Ryan Rutan: Welcome back to the episode of the Startup Therapy podcast. This is Ryan Tan joined as always by Will Schroeder, my friend, the founder and CEO of Startups.com. Will. No, no shortage of discussion around ambition in the founder space, right? We have to be ambitious. We're gonna go build something that's never existed before, uh, based on nothing more than an idea and some blood, sweat, and lots of tears, and I think it often gets touted as a superpower, particularly on social media, you know, the ambitious founder out there killing it, doing it, burning both ends of the candle and just making it work. But there's real cost to this, right? Like with let me see the other side of this. We talked to founders day in day out. What's what's your view on, on ambition as this double-edged sword?
Wil Schroter: I think nobody talks about the cost of it, right? It it'd be the equivalent of like having a marathon runner, and they're running and and and they're they're winning the marathon, like, so on paper they're winning, but while they're doing it, their body is getting dehydrated and they're dying. And everyone's cheering them on as they, they, they collapse across the finish line. It's like, oh, what just happened here? We, we have this weird thing, you know, among startups among founders where we celebrate ambition, of course, and, and ambition on its surface sounds wonderful, and I'm not knocking ambition. But there is a cost to ambition, and that's the part that as founders and startup community, etc. we kind of don't talk about, and it feels like everybody just like, like scuttles away and deals with it in a corner. I know I did. It scares me. Because, you know, we have so many great founders that are, you know, not to do great things, but behind the scenes, they're a mess. And I think we should talk about what that cost looks like when it comes to ambition.
Ryan Rutan: What do you think the core source of this is? I mean, like I I said at the top, like, we sort of have to be ambitious. Ambition is a necessary ingredient because if you're not ambitious, you're not gonna wake up one morning and go, you know what, this thing doesn't exist. Yeah, right, anybody will buy it. I don't know if anybody cares, but I don't know if anybody wanna work out with me I don't know if anybody will give me money to do it. I'm gonna go do it, right? Like, you don't have ambition, you're, you're not going to start it. So I think it's important to recognize that it isn't a necessary ingredient, but like I think you and I see all the time people go from a pinch to a cup to a pound to a truckload, and this is where it starts to become a problem in all the. you're having right now is this across the board? Is this at a later stage thing is something really early stage founders need to be concerned about, or is this like, uh, I'm 15 years into this thing now my ambition is caught up.
Wil Schroter: You know what, it's actually what I've learned or what I've witnessed, and I'm curious your thoughts of what you've seen is it gets progressively worse. It's almost like a virus. Here's how I see it metastasize if you kind of stick with that analogy. What ends up happening. Is that we start off by being super ambitious, obviously that's why we start a startup to begin. What happens with that ambition is whether we realize it or not, we start raising the bar, we start setting a benchmark for what our output and what our accomplishments need to be. When do you ever hear someone say, man, coming out of college, I always wanted to be able to make 100K, but now I make 100k, don't you do anything else. That would not be a found. Not the ambition, and yet we have this weird thing where whatever we accomplish doesn't become the goal, it becomes the benchmark. And so we keep ratcheting up. I, I know I've dealt with this personally, and all of a sudden you realize that you've raised the bar, the benchmark so high. That anything but that, in the amount of blood, sweat, and tears that it takes to sustain that becomes a step backward. And I'm just gonna mention this because as we're recording this, I think, uh, you know, we're in the middle of the Paris Olympics, and then, you know, I just watched Simone Biles just clean up the medals in in the the Olympics, but the entire time, and it's just such a perfect example of this, the entire time everyone's like, yeah, but she had that tough time in Tokyo and yeah, and it's like, yeah dude, she won more medals than anyone, of course there's an insane amount of pressure.
