Episode Highlights

• Zack’s 2024 predictions he wrote in last January’s newsletter
• The biggest challenges Zack faced in 2024, including industry shifts, personal losses, and professional setbacks
• Why Optimize Yourself is rebranding and changing the name
• What the Mastermind program is and how it’s different from anything we’ve offered before
• The GO FAR framework: how it works and why it’s the foundation of the Mastermind program
• Practical steps to apply the GO FAR framework to your own career and goals.
• How to turn adversity into an opportunity for growth.

Useful Links

• How I burned out as a burnout coach (and then bounced back)

Transcript

Zack Arnold: Well, I am here today with me. So happens that I'm going to end up being today's guest, and alongside with me who will be helping to facilitate this conversation is my longtime fellow coach, Debby Germino, as well as my Podcast Producer. So Debby, it's been a long time coming recording this conversation. At least as of recording this, we were at the beginning of 2025, and from here, I'm going to let you take the microphone and you're going to become the host and I'm going to become the guest.

Debby: Yeah, well, happy new year.

Zack Arnold: Yes. Happy New Year. New year, new you. Right? This is our opportunity to fix all the things that were broken about us and all those horrible things we did wrong, and all those mistakes that we made and all those habits that we didn't follow through with. This is our opportunity to wipe the slate clean and start over and fix ourselves, right?

Debby: That's right. Start fresh, right? Fresh Start.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, don't get me started on the New Year, New You bullshit. Anybody that already follows our newsletter already knows that I've gone on a giant soap box rant about this, but I do not believe that we are problems that need to be fixed. That's actually a lesson that I learned from you. There are always things that we can tweak, that we can modify. But I just like any kind of a workflow, whether it's an app or whatever it might be, it's usually not that it's fundamentally flawed or broken. Is there's one or two little, tiny check boxes. We just can't find that stupid menu within a menu, within a menu, you find that one check box and boom, everything works flawlessly. And I'm a much bigger fan of figuring out what are those few check boxes in our lives and in our systems that are going to help all the pieces come together, knowing that we are not fundamentally broken, we do not need to be fixed. But it's always fun to pursue progression, pursue growth and pursue purpose, absolutely over perfection. Yes, that's one of our key mindsets in our program, is, do not pursue perfection. Instead, pursue uh, instead, uh, pursue progression. Look at that. How funny was that? That the the old me would have said, Nope, I need to say that over, because I screwed it up, right? But I don't want to pursue perfection at the expense of progression. So here we are,

Debby: Yeah, so maybe it would be helpful to actually talk a little bit about our imperfections and the struggles that we I think all of us, including the listeners and certainly us at Optimize Yourself and behind the scenes, just give people a little look at 2024

Zack Arnold: Do we have to this is where I'm going to take a pass for every episode. I make sure that I give my guests one pass where they want to skip the question, they can skip the question. So I'm going to take a hard pass on talking about 2024 Can I do that?

Debby: Well, you can. You can. But I think we would be cheating the listeners a little bit, because I think really helpful to really get a little bit of a behind the scenes look at the challenges that we faced and how we dealt with it and and where I'd like to start actually, is your newsletter from 2024 the beginning of 2024 oh boy, where you made some predictions about what the year might bring. And I'm just going to read a few of the bullet points that you wrote about. And this was, oh, I should have the exact date with me, but it was at the very beginning of 2024 last year.

Zack Arnold: It was, I don't remember the date either, but it was the first week of January. Yeah.

Debby: Okay, so you wrote analysts estimate that there will be 25 to 30% less jobs this year, budgets will be lower so studios can desperately try to turn streaming into a profitable business model. With the gluttony of content already on streaming platforms, there's no huge rush to create a ton more artificial intelligence is changing the way creatives work and the number of people needed to do the work. There's even potentially another looming industry strike this summer.

Zack Arnold: Yikes. I feel like I wrote that 25 years ago. I've been going back and reflecting on things for 2024 looking at some of the things that I had written, I totally forgotten about this newsletter, so I appreciate the fact that you actually dug it up, but when I was reading through it, I'm like, I have no memory of writing this, and I feel like a different person wrote this 25 years ago, but I would say that, yeah, pretty much all that came true. Obviously. There wasn't any strike in our industry, and we were able to avoid that. I don't have the statistics in front of me, and I don't dive deep in all the the analytics, but there's no question that there was a significant amount less work, and I think the numbers ended up holding true to where I think it was probably 25 to 30% less work, at least for those of us that do creative work in the entertainment industry, we're already seeing the transition from. The work that we were doing manually to artificial intelligence taking over so many different jobs. I don't think that in the entertainment industry specifically, we're just seeing entire sectors that are disappearing. We're more starting to see just easing into integrating it into our workflows, which I think we're going to start to see much faster, if we're going to already go into predictions of 2025, I think because the industry moves so slowly to adopt new technology, just because there's such a lack of leadership and vision in this industry as a whole, that we can all say the sky is falling, but to actually implement these things takes years. I'm the perfect case in point where I literally still was editing on Avid 2018 so I think that that's kind of a microcosm of where the technology is going. But I definitely think we're going to see the contraction of certain sectors of the industry, or, frankly, anybody that's doing creative work, because less people are going to need to do the work, because artificial intelligence is taking some of it. I don't think that AI is going to replace us anytime soon. I'm talking years, maybe even decades. And that's a whole other soap box for another conversation. The short version being that, because we are storytellers, I believe that storytellers need to continue telling stories. We as human beings need stories to understand our world, understand our relation to other people, to understand our relation to reality and to the universe, or whatever it is that you want to call it. We've needed stories since stories since the beginning of time, and I believe that storytellers need to continue telling those stories. Artificial Intelligence is really good at repeating and regurgitating and summarizing, but it's not good at creating things, right? We're not at AGI we're not an artificial general intelligence where it can just decide I want to create something new. It's all about regurgitation. And I think that the more we're seeing artificial intelligence, specifically in the content creation space, we're already starting to smell the difference between this was human created and this is AI and we're seeing so many areas now. I was just reading an article yesterday about how in the education field, students, especially in college, are starting to write their essays, or heavily relying on chat GPT to write their essays, and because the professors are so overloaded with work, they're starting to use AI and chat GPT to review the essays. So now the bots are writing papers and the bots are grading the papers, right? We're going to start to see more of that. But at the end of the day, I really believe that we as creatives are generalists and not specialists, and I think that our ability to problem solve, our ability to combine different ideas, which is essentially the definition of creativity, and our ability to both take the feedback and iterate on the feedback, leads me to believe that I don't think that AI replaces us anytime soon, but it's going to change the way that our relationship to the workforce is going to change the amount of people that need to do certain things. I do think there are certain jobs or certain paths that will all but disappear, only those that are hyper, hyper specialized. An example being, if you're a roto scope or in visual effects, you're probably in trouble. I think that there's going to be, you know, whether it's pulling green screens, whatever it might be, just this morning or just yesterday, I was on my phone, I was updating my wallpaper, and I've got a picture of my kids, and I accidentally swiped right, and it instantly removed the entire background, a clean key, and I was able to put any background behind my kids that I wanted. I'm like, Whoa. Like, that's that's the transition that we're going to see. And if you're hyper specialized, and that was your one skill, you're in trouble. But my my biggest prediction as it relates to artificial intelligence or the workforce, is we're going to see a transition. We're going to see a contraction for jobs that are hyper specialized. We're going to see an expansion of those that are generalists doing multiple things on top of that. We'll get back to the the, you know, original predictions of 2024, but you know me when I get on my soapbox. It's very hard to get me on my soapbox, but what I also see happening over 2025 and beyond, is the drum that I've been beating for two years. We're gonna watch the transition from specialization to generalization and the ability for somebody to make a living doing one thing, especially if you do creative work, that ability is going to plummet very, very, very. Few people are going to say, I do one thing for a living. I edit television. I'm a composer for feature films. I'm I'm a writer for, you know, broadcast, advertising, whatever it is, very few people are going to make a living doing one thing. And I think the future is fractional. This idea of being a fractional employee, you're the perfect example where you are a Podcast Producer. You don't work for my company full time, largely because I can't afford to hire you full time. So you are a fractional Podcast Producer with me for give or take, 1015, 20 hours a week, whatever the workload requires. But you're also a fractional Podcast Producer for another company. You're also working as somebody that's building a business as a somatic coach and teaching meditation. There are all these different things that you're putting together. And I think you're the perfect representation of how the future is going to be fractional for creatives. If you're somebody like Eddie Hamilton, you're fine. You're going to be adding, whether it's the next mission, impossible, Top Gun, seven, whatever it might be, the Eddie Hamilton's of the world, the Tom Cruises of the world. World, there are going to be a select few where they continue to do one thing, and they do it at an extremely high level, and they go from one project to another. But I think the vast majority of us, and I say us, including myself, I think it's going to be very, very difficult to make a living just doing one thing and going from one job to the next job. I really believe that the future is fractional. So that's kind of one of my major predictions for 2025 going back to 2024 minus totally whiffing on the strike. And I'm very glad that I whiffed on that one. Was there anything else that I didn't cover as far as the predictions you mentioned for 2024

