Joe Stolte is the CEO of Daily.ai, an AI platform that helps businesses design, write and test newsletters that will wow their audience and increase conversion. However, before that role, Joe scaled and sold five technology businesses, which ended in what he describes as “ three successful exits, two spectacular failures.”
In this episode of the Conquer the Chaos Podcast, Joe joins Clate Mask to discuss what he’s learned through the highs and lows of his career, including the role curiosity plays in your personal and professional success, the steps you need to develop growth habits, how to revolutionize your follow-up process with AI, and more.
Mentioned in this episode:
- Daily.ai
- Joe Stolte Instagram
- “Conquer the Chaos” book
- The Let’s Grow Summit
- “Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself”
- “Power vs. Force”
- “Think and Grow Rich”
- “Atomic Habits”
Transcript
[00:00:23] Clate Mask: Welcome everyone to this episode of the Conquer the Chaos Podcast. I am Clate Mask, your host, the co-founder and CEO of keep. And I'm really excited today because we've got an AI expert, a personal development expert, and a friend that I'm excited to introduce to the Conquer the Chaos community, Joe Stolte. Great to be with you, Joe. Thanks for being here.
[00:00:45] Joe Stolte: Clate, it's an honor to be here. This is exciting. Thank you.
[00:00:48] Clate Mask: Yeah, you bet. So why don't you give the audience a little bit of background? I mean, AI is all the rage and what kind of self-respecting podcast would we be if we didn't have something about AI in our conversation? But there's much more to it, obviously, as it relates to the six keys to success for entrepreneurs. Why don't you just take a second and talk about daily AI? Just give a little intro to our audience about who you are and what you do.
[00:01:14] Joe Stolte: Yeah, absolutely. So, I'm Joe Stolte. I'm a five-time technology founder. I've had three successful exits, two spectacular failures that, of course, I learned more from the failures than I did for my successes as we tend to do. And the last company that we sold, that company was under contract to be sold. And I reached out to my coach at the time who's a phenomenal guy. His name is Brian Franklin — and he coached people like Reid Hoffman and a bunch of other unicorn CEOs, just a spectacular human being. And I was like, “Hey, for my next adventure, I'd really like to work on something at the intersection of AI or machine learning and email or marketing. Do you happen to know anybody?”. He's like, “It's funny that you say that because my friend, Evan Pagan and Dr. Peter Diamandis have this product, it's not out in the market, that's doing something in that stratosphere. You should talk to them.” So I did. And I became the CEO of what's now called Daily.ai.
[00:02:14] Joe Stolte: And what we do is we build AI automated email newsletters that get 40-60% open rates without spending any more than five minutes of your time a week to look at the content that's going out to your customers. And the secret sauce, the thing that makes it really special is it's not just generative AI making stuff for you. But it's actually looking at what every single one of your subscribers is doing And it's getting smarter and smarter and smarter based on what they're actually doing so that it can curate your content and third-party content that's most aligned with what they're clicking on and how they're engaging. One thing I like to say is that as a marketer, there's three forms of truth.
[00:02:52] Joe Stolte: There's what the brand thinks the market wants. There's what the market says that they want. And then there's what they actually click on. So we want to know all three. We just want to over-index on that third one so that we're giving them the right content. That's within the spectrum of the brand in terms of what they want to share with their audience that they want to read right now and then build an algorithm that makes it smarter and smarter and smarter over time. So that's, that's who I am and that's what we're up to.
[00:03:17] Clate Mask: Joe, awesome. So obviously I'm interested in this too because automation and marketing automation, specifically email marketing is a big part of what we do. It's a big part of how we get our messages out to our audiences, whether that's customers or prospects or members — whatever it is.
[00:03:37] Clate Mask: But if we aren't getting those messages read, Then what good is it doing? And as we all know, it's really tough to get messages through to people and you know the age-old maxim of good marketing is sending the right message to the right market at the right time. Well, you guys are doing something that really tips the deck, weights the deck in your favor in terms of the timing and getting the right message to the right audience.
[00:04:04] Clate Mask: So I love what you're doing. What I'm hearing you say is it's generative AI combined with hyper-relevance and timeliness for customers because the AI is responding to their behaviors and making sure that what is delivered to them makes the most sense for them based on those behaviors.
