____________________________________ Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.
____________________________________ Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.
success is going to take you longer than you think it should, and it will be harder to get there than you think it will be. And so, knowing those two things, you have to have a system in your life Number one, for making sure that you actually enjoy the journey towards whatever you think success is, and number two, periodically checking in with yourself to make sure that the actions that you're taking are getting you any closer to your idea of success. Welcome back to a Friday episode of Life Beyond the Briefs. I'm your host, brian Glass. Hey, I have a podcast. I'm an injury lawyer in Northern Virginia and I help run a company called Great Legal Marketing which helps solo and small law firm owners have better businesses so that they can live better lives.
Speaker 1:
And on today's episode, we're going to be talking about how long it takes to achieve success and the methods that I use to track. Is the stuff that I'm doing actually getting me any closer to where I want to be? We're going to dive right in after the break. So this episode is inspired by my LinkedIn friend, talar Herculian-Courcy, who earlier this week, just discovered that I have a podcast and a funny story I've been posting almost daily on LinkedIn now for about a year and a half and the first time that I ever felt like I had some modicum of success was when Talar reshared one of my posts and at the time she had about 12,000, 15,000 followers and I had two or three and I just I remember where I was and thinking, holy shit, like somebody important in the LinkedIn world has noticed me and shared something that I'm doing. So I'm grateful for that. But then last week she commented on a post of mine after my interview with Jen Deal, which you should go back and listen to if you haven't said, oh, I didn't even know. Brian had a podcast and for somebody who's been quietly trying to self promote this thing and trying to grow it organically and not trying to beat my chest about having a podcast and doing this like maybe I should be doing that more. So we had a discussion about like quiet self-promotion and why that doesn't work and the reality is that most people don't notice all of the things that you're doing. It just doesn't happen.
Speaker 1:
I've told this story before about the guy who worked in our building who found us through a disability lawyer in California actually, even though the sign outside our door says disability lawyers and so people need to be told and reminded, and told, and reminded, and told, and reminded what it is that you do. And in our own heads, we think that we are bragging or we think that we are talking way too much about ourselves, but I think the reality is that people, they just don't pay that much attention because everybody's got their own bandwidth focused on their own things that they're doing. And so, as you are marketing yourself and your law firm, it's easy to feel as though you keep talking about yourself all the time, but you need to realize that not everybody out there thinks that you've been talking about yourself all the time, and the reality is that podcasts are hard to grow, man, and there's a couple of reasons surrounding podcasts. One of them is discoverability right, it's not like. It's not exactly like SEO. You can do some SEO on podcast titles, but really most people are not out there looking for new podcasts and most people who listen to podcasts and they're in the minority to begin with but most people have their four to seven podcasts that they listen to. I think the average podcast listener listens to about five, which creates a scalability issue. Right, you have to hone in and you have to elbow your way into the five podcasts that somebody listens to on a regular basis. And so I get people that reach out to me. They all thinking about starting a podcast about X, y, z because I want to grow my audience.
Speaker 1:
Like, no, don't do that, because a podcast is a shitty way to grow an audience. A podcast is a great way to serve an audience that you have or to serve an audience that you are growing, but it is not viral. You are not going to unless you are a celebrity already. You're not going to have somebody sharing your podcast with many other people. It just doesn't happen. And so don't start one because you want to grow an audience. Start one because you want to serve an audience. And think about it this way no-transcript every single week, like you would be. Most of us would be over the moon about that, but it's easy to get depressed about shit. I put out that episode and only a hundred people downloaded it. So no, don't start a podcast to grow an audience because the growth is going to take way longer and it's going to be way harder than you thought it would be. And so if you don't actually enjoy the process of podcasting and interviewing people, you're not going to stick with it. That's why most podcasts last only three to eight episodes. And that is the same of almost everything If you don't actually enjoy it, you won't do it. So people ask me about podcasting, they ask me about LinkedIn, they ask me about social media and they say, oh, I couldn't do that, then don't right.
Speaker 1:
There's plenty of ways to grow your business and to advertise yourself and to market yourself, and you don't have to pick a way that you don't actually enjoy. Or you don't have to pick a medium that you don't actually enjoy engaging in and you shouldn't, because you won't stick with it. And what happens all the time and it happens in business growth and in social media growth, but also in things like weight loss is people set a goal and then it's usually an arbitrary goal and they set a deadline because they've been told they need to make set smart goals and there needs to be time bound. And then they pick a method of doing it. It might be cardio, it might be running, it might be elliptical, it might be kickboxing, like whatever the thing is, and that if you pick something that you don't actually like doing, then you're bound to fail. The best form of cardio for you is the cardio that you actually are excited to go and do. That's why people get into these weight loss fads. They do it for a little bit and then they burn out because you didn't actually like doing it If you actually liked going for long runs and you liked how it felt during the run.
Speaker 1:
Everybody likes the runners high. Nobody likes getting the runners high, or very few people like getting the runners high. If you like how it feels during the run, you will run more than people that like to run for losing weight or like how they feel after a run. It's just a fact and as you're growing your business, growing your referral network, you have to enjoy the method and the means through which you're doing it and if you don't, you're going to struggle. The second piece of that is that you have to have a goal that's large enough and that's meaningful enough to you that in the times where you are struggling because there are days when you're not going to like doing it, even if you do doing it most of the time but in the times that you're struggling you have a reason to push through and to get to the other side, because anybody who tells you that it's not going to be hard and there won't be hard patches along the way is either never done it themselves or they're lying to you because they have a course or a subscription or something else that they want to sell you. They usually have the easy solution.