Ryan Rutan: There's a cost, yeah, that's the cost. Now it's, I think, yes, sports is an easy analogy here because it's but but you know, the thing that athletes don't do is continue to push after they've won, and I think part of the challenge in the startup space is we don't necessarily have these clear delineations of what we're actually truly using our ambition to drive. I think ambitions like great fuel, but there's a point where you got to let off the gas a little bit, and I, I think this is where founders get it wrong a lot of times. We just don't know when that moment comes where it's like, I don't actually need to be. Pedal to the metal. The benefit is now far outweighed by the cost of continuing this, so we draw another completely random analogy. My six year old is into anything mechanical and the latest thing being trains. We're here in as of this recording, I'm I'm in Madrid, I've been doing a lot of train travel, a lot of a lot of subways, and he is all about it. So we downloaded a train simulator a couple days ago, and we've been spending our evenings on this thing. Not extremely detailed. I won't go into all of it, but one of the things that he's had to realize is that like The amount of power it takes to get the train moving is very different than what it takes to sustain it and stay on the gas on the train in particular, once that thing builds momentum, you actually have the speed you need, you have to slow down or really bad things happen. In this case, it's derailment of the train. In our case, it's a derailment of the founder and often the starter right along with it. And I think that's the point that's really hard for founders to gauge is when do I actually need to back off the ambition throttle so that I can. Move this thing forward at pace, but not at breakneck speed, not at something that's dangerous to me and the business. And I think that's the part we screw up all the time is right you don't realize it really is a danger to us and the business. Pushing too hard can lead the entire thing to collapse.
Wil Schroter: And I think a lot, you know, personally about how I got here because, you know, I'm definitely afflicted with this problem. My my ambition is without, without a doubt, my greatest enemy to my health, like let's
Ryan Rutan: be specific. I have weekly examples of this. I can, I can vouch for you on this one will. Yes, you do. Yeah, yeah,
Wil Schroter: I do. And so where it started for me was when I was 19, I was starting my first company. I had no cost to my ambition. I think that's so important to to kind of start with, right? So I'm at a point where I have nothing, you know, I came from nothing and so in my eyes, ambition equals survival, mostly in ambition equals progress. I looked at it like, hey, I got an idea. What if I just work every waking hour for the rest of my life? And people exaggerate when they say that I'm not exaggerating. We talking every waking hour, while some people will look at that, myself included, and again, I, I've got a a love-hate relationship with this discussion, and some people will look at that and say, that's great, right? That's noble, that you're willing to work hard. There's there's not a lot of people that will say work hard is bad per se, right? It's considered a good ethic, especially in the US. However, no one ever tells you until what point it's no longer OK. I'm 19, I just put myself completely into starting, you know, an internet company back then. I get to a point where my baseline, Brian, is every hour of every day. 1st 4 years of my career, I never took a day off. It didn't even occur to me you could take a day off. When I say take a day off, I'm including weekends, holidays, whatever. I didn't see my family for like 4 years. I was psychotic about it. Now, to be fair, I loved it. I like I, I was, I was so excited the entire time. So here's why I bring that up. That became my benchmark. That it. To this day, 30 years later, dude, 30 years later, that is still my benchmark for productivity.
Ryan Rutan: And think about what a dangerous baseline that is, right? When you set like every waking hour, oh there's nowhere to go from there, right? That sets one standard, like you can't go backwards, you also can't go up. So it leaves you feeling trapped at that point, like, how do you do more? How do you feel like you're making any progress when you're already spending every single bit of it all the time? You've got nowhere to go up. You got nowhere to go down. I mean, it's such a beautiful recipe for founder disaster. We've seen it manifest a couple times in our lives,
Wil Schroter: both of us. Yeah, yeah, and that's the thing, man, like, take like someone winning a Super Bowl, you know, as an example, right? What do you do after that? Like take Simone Biles, like we just talked about when he's
Ryan Rutan: in 90s, you went to Disneyland. I don't know if they still do that. I don't know.
Wil Schroter: It's true. But, like, like, seriously, like all you can do is win another Super Bowl. Your, your bar for progress is winning the Super Bowl. Like that is your benchmark, no longer your goal. Simone Biles cleaned up every medal you could win, right? Um,
Ryan Rutan: what
Wil Schroter: else
Ryan Rutan: can that girl do for her now, right?
