How to BEAT 95% of People WITHOUT Being a Genius ⚡ Jay’s SCOOP | Ep. 431

Jay Schwedelson: We are back for do this, not that podcast presented by Marigold. And normally I come on here and I share these random marketing tactics. You test them, maybe they work, hopefully they work, maybe they don't work. But once in a while I like to share things that.

Jay Schwedelson: I've experienced, or that I've kind of figured out a little bit for my own career, and maybe they will have an impact on yours because all this stuff is pretty hard. And there's this one concept that I think has been more impactful for my career than anything else. And it's this idea of being.

Jay Schwedelson: Consistent and accountable, and it's not what you think. Okay. When you hear those two words, but lemme back up a little bit. So I have a, I have a horribly bad habit of always talking down about myself. I do. I'll say, oh, I'm not smart, or I have no idea what I'm doing. And there's, there's always a noise. Uh, the people around me, because they either think that I'm fishing for a compliment, like, Jay, stop it.

Jay Schwedelson: You're so, you're smart, whatever. Which I'm genuinely not. Where they just find it weird and annoying and they're like, what is your deal? Stop saying that. Uh, I personally, you know, I like saying it. 'cause first of all, uh, I believe it to be true. Uh, I don't think I'm the smartest dude in the room. I also think this idea of, you know, sometimes being self-deprecating, it's, it's nice, it gets people comfortable, slightly funny once in a while, and I'm being real.

Jay Schwedelson: I'm not doing it to be funny all the time. I'm just being real. And so the reason I share that is, um. When I went through school, for example, I was, I, I didn't do great at all. I got waitlisted four times, okay. Before I got into the University of Florida. I have no idea how I got finally accepted. It was like probably the last possible day on earth.

Jay Schwedelson: My SAT score was an absolute joke. I had to take statistics three times in college just to get a c for, to count. Uh, I mean, I was not, I, I could not crush it at all. I actually think though, knowing that I was not gonna be some sort of, you know, NASA space program engineer was kind of a superpower for me 'cause it forced me to figure out.

Jay Schwedelson: These two critically important things, um, that radically changed my career, my business, basically my life. And this idea, this idea of being consistent and accountable. Now I'm not talking about being accountable, uh, being there for, you know, your family or whatever. You should do that. Okay. Hello? That's kind of obvious.

Jay Schwedelson: No, I mean something different. Let's talk about accountability. How do you hold yourself? Accountable to learn new things for your career business. How do you hold yourself accountable to actually learn something new for your career or your business? Or do you do anything specific or do you just wake up every day and you kind of bust your butt and you do what you have to do?

Jay Schwedelson: You work on maybe the client campaigns. You are working at your product out the door, you work on whatever, and you learn by doing right. You learn by doing it. Every single week. You're just doing more and more, and you're doing your best to step to date on stuff, and you're trying to meet new people, but you're just learning by doing.

Jay Schwedelson: And by the way, when I talk about learning, I don't mean that you read an industry email newsletter once a week or you go to an industry website once a week that is not, uh, holding yourself accountable to learn new things. Here's the gig. Every single person. I don't care if you just graduate, graduated college.

Jay Schwedelson: I don't care if you are, you know, 40 years into your career. I don't care if a manager, a, a senior vice president, a CEO, a founder, doesn't matter. Every single person needs to have something that they must do every single week. This is what I believe. This is what has helped me. Okay? Something that they do every single week.

Jay Schwedelson: That holds them accountable to learn, okay, about their craft, their industry, uh, their profession, what it is that they're trying to do for a living. That you might be putting out a podcast episode once week. Maybe you publish a newsletter once week. Maybe you do a weekly social media post once week. Maybe you put out YouTube series once a week.

Jay Schwedelson: Maybe you just send an email to your company or the team that you're on, your marketing team about the outlook and industry updates for the week. Right, but you're sitting there like Jay, no, no one's gonna listen to a podcast I put out there. No one will ever read a newsletter from me. I'm a random uh, person.

Jay Schwedelson: No one's gonna engage with my social posts. I'm gonna get like one, like if I put out the new industry trends out there, who am I? And you know, the answer to that is who cares? It's actually not about that. Having this weekly thing that you do. Forces your hand to read stuff, to find stuff, to network with people, to learn stuff, and you can decide.

Jay Schwedelson: How heavy or light of a lift you want this weekly thing to be? Okay. So obviously a podcast is a heavy lift. Alright. Uh, getting a newsletter out is a heavy lift. And maybe like, I can't even, this is ridiculous. What you're saying is ridiculous. I don't even understand why. Maybe, uh, uh, maybe even getting LinkedIn posts out, uh, every single week is hard.

Jay Schwedelson: Okay. What, what about just. Sending a Slack message, okay? Your Friday Slack message to your entire team where you are saying to them, every week I'm gonna send you this message. You go to your boss, you say, Hey, I wanna send a Slack message every week about some new industry trends that we're, that are going on out there so everyone could stay up to date.

Jay Schwedelson: And you're gonna send out every Friday to coworkers. Alright? And all you have to do is look at three different websites in your industry, bring together some links, and you send it out. All of a sudden, what is that doing for you? What is that doing for you? What that's doing for you is it's forcing your hand to be out there trying to consume this information, and on Thursday night when you don't have that slack message ready to send on Friday, you're gonna say, wait a minute, I gotta put my brain rock down on my phone.

