Ryan Rutan: Welcome back to the episode of the Startup Therapy podcast. This is Ryan Ran joined as always by my friend, the founder and CEO of Startups.com, Will Schroeder. Well, it is no secret that as founders we get a little obsessed with things. We, we dive in, we go full on to our startups. This leads to burnout, and we know, like thanks to some of the, the, the new narrative that's appearing, that it isn't just all crush it, kill, go. You know, 80 hours a day. And so there are a lot of things we try to do to relax. And I know you've tried a bunch of stuff, a bunch of stuff, but like the whole sitting on the beach thing doesn't seem to work all that well for us. We can't really fully unplug and disengage. And so sometimes relaxation becomes as much of a frustration for me, and I know for you as just actually doing the work. And so what have you tried like what's worked for you, Will?
Wil Schroter: Here's the weird thing, I've tried everything. I mean, like, you know, and you and I've talked about this, especially I'd say in the last, right, probably decade of our lives, where we've realized that like working all the time also isn't the right answer. Fortunately obvious to a lot of people was less obvious to us. So then I was like, OK, so I'm gonna, I'll work less, so to speak, I'll relax more. And then I tried relaxing and it didn't work. It became a real issue. It became an issue where like, I knew I needed the downtime. I knew I needed to reset, come off the field, rest, and then, you know, go back uh healthier and more productive. I knew that was true, so it wasn't a matter of I'm not willing to to work less. It wasn't that. It was when I came off the field. I never felt rested. When I came off the field, like I was more distracted. It was almost like all I wanted to do was play and now you're keeping me on the bench. What's not worked for you? Like, what have you tried that just didn't work?
Ryan Rutan: A lot of the same stuff, right? So it's like the the traditional hobby sets, right? That all of those things. So like, for example, I, I think you you messaged me this morning early and and I responded, you know, that I was out, I was and I jokingly said that I was, you know, conducting a case study for today's episode and I I was running. Right? And so some of these things like people have all kinds of hobbies, and I've tried lots of different stuff. Something like running doesn't work at all for me because the entire time I'm running, I'm still just thinking about work. There's nothing else to do, right? I don't like to listen to podcasts. I don't like it doesn't doesn't work for me afterwards. I love to be able to take notes during podcasts. So it's the same kind of frustration. I'm just thinking. So I'm basically podcasting in my own head while I'm running this morning. I have no way to act on any of this stuff. And I think that's kind of the macro theme for me is basically anything that's where where I'm supposed to just be relaxed and like I've got nothing but time, like, like I'm on the beach, I'm I'm by the pool, I'm I'm walking, whatever it is. I enjoy these activities, but they don't recharge me as a as a reset, and I think it's because when I'm given that much free time. My mind gets really active, typically on a work startup problem, but I can't take any action. I think that's where that's maybe that's the same thing for you. That's where I start to turns from just not only not being restful to actually being actively frustrating. Absolutely. It makes it worse. halfway through my jog, I had this I was like, oh, I should test this thing, right? Something happened. I had to dodge a lady and a dog, and then I saw my mother-in-law running in the direction of be high fived. And then all of a sudden I was like, shit, what was that thing? Because if I had been sitting down, if I had been working. I would have just written it down. I would have typed it out. I would have done something that would have memorialized it, and I was running, I'm like, damn it, now I can't remember what was that thing I wanted to do, and it just turns into frustration cause I can't take action.
Wil Schroter: And the thing is we cognitively know that rest and relaxation is good and we're seeking it. So it's not like we're saying rest bad, we're saying rest good but it's not working. But we rest, yeah right. It's so like I would go on vacations and my wife and I were just talking about this last night and uh we were planning our our next anniversary trip, and she's like, you hate vacation. And I was like, you know, you're not wrong, I do hate vacation, and I suck at it. And and here's what happens. Let me just play this out, and I'm saying this because I've got to imagine that there's some other folks in the audience, right, you know, that that are listening to this, that are like, yeah, this is pretty much how vacation goes for me, but here's how vacation goes for me. I have two paths in planning the vacation. Path A is I plan a really nice, like rewarding vacation, which translates to a lot of expense. Path B is I, I, I do a phone it in. I don't give a shit where we go on vacation, right, which usually is a family vacation, right, because they're always the same. What ends up happening in both cases, if I go on a nice vacation, right, where like it feels like a reward like the place we're going is like super nice the entire time all I'm doing. Is almost like like an odometer running like a taxi, running the cost of this vacation,
Ryan Rutan: you're constantly real time calculating ROI. Yeah,
Wil Schroter: exactly.
Ryan Rutan: Am I getting $1800 a day, which would be how many per hour, right? Am I getting $75 per hour worth?
Wil Schroter: Now I'm stressed, right? I'm stressed that I'm sitting on this this beach chair. Right, staring at the ocean, where all I can think about is work, and now I'm more stressed that I'm stressed that I'm on I'm like this isn't working at all. And when I go on cheap vacation, right, just to wherever, I'm miserable the whole time. It doesn't feel like a reward at all. I'm like covered in in like dirt from all these other kids at Disney World or something like that. Well, I love the. Time with my kids at the same time, it's like, this doesn't feel relaxing whatsoever.
