Brian Herriot - Time Freedom
DH ### Brian Herriot
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Brian's Time Freedom Story
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Jonathan Stark: Hello and welcome to Ditching Hourly, I'm Jonathan Stark. Today I'm joined by guest Brian Herriot. Brian, welcome to the show.
Brian Herriot: Thank you Jonathan, it's great to be here.
Jonathan Stark: Today we're gonna talk about Brian's new book, Time Freedom, and his background as an independent consultant and even the interesting hybrid publishing approach that he's taking. I think we'll cover all of that today. But first, Brian, could you tell folks a little bit about who you are and what you do?
Brian Herriot: Yes, so my name is Brian Herriot. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area in the beautiful city of Alameda. I have been in consulting most all of my life except for four years. Started with Accenture, joined a regional firm, Point B, and then I've done my own thing since 2017. And figured out a way such that around 2022, I was able to find a solution where I could work approximately nine to 10 months of the year and then take the other remaining months and spend it in the summer in northern Wisconsin on a, not a great cabin, on a very nice lake. Where I can both relax, but then also, you know, as an entrepreneur, you're always thinking about how you wanna change things in your business. So it's been a nice opportunity to kind of pull back and then come back in fresh again during the quote unquote school year. I've got a son going into 10th grade. So that's pretty much my life. And then, you know, I've also been able, over the last almost three years now, been working on this book project. And so I can now say that I'm also an author.
Jonathan Stark: And the book is out now or not out yet?
Brian Herriot: The book will be out on September 15th. So I'm just a bit under two months left as of when we're recording here. It was pushed back by six months because I'm publishing through a hybrid publisher who decided that I was getting some good traction and they wanted to give me trade distribution into the bookstores. So that then meant we had to push it back six months. But I'm like, you know, this book is a long game thing. I don't care if it delays it a bit. The fact that it's gonna be more accessible to people is really what I'm looking for.
Jonathan Stark: Okay, so you sent over, you reached out, you've been on my mailing list, and you reached out with, you know, what I wanna read, that sort of thing is very nice. And to be totally transparent, I was a little nervous because of the title. So the title of the book is Time Freedom. And I'm also working on a book that is a time management related book. And I was like, oh no, we're gonna have the same thought at the same time and write the same book. And actually yours is significantly, it goes in a significantly different direction than mine because it talks a lot about personal finances. But before we get into that, let's back up a little bit. What was the thing that caused you to want to write a book? I'm sure you thought, well, this is a big deal. It's like running a marathon or even bigger. What was the trigger that caused you to start?
Brian Herriot: It's kind of interesting. I have a very specific answer to that. So about three years ago, I wanted to transition and not do as much project management consulting in the healthcare space, which is what I had been doing as an independent consultant and doing more money work. Cause I've always been fascinated by money, investments, managing money. And I decided to start to transition my career. So I am now a registered investment advisor and do manage money. However, I knew I needed to develop a platform of people. And I did not want to do social media. And I finally realized that the other option is to do book and speaking. And I thought, okay, that's what I wanna do. So I was actually investigating writing workshops and things like that, kind of for my wife, cause she's a far better writer than I am, found an incredible one. And ultimately I thought for her, but then ultimately joined it myself. And I've been all in ever since this was, yeah, late 2023 when I was doing this initial research.
Why Brian Wrote the Book
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Jonathan Stark: Okay, so, and it was a nonfiction writing workshop or was it just a general writing workshop?
Brian Herriot: No, it is a nonfiction prescriptive, nonfiction writing workshop. She has a book, it's A.J. Harper. It actually is Mike Michalowicz's writing partner. A.J. Harper, her book is, it's my Bible here. Write a must read.
Jonathan Stark: Yeah, nice.
Brian Herriot: And what really attracted me to that book, the message in it was at the end of the day, if you market the heck out of a subpar book, it's just gonna be a subpar book. There's nothing you can do to sell a book that can't stand on its own. And the message was, you have to write an incredible book. And I took that to heart. And that is why it takes so long. Because there's 50 rounds of edits that you need to do to make sure that it's the best that it possibly can be. So yeah, so I joined her workshop and I've been associated with her. Then I got associated with Mike Michalowicz and then I ended up publishing through his imprint with Hybrid Publisher, page two.
Jonathan Stark: Mm-hmm, okay. Is it actually called Hybrid Publisher?
Brian Herriot: So as I, no, it's just called page two, page two simplified.
Jonathan Stark: Okay, sorry.
Brian Herriot: Yeah, do you want me to explain my understanding of kind of how the different publishing looks or?
Jonathan Stark: Sure, yeah, go ahead.
Choosing Hybrid Publishing
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Brian Herriot: Yeah, so this is something that's actually talked about in A.J.'s book. But you've got your traditional publishers, the big five, I think they are, you know, the names that you'd be familiar with.
Jonathan Stark: Penguin, Harper, yeah.
Brian Herriot: Penguin, yeah, Portfolio, those. And then on the other end, you had self-publishing. And there's drawbacks to both of them, you know, the former being you really don't own your intellectual property, you get very small royalty payments. And on the other end, you have to do a ton of stuff yourself. And I was always worried that, like, I want a book to look good, be good. And I'm like, if I'm trying to find the right experts, I don't know if I can. Well, come to find out, there's a thing called a Hybrid Publisher, which are people that have come from traditional and take all that knowledge and then formed Hybrid Publishing, which then allows you as the author to maintain ownership of your IP. But they have all this expertise. Now, you have to pay some money upfront. However, if you find a good Hybrid Publisher, they're still very selective and only release a certain number of books out of the year. You just have to be careful with the term Hybrid Publisher because there's, like, top tier, like, three, four, five really, really good ones, and then kind of book packagers that I would say kind of that also exist.
Jonathan Stark: Yeah, I'm sure there's a broad spectrum in between. Like, I've done both traditional and self, and they're wildly different. They're almost, they're so different, they're almost for different purposes. It's almost like, what's the purpose of the book? And that kind of says where you should fall on the spectrum. You know, if the purpose of the book is to, you know, like, be direct monetization of your audience or something like that, it's like, self-publish an e-book and, yeah, it's just like the traditional published site, it's much faster, it's way higher profit, it'd be way lower volume, but the profit's 10 times higher, so it doesn't matter. And, you know, so there's pros and cons to it. On the other end, and it's fast, the other end, it takes forever. And, but you really do end up with a premium product. You really do, it's, they will not, if you're working with a good publisher, they will not let, they care just as much about the quality of the book as you do, if not more, and they have way more expertise. So there's this thing that I've, I've talked to several people recently and over the past few years, where even if you're self-publishing, hiring an editor is almost a non-negotiable. I mean, it's like, you're crazy if you don't hire an editor. But then there's like five kinds of editors, and which one do you hire, and when do you hire them? And it starts to turn into a project, a real like multi-person project with back and forth, and you're getting edits and dealing with that, and then what's gonna happen? What about the cover, and title, and back cover, and all of this stuff? So it starts to turn into, the pendulum, for somebody like me who likes to move quickly, self-publishing was very cool, and I know how to make a website and things like that, so it wasn't like there were a lot of, but there were plenty of things that were annoying, it would have been great if somebody else could have handled them, and as you increase the level of quality that you wanna put out as a self-publish book, you end up spending more and more money on other experts, and then the pendulum starts to swing back, and I think, just for the dear listener, if you're thinking about writing a book, I read one time, I think it was, what's his name, Chris Brogan, who's been self-publishing and sort of traditional publishing for 20 years. His sort of litmus test is like, are you trying to reach a broader audience or a more narrow audience? If you're trying to, if you're just trying to reach a really narrow specific target market of maybe, I don't know, 100,000 people or 50,000 people or something like that, then pulling in the big guns of like trying to get a deal, get an agent and try and get an advance from Penguin is probably, they're just going to say no. It's overkill, right. So there's a strategy involved. Where did this book fall into your business? You started to talk about it a little bit, but you didn't want to do social media. The book is the other option. So what is the business that you have or want to build around this book?
Brian Herriot: So the business that I'll be building is in investment management services that are targeted at a niche of person that would be reading my book. So it is the person who's worked in corporate or in a professional setting for 20 years. They're in their 40s, early mid 40s, and they've been working hard. I'm kind of telling you my story here, working hard. And then all of a sudden you think, okay, but why am I doing this? What's the purpose of all this effort I've been doing? I would really like to go do this other thing and do it on my terms, basically. And I don't want to just grin and bear it for another 20 years until I retire. But it's not an extremely common path in life. And so there are some money pieces of the story that need to be figured out and aligned. And so I read all the money stuff. I read all the how to start a business stuff, but they're very separate. And I needed a way to kind of bring it together to show if I could manage my money in this way, it could help support some inconsistent income for a while, that would then allow me to do this work. And oh, if I want to work flexibly, because I have some savings I could live off, I can actually match that with some flexible work and still be fine, be able to work on what I want to work at. And what I've found is when you're working at what you really want to work at, you're going to do great at it anyway, and you're going to make even more money. So it's just how do you get through that bridge period. And so I wanted to, so I wrote the book, I do come from the financial freedom background, where you're focused on saving up all the money and then retiring early. But I didn't want it to be just that niche. I really wanted to expand the readership to be anybody that wants to make that transition and have this life inflection point where you want to do what you want to do on your terms. And so because of that expansion of the audience, that's where I wanted to broaden out beyond just self-publishing. I wanted to expand it as much as I could.
Building the Business Behind the Book
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Jonathan Stark: Okay, so let's talk about the book specifically, because that's a great intro. So Time Freedom, what's the subtitle? Time Freedom. Yeah.
Time Freedom vs Financial Freedom
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Brian Herriot: So let me describe Time Freedom in terms of what Time Freedom is not. First of all, and this is where an editor comes in to help, because he's like, the first thing people will say is, oh, you mean work-life balance. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, I don't mean work-life balance. So in the intro, you know, you define time freedom as what it's not. It's not work-life balance. Work-life balance is where you're looking at your days or your week and you're trying to accommodate things and take two hours off in the day and work three hours late at night to cover it, right? That's not time freedom. Time freedom is longer. It's like looking at your year and saying, what are the seasons of my life or my year and how do I work these periods of intense work, because I love doing my work. But then I'm ready for a break for two, three, four months. How do you make that work? The other key thing that time freedom is not is it's not financial freedom, which is the distinction that I had to make before I could articulate what the true core message of the book is. I was always approaching it as you need to achieve financial freedom first, and then you have control of your time. However, the end goal is the time part. So here's what happened. It was basically, it was 2020, February and March when everything tanked, all the investments tanked from the COVID crash and we were doing well and I said to my wife, you know that financial freedom thing, it's not happening anytime soon. And I didn't know what she was going to tell me. And she basically asked me, well, what does financial freedom actually mean to you? And what I said was that I still like work. I just want to maybe do less of it or more flexibly. She's like, well, why don't we just do that now? Right? Yeah. Right? And I'm like, oh, duh, yes. You know, and that's the end goal. So my core message of the book is pursue time freedom first by balancing your money that you've saved. It's not enough to be independently wealthy, but it's enough to help support you in this mission of flexible work. And then the financial freedom will come eventually. There's nothing, I have no, nothing against financial freedom. I'm all for it. It's just that it takes longer. And so if you pursue time freedom first, you can actually achieve what I consider meaningful freedom much sooner than financial freedom's absolute freedom where you never have to work again. And I'm just so glad I didn't try to, I didn't wait forever to get financial freedom to only realize that I wanted to go back to work, you know, like, yeah, that's, that's how that works.
