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250. Optimize Your Odds: The Science of Actually Reaching Your Goals · The Life-First Solopreneur

• 0:00
  Carly Ries: In this episode of the Aspiring Solopreneur, author and strategist Kyle Austin Young shares the wildest story from his consulting career. One that went from, I just lost months of income, to you're the first consultant who's ever done exactly what you said you'd do. From there, Kyle breaks down his simple, super practical framework for probability hacking, mapping out everything that has to go right, spotting the risks most solopreneurs ignore, and actually changing the odds in your favor. So if you've ever wondered when to double down, when to walk away, and how to pick goals you can actually stick with, this episode will completely change how you think about success. You're listening to The Aspiring Solopreneur, the podcast for anyone on the solo business journey, whether you're just toying with the idea, taking your first bold step, or have been running your own show for years and want to keep growing, refining, and thriving.
• 0:52
  I'm Carly Ries, and along with my cohost, Joe Rando, we're your guides through the crazy but awesome world of being a company of one. As part of LifeStarr, a digital hub dedicated to all things solopreneurship, we help people design businesses that align with their life's ambitions so they can work to live, not live to work. If you're looking for a get rich quick scheme, this is not the place for you. But if you want real world insights from industry experts, lessons from the successes and stumbles of fellow solopreneurs, and practical strategies for building and sustaining a business you love, you're in the right spot. Because flying solo in business doesn't mean you're alone.
• 1:28
  No matter where you are in your journey, we've got your back. Kyle, I didn't say this to you offline. I know you're an author, you're your business, but your name, I feel like you need to be a big big celebrity. Like, Kyle Austin, and the award goes to Kyle Austin Young. Do you think that a lot?
• 1:48
  Kyle Austin Young: Well, there's a little bit of backstory to that. You know, what happened was I have a very common name, Kyle Young. And so I live in Nashville, Tennessee. The director of the Country Music Hall of Fame, his name is Kyle Young. I sometimes get phone calls confirming my golf reservations, which is always very exciting for me, but then I worried I had dementia because I didn't make golf reservations.
• 2:05
  But they had both of our names in the system, so he'd call in and make a reservation. I get a call to confirm it the day before tee time. So that was a challenge. There was a basketball player named Kyle Young. There was somebody who actually committed some crimes and went to prison.
• 2:18
  And so I got a Google alert one day saying Kyle Young had been sentenced to seven years in jail and that was alarming. So finally I was on a call with McGraw Hill and they said we googled you and we just can't figure out which one you are. And I said, all right, it's time to call myself what my grandma's always called me. I'll be Kyle Austin Young. And so the first podcast I went on, and this was a while ago, at least in relation to the book, he said, it sounds like the name of a professional wrestler. I don't know where he got that idea. I watched a decent amount of professional wrestling. I don't think it sounds like professional wrestlers. So I like your description a little bit better. Massive celebrity. That'd be fun.
• 2:49
  Carly Ries: There you go. Yeah.
• 2:50
  Joe Rando: I got the same impression when I saw it. I was like, oh, we got somebody famous on. Cool.
• 2:58
  And you wanna talk about common names, I mean, I'm Joe Rando.
• 3:02
  Kyle Austin Young: So the rando is a funny implication, isn't it? That's great. Joe Rando. really it hadn't hit me that way, but I get it now that I hear you say it.
• 3:09
  Joe Rando: I'm sorry I brought it up.
• 3:11
  Kyle Austin Young: No. I like it.
• 3:12
  Carly Ries: Well, Kyle, you chose our favorite of our two icebreaker questions because it has the best stories. So we have to ask you, what is the wildest thing that's happened to you as a solopreneur?
• 3:21
  Kyle Austin Young: I've had a lot of wild things happen to me as a solopreneur. But what I thought about, you know, I'm a consultant and so for over a decade now I've worked with people, typically small business owners who were trying to accomplish these big audacious goals. And one story that really, stuck with me ever since is I was working with the CEO of a healthcare company that wanted to change the conversation around cancer in The United States. Really prominent individual, somebody who'd done incredible research and now wanted to have an impact. And this person was paying me quite a bit of money at a time when my family didn't have a lot of money about ten years ago.