Ryan Rutan: I always have the sense that I'm also doing something in an environment that's somehow less enjoyable than my own home, right? Yeah, exactly. We have nice houses. We like, we've we've designed where we lived in a way that makes us happy to be there. And so like, if I go on something like run of the mill vacation. It feels like a step backwards. Like, I, it's funny we've said this before, but my wife and I both said this. Sometimes when we go home, that feels like the vacation, right? To me that's kind of the goal. That's the way I wanted it to feel, right? At this point, we don't go on vacations for relaxation. We don't go on vacations to to reset. We don't go on vacation to escape our everyday. We go on vacations to see things we haven't seen before or or have new experience and I think for us that does work, and I, I do enjoy those. But it also isn't necessarily a a a reset in in that same that traditional sense that it's like, no, it's worse. Take the book, go sit by the pool, read it, you know, it doesn't work, right? Just absolutely doesn't work
Wil Schroter: for me. What bothered me was how consistently ineffective it was, right? How everyone else does it and everyone else seems to like my wife's great at it. She goes and she, she enjoys herself, she recharges, just everything you're supposed to do, and I'm glad she does. But when I go, I'm just anxious the whole time. All I'm thinking about is work. In fact, for a long time I used to say, I can't wait till I can get get some vacation time so I can be better at work. To me, like, vacation was literally just a mechanism to do more work later, um, and I was OK with that. But my point is, what it didn't do, woefully failed at, was getting me to to reset my mind. Getting me to think about something else other than work, in a productive, useful, happy way. and all the other things that I've tried, I I've tried meditation, which is almost like that frustration on steroids. I love the idea of meditation. The practice of meditation is maddening to me. It's like the worst place you can put me.
Ryan Rutan: I cannot get rid of the monkey thoughts, like it, my, my, my, the monkey on my back is way too strong. It rides around, it slaps me in the face, and it's like, think about this, think about that. Think about this, think about that. And I'm like, just let it go. Like I, I, I go back to those earliest days of listening to the Headspace app where where Andy was like, just treat each thought as if it's passing traffic. And I'm like, yeah, but every bit of that passing traffic says something to me. I have to say something back. Some of them drop stuff off. Some of them want me to put things in their cars like. Every bit of it, like there's there's no just watching it go by from doesn't work.
Wil Schroter: It's funny, I loved Andy cause obviously he's got the best voice in the world. Um, like nobody could have done a better job, and I remember thinking about this, of Andy at getting me to try to relax my mind and by the end of like day 10 of Headspace, I hated Andy wasn't his fault? I was like, this guy just reminds me of being trapped in a coffin.
Ryan Rutan: Right, if you tell me, if you tell me to let my thoughts go one more time, Andy, I'm gonna find you.
Wil Schroter: What's interesting though, Ryan, is, I think, you know, the common narrative, for all the right reasons, is that relaxing and taking a break and going on vacation is how you reset from work. That's just how you do it. And what I found over and over and over again, more so with founders, is it's actually not what we're built to do. However, however, that's not the same as saying, so let's just work more, right? What it's saying is we have to find an entirely different way to relax.
Ryan Rutan: Oh, cause I, cause it doesn't work, right? And so I think we, we do wanna to play devil's advocate here for just a second, like, so we, we do know that some people can unplug, right? There are people that can do this, and so it's, it's not that. Vacations don't work and for some people. So I just I wanna make sure we're not overgeneralizing
Wil Schroter: here. I'm, I'm saying for most people it works great
Ryan Rutan: works great. So here's here's, but so I am, I'm saying even within the overgeneralization of just the the founder population. I'm trying to think of of founders that I know. So is this just a founder condition, or is this a subset of a a personality type within the the overall founder archetype? What do you think? Oh,
Wil Schroter: I'm sure it goes beyond that. The reason I think it seems to be so damn um prevalent within founders is because we tend to create our worlds. If I'm an attorney, it's not that I'm not dedicated to my craft, and I'm a hard worker, but I'm not creating law. Right, like I'm, I'm thinking about a case that, you know, I'm trying to think creatively about how I'm gonna attack something, but it's not existential. Like we get into this in a very existential way, and we are creating the universe. If you have that type of mind that is running and building and creative nonstop, I would almost argue it is a disservice to turn that mind off. Now, most people again are gonna. Take that and say, well, what you're saying is you just keep working. No, what we're saying and what we're gonna unpack in this episode, is how to take that energy and maintain it, but do it somewhere else.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah, because I, I think in, in, in the, the founder's mind, right, it's, it's, if we're not building something, right? If if we're not building next feature, next campaign, then we're just sitting and probably worrying about. What's already been built or the fact that we're not currently building, and that's the real trap, right? And I think that's the the problem. So if, if moving to relaxation mode, if that's all that buys you, is anxiety around the fact it's not working, then then I that's where you and I are most of the time, then clearly just pushing into relaxation has a net negative impact, right? Cause I like I've tried the lounge on the beach approach. I found myself more stressed. Right, my mind was just spinning on all the things that I could have been doing other than that, and it's hard to let go. Why is this, right? Like why is just relaxing so useless for us?
Wil Schroter: I think because our minds want to grind, right? Our minds want to chew on something all the time. And I think when we try to listen to Andy, and we try to say, OK, mine, stop chewing on things, it's not what we're built for, right? And again, that's why it feels so foreign to us. And for the longest time, I kept saying it's my fault, it's my problem. I can't unwind, so I have to change. In a while back, I learned. That I was doing it wrong. I was approaching, relaxing in the wrong way. Now I had a hint of this, that that something was was off because a lot of times when I would try to relax, I'd play video games. In the game that I would play more often than not was called Civilization, which, you know, I, I'm sure some of the folks that right I know you've played, etc.
Ryan Rutan: It's the equivalent of a full-time job.
Wil Schroter: Well, it is, and you're basically creating a civilization, making all the same kind of strategic and tactical decisions that you would make building a startup. What I realized now is the reason I was gravitating toward that. It's cause my mind wanted to chew on something. Yeah. I just needed something else for it to chew on.
Ryan Rutan: Our minds are problem solving engines, right? That that's that's specifically what like we've geared ourselves around or we already had a propensity towards that engine doesn't just sit at idle simply because you're sipping margaritas in Maui or whatever, right?
