Founders, Embrace Your Flaws

Welcome back to the episode of the Startup Therapy Podcast. This is Ryan Rutan, joined as always by my friend, the founder, and CEO of startups.com. Will Schroeder, will they say that pets grow to resemble their owners? And I think it's, it's also true that that startups often resemble their founders, or founders often resemble their startups. And, and I'm speaking about something very specific here, which is that startups are just a giant collection of problems, right? Mm-hmm.

Problems that we have to, or want to, or think we should go solve.

But I think something you and I can talk about today is that, uh, founders are full of problems too, right? We've all got tons and tons and tons of issues, challenges, you name it. So why don't we dig into. The reality of those things, how important they actually are and, and whether they're problems or solutions in the making and, and sort of where, where do we stand on all this stuff.

I think most founders, uh, by definition have a ton of problems, and I don't just mean with their startups, I mean their own problems. I think my concern having a laundry list of them is that we've created a society where we're so intent on saying, you have a problem. Here's the pill that fixes it.

Right. I, I say this, you know, having come from the pharmaceutical industry, right. You know, so for a decade of my life, I ran in at agency and our largest clients we're all pharmaceutical, uh, companies. The script was first convince the patient that they're broken. Uh huh. Then of course come back with a solution.

In, in the nineties, you know, we were launching a product called Prozac, and it was funny yesterday, I was on the phone with one of our clients yesterday and I was referencing the fact that, you know, this was, you know, kind of problem solution. And we are at the dawn of consumer marketing back then around Prozac, and they were. What's Prozac? And I was like, seriously, you're the first person to ever ask me that. Right.

They spent hundreds of millions of dollars so that no one would ever ask that question. Yeah. Yeah. I I was like, it's the largest, like at the time there's the largest consumer prescriptive product in, in history. Yeah. And the fact that, that you don't know tells me two things. One, that's not a problem you have, thankfully. And two, you clearly weren't around in the nineties, right? Yeah. You were, you were not alive then. But, but let me build on that.

The idea for the pharmaceutical companies, and I know everybody wants to paint them as these like big, awful people, but like their script was simple. Convince people that this is a problem. And by the way, it usually was like for most of their products, those are actual problems that they're solving at, at a prescriptive level. But then sell them the prescription, you know, sell, sell them the drug.

And where we see that now is on social media. Social media has an endless stream of people telling you that you have a problem and they are the prescription just to solve Yep. Problems you otherwise never would've surfaced.

I think, I think that's what's so interesting about it, is that because of these little echo chambers that we get stuck in and because of the, their ability to reach us over and over and over again, they take something that, okay, sure, it's, it's a problem at some level, but it probably wasn't in your, in, in the near the top of your hierarchy of needs. Yet, if you hear about it enough, all of a sudden it does feel like a problem.

So not only are they telling you have the problem, they're sort of creating the problem, right? Yes. Because what they're creating is the intensity around the problem, right? Right. They're creating the desire, the need, or the feeling that I should fix this, and then they sell the solution. Right? That's batshit to me, right? He's like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna make the problem and then I'm gonna sell you the solution, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I used to tease my dad when he was still a practicing podiatrist, like, drum up business, like, dad, just buy me a couple a box of thumbtacks and I'm just gonna go scatter 'em all over the streets, near your office. This we'll drum up business like, like, like crazy, right? Like create the problem and then solve a solution or sell the solution.

Let me give you my list of problems because this list is long, but like kind of off the top of my head, I am as a founder, wildly obsessive. Like about anything that I'm doing, even when I hate what I'm doing, I am wildly obsessive about it. And you were in town from Spain last week and you know, you, you, you got to watch my obsession being like carpentry and everything else. Uh, you know, in the, in the flesh. I didn't do anything to dial it down. You did not. No. The tank could dial it up.

Exactly. More sawdust. That's what we need. More sawdust. More sawdust. I used to look at my obsessiveness as a negative. Right? And so I would look for all these self-help kind of things. Yep. I get too stuck on these things, right. To fix it. I find that I am hell bent on control. Now, again, I don't wanna get like too deep with this, but that was like a facet of my childhood and not being able to have control, et cetera.

Yeah. So I'm hell bent on it and I'm like, Hey, you know where I should go if I, if I have a control issue into startups. The one place where there is no control ever and it only gets exponentially worse. So like something that would poke that therapy. Well, to be fair. You do have control. You get to decide what to do, when to do, how to do it. Mm-hmm. We don't have any control over the outcomes. Right. So it does put you in a dangerous spot.

But I can see the allure, I can see the, the draw because it's finally like, nobody's gonna tell me what to do. I can run this thing into the ground however I want.

