SPI 887: The Long-Haul Leader with Chris Ducker

SPI 887: Long Haul Leader with Chris Ducker

Chris Ducker: You don’t need to break, in order to take a break. It’s okay to do nothing for a little while and to understand that you are the engine, you are the spark, you are the difference maker. But you can’t build your business at your best if you’re running on fumes all the time. And so sustainable success isn’t just about how hard you go, but it’s actually about how long you last. And I burned out hard and I kept it a secret because I’m just a stupid man. Plain and simple. I was diagnosed with depression. I was diagnosed with anxiety. and I also went through a full blown adrenal failure. Chronic fatigue syndrome, as well.

I was actually in a really good place business-wise, so we were making a ton of money, but I was just absolutely exhausted and I know now burnout is not a badge of honor. It’s a warning sign. If you want to be around for the long haul, it’s not about more followers and more likes, it’s about more focus. Growth comes from clarity. Focus builds momentum and distraction drains it, right? So sustainable business starts with sustainable you.

Pat Flynn: I remember what the entrepreneurial aura was like. If you look at the top entrepreneurs back in 2010, their aura was just all about speed, growth, scale. And I recently got back from a trip to Nashville with a number of incredible authors, and the theme was not growth scale fast, it was slow down, it was peace, it was longevity.

Which actually was amazing timing because one of my best friends, you know him, Chris Ducker, if you’ve listened to the show before, he has a new book coming out called The Long Haul Leader, and if you actually pre-order it before it comes out on September 2nd, you get some bonuses. Just wanna let you know about that since this comes out the week before.

But this discussion about living a smarter life through not just thinking about the revenue and the profit and the growth and the scale, but by sometimes taking pause to slow down. Chris himself went through an incredibly hard medical experience as a result of overworking and the pressures that he put on himself that are a result of just what we see out there in the world.

And the last thing I want you to do, the entrepreneur who is starting on this journey, or who is already on this journey, is to get to the point of burnout. To get to the point of mental and or physical breakdown and have to try to get back up on your feet. From there, you can get ahead of this, and that’s where this book comes in. The long haul leaders that you can stay in it for the long term. The subtitle is, 10 Strategies To Work Smarter, live Better, and Achieve Lasting Success. And The Forward, in Fact is from one of my favorite people and mentors, Michael Hyatt, who is the perfect person for this, forward for this subject. But let’s not wait any longer.

This is episode 887 of the SPI Podcast with my good buddy and best friend, Chris Ducker, author of the new book, the Long Haul Leader. Here he is.

Chris, welcome back to the show for, I don’t know, the 17th time. Maybe not quite.

Chris Ducker: But not quite. But we’re we’re probably not too far off either, actually.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, and we’ve been together for a very long time.

We’ve seen each other go through many different projects, many different books now. Your new book, the Long Haul Leader, to me is your life’s work, and I think it’s very, very important that people need to listen to this conversation because of the reasons why I know you wrote this and I’ve seen the impact that this kind of information can make on people ’cause in a fun, interesting way.

It’s kind of already impacted me through your example and it took a lot of ups and downs for you to get here, but like the long haul leader to me before I, we even dive in and have you define what that means. Long haul in it for the long run. Not here for the quick success, but in it for long-term. Not just success in business but in life as well.

And I know you live and breathe this and now you’re preaching it because of stuff that’s happened in your life too. So first of all, just wanna thank you for writing this ’cause this is very, very important. Why write this now?

Chris Ducker: Well, you know, it was weird, you know, we were hanging out just a couple of weeks ago in Nashville, and I, I said to you, I believe that, I think deep down, like I’m a different person now after writing this book than I was before I started writing it, or I was, at least while I was writing it, it was almost like therapy writing this book. And my first two books, which obviously you are very familiar with, were not like therapy at all. They were entrepreneurial handbooks to a certain degree. And there is one thing though, that’s in common for all three of them, and that is that I have written all three of my books based on nothing but pure experience.

Plain simple. For the good, for the bad, and for the ugly, right? So Virtual Freedom 2014. I’d been in the outsourcing game, the VA world for about seven, eight years when I wrote that book. So I was coming from a place of a certain amount of expertise and experience, and at that time, you know, we were kind of all right, riding a little bit on the coattails of Tim Ferris and kind of lifestyle design businesses and all that kind of stuff.

But I was really living it and I had been living it for a good while. So I was in a good spot to write that first book. Rise of the Youpreneur 2018 was all about how to build a business around your personal brand and your expertise. Well, I’ve been doing that for like 10, 12 years when I wrote that book and teaching other people how to do it for at least four or five years before it came out.