Wil Schroter: It's that
Ryan Rutan: that's the
Wil Schroter: thing to run. Now, I want to use, because I think this is important. I want to use a different scenario because we keep talking about like time off or like going to meditate. I want to talk about maybe the most important moment that I needed this distraction the most is at 3 a.m. when I wake up and my mind is racing on a problem that, by the way, I will not solve right now, OK? So I mean this has happened to me all the time, every night. I'll wake up at some bizarre hour in the morning and I'll be like, oh my God, this problem, OK, this is the way my mind works and I'm 100% sure. It's the way that our our
Ryan Rutan: listeners, I had 3 of these wake ups last night, uh, 2 work related, one preparing for paperwork for moving to Spain stuff, right? Literally at 3 o'clock in the morning, there is nothing I can do at this point, nothing I can do. All I can do is think about it.
Wil Schroter: It never gets solved. That's the worst part. It never gets solved. I want to hold on to that for a second because this is actually a really important building block to all of this. As founders of startups, we have an endless number of problems that actually don't have a solution anytime. Soon. In other words, like, we need to get more customers. OK, sure, everyone needs more customers. But that process will essentially take years to get to that milestone, maybe months. What, what won't happen is we'll solve it that day. And like, we got customers don't need to worry about that anymore. Done. And so what I found was I'm up at 3 a.m. and I'm grinding on a problem that number one, I'm not going to solve at 3 a.m. I'm just gonna worry about it. And number 2, I can't solve anytime soon. This is a big one. I don't think founders appreciate or understand how few of our problems can be solved anytime soon, or will be solved anytime soon, or
Ryan Rutan: will ever be solved, right? Some of these things we're we're constantly chipping away. Yeah, I think it's the case that in as as a founder within a startup, we rarely get to declare done, right? Very few things are ever done as in it's any level of finality. And so I think that's where, like, and I think this is where you're going with this, that's why like the selection of of personal projects, something that's still mentally engaging, creative outlet, physical work, something, but that there is sort of a finite point of victory where you can say, hey, that's done, I did it.
Wil Schroter: Yep, 100%. This actually happened yesterday, and you, you were there when it happened. Yesterday internally, uh, we announced that we just launched a huge, huge feature on the platform, um, to do member search with AI. It allows people to go on into like a natural language search explain for the audience and find anybody in our community that fits what you're looking for, right? It's so awesome. It's one of the best pro it's the best product we've ever. But the reason I'm bringing it up is because it actually launched yesterday. And, and Ryan, you were at the all hands meeting when we were doing the final demo, and when we hung up, I actually stood up from my chair and yelled at the top of my lungs, fuck yeah, because I, because I realized this happens so rarely. We have so few actual finish lines and this one was a big one. Right, maybe we have 2 a year at best.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah, and and again like with some of those mileage varies and, and even there like look at something like that, like we rolled out member match. That part of it's done, right? The product piece is done. Now we gotta go work on it. We got 5 years we gotta promote it, we gotta get people using it. We gotta get so like even even our Duns just tend to lead. It's just you kind of get around the corner like, OK, I made it around that corner, and now there's nothing but but road ahead of me again and so. It's, it's even within those, it's rare that we get to that like true moment of finality. We get to these moments of victory, right? Absolutely. But that's a midseason victory. There's still a lot of games to be played uh before we can call that done.
Wil Schroter: Often those milestones, you don't even notice when they happen.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah, 100%.
Wil Schroter: My favorite thing is exactly this, like a website launch, and like you want there to be a ribbon cutting moment or like a giant like, like fake switch that you flip. In reality, a developer somewhere just hits enter and, you know, now you've launched, right? Like it's the amount of effort you've put into this, right, the payoff is zero, but I want to step back for a second, and I want to inventory a couple things that we covered here and make make sure they get isolated as as key building blocks here. One, for many of us, our minds will not stop. It's a a a thankless effort to try to make them stop. And and the truth is, our relaxation doesn't have to equate to stopping our brains, and I don't think anybody's ever said that to us. I think it's always be, no, slow down, take a breather, etc. and you'll be better off. No one ever says go channel that somewhere.
Ryan Rutan: That it's the thing, because it doesn't get channeled, right? I think what what it's basically the equivalent of keeping your foot on the gas, but shifting into neutral. Engines still revving, RPMs are high, we just, there's nothing happens, there's no movement, there's no progress.
Wil Schroter: I was playing baseball with my son last night, you know, I, I got him this nerf bat. So that we can play indoors in the basement that ends well, worst idea ever, right? Uh, I get him the bat, he's over the moon, like the best gift he's ever gotten, right? And I was like, Dad, can we go a play? And so me and and him and uh Sarah, my wife, uh, we go downstairs in the basement. It's not a huge basement, we have just enough room to like, you know, throw the ball, but it's, you know, it's cold outside. And so we throw in the ball got nerf ball, nerf bat. First pitch he cranks the line drive. I mean, he connected beautifully right into my wife. I knew where this is going. And she was like, we're done, we're done. Anyway, my point is, last time I played with him, he wants to play the uh baseball thing, right? So we played forever. He scored like 23 runs and I was like, OK, you know, let's take a break. And at that moment where I'm exhausted, I've been up since 4 a.m. it's like 7 p.m. now, where I'm exhausted, he just wants to keep going. Again, in the back of my head, I'm like the, the answer isn't to find a way to, to have him do less. It's to find a way to channel that energy to something where he can do it where it's 7 o'clock at night, he's gonna go to bed an hour. But my, my point is. I'm starting to realize that for certain types of energy, the goal isn't to stop energy. The goal is to channel energy. And I think that's I, I wish I had known that sooner. I certainly know it now. I wish I'd known it sooner. Uh, Ryan, you've done martial arts. That's a big part of martial arts. Yeah. Channeling your opponent's force, so to speak. Yeah,
Ryan Rutan: well, and you know it was funny, but uh so jiu-jitsu was one of those activities that actually worked well for me because it requires a full mental shift and focus. When there's some highly trained physically strong person trying to choke you, bend your joints in the wrong directions, sit on you until all the air squashes, whatever it is, right? Like there's real consequences to that. So you pay attention, you
Wil Schroter: get my. My customer acquisition costs. I,
Ryan Rutan: you know, it's funny, I never thought about that, despite the fact that we'd actually mixed these two things pretty heavily because at the early stages, the way I was doing jiu-jitsu was in return for some business consultation to the owner of the studio, right? We were trading off, so we were literally go from talking, here's how to structure marketing, here's how we can look at your CPC. Here's how we can, we can work on your Google ads to him choking me out and brutalizing me,
Wil Schroter: right? So instead of having you tap out, he's like lower ca.