I have another problem. Again, this is a long list, but I'm just going through random ones. Yeah. Because I, I wanna set the stage for this that I ignore success. No matter where I'm successful, no, no matter where it is, I just, as soon as someone says, Hey, great job. I'm like, cool, that means I should stop thinking about it. What next? Right. And go find a problem. Right? But my failure is on an infinite loop, right? It, it's, I, I don't know what it is. Analysis paralysis, baby.

Just, just running those things over. What could I have done differently? What could I have differently? What could I have done differently? Endless loops. I mean, this is the soundtrack to most of my nights. W where do you see the same like, uh, with you? Oh, I mean, so check, check and check. Control was the big one for me. That was something that I, I did work on. So, so here's what's interesting.

As we go through these lists of problems, I, I find that there are, are some of these things are actual problems, right? But I think it depends on where, right? So needing a high degree of control in my startup not necessarily a bad thing, right? Right. I mean, yes, you can take it too far, just like anything. But having to a need for a high degree of control in personal relationships through my life. Not necessarily a good thing. Right?

So what I started trying to say was, instead of trying to fix these things, yeah, I need to figure out like where they belong. Because what turned out was like, especially in the context of the startup, a lot of the things I was trying to fix because they were bugs. It turned out to just be features with really shitty pr. Right? It was like, I just needed to kind of rethink like when and where these things, these things should survive.

I think for me, outta the ones that you've listed, the, the, the ones that, and, and I think there's one you haven't hit on yet that you'll get to because we, we both have a challenge around this, which is attention span. Um, and, and just being able to stay focused. So it's interesting while we can be completely obsessive about things. We can obsess about four or 500 different aspects of that thing at any given time. And I think that, again, sometimes that's great, sometimes it's not.

But I think the one that has bothered me most and that I thought I needed to fix the most was over analysis, right? You know this about me. I will think and think, and think and think, and sometimes it can cause me to delay action. However, when I go back in time and I look at some of those things.

Most of 'em have worked out pretty well and, and most of them were a result of having analyzed things to a point where had I just jumped in with the first or the second, or even the third thought, it probably wouldn't have turned out as well. Now there's a balance there. 'cause if I never get off the lab bench, if I just keep thinking and never take action, nothing happens. Um, but I think that was one of those where I fought hard to try to like, just stop overthinking it. Stop overthinking it.

And then I realized at some point I was like, well. I actually don't know where the overthinking line is. So carry on, son. Keep thinking. Who convinced you it was a problem? See, see, this is where I'm interested. Like I'm interested that, that there are these, you know, uh, we're called false prophets. These people that are like, Ryan, here's what's broken with you. You've gotta fix this. And, and this again, I think for a lot of founders is like, oh no, I have this thing that I have to fix.

And they end up fixing something that's actually their superpower. Did you see that? Yes, a hundred percent. And I think it was, it was, again, people mostly trying to be helpful, I think. But it was cheap dime store advice. It was like, maybe you're overthinking this. And of course maybe I was, but there wasn't ever any follow on when I was like, okay, so help me understand, like where, how would you approach this differently? Well, you know, you really have all the context for that.

I can't really, you know, like, okay, cool, so you just said a thing, you know, now guess what you've done. Instead of making me think about it less, now I'm overthinking whether I'm overthinking. But that came from a lot of places. So it came from. People around me, people who are maybe involved in the same decisions, right? So let's say I'm sitting in a meeting with a startup team and we're like trying to figure out what to do, and I'm going through iteration, after iteration, after iteration.

And sometimes that question would come up, maybe we're overthinking this, maybe we are. I don't know. That's my job. My job is to keep thinking other places. Where would be when I would come to somebody with like a personal pain and say like, you know, I'm really stuck on this thing and I just can't, and I just blah and I don't feel good. And they're saying, maybe you're overthinking it. And again, maybe.

But I think that there were always other root causes that led to the overthinking that maybe were actually the problem my entire life. I've been told by the outside world that everything that makes me me is a problem. Think about that for a second. Yeah, right. Uhhuh, like, I've never, ever, ever been told in my life that what makes me, me, me is good. Okay. Now let me build on that. When people look at. Our outcomes, right?

Yeah. As founders, if they've, if, if the outcomes are great, we are applauded for that, but no one ever says Yeah, but along the way you are all fucked up. Right, like which incidentally led to that outcome. So let's try to fix that. And I'm like, wait, hold on a sec. If you tried to fix all of the things that were broken in me, I would've never gotten that outcome. Now I wanna be clear when I say this, right? There are things that are broken within you. Actually can be a, a, a force of good.

And then there's things that are broken within you that actually probably need to be, need some actual therapy. Right? You should fix, in other words, if you have a raging temper and you want to belittle or hurt people, right, you should fix that, right? Yes. That's, that's worse. Fixing. Correct. Right. There are like legitimately bad behaviors that actually don't have cool outcomes that you should probably fix. Right. And, and I'll give you an example.

