right, that's it for products. Anything else that we want to talk about product-wise that can help people with their planning before we move on?
Josh LeQuire:I might offer just a little bit. Vanessa, you said something earlier that I think was really insightful. That's probably good for folks watching the show. Yeah, a lot of times we just got to try things out, you know, just kind of see what works for us. There's so many products out there. I think we're kind of seeing this now In our world with the proliferation of LLMs, co-pilots and agents and so forth and just the proliferation of apps you can use that. We've always had the SaaS revolution and now the agent revolution. Sometimes you just got to say, hey, I don't need to sign up to something, to commit to it for life. I just need to try it for a week or two, see if it works, and if it doesn't work, try something else. So kind of getting mentality. You know, try before you buy. You know, kiss a few frogs before you find your friends, or however you want to frame it. It's probably a good way to find the right tool set that works best for you.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, I think you're right about that.
Vanessa Grant:You know I'll share something, maybe slightly on the personal side, but I think very relevant to this. So I'm homeschooling since September. I have a son that's 11 with ADHD and, besides leveraging chat GPT for, like, I created my own GPT that has all the common core standards, so to help me put together stuff. He struggles with this focus. So, yes, he you know he has some medication that can help, but I have a thing that is in his folder that I give him with all of his work that says things to try when you lose focus.
Vanessa Grant:So one change of scenery move to another room or outside in the backyard to reset your focus. Work outside. Try to do your work in the front or the backyard. Fresh air can give your brain a boost. Task switch when stuck. Switch to a different task for a while and then return to the original one, because sometimes I know even me like I will sit in the same spot and trying to will myself to do something and it's just not working sometimes. Take a shower, do the Pomodoro timer we love the Pomodoro timer here too. Five minutes of exercising, so run around the block, do some jumping jacks, something like that. Body doubling I have another desk right next to me. Body doubling is actually something I learned from Tracy Green and certainly helpful.
Josh Matthews:What is that?
Vanessa Grant:You just have somebody in the room with you. That's also co-working. You just have somebody in the room with you.
Josh Matthews:That's also co-working. Can I tell you something? Sorry, it's a little bit of an aside I recently flew back from Portland, florida, and I cracked open the laptop and, just sandwiched between these two people, I got so much work done. I got so much in the middle seat. I got so much work done. It was incredible and it almost made me think. I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to set up a coworking space where people are smushed together. You know, get tiny little space. They're smushed together. You know, no one's talking to anybody, there's no talk, and you're in a tiny little but comfortable seat and you just have to crank because your goal is to get the hell off out of this place. Just get it done. You don't leave until it's done, right? Anyway, sorry, keep going.
Vanessa Grant:No body doubling and it's a thing you can look up body doubling and that is a way to focus, declutter your workspace, clean up your desk for a few minutes to create a more focused environment, use some headphones, take a walk. And then the other one that I thought was interesting, another one that I thought was interesting, another one that I learned from Tracy Green, who's like been really helpful as far as giving me ideas to support my ADHD kiddo, is changing your clothes, so putting on shoes if you're home. And I think it's one of those things that happens when you're working from home sometimes, that you can just be in that home mindset. Sometimes, putting on some shoes or some business clothes or in my kid's case, you know, just you know, throwing on some sneakers even can strangely switch your mindset a little bit in, you know okay now I'm in work mode because I have shoes on.
Josh Matthews:Absolutely, I think those are all outstanding recommendations. I mean, there's a reason why there are dress codes right in offices often not always often there's a reason why prep schools have kids wear the same uniforms, wear ties, wear blazers and so on, because the more you kind of like dress for the role that you're in, the more likely you're going to behave that way. And we don't have to behave that way when we're sitting at home and coding, necessarily, but a little shift to make sure that like look, man, this is, you're not going from this seat directly into the bathtub, you know. Or to your like little golf practice mat out back. You are working, so be in work mode. Body doubling and shoes 100%. Yes, anything else there? Vanessa.
Vanessa Grant:No, that's. I think that's kind of about. At least that's on the list. I don't think that all those things are going to work all the time, but it's a matter of like in general. If you're stuck on something, try something. Just keep trying stuff. Don't give up, I think is the main thing and there's always the one that I don't think will necessarily help our audience but is good for the kiddos Just if you're really stuck, ask mom for help If you need help.
Josh Matthews:Ask mom for help.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, and really what we're talking about here is focus, right. That's a big thing for anybody who has ADD or is just even like kind of a touch of it right, it's super helpful. One other thing I forgot we almost moved on before I mentioned this there's a, there is a website called brainfm. But you don't have to go there, you don't have to pay for this stuff. The idea of listening to binaural beats or binaural audio. That helps to stimulate the right kind of brain waves, depending on what you're trying to do. So if you're trying to do like very hardcore, independent focus, it's one sound. If you're trying to do creative work, it's another sound. If you're trying to relax, it's another one.
Josh Matthews:If you're trying to get a bolt of energy and I did for years I'd wake up, pound my water, put on my headphones and play like this 10 minute track. What I use is called iDoser little I big D O-S-E-R. It's an app that you can get on most smartphones. There's a little bit of cost to it. You might spend a couple of bucks. I use it for sleep, I use it for waking up, I use it for getting focused, but probably more often than not these days I just type in focus into Spotify, find some cool playlist, put it on, get my noise cancellation headphones on and then like, let's lock this thing in and, you know, get it done. So I think that there's a lot to be said about these little life hacks. Right To get the most out of you.
Josh LeQuire:I do the same thing, josh. I've got my playlist on Spotify. You have some that are electronic, some that are old school hip hop, some that are very nasty. It's background noise to get me focused, so for me it's been a good hack. If I need to focus, I turn on the tunes, got my AirPods in, just go to town, get work done. Excellent, hold on.
Josh LeQuire:I'm curious about some of it's really nasty, like busting out some Lil' Jon or 2 Live Crew. What's going on over there? I love old school hip hop so I've got all the well, I guess it's not so old. Well, maybe it is old school. I say Snoop and Dre and Jay-Z and all that kind of stuff, yeah, all the West Coast, east Coast stuff that I kind of grew up with and still kind of, yeah, it's very nostalgic, but I've of getting a little bit into. You know new stuff lately. You know some of the newer hip-hop artists which you know kind of ranges across the whole spectrum of. You know safe for work and definitely not safe for work, which my son like vanessa wants you to share your playlists?
Fred Cadena:hey, for the productivity.
Josh Matthews:Spotify, be spotify friends. I'll tell you my son, charlie, he and a couple of his friends do some rap music. They cut songs. It is not for public consumption, it's definitely not for the office. I mean, I find it really awesome that they're doing it. Sometimes I listen to it and I'm like that's worse than some of the stuff that was coming out in 87. Than some of the stuff that was coming out in 87. Like that is rough man, whoa, okay cool. But it's fun, it's creative and it makes me smile. So sometimes I'll throw that on too.
Josh LeQuire:I'll make one recommendation, Vanessa, if you want something that is safe for work, that I can say on this podcast and won't give me trouble, I kind of. I love the roots of Black Thought. He put out an album with Danger Mouse in 2002 called Cheat Codes and I've had that one on repeat. I mean that album is just, it's a banger. I mean it is a good one to turn on.
Josh Matthews:And he did 99 Problems, didn't he? That was Jay-Z, that was Jay-Z, yeah, oh, I must be thinking. I'm trying to remember an old Danger Mouse song from back in the day I used to run my college radio station back in 1991, 92. Hey, I do love me some Milli Vanilli.
Josh LeQuire:Josh, we won't tell you what happened with Milli Vanilli. They're such good singers.
Josh Matthews:I just love it, whoever actually sang.
Fred Cadena:the song was pretty good yeah.
Josh Matthews:He's very good. Good production, good production guys. Let's dive into how to actually go ahead and plan, and I think there are a lot of things here. I mean, like people take year-long courses on this stuff. We don't have that much time, fair enough. So we're gonna just kind of dive right into it. And I'd like to share something that has been a massive, massive help to me.
Josh Matthews:I'm going to encourage people to jump onto perplexityai or their favorite, you know, ai, llm and do a little bit more research on this, but it's called the RPM system. It's from Tony Robbins and it stands for rapid planning method and the idea behind it is that it's very results driven, results oriented, it's purpose driven, and you create a massive action plan. I'm just going to kind of go over if I hope it's not. I don't want to steal the floor too long, but I do want to go over this just a little bit, because I think it's something that's going to be super valuable to all of our listeners. The first one, and this might be a little bit of a different tweak A lot of times people are planning and they just kind of come up with like, oh, I want to lose weight. Okay, I want to get new, talia. Thanks, I blame it on the rain. Thanks, talia. Sorry, I love that song. So look at me, I've completely lost my place.
Josh Matthews:The idea here with the RPM is to approach the goal from a position of success and results. Okay. So a lot of times people might say, okay, I want to lose 10 pounds. It's like, well, okay, why? And why is weight the measurement instead of heart rate, blood pressure, how fast you run a mile, like health? Losing weight's not necessarily health. Does that make sense? It's not the same thing. I mean, there's a correlation, but it's not 100% correlated, right? And I know this for a fact because I ran a marathon like 20 years ago and I was beaten by a lot of people that were a lot like, by a lot. They didn't look like they could run a block and they crushed it. You know they really did. They crushed it. So health and weight, it's not the same thing.
Josh Matthews:This show is not about weight loss. It's about goal planning. But the idea here, as an example, is why is that a goal Like? What's the purpose of it? What do you hope to get? Because if you don't have a strong reason, none of your goals will be accomplished, period and you might want to do a little exercise called the brain dump. Who here knows what a brain?
Vanessa Grant:dump is no one Okay.
Josh Matthews:Kind of. Yeah, it's very much stream of consciousness, although stream of consciousness is more like you keep writing and typing. This would be more like list making, right? So stream of conscious list making, and the idea is to just dump everything that you could ever hope to accomplish in a year and be bold, be really brave. The very first time I did this I was, I think, about 28 years old. I had just bought some Tony Robbins tapes. I think I only got through. It was like a month of tapes. I got through the first two weeks and I and I got so much done that year.
Josh Matthews:I know I've mentioned this probably a year or two ago, but that year I went and what did I do? Bought a house, had a baby, got married, started a band, learned how to play drums, snowboarded for the first time, got licensed scuba diving and ran a marathon and quit smoking. That was in one year and I don't know if I've ever had another year quite like that. But the idea was you dump all of this stuff down onto paper and then you go through it and you decide which ones are really the most important, the most worthy. You bold them, you star them, whatever you want to do put it on a short list, and then you're going to take a little bit of time and you're going to write down the reasons why it's important for you, and then this is my favorite part, right here you also write down who else is impacted by this. So many of us will not do kind things for ourselves, but we will do kind things for ourselves if it has a positive impact on our family, on our coworkers, on our employees, on our children, on our friends, on our neighbors. That is the reason that we need to actually have the motivation to move forward.
Josh Matthews:Motivation's key for all of this stuff. But to have motivation, you have to have reasons and to have, once you have those good reasons, you have to have some accountability to it, and that means sharing your goals with other people. We've talked about this a little bit. Right, accountability programs, accountability sessions with other people. This is a version of body doubling. It's just next level, right, you're not physically necessarily there, but you have told someone hey, vanessa, my goal this year, one of my goals this year, is to acquire my admin certification, and then you're going to set a date. Like you have to have a deadline. These are smart goals. If you're listening to this, you've never heard of smart goals. It's okay, but you're going to want to Google that S-M-A-R-T, right, so you've got to have specific, measurable, action-oriented I forget what the other stuff is time-bound things like that. So check out smart goals, so figure it out. So let's try one just as an example. Mike, what's an example of something that would be really cool if you accomplished this year?
Mike Mikula:Right now I'm pretty stretched on. My goal is basically to have AI productionize an complete full stack app and deliver it as a product that anyone can use. And because right now I'm at a prototyping state, like I can build a lot of really cool prototypes that look really fun and flashy, but like building something that people could use and it's production level and if someone wrote it they would look at it and say, yeah, this is a good code.
Josh Matthews:Okay, why is that important to you?
Mike Mikula:Because I find it really interesting. I'm very and I guess, taking a step back you talked about how much stuff you were able to accomplish that one year is probably because you were very passionate and you have a system of how you figure out what you're passionate about, right, right, and I think that's interesting in itself because for me, and then just be super passionate, super focused and accomplish more than I ever thought, so to have all of that amount to a deliverable like something I fully shipped and can repeat and share, that would be very interesting.
Josh Matthews:I like it. Anyone else want to offer up an example of one of their goals for this year and why it's important to them? Who else is impacted by that goal? Go ahead, Josh.
Josh LeQuire:Yeah, I don't know, this might be a little more confessional than, or maybe sharing a little more than I need to.
Josh LeQuire:I shared earlier in the call that I am going through a separation and trying to establish my life on my own after 18 years of marriage with two kids, and one of the consequences of this is I haven't really done the work I need to do to develop a stable, steady pipeline of business and I've always kind of relied on a network of referrals to build my business. I've worked with exceptional consultants. I feel like I do pretty good work myself. You know word of mouth has been good, but I want to get to a point where I step outside of my comfort zone quite a bit and start making new friends, making new connections, building new business and doing more of the business development side.
Josh LeQuire:I've always felt comfortable delivering projects, sitting down and putting my hands on a keyboard and getting the work done. I want to kind of develop that skill and for me one is going to build stable business and financial security, which is huge. But the way it impacts others, as you say, is I can reliably put food on the table, I can do things with my children like take them on trips, I can pay for their college. It actually has real financial impact, real household stability impact. So that's a huge goal for me is to step outside my comfort zone, do a lot more. If you look at my LinkedIn feed, I don't post a lot. I don't publish a lot, but to get out more, connect more and develop connections and build a bigger, steadier pipeline for my business. That's a huge goal for me this year.
Josh Matthews:Thanks for sharing that, josh. That is a perfect way to describe. It's a perfect example of what we're talking about here. You start with what do I want, right? And then and this is the question that a lot of people kind of mess up on, which is why do I want it? Like, do you want to get a new car? Why? Because a neighbor on the left and a neighbor on the right both showed up with shiny new sports cars or something, and now it's just on brain, like or is it because you actually need a vehicle? Like that's important. You don't have one, right? Or you're spending too much on maintenance every year for your piece of shit. I got one of those. Don't ever buy an old. Don't ever buy an old mercedes, don't ever buy an old mercedes.
Josh Matthews:It's a nightmare. So you know you've got to have your reasons, your reasons why, and then the then it is what do I need to do? Right, and the what I need to do section is really fun. That's where we create what's called a map. It's your massive action plan, and when we're creating these maps, what we want to do as we're filling it out, is not think about tasks. Right, I need to get on LinkedIn and add 20 connections a week. I need to update this. I need to do that.