Debby: No, I think you covered them. And I think I want to actually jump on that point you're making about the fractional employment and the challenges that that creates, and I think Optimize Yourself is a great example of it, because we're all sort of fractional employees, yourself included. Because last year, you were juggling Cobra Kai and you were juggling running a business, and you were caretaking for your parents who were 2000 miles away, and all of these challenges that were faced. And I think it would be helpful, since you mentioned storytelling and how it's we need it as humans. We need it to to relate to each other, to connect with each other, to understand each other, and I think this idea of fractional employment is you're probably right that it's the way of the future, but I think it's really scary, and I think it's really challenging right now, because a lot of people are probably juggling that thinking, Okay, I have to start this other thing. What else am I good at? What else can I do, and how do you manage this? So I think it would be good to start with maybe just addressing some of those challenges that you went through last year on your own, juggling all the things that I just mentioned, and then talk about how it also affected Optimize Yourself as a company.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, boy, we could probably do a three part episode just on the challenges of 2024 and I wrap a lot of 2023 into it, because essentially, the last two years of my life has been a complete, total, utter dumpster fire. And you know, because you've been a party to seeing all the things that have been falling apart and all the things that have gotten in the way. And when we did our reflection exercise as a team. This is something that I shared with my newsletter subscribers as well, that I have an exercise that I go through at the end of year where I do a yearly reflection, and I actually do this exercise with my family as well at the holiday dinner table. But one of the questions that we answer is, what accomplishments are you proud of this year? And both of us independently, we weren't even on the call at the same time because you came to our team call later. Our answer was, I survived. Does that count? The fact that I'm still here at all, and I think the that it's a testament to our resilience and the fractional nature of our company, the you and I are even recording a podcast that's being released for a company that's still in business here in 2025 so some of the challenges that led to that were, I mean, the most obvious one is that just the complete implosion of the entertainment industry has absolutely decimated our business. It took a while to trickle down, because the as far as those that were working there were the boots on the ground that were the crew members, whether you're above the line, below the line, directors, writers, producers, editors, composers, anybody that was doing the work. As soon as the industry shut down, I think it was in May of 2023 give or take, when the strikes began, that was just an immediate cut off. Work is gone. You're not getting paid anything, right? But we were fortunate enough to be in a position where we weren't relying just on the entertainment industry and people having work, we actually saw a surge of students, because people said, All right, now I've got all this downtime. And what I want to do is I want to dive in and update my resume and when I write better outreach emails. And want to use this opportunity so I can build my network so that when the work comes back all of a sudden, I'm prepared. I'm at the top of people's list. I'm the one that's getting the phone calls. And we were hoping that was going to happen. And then, of course, the industry never really came back. And I had been saying that I never thought it was going to be like flipping a light switch. You go back to 2020 I think it was when we were just inches away, literally minutes away from an industry shutdown with the IATSE strikes. It went from nothing to flip a switch, boom, we've got all this work again, right? We had the pandemic shut down. There was literally no work for a few months, and then all of a sudden, there just there was so much work to go around that it was basically Oprah saying, you get a job, and you get a job like the job. The joke that I was saying is that in 2022 if you were looking for work as either an assistant editor or an editor, if you had a pulse and you knew how to turn on your computer, you were probably getting hired. I've never seen the gluttony of work that I was seeing, at least on our side of the industry, that completely went away, but it took about six to nine months for it to hit us. So come January of last year, we actually had one. The best enrollment periods, as far as bringing in new students into our live classes. And between January and April, we changed nothing. It was the same messaging, it was the same services, it was the same problems that we saw for our customers. Went from one of the best enrollment periods in January to April, 90% drop in enrollment. All of a sudden it was crickets, and that was where the trickle down effect happened, where people realized work isn't coming back the way that I expected it to, and I'm in for the long haul, and now I've got a hunker down, right? It's just like you're, you're an animal that's kind of burrowed in for the winter. You're just holding every single possible nut, and, you know, seed, or whatever it is that you store it away, and you're just sitting there saying, I gotta get through the winter. I got to get through the winter. So financially that decimated us. We've been able to kind of, you know, crawl along and make it work, but we've seen a significant drop in revenue and student enrollment. All of that was happening at the exact same time that I was going back to the final season of Cobra Kai. I was supposed to go back to it in 2023 but because of the strikes, obviously that was delayed, and I had no plans of working in 2024 so the fact that I was working on the show through much of 2024 as you said, turned me into my own fractional employee, and I was the fractional CEO of this company, only able to really put in 10 to 15 hours a week on the business, spending The rest of my time working on COBRA kite. All at the same time that's near the end of 2023 I watched both of my parents rapidly decline, both cognitively and physically, and went from the point for where they were both completely self sufficient to both of them began coming down with dementia, and over the period of about two months, we had to move them into a facility. And again, as you mentioned, this is 2000 miles away, we had to move them into a facility, and without them even knowing, because of them having, not, you know, shored themselves up as far as estate planning finances, and otherwise, we had to liquidate their entire estate, all of their belongings, without them even really being aware of it, or at least my mom being aware of it, just so they were able to stay in this new facility. So all of that was happening throughout 2024 as well. And as you know, as I was both trying to keep the business afloat, as I was staying focused on finishing up the series finale episodes, the final few episodes of Cobra Kai and I was managing the health of my parents. Things deteriorated rapidly with my father. I ended up having to leave Cobra Kai the I was working on the series finale at the time, which to me, was like, that was, that was the piece to resistance. That was I've been working on this show for six years. The Karate Kid was my Star Wars as a kid like I finally get to work on the series finale of this. And, you know, our hope was that it was going to be just as memorable as the the end of Karate Kid one, I deliver the editor's cut the next day, get the call from the facility if you want to, you know, if you want to say goodbye to your dad, now is the time I'm like, You got to be fucking kidding me. Like, are you serious? Like, the timing of all these things coming together, it was literally the perfect storm. So I essentially had to make the very difficult decision, which was very mutual, that I wasn't going to be able to finish the series finale of Cobra Kai, and I had to hand it over to another team member. I have no ill will about that. I think that everybody decided this was the best decision. They ended up finishing it, making a fantastic episode. But it's definitely going to haunt me for the rest of my life that I didn't get to deliver my version of that episode, and I didn't get to walk away from the series the way that I wanted to. So during that period of I guess it would have been late July, early August, my father did end up passing away, and luckily, I wouldn't say luckily, I would say fortunately, because it took a lot of work to get here with all of the horrors that were going on behind the scenes and out of which I'll go into, he ended up passing peacefully in his sleep with my mom by his side. The amount of work that it took to create that moment was insurmountable, and just thinking about it makes me emotional. So all of that was happening simultaneously, and I had all, you know, this was happening in Wisconsin, so I traveled back and forth between LA and Wisconsin, I think, three times in the span of a month, which was wonderful for my ailing finances and my ailing business. But it's just one of those things you have no choice.

