Hey! Welcome to Lessons from a Quitter where we believe that it is never too late to start over. No matter how much time or energy you've spent getting to where you are. If ultimately you are unfulfilled, then it is time to get out. Join me each week for both inspiration and actionable tips so that we can get you on the road to your dreams.
Hello my friends and welcome to another episode. I'm so excited to have you here. I hope you're all doing well as this year is kind of drawing to an end, I think it is a natural time for reflection. Hopefully it's a time for some rest and some joy for you all in this month. I know it can be an overwhelming time. If it is, listen back to some episodes about how to get over that. So today I wanted to talk about something that has come up. It comes up all the time, and I actually wanted to do a much more in-depth episode. I've been putting it off because I wanna outline something much more in depth, but I figure I have to address it anyway. So I think I might do a later episode that's focused just on this idea of wasting time.
But today I wanna talk more about, I mean that, but in relation to not just to time this idea, this obsession that we have with wasting, I should say the fear of wasting time, money, energy, whatever it is, like this fear that what we are doing is somehow a quote unquote waste. And how that keeps so many of you stuck for so long. It is, I think one of the things that I coach on the most is this fear of like, what if I try this and it's a waste of time? What if I try this and it's a waste of money? What if I invest in this and it's a waste of money? It, actually, the reason I wanted to do this episode is because I was promoting my program last, the last couple weeks. The bootcamp that I'm doing starting in January for people that want to start an online business. And I got the question of like, how do you know before you enter, you know, before you make an investment in yourself, in education, in all of these things, that it's not gonna be a waste of money? And the short answer is you don't. You don't know.
And it's just fascinating, even the question, and I was like, I gotta talk about this. Because the question presupposes that there is a way to know the future. There's a way to know something before you've done it. And this keeps so many people paralyzed from ever taking a step because we've sort of believed that we should know how it's going to turn out. And we should know that it always turns out the way that I want it. And that's the only time that it was worth me doing it. It's if I get the result that I want.
And that's such a, what's the word I'm looking for? Like, not just terrible, but like, I can't even think right now. Like it is such a hindrance to your growth and your life and your happiness. And I wanna talk about what, here's the thing. We don't consciously understand that we are thinking this, but when we are obsessed with never wasting time, never wasting money, never like always quote unquote doing the right thing, there is this perfectionist fantasy behind that. There is this idea that you can ever, in some universe, always make the right choice, always make the right decision. Like there's this belief that I'm gonna start out. And if you think about it like a graph, it's just gonna be a steady slow climb all the way up, right? It's like exponentially just gonna get better and there's no pitfalls. And I'll never make a mistake and I'll never, you know, make the wrong turn.
And I don't have to tell you that it's absurd and that that will never happen. And I think when you consciously think about it, you know that that's not gonna happen. And you wouldn't even claim that that's what you're going for. But in essence, that's what your action is proving, is if I can't know if this is gonna work out exactly the way that I want it to, and that the result's gonna be great, like if I can't know before I start this business that it's gonna be a success. If I can't know before I start this relationship that I'm gonna get married to this person, if I can't know that before I, you know, start this hobby, it's gonna be my next passion project that I stick to. Like, I don't wanna spend all the money on this hobby or time. If I'm gonna let go of it in a year, then I'm not gonna do it.
And then we have all of these people that just don't do anything in their lives. They don't put themselves out there. They don't go after their dreams. They don't build the business. They don't start the passion project. They don't date the people. They don't do anything 'cause they're so terrified of wasting time. And guess what you're doing when you're doing that dinging, ding, ding. You got it. You're wasting time. You're wasting your whole life, right? And so there you have to be aware of this fantasy that you have going on, that there is some universe in which you will know what the result of your decisions in the future are, where there won't be uncertainty that will never happen.