So again, from a place of tenureship and stewardship and a coachability mindset of I can teach you how to do this well, this one, however, I didn’t quite know in what direction I was gonna take it. And I knew I wanted to write another book and I know you and I kind of like, would kind of point jers at each other a little bit and say, Hey, when’s the next book, loser?

Come on. Slow coach. Kind of. And you know, I mean, you know, Lean Learning, you were talking about doing that for like five years before it came out. Right. So, you know, it was one of those things where I knew I wanted to write another book, but I didn’t quite know what I wanted to write it on. And then 2021 came along.

And I burned out hard and I kept it a secret and I didn’t share it with anyone, not even you. And you’re like one of my best, most closest friends on the planet. And the reason why is because I’m just a stupid man. Plain and simple. There’s no like. Rah rah. Answer to this. I was diagnosed with depression. I was diagnosed with anxiety.

I was put on antidepressant medication. I was on that medication for about 18 months or so, and I also went through a full blown adrenal failure. Chronic fatigue syndrome as well, which basically meant that my adrenals were flatlined. I wasn’t creating any cortisol, which as we know is our stress hormone.

So I was kind of in this spiral for a couple of years. And the really ironic thing here was that looking back on it, which I can do now retrospectively. I was actually in a really good place business-wise, like we were crushing it. We were halfway through the pandemic. We’d moved a lot of the stuff that we were doing in person in terms of the education side of our business online.

Everybody was stuck at home. They were investing in up-leveling and up-skilling themselves. So we were making a ton of money, but I was just absolutely exhausted and tired and starting to dread certain things that I was doing and, and when that starts happening and you realize that you’re in that burnout mode, like I know now burnout is not a badge of honor. It’s a warning sign, and it’s a warning sign that I’ve been living wrong, leading wrong, and scaling my business wrong. So I had to kind of check myself before I really wrecked myself.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, and times have changed. I feel like for a lot of people across the board, again, people that we’ve grown up with as entrepreneurs and we’ve seen their journeys as well, and I feel like there’s a lot of people falling into the same path that you have fallen into. Some are still there, some are burned out and lost. Others have found their way out of it as well in different ways. I think when we were in Nashville there was a phrase that was mentioned that was so like, wow, this is exactly it.

And that was optimizing not for revenue. Optimizing not for a successful business. Optimizing for peace. Yes. And I was like, oh man, is this just because I’m like getting older that I feel this way? And then I look at a lot of these young entrepreneurs who are lost, who are hustling, who are trying to do what we did back in the day, who are going to be experiencing burnout soon.

Chris Ducker: Yeah. And actually I feel like they’re gonna experience it a lot quicker than we did. Yes. Because the world is moving a lot faster than it did when we kind of got started, 2008, 2009, 2010, and we started coming up. Right. And if you remember, actually, you. Myself and Amy Porterfield in amongst all these great people that we were hanging out with for those couple of days.

The three of us kind of went to one side at one point, and we were talking about the good old days of like when we got together and we were kind of like coming on the up and up online at the same time. We’ve all done things very similarly, but in very, very different ways with different styles, with our personalities engaged and infused and all that kind of stuff, but like we know how much different it is now compared to what it used to be, and I think there’s, social media plays a massive, massive part of that. We wanted blog comments when we started out. All these younger entrepreneurs want nowadays is like followers and likes. Right. So yeah, I think burnout is inevitable, unfortunately, for the younger generation of entrepreneurs unless they start taking some proactive moves now in order to make sure that they avoid it not only for the near term, but hopefully for the long term as well.

Pat Flynn: How do you balance, or what would you offer to somebody who is struggling with wanting more and to do as much as possible to succeed. I mean, things are hard out there. And yeah, you do get rewarded for doing a lot of hard work, but how do you balance the desire for fast and scale and revenue with health, mental health and peace?

Chris Ducker: Yeah, I mean, I’ve done a lot of thinking about this and actually I should say with this third book, I’ve done more research, more deep dives, more interviews, more case study collection, more everything than I have done with my other two books combined. Because it was such an important topic, such an important subject to write about that I wanted to make sure that I got it right.

If I’m quoting something or some, I’ve gotta get that right. I can’t make any mistakes here. Right? And so here’s the thing, and it’s gotten worse, like I said, the last few years. We have got so used to having exactly what we want, when we want it, how we want it served up on platforms that only we want them on, that we become almost numb to the fact that it can happen in other ways as well.