Josh Matthews:It's like, okay, slow down, let's not start biting off all sorts of activities. This isn't really about activities. This is about although it gets to the activities, it's about describing all the ways that you could achieve that right, because we're pattern recognition machines, these brains of ours inside our skulls, and that's what they do, and we create grooves of, and our neurons basically have grooves that like, when this happens, we're going to think this and then we're going to do that right, and so the idea is to hopefully kind of challenge that a little bit as our own personal coaches, like what do I need to do? Okay, so for you, josh, you just shared some of the things that you believe you need to do in order to grow, improve your marketing and to gain followers, but the main thing is, you need to acquire. You want to acquire new customers and solve more problems for them, right, yeah, exactly. So what you need to do is message out as much as possible and convince as many people as much as possible One that they have a challenge to that, that solving that challenge is going to bring them all these other things, the purpose. You know the things that they want and that you are the who. Right, they don't need to know how, they need to know who. And if you're the who, you need to be able to articulate that accurately in a compelling way. And now you can start to figure out how do I get that message across. You see how it starts. It's just kind of getting a little bit closer to the roots of the thing, before the planting occurs.
Josh Matthews:I've done this so many times, whether it was like, okay, I need to get my accounting in order, what do I need to do? Eventually, I got to the I don't need to do anything. It's who do I need to find? Then it was okay, what qualities do I need in the person who's going to take care of my bookkeeping for me and I start thinking about all that stuff why is it important? What am I willing to spend? You know all this other stuff. So I really appreciate the mapping part of it, but the top part is the brain dump that gets us clarity, and I'd like to kind of shift just a little bit on a little section that I feel like I should have started with, because this is the most, I think, when it comes to planning. It's the most important part of planning and that's understanding where are you right now? Right, this is the as is to be of business analysis. Right, what's the as is of your life right now?
Vanessa Grant:What's the current state?
Josh Matthews:Yeah, what's current state? Right, and I think it's best to get to current state by not just looking at the moment right now, living in the moment, feeling the moment right now, it's about looking back at the past year. Feeling the moment right now, it's about looking back at the past year. So what are some of the things that you guys have done or plan to do to dedicate enough time, an appropriate amount of time, in self-reflection over the past year or so and it can be the past three months, it can be the past six months, past week, it doesn't matter but what are some things that you guys do to help include some reflection?
Vanessa Grant:There's a couple of things that I've started to do this year I would say that have been helpful. Now, they're not particularly comprehensive, but have kind of helped me at least keep track of stuff. I created a YouTube playlist so every time something of mine is on YouTube, I just add it to my saved playlist so that I don't lose track of it, because at this point, like I've just gotten, I've got too much stuff going on at this point, so it's a nice way to just have. Oh, you want to know a little bit about what the stuff I'm doing. Here's a playlist. There you go, and it's a good way for me to track. I've also been bookmarking Twitter posts or LinkedIn posts for any particular accomplishments or announcements that I've made along my career journey. So, for example, I just I actually just got my first TDX speaking submission accepted, and so, even though that was a post that I made, I bookmarked it. So I can always kind of go back to my save bookmarks and see all the big milestones in my past career-wise.
Josh Matthews:I love it and I'm doing something. Right now I'm typing into Perplexity. Give me three of the best quotes from Salesforce Pro Vanessa Grant, and let's see what this comes up with. I did a little test on this the other day and it was pretty darn awesome. Here we go. Number one business analysis is the secret ingredient that goes in moving from systems to actual, usable, viable solutions. Good ones, Good one.
Vanessa Grant:I don't know that I've ever actually said that, but it sounds like something that I would imply.
Josh Matthews:But that's the thing, the reasonable hallucination. But that's the thing is a reasonable hallucination. I mean, I'm looking at this list and it's got references to one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight oh my gosh 10 different, you know, interviews, linkedin posts, x posts, like all sorts of different things. You said that you didn't. You don't remember, you don't remember. I don't remember almost anything that I ever said. So it's kind of cool to do that a little bit, but if you are in the public, if you're getting interviews, you can do that. What about you, josh? Or what about you, fred? How do you look back on the year and how do you measure a year?
Fred Cadena:525,000. I'll you know it's very similar to vanessa I. This is not an area that I've been particularly good at. When I was in a more you know kind of standard corporate, you know climbing the career letter thing, I would have a word doc or a excel file where I'd kind of things you know over the course of the year, you know kind of for performance review time. I don't have a good system. You know this has been a really good session for me because it focuses in on a lot of stuff that I just don't do very well, like I just don't you know for somebody that you know and I'm going to sound like an egotist here operates at a fairly high level. I don't necessarily have great systems for these things, so but I love Vanessa's ideas.
Fred Cadena:I do go back and look at public statements that I've made on stuff. I had a very if you guys saw me on LinkedIn, I made a post yesterday. I was shocked for somebody who's as public as I am, at how little I actually posted last year on the LinkedIn platform. I was so shocked when I ran one of those LinkedIn wrapped things that I went back and I actually counted my posts and I'm like, no, yeah, they're right. For some reason I thought maybe the code was broken, but it wasn't.
Josh Matthews:So, no, it's just something I need to get better at, for sure. Well, I thanks for sharing that, fred, and I think I can share a technique that anyone can use, and this is something that I use I'm in the process of. I'm halfway through my reflections on 24 right now, and it's very simple. If you want to have a look, it'll help you right now, but it'll really help you next year too, or next quarter, and we've talked about it on the show before. I can't I can't underline this enough of how helpful this is, and it's having a failures and accomplishments record. Okay, you can do it once a week. You can do it once a week. You can do it once a month. I generally these days I'm doing it once a month because I just want to like keep flying, you know. But I'm able to because I color code my calendar. I can look back and be like oh, I had X number because all my client meetings are in red on my calendar, all my interviews are green and so on, so I can like quickly count up that stuff, which is helpful, but it's truly such an incredible tool for learning I know that we've talked about this before, vanessa where it's like gosh, listing a bunch of failures that might get us down. Get over it.
Josh Matthews:This is about reality. This is about taking stock, not living in la-la land. It's okay to dream in la-la land, but if you want to get to la-la land, you got to live in reality. You got to live in the present. You got to know what's working, what's not. Anyone who's unwilling to take a good look at that look. If you're feeling fragile and you don't want to do it, that's fair enough. Mental health is paramount here. But if you feel like that's something that you can do, I definitely recommend you do it, and it should apply, I think, to business and your personal life.
Josh Matthews:Right, I could have listened a little bit better during this one conversation with this person. I could have followed up with that client a little bit better. I probably wouldn't have lost them right. I could have delivered up with that client a little bit better. I probably wouldn't have lost them. Right, I could have delivered a solution sooner on this one and the result of it was lost revenue of plus. I didn't get to help this person that I was really hoping to get in the job, like that kind of a thing.
Josh Matthews:And then the successes and I love this stuff. The successes are so helpful because you actually get to be like oh my God, I did do that, I forgot. If you're like me and you forget a lot of things, and you can go back once a month or once a quarter and then certainly by the end of the year, and you just grab all of your you know, just use AI, take all your failures, drop it in. Take all of your successes, drop it in, have it, count them for you, have it, consolidate it for you. You're going to get a real strong understanding.