Debby: So that's like, I just want to pause for a moment and just acknowledge those like all in a span of, you know, a few months. I mean, there was a lot of lead up to it, but all in a span of a few months, you had three major losses. You lost your dad, you lost the finale of Cobra Kai. And the one you didn't actually mention was actually that summer, we, for the first time that I'm aware of anyway, we did not run classes. We, we, you made the decision to decide not to do a summer semester of classes. So that's like three major losses right there in that very small period of time.

Zack Arnold: Yes, and. You haven't even gotten to the good part yet. You want to talk about losses. This is where really all started to come together. So yeah, so the in the span of four weeks, I essentially lost my father. I lost my job, knowing the circumstances, it wasn't a matter of I got fired or anything else, but technically, I did lose my job, and I lost what I think what amounted to probably a month or two of employment. Because it isn't a matter of in you know, if you have a full time job, you take a leave of absence, maybe you use paid time off, whatever it might be in our industry, if you ain't working, you ain't getting paid. So the day that I handed it over, that was it no more income. So I essentially lost what would have been about two months worth of income. Lost my father was losing my business, and then where it really all came together. And was really fun. I lost my house, so the day after I had given my my father's memorial service, I had organized the whole thing, brought family together, you know, put together a celebration of life. And I will never forget, I was in the Uber on the way home, and I was just, I don't think I've ever been so spent or exhausted in my life. And I just thought, all I want to do is I want to walk in the door of my house. I want to walk to my bedroom, and I want to sleep for like, three days. I don't want anybody to bother me. I don't want to answer emails. I don't want to check text messages. I just want three days to decompress. Uber drops us off. I opened the door of my house, and it had been infested with rats while we were gone, and I literally turned around and I said to my family, and I said, we can't live here. We have to find somewhere else. That happened right after my father's memorial service, right after I got off the plane, Uber home and said, We can't live here. So all of a sudden, it was back to massive crisis mode, so I immediately found an Airbnb in the neighborhood. We stayed there for two weeks, all of which was the day before my kids went back to school and before my son's first day of freshman year of high school and a new school. This was all happening for him at the same time that it was happening for all of us. So for the next two weeks, lived in an Airbnb. It was all hands on deck. We have to find a new house. I would literally 24/7 that's all I was focused on. I had said to the team, I'm gone like you guys need to figure it out. I'm not going to be managing messages. I'm not going to be doing coaching calls, clear the decks, delete everything on my calendar. I'll let you know when I resurface. And I think it was two to three weeks. And then we ended up finding a place. I ended up moving in, and it was it was essentially just abject chaos of living in boxes in both houses and just really having I literally had nothing that I could count on in a 24 hour span. That was something that was predictable. I didn't know where I was sleeping that night. I didn't know where the hell the silverware was. Like, Oh, crap, have we do we have any food in the refrigerator like it just got to the point where there were no habits, there were no systems. There's nothing reliable in my life, and it was 100% uncertainty, but we were able to get through it. We found a house that, frankly, I think, is a significant step forward. So this wasn't just a lateral move. We ended up finding a place that I like a lot more, and it didn't cost us much more money to do that. Was able to settle in, and just slowly, one brick at a time, started to rebuild the wall just approaching. How do we start to rebuild the business? And how do I rebuild my finances, and how do I rebuild all the relationships that I've kind of let linger for the last six months, because I essentially disappeared off the face of the planet, and this is probably something we'll get to in a few minutes or at some point. But the biggest realization that all of this, I don't know if I want to say chaos, but I would say that there was definitely some some chaos, some change, some uncertainty, this major transition, the biggest realization that I came to from a business perspective is that, why not make things even more difficult, let's just rebrand the entire company. Because I had had this nagging intuition for almost two years, and it took me a long time to actually listen to the intuition, because I kept suppressing it. But the intuition was something feels off about the business, and I don't know what it is, but where it kept coming up is everybody would say, if you want your business to be able to grow, you need to put your business out there. You need to do marketing, and you need to generate leads, people that know that you exist, that are interested in your products and services. And I said, I know that that's the case, but intuitively I was, I was avoiding doing marketing, putting myself out there, going on podcasts, you know, writing for other sites, things that I was doing all the time four or five years ago. And because of that, on top of all the things that were happening with the industry and with our students, lead generation completely stagnated. So that was just a kind of another nail in the coffin of I just couldn't get growth off the ground. And what I discovered is that, intuitively, the reason I didn't want to put myself out there anymore. Something felt wrong about the brand, and I think that the big highlight of 2024 and how this is going to be a little bit of a tangent, but there's a saying that I heard recently that I absolutely love, and I saw it of all places on a random Facebook reel. Basically, I only use Facebook for 10 to 15 minutes a day as a palette cleanser. I just randomly. Roll through reels, and it knows how much I love stupid, irreverent stand up comics. So I get to see a lot of stupid stand up comedy. It helps me kind of clear my palette. But there was a video that came up from Michael Caine. And Michael Caine was talking about this concept that he learned very, very early in acting school that was called, using the difficulty. And I'm probably going to ruin the story, but essentially, he was doing some form of an improv scene, and somebody, for whatever reason, had taken a chair, and they had thrown a chair, and it landed, like, right in front of him in the doorway that he was supposed to walk in, and he stopped, and he's like, What am I supposed to do? The chair is on my way. He's like, What are you talking about? It's like, use the difficulty, use that in the scene, and take that difficulty and turn it into something else. So essentially, what I realized from 2024 is that I need to use this difficulty and realize that I don't want to have a business or a vet, a brand where the core value, and literally the name of the brand, is optimization. I didn't want it to be about this idea of the world, the we are something that needs to be optimized, right? It's all about perfecting whatever it is, your health, your caloric intake, your sleep scores, your you know, your income, whatever it might be. When I started the the fitness and post podcast 10 years ago, and I eventually made the transition to Optimize Yourself, it was because everybody at the time was talking about hard drive optimization and internet speed optimization. And I was kind of raising my hand saying, none of that matters if you're not optimizing yourself. Like the most important operating system we have is up here. It's our brains. And that really clicked with people, but especially over the pandemic. And sense the kind of the proliferation and the explosion of influencer culture, and especially the hustle culture and bro culture completely destroyed any meaning or value that I saw in the word optimization, and I realized I don't want to be about optimization anymore, but I didn't want to do the work either, because rebranding sucks and it's a pain in the ass, and we are square in the middle of the giant mess that rebranding creates. But I realized that I needed to use the difficulty of 2024 and I needed to be vulnerable about the fact that my life is anything but optimized, like behind the scenes, in so many ways, nothing but challenges. Everybody thinks I missed your consistency with fitness and diet and exercise and sleep and everything else. I'm a mess from our Mastermind program, you're seeing all the ugliness behind the scenes that I struggle with all of that as much as everybody else. So I made the very difficult but necessary decision to say goodbye to the Optimize Yourself brand, and the word for me, for 2025 is redefine. It's all about redefining who we are as a company, redefining who I am as a creative professional, who I am as a person again, not because it's about New year, new you. It's not about I'm something broken that needs to be fixed. It's about making sure that how I'm spending my time is in alignment with my values and optimization is just not a value that I COVID anymore.

Debby: Yeah, and I want to acknowledge all of that, just to say that that story that you just told is, like, you can't even write that, right? Like nobody.

Zack Arnold: If this turned into a movie, people will say, This is bullshit. I'm turning this on realistic.

Debby: This was so ridiculous. Yeah, I mean, it just, it just has that element to it. And I think just for the listener to understand, we're not telling you all of this to, you know, have a pity party or feel bad. Instead, it's really just to say that all of these things can happen to anyone at any time. And like you said, it's it's not that you're broken and it's not your fault, and it think this leads nicely to talking about what you mentioned, the mastermind program, which we launched, literally, I don't know, two months after all of that shit. It was

Zack Arnold: a month after. It wasn't even two months, yeah, literally, I moved to, moved our family, hunker down, and for the next four weeks was in total crazy laser sharp focus mode. And four weeks from the point that I moved into our new house, we had launched our Mastermind program.

Debby: Yeah, so I wanted to, I want to talk about the mastermind program and give people an idea of number one, how just drastically different this is from anything else we've ever done, and what a big leap that had to have been for you, coming off of that craziness that you were still really not having dealt with, right? It's still very, very present, and deciding to make this huge leap into this brand new, 10 month long program, high ticket, program that we've never done before. So can you give the listener an idea of what it took, what number one, what the program is, right? Why is it so different, and what makes it so special, and and number two, what it took for you to be a. Able to get into a headspace to take that challenge on at that time?

Zack Arnold: Yeah, so a couple of things to clarify. I don't think that it's a drastic change. I think it's a natural progression and evolution of all the work that we've already done. I don't think it's something that's so brand new and off the map. Like, wait, you're doing what? Like, you used to talk about these things, and now you're teaching us how to do underwater basket weaving and scuba gear. Like to me it wasn't. It's not a drastic shift. It's a natural evolution and growth of the work that we've already been doing. But essentially, it's kind of in a nutshell. It's a year long program. Others, just to clarify, there's about 10 months of weekly zoom calls, but the entire program itself lasts for an entire year. It's for an entire 12 month period, or technically 11 and a half months because of the holidays at the end of the year, but essentially, it's a year long boot camp to get your career and frankly, your life into the best shape of your life that it's ever been. It's not necessarily about I want to make a totally different transition and change everything about my life and my career, but it's about focusing on one or all three of the following. What it is that you're doing, knowing that for most of us that do creative work, what we do is going to change, not necessarily, I have to completely enter a different field, but as I talked about earlier, this idea that I don't think that, I think very few of us are going to make a living doing one thing, we're going to have to learn how to become more fractional in the way that we're working on different projects simultaneously. We're working for different people, and we're using our skills, our knowledge and our experience, and diversifying it in a multitude of ways. So it focuses, one on what it is that we do. Secondly, it focuses on how we do it. So even if what you're doing is going really well, let's say that you are one of the fortunate few that's able to consistently do more work, I would venture to guess that it's getting a lot harder. Budgets are tightening, schedules are tightening, and the reason the studios and all of the other companies and corporations can allow it, what choice do we have? What are we going to do? Say, No, they're going to say, I literally have 578 other people on a list that would take your job this afternoon. So you're going to work under these conditions? Yes, we're going to exploit you. We know we're going to exploit you. What are you going to do about it? So I think that even if what you're doing is working how you're doing it probably has to change how you're approaching, the way you manage your time, the way you manage your energy, the way you manage your attention. And really getting clear and what are my values? What's the core? Why? Why am I really doing what I'm doing? That's the third component. So focusing on what it is that you're doing, how you're doing it, and getting a deeper connection with why you're doing what you're doing. So even if what you're doing is going well, and you feel for the most part, how you're doing it is going well, do you feel a connection to it? Do you feel a sense of purpose. Do you feel like you're working towards your calling? And if you're not, let's dig into what your core Why is so essentially, again, to summarize, it's a year long boot camp to help, specifically creatives, get their career in the best shape of their life. Give or take, it's about 36 to 37 weeks of weekly group zoom calls, with the goal being that we're not gonna have any more than 10 people in a cohort, because cohort, because we like to keep things small and we like to keep them intimate. Again, it spans over the course of the entire year, and the reason that I see it as a natural progression and growth is that we're not talking about things that we didn't talk about before. If you look at all the various individual classes that we offer, whether it's about designing your dream career and really understanding, how do I figure out what is my asymmetric advantage? How do I know where I can leverage my skills, my abilities, my experience, any kind of unique perspectives that I have? All of us I believe, have far more potential than we believe that we do because we've been basically conditioned to believe we are one thing, literally from preschool, what do you want to be when you grew up? I want to be a doctor. I want to be a lawyer. I want to be a baseball player. I want to be a director, whatever it might be, right? A single lane, a single path. And I don't believe that that's the path forward for any of us. So we were already talking about this in our design your dream career class. Now we're just going into a more in depth in the mastermind. We've already spent years teaching creatives how to reach out and build their dream networks via cold outreach, via warm outreach, and really kind of expand their network of peers, experts, mentors, and potentially even connecting with gatekeepers. We're still going to dive into all those topics and subjects just again, on a deeper level, we already have a class where we talk about how you can build your personal brand, specifically, if you're a creative How do you really make your brand story clear and make it about that person that potentially wants to hire you so you can tell them that I am the solution to your problems? We're going to talk about those same things branding, and we're just going to go a little bit deeper. We've already talked about for years in our focus yourself program, how you can set goals to go using the go far framework, how you can set goals, how you can overcome your obstacles, how you can focus and prioritize the essential, how you can eliminate the non essential, how you can build healthier habits and systems and how you can build the regular habit of review and reflection, right? Go far is goal? Obstacles, focus, act, review. So we're using all of the things that we've already taught in individual classes, and we're bringing it all together in a comprehensive, year long program. And the way that I see it in the way, the reason that I decided to build this is that I think a lot of people have been contemplating over the last couple of years, well, if I'm not going to be able to do what I do anymore now, what? Are my choices? One of the choices is I can literally sit around and I can repeat the same behavior, hoping for different results. That's Einstein's definition of insanity, thinking, well, if I just wait here and I hunker down, eventually, things are going to go back to normal, right? Repeating my prediction for 2025 it's not. We're going to see a massive equilibrium shift where it's going to take us years to kind of figure out, how does all this come together, and how do we find our new version of normal? So I don't think sitting around and waiting is going to work. I said that two years ago. People said, Be patient. I said waiting around isn't going to work. Here we are two years later, and I still stand by that assertion. But in addition to that, I think this idea that we really need to, if it's just a matter of, I can't sit around and wait, and my second choice is, well, you know, maybe I learn another skill, maybe I go back to school, maybe I get another degree. I would say, perhaps that's not a bad idea. But frankly, the entire academic system and institution is still designed for the industrial revolution of the 20th century, and even academia on a global scale, saying, How the hell do we prepare people for the 21st century? So going back and getting a new specialized degree, I think, is just going to put you in the same place. So I really believe that there are a core set of not just hard skills, but what I like to call human skills. As you know, I hate the term soft skills, but I believe that there are essential human skills that we need to be able to survive and thrive in the 21st century. There's nowhere to learn those. So essentially, I see this as a year long program, no different than going to an academy where essentially you're learning how can I build a more diverse, more rewarding, more sustainable, more successful, creative career on my terms. So I no longer have to basically, you know, live by the status quo.

