My Top 10 Mistakes of 2021 and What You Can Learn From Them

by Matt McWilliams | Dec 7, 2021 | Affiliate Management, Podcast

The year 2021 was full of a lot of mistakes and opportunities for me to learn. Reflecting on them is also an opportunity for me to share them with you, so that you can learn from my mistakes. Today, I’ll share the top 10 mistakes I made in 2021 and what they mean for YOU!

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My Top 10 Mistakes of 2021 and What You Can Learn From Them

So I’m not really sure how to feel about this episode. This is an episode my team and I came up with, we actually decided this back in. I think it was like back in September might even have been August. It was a while ago. And then I saw this come up on my calendar to record this episode. And I’m like, ah, I don’t want to talk about the mistakes that I made in 2021, but I’ve always I don’t mean this to sound totally selfless. My duty is to instruct my calling is to be a teacher. And one of the ways that I can teach is by sharing the mistakes that I made this year so that you don’t have to make them.

I know I have learned a lot from others, sharing their mistakes and in fact, a couple of the mistakes that I’ll share today are mistakes that I learned from other people and went years without making them, and then fell back into some of my same old traps this year. So kind of interesting 2021 has been one of those years. It’s been that way for a lot of people in many ways this year has been different from 2020.

I think we’d all agree that as a whole, like for society at large, 2020 was harder than 2021, but there were still a lot of challenges, there’s still a lot going on in the world and there’s still a lot of uncertainty and causes of stress and things like that. But I think it’s not cliche to say we grow stronger from those.

I’m going to share my top 10 mistakes of this past year. Ten’s kind of an arbitrary number makes for a good list. I one thing that I teach is how to create a lead magnet and I teach you to want the number to be 3, 5, 7, 10, or, or, some variant of that. You typically want it to be an odd number unless it’s 10, those numbers work best. And I could have shared my top seven. I probably could have gone 17 or 18 deep on this, but I feel like I narrowed it down to the 10 that had the most negative impact but also that I learned the most from.

There’s a couple of mistakes that I won’t share today and the truth is there’s not really a whole lot of a lesson in them. I just screwed up and moved on, there are some mistakes that were tiny I mean hundreds of those probably, but as, I went for a walk and I kind of thought through what are those mistakes? These were, I literally only had 11 that just immediately popped in my brain as impactful, but also that have a lesson in them. I mean, it made it easy. These were the top 10 of those. I’m going to jump right in. I’m going to share those mistakes and my hope and my prayer are that you learn from them and you don’t make the same mistakes that set you on the right course.

1) I Put Less Value On My Health

I’ll highlight the first one, for example, is one where it’s a mistake I learned from somebody else, back in 2007. I made a change in my life back then, and then I got away from it and then I remembered it and got back to it and then I kinda got away from it again. And that’s a mistake. Number one, as the year progresses, I’ve put less value on my health. many of and, and follow me for a while that a couple of years ago I was tipping the scales close to 300 pounds.

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I then lost almost 90 pounds, 88 pounds of body fat. I put on some muscle, I got leaner, I dropped eight sizes. My jeans are actually really almost nine sizes. I was down significantly and then it’s kind of a chain of events mid-summer, I got really sick. I was actually sick for almost three weeks and it completely knocked me out that in and of itself, wasn’t that big of an issue. But when I came back from it, I jumped right into the chaos in our business because I’d been out for a while.

And while we have a, I have a great team, there were a couple of areas of our business where we were still very reliant on me. And so it was a problem. I came back and I just dumped myself for the next six to eight weeks. I felt like I was just kind of coming up for air and then we entered a busy season that we’d already known about, but the plan was to kind of have those couple of months before that, to get ready for that and also to have a little bit of rest. And I didn’t get that. And so I look at the last three to four months of the illness, certainly, because it knocked me out physically.

I wasn’t working out during that time. Actually, I lost like 20, I think it was like 19 pounds. And that was just in three weeks. I mean, almost a pound a day. That was just from not eating. I told somebody, I think the second week we bought a canister of lays potato chips and like the Pringles, like can the tennis ball can, that week the only thing I ate or just added any calories whatsoever, had that thing of plain potato chips, that was all I could stomach. Plain potato chips and some juice. I was drinking like a cup of juice a day just to try and get something in me.