Josh Matthews:And let's face it too if your failures list is outweighing your successes list, my guess is that you're probably not failing more than you're succeeding. You're probably just being a little bit harder on yourself or not acknowledging some of the really positive things that you've done, even if it's just you know what. I helped my friend that one time. Right, it's okay to write that down. So I definitely recommend, starting today, do a successes and failure list once a week to start. Once you're comfortable, you can move it to every two weeks or once a month. You're going to have an incredible record of your past year if you do this and it's going to really help you plan and, more importantly, it's going to help you learn. It's going to help you learn. I keep making these mistakes. Maybe I want to make that important right. Get some accountability on that.
Josh LeQuire:This is very akin to the retrospective that we have in Agile. When I'm working with a larger team on a longer running project. It's by far my favorite ceremony in agile because every increment, every sprint cycle, you know whether it's two weeks, three weeks, one week, however long you've tailored that for your engagement, or if you work on a product development team, that's truly long running is. You know what went well, what didn't go well and how can we do better. But you actually take a chance to reflect because I do think as we look over the course of the year, there are the things that we have, goals that we set, that you know. We start at the beginning of the new year with our resolutions, right, and you know by the middle of the year it's like I don't even remember what I resolved to do. We don't do enough of checking in and seeing. You know what worked and what didn't work. And, to your point as well, failure is stigmatized. Failure is feedback. Failure is learning. If you're not failing, you're not trying. I tell my kids this all the time. You have to put yourself out there. Failure is the best thing. In fact, in sales, as I'm learning this by running my business, I want to get a quick no instead of a prolonged no or an eventual maybe. I'd rather just fail and get that no early and often.
Josh LeQuire:So I think you know the retrospective kind of going back to the point. The retrospective activity needs to be, scheduled, needs to be. It needs to be proactive, not reactive, right Like as we get into our rhythms, our circadian rhythms, we get into our life rhythms, we get into our work rhythms and we're putting out fires. We're kind of doing the tasks of the day. It's easy for me as a consultant to go back and see I have clients who I did great with, who gave me great reviews and have come back and done more work. I have clients I failed, you know, haven't heard from and can't, you know, get a testimonial. That's easy to see. But you know your team at home with your family and saying, hey, what worked and what didn't work, how can we do better? And writing that down. That exercise, in my opinion, is the most valuable learning you can get in any application in life and business at work.
Peter Ganza:I agree, schedule, the one keyword that you said, josh, that's one thing I need to do better at this year is schedule that time right, whether it's just 30 minutes or whatever, where you know you decompress, do whatever the heck you got to do and do that retrospective, but it needs to be something regular and scheduled. That's what I found that I had a challenge with last year. It was just kind of, you know, at a whim or something, right If it happened here, there, no, this year I'm going to. I at a whim or something right If it happened here, there, no, this year I'm going to, I'm going to put it in the calendar and actually get it done. And Fred, by the way, I think I speak for the whole group we're all proud of you for admitting the problem exists. That is the first step.
Fred Cadena:I've got all kinds of problems that I can admit that, less than anybody else, I have everything figured out. I will say this One of my challenges and it's a challenge, it's one of the things I'd love to get some thoughts on this is I spend a lot of time on the road. I just actually opened up my TripIt and I pulled up my 2024, 194 days on the road in 2024.
Fred Cadena:Holy cannoli and so one of the things that you try to figure out is how to adapt all of these things into a continuously mobile schedule. So, as you guys were talking about a lot of this stuff, I was thinking about the success and failures. No matter how busy my days are, usually I've got time in the Uber or time in the rental car back from a client dinner. At the end of the night I could always open up a voice memo and then drop it into like I don't know, like the Claude Project or something, and have it, transcribe it and kind of keep track of it over the course of the month. But I'm trying to like figure out ways to do these things in a way where you know I'm frequently not in the same place day over day. So any thoughts or ideas people have, I'd love to hear what they are Frequently not in the same place day over day.
Josh Matthews:So any thoughts or ideas people have, I'd love to hear what they are. Well, that's a great ask. Let's open it up to the panel here. Any suggestions for Fred? Okay, not off the bat, eric, we've got Eric.
Mike Mikula:Look, I mean, can you rephrase that again Can?
Fred Cadena:you rephrase that question?
Mike Mikula:one more time. Well, just you know.
Fred Cadena:And again I'm certainly not saying like it's a killer or anything like that, but I'm on the road a lot and so I'm not necessarily doing things in the same place. My schedule is very different day over day, so it makes it difficult to do things like schedule. You know, a reflection at the end of the week, because at the end of the week I might be like stuck in dallas, not on my way home, or I might be, you know, someplace else. So I think that with modern technology, you know, I can leverage things like voice demos and AI to do a lot of this that I would have typically done more manually. But if people have like off the shelf tools or systems or anybody's tackling some of those things, I'd love to hear how other people are tackling it or anybody's tackling some of those things.
Josh Matthews:I'd love to hear how other people are tackling it. Yeah, I use OmniFocus. Ever know an OmniFocus Working together? When you're on your laptop you can create calendars, and for calendars I use Fantastical. Again, it's about 80 bucks a year. It's awesome, I mean it uses AI.
Fred Cadena:Josh is going to 80 bucks me a year into the poor house. I don't you know what yeah. You got it. I do have the Omni on my phone now.
Josh LeQuire:There you go. Nice Death by a thousand subscriptions.
Josh Matthews:So I think it's just two of your cigars, dude, so I think you're going to be fine.
Josh LeQuire:And Fred, I don't want this to come across as harsh and it's not intended to be at all, but I hear this a lot and I'm more talking to myself than anybody else on this panel or out there in the wild. If something's really important to you, you have to make time for it, right? Like, if you want to improve your health, if you want to build your business, if you want to kind of do it, you need to make it a priority and you need to put it on your schedule. I don't think it's a calendar, it's a tool, it's an intention, right, like hey, this is something that really matters and is important to me and I make it part of one of my schedule, and that's.
Josh LeQuire:I don't mean to oversimplify or assume anything that's going on with your schedule, in your life, but that this is kind of a general approach I take, you know, with myself. You know, when I say, you know, or maybe I won't go to class, or maybe I won't do this thing, it's like, well, really matters, I'm going to make it work, you know, I'm going to put on the counter, it's going to be a priority totally no, I, I mean, I think that's definitely you know, definitely great advice I think too, you're going to find some of these tools have a lot of audio input.
Josh Matthews:So I can just hold down my suri key for my phone and I can say create OmniFocus task, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I just talk into it and it's due on this date and it dumps it right in. I can say I can go into Fantastical and then hit the voice button and say create a calendar invite for Mike McCoola for 3 pm Eastern next Thursday, and make sure that it's you know whatever, duplicate that second Thursday of every month for the. You know and it knows, and boom, it's in and it populates with the invite and you just click send. So there's a lot of a lot of these tools. And look on your show on banking, on disruption, and we're fortunate enough to have Eric with us today. Who's the other person? It's you, me and Eric. On Thinking on Disruption, short Takes, which is often the back half of your regular show. I think we're recording tomorrow, aren't we? Fred?
Fred Cadena:We are recording tomorrow our 2025 predictions episode.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, I mean Eric's going to be the tools guy. Eric, why don't you say hello and maybe share some thoughts on this with us? Yeah, click, unmute captain. This guy went biking out on a frozen lake today. I don't know, eric might be broken.
