I recently suggested listening to Pat Flynn’s SPI podcast #211 interview of Chris Guillebeau.

I decided as a curator, I needed to step it up a bit so here are some choice excerpts from that 2016 interview:

“…most of what I’ve done has just been consistently putting stuff out, which is what you’ve done as well. I think that is the best long term strategy. You can’t really have a strategy for going viral. It just happens.”

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“If people are asking the same questions, pay attention because it’s showing you a couple of things. It’s showing that people recognize you as this authority in a certain area, and they also have this desire for information that’s valuable to them.”

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“What I did see from these successful people is that they actually tended to make a lot of mistakes. There’s not many career mistakes you can make that you can’t recover from. They made mistakes. They were willing to give up on something and go back to a different path, or a different fork in the road. They were willing to experiment.”

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“One of the best things you can do, I think even if you love your job, is to actively build this side hustle. Even if it’s not making a huge amount of money, what I’ve seen and I’m sure many of your listeners as well, it’s disproportionately satisfying. It’s incredibly rewarding the first time you get $50 in your Paypal or something. It’s just great.”

Pat: “$1.18 in AdSense.  It’s what changed everything for me.”

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“To me the whole goal is not necessarily become a full-time entrepreneur. The whole goal is opportunity and possibility and creating that for yourself.”

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Pat: “As a writer, how do you get into the flow?”

Chris: “I’m not a big fan of, I’m being inspired I guess, or getting into the flow. To me, I’m a big fan of sitting down and okay, now I’m going to get to work. It doesn’t always work that way. I definitely struggle and get stuck with things…”

***

“If you’re like, ‘Wow, that sounds great. That’s really big, how do I do that?’ Here’s what you can do. Every single day at the end of the day, you just get out your journal, and you answer a couple of questions. You’re like, “Today, what did I do that gave me energy? What did I do that drained my energy?” This sounds like woo woo question, but it’s actually very practical. If you look at okay, here are the things that made me come alive. How can I do more of that tomorrow?”