Wil Schroter: Win more medals? Like, by the way, in order for her to even like contribute to her baseline, she has to win all the gold medals. Yeah, can't think of anything that would be harder to re-achieve.
Ryan Rutan: First person to win all the medals a second time, right?
Wil Schroter: Like, come on man,
Ryan Rutan: nasty benchmark.
Wil Schroter: And those are extreme examples, but it's also an example of people who could not have possibly achieved more, now have an impossible baseline, and I think that gets really interesting and forget like their superstar success. It applies at every level. My A year old daughter, who's amazing, as smart as can be, has an A plus average. You know I've talked about this, right? She's got a 100.3 GPA grade, right, which is more than an A plus, which means she also gets all her extra credit,
Ryan Rutan: right?
Wil Schroter: Extra credits, yeah. Right. Where does she go from here exactly?
Ryan Rutan: I don't know. I already have a series of care packages um lined up and ready for the day if it ever comes where she gets just like a standard A or an A minus because She's gonna need it at that point. It's gonna be,
Wil Schroter: and it scares me, right? It scares me. I'm so proud of her, don't get me wrong, right? I mean, she's just
Ryan Rutan: so hard, but that that's, but this is the double edged sword of ambition. It's
Wil Schroter: exactly
Ryan Rutan: it's admirable. It's amazing, but it's dangerous, especially when we said it like that early, right? So we're talking about like, and these things often do start it's like childhood patterns that carry into adolescence that carry into young adulthood, they carry adulthood and throughout our careers, but it goes back to the trade analogy like at that early stage you have To push, you have to set some of these standards for yourself so that you, you know what you're capable of. You've learned to accomplish, you learn the value of those things, but at some point you do have to back off the throttle. And I think this is where we see founders who are like, look, this thing needs every waking moment for that first year you were running the agency, you probably needed every single waking moment. I, I argue 10 times harder, yep, going into year 2, probably a little less than that, maybe not a lot less, maybe a little less. Yeah, uh, by year 3 or 4. If you're still doing that, what are you actually doing? And at that point, at some point you have to start to replace work hard with work a little smarter, work a little less work a little something, so that it's sustainable. Otherwise you do just end up burning out and breaking down. But again, it's such a hard thing to see. That's the thing, and it's such an easy answer. It never fails until the founder fails, until the founder breaks, that will always be the right answer. So what do I do? How do I make this work faster? You work more, how do I work this work harder? You work more. How do I grow this. You work more, you do more. There comes a point at which a founder can't, right? And you end up in sick bed or something worse, right? And we've seen it happen time and time again, and that can have major, major impacts and like how long is your roster of founder friends at this point where they're now very focused on their health because they've been forced to, yeah, because of bad things that have happened to them. How many of them were just like, you know, I really had this awakening in my early 20s where I wanted to take care of myself and I've done it ever since. I know no one like that, by the way.
Wil Schroter: The problem with being young is your health isn't a cost yet, right? And frankly, you can abuse the hell out of your body and mind at such an epic level that you'll never get to do again. And by way of that, build a habit that is so bad. I'll give you an example. Until I was 30 years old, I actually didn't know what a calorie was. It didn't occur to me that you could eat too much food and still not have like do that
Ryan Rutan: really quick, man. 30 teaches that really quick.
Wil Schroter: And I remember like the day I hit 30, I like pinched my side. I'm like, where the hell did that come from, right? Sure, what is this? For 30 years, I could go and just abuse myself. Like I would eat entire packages of EL fudges, which are so delicious, right? I got a Sunday evening while I watched a movie, that had to be like 10,000 calories, like, like,
Ryan Rutan: yeah, exactly, not now that even worked same belt size, yep, doesn't matter.
Wil Schroter: I didn't even get it, but because my health was kind of taking care of itself, right, it was making up for. My horrible decisions, I built a habit, a benchmark in a muscle that basically said, you can do that stuff and not worry about it. Now, take that a step further, right? Like, everyone kind of understands why eel fudges are wildly delicious, that they're not good for you, OK? Now let's take it a different direction. And let's say in that same time period, right? I'm also working insane hours at a level of intensity and stress that there's no version that can be healthy, but I'm being rewarded for it. This is the dangerous part.
Ryan Rutan: Yep, that's the thing. It's all reward with no cost at that point. Unfortunately. Exactly. Youth is a disease we only suffer in old age, right? Like it's absolutely true. It's so hard, right? Like, again, you're just constantly rewarded for overdoing and overdoing and overdoing, and until that bill becomes due, and it doesn't until much later, we just enjoy nothing, nothing but the rewards. And then all of a sudden the the bill comes due and it's a lot less fun.
Wil Schroter: And look. We have a culture that is all about rewarding sacrifice, and it's kind of the nature of what we do, and I don't wanna discount that, right? I mean that is a necessary evil, but the hard work is necessary, the risk is necessary. All those things are necessary. Never once on this show have we ever said you cannot do all of those things, right, or have no risk, have no hard work, whatever, and money will magically fall out of the ceiling, ain't gonna happen. What we're saying is, there is a part on the other side of this, where you do. Those things you put in the work, you put in the ambition, you hit those milestones where all of a sudden a cancer starts to form, either figuratively or literally. And it's something that's so easy to ignore, but it will catch up with you. It always catches up with you. I built a habit in my 20s that you work as hard as you can for as long as you can until your body fails, dude.
Ryan Rutan: We carried that shit into our 30s, man. I remember there was like every year it would happen like typically twice a year for each. We're just like all of a sudden we just disappear, like, uh, I'm dead this week, right? And it just, you can't, you just literally couldn't go on any further. I remember one of them was the most mark for me, and this one we earned, like we really earned it was the virtual acquisition. I still remember after like 34 days of like not quite no sleep but pretty close, pretty close to no sleep. I remember coming home, taking a shower, eating something. I lived a mile from the opposite to that point. Got dressed, had my over the shoulder bag, over my shoulder, shoes on, sat down on the bed for something. I woke up there 5.5 hours later, still basically sitting, leaned back against the bed, with my bag on, my shoes on. And my wife's looking at me going, I should have moved you, but I didn't want to wake you. I mean, I don't think you could have, right? At some point the bill becomes due,
Wil Schroter: the bill becomes due and so, so what ends up happening though is we start hard coding these behaviors at an early age.
Ryan Rutan: That was the thing, dude, it didn't feel like there was anything wrong, right, like this is the program, right? I, this is what I do. What do you mean? What do you mean this is weird? No, it's not.
Wil Schroter: My problem is my ambition didn't come with a shut off foul. My ambition didn't come. With a shut off belt, right? So at no point did it say, hey, you're good here, as we're recording today, no matter what I do at work today, it won't be enough. And here's the irony. I'm on I'm about to go on vacation, like, like 8 hours, right? I still feel that way. I don't have this ability. I never built this muscle where I can say you're good, right? So when we talk about this, you know, this isn't me saying, hey, I can't believe everybody else can't figure this out. Dude, I can't figure this out. I'm just saying, yeah, I'm just identifying the problem. I'm by no means saying I have like the answer. You know, something that's really funny about everything we talk about here is that none of it is new. Everything you're dealing with right now has been done 1000 times before you, which means the answer already exists, you may just not know it, but that's OK. That's kind of what we're here to do. We talk about this stuff on the show, but we actually saw. These problems all day long at groups.startups.com. So if any of this sounds familiar, stop guessing about what to do. Let us just give you the answers to the test and be done with it.
Ryan Rutan: We've built up this horrible habit, right? We've flexed this muscle. It is now the strongest muscle we have. Let's talk about the actual cost, right? Because we've talked about health a little bit. That's a fairly obvious one, burnouts there. We talked about technical debt. We're building products, but what is the debt that we're accumulating? What are the costs that that add up as we are just burning it at both ends and ambition is the North Star and the fuel and it's just all consuming or its relationships, it's our physical health, it's our mental health, our emotional health. Biggest danger, I think in all this is most of us don't see it until it's too late. When I saw the story before about falling asleep sitting up on a bed. I didn't feel tired, right? I didn't notice I was tired. I wasn't like, I should probably take a nap. I was like, I gotta tie my shoes and get back in the game, and then I was asleep, right? So you don't see it coming until it literally hits you over the head.
Wil Schroter: Let's talk about the things that you see right away and the things that are happening just as quickly, but you don't see. The first thing you see right away, this is always kind of funny, is you're going broke.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah, there's that.
Wil Schroter: It's numeric, right? You check your bank balance,
Ryan Rutan: that one's easy. Oh my God, sorry, I just had a memory of walking in with the worst piece of facetious good news I had ever delivered. I was like, good news guys, we've got 3 zeros back in the bank balance. Bad news, there's a negative sign in front of it this time. Oh my God, it it it look at the team laughed. It was funny, I guess at the time we were all really young and get like it didn't matter, like we ha doesn't matter, like we're young, we'll we'll figure. Figure it out like we'll we'll eat less eel fudge tonight, but yes, that is definitely one of them.
Wil Schroter: Around that time, I distinctly remember going to the ATM and I needed to get money to buy food, and I couldn't get any money out because the ATM only dispenses $20 and I didn't have $20. I had $16 and I I couldn't get, I
Ryan Rutan: couldn't
Wil Schroter: get
Ryan Rutan: my ATM somewhere and
Wil Schroter: that's. Is there an ATM that just has dollar bills, like a strip club or? I don't even know, right? Definitely a sad low point, but you tend to notice, right, that cause it's numeric, OK? Now there's a spectrum of things that happen from there to the endpoint on the other end of the scale, which I'm gonna say is your health. Your health becomes the the one thing you can't ignore, right, especially when it goes exponentially dead. So along the way, it kind of like like chapters along the way. The first thing you don't notice, but it happens almost immediately, are your relationships. It's You're just not hanging out with your friends as much. So they called and said, hey, are you getting together? I can't, I gotta do X Y Z, right?
Ryan Rutan: That's one I definitely noticed, definitely noticed, right, because you you do start saying no all the time, and I think you realize I did at least, I realized I'm starting to say no all the time, I'm starting to say all the time, like the other muscle. I just got really good at flexing it. I got really good at saying no, I got really good at not going. The thing I totally didn't recognize what the cost of that was gonna be your time. Yep,
Wil Schroter: and that's the thing, and you know, I've talked about this before, our kids come in to say hi to us, right? And we run a little bit of math that says like the task I have to get done right now versus a son wants hug. How fucked up is it that we even run that math, right? Like I'm, I hate the fact that that even enters my mind. Yeah,
Ryan Rutan: exactly, that should not involve calculus.
Wil Schroter: That's what I'm saying, but it's, it's this hard coded behavior that I've developed over a long period of time as a consequence to my ambition, right? And again, everyone talks about how ambition has all these positive things, and I'm like it does. look, I owe everything I've ever achieved to ambition. So again, I call it what it is, right? As I watched it develop, and I'm a pretty introspective guy, I start to look at things like, huh, that's that probably isn't right, OK? So the relationships is one. Now, relationships are a lot of different things. I mentioned friends, but it's your spouse. Where, like, when is the last time you, not you, but like when's the last time you went on a date or when's the last time you just spent time together without work being a fact, but for most founders like almost never. When is the last time you got together? With a friend, not because you had a purpose, but because you had time to get together with a friend.
Ryan Rutan: I just had this before we got on the podcast was talking to a new founder friend was asking me for some advice on on things like networking and I just sort of asked like what's your plan? How are you doing it right now? And it was so transactional and it it was so like tit for tat like what do I get from each one of these people I want to talk to and I thought like I really wanna see you warm this process up a little bit. I really want to see you not make this just a About, like, they're so purposeful, it has to have a point, like each and every conversation has to have a predefined outcome so that I know whether I won or lost, and like, oh, yeah, that's gonna leave you. Maybe you'll get some outcomes, but boy, you're gonna be, you're gonna be fried, you're gonna have no friends. Uh, so we talked about slightly more gently.
