The Growth Booth

#1: The Journey Towards Lifestyle Freedom

December 28, 2021 Aidan Booth Season 1 Episode 1
The Growth Booth
#1: The Journey Towards Lifestyle Freedom
Show Notes Transcript

What do bamboo trees and businesses have in common? Tune in to The Growth Booth to see how I realized my dreams of freedom through $MM businesses.

In this episode, we explore the idea of lifestyle freedom being a journey, and that business growth and personal growth never happen in a straight line. I share my journey as an entrepreneur over the past twenty years, beginning with my background in eCommerce, and the trials and tribulations of my journey towards lifestyle freedom. I  encourage you not to give up on your dreams 'before the magic happens'.

One of the key lessons I want to share through my story is that everyone’s business journey is different, and it will be constantly evolving over time.

Whether you're looking for step-by-step strategies to start building an online business, simple game plans to grow your business, or proven lifestyle freedom frameworks, you’re in the right place.

Stay tuned and be sure to join the thousands of listeners already in growth mode!


Timestamps:

00:00 - Intro

01:12 - Why Everyone's Lifestyle Journey is Different

03:20 - The Story of the Bamboo Tree

05:47 - Success Doesn't Come Along Right Away

06:31 - Success Requires a Strong Foundation

07:44 - Commit to Deliberate Practice

09:34 - Why Consistency is Key

10:03 - Nurture Your Dreams

10:18 - Believe Without a Doubt You Can Do it

12:08 - Lifestyle Freedom is a Journey of Growth

12:51 - Assessing Your End Objective

13:52 - Finding What You Enjoy Doing

15:50 - Setting Goals For The Next 5 Years

17:08 - Outro

 

About Our Host:

Aidan Booth is passionate about lifestyle freedom and has focused on building online businesses to achieve this since 2005. From affiliate marketing to eCommerce, small business marketing to SAAS (software as a service), online education to speaking at seminars, the journey has been a rollercoaster ride with plenty of thrills along the way. Aidan is proud to have helped thousands of entrepreneurs earn their first dollar online, and coached many people to build million-dollar businesses. Aidan and his business partner (Steven Clayton) are the #1 ranked vendors on Clickbank.com, and sell their products in over 100 countries globally, as well as in 20,000+ stores across the USA, to generate 8-figures annually.

Away from the online world, Aidan is a proud Dad of two young kids, an avid investor, a swimming enthusiast, and a nomadic traveler.

Let's Connect!

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Thanks for tuning in! Please don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe!

 

 



Lifestyle Freedom is a Journey: Aidan Booth here, and welcome to episode number one. I hope you are excited about what we're going to be diving into here. I know I am excited, anxious, looking forward to seeing what this turns into because I'm in belief, and this is something I want to talk a lot about on this show, is that lifestyle freedom is a journey, and business and personal growth doesn't happen in a straight line. I want to explore that journey.

 

Another Podcast? The first question that you may have is why on earth does the world need another podcast? Hasn't that ship sailed on nearly enough podcasts to go around? Well, I think the journey for everyone is a little bit different. With that in mind, I thought I would start this off by sharing a little bit about my journey. You'll probably notice some reflections and your own journey. Mine is always evolving. Yours probably is too. My initial goals when I started out were just to reach a financial tipping point, a place where through having an online business I could have lifestyle freedom. 

 

From Flowers to SD cards to reach my initial goal: In 2005, I started out selling online. I was selling SD cards. I was attempting to sell flowers. It was an interesting niche to be in and we can talk more about that another day. As happens with business growth and personal growth, the goals change when you reach a certain period. I reached my initial financial goal and I started making a lot of money online, and my goals started to change.

 

Investments and accountability: I started to invest that money. I then got into a partnership with Steve Clayton who is still my business partner today many many years later. With that came a new level of accountability. It wasn't just about me anymore. There are other people involved, and also with that came business maturity. I had more businesses, make more money, a team of over 60 people all around the world. I started traveling a lot more. I got married, I had kids.

 

An ever-changing journey: The point is every single year along this journey has changed significantly, and I want this podcast to be a place where you can participate in this journey and you can see what's working and what's not working for me, not just from a business growth standpoint, but from a personal growth standpoint as well. 

 

Wealth generation is another journey on its own, but it's all tied in to personal growth and business growth. [I've already touched on those,] but when you start making money, it doesn't take long before the amount of money that you're making might have far surpassed what you are hoping to get and your goals are going to change, and then what do you do with that money? Can you tap into compounding growth? How can you invest that money? Should you take a salary? Should you allocate some profits back into the business? Business growth is also a journey, and how's that going to unfold for you?

 

The Story of the Bamboo Tree: I mentioned in the very beginning that I was going to talk about the story of the bamboo tree and this is one of my favorites because I think it really works as a nice story and reflects what a lot of people feel with the online business. If you plant a bamboo tree and you nurture it, you give it water, in the first year, it's not going to show any sign of life. You won't see anything. There's no growth at all in the first year, not that you can see anyway. In the second, third, and fourth years, you're still not going to see any signs of life. If you didn't know better, you might think that that bamboo tree was dead and wasn't going to survive. 