Ryan Rutan: That was it. I had to lower cal or he would snap my, he would snap my, my shoulder.
Wil Schroter: So one of the elements is, is not trying to stop energy, but trying to channel energy, right? I think that's one a second element is this concept that we don't have a lot of things in the startup world that tell us we're done. The sense of finality of accomplishment of being able to walk away from something today and say I did that exactly the way you felt when you left Jujitsu, bruises notwithstanding. Like that, that the way you feel when you're you're done with soccer, like you get this feeling where you're like, I feel like something finished. I think that fucks with us, and I think it's something that that we do not appreciate nearly as much as we need to. A parenting is the same way, by the way, there's, you know, there are clear milestones, but there's not enough of them. No,
Ryan Rutan: there are no exit ramps, uh, for sure. Yeah, I, it's interesting because I think that with with certain things like with sports, so for me, soccer, fishing, jiu-jitsu, these things that are all fairly physical activities, they they do have a start and a stop. But there isn't also a done necessarily. I mean, it's some someday there will come ad where I don't play soccer anymore, so they will come a done where I don't I can't imagine not fishing, but there's always the next time, right? Like the the challenge with fishing, we did it last night, uh, finally caught something too, a little flounder, we're gonna have it for lunch today, but there's always the kids picked up on it right away. It's one more cast, we'll say last cast, and there's one more cast cause there's always the chance that the next cast is the one. And so what's been interesting and And I, I really want to get your take on this cause you've had a lot of these in the in the last few years, which are relatively large scale projects, but they do actually have like a a more of a sense of completion, you're in a huge one now. But so for example, for me, there were, there have been a couple. The one was around kind of building our at the previous house where we built out the little little kind of gardens and chicken coop and stuff and so like there was a sense of completion. I built the kids' playhouse. And there was a sense of completion on those things. My pond of two years ago was a fantastic one because it involved all of these things that I love, physical work, design, science, biology, like it it was just all this really interesting stuff. And because there was sort of a, even there, it's not really a final point because I'm still optimizing, right? I'm still figuring out like what are the balance of fish, how do I do this stuff, but there was there's a pond now. There wasn't a pond, now there's a pond and that Felt great, right? That was truly energizing for me, waking up, you know, wake up at 4:30 in the morning, instead of thinking like, oh dear God, what will be today? Will we get enough traffic? Well, it was, I wonder if the rate of flow is too high, given the amount of surface area I have based on the gravel size that I selected, right? This this shit.
Wil Schroter: But that's a solvable problem. That's exactly. So that's where our story begins. This is the longest intro of all time. That's where our story begins. I think that, again, everybody's version is gonna be different, but what I found was that I needed a problem, a different problem to work on that was big enough to matter. You know, Ryan, you're obviously familiar with the story, but like, yeah, years ago, I started to get really into carpentry into woodworking, like building stuff. And I think it checked a lot of boxes for me. Incidentally, I meet a lot of other woodworker founders. I think that uh I think because it checks some of the same boxes, which is we like to create, we like to invent. I like things that have a skill tree attached to them if we're going back to video game references, where you can kind of level up, you know, like carpentry, home building, things like that have endless skill trees, everything from being able to learn how to build furniture to do electrical. To do plumbing, like, you name it, like it goes on forever. A few years back, 4 years ago, we were about to remodel our home, and by this point, Ryan, you know, I had built out my workshop and everything else like that, like, you know, I, I got really, really into it. What was initially driving me uh toward this was a sense or two things, just what I just described. I found that when I was building things. I was not thinking about work, and it was the only, only, only time where I wasn't thinking about work. And, and, you know, glad for it because my hands were in front of a table saw or a mor or some spinning blade that that required some focus, and I found that the second thing that I, I didn't know that I was looking for or that I needed was completion. At the end of the day, I had completed a project. And there was an overwhelming sense of finality, and it felt good. It felt really good, right? It reminds me of the scene, I don't know if you remember this, in Fight Club, where Edward Norton is trying to figure out like, he's like, you know, going through life, whatever, and he finds Fight Club and he ends up, you know, getting in a fight and he's like, and it felt good, right? Like I. Granted, like that was a very bizarre and twisted version, but it's kind of what he meant. He's like, I,
Ryan Rutan: I knew I was looking for something to channel some energy, needed something with a sense of completion, needed, all those things.
Wil Schroter: Yeah, and obviously the premise of Fight Club is much cooler than the premise of Woodworking Club, but the same feeling, right? Um, I knew I needed to build birdhouses. It's. So I get into it, right? I go down this rabbit hole and and you've been watching this uh develop. So a few years ago, we decided we're gonna remodel our house and uh and I was breaking down all the costs to do it. This is right before COVID, and, and I said to my wife, I was like, you know, like for, for what it's gonna cost us to fully remodel a house, cause you're really paying for it twice. I was like, we should just go build a new house,
Ryan Rutan: a house, right?
Wil Schroter: And that's where it began. That's that's where my obsession began. And so, for, for the folks in the audience, what I ended up doing was, I was like, I not only want to build a house, I want to do everything. I like I I wanna design the house, I want to learn 3D modeling, I want to learn interior design. I want to learn um structural engineering, like the basics, 3D modeling plus rendering, so I could, you know, figure out exactly what everything would look like. I
Ryan Rutan: still trip out, man, when we go to the house now to the site and walk around. There because I spent, you know, probably an hour in total inside that place when it was still just a 3D model and I was headsets on running around with an Xbox controller. Although I still, I, I wish that you would included in real life the feature where I could just levitate between floors. That
Wil Schroter: was the stairs. That was pretty neat or become a drone and fly around it. So here's here's why this and why I'm setting it up and why this mattered. What I was looking for was a massive overwhelming challenge. Now, for a lot of people are like, fuck that, I've already got a massive overwhelming challenge, like, it's my kid or it's my my har. Why would I want another you psychopath? And here's why, because it gave me something my mind was looking for, which was a really powerful challenge, so powerful. That it could force me to have to think about that at the expense of work. Now, again, a lot of people say, well, I don't want anything at the expense of work, dude, if you're built like we are, that ain't your problem, right? Your, your problem isn't, oh, I guess I'll become lazy and not work. It's like that is, that's crossed that bridge a long time ago. That ain't your problem, right? Your problem is you are so consumed by work, you don't have. The ability to recharge, which is making you a worse player. Yeah. That's the part that I know I missed for years, you know what I mean? Yeah.
Ryan Rutan: For sure. So look, you you're building a house, we're getting ready to engage in another international move. I've decided that international moves are actually one of those things for me. It's like truly it's, it really is. It's a, it's a full creative project that you have to go through in your redesigning life. Is there in your mind a a risk like, how do you do the calculus? It does have to be big enough to matter, right? If you're just like, I'm going to, I don't know, I'm gonna mow my lawn. It has a sense of completion and it's a physical activity. Yeah, grass grow right back.
Wil Schroter: But it is how people feel when they clean like their room or their house. 100%. A lot of people use cleaning as a method whether they realize it or not, to get to completion. They say it makes me feel good, and what they're saying is it makes me feel like I've completed something, and that's a powerful feeling.
Ryan Rutan: It is also one of the number. One, procrastination activity. Oh
Wil Schroter: yeah,
Ryan Rutan: you gotta be careful with that one, right? It's like I could do that next campaign or I could tidy my desk again, from this side to that side in at least an hour. Is there, so it's gonna be big enough, but like what about, what about too big, right? Is there a risk of going too big? What if the second obsession, because I know the people out there again like because one of the things is just like. Will they do it at all, right? As, as you just said, like they're gonna think, oh this is a divergence from work, I don't need that. I never need that. Yeah, you do, but is there a place where the second obsession there's a risk of it overshadowing the startup itself and how do you keep from accidentally prioritizing the the the side passion over the main hustle. Now I, I've never had that become a problem. I don't think you've ever had that become a problem, but I think when people hear things like, you know, I'm building an entire house, I'm doing everything from the CAD to the to the wiring to the carpentry to the cabinetry. Oh, they're going. How do you actually do both those things?
Wil Schroter: 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 solve 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. As you know, because you've been on site, uh, Ryan came and visited me a few weeks ago and he came on site and he was helped me build stuff out in the house. I am way into everything, like every last detail of this house, and it's a big house, right? So, so the gravity of it, of everything that, that I need to do is significant. And so. But Ryan, you've watched me do it, and in some case you helped me do it. I, you know, I've built every cabinet in the house. I've built 3 kitchens, I've built a bar, I've built every closet, every
Ryan Rutan: vanity.tire workshop worth of like 80 ft of benches and yeah,
Wil Schroter: I mean, everything. And how did I do that? Like how did I find the time to do it? Honestly, it was kind of this simple. I wake up bananas early and and I put in 2 to 3 hours a day before the day starts. Now when people say that it's like, OK, you, you can't do much in 2 to 3 hours, bullshit. I to tell you
Ryan Rutan: 4 years you sure as hell can. yeah,
Wil Schroter: you can. Yeah, you can. Um, it adds up way more than you think. Most people just don't have the dedication to do it, and I'm not Johnny dedicated. It's just something that I love, which is why I'm doing it, right? But here's where it gets interesting. At 3 in the morning, as soon as that, oh shit, how are we gonna market member match thing comes up, right? Now I have a process. where I say, been here a million times. I know this. I, I can't answer this. Let me go switch gears to something, uh, so some problem to do with this house thing. Um, I can solve immediately, right? So it's like a certain joint that I needed to put in it or how I'm gonna configure lighting or something like that. It works every single time. I've found a way to take that energy and just channel it instead of trying to stop it and somebody damn it up. I just channel it, but here's the key. I channel it into something I can actually solve, right? So this morning, and this is stupid and minor and dumb. Uh, this morning, Ryan, you came in, you helped me. We're building, you know, all the, the benches for the, the new workshop in the house, and I was trying to figure out how to get all the bench tops to line up because there's like a, like a 45 ft long uh countertop that has all these 6 ft, you know, butcher block sections. Again, none of this is important, that's my point. And I was thinking like, damn, like the, the, the, if I but them up end to end, they're not gonna be like exactly symmetrical, so how can I make sure each of them is cut perfectly so they all line up so it doesn't. Creating a long arc. None of this matters. That's my point. The point is at 3 a.m. I can solve that problem. I can run through a bunch of, uh, different ways that I can do the cuts, the mortices, everything else like that, and figure that out. It's stupid, and that's exactly why it's beautiful because then I'm, then I go back to sleep and I'm like, I guess I've solved my morticing, you know, countertop problem, and I know most people are gonna be like, I would never care about that if. Really what I cared about was, you know, launching new product, whatever, and I get it. It's exactly what I would have said. That's why what you're doing this other obsession has to become an obsession. It has to be something that you can grip into and be as worried about that or as excited as obsessed as you are about work. And and I know the problem that I'm solving there is minuscule and dumb and damn near irrelevant, but I also know. That if I put my focus there, my problem is solved. The
Ryan Rutan: actual
Wil Schroter: problem,
Ryan Rutan: which is the the the 3 a.m. wake up and worry, which never solves. I've never solved the startup problem at 3 o'clock in the morning that I can remember, and you never will. Yeah, right, but 3 a.m. creativity can actually produce something tangible, right? Whether it's, you know, the right cuts for to to. Eliminate that arc in in a 60 ft of uh of workshop bench or checking the tides to see what time I should do. I need to be out at 5 or 6:15 to go hit some fish this morning.