Debby: So if you were to say, if someone were to have gone through all of our previous classes that you just mentioned, design your dream career, and the networking class and focus yourself the branding class, haven't they already kind of gone through the mastermind already?

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that's a really good question. I've actually gotten that from several students that have reached out and asked about this new mastermind program. So yes, there's plenty of information in this program. And as far as the core ideas and concepts, I'm not going to rewrite from the ground up, the things that we've been teaching for years that have gotten students results. The difference is that this is not a class about more information. This is a class about implementation. So the reason it's not a year long class, and the reason that we call it a year long mastermind, is that we assume that these students already have a base level foundation of all of these concepts, even if they're coming in brand new. We provide all the self guided materials so they're able to catch up, and they're kind of get a sense of, what's the vocabulary, what are the key mindsets, what the hell is the VSA formula for outreach? Like all those questions are answered in our self guided materials. So it's not a matter of, I'm going to regurgitate all of this information that you may or may not already know, and it's going to be a fire hose of new information that doesn't work anymore. The internet was supposed to make us smarter when it came out. It's just made us dumber. The problem is there's so much information and there's so much misinformation, so we don't actually know how to take that information and implement it and make real change. So this isn't just us stringing together all of our classes. This is integrating them in a much more cohesive way, but essentially all of us deciding that we're here to mastermind each other's problems and obstacles so that we can achieve our goals together. So one of the the analogies that we use this is kind of one of the core lessons that we teach, specifically when it comes to focus and prioritization, is this idea of the one thing. And anybody that wants to go deeper into this, you can either literally get the book, The One Thing by Gary Keller and Jay papazant, or if you want to cheat code shameless self promotion, you can go into our podcast library, and I did an extensive podcast interview with one of the authors, Jay papazant, but the one thing essentially comes down to a single question, what is the one thing that you can do such that everything else becomes easier. And the best analogy of this would be stacking dominoes. So there's a physics experiment where they discovered that you can take a domino and you can make the next domino 50% larger, and they will knock each other over. So if you start with a domino, the first one may be two inches tall by the 31st domino, that domino would be the size of Mount Everest. And if you want to see this in action, you can look it up on YouTube. And as many reservations as I have about recommending this content, the best visual representation of this is actually Mr. Beast video. So just put in Mr. Beast domino video, and you're going to see in less than a minute how we had this tiny Domino. And I think it might have been the ninth. Or the 10th one literally knocked over and flattened a building. It's a crazy, crazy video. The point being, it's all about figuring out, well, how do we string together these actions, these goals, these habits, these behaviors, and build systems so that we can essentially climb our Mount Everest? So everybody in our mastermind has defined what their Everest is. It's not just a matter of, I want to be healthier this year, or I want to get a new job, or whatever it might be. It's very clearly defining. What is that scary goal? What is that thing that just scares you? Where you're like, I know I want to do this, I know I'm called to do it, but it's really scary. I don't know where to start. This is going to take a lot of time, or this is going to take a lot of money, or this is going to take a lot of support, and I just don't know if I can do it. So for us, with the go far framework, we start with goals, right? And it's about defining what that scary goal is, and the difference between stringing together a series of classes versus we are a mastermind, as all of us are climbing our own versions of Mount Everest, and we're helping each other to do

Debby: it, yeah, and I think that's a really key point to emphasize, and when we're talking about the mastermind, is that this is a really immersive experience, and it's not as much as our other classes, which sometimes we have a lot of work to do on your own, there's videos to watch, there's modules to go through, and worksheets to fill out, and the mastermind is there's still a lot of content. We're also building the content as we go. And so it's really a lot of helping each other through it, right? So it's not just which, by the way, we didn't even mention that you and I are co coaching this, which is also a new thing for us, we haven't coached together anything before, and it really is like what I love about this, this mastermind program, is that everyone's helping each other with their problems, right? So we're all sort of doing certain exercises together and workshopping them together and using our different strengths to help other people with their strengths. And so it's less of like you're on your own island, kind of doing the work on your own, but you're more in this group, and we're all helping each other out, which I think makes it very distinct from our other programs. Yeah,

Zack Arnold: agreed. And again, this is not just about information, it's about implementation, and that implementation leading to transformation. And there's no way that you're going to climb Mount Everest alone. There's literally a string of hundreds of bodies from base camp to the top of Mount. Everest, look it up like it's in there. They're finding new ones every day. All of a sudden there's a warming and there's a new layer of snow or ice that melts. Hey? More dead bodies, right? Nobody makes it to Mount Everest alone and for the goals that we're choosing for each other, for everybody that has their kind of own individual Everest that they're climbing, we're helping each other climb it together, right? So if you're in a live class, you can show up, you can do the work we do our best to make it interactive and address any questions. But if somebody doesn't come multiple weeks, well, that's on them. Like they they're not. They're they've decided I want to invest in this, but I don't want to get as much as I can out of my investment, right? You get out of something, what you put into it with the mastermind. It doesn't work that way. So if it's a matter of we're all going to climb Everest together. One person is in charge of the water, another one's in charge of watching the weather. Another person takes care of nutrition, another person takes care of the camping gear, right? And you can't decide on week four, yeah, no, I don't feel like bringing the water today, and you're like, we're all gonna die if you don't show up with the water. So clearly, it's not that dire with our group, but that's kind of the general mentality, is that rather than I'm taking the class on my own, I'm on my own path. If I have questions, I can go to the Slack community with this group. As you know, the slack conversations are popping off basically every day, so it's more, hey guys, I've got this challenge with this worksheet. I'm trying to work through this, or take a look at my calendar. Where can I modify the, you know, my morning routine so I can tweak this, because I'm I'm having a hard time getting exercise in, or whatever it is, it's all of us identifying what are our strengths and weaknesses so we can work together as peers to kind of talk a little bit more high level on the the reason, or one of the reasons, that I decided that I wanted to build this program is that I believe that for for the most part, we are Just not trained or conditioned to know how to organize and put our lives together on our own right. We're basically, as I talked about before, we're trained to be on the assembly line, whether it's literally on the assembly line or proverbially in cubicles or whatever it might be, right? So we're not trained to organize all these things on our own. So the way that the academic system works, and frankly, the way that even most, most coaching program works, the way that most education works, is they pair people based on their goals. They say your goal is you want to be a successful writer in Hollywood, so we're going to put all of you in the same group, or you are an assistant editor that wants to become an editor. Or. You are a composer, whatever it might be, right? Everybody pairs people up based on their goals. You want to become a lawyer. Boom. Here's a series of classes for lawyers. And while I think there's merit to that, I think that the opportunity that so much of the educational system misses is pairing people based on their obstacles. And I think that's one of the key reasons that I think this mastermind, the group that we have so far, and the future of this program, the reason that I'm so optimistic and excited about it is that the amount of connection and support you see when you pair people based on their obstacles, and they become peers, rather than we're all kind of working towards the same goal. There's so much more diversity of thought, so much more diversity of perspective. And as I'm sure you've already seen, the bonds that our group has created far surpass any of the bonds that we might have seen in our other classes. Right? So that one of the things that I've learned over the years in all these classes, and as you know, I one of my, one of the words we call them, identity anchors, one of my identity anchors for the kind of person I want to become in 2025 is decisive. I'm literally the founder, president, vice president, treasurer and Secretary of overthinkers. Anonymous. I struggle with every possible decision. I'm a questioner on steroids. But I've decided that I wanted to be more decisive. And for me, it was really kind of making the decision that I wanted to have this group based on shared obstacles and not goals, and really kind of doubling down on is that going to create the cohesion that we want and the support that we want, and one of the other new things that we're doing with this mastermind that we've never done before, which is really scary for me, because I'm extremely introverted, we did a three day live retreat, and we brought everybody together, and I tested this theory out, and I said, let's see how deep we can go in building bonds with others by sharing our obstacles. And we did this exercise where, essentially, we created what I call the wall of fears, or the wall of limiting beliefs. We had all of our students write on a bunch of post it notes you and I included, what are all the fears? Right? Like, nobody's gonna love my work, or I'm gonna fail, or I'm gonna be homeless, or I don't know, I can't make decisions, whatever it is, what are all the things that are stopping you from achieving your goals? Right? Goals, obstacles, focus, act, review. Goals, what do you wanna achieve and why obstacles what's stopping you, and for most what's stopping us is ourselves. So we put together this wall of fears and limiting beliefs. And I think the biggest aha moment that just about everybody had at the same time, including myself, was we're all writing the same shit like I literally have a group of 10 post it notes that when you put them together, they all say the exact same thing. And that's when I realized that my hypothesis that pairing people based on their obstacles actually has just as much or more merit as pairing them based on their goals. That, to me, is the core, fundamental difference between a class and this mastermind program, where we literally have somebody that just is a year out of school just trying to break into the industry. We also have Emmy winners in our group. We also have people in completely different industries that are close to retirement, and you put all of them in a saying in the same room, and you only talk about your goals. You're like, well, there you're gonna feel like you're disconnected, and people don't really relate to where you are. You put a bunch of human beings in the same room, regardless of color, race, nationality, age, level of success, career path, and they start talking about their obstacles. And what we discovered is that we're all human on a very, very similar level. And that, to me, was the most transformative experience that I think I've ever seen, knowing that, yes, there is tremendous value in pairing people based on their obstacles. So that, that, to me, is probably the biggest difference between what we've done in the past and what we're doing now is this in person retreat component, rather than everything being via zoom.

