The $90B Mistake US Companies Make Every Year
Tim Fitzpatrick
MSP & B2B Professional Service Firm Marketing Consultant/Advisor | Fractional CMO | Build and manage your marketing engine to get where you want to go faster. | Remove Your Revenue Roadblocks
As business owners, we make mistakes all the time. But, there’s one mistake that will doom us to failure. We’re going to dig into this mistake today to help you avoid this fate. You don't want to miss what our special guest Collin Jewett of SuperHuman Academy and Curiosity Jump has to share.
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The $90B Mistake US Companies Make Every Year
Tim Fitzpatrick: As business owners, we are constantly making mistakes, but there is one mistake that will absolutely do most to failure. We're going to dig into this mistake today with our special guest in hopes of helping you avoid it. Hi, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe marketing shouldn't be difficult. All you need is the right plan. Thank you so much for tuning in today. Really appreciate it. I am super excited to have with me today Collin Jewett from Curiosity Jump and the Superhuman Academy. Collin, welcome, and thanks for taking the time.
Collin Jewett: Thank you, Tim. A pleasure to be here.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, I'm excited to dig into this man. I know when we initially met several months ago, we had a great conversation. I really love what you're doing with Curiosity Jump and Superhuman Academy. So I think you've got a lot of value to share and I'm excited to dig into this. So before we jump into it, I always like to just kind of ask an icebreaker-type question. So this'll help us get to know you a little bit better. What's one of your favorite hobbies?
Collin Jewett: It's going to sound super corny, but honestly true. And that's how I spend most of my free time. It's learning. I just love to learn new things, whether it's new languages, just random skills. Right now I'm actually taking financial advisor courses, even though I don't really care to be a financial advisor. I just want to learn the content. So, yeah, it's kind of my weird hobby. I just like to learn new things.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Hey, there's nothing wrong with that. So I'll tell you, one of my core values is constant learning. Somebody told me early on in my professional career, the day you stop learning is the day you die. And that always stuck with me. So I'm right there with you. I've never considered it a hobby, but it is part of my being. So I'll tell you, one of my favorite hobbies, especially here in Colorado, is mountain biking. I love mountain biking. Just gets me out. It used to be very quiet, now it's becoming a lot busier when you get out there. So I find myself going earlier and earlier. But it's a beautiful hobby to have here in Colorado, that's for sure.
Collin Jewett: Yeah, I'm a big fan myself. You probably can't tell in the stream, but I've got my share scars on my face. A face planted into a boulder going like twenty miles an hour a few months ago. Just happy to not have too much surgery for that.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, it's and that's never fun. You know, the older I get the more I slow it down a little bit because I've just gotten to that point where I would rather be safe and be able to continue riding than get injured and have time off because when I have to have time off for an injury, it drives me freakin nuts. And mountain biking is definitely one of those sports that if you don't watch it, man, you can take some pretty bad spills, but, uh, it's fun and it helps keep me young, let's put it that way.
Tim Fitzpatrick: So dude, let's start off. Share your back story here, because when we originally met, you shared with me, you know, your college experience and really your college experience really led to what you're doing now. I think it's a really interesting story and I think people can learn a lot from it. So share that with us, if you would.
Collin Jewett: Sure. Yeah, that story is probably some background to why my hobby is learning now too. So a good tie in and I'm not doing what I went to college for, but doing what I'm doing because of what happened in college. So yeah, a little bit about that. So I went to Purdue University to be an engineer. I got my industrial engineering degree, but I almost didn't. So sophomore year, well freshman year I was struggling hardcore.
Collin Jewett: I mean, I barely scraped by my freshman classes. Not a good sign. And it doesn't really get easier though. Freshman year barely scraped by. I figured I'd turn turned around sophomore year. That didn't really happen either. So I was still really struggling. And for me I think it was a shock because I always breezed through school like high school was easy for me. I got straight A's without really trying too hard. I never really learned good study habits because I didn't need to. I just kind of remember things.
Collin Jewett: Once I got to college that didn't work. And so the sophomore year I was like, all right, I'm going to actually do what you're supposed to do. I'm going to put in the hours and hours every night studying for these exams weeks ahead of time. I did all the right things and I was still pretty much failing. I was right on the borderline essentially of having to drop out. And so I got to the point where I was kind of rock bottom.
Collin Jewett: And I sense this infamous email changed the course of my life. And a really interesting way to my academic advisor to say, hey, I'm going to fail out of school and I don't know what to do about it, I'm trying everything I can. I'm doing what everyone tells me I should be doing to learn faster and it's just not working. And so she sent me to the Disability Resource Center. They told me I testing anxiety and all this stuff, you know, and they gave me extra time on exams. And that's typically the best you're going to get.
Tim Fitzpatrick: That's their solution.
Collin Jewett: Right. It did help. I mean, it definitely helped a little bit. But I knew personally I needed something more than that. I needed to actually learn how to learn. And school had just never taught me that. And the solutions that I was getting from the people around me, the so-called good students and the random YouTube videos I'd find about how to study just didn't cut it.
Collin Jewett: And so I stumbled upon Superhuman Academy. Jonathan Levi's courses, his super learner master class, all about metal learning and how your brain really works and how to take these ancient techniques. I know it's kind of a buzz phrase, but it's true. These techniques that have been around forever and then pairing that up with cutting-edge neuroscience, psychology, behavior design to actually learn how to learn and learn faster. And so for me, that changed everything. I went from being nearly a failing student and studying constantly all the time, doing everything I was supposed to be doing to get good grades to studying, I don't know, maybe half the time.
Collin Jewett: And this was just as I was learning these skills and being on the dean's list my senior year. And I went from having no job prospects, essentially begging for internships to getting a senior-level engineering position straight out of college, which, you know, that was mind boggling to me. I even finished a book. I wrote a book while I was still in college, published that when I graduated. And so my life completely changed from in a short span of a couple of years from learning how to learn and I guess to get to where I'm at today, Curiosity Jump is my personal brand, my personal business.
Collin Jewett: I'm an accelerated learning coach and Superhuman Academy. I work very closely with them now and Jonathan Levi's company. And we teach students and professionals how to reach their personal and professional goals, no matter how audacious, through accelerated learning.
Tim Fitzpatrick: I love it, there's a couple of things I want to pull out of this, so one of the things you said I think is really important, you know, going back to a lot of these principles that you learn there, they're based on old things. Right. And one of the things that we talk about from a marketing standpoint is the fundamentals. The fundamentals are so important in any discipline and they don't change. So it's how you learn. And the way you learn, it's the same today as it was 50 or 100 years ago, those principles, those fundamentals don't change. So I think the fact that they're old it doesn't matter. And so you guys are still teaching these things.
Tim Fitzpatrick: The other question that I wanted to ask you. So you became exposed to these these fundamentals of how you learn. How long did it take you after diving into these fundamentals to really start seeing things shift upward rather than on that downward trajectory that you were on?
Collin Jewett: Oh yeah, for me it definitely started to change instantly. And it wasn't like I got the full effects instantly or anything like that. And I'm always still learning. Of course, not just learning new skills, but learning how to learn the things I love about what I do now is I'm really on the cutting edge of how to use our brains effectively. And I'm personally exploring that and researching that all the time. But when I was first learning new skills, it really did start to change immediately. Once I just got a basic understanding, hey, here's how your brain works on a very general level.
Collin Jewett: Here's some simple things that you can do, types of information that your brain likes and types it doesn't like, and how to convert information from the things that it doesn't like to the things that it likes. You can consume them faster. Those basics change things for me right away. But I can say, like, you know, within three months I was a different person. And that's how you can change your life. I mean, faster than that, but that's what it was for me.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Are the principles that you guys use the same no matter like you hear people talk about, well, I'm a I'm a visual learner or I'm an auditory learner. Do those change or are they really the same?
Collin Jewett: Yeah, that's a really good question, and I did write an article about that a little while ago, so maybe I can share it in the comments to this video or something.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, we'd be happy to put that in the show notes.
Collin Jewett: I think a lot of that stems from some common misunderstandings. So when you're going through school just on the auditory learning, because I hear that all the time, I'm an auditory learner. And I think a big reason why people think that way or feel that way. And the truth is, you learn through all your senses, all your senses are important for learning and you can incorporate them.
Collin Jewett: But some are stronger than others. So our visual memory is stronger than our auditory memory. That's true for almost everybody. True for every single person, but it's true for almost everybody, the reason people don't feel that way a lot of times is because when you go through school, what's the format? You're sitting there and you're getting lectured to. You're constantly training your brain. You need to be listening for specific types of information. And so it's not necessarily the best way to learn, that's just the way that people have been trained to learn, but it's not necessarily the most effective. So, yeah, there are some general principles that apply across ninety-nine point nine percent of people that are far more effective than anything that I've ever learned in school.
Tim Fitzpatrick: So tell me a little bit more about some of the things that you guys do at Superhuman Academy in with Curiosity Jump. I mean, what are the details of how you're helping people learn better?
Collin Jewett: Yeah, so to get into the nitty-gritty a little bit, you know, like what my day job looks like or what I'm doing, I'm constantly engaging with students and professionals. And first, we want to identify what is it that you actually want to do? I know that might sound really basic, but a lot of times people haven't really answered that question. And not to get too deep into the weeds here, but your reticular activating system, it's a part of your brain. You've probably heard of that. It's kind of a people to talk a lot in the mindset space. It's important if you don't know what you're looking for, you're not going to find it.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Yes. So I'll give you a perfect example of this reticular activating concept. Right. A year ago, my wife and I bought a new car. All of a sudden we buy that new car. We start seeing that same car everywhere on the road. Oh, my God. You know, and so it's that particular activity. It just puts that at the top of your brain and then you start looking for it and magically you start to see it.
Collin Jewett: Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, one of the early things that we do, first of all, we help people to really identify what it is that they need to be looking for, and that's a trainable skill within itself, is how to identify what information is important and what information is not important. I've spent a lot of time working both with students and professionals and professionals, just somebody who has been a student for a long time, most of the time.
Collin Jewett: So they've kind of been through the same patterns. And one thing I see a lot is just because of the way our school system is structured, you're trained to prioritize information that's going to be on an exam. You get out of school and that's not the case anymore. And so you don't know how to discern between what's important, what's not important. All of a sudden, you don't have somebody telling you, hey, here's what's on the exam, here's what you study.
Collin Jewett: And so people get really lost and they end up spending a ton of time on things that don't matter. Teaching people to cut through, cut through the crap, so to speak, and get to what's important. And that's part of it. A lot of it is also just training people. Here's how your brain functions and based on that, here's how you should feed it information. Here's how you should treat it. It's kind of like we give people an owner's manual for using the brain.
Collin Jewett: It's really important because if you think about it, the brain, the human brain is the most complex thing in the entire universe. And you're just expected to kind of figure out how it works. It eventually kind of thing and it definitely helps to have some guidance. You get an owner's manual with your toaster. It's you might as well get one with your brain to probably help.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah. You know what? Those guys don't usually read the owner's manuals anyways, do we?
Collin Jewett: But it's frustrating because, you know, I feel like the brain as a the best supercomputer in the world. And most people are using they're using Microsoft Paint, you know, on their computer. So you might get you go through school and you might learn how to draw the most beautiful Mona Lisa in Microsoft Paint. But you're still using Microsoft Paint. Let's figure out how to use everything else that's at your disposal.
Tim Fitzpatrick: So you're really helping people understand how they can use their brain more effectively.
Collin Jewett: Exactly.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Cool. I love it. So let's talk about this mistake that I kind of hinted to in the beginning of this. What's this critical mistake that a lot of small businesses out there are making?
Collin Jewett: Right. So I think the title of this and then you called it the 90 billion dollars mistake US companies make every year. Yeah. So the companies in the US spend, at least at this point, roughly 90 billion dollars a year on training, training, new employees, everything like that. And the training for the most part is really ineffective. And I've got reasons to kind of back up why I'm saying that.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, absolutely.
Collin Jewett: First of all, people don't know how to learn. I mean, that's kind of why we're here and what the dilemma is. So you have people who don't know how to learn. Creating resources and training other people who don't know how to learn on what they should know. And so you've got all these areas of inefficiency where you're just losing information so that 90 billion dollars that's being spent, how much of that is actually converted into in our ally? And so I think it's very low.
Collin Jewett: It could be a lot higher. And so when you've got these massive companies training people, you know, they're more robust. They have way more points of failure that they have to go through before the company crashes to the ground. Small businesses can't afford what really large businesses can. If you're making mistakes in your training or if you're not maximizing your training, that might be the mistake that puts the nail in the coffin for you for a lot of small businesses that are just starting.
Collin Jewett: If you're a single person, you own a job. You don't necessarily own a business. Once you start to grow that business, you're going to have to bring other people on. And if you don't train them effectively and they can't learn effectively, chances are you're going to fail.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah. Yes, super, super important. So how do we train better, right? How do we avoid making this mistake? Because every I mean, look, every company out there is doing training in one way, shape or form, whether it's training, they're people that are on their team or frankly, I mean, there's a lot of companies doing training to clients or prospects. So what can we do? How can we do this better?
Collin Jewett: Yeah, exactly. So what people are investing in, it's really good. It's really important. You need to invest in training, obviously, like investing in education is one of the best things you can do. However, if you don't invest in learning how to learn, if you don't invest in mental learning, the value of that education is not even close to what it could be. So, yeah, just from my personal experience and what I've seen with clients and people I've worked with, the average person can learn 12 times faster than they think they can or they start out learning after you've gone through all the way through college, high school, whatever, you can learn at least 12 times faster than you can at the point where you finished your education and the skills that you have when you finish your education are the way that you're using your brain at that point is the way most people use the brain for the rest of life because they don't know any better.
Collin Jewett: And that's not their fault. I mean, no one's really teaching this stuff except for us and a handful of other people. So it's a small group, but I would say that's where you need to be investing and not just investing in your education, which is critical, but make that investment more valuable, get higher returns for that investment by investing in learning how to learn.
Tim Fitzpatrick: One of the things I could do is when new people come on the team, they go through some of these things that you guys are teaching as part of that process. Right? I love that. Are there also ways that when we do train, we can train more effectively? Right. So whatever the medium or how we train is going to help people retain that information or learn it better? Are there ways that we can do that?
Collin Jewett: Yeah, absolutely. So if we look at some basics and, you know, it's a little tough to communicate over a podcast just because there's a lot of fundamental knowledge that kind of comes into this and how you can execute it really well. But one thing to realize is stories are really powerful. Stories and examples just giving people. So one thing I've seen at several companies, I hear people talk about how they were trained this way all the time. They show up on their first day and their boss hands them essentially just a giant textbook and says, read this, you know, OK, that's great, but this person has come through our education system. That person is going to forget at least 50 percent of everything they learn within like a day.
Collin Jewett: You're telling them to read something, first of all, which is boring, if things are uninteresting, they're way harder to learn. So I think a common theme with companies is they try to make things really, really professional. You know, you want your stuff to look really good, look really professional, use really proper language. And so, you know, it's very it's everything's written like a research paper, right? Yeah, it's very precise. Unfortunately, that's not really how your brain processes information effectively for most people.
Collin Jewett: So using pictures, using visuals, hands-on learning is really critical. Actually, you know, blue-collar jobs, typically blue-collar type companies are the most effective at training because they do a lot more hands-on learning. Yeah, that should be the case with a white-collar job as well. There should be a lot more hands-on training than there typically is giving somebody a textbook is the worst thing you can do.
Collin Jewett: So you had an episode a little while ago which I loved, which was talking about how to bring how to find all stars and bring them onto your team. That's amazing. But what happens when you bring those all-stars on your team and you don't have anything to unlock their potential? They have a ton of potential that could bring so much value to your business, but you don't have the training in place. You don't know how to help them to unlock that potential.
Collin Jewett: See that they're not going to perform as well as they can and they're going to go somewhere else eventually. It was somewhere that can help them to unlock that better and small businesses can't afford to be having that kind of turnover with those all-star key players that you bring on.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Got it. So, let me make sure I've got all this stuff right here. So, there's a few ways we can train better. One is just initially giving people some of these tools that you guys utilize so that they learn how to learn better. Two is using stories, examples to really solidify these points. We need to keep it interesting, right? Nobody wants to sit down and read this white paper or have you run through a frickin slide deck and hands-on whenever it's it's possible. Let people learn by doing.
Collin Jewett: Yup. Hands-on, visual and also, it might be a little bit hard to communicate this in a short period time, but I'll do my best personal language is really key. So one thing that I think it's a real shame, but happens in school all the time. Your professor has a certain way of talking. They have certain just their vocabulary mean something to them. However, if you were to go into a room in front of ten thousand people and you were to say the word dog, every single one of those people would have a different visual in their head. They know what you're talking about, but it's something different to them.
Collin Jewett: There's a slight nuance. They picture the dog that they had when they were a kid. They picture of all brown and fluffy, or they picture something like this, a giant Rottweiler. They all have these different images that come naturally to them. If you're not aware of that or you don't think about that, it's really going to affect how well that a communication works. And so identifying what things mean to different people is really important. And so that's the idea of personal language.
Collin Jewett: Everybody has a certain vocabulary that they use in their heads. And so the closer your vocabulary is to the person that you're talking to, the easier communication is going to be. But the two people have extremely different personal vocabularies, personal languages, and if that's the case, the communication is going to be terrible and the person is not going to learn very fast. And so what happens in school is you've got a professor who's teaching and there are some students in that class of a personal language, very similar to the professor.
Collin Jewett: Things just click and it makes sense to them. And you have other students where it's very different and it makes no sense at all. I think in the same classroom they have the same professor who's saying the same things. For some people it makes no sense and some people it does. So like I said, that's a little bit difficult to communicate how you can make that implement that idea well in your business. But that's important as well.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, no, it makes perfect sense. So, Colin, thank you for sharing the stuff. Man, this is I've learned a lot and I know other people will as well. We'll put up your websites here in a minute. But just so people understand, like if they love what we've been talking about and they want to dig a little bit deeper and start to learn how to learn better when somebody works with you, when you coach with them, what does that engagement look like?
Collin Jewett: Yeah. So typically and this will change based on like I said, it always matters. What are what's the end goal? Yeah, completely how we do things because it needs to be customized to the person. But a really, really standard example would be a three-month engagement that will connect either with an individual or with a business. And we'll look at what their goals are and then we will help them to develop training and will help to teach the people how to learn over the course of that time. And three months is just the timeline. It generally takes people to learn a lot of the skills that we teach and to implement them effectively and feel like they don't need as much handholding anymore. That's why that time period is there.
Tim Fitzpatrick: How much time are they investing each week over that three months on average?
Collin Jewett: So if we're working with individuals, it's typically 20 to 60 minutes per day, four to six days per week. Pretty standard. If we're working with a business, it could be totally different depending on what we're doing. If we're developing training for them, if we're training executives for training employees, it can be different.
Tim Fitzpatrick: And with one on one coaching, what are the price ranges looking like for that three-month engagement?
Collin Jewett: Yeah, there's a huge variety there too.
Tim Fitzpatrick: I don't want to put you on the spot, but it would help people I think if they had a general idea.
Collin Jewett: Yeah. It's going to, it's going to range from the mid-hundreds to usually less than ten thousand. The reason there's such a huge range, just because that goes from essentially tutoring students. Yes. Working with executives.
Tim Fitzpatrick: So on the business side, if you're working with an executive and really putting together programs that they're going to use within their business, there's a lot more intricacies and details there that need to be hammered out.
Collin Jewett: Yeah. For sure.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, got it. Cool. I love it, man. Thank you so much for taking the time to to share this stuff with us. It's been eye-opening to me. Where can people learn more about you if they like what we've talked about?
Collin Jewett: For sure. Yeah. I would either check out superhumanacademy.com or curiosity jump.Com. Those are both places you can find me the most easily. I'd also recommend if you found any of this interesting for your personal use. We have the Superhuman Academy podcast is a really popular one. It's got three hundred episodes. There's a massive amount of content there. It's only the Super Human Playbook podcast is a good place to hear more.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Awesome. I love it. And just so people know, Curiosity Jump is your company and within Curiosity Jump you are coaching and teaching the principles of Superhuman Academy. Is that right?
Collin Jewett: Yeah, right. So Superhuman Academy kind of provides a lot more of the infrastructure. Director of coaching for them. It's my personal brand, but I've got some other things that goes on for there.
Tim Fitzpatrick: OK, awesome. Collin, thank you so much for taking the time man. This has been fantastic. I know people are going to get a ton of value from this. I just want to thank everybody for tuning in again. I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing. If you want to gain clarity on where to focus your marketing efforts right now to get the best return, hop on over to our website at rialtomarketing.com. That's R-I-A-L-T-O marketing.com. Just click on the get a free consultation button. I guarantee you will get a ton of value from that call and walk away with some clarity on where you need to focus right now. So thank you for tuning in. Till next time, take care.
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About the Host Tim Fitzpatrick
Tim Fitzpatrick is the President of Rialto Marketing. At Rialto Marketing, we help service businesses simplify marketing so they can grow with less stress. We do this by creating and implementing a plan to communicate the right message to the right people. Marketing shouldn't be difficult. All you need is the RIGHT plan.