Welcome to the Bipolar Excellence Podcast. I’m your host, Ken Jensen. I’m someone who overcame bipolar disorder, in an organic fashion, back in 2004. That process taught me a couple of things about bipolar.

I was living life so incorrectly, in relation to what the better part of me wanted and needed me to do, that it took bipolar disorder to shock me into seeing I should go another way.

The fact that it was bipolar that was the change agent meant I’m more creative than most. I have a certain, slightly higher amount of intelligence than the average bear.

And I have a way of seeing life and expressing myself that most around me do not, in such a way that I can have great impact on those who need me most.

You might be the same. I want to help you understand this about yourself. And I want to help unlock your greatness and then unleash it on the world in the best and coolest way possible!

Hello, bipolar prone folk! Welcome to Episode 44. People Love What I Do, But I Can’t Ever Profit From It.

This is the ever so exciting moment where I finally finish the series Life Of an Outsider, which you will find a link to in the website, bipolarexcellence.com. You’ll find it in the footer.

Oh, this is fun. I did like a, this’ll be the ninth episode I did in one sitting. You don’t, you don’t, nor probably should you, do this this way, but I’ve had it with this series! I need it done and out of the way. I have very cool people waiting to be interviewed who’ve for the podcast, who’ve done incredible stuff in alignment with their bipolar characteristics. I can’t wait to bring them to you.

Let’s see. Well, now, now I’m fully winded. People will love what I do, but can never profit from it. The funny thing I’ve realized is.. These titles? Part of why I came up with them was because they were all individual ways I listed my own problems becoming more with bipolar, with a bipolar background.

And I figured out, or I figured people… I wanted to have episodes, even though so many of these topics in this series are very similar, sometimes damn near the same, people are going to ask the same question with different words. So I tried to address that. It made it very confusing at times for me, to make my points and keep them tight, tightly focused.

But I think I did a pretty good job. And moving forward, I have other series planned and they’re not going to be this. They’re not going to be as closely, the topics, as closely related as these are. And I’m just going to handle them a little different.

There was, there was a whole technical thing I set up in a certain way that I couldn’t undo without breakin’ a bunch of things. And it has pissed me off that I couldn’t finish this series because then life, life got in the way. It’s it’s been a wild ride. It’s going to do the same to you. When you’re getting ready to launch your big project, it’s it’s life.

Shit’s going to get in the way. You’re going to get tripped. You’re going to do something wrong in a way you can’t fix. As I always say, keep moving anyway. Just keep moving. Don’t stop. Don’t stop until something becomes nightmarishly incorrect. Then you might want to look at it and be like, geez, I don’t know.

But take everything to its full extent, before you make a decision on whether to quit it entirely. And even then hang on to everything you create. And I mean, for a handful of years. Hard won experience talking to you right now. This list? I wrote it in 2011. I never did anything with it.

It was going to be a bunch of blog posts on the last website, I think it was? Yeah. Two websites ago? Anyway, which I easily could have done. But it became these podcast episodes 11 years later.

So hang on if you’re a content creator, keep track of everything somewhere. Maybe 4, 5, 6, 7 years, just to be sure. You have no idea of knowing when something you created way back when will find a home years down the road.

Because, particularly, I believe ,with bipolar people, we’re always trying to sort ourselves out. I don’t know. I think we’re always trying to do that. We get better at it with age and experience. But I think it always happens to a degree.

And if nothing else, even when you create something and it doesn’t go the way you want, or you can’t use it the way you want, it was your, it was yours. It meant something. And the person you become later will be able to find a way to make use of it.

Because it’s a piece of your past that proves a point. Even if you don’t talk about it in, in the, the context or tone that it was originally designed for, it still proves a point that you can now address in a completely different context and tone of voice.

I just did that with this list. So this last episode, people love what I do, but I can’t ever profit from it. I believe, looking at the little picture you might’ve heard me mentioned a handful of episodes back, I picked pictures off of various free image databases. Like Unsplash. What does it, what’s that one? Pixabay. There’s been a few, but that’s the two I was using latest.