Fred Cadena:I don't. I don't know if you in your text messages, but he set the map of the 16 mile frozen fat bike route that he took and he may be out of energy to talk.
Eric Cook:He might, I think well I'm never out of energy to talk. He might I think you are. Well, I'm never out of energy to talk. I was just sitting in the living room with my wife, so I had to excuse myself.
Josh Matthews:Oh, there you go.
Eric Cook:So, yeah, I relocated to the dark bedroom in the back of the house so I've been listening and snooping. So I appreciate the conversation and echo a lot of the feelings and thoughts that you guys have been sharing. And echo a lot of the feelings and thoughts that you guys have been sharing. I think the intent comment is one that I have been thinking a lot about and probably for the last six plus months I've been really focused on the business and that's one of the reasons why I want to start the new year with just a crazy bicycle ride and called one of my buddies and got accountability and you know he was going to meet me at the trail at 2.30.
Eric Cook:So my ass, better show up or he's going to be mad and went out and it was one of those things. I could have stayed at the house, I could have worked, I could have caught up on email, I could have done more planning. I've got billing that I got to take care of, but I'm trying to make health and personal time and stepping away. That's one of the things we'll talk about in one of the book reviews that Fred and I are going to be doing here for the Bankers Book Club, which is another podcast that we're on.
Eric Cook:Also recording tomorrow.
Josh LeQuire:Yeah, exactly.
Josh Matthews:I don't read, so I wasn't invited.
Eric Cook:Well, that's okay. All of my books are audio books anyway, so it's all good. But the intentional, unstructured time of just getting away from it all and allowing your brain just to wander and meander and come up with ideas. And I'm amazed at, when I do that, how often ideas will pop into my head and I'll get inspiration for something. And what I've done is I've got a Telegram app that I use for communicating with the team. But you can create a self memo and I will find things online and send those to me in my self memo.
Eric Cook:But if I'm out on a ride, I'll leave myself a voice memo on telegram or I'll just transcribe it and talk into it.
Eric Cook:And then when I get back, I know that it's there because, like everybody I'm sure on the call, you have the brilliant idea and you're like, oh, I'm going to totally do that as soon as I get back to the truck. And then you get back to the truck and you're like, son of a, b, what was it that I thought of at mile six? Dang it, and you can't remember it and it just doesn't happen. And so making sure that it gets out of my brain into something consistent and making sure then you can go back, and I may not go back and look at that for maybe a couple of weeks, but it's okay because I don't stress out, because I know that it's there if I need it and that eases my stress load by just dumping the ideas and the things into that. And I really like the idea of a win and a loss concept and we're kind of doing the EOS plan light basically, and every Monday we do our level tens and it's a version that we've kind of modified.
Josh Matthews:I'm already I'm, so I'm lost. I don't even know what that is.
Eric Cook:Anybody familiar with the EOS entrepreneurial organization system? Yes, do you know Wickman Entrepreneurial Organization System? Yes, gina Wickman, it's a structured process to kind of organize your business and one of the things that is part of that process is a level 10 meeting that you have every week with your team and it escapes me why it's specifically called a level 10, but it's got a structured agenda that you run through in order to get information out for your team and you identify issues and your rocks that you want to accomplish. And we're a small enough team where a lot of the EOS stuff doesn't really feel right because I think is good for a really large, maybe a large organization. But I think going around the Robin really large, maybe a large organization, but I think going around the robin and saying, all right, give me one win and one loss for last week and if you want to talk about it.
Eric Cook:That's the failure is accomplishment thing, yeah exactly Make accountability, so I think that's awesome Eric, so that we can be here to help you. And if you get a win, we all celebrate and we should feel good.
Josh Matthews:Thanks for being on the show here tonight. I really appreciate it. I'm looking forward to seeing you tomorrow. We've only got about 15 minutes or so left, and I want to make sure that we're covering a couple of very critical things. And one is something near and dear to Josh's heart, and that's calendaring right as well as well. What are we actually going to do? Because we haven't even really talked about that. At the end of the day, this is the career show, right? And when you're planning out your year, I would hope that some of that has to do with your career. So maybe we can just kind of go around the table here in the Salesforce ecosystem. What are some of the things that we might want to do to improve our career? We'll start with Vanessa.
Vanessa Grant:The top three things that I would like to do career-wise this year is I want to get a website up. Well, actually maybe it's four. I want to get a website up. I want to figure out what my service offerings are going to be and approximately how much I want to charge for them. I also want to start outlining a course or figure out what kind of passive income I can create. I think those are maybe the top three things.
Josh Matthews:There you go. Thanks for sharing that, and I do think that's one of those things like I want some side income, so I'm going to create a course. It's like well, hold on, most courses don't make a lot of money, they just don't. Now, if you can put it together in 20 hours or 40 hours and you can make five grand on it and it doesn't require a lot of work, well, you know, that's fine. Now you're right in the 250K a year income range. If you did that once a week, right. But if you really want passive income, it's like well, what aren't you thinking about? What are other ways to generate passive income? What are other ways to generate passive income.
Josh Matthews:You got me thinking about that.
Vanessa Grant:It's like maybe I need to RPM this and like I just want to figure out a way where I am not the limit to the resources that I have in order to make money, exactly, exactly.
Josh Matthews:And when I think about how people can be planning for their career, there are a number of different things. One is just like understanding do I have a time problem, energy problem or an attention problem? And whatever the thing is that you're struggling with the most, you focus on that. That's got to be number one. Typically, the energy thing has to do with sleep, exercise and nutrition right, that's what we know in the land of science. That's how you get energy. Is good food, plenty of sleep, appropriate amounts of exercise, right? So if you've got an energy problem, you might want to do that.
Josh Matthews:I remember when I first started on this stuff and it was in 2018 was the very first time I used this, and I was thinking about time, energy and attention, and I had just launched this business, just over six years ago, and I was like I am going to have to work a lot and I did 12 hour days for years and I knew that there was no way I was going to accomplish any of this stuff without the energy that I needed, right, and so that's when I started using eye dosers so I could fall asleep faster. I used eye dosers so I could wake up a little bit better. I changed my caffeine input. I was on matcha. What is it? Matcha, maca, matcha, matcha. Yeah, I was on matcha Instead of like caffeine. It's really acidic on your stomach, so it lists acidity and things like that. Just in general, I felt healthier. I stopped drinking regularly. It's not that I ever had a drinking problem, but I liked a whiskey at night and I recognized that wasn't always great for my sleep. You know, it's not that I had a hangover, it's that I'd wake up at two in the morning, wide awake, stuff's like coffee for me three hours later.
Josh Matthews:So you got to figure out these things. Is it energy? Is it time? Okay, if it's time. There are so many tools like text expander and planning. I mean to Mike's point and to Josh's points earlier, it's like getting things on the calendar. Planning the fun time. When you have planned fun time, you stop chipping away at work time to have fun. Right, this is a big thing. If I don't plan like, okay, it's six o'clock, I'm going to go play 20 minutes of drums, 20 minutes of piano and go on a walk with Casey or something like that, if I don't have that power hour booked or planned out. It's much more likely that I'm going to be like oh it's 2.30. I'm between meetings, I'm going to go fuck around and go do this thing here for a little bit. Then maybe I get stuck. You're like you've got this thing to look forward to, right, you know when it's going to happen.