Wil Schroter: Here's where the payoff is for work though. I actually sleep, so that's one. But when I get up and I get ready to work, my mind is clear. Right? I don't feel like shit. I don't feel burnt out. I can't wait to start work.
Ryan Rutan: It's
Wil Schroter: it's literally the opposite of burnout.
Ryan Rutan: It's OK. But let's, let's talk about that for a second because I think that there's also this notion that like, could this just become like double burnout, right? Am I just gonna double the rate of my burnout because I'm now spending energy in this other way, you know, and are we, are we actually solving something here, or are we just transferring this obsession from one thing to another without solving the root problem? Is this just a coping mechanism? Does it matter? So I, I think these are the questions that people are probably asking. And you and I have answers to them mostly through experience, because I certainly haven't thought specifically about that, like, is this actually the healthiest way of doing this? It's the way that works. I can say that. Yeah,
Wil Schroter: there's no question, right? Here's here's why it's been healthy for me, OK? Uh, this past weekend, you know, I'm installing all those crazy heavy, uh, benches that we're putting in. Those things are like the size of each one's the size of a refrigerator, and we're installing 10 of them, and, and they're heavy, and I'm moving all those things around. They're heavy as hell. Every single muscle in my body is screaming by the end of the day Sunday, and I think to myself, all I want to do tomorrow is not lift heavy shit. And go work on launching our product. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like, it's the first time I found a way. To come off the field, actually recharge, and go back. Now, a lot of people look at and say, wait, aren't you super tired? Yes, I sleep like a baby, and I wake up the next morning and I don't have to lift the goddamn thing. So like that's not my problem anymore, right? My problem was when I spent all weekend obsessing over stupid stuff I couldn't fix. And then Monday I wake up and get this. I'm like, I need to work on uh stupid stuff I can't fix. You see, like I, I've been. wallowing in the problem the whole time instead of disconnecting from it. I, I never came off the field. That's why I was so burnt out.
Ryan Rutan: You know, it's funny. I had an example of this, uh, a friend of mine, uh, we went through a business school together and he, he went off, eventually made it over to to Wall Street and then quit Wall Street and became a day trader. This guy just could never put it down. There's also nothing you can do on Saturday or Sunday or after 4:30, but he would obsess and worry and wait and worry and wait. I'm like, dude, you literally actually can't do anything until Monday, right? The analysis is done, you're just waiting to see what happens to know whether you're gonna buy it and just it was, it was the same kind of thing or just like it just wouldn't ever switch off at a point where he absolutely had no ability to to change the outcome. And it just hated them constantly.
Wil Schroter: Let's stick with that cause I, I, I, I really want to dig into that for a second. If we give ourselves in a given week, let's say 40 hours to worry about something, and I'm not saying the part of doing anything, I'm saying literally just worrying about it in some form or another, right? Whether it's between slack chats, um, you're journaling to yourself, you're talking to your friends, you're complaining to your spot, like, you name it, whatever, whatever your version of how you express bullshit, you know, worry is, let's say you spend 40 hours a week doing it. It's because you had 40 hours available to do it, but the actual Fixing of the problem doesn't take any amount of time. Like if you and I are worried about, let's say we're trying to raise more money and we're worried about running out of money, we're gonna spend so much time worrying, but the amount of time it takes to do something about it still may be a fair amount. We've exhausted so much energy. In worrying, OK. Now, what I did was I took all the time that I was otherwise gonna be worrying, and I did something else with it. That's it. That's all I did. I just took my worry time and put it into something that was easy to worry about. Like, like when you come into the workshop and you and I were working on something, I think we were building drawers, you know, the time before that, and I'm like, we just have to make sure that this rabbit joint is exactly 5 days inches, so it, it, it that's it, it's all we have to worry about and not cutting your fingers off. And it's beautiful. Because it's so dumb, right? And I mean dumb in a good way. It's simple and it's obvious
Ryan Rutan: and it's achievable. Exactly when we're
Wil Schroter: done with it,
Ryan Rutan: nearly immediate. We
Wil Schroter: just have this this beautiful outcome, but
Ryan Rutan: it's also meaningful, right? I think that's the thing you can't just cumulative, can't just pick dumb. Wrote work, like, it's the kind of like, oh well, would a crossword work? and maybe for somebody, not for me, right? I just feel like every every word just prompts another thought. So yeah, I think that it it does need to have like some meaning again sense of completion, but sense of completion of something maybe with some permanence. I'm trying to think of this now. So with things that I've done that gave me some of this catharsis, I'm trying to think if any of them. weren't somehow memorialized.
Wil Schroter: Let's dig into into jiu-jitsu. You were leveling up, you, you were learning moves, techniques, uh, things that you didn't know before. You had a clear sense of progression. So maybe the memorialization, maybe the finality isn't necessarily it as much as it is that that sense of progression.