Another underlying thing that is happening with this type of thinking is this capitalist in imposed fantasy. I think in capitalism, this, this principle, this kind of obsession with productivity and this obsession with everything, basically, basically trying to weeded out any inefficiency and make things as quick and as productive and quote unquote useful as possible has bled into our lives. So maybe you can do that with a factory, right? Maybe the, you can create a factory line where you eliminate most problems and we somehow think like this is what should happen in our lives, right? We've all been so inundated with the programming of capitalism and of this idea of like getting to a quote unquote success. That we believe that our job is to figure out like what all the inefficiencies are, what all the pitfalls are, and get rid of them so that we're only ever doing things that are productive, right?
That we're never wasting time, which is just not the way the human beings operate or are supposed to operate, or that our lives are supposed to operate, right? If you think about it, some of the most, the biggest pleasures in life is wasting time, is laying under, you know, a tree in the grass and bathing in the sun. It's doing things that don't produce anything. And yet we have this idea that if we're doing anything that isn't productive, that somehow it's bad, right? And so we have to be aware of, like, that is where our beliefs come from. And, and it's easy to see as soon as you see those beliefs, like of course they're faulty. Now it's harder to root out. But I want us to really understand where these come from, right? And so I want you to think about how often you think you're wasting time or you're wasting money, right?
Because what happens then is then we not only quote unquote waste it, right? The time is gone, the money's gone, our energy's gone. We spent the time on this thing. Then we spend more time beating ourselves up. We spend more time constantly berating ourselves of like, I should have known. I shouldn't have made that decision. What's wrong with me? I wasted so much time. I'm so lazy, I can't get that time back. I'm too old. You know, on and on and on with these thoughts. So then we waste more time just completely berating ourselves. You see this pattern that comes from this thought, and I want you to really hear me when I say this. This is a waste of my time, or I wasted my time, or I might waste my time is a thought. It is not a fact in the universe. You cannot prove to me that it was a waste of time.
And I want you to think about this truly about how this is not a truth. When you think about your life and when you think about where you are and where you think about, where you know how you've gotten here and the person that you are, it is, you have not gotten here because everything went your way. You did not become the person you are and get the traits that you want and build the resilience and the confidence or you know, all of these beautiful traits because you made the right decision every single time you are here because of all of the failures that you've had, right? Your life is built on a pile of failures. All of ours are. And you learn to navigate those. That is how you learn, always, always, always, right? And so saying that those things because they were failures, were a waste of time, is negating everything that it helped you in order to get to where you are.
I want you to think about like a very basic example. Think about like a baby trying to walk. How many times does a baby have to fall before they tried to walk? Do we say that? Like all of those attempts that they tried to do when they got up was a waste of time? Or is it built on the backs of every time they tried to stand up, they built their muscles, right? They learned more about balance, they figured out where to place their feet, and they kept failing and they kept failing until they learned to walk.
When you don't understand that, like even these quote unquote waste of time, let's say you try the business and it fails, let's say you go after the relationship and it fails. That is what teaches you how to feel certain things, how to navigate certain things, how to have your own back, how to love yourself, how to, I don't know, learn marketing, right? Like I'm mixing all of my things, but let's say, let's just go with like the business. You, you try to run a business and it doesn't work. Now what? Now we could just spend all of our time telling ourselves it was a waste of time or we could learn from it, which is how any growth happens, right? Is me doing something, failing and learning, knowing like, Hey, what was I ignoring? What were the red flags? I wasn't paying attention to? What, you know, did I not do? How was I showing up? Did I set myself up for success? Did I get the mentoring or the support that I needed? Did I read the books? Whatever I can learn, I can decide. Like maybe it wasn't even for me. I can't do that if I'm spending all of my time beating myself up, telling myself how terrible I am because of some mistaken fantasy that I should have just known somehow what was gonna happen with this business, right?
I want you to think about, 'cause again, like I talk a lot, obviously I teach about the model in the quitter club in my membership, and I teach you how to look at your thoughts. I just want you to plug in this thought. It was a waste of time into a model. If you think about that thought, how does that thought make you feel? Likely it makes you feel frustrated or annoyed or defeated. And when you're feeling that, what do you do from that place when you're telling yourself, oh my God, I just spent two years on this business. It was such a waste of time, and I feel shame and I feel frustration and I feel disappointment. What do I do? I beat myself up. I spin about it. I don't take risks anymore. I decide that it's not meant for me. I, you know, whatever, there's a million things that I do, none of them are productive and my result becomes that I waste more time. I keep wasting time.
