Can we let our curiosity guide us into cultivating a new passion?

John Lee Dumas is the Host of the incredibly successful podcast, Entrepreneur On Fire; which amasses 1.5 million listens every month and includes almost 2,000 episodes! He is also the author of The Freedom Journal and The Mastery Journal; which have been two of the most successfully funded Kickstarter campaigns in history.

In this episode, we’ll find out why John Lee Dumas decided to follow his curiosity by becoming a podcaster instead of following his passion and becoming a basketball coach, why he thinks it’s important to focus on short-term goals, why he publicly releases monthly income statements, the ripple effect he hopes podcasts will have on the world, how entrepreneurship has changed since he started podcasting, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

• John Lee Dumas’ Website
• John Lee Dumas’ Entrepreneur On Fire Podcast
• John Lee Dumas’ Book: The Freedom Journal
• John Lee Dumas’ Book: The Mastery Journal

 

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

 

Transcript

Andrea:  John Lee Dumas, it’s great to have you on the Voice of Influence podcast.

John Lee Dumas:  Andrea, I am fired up to be here.

Andrea:  I would love to just jump in and ask, what is something that really drives you as an entrepreneur, as a voice of influence in the world?

John Lee Dumas:  You know what I think has been driving me recently is what I call the ripple effect because now that I’ve interviewed over 1750 successful entrepreneurs, I’ve been able to see not just their progression but the listeners of my shows progression and the emails that I get from people who have been inspired by one of my guests or just by the body of work, etc that have gone on to do something and they’re now inspiring other people that myself and my show never would have reach.  It’s just this ripple effect that I’m loving and I just know that you know, Andrea, people like yourself and me and everybody who’s listening and creating content like we’re having this kind of unseen ripple effect, just having this powerful effect to better world.  To me, it’s just exciting to know the power of that.

Andrea:  Is there anything in particular that you’re hoping is the difference its making like what is the difference that you’re hoping this ripple effect will actually make on the world?

John Lee Dumas:  I hope this going to open people’s eyes and if it opens people’s eyes to realize that they’re on the right track in life that’s awesome.  Like it will open people’s eyes to realize that they want to be getting their ninth degree in graduate school then that’s awesome.  I hope that does but then I also hope it opens people eyes up like mine who were shut from the first 32 years of my life to know that there’s other opportunities out there.  There are other ways to go about this world than just accruing hundreds of thousands of dollars to student loan debt and getting crippled into a path that you really have no other way out of.

For me, I was able to avoid that narrowly just because of my military and ROTC army scholarship, so I wasn’t crippled with that debt from day one.  There’s nothing sadder to me than people who are limiting their futures before they even know what they’re doing.  So I want them to be amazing doctors in this world and lawyers, veterinarians, dentists, and all of those great things.  They need to go on their path and I will encourage them all the way home.  But I want other people to know that are just doing it to do something.

There are so many people they just go to law school because they just know what else to do.  I was one of those people and I hated it.  It was a $20,000 one semester in the state, like I can’t get that back.  That was just one semester; multiply that by six for most people.  So that’s just an example of what I want is just people’s eyes to be open and maybe it’s going to resonate with them and maybe it won’t.  But at least, I just want to put the opportunity and the information out there.

Andrea:  Have you seen a difference change on entrepreneurship in the last few years since you started podcasting?

John Lee Dumas:  You know, I’ve seen a lot more people that are really following their curiosity, which I like.  Because for a long time, it was just following your passion, like what excites you most and there’s good and bad to that.  The good to that is sometimes it works and sometimes following your passion is an amazing thing.  But sometimes what a lot of people are doing is their taking some things they’re passionate about, they’re making it work and stress and then they’re hating their passion and then they’re extinguishing that fire and now it’s not working anymore.