But since then I kinda got out of the habit. I’ve been so busy. I realized like yesterday I live in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and we’re not going down south for another five weeks. So anytime we have nice weather, I used to always get outside. I used to pay attention to the weather and get outside and I’ve been so busy. It was 57 and sunny yesterday. And I didn’t even know it and I never went outside and I’m like, that sucks but that’s been, what things have been like now I’ve reprioritized this something I’ve I fixed but I have been so good at valuing my health, putting that first if I’m not healthy, the company is not going to be healthy.

If I’m not healthy things are not going to go well, I’ve been really good about doing, like, I didn’t really do a lot of video calls important calls, and meetings. I did over video. Most of the calls I did over the phone, and I was pretty demanding about that because why would I do it over the phone? So I can go for a walk and get outside and I started valuing the video calls over my health and not valuing like, no I’m done at four, so I can go for a walk or I don’t take calls before one o’clock so that I can make sure to get in my workout and go and go for a walk or, go play with the dog and get some exercise that way as I said, I’ve been so good at this. And that’s something that I’m in the process of fixing again, it’s just kind of shifting my, thinking on that.

2) I had Forgotten My Mantra

The second thing is the big mistake is I had forgotten my mantra. There’s something I’m so good at coaching people on this find what works and do more of that. I had a conversation just yesterday with a guy I did a 15-minute coaching call with him and he’s just like Matt, here’s how I’m struggling. And I said, okay, how many customers do you have?

he’s high-ticket coaching. He said $10,000 coaching program. And he’s like, well, I’ve got like 42. I said, how many of those are have already finished their six-month commitment? He’s like, I think he’s like 24. I said, how many of them they’re in their last month of the six months, he was like another three. So I’m like, okay, 27 people. I want you to go make an offer to them. I mean, I found out later, he told me yesterday, they were down there last thousand dollars, right before Thanksgiving, down to their last thousand bucks.

So I said if you told me like I needed to make $50,000, like really fast, and I had to do, I mean, and I didn’t have time to create a product. Like I needed it in 48 hours, I would go to our customers. I would go to our customers and I would make an offer to them for some sort of a coaching thing or a mastermind or something that would bring in $50,000 fast.

So I’m like, he didn’t need 50,000. He needed 10 or 15. I said, do what works, go to what works in, do more of that stop trying to reinvent the wheel. And he told me yesterday, he was like, man, we got, I think you said three, you made a $4,000 offer. These are people who paid like 10,000 and when I told them, I was like, do a year thing, less intense, but this is like the maintenance program. But if you sign up now, before the end of Thanksgiving, then I’m going to give you the rest of this year for free. You’re actually going to get a free month and we’re going to start immediately.

He’s like sign up three people at $4,000 a piece and I think one or two at $500 a month for next year, that’s pretty cool. He’s like, now you have no idea how much better Thanksgiving tasted. We got away from what works. We got away from our core competencies, we began chasing after the latest and greatest things and we forgot our core focus. Now we’ve remedied that. And this is again, something that we’ve started to remedy here in Q4. We are really focused on the key things that only we can do as a business. We’re not trying to be second best at anything. That’s the thing we’re going to be. Number one, we’re going to be the best at our core competency.

We have two core competencies. I’m going to teach you how to be an affiliate and how to make money as an affiliate. I’m going to teach affiliate program managers, how to teach their affiliates. I’m going to teach them forums sometimes as we did with Jeff Walker’s affiliates, or I’m going to teach you how to run your affiliate program. That’s it. Those are the two things I’m the best in the world at and, we are the best in the world that as a company. Running affiliate programs and teaching affiliate marketing, nothing else, that’s it.

3) Not Prioritizing Affiliate Promotions.

The third biggest mistake was not prioritizing affiliate promotions as much. Now, this is one of those, it’s hard to admit. I mean, the podcast is called the affiliate guy and I’m talking about not prioritizing affiliate promotions. The thing is starting in mid-2020, we had developed some, we have so many products and services of our own we’re in the 25 range that we just got away from it. We just kind of got away from prioritizing affiliate promotions like we used to get so excited and I shared one of the benefits of affiliate marketing is that you get noticed and I used to get so excited back in 2013, 14, 15 even in 2000, like 17, 18, when I would be on a leaderboard like I’m number two on the leaderboard. I’m the head of the social I’m oh my gosh, we might win this. I’m going to win this prize. And then I didn’t really need to get noticed as much anymore. People knew me. We have other ways of getting noticed.

We work with some of the biggest names in the world, in our space. I didn’t need those and I got away from it. And just financially it’s cost us like a quarter-million dollars a year over the last two years that pays for three team members. That’s a big deal. I’m like, no, 2022. We’re not having that happen. And actually really starting the last couple of months, that didn’t happen anymore. We’re getting back to that. So that’s a tough one to admit, but that is something that you may notice over time and you realize, oh wow, there are some downsides to that.

4) Wasting Time on Distraction Zone.

The fourth, big mistake that I made in 2021 was I spent way too much time. The first half of the year in my distraction zone. Let me explain what that means.

This comes from Michael Hyatt. We’re one of his business accelerator coaching clients. And he has four zones, four zones of productivity. You’ve got the, basically on the, I forget the order, but you got the desired zone? So the desired zone is things that you enjoy in your skill that. So you’re really, really good at them and you love doing them. On the flip side of that is the drudgery zone, which is you hate doing it and you suck at it. All right, like, okay, I wanted to get rid of the drudgery zone stuff. I spent a lot of the latter part of 2020, and early 2021 eliminating drudgery zone activities. I’m done. Like I eliminated 5, 6, 7 hours of draining work.

The other two zones are the dangerous ones for entrepreneurs though. There’s the disinterest zone. So this is, you’re really good at it. It might be the best in the company, maybe even one of the best in the world, but you hate doing it. You absolutely hate doing it. And then the other ones, the distraction zone. And this is why I said I spent too much time in the distractions. On the distractions zone, you probably figured out by now is you’re not really that good at it. Or maybe you’re okay at it on a scale of five to 10.

You’re a, you’re a seven, but you love it. And the problem with being like a seven is, well, if I hire somebody and they’re a nine and I got to pay him $70,000 a year, there are only two spots better. And I love doing it. For me these were things like video editing, graphics, copywriting, creating funnels. I love doing those. I did a great job of eliminating the drudgery zone. And then I, then I immediately tackled the disinterest zone. These are things like, it was easy for me. I hate it. And I suck at it. Okay. That’s easy. It was easy for me to eliminate things that I’m good at, but I hate doing, but what was really hard for me was the distraction activities, because precisely because they’re fun. Wow. Like I could do a graphic, it’s been half-hour doing a graphic.

Well, that keeps me from doing something that’s maybe just a little bit less enjoyable, but that I’m a 10 on the one to 10 or yeah, I could spend 30 minutes doing this thing well that, this other project takes four hours as someone who has entrepreneurial add doing a four-hour task is hard for me. But if I spend 30 minutes doing this thing and then 30 minutes doing this and 10 minutes doing that, and 20 minutes doing this, all these distraction activities, then I never get around to the four-hour thing. Oh, that was more fun. And so eliminating distraction and even low desire zone.

So what do I mean by the low desires zone? Things that I’m, that are a 9out of, 1 of 10 on, maybe I enjoyed them at a level 9 and I’m skilled at a level 9, or I’m going to hire people who might also still be 9s, but now I’m not doing them. And I’m focused only on the tens and tens. And so we hired a graphic designer.

Here’s a fun thing that happened. Our graphics are better and I love our graphics now, we hired a copywriter in our copywriting and our products like our reports in the inside of affiliate insider monthly, our 18 reports are better. They’re better written when I’m not the one writing them. They’re my ideas. What I do is I record a video 15-minute video and share the principles in it. And then he writes it. They’re better at creating funnels. Oh my gosh, I love setting up funnels and sales funnels and writing sales copy. I love it. And I’m really, really good at it, but it was a distraction. It was a distracting activity from what I needed to be doing as the leader of our company.