And so we have to let go of this fantasy that we're not gonna make mistakes. That that in and of itself is not the point of life that we should be making mistakes. That that is how we learn, that is how we're gonna grow. That it is never a waste of time. It is simply a learning experience. How can you even know if it's a waste of time? This is like the interesting thing to me, like, you know, oftentimes hindsight is 2020, obviously, but oftentimes it takes us a long time to kind of get to that hindsight, even like we might have a relationship and then 10 years later we sort of realize the things that we had learned or we realized like, hey, I was really not sticking up for myself in that relationship and that taught me to kind of have my own back and to not let people treat me like this.
Right? It doesn't mean that that was a waste of time, but how can you know? Like, how can you know until years later? I know for me, I look back at my journey right now, and it's like a lot didn't make sense in 2014 when I quit a lot didn't make sense when I was in the shame and guilt in 2015, 2016 when I was building my photo booth business, I couldn't see the lessons then, right? And it wasn't like I got it that year or the next year, or even the next year. But I look back now like six years out, seven years, eight years. And I realized like what I learned, how I became strong, how I learned to drown out other people's voices, all of that came from things that I thought were a waste of time. I, I tried a number of businesses before I even started my photo booth business. Now I could look at all of those as a waste of time, or I can realize those were the stepping stones that kept teaching me what I like to work on. What I don't, what seems too hard for me. It taught me to look into how to run a business and learn marketing and take one class or whatnot.
And so you can keep this thought if you want, it's just never gonna serve you ever. Or you can look at like, my life is not gonna be one, you know, constant road straight up. It's gonna be windy, it's gonna have dips. And all of that is a part of it. It's supposed to be there. So what if we just take this out of our vocabulary, like we don't even use this sentence anymore. It cannot be a waste of time. One of my favorite quotes is, I either got the results that I wanted or the lesson I needed. Like how would your life change if you just thought about your life in that way, right? I was just talking about like, I was thinking this with respect to investment. Somebody was asking me, how do you, how I invest in you know, coaching masterminds, classes that I take for my business?
And what's fascinating is I adopted a very intentional mindset around this probably after my first year in business. And it was the same mindset that I can't obsess over what investment is gonna be a waste of money. Now let me say this, that doesn't mean that you're gonna be completely willy-nilly. That doesn't mean that like nothing is, you know, you're never not gonna think about what are the chances of your business actually being successful, like looking at them, you know, doing your research or if you wanna invest in something, really getting clear on why you wanna invest on it, what you think it's gonna help you with before you invest. But at the end of the day, you cannot know because you're not in the program. You haven't done it yet, right? And it doesn't even mean it's a waste of money for everybody.
Maybe there's times where you're gonna invest in something that, you know, sometimes it just fails. Let's say you invest in the stock market and the market goes down and you everyone loses money. But sometimes, like you're gonna invest in let's say a course. And for some people it was a life-changing course. And for you, it wasn't like you're not there on your journey, you didn't really learn anything. Who knows, there's a lot of factors. You don't get along with the coach, whatever. What I realized very early on in my journey when I started investing, 'cause I was the same way, I was terrified of like, if I spend this money and I waste it, then what? Right? Like, then I'm gonna have to beat myself up. I can never invest in anything else. And I, I talk about this a lot. I always, I had two things.
I did say, like, I started going into programs thinking if I get one thought out of this, it will be worth it because I know the power of how much one thought can change my life. 'cause it has in a number of ways, this has happened a number of times. But beyond that, one of the things I started realizing was I'm never gonna get it right. A hundred percent of the time I'm going to waste money. It is going to happen. So let me get comfortable with that because the thing is, is that if I don't invest in certain things, then I'm never gonna find the ones that are gonna change my life, right? It's the same thing. You take the analogy of dating, right? I, I know a lot of people, it's like they wanna get married and, but if you have this idea of like, I don't wanna go on a date with anyone unless they're the right person, you are never gonna meet anybody.