So they have taken that thing they love most in life and they kind of made it into a job that they no longer like.  So that’s not always the path.  It might be a path to explore but at the same time, for me, I was never passionate about podcasting.  I was curious about having conversations with successful entrepreneurs because I wanted to know out of curiosity what was making them tick, why they were successful.  But I wasn’t passionate about podcasting as a medium, I just knew that that was a way that they’re going to be able to share this conversation that I was curious about with other people and then that turned into something amazing.

You know, if I followed my passions, I would have probably tried to become a college basketball coach and who knows where I’d be right now.  But guess what, I love college basketball and I can sit here now in Puerto Rico and watch my team probably college play and just love every second of it and I have to extinguish that passion because it’s still there for me.

Andrea:  You know, this concept of passion is really, really fascinating to me.  But I’m wondering if there’s something similar, there’s some sort of underlying maybe commonality between what you’re doing now, the entrepreneurship, the interviewing, the competitive nature maybe even of entrepreneurship something in common with that college basketball passion that you have.  What’s the underlying thing that maybe you’d see in both?

John Lee Dumas:  You mean, combining like what I love about college basketball with broadcasting?

Andrea:  Not necessarily combining but maybe it’s the drive to succeed, that thing underneath of both of the actual thing that you’re doing, there’s like the top level action or activity job, but then underneath of that is a motivation of some kind probably about who you are.  You are somebody who is super focused and you’re applying that in just in a different way.  So I’m just wondering if you had any thoughts about that.

John Lee Dumas:  No, I do think there’s a lot of people are going to realize that once you focus on something for a little while, that focus can either become more intense or it can kind of start to kind of lose its luster a little bit.  That was interesting to me as I didn’t know what that was going to be for podcasting for me.  I didn’t know if I was going burned out, if I was going to stop and join the conversations, or just kind of lose momentum and it just ended up being the opposite.  As I just had more conversations, I became better to have those conversations.

So therefore, I was just finding myself enjoying those conversations a lot more.  And when I think as kind of interesting kind of _____ you know a lot of people feel like they can only start something that number one, they’re really good at.  Or number two; they’re really excited about, where the reality is sometimes when you focus enough to become good at something, the passion can follow.  And that’s what happened to me for podcasting.  Podcasting for me at first was just scary to get on a mic and talk to people.  There was no passion there at all.

But then as I got more comfortable, as I got better, as I got to be a kickback and just have real fun conversations, I was like “Wow, I actually love podcasting.”  This is a dawning realization.  I didn’t know what’s going to happen.  So for a lot of people just doing that thing and getting better and finding that comfort zone is going to kind of be the spring of passion as well.  So I think you need to look at it too.

Andrea:  Yeah, yeah that’s a good point.  So you are somebody that is just super laser focused.  I mean, even in just conversation with you, you’re so good at just getting right down to the meat of what you want to say and that’s sort of thing.  What is it that you are focused on in terms of the goal that you have in life, like what are you headed towards?  What’s your focus in sort of a long game?

John Lee Dumas: It’s interesting, so my focus for a long time has been in short game purposely because I wanted to grow Entrepreneurs on Fire.  I wanted to make it a very financially successful business and now we’ve done that.  For years and years and years, we’ve generate over $10 million in revenue.  I’ve been able to amass a huge _____ of financial savings that really gives me now this flexibility of like “OK, now that I’ve kind of set myself financially for the long term, like what is next?”

So now that I kind of taken care of that short term, that short-term thinking, now I’m kind of sitting back and say “OK, what is that legacy play?  What’s that thing that I may want to create that’s not just talking about making a dollar today or dollar tomorrow but living a lasting legacy for years, for decades, or for potentially centuries to come if that’s being possible.”  That’s exciting to me so that’s kind of having me think in some different areas, different places and just kind of say “Hey, what would this look like 10 years from now?”

Honestly, for the first few years in my business, I was like “What’s this gonna look like 10 days from now?”  Because that’s what was important building the business and that’s what the focus was.  I think that’s important for people to realize, you can’t start day one thinking you know “How am I gonna impact year 10?”  Because you can’t impact year 10 if you can’t actually put bread on the table for day 10, so you do have to take care of the short-term priority first.