So we hired these people this year and it’s left me 100% in my desire zone with one exception. That’s our quarterly meeting with our CPA. And well, there’s no way around that one. That’s, I dunno if it’s drudgery. I like, I like Brian, but it’s drudgery. It’s just not my thing. Right. But we’re hiring people for those. And now I’m able to focus on the things that only I can do in our business.

5) Affiliate Promotions

On the affiliate promotions that we did do, and we still did eight this year eight it was down from about 12 to 14 over the previous years. It’s not like we did none. We didn’t go all-in on all, but two, I think two of them, so six of them, we didn’t go all in.

Now the ironic thing is I talk about this. I talk about this all the time. I wrote about it in my book, I’m going to share an excerpt from the book, Turning Your Passions Into Profits, by the way, coming out, January 2023, this is a side note there. And I write about this and I share this all the time.

And yet again, we weren’t doing it. This is one of those things where it’s like, Do as I say, not as I do or not, as I did, we’re fixing this. This will not happen in 2022, but here’s what I wrote in my book. And this is a pretty long excerpt, but I’m just going to read it pretty much word for word. I’ll probably give a little bit of sides here, but it says I wrote in the book “when I work with clients such as Michael Hyatt, Stu McLaren, Shark Tank’s Kevin Harrington, Zig Ziglar, Shutterfly, and others. There’s one thing that always happens in their big product launches, at least one affiliate shocks us and performs surprisingly well.

Mike Kim defeated the legendary Jeff Walker with a list 150 at the size of Jeff’s, Matthew Loomis went toe to toe with some of the biggest names in the online marketing world finished as the number two affiliate for Jeff Goin’s, despite having the smallest list of anyone in the top 10 and only my second affiliate promotion ever. I was the number one affiliate who made more than $10,000 in commissions with a list of fewer than 1800 people which was tiny compared to the rest of the top 10. Every single time someone shocks us. They’ve vastly outperformed their list, size their following, and their traffic levels to continually prove a key point. You don’t need a huge following or large list to succeed with affiliate marketing. You don’t need a huge following or large list to succeed with affiliate marketing. And in the book, I share how they do that.

How do they do that? Well, we use the scale acronym, S C A L E. Now the aim is to go all in the S is shift your mindset. You’ve got to shift your mindset first. You have to believe that it’s possible. The capitalizes to capitalize on your smallness capitalize on your newness. The L is looking for the gaps.

So look for the, what are the gaps in the marketing, the offer, what other affiliates are doing and find those and fill them. And then the E is engaged. They just use these affiliate promotions as an opportunity to really engage their audience. But the A is what we really messed up this year.

And here’s what I write in the book. Then the next thing we found in common with the people who vastly outperformed their list size was that they went all-in on their promotions. They treated affiliate promos like their own promos. They plan for them. They created irresistible offers with great bonuses and they didn’t shy away from telling people about it. In other words, they promoted big time. Success in affiliate marketing is based a lot less on list size and following and more on passion and strategy. The people I’ve been talking about didn’t have big lists, but they committed to going all in. I went all in Matthew Loomis told me in a recap of his affiliate promotion for Jeff Goins tribe writers, I decided to do the aggressive plan and sent 21 emails in total.

I just trusted you Matt, followed your direction and suggestions and just went with it. I went all out. Mike Kim told me after winning Ray Edwards’s affiliate launch, I was all in like, it was my own promo. John Mees shared in an interview with him after that same promotion, some of the most shocking affiliates that we’ve worked with, like Sarah Williams,

Heidi Easily, and Paul’s Pruitt said similar things when asked for the secret to their success. Paul said we were all in. Heidi said I treated it like my own launch. I’ve never gone that all out before, but it worked. Sarah Williams told me, recounting her experience, winning Stu McLaren’s affiliate launch making more than $180,000 in commissions and prizes. The previous year, she made less than 7,500. I made more than 20 times the money from three times the effort she said, I worked hard and dedicated myself to this affiliate promo, but the result was five times more than I expected.