Debby: Yeah. And I think the other component that is different here also is that you and I as coaches are also very much students, right? And we're and we're very much in the program as well, going through it on with our with our own goals and our own obstacles and and I think the the approaches that you and I take as coaches, but also as students, is is helpful, and it's nice to have a, I guess, a diversity like we we approach things very, very differently, and so it's interesting to kind of watch the ways that we tackle things, and then the responses from students, and how that really can create a different dynamic to open people up to new ways of thinking of things, to new perspectives, to understanding themselves differently, right when they see us going through it too. And just like you said, in that in that wall of limiting beliefs, our limiting beliefs were up there too, and we were in.

Zack Arnold: Not, I'm going through the same trenches and the same challenges and difficulties as everybody else. So as you know, because you're in the mastermind and you see the slack messages, it isn't a matter of, here's the perfect way to organize your calendar. Here's how to build habits. Just the other day, I sent a whole diatribe of messages saying, well, it's January 1 at 9:30am My plan has already gone to shit. So here's what I'm going to change. Here's what I'm going to ITER. Going to iterate. Right? It's a constantly iterative process, and all of us are going through those iterations together because the all or nothing approach just doesn't work. So again, it really comes back to this idea of we are sharing these obstacles, but all of us are embracing this simultaneous living in both performance mode, but in learning mode as well, because it goes back to the same thing I've been saying over and over, very few people are going to make a living doing one thing going forwards, living in performance mode for 40 to 50 to 60 hours a week, doing one thing is not going to work anymore. So we have to be willing to embrace being in learning mode, having a beginner's mind, which ultimately leads to the F word failure. What do we talk about all the time? Right? It's all about embracing that failure and seeing that failure is feedback. But failure is very, very scary for people that have lived their entire lives in performance mode, always having to put on the facade. I've got it figured out, and I know what I'm doing, right? So part of the mastermind is all this helping each other through those failures, and the fear that comes from going through those failures. But I've been saying for years, even before, I knew that I was doing it and I was saying it, essentially, I strongly believe that in whatever avenue that I've chosen, whether it's been in, you know, my editing career, whether it's been, you know, Spartan racing, whether it's been American Ninja Warrior Training, building a business, the reason that I consistently succeed at whatever I choose to do is I'm willing to fail faster than anybody else, right? You see it all the time, like, How many times have we tried to, you know, create a new resource that we want to get people, or we launched a class, or whatever it could be, right failure after failure after failure after failure. Right now, what people see on the outside, these are the things that we think are working, and we're going to double down on that success, and we're going to build it and grow it. But I've had a multitude of classes that we've launched, a multitude of self guided courses, that I've launched, newsletters, podcasts, growth strategies that are massive failures, but the faster I fail, the faster I get towards success. So that's a huge, huge mindset of this program, is being willing to embrace learning mode, the beginner's mind, and being willing to fail in an uncomfortable, but safe environment.

Debby: So I think that leads really nicely into talking a little bit more in depth about the go far framework, which you've mentioned a few times, and how really it's, it's the foundation for everything we do behind the scenes, right? We use that framework for new programs that we're doing or goals that we're setting behind the scenes, and then it's also the framework for all of our programs, and specifically the mastermind as well. So can you talk a little bit about where the go far framework came from, and then go into a little bit specifically about what exactly it is, even though you've mentioned it already, but really being explicit about the steps and how we how we can apply it to our lives.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, so one of the things that I always talk about, that I certainly didn't make up, but very much comes from stoke philosophy, is the idea that there's very, very little in life that we can control. So I focus on the things that I can control, and I really believe that we, by and large, end up where we are in life based on the quality of our choices. There are a lot of choices that were made for us, as far as you know, the color of our skin, where we were born, who we were born to. Those are choices we had nothing to do with, that we can't control. But there's always this space between stimulus and response, where we can choose our response to whatever might be going on around us, and that's based on our choices. Anybody that wants to go much deeper into this, one of the most transformative, seminal books that I think everybody should read in their lifetime is Victor Frankel's man search for meeting somebody that lived lived through being in a concentration camp and was able to, again, use the difficulty to bring something positive out of that. But the reason that I bring all that up is, again, this idea of choices. So there is no question that the single choice that I made that has defined who I am and define the course of my life is the day that I met Christopher rush. I always have a hard time getting through this story without crying. So the beginning of my senior year of college, and I was in an advanced level undergrad film production course. This is basically the this is the crowning jewel of the filmmaking path, where the entire semester is based on one short film. This is where you pair. Up with a group and your entire grade, 100% of your grade is the final product that you deliver. This is what I've been working towards for years. Finally, here I am at the University of Michigan. I have all these resources. I get to make a film right five minutes into class, this guy is wheeled in. And I don't mean like he was in a wheelchair, wheeling himself. I mean it was very clear that this person was quadriplegic and somebody else was pushing him in. And I was just like, well, that's kind of curious, because this is a really hands on, very physical class, like you're going to be, you know, shooting stuff, carrying cameras, carrying lights. But I didn't think much of it. And then all of a sudden I started to hear kind of the the elites of the group, the students that literally thought they were going to be the, you know, the next Martin Scorsese's like, Oh God, I really hope we don't get stuck with that guy in our group. And something just went off at me, and that just pissed me off. So at the end of class, the choice that I made is I walked up to him, man, I have a hard time telling the story. So I walked up to him, I introduced myself, and I said, Hey, I don't know what your capabilities are. I don't you know understand much about what you can or can't do. We'd love to have you in our group.