[00:04:24] Joe Stolte: Yeah, that's exactly right. The thing we really want to capture as marketers, as people who are in the business of grabbing and directing other people's attention is we want to understand their intent. And the thing about intent is intent is fluid, right? On September 10th, 2001, your intent was different than on September 12th, 2001, because something really important happened in the middle if you're an American, right? Well, some micro version of that, but less extreme is happening all the time in the war for our attention. If you're really focused on one thing and you're locked in and then bam, something hijacks your attention and your intent completely shifts. So how does that show up from a marketing perspective?
[00:05:05] Joe Stolte: Maybe I have a problem I'm trying to solve and I'm researching solutions. I'm looking for stuff, but I'm totally enthralled and trying to figure out what do I do about this. And then, my five-year-old son comes in and it's like, “Hey, my little sister just pooped all over the floor.” I'm like, “Oh no,” and now my frame is totally changed.
[00:05:22] Joe Stolte: Yeah. My intent is totally different or I'm on vacation in Europe, and so if you send me an offer, because my intent is completely shifted, I may even forget that I was looking for that solution. Maybe I opted into something half heartedly and just abandoned it.
[00:05:37] Joe Stolte: So I think it's really important to understand intent and building tools and capabilities to understand, like, how is that fluid intent changing over time? But you nailed what we do. One other thingI wanted to say is it's marketing the right message over to the right person at the right time over the right channel with the right offer. Everything but the offer can mostly be solved with math, meaning just looking at enough data. And so what people don't often realize inside of that paradigm is that up to 40% of the content as a marketer that you put into the marketplace actually pushes your prospect away from the sale because it's intrusive.
[00:06:16] Joe Stolte: It's the wrong message at the wrong time on the wrong channel. And so that's the slippery slope. And so our vision is like, how do we help? All small businesses market without being marketers by using data to arm them with these kinds of things so they can just get a lot farther, faster in the conversation with their customers.
[00:06:32] Joe Stolte: So newsletters for us are like the opening act, and there's so much more that we have planned after that. But you nailed it. That's exactly how we think about it. That's exactly what we do.
[00:06:43] Clate Mask: Well, it's super fascinating because it increases the effectiveness so much. When I think about automation, and I talk on this podcast quite a bit with people around automation because it's a way for entrepreneurs to buy back their time …
[00:07:02] Clate Mask: It's a way for them to get greater yield out of their efforts. It's a great way for them to grow their business without having to put so much in. At some point, labor plus capital equals output. And it's like If you automate, you can do a lot more. And so we talk about this a lot.
[00:07:21] Clate Mask: We talk about automation, but what you're describing, the overlay of AI, creates a level of smart automation that improves the effectiveness of our marketing considerably. And when you look at the customer strategy across a business where we're trying to get the messages, we're trying to move the customer through our experiences or our products or find ways that are going to improve their lives and make their businesses better, it's really tough to compete with all the noise. It's really tough to get that message through. So when you take something like you've described, it dramatically improves the effectiveness. And I know you've got a solution where some of our customers at Keap are using your solution.
[00:08:04] Clate Mask: Why don't you take just a second where you kind of left off at newsletters and what you do with newsletters and maybe … What's the automation there that's happening? And then what is it that you … Maybe it's a standard automation without your AI, just for people to kind of connect to.
[00:08:21] Clate Mask: And then you can add the AI part. Well, why don't I take the first part? You take the second part and make it really fun. So I think everybody knows that sending regularly scheduled emails out in a weekly fashion, a monthly fashion, but having some kind of a nurture through an email newsletter is one of the most common ways that marketers, business owners, entrepreneurs will stay in touch with and stay top of mind of their of their customers, but it can become very tricky and stale. It can become just another thing that lands in their inbox. So talk to us about what you do with your newsletters and what that version looks like that applies AI.
[00:09:09] Joe Stolte: Yeah, absolutely. And in the context of automation, just as like a frame, let's go up a level meta. Before automation, a best practice that I've observed and applied and found quite useful is elimination.
[00:09:23] Joe Stolte: What can we get rid of? What activity that doesn't even need to take place in the first place can we get rid of? And then automate the things that do need to take place. And so, in some capacity, what we would love to do is be able to say, “Alright, if you don't want to receive the message and you are not engaging, let's eliminate you from the send.”
[00:09:42] Joe Stolte: Because it's hurting your email deliverability. It's sending stuff to people that they don't want, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And let's get that right message to the right person at the right time. So right off the bat, if you don't want the message and that's clear, before I push you with more messaging to push you to opt out, let's just not send you the message. That's one part of it. But another part of it is … I'll describe what our newsletters look like. And if you wanted to see an example, you can go to daily.ai and see it. It's effectively a newsfeed. What we found is that there are pre existing behaviors that already exist inside of human beings when it comes to marketing that you can just latch into.
[00:10:24] Joe Stolte: One of them is scrolling. For better or for worse, a nontrivial amount of human beings spend a lot of time with their head craned down and their phone in their hands, scrolling LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok, news sites, whatever. Everything is a scroll, right? It's an image. It's a headline. It's in text and you just keep scrolling.
[00:10:42] Joe Stolte: But what we did is, when we looked at newsletters, we went out and looked at it and said, “Hey, there's a lot of really good newsletters that I subscribe to that I get to it, and it's actually, it's a bunch of text and I want to read it, but I'm busy. So I go, ‘man, I'm just going to read this one later.’”
[00:10:55] Joe Stolte: But in the world of marketing, later is never. I call that the readability burden. If it's got too much text or too much text clumped together, then you just don't want to read it. So the first thing that we did to really kind of make it effective is we broke it up and we made it look like a newsfeed, something you might see on Instagram, right?
[00:11:12] Joe Stolte: And we tried to give three or four thumb scrolls, which are seven to 11 pieces of content along with your ad, which we call a conversion card. Now, this is not an ad for a third-party product and service. This is your ad. This is like a CTA in your newsletter to go get out of the newsletter and get into your sales process.
[00:11:29] Joe Stolte: Otherwise, it's other people's content mixed with your content that's delivered to your customers automatically. So it grabs the content, either pulls the image from that content or uses AI to make an image depending on if the AI thinks that image is strong enough, it rewrites the headline and then it summarizes the content in bite-sized chunks so that your audience can quickly scan through it and get a bunch of value from scrolling through it.
[00:11:55] Joe Stolte: Again, whether that's your content or third-party content, the goal isn't to start with “why am I so cool?”. The goal is to start with what's in it for them. What's the best possible little chunks of content that I could give my audience that they would appreciate, that they would find value in? Then I can mix that with my stuff.
[00:12:13] Joe Stolte: So we built this thing called the perspective engine. It goes and looks at over three million pieces of content a day and it filters out negative news and clickbait and it filters in what we call future-forward positive news. That creates something in readers that we call hopamine. So it's that, plus your brand preferences to deliver content to your ideal customer profile.
[00:12:33] Joe Stolte: And that's what ends up in the feed. So all of that is automated and you get a version of that newsletter in your inbox as the publisher. And it takes five minutes to review it. There's a little box somewhere in there. And when I say a box, it's like a little piece of content with like three or four bullet points of other articles.
[00:12:50] Joe Stolte: That would be like Clate’s picks that are personalized for Clate based on how Clate has interacted with your newsletter. That's personalized just for him. So each of the subscribers is now getting a personalized version of the newsletter. So we've taken this whole process … If you look at the data, pre-AI, it took 1, 2, 3 weeks — not days or hours, but weeks — to go from starting from scratch to sending a piece of marketing content to your audience on average for a small business.
[00:13:18] Joe Stolte: We've completely compressed the whole thing down where it's done and all you have to do is take about five minutes to review it. And if you don't like it, you can eliminate articles, send feedback, whatever it takes. It's a very quick review process and then it's ready to send.
[00:13:32] Joe Stolte: We send newsletters every day, five days a week, 20 sends a month. Because it's so easy. So anyway, that's a lot to digest, but we've taken the whole newsletter process and we found the best way to get people's attention and update that over time and make it really easy. So you don't have to spend any time on it.
[00:13:50] Clate Mask: That's really fascinating. It's such an interesting study to look at human behavior and what has become so habitual for people when they're consuming information on their phones. And you're right. Everything, what you just described, the formatting … I think if our listeners think about it, the formatting of everything you look at from your news sites to your Instagram or Facebook, everything is what you just described: Image, headline, a little bit of copy.
[00:14:25] Clate Mask: People are just scrolling through it and it's a really smart thing to take that format and put it into a newsletter that recipients can receive and go through to get the information that your business is interested in conveying to them in a format that they're used to in a layout that's very familiar so that they're clicking on your CTAs because it's part of their habitual behavior.
[00:14:58] Clate Mask: So I think it's really fascinating what you guys are doing. So tell us how that's working. What are you seeing? How are people using that technology to automate more of their marketing.?
[00:15:12] Joe Stolte: Yeah, absolutely. We have two different customer segments. We have one segment, which we'll just call famous thought leaders. These are like the Chris Fosses and the Dr. Peter Diamandises of the world or the Joe Polishes or the JJ Versions. I could keep going. We have I think 22 different Wall Street Journal or New York Times bestselling authors that just use this to connect their audience to the content from the book and give them a touch at least every week to show up and add value.
[00:15:44] Joe Stolte: So they continue to make those CTAs. That's one way. And then we've got several hundred brands that you've probably never heard of — everybody from real estate to plastic surgeons to insurance professionals, private equity firms, venture capitalists, coaches, consultants ... I could keep going. … 37 different industries where they're just using this as a strategy to stay in touch with their audience in terms of the middle of funnel.
[00:16:09] Joe Stolte: At the top of the funnel is getting leads in and getting people to pay attention to me for the first time. And the bottom is getting them to convert and buy my stuff. The middle is where you give them that big value hug and you show up for them. One thing we say is that consistency creates trust and trust creates transactions.
[00:16:26] Joe Stolte: So what we're trying to do is be that consistent engine that can show up every month or every week or in some cases every day with valuable content so that we can stay top of mind as a brand and understand your intent. Where is it going and how's it slipping around? One other thing I'll say is a helpful mental model that we love is the 7-11-4 rule.
[00:16:44] Joe Stolte: Google did a study some years ago to basically track, “Hey, how do you convert on the consumer side — someone that's never heard of you, into a paying customer?”. And looking at all their data, they determined that it takes about seven hours of interactions across 11 different touch points and four different platforms or channels.
[00:17:00] Joe Stolte: So if you think about it, we really automate that middle part, 11 different touch points. So if you have a newsletter and it goes out every week when you've received a lead, we're going to help chip away at those 11 touch points. If you're doing anything else, ad retargeting, sending other emails, doing sales calls, or posting social media content, that's going to help get the four channels and increase the touch points, et cetera. But we're just chipping away at those 11 touchpoints. And the more time you spend in the newsletter, the more value they attribute to the brand. So that's another thing that we do that we just try to think about that customer journey. We don't solve all of it.
[00:17:38] Joe Stolte: We're very specifically paying attention to the middle and we're trying to be as great as we can to turn it from the middle to the bottom to drive clicks, leads, book demos, that kind of thing.
[00:17:48] Clate Mask: Okay. We're going to keep this going, but first a quick message for you. Conquer the Chaos listeners, let me talk to you straight for just a minute. You're running your business, and it dominates your mind. It can be very difficult to take a step back and see what's needed to create balance in your business and your personal life, and to create great growth and development and progress in your business and personal life.
[00:18:09] Clate Mask: One of the most powerful ways to gain the perspective that you need is to get away from things and immerse yourself in an environment where you're going to be inspired, where you can see possibilities, where you can create connections, and where you can learn and grow and develop. And I know of no better place for entrepreneurs than Keap’s Let's Grow Summit. For years. We ran this conference as just an amazing mecca for entrepreneurship. And then, truth be told, for a few years, we didn't run it. We got back to it last year, and this year, we're putting it on and it is going to be awesome. I am so excited about this.
[00:18:47] Clate Mask: And I want you as our listeners to not miss out on this event. It's going to be November 20-22 in downtown Phoenix with the main days being the 21 and the 22. You can register for it by going to keap.com/letsgrowsummit. That's https://keap.com/letsgrowsummit. And you can take advantage of our early bird registration pricing, which expires at the end of July.
[00:19:10] Clate Mask: So if you are needing a reflection time, an opportunity to take a step back, gain greater perspective, inspiration, and most of all, see what automation — the fifth key to success — can do for your business, then make sure that you attend the Let's Grow Summit. Keap.com/letsgrowsummit, November 20-22 in Phoenix. I look forward to seeing you there. Alright, now back to our chat.