They were passionate about the products they promoted and created a winning plan that had them all in these all-in strategies often made them more money in a couple of weeks than they’d previously made in an entire year. When your audience sees how passionate you are about a product and how invested you are in success, they won’t be turned off as some people think, they’ll be drawn to it and to you. And when you go all in, you get results like Brandon Cox.

In my first year of affiliate marketing, he said, I earned a whopping $384 all year long. Then I came across Matt McWilliams and he guided me through how to promote affiliate offers. The change was amazing. Over the course of the next year my affiliate marketing income, just commissions from affiliate promotions was about a hundred times what it was the year before and this year I’m set to double that there’s not a single name or person who’s influenced me more than Matt in this particular area. Another successful marketer, Dave Gambrill wrote that some of the things Matt taught me were counter-intuitive I a little gun shy to send so many emails to my audience, but once I implemented them, I started showing up on affiliate launch contests, leaderboards, which earned me invitations to promote some other very exclusive and lucrative launches, Matt’s methods, work.”

Problem. Now we’re out of the book here. I wasn’t following this. My methods work. I mean, that’s only daily, I’m not bragging about that. Nobody’s influenced Brandon more than Matt and yet I’m not doing what I taught. That was a big mistake, not going all in. So don’t make that mistake. If you’re going to promote something, most of the stuff you promote go all in.

6) Not Focusing on Our Number Two Core Value

Number six mistake. This year was not focusing on our number two core value. Our number two core values as a company, or we are constantly learning. We didn’t learn as a team as much. We got busy. We didn’t spend as much time learning as a team going through courses to help us be better, marketers, more productive, better leaders, better people like we used to. We didn’t read books together as a team. We’re fixing that in 2022.

7) We Didn’t Start Our Agency Sooner

Number seven mistake was that we didn’t start our agency sooner. Now we did start it in 2021.

Really just here in the past couple of months, we should have done it in Q1, maybe early Q2 at the latest and so, Yeah, we had a great process. I’m proud of what we did, but we were six, seven months late. And it costs us not only a lot of time and stress and gosh, health problems and all that stuff, but it cost us a lot of money. One of the mistakes that I made, wasn’t thinking that I had to do it all.

I had to run every affiliate program that our company brings on rather than coaching people on how to do it and allowing them to thrive. The process that we used as we went through a workshop. We did a workshop where we showed people how to run an affiliate program and how to work with clients, with the goal at the end of potentially hiring a handful of them to work with us.

So they went through this workshop. We narrowed that down from, I think 54 people. We narrowed it down to six, just from there were tests and quizzes and just paying attention to them. What kind of questions are they asking? How into it are they? And then from there, we, we would put them through a test, some test phase.

So we’re in that phase now. And they’re starting to deliver, we actually have a few candidates that are really quite frankly, wowing us. I think they’re going to be amazing. So the mistake there was just thinking I had to do it all rather than coaching people and doing what I do best, which is coaching them to be able to then run with it.

8) We Didn’t Mind Our Numbers

Mistake number eight, we didn’t mind our numbers. I say, we, I didn’t mind our numbers. I’m going to claim that one. I shouldn’t be saying we this, and this is nobody’s fault, but mine, I’m not a numbers guy. Like I joke about, I don’t know how much money we have. I used to joke about this.

I don’t know how much money I have. I don’t know what our cash flow is like. And we fixed that in Q4. I get a weekly report, our cash flow, our revenue, our expenses, and some other key numbers in our company. I take 15 minutes each quarter. This is not a huge thing.

It’s kind of a drudgery zone thing, but it’s 15 minutes a quarter, I’d say an hour a year, I’ll get over it just to do things like look for cuts to spend another hour or so this is more fun looking for growth opportunities. And when I say cuts, like it might be something as simple as,

oh, there’s a software that we’re really not leveraging. And it’s $300 a month. What would happen if we just stopped using it or we’d save $3,600, we could hire somebody for a third of that to do it manually in, well, now we make an extra $2,400 a year. That’s kind of cool. What are some growth opportunities?