I try to get a picture that metaphorically matches the, the, either the topic directly or the tone of it to just try to give the story on the web page some context. So I, so, and I remember this picture here, these guys running an ice cream stand or something. I think it’s like in Italy or something, something like that.

I remember trying to figure out, why is this different than a couple other episodes I said? I believe what it is is it’s about, like in my case, you, you get onto a project. It makes sense. That’s one of the trickiest things. A thing makes sense. There’s a certain amount of standardization standardization to it.

There’s a business plan that is, that is understood and widely accepted to be sane and proper. And you’re capable of pursuing it and you do so. And it goes nowhere for any number of reasons.

I believe that was my, my perspective on, on what I wanted to say about this topic. You might be in the wrong thing still. You might be on to something that you’re just capable of doing, but that doesn’t, that doesn’t mean you should do it.

Particularly, if you can’t ever profit from it, you’re ah, I’m still struggling a little as you hear. I’m trying to make sure that I hit on really what it was, why, why I made this topic distinct from the rest. But

I do know there comes a point. If you’re not profiting, you need to profit or you can’t eat. They’ll come a point when you’ve got to look hard at something and let your baby die, clip it out and start over. I’ve done that dozens of times. I’ve had, I think, four major website revisions with completely different names and, and everything.

I worked on my very first website. I hired a company that had a program you followed that they told you right up front, it’s going to take months. It was big on search engine optimization. There was a whole plan. And they’re like, their symbol was the turtle. Don’t be the hare, be the turtle. And they’re like, if you do what we say, it’ll, it’ll pay off.

It’ll do it. What it, what we say it’ll do. And I kept the faith and I worked on that site, something like four months. Many hours every day. I was on disability at the time and didn’t have a job. So I had all day to work on this and I put in all day, every day for four months straight.

When I turned the website on the way they told me to, it exploded. I was finding myself on page one for various keywords in Google all over the place.

That’s all grand and good. In the middle of that, somebody found the website and a film crew came up from New York City. I’m a couple hours north of New York City. They filmed me, in relation to my bipolar story. That never went anywhere, but it was awful fun. I learned from it.

But there comes a point when you, you you’ve got to know that a thing needs to, it has to have profit. Or it’s either a hobby, might be perfectly fine, but just back down your expectations and just treat it as a hobby. Don’t expect anything bigger than that to come from it.

Or if you really needed it to feed you, you got to go a different way. And that is, my God. Is that a hard conclusion to arrive at. And it’s hard to kill your little darling. But it has to be done. I’ve done it many times. And I remember writing to a coach I had at the time, how do I know when it’s time to stop on a thing?

How do I know when it’s, when it’s time to give up? Particularly in reference to bipolar? Because in my case I was more manic than not for many years. Even after I beat the bulk of the disease mania lingered. You can hear it in my voice on and off throughout this podcast. It’s a thing. It’s just not constant.

It just has moments now. But in the early years it was quite, quite present. And I had the energy to keep going, even if I shouldn’t. And I also had an aspect of bipolar where I call four dimensional thinking.

I could see forwards and backwards in time, for planning purposes. And I could see like, on all three planes of reality up, down, back and forth side to side, connected with the time aspect.

And I had an ability to link resources and ideas and experiences all together to create a thing that existed in real life. I don’t have that anymore. I have a remnant of that in me, but not like back then. It was, it was wild back then. I, I, I couldn’t believe the things I used to build. The constructs that could become like a literal business.

And none of that led anywhere, as awesome as it was, other than, as a learning experience. Made few dollars here and there, but not nothing to brag about. But you do have to profit.

One of the things that has annoyed me about, even sometimes now, like when you talk about profit people have a, they got these condescending notions of money.

You shouldn’t be doing something, you know, for money and like w… you fucking go to work for money! Me doing this? This is me going to work! As it will be for you on your podcast, your website, whatever it is you’re creating.

Hell yeah, you should profit. You should get paid for your time and effort. And you need to, so that you can reach more people and do more good in this life.

Look at a nonprofit. Nonprofits are some of the most profitable companies on the planet. They need to bring in money, wildly so, so they can help more and more people.

I know in my case, just to give an example, the more people that hire me for higher level coaching, I reach a point, because I’ve done this before, I reach a point where some of the smaller things I used to sell, I just give them away.

