Here's an oldie but a goodie from the archives from the Side Hustle Show Greatest It's Collection. What's up, what's up Nick? Loper here, welcome to the Side Hustle Show because your life is your lecture. Just a quick solo episode of 40 today in honor of Father's Day. I wanted to share some of the best advice I've received from my own dad over the years and how we can all work to apply it in life and in business.
For the sake of background, dad is a chemical engineer. He's not an entrepreneur in the traditional sense in that he spent decades of his career at one company but still had lots of entrepreneurial experiences and I think insights along the way. I know I've shared some of these in bits and pieces over the years but wanted to run through my top 10 bits of fatherly advice here on the show today.
The funny thing is that almost all of these were very literal conversations which now 30 years later I've extrapolated to have a broader meaning that may or may not have been attended at the time. As I think about the kind of advice I want to be passing along to my own kids, I think these kinds of concrete illustrations might be a really effective way to do it, especially if they turn out to be the chronic overanalyzing types like me. Ready? Let's do it.
Lesson number one is it's not a piano. This is something dad would say as we were working on home improvement projects when I was a kid. What he meant by that was it doesn't have to be 100% perfect which isn't to say he didn't care about quality. He absolutely did. Just that sometimes it's better to finish the job than stress over every last detail perfectionism is definitely something I still struggle with so I try to keep this one in mind and apply to my work today.
In startup speak this isn't anything new this is the MVP the minimum viable product read Hoffman of LinkedIn put it this way if you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product you launched to late. If you're waiting to launch your service your website your YouTube channel your podcast until it's perfect you're probably never going to get it out there.
The first versions of most of my projects were pretty awful looking to the point where I literally was kind of embarrassed to share them which is why that read Hoffman quote rings so true but they were functional they did the job. Remember it's not a piano and for most things in life good enough is good enough.
Lesson number two is you can figure it out I mentioned that dad was an engineer career path that neither my brother nor I followed but some of that still managed to rub off particularly he would encourage us to be curious about how stuff worked and he was really methodical in a lot of processes and chores around the house.
And he made sure to let us know whenever we were stuck that we could figure it out and honestly this was a little annoying for kids who just want the answer but he was big into the socratic method or basically teaching you by asking increasingly more difficult questions and letting you find out the answer on your own. Everything is learnable the answers are out there they might not always be easy to find but you can figure it out.
In fact one of my new favorite newsletters is ebiz facts by Nile Dordy ebiz facts dot com if you want to check it out and in one of his recent additions he highlighted this he wrote about an email that he'd received that said hey I want to start an online business but I heard that PayPal doesn't work in some countries do you know if it works in South Africa.
And Nile's first thought is I don't know if this is going to work out for you man because instead of googling that question yourself and finding the answer in 10 or 20 seconds you email the complete stranger on the internet and hoped for response he was like don't be like this guy instead cultivate the skill of figuring things out and he called that the number one skill for making money online.
So be resourceful be curious there's a reason that a lot of episodes here focus on quote reverse engineering successful businesses I think that's dad rubbing off or trying to deconstruct the processes that works for other entrepreneurs because I believe if we can take something complicated and building a business unquestionably is complicated but if we can break it down into simpler steps then we're far more likely to move forward.
Lesson number three is sharpen your pencil and again this was very literal advice as in look I will help you with your homework but sharpen your pencil it can't do good work with the dull pencil.
And now interpreted a little more broadly this was dad's way of saying the tools you work with matter respect them and respect your work don't make things harder than they have to be in your business you can do a tools audit a pencil audit if you will are their products and software that you're using today are those the best.
For the job or do you have some dull pencils in there now found this lots of times over the years from trying to build functional websites with go daddy's website tonight software I think it was called back in the day instead of. Bucking up and learning WordPress like I should have this could be setting up automations in Zapier right run more efficiently this could be bringing on additional team members this could be optimizing your top performing content.
But sharpen that pencil and recognize it's an ongoing process it's likely to get dull again that's when you use it and why a pencil over a pen well because it's okay to make mistakes in a race. Lesson number four is to do work you're excited about after college I took a job with Ford that moved me from Washington state to Washington DC and I took the gig for a couple reasons number one I was excited about the adventure and the opportunity to quote be a grown up and get a place of my life.
And check out another part of the country in number two I didn't have any other offers I'd applied to a bunch of other jobs in Seattle but they nobody hired me to dad credit at the time he questioned the move is like you don't really care about cars why do you want to go work at a car company.
You're going to spend a big chunk of your waking hours at work so doesn't it make sense to do work you're excited about that you care about that has stuck with me and in all the side projects that have found success especially compared to the ones that have flopped there was some level of interest or excitement that kept me going and of course I became more interested in the car business as I was in it day in and day out because as I've also learned passion tends to follow doing the work rather than the other way around.
But this is an important one and if you're not excited about your day job a lot of people aren't let me task you with this find a way to be excited about your other 16 hours a day lesson number five is if you're not falling you're not getting any better this lesson comes from the often foggy and often soggy ski slopes of snow call me pass after each spectacular yard sale wipe out dead would encourage us to say you know what I'm going to do is I'm going to do a quick walk.
You know what they say if you're not falling you're not getting any better this is the call to do the work that challenges you knowing you might fail and yes you could probably stay on the green circle runs the bunny slope and never crash but look there's this whole rest of the mountain to explore the other thing
to say as it relates to personal injuries is it'll grow back and that's his way of saying time heals all wounds with each crash on the mountain or with each failure comes a learning moment like well that didn't work I'll try a different approach next time and I know I will continue to fall because the challenge of trying new things as part of what makes business fun.
Now I've got five more fatherly nuggets that I want to share but before we do that I thought I'd ask the man himself what kind of advice his dad passed on to him.
So it was a summer after graduating high school and I had made a fair amount of money that summer mowing lawns so my dad says I want you to buy 100 shares of british petroleum now pp. It's a great opportunity to grow your hard earned money okay I say so he helped me make the purchase at six dollars a share less than a year goes by and I'm at the UW trying to succeed in school and meet a girl while living in a fraternity house.
All the cool guys had really awesome stereos which seemed to correlate with having girlfriends so I've been religiously watching the price of my bp shares climb to twelve dollars a share and I really wanted a stereo to impress the girls. So I sold this stock and spent six hundred nineteen seventy five dollars on a new stereo when my dad found out about it he was really pissed and told me it was a dumbest thing he'd ever seen me do.
Ouch and he was so right by nineteen eighty bp was selling for twenty two dollars a share the stereo I don't know even know where that is today. A few years later when he told me to buy some texico I followed his advice again and before I sold it to provide a down payment on a house I call and make sure he was okay with it absolutely said perfect perfect use of the money.
So my dad was not too big on fatherly advice but his favorite was probably if you don't have time to do it right when will you find time to do it over again. That's been very tough advice to follow in a lifelong learning process for me I'm more of a ready shoot aim kind of guy and have had to do many many things over again in my life. I love that if you don't have time to do it right well when are you going to have time to do it over again and apparently grandpa was big into the oil stocks.
Now as for that stereo maybe it was a better investment than dad's given himself credit for after all he and mom have been married for over forty years now.
Lesson number six is you really only racing against yourself so on the swim team for several years growing up and early on it was discouraging to be getting these random pink and green ribbons for a fifth or six place finish in a six lane pool but dad's advice was ignore the other races you really only racing against yourself if you can beat your time from before from the last time you swam that race.
You're getting better that is a win no matter what happens in the other lanes and since I was not an Olympic hopeful by any means that was really helpful from here something that I applied in the pