Notes From a Neuro Nerd: The Science Behind Living Your Best Life
Welcome to Notes from a Neuro Nerd, where brain science meets practical tools for living with purpose, clarity, and joy. Join Monica—a certified life-purpose coach and neuroscience enthusiast—and her partner, Austin, as they explore the mindset shifts, habits, and tools that can help you build a fulfilling life.
Tune in to uncover the ‘why’ behind your thoughts and behaviors and get actionable, science-backed strategies to boost your well-being. If you're ready to design your best life, you’re in the right place!
Notes From a Neuro Nerd: The Science Behind Living Your Best Life
76. Books Aren't Written, They're Rewritten
"Books aren't written, they're rewritten" - Michael Crichton
In this episode, we reveal how embracing the ebb and flow of creativity is the real key to building a thriving online business. It's not about flawless execution from the get-go but rather about nurturing a simple idea through action, learning, and inevitable mishaps.
By treating your business as a work in progress, you'll find beauty in the messiness and learn why getting started is far more important than waiting for perfection. In business (as in life), failure is not the enemy. It's an invaluable teacher.
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Hello and welcome to the profitable Nomad Couple podcast. This is a show where we share all of our secrets about building a sustainable location independent lifestyle.
Speaker 2:We're Austin and Monica. We're a digital Nomad couple here to help you develop an entrepreneurial mindset, ignite your passions and develop a purpose-driven online business.
Speaker 1:Get ready for weekly insights and inspiring stories to empower you to live life on your own terms.
Speaker 2:So are you ready to unlock the Nomad mindset and embrace a life of limitless possibilities? Let's dive in. Hey friends, welcome back. Our episode today is centered around this quote Books aren't written, they're rewritten, and I understand and I recognize that this quote is mostly for writers and authors, but when I heard this quote, it's one that I've always come back to and it's been really meaningful to me, and I think there are a lot of lessons in this quote that apply to building a business and personal development, and so I want to talk about that side of this quote. I know most of you listening aren't writers, but there's a lot of good takeaways here, so we're going to jump into it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think the biggest point of this episode is that you recognize that success is a process, not a destination. This is a journey that we're on together, and building a business is a journey.
Speaker 2:If we were to rewrite this quote for business, instead of saying books aren't written, they're rewritten, I think I would say building a successful business isn't immediate, it's iterative. You go through lots of changes and iterations in your business and you grow and adapt with it.
Speaker 1:So yeah, essentially the original quote is talking about the fact that you can't sit down and, in one go, write a New York Times bestseller. Through the writing process, there's going to be several drafts and several revisions, and sometimes you might even have to start completely over and then keep going until you write a successful book. And so, just like you can't sit down and write a book on one go, you can't start an online business and have it be a raging success overnight. Business are not built in a day.
Speaker 2:Yeah, businesses and Rome not built in a day. Yeah, actually we heard of an author, rob Diles, who was writing a book. He told us that he basically had the whole book written out and then he felt like it wasn't quite right and wasn't what he wanted to put out into the world and he scrapped the whole thing, started from basically from ground zero. Again, that happens, that happens sometimes and so, just like, like Monica said, that kind of parallels our personal experience with building an online business. Businesses need constant refining and improvement and it's going to change. That's just how how it works.
Speaker 1:Yeah, one of our big values is to keep it super real with you guys, and I think one of the really damaging things about social media is people are only posting the best side of things, or we keep seeing these overnight success stories quote, unquote overnight success stories because there really are no overnight success stories and we keep hearing people being super successful, really fast, and like, wow, I just built this YouTube channel from scratch in 30 days and now I'm making six figures from it or whatever it ends up being, and that's not necessarily the case. One of my favorite quotes is from Messi, who is a soccer player or a football player, depending on where you're from.