If you have a raging temper and you become a professional boxer and somebody could say, well, look, you took that raging temper and, and put it to a. Place of good. Sure. When you're in the ring with the other 99.9% of your day, you have a raging temper and that's a big freaking problem you should address. Right. So probably even more so of a problem because you're a trained puncher. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Right. So I wanna make sure when we're saying this, we're not saying that every negative trait is actually a positive and you shouldn't address it. There are plenty of negative traits. Yeah. That you absolutely should address. Yeah. Yeah. What we're really talking about is there are a lot of traits that aren't necessarily negative, but we're being told they're negative. Yes. I, I'll give you an example 'cause because you, you said we'd touch on this.

I have massive A DH, adhd. Yep. However, I grew up in the eighties when A DHD wasn't a thing yet. You were just someone that couldn't pay attention. That was it. Right, right. So my entire focus, my entire childhood and academic career was punctuated by being reprimanded for my A DHD again, for not being able to pay attention. You know, will sits in class and he is never paying attention, will gets assigned tests and, and he ever does it. Will's gets assigned a book. He never reads it.

And you know, you and I were talking about this, like, I actually cannot read a book. It's not that I don't want to, right? The irony is I can write one, but I cannot read one. When I read a single paragraph, it doesn't matter what it is. By the end of the first paragraph, my mind is already gone. My mind is already in 10 other places in most cases. By the time I get through the bottom of a page, I cannot remember that I was reading a book or what was on the top of that page.

Think about that for a second. Yeah. As a student, as an academic, that is exactly what you scored on, on your ability to, you know, synthesize and, and regurgitate that information. And I actually kind of can't do it. I'm very bad at it. Yeah. However, no one ever stopped to say. Where is your head at? What, what are you actually thinking about?

Did you stop paying attention because you already know all of this and you're egregiously bored, or you're taking what you just read and processing 10 other threads, synthesizing it into something else? Right. That was always my challenge. It was like, because to me, and this is where like somebody had to teach me what education was actually supposed to be doing, which didn't align well with what I wanted, I was like, I think you're gonna teach me things.

I'm gonna then figure out how to use in new and exciting ways that exactly it. So the minute I learned something new, and again, that might've been in the first paragraph, I'm like, what can my brain turn this into? That'll be useful. How is this a tool? How is this fun? How is this exciting? And then I missed the next three paragraphs, right? Or, or did I? Well, right, so, so no one stopped at the time to say, where is Will's head? Right? Oh, he is not paying attention in class.

So he's bat maybe like, why don't we ask him what is going on in his head? When I got out of academia and I was able to just operate on my own, everything changed because for the first time in my life, I was being rewarded for my head going in 10 different directions. Yes. 'cause it turns out those were ideas, those were actions, those were things that needed to get done. Right. That most people were still stuck reading the material. Right. I was 10 steps beyond that.

Thinking about like how many different ways we can apply it. Uhhuh. So for the longest time, again, I'm just using this as a reference point. I kept trying to fix myself. I kept trying to fix my attention span. I kept trying to to fix my thought process, and it turned out that the very thing I was trying to fix was my greatest asset, right? Which is bananas, right? It's right. It's like, and I think of how many people are out there that are selling the dream, selling the pill, right?

Pretty much every social media influencer they're trying to sell while why you gotta be in the cold plunge pool. Otherwise, you can't get started in the morning maybe, right? I'm not saying the cold plunge pool is bad, right? No, I, I, I understand the health benefits, right? I love a cold plunge, however, I know that. I use, 99.9% of my mornings have started without them, and most of the world does exactly the same and seems to get on just fine.

Every successful thing I've ever done specifically didn't start with a cold plunge. Right, exactly. And again, I'm, I'm picking on the cold plunge, not 'cause it's a bad thing just because it's one of those things where it's like, I've gotta incorporate this. Yeah. I, I've gotta use Tim Ferriss's tips. I, I need the one hack, I need the biohack. And I'm like, you can, it's not necessarily bad. Right. But there's this massive stream of false profits right now, okay.

That are telling you all of these things that you need to fix yourself. And I, I'm just raising my hand and I'm going, are you sure? Are you sure about that? Well, they are, they're sure because they're sure that's, but they are, and they have to be, I mean, that self-help economy needs you to be broken. Okay. So I, I just have to point this out. I know most of these people, like most of the people that you're probably following on a podcast or you know, you're buying their products.

I know most of these people, and I, and I've known them for a very long time, not gonna name any names. 'cause that would be the worst thing ever. Right. The irony is most of them. Are the most fucked up people you'll ever meet. Right, right. Like selling, like the self-help and stuff like that. I know how their personal lives have gone and they are not good. It's not something you'd wanna replicate. It is.

