A Freelancer's Guide to Working Smarter, Not Harder | Cracking the 80/20 Code

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 246

Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income. If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place. Welcome back to another episode of the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Brian Hood, and I'm here with another substitute co-host, episode from Mr. Sexy Mark Eckert. How are you doing today, my dude?

Mark Eckert (0:34)

That's right, super sexy, super here to substitute. I'm just here, dude. You call me, I show up, that's it, man. How are you doing?

Brian Hood (0:41)

I'm doing great, man. This is my last day before my vacation. I'm really excited about this. If you're watching on YouTube, I've got my beach shirt on for everyone watching the video of this.

Mark Eckert (0:51)

He's got the classic music industry Hawaiian shirt, gold chain, douche bag mode, so I'm really excited.

Dude, gold chain, you got puffy chest hair, your name's Lefty. You're gonna give me a good deal on management. I appreciate you, bro.

Brian Hood (1:06)

Oh, God. You're gonna be a star, Mark. Yeah, so we leave for Cancun on Monday. And I don't know how you are, Mark. Are you an adventure traveler or a relaxation traveler? Which one are you?

Mark Eckert (1:15)

No, I'm definitely... So Shira, my wife and I, we call it active resting. So if we're just sitting doing nothing, we're pretty miserable people.

But, so this past year, we went to France and we did not sit at all. We were just going from city to city.

Went to Panama last year. I slept in disgusting hostels. I was meeting all these people. I was sweating in the humidity. That's my kind of trip.

Brian Hood (1:40)

So that's how we typically do it. That was your honeymoon, right? I believe that you're referring to when you went to France.

Mark Eckert (1:45)

No, well, so we had a domestic honeymoon, which was Jackson Hole. But once the border started opening up, then we did our international one, which was Paris.

Brian Hood (1:55)

Yeah. So on our honeymoon, we went to Paris, and we went all around Europe on that trip. And it was very much active traveling. We went to Thailand right before COVID, like January 2020 to February 2020, like right before the ball dropped. And that was like six weeks active travel.

Once a year, my wife and I, we just want to do like nothing on a trip. And our place for that is Cancun. We did this last year, about the same time last year, went to Cancun for like about 12 days, and we do nothing, nothing. We sit, and I'll tell you right now, like we love the beach, but not really. We really like the idea of the beach. So we stay at the JW Marriott on the hotel zone, and like we sit at the pool. It's visible, you can hear it, but we're not going to touch it. We're not going to use it for anything. We're going to sit by the pool. We're going to order food, drinks, and we're going to read our damn Kindles for like seven hours a day every day. I'm going to get through like 10 books. My wife's going to knock out like 20 books, because he's a faster reader.

And we're just book nerds, man. None of our business books, by the way. All like fantasy.

I'm just escaping reality. Yeah, it's nerdy stuff.

Mark Eckert (2:49)

See, yeah, Sheeran and I are definitely more like, we don't like heat.

We're not like beach people at all. We like to go as cold of places as possible. So like we'll go to New York in the winter when everyone's like, fuck that place. Jackson Hole was during the winter. France was cold as fuck.

Yeah, you just it's it's good to like get cold a little bit because we're in North Carolina. So like the summer, we're just miserable people. So we try to counteract that as much as we can with travel.

Brian Hood (3:15)

Yeah, yeah.

So by the time, by the way, by the time this episode airs, I will have already been on my trip and come back. So that's that's the beauty of like batching these episodes ahead of time is like, I can take some time off and you still get weekly episodes. Listener, speaking of weekly episodes, let's talk about what we're talking about today on the podcast. If you listen to last week's episode with Stephen Helvig, we mentioned a little bit about the 80 20 principle.