And the way I’m looking at the newer generation of entrepreneurs and even actually people like us who have been in the game for a good while, but maybe haven’t quite sort of pivoted in the right direction over the last four or five years or so, and are kind of maybe stuck in the mud a little bit in the way that they’re doing things.

A lot of people are still chasing down those quick wins, right? Those quick wins, and there’s nothing wrong with quick wins, but if it’s all we’re chasing down, then something is gonna break sooner or later. Quick wins are great, quick wins are loud, however, so I would rather go like long term, impact focus, right?

I wanna whisper. I wanna whisper. I wanna whisper until I can start roaring. I’d rather sell 10,000 books over two years than sell a thousand books over two weeks and then completely fizzle out from it. I’d rather make a million dollars over five years than make a million dollars over a year, year and a half, burnout be no good to anybody for anything for six months while I recover.

Right. And so although short term wins are great, it’s that real, the real game here is patience. It’s consistency. It’s showing up when it’s not flashy, when there is no one looking. When it’s unsexy, it’s doing the work before the work and not caring so much about the likes, the follows, the shares, and all the other validity metrics that are out there.

One. One thing that I have learned really, really clearly over the last few years as I’ve recovered from this burnout, I’m better than ever. I’m not completely over the hill on the adrenal fatigue because I was in phase three adrenal failure, which is about as bad as you can get, but the fact is I didn’t get there overnight.

It took several years to get there. Therefore, obviously it’s gonna take several years to get out of it, but you know, if I was in the very tail end of phase three, I’m now bank smack in the middle of phase one. I’m realistically probably 12 months away from being completely quote unquote normal in terms of those numbers.

But there’s one thing that I have learned, and that is that you don’t need to break, in order to take a break. It’s okay to hit the pause button. It’s okay to do nothing for a little while and to understand that you are the engine, you are the spark, you are the difference maker. But even that, that engine needs some maintenance.

You can’t lead it your best. You can’t build your business at your best if you’re running on fumes all the time. And so the mentality is that sustainable success isn’t just about how hard you go, but it’s actually about how long you last. And that’s the big message of the book, above and beyond everything else.

Pat Flynn: Amen that you don’t need to break in order to take a break. Huge. I remember when reading Virtual Freedom, there was an exercise in there, the three lists of freedom. I still remember this thing lives on forever now.

Chris Ducker: Dude, it’s in this book as well. It’s still relevant. Oh, is it? Oh, we put it into this book.

We kind of rejigged it a little bit, but it’s in this book as well. ’cause it’s that important.

Pat Flynn: How is it used in the context of going for the long haul and explain it for people who, who might not know what it is exactly.

Chris Ducker: Yeah. So when I initially came up with a three list of freedom, basically you would make a list of all the work tasks.

Okay? All the work tasks that you either hated doing, you couldn’t do, but your business was demanding that you do them or. Ultimately you felt like as the business owner that you were, you shouldn’t be doing them. Like your time could be spent doing more important activities. Right. And so that was the kind of the incubus of the three list of freedom with the principle of when you made those three lists, you ultimately had a bit of a blueprint ahead of you to start delegating work and tasks to virtual employees.

That was the whole principle of the book. But like you said, it’s lived on and here we are all these years later. And the three, that’s the freedom is now based around the concept of what are the things that you still are doing but you don’t like doing necessarily, not just at work, but also in your life, in your personal life as well.

And those can be things like toxic relationships or having to show up for certain things within the community because you feel peer pressure is involved, or whatever the case may be. Right. And then obviously the things that you kind of, you struggle doing, you carry on doing because maybe you feel like you should do it because of a responsibility perspective or something.

And then the things that we really like to focus in on in relation to the long haul leader principles is the stuff that you really feel you should be doing. What can move the need, what can make a difference? And a lot of the time it’ll come down to actually being a little selfish and you are at the very, very center of it all.

Because if you are not in good shape, then how can you lead not only for the long haul, but how can you lead, like how can you show up authentically being you all the time. If you are fighting illnesses all the time and you’re kind of, you know, having to kind of wear makeup under your eyes to hide the dark circles ’cause you’re not sleeping and all these kind of things, right?

So another thing, another big realization was that it’s okay actually to be a little selfish and to think about me a little bit more and to think about the fact that I wanna go to bed at the same time every single night. And if, if my spouse or my partner wants to carry on reading, then you know they’re gonna have to get like a little tiny little light that just sits on the top of their book.