Well, it's that old adage and I, I don't know how true it is 'cause I've only interfaced with a few psychologists or psychiatrists, but they say, you know, that the people that go into that field are the ones who need it the most. I respect anybody that just wants to help. And I, and I don't necessarily know that there's like bad intent, but I just think the irony cannot be overlooked, right?

That the people that seem to be at the highest orders of magnitude of how they're, you know, they're trying to convince you that you're broken, tend to be the most broken people. Yeah. Which, which blows my mind. And I think over time, especially with, um, social media. And how I've seen everybody become, you know, the, the prophet or the doctor or, you know, the, the, the messenger. I've been like, damn, dude, I knew you from before and nobody should be listening to you. Yeah. No credibility.

How did you hear? Well, we got an email to that effect last week. It was like somebody said something about something they saw on the site, and they're like, but I actually know that personally, and, and it's, yeah, it's not good. And we're like, well, okay, that's, let's flip this. Instead of saying, okay, yes, there's a lot of people out there that are trying to tell me that I, that, that I'm broken.

Let's flip it and talk about why some of the things, Ryan, that, that you and I do, that everybody's been trying to fix, and again, as it relates to other founders like us, should not be tampered down, right? Yeah. They should be harnessed. They should be exacerbated, right?

For example, my obsessiveness, my freakish obsessiveness right? Can absolutely be pointed in the the wrong direction. But it can also be pointed in a couple cool directions, right? Yeah. So if we rewind back, and again, you've been through this journey with me, so, so you can appreciate this. You know, five years ago I decided I wanna build a house. Now how many houses I had I built up until then? Zero. Zero. Yeah. Right. I, I decided I wanted to be, become an architect.

How many houses that architect? Zero. Right. You name it like every single thing that you could wanna do. Right. But I, I have a freakish, obsessive personality. Mm-hmm. When I decide that I wanna do something, I just go full bulldog. So I decided that I wanted to learn 3D modeling and design a house from, from start to finish. Right. So that's exactly what I did. Right. I decided that I, I wanted control over every aspect of building this thing.

So I decided I was gonna learn how to become a general contractor and GC the entire thing, right? Yeah. I decided I wanna build cabinets. I decided, you know, all these things, right, and I just decided my obsessive personality that I was going to get, go all in on that, learn everything I possibly could, and become competent in all of these different trades and skills and, and whatever. That is a weird trait to have. But when pointed in the right direction. Yeah, it works pretty well.

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 a thousand times before you, which means the answer already exists. You may just not know it. But that's okay. 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 dayLong@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. I came to that realization at some point where it's like. Before I started to fix things. Right. I would, I would really try to see like, okay, I get where these things manifest negatively. Yeah. Right. I can see where that obsessive or, or overanalyzing something that maybe doesn't matter that much. Right.

Like. Going over a conversation that I had where I gave, uh, some perspective to a friend. It was like, oh, maybe I could have said this, or maybe I should have said this. Or, oh, what if I made him feel this way? Right. Just obsessing endlessly. Yeah. And re-analyzing and going over stuff. Maybe that isn't a good, a good use of that, but when I do the same thing, when I'm pouring over our, you know, return on ad spend results and I'm trying to figure. Right.

So there are definitely places, so what I've started to do is, is try to decide like, okay. Given a, a particular trait that maybe could need a fix. Right. Social media is telling me it needs to be fixed. This is a problem. The thing that you do is a problem. Right. I always want to make sure that I understand where else. 'cause they, they'll give you the use case where it's bad Of course. Right. They'll come up with whatever the, the, the place where this manifests. Right. The temper.

You're not in the boxing ring. This is bad. Yeah. Right. Right in the boxing ring. Great. I'm always trying to figure out, does the fix. Erase an edge that I have. Right? Right, exactly. 'cause that's not therapy. That's sanding the edge off my sword and I want to make sure that I'm not doing that. And so that's, I'm always looking at it from that lens to say like, okay, cool. I can fix this thing. That's obviously a problem here, but if I fix it here, what am I breaking downstream?

What else am I not gonna be able to do because of this? And can I selectively fix, right? Can I pick and choose where this happens as opposed to kind of wholesale taking the advice.

Let me ask you a question because I'm curious where, where you stand on this Now. I know neither of us are massive social media users. We're not always out there like everybody else's, but like, what advice would you give to somebody who's feeling pressured by all these self-help trends, but isn't sure what would work for them or, or if they should even be doing this? How, how are, how are you thinking about that? Here's what worked for me.

I, I started to say to myself, my superpower slash deficiencies.

Need a home. Mm-hmm. Okay, so, so stick with that. It turns out that my lack of attention span is really bad in very specific cases. Sure. In other words, I don't do workshops, classrooms, anything that requires my undivided attention. 'cause I do not have undivided attention. Right. Right. So I absolutely keep myself outta those situations.

However, how the hell was I gonna keep myself outta the situation for the first 22 years of my life in school? Right. It is literally what I was being tasked with doing. Right. Which, but hang on, hang on a second. So just, just, and, and I want to, I don't wanna dig into how broken the education system is, but I just want to highlight how differently people learn. Right. So to your point, you couldn't sit in a cloud, you couldn't read a book, you couldn't do anything.

And yet you taught yourself how to build just a house, but a pretty big, pretty complicated, pretty de very insanely detailed home. You taught yourself all of that. You learned all of those things. So I think we have to be really careful when we think about some of this stuff that's like, does, will, will just doesn't have the ability to learn. Bullshit will didn't have the ability to learn in that, in that way.

Right? Right. And so we have to be so careful about what we think of as like these things that may be short-term challenges or just even the modality that we're facing that's keeping us from doing something and saying, oh, I'm not capable of learning. But we know that's not true. You're insanely capable learning. One of the, the, probably the one of the fastest learners over the broadest number of topics that I've ever met in my entire life.

Right. And yet, if I was your third grade teacher, I would've just put a check mark that said, you know. Not, not this one. Yeah, no, that's exactly what happened. You know, I graduated with a 1.2 GPA. Like the teachers basically said there's no hope for you and can you graduate with a 1.2 GPA in the state of Connecticut? You can. I couldn't confirm. Amazing. I can confirm, but. You can graduate last, by the way, you know, you and I, you both have kids.

We have great kids and, and we can see that. We can see where like maybe our kids are struggling with one thing, but we start to see them excel at something else. And I've always been a big fan this as a parent of saying, I'm not going to bring a better kid in the world by emphasizing what they do wrong. I'm gonna bring a better kid by accelerating what they do Well. Gold from a point of strength. Correct?

Right in, in, in tripling down on the things that they are great at, not at the expense of everything else, but not the opposite. Let me triple down on the stuff you suck at, at the expense of the things that you might do well.

So with that said, that definitely applies to founders. You know, I see founders come into this, into this business, and everybody comes into it terrified because there's so many things you're being tasked with that are not in your wheelhouse. And so we'll have a founder come to us, Ryan, and say, Hey, I'm not great at finance. Okay, then don't do finance. Right? Like literally don't literal find out any other way to do that.

Yeah. But instead of saying to yourself, you know, I'm really good at product development or really good at sales, but I suck at finance, so let me be worried about finance. It's the same thing, right? Find out how to supplement that so you can triple down on what you are good at. If we only focus on fixing weaknesses. We risk totally missing out on developing our actual strengths, our superpowers, and, and let's, let's be honest, the world does not reward average across the board. Right.

You're a well-rounded and super average in every way. Individual. Right? Exactly. We'd love to have you aboard. Yeah. It doesn't, it rewards exceptionality in specific areas. Absolutely. Right. That's why it's important to, to think about those things and to identify and double down on what actually make you unique, even if it's unconventional. Es maybe, especially if it's unconventional, right? And so, you know, from my standpoint, I look at it and I'm saying, okay, what am I great at?

Or said differently? What do my superpowers require in order for them to be superpowers? Okay, so my lack of attention negates lots and lots of things, right? But if I embrace the fact that, but when it's pointed toward the right things. It's a whole other animal. It reminds me, 'cause I'm such a huge comic book fan. Uh, and for those that are watching the, um, the YouTube right now, if you look behind me, those are all comic books behind me.

Uh, I always look at, you know, the, the, uh, the superpowers. You know, the whole thing with, with Marvel specifically is whenever they talked about characters, they, they always had a, a character who had a superpower, but it had some sort of challenge behind using that superpower. What were you pointing at? Captain America and Spider-Man. Oh yeah. They're out, they're out of focus, but they're right there. That's awesome. But that, that was always the case. Right?

That uh, and, and what they did a great job of is saying is like, this person has this incredible capability. It's the Hulk, right? Yeah. Has this incredible strength, but the rage and anger that they deal with right. Is, is always kind of countering that. And when I think about our capabilities, our superpowers, so to speak, I think to myself, okay, maybe Ryan's over analyzing things, so why don't we work on the shit that, that we, that needs over analysis, right.

Like you said, exactly like digging into, you know, uh, marketing analytics and things that, where that is a strength. And so if I were to zoom out, I think at some point, and I think this is important, I stopped trying to fix my problems. Yeah. I stopped trying to fix them. I try tried calling myself broken and I started to say. I've got all these problems, but the fix is where I point them. The the fix is, is, is, is where I triple down.