• 3:55
  And we were making investments in our lives. We were in the process of adopting a child, which was very expensive. And one day I logged into my PayPal and I had this enormous negative balance. And the negative balance had come from the fact that this CEO had marked every dollar he'd ever given me as fraud. And I didn't know that I had any challenges with this person.
• 4:15
  I thought that we were getting along very well. so I was super confused, spent a couple hours wondering, I mean, this is a staggering negative number to see in a PayPal account, just the reversal of months of work. And so I thought, well, I gotta get to the bottom of it. So I picked up the phone, called in, and this kind of goes back to the naming thing like we were talking about. He picked up and he didn't seem upset. I had a conversation with him, how are things going? Are you happy with your service? Do you feel like I've ever misled you? And everything seemed to be going fine. And finally I said, why did you mark all of the payments you've given me as fraud?
• 4:47
  And he said, didn't mean to do that. What are you talking about? I said, well, This is the name of my entity, my consulting firm is Growth Solutions LLC. So like you said, kind of a case of mistaken identity. He said, Oh, I was just a victim of identity theft at Wells Fargo.
• 4:58
  And they said to go through and mark anything you don't recognize as spam and I just know you as Kyle Young. I didn't know you as Growth Solutions LLC. So I thought this was one of the many people who had gotten a hold of my information. He said, I'll rewire the money today. And so he sent me all the money back.
• 5:12
  And so I woke up with an enormous amount of money missing and then I went to bed with all of that money returned. I tell that story because what happened a couple of weeks later is I was sitting at the dinner table with my wife and the phone rings, and it's this guy. And he doesn't typically call me at nighttime. This wasn't somebody who called during dinner. He had a pretty strict nine to five.
• 5:29
  And so I thought, oh goodness, is this more about that? What's going on now? I picked up the phone. He said, hey, you know, I was just talking to my wife, telling her about how work was going. I realized I needed to call and tell you this.
• 5:40
  He said, You're the first consultant we've ever worked with who did exactly what he said he was gonna do. And I just wanted you to hear that. Then he hung up. And that was about ten years ago, and ever since then that became the standard. It wasn't about, you know, I'm gonna be necessarily the best at this, or I'm gonna have the flashiest proposal, or I'm gonna drive the nicest car, whatever the case might be.
• 6:00
  It was just I'm gonna do whatever I said I was gonna do. And that really impacted me. again, just an interesting relationship that went from being listed as fraud, losing a lot of money, getting the money back, and then ultimately just being reminded of the importance of earning people's trust.
• 6:14
  Carly Ries: It's just so wild because you think that'd be the baseline, but that is such a unique value proposition because so few people actually deliver. Maybe they do what they say they'll do, but oftentimes not on time. And you know what I mean? There's just all those things in and out. But that is such a great story.
• 6:32
  Kyle Austin Young: Yeah. And I'm sympathetic to the people who struggle to live up to those promises because I don't think it's always ill intentioned. It's kind of like what happened in COVID when everybody started buying up toilet paper. You didn't wanna be someone who hoarded toilet paper, but everyone else was hoarding toilet paper. So when you saw it, you kind of needed to stock up.
• 6:46
  And it can be challenging. I just want to honor the fact that it can be challenging for consultants because their competition is promising the moon. I deal with this a lot when I consult on search engine work. I've got people promising these enormous things. And by comparison my promises look so flimsy, but I'm actually gonna do what I'm promising.
• 7:02
  And so I can certainly understand the temptation to sensationalize a little bit, but that was a story that I think set me on a path that I've been able to stick to, and I'm thankful that I did.
• 7:10
  Joe Rando: You know, I think another aspect to what you're talking about is that people that start businesses, a lot of times are optimists by nature, and, they wind up making promises that they fully intend to keep but are incapable of keeping. I've seen that a lot of very good people that, you know, just cannot at least in terms of time frame. I'm one of them sometimes.