And, you know, we get, give a little Kindle, go to dark mode, and I’m gonna put my eye mask on and I’m gonna go to sleep and it’s gonna be one of those situations. So it was like understanding that self-care is actually not selfish. It’s a strategy, and if you look after yourself and you take that, like we put strategies in place for our business growth all the time by building our email list, running a successful webinar, launching our online course, you know, whatever it might be, strategy, strategy, strategy.

Right. Building our social following, but why not put the strategy in place for self-care? Why not have that mentality as well?

Pat Flynn: Yeah, I can vouch for entrepreneurs not doing that, that’s for sure.

Chris Ducker: Yeah, me too. Yeah.

Pat Flynn: What are some of the other principles that a long-haul leader, a person who’s gonna last for a while continually show up, be at their best and top game, not just in the business, but in their life as a family man or a woman or as, as a person in the community. What’s one of those principles that a person like that would have, that a person who’s definitely gonna burn out doesn’t?

Chris Ducker: Well, I think along with the kind of the health and all the rest of it, and that is a, an important part of it and, and that very much comes within, there’s four main principles in the book. The first one being personal mastery, so upleveling yourself. Another big principle that I like to really kind of think quite deeply about, particularly over the last kind of year or so, is what it’s like to be grounded, like really grounded. Because I think, particularly when you’ve had a certain amount of success, you’ve made a certain amount of money, you’ve got a certain amount of accolades under your belt, you’re kind of known in certain circles for certain things. It’s a little easy to let that spiral outta control and think that you’re kind of a bigger deal than you really are.

And the brutal reality is that actually none of us are that big of a deal and the grand scheme of what’s going on in the world. And so I like the idea of thinking that long haul leaders remain grounded. Not only in the way that they think about themselves, but they really remind themselves and they remain on a regular basis, on the fact that their values, their principles, everything that they stand for, even when we kind of navigate a little bit of pivoting, a little bit of changing, a little bit of uncertainty, remaining really grounded in those values are really, really important. And the flip side of that coin is understanding also that. We need to be really nurturing in the way that we’re leading as well.

So you lead a community with SPII lead a community with Youpreneur, and a lot of the people tuning into this right now are gonna be leading their own communities in one way or another. And I want you to pause for a minute and think a little bit about how you’re nurturing the people that you are surrounded by.

And I’m not just talking about the people in your community here, but also further afield as well. Are you helping them, by fostering growth and developing themselves, developing their personalities, the relationships that you have with them, are you thinking about the long term with those relationships as well?

You know better than most people how important relationships are to me. I know you know that because you are my youngest child’s godfather. You know how important our personal relationship is to me, and all I would ever need to have is a phone call from April and say, there’s something up for Pat. I can’t figure it out.

Chris, can you help? And I’d be on the first plane out at San Diego. Stat. That’s how deep our relationship is for me, right? And you’ve heard me quoted on this a hundred times over, relationships should be treasured not used. So what are we doing to nurture those relationships? What are we doing to forge those, go deeper with those relationships?

We don’t need more friends, we just need deeper friendships, and that’s a big part of being a long haul leader as well.

Pat Flynn: As somebody who exemplifies that really well as, and a good friend of both of ours is Michael Hyatt. He has always been an inspiration to me in terms of the relationships he seems to have built for the purpose of just treasuring those relationships, not even using them.

In fact, I have gotten to meet a lot of people through him. That have been of benefit to me, and it really didn’t help Michael at all in terms of like, oh, well if I introduce this person to you, Pat, then can you get me on? No, there’s none of that. It’s just simply because this is what we do as good people.

And Michael is one of those, the, the greats out there. Not only that, how he’s able to continue to develop the relationship he has with his kids, despite being older and his kids being older as well. They just have this incredible aura around that family. And then that’s really inspiring to me as somebody who has now kids, one that’s a teenager and another that’s kind of going into that very soon.

And Michael is the person who wrote the Forward in your book, which I think is very perfect and I’m glad that you chose Michael for that.

Chris Ducker: I wanna say like there was nobody else. Yes, I chose him. Yes. I reached out to him. But there was not gonna be anybody else that was gonna write that forward for me. At all.

And I told him this not to try and guilt trip him into saying yes to doing it, but I told him, because he and I have had several conversations over the last decade where I’ve said to him very clearly like, you know, you are doing it right. You know, you’re getting your family involved, you’re building things for the future.

You don’t think about tomorrow so much, but you think about a year from now, three years from now, five years from now. Holy moley Michael Hyatt is a long haul leader. Personified. So if I’m gonna get anybody to write a for word, and I’ve always said like a forward has no place in a book unless it’s going to genuinely add something to the manuscript that book is made from, so.

