Success Road Joshua Rivers

People have varying definitions of joy. Some tend to look for material things to guarantee such joy and associate it with happiness. While only a few go beyond these external things to find the true meaning of joy. However, with the society that people live in – people succumb more to superficial things in defining joy and bridge such ideas to happiness. But the real question is, how do we seek joy in this world fully dictated with material things in defining life's beauty?
Erin Mac joins the podcast to talk about joy. Specifically, how you could recognize your experience and learn to strategize it to a positive experience regardless of outside influences. As someone who's built her company 20 years ago, Erin shares more how money can't provide the real meaning of joy, and it won’t help if you only rely on external things. In this episode, she shares how one can start finding oneself and get on that journey.
Impenetrable JoyImpenetrable joy is the experience that you no longer have to be at the mercy of or beholden to people or circumstances to dictate as to whether you're having a good day or a bad day, or for that matter, a good life or a bad life. You're no longer on the roller coaster ride of emotions, like when someone says something or something happens, and all of a sudden, our mood switches, and we start going south. When you recognize that you are responsible for your experiences and learn how to change them into the experiences you want, then create a penetrable joy, which is internal. It's not based on something that's going on externally.
It's recognizing that some things are going on behind the scenes that we are often unaware of, and when we can get awareness of them, we can begin to unpack what's going on. Not so much on why it happened, what were the circumstances or the things that led to the experience, but more just in the proactive state of how can I change that experience? 
Joy vs HappinessThe difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is based on external things. It's a brand-new car, but it's short-lived and is based on an external thing. Joy is an internal experience that you can create throughout each day. However, the idea of happiness that we've been taught in our society and many other societies is based on external things. But the real joy is the kind of joy available now, regardless of what's going on out here. The internal experiences, the one that's meaningful and has a purpose. And that's what we're after. But people don't know it because we don't make these distinctions.
 
Sufficiency and ExcessWe have this idea of sufficiency and excess. It's like, what is going to be enough for me? Is it enough to have a nice home, to have shelter, to have access to food and water? Is it enough to have those things to have deep, meaningful relationships with people and purpose and meaning in your life? Or do I need to subscribe to what society would have you believe? 
If that's the case, why are multimillionaires or billionaire clients also miserable despite having all the money? It's because of that happiness thing they were pursuing. Because it's the journey inside that has meaning and purpose. It's not the exterior nor the external things.
Journey of GrowthPeople are essentially here for growth. As humans like to evolve as human beings. And when we can align with that idea, then we find purpose and meaning in our life. Hence, the way to begin the growth journey is to recognize that you do not have purpose and meaning. And sometimes, that comes in the form of a crisis. Like recognizing that if you keep doing the same things repeatedly, you will have the same...

With the constant demand of time in a fast-paced world, automation took the stage of varied industries. From marketing, management, support, and more, human intervention was less needed, and technology became essential. Hence, businesses delve more into implementing automation, especially when industries shift to virtual set-ups.
Samantha Porter Fox of Samantha Porter Enterprises helps businesses automate their marketing and sales systems. Her whirlwind journey began as a professional organizer in 1997. After ten years, she started to help clients organize their digital files and go paperless. From there, she went to marketing and started a web business design after college. Years later, she joined Chris Davis’ automation program. Now, she joins the podcast to talk about automation. Specifically, mistakes people make when they start getting into the automation process and how they should overcome them.
Beginner’s MistakesOne of the biggest mistakes is that people immediately jump into the technology tool itself without any strategy. In the end, they feel disgruntled. It would have been a great tool if you had started with a strategy on how you need to use it and knowing your end goal. It is like how easier it is to see problems beforehand when you’re doing it on paper first or mapping it out first. However, since many business owners aren’t tech-savvy, they get easily overwhelmed with the options. It’s like spending money without using it for your advantage and end up becoming a collector of all this software.
Document the ProcessKeeping everything in your head on how to do things will keep it trapped in there. It’s easy to blow things up if it becomes complicated. But if you write it down, you can streamline a lot of things. Remember, you can’t scale your business if you’re the only one who knows what’s going on in your business. Document your process! It doesn’t have to be fancy. You can write or record and let someone else transcribe it into a document. It will help you pivot things up when need be.
Getting StartedStart at the place closest to the money. For example, if it is a process that you generate money and you are doing it manually, like a coach manually booking people. It can be a start to document the steps like what do you send out to the people? What information do you need? And find a tool that will automate that. Another place that’s easy to automate is social media. There are a plethora of social media dashboards you can use to start to automate that process. Like Facebook, you can start automating your posting with native Facebook and schedule stuff ahead of time. If you want to automate your content to drive awareness to you quickly, that would be a quick thing you could do to get started.
Things People AutomatePeople want to save time, but some apps don't allow the usage of third-party tools, for you can be penalized for that. However, you can take advantage of a lot of stuff right from your phone and schedule or create content in advance. Also, most booking software has integrations with email management software like MailChimp or Active Campaign. You can have it set where it sends information once something is booked and send out these sets of emails. These are the types of things people can automate.
Identify your NeedsOne major thing is to sit down and think about your goal for your business. What area is the most important for you to automate right now to put you on the path to reaching that goal? Once you do that and have the vision and the goal, that's where the strategy starts. Don't look at every other business out there. Because what works for one business may not necessarily work for yours, or you may not even need that. And don't get...