• 7:35
  Kyle Austin Young: Oh, I am too. I was telling Carly before we hopped on that I've been doing so many podcasts in preparation for the book coming out. And every time I've had conversations, you know, what are you working on? How can I help? And I've made all of these very well intentioned promises that I'm now realizing when all of them came to a head at the same time, it's difficult to keep.
• 7:50
  So I told her I need to be a little bit more intentional about spacing these out.
• 7:53
  Carly Ries: Well, Kyle, speaking of your book, you are taking a very unique approach to success through like probability basically. I wanna dive into this. So probability hacking is such a unique concept. can you explain what that is in simple terms that I would understand. someone who is hearing it for the first time.
• 8:17
  Kyle Austin Young: I'm not a mathematician, statistician. I'm a business strategy consultant. And I think I actually, the last math class I took in college I got a B. So there are people worse than me, there are certainly people better than me. So I don't think there will be any issues with making this really understandable.
• 8:32
  But ultimately, exactly what Joe described, most business owners are optimists. They go in with a lot of hope, potentially with a lot of expectation, not always necessarily with a very informed perspective of what's gonna happen and you know, what's gonna be expected of them if they wanna succeed. And so about ten years ago, I went through a couple of layoffs. I was in management level positions at different organizations. And after the second layoff in about thirteen months, I got tired of telling my wife that I'd lost my income again. I was very fortunate. There were people who knew of my work and really respected it. So the day after that second layoff, I had four job offers and I was trying to decide which one to take. Ended up going to lunch with a friend and he said, I hate watching you get these leadership positions and then lose them through no fault of your own, but it's just the way it keeps working out. What if you took on a fractional role with each of these organizations?
• 9:21
  What if you started consulting essentially, diversified your income a little bit? So that was the goal ten years ago. That is what I ultimately started doing, but it grew into something a lot bigger than that. And as I would work with different clients in all of these different spaces, I needed to find a common denominator to keep from going insane. Because one day I would be coaching a healthcare CEO.
• 9:38
  The next day it might be the owner of a bed and breakfast in Coastal Maine. The day after that it might be somebody using virtual reality to disrupt a crowded niche like language learning. So I needed something to kind of, I needed a framework. I needed a methodology that would allow me to think through projects quickly and bring a lot of value. And so what I started doing is I created something that I call a success diagram.
• 9:58
  A success diagram maps out everything that has to go right for you to accomplish a goal, all right? And then what I do is you can layer some very simple math on that. Math that you can do on your cell phone to get a real estimate of how likely you are to accomplish the goal. And so if you want, I'll give you an example of how that works.
• 10:17
  Carly Ries: Yes, please.
• 10:18
  Kyle Austin Young: So let's say that maybe you're intending to run a marathon. Maybe that's a goal that you have. You've got about ninety days to get ready. That's not a lot of time, so you hire a running coach. And she says, okay, I can get you ready for a marathon in ninety days, but there are three things you're gonna have to do.
• 10:31
  You're going to have to eat the way that I tell you, train the way that I tell you, and sleep the way that I tell you. If you do those three things and actually stick with it, I can get you ready in ninety days. If you don't do those three things, if you cheat on them, if you only do two of them, you're not gonna be ready on race day to run 26 miles on such short notice, okay? So there are three things that have to go right for us to accomplish this goal. So if I were creating a success diagram, I would list those three things out one after the other, and then I would estimate how likely I am to stick with each of these three things.
• 10:59
  So I've just picked up my cell phone. I wanna use really simple made up numbers. I'm gonna say that I think there's a 70% chance I'll do each of them. There's a 70% chance that I'll eat the way she tells me, a 70% chance that I'll train the way she tells me, a 70% chance that I'll sleep the way she tells me. What a lot of people do in this situation, we do that intuitively.