For any author to put a forward in place of its manuscript before their part of the book even begins, there’s gotta be a deep reason why that happens. It’s not a marketing ploy, it’s not about having their name attached to the book, not in my opinion anyway, it’s about making sure that it’s providing upfront value right out the gate for the reader.

He did me proud man. He wrote a killer forward, so yeah, he’s a great guy.

Pat Flynn: He is somebody that has taught me with his best year ever course, way back in the day, always forward thinking and again, just somebody that’s very inspiring. So I’m glad you you brought him on. One thing that I’ve also noticed about Michael and then more recently you, is your attention away from the business and into seemingly random things that may surprise a lot of people.

For example, Michael I know plays the flute. I think there’s a specific name for it, but I don’t know what it is. But he has a collection of Native American flutes. Yep. And he plays them. And That’s awesome. That’s like so random to me. And you, I remember when you were on your road to recovery, you had gotten involved with bonsai trees.

Mm-hmm. And now, more recently, another hobby. Like what is the importance of stuff outside of the business, outside of what it is that you’re actually a leader for? How important is that? For a person to stay here for the long haul.

Chris Ducker: So dude, it is everything. And that’s not one man’s opinion. That’s fact because the data is out there, the numbers don’t lie.

Right? When I first started writing this book. I actually had a triangle that I had drawn on my whiteboard here in my office, and I had personal mastery. I had love and relationships ’cause I believe that’s a super important component of being a long haul leader. And then I had impactful work. So the work you do, the clients you work with, how you serve, et cetera, et cetera.

And that was gonna be the life os or the life operating system of the long haul leader that we talk about in the book. But then when as I was writing the book and I was talking to people that I feature in the book as part of the case studies and things like that, I realized just how important hobbies were to people.

And I had started to. Involved with more and more hobbies and pastimes and like you said, the bonsais, watercolors, and more recently nature conservation, wildlife photography, that kind of stuff. And there was something that it kept niggling away at me and I said, you know what? I gotta look into this hobby thing a little bit more.

Then I really started do some serious research on it. And one thing that I found there was a stat, I believe it was from a Forbes survey that was done many years ago, and it stated that for c-suite executives, business owners, people in very high end sort of type of managerial roles and that kind of thing, if they were to engage in a hobby or a pastime for a minimum of just two hours a week, that they could become up to 30% more productive in their work because of mental recovery. And so I started looking at that a little bit more. And I remember talking to one particular young female entrepreneur as I was kind of writing out the book.

She’s based in Europe, and she said to me that she felt guilty every time that she was away from work doing things that she was into hiking and mountaineering and that kind of thing. And she said like, you know, I love being up on the mountain. Like it brings me so much clarity. And so much excitement to be able to climb a mountain and to hike with friends at the weekend and things like that.

But every time I’m out, I feel guilty about the time that I’m spending away from my business because I could be building my business. But the fact is, please don’t have that mentality. Like I, I was able to kind of not forcibly, but quite, quite loudly get, get her to start thinking about things in a slightly different mindset.

It was like, allow yourself to feel less guilty about the fact that it’s all right to spend some time away from your business. In fact, actually, it’s incredibly important for you to do that. Part of the research I did, I discovered that the CEO of Goldman Sachs is a gentleman under the name of David Solomon is also known in his spare time as Dj D Soul.

Now, if you don’t believe me, you can Google this. It’s out there. So we’ve got a guy who runs one of the biggest financial institutions on the planet, who’s actually a dj in his spare time. And all the money he makes, he gives back to charity. ’cause he doesn’t need the money, obviously. But the fact of the matter is he loves doing what he does.

He’s got that creative hobby, that outlet for him to be able to spin the decks and make people dance and make people shout and scream and jump up and down. And he’s been able to kind of just let go of all that stress that he deals with through his work. And I feel the same when I’m sitting in front of a bonsai tree and I’m putting wire on it to move one of its branches.

Or I feel the same when I’m in the process of painting or when I’m out in nature, taking photos of birds, for example. You feel the same. I know you do. When you are out fishing and you’re in a boat on a lake and you’re casting the flies and you’re catching those fish, like I know you feel the same as well because we’ve had very deep, meaningful conversations about these things.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with taking time away from your work. Our brains need it. We have to spend some time working on us and recalibrating and actually doing it on our own as well, not just with friends and with family. Like it’s a good thing to have a little bit of solitude on your own.

Pat Flynn: The fishing thing has changed my life.

