How to Make Everything Better

0:00The amount of gymbros on tiktok who eat the most boring meals imaginable, it's flooding my feed. I see a lot of these guys, it's not all of them, but it's majority who are like, here's what I eat for a lean cut, here's what I eat to bulk up, here's what I eat in a day to maintain a caloric deficit, all this stuff. And the meals are dog bowls, they're terrible, it's friggin' rice, ground beef, covered in sriracha, that is not food. Like look, I know it is food, but that's disgusting. Would I eat it? Of course I would. Am I eating it every day, do I hate myself? Yeah, but I'm imagining that these gymbros are not cooks, they're not chefs, and like I said, it's not all of them, but it's a majority.

1:02A majority of these people are completely happy, going through life, eating the most boring, the most bland, the most gross food imaginable. I one time watched, oh my god, I couldn't even like, stomach, Alex Hermosi, gym bro, eats like garbage to me, the way he eats is just like, I watch him eat on camera, I've seen him do a video, and I was just like, really? I get it, I mean, optimize every goddamn minute of your life, I understand, I get it. But like, putting chocolate powder in a carton of egg whites and drinking it like a milkshake is disgusting, like fucking kill me. No, no, I don't want it. And this rant is because I see it, it's so ubiquitous, and I think to myself, doesn't

2:08anybody want to make this better? How is this the standard? This is terrible, like what in what world would you not want to improve this? So here's a case, here's just like a very simple thing I think about all the time. And again, I know that I've talked about on this show how my passion, my secret passion is just wanting to get better and just wanting to do better. In this case, look, I need to eat that stuff, but I can't watch this stuff because every time it comes up, I'm curious. It's like, hey, here's what I eat, to get 1800 calories a day, and I'm like, all right, maybe he's got something interesting in this one. Nope, ground beef, it's fucking ground beef, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I'm like, you know there's other meats, there's other meats, there's other non-gray meats, but okay, you want to make a dog bowl, right?

3:10You want to make a bowl of ground beef. You want to cover it in sriracha, fine, all right? But like, here's what I'm saying. My brain likes to take that and go, all right, how do I make this into something better? Something I'd want to eat, something that is normal sounding when someone says, would you have for dinner last night, you can say the dish's name, not the individual ingredients, because what you'll say is, oh, I had dog food last night, because that's essentially what you're eating. All right, so just off the top of my head, you want to make a ground beef bowl, make it chilly, that's normal, that's a good, delicious meal, that has multiple flavors, that has vegetables, you can add, you can make it as spicy as a one, you can add honey, you could add maple syrup, you could add baker's chocolate, you could add coffee, you could add beans,

4:15you can add any fucking vegetable on planet earth into that, and call it chili, and make it crazy flavorful. You could saute the onions until they're charred and caramelized, you could roast peppers, you could use dried chilies, you could do so much, and it's still a bowl of ground beef. You get my point, you can just make it a little bit better, you can make a shepherd's pie, that's a meal people have heard of, you can make it healthy, it's basically ground beef sriracha and mashed potatoes, maybe you can add some peas, maybe if you want to add carrots, whatever, but that's essentially what you're eating, it's not ketchup and ground beef, which is what sriracha and ground beef is, oh my god, do you know what else is made with

5:18ground beef, hamburgers, you could make a fucking burger, and you can put sriracha on it, and it's normal, you can do these things. My point in all of this is, don't you want to make your life better, don't you want to make everything you do better? And I guess the answer is like, nah, and that's okay, and I get that, but that's not how I roll. And so when it comes to business, even though, yeah, I need to do the same boring thing over and over and over again, you know, in the weight loss world or the bodybuilding world, the name of the game is boring consistency, you know, eat your dog bowl, don't think too

6:19much, lift your weights, stay the course, do it forever, you know, and I get it. But why not make everything better? Why not optimize it a little bit more for enjoyment? Not even enjoyment, why not optimize it a little bit more for everyone else? Why not get better? If you're going to do it, why not do it really well? And that's kind of where I am. So I want to talk about how I'm applying this to business. I think about this all the time, which is when I look at, you know, and I've talked about this, our business runs on about six SOPs and every SOP, I'm constantly looking at it and saying, how can I make this better? And it can't just be better for me as the person who has to do the boring work, although

7:24that's a great, that's great. I think it also has to be better for the user. Something I did recently was we were, I was working on the email SOP, your email marketing SOP. And by the way, SOP stands for standard operating procedure in case you don't know, basically a set of instructions for us to create emails in our business. It's boring, it's repetitive. And so I was like, how do we make this easier to make so that we can make more emails, more helpful emails? How do we make these emails easier? And really simple stuff, really simple tweaks, you know, I noticed that we were adding too many images to the emails and they were emails were getting bloated and I thought it was unnecessary and I thought, all right, how can we combine images? How do we, how do we remove images? How do we, and also by removing images, we're making it easier to make. So we're making it easier and we're making the email less bloated.

8:25And so we just did little tweaks over time and we just kept getting better and faster. I think about the app that we're working on. We started with this bloated piece of software that we trimmed, we trimmed everything. We went, what's the, what's the thing that this needs to do? And what's the thing that no one else does, but we know it needs to be done. And we did that thing and then we just tweaked. We're not adding and adding and adding layers on top of it and bloating it more. We're tweaking things, we're swapping things. And we're going, does this make the app better for the end user? And that's really what we're going for there. For us, yeah, it may be a little bit harder to code, but who cares? If it's better, then it's better.

9:25If it's easier for them to use, even better than that. But it's not about adding, it's about subtracting or moving or swapping. It's not this constant layering. We're currently working on our, our new update at course for a pool care. And the way we're thinking about it this time is, look, we created this course in 2017. And we've been selling it for close to nine years. That's insane. Oh no, I guess close to 10 years. I guess we've been selling it for nine years, can't insane. And we're like, okay, let's, we're not trying to reinvent the wheel. We invented the wheel, we got it, all right? The idea is not to break it down and build it back up from scratch.

10:27The idea is, how do we make this, which already exists, better? Do we remove? Do we tweak? How do we make editing these videos easier? How do we make filming these videos easier? How do we make the videos shorter so that the customers don't have to sit there and watch me ramble on like I did in the other videos? Let's, let's tighten it up. And we're not doing this like all in one shot, we're taking our time and doing it piece by piece and just thinking about each process and getting better each time we do it. Not that we have to come out of the gate, perfect. We just have to come out of the gate and then once we're out of the gate, okay, tweak, swap, whatever you got to do, optimize, shave off, edit, subtract, add a little, whatever you got to do, but it's a constant pursuit of better, very, very rarely will you get

11:32to perfect. In fact, I love the fact that maybe you never do. And you're always just trying to make it a little better. Something I did recently was I'm thinking a lot about this podcast, I'm thinking a lot about my personal brand and I spent two years recording this podcast on my iPhone pacing back and forth in my brewery. And I didn't really change a damn thing. I've been doing the same thing over and over and over again, boring consistency. You know what I'm thinking? Maybe I've been eating dog food this whole time. I think maybe it's time that I start to optimize a little bit, but of course I'm not going to do what I used to do in the past, which is like, all right, I got to rethink the

12:32whole damn thing, blah, blah, blah. It's like, no, tweak it. So the first thing I did and I'm kind of making this up as I go, I'm learning, it's not that I have this grand master plan, I don't. I really don't. And I think this is important. You have to go, you have to get out of the gate, you have to start moving. So okay, I'm moving, we're moving for two years. What's not working? First thing I did, changed the name of the podcast, update the imagery. Why did I do that? What was the point? How did that make this better? Well, I think it fit. I think the brand name and what I was talking about, they didn't fit together. And I sort of lost that thread. I mean, I mean, money lab had a purpose. There was a reason for it. It had the brand. I was doing experiments. That's what we were doing on the website.

13:35That's what we were trying to do with the podcast. And I haven't done that in a long time. So we don't do experiments anymore. We just do the same, we have experimented. And now we just do the same boring shit. Okay. So I changed the name of the podcast because I felt I was moving more into this idea of early retirement, lifestyle business, you know, financial freedom, working less hours, etc., you know, optimizing for life as opposed to work. And so I thought the name change was a good reflection of that. That's step one. And then I was like, all right, all right, Doug, my friend Doug emails me and he goes, you know, I don't like how you're, I don't like the sound of your podcast and guess what?