Josh Matthews:Again, a really good calendar system can help. I love Fantastic Cal. It is Mac only, so there are other calendar apps for PC users out there that you can say schedule a meeting for blah, blah blah, block time for this. And if you looked at my calendar you would see that it's all color coded with the kind of meetings Is it personal, Is it self-improvement, is it a client, is it a candidate or is it just blocked work time? And because I use a product called Once Hub it's similar to Calendly where people can just I can send the link out, they're going to book a meeting I block time on my calendar so that those times aren't interrupted calendar so that those times aren't interrupted.
Josh Matthews:So if you are in a customer-oriented role, like Vanessa is or Josh is or Fred is, and often Mike, definitely, eric, definitely AppExchange, whisper, mr Peter Ganza then you've got to be able to block around that time, because if people are booking, if you get a 15-minute conversation booked once an hour, you're screwed. You're not getting shit done all week. You have to have these dedicated blocks and I strongly recommend that you do something like Eric talked about, which is this thinking time. Right, I have thinking time scheduled for Fridays. That's when you're working on the business, not in the business. That's when you're trying to figure out like, what can I do better? How can I, you know, what can I learn? What video can I watch to learn something? What can I implement today that will improve the overall business? Not let me make more client calls or look at more resumes for me, right, that's for me. For you, it's going to be whatever it's going to be.
Josh Matthews:So I think, getting onto your calendar, strongly recommend a Sunday night session. You know like the weekend should really be Friday at five to you know, sunday at five and then at five o'clock on Sunday, as long as you're not, you know, getting stuck into some Sunday night football or something. I mean you use your best judgment. Maybe it's Sunday morning. You plan your week. That means you populate your calendar with time blocks for the projects that are on your new year calendar, that are the most important things, and you're going to get the one thing done. Do the damn, do the one damn thing right and make sure that you've got enough time blocked off for that. If you're at all like me, I think what's going to happen is you're going to find that you really overestimate how much time things are going to take and you really underestimate how much time things are going to take. Does anybody else deal with that? Okay, it's a podcast. People can't hear your nods. Yes, okay, absolutely All right.
Josh Matthews:So, one thing I found it's like, oh, I've got to do. You know, look at 300 resumes, that's going to take me, you know, three hours. No, it's not. I can fly through that stuff. I'm very good at it. I read fast so I can crank it. And I found like, no, a good hour will get me most of the way through. And then other things. I'm like, oh, I just have to post that podcast. That's going to take 10 minutes. No, I've really got to get in there. I've got to do the transcript updating, editing. I've got to come up with a good title. I've got to push it out. I've got to create an ad. I've got to push that to LinkedIn and all the other social media channels. No, it's an hour and you're going to start figuring this stuff out. And if you want an app that's going to help you figure this stuff out, you can get an app called RescueTime Rescue.
Fred Cadena:No, I haven't. I'm just laughing, because if you don't have affiliate links for all of these, you definitely should.
Josh LeQuire:You're really missing out, Josh. No one's going to watch this. Who are you?
Josh Matthews:kidding, this is like a friend hangout. Maybe someone will watch it. But yeah, RescueTime is awesome. I used it for about a year and I got really great value. I don't use it anymore. I don't feel like I need to, but what it will do is it will automatically look at.
Josh Matthews:You use this app this many minutes in the week, this many hours. These are the days that you're using it the most. You're using this app, You're using that. You're on Google. You're looking at news channels this much. You're looking at stupid YouTube videos this much. You're looking at helpful YouTube videos that much. It gets into everything and so if you're in a little bit security concerned, don't get it. But I think it's solid and it's really just measuring not so much all the content that you're consuming, but the. You know if you're going to CNN or Fox news, it knows you're on a news thing. It doesn't know what articles you're spending time on or what videos you're watching, for instance, but you can start to see like, wow, my Wednesdays are really efficient. Like, why is that? Oh, that's because I exercise Thursday night and I sleep really well and I wake up refreshed. So you can start to pull together some ideas here. So I definitely recommend that.
Josh Matthews:I think that we should spend the last couple of minutes really talking about, and more broadly, what Vanessa shared. Vanessa shared three of her goals and thanks for doing that. But when we're thinking about careers here in the Salesforce ecosystem, I'm thinking that people are trying to take into consideration like what's my income? How do I increase it? How do I improve relationships with my coworkers and my boss? How do I? I'm interested in making a switch this year, so how do I actually get myself positioned within my current organization so that I can maximize that experience for the next role that I'm going to acquire?
Josh Matthews:Maybe you want a promotion, Maybe you want a raise, Maybe you want to start presenting sessions at Dreamin' events and things like this. So you do your big brain dump. Then you ask yourself why? Right, but then you got to really figure out what's the focus for your career. That's going to make the biggest difference. One of them could be I really want to improve my LinkedIn presence. Fred, you said you want to post a lot more on LinkedIn. Great, and so how are you going to do that? Well, you could, in between flights, just randomly post stuff, or you could get a product like Hootsuite or like SmarterQ, and you can just spend an hour type up a bunch of different stuff, share a bunch of different articles, drop it into the posting calendar. You spend 20 bucks a month, not 80 a year. 20 bucks a month on it.
Josh Matthews:And then that's it. You don't have to think about it. You can actually take care of two weeks of your postings in about 45 minutes every two weeks, or an hour and a half once a month All these great tools for automation which are out there. But I'm kind of curious what are some other things that someone might want to set a goal for regarding their career? Let's hear some ideas.
Fred Cadena:I don't know how relatable mine are. I'd share mine as well, the one that is probably relatable to people, and it ties in with what Vanessa put in the chat comments. I don't know that it would necessarily be agent force, but I've never been the most technical person. I'm definitely more on the business and sales side. That being said, I do have some technical chops that I like to exercise them when I can, and it's probably been a good six to nine months since I've tackled anything meaningful. So I want to tackle some kind of a technical challenge.
Fred Cadena:I haven't identified what it is yet. It probably won't be agent force. I don't know if there's anything wrong with it. It just might be something a little bit different, maybe a little bit more through, more of a mainstream AI platform. But that's definitely one of mine. My others are well, this is probably relatable too, and it's maybe not as directly tied into a career objective. But I just need to get dialed in on what I'll kind of call health and wellness stuff. You know a lot of the stuff that you shared a minute ago, Josh. You know, ever since COVID came in, you know, I just have not been dialed in from that perspective, not really making time to go to the gym, not eating the way I should be.
Josh Matthews:It's very hard 200 days on the road a year, Fred, I mean that's difficult.
Fred Cadena:It is hard, but hard shouldn't be an excuse To the other Josh's point when he was chatting earlier, and I just need to get that dialed in a little bit more. So that's the second one. The other two probably not on everybody's list, but I've been talking about getting a book published for the last couple of years and I actually want to get that done. I've set a deadline to myself by July 1st to have that out. And the other thing that I do quite a bit, that I am now drawing a harder line that I'm not going to do for free as much or potentially at all, is speaking gigs. So yeah, I'd like to have five paid speaking gigs this year. Again, it's hard for me to do a lot more than that with the rest of my schedule, but those are kind of my four top items that I've identified.
Josh Matthews:Very good Thanks for sharing that, and I wonder if anyone else wants to contribute and share. What are some general things that people in the ecosystem would probably want to accomplish this year to improve their career?
Josh LeQuire:Yeah Well, go ahead, Mike. I see you're coming off. I've got a couple of things, but you go first.