Debby: What was his reaction

Zack Arnold: he was he was very open to it is like, yes, I would love to like, you could just tell that it was great for him to feel like he was included. That is, I would say that there are two choices that have defined where I am in my life, my choice of bringing him into our group, and the choice of the person that I married. Everything else is secondary. Those two choices have defined where I am in my life and the quality of my life. So going back to the story of meeting with him, ended up having in our him and our group for the semester, and he was amazing. He ended up being our producer, coordinating everything. It was literally like hiring a professional film producer. I've never seen somebody

Debby: I want to pause really quickly and just acknowledge that, like what it took in you and what you saw in him to be able to do that right like you were different from everyone else in that class, and so that says something about you and your character, that you wanted to reach out to him. You wanted to make him feel included, and you were bothered by everyone else's reaction. What do you think that was in you that that made you do that?

Zack Arnold: I mean, this could easily be a multitude of series of therapy sessions. The simplest version is that I think that by and large, most people choose a career path or choose a calling based on righting a wrong from their childhood right. The more that you and I kind of dig into people's core wise, you really see the reason I want to tell this story, I want to do this job, is that I want to have an impact on a person or people that are struggling with this challenge that I had, that I really wish that I had the support to get through. And I have felt excluded my entire life. I've never felt like I fit in. I've really struggled to find a peer group, and I always get really upset when I feel that other people are being excluded or underrepresented because of what some specific reason that has nothing to do with them, again, prejudice because of color of skin or ethnicity or disability or otherwise, right? So that's just ingrained in me as a person. That was just part of my upbringing. It wasn't even something that needed to be said. It was just understood in our home, right? So I think that because I've I felt excluded from so many things and on the outside and struggled to find a peer group, it was just the sense of both purpose but duty, of like, oh, there's no way that the students in this class are going to get away with this bullshit. Like somebody has to include him in the work that we're doing. So I think that's by and large, the short version of where it came from is just saying I'm not letting this happen on my watch. And again, it goes back to this idea of using the difficulty or something else that I've shared many times my one of my favorite eight word phrases, easy choices, hard life, hard choices, easy life, choosing the disabled kid for a high level film production. Course, our choice very scary, lots of unknowns, lots of uncertainty, but I was willing to make that hard choice because I saw the potential that was there, and it could have been a total bust. He could have been an asshole, right? But he ended up literally changing my life in so many ways. Yeah,

Debby: that's beautiful. So how did he change your life? What was it that came next, and how does that relate to the go far framework? Yes,

Zack Arnold: so this would be shameless self promotion portion of the program. Number three, the short version of this is in a 90 minute documentary feature that I spent eight years of my life writing, directing.

I can teach it to others so they can implement it

Debby: as well. Incredible. It's such a it's such an inspiring story. And, yeah, I mean, again, it's another story that feels like you you couldn't write that right. Like, what do you mean? A quadriplegic who scuba dives, who has a law degree, who went to film school, like, like, it just sounds completely unrealistic. So let's, let's talk about in the time we have left, let's talk about the go far framework. And you, you mentioned kind of what it stands for. It's an acronym. Can you walk us through the steps and help us be able to maybe give someone, a listener, a way to implement it into their lives if they wanted to use this framework. Yep, this

Zack Arnold: is going to be a really good test for me, because it's taken me about 10 years to explain in less than 10 minutes how the framework not only works, but how somebody can implement it immediately after finishing this podcast, knowing that there's a lot more depth and complexity to it. I mean, we've been working on this framework for months as a mastermind group, but the simplest version, again, the acronym stands for goals, obstacles, focus, act and review, and I've added a little addendum, review and reflect, because I actually think that those two things are are different enough that they need to be differentiated. But essentially, what I've done over the years in my endless quest for progression and better understanding, how do we improve the quality of our lives? I've discovered that, by and large, the quality of our lives is defined not just by the quality of our choices, but by the quality of the questions that we ask ourselves. So there's a whole multitude of questions and prompts that we use to kind of decide what are the goals that we want to achieve? What's stopping us with the obstacles? Where do we focus our attention? What actions do we take, and how do we review and reflect? And I've essentially simplified it to five questions, goals, what do you want to achieve, and why? Obstacles? What's stopping you? Focus, what's the one thing you can do such that everything becomes easier act what actions, habits or systems do you need to take next so that you can achieve your goals and review and reflect what needs to change to be just 1% better tomorrow? And the idea is, and it's taken me years for all this to click, and I feel like during our mastermind the semester is where it finally clicked, is that I was always teaching this as a linear progression. I'm a very linear systems thinker, and in the former version of when I started to teach this framework and our focus yourself class, it was I literally said, this program is like a math class. You do one step, then another, then another, very systematic and very linear, and I realized that most people don't see the world that way and don't think that way. Yourself included, like you said before, you and I have very different approaches to this, where you're literally the yin to my young I am all about young energy. It's all about moving forwards and going and doing, getting shit done, and breaking through the wall, which is great in certain respects, and is very detrimental in other respects, specifically when it comes to mental health, emotional health, burnout, et cetera, et cetera. You're very much the yin energy, which is less deliberate and less linear, and for you, it's more about intuition and seeing what emerges and what I realized that there has to be a way that this framework works both ways, and that's very, very difficult. I've learned over the years as a storyteller, as an editor, that's really my unique specialization, is my ability to take very complex ideas and distill them down into their essence and explain them in a simple, engaging and entertaining way. And what I realized is that there is a way for this to be both a linear progression and a cyclical or circular progression. So essentially, what I discovered is you can use these same five questions, but they could be done in any order based on how you modify them. So an example being, what do you want to achieve and why? What do you want to achieve in the next decade? And why? Can also be, what do you want to achieve by this afternoon and why? What's stopping you? What's stopping you in life versus what do I want to achieve this afternoon? I want to take a 30 minute walk with my dog. Great. What's stopping you? Well, I've got all these things to do, or, you know, it's raining outside, or whatever it is, right? So you can work through this progression, both on a massive, literally lifelong scale, and it can be very micro over the next 30 minutes, what do I want to let so I'll use the micro for a second. What do I want to achieve and why I want to take my dog for a walk this afternoon? Why do I want to do it? Because I know that if I take a walk, it's going to help me generate more energy. Maybe I'll even get some new ideas, and I'll be fresh for the afternoon of creative work ahead. What's stopping me? Well, it's raining, or, you know, it's 100 degrees outside, or whatever it might be great. Well, what's the one thing that I can do such that everything becomes easier? I can get my umbrella if it's raining, or I can make sure that if I have too many things to do, I spend five minutes looking at my calendar and my to do list to make sure that I've organized everything in such. Way that I can be focused and intentional on that walk for half an hour, right? Which then tells you what is the next action or habit or system that you need to build to achieve your goals? Well, I guess what that means is that if I'm struggling to take this walk every afternoon, I need to build a better system so I'm not finding myself five minutes before saying Nope, I can't take the dog for a walk today. I'm too busy, or I've got too many emails, or whatever it is, it helps you identify the habits and systems that are going to help you do this more consistently, and then whether that review and reflection is at the end of the day, at the end of the week, at the end of the month, at the end of the year, at the end of the decade, again, you can insert and say, what's the one thing, or what is the you know, what needs to change so I can be 1% better tomorrow, to be 1% better this week, to be 1% better this month, this year, this decade, and it's all cyclical, right? So it's once I discovered that it wasn't just I'm setting a goal for the next three to six months or the next year, and now we need to break down all the obstacles, the fears, the challenges, the limiting beliefs. Now we need to organize all the dominoes and get everything in place. That's my that's my perfectionist tendency. I always call myself a recovering perfectionist, and I realize that this is just about progression. So the go far framework for anybody, they can literally use it as soon as they're done. Here, what do you want to achieve and why? What's stopping you? What's the one thing that you can do and can do is very important. That's the small Domino, not the huge one. What's the one thing you can do such that everything else becomes easier, right? What are the next actions, habits or systems that will help you achieve your goals? And then what's the next thing? Or what? What needs to change to become 1% better tomorrow, next week, etc, etc. You can do those in that order, or, frankly, in any order, really small, really large. And what you find is, when going through this exercise, there are a lot of things that come up that you wouldn't have realized otherwise, when you're just constantly in performance mode and survival mode and reaction mode, when you're just letting your day coming at you, and you're not taking that moment to pause and reflect and ask yourself these questions. You find yourself 20 years later wondering how the hell did my life get to this point? So this process is all about being intentional.