Speaker 1:He said it took me 17 years and 114 days to become an overnight success. Even if we are seeing these quote-unquote overnight successes, we don't see all the background that people are putting into it, because they don't want you to see it. They want you to think that literally they were an overnight success. But that's not how businesses grow. So we put together three different pieces of advice as far as really adopting this mindset of your business is an iteration, not the end-all be-all.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So here are three lessons from this quote. The first one is that it's not worth your time to painstakingly plan every detail of your business when you first are getting started. This was something that I did as a kind of a trap that I fell into. I think we would spend countless hours, countless days, creating a full-fledged operations manual and a business plan with every single detail of our business and planning out our email sequence and our website flow and all that stuff, before we even had a single client, and I remember just getting frustrated constantly. Every time that our business pivoted or shifted or we signed on a new client, we would learn something new and whether it was big or small, and there'd be some change to this plan that I made. And I just remember getting frustrated because I'd spent so much time working on it and now we're just going to go change it.
Speaker 2:Looking back, I realized that I think what was going on was building a business is a very creative process. Creative processes are inherently messy, and I think that was kind of my way of containing the mess. I'm a very organized, orderly type of person. I don't really like mess, whether it's literal or figurative mess, and so I was trying to contain this whole mess by creating systems and processes and creating guides and plans and manuals for everything that we did in our business. And looking back, it was kind of a waste of time but it also restrained me and didn't allow me to be fully creative in our process and to really see our business from a big picture. Creating a business is messy and I say, let it be. Let it be messy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, really, all you need is an idea, and then you need to start taking that messy action and start trying things out, start experimenting, start taking on clients and seeing what works and what doesn't work for you. You don't need to have it all defined before you get started. All right, the second lesson from this quote is that you shouldn't tie the outcome of your business to your personal worth. Especially if your first attempt at business isn't the raging success you were hoping it would be, it's really important to not let that affect your view of yourself and your personal worth.
Speaker 2:So, just like a writer, they have an idea of a book that they want to write and they can envision the story. Maybe they have the whole thing laid out in their mind, or they can envision the success they're going to have as an author and they sit down to write that first draft. And that first draft isn't going to match their dream, whether it's the dream for that individual book or their career as an author as a whole. Similarly, the initial stages of your business might not resemble the polished, fully successful, fully automated, money-making business that you envision having a decade down the road or years down the road from now. But that's okay, that's totally okay and that's normal and that's the way it's supposed to be. I believe the first versions of your business is it's a starting point, it's a work in progress that's going to evolve as you evolve and your business is going to go through various iterations and improvements, even. But all of that comes, like we talked about in the last point, after you take messy action.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you think that reminded me of the opening scene from the movie the Lost City with Sandra Bullock, where the author is trying to write a scene and then she keeps like deleting it and then rewriting it and then deleting it because she can't figure out what it is to get to that ending that she really wants to in her book and the. I mean that's. I really like that movie.
Speaker 2:That's a good one.
Speaker 1:Kind of cheesy, I bet it was funny. But I think similarly to that, like you have to kind of try things, kind of put it on paper, kind of see what's working and what doesn't work and then run with it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So here's a point about that that Monica and I have been talking about a lot recently. In our society we're typically taught like especially through our education system that there's a right and a wrong. You know like. You take a course, you learn things, and then you take a test or you have exams at the end of the year and there are right and wrong question like right or wrong answers to the questions, and then you're graded on that and that ingrains in us this, this belief that there's a right and a wrong to everything.
Speaker 2:And so we do everything that we can to avoid the wrong, and I think that attempts to avoid doing things wrong blocks us in from experimenting. We're afraid to experiment with something new because we don't want it to be wrong. But that's how you learn, that's how you're going to figure it out, that's how you're going to build that successful business that you want is going through different iterations and variations of your business that don't work, and you're going to learn through that process what does work. And that does not mean your failure. That means that you've learned something really valuable.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I always think of the example of watching a toddler who's learning how to crawl or learning how to walk, and at first they try to, you know, kind of crawl on their their stomachs, but then they realize that this isn't getting me as far. So then they go up to their their hands and their knees and they fall on their faces a bunch because they can't figure out how to coordinate moving their hands and their knees together. And it's hilarious, we all laugh at them. But they keep going and then they start pulling themselves up and then all of a sudden they start trying to let go of the couch but then they fall again and and it would be so easy to be like you know what, forget this. I am tired of falling on my face. I am tired of people laughing at me. I am perfectly content sitting on the floor and then people carry me and stop, like or not, and not trying again. But babies are so resilient because they know every time something goes wrong they learn okay, that didn't work on, let me try again next time, you know. And then they keep going and going and going.