Where are some areas again, what’s working? What are some surprises while we did that little promotion, this little tiny offer that we thought would bring in $10,000 and it brought in 20, alright, well, how do we add a zero to that? We streamlined our process for collecting money from clients. And now we don’t chase clients anymore. The process is dialed in. If somebody misses a payment, we know the next day, if they go seven days, like, okay, then you either need to pay us or we can’t work with you anymore. We’re not being jerks. It’s just like, we got to get this figured out and the process is streamlined.

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So I don’t even hear about it. I don’t even know if we could have a client whose credit card fails. I wouldn’t even know about it. No clue. And now I know within one or 2% where we’re at any given time financially like, I, I know how much money roughly give or take about 3%. I know how much money we have in our bank, in our business banking account. I mean I know within $15,000, I mean like how much money we have used to be. I had no clue. And if we were running a little bit low, like, Hey, if we continue at this rate, we’re not going to make payroll in two months. I didn’t know. I didn’t find out that it was like, oh, I remember this a few years ago. We’re not going to make payroll like next month. Oh, well then we should do something about that.

So knowing these numbers has allowed me to know, Hey, you know, we’re doing great. So we can pull back for a month and work on some things that are more fundamental. We can do things like earlier this year we were in a really good place. I said, now’s the time to update our website. This is going to be a money loser between what we’re paying people to do the work and losing sales. We’re going to lose money in January.

I think it was February. We’re going to lose money in February, but that’s okay. Now, if we’d been in a less, really good financial spot in January and February, I would have said, no, we need to do a big promotion. Then do that. We need to fill up the coffers. But I knew where we were and I knew we were fine to do it.

And then I also know when it’s like, okay, like why is our cash flow down six consecutive weeks? Do we need to do something to fix that versus why are we almost out of money? So something we fixed and I encourage you to start that, I wish I’d started that practice sooner. Start that practice sooner. Even when, oh, I brought in 12 bucks last week, still get in the habit of it.

9) Not Calendaring My Personal Items

Number nine, the mistake was not calendaring my personal items. It is comical. I am notorious for planning my workdays almost to the minute. If it’s not on my calendar, it doesn’t get done, but I wasn’t doing it, I wasn’t making personal things a priority. So work was seeping into my personal time.

This is something I did not let happen for a long time. I wasn’t planning my time away from work well, and this is something that I fixed probably in the last five months of the year where I made sure if I have something that maybe doesn’t have to be done at 5:00 PM, but it’s best for me that it gets done.

And I have time to do it after 5:00 PM that I don’t schedule a call after 4:30. So I put it on my calendar so that my assistant Kevin doesn’t schedule something at 4:30 anything in the day personal things like my workout. My workout is on my calendar. Now. It has been for about three months, my workouts on my calendar. So it pops up, nothing else gets scheduled. Then if I’m going to go for a walk and if I, if I’m gonna, if I’m going to talk on the phone with somebody and go for a walk, I make sure my assistant knows, Hey, this is a walk and talk and we call them.

And that, that means that we don’t schedule a video call right after the walk and talk might mean that I’m on the phone and I’ve finished the call and I’m still a mile from my house things like that. I just plan my personal time better and was a big mistake, especially the first up through about mid-summer up through really, even through like September was a big thing and we’re starting to ruminate. We’ve got a long way to go. We’re going to keep working on that.

10) Getting Trapped Inside My Head

Then the last mistake and this kind of goes back to one of the first mistakes about not prioritizing my health and what got us here was getting trapped inside my head, not asking for help, not leaning on our team, not meditating, not taking time for meditating. Personally, I don’t do transcendental meditation. I just do. I do a box. I do two different types of meditations, mindfulness, and a box breathing and not taking time to do that, to get out of my head for 15 minutes a day, not talking with friends, I went for a stretch there. I didn’t talk to friends and not talk enough with my business partner who happens to also be my wife about business. We got away again, things got busy and things are chaotic and we weren’t doing our regular hour-long weekly meeting, or when we would do the meeting, but I didn’t have an agenda.

