Episode #133 – Leon Jay on Tapping Into Your Inner Drive and Not Caring About Money

It’s John McIntyre here, The Autoresponder Guy, I’m here with Leon Jay. Now Leon was on the podcast in Episode 38 when we talked about how to generate 7 figures in 7 days. He does a ton of email marketing, a ton of just marketing and business in general. I first met him in Thailand where he had a coffee shop there as a side business just to — somewhere cool to hang out. I just found out that he since sold that and moved to New Zealand. So he’s travelling around and he’s just written a new book which is what I wanted to get him on the show for. It’s called “Create, Automate, Accelerate” and it dives into a you know concept that I find very — that I find very interesting in my own life right now which is this idea that business isn’t just here to make some money and have a nice lifestyle, but to actually put some purpose behind it.

And so it’s — you know I like what this book’s about, I like what Leon’s about and today I thought we’d have a chat about some of these concepts and how you get some more — just like the tough thing which I think we’ll get into today is that this whole world is you know with meaning and purpose. It can get a bit cloudy and a bit whirl wind sometimes so we’re trying to avoid that today. Focus on the nitty-gritty, what you consider — so anyway Leon, how you doing man?

Leon Jay: I’m good. Yeah I think you hit the nail on the head there. It’s — there’s a lot of whirl wind stuff particularly when people start talking about passion in relation to business.

You know it’s one of those topics that I think often has a lot of fluff and no real kind of getting down to it and some practical how to.

John McIntyre: Yeah it’s — yeah I mean just this whole thing this — is it like a whole business niche or business industry focused on teaching people how to live their purpose and I think it rubs all over — I mean I think a lot of who get value out of it, but it — I know it rubs a lot of people the wrong way at the same time.

Leon Jay: It does, it does and for good reason. You know it’s one of those things that frustrate the hell out of me, to be honest and coming from a personal development world and a business world both are full of — heaps of BS and let’s just put it bluntly and call if for what it is.

And then there’s a lot of other stuff which is well meaning and well intentioned, but really just leads people down the wrong path or gets them frustrated and sort of almost does more harm than good.

So hopefully we’ll try and avoid that. Hopefully we’ll try and actually find a concept here that people can find useful and practical in a meaningful way.

John McIntyre: Cool, cool okay. Well these people want to probably get the full background on what to do. We — I can refer them to the last podcast and that’ll maybe today just focus on this book, but can you get — give me like why — you know just a couple things — couple hard hitting social proof things, if anyone listening here — who hasn’t heard of you knows that you really know what you’re talking about, and then we can get into the book.

Leon Jay: Okay so, I guess the general run down is that I used to be director of marketing for Mark Joyner which was one of, you know, big 7 figure international online business.

I was Affiliate Manager for another 7 figure online business. We raised $1.4 million in revenue through one of their projects that I was a co-founder of.

I’ve founded FusionHQ and I’m now CEO of FusionHQ, online platform for internet marketers. We’ve run our own event — internet marketing event. We’ve run a series of 5 of those out in Thailand. Like you say we started up a co-work space for internet entrepreneurs and I’ve spoken on stages around the world and this will be my third book on the topic of business.

John McIntyre: Awesome, cool, okay. I like it. So let’s get into that end. Tell me about this book. What’s the — what inspired you to write this book?

Leon Jay: So basically my concept is that many people are coming to the world of online marketing, business ownership et cetera, et cetera with the belief that it’s gonna make them a heap — a whole heap of money. And while that’s entirely possible I think that it’s perhaps the wrong way of approaching it and ultimately the successful business owners that I find — those that are really getting more out of life other than just simply turning a profit are those that approach business as an artist. And I often see — well the way that I see an entrepreneur is an artist with business as his or her canvas.

You know they’re the ones that will put their soul into it — that they’ll spend their last dollar on it, that they’ll not worry about the 9 to 5 or they’re not worrying about trying to free up more time or make more money, but they want to see a project come to fruition. And they want to create something.