Speaker 1:Nothing we do is ever just inherent. Like we have to learn everything. We had to learn how to walk, how to eat, how to to speak, how to understand, how to see. We couldn't even see when we were babies and we had to learn how to do all of those things. But then, somewhere and along the road, we start to expect ourselves to try a new thing and get it perfectly. And if we don't get it perfectly, then there's something wrong with us. But that's not how we are designed to learn. We're designed to take messy action, we're designed to fall on our face every now and again, and we're designed to learn from it and then be able to create a better version of of our business, of our lives it makes me think of the, the stat.
Speaker 2:You've probably heard the stat before that 80% of businesses fail. What I take away from that is that doesn't mean if you start a business and it fails, then okay, that was your go at business. You're one of the 80%, you know. You gave it a try, let's move on.
Speaker 1:Not meant to be a business owner.
Speaker 2:Instead. Think of that, think of that statistic as okay. That just means you need to try 10 times. Um, if you try and it fails, try again, and then, if that one fails, maybe you're going to be successful in your third attempt, maybe your fourth, maybe not until your tenth try. You're going to make it, you're going to make it in the way that you want, but you just need to keep trying. I think, like, honestly, it sounds just simple, but but I think it is. I think it's just a matter of um, not being afraid of that failure and not going back to our. The initial lesson from this point that we're making is, uh, like, don't make it a reflection of who you are as a person, um, don't make it about you.
Speaker 1:I think that is, for a lot of people, easier said than done. So something that has been helping me wrap my mind around that is, is thinking about it like a game. Austin and I love games. We love board games, we have card games, we have strategy games, and every time I play a game, I try a new strategy, I try something different, just to see. Maybe it'll work better, maybe it won't, I don't know, let's find out and but I never attach my worth to the outcome if I lose and I'm like well, I'm not going to do that strategy again and I want to play the game again and then we play again and we try again, I try something different, and then I start winning and it's the best okay, sometimes that happens but?
Speaker 1:but the idea is that we need to start thinking of our business as more of a strategy game. Let's just try something out and see what works, instead of like if it doesn't work, instead of saying wow, I must be a loser, saying, oh darn, that strategy, that business didn't work. What can I do next?
Speaker 2:okay, our very last lesson from this number three is there's actually a point that we've kind of tied into our first one. We talked about it already, but we'll we'll kind of rehash it just a bit business is messy. Building a business is a messy process, and what I mean by that is it can be very unpredictable. It involves a lot of trial and error. You're going to make pivots, there's going to be unexpected challenges and hurdles you come up against, and it's going to constantly be adapting. You are going to be changing, your market is going to change. So I recommend that we learn to embrace this uncertainty and see it as a part of the entrepreneurial journey how exciting.
Speaker 1:I love the fact that, as a business owner, I have the ability to grow, to change, to adapt and my business is going to do it right along with me, that I am not locked in to a specific job title or salary. I am. I have the ability to grow and change along with my business, and that is exciting. You know, the saddest thing to me is when I see business owners start to freak out when things start to change, because they're like oh no, this has been working for me forever. What do I do now? But if you can see this as okay, this is a growing opportunity. This is the best time to try new things, to grow, to expand to, to evolve as a person and allow my business to evolve with me. Business just becomes fun.
Speaker 2:It just becomes part of that journey that you're on yeah, so, uh, those are our key takeaways from the quote. Books aren't written, they're rewritten. So if things aren't working out for you right now, like, please don't get discouraged. Um, that's going to happen in business and um, if we just keep picking ourselves up and keep going at it, you're going to hit your stride and you're going to find a way to make it successful. I know you are thanks so much for joining us here on the profitable nomad couple podcast.
Speaker 1:We appreciate you listening to us today if you enjoyed this episode, share it on instagram and be sure to tag us at awesom and monica.
Speaker 2:Together, we can inspire others to embrace a location independent lifestyle and while you're there, we'd love to connect with you, so make sure you follow us for more tips and inspiration on living your dream location independent lifestyle until next week.
Speaker 1:Remember that you have the power to shape your own path. So stay curious, stay adventures and stay connected. You.
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