• 11:17
  When we think about a goal, we put some thought, even subconscious thought into what's gonna have to go right for us to accomplish it. And then we might feel pretty good based on numbers like these. You know, I think I have a 70% chance of doing each of these things. What most of us do is something that's called averaging. We will take what has to go right, we'll take how we feel about it, and then we'll kind of meet in the middle and say, I feel pretty good about all these things.
• 11:37
  So I feel pretty good about my goal. What we fail to understand, and this is why so many people don't accomplish goals that they could accomplish. I'll teach you in a minute how to change your odds. But the reason so many people fall short on their goals is they average these numbers not realizing that if all of these things have to go right, you actually have to multiply them out. So I just multiply 0.7 times 0.7 times 0.7.
• 11:59
  We have a 34% chance of being ready to run this marathon. Even though only three things need to go right, even though we feel good about each of these things. We are not expected to be successful in this marathon. So that impacts our thinking, that impacts our decision making. That impacts whether or not we wanna devote ninety days to training for something that we might not be prepared for.
• 12:18
  However, ultimately my job and the focus of this book is how do I improve a person's odds of success? So like Joe said, many business owners are optimists. I tend to be an optimist. I'm excited about running a marathon. But I realize when I actually do the math that maybe these numbers aren't as good as I thought they were.
• 12:35
  So what you do next with the success diagrams, you try to identify the potential bad outcomes. Where could this goal get derailed for each of these steps? Probability is kind of like matter. It can't really be created or destroyed. The odds of all possible outcomes add up to 100%, but you can rearrange it.
• 12:53
  And the way that you go bring odds over to your side is you identify the potential bad outcomes. So let's do that as a hypothetical. Let's do that in the context of training. If I need to create a running routine in order to be successful on race day, what are some things that could keep me from sticking with the training routine? What do you think?
• 13:10
  Carly Ries: You mean like what would derail you from your training win?
• 13:13
  Kyle Austin Young: Sure. Absolutely. What's an example of that?
• 13:15
  Carly Ries: I would think family schedules.
• 13:16
  Kyle Austin Young: oh Yeah. Family schedules. Totally. Something could happen during the day that swamps my schedule and I'm not able to go for a run. So what can I do in response to that now that I've identified this potential bad outcome?
• 13:25
  Well, might be smart to train first thing in the morning before the day can get totally out of hand. Might be smart to buy an extra set of running shoes, keep those in the car so if there's a gap in my schedule, I can make the most of it. It might be really important to have a conversation with my family and say, this is a goal that's important to me. I've set this and I'm gonna need to devote some time to this. So when we identify the potential bad outcomes that could derail us, and there's a lot when it comes to training.
• 13:48
  Injury could derail you. A rainy day could derail you. A lack of motivation could derail you. When we identify these potential bad outcomes and then we look for ways to minimize their odds of happening, we can improve our odds of success. so I take people through a system where they do that step by step and transform their chances of getting what they want.
• 14:07
  So let's assume that we were to do that for all three of these steps. We were to figure out the things that might keep us from eating the way we need to, sleeping the way we need to, training the way we need to. Let's say we get to a point where we're now confident that there's a 90% chance I'm gonna do each of these three things, alright? If we multiply that out, we're at a 73% chance of success. So that's a very quick, very abbreviated example that shows the power that we have to change our odds when we act intentionally.
• 14:32
  I told you that a lot of people make the mistake of averaging. The other mistake that so many of us make, and it has to do with that optimism that Joe mentioned, is we wanna believe that desire is somehow an antidote to risk. If I really want a goal to happen, that's somehow gonna make it more likely to happen. That doesn't work at all. That's not a real thing because what have we identified as a threat to our success?
• 14:52
  Well what if it rains on a day when I have to train? Okay, explain to me how you really wanting to run a marathon is gonna change the weather. It's not going to. What if a shin splint derails my training routine? Well I'm really gritty.
• 15:04
  Okay, but tell me how your grit or your resilience is gonna help with that. You're just gonna exacerbate an injury. That's not gonna fix it at all. What could fix it? Well we could do some stretching in preparation that would try to reduce the risk of shin splints.