I used to fish a lot when I was a kid and you know, went to school, went to college, got a job, just kind of lost that. But recently, especially around the pandemic, I got back into it and it’s been huge for mental clarity, for just having an escape from everything. And I used to feel guilty about it too, but now I see it as an opportunity in, like you said earlier, a strategy to help me just have more mental clarity to help me be in the best shape that I can be in my mind, so that I can then bring back that sort of effort, that energy into the work, it’s almost like, you know, the person who goes to the gym, if they go to the gym every single day, there’s literally no time for them to recover. They’re never gonna get stronger because you need time to recover. You need sleep, you need time for those, the the protein to help you regenerate those muscles that you’ve been breaking down.

If you don’t rest, you’re not going to get better or stronger, but it just feels so counterintuitive because time and hustle and the competitors.

Chris Ducker: You know, let’s keep it real like we’re on a mission, right? We’re on a mission to build something great, to serve people in the right way, to make money and to try and make an impact, to make a difference, right?

But here’s the brutal reality. Here’s the reality check. The business will wait. Your inbox will wait, but your body. Your brain, your relationships, they’re not gonna wait. So give yourself permission to matter just as much if not even more than the mission that you’re on. And if you do that, I know it’ll come back to you over and over and over again in positive spades.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. Yeah. Amen. There’s deep stuff that we don’t often talk about because we often talk about the strategies that help us grow faster, scale bigger, all those kinds of things. But it, again, it’s so counterintuitive. How are you thinking about beyond just us getting older and wanting to remain wiser?

Chris Ducker: Getting wiser as well as, yeah.

Pat Flynn: Wiser, mentally. Better physically strong, still into our later years in life. Are you thinking about anything beyond that? Leaving a legacy, passing things down to our children? Where’s your head at with with that?

Chris Ducker: Yeah. I thought about, and we cover legacy in the very final chapter of the book actually, and I don’t know about you, but as a dad, as a husband, like I don’t like to think about dying, like I’m not scared of death, but it fills me with dread to know that one day I will not be on this planet.

My children will be, and my grandchildren will be like, that’s scary. In and amongst itself, that’s worrying, that’s sad, that’s depressed, saying, you know, all that kind of stuff. So we touch on it. Touch on it in the last chapter of the book. I do believe long haul leaders, and I know I’m, you know, personally focused on leaving a lasting legacy of positive impact and work in the lives of the people that I love, the people that I’ve worked with, the people that I’ve served, the friends that I’ve surrounded myself with.

It’s important that when I’m not around anymore, that people pick up my books and say, man, that changed my business. Or recall a conversation that we had over dinner. Man, remember that time we went out with Chris and he talked to us about X, Y, Z that saved my marriage, for example, or whatever the case may be.

Right? Like sugarcoat it the way you want. I think it’s really important to know that we’re not gonna be around forever and our time is finite, but you know what isn’t finite? How much time we spend on creating amazing things when we’re still here. That is all down to the attitude that we bring to the table every day.

When we sit down at that table and I say, right, today I’m gonna do some cool stuff. Today, I’m gonna serve some amazing people. I’m gonna create some incredible solution to solve somebody’s problem today, or I’m gonna take my kid out even on a Thursday afternoon after school to go watch a movie just because I can, like, this is the stuff that I’m all about now and here’s the brutal reality.

And you and I have talked about retirement and what that looks like and things like that before as well. And I’ve, I’ve really thought a lot about this actually. And I had a really deep down conversation with our buddy Jeff Walker. The day after we were done in Nashville, we, we grabbed lunch together and we were talking about retirement.

’cause Jeff’s a few years older than, than myself. I’m a few years older than you. You know, he was like, I don’t wanna retire, man. Like, I wanna keep going, you know? I just love what I do. I love launching, I love teaching people how to, like, I don’t wanna stop. Like, I wanna be able to get my family involved.

My kids, you know, and his, his son’s getting involved now with the business and all this kind of stuff. But here’s the thing. Different horses for different courses. I do want to retire at some point in the future. I don’t wanna retire anytime soon, but I certainly do want to get to the point at some point in the future where I do not have any quote unquote work to do.

On a daily basis. And so it’s for everybody, right? Like different ideas, different structures of their lifestyles, whatever the case may be. So I know that my time at work is probably a little bit less than other people that wanna carry on like Jeff, right? But I’m totally okay with that. Like, that’s part of my life plan and, and the way that I wanna live out the last, you know, 20, 30 years, 40 years of my life, hopefully, right?