You have to accept, I'm gonna go on a lot of dates with people that will 100% be the wrong people for me. That it will be terrible, the date will, right? And I have to be willing to do that and know that it's not a waste of time because I will never meet the right person if I don't open myself up to trying to meet a lot of people, right? When I started investing in programs, I was realizing like there some where, you know, I think it's not gonna have enough value. There's some where I'm not gonna, I'm just not gonna get anything out of it. Okay? But on the whole, the majority of them are gonna teach me something, are gonna gimme a thought, are gonna change my life. And that's exactly what has happened. I have, I have invested over a hundred thousand dollars at this point in my, in classes now, this is over the last five years.
And I am always like, I make the money first and then I invest it. But it has been a resounding success because if I can invest a hundred thousand and I've made over 700,000 maybe in the last five years, I think now it's clearly the ROI is there, right? And I have learned skills that I will continue making hundreds of thousands, you know, year after year, as long as I kinda wanna keep this business going. So it has worked. And yet in that a hundred thousand there's a pile of failures, there's a pile of things that I have invested in that I was like, well, didn't really get much out of that, that one wasn't like the best. I wouldn't recommend it or whatnot, right? Okay. And then I move on, and I will say this before I actually move on. I think that the important part is when I, when I approach take this approach, it actually allows me to learn from it because I, I finish it and then I think, okay, what was I ignoring when I took this?
You know, what red flags was I not seeing what, what clues can I take from kind of figuring out, I don't think most people's aren't a scam. Again, I think it's just maybe not where I am on my journey, but sometimes I look at like, yeah, this is, I I was sort of wanting this thing. I was wanting someone to gimme permission or I was hoping that this was the magic key. And I can see that that is not the best way to invest in a program. And so I would learn from it so that I can make better investments going forward, right? And I now, I'm a much better judge at like what I need, where I'm at in my business, what I wanna spend money on, okay? But I can only do that if I stop beating myself up and thinking that every single investment I make has to be, uh, you know, I have to knock it outta the park. It has to be a home run. It has to be the best thing I've ever taken.
This is the same thing with like energy, right? You can think about it, whatever you're expend, whether it's time, whether it's money, whether it's energy, whether it's like, okay, well I, a lot of people think like, well I'm, I've spent so much time building this course and then I'm, you know, gonna fold the business. Like they don't wanna, it's like the sunk cost. I don't wanna lose this energy I put in, but again, what did I learn from expending that energy, right? What did I learn about myself? What skills did I attain? It's not a waste of energy, it was a building block that takes me to the next thing and the next thing, right? It's fascinating when it comes to money, I think about this stuff like we inve, we spend, so, I mean, we're like a consumerist economy, and we spend a ridiculous amount of money on so many things, so much crap we all have in our houses.
Like everyone's garages. You can't even fit cars in 'cause we have so much stuff on, I see like women, not, there's no shade. I spend this money, but the amount we spend on like upkeep, whether it's nails, now, lashes, hair extensions, you know, like haircuts, hair, whatever, all of this stuff, we spend so much money, I, I was thinking about people spend tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands on a wedding, on a a day. And because that's acceptable in our society because that's something that's, I don't know, we, we have added some kind of value to, nobody blinks an eye. But then when you're asked to like invest in yourself or like learn, you know, something, we scrutinize it to the point where we feel debilitated because we're not used to investing money in ourselves. We're not used to investing outside of traditional education, which again, we're very much encouraged to waste a ton of money on degrees that don't do anything.