• 15:16
  So it's all about living intentionally. It's about what I call thinking negative. Everybody tells us to think positive. I tell people to think negative. I tell people to identify the potential bad outcomes that could derail their goal and do everything they can to systematically de risk those.
• 15:29
  Take as much risk out of them as possible. We've seen in the context of a marathon example, three things that needed to go right, and we felt good about all of them, and we had a thirty four percent chance of success. That's why so many people are failing at their goals. Because imagine if you're trying to start a business. How many things have to go right for that to be successful?
• 15:45
  A whole lot more than three. What are the odds of each of those things being right? Often lower than 70%. I don't say that to discourage people. I say that to tell you to think negative, identify your potential bad outcomes, and do everything you can to probability hack and change your outcome.
• 15:59
  Carly Ries: Joe's like the scientist mathematician on the team and I didn't know if he was thinking...
• 16:04
  Joe Rando: Oh, I love it. I love it. It's great. It's a great way to think. And you're right.
• 16:10
  It's like taking that positivity that it's gonna be great and turning it on its head and saying, okay. Well, how could I derail it? How do I avoid that stuff? And that's something that we don't have fun doing as entrepreneurs. It's always fun to think about all the fun stuff and the cool stuff and the great stuff that's gonna happen, but, you're absolutely right.
• 16:28
  Kyle Austin Young: I wanna jump in on that, Joe, if you're if you're okay with it. You said something we don't have fun doing, and I think that's true.
• 16:34
  a line that I have in the book, that's kind of the premise of the book, is every goal that you're pursuing has two hidden numbers attached to it. It has a probability of success and a probability of failure. And the point of the book is to help you understand what those numbers are in your context, and then it's to help you change them.
• 16:48
  I think the reason that so many of us don't try to think about our odds of success, the reason that so many of us avoid it, is we don't realize that we can change them. We think that if we ultimately find that we have a thirty four percent chance of being successful at running a marathon, that's just gonna be bad news. And maybe if we don't think about it, it'll go better. We can change our odds. And so you mentioned it's not fun to do that.
• 17:08
  It's not always fun to get that initial projection. It's not always fun to realize that we've been averaging in our heads. We had a goal that we felt pretty good about. I see people do this in the context of goals. Maybe there's 10 things that need to go right, and they feel like there's a 90% chance that the first nine are gonna happen.
• 17:23
  There's this one where there's maybe a 20% chance, but the others we feel so good about that we think that that somehow raises our overall odds of success. But if that step, that critical point that has a 20% chance of happening is a true prerequisite to our success, then our overall odds have to be lower than 20%. We can't average, we have to multiply this out. So the reason I talk about just this being a fun thing, it's not necessarily fun to get the initial projection. That can be discouraging.
• 17:50
  What I find to be a lot of fun is the creative work that we were just now doing when we've identified potential bad outcomes, finding ways to fix them. When I applied for my first job out of college, one of the jobs I got laid off from, I was 21 years old. I didn't wanna start with an entry level position. So I decided to apply, this is crazy, to become the product development director at a growing health organization. I was gonna lead people in their 50s, 60s, people who had PhDs, people who had Masters degrees.
• 18:14
  I was 21 years old with a Bachelor's degree from the University of Oklahoma. What a wild audacious goal. But I applied and I got an interview, and I knew that that was already a big step in the right direction. I wanted to make the most of it. So I identified the potential bad outcomes that would keep them from wanting to hire me.
• 18:29
  One of them was them rejecting me because of how young I was. So one of the things I did very intentionally was I grew a beard for that interview. I knew they couldn't ask me my exact age, and I thought I'll try to look a little bit older and see if that takes away some of these concerns of the shock when a 21 year old walks into this health complex to ultimately audition for this job. I thought that they might be concerned about a lack of experience. So I wrote up an entire book of my plan to turn this department around.
• 18:56
  I had it spiral bound, I gave it to every person I met that day. I knew that there was a chance that they would reject me just because I didn't fit in. That could happen to somebody at any stage of their career, even if they had a better resume than I did. So one of the things I did is I asked the hiring manager, I said for this department, do you know if they've read any books lately as a team? She sent me three books.