Jonathan Stark: Yeah. So we're brothers from another mother because the subtext, the subtext of my book is how to learn how to be happy now, instead of waiting, grinding and grinding and grinding and doing all these things that you hate because someday you're going to have enough money to do things that will make you happy. And it's like, I don't know, I hear you. If you don't learn what you like in your thirties and forties at the latest, you're not going to magically learn it. You're not going to like, you know, my dad bought a sailboat when he retired and two years later it had barely been used and he sold it. And that was the dream. And I was like front row seat to that. And I was like, yeah, it was like, you know, and he, you know, he's sort of a boomer era American dream. You know, I'm 57. So, you know, he's up there, but, uh, it's always, so I love that basically is what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that I love that. It's like in the quote I always think of, I think it's from the movie wall street and Charlie Sheen saying to his wife, um, you know, she says he's like trying to get rich and she's like, what do you, what would you do when you got rich? Like, Oh, I want to take a motorcycle trip across China. I think he says, and she's like, you have enough money to do that now. You don't need to be rich to do that. And it's like, and it's like, do you really, is that really what you want? What do you want? You know, what is the thing that you actually want and what's stopping you from doing it now? You know, I just, I love it. I love it. Okay. So what was your first step when you decided, so you had this sort of realization, you're like, I want to write it. I want to do more stuff that I want to do. Right. I'm not looking to retire. I just want to do more stuff that I want to do.
Making Nine Months Cover Twelve
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Brian Herriot: Yeah. So what I wasn't, we were not able to just flip the switch immediately and, and start living this time freedom lifestyle. So what, what I did over the next three years, and this is actually the timeline, the promise that I make in the book is I can kind of get you there in three years is, I mean, it sounds so easy, but it's simply like, how do you make enough money in nine months so that you can live comfortably in for 12 months? And the thing is, it looks so different for different people based on the type of work that you do. And I mean, let me just stop there. Yeah. Like it can look different, but I, you know, being an independent consultant, I could navigate my work into projects such that I could then line them up so that I had none or less work over the summers.
Jonathan Stark: Right.
Brian Herriot: And it also matters with family. Like now here's just a quick aside. Like my son is now right in the heart of high school. He doesn't want to be spending three months in Wisconsin on a lake. He wants to be with his friends doing his thing. So, you know, again, the seasons change, you know, I'm not a purist here. And so we're already back from Wisconsin and it's July 23rd, you know, we kind of shortened our time period. this summer, so things ebb and flow, but we figured out a way finally, and COVID kind of helped because it made work even more remote, where even the first summer we spent in Wisconsin, I did work from there. The second and third, I did not. A big thing for me with the book, too, is so many prescriptive nonfiction books are really cool ideas, but they cause you to upend your life and do these crazy things that people can't do. It's just very important that I write it in such a way that it's balanced, it's doable. The things that you can do can be achieved by anyone that picks it up, but over three years. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Well,
Jonathan Stark: I love the honesty of that claim or that promise, and I do want to commiserate for a second on the grind, hustle culture stuff, which is telling you to just white-knuckle this system and it'll be fine. It's like, well, if I had the discipline to white-knuckle that system, probably any system would work because I'm self-disciplined. I don't know if that aligns at all with your approach, but it sounds like maybe if you're 20 and you have no kids, right, then fine, grind 80 hours a week. I sure did, but it wasn't because... Yeah, but we're
Brian Herriot: getting up there. I've got a 16-year-old and 12-year-old. They want to do things. I want to do the things with them. To me, it's about time freedom. It's about being able to decide when I work, with whom I work, from where I work. And I want to loop back to something that you
Remote Work and Flexible Work
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Jonathan Stark: mentioned a couple times briefly about remote work. How long have you been working remotely and how much is that a key piece of the reader? Does the reader need to work remotely to get something out of the book or is that something they'd work toward or is it irrelevant?
Brian Herriot: Let me start a little broader and then come back to remote work. The time freedom formula, the framework that I lay out is built... Well, first let me say it's built off of the financial freedom formula. The financial freedom formula, also called the 4% rule, is that if you want to cover a year's worth of your living expenses, it needs to at least equal pulling out 4% of your savings for your investment income. Lifestyle expenses and investment income. The time freedom formula adds inflexible work. So, not rocket science, but if you can make your work and your investments equal your lifestyle spend, then in general, you can make it work. You have to project and there's future expenses, blah, blah, blah. If you look at the bare bones, that's how it works. Now, I was very careful to be like, based on the type of person you are, you may focus on one of those in particular and have that be your key driver. So, if you've been an incredible saver and you're discovering this at 50 and you've already got 3 million bucks, you're going to rely on that component of the time freedom formula to drive it home. Now, if you're more entrepreneurial, you've been doing that more, you haven't saved, you need to lean on the financial work piece of it. Then some people just live frugally and they're cool with it. If you can drop that lifestyle expense way down, you don't need that much money to live off of. Now, the reason I describe that is to say, if you're relying on the flexible work and that's your key area, which it's the one that you can make the fastest progress with. I certainly did. I think, yes, remote work is hugely important for that. I've been remote working off and on pretty much since 2017, I would say. So, it's been quite a while. Now, although I continue to hear about usually smaller businesses moving to four-day work weeks, and I think there's just a variety of ways. I think the pandemic, a good thing that came out of the pandemic was people are interested in doing different ways of work these days. And to the extent we can lean into that, we can really help with our time freedom. But, if you have a more traditional job, the thing I always will hear is physician or attorney or high-income earning professions that are more traditional professions. Sometimes individuals like that can get by with reduced hours. If you're able to structure your work, again, you have to be established in the place that you work and have some power and authority. You know, those last hours you're working on a huge salary are the highest taxed anyway. So, figure out a way to go to 30 hours a week. There's strategic things that can be done no matter how you're doing it, even if you don't have the opportunity to work remotely.
Jonathan Stark: Okay. So, let's stress this a little bit. So far, everything you're mentioning is kind of like, unless I missed something, it's all independent professionals or self-employed business owners, doctors. But when you're at Accenture, how would you take the summer off? I can't. You can't. You can't. And the way that I have to look at that is,
Who Can Actually Do This?
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Brian Herriot: although I should talk to more young people because they will probably say that it is possible. But my perspective on this was and is that you need to come out of school and you need to develop some skills and a network and you need to work. You can't just start living this life at 22 years old. In my mind, in the model I present in the book is like, until you're 35, you're making yourself marketable. I'm also assuming you're very good at your job. It's kind of like baseline assumptions. But then at that point, then you can start to take control of your life some more. And certainly, entrepreneurship, solo launch. But I'm not talking like starting a new thing that's VC backed and whatever. I'm just saying like, whatever you've worked in, yeah, like I think I mentioned earlier, you're taking that and you're doing it yourself now. So whatever skill you've developed over the years in the network that you've established, you're using that to your benefit as you kind of go out on your own.
Jonathan Stark: Yeah. So to answer your question though in short, no. And I even have that in the book. I'm like,
Brian Herriot: when I was at Accenture, it's like, I need you here 80 hours. Okay, sure. I need you tomorrow. Okay, sure. It's kind of just how it has to be. And maybe for the person who's still there, they're a partner and they're 55. I actually just talked to one the other day. That's just the life that he chose to live. And that's okay. That's okay too.
Jonathan Stark: Yeah. If that's what they want. Yeah.
Brian Herriot: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Jonathan Stark: So if I could not, I don't want to put too fine a point on it, but if you're currently at a kind of job that does not accommodate sabbaticals or a month off or 30 hour work week or job sharing or something, then that might be a knob you have to twiddle. Like that might be a lever you have to pull. Yes, it is. And I've noticed now a couple more
Brian Herriot: books, like this last one just I think came out yesterday, big time. It's like the transformative power of a sabbatical. And so if you're in a high powered, employed type situation, again, this is where the money part comes in. You need the money confidence to be able to do something like this, but you may choose to take your six months off or something and use it to figure out what you really want. And there's a lot of really great resources out there for doing that and figuring out how you want to come back. Or maybe your flexible work is a six week, six month break, and then you come back. Sometimes you can negotiate that. I mean, I've heard it done. I've never tried it, but maybe that could be done. And maybe you're just kind of moving from, actually, this made me, an individual that I had on my podcast, Les Sherry was his name, is his name. And he navigated a trip around the world. He took 18 months off of his corporate position. He was a senior director when he left. He came back, he was confident in his skills. And I can vouch for that because he's excellent. And he did his trip with his family at the appropriate time. He planned it for 10 years, took the trip, came back. I think he consulted for six months, but then came right back in and got a VP position right back at the same company. So, again, it just looks completely different for people. I really wanted to have him on the podcast because it was such a non-entrepreneurial way of doing something like this.
Early Readers and Draft Feedback
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Jonathan Stark: So, what happened next? Of course, you've been working on the book for three years, so your ideas around it are very, you're articulating them extremely clearly. I'm sure it didn't start off like that. So, what was the-
Brian Herriot: Writing process, yes.
Jonathan Stark: Oh, yeah, so let me, I'd love to talk about this.
Brian Herriot: Yeah, I mean, I was actually just looking at this the other day in that, like, when you, you know, you write that first draft of the book and I think it was 100,000 words. Now, for the average listener who doesn't know word count, you know, a normal prescriptive non-fiction book is 40 to 60,000 words, right?
Jonathan Stark: Yeah, you wrote a Stephen King novel.
Brian Herriot: I did, but I think you need to do that because then you can start cutting the stuff out that is not required.
Jonathan Stark: Yeah, get the clay on the table.
Brian Herriot: Yeah, and I think the number one thing that I would advise to anybody writing a book is have an active set of early readers reading these drafts and I ran four rounds of early readers. The first, we actually, we'd read a couple chapters, we'd meet, so helpful, and then the next round, I did it again, we didn't do the meeting, but we, you know, I think over the, at the end of the day, I ended up with like 90-some early readers that hugely impacted, hugely impacted, I believe, the quality of the book.