I think that we have this idea like that if I spend this money on myself, then I have to somehow prove the ROI, right? I, you don't ever do that with like a wedding or like hair extensions, but with, with, you know, investing in a program or learning a new skill or you know, any therapy or whatever we have to sort of justify to ourselves and you just wanna question why, right? You wanna figure out like, if I have money to spend, what are the things that are important to me and what do I do? Like where does my growth lie? Where's my happiness lie? What are the things that I want to spend money on? And then you have to realize that like even when you do that, the things that you spend money on, some of them will be a quote unquote waste.
Like the same way consumerism, right? It's not like you buy clothes and some of them are gonna be ill-fitting or they're not, are gonna be cheap material or like the, they're not gonna be made well and it's gonna rip and you're not gonna be like, oh, I'm such an idiot. I can't pick out clothes properly. I should never buy clothes again. It's like, okay, it is just the way that it ha like I'm gonna have to kiss a bunch of frogs in order to find the prince. That's the way that it works. And I think that the only problem here is that we just spend our time telling ourselves that we should have somehow known when it's impossible to predict that future. Right? How would you know any of this? I recently had this same experience. When I was redoing a sales page, I was, I had hired someone to help me redo the sales page for my membership.
And I, I think about this a lot 'cause entrepreneurs I think go through the same exact thing when you're hiring a contractor. When you're hiring someone to help you in your business. It's like, unless it blows it outta the water and there's no mistakes and there's no change, then it's a waste of money, right? And so a lot of times I think entrepreneurs like hold onto their money for a really long time because there's so scared of quote unquote wasting it and then they end up wasting so much time and energy instead trying to do everything themselves. And so I've been more cognizant of that and been trying to outsource things. And I got the sales page back and it was a great sales page. But what was fascinating is that in the process of doing that sales page, it really started because I had to provide some of the copy and I had to go through a lot of the stuff of like what I wanted to tell them, like what I wanted in it and, and I, what I didn't.
And then I gave it off to them and then they gave it back to me. And then in that process it really started turning the wheels for me, like about the program and how I talk about the program and kind of my messaging and stuff. And it really like shifted something for me in the last couple of weeks where like I wanted to change some of the messaging and I wanted to, you know, talk about the quitter club in a, in a slightly different way and that would change the whole sales page. And so I'd already paid for the sales page, they got it back to me, they did their end of the bargain, right? But then I wanted to change stuff and I was thinking about it that like I could sit here now and beat myself up and be like, why did you waste this money?
Why did you have them build it before you really knew what the messaging was? Um, you can't change it now because now you've already paid for this and it'll be a waste or whatnot. And I realized like I had sat for with it for a second 'cause I was starting to have those thoughts. I was thinking like, well great, I just wasted this money on the sales page because I'm not gonna use the one that they did. I mean, I'm gonna alter it a little bit. I'm gonna change it for like, some of the new messaging. But then I was thinking about it and I was like, the only reason I got to this new messaging that I love that I think is actually so much better in the way that I want to talk about the, uh, quota club is because I had gotten the sales page, like me hiring them out was what triggered me thinking about it in a different way.
And going back to the basics and sitting and pouring over their sales page was where I was starting to think about like, okay, no, but what am I promising and what are they gonna get? And that is what triggered me thinking about my messaging in a different way. And so I wouldn't have gotten to this point if I didn't have the sales page. So I can look at that sales page as a waste, right? I can think like, oh great, I did this and then now I wanna change something stupid. Me. I shouldn't have done that. There's something wrong with me. Or I can be like, yeah, this is what, this was the stepping stone to me really getting my messaging, honing it in, right? This is where I kind of got the next level of like what I wanna talk about with this membership.
And again, all of it is made up like obviously like I, you know, you can think that hey, she's just trying to convince herself that she didn't waste money. Sure it's all thoughts, but I just think about what thought is gonna serve you, right? Me thinking that this sales page was a waste of money is only gonna lead to shame and a negative spiral and beating myself up and not actually working on my business. And me really thinking about like, this was the catalyst that got me to like actually find this new messaging. And even if I have to change the sales page, or even if I have to pay more, I actually have messaging now that's so much more in line with what I wanna sell. And like ultimately that's what I've been working towards. And so of course I'm gonna spend more money than I thought I was gonna do and I'm actually gonna get the messaging that I want.