And I think that is a much healthier approach to starting because let’s be honest in almost any business there’s going to be a lot of struggles. There’s going to be a lot of ups and downs. And a lot of people fail in business simply because they don’t have the stamina to survive the challenges that creating a business provides and, I mean, you see this time and time again with any biography of any successful business owner especially, you know, go check out the stories of people like Elon Musk and Richard Branson who are often held as huge inspirations within almost any entrepreneurial community. And you’ll hear them tell you again and again it wasn’t easy in the early days. It was real struggle and even now they face many big challenges. So — and again in these cases, these guys they’re not — you know they could have retired years ago and yet they still carry on doing what they do so, it’s obviously not to free up more time, it’s obviously not to make more money because you know they could just stop what they’re doing and have far more time and they’ve got you know every dollar they make now doesn’t really make a difference on their lifestyle.

So I think it’s really important to look at those who really succeeded and find out well what does that mean to their life and what was it that they did to actually get there.

John McIntyre: Hmm it’s interesting you mentioned Elon Musk. I just read his — well it’s about a month or two — I’ve read his biography. There was a…

Leon Jay: Yes.

John McIntyre: … you know…

Leon Jay: Me too.

John McIntyre: … see you…

Leon Jay: Excellent.

John McIntyre: Yeah that was amazing and it was interesting seeing because you know everyone glorifies the guy because of his work ethic and you know he’s got 3 you know $3 billion companies that he’s running right now and he’s built, I think it’s all, 4 or $5 billion companies total. So he’s a very successful guy…

Leon Jay: Yes.

John McIntyre: …but in the book you start to see a bit of the weakness side of him as well which is we probably don’t have time to get into here, but it’s interesting like probably in the same — I was probably very interested and have the same reasons you are.

I was thinking how do — like these guys who do these incredible things and work these incredible hours, they’re obviously driven by like they don’t just doing it to do it. That doesn’t really make sense. So they’re…

Leon Jay: No.

John McIntyre: … obviously driven by something. So it’s like how does — I mean it’s a really interesting question. How do you actually find the same kind of purpose that they have?

Leon Jay: Well I mean it’s interesting with Elon, right? Because Elon has — let’s say take his 2, 3 primary companies.

SolarCity obviously looking at eco friendly power, Tesla looking at eco friendly transport, and SpaceX which is a backup plan if — and in — basically in his mind it’s a backup plan that if all else fails — if his other companies and other entrepreneurs don’t do enough to save the planet then there’s an escape route to Mars. And I mean for many of us we might find that completely outrageous, but this is not a stupid guy you know by any means, but he’s so passionate about that belief that he’s gone to all this extent to build these companies.

Now I don’t believe that the majority of this likely to ever tap in to such insane levels of determination and focus as Elon. I mean he is definitely out there as one of the 0.001%, but that said I think he does represent something that we should all consider and that is to try and tap into something more meaningful and so, this is why I came up — you know I — as you know I spent a lot of time talking to entrepreneurs who would come to me and ask me the question how do I make money? And that would frustrate me because I say, “Well that’s the wrong question.”

It’s not that you don’t want to make money. I’m not suggesting that that’s not an important thing to do. It absolutely is, but it’s the wrong question. And a lot of people would get frustrated with me because I couldn’t tell them well what was the right question and I — you know frustrate me too.

So I was out for a motorbike ride one time up in northern Thailand and I just suddenly had this flash of inspiration about this — these 5 Ps of priority and I realised that they’re actually 5 things we need to consider when building a business. And if we get them in the correct order they naturally flow. If we start in the wrong sequence, then we could end up giving ourselves poor quality answers. And ultimately poor quality results…

John McIntyre: Okay.