[00:19:35] Clate Mask: Well, I love what you said that consistency creates trust, and trust creates transactions. Everything you're describing is the science behind follow-up. It's what I've taught and shared for years: The fortune’s in the follow-up. The consistency of being there because we can't control the timing. We can't control the intent and we can't control the attention span of people. We can just be there when the time is right for them.
[00:20:02] Clate Mask: And what you're describing creates not only that consistency but the relevance. And so I love it. By the way, a while back when I heard the 7-11-4 rule from Google. I was like “This is what people have said forever. It takes, you know, seven to 12 impressions.”
[00:20:21] Clate Mask: And of course, those are going to take some time. Those touches take some time. And then, everybody has recognized that when you can get in front of people on multiple forms of media, multiple channels, multiple ways of touching it, it's not additive. It’s multiple — it multiplies. When they hear your business on the radio, they see you on their phone advertising to them, and then they also see a billboard or something, all these things converge. And the power of that is what Google is describing in the four channels.
[00:20:58] Clate Mask: So I love what you shared there. And for all of our audience, I would reinforce when we talk about customer strategy, which is the fourth key to success for entrepreneurs — the first, the business keys — it's that customer strategy of consistent follow-up across the customer journey.
[00:21:14] Clate Mask: And you guys really focus on the middle and getting those 11 touch points where you're building value. As you said, it’s the hug in the middle of the funnel. So I love that. Well, in a minute I'll definitely give you a chance to share where people can learn more about you, but you and I were talking in the green room before and you said that … You caught my attention because you said you've been studying neuro linguistic programming for 15 years. You're a huge personal development geek as am I. And so I say that with lots of love because I do absolutely love it.
[00:21:51] Clate Mask: So we talked for a second about mindset and I want you to take a minute because you've built three successful businesses that have sold. You've had two spectacular failures in your own words, and you learned so much from those. What did you learn about mindset? In going through the successes and the failures as a personal development guru — really, I mean, you're a total student of it — what did you learn about your mindset and what did you learn that would be helpful for our listeners as they're practicing entrepreneurship and working on their mindset?
[00:22:24] Joe Stolte: Yeah, probably one of the biggest things I learned. There's a couple. There's a handful of things. Number one, what I learned about learning, and I learned this from NLP, is that learning is not memorizing something.
[00:22:36] Joe Stolte: Learning is evidenced by behavior change. So if I got the information in, I digested it, and then I changed the way that I show up in the world, that's what real learning looks like. Anybody can memorize anything, and that's kind of how we're taught at school. Memorize it, take the test, get the grade. But if it doesn't actually it…
[00:22:53] Clate Mask: If you’re not doing it, you haven't actually learned it.
[00:22:55] Joe Stolte: That's it. If you haven't transformed, you haven't transformed. It's all in your head.
[00:23:00] Clate Mask: By the way,I think that point … I came to that realization one time many years ago after going to a conference and my lizard brain was telling me, “You already know this.” And then, my wiser self said, “Yeah, but you're not doing it, so who cares if you know it?” And as I've gotten older, I've realized that what you just said is some of the best wisdom that I think my younger self could have absorbed. That it was like, “Hey, who cares if you know it? If you're not doing it, do you really know it if you're not doing it?”
[00:23:36] Clate Mask: And I think that way of learning … And how many of us have gone through and said, “Gosh, I'm learning this thing again and I wish I didn't have to keep learning something over and over.” It'd be really nice if I could learn it and just do it consistently forever. And yet that's not how we are as human beings.
[00:23:51] Clate Mask: We have to learn it again and do it again. And so I appreciate that perspective of if it hasn't transformed you, if it hasn't really changed you, have you really learned it? So how do you go deeper on that? How do you … For those of us who always are struggling with, “Hey, I'm trying to get better at this thing.”
[00:24:13] Clate Mask: And we feel like we're taking a step back. I say all the time, the whole point of working on this stuff, this practice is to make progress, not to be perfect. But what did you learn and what do you tell yourself in those times where you take a step back, and you find that you're not doing what you thought you had learned?