And so I just want you to think about like how different your life will be if you don't have to constantly predict winners every, in everything that you do. Like, if you can allow that, that doesn't mean that you don't know what you're doing or that there's something wrong with you, but it simply means that you made one decision and then you got more information and then you made another decision from there because you didn't have that information beforehand, right? Like how different you can explore and actually make progress. And again, I say this because I work in the Quitter Club in the membership, I work with so many people who I see stay stuck for so many years because they're so afraid of wasting time. It's so backwards, right? It's like, but we already are wasting time 'cause we're not doing anything, we're not learning anything.
We're not changing anything. I think about Gary Vee don't know if you guys are familiar with Gary Vaynerchuk. He is like a, a marketing guru type person. On like everywhere actually Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, whatever. He talks a lot about marketing stuff, but he also like talks and, and about business. And one of the things that he said a long time ago that I had heard that I loved, because he's sort of known for making really accurate, uh, predictions about what was gonna happen with social media. Like he started from like before Facebook and stuff was blowing up. And then with Instagram, like he saw, he's been able to really predict the rise of a lot of like tiktoks, Snapchat, all these these things and like telling people how to utilize it. And so that's why he's, he now has millions and millions of followers and he, you know, has done really well.
But what he talked about was like, listen, you guys see the, the successes. You don't see how many incorrect predictions I've made, right? How many things like I bet a lot of money on and lost on different like platforms and stuff. And he was talking about how he, he is like, I would rather try to juggle 80 balls and have five drop or 10 drop than try to jug juggle two balls to make sure that I keep them both in the air the whole time, right? And it's such a like, profound way of looking at your life. I think for so many of us that are so afraid of failure is like if I am not moving because I'm so scared of, of, you know, if I'm only juggling two balls because I'm so terrified. 'cause if one drops then I have to spend my whole life beating myself up. Then I only in my life get those two balls. Like that's the only thing that I get to, you know, have in my life contribute to my life. But
If I decide like I'm okay with a couple balls dropping, I'm okay getting it wrong. I'm okay predicting it incorrectly. 'cause I know that on the whole, I have pretty good judgments and I kind of know what I'm doing and I can trust myself and I can learn from the mistakes and then I can have so much more. I can try so many things. I can experiment so much. And I see this for so many people that wanna try a bunch of stuff or wanna figure out what they want. Like you can't figure out what you want unless you're willing to experiment. And you can't experiment unless you're willing to fail and you can't fail unless you're willing to quote unquote waste time.
So like, what if it's just not a waste of time or energy or money? What if everything you do is what's gonna lead you to where you want to go? What if you could trust yourself to know that what the next step is and then trust yourself to figure it out regardless of what happens, whether it's a success or a failure. How much of your life would change if you were able to do that? Quite a lot my friends.
If you want help with that, I want you to join me in the Quitter Club because this is the work that we do together. I will help you figure out how to get rid of these thoughts that you stop thinking things like I don't wanna waste my time. You can go to lessonsfromquitter.com/quitterclub and join the wait list so that you can be notified when we open. And I want you to go on from here and I want you to go waste some time, waste some money, know you'll be okay. Know that it'll teach you something. Learn to trust yourself. All right, my friends, I hope this was helpful. I'll be back next week with another episode.
Hey, if you are looking for more in-depth help with your career, whether that's dealing with all of the stress, worry, and anxiety that's leading to burnout in your current career or figuring out what your dream career is and actually going after it, I want you to join me in the Quitter Club. It is where we quit what is no longer working. Like perfectionism, people pleasing imposter syndrome… and we start working on what does, and we start taking action towards the career and the life that you actually want. We will take the concepts that we talk about on the podcast and apply them to your life and you will get the coaching, tools, and support that you need to actually make some real change. So go to lessonsfromaquitter.com/quitter club and get on the waitlist. Doors are closed right now, but they will be open soon.