So we just kinda talked about things. So I have in my planner now I keep a thing on my Monday. And I was like, here, I want to add this to the agenda. I’ll go write it down, not working with my coaches much. And really just really digging deep with my coach, just internalizing everything and thinking that I had to solve all my own problems. Like we talked, I talked about this earlier asking how and not who, which I’ve shared about before I did an entire podcast episode and said to you, stop asking how and start asking who you probably already know somebody, you don’t have to be the one to do everything. And that the middle-class say they Google stuff and how do I do this? And they try to fix it themselves. But it’s the wealthy who go, well, who do I know who already knows? I did a whole podcast episode on that. And then I’m sitting there in the middle of summer going, wait, I’m doing the same thing.

And this is something that I’ve started to remedy in the last 90 days. And it has really paid off. So it’s hopefully one of those mistakes. This mistake I’ve made twice that seemed to be on like about a seven-year cycle with this, where I fall into this. It was 2000. Oh, so eight-year cycle, I guess, 2013, 2005, 2013. Yeah.

That’s an eight-year cycle. So I need to have set this in my calendar for like 2028, 2029 to not fall into this trap of getting stuck inside my head. And so I made it a priority to learn more on my team, tell them I trust them, not be the one who has to sign off on everything, ask for help from my team, from my friends, from my coach prioritizing my health. Like we talked about meditation deep, like it no longer. It doesn’t have to be, I don’t have to do 20 minutes. Oh man, I really am having one of those days. It’s a busy day and I needed to do 10 minutes. Just 10 minutes. If you can’t find 10 minutes, seriously just, I just do it taking time to get outside, taking time to, to do my stretches, I’m, I’m 42. So it can’t just be about running and lifting weights anymore.

I’ve got to make sure I do my stretches. And I use that as a little bit of kind of meditation time, talking more with friends, getting on the phone call my mom things like that. I’m just getting out of my head, big, big mistake that I made earlier this year. So there you have it, not my most fun episode ever, but I hope you got something out of this. Like I said, my hope and prayer, as I said at the beginning is that you avoid some of these mistakes. Maybe you’re not susceptible to a few of them. Maybe you’re susceptible to four of them or three of them. And now I’ve, I’ve helped you through those. That’s my hope. That’s my hope.

Real quick, make sure you come back from the next episode, I’m going to share my top 10 lessons of 2021 and what they mean for you. So these are things that we, a little bit of a tie into today clearly, some of my biggest lessons were from mistakes, but these are just things that maybe I just learned. I saw somebody doing this and went holy crap. That was amazing, I read it in a book and learned it.

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Make sure you hit subscribe. So you don’t miss that episode. And while you’re doing that, if you’d be so kind as to leave a review, a rating, and a review, that just helps us to get more exposure people said they get these lessons. I got an amazing one from Teddy D I don’t know who that is because it’s, I don’t know. I think it’s like a nickname on there, but Teddy D “The Affiliate Guy is one of my favorite podcasts, certainly tops the most often listen-to list. Why? I not only get actionable information and not just on the affiliate stuff, but business and even life in general, but Matt is always fun and also fun and exciting to listen to. He has guests who tend to be awesome. His book authors usually have great books for me. I’m currently reading The Long Game by Dorie Clark.”

That’s so cool. Like I know people do that, but it’s so cool to know that he listened to that and got the book.

“And even if I didn’t buy the book, his podcast episode with her was fantastic. I learned a few things I’m actually using and yes, the content on affiliate marketing is great. I must really, really, really like Matt’s podcast because I think it’s the first podcast review I’ve ever written.”

So Teddy, thank you so much. I appreciate that. If you haven’t yet, please do leave a rating and review just helps the skill but more exposure to people who could use this message, whether it be about said affiliate stuff, business life in general, as we shared today, and then make sure to come back for that next episode, my top 10 lessons of 2021 and what they mean for you. I’ll see you then.