People find it very difficult to manage their energy. Especially if the energy comes from considering one’s food intake, hydration, exercise, sleep, and etc. It almost feels as if the difficulty comes not with the lack of focus or time. But the lack of habit to condition ourselves into doing so. Looking into these areas would actually lead to a good energy flow, as well as making us more productive in the process.
 
Chelsea Stegman has an undergrad degree at Miami University of Ohio. Got her dietetic internship in Louisiana, and worked with the worst diabetes, and kidney dialysis. Afterward, she became a dietitian, moved to Cincinnati, and worked in a health club for three years. Now, she’s in downtown Chicago, worked in another health club, finished her master's, and started her own virtual business. She now joins the podcast to talk about energy management. Specifically, about managing nutrition, how to decrease burnout, increase energy, productivity, and performance.
 
Managing your nutrition 
Managing nutrition often depends on the person but the most realistic way for you to start, with priorities in general, is finding that needle mover that moves all these other habits. Health-wise, it's focusing on exercise, and a lot of nutrition habits, water intake, and eating frequency. But a big priority with most people that leads to all these other things is managing blood sugar throughout the day and looking at macronutrients’ meal timing. And that can also help with productivity and reducing brain fog throughout the day.
 

The Blood Sugar and Diet 
You don't have to look at blood sugar, or blood values consistently. It's really what makes up your meals. Starting off the day with adequate protein, non-starchy vegetables, a complex carbohydrate, healthy fat, or overall a well-balanced meal. Also, looking into the components of each meal throughout your day, and ensuring that you are eating or snacking to just keep that blood sugar stable. So, you don’t ride the blood sugar roller coaster. And symptomatically we can feel it, we feel the cravings, we feel the brain fog, the energy dips, and rises and everything that comes with it. Hence, what people should look at is what they are eating and noticing that link between a lot of those symptoms. Also, we kind of life in a world of extremes, there are some components that do help with brain health, people with actual disorders, such as epilepsy. It can be beneficial for the general population. Not advised for that, just making more of a well-rounded approach. Because carbs can support brain health, muscle development, and so many other things. So just making sure we have all those components to keep it stable, and not just go into the extreme forms of dieting. All is right.
 


Cortisol and Energy 
It is your stress hormone, it takes a diurnal rhythm, that spikes in the morning then slowly taper off throughout the day. And has an inverse relationship to melatonin. For instance, at night, when cortisol is supposed to be low, melatonin is supposed to be high. But some people could have that imbalance if their cortisol is high. A lot of people with productivity energy levels throughout the day performance, like at work or at the gym, are looking more into those cortisol levels and how they're managed. Also, it has a very close relationship with blood sugar too. Managing blood sugar can help manage that cortisol throughout the day. If blood sugar is super low, your cortisol spikes and vice versa. Also, you can tell symptomatically if you're tired and wired throughout the day. Your brains keep on going but...

As everything comes online, sometimes we could not eradicate the overwhelming pressure. We constantly work and speed things up. And we often forget to take a short pause or break. Then we either forget things altogether or leave things in a mess. Hence, burning out ourselves too in the process. 
Jimmy Claire is a motivational speaker and an autism advocate. He joins the podcast to talk about different time management tools and tips. Specifically, the tools he used to help improve his work-life balance.

Block Scheduling
One of the biggest things that helps a lot is block scheduling. And not like block scheduling and Google Calendar. It’s a different tool called Time Tune for Android. It helps you to block your time. It's useful because it helps you stay on track of each task on a day without overwhelming your calendar. It helps you to stay away from burnout, and information overload. Because sometimes too much information could shut you down. But with Time Tune, it can tell you that there's two hours’ time remaining, and you can find two hours of time that you didn't even know that you had.