Andrea:  Yeah.  So you have the opportunity now that you feel like you’ve kind of gotten to this point.  You’re ready to start thinking about but you’re not totally sure with that legacy is that you’re shooting towards.

John Lee Dumas:  Right.  But I’m open to it which is the first time I’ve ever been opened to it.  So that’s kind of interesting when you do open yourself up to something that’s when the idea started to come and that’s when the aha moment start to drop.  Again, most of those ideas and aha moments are going to be really bad ones but there might be a couple good ones _____.

Andrea:  Sure!  Yeah, you kind of set your interviews up with a low point because it seems like you’re saying that after your low point, you start to move forward, right?  Is there any kind of low point kind of thing that you’ve experienced since your initial one that got your podcasting?  How did these low points along your path, do they continued to direct you in the decisions that you’re making in your business, in your life?

John Lee Dumas:  Absolutely!  That’s why we love publishing our monthly income report and we’ve been doing it for 47 month because every single month, we’re doing something wrong.  We’re making some kind of mistake or we’re facing some kind of big obstacle and challenge in our business.  About 16 months ago, I moved to Puerto Rico like moving a business from California you know the mainland to an island in the Caribbean.  It’s a challenge and it’s a struggle and we learned a lot from that and those are just things that we love talking about our income report are those things that we didn’t even know.  We didn’t realize for whatever reason the entire banking world looks at Puerto Rico as a third world country as opposed to US territory.

It’s just kind of one of those things were sometimes you can know these things that are going to come but sometimes you don’t.  But no matter how successful you are, you’re still going to be facing your day-to-day struggles.  Sometimes I kind of chuckle when I look at Biggie Smalls back in the day and you know he said, “More money, more problem.”  And that can honestly be the case in a lot of scenarios.  Of course, I would always rather have money than not, but money does come with its own set of problems that you now have to deal with.

Andrea:  Well, I really appreciate you being on the podcast today.  I do have one more question.

John Lee Dumas:  Sure!

Andrea:  When did you feel like you’d really kind of made it as a podcaster, as entrepreneur?  What sort of goals did you have that you’re like “Yes, I’ve done it,” or whatever?  Is it the one that you’ve most recently done with feeling like you can think of legacy now?

John Lee Dumas:  You know what; I’ve made it moment which is interesting.  I actually used to ask this question on my podcast and I haven’t thought about that for a long time.  But I used to ask a question, like tell me about you’re “I’ve made it” moment.  I literally haven’t thought about that for probably years, but it’s an interesting question.  I will maybe share one kind of “I’ve made it” moment was that when I launched the show, I remember thinking to myself “How cool would it be if someday one of the people that I look up to the most, that of course doesn’t even know that I exists right now, but one day they come to me and they ask to be on my show because they know that there’s going to be an incredible power and impact to what they’re doing.”

You know, a little over a year and half ago that happened and Tony Robbins had his team reached out to me specifically asking to be on my show.  The moment we jumped off to the pre-interview chat, he made a comment and he goes “John, I just wanna say I’m really impressed of what you’ve done.  My son and I were talking about you the other day.”  Just that quick comment of like Tony Robbins was talking about me in a personal conversation with his son.  I came up somehow that I was on the radar like “Wow,” that was kind of I’ve made it moment to know that with all that he has done and what he’s doing in the world.  So that was a really cool experience for me and that’s one that I was going to look back and smile and say “You know what, I didn’t know what I was doing when I launched but thank God, I launched.”

Andrea:  Oh wow and you stayed focus and you stayed with the course.  You found your passion in the midst of it.  And now I wish you great luck and may you find that legacy thing that you really want to live for the world even beyond your podcast, even doing in all the courses and other things that you have to offer.  I just thank you for sharing your voice of influence with the listeners today.

John Lee Dumas:  Andrea, thank you so much for having me.  It was a blast!