This episode unpacks insights from a rare reset weekend during a fifth wedding anniversary celebration—the first since 2025 began without urgent deadlines. The forced pause revealed dangerous patterns: excessive notification checking, approaching burnout, and losing strategic altitude by staying buried in tactical execution rather than architecting the next growth phase for both Serious Land Capital and LandPricer.
Key Takeaways:
- Boredom Builds Strategic Clarity Allowing mental wandering without deliverables due surfaces critical business insights that tactical execution obscures—this reset identified needed pivots in BD approach and talent optimization.
- Land Daily Diligence Quality Filter Moving to selective deal reviews that teach valuable lessons rather than reviewing commodity submissions protects time and maintains audience value.
- Deep Work Requires White Space Scheduling at least one full day weekly for unstructured thinking prevents the swamp of constant execution from drowning long-term strategic positioning.
Tune in to understand why stepping back from the business sometimes moves it forward faster than relentless grinding.
(Podcast transcript below)
Welcome to get serious today wanted to go over some insights from a more of a reset weekend. So my wife and I were I think I remarked in a podcast recently we were celebrating our fifth wedding anniversary and my parents were watching our two and a half year old and so we were able to
just enjoy a bit more time with, you know, my wife and I were able to enjoy more time as a couple. And also it was the first weekend since probably well, since 2025 started that I didn’t have any like urgent
deadline oriented work to get done. I had some podcasts pre-recorded newsletter written, all various homework done for the Callens AI course and was even caught up on what I was doing with LandPricer. And so I felt like I really needed just time to reset myself, just given how much
Uh, you know, work I’ve been doing over the past several months here and I was just noticing in myself like last week of,
Too much checking on notifications and…
Again, just kind of like on the verge of a bit of a burnout, not crazy, but also like I felt, hey, I’m just, too much in the business at the moment. And I just need to kind of come in more fresh to do a lot more deep work into this coming week here. And I don’t think I fully appreciated that until I was, you know, deeper into the weekend where
You know, it’s just nature being an entrepreneur here too, that I just don’t have that many other focus in my life. like, okay, what else can I be learning here and so forth? And it’s going over some additional videos that were in my backlog and just still continuing to learn and let my mind kind of wander. And it kept returning to the funding business and land Pricer and just
you know, really coming to the realization that, I had been stuck too much in the minutia of the business and I was losing sight of how to orient the additional business development and growth that really needs to occur to truly meet our potential here.
And I know that’s a little bit vague in terms of the sense of, you know, how I’m trying to express that, it was, it was just more of a, like sometimes you just, you really need that space to, um, you know, again, just let your mind wander because, know, if you are a dedicated entrepreneur and so forth, like your, your typical thoughts are going to be returning to your business routinely. But if you don’t have anything that.
expressly needs to be done just to keep the business going forward. That is what allows you that freedom to really kind of think through the next steps as well as kind of refill the well, so to speak, of just, you know, even letting some boredom build up over the course of the weekend and then realize, okay, yeah, now I’m like, I’m feeling more energized.
to get to some of this deep work. I’ve kind of cleaned off the rest of my plate here and then I’m ready to be diving back in and have a better plan on how to tackle these next steps accordingly. And I used to get that a lot more over last year, but again, it’s just been so hectic and trying to push so much more routine content and just working so routinely that…
head to fallen away from that. So I’m going to do better because I think even for the sake of the business having at least one day a week where I can just let my mind think and orient around, all right, what is everything that’s been happening here? What can I start to back off from? And how do we really try to orient towards greater and greater growth to be able to make decisions quicker? And…
kind of upscale the talent, both myself, anybody involved in the business, just so things can move even faster and realize the potential that we have within my team and just realize, yeah, just have so much more room to grow. So that was just more of a
like I’m just kind of really reinvigorating, sense that I got over this weekend here that I hadn’t experienced in, in, a long time. and some of these things too, just like looking at the industry as well. And, you know, out of some of the content that I produce, even like land daily diligence, I mean, we get a lot of, you know, very solid deals that are worth reviewing. It’s just, I think, you know, some folks are.
treating us as a bit of a commodity for deals that are just like, they’re not teaching, you both my own team as well as the industry as a whole. it’s just, they’re just kind of really poorly thought out deals to be sent over. So I think I’m to have a bit more of a selective approach to what is going in on those Facebook lives, for instance, of, if there’s not.