So what does that mean? I need to do? Before I hang the sneakers up, like what do I need to do? Well, first and foremost, I need to make enough money to sustain retirement, that’s for sure. The fact that I’m taking care of myself better than I ever have done before, and the fact that I am wanting to be around not only just for my kids, but my grandkids, but maybe even my great-grandkids.

We’ve got medical advancements moving at rapid rates all around the world, like we should be able to live healthily into our nineties, if not even, maybe a little bit more now. So if that’s the case, then retirement’s gonna be a lot longer than it used to be for our parents and our grandparents, right? So I gotta make more money.

I definitely wanna make more impact. I definitely wanna be able to write more books and speak on more stages and all that kind of stuff, but that’s my journey. That’s what I want to do. It might be different for you. It might be different for somebody tuning in right now, but you should know, if you want to be around for the long haul, if you want to do that for a longer period of time, it’s not about more followers and more likes, it’s about more focus.

Growth comes from clarity. It’s not from constant content and spilling out your guts on social media Every single day. Focus builds momentum and distraction drains it, right? So sustainable business starts with sustainable you. And that’s, that’s the big, that’s the big message really. I’m trying to get out more than anything.

Thank you for that. That was a rabbit hole right there.

Pat Flynn: No, this is great because I’ve thought about retirement as well. I don’t think I would retire in the sense of I wouldn’t do any more work. I would just be in a position to not have to do something if I didn’t want to. Right. I mean, I’m kind of there already, but to be at the place at which I have complete peace of mind and I know things are taken care of. So that the things that, like if I wanted to then write a fiction book, which is what something I wanna do, I wanna world build and build a a fiction series.

Chris Ducker: I wanna point on that very quickly. We’ve hung out, gosh, for days and days and days, hours and hours and hours over the last 15 years, right?

Like I have heard you say that you wanna write a fiction book. At least half a dozen times and probably two or three times over the last four or five years or so. So my question to you, not only as a fellow entrepreneur, but also as a buddy, is what are you waiting for? Why not make that part of the time that you spend on your own in order to be able to bring something to life that’s deep inside of you, that you clearly have a lot of passion.

It’s a work. That’s a great question. Yeah. It doesn’t take much like an hour a week. Get the ideas out of your head, get them into Apple Notes or whatever you wanna call it. Right? Like whatever it might be. Just start working on it now, because then when the time comes around for you to put the your foot down on the gas, so to speak, you’re gonna have so much more groundwork already laid that you’ll be able to kind of crack on with it a lot faster.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, I hear you. And I feel like that’s what exactly I would do if it was something that was for the purpose of generating revenue or being a business or something that I want complete peace around the world building that I wanna do. Gotcha. And so right now my focus is on. Well, in a way, the Pokemon thing and of course SPI and these things that I feel like are, are all things that will eventually contribute to those times when the night world build.

’cause I’m world building right now. We see it on the Pokemon videos, for example. Yeah. And I’m learning about storytelling across the board, so I hear you on that for sure. And trust me, I have notes written about different stories, but to deep dive. I imagine when I’m retired, for example, living on a beach somewhere and I can wake up and just transport myself into that world. I don’t know. Maybe even use VR to help me see it and visualize it as I write it. I don’t know. We’ll see what happens. Who knows? I mean, that’s the crazy thing about this. It’s like we don’t even know what the world’s gonna be like in two years, let alone 10 20. How whenever that time may be.

Chris Ducker: So here’s my rather contrarian thought here, and I don’t wanna get too deep, but if we don’t know, what the world’s gonna be like two years from now, five years from now, then that’s a perfectly good reason why we should make sure that we’re putting ourselves first so that we can be ready for anything that comes our way so that we can weather any storms that we wanna weather.

I recently closed down a part of my business that made a significant amount of money for me on a monthly basis because I was no longer enjoying what I was doing in relation to that particular business model. And we’re talking about a good chunk of change every month. It wasn’t chunk change. It was a good chunk of money every, every month.

I was in a position from a financial runway standpoint to be able to make that decision because of the things that I’ve done running up to this point to make sure that I had a financial runway to run down for a few months if I needed to at some point. And so I don’t really think it’s like about doing less per se.

I think it’s about doing your best work now while you can, and getting ready for the future. Elevating your role as a leader and making sure that your highest value work isn’t necessarily about being the most urgent work, but more importantly, the most important work. That’s what you should be working on now.

To get ready for the future.