Because I can afford to. Now I’m helping even more people get their foot in the door and better their lives. And in a way that doesn’t take food off my dinner plate. Money is just a tool. It’s just a tool. It enables you to do things. That’s all.

Anything other than that, that you feel about money is your belief system working on money. It’s what you believe about money. It’s a. That’s that’s always annoyed me. It bothers me whenever I want to talk about it on the show. Because you definitely don’t want to talk about it all the time, but since this one’s about profit, it’s, it’s a, you don’t carry on about it, but I get paranoid when I, whenever I talk about it, even now!

I’m like, is this too much? But no, man. It’s you go to work, your pissed if they pay you, like, if they, if you’re short an hour or something, or the paycheck’s late, you’re losing your mind. Anything you do on your own is no different. Just, you’re the boss. So get good with profit. If you’re not already.

That’s a load of shit that’s, in a large sense, that when people, you care about money too much, that’s people who have no money. I’d say that in general. I don’t intend to be one of those people. I’m not one of those people.

That’s a, that’s an ignorant way of looking at life, point blank. More money you have, the more people’s lives you can affect and change for the better. You get that money when you realize the thing you’re doing sucks. Or it’s incorrect. It doesn’t match somehow to what it is you’re trying to achieve. And you’re just, you’re either not the one to do it, because sometimes the idea is solid. It’s just not for you. Or the idea is not solid or the area it’s in isn’t right.

You’re not marketing right. Whatever. But if you’ve been trying for long enough and it ain’t going, it’s time to let it go. You can park it. You can keep it alive off to the side and just not add to it anymore. That’s a thing. I’ve done that with other stuff. There’s stuff in Bipolar Excellence, I’ve done that with.

But the pruning is hard.

I didn’t get a lot of direct help from the people that coached me in the past. They’ll just say, you’ll know when you know. And they’re right. I hate to share that with you, but you’ll know when you know .

It’s going to take too long with some. You’re going to embarrass yourself because, sometimes, cause you’ll have shared with everybody about this great thing you’re doing. And then it does not a great thing.

And if you’re a, you know, a dreamer and bipolar prone, like I am, there’ll be so many of those things, you lose a lot of credibility. So off the back of that statement, the longer you go with this, the more you keep it to yourself. Unless you’re talking to your people or your potential people. It’s how you’ll save yourself a lot of effort.

Talk about it indirectly. You don’t remain, you know, you don’t stay negative about it. You don’t say negative things about it or, or denigrate it. You just, there comes a point when you do have to protect your own sense of well-being, by not oversharing on a thing. That’s not really real yet. It’s not. It’s not real until it’s real.

Real means you’re you got dollars going into your bank account, then it’s real. And even then, make sure that they’re coming in consistently and enough that you’re earning a respectable, a respectable income.

People I got, before you share. People like us, the creative types? We get ourselves into a lot of trouble in, in the realm of being socially comfortable with our peers.

We’re just not normal .And it can, it, it causes us grief until it doesn’t. There’s a chain of events, it’s only like four steps long, when somebody comes up with a new idea. It’s heresy and then the second step S people then attack it. They attack you, directly. Then there’s like a begrudging respect, as the thing that you’re doing well proves to be useful.

And then there’s a point reached where everybody just thinks this thing’s always been around. And when they read the history of your struggles, they can’t believe anybody ever would have said no to this.

That’s where you and I, more than likely, find ourselves. Gauge you’re sharing accordingly to protect yourself socially, which will directly affect your mental wellbeing.

And as far as clipping, clipping things out, when they got to go? You will know when you got to know. I wish I could be clear than that, but it’ll make itself clear when the time is right.

Now childrens! I leave you with this: please go over to bipolarexcellence.com. Sign up for my free newsletter. Get the guide that comes with it that can answer some of your largest problems immediately and get the ball rolling on some of the bigger issues.

Because there’s no time to waste. World’s burning all around us, quite literally in a lot of areas. They’re waiting for you to show up and help, in some brand new fashion that nobody else can see.

And I want to launch that thing with you. Good God. We’re going to do interviews next. All right, guys. See, in the next episode.