And I think, again, I'm gonna go back to founders for a second. They're called on to do all of these things, many of which they're not qualified or interested in doing, and they put all of their focus on their deficiencies, especially when it comes, uh, time to becoming managers and things like that. They're like, here's what I suck at. Oh, okay. Yeah, you probably do, dude. But why don't we put you on the stuff that you're great at?

If you're a great developer, if you're, if you are great at writing code, why the hell are we making you a manager? Yeah. That's like one of the oldest ones in the book, right? Yeah. I, I think interesting too, because you do have to be a little careful here, going back to the build from the point of strength, because there are times where we just truly haven't discovered a strength. Maybe it even looked like a weakness in the beginning, so I want to be careful.

But when we get into the context of a startup, one of the things I think is also very important to think through. Go back to your example, the founder who's like, I suck at finance. Okay, we can look at that two ways. You suck at finance, but you're really good at product, so just focus on product and that's probably the right move. Now you might, it might turn out that you're an absolute savant at finance. You just haven't been given enough of an exposure, right?

Think about how many musicians get discovered late in life that didn't know that, right? All that kinda stuff. However, building from a point of strength is almost always gonna be a, a more reliable way to an outcome. The other thing I like to measure it against is, okay, even if it turns out you were a savant, you are just like top finance. Is that gonna help you do what you need to do now? Right.

With being amazing at finance within an early stage startup, is that what's going to move the needle most? So I think oftentimes we get so caught up in like, what I can or can't do. We stop thinking about them in the context and, and how valuable they are to the startup, right? If you're an early stage startup, I can tell you finance isn't gonna be that important 'cause there's not gonna be that much of it, right? There's gonna be no beans to count, right? There's gonna be very little to plan.

When I think about my anxiety. Right, just my baked in anxiety. Everybody's got some version of it. But again, when I analyze my own, um, we have, we have pretty special versions of it. I would argue. Here's what I would say, I've got two versions of how that can go. I can say my anxiety is, is what? Ruins me, right? It's keeping me up at three in the morning. It's, you know, preventing me from sleeping with health issues like you name it, right?

My anxiety is doing all of these awful things to me. And all of that would be true. Just wanna be clear. All of that would be true. I'm not, I'm not, uh, discounting any of that or taking off table, but there's another version to say. Hmm. Your anxiety also has some really interesting superpowers. It's got you thinking about stuff when nobody else is. Yes. When everybody else is, is calm and relaxed. Oh, this problem must be solved. It's got you saying, yeah, but what if it's not right? Mm-hmm.

And, and then you turn over a stone wherever. It's like, oh shit, we didn't even look at that. Right. Like it's this early warning system. That's exactly how I look at it, man. For me it's, it's predictive analytics with a heartbeat, right?

Yeah. I'm, if I'm laying down at night and I start having one of those thoughts where it's like my heart rate starts to go up a little bit and I'm like, okay, this is probably something that's actually important right now, does it mean I need to stay awake all night and worry about it? No, and what I've found is that if I just acknowledge it and then I try, you know, the whole thing, like, yeah, write it down or whatever. Yes, some of that stuff does actually work.

Some of that does actually work because part of the anxiety is. What if I forget about this, right. Combine anxiety and a DH adhd. That's a neat recipe. You are like, I'm worried about this thing. Yeah. And if I don't keep worrying about it, I'll forget to worry about it. And then what the fuck will happen? My session? Yeah. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Last night I was having one of those anxious thoughts, right. And I, and it was, I was like, say exactly like you played it out. Right.

Whereas like, oh my God, I, I need to solve this problem right now. Yeah. And I remember having this conversation with myself right before I fell asleep. The key being. Right before I fell asleep and I said to myself, I've had this thought 10 million times. Not this one, but one like it. Some random, anxious thought, right? I've been to this rodeo over and over and over again. The one commonality is in the history of history. The problem never got solved at this exact moment, right?

Ever, ever, ever. So I can, you mean while you're laying in bed with your eyes closed, you haven't solved problems? I, I, I, I can choose to obsess over it, lose, quite, literally lose sleep over it, or I can file it for, again, the millionth time that there's absolutely nothing I can do about it right now. Meaningfully uhhuh, if I get sleep, I'll wake up in the morning and be ready to tackle it, and that's actually the only time I can tackle it.

Like, again, just because I'm worried about it doesn't mean I'm prepared to do something about it. And as I started to build those tools, I was like, listen, hey, anxiety, thanks for the heads up. I'll go hand that over to obsessive person in the morning, my other demon. Right. Uh, but, but right now, good. You did your job, right? Right. You did your job. Smoke alarm. Smoke alarm. Recognize, you know, I actually, I loved the, I loved the rodeo analogy and I immediately took it to bull riding.