Wil Schroter: To me that tends to dovetail into the next chapter, which is the cost of your mental well-being. I just, as you start to disconnect from people, even the biggest introvert at some level needs some level of, you know. Connectivity or or discussion, it generally doesn't make you feel better, right? Even if you can go hardcore and say, yeah, I don't need anybody else, I'm good by myself, whatever, at some point, regardless of whether your friends are driving it or not, this level of ambition and intensity has a massive cost to your mental well-being. Another way that that that drags it down is, again, like every day for me, I wrestle with the fact that no matter what I get done, no matter what I get done, I could have done more.
Ryan Rutan: It's a good point, and I think it's one of those things to begin with. Like, I feel like it gets rewarded in Founder N so often this thing is like, you know, I'm, I'm a lone soldier. I'm the lone wolf. I asked this question. So when we run our workshops that we do, well, our funding 101 or uh Pitchtech perfection, I run some polls during those and I ask people some questions. One of the questions that I ask is about like how they're approaching this thing, you know, are, you know, are you working with a team? Are you seeking external help? Are you or no, I'm a wolf pack one is one of the responses. And the no I'm Wolfpack. One tends to be in the minority of the responses, which I'm always happy to see. But in this now I'm giving away a secret here for anybody that's listening so that they may not answer this in the future. Anybody who answers that I'm a wolf pack of one, I send a personal email to afterwards saying, I saw you said you're a wolf pack of one. I want you to know, you don't need to be. If you need an ear, I'm here. Sometimes we're wolfpack one by choice, sometimes we're not. And it's amazing the responses I get from those because I think that again, so people are so conditioned to like, this is what I have. To do, I'm the ambitious one. I'm on my own. I'm the one that's gonna hunt and kill everything that we're gonna eat. OK, cool, until it's not.
Wil Schroter: I think the other side of it too, especially this is by definition, a very lonely journey, even if you have hundreds of people working at your company. I think
Ryan Rutan: part of sometimes even more so when there's hundreds of people. Yeah, yeah,
Wil Schroter: exactly. Yep, agreed. I think what happens too is we look at our accomplishments, our ambition as a source of validation, and all of a sudden over period of time that validation. Turns into insecurity. It wasn't enough. It was what I said earlier in the show. I said, hey, at the beginning, if I ever made $100,000 I'd be happier than hell. And then you make it and you're like, well, now I'm not making $200 and all of a sudden what you have isn't enough, and that is the definition of being an ambitious founder is that what you have isn't enough and you have to have more. How often do you hear we're
Ryan Rutan: jumping the high jump and we hold the bar in our hands while we do it, right? No matter how high we jump, the bar just keeps going up.
Wil Schroter: It's like, how often do you hear founders say, one day we wanted to get to a million dollars, companies at a million dollars, everybody, we're good here, right? Stop selling more, we're at a million dollars. It's you could be out of your mind if you said that, right?
Ryan Rutan: The one of the ones that kills me is when people just talk about like compounding growth rates and they're just like, we want to achieve this growth rate or then I was like, OK, so where will that put you in 18 months? And they're like, they have no idea. It was just like they just wanted to grow. Like it was an arbitrary growth number and like, well, but you know, like that there should be like some bench. Mark you're trying to hit there, right? Like what's top on revenue? What's IIA? What is it you're trying to achieve with that 10% month over month growth or whatever it is they're like, we just felt like that was a strong growth
Wil Schroter: number. Yeah, no, I, I get it. And so as you move down that spectrum, I think about it, now we're broke, now our relationships are suffering. Now, of course, with that our mental well-being is suffering, and then that finishes the last step of that train is your health. The last step is where your health just gives up. Now for me often like I would be sick every 6 weeks for like. 20 years. I was constantly, constantly sick, because what I did is I just worked every possible hour as hard as I possibly could, and eventually my body just gave up, just great, yeah, yeah, like, it's
Ryan Rutan: what I was talking about earlier, it's like I remember this happening twice a year, right? Yeah, every year for like 10 years.
Wil Schroter: And it's just like it's crawl to the finish line over and over, and it was one of these things where I I built this habit that I don't have to stop or pace myself cause my body will tell me when it when we're done, right?
Ryan Rutan: I messed up you're taking that as a positive signal.
Wil Schroter: Oh my God,
Ryan Rutan: he's so smart, it knows when and how to totally shut me down. This is
Wil Schroter: awesome. I mean, come on, man, right? Like, and I gotta say, even though, you know, we've talked about this before, like my, my heart stopping all you didn't it to kind of said, hey, maybe we should we should stop this a bit. But beyond that, I'm starting to realize, and again, as as I get not young, I'm starting to realize that I can't even gamble anymore. It's not even like, hey, let me see how it goes. Now I've got to be like, uh, there's, I have friends that are in my age group now, right, late 40s and now into their 50s, who have like significant heart problems, who have significant health problems, right? Bypass surgeries. Oh my God, right? And it's like, like bowels, you know, we're not playing with house money anymore. Like this is dangerous. And I think here's what happens, we get to the end of that journey, if you will, in our health gives out. And for every founder I've ever talked to, that is like, even the most hard-headed founders are like, hey, maybe we got a problem here. It reminds me of, you know, with Steve Jobs like in his battle with cancer, the end of his career, he died young in his 50s, and, and like, he's like, no, I, I can just like outwork it basically. And I was like, damn dude, talk about your ambitions. The thing that's supposed to make you so clear, clouding your judgment at the most epic level. I mean, we're watching it in real time with Elon Musk now as he's becoming batshit crazy, you know, easily the most ambitious person alive, right? But his judgment in his just
Ryan Rutan: process about to face the other side of that sword, it feels like, man, unfortunately,
Wil Schroter: um, and he's actually been fairly public about his battles with depression and anxiety and everything else like that, and again. That's Elon Musk, right? I mean, again, you can't get more ambition, ambitious, right? He is the benchmark for ambition, but also everything that comes with it,
Ryan Rutan: right? That's it. But so you use Simone Biles is the contrast there. Tokyo Olympics. Yeah, she hit pause. She's like, I'm just not going to do this. I realized that my ambition has gotten the better of me. Yep, I'm hurting myself, and I'm just not gonna do this and it's gonna be really unpopular, and I'm gonna take, I'm gonna eat a torrent of shit from the internet. Doing this and she did. And she came back and she did, she did the right thing then and she did the right thing now. She came back and and proved that you can come back and and do what you need to do if you take care of yourself. If she had pushed through then, who knows, maybe she would have won the medals then, maybe she wouldn't have, doesn't matter, right? She proved that you can pause your ambition. There is a safety valve there that can be exercised if you're, you know, kind of aware enough to know how to do it. Kudos to her cause she's definitely got a better handle on it than I do, um, and more gold medals. And
Wil Schroter: there's something to that. I always think about that clouding of judgment in contrast to what I consider a rational person would look at our lives or our decisions and make a call. A couple weeks ago, I'm driving home from a founder lunch and I call one of my buddies, he's a friend of mine that you know, we're sitting there, it's like 2 o'clock, let's say on a Tuesday, and I'm driving home and I'm like, hey, yeah, you know, I've got to do this and this and this, whatever. And he's like, oh, that's cool. He's like, I'm actually just sitting in my pool right now. floating around. I'm like, wait, what? He's like, yeah, you know, my meetings are done for the day. I'm, you know, do you need help? Yeah, exactly. I'm like, wait,
Ryan Rutan: I'll I'll be there with a life preserver and a and a waterproof phone so you can get back to work. Dude,
Wil Schroter: it didn't even occur to me that anyone could ever do that at 2 o'clock on a Tuesday, right? Like. And he was so cavalier about it, right? Yeah, I said to him on the phone, I was like, only one of us is spending our day properly today. This. like, look, I'll be honest, I don't want to sit at 2 o'clock on a Tuesday in a pool, right? Like I would rather be getting something done that's kind of just how I'm built, but I, I use that example though, to point out how a rational person looks at the world. A rational person looks at the world like I got my work done. I'm ahead of plan. I wanna be in a pool. That is a very rational thing to do, and he's done very well in his career, so he's not lazy. I'm like, it would never occur to me that you could do that.