But in the fifth year, something truly amazing happens. In the space of about six weeks, that bamboo tree shoots up from not even being visible to being 80 feet tall, which is around about 25 meters, which, to look at it another way, is like the height of a seven or an eight-storey building, and it does this in six weeks. Now up until this moment, everything has been happening underground. The perception from the surface is nothing is happening. 

How the Bamboo Tree story relates to online business: I know that for me in my own journey to building an online business and to achieving complete freedom, financial freedom, geographic freedom, time freedom, so much of that happened almost like delayed. I planted the seed, I nurtured it, I watered it, and eventually, things started happening, but it sure as hell didn't happen, not in my case, overnight. There was no magic event that one day a nonexistent business to be a very successful business. It didn't happen like that. I don't know anyone where that's really happened. 

"Don't give up before the magic happens." One of my good friends and early mentors used to say "Don't give up before the magic happens." This is something that I noticed with people who are building online businesses so often. It happens and they do give up before the magic happens. They fail to reach their goals because they just didn't persevere long enough. I've seen this in selling courses and coaching tens of thousands of people all around the world. The ones that succeed are the people that really do persevere and don't give up on their dreams. 

Six Lessons: "I want to share six lessons that we can take from the bamboo tree story, then I'll get into some more thoughts about lifestyle freedom and maybe a few questions to ponder here.

1.   The first point that comes to mind about the bamboo tree is that success doesn't come along right away. It took me a good two or three years before I started making any money at all online through my online business. I guess in those first few years, I was doing a lot of trial and error, which is not the best way to learn. It would have been better if I had some kind of a blueprint or plan or guidance, but nonetheless, success didn't come along right away, but it did eventually come along by me sticking with it and having that perseverance. I feel like as part of your journey, you're going to need to realise that it can take a little bit longer than you may anticipate to reach your goals. 
 
 

2.   Another is that success requires a strong foundation. In the bamboo tree, it was four years of nurturing and watering to build that foundation, and all that magic was happening beneath the surface. That's often true with an online business as well. You want to make sure that you are spending some time or putting some energy into building that foundation.
 
 

3.   With my online business, not just online business but investments as well, I often think of myself as levelling up through some kind of a fun video game. When you level up through a video game or any kind of a game in life, you can look back at the lower levels and you see it with a different perspective. You can see it with, "I'm on level 7 now, but when I was back on level 4, I was concerned about these little trivial things, and now they're just so simple. It seems so obvious." But that's the benefit of hindsight. That's what comes with experience and that's what comes when you're able to dream bigger about what it is that you want to achieve. The size of the problems you have doesn't really matter. What matters are the size of your dreams. 
 
 

4.   Another key lesson, I think, from the bamboo tree is to commit to deliberate practice. The magic doesn't happen from one moment to the next. There's a common misconception you may have heard of the 10,000 hour rule. "Do anything 10,000 times or for 10,000 hours and you'll become an expert at it." What most people don't get is that the actual way that rule is meant to work is it's not just 10,000 hours, it's 10,000 hours of deliberate practice or 10,000 repetitions of deliberate practice where you're looking at what you're doing and trying to get better every single time. 
 
If you take an average jogger, for example, and let's say this jogger goes out on 10,000 runs, or maybe they're running for 10 years or whatever it might be, are they going to be ready to compete in the Olympics? It's highly likely that they wouldn't be, unless they're one of these freak athletes. Most enthusiasts or avid joggers would not get ready for the Olympics by going out for a jog every day. 
 
The way that they would get ready for that is by following a strategic plan and thinking about deliberate practice and skills that they could work on in an effort to improve and that might come down to setting mini targets. Each time they go for a jog, it might come down to monitoring and charting their progress. Is your heart rate getting better, what is your cadence when you're running, or any number of different things. 
 
The point is, the way that you would get to expert level is by making continuous and ongoing improvements. A lot of it comes down to committing to a deliberate practice. It's about consistency and most people that I've seen that have had the most success in their lives are people that practice performing with a consistent effort. 
 
Essentially, Aristotle has got a quote that goes something along the lines of "You become what you repeatedly do," and excellence being something that you build through habit, not through anything else other than that. I think it's really true. What you do every day matters. You need to nurture your dreams, and that will be the fourth point. 
 
 

5.   My best projects have been the ones that I've looked after over a period of time. I think if you look at yourself in your own life, your best achievements have probably been the things that you've really nurtured. The fifth thing that I will leave you with in relation to the bamboo story and success and business in general is just to believe without a doubt that you can do it and have trust in the process. So many people have seen them come into something, put in a half-hearted effort, and then wonder why it didn't work. It's easy to see why that thing they were doing didn't work: because they didn't truly buy into it. They didn't truly believe that it was going to work.
 