Jonathan Stark: All right, we gotta pause there because there's a bunch of, I have a million questions. So, how did you, who are these people? So many questions, I don't know where to start. So, here's an easy one.
Brian Herriot: Yep.
Jonathan Stark: Was it the same group of people on every round or did you get fresh people every time? Good, okay, I'm glad you said that.
Brian Herriot: Fresh people, yep.
Jonathan Stark: Fresh people every time. Where did you get these people?
Brian Herriot: I got them all over the place. So, you know, your focus is to get a reader that is actually your reader, right, not your mother. So, my mom or my dad, they didn't read it. They actually, they read the fourth version because they wanted, they asked me to include them and I did. I mean, a lot of, so, as part of this transition in writing and speaking, like, I've been in, surrounded by some incredible people. I, you know, in the heroic public speaking program and A.J. Harper's three book writing workshops. So, like, all of a sudden I had access to like 80 some people right there and that are all kind of doing the thing that I talk about in the book. So, I had my niche right near me and I got, you know, if you're likable and you build a good case, you can get people to do this stuff for you. They're really helpful. And so, I was able to find, you know, you also do LinkedIn posts and you say, hey, one thing A.J. talks about is when you describe your book and someone says, what's your book about? You actually say who your book is for. So, you say, you know, if you're someone who values a free and flexible life, but you want access to it before you're independently wealthy, rich or retired, who would be interested in reading a book about that?
Jonathan Stark: You know, you get-
Brian Herriot: Yeah, I mean, the thing that you just said is solid gold money. Like, you must have worked on that a lot.
Jonathan Stark: Yes, I did.
Brian Herriot: Yeah, that is great. And yeah, so that's like, again, I cannot say enough, read this book, write a must read. Like, the talking about the book fundamentals and how you talk about your book, all those things are so extremely important. And then, and that's how you then recruit those early readers. And the other reason for an early reader too, is if, especially if you publish through a hybrid publisher, the editorial decisions, sometimes they tell you that you should cut something or change something. But when you can come back and say, well, half of my readers love this, they'll be like, leave it in. You know, like, they can't tell you to take it out if everybody loves it. And so, that's another huge. And when you go live with your book, now you have all these people on your launch team wanting to share news about it. And I read this two years ago, it's great, blah, blah, blah. So it's just early readers are such an important. Another good book is called, Write a Useful Book or something like that. Rob Fitzpatrick. Rob Fitzpatrick's book. Worst title ever. No one can ever remember the title. I think it's Write Useful Books by Rob Fitzpatrick. But I used that software product for my last round.
Jonathan Stark: And that was my next question. So technology, what technology was involved, if anything, other than, what's that called, help a book?
Tools for Testing a Book
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Brian Herriot: Yep, help this book. So that's a really interesting sort of, it's sort of like Google Docs for the book, but with like a lot of, so people can come in, write comments, but it also, they can kind of flag their comment as like, this is amazing, or I'm confused, it's really cool. I've helped other books through that platform, and it is pretty useful. It's much better than using a Google Doc or something like that.
Jonathan Stark: Yeah.
Brian Herriot: Keeps things organized.
Jonathan Stark: But any other technology besides that that you used?
Brian Herriot: Yeah, so the first round of early readers, I had a pre-read nine question, because 10 is too many for people, nine question survey.
Jonathan Stark: Yeah.
Brian Herriot: And then I actually had four to five questions in each segment that we did, and we met and talked about it on Zoom, so technology-wise. And then the second round, I just had a pre-read and a post-read survey, and we didn't meet, because that was the right level, right? I think at the time too, I was still developmentally working on the book, and so it's not as though you could get down to like, this little line is confusing, it would be more like,
Jonathan Stark: this whole chapter is confusing. The chapter doesn't make sense, yeah.
Brian Herriot: By the time I got to the fourth round, I had a pretty solid book, and so then those were very helpful. Like, when you have six people saying, I'm confused about this part, that's really, really helpful to know.
Jonathan Stark: Yeah.
Brian Herriot: But I just, I waited till right at the end to use that product.
Testing Ideas Before Writing
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Jonathan Stark: So Mike Michalowicz, when I interviewed him with Rochelle on the Business of Authority a while back, his model, and since you're associated with him, I'm curious, it sounds like you didn't do this. I wonder if that was conscious, or you just used a different process. His model is to first create a workshop that is essentially based on the content that will eventually be in the book, and teach the workshop a few times, in real time, to get live feedback immediately, which is almost like reader feedback on the content, but you haven't gone through the writing process yet. And the way that he tells it, if I'm remembering it right, he would sort of outline the content, and say like, okay, I could teach this. I know this stuff, but it's not articulable, I'm not really good at saying it, or maybe organizing, but I'm gonna make a slide deck, and I'm gonna teach a four-hour workshop on it, I'm gonna take questions, I'm gonna answer the questions, I'm gonna capture all of that, I'm gonna teach the workshop four or five times, and then I'm gonna know kind of like all this stuff you would sort of get from reader feedback, and you still have to get reader feedback on the actual pros, I guess you'd call it. But did you, was that, I don't know if that's something AJ talks about in the book since they're partners, but did that come up at all?
Brian Herriot: It absolutely did. I know Mike also then will like speak about it as well, and get feedback from doing kind of like some ad hoc speaking and stuff like that. What I failed to mention before the early readers is that I did two things more in line with what you're asking about now. And the first is, I did, what you're supposed to do is you spin up a new service offering, offer services for testimonials, right? And so I had worked with about 15 people on creating what I call a time freedom forecast. And so I had done that kind of as my workshop, but then I also met with, it was eight people, but there were really four that were hugely involved, where we did kind of a workshop version of the book before I ever even wrote anything and had my first early readers. So yes, definitely, I definitely did that. Because otherwise you don't really, even if, I would also say like, if you're a professional that has a process or a framework and you're used to working with people one-on-one, that's great because you know it works one-on-one, but then you still have to make sure it works when you're not around to help.
Jonathan Stark: Right.
Brian Herriot: And so that, but both steps are important. So thanks for actually reminding me of that first step. That's, that's, yeah.
Writing the First Draft
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Jonathan Stark: That's super interesting. And I was pretty surprised when you said that you were able to first draft 100,000 words cold. So did that stuff happen before the 100,000 word draft or?
Brian Herriot: That's happened before. That did happen before. So like, again, this is my first book too, so I didn't really know how long 100,000 words was, or I just kind of wrote everything I thought I needed to write. And then what happened is I pulled like a whole chapter about taking action because I'm like, well, you know, I had to cut something. I have kind of a proprietary investment strategy that was a little too complex for the book. And so I put that in a bonus chapter. And then one chapter I cut and another two I merged. And it got me down to about 65,000. So my book is still, I mean, it's pretty hefty. But the feedback that I will get is that it's a quick read and that's exactly what I want because people, you know, you don't want reduced friction, right? You got to reduce friction.
Jonathan Stark: Yeah, it needs to be the length that it needs to be to get the results that you promised to the reader. So I'm a big fan of short books, but only if it's not, it needs to still get the effect, you know? So, okay. So let's, I want to ask one more super annoying tactical question and then I want to zoom back out to the actual content. So what was your process like to crank out a hundred thousand words? Were you voice typing? Did you have a, you know, before coffee every morning, did you crank out a thousand words, come hell or high water? Like, cause I'm sure your whole other life is going on and you know, this is a three year process. So give folks a little bit of a picture of that.
Brian Herriot: I would say that I was able to put those words on paper over a four month time period. Um, I always wrote for two hours from five to seven in the morning. Um, I basically gave up my workouts at that time. So I wasn't in my best shape at the time, but that's a choice I made. And then I was also writing while I was in AJ Harper's workshop. And so when, when you're in that and even after they have a writing sprints and so they offer like three other hour long, our 90 minute sessions to write. And there was a concentrated time when I would go to probably two of those a day as well. So maybe for about two of the four months I was writing up to four to six hours a day, um, during the week. And then you just kind of get the, and she teaches all the strategies. Like if you get to a point where you're like, God, I really need to look that up. Just make a note, look it up and keep going. Like do not stop. Do not go to the internet. Nope. Not go on the internet. I guess. And I was writing this before AI was really a big thing. So now I've heard what people are doing is that they're going to a dumb computer that's not even attached to the internet pulling up Microsoft word. And so there is no temptation to use AI, um, because you know, why not use AI to do some research, but I don't want to mix, I wouldn't want to mix it with my writing because then you lose your voice and you lose all the wonderful things that makes, you know, an original work.
Jonathan Stark: Yeah. It's, uh, this will be the first book I've worked on since AI turned into a real thing and it is like wild cause it's useful, but I don't want it writing for me, but it can poke holes in things. It could do other things. It's very interesting. Yeah. Um, okay. So let's, let's get into, I feel like I'm asking you about the, the craft and not the book. So look, that's okay. But I love your articulation of who it's for and what the promise is. What are, and you mentioned, uh, uh, you basically have a framework that could take you three years. So what are the, what are the big beats? What's the first thing that someone needs to realize, uh, if they were going to either disqualify themselves from the, you know, that's books not for me or like, OMG, I'm pre-ordering this because I am the person who needs this. Um, I'm thinking about the best way to say this. So, um, so
The Time Freedom Framework
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Brian Herriot: again, in, in the, in terms of the craft of writing a book, um, you should know by the time you finish the first, maybe the second chapter, if the book is for you, because you have to front load the book. So in, I basically talked through the concepts of chapter one, you know, which are, um, and two, cause in two is where I get into the, the, the framework, which is the time freedom formula. Um, you know, meaningful freedom versus absolute freedom, time freedom before financial freedom. Um, I introduced this concept of the free timer, which is a name that I had to come up with because I kept, I couldn't keep saying somebody who wants time freedom, somebody who lived with time freedom. And, and it is basically somebody who lives kind of a, not a two block life, work, retire. It's someone who kind of comes in and out of breaks and work. Um, and so, um, and then the framework, but, but the beauty of a good book is that, you know, you've got story woven through there. And so, um, I think that the thing also that you have to do is meet the reader where they are. And for me, it was important to share that there's just so much conventional push to just do the normal path that even for people who it's obvious they shouldn't do the normal path, which is me, you still end up on it. So back in 1999, my wife, girlfriend at the time got a double lung transplant. Oh my God. And almost didn't make it. She had a emergency surgery the next day, but she survived. And so from the beginning, we were always like, do we live for now? Do we live for the future life expectancy? But then all of a sudden you look up and like 15 years has passed and you're back on the corporate track doing what you're supposed to be doing. Um, and then you're like, Whoa, but fortunately she is the brains of the operation. So she's the one asking those hard questions, right? Like, well, what does financial freedom mean to you? Um, and so I share that story in there just to say like, Hey, if, if you're like, don't, don't, you know, kick yourself in the, you know, because you're, you haven't thought of this before. It's hard. Like this is hard. It's easy to get wrapped up in it. So that's, that's the, that's what, what, what makes a book a good book, a good book. But anyway, so then the, the, the, the rest of the book really dives into those elements. So there's a couple of chapters around lifestyle expenses. So that's where you get into, how do you do this without being like a all about budgets? Cause you know, budgets never work. And how do you kind of design your ideal life? And then there's a couple of chapters about the saving and investment part of it, a couple of chapters about flexible work. And then at the end, I have actually tied. So what's important to me in, in achieving the promise is somebody I, this bothered me too, is like, okay, so I've mapped out my year, but like I have college expenses coming in my future. And what about, you know, when I get old and my healthcare expenses. So, um, as part of my business, I have what I call a time freedom calculator, which is basically a retirement calculator that allows you to put work after your retirement date. And so it becomes a time freedom calculator because your retirement date moves way earlier, but you can put some flexible work after it. And that chapter talks about how now you project into the future and give yourself that confidence. And then the final chapter is, okay, I have the confidence I have, how I'm going to do this. Now, what are some of the unique ways in which people structure seasonal schedules and three, three weeks on one week off or four months off a year, or all these kinds of ways that in incremental ways that you can kind of build up to three, four months off. Because again, when, when my writing coach was looking at this, she's like, I think people would want to know more about how you can get there instead of like, what's the big end goal. And I'm like, oh yeah, of course. And that tested really, really well in the early readers.
Jonathan Stark: I know when you, when you just said it, I was like, oh, that's like, I know you don't want to do social media, but that's the kind of thing that just explodes on social media. Can you, can you think of an example of one of these, you know, sort of novel, unconventional ways that somebody, something someone did to start to make a change to, to get toward time?
Brian Herriot: One of them is to say, you know, there's a couple that can work when you're employed, but the one is like, you know, you get two weeks off over the holidays. So, just take a week on the front and the end of that and you've got a four-week break. A four-week break is completely different than a two-week break, you know, so it's small. And then, you know, you, I call it, what did I call it, like the European holiday, which is, you know, your August off, you know, and that, but that's, there's no other vacation to put that around, so then that's a little, you know, harder to do. But, you know, you can kind of slowly build up and if you like one and then you add another, I did do the math in the chapter where it's like all of a sudden you're off for three months, the equivalent of three months if you just add these up and, anyway, the idea is to get people excited to try, you know, start small even.
Jonathan Stark: Yeah, I mean, but I think providing some examples of people who kind of, air quotes, got away with it is, makes it feel more attainable. I mean, I've only had one corporate job in my whole life and it was only for a couple years, so I, but I can still remember, you know, my manager was awesome, she was great, but there was no way I was taking August off, that was, it was not, so to see some kind of, but maybe I'm wrong, I don't know, I mean, she did, for example, I worked in Framingham and it's outside of Boston and the traffic at rush hour was just insane and it would take me an hour and a half to get there and an hour and a half to get home if I had to be there for nine and leave, and I left at five. So I said, you know, like, would it be a problem if I came in for 10 and left at six? And she was like, well, I think that'll be okay, let's try it. And that cut my commute by like 20 minutes both ways. So who knows? I never asked, I suppose it doesn't hurt to ask. And this was a while ago, probably, I'm guessing, you know. Yeah, that was like 99, it was last millennium.
Writing a Better Ending
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Brian Herriot: One thing I want to mention about, just about the book writing process and like the, other than early readers, the other key thing that I learned from AJ is, is writing the conclusion. Which, which for most books, if you read them, the first, now, now that I've learned this, which I'm about to tell you, is I go to the conclusion and I look how it's written and 95% of conclusions are a summary of the book, right? Like, you know, oh, this is what you learned, great, done. AJ Harper teaches the call to greatness, which is, you have now achieved the promise of the book, right? You've done X, Y, Z. Now this is what's possible. And it's just an incredible way to leave a reader wanting to take even the next step and want to recommend your book to somebody, right? So like her, the, the, the simple analogy is when you started climbing this mountain, you thought you wanted to climb, you couldn't see the next mountain up there, right? But now that you're at the top, you can see the next one and how cool is it to go to the next stage? So my scenario is you have time freedom now, but now what does that allow you to do, right? And I won't give it away, but you know, like, so much more.
Jonathan Stark: I love that. That's a great tip. It reminds me of the sort of cliche advice about, uh, any kind of, you know, Joe Pine style experience of like Disney world or even just a, a, a, a plane trip, you know, an air, air trip to like that people are gonna remember the beginning and the end. So if the end is like you said, if the end is just some like dry summary of what they already read, well, why is it even there? I mean like, you know, like get like send them off with a bang, like make the end just as good as the beginning. Cause I, I personally am a, there's a, there's an interview with, I don't know if I'm pronouncing it right, but I think the guy's name is Charlie Hone and he was on Shane Paris's podcast and he's a multiple New York times bestselling editor. Book strategy.
Brian Herriot: Yeah.
Jonathan Stark: Yeah.