Leon Jay: So the first P — the first priority is to determine what is our purpose? And you know I think a lot of us are annoyed by many things in this world. A lot of us are very concerned about many things in this world. There are so many issues facing society today whether it be abusing in the various communities, whether it be pollution, whether it be global warming, whether it be war, financial crisis, issues, I mean anything you know disease and sickness, poverty, the list goes on.

And for almost all of us there has to be one of those things that or more than one, but something that we feel quite passionate about. Something that’s probably touched our lives in some way whether it be something we’ve seen while we’re travelling or something that we’ve experienced at home, but it’s — once we realise what it is that we want to change in the world then it’s becoming passionate about that. And I find that that’s the second P is passion. Passion comes out of purpose.

A lot of people talk about building a business of passion and I think that the problem with that concept is that it’s a misunderstanding of the term passion. Passion comes from the word suffering not…

John McIntyre: Hmm

Leon Jay: … joy…

John McIntyre: Give me…

Leon Jay: … right?

John McIntyre: … give me a background on that. Where is — you mean from the Greek [?] just going back to the Greek [?] or something like that?

Leon Jay: Right so basically the idea is and the you know if you look at the Passion of Christ as a movie, right? It was about his suffering. That was coming from the true root word of passion.

And it’s not to say that it’s all suffering and if we talk about passionate lovers, often we consider the passionate lovers not just to be you know a hot embrace, but also to be hot and fiery in their arguments. And you know we see that whenever passion is involved its intense emotion. It’s not just joy, it’s not just pleasure. It’s much more than that and if we look at sports analogy here, but let’s say you’re going for Olympic gold. Now you’ve got to be — you’ve got a serious purpose, right? You’ve now defined your purpose, “I want Olympic gold.” And it may be not the most ultraristic purpose, but it is a strong defined purpose and very, very clearly marked. Now once you become committed to that purpose you can become so passionate that you will do whatever it takes to achieve that goal. Well that’s not all pleasure, right? It’s the — if you’re not passionate about your sport you will never attain Olympic gold, but likewise if you don’t bleed, suffer and put your entire heart and soul into it you will never attain it either.

And so I think that that’s the important point to remember here, is that when you have a big enough purpose you’ll become so passionate that you will do whatever it takes. That means, yes you can enjoy many of the days. It’s not that everyday is painful and suffering, but at the same time you recognize that there will be ups and downs and it will give you the strength and the emotion and the resolve and the determination to continue through the down periods. Now I think that that’s extremely important particularly when you’re building any form of sizeable business.

Now the next part is that this leads nicely on because once you become really passionate about something it gives us the influence over others and what I mean by that is we know — it’s very easy to become inspired by somebody who is passionate and that leads us on to the third P of priority and that’s people because ultimately, I’m not a big believer in the solopreneur world, I think that if you become a freelancer or a solopreneur there a huge danger in that and — in that you are your weakest link in your business.

If anything should ever happen to you then ultimately the likelihood is that you’re gonna see your profits disappear very, very fast. And ultimately that business isn’t gonna out survive you. Not just that I think it’s a lot more fun if you work with other people that are also passionate and committed about obtaining a certain and specific purpose together. So we might have multiple different skills sets so that I mean you know within my business I have guys that work for me doing the jobs that I don’t like, but that doesn’t mean that the jobs that they don’t like they’re jobs that they do and I do the things that they don’t like and together we’re able to enjoy our workday much, much more because we’re doing the type of activities that we enjoy, but also we’re committed to the same common goal. We’re driven and directed by the same purpose. So you know you can have a group of people that won’t necessarily attain much, but if you have a group of people that are driven by the same goal, the same vision they can all become passionate together and they are likely to achieve far, far more and enjoy doing so on an average level on day to day basis as a result of that.

Now I think you know once we’ve identified our purpose, we’ve identified the you know connected to that passion, we’ve built a team of people or we’ve started at least to build that team of people that you know I think all of these things are an ongoing process it’s not like you have to have everything black and white from day one. They’re all organic and evolving over time, but then we’re able to move to the fourth P which is I mentioned is place. So you know place is going to be — the ideal place is going to be specific to each individual business and you know that may be determined by the purpose. I mean if you’ve got a specific purpose in your business is delivering on a specific intention you may have to be in a specific location to achieve that. It may be determined by the people.