• 19:14
  She said they've read these three books as a team over the last year. I read all three. And so when I showed up at that interview, I was the only candidate there who could speak their language. I knew what their objectives were. I could make inside jokes. One of the books they had read, this was over ten years ago, it's called The Wuffy Factor.
• 19:28
  It was about how to basically build up trust with a brand. Wuffy was kind of this idea of social capital. And so when I'm sitting in a group interview and I made the comment that I think this is gonna get us a lot of Wuffy, it was hysterical. All these other candidates are looking at me like has he had a seizure, is he going insane? Well what is he talking about Wuffy?
• 19:46
  The team is all laughing because that's the book that they had just finished reading. So I did all of these things very intentionally by identifying the bad outcomes that could happen. I was thinking negative, and I think that work is very enjoyable. I think it's a lot of fun to creatively take the risk out of our goals. And I think when we realize that we have the ability to change our odds, it doesn't become scary, it doesn't become something to avoid.
• 20:07
  I actually find this to be a really addictive way to think, a really addictive way to live. I'm always looking for opportunities to make my odds a little bit better.
• 20:16
  Carly Ries: Well, so on that note, we've been talking about how to improve the odds, but you have a section of the book called, is quitting ever an option? So what's your take on knowing when to try to improve those odds, and just knowing when to walk away?
• 20:27
  Kyle Austin Young: Yeah, absolutely. Well, if you go through the probability hacking framework, I'll give you five steps to do that in the book. Some of them are so contextualized that it's not easy to necessarily list out. But again, the general idea, create a success diagram, identify the potential bad outcomes and see how much risk you can take out of it, then rerun the numbers. If at the end of that the numbers still look terrible, then you need to make some potentially difficult decisions.
• 20:50
  One of the things that I encourage people to do is I encourage them to brainstorm at least five other ways they could be investing that same time to pursue whatever the ultimate goal is. Because typically our goals are in service to something even bigger. Maybe we're starting a business but the ultimate goal is to have enough money to create financial security for our family. Maybe we're going to therapy but the ultimate goal is to have a life that feels more peaceful, more grounded, more unhurried. So I try to encourage people to identify what's the big goal at the root of the smaller goals, what are some other ways we could spend our time, and then see if maybe we feel more realistic about accomplishing these alternatives.
• 21:27
  I know that sometimes you ask guests, I'm jumping ahead here, but sometimes you ask guests to share a favorite quote about success. One that impacted me as I was writing the book, Annie Duke, who's written several books in the genre. She says success does not lie in sticking two things, it lies in picking the right thing to stick with and quitting the rest. And so I try to encourage people if they ultimately realize that they're not gonna be able to optimize their odds of success to something they feel good about, to consider pivoting to another goal. And one of the case studies that I make in the book is just demonstrating that just because your odds aren't great at that goal now doesn't mean you can never accomplish it.
• 22:01
  Sometimes going and accomplishing other things will improve your odds at that goal. I've wanted to write a book for years. I was remembering recently how a bizarre memory, but I was driving home from a funeral when I was I think 11 years old and my mother asked me, what do you wanna do when you grow up? I don't know why that happened when it did, but it did. I said I wanna write books.
• 22:19
  That was how long I had an interest in doing this. Ultimately, I would have a few different leadership positions. I'd have a long consulting career and now I am in the process of publishing a book that comes out next month. Well, depending on when this releases, comes out November 11, excuse me. But the reason that it took that long was I was optimizing my odds of success.
• 22:38
  I was building a career that allowed me to write for the Harvard Business Review and Forbes and Psychology Today and demonstrate my credibility on these topics. I was developing a framework that I could actually communicate clearly like Joe kindly said a minute ago. I was forming connections with literary agents and publishing houses. And by the time I decided to actually pursue this goal, my odds were great. So the fact that it's time to, I don't necessarily like the idea of quitting goals.