14:38I don't either. I asked my audience, you guys, what do you think? And you're like, that's fine. I can hear, I can listen to it. You being on your phone, the echo of the space, okay. So I didn't change it because I didn't think I needed to. Doug said something to me, but on top of that, stuff said something to me. And I think because I really asked, like I really challenged people and I was like, are you fucking pulling my leg or are you telling me the truth? Like, what's going on here? And it's like, yeah, it's a kind of annoying to listen to. I'm like, well, okay, I need to know that. So cool. That needs to change. That needs to get better. How do you do that? There's a million ways you could do that. But I have my standards. I know, I know what I'm trying to do here. And so all I did was plug in a microphone, Don. Is it better?

15:38Is it the best? No. Is it better? Certainly. Definitely. All right. So next thing I go, all right, well, I'm going to start doing Twitter and LinkedIn and start posting content there. Is it growing? Not really. But I've been doing it for three, four months consistently every day. Writing tweets, trying different things, seeing what sticks, just keeping my ear to the ground, just keeping my eye on it, thinking about ways to making it better. I am making it better. I'm trying each day to make it better. Learn something, apply it, learn something, apply it. You know, I tweeted a lot. Now I'm tweeting much less, getting a little tighter, things like that. I finally think, all right, I'm going to start a newsletter. Got to get the first one out. Got to get the first one out. I don't know what I'm going to say.

16:38Got to get the first one out. Get the first one out. All right. Cool. What's next? Get a little feedback. All right. Got an idea for the next one. Next one I include a video. Because that's what I want in an email. I want a video. You know, a lot of people watched it. Not everybody. But a lot of people watched it. I'm like, okay. Maybe the video is a little long. You know, it was shot on loom. It's fine, but not the greatest. So, the next video I do. Make it a little shorter. You know, polish myself up a bit. Add some lights. Okay. Next video. I break out my camera from the closet that I hadn't used in a while. Stuck that. You know, put that back together. Have a nicer camera. It still looks a little blurry. You know, audio looks good. I can do camera switching now. I'm like, it's a little better. It's not there yet.

17:41And now I'm just thinking, okay. The move is you got to put out content. You got to do it. That's the thing. You got to move. So I'm moving. And I go, how do I make it easier on myself? How do I make it easier to put out this content? How do I make it better for the audience to watch? Listen to. Is seven. You know, the last video I just did was seven minutes long. It's supposed to 20 minutes. You know, we'll try it. Let's see what happens. But each time I'm looking at my process, I'm looking at everything I'm doing, and I'm like, I don't even have a process right now. Right? I'm just throwing stuff. And then it's like, all right, you start to get, you start to see patterns. You know, and if you really want, if you like this, if you like the game, you want to get better. So you write, shit down. You create your document. I listen to the show.

18:43Susan emailed me, I'm going to probably do an episode or I might just shoot her a video. But she asked me like, where did you learn how to do SOPs? I didn't. I didn't take any formal training. I just wrote down what I did. I took a Google doc and I just wrote down what I did. And then when I could see it, I just kept editing it. And it's a constant involving document that I constantly edit, edit, edit. Very rarely do I add things. And I look at a task and go, how can I say that in fewer words? Do we have to do it that way? Maybe I'm overthinking it. Maybe I'm doing too much work. Maybe it doesn't need to be this complicated. And you just beat it up. You just carve at it. You know what I mean? And you make these little improvements that you have to ask yourself,

19:44is it better for me and is it better for them? If the answer is yes, then it's a kind of a no-brainer. When you watch our swim university short form video, or even long form video, like that studio that I built that you're seeing is exactly what I'm talking about. It is a series of me wanting to get better at that specific thing. But at the same time, not only is the quality of the output getting better each time I record. And it doesn't do it, it's not every single time. It happens in batches. But not only does it get better from what you see, my job gets easier too. Because I'm always thinking about how I can make it better. I'm always thinking, hmm, you know, can I hook, you know,

20:44I have two, I have one light. If I hook up two lights, will that be better lighting? Will that look better? Yes. Alright, let's, let's, next time I'm like, can we put that on a, a bar? So I can just tap my foot, hit a button, and everything turns on. And it's like, I don't have to go around and turn on every single item on its own. I can just hit one button. Yeah, you go to lows, you spend 30 bucks, you get a, you get a power strip, you're done. But it's like, it's a little tiny improvement. You're never going to see it as the viewer, but it made, it makes editing videos easier. It makes filming videos easier. So therefore I'm going to do it more often. Okay, little improvements. I switched from using a desk microphone to an overhead mic, to a shotgun mic. Why did I do that? The reason I did that was one, I had the mics, and I had the equipment.