Stack Browser
What process are the most unfriendly tools to use and keep your most important websites at hand possible? Yes, you can have bookmarks, but then you can also have search functionality. Eventually, a bookmark bar is also going to fill up or you start scrolling down and say, “Now where do I put this website?” It's like a shell kind of game where that person puts the ball underneath it and mixes it all around and everything. So, there is this tool called things browser stack or stack browser. It lets you bookmark all the important web pages that you use on a daily basis. It keeps them all in one spot, and it syncs across your devices, from Windows and Linux and an Apple.

An All-in-One Tool 
The notion is basically an all-in-one app that can do pretty much everything. You can store files, has databases like spreadsheets, and it condenses everything in just one box. So even if the text is long, it just makes the box bigger. And it doesn't overlap with another box or another row or column. It’s literally the best tool.

Browser Extension 
One of the other tools that you will find helpful is called station. It is a web browser extension and helps you find all the files that you need in different places that you put them in. And if you might say, “Okay, well, why can’t I just use my browsing history?” Yes, you can but if you want to have everything just a click away - you can use Station. It used to be an all-in-one app, but their goal was not to become a web browser, it was to help people find stuff. So, they kind of rebranded their tool and made it into a web extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. It's helpful because sometimes there are so many places where we store stuff, and we can't find it all nor do we really want to go to that service area, a lot of times.
 
Blocking out Distractions 
One of the things you can use is called a Dragon. It's a Pomodoro timer app, it's free, and it syncs with your to-do list. If you are a person who likes everything digitally and has it on all your devices wherever you go and need them. Like if you forgot to upload up the night before on your computer, then you should be able to go on your phone, get it from the web browser, like the cloud storage. And instead of logging into every system.

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Jim Rohn said, "You're the average of the five people you spend the most time with." 
The amount of information we can get from people is astounding, and most of it is pretty useless. If you want to accelerate your learning,  you need to surround yourself with the right people. The people who will help you accelerate the ladder of success and not failure. It might seem pretty intense but not impossible. And all you have to do is to get started!
Geoff Woods was a former medical sales representative. In 2015, he started The Mentee Podcast because he wants to start a business that will deliver a massive impact on society. Later, he joined Gary and Jay in building the company around The One Thing. Now, he joins the podcast to talk about The One Thing. Specifically, how The One Thing can be the simple truth behind extraordinary results.
Take the First StepIt's mind-blowing to see someone be able to pull off something amazing and seemingly effortless. But it can be hard to imagine it for yourself because we're so used to "Well, he is a movie star" or "He is a famous actor." But just because you don't see the clear path on how to go from where you are to where you want to be, doesn't mean that you can't take the first step. 
Enjoy the ClimbYou need to learn to focus less on the destination and more on the journey. You hate it when you're in the middle of it but miss it when it's gone. So, enjoy the climb because that is where the value is. Stop focusing on the destination that you want and start celebrating the journey.

Time Over MoneyWhich is more valuable, time or money? Time for sure! We're in the business of time and it's our most valuable resource. But most people spend time and do not invest it. We don't hold our time to the same standard we hold our dollars. But anything that we want in our life happens over time. You look at somebody who's built wealth, they built it over time. You look at somebody who's in shape they got there over time, you look at great marriages and relationships, they were developed over time. The key is over time. 


The Domino EffectThe path to getting everything you want in life personally and professionally starts by getting one thing at a time. Back in 2009, there was a group out of the Netherlands Wieder Domino productions, they broke the world record for Domino falls, they lined up 4.5 million dominoes. But the most amazing part was that when the leader of that group knocked the first one down, how much effort did that take? It's almost effortless. If you were that leader, you would have just unleashed 94,000 joules of energy. Put that into context, if you were to do 545 consecutive push-ups, that's how much energy you would release. So, think about it, the flick of a finger, that one subtle action could create a massive reaction. Small actions can unleash massive reactions. And if you graph this out, it's that hockey stick growth where it feels like you're moving forward not making much progress and suddenly, boom, it's just exponential. This is the shape of success. 

The Seven CirclesThe seven circles are the seven most important areas of your life. And you only need one area to focus on. However, this is hard for people because they feel like they want to focus on all of them. But again, the path to getting everything you want starts by getting one thing at a time. Think big, go small, trust the dominoes will fall, start by picking one circle. It could be a circle that...

I grew up in the era when the original NES came out. I could often be found spending my free time playing video games.
As a family, we would often have competitions on games like Tetris or Klax, but I also spent a good deal of time playing role playing games like Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy. These games required a lot of solving puzzles, planning, and strategizing. 
We would have some family collaboration with these games, too - mostly with my mom and grandma. We would often pause the game to make notes on clues from talking with different characters, draw rudimentary maps, list where certain items could be found or bought, and so on. I often found myself looking over this array of information before and after playing so I could strategize my next course of action.
Similarly, we sometimes need to hit the pause button in life to figure things out.