I was thinking, you know what, that's, that's exactly it. Anxiety is a bull worth riding for eight seconds. But once you've gone that far with it, yeah, jump off right? Get off the anxiety bull and then, and then, you know, put it to ease with the obsessive guy in the morning. It's exactly it. So, you know, and, and I think about it too, where like, you know, my mind's always racing and, and I, I always explain what that looks like is, yeah.

If you could watch the television channel that is my head, it would be as if somebody just hit the channel button on the remote and just left it down and just every single thing. Ding, ding, d ding, ding. Just kept flipping over and over. Oh, by the way, you've also got picture and picture turned on. So there's, there's, there's no way around that one. And for the, my entire lifetime, again, I've tried all these things to try to like you. Control it, if you will, and concentrate it.

Meditation and everything else, like just does not work. And, and what I learned over, over some period of time is it's not what I was supposed to be doing. The, the question should be, how do I take all those thoughts like that, that rapid fire and capture them? Write 'em down. Brainstorm. Now I use the hell outta chat. GT the chat GT Yes. Is the unwitting accomplice to all of these ideas and chat. GT is, I I I'm loading up context windows single handedly. Yeah. Simply just by brainstorming.

But it turns out somewhere on their CDN is is a server that just has your name on it. Yeah, the, the Schroeder Stargate. So that said, I found healthy outlets. To point these things. And it turned out when I found these healthy outlets, things got real interesting. And a moment ago you mentioned finance. You said, Hey, maybe you're not good at finance. We'll go back to my 1.2 GPA what dragged my GPA down the most, which I guess if you've got a GPA that low, that it's literally everything.

Yeah. But was math. There was a couple drags on that one. It was math. I I Interesting. Never made it past freshman High school algebra ever. I took it seven times. I took it. In all four grades in all three summer schools, and I never passed it. I then went to Math oh five oh in college and flunked out of that as well. So, needless to say, not super sweet at algebra, which would surprise a lot of folks to know that I've been a CFO for 25 years. Right? You try to say, wait, what?

Those CFOs don't use a ton of algebra terms. Well, right? But the leap is as soon as you put dollar signs in front of those numbers. I was, you know, the Stephen Hawking of finance, right? I mean, not that I'm like the greatest finance person, but like I really understand finance. I really, really, really understand finance and that has opened so many doors for me.

Okay. But that said, if you said, will, we are gonna put you in a finance class, your job is to learn finance, and here's the, here's the trick, but I had no context for it. Yeah. I didn't have a reason that I needed to learn finance. Yep. I would've flunked seven years in a row. Well, it was somebody else's dollar signs in front of it. Who cares about those? Exactly. But as soon as you put my money in front of it, no context, no connection. Yeah. Forget about it.

Right. And I, I use that by the way, in fact, I think you and I talked about this yesterday. 'cause we were talking about open AI had had launched their new agents, uh, product. Yep. You know, this, the, the nodes and stuff. And I said, I looked at it, I, my eyes went cross-eyed and I had, you know, I, I had no interest. You said, you was like, I didn't make it through the five minute video.

Yeah. And I confirmed that later in the day by asking, Hey, did you get to the part where it showed this, which is about three minutes and 30 seconds, you're like. Nope, Nope. However, the moment I find a use case for it, the moment I, you know, I find, um, okay, this is, this is how I'm gonna use it. Yep. Totally different, right? The YouTube rabbit hole portal opens wide Oh yeah. Will pops in feed first and at that point turn on the obsession filter and go, yep.

I look at that a lot in kids, by the way. 'cause again, I'm make making that parallel when a kid says, Hey, I don't get it. It's often because they don't care about it. But if you, if you look at what your kids are capable of doing when it's stuff they care about, I watch my son in Minecraft. He's building the most extraordinary things. Yes. Yeah. Like, like literally like, and again, I've got a pretty high bar for what that might be, Uhhuh. And I'm like, damn dude, that's like legit.

'cause he cares. Yeah. Right. And you watch, you mentioned musicians, right? You know, I think I told you this story that, you know, years ago I got to see Lars Ulrich, the drummer of Metallica, talking to his parents at the private induction of their, when they were in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And he said to him, he said, the only reason I'm here. Because every day you played music in the house, because every day you let me be a drummer. You encouraged me to be a drummer.

You know, he could have been, we talked about this, an accountant or something else like that, but it turns out he's one of the greatest drummers of all time. I mean, he went to Julliard. Yes. I mean, he's pretty gifted because someone encouraged him to do what he wanted to do. Someone forced him to do it. Didn't, wouldn't say, sit still. Stop tapping your foot, Lars. Where will that get you in life? Exactly.

Exactly. But I guess what I'm saying is when it's something that we're genuinely interested in, we take a a different passion around it. Right? And it changes things dramatically, even if it's the same information. Right? So we saw this a few weeks ago with my middle daughter, aria. She's 10, and it's not that she doesn't like history or social studies, but it's not been her like favorite thing. You ask her about what she's learning about, she'll give you some basics.

