Don't sleep on your past

Happy New Year’s resolution-breaking season!

A 2020 study found that the average American takes 32 days to give up on their resolution, and 68% don’t even make it that far 😩.

How are you setting yourself up for success?

The best resolution I’ve heard of recently is committing to something small like reading one page per day. David from The Vergecast podcast tried that a few years ago, and that was the first year he cracked 50 books for the year - because starting is the hardest part.

Should you talk about your past before you pivoted into entrepreneurship?

This week, on a coaching call, we helped someone reframe the idea of talking about what she did “before” - this is a question I spent years struggling with myself.

When I left corporate to join Jo at a photography company in 2021, I felt like I was betraying the ‘Top 25 MBA Program’ education I had pursued and my network of ladder-climbing professionals. Honestly, I stopped “showing my face” on LinkedIn after being about as close to a power user as you can get throughout school.

I had spent so long tying my identity to position titles, income levels, and degrees that when I entered a field where it felt like those things were valued differently (or not at all), I just stopped talking about them.

The irony here is that this is exactly the opposite of the advice I countless times gave undergrads & my intern in corporate!

You can almost always translate the “story” of your past to where you’re now going. For example, when I was in business school I worked as a graduate assistant interviewing prospective students to give a recommendation if they’d be a good fit for the program or not.

To this day the one answer that sticks in my mind is (summarized for length):

Sure it’s a very focused biz answer because they were trying to get into biz school.

But they still brought their full history with them to their interview. By choosing how they told their story (context, framing, “plot line”, etc), they made their time in the military applicable to answering my question about growth and showing that their past is relevant.

Back to me - in my first year of working with Jo I rarely talked about my non-entrepreneurship work experience, because I didn’t see any of our peers talking about an MBA or working in Big Pharma, so I thought it wouldn’t be relatable to anyone.

Over time, I started experimenting a little with sharing my “niche” biz knowledge starting with frameworks like agile or design thinking and using case studies from the corporate world to explain concepts, and shockingly to me, they started to “land” with our coaching clients. In 2024 you saw me take the jump to starting to write long-form emails almost every week that blended my biz background with my newfound applicability to entropreneurship.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like you appreciate the mix of conventional biz & entrepreneurship (hit reply, tell me how you really feel, and what you’d love to read in 2025)

All of this comes full circle to just before the holidays, we were invited to present to a group of high school students about our experience in entrepreneurship and what options could be available for them. In prepping for it a friend recommended pulling out specific things that we learned at each point in our past that makes us good coaches today.

This is actually kinda a fun exercise I’d recommend you try out as you’re starting the new year. What’d you learn at each step along the way that makes you a better business owner today?

This is what our couple word takeaways were:

Why talking about your past is valuable?

• Telling stories is one of the easiest ways to connect with people, and no matter if it’s a positive or negative experience, you’re able to frame just about any experience as a story that you can tell

• People buy from people - I’m more convinced of this than ever going into 2025, people’s buying behavior (from what I can tell) is slowly (rapidly) shifting to putting more emphasis on who they’re buying from not just what

• Talking about your experience makes you relatable - especially to your ideal clients. (eg: we coach creative entrepreneurs, we spent years as photographers so we know what being a creative entrepreneur is like)

• It’s freeing to show up with your full self, instead of “locking” parts of yourself away because you don’t think anyone would care

What does this mean for me?

I’m going to clean up my LinkedIn and start leaning into my duality of being Biz School educated and a creative entrepreneur - I have a perspective that few other people have, and I gotta stop avoiding that part of my story just because I’m on a different path now.

Oh - Jo’s gonna be on Linkedin too… we don’t have our social strategy over there figured out, but we’ll be experimenting during Q1 (hit reply with any suggestions on being a LinkedIn creator 🙏)

Have a great week!

Lyndon

Things I sent to people recently:

• The Top 24 Knowledge Creators of 2024 is such a cool round-up put together by Kajabi & Course Studio that Jo & I signed up for at least 3 new email lists each.

• With America hitting the highest levels of loneliness in history TimeLeft is an interesting monthly subscription that’s built around the idea of having organized dinners with strangers on a weekly basis to meet new people.

• MrBeast launching Beast Games on Amazon Prime, but I think the BTS videos are almost more interesting. Like how do you create a YouTube video with 2000 contestants or a gameshow with 1000 contestants that are all mic’d with their own camera?

• An over 2-hour interview with Linus of Linus Tech Tips about how he started a Youtube channel working at an electronics store that he ended up buying the channel and turned it into a media empire with almost 100 employees that does 6x more income in products than Adsense. Oh, and how they maintain 4.5 YouTube video uploads per week.

• Possibly the best way to plan out for 2025 that I’ve heard yet. Totally recommend listening to the interview with Jesse Itzler.

• Cloudflare uses a wall of 100 lava lamps to create truly random SSL & TLS encryption since “random” generators on computers are still predictable, but not two lava lamp bubbles are the same 🤷‍♂️

• MQBHD breaks down the Honey Scam that’s been rippling through the creator economy, especially with people who have done brand deals with Honey (while Honey secretly “stole” from them).

• Justin Mares published The Great American Poisoning to his substack in December which was a very interesting stats-based deep dive into how the American healthcare system is designed for acute illness but has developed a big chronic illness problem in America.

• One of the most interesting ideas in modern medicine that I’ve seen in a while is being done by the start-up superpower.

• Get 30% off your first year when you sign up for Honeybook using our link