• 23:01
  I like the idea of pausing goals. I like the idea of saying, I don't love my odds right now. I'm gonna put this on the back burner, do some other things and I'll reassess how I feel about this. You know? In the case of writing a book, was it was decades later, but it did happen.
• 23:15
  Joe Rando: And, beyond that, I liked how you framed it with the goal of, you know, say, having enough income to support your family or it could be something else, but, there's not just one way to get there. Right? You could give up on the particular path and find another path that gets you to that same place in a different way.
• 23:36
  So I like your method because you can run the numbers on a few different paths and say, hey. This one has a lot better chance of getting me where I wanna go than these ones do.
• 23:49
  Kyle Austin Young: Absolutely right. Yes. Yes. Yes. And I'm a big fan of being able to put numbers on things. Not that, you know, qualitative analysis is not valuable. It's very valuable. But quantitative analysis is I don't know. It just pushed me in a comfortable place personally.
• 24:08
  Yeah. I think it does for a lot of people. there's nothing more reassuring in my mind than having the numbers on your side. And with probability hacking, you can change the numbers. You can get those numbers on your side.
• 24:17
  And what you said was perfect. That's exactly right. A success diagram is not telling you your odds of accomplishing a goal. It's telling you your odds of the plan that you currently have succeeding. But you can change the plan.
• 24:29
  That's absolutely right. And that's a big part of that five step framework.
• 24:32
  Carly Ries: I love that. Well you also mentioned in your book that resilience is key to winning the numbers game. So what are some top habits you'd recommend or even like mental shifts that help someone stay in the game longer?
• 24:44
  Kyle Austin Young: So again, having a sense of your odds is helpful. One of the things that I like people to realize, and the success diagram really illustrates this, every step that you accomplish in pursuit of your goals improves your odds. You know, if there are five things that need to go right and each one of them have a chance of succeeding and a chance of failing, once you progressed past a step, those numbers can improve enormously. And that's a really helpful thing to kind of follow the numbers as you progress down the context of the goal.
• 25:09
  When you know that your odds are good, I find that it's typically easier to stick with it. I do give some strategies for resilience in the book, but one of the biggest ones, and this is something that I emphasize a lot, is I'm not as big a fan of picking just these incredibly oppressive, miserable goals, and then trying to find ways to stick with it. I'm more inclined to encourage people to try to identify goals that are actually aligned enough with what they want in life, that they're gonna be able to tap into a pretty deep well of motivation. It feels like every New Year's society just kind of layers these goals on the people that people weren't necessarily asking for. This is the year you're gonna lose the weight.
• 25:48
  This is the year you're gonna learn the new language or whatever the case may be. But when we just sort of take these arbitrary goals and apply them to our lives, we're not really predisposed to wanna stick with it. I think it's better to have a conversation with yourself and figure out what do I really want? Like Joe just said, maybe it's super important to me to be able to provide financial security for my family. Well if that's been something I've cared about for years and years, or in my case writing a book, a goal that I'd had for decades, potentially a good goal to chase when it comes to the idea of resilience, because we know that the resilience is there.
• 26:18
  Jeff Hayden, he's an ink columnist, he has a tip called the two week rule, I really like this. He says if you're thinking about pursuing a goal, try to pursue it for two weeks without making any big financial investments. Try to do everything you could be doing for two weeks without spending a whole bunch of money. Then stop and check-in with yourself and say, am I enjoying this? Is this something I wanna continue doing?
• 26:37
  Do I feel like the motivation is still there? If it is, maybe keep going. If it's not, well at least you haven't spent a bunch of money on it. A lot of people, they make those investments early and then they find out maybe two weeks, maybe a month in that as exciting as the thought of starting a t shirt company was, buying that screen printing press was really expensive. And maybe now the motivation isn't there anymore.
• 26:57
  I'll tell you one story really quickly if you're open to it. Early before any of the stories I've told so far, very very early in my career, my wife and I had a subscription box business. We made stationary. And so what we would do is we would send people letters. My wife is amazing at calligraphy.