Pat Flynn: Chris, thank you so much for this deep conversation today. It’s almost a small window into the kinds of conversations that you and I have in private, and I’m glad that we are able to record this. And, you know, I’m, I’m prepared for the future. I have a bug out bag in my garage.

Somewhere.

Chris Ducker: You do. Oh dear. One of my favorite stories ever.

Pat Flynn: This is a a little running joke.

Chris Ducker: It’s a running joke. I’m gonna tell the story real quick. We’re gonna finish the episode like this. If you were at FlynnCon, what was it now, four or five years ago, I told this story as Pat asked me to come and Mc the event.

First time I ever hung out at Pat’s house. Uh, it was his older house, not the house he lives in now. We were sat at the dining table and I don’t even know how we got onto the conversation, quite frankly, bro. But you brought up the subject of your bug out back, which I had never heard the term before, being somewhat of a sheltered British person, and so you very quickly brought me up to speed with what the bug out bag was.

It was a bag, it was in your. Garage somewhere and it was full of water purification, tablets and food and you know, all this other sort of stuff that if in the event of some sort of zombie apocalypse or something along this line, you could grab the bag and you would be out and you family are out the door and you’re safe and you’ve got the bag and it’s gonna keep everybody healthy and alive and all that sort of stuff.

And in theory, it sounded great until I asked Pat. To show me the bug out bag. I was genuinely interested like this sounds like every home should have one of these things, right? And so Pat said, wait right here. I’ll go get it. He was gone for about 15 minutes. Eventually came back into the house from the garage.

I’m sitting there talking with April at the time, and you’re like, here it is. I’m like, dude, your entire family are zombies. Yeah, they’re all dead. They’re all zombies. 15 minutes to find the bag. Ridiculous. But still one of my favorite stories to tell.

Pat Flynn: Yes. So you can have the right things for preparation, but unless you know how to use them or where those things are located, then it’s not gonna work for you.

Chris Ducker: That’s good. I like the way you brought that back around to some sort of a life lesson. That was good stuff.

Pat Flynn: Yes. And one of those tools that you could have access to is this book The Long Haul Leader, and don’t like me, keep it in the garage of Amazon and let it sit there or wherever else you want people to get it.

Chris, where should people go and pick up the long haul leader if they’re listening to this right now?

Chris Ducker: Well, at this point, the book. Is out, I believe, when the show comes out. So yes, you can definitely get it from Amazon, you can get it from Barnes and Noble. You can get it from any other good bookstore.

And I would urge you, and I’m not just saying this ’cause I wrote this book, but I would urge you to pick up two copies, one for yourself. And one for the person that you care about the most when it comes to your own business journey, it can be your best friend, it can be your business partner. It can be one of your coworkers or a peer or a mastermind member or whatever it might be.

But give the gift of longevity to somebody else rather than just yourself, because your business really does need you at your best not just at your busiest.

Pat Flynn: Thank you Chris, and I’m glad to see you back on your feet after all that stuff that went down earlier. It makes you really happy.

Chris Ducker: Thank you man. I appreciate that bro.

Pat Flynn: Appreciate you man. The long haul leader. Go ahead and check it out. Grab it now and we’ll see you on the next one, Chris. Thank you.

Wow. Chris and I definitely went deep in that episode. We get deep like that all the time when we chat. Number one, just I think it is a great example of what can happen when you have a person who in your life is going through the same journey as you connecting with them, bonding with them, sharing ideas, and having these kinds of deep conversations with them, and that has been so vital to my success across the years.

But this topic of being here for the long haul is so important. It’s something that needed to be said a long time ago, but we were getting overshadowed by the hustle culture, and I’m glad that the world has experienced this reaction to it and has sort of put down this idea that you have to go faster to sacrifice everything.

Yes, that still exists, and there are gonna be people who will preach that, but I’m definitely in the camp of staying true to who you are staying at your best self and staying available for others who you want to serve as well. Because if you’re suffering mentally and or physically, well, then you cannot do that for sure.

So definitely go and check out the Long Haul Leader available on Amazon. You could pre-order it on his website, the LongHaulLeader.com, and maybe get some bonuses from ’em too if you get it early. I think $600 in bonuses for free, but. Thank you, Chris. I appreciate you and I appreciate you for listening through and hopefully this is not a, an eye-opening thing for you.

And if it is, great, great to get this message in front of you now in case you needed it, but hopefully something that sets you in motion in the right direction so that you can stay on top of it and on top of yourself. Go get that hobby, go make time for it. You will see the benefits of it just like Chris and I have.

And I look forward to serving you in the next episode. Thank you so much for being here. Cheers.