Debby: Yeah, and that's a great description of it. And I think the thing that now that I've sort of been working with it for some years now, within these programs that I've coached as well, the thing that for myself, that I would get stuck in, and I've seen a lot of students get stuck in it too, is literally the first question, what do you want to achieve? And why? Right? Literally, the first thing a lot of people, I think, get stuck there because we're not actually sure what we want to achieve, or it's coming from outside, where we're basing it off of these external ideas someone is telling us, or it's what society is telling us. So what I found to be helpful for me and and maybe for others too, if you get stuck on this question is, what do you want to feel, and why? And that, to me, really helps, because it some there's something about the Word achieve makes it feel like I have to do some big thing, or it has to be meaningful in some way. And if I can just think about what, what do I want to feel, what's the feeling that I want to have? Is it? Is it happiness? Is it purpose? Is it, you know, whatever that might be. That gets me a little bit closer to to finding something that I can then kind of work towards and then apply the rest of the questions too. So I just wanted to add that in there. And

Zack Arnold: that goes very much to the contrast in a good way that we have, where I'm very deliberate and you're very emergent, you're very intuitive, right? And I'm going to add one more onto this very briefly, because I want to make sure anybody that's listening, if they never want to download a guide, if they never want to subscribe to the newsletter, if they never want to, you know, take a course. If they never want to do a year long mastermind, they can still take something away from this. If you two are stuck here, like I don't know what I want to achieve and why your suggestion is great, which is what you want to feel and why? And I'm going to add something onto this, this new concept that we discovered recently, called anti goals. Here's a question everybody can answer, what don't you want? Right? What don't you want to achieve? I don't want to work more hours. I don't want to, you know, spend even less time putting my kids to bed, you know, to at night via FaceTime, whatever it might be, right? If you don't know what you want to achieve, instead answer the question, What don't I want? That's a really, really great place to start. But even if it's a matter of, what do I want to achieve and why? And the answer is, I don't know. What's stopping you what's stopping you from not knowing? Again, the workflow still works, right? It's like, well, because I don't know this or that, or I'm, you know, unclear or uncertain about the future, it still continues the conversation and leads you down the path of review and reflection. Yeah,

Debby: yeah. I think that's really important. And like. Always say the the obstacle question is really the one that, and that's the one that is non linear, right? Because it just keeps coming up constantly, as you're going through all

Zack Arnold: day every day. What's stopping me from everything? Yes, yeah, and that's and then I realize that we have to wrap it up here. But the one kind of key point that I want to to mention here that I think is so important about this framework and how it differentiates from I'm not going to say every because I don't like hyperbole, but almost every program that I've ever looked into or taken or read about that has to do with goal setting, personal development, professional development, everybody's saying all the same things in different ways with different frameworks. So there's nothing about what we're doing that's revolutionary. And frankly, we're using other people's resources, doing podcast interviews, sharing their books to go deeper into all five of these areas. But here's what I cannot find anywhere else with all goal setting, personal and professional development, it essentially is we're going to talk about the goals and what you want to achieve. Now let's talk about how to get things done right, whether it's focused, prioritization, important versus urgent. GTD, there's so many things that answer the question. Here are all the strategies, tools, tactics and systems that you can use to achieve your goals. Nobody ever asks the question, what is stopping you? And to me, the magic is in the answer to those questions, because that's the real shit that we don't want to admit. And once the goals become overcoming the obstacles, the game changes. And that's the component I just can't find anywhere else is stopping to ask, What's stopping you, if you're really willing to be open and honest and vulnerable and intentional about creating the space to answer that your literal life can change, but you have to be willing to ask, What's stopping me? Because, PS, spoiler alert, it's probably you

Debby: absolutely, absolutely

Zack Arnold: myself included, by the way.

Debby: Okay, so for anyone listening that wants to implement this, can you quickly go through the five questions one more time. And then if anyone so they can, they can do this on their own. And then, if anyone wants help going through this and is interested in learning more about the mastermind program or any of the other programs that we offer, can you tell them how to get that information?

Zack Arnold: Yep, so reviewing the questions one more time, and this is all subject to change, because it's all about progression and not perfection. So I'm constantly iterating and revising this, but it basically comes down to the same ideas with slight nuances. Goals, what do you want to achieve and why? Or, in your case, what do you want to feel and why? And if you're stuck here, what don't you want? Obstacles, what's stopping you focus, what is the one thing you can do such that everything else becomes easier act what next actions, habits or systems will lead you closer to your goals and review and reflect what needs to change to be just 1% better tomorrow or next week or next month or next year, whatever it might be. So if somebody wants to learn more about this. They want to either learn more about the framework, learn more about Christopher rush, or they're interested in joining the mastermind, they can either go to go far movie.com. So they can watch the movie for free. And if they're interested in the mastermind, they can go to optimize yourself.me/mastermind. So it's Optimize Yourself. Dot m e slash mastermind. Awesome. Thank you so much. Yes and thank you. Great work as a podcast producer and host today, I have a job easy.

Debby: Is there anything else that I didn't give you a chance to say that you want to leave people with?

Zack Arnold: Well, you know that when you give me the mic and say, Is there anything else you'd like to say I could go on forever and forever and forever and forever, but what I like to leave people with is that I have 100% confidence that whomever it is that's listening right now, you bring more value to the world than you think you do. If you're stuck thinking, I have to start over, I don't know what to do. I guarantee. There's so many things I don't guarantee, but the one thing I guarantee, I'm so confident in this, you bring more value to the world than you are aware of right now, with your skills, with your experience, with your knowledge, with your perspective, just on the way that you've been brought up in life, and the way you see the world, I guarantee you bring more value to the world than you know. You just don't know it yet. And we want to help you realize that potential.

Debby: I love that. Yeah, yeah, you are not a problem to be fixed. Beautiful, awesome. Well, thank you so much for doing this. Yes, thank you. Get a good look at kind of behind the scenes, at what went on in 2024 for us and and have a better idea of kind of the go far framework and the mastermind program.

Zack Arnold: Yes, here's, here's the 2025 not being another dumpster fire. Yes.