Speaker 1:
There is no easy solution to any kind of success. Everything takes time and everything is harder than you think it will be. That's why there are so many people who are not successful, and one of the things that happens when you're 40 and you're 40s is you look around and you see all these people that are successful and you go shit, I'm far behind. But then periodically you're reminded that those people are actually 55 and they are 15 years ahead of you and they've had 15 years more time to get to where they are and 15 years of more struggle that they've gotten through. That has landed them where they are. And if you aren't periodically reminded of that, it can be easy to compare your chapter three to somebody else's chapter 17. And that can make it easy to say I'm a failure, I'm unsuccessful, and that's what leads to what we call imposter syndrome. I don't belong here. The other thing that it leads to is chasing somebody else's idea of success, or chasing somebody else's method that they achieve success. Again, it might be social media, might be podcasting, might be LinkedIn growth, might be trial work.
Speaker 1:
There's this idea among lawyers that there's a right way and a wrong way to be lawyers that quote real lawyers or trial lawyers or real lawyers or CEOs. Or the goal is to be the CEO of your law firm, or the goal is to do great work for clients and get all your clients through referrals, or the goal is to have the greatest digital marketing and attract all your clients through that, and the reality is, again, there's no one right, correct pathway to success. There are many ways to get there and you have to focus on the end result that you actually want. And the end result that you actually want is and the end result that you actually want is not usually is usually not more dollars. I hear people all the time I want to have a seven figure law firm, I want to have an eight figure law firm, I want to make a million dollars, and the reality, I think, is that you don't actually want any of those results, because there's many like. You could have an eight figure law firm if you spent mid seven figures on pay-per-click, like it wouldn't be that hard If you had the bankroll, you can get to the top line.
Speaker 1:
What really matters is the bottom line, and what really matters is how you think you will feel when you have the bottom line, because it's not that you want to make a million dollars per year, it's that you want to live the life that you think you'll live when you make a million dollars per year. And that scales back down to every goal, whether that goal is graduate law school, or try my first case, or make partner, or make a hundred thousand or make 150,000, like. Whatever the goal is, it's really not that you want the thing. It's that you want to feel the way you think you're going to feel when you get the thing. And so the exercise that I recommend over and over and over to new lawyers, old lawyers, anybody who's trying to get more out of their life, is the vivid vision exercise.
Speaker 1:
It's a book by Cameron Herald. It's about writing down, sitting down first and brainstorming what are all the things that you want out of your life and then putting it into a narrative format without thinking about how are we going to get to any of these things? But what do I want my life to feel like? Not look like, not be what I wanted to feel like three years from now less stressed, more fulfilling and you're gonna put color and put detail around all of those things and you're just going to share that with people, and a while back I shared my 2025 vivid vision and and things have changed in that I went back and I rewrote it coming into this year and some of the details change.
Speaker 1:
What you notice is some goals fall off because it wasn't really a goal for you. Some goals get added and some stay, and the ones that stay are the important ones and they're usually not tied at least not in my case. They're not tied to dollar figures. It's tied to, broadly speaking, freedom, the ability to do what you want when you want with who you want for as long as you want. Broadly speaking, the stuff that has stayed for me has been tied to those kinds of goals, and my method for going through this exercise is I revise it about once a year, take things off that are not important to me, add things on that are important to me, but really focus on the things that have stayed year over year, and I share that with a group of guys that I talk with every Tuesday night and we shared that on our Cancun trip boys trip in January. And then, from that three-year vision, come back to what are the things that I need to do this year that will get me closer to that goal. And then from that, what are the things that I need to do, can achieve in the next 90 days that will get me closer, and the things that you can do in the next 90 days. You really need to have accountability around and be running hard towards, because that's ultimately the activity that's going to move your life along, so that life is happening for you and not to you.
Speaker 1:
Now an exercise that we had lawyers do at the last Great League Marketing Summit on the last day, I think in the last hour of the event, is write a letter to themselves a year from now. What will your life look like? What will your life feel like? And we're getting ready to mail those letters back out to the lawyers to remind them. Now we're six, seven months out from the event. Here's what you said your life was going to be like have your actions tracked to your words? Does the visual match the audio? And in many cases, I think the answer is going to be no, because what happens is we write down our goals, put them in an envelope where you put them in your desk drawer and you forget about them.
Speaker 1:
And everybody says they want accountability. Almost nobody actually wants accountability, because it's hard. It's hard to be called out on your bullshit. It's hard to be told you're working on stuff that doesn't matter. It's hard to recognize that you are working on low dollar per hour tasks. When you say you want to run a seven-figure or an eight-figure law firm, but you need it.
Speaker 1:
Sometimes you need to be reminded that here's the goal that you said you were going to achieve and you either need to say, oh, I don't actually want it, and it's okay to admit that you don't actually want the thing that you said you wanted. That's okay, because our lives change, the facts on the ground change and sometimes your targets are going to change, and that's totally fine. What's not okay is to have a goal that you really want and to not be taking action towards it, to not be revisiting it, to not have your sights set on that big-ass goal, because that's how you end up at 55, not successful, looking back with regret and just know if it's hard it's supposed to be. If this were easy, everybody would do it and it wouldn't be worthwhile. And so if you are in the middle of a hard season, recognize it's a season.
Speaker 1:
Refocus on your goals and refocus on what will happen to your life when you hit those goals. And make sure that the goals are calibrated to what you actually want out of your life. They're not some arbitrary random number picked out of the air because somebody else said it at a conference and you thought that'd be pretty cool if I had that also. What will achieving those goals actually do for your life? And if you're listening to this and you're going shit, I need that. I'm going to invite you to the summit this year, october 3rd through the 5th in Phoenix, arizona, and I'm going to drop the link in the show description and I want to see you out there. Have a great weekend.