This is the first of my Wednesday “Best Of” Series.  Every Wednesday, I’m hand selecting my favorite episodes from the 9 years of podcasting.  You know this show is going to be completely baller…that’s the long and short of it. The Solopreneur Hour is an audio podcast hosted by The Kickass Life Producer Michael O’Neal that will interview (and co-host with) the best and brightest solopreneurs from all walks of life, including network marketing, internet marketing, music, fitness, actors, comedians, and more.  These people are not only standouts in their industries, but they’ve put an entrepreneurial spin and “zagged” while everyone else zigged.  Our mission is to take you through their journey, give you actionable steps and actions to help you with your ventures, and inspire you to take massive action.   Hopefully we’ll have a few laughs along the way. We share practical steps and tools, including books, smartphone apps, websites, training courses, strategies and stories that will support you every step of the way. Instead of giving the same interview you’ve heard 100 times, we invite our guests to be co-hosts, and have a casual but insightful conversation about success, just like you would at a restaurant or a bar.  It’s that down-to-earth, practical conversation that lets our listeners know that we are all the same…just at different stages of our journey. Our first guest is none other than the podcast juggernaut himself, Mr. John Lee Dumas.  Many of you have heard his story. (If not, catch up with him at https://eofire.com/about)  His podcast is not even a year old yet, and his downloads per month are over 300,000! He’s taken a brand-new-to-him medium and turned it into a six figure income in a few short months. Since this is show #1, during our chat we talked a bit about how this podcast came to be, and the journey I’ve been through myself.  I’m going to go deeper into it in episode #2, but it’s been an amazing ride for the last 4 years…starting from only $14 left in my bank account, to this. We talked about how John got his start, leveraging his experience with the military, combined with some great lessons from The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss, to “batch” the tasks he needs to do every day to be a successful entrepreneur. We also talked about a game changer of a book (for both of us), called “The e-Myth Revisited” by Michael Gerber.  We both had a profound career change because of that book. John explained the concept of Parkinson’s Law:  work expands to fill the time available for its completion – means that if you give yourself a week to complete a two hour task, then (psychologically speaking) the task will increase in complexity and become more daunting so as to fill that week. We then got into a great conversation about creating and leveraging relationships.  How important building relationships to the right people in your niche are.  In fact, if there’s any nugget to take from this show, it’s this: Surround yourself with success.  If you want to be successful at “xyz”, then work to establish relationships with people that are successful at “xyz”.  John mentioned how instrumental Jaime Tardy (https://eventualmillionaire.com/) and Cliff Ravenscraft (https://podcastanswerman.com) were in helping him develop a winning strategy to start his show. And it’s worth nothing…he had his naysayers.  Have a listen to find out how he handled being told “There’s no way you can do a show 7 days a week!”. Finally, we talked about his killer program “Fire Nation Elite”.  Talk about a killer deal! If you want to surround yourself with success, have a look at  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices