Hello and welcome to the You Know How To Live show my name is Kate Hammer and in just a moment we will have Carly Riordan with us Carly is a full-time blogger and soon to be first-time author with Penguin Random House debuting her book Business Minded on November 23rd a graduate of Georgetown University's undergrad business school Carly turned her blog into a legitimate successful business and now offers everything you need to know to turn your creative passion into a successful company today we're going to talk to her about how she did it and how you can pull from Carly's bag of tricks wherever you're listening or watching from I'm so glad that you tuned in and are hanging out I hope that you are ready for my favorite combination of things hopefully a bit of entertainment and of course some takeaways to improve how you work and play and do everything in between please take a moment right now to subscribe follow leave a comment or give a five star review so that we can stay connected and with that let's bring in Carly Riordan Carly thank you so much for making time to come hang out and share a little bit about who you are and this new awesome book that you have coming out November 23rd Business Minded and sharing with us a little bit about what your day-to-day looks like habits what works well for you and how you go from sharing that as an influencer and on your blog into in the space of an author so I would say right now my life looks so much different than it did this time last year just because about or two months ago I had my son so life is kind of crazy just like trying to get into a rhythm um but I would say I definitely have like implemented a lot of daily habits that I've brought with me throughout like a lot of stages of my life which I think is really important um so they're kind of things that keep me grounded and outside of work and outside of the stressors of life so I always try to practice french for 15 minutes every morning which is like a sort of new thing I've done over the past couple years I try to meditate well I do meditate every day I work out or try to get movement in just try to keep like well-rounded habits that get me away from my computer and my phone because I spend so much time for my work on my computer on my phone so I find that those things are so important to like look forward to that are just for me yeah absolutely okay so let's dig into that a little bit about what you do with your phone so how do you prevent it from happening because we know it's this like super addictive situation so how do you keep your phone out of your face
the truth is that I don't um before the pandemic the one thing that I would do frequently was go to the movie theater and I don't even know if I really enjoyed watching movies so much as I enjoyed being in a room where I was forced to turn my phone off for two hours and like focus on something else um obviously haven't really been able to do that as much now really at all um I wish I was better about putting my phone down I think it's hard because it is such a huge part of my life of my work life and so my life is also such a huge part of my work and so yeah it's all mixed and it's very hard to separate and I try to make a conscious effort of doing that but the reality is I feel like I almost have to be kind of tethered to my phone because you know my co-workers essentially are my management team they're based in LA so I always have to be in touch with them and um just being on social media is part of the job and capturing my life with my phone and camera so you know if I find myself that I am reaching for for my phone too much and I'm just doing like a refresh to see like oh how many more DMs do I have to respond to today that's actually when I find myself like wanting to take a step back it's like when I feel that overwhelming wave come crashing over me and I'm like all right I need to take a step back yeah do you ever physically separate yourself from your phone like leave it in some particular area of the house you're not in no no I think I have like actual anxiety so I think this is sort of a new thing because um like as a person on social media I'm always afraid that something's gonna happen in the world where like I shouldn't be posting so I actually this like compulsion to like know what's going on in the news and I'd been especially at the beginning of the pandemic I was like doom scrolling on Twitter just to make sure like it was like every hour something really dramatic was happening and yeah was it appropriate to even be posting about like I didn't want to be the person you know sharing a superfluous link to like a cute outfit when like a tragedy was happening in the world and so oh yeah I actually started signing up for the New York Times push alerts yes just so that it actually even though it sounds like crazy to add more alerts to your life it actually helps me because it doesn't make me feel like I need to go seek out the alerts they come to me when they happen and that helps but I would say my phone is almost always within reach yes okay fair enough so let's actually talk about alerts for a second because you bring up a good point they can be super abundant or not depending on how you tailor them do you have outside of New York Times do you have specific applications that you allow push through notifications so on Instagram I actually allow all comments which sounds insane that's all it is
but I really I guess I get so much hate honestly that I like to see when comments are rolling in because if I get a negative comment I can immediately delete it like within seconds and it doesn't even it doesn't get air time so to speak um so that really helps me and I like to just be in touch with like what people are or how people are responding to my content but because I get the the notifications so frequently I'm actually pretty good about tuning them out it's not like the New York Times when I see that I'm immediately gonna stop and like figure out what's going on yeah the Instagram comments are just kind of like background noise like putting on like tv in the background while you're working it's like it's there but you have no idea really what's going on yeah yeah and then I have I have um notifications for some text messages okay you filter some I mute almost everyone and it's mostly because I just like improving my workflow yeah yeah like obviously I want to know if my husband's texting me and I'm I have text messages on my computer so if I'm on my computer I see them there but like as far as my phone goes I just my mom I have on obviously yeah yeah yeah anyone you need to know about emergency situations right exactly exactly but otherwise I'm like it's okay if it goes five minutes without responding yeah you know and I'm on my phone so frequently I feel like I don't actually miss that much so totally okay so you've developed a lot of strategies over the years to streamline things to be able to keep focus a lot of what you write about in your book is challenges that came up over time that you realized okay I need a way to navigate this I need to change things up a little bit uh one question that I thought of when I was reading the book is what would you tell 2008 Carly when you are just about to launch this blog and
I think there's like some context that has to be before I say what I'm gonna say which is when I started my blog in 2008 I was no question at like the lowest of lows in terms of my life and so I was really grasping at straws for something outside of school where I was really struggling from a social perspective and an academic perspective and outside of the crew team because I was you know a student athlete as well I needed something that was just for me so I think there's a little bit of an irony to it that I had created something just for me that was being consumed or would ultimately become consumed by hundreds of thousands of people um really more than that if you add like all the blog hits up over 13 years and there is something funny about why I chose a blog you know why didn't I choose like reading or something where like that would just have been an experience for me and I chose this thing I needed to create a creative outlet for myself and yet I chose something that was going to just be seen by millions of people and shared with millions of people and I had no idea that that was where I was going but I think I would look back and really tell myself like you have a really really strong gut intuition and I don't think I really valued that even though I felt things and would like feel strong pulls in certain directions and it took me a really long time to like hone in on that but I really do feel like I've always kind of had a good sense for these types of things and I wish I had been able to like you know cue the radio antenna a little bit more so I could really hone in on it earlier I think I would have been better off like maybe this person isn't even a good friend or maybe that's not the person you should be dating maybe this is a job where you should be like I think I always had those feelings I just ignored it but I had a good intuition and I think starting my blog when I started it was just kind of cracking into that for the first time and I look back and like yeah I definitely felt like this was what I should have been doing had no idea where it was going to lead but it ended up being the best thing that could have happened yeah absolutely so that whole concept of self-trust like believing that you know what's going on oh yes that's I feel like we do kind of have to just redevelop that after the teenage years because we are just constantly having to second guess and wonder like everything externally is telling us like question yourself you don't know so that is actually I mean I can't remember exactly which chapter but it's early in the book where I talk about tuning out other people because maybe not everyone but even people that you trust they might not understand your vision for a business and I had I can't think of really many people who were like fully supportive of what i was doing i think there was a lot of people including my parents who were like what is this like why are you sharing your life the internet you shouldn't be talking about these things like your mental health is a private thing and I just had this like deep feeling that no I really should be sharing this like it felt so important to me and I didn't know why at the time and now looking back and like oh yeah like this was the beginning of social media where people were sharing these things and being more vulnerable on the internet and I just felt that like deep um and we had to tune out a lot of people who didn't believe that or didn't understand it and if I had listened to everyone who told me no or that this was a horrible idea and it stopped I can't imagine what my life would look like now and I'm so glad I did listen to myself and kind of block out that noise yeah yeah absolutely yeah I remember the part you're talking about in the book something like just be patient when you have a new idea like wait wait to share it like let it sit with you because the minute you open your mouth and tell someone even if you're so excited about it there's a really good chance that person's gonna look at you and say that's a really terrible idea or well someone else has already done it so you shouldn't even bother or like there are just everyone's gonna have feedback even people just telling you oh I like that idea but like have you ever considered this you might not be able to it might be hard to block that noise out especially when you're in the very very early vulnerable stage of your business idea and it can be it can feel personal if someone shoots it down and you feel so passionate about it so I do kind of recommend like keep it close to the chest like do a lot of the brainstorming do the research you know call on mentors and experts like as needed but maybe don't wear your heart on your sleeve quite so early yes absolutely there's plenty of time for negativity yeah totally so when it's time to share your idea when you feel ready how do you approach that conversation to let the other person know not to be hyper critical do you have any thoughts I think so I think instead of trying to control what other people are going to do your best bet is to control what your reaction is going to be um I think the first thing that you kind of have to remind yourself is that if people are giving you feedback they're interested which is a positive thing now if you are just if someone's just dead silent on the other end on the one hand great you're not getting feedback but on the other they just don't care so yeah when you are getting that feedback even if it hurts and if even if it's not what you want to hear it is a good reminder to just say oh well okay this person really cares about me and cares about my business and they're interested enough to like give me feedback so I'll take that as like a gift it doesn't mean you have to implement it but it does kind of help soften the blow a little bit of what they're saying to you yeah maybe just really freaking annoying that they're even like giving you this feedback so reframing it being like oh they they're interested is a positive thing um I like you describing it as a gift because there you are unwrapping it and if you need to take it back to the store later you can absolutely yeah get your seat attached um and the other thing too is you know I do this with my friends sometimes where I just need to vent and I'm not looking for advice and just starting that off by saying can I have five minutes to vent about something and be explicit saying I just need this to get off my chest and vent it I don't I'm not in a place or a position for feedback right now or like even advice like I just need to to vent my friends and I kind of have that with each other like are you looking for advice or are you looking just blow off steam and I kind of feel like when you're doing your business at the end of the day people are going to give you the advice or feedback that they're going to give you even if you explicitly state you don't want it there's a good chance it's going to happen yeah you can say you know I'm at the early stages I'm not quite ready to like brainstorm or I just wanted to share my idea but I'm not I you know I feel kind of vulnerable sharing my idea I'm not ready to like hash it out and and pitch it to investors necessarily like you're just trying to tell people about your idea now with all that said it might be like a really good first exercise of what it's like to be a business owner because these types you know your customers are going to have feedback your investors if you have investors are going to have feedback your employees are going to have feedback it's kind of unavoidable and I think especially as a business owner when you're a leader but you're also you're beyond just the leader you know you're not just managing a team of people you're leading an entire company it's just part of the the job and so I think the earlier you can kind of accept the fact that this stuff is going to happen the better absolutely this is a part of life that we're going to experience regardless if we're an entrepreneur if we have a job and you know we have a manager that we're interfacing with and maybe even for some of us getting to the point where we're delivering feedback to someone who reports to us so getting used to those conversations like it's top of the list you got to do it totally and the other I just thought of a tip too like if you don't want to engage in having a conversation about it even if you have a response or a retort for like whatever feedback maybe they just gave you really terrible advice and you you're like no that's not how the business works and you want to get into it the minute you get into it you're getting into it so it might just be best you know when your Uncle Joe at the Christmas party is telling you why your stationary calligraphy business is terrible yeah but he doesn't even know the start of you know he's never heard of Etsy or he doesn't know how it works it might just be best to say oh my gosh thank you so much for your feedback like I haven't thought about that I'm gonna keep that in mind yeah by having to then go into like the whole can of worms of explaining Etsy and like no here's my social media strategy you can just kind of like say thank you thank you for this gift of being interested in what I do and yeah the gift I love that so much I'm gonna literally picture a gift anytime I get any constructive feedback I mean it's annoying like I feel my blood blood pressure like raising when like people give me feedback and especially for like what I do people don't get that you can make money doing what I do and so I just like I'm not going to sit here and explain you know oh you make money doing that that's a very common question it's like I'm not going to explain like you know my quarterly tax payments and how I get paid like I'm like it's just not worth it telling the cashier at the grocery store what how it happens and so I'm just I'm always like yes I do you know I love my job and then leave it at that yeah yeah absolutely I think what readers will find really interesting about the way that you format the book is you really do describe all aspects of how to do business and all the ways that a person can prepare themselves so I imagine that if someone is a longtime reader a fan and they're reading it they're going to be thinking about like oh how did this apply to Carly like how did how does Carly do her finances like oh yeah like Carly must have to be making money like how does this work um and though you kind of apply generally all of these different areas of business like how you know how somebody can create spreadsheet x or whatever um I do think it sort of begs the question like okay well how does this work for you so yeah I wonder how many readers will be thinking like oh wow like she runs a real business this is legit like I could do this too well and that's like that was a big inspiration behind the book so yeah I it was originally it was actually two ideas that kind of got smushed together after meeting with um publisher book editors and publishers and stuff and the first part it's it's so not what the book is but it had started in my mind as when I was in college honestly and I was in the business school undergraduate program which we had all the same professors and basically the same course load we did all the same cases that the graduate school was doing and you know I was sitting there thinking this is so much more complicated than it actually needs to be feels so intimidating because it's like business school and you know you think about people going to school to like get their MBA I know tons of people who have their MBA have never started a business and I know tons of people have started businesses and have never stepped have never gone to college maybe graduated high school maybe not even like I just feel like there's this idea that there's this really fancy ornate gate that keeps people from thinking that they belong in this space and I I'm I can't tell you like you're sitting in this classroom and you're the textbooks are heavy and it seems so complicated but when you really break it down it's like it's not as hard as I think people think it is it's annoying there are tasks that you aren't going to be suited for I hate accounting I'll never like accounting that's what accountants are for it doesn't mean that I can't start a business just because I don't enjoy accounting like you can figure out what you like to do and make it work for you and originally I had wanted to write a children's book for girls to explain basically like the very fundamentals of business and for a fifth grader and ooh I hope that's still gonna happen I know I still want to do it but I after writing this book I need a very long break from writing books but it you know I feel that this stuff isn't that complicated and you can really apply it anyone can figure this out and I wanted the book to feel approachable and to kind of demystify some of the complications about running a business and you know spell it out but then also give you the tools to like work through it on your own so if you haven't read the book this is like just a gist that it's basically four pages two spreads per chapter and the first two pages are kind of like an intro a description of like what that chapter is about what that topic's about and then it's followed by a workbook type page so you could really work through what that is for your specific business so I didn't want someone to feel like oh I'm not a blogger so like I don't know I don't need to know how to run a blogger business I really a lot of these con- all the concepts apply to any business where you're making money yes and so it doesn't matter if you're a blogger or you know I talk about my mom in an early chapter about running starting a cake pop business and it doesn't matter what you're doing it can you can use this if you want to start a business so it's not for everyone it's okay if you're not an entrepreneur which I also talked about in the book like yeah it's okay to keep your hobbies a hobby because once you turn your hobby into a business it becomes business which is that therefore a lot of work and you might not be doing the stuff you really enjoy about your hobby but you know anyone can pick this up if you want to start a business especially if you just feel overwhelmed maybe you have a business and you're like you know need to take it to the next level and you felt trapped in this kind of smaller space but you want to you know take it to the next step yeah it does really feel like this is the right book to pick up if you just have that feeling yes the other entrepreneurs out there and it's attractive to you and you're curious but you don't know what you would do next you're like oh I mean I think I would like to pursue this but how could I do that legitimately like it really helps you brainstorm through every aspect yes and a big I mean listen starting a business can be really expensive um it might not be but usually you're you're going to need some sort of initial capital from the start even if you're bootstrapping and like cutting every corner even just you know filing to incorporate it's gonna cost money and so buying a domain name could cost money but it will cost money building even just a basic GoDaddy or um you know Squarespace website is going to cost money but before you commit to spending the money on starting a business it might be helpful to like really work through some of the questions that come about starting a business that you might run into down the road that might be either complete roadblocks or you know uh turn left here this this exact path doesn't work and using a workbook you don't need a workbook I'm not telling you you need to buy my book but like sitting down and working through some of those questions and problems when you have that gut feeling it's so much cheaper to do it before you start than at the end oh yeah or in the middle I should say I've definitely learned some of those lessons throughout my stretch like but at the same time you also talk about not waiting for perfect and expecting things to evolve and grow and that's okay right oh yeah I mean I feel like if anything over the past year and a half has taught us anything it's you have it doesn't matter if you have a standard nine-to-five job or you're starting a business I think people have to just anticipate and expect that pivoting is crucial we don't live in an era anymore where like that you know different generations had where you got a job when you graduated college and you you step by step climbed the corporate ladder until you hit retirement and then you retired with a pension like that is just not how the world works anymore and I think people have to be really willing and able to be agile and flexible business or not and you know you need a growth mindset to just survive in 2021 uh I love that you said growth mindset I uh have you ever read the book Mindset by Carol Dweck do you I haven't but it sounds right up my alley oh man you would love it um but basically that idea that you know we're not necessarily born like smart or not smart but that we have so much control over uh the way that we can develop ourselves yeah um so yeah I do love that um okay so moving into the other part of your book the minded half the second half how do we do business well like yes we want to like get our finances in order and have a business plan and all these things but we also want to feel good along the way and be good to ourselves and be able to show up holy and you really get into that in a lot of ways um one of the most interesting parts to me was about your recognition of sleep which my goodness like that's the first to go if you start to get passionate about something you're like well I'll just you know stay up a little bit later just get a couple extra hours in on this but you were just like no this is the lesson you must sleep so what were your thoughts on adding that component to your a big reason I added it was because I had really messed that up in my own personal life and that spilled over into my professional life where I had not been prioritizing myself and I was doing it under the guise of like I'm you know this was peak Pinterest like hashtag hustle like girl boss like you can sleep when you're dead like daily grinds like all these mottos were just everywhere and I fell victim to that like in a big way and I really truly felt like if I wasn't if I didn't feel tired or feel exhausted it was almost like well you're not you're not successful you're you don't take it seriously enough it's not a priority to you yeah and I do that for you know and you can also get away with it in the short term like yeah you can absolutely go without sleep for a little bit you can absolutely eat terribly and not drink enough water and over caffeinate yourself no question the problem is that you almost get this feedback of like oh you know if it's not if it's burning it's working then you are going to no question your body will eventually or mind hit a point where you can't take it anymore and I hit that point kind of quite literally you know and I had a huge wake-up call after getting very sick one time and I realized I have not put myself first and I was I think 26 and thinking to myself oh my god I almost felt like I was gonna die true not in a exaggeration standpoint but I really felt like oh wow I'm not invincible and I've been really hurting myself by doing this I need to get my life in order um and I really wish I had known what I know now then which is it feels like you're giving up productivity and your work ethic by prioritizing yourself because you're not giving a hundred percent it feels like you're not giving a hundred percent to your business the reality is the only way you can give a hundred percent to your business is if you're giving a hundred percent to yourself and you can't it's a really weird mental idea to think like oh if there's 24 hours in the day and I you know maybe it's your side hustle and you you're working eight hours and then you have your family or whatever like well I need to get this done and I have six hours of awake between now and when I have to get up for work tomorrow I have to use every all of these six hours and it's like yeah you're going to burn yourself out you're not going to be passionate about what you you do you're you're going to exhaust yourself and ultimately you're not going to be able to fulfill your goal which is to have the successful business and I was confusing small success with max success I thought it was I had hit the peak of what I could do because I was like you know just burning the candle at both ends in such an intense way and so when I decided to prioritize myself I really thought I was giving up my business and to me I was like well my health is so important I'll just put my business on the back burner the trade-in mm-hmm and then I realized how wrong I had been because almost immediately I realized how much happier and healthier I was and how much more I actually could give to my business and I was making much clearer decisions I was working so much more efficiently so even though I wasn't working the hours that I was working before my output was leaps and bounds beyond what I've been doing and it was such this eye-opening experience of like you're telling me I can work less fewer hours and have more outcome with a greater success and make more money bottom line but I feel better also and I'm healthier and I have time to do like other things outside of just like work work work it was mind-blowing to me and I really had made this decision thinking I was giving up my business and it was a true shock to know I had actually bettered my business by bettering myself and I want to scream it from the rooftops and be like everyone needs to know this because it seems like the opposite of what should happen yeah yeah absolutely it's one of those things that sometimes when you hear it you're like yeah that sounds right but you need that experience to prove it to yourself like no no this is true and this is worth creating a lasting habit and doing what I need to do to show up yeah yeah so you know if if you're reading this book you can find some really specific instruction on how to do that with sleep as you said with movement um with what you put in your body gosh you used a great word to describe um tracking what you eat do you remember what it was um fuel fuel tracker yeah I thought that was super genius because so often we're like trying we're like trying to do all of this stuff like part of when when we are tracking food it's often to think about like dieting or worries yes and for you it was like no like how are you helping yourself show up yep and you know I think as long as you know yourself and you know that tracking your food isn't going to cause like other issues like for me it was such an another eye-opening experience to realize you know I had been cutting all these corners because I didn't have enough time in the day like when I worked my job in New York while I was also doing my blog in the middle of the night you know yeah six days a week it was insane I felt like I was just running on a treadmill or a hamster wheel and I didn't feel like I even had time to eat like truly and I would go to the Whole Foods around the corner in Union Square and every day except for Fridays when I'd let myself get hard-boiled eggs because they were easy and quick to eat but I felt like they had protein but I would get a protein bar and a Vitamin Water and I was like I got my vitamins I got my protein I'm good to go you know the reality is I would feel horrible two hours later when like the sugar from the Vitamin Water left my system and the sugar from the protein bar left my system I would have this huge crash and I was like I'd never really tuned into that I would just go to the Starbucks and get a coffee and like have another quick fix and then I'll then at 6:00 pm and it's time for dinner and I don't have time to cook so I'm just gonna eat something cheap and easy that I don't have to think about that makes me feel horrible two hours later and keeping track of like well what makes me feel good and everybody is gonna have a different experience like if I gave you my ideal daily intake of food it's not gonna work for someone else but like keeping track of like what makes me feel good like what do I eat at noon that at 4 pm when I then worked for you know from 12:30 to 4 at my desk like what made me feel awesome versus like oh did I like reach into like the snack drawer in the back of the office kitchen and like grab you know a bag of skittles like do I feel good after that no yeah yeah it's a very fleeting thing but man like what a worthy journey to figure out what does work for you because when you do and I've experienced this personally so I know exactly what you're talking about when you do find the foods that fuel you well and you have that next level energy and like you become just so much more resilient and patient and focused it's like oh my gosh how is that possible like how could it be such a simple thing I thought this is just like when you're not eating while it's like I thought this is just like who I am like this is just my body and it comes your baseline and you don't no I like I don't even especially when you're in it it can be so hard to see like the forest when you're among the trees it's like you are you gotta pull yourself out which is why I really wanted to include just as many chapters in the minded section as the business section because it is just as important and one thing I say like all the time in the book in real life to every anyone who will listen it's like yeah you can have the best idea in the world you can have all the capital in the world you know to start your business you can have the work ethic to start your business if you aren't a hundred percent healthy and like in a really good place yourself it's not going to work and it's because you're your biggest asset for your business and you know I think people want to like romanticize you know having fancy storefronts and having perfect social media accounts with like branding to a t that's great but if you're running yourself into the ground and all of a sudden you can't be a good leader and so your team is falling apart and or you're doing everything yourself and you don't have time to post on your super fancy schmancy perfectly branded Instagram account we're not going to be successful and so it doesn't matter all the other stuff for your business because you have to be the one like at the you know leading the charge if you're not in a good position to do that it doesn't matter how great everything else is or could be because you're almost like you know you haven't you're just dead on arrival essentially like you're not giving it your best even though it looks like it from the outside yeah yeah so when you're thinking about this book business-minded and you're like is this for me maybe I just need one part guarantee that is not it you need the both yeah absolutely need the both like Carly's been through this I've been through this when you have your own business you have to learn how to take care of yourself there are this is like pretty much the instruction manual on how to do it and you can tailor it to yourself like there's plenty of breathing room in the way you wrote it Carly that people are going to be able to you know use your suggestions but make it work for them and be super intentional yeah and you know when I when I finally got the green light for it I the hardest part for me or maybe not the hardest because I wrote this while pregnant which was very hard but really a part that I really had to spend a lot a lot of time was figuring out the table of contents because that was basically the outline for the book and I really wanted to make sure I was hitting every part of the business section every part of the mindful section that I thought was the most relevant because the reality is again you could go to business school and spend years learning all the ins and outs but I was like what do you really need to know I also felt the same way in the minded section of like you can spend years in therapy like you know dissecting every little bit of your life and going to a life coach and doing all these things for yourself but like what do you really need at the end of the day and like you know that is part of the book it's like you need to get off the ground you can't just like let an idea sit somewhere and like never touch it you shouldn't also do that to yourself of like letting perfection get in the way of the progress and so you use this book as you're going along to like really get to the the nitty-gritty of what you need yes oh yes you don't need to be an expert in all fields of business to be an entrepreneur and I say that I kind of call out in each section like where my strengths lie or don't lie and yeah no I'm like no I'm I'm going to hire a legal team because I don't know what I'm doing I'm not a lawyer and I'm going to hire an accountant because they can do what I need done in record time that would take me weeks and a lot of years off my life if I were trying to do it myself and so you know oh man once I feel like it's all about just that first hire or you know whether it's an employee or you know contractor contractor of some kind once you start you're like oh my goodness what else can I outsource oh yeah I mean or delegate yeah I'm still learning too like I think that's important of even when I feel like I have things figured out and I'm like well I'm in such a great place and then you know I get to like another point in my career where I feel a little bit of that squeeze and I'm like I got to make another change and am I making the right change and then I bring someone else on to the team and I'm like why didn't I do this two years ago like I would have felt so much better so it is kind of it isn't a constant evolution and going back to the drawing board and you know maybe you fill out the entire book for for your first year of business it could be totally worth going back in and like reviewing what did I say a year ago redoing some of the sections yeah and where you are now so you can make better decisions moving forward and absolutely as I was reading it I kept thinking like oh I've never thought about that I mean we know what we know yes like yes this is a great place this book is a great place to start but I've been in business for several years and there were things that you talked about that were still new to me um so or just a different vantage point just a different way of thinking about something so absolutely yeah I love the idea of going back to it and seeing how you've changed too like oh yeah you already suggest yeah definitely all right Carly so I'm going to ask you this or that for a bunch of things and we just want to hear your favorites your preferred thing I have some guesses about what your your answers will be okay but let's just rock and roll okay would you rather read a book or listen to a playlist book all right keep your style classic or let your style evolve classic go on an adventure or stay in and relax stay in let's be honest re-watch favorites or search for a new show re-watch favorites oh can you name one so I love going back and re-watching Gilmore Girls oh yes I just think it's great background noise and then I watch 10 Things I Hate About You the movie at least three times a week like I watch it a lot oh my god what is it about that movie I don't know but I think it is like I think it is the perfect movie and I watch it all the time like all right all the time there you have it 10 Things I Hate About You okay the more the merrier or more fun with fewer more fun with fewer yes cleaning is my love language or cleaning is my nightmare I would say I like things to be clean but I don't really like cleaning yes yes that is it that is it okay here for humor or please be serious I like to be serious but I appreciate when other people are funny okay got it all right so we're not going to see any like silly reels on your Instagram anytime soon I've been trying to get into TikTok so maybe I just think I'm like I'm more of a serious person and my humor I think can be like unless you know me really well it's like hard to get my humor okay fair enough well now I'm curious about that like I think I can describe I think I'm funny but I don't think it's funny to other people and so I'd rather just be serious like I crack myself up yeah I love that all right another segment so I'm gonna just shoot these off rapid fire couple quick questions what is a recent read I just read made which it's an old it's not a new book but it's a memoir about a woman who was in an abusive relationship she got pregnant she ended up becoming homeless and she became a housekeeper to make ends meet for her and her daughter and it's all about like class and hard work and she also describes like you know what is happiness like can money buy happiness like you know what is it like being in the system for government assistance it was fascinating I thought it was so well written and I loved it I listened to the audiobook and she narrates it which I also love yes oh yes when the author does the narrating yes and I'm almost done with Bill Bryson's The Body which I thought was going to be super dry it's blowing my mind I'm like obsessed with it I want to go back and listen to it again it's so good interesting yeah you know what I love that you said you picked something up that wasn't necessarily a new release I think sometimes we have that pressure of like what's what's right now like what's everybody reading right now but you can like go back oh yeah to be fair I picked it up because Netflix made it into a series so I was like oh I want to read the book before I watch theories but I like I use my library card a lot for audiobooks and so usually the new books the waiting lists are like week you know months long and so I like going back and reading old but or listening to old books yes so I use Libby and Hoopla are those the ones um yes that's always the challenge like you see that a book is on hold it's gonna be six months or something it's like do I go over to Audible do I sit tight yup yep forever the challenge okay what's something that's a favorite right now like something maybe you've bought or you've been using a lot that you're loving I just got um a new like I think it's it's like a makeup serum it's kind of like a mix of everything so it's a foundation and a moisturizer in one from ILIA I did it for a sponsored post and I really historically struggle to find like a good shade of foundation this thing like magically morphs to your skin tone so even when you put it on it doesn't look perfect and then 30 seconds later it like develops and it's a perfect match I don't get it but I'm obsessed that sounds like a fun little experiment now I want to try it just like see this all go down yeah it's the serum it's their new serum it's amazing all right cool all right what's one thing we'll never see you do you know I never want to say never but I'll probably uh never do like a reality tv show oh oh my goodness I like to be in control of like what I edit you know what I put out there and I don't feel like I'd have that with the show now you know like Bravo is gonna call and say we're developing uh Bloggers Of The Northeast and we wanna feature you and you're gonna be like are you kidding me here's the thing I did I've gone down that route before and I think that's why I know it's not oh you have my goodness okay it's wild but we did a few of us did a sizzle reel for production company and it was getting shopped around to networks this was like back when Girls was a huge show and so they were kind of making it like the real life Girls but they we were all bloggers or influencers when I watched this as a reel back no granted they made me out like a really like snotty uh not snotty is not the right word but like so serious that I was just kind of like a wet blanket which it's not so far from like what I'm like in real life I just came off it like very yeah type a which I am but it just didn't look the same on screen because they just exaggerated so much and I was like I don't know if this is for me and because that is my personality I'm like you have to like dramatize that and I'm like yeah it works when I'm just myself because that is who I am but like when you start editing it and like oh analyzing it it doesn't feel the same and I was like I don't know if I want to be like I'd rather be that than like you know a terrible person or like you know a party or something but it was like I look so boring does that give you empathy for other characters in reality tv like thinking they might have a bad edit well now I can just like tell when things are edited because like they'll show people in in an interview but then they'll cut to another like b-roll shot yeah and the sound sounds slightly different and they're definitely piecing together words to make it sound like they're saying something else like full sentences
you know if you don't see someone say the sentence straight through they didn't say it straight through no way and so I'm like they would have shown it for impact yep so when they cut you know when you're watching Below Deck which is my favorite reality guilty pleasure tv show and they're showing someone sitting in like the room doing the interview and then they cut to like you know the b-roll of the water on the outside it's not the same shot with the voiceover wow now I'm going to be paying like extra close attention to this happening oh yeah and like it'll the voice will change just enough like it won't sound like it flows a hundred percent and like oh it's all edited oh goodness it just makes me wanna go like check something out right now I'm a Bachelor person but yes okay so last question do you have an amp song right now something that you love to listen to for working out or just like getting super focused with work um I really don't listen to a ton of music but I like putting on the Spotify focus genre ah well I like the classical interpretations of like pop songs that are current just like someone playing piano I'm in for that not that exciting from an amp perspective you can see why I might not be so great on a reality tv show but that is actually
no I love that I think I mean I think especially for those of those of us who work alone we are always sort of like trying to create our own version of company you know like a little coffee shop feeling yeah yeah yeah absolutely um so like having good tunes that aren't distracting is a thing like that's nice so I think that's actually really great advice so I'm gonna look it up thank you yeah well thank you so much for coming to hang out and sharing about your book again out Business Minded November 23rd everyone needs to run and grab their copy um I can't wait to get like an actual physical copy in my hands but I'm so excited yes and read both parts everyone both have yeah they're both important and the worksheets yes don't be afraid to mark up that book I know like sometimes I get hesitant right with the pen but yeah just go for it just jump in there all right thank you so much thank you I just had a blast talking to Carly I hope you had so much fun listening don't wait to pre-order or buy your copy of Business Minded out November 23rd and if you want to keep in touch with Carly she is an absolute pleasure to follow along with on Instagram and her handle is extremely simple it's just @carly thank you for tuning in and if you enjoyed your time with us today please share the episode with a friend then subscribe follow leave a comment or give a five star review season one of the show will include more chats with top authors experts and influential personalities we will be serving up simplified applied psychology habit theory and quality of life tips and tricks that you can put into action right away until next week I'm Kate Hammer and You Know How To Live