[00:24:35] Joe Stolte: Yeah. Well, another powerful thing I learned in the mindset game is that at any given time, you're really only ever in one of two states of mind. I'll just call it a pain state and a power state. A pain state would be like fear, overwhelm, anxiety, frustration, jealousy, envy, and a power state might be like curiosity, creativity, joy, love, et cetera.
[00:24:57] Joe Stolte: And so what happens is if I've learned something and I want to go implement it in the world, the gap between understanding and action is either I know what to do and I know how to do it or I've got an internal blocker. So if I've got some kind of internal blocker, I need to work through that. A lot of times I think what happens is people fail and that becomes a muscle memory, a whole behavior around failure, right? “It's bad. You did it wrong.” Whereas one thing I've learned is if I ever want a bridge out of a pain state to a power state, I just try to get curious. Curiosity is a better state of consciousness. It's a power state. If I can get into curiosity, like, “Huh, why did that happen? How did I forget to not pay the parking meter and got a ticket? What's the lesson I'm supposed to get from that?” …
[00:25:50] Joe Stolte: Curiosity opens the floodgates of what's possible for me. And it moves away the heart palpitations and the anxiety and the judgment of, “I did it wrong,” and all that kind of stuff. It just gets me back into, “Huh, what could I do to not do that again? That's silly.” And so that curiosity bridge is a big one for me. Another thing that I learned from an old mentor of mine, Wyatt Woodsmall, is if you want to achieve a dramatic outcome in your life, sometimes you have to become not you. The version of you that wants that outcome is not capable of that.
[00:26:26] Joe Stolte: So if you start with the identity transformation instead of like the big goal or the process you're going to use to get the goal, it can help you embody the person you need to become faster. For me, personally, I'm not saying this is universally true for everybody, but I grew up in a farm town of less than a thousand people.
[00:26:44] Joe Stolte: We didn't have any money. We didn't know anybody that had any money. So to go from that to entrepreneur, I had to become a different kind of person, and at some level, there's …
[00:26:53] Clate Mask: Reset your identity.
[00:26:54] Joe Stolte: That's right. And I don't think like … Ken Wilber talks about how I transcended and included that farm version of me. It's still in there like a Russian doll, like a mini Russian doll. I just put other dolls on top of that because I've grown.
[00:27:09] Clate Mask: You introduced yourself as growing up on a farm. It's still part of your identity, but you've evolved that identity to create space for the successful entrepreneur and you've done it … What I'm hearing you say, Joe, is you did it by focusing on the two realms of emotion. You've got power and you've got pain and you realize that the bridge to move to the more effective side is curiosity.
[00:27:38] Joe Stolte: That's it. And if I'm curious and I'm not in fight or flight, I don't have my parasympathetic nervous system keeping me stuck. Then it's a lot easier for me to move forward and take action, and action is how we evidence behavior change, right?
[00:27:51] Joe Stolte: So it's like I wanted to pick up a meditation habit. About 12 years ago, my father passed away from cancer and I'd never meditated. So I took a course on meditation and I wanted to meditate. And I heard a joke one time, it was like, “Well, how do I implement a new habit? It's two steps: Get started and don't stop.” So I was like, I'm going to do it. I'm going to go … I had moved from Seattle to Venice Beach, California, which is a beautiful setting to do this. And I would just go to the beach every single morning, and I meditated every day just so I could get an anchor in the chaos.
[00:28:24] Joe Stolte: That was my life. I had just moved. I just got married. My father just passed away. So I just did that. And man, did that change my behavior! Well, first of all, I changed my behavior. I wasn't meditating. Now I'm meditating, but it completely gave me a whole new access to stillness, but I'd never really been accustomed to stillness.
[00:28:42] Joe Stolte: So that's how I changed my behavior is when I learn something, I realized that thinking is a low-cost activity. Talking is a slightly higher-cost activity, but not by much. Doing is a much higher-cost activity. So if I want to be a strategist, I have to be very careful about what I do.
[00:29:03] Joe Stolte: Because that's what's going to create my character, right? So I’m very careful about what I do. And what I do, I try to go all in on it and feel it, embody it. On the Kolbe score, my Kolbe score, I'm a fairly low fact finder, but I have a high quick start and high follow-through.
[00:29:21] Joe Stolte: I just like to go do stuff, feel if that's right for me, and then discard it quickly if it's not. So, thankfully, I had that wiring in some capacity, but that's how I make it real. That's how when I learn something I'm like, “Man, like this is a total waste of my life if I'm not changing my behavior,” so I need to go in and basically split test that paradigm or that reality.