Ryan Rutan: On a Tuesday of all days, my God.
Wil Schroter: I said to him, I was like, I, I said, you are uh you are the nightmare that comes to life for me when I think about my staff not working.
Ryan Rutan: You are what my worst fears about work from home look like, yeah. Exactly, you know, I want to circle back on something because you talked to. This in the context of like our our health being the last thing to fall, and often it is, uh, sometimes it's not, but let's let's stick with that for a second and then the clouding the judgment. So imagine we now get to this point where we've sort of spent all the capital we have, right? Maybe the money, maybe the money is even there, kind of doesn't matter at that point, because you can't buy some of these things back. The relationships aren't there. Your, your mental and emotional health aren't there, and now your physical health starts to fall, and we wonder why we make bad decisions around this. Well, you have now isolated yourself, so you don't have. People around you because you've you've burned the relationships. You don't have people around you to tell you like, hey, you should probably think about this differently. You should probably do this. You should probably reconsider the way you're behaving right now. Your mental and emotional health are so shot that you have lost the plot completely and can't rationalize these things, uh, and then your physical health is failing and you don't know what to do about it and and it just all starts to compound and pile up on you. So I think again, it is so important to take stock of these things as early as you can, try to do something to curb the ambition when. You do realize that there are real costs at play here.
Wil Schroter: I distinctly remember how this was put into perspective for me. Ryan, after that whole episode where my heart stopped and you came and helped rescue me and into a hospital. I had so many things going on at that time, you know, we were, we were launching Startups.com. I still had all those startups that I'd started before, unsubscribe.com and all that other stuff, and I, I'm clearly a wreck. I mean, at which point I'm 37 years old and my heart's stopping, like, obviously I've gone too far. And I'd been at that pace
Ryan Rutan: or have you, or the ambitious person might say, you just hit peak performance. You outworked your own heart. Congratulations. Yeah,
Wil Schroter: right, right, right, don't want to do that again. And so, so I'm, you know, I'm 20 years deep on that on that treadmill. I'm at a point where you can't, like, I'm staring at the ceiling of a hospital bed, right, you know, like, like what the hell, man, right? I'm like, and you know, my daughter had just been born, had just gotten married. Like my life had kind of just started in like, you know, in that next chapter, and I'm like, and what am I doing? I got the best advice I've ever got in my life. It was, look, you're doing all of these things because you can, not because you should. And I thought that was for some reason, Ryan, that just flipped the switch for me, and and of course, as you know, that the wise Yoda that said that is my wife, and it stuck with me. I was like, wait a minute, it doesn't even occur to me that if I can do something that I wouldn't just do it,
Ryan Rutan: right? It's it I can therefore I must
Wil Schroter: I can therefore I must,
Ryan Rutan: right was our mantra,
Wil Schroter: right? Yeah, and how dangerous is that, right? So here's what I say for for all of us, right? Yes, you can do more. You can work more, you can risk more, you can do everything more. Yes, you can. That doesn't mean you should, because when you do that calculus, when you run through that gauntlet, and you say on the other side of it, what will be the cost to getting there, it's way higher than you think in almost every case, it's not worth it.
Ryan Rutan: Overthinking your startup because you're going it alone, you don't have to, and honestly, you shouldn't because instead, you can learn directly from peers who've been in your shoes. Connect with bootstrapped founders and the advisors helping them win in the Startups.com community. Check out the Startups.com community at www.startups.com to see if it's for you. Could be just the thing you need. I hope to see you inside.