MM#139--One Year Anniversary SPECIAL

Welcome to the theory to action podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time to help you take action immediately, and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now, here's your host, David Kaiser.

Hello, I am David and welcome back to another Mojo minute. In fact, a very, very special Mojo minute. Wow, this is episode 150. Actually, I think it's Episode 151, or 152. But who is counting when you are having fun, right? And, folks, I'm having a blast. And based on your feedback for the last year, you guys are enjoying these quick hits and nuggets of wisdom too. And because we've had a great deal of that feedback be positive over the last year. And that's all it's been is, since we launched the Mojo Academy is been one year ago. Today, today is the anniversary special one year. So some backstory on the launch is probably warranted here, because everyone likes an origin story. These days, and I've gotten a couple of requests of how this whole thing began out of nowhere, I just learned you had a podcast, and I listened. And it's kind of cool. And I like these books. And, boy, you're giving me a lot to think about. And I'm starting to put theory into action. And you know, we're rolling. 

So often in our lives, we come across nuggets of wisdom in life, or in a book or among friends. And we share those wisdom, that wisdom. You know, we share it with our family and our work colleagues, and even with our friends, our other friends who didn't tell us that nugget of wisdom. So to capture some of those nuggets of wisdom that I was reading in books, I thought I would start a podcast to share this type of wisdom. And so I did, and you guys liked it. And so other questions started coming up, or how did you know to come up with this format? That seems to work for everybody in? Why have you made him kind of short. And there was a method to my madness. So let me answer both of those questions. I wanted to capture in a very short amount of time, while people were commuting to their jobs. Or they would be on a bus or a public rideshare. And frankly, maybe just getting a workout in or taking a break from work 15 minutes if they were on a break or walking the dog. Because let's face it, none of us have any more time and we're all running pillar to post with tons of obligations. So I knew I had to capture people where they were where you guys are, and not try to introduce something else into your life that would be overwhelming. 

And you know, sometimes I I look at my own podcast, not my personal podcast, but podcast, I like that I subscribe to some that I pay money for. And sometimes if it's 45, or 50 or 55 minutes, I'm like, Man, I don't have that time. So then you're trying to do it in segments. And that's not ideal sometimes, but I get it. So I want to make them anywhere from seven. My ideal time was seven to 14 minutes. I know, for the most part, sometimes I exceed that. But I try to keep it within that range enough to introduce a nugget of wisdom, be able to talk about it. Offer commentary, actually read the words from the book, sometimes a lot of some summaries and some other types of formats. They they summarize what the words are from the book. And sometimes those summaries are not, you know, sometimes they don't even make sense from what the actual words were from the book, or the point being made. So I wanted to at least stay true to the to the words of the book. So that is how we came up with the format. Now, some people were saying, Hey, man, you're really obsessing on the word flourish like it comes up all the time.

Yes, yes, it does. And it's a good word to describe my obsession with the obsession of flourish and it's fun Because probably for the last 20 years, I've come across that word in many different contexts, and areas of life ever really ever since my college days. And I always found that that word captured the right tone, and, and meant exactly the thought that I thought should be conveyed. And it has many meanings, from economic flourishing to personal development flourishing to many other meanings, and I intend to explore all of those, and later episodes, but often it just nails perfectly the word flourish just nails perfectly what you're trying to convey to people. And I've gotten so much feedback over the last year hey, you need to keep this up. What's the plan? What's next? And well, it's there's a funny thing about that because we have grown a small but sizable organic following without any marketing or ads whatsoever, literally, word of mouth, and friends telling other friends. And so here are some. 

Some folks have wanted some some stats. So this is our 100 and 52nd episode we have covered let me make sure I get this number right. We have covered 107 Yes, 107, unique books, 12 Catholic corner books, and a smattering of episodes on speeches and poems and other nuggets of wisdom. Some more of the unique stats over the last year we are at 3483 downloads as of this morning. So we'll we'll pass 3500 today, and our top five most popular episodes. And there are books that we covered our mojo minute 56 schedule scaffolding, where we covered the Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod. And actually as an aside, the Miracle Morning is one of our first Academy Review releases. And you can check that out by going to our new website, Team Mojo academy.com. Go to the books at the top, and you will see the new releases for the month of July. And our next most popular episode was number 57 Dante's Inferno, part two where hope dies, which is all about Dante's Divine Comedy. And the first book, which is Dante's Inferno. Our third most popular episode was number 50, or number 85, rather, the unbreakable Goggins, which was, we talked about and covered and reviewed a nugget of wisdom from David Goggins, the former Navy SEAL, his book called can't hurt me. And it's a fantastic book, and our fourth most popular episode number 62, the two misconceptions of personal growth, where we covered John Maxwell's jumpstart your growth book, a 90 day improvement plan. And our final top five, our fifth most popular episode was number 76, the Christmas miracle of 1776. Ironically, I thought that was kind of cool. Episode 76. And we covered Thomas Paine's, the American crisis, the great pamphlet that he wrote to encourage the man during the American Revolution in the winter of 1776. So those are some unique stats I thought everybody would be be curious of.