• 27:12
  She would design these cards. And we had some research showing just the power of writing handwritten letters, how beneficial that was to the recipient. So we'd give you a few cards and a prompt and say, send this to a teacher who made an impact on you. Send this to a friend you haven't connected with in a while. Send this to a loved one who's maybe going through a hard time.
• 27:28
  And it was a lot of fun. We had customers who paid us every month. They were enjoying it. But that model was just so out of alignment with our lifestyle. I had a full time job.
• 27:37
  My wife had a full time job. We were trying to start a family. There were all of these expectations. And so having a new box ready to go every month, you know, fresh calligraphy, fresh packaging, getting everything shipped, just became miserable. We just couldn't keep up with that treadmill.
• 27:53
  So we ultimately had to shut that down. But one of the things that I learned from that that really stuck with me was just the power of picking goals and picking business models that could align with my own temperament and my own availability. So as I moved forward, you know one of the businesses I started, I write for publications like Harvard Business Review and Forbes. I had an online course about how I did that and how to do that. Well, that was a great model for me because I would only offer the course a couple of times a year.
• 28:15
  I could still keep the other demands in my life. Another business model that came out of that is starting niche websites. Starting websites where I could generate affiliate income through organic traffic. Well the great thing about SEO is you don't have to write a new article every day. You can take a month off if you need to and the organic traffic keeps coming.
• 28:32
  So that's a big part of sticking with it. It's just some of it is resilience and there's certainly some wily tricks that I talk about in the book. A big part of it is just don't pick goals that you know from the outset are gonna be almost impossible to stick with.
• 28:45
  Joe Rando: It's funny though. Carly, doesn't this sound familiar? The philosophy here? We, Carly and I have just had a book come out called Solopreneur Business for Dummies. And the first chapter that isn't kind of a general introduction that's of getting started with your business is finding your why and you're defining your goals, basically. And that's the same thing that you're saying. So it's kinda cool. We are definitely coming from the same perspective on this stuff.
• 29:14
  Kyle Austin Young: Absolutely. And I think that some people can take it too far. It's not enough to just literally find a goal that aligns with your values. I would encourage you to take that as a very important input, and then look at your odds of success like you've been mentioning, Joe. The fact that something aligns with your values doesn't mean that it's likely to succeed.
• 29:30
  When you do those things in combination, which is the goal that is the most likely to succeed and aligns with my values, I think that's the sweet spot.
• 29:38
  Carly Ries: Kyle, I'm so excited for you and the book that is coming out in November. You've already given us your quote about success
• 29:45
  Kyle Austin Young: I know, I broke the system. I'm sorry.
• 29:47
  Joe Rando: No, all good.
• 29:48
  Carly Ries: But where can people find you and where can people purchase or pre order the book?
• 29:53
  Kyle Austin Young: You can grab a copy of the book at any retailer. You can buy it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble directly from Penguin Random House. You can find me on LinkedIn, Kyle Austin Young. I have a website, kyleaustinyoung.com, but I just think LinkedIn is more fun, more accessible. So feel free to go to the website or feel free to just connect with me individually.
• 30:11
  And yes, so excited about your book too. I've been looking at it, like I said, I've been listening to episodes of the show and I love hearing about it. there's a lot of synergy there. And I'm just very excited about the work you're doing. I would definitely encourage people to get a copy of that.
• 30:23
  Carly Ries: Well, thank you. Thank you. And thank you so much for coming on this show today. And listeners, thank you so much for tuning in.
• 30:29
  As always, please leave that five star review, share this episode with a friend, and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. And we will see you next time on The Aspiring Solopreneur. You may be going solo in business, but that doesn't mean you're alone. In fact, millions of people are in your shoes, running a one person business and figuring it out as they go. So why not connect with them and learn from each other's successes and failures?
• 30:54
  At LifeStarr, we're creating a one person business community where you can go to meet and get advice from other solopreneurs. Be sure to join in on the conversations at community.lifestarr.com.