You know if we look at, for example, when Google started out they were in a place where they were surrounded by investors that could believe and fund projects. They were surrounded by people of extremely high talent. And they required both of those to make their business a success. So in their situation, their location suited them absolutely perfectly.

And then finally we can move on to the fifth P which is profit, that’s how to monetize that business. How do we fund those people, how do we fund the creation and delivery of that product or service that ultimately meets the needs to deliver on that initial purpose? And again I mean if we look back at Google as a prime example of this. When Google started out they had the intention to make the world’s information available to everybody, to make the world’s information accessible and useful. They were very passionate about that. They became very committed. They were also very passionate technologists you know they were very passionate programmers and involved heavily in technology and in the development of technology. And it was their passion towards their initial purpose to make that information available to the world and their passion around the technology that they were involved with that ultimately inspire — was — enable them to inspire the investors around them that coughed up $23 million before they’d even figured out their profit model.

You know when Google started their initial idea was, “Well perhaps we’ll sell this technology to Yahoo!”

John McIntyre: Hmm.

Leon Jay: Well I mean if they were — if they were built — if they would of focused purely on the way that they were gonna monetise their business model they would have failed miserably, right? Because that didn’t happen, they tried to sell it to Yahoo!, Yahoo! didn’t want it. So, luckily they weren’t invested in the specific business model in terms of the way they were gonna monetise the business. They were invested heavily into the purpose and they were very passionate about that purpose and they built a very solid team up around them and they were located in a very good place. And then ultimately out of that they then were able to identify multiple different methods for monetising their business and of course you know they became the world’s largest advertising network, they’ve gone on to deliver multiple products and services, they’ve even deliver — sell physical hardware in terms of the Nexus range so, you know you can sell data, you can license agreements, I mean there’s so many different ways to generate revenue and I find that everybody is running around asking this question, “What’s the best way to make money?” they’re not asking, “Well how can I monetize a way that I can make my life more meaningful or create a more meaningful business?”

John McIntyre: Hmm got one question I had. We had to jump back a little bit; just go back to the purpose. A lot of people think that — yeah I know that a lot of young people struggle with this. Yeah I’ve certainly struggle with this. I think a lot of people that I speak to struggle with this idea of you know go out there and figure out what your passion is and figure out your purpose is. And it’s almost like there’s this believe that maybe comes from you know pop culture and movies and music and all of that that purpose is something outside of us that someone’s gonna bestow upon us as opposed to something that we just decide as really important like it’s a you know it’s a conscious choice. So how do you…

Leon Jay: Right.

John McIntyre: … I mean how — you know what’s your advice to people who you know would try to do that? Like I just don’t know what my purpose is. I you know I’d be loved to be passionate about something, but…

Leon Jay: Yes.

John McIntyre: … I just haven’t figured out what my purpose is.

Leon Jay: Yeah I get that and you know I’m not suggesting it’s necessarily a magic wand, but I think there are some steps that people can do or take to figure that out. The first thing to point out is just to clarify the difference between passion and purpose. I mean passion is the emotion that comes out of purpose so, you don’t need to find your passion. I think passion finds you. And I think that’s perhaps the biggest mistake that a lot of people are making in the personal development world is that they’re trying to figure out what they’re passionate about. So they’re going out there and trying to figure out, “What do I enjoy doing?” And that’s going to lead you to the wrong answers. That’s gonna lead you to try and start a bakery when — because you love cooking and you know a bakery is — yes there’s cooking involved, but it’s a business and so, a lot of bakers, who enjoy baking, suddenly hate their business now because they try and follow their passion. And I think there’s a danger in that. Whereas if we find a purpose, if we say let’s say for example — stick with the baking analogy, but we become really passionate about the importance of eating organics and in particular, say for example, organic bread and if we go, “Okay well how do we deliver? How do we supply organic bread to our community?” and you become passionate about that — I mean that — that’s a different story. That takes you on a different path.