[00:29:40] Joe Stolte: It's either useful for me in my life or it's not and I'm going to disregard it. But one thing I learned is that I'm not going to disregard it with judgment because when other people do it, the proclivity is like, “Well, I tried that and that doesn't work.” Well, that just wasn't useful for me. Maybe it's useful for you.
[00:29:54] Joe Stolte: So I could do that. And it's helpful for me to not judge other people and for me to not judge myself because the stuff that I was doing 12 years ago, I don't do that anymore. So, that's the bridge between, “Okay, I've got a habit for learning. I love learning. I'm curious.” … I've learned that curiosity is this bridge, but when I get something and I'm like, “Cool, let's do it.” What's the filtering mechanism that I can put in place so that I'm very intentional? I'm at cause, I'm not at effect with what I choose to make habitual in my life. And I go all the way in on it.
[00:30:22] Clate Mask: There's so much good stuff here and there's a bunch of different little things that I want to go down, avenues that I want to go down, but there's a couple of things I want to make sure I draw out in what you said. There's a lot of depth here. I think, first of all, your point about establishing habits … The way I've always thought about it and the way I talk about it in the book is you establish your identity because then it makes it a lot easier to take the actions that are consistent with that identity.
[00:30:51] Clate Mask: It's got to start with the identity. And once you've got the identity set, then it's just a matter of taking the actions that are consistent with the identity. And eventually, you get enough that your rational mind has recognized that that's true, this identity that you've established. I say all the time, it's not ”Fake it till you make it.“ It's “Be it till they see it.”
[00:31:09] Clate Mask: And by the way, the most important is your mind inside that sees you are what you are saying. So I love that you described to just start and don't stop because that's taking the actions that are consistent with that identity that then makes that habit a character-producing, results-producing, happiness and joy-producing identity that you have set out on.
[00:31:33] Clate Mask: So I love that. I also really appreciate your point about how you both get into the right space of energy with curiosity, but also how you stay in that space by not bringing judgment and energy that pulls you down when you're learning and you're taking a different course. I think the way you describe that is really powerful for people because when they do it the other way, not only does it rob them of that path that they're going down … And we all do this at times, but we start to develop a habit that takes that approach instead of a learning, trying, testing, figuring things out approach. And it creates a calcified way of moving through life that doesn't produce the best outcomes for us. And so I really appreciate that point.
[00:32:28] Clate Mask: I hope the audience hears that — when you're making you learn and you take a different approach, there's no reason to beat yourself up about it. You can stay in that place of positive energy. By the way, I don't know if you've read this book, but to me, what you've described is really a practice of … You've, you've described a couple of things. One is Joe Dispenza's book about “Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself”. The other one is “Power vs. Force”. Have you read that book? For those who haven't read it, it's, and I think it is Michael Singer that wrote “Power vs. Force”? I think that's who it was …
[00:33:07] Joe Stolte: I think so, yep.
[00:33:09] Clate Mask: I might be getting that wrong, but …
[00:33:11] Joe Stolte: I can be wrong, but it sounds familiar. I'm tempted to Google it, but I'm just going to say …
[00:33:17] Clate Mask: It's such a fascinating book, though, because it breaks down all of the energy spectrum from positive to negative, and it assigns a point value to it, essentially. What you just heard Joe describe here as power and pain, it's what the author describes. And he goes through all of the different kinds of emotions, and he talks about how some of them are extremely positive and bring really great energy, and others are awful. He has his polar ends, and then he has a spectrum of types of energy, and it's really, really impressive how he breaks it down. But I've never heard what you described just now, Joe, as the bridge between the two sides as being curiosity.
[00:34:03] Clate Mask: I think that's fascinating and really enlightening when we think about it that way. So thank you so much for sharing that. We could geek out on the mindset stuff for a long time. I'm confident of that. But I hope that what we've done is brought a little bit more perspective to what I've shared with our audience many times of what I write about in the book, that it does start with mindset and then it flows into our vision and our vision for our lives begins with that identity. I've always looked at our identity as being where you cross over from the realm of your mindset into your vision for yourself and then how you actually live your life.