21:44But two, every time I hit my hands on the desk, the microphone would boom, because the microphone was attached to the desk. And so I went, okay. Well, if I'm using my hands when I talk, then, and I can show more things on the desk, like, this is an improvement. So let me, so it, so here's what it did. It not only improved what you see, it improved my workflow, because now, I don't have a mic in my face. It's out of the way. It's stupid, but it's simple. It may seem inconsequential, but I'm like, I want this to be better. The thing that's driving me nuts right now with my studio setup is the sound. Now that I switched to the shotgun mic, I don't think it sounds as good, but there's so many other benefits that came with it, that I'm like, okay, I, all I have to do now is I've made a lot of other benefits,

22:46the sound quality dipped, but now I just need to improve that. How do you do that? You soundproof the room, you treat the room, which means I have to get sound panels and put them up, and that's fine. I'll do those things. Is it crazy important right now? No, but it's gonna happen, because I can't not happen for me. I need to make it better. It's like a drug. So what I'm saying in this episode is I'm not even talking about more work. I'm talking about taking the things that you already do, the boring monotonous things, the dog bulls you eat, and just making minor alterations over time to improve not only the life of your, like not only your own life, but the life of your creators, or the life of your, you're not creators, your audience. Because guess what?

23:47You eat in a fucking dog bull, sucks. That's not good. You know what's better? Being slightly more creative. Being slight, being just one little iode of wanting to make that better. There's not a day that goes by that I don't think about some type of thing in my business that I think I can do a little bit better. I could try, not even trying harder. It's not about that. And I think that's where it gets confusing. I'm not talking about pushing more, or trying harder, or working more hours, or putting extra time. I'm not saying that. I'm saying, I'm saying tweak it. Swap it. Edit it. Like, the amount of hour, I mean, like we're talking, we can shave off a minute. You know what I mean? The,

24:47I was bragging to Steph today about the, are my new email marketing system which I do have to send an email about soon. I don't have it fully fleshed out and finished yet, but I go, we went from my, it took my brother, like five minutes to create an email. Because, and that was, that's minimum. It would be five minutes baseline. And then if he had to, you know, create a new image for one of the emails, he would create it in Canva. He's not really a designer. And it's like, you know, maybe took him 15 minutes to put together an email. After it's already been written, 15 minutes put together an email. Average. With just a few simple decisions, a few edits, a few swaps, I brought that down to maybe a minute, maybe, maybe, maybe five minutes.

25:47Huge time saver. And, at the same time, made the emails faster, more, the easier to deliver, easier to see. And I'm not done. I have more ideas to shave off time and to improve the actual quality of the emails themselves. Without, again, this is not adding more work. Yes, it's more upfront. You know, it's like, all right, we're putting the system in place. But like, I'm always doing that. That's my job. My job is just, my job is this. Make every little tiny thing better. I have an episode idea coming up, called, I'm trying to find it here, just hit record. And to tease the, to tease the idea there, a little bit,

26:47I am trying to get to a spot in 2026, where all I do is hit record. Now, I just hit record today on this podcast. That certainly counts. I also filmed a video today at my computer. Yes, or on Friday, which was a week, you know, last week, I shot 12 videos in less than an hour. Tomorrow, I think I'm going to shoot six, seven videos. Easy, and it gets easier every time. It's like, it's so easy. And it's really just a process. And just be, if you, if you see my SOP, which I'm going to share all this stuff in my newsletter. So if you're not signed up, go to jiveneasy.com, sign up for my newsletter. I'm sending out videos, I'm putting stuff in the email. But listen, what I'm saying is,

27:47I have a written down process. I've repeated this process so many times that it's just like ingrained in me. And now I can look at it objectively and say, how do we, do we even need to do this? It's editing. And I just keep shaving off little tiny steps. And only adding steps, if I know it's going to improve the end user's goal. If the audience is happier, I will take the extra step. But that's, that's the key. It needs to be better for the audience. Otherwise, what's the point? You're just adding more work for this sake of adding more work. You're just making things harder because I need to be busy. No. Bottom line. Thinking about it. Just make everything better.

28:49One little tiny tweak at a time. Go to jivinesi.com. Sign up for my newsletter. It's free. Tell your friends about this show. And, you know, chat with me via email or the YouTube comments. And I'll talk to you next time.