So the next step is people have been asking for a full review of these books we've been covering, you know, the Mojo minutes, we just cover a little nugget. And he uses a key idea. And we introduced that we commentate on that. We connect it to other ideas, and then we're off and running. We have to put theory into action. Well, many of you are so enamored by that and want to go deeper with deeper flourishing, which I appreciate that you've been asking for a full review. And because you've been asking for a full review of these books, that is exactly what we are going to be doing next. And we're going to be doing this through our new membership program. So I'm very excited about that. But first, let me talk about the new website. Because that's the first thing we had to do the old way website was decent. But we really couldn't help people find the nuggets they were looking for. If you listen to a nugget, and you tried to go back three, four or five weeks later, you had to kind of sift through everything. And it was kind of cumbersome. And so some of the feedback was, can you make searching a little bit easier? In the perfect example was, especially with Catholic corners. 

You know, Catholic corners were only once a month for the most part, and then you would try to go back later. And it would have been, you know, pretty deep down in the in the summary of episodes. And especially now with some 150 episodes, searching and trying to find that favorite nugget can and often is a problem. And we're only going to keep adding to that number. So probably in another year, we're going to be a 300 episode. So we knew it was kind of paramount to make sure we get a website where we can where the search was much more, was much more efficacious was much better, and trying to find exactly what through keyword search. So we now have that we have a very robust search function. And I'm super excited about this. We now have category listings. So we have everything from habits as a category that breaks down everything that we've talked about if it was habit related, and we categorize it as that you get a whole summary of all the the episodes dealing with habits. We also have done nutrition, and sleep and leadership and productivity, nutrition, fitness, learning business, ancient classics, modern classics, parenting, US and world history, virtue, culture, mindset, hardwork, optimism, and goals, and much, much more. So we are super tickled about that. I talked about those search bar. 

And at this point, I want to give a quick shout out to Mark. Thank you, Mark. Mark is a friend, Dennis, who has reminded me constantly about transcripts. Often our transcripts will not be loaded in the show notes. And Mark loves the transcripts. And I assume all responsibility for not loading the transcripts. So thank you, Mark, I heard you, I appreciate you, we clean those up. So we are good to go with those transcripts will also tie into the search function. You anything you search in the search bar will also grab through the transcript. So if you know if there's just one word that I said, if you remember that word it's in, it's in the transcript, it will come up. So that's a good thing. Another good thing is we were able to get the website to offer automatic notifications on new episodes when they're released. 

So many of you been asking for this. So we now have that feature. It's on the right hand side. So be sure to just sign up, it's free. With your email every time a new episode is dropped, you get a reminder in your email box. How convenient is that? Love it. I know some folks have been asking for this since for a long time, actually. So we now have it easy peasy. Plus, we just released a lot of extra specials outside of the Tuesday Thursday format, and especially extra content which are going to get more content today. Because it's the fourth of July. So Happy Fourth of July, you're gonna get a whole separate episode. Because we'd love to produce extra content here. And sometimes people miss those because we didn't have a way to remind them through email. And now we do.

We also continue a great feature. About four months into the last or formats into the podcast. We offered the voice voicemail feature. It was kind of buried it was hard to find on the old website. It's now more prominent on the new website. It's great feature. Some people like to leave comments via voicemail and not, you know, go through the whole email process. Or they can ask a question there. It's free. It's easy. So we made that easier to find it's more paramount and prominent on the website. Some folks have always wanted to leave a review to show their appreciation and some podcast hosting sites can actually be quite difficult to log a review. I was kind of surprised to see that. 

But with the new website, we made that far easier you can just leave the review At the top, it's easy. It's quick. We appreciate if we do. Like I always say, if we've earned a five star review, well, please tell us, we would thank you very, very much. Please take that quick two minutes to write that review. And if we have not earned that five star review, well, then I guess don't leave it. That's, that's pretty authentic, isn't it? That's honest. Tell us over the voicemail feature, how to improve it to your liking, because we appreciate the feedback, even the constructive feedback. And we appreciate you listening. Nonetheless, even if we haven't yet earned that five star review, we will keep trying for that. So in asking many of you, what more you wanted to hear what books you would like me to cover in the future? What categories to go deeper on with, you know, personal development, and maybe the habit fundamentals. We've talked a lot about over in the Mojo minutes. 

It was interesting for the most part people in and it was just me totally randomly asking folks, if they were listeners. I didn't do any formal polling or anything. I just randomly asked them, you know, what more would you like to hear? And What books would you like me to cover? So a little more than half of folks said, they wanted books on how to improve the country or their culture, I would say roughly like 60%. You know, like, personal development just wasn't their thing. Or perhaps a couple people have told me that, you know, they were already nailing it on the personal development side. So they want to take the next step in flourishing. And I think one person said, you know, his exact words was I'm nailing it and feeling good about my state in life, about my job about my relationships. So for personal flourishing, I am good to go. I want to learn how to get my country back and how to get America flourishing, flourishing. So that was pretty powerful, too, like I said, that was about 60%. And then the next group, everybody fell back into what I would say the personal development side how to personally get flourishing every day how they could grow personally, and live life they've always wanted. They wanted books around that. And that group broke down to roughly about 40%, I would say. 