Ryan Rutan: I think the sense of progression was definitely there. There is absolutely no sense of of of finality because each each role, each scenario presents something different,
Wil Schroter: right? You bet, which is what makes it exciting. Yeah, but, but knowing like, like when you play soccer, knowing that you won the game, again it goes back to to milestone, but but it it it's a true sense of accomplishment, you know, when you'd come with me to play uh hockey and and and we played over another founder's house, you know, built a hockey rink in his backyard, and I said I would tell you I was like, I don't actually care about winning that game because it's just my friends and I, and we switch teams like every other game, so like the people you're playing against, you're playing with in the in the next round. But holy cow, I like to win. And and when I say that, not like, uh, because I beat the other team, nothing like that. It just feels like I did something.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah. You, you did the best you could at that moment.
Wil Schroter: Yeah, also, if I lose, I kind of don't care, like there's just no consequence, but if I have a great. or or if I have a hat trick like in whatever I'm like, I feel freaking great about it. And it's weird because I know there's no consequence to this, but I also know that like mentally, I needed a win. I, I needed a milestone. I needed, you know, a level up. And I think what what you're saying because you said this to me when you were in town last time when we were working on that workshop, you said, well, it's really cool that what we're building will be here forever. Yeah. you know, when we build this workbench, whatever, I know you'll be working at it all the time and I know that like, you know, you'll pass this to your kids, so to speak.
Ryan Rutan: Give me a lot of joy to think about the fact that like we're building something that you're gonna use to build a bunch of other stuff that will go on and have their. It's, it's funny, it's, it's amazing, it's, it's almost a perfect metaphor for what we're building with startups.com, right? We're building the time gonna help to build a bunch of other businesses and people to go and do their thing, right, which is, You bet.
Wil Schroter: It has an exponential factor. What's interesting about it to me is that, yes, I'm building an entire house. With my free time, so to speak. I know I know that sounds bananas, and it is, and I'm not suggesting do that, right? For me specifically for my personality, in order to achieve what I needed to achieve, which is to find a different way to channel my obsession, it had to look like that. I didn't know that. I didn't like set out to do that, frankly, it ballooned on me, but it worked really well, like freakishly well. And now when I talk to other founders, right, I'm finding more and more of them that do have an obsession. They have an amazing amount of peace that comes with it, where they're like, when I'm doing that, I am in my zone, I'm in my z.
Ryan Rutan: Stick on this for a second, because I think there's a misconception that this is a thing that comes as you achieve a certain level within your startup, where you're now allowed to have this other thing, and you are already feeling very fulfilled with your startup, and then you added this other thing. I think if we were to do some sort of dissection on any one of these, the vast likelihood is that they feel that way because they started the side hustle. They, they, they achieved both together, not one because of the other. It wasn't causal, it wasn't because I achieved success in startup. I was able to go pick up this this side hustle that gives me all this zen uh happiness, not the case.
Wil Schroter: And again, I think I needed to see the other side of it, see how, how, how these other things did not work for me, in order to have the appreciation that I do. That this other obsession is is something that that I've needed mentally and emotionally for decades, and I just didn't know it. And I gotta say, the more overwhelming it got, and I know overwhelming strikes fear into people's hearts, and I get that. I understand why, but the more overwhelming it got, the more I enjoyed it, right? At which point I was like, fuck it, I'm gonna build everything in this house myself. Yeah. And I remember my uh my contractor who, you know, has been helping me through this, is like, what do you mean? Like you're gonna be like a table or something? I'm like, no, I'm, I'm gonna literally build everything, every kitchen cabinet, every vanity, every closet, every cubby, every everything. And he's like, when are you going to do that? I'm like, I have no idea. Actually don't know yet. And then uh I picked up another habit, this is 4 or 5 years ago. And you and I talked about this on the on the podcast in our early podcast actually about one pebble at a time. The way you move mountains is one pebble at a time. So I started to apply that. So like, you know, this morning I get up, right, you know, crazy early, that, that just happens to be my schedule, but I go into my workshop and I have exactly one hour worth of work to do. Today involved standing and and applying poly, so it just needed to dry so I couldn't.
Ryan Rutan: So you decided, you decided to do that and you're you're taking the, the original finish off all those tops.
Wil Schroter: Yeah, I ended up getting. You know, for those in the audience that absolutely don't care, I ended up getting 60 ft worth of butcher block countertops that were all stained espresso. Happy accident this weekend that I texted you and showed you the picture. I happened to take a bunch of this, the stain off by accident of one of the countertops and lo and behold, the wood below it was way more beautiful. And I was like, God damn it. It's like
Ryan Rutan: the one time I buy pre-finished, I end up taking all the finish.
Wil Schroter: I have to take all the finish off all of them. So that's what I was doing at 5 in the morning. I do it in just little chunks. If I said, oh my God, I have to do the whole thing. I look at it and I say, no, I have to do an hour a day, 2 hours a day, depending on, you know, how much time I have in the morning, and all that adds up. All that adds up. Remember when we went to the storage container where all the stuff is sitting flat packed and yeah, yeah, like, so everything I've built like the entire kitchen, I would build it like every cabinet, every, everything, and then take the whole thing apart. Flat packet, wrap it in in uh in bubble wrap and store it like Tetris.
Ryan Rutan: Tetris is exactly what it looks like, except that it's, it's uh 3 dimensional Tetris.
Wil Schroter: It's 3 dimensional Tetris. It also weighs hundreds of pounds, yeah, which we also discovered. Anyway, point is, every single thing in there that's stacked in there, yeah. With an hour worth of work, yeah, compounded over a long enough period of time,
Ryan Rutan: which like it's an important piece because I you you said it earlier, which was like, what can you actually get done in 1 hour or 2 hours? Turns out a lot, but there's there's two pieces to that. You can actually get a lot done, but if you really feel that that's true, you're saying like what could you actually get done in in an hour or two? Well, then you can easily reverse that same logic and say, well, what were you gonna do with it anyways? If you can't get anything done in that hour or two. Why were you gonna spend it worrying or working when you could have spent it doing something else that might actually recharge you, right? So it's funny that so often uh the the the pushback that we provide, the reason why we can't do a thing, is exactly the reason that we could also do the thing, right?