She went on a one hour, took, took tour while we had some friends in town a few weeks ago. I didn't, I wasn't on it unfortunately, but they, they went on this little tour. She came back and she unloaded. I, I don't know how she told me about Madrid history for about three hours. How she learned three hours of, of history in an hour trip. I have no idea. But she came back so excited about it.

All these little anecdotes, all these details, exactly the kind of thing that you could learn from a book, but she didn't because she was bored to tears. Right now when she's racing around town. And it took to getting to see these places touch things, right. See, smell like all of a sudden completely different experience. So even sometimes it's not the information, it's the, it's the modality, it's the context, and it's the reason behind whether I want to do this or not. Correct, correct.

And so build on that for founders who are like, oh, you know, again, I'm not good at all these things. Yeah. 'cause you don't care about them. Yeah. Once you care about them, and there's two versions of caring about them, there's one, I, I really need to get this done 'cause it's important to my startup. That's actually not what I'm talking about. Like, it being important doesn't mean you care about it.

There's a million things in my life that are important that I actually just don't give a shit about. Right? That, yes, I should care about them. I just don't. But once you actually, you, you find a fascination. Around it. Right. At some point, Ryan, you looked at like Google Analytics or another analytics package and just something clicked in your head where you're like, I need to know everything I can possibly know. Yeah. I need to know everything about this.

Yep. And then it became course after course video, after video book, after whatever, anything I could find to consume. But because I had a goal in mind, there was somewhere I was trying to get, I didn't just wake up one morning. I was like, I wonder what analytics are. Absolutely. And so in, in the same way, like for years, every year I said, I'm gonna, this year, this is gonna be the year I learned to code. Right? Like, and you and I haven't coded in like 20 years, right?

And so like, this is the year I'm gonna learn Python. This is gonna, I'm gonna learn whatever, right? Yeah. And every year I get into a prompt and I'm like, oh, that's right. I have no reason for learning any of this. Right? Yeah. Like, I, yes, like I know it's part of my job with regard to what we do, but there's nothing that I want to code so badly that I wanna learn it.

Every time I manage getting through, like installing the terminal and the packages that are necessary, and then it stops there. I'm like, okay, yeah, yeah, we should accomplished, I created the environment that will allow me to code. I'm not gonna write a single line right now. I remember I don't give a shit. So, so, yeah, exactly. That's the thing. I I actually don't have any reason to do this. Yeah. Correct.

So I think where, where this all maps back to, which I think is really interesting, is it is possible, dare I say it. We could enjoy a certain level of self-acceptance. Now that is not the same as being complacent. It's taking inventory of, of the assets that you have and figuring out how to use them to best effect. That's way different.

And so I think for, for a lot of us, again, we're so convinced that we have to fix our shit, that we never take the time to say, maybe I need to apply it differently. Maybe. And again, not all of it. Yeah. Some of it. But yeah, I, I think, you know, a way of looking at, it's, it's, you know, self acceptance isn't surrender. It's redesigning the org chart of your personality. Of your makeup, right? Right.

To be able to say, how do we, how do I reorganize these things that exist, these resources that I have, right? So instead of thinking of these things as, as skills or flaws, these are the resources that I have, these are the things that I'm made of. How do I organize those? How do I utilize those in a way that stacks up to being something absolutely useful as opposed to just. Fighting my wiring endlessly. Right.

If you stop fighting your wiring and just give it a workload in SLA, you'll probably find yourself far better off. Right. Right, right. And I, I think from my standpoint personally, the moment I was willing to do that. Again, the separation was this, but separation was okay. There are some, again, my attention span. There are some places where that is an absolute problem, but there are also some places where it's an absolute superpower. I'm going to recognize both. That's part of the acceptance.

The acceptance is to say that this, this is a thing. My lack of attention is a thing. I have to control where it's good and where it's bad. And I think that's the big difference. Instead of inventorying everything that ever causes a problem, holistically calling that, you know, I have to fix this entire thing is wrong, is wrong. Some people say, I get too emotional. There is a time and a place where getting too emotional is exactly the right answer. Exactly, and it should be applied accordingly.

But I think for, for founders, one of the hardest things for us to, to enjoy or, or, or accept is ourselves. Is for who we are and what we're great at, and again, in what we're not. It's okay to be not good at things, but I think once we do that, once we figure out the things that are strengths and our weaknesses and, and we inventory when we accept both, then at that point we can start to become the best version of ourselves. Because we know where we're supposed to put ourselves.

We know where we're supposed to stay away, and we can go all in on the stuff that actually makes a difference. 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 bootstrap founders and the advisors helping them win in the startups.com community. Check out the startups.com community@www.startups.com to see if it's for you.

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