Brian Herriot: I've heard of him.
Jonathan Stark: Yeah.
Brian Herriot: Yeah.
Jonathan Stark: He's, I, he sounds like he knows what he's talking about. I really liked what he had to say on that interview. It's hard to find, but if folks, you know, email me anyway. So he said the thing about that you also said that I think got from AJ is that that first chapter has to be a grabber because if you look at the Kindle statistics for how much people read books, like some, some crazy amount, like 80% of people stop after chapter one. And it's like, Oh, that's brutal. So it's like you get the title, it hooks them in the, in the, the subtitle, like this is for me and they buy it and they start reading and then they fall off then like, Oh man, what a drag. So you really, that first chapter is worth putting like an inordinate amount of effort on, but he never said anything about, and I've never heard anyone talk about doing the same thing at the end. And I believe that that's genius because it will, because if you got them to go all the way through the book and now you've sort of the call to greatness happens and they have this amazing experience at the end of the book or this really visual or tactile kind of vision of themselves in the future or the potential, it makes it more referable, more recommendable to other people. I would guess I'm just guessing, but that having written a couple of technical books that kind of, you know, like software development, that kind of stuff, I feel like it could have been in there. It could have been in there. I can, I can picture it. It didn't, it wasn't, but that's a, that's fantastic. That's an amazing, amazing tip. What else can you tell us about, what's another key insight from the book that would surprise people? Something that, something that is not, it's sort of counterintuitive perhaps.
Brian Herriot: Um, well there's, there's a series of things that like, I like to describe as the old Brian would have never recommended this, but the new Brian will. For example, like, um, when is it okay to, I kind of alluded to it, but when is it okay to pull some money out of a retirement account? Um, when you sit down and you, you know, if, if, if you, you know, heaven forbid you pull a hundred thousand dollars out of your retirement account, you know, and it costs you 110,000 because of the penalty on it, but you know that in three years you can turn that into $200,000, that's a far better return than you would have gotten if you just left it in there. Um, now granted you have to make sure that you know you can do that, um, but that's where the, the entrepreneurial training and some of those things come in. That's when, I mean the other, of course, and, and from a money standpoint, people that are into money know this a lot, but people that aren't into money and investments don't know it is the, just the extreme cost of investment fees, right? And what that really can truly do to your investments. So one of the rules, and we're getting a little into the details here, but like the rule of 72 for those that have, have ever heard of it is like the percent that you earn, if you take 72 divided by the percent you earn, that's how long it takes to double your money, right? So you earn a 8% return, 72 divided by eight, nine years, you'll double your money approximately, but it also works for costs. So if you have a 2% cost, you have a 2% cost because, you know, you're in an expensive fund and you, um, pay someone 1% to manage your money, um, 72 divided by two is 36. So that means if you've invested for 36 years, which is a long time and you, and you have 3 million bucks at the end, you're like, yeah, I did great. But if you didn't have that expense, you would have 6 million bucks double, which means that that 2% cost cost you $3 million. Like that, that is that when I first learned that and that ruled, it was really eyeopening to me. But, um, I try to include little things like that throughout that are just, oh, I didn't thought about that, you know, or, um, a lot of them are related to the money side of it. Cause as you said, you know, there's a lot of, um, discussion of money and money topics in there.
Counterintuitive Money Advice
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Jonathan Stark: Cool. Well, I'm looking at the clock. We probably should start to wrap up. But this has been amazing. I really, I'm looking forward to the book. You sent me a pre-release copy, but can people pre-order it yet? Is it too soon to pre-order?
Brian Herriot: No. So here's what you could actually do, which is again, a lesson that I've learned on the how to appropriately market a book is, um, you can definitely, if you go to time, freedom book.com, it's got all the links to the places, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, all those pre-order links exist. If you order, if you order just one copy from those places and you capture the, the, the order number, there's another form on that same site, time, freedom, book.com that you can fill in and then I'll send you the official audio book like right away. So you. actually have to wait until September 15th when the book comes out. And again, it's because it's a hybrid published book, I own the rights to these things and I can do with them whatever I want. And so that allows me to send the audiobook to you for free. Now on the site it says you need to have three books in order to get that. But let's say if you just put Jonathan in the special code, I'll put that in there. Then you just order one book and I'll send you the audiobook right away. So definitely do that now while that promotion is still available.
Jonathan Stark: And did you read it or is it a narrator?
Brian Herriot: Oh, definitely. Another lesson, always read your own nonfiction book. Yes, I absolutely read it. I actually, when I find, when I listen to people's books that don't read it themselves, I'm like, well, I kind of want to know your story. Like, why aren't you telling me this story?
Jonathan Stark: Yeah.
Brian Herriot: So yeah, that was another interesting process of that whole thing. And like, yeah, it takes a lot of energy if you want to read a book well, you know, and with emotion and things like that. And so I did it in two hour sprints for seven days. That's what it took. Yeah.
Jonathan Stark: Yeah. And not easy. It's surprisingly, surprisingly draining.
Brian Herriot: Yes.
Jonathan Stark: Cool. All right. Well, if folks have more questions about how to record an audiobook or anything else about time freedom, you head over to timefreedombook.com and go ahead and pre-order it.
Brian Herriot: Thank you so much, Jonathan. This has been great.
Jonathan Stark: All right, folks, that's it for this week. I'm Jonathan Stark and I hope you join me again for Ditching Hourly. Bye.
Creators and Guests