And I think for many people finding a purpose — I mean there are many different purposes in this world. Some small — maybe seemingly small, some much larger, I mean perhaps if you’re a golfer and you’re mission is to try and improve a swing and it’s all about you know the purpose is to become — to divine — design a better golf club and you just become super crazy passionate about designing a better golf club, ultimately you’re gonna enrich the lives of you know many golfers because they become so obsessed about these little details.

Other people like Elon Musk take an absolute much you know huge view on the world and try to address and tackle head on the really big issues that are facing society. Now I don’t think there’s necessarily a right or a wrong. I think we should all take a step back and look and just say, “Well how is my business really improving the world? How is it making society or the environment a better place?” and or, “How — what would I like to change in this world to make it a better place?” And I think for almost everybody I speak to if you asked them long enough and you dig deep enough they do have things the care about. There are things that annoy them in this world or that they would like to see improved in this world. The problem is that they’re just too afraid to follow that. They don’t have enough confidence in themselves that they could possibly create a business around that and I think that’s a shame and I’m not sure whether there’s necessarily a simple answer to that, but I would suggest that if you are struggling with this then perhaps take a step back and just ask yourself, “Is it simply because I’m too afraid that I may fail? That I’m not good enough? That I can’t contribute enough to this particular cause or this particular issue in society?”

And I think that’s probably the you know what stops more people from following that path, the fear that, “Well you know I’m not gonna have enough money if I focus on this because they’re — they keep going back and keep getting stuck on this issue around, “Well how am I gonna finance it? How am I gonna fund it?” And they keep going down to that last question before they’ve identified the other 4 questions.

Now I can say — tell you now once you got those first 4 questions aligned then you can start answering the fifth question far, far easier, but everybody gets stuck on the fifth and go, “Well how am I gonna fund it? How am I gonna fund myself? How am I gonna fund the — I’m not gonna be good enough. I can’t do all of those things.” They haven’t got the you know they haven’t identified the team yet. And so I think it’s important to remember we don’t need to have all the answers before we start, but really identify, just in your own life, what is important to you? What do you really want to change? What would — and then just focus on it and start asking the questions like, “Well if I could change it how would that look like? What could possibly make a difference in this world? What would be the solution for this problem?” Okay and then you can start becoming — tapping into that passion and start talking to other people, start attracting other people. It’s not something that happens in 5 minutes, but I think it’s an important stepping stone and my fear is that a lot of people have this belief that it’s a case of you know well when this happens then I’ll do this. And they go around kidding themselves saying, “Well you know once my business is successful then I will tackle these kind of issues.”

John McIntyre: Yeah.

Leon Jay: And you know the problem is that often they end up creating this income — they create this financial stability, but then they become trapped by it because they become dependent upon that cash flow and they become scared to let that cash flow go and now because they haven’t systematized or automated their business in the correct way then they’re now limited in time and you know time slips them — slips by and they don’t really achieve what they intended to or set out to achieve.

John McIntyre: Yeah. I like it, very cool, very cool. We’re coming right up on time here so, if people want to go and get the book and they want to read more about this process what’s the — how do they do that?

Leon Jay: Well I mean you could either go to createautomateaccelerate.com and check it out or just go direct to Amazon and you know pick it up on Amazon, available in print or Kindle.

John McIntyre: Cool, cool. I’ll have links to both that createautomateaccelerate.com and the Amazon book in the show notes at themcmethod.com. Leon thanks for coming on the show man.

Leon Jay: Always a pleasure John. Good to speak to you again and I just you know wish everybody the best out there and encourage them to take some proactive action and not to be afraid of creating some real change in their lives and to the lives of others.