Jay Schwedelson: And I gotta get off TikTok and I gotta find the three things I'm gonna send out to my team. 'cause I said I'm gonna do this every single week. Then you start reading a few articles instead of the garbage scrolling. You put that together, you send it out on Friday, the people on your team, like, wow, this person's really with it.

Jay Schwedelson: They're really on top of things. And then when opportunities come up in your organization, they're like, oh yeah, Sally's the one who sends out the thing. She knows what's going on. She's awesome. Okay. You can do so many different. Formats of this. You could post once a week on Sundays saying the Sunday stat on your social media feeds.

Jay Schwedelson: Whatever the stat is that you find for the week, it doesn't matter. Okay. When I started, for example, my email newsletter, I thought getting lots of subscribers was the goal. A few months into it, I realized something though. It was never, I didn't, it doesn't matter how many subscribers I got. What I realized was because I had a weekly newsletter, I became exponentially better at my job.

Jay Schwedelson: Because I had to go out and learn stuff. 'cause for a zillion years before I had a newsletter, I was just learning by doing the work for my clients. I wasn't learning by actually trying to learn anything. Because once school ends, nobody's forcing us to learn. No one's holding us accountable. Once I started to hold myself accountable, that is when it all clicked.

Jay Schwedelson: And here's the real deal. I'm deep into my career. I'm in year 27, okay? A lot of you are not out there in year 27 of your career. And I will tell you this, you will blink and you'll be into year 10 of your career, and you're gonna be like, whoa, what happened? How did I get here? And you're not going to have learned a lot.

Jay Schwedelson: And here's the difference. Here's the second piece of this thing where it all falls apart. I'm not the smartest dude. I'm being real. I'm not. But what I have figured out, there's a way to beat 95% of the people on this planet. You could beat everybody in your high school, okay? That, that had way better grades than you went to these big, fancy colleges, got all these graduate degrees.

Jay Schwedelson: Trust me, I I've seen it. I've seen all of that. Okay. Everybody that I know that went to Ivy Leagues, or almost all that went to Ivy Leagues, all these fancy schools, they're doing garbage. Okay? Sorry to them. They're doing garbage, and here's how you win. You could beat 95% of these people by doing one extra thing and that's being consistent.

Jay Schwedelson: When I talk about consistency, lemme give you some random stats. That's true. Okay. These are all sourced. I can give you the sources. Who cares? 90% of podcasts that start never make it past episode three. 15% of people actually that start an online course, finish it. Nobody finishes it. Uh, when you have about reading books, 40% of books that are bought are never read Past chapter one.

Jay Schwedelson: 83% quit journaling at within 30 days. 70% of people abandoned budgeting apps within 90 days. How about Duolingo? 92% of Duolingo users quit within one year. Okay. How about marathons? One in five. People who register for a marathon never even show up. Here's the gig you're saying to yourself, but I have so much going on.

Jay Schwedelson: No, you don't. You don't have so much going on. Everybody has so much going on. I have kids in my house. I'm taking care of my mom, who's not. Well, I have, I have to do this. I'm, I'm a yoga instructor on this side, blah, blah, blah. Who cares? Everybody's got stuff going on. You can't find 15 minutes to put together a slack message to your team, okay?

Jay Schwedelson: You can't find 30 minutes to a social post every single week about new stuff going on. Yes, you can. And when you do it, here's the secret, you can't stop. Not after three months, not after six months, not after two years, never. That's the consistency part. That is how you win. Because what everybody does is they stop.

Jay Schwedelson: They're like, oh, it's been three months. Nobody's reading what I'm putting out there. Nobody really cares. I don't really see the benefit of it all. And they stop. And that's where the opportunity dries up. Okay? That's where you holding yourself accountable and learning dries up, and that's where everything falls apart.

Jay Schwedelson: So the secret sauce for me. That I have found for my career to win when I know I'm not the one who understands everything going on. 'cause that my, my, my, the brain cells aren't there too bad for me. Okay? What I know is, uh, if I hold myself accountable and there are things that I have to do every single day, week, month, and I don't stop and I do them, I'm gonna know a lot of stuff and then people are gonna think I know a lot of stuff.

Jay Schwedelson: And I'm just gonna keep pounding it out there and pounding out there. So this idea of being accountable and consistent is secret sauce stuff for your career, for your life, for all of it. I know this episode was very different, but I like to share this stuff because you know what? Um, we all need to figure out.

Jay Schwedelson: We all wanna win. We all wanna get ahead. We wanna do stuff. And just by putting down the brain rod on our phones, you don't need to see every Instagram story. You don't need to see every TikTok reel. You don't need to see every meme. Find that 30 minutes, wake up 30 minutes earlier, find the 30 minutes in your week to allow yourself to learn, to grow, to do more.

Jay Schwedelson: It will change everything. Listen, I appreciate you being here. I'll probably get horrible reviews for this thing, for this episode. That's okay. I get it. But it's an outlet for me to kind of just share whatever brain rots in my brain. So appreciate you all. See it. The next one, if this didn't stink, leave it to review.

Jay Schwedelson: Thanks.