[00:34:44] Clate Mask: And I appreciate the way you've talked through your identity and the things that you needed to do to expand it in order to create space for entrepreneurship. I just want to honor you for the learnings of five businesses, three that were great successes and two that were great failures. But they're all great, right? The things we learn and the ways that we grow and develop are really what it's all about. So thank you for sharing that. Anything else you want to add on to the mindset aspect before we wrap up here?
[00:35:14] Joe Stolte: I mean, the last thing I'll say is that I have this concept called Prime Minds. It's like a great idea. The first time it's birthed into the world, it's like a pebble thrown into a still pond. It creates these ripples. And one thing that I've observed is that these ideas have carried over time.
[00:35:33] Joe Stolte: I think about it.
[00:35:35] Clate Mask: There we go.
[00:35:36] Joe Stolte: Um, yeah. So these ideas carry over time. a
[00:35:39] Clate Mask: We lost you for just a second. You were saying that idea is like a pebble thrown into a pond.
[00:35:46] Joe Stolte: Yeah, so, I have this concept called Prime Minds. Think about a still pond and you throw a pebble in the middle of the pond. It creates these ripples, right? Well, that's what good ideas do over the ages. If you go back, you can find the echo of that idea. Like the stuff that's in Joe Dispenza's book — in “Power vs. Force.” It's also in “Think and Grow Rich.” And if you read Dale Carnegie's book on public speaking, it's the same thing where he talks about embodying it. And nowadays, a more modern version is James Clear and what he talked about in his book, “Atomic Habits.”
[00:36:17] Joe Stolte: You can just keep going back and seeing these ideas echo. And so that's the thing I love is when I get a good insight and idea, I try to go back to the source to figure out what's the closest place where the pure uncut idea came from. And along that way, I pick up all these cool distinctions.
[00:36:35] Joe Stolte: So from a mindset perspective, the reason I'm bringing that up is because that's what strengthens my curiosity. So, curiosity is like a muscle. You have to develop it. If you're listening to this, it's not easy to get what might be perceived as a negative stimulus in your life and to not have a negative reaction.
[00:36:51] Joe Stolte: It's a muscle. You have to pause and go, “Huh, okay, well that was a stimulating thing. Why did that happen?”. But it's a bit of a muscle. And so I've found the more I train my curiosity, the more I have available to use when things aren't feeling great or maybe shouldn't feel great.
[00:37:06] Clate Mask: I love that and I'm going to put a fine point on this. A smile with, “Huh?” can do wonders when you're in that place and you can take the bridge one way or the other. I wish we could spell that out, but it's just a smile and “Huh, let's look at that.” So I appreciate you modeling that. And I recognize that when all of us are in that tough time, that curiosity, which can be sparked by a simple smile and “Huh?”, it gets us looking at things the right way and creates a different energy as we're learning.
[00:37:44] Clate Mask: So thank you for sharing that. Where can people learn more about you, Joe? I'd love for people to be able to go deeper on some of the things you've shared, whether it's the AI or the mindset stuff. This has been a great conversation.
[00:37:57] Joe Stolte: Yeah, probably the best way is you could follow me on Instagram, @joestoltelive, or just Google my name, Joe Stolte, find me on Instagram and then just DM me the word newsletter.
[00:38:06] Joe Stolte: If you want to learn more about daily.ai, I'm happy to get you some free resources or set you up with a demo. Then, we’ll just be publishing content on Instagram on mindset and leadership and automation, AI, marketing, all that kind of stuff. So give me a follow there. And those are the best ways to get in touch with me.
[00:38:23] Clate Mask: Awesome. All right. Well, Joe, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom, your experience as an entrepreneur, the cool things you're doing now with AI and helping marketers and business owners and entrepreneurs get their messages to the right person at the right time with the right channel, right offer … Being more effective in the work that we're doing. And so I really appreciate you spending your time with us today. I look forward to continuing our partnership and finding ways that we can work together and for everybody out there who is taking away some different things here, I would submit to you that the most powerful concept we just talked about is being in a positive place of energy and the bridge to that is curiosity. And if you're struggling to muster that curiosity, just put a smile on your face and say “Huh?”. Until next time everybody, it's been another episode of the Conquer the Chaos Podcast. We look forward to seeing the great things you do out there as you conquer and grow in your business. Take care.