like a good lesson here to convey over to, again, both ourselves internally and to the industry as a whole. Like we’re just, not gonna spend our time reviewing it. It’s, in order to reach the next level, like I have to protect my time more and more and not be.
you treated quite as much as a commodity. Just like, yeah, like take a look at this deal and like people not really doing their homework initially to even assess whether something should even be remotely considered to go for it. you got, I want to review deals where some folks have actually put some initial thought into it versus like, hey, here’s just some random deals coming in. I’m just going to show all these over to like get a free review on like that. Just, it’s not really sitting well for me. And I think
that’s going to come out during my own reviews and I should be more energized and it’s not really helping my audience either. So, for example, that that’s just one change that I want to explore going forward here. that’s pretty much like as of today, that that’s going to be how we operate, in, being more selective.
And additionally, like I’ve just realized, Hey, like it just this bigger while we’re, still deeply in the midst of building out, AI solutions, you know, being in this exotic automate, Callens program and still have a lot more to do on that. And I did spend some time over the weekend starting to actually build out, that AI.
brain that I had talked about a few podcasts ago, so I already got the custom instructions in, that’s just like additional project knowledge, even got some of that into, and I’m calling it Sage Mode. Anybody who might read manga or anime, if you’re familiar with Naruto, that would be of note to you. JT Olmsted is probably nodding his head vigorously here.
Um, in accordance with that, but you know, just going to have, have some fun with, with that project, uh, and the underlying, um, focus on, again, just orienting, Hey, you have with the advent of AI here and just knowing still how far people are behind from knowing how to properly use prompts and, um, automate certain systems within the business. Like this is our, still our core opportunity to really.
seize the moment in order to get that much further ahead than everybody else. And just knowing like, a lot of this knowledge is just available to you. You can really orient it around these AI programs where I don’t necessarily need to pay for or invest into like, you know, some really kind of crazy expensive coaching. And there were a couple other opportunities I was looking at over the weekend. There can be like 50, 60 grand a year from like really, really accomplished coaches. but I’m like, you know what I.
I get it. I’ve done that in the past and maybe I’m missing out to some degree and I think in a certain degree I am. But the initial content they have out there, I think I can orient around within like this Sage mode and some of the AI learning that I can have a lot more of this on tap that I’d rather bet on that being more of the future to focus on in terms of building my business and my assistants already been putting out a whole bunch of SOPs and just trying to
you know, knock out some of these repeatable tasks. Like I just want to keep doubling down, doubling down. that effectively collapses some of that talent gap that I think that we’re missing, by primarily using AI initially, and then being able to build in more revenue and freedom within the business to then hire as needed to free up even additional time there. That’s
kind of what I was orienting to as well.
And the additional piece is just like, just gotta, again, get out some of this minutia, some of the email, text checking, that doesn’t require, you have some systems built in that doesn’t require your immediate notice, you gotta be pushing out more tactical and strategic.
Progress on a day-to-day basis in order to really get to that next level like there’s just so much so much more growth that we can we can reach but you know, know that I have decades to work with knock on wood and just have to remain energized and steady throughout this period of time, so Hopefully this helps you all in your journey as entrepreneurs again, I know it’s a bit more difficult market for pretty much any industry out there and
feel some of that various burnout and stuck in your own business. Yeah, I’ve been feeling that for pretty much all this year. but given how much progress I made, even though I wasn’t necessarily intending on making progress within the business over this weekend, like it was kind of counterintuitive, the amount of progress that was done by just letting my mind sit and wander, and letting my subconscious do a lot of the work, that
I didn’t even perceive needed to be done last week was extremely, extremely effective. And I just want to continue to build in more and more time for that because I think that is where the biggest, biggest stones get moved in terms of clearing up, clearing up all the chaos of the future so that we can really reach our true potential here.
So with that in mind, SeriousLand.Capital for any of your funding needs, zero cost review of your land deals at the Land Daily Diligence Facebook group. Again, gonna be more selective going forward. And LandPricer.ai, I was meeting with my team earlier on that. We’re, again, continuing to make the final bits of progress. I can’t be more excited even to test out this product internally. Just, I need it.
And and yeah, I’m gonna have to be the North Star for for our own customer base By fitting it into our own company. So looking forward to delivering that to you all to subscribe and share With that talk to you tomorrow. Take care now. Bye