Wil Schroter: You know, uh, a perfect example like the visual metaphor, Ryan, you know how that downstairs in my theater, I've got all those DVDs. Yes, right, like 1000 DVDs from back in DVDs were. You,
Ryan Rutan: you look like, you look like what happened when Blockbuster closed.
Wil Schroter: But I remember sitting there one day and and and I'm looking at all these TVs and, and my daughter was there, and she was like, Dad, have you watched all these movies? Cause remember, like, more like a kid doesn't physically see movies or media for that matter, right? And I was like, you know, some, I did, and all I can think to myself is how much I could have gotten done. In this time, if I wasn't watching Bubble Boy,
Ryan Rutan: and it's funny, I have this, I have, I have this thought a lot because as you know, I'm not much of a media or TV guy, right? I just, I don't know the last time I watched Netflix. There are times where when people are talking about something like it's like, oh, Black Mirror is made for you, you're gonna love this. And I think like, I, you know, and I, I hear people talking about the episodes discussing, and there are times where I feel a little left out. Yeah, I get it. I feel a little left out, and then I think about, I'm like, these people are talking about something that in order to have this discussion, they invested 40 hours plus of their time each. And that's where I go, you know what, I'm good, I'm good. I, I probably spent that on, on something significantly more important. Like mileage will vary, of course. The other thing I wanted to to talk about was this, this notion where you said that like the the more overwhelming it became. The more valuable became for you. It had consequence. There's there's a consequence and there's also, there's something about like, I think this is where we said it in in a couple different ways, and I think one of the maybe the nuanced points that we missed was when we said like it needs to be big enough, it needs to be big enough and important enough that it also eliminates, basically squeezes out like. Eliminate sucks up all that air that you would have otherwise spent worrying. For me, it it's funny we're, you know, as, as you know, we're we're traveling right now, we we're in Ohio with my parents, we're now in in Florida with my wife's parents, but we're through lots of strange circumstances, there is a bunch of my parents' stuff, and I was going through some of this old memorabilia, and it forced me to revisit a couple periods in my life that were absolutely overwhelming. And they were some of the most productive periods like in in in youth, right? Like, so there was this we discovered all of these merit honor roll uh certificates, the, you know, uh all state first team notifications for for sport, and this other law in the Constitution conference that I attended, it was all like the same time period, and I was going, my God, I was doing a lot of stuff, and I was excelling and thriving at all of it. Why? Because it was so divergent. And it was so different that it gave me that level of catharsis, but it also squeezed out any time to do anything other than do this stuff, didn't leave me any time to worry about it. I couldn't worry about my soccer performance because the minute I was done with soccer. I had to, I was, I was off studying for something. I was, I was, you know, going up to uh Ohio State to, to, you know, take part in an academic conference, doing something, right? And it was those periods where I was totally overwhelmed. I think I've shared this one on the podcast before, but it was those the the the period in university at which I had started the business, so running the company, I had a full load at Ohio State. I had a couple of weird electives that they wouldn't let me take because it was already over my credit hours and so I, I went to another local university and signed up to take these transferable credits that didn't matter to me anyways, they just selective classes. And so it was completely overlook. Literally overloaded with the schedule, like beyond what was allowable to take at one university, so I took it a second and running the business at the same time, and I had some of my best grades ever. fantastic performance in the business. Why? I didn't have time to think or worry about shit. It was, I was either asleep and and completely soaking up the the needed rest, or I was on something, but things that I cared about, not things that I was just thrown into or had to do, right? Things that I that would legitimately mattered to me that I was engaged in that gave me very different types of outlets for for all that
Wil Schroter: energy. You bet, and it doesn't have to be something that is like a job, right? Like, you know, I'm doing. It's very physical and and that's fine. It just happens to be what my thing is. You could just put that energy anywhere else, right? In a way, it has to be in in in my mind, for me, I just, I'm not speaking for anybody else. It, it has to be challenging. There has to be a mental challenge to it. If you take out the mental challenge to it, or in some cases the physical challenge to it, the challenge in general, it actually doesn't interest me. In a perfect metaphor for that, Ryan, is, you know, as you know, I love to play video games, but the moment in the game, no matter what game it is, that I know that I've got the most powerful weapon or I've got, you know, the best armor or like I'm just gonna mow over everything. I absolutely lose interest. That's what always killed me in Assassin's Creed because it's such a big long game, but I would grind like nonstop in order to get like way ahead of where I should be in the game. And then the moment I got there, I could just take out everybody immediately. I was, I was like, I don't care how this game ends.
Ryan Rutan: I just boring now. There's no sense of progression. Yeah, I took the
Wil Schroter: challenge out of it, right? Um, and, and now it's funny when I play something, I'm very mindful. To try to like do what I enjoy doing, which is like gaming the game, but also not do it so that I
Ryan Rutan: I can never say I just I ruined this for myself again.
Wil Schroter: What's interesting though is I, I, I don't think that for some of us, what we're looking for is the opportunity to quote rest, like, you know, put our brains to rest. like, and for some people it works great and, and, you know, God bless you. But for most of us, for most of us that have this, this obsessive mind that cannot stop that is gonna be a. Every morning at 3 a.m. grinding on something, we gotta feed it. We gotta feed that with something that has the same type of challenge that got us grinding on this in the first place. So yes, it's something overwhelming. Yes, it's something that's gonna challenge us even more. Some stress us out in its own way, and maybe that's a good thing, but the truth is we have to find outside interests that consume us because it's the only way for people like us that will ever actually get the rest that we need and how we recharge to go build something amazing.
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.