6.   But when you truly believe and you're laser-focused on whatever that objective might be, then something magical can happen. And you're certainly going to stack the odds of succeeding in your favour. The most highly successful people that I know understand that success is not easy. I think Steve Jobs summed that up amazingly well in one of his speeches there where he said, "You can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them when you're looking backward." You sort of have to trust at some level that the dots are going to connect in your future, and however that happens, it's going to happen. 

 

This is an approach, that Steve Jobs had said, had never really lived down and had always made a difference in his life. I think you can take a lot from that. You move forward with trust and you move forward with faith that whatever you're doing is going to work and that can go a long way to stacking the odds of success in your favor, and your patience and persistence will pay off. I think this one's pretty self-explanatory, that magic doesn't always happen overnight. In fact, that will be the exception to the rule. Normally, you're going to have to persevere, you're going to have patience and persistence with anything that you're trying to achieve in life. 

With all of that said, I hope you found the story of the bamboo tree interesting. It's something that I often come back to in my life. That makes lifestyle freedom. Lifestyle freedom is a journey of growth. For me, that's geographic, it's financial, and it's time. Online businesses, in my mind, are an important steppingstone that can be a great stepping stone, you probably already know this if you've got an online business, but also be aware that they are just that -- they are just a stepping stone. 

They're not the be-all and end-all. Money isn't enough. Some of the studies show that after you reach something like $100,000, more money doesn't make you happier. I think that's an important idea to keep in mind, that online business is just part of the package. It's one of the ingredients in having lifestyle freedom. It's not the only one. 

How much money do you actually need? Some questions for you to ponder as you think about your own lifestyle freedom: from a financial standpoint, how much money do you actually need? What's your end objective? I think that's a good starting point because it's something that's easy to measure and might guide you in one direction or another, because not all businesses are created equal. From a profit standpoint, the money that you end up with in your pocket, is definitely the most important part in my opinion. 

When looking at business numbers, I can tell that someone, "Look, I've got a $1 million ecommerce business," but what's a $1 million ecommerce business? Maybe it's $300,000 in profit, or I could say to someone, "Look, I've got a $1 million software business, and that might give me $700,000 in profit." That's completely different. It's the same revenue, but completely different profit numbers. I think it's that bottom line metric that really matters and that's what you should keep in mind when you're starting to think about the financial freedom component of any business that you're working on.

The other thing I'll say is "What do you enjoy doing?" You want to be doing something that gets you excited about getting out of bed every morning, that gets that fire going in your belly. We'll talk about this a lot more in future episodes, but looking back at my own life, in 2007, I started a Spanish school when I was living in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I started it because I thought it was an interesting business opportunity and it was going really well. I hired our office space. I hired local teachers. I started doing the marketing and we had basically more students than we could even handle with a lot of hotels and hostels, and the way it worked was people would come in, maybe for one week or sometimes one month of intensive Spanish lessons, normally when they were travelling through South America. 

It was great, but ultimately it became a headache. That became a headache for me because I turned into someone that was solving people's problems on a personal individual basis and helping people navigate through the streets of Buenos Aires essentially, and all the ups and downs and problems and challenges that can come from that didn't really get me excited about getting out of bed every morning. I've got some other funny stories about this, [inaudible], but anyway, very interesting story about doing business in South America. We'll get to that another day. 

I think the point that I'm trying to get across here is it's really important that you find something that you enjoy, and when you do start making money and good money from something that can certainly help you with that enjoyment factor, that's something else to consider. There's lots of interesting niches that I've been a part of over the years, which from an onset maybe were not all that interesting, but they became very interesting once the business started thriving. That's particularly true in the online space because it lends itself so nicely to an online business. 

The final thing to think about is "Where do you want your business to be?" What do you want your life to look like in five years, and is your current plan of attack, is your current game plan aligned with that? If you want to build a multi-million-dollar ecommerce business, then should you be tinkering around with affiliate marketing right now? Maybe. Maybe you should if you've already got an income stream. Maybe that'll help you to accelerate your ecommerce business, or maybe it's just a distraction.

Something we'll come back to is talking about deep work, where you really focus on one thing and accelerate your results by way of doing that. Sometimes I find that if I'm trying to do multiple things at one time, then often my alignment is off with where I ultimately want to get to, and it takes me longer to get to that place. I think having a vision is something that's really important here as well. Thinking about what you want your life to look like, maybe not even in five years, but in ten or fifteen years’ time, and then connecting that back with what you're doing on an everyday basis. It's having alignment between where you want to get to and what you're doing today essentially. 

 

These are some of the things that I want to explore as we dive into more episodes here on The Growth Booth. Hopefully, one lesson you can take away from today is that business and personal growth, it's not a straight line. It's ups and downs. It's a journey. It's all over the place. These are some of the things that we're going to be talking about as we move forward here. I hope you've enjoyed this first episode.

 

Enjoy your journey! I've got much more in store for you, and I hope you'll tune in and join the thousands of people that are going to be listening to The Growth Booth. Thanks for listening. See you next time.