So I'm guessing that's it's probably mirrors the state of our country right now. We're a very divided country. COVID certainly didn't help that at all. And most of you know that I don't believe the current administration is helping that at all. So with that, in addition to the Mojo minutes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which will focus on more personal development growth. On Saturdays, we're going to release the Liberty minutes. And that's just going to be a focus on books about how to get the country working, again, some political books, some cultural books, but just how can we get America flourishing once again, because nothing is working right now. Nothing. And we know that gas inflation, baby formula, schools, debt, southern border, nothing, nothing is working, frankly, everything is broken. 

So I think there'll be a nice mix up. Two thirds of our, our free Mojo minutes will be personal development, how to get better in life, and with your own flourishing. And then a third will be on Saturdays.

Not sure how many times Saturdays, it's not going to be a once a week thing. But we'll see what we can put together at least once a month for sure. I can promise that. And that's going to be America flourishing Liberty minutes. And that's going to be focused on how do I help my fellow Americans and myself help to build a more better and perfect union as the great Abraham Lincoln said. So with the new website, it allows us the room and the customizability to offer more stuff that you guys have been asking for, which is really across the board. But it's safe to say with the old website, we were kind of locked in could not do what we wanted to do. And with this new platform, while it doesn't offer every bell and whistle it does allow us to scale and meet our demand and your needs. So with all that said, we're super excited about the website. 

And now for the major big announcement. Because you a lot of you have been asking. And so we have been planning for about six months, I guess now Geez, six months? Yeah, yeah, that's been six months well. So we wanted to create a platform to share content protected stuff. And we wanted to do that an audio version, where we could offer the full review. And some of these reviews ended up being somewhat long because we wanted to cover a lot of the ideas. So we have partnered with a company called Super Cast. And they host paid for TED talks in other special platforms. But Ted Talks is kind of their, their major folks that they have partnered with in somebody that we all recognize. So the audio is protected. But it also gives you the listener, a superior listening experience, it's very easy, we've run beta test on it, it works very nicely. In fact, you can customize your players per the audio platform that you choose to listen to your podcast on. And that was super important to us. 

And ultimately, it allows us to offer a membership program. So that's what we're doing. The Academy audio book membership program is what we're calling it. It's going to be a monthly reoccurring paid membership, it's going to cost $7.99 per month, you're going to get two audio book review summaries each month, roughly about 25 to 45 minutes each, I would guess most are going to be around 30 to 40 minutes, on average, you're going to get more exclusive content as well. And then you're gonna get some behind the scenes stuff. Some people have asked for that. Oh, and a cool thing we're doing is is we're going to be adding for the first month of signup, you're gonna get two bonus Academy reviews. So Academy audio book summaries. So your first month, you're actually going to be getting four book review summaries, for Academy reviews. To have the regular Book Summaries with their key takeaways, usually about five to seven key ideas that we break down, we give you the the format is we give you the quote from the book, and then we offer commentary. So it's like Mojo minutes on steroids. And so you're gonna get two for the regular book summary, or the two for this month. And then we're going to add two for this month as the first month of launching this. And there's going to be more features and benefits. 

So with that all said, a lot of you have said, Hey, can you just give us the full book review of you know, whatever book we covered. And a lot of you came to me and said I hate I just don't have time to read the whole book. So if you can cover, cover the books with five to six key ideas or takeaways. And then I would be able to filter that and figure out the books that I would really like to spend time on. That would be most beneficial to me, because that would allow me to stay on the road with the kids and family stuff. And so I want to go deeper with the flourishing stuff. But I don't have the time. So that was a light bulb moment for me to say, hey, I have the time I have the ability. And so I'm super excited to be sharing this with all of you. And so when is it going to start?

It's going to start right now. It's released as of this morning, on Independence Day, I thought what a better way to launch the membership program. We started the podcast a year ago, we're gonna launch the membership program today. And the Liberty minutes today, or this week. And we're just super gratified and super humbled. And yet excited because we think this is the next step in allowing us to go deeper in our personal lives and with helping our country. So super excited for you guys. I'm anxious to hear your feedback. And so yes, please let me know about the website what you like what you don't like that easy. Find the books you wanted. And also, be sure to check out the audio book membership, because I think this is the next step. Like we talked about being able to go deeper with flourishing, where we can review the whole book, get the key ideas, offer commentary, and most importantly start and connect those ideas with other big ideas from other books. So we can If we can create a deeper and more flourishing life. So I thank you for listening. I hope you're as excited as I am. And let's go Mojo.

Thank you for joining us. We hope you enjoyed this theory to action podcast Be sure to check out our show page at T Mojo academy.com where we have everything we discussed in this podcast as well as other great resources until next time, keep getting your mojo on