Mike Mikula:I'm just going to say I have one specific goal and it's to find one thing that I love to do and I can do it for the rest of my life. Right, like, and that'd be awesome, but maybe it'll change, right? But, like, I've tried a lot of different things and like, certainly right now, my passion is all about the AI stuff, and so if, whether I land a role working with AI for my next job or I build a company on it, either way, like, I just want to find that one thing that I love to do and I can do it for a long time yeah, golf, dude golf, you can do till you're 90 like just do that.
Josh Matthews:It's expensive and you'll hate it three quarters of the time, but you can do golf go ahead.
Josh LeQuire:I want to echo um fred. I think you know the one of the things I would pull out of yours is make what's most important, identify what's most important. You make that priority number one. I think that supersedes everything else on the list. I think, mike, with your point about finding what you're passionate about and diving into that, I can't begin to tell you.
Josh LeQuire:I've been building after over 20 years, been consulting for a long time. If you don't love it, find something else to do. You're just wasting your time. Every client I have knows if you're burned out or you don't want to be there or you're just trying to say the buzz words, right. So find what you love and dive into it, and if it's not in this ecosystem, that's okay. Fine. If you want to go out and be a nurse, if you want to be a lawyer, if you want to go back to med school. I was talking with somebody last night who was a manufacturing plant manager and she's like I want to go to law school, but I'm 40 years old and I said the most interesting people I know have second careers, have reinvented themselves.
Josh LeQuire:Like, just do it right. You only live once, as all the kids were saying about 10 or 15 years ago and I get made fun of for saying that, but I think those things are probably way more important. I was going to say I did want to kind of get back to the agents and all the AI hype. There's a lot of marketing right now. Salesforce is pushing agent force hard, so it's driving all of us in the ecosystem. We're getting whipped by Mark Benioff to ride that train, which I don't think is a bad thing. You know, agents autonomous agents is really the convergence of the very best of LLM, of co-pilots, of all AI technologies today. When you can actually build an agent that does something a human being can do, there's massive value there. Now the trick to doing that if you're actually interested in doing that and Mike will probably speak much more authoritatively than me on this, but I've taken a deep dive into this past year myself as well you have to really be good at understanding business process. No agent will only be as effective. Every piece of technology you build will either augment and make a great process much better, or it will take a bad process and make it much worse. Agents are just another augmentation tool. They're another catalyst tools and if you want an agent to work, you have to understand a process.
Josh LeQuire:The second part of that, too, is if you want to get into agents, you have to have that kind of business value, iterative, kind of agile mentality. Start with a pilot, iterate, iterate, iterate. There's no. I think that the days of the big gold plated, you know, multi-year, multi-month projects are over. Everything's about understanding what's most valuable to your business, what's most valuable to your clients. So, as a consultant, as an individual, as somebody in this ecosystem, the career advice there is understand business process, geek out about business process, and if you don't like that, I'd say, find something else to do. So I'm giving you a little bit of a plug there, Vanessa.
Josh LeQuire:The second part of that is get into what is most valuable for the business, where I can pilot and iterate and try things out. Try before you buy. You know, kind of do things on a small scale. And as an individual, building your resume, building your portfolio, you want to write something down. Write down where you added value to your client or your business. And, Josh, I think we talked about this in your last podcast If you're not adding value and you're not tracking that, then your head's on the chopping block and this is a very aggressive, tough environment to get hired and a lot of people are getting fired and laid off. So focus on delivering value constantly and that's not a threat, it's not something to scare people. You should be thinking about where am I making myself an asset to my client, to my company, to my employer? Absolutely, and I think that's just going to help you build the right mentality, the right focus for doing your work, and it's going to make you stand out and differentiate amongst the herd. You're going to be a very different looking person.
Josh Matthews:Exceptional recommendations, josh. Really great. I love that. You know there's. I think you know I'm a big fan of a handful of books that have really helped me tremendously. You know Jordan Peterson is certainly one of them. I'm a huge fan. He's one of my favorite people on the planet.
Josh Matthews:I've given one of his quotes. I bet I've said it six times on this show over the years but I'm probably going to mess it up. But the idea is in your role, look for where responsibility has been abdicated and assume responsibility for it. If you're listening and you are, whether you could be a leader or not, you could be entry level. It literally doesn't matter. If you want to grow your career at all, you must start with growing within the organization that you're currently serving. Right, this is not necessarily helpful for those of you who are not working, but for those of you who are in the workforce in a company, you must pay careful attention what's not getting done and then do it. One of his quotes around abdication of responsibility is that abdicated responsibility is turned into the power wielded by tyrants or exerted by tyrants. I mean it's just that whole idea of like look, if you don't do it, someone else is gonna and you might not want those people to do that thing that's really important to you. So be very careful about shirking your responsibilities one and be very careful about assuming some responsibilities that have been abdicated by others. Don't be a tyrant, okay, but do it and do a good job, and when you do that, you will advance your career. You might advance your career in the current organization you're in. If they don't appreciate it, another company might appreciate it and you'll have a record of accomplishment. So I strongly recommend that.
Josh Matthews:To begin with, right Anytime, like when people are thinking about their career, they think about so many things Okay, where am I working? Am I remote? How much am I getting paid? What are the benefits? Who am I reporting to? How supported am I? Is my certification journey or my desire to be a presenter and do sessions at events? Is that supported? Do I feel like I can get the help that I need? Do I feel like I'm compensated fairly? How do I know if I'm compensated fairly? How do I know if I'm compensated fairly? What research might I need to do? How can I increase my income? Or, in Vanessa's case, where can I identify some passive sources of income? And that's a big thing People think about their careers.
Josh Matthews:They often think about money, and why wouldn't they You're paid to do the work often think about money, and why wouldn't they? You're paid to do the work. But there are so many people out there that struggle financially and they really think that the way that they're going to solve their problem is by getting a job that's going to pay them more. And for all of those high earners out there, you guys know who you are. You know that 100K that you're getting over 300K, you're not getting almost any of it right. Like it's not a number to be wielded, it's about how you're using that money.
Josh Matthews:I ran a little search on perplexity earlier in prep for the show because I wanted to share just a really good number and the value of saving and preparing for these downturns. A lot of people listening to this show lost their job in 24. Some of those folks are going to be fine. Some of those folks won't be fine. Maybe you didn't lose your job, maybe you lost clients. I lost clients in 24. Still connected with them, but they're not hiring the hiring freezes. So these sorts of things happen.
Josh Matthews:So I asked Perplexity. I said take $100 and tell me, after accounting for all inflation. What is $100 investment in a basic, simple, like Dow index fund, like the most basic kind of fund that you could invest in? What's $100 going to be worth in 10 years? And what's the same $100 going to be worth in 20 years? And in 10 years that $100 will have the buying power of $265. And in 20 years that $100 will have the buying power of $733.
Josh Matthews:I am not a financial advisor. I'll just say that I probably wouldn't ever model a financial success after Josh Matthews Probably wouldn't do that. It's not my biggest skillset saving money and things like that but this is a really powerful thought. So when you're thinking like, yeah, I'm just going to buy that, I'm just going to get on, I'm just going to do that, like just pause and just think, okay, I'm 40, when I'm 60, I will have 633 more dollars If I just don't touch this, if I just don't spend this a hundred bucks right now. Do you see what I mean? And so, as you're going through this kind of career planning how to get the most out of your year, if it's about finances and money, if that's a big thing, you know it's like. You know, like got to pay for kids in college. We've got three kids in college right now. It's not the cheapest thing in the world. So when you're thinking about that stuff, just think aboutaderie and really awesome projects to work on and learning opportunities, and they'll leave it for an extra $20,000. And they'll adapt to that income so fast and they will forego some of those positives that they had in their last role.
Josh Matthews:So make mental health important. Make, I think, clarity of thought really important. I loved what you said, eric, about that creative time to think. You know, and meditation is a big one. I've had an accountability partner in my friend, francisco Valdivieso, for about six years now and we talk every Tuesday for 30 minutes. He's an old friend, we've been friends for over 20 years. Have an accountability partner, make big plans.
Josh Matthews:And the last thing I will say before we kind of say our goodbyes here and this is an inspiration from my girlfriend, casey A lot of you guys know Casey and that is to dream big. I mean, she's got this incredible skill set of thinking really big, no boundaries, and when you start, when you're around someone like that regularly, it can't be anything but inspiring. Whatever you think you want, ask yourself is this all I want? Think you want ask yourself is this all I want? Why not more? What if I had said 20% more? What if I said 100% more of that? Maybe you're thinking I want to increase my income by 20%, why not 100%?
Josh Matthews:Figure that out, start thinking and problem solving big to solve your small problems. You might actually hit that big stretch, what we call a stretch goal. You might hit that big stretch goal or you might not, but the further we reach, the more we're likely to accomplish. Does anybody agree with that? Couldn't agree more 100%, lots of nods, 100%, lots of nods here. Any final words? I'll just, you know, to pipe up before we wrap up this January 1, how to plan your year and have a kick-ass 2025. I'd love some last words from some of you.
Mike Mikula:So one thing I really want to say, josh, is the accountability partner thing is something that changed my life more than anything else Having someone weekly that I could talk to about like finances or how I was feeling or everything else, like sure, there were things I worked on, but there were some things like exercise. For like years I knew it was something I needed to do, but I didn't do it. But then it compounded when I found something I was passionate about and I was like I don't have enough energy, like I want to do more but my body's not letting me do more, and suddenly I'm like how do I get to a gym? And now I'm exercising for the last two months to further fuel the thing that I'm passionate about. So there's like a compound effect of solving both those problems.
Josh Matthews:Yes, I love it, I'll tell you. I think anyone listening to this show those of you who are listening, who don't have regular exercise going on in your life don't feel bad about it. It happens, I go through. I'm a sporadic exerciser, I'll go hardcore for four months and then take two months off, and but the idea is, find something that's physical, that's fun. If you just did that right. And it could be golf but walk the course, or it could be fat tire biking for 16 miles in the snow, like Eric, it could be anything. Find a sport, individual or team that will be exciting for you. Maybe you want to learn how to stand a paddleboard. It's not the easiest thing to figure out, but you can do it. Do it given time. The other thing is someone brought up early on. I think it was you, fred, you were talking. You know, do it given time. And the other thing is to someone brought up early on I think it was you, fred, you were talking about. Hey look, try out these tools. Try it for a week. If it doesn't work, get rid of it, try something else.
Josh Matthews:But I'm also a big believer that anything of value is going to probably take a little bit more energy, effort and stick to itiveness than your impulse is right. You will have an impulse to quit and you don't. Vanessa, we've talked about this all the time. My definition of a challenge is you'll want to quit, but you don't. That's a challenge. So how are you going to manage that? I want to quit, but I don't thing whether it's exercise getting your resume done and dialed in, asking for additional responsibility at work, like whatever it is. But you know, like you got to do it, you got to do it. Okay, final words from anyone else. Josh, I'll ask you a question.
Josh LeQuire:Yeah, how do you organize a?
Josh Matthews:party in outer space. I just tell my rabbit to do it.
Josh LeQuire:I just put in my rabbit R1. You have to plan it. Yes, there do it. I just put in my rabbit R1. You have to plan it.
Josh Matthews:Yes, there you go, I'll be here all night. Thank you, I feel like I just walked into the. How Do you Eat an Elephant?
Fred Cadena:Where's that stream, your rim shot button? You need a soundboard.
Josh Matthews:I've got my drum kit right there, so I can do some room shots later on. Too funny.
Vanessa Grant:I was just going to say happy new year everybody. Good luck yeah.
Josh Matthews:Happy new year everybody.
Josh Matthews:I hope everybody does something really kind for themselves. This year In particular, developing a new habit. I strongly recommend James Clear's book Atomic Habits. I've listened to it twice. It's so helpful. I'll give you a quick, small little example of how powerful this book is, and I think it was the first one or two chapters. It just talks about your environment and we talked about this early on, right, like having a body double, or, vanessa, you were talking about like go outside, do some studying outside, like some fresh air, things like that. And he talks about proximity, like getting your physical space set up so that it's easy to do all of the things that you want to do.
Josh Matthews:My son, oliver, when he was about 15 years old, knew how to play the drums. I'd taught him when he was quite young and he'd kind of gotten through the parts that really make you want to cry because it's not the easy. It's not an easy thing to learn a limb independence like that. You know, at any age it's very difficult, but he got through it. But he just wasn't practicing much and he said that he, I remember he came to me and he's like I feel like I'm not good at a single thing Like the way my brother is because Charlie does art and he does this other stuff. He's like I really want something that's my own and I was like, well, look, dude, you're first of all. That's not true because you're really athletic and the fastest kid in school and super smart, really funny, you got great friends, all these other things. But if you want to do that, let's figure out how to help you drum more. All we did is we took the drum kit and put it in his bedroom. That's it Problem solved. Twice a day he would jump on that thing Within three months. It was like, oh my God, who's that? Well, it's Ollie, and that guy crushes now and he plays guitar and he plays piano and he's done all that in the last three years. He's very good at all of them, and so it's a proximity thing. If you have the thing that you want to work on close to you, near you, and it's easy to use, then you're going to be really set up for success. That's like chapter one, chapter two and it's a whole book. So definitely check out James Clear. You can also subscribe to a newsletter. You can get words of wisdom once a week and a little email message to you to keep you focused and keep you on track.
Josh Matthews:I absolutely am so stoked about 2025. I can't wait. I mean, it's here so I don't have to wait anymore, which is great. I am so stoked about what 2025 is going to bring to America, to the world, to my business, to your businesses, to all of these wonderful listeners that we have, and to my friends who join Vanessa and I regularly on this program. I'm stoked for you guys. I'm stoked for everybody. Just make it count.
Josh Matthews:Don't let this year slip through your fingers. Don't wake up and be like shit, what happened? It's July. Pick the best goals, get rid of everything else. Focus on those right. You will get momentum. Just don't try to do too many things, you know. Be hyper selective, be very particular and know your reasons, why it's important and really flex your muscles around how to do it, cause it's not just one way and it's definitely not just how you think to make sure that you're sharing your goals with your friends, too.
Josh Matthews:For anyone who's listening to this podcast right now, either live or afterwards, we would love to hear some of your input in a month or two about whether or not you actually utilized some of these things that were shared. I didn't write any of this stuff. I didn't create any of it. I don't know if any of us did. These are just our own experiences and how we've come. You know things, tools, techniques, methodologies that we've come across. You know the real, you know the people who designed this really deserve the credit. We just want to be a loud speaker for some of these great techniques and methodologies. So good luck to everybody and thanks so much for listening to the Salesforce Career Show. We'll be back on in two weeks at 5.30 Eastern, 2.30 Pacific on LinkedIn Live and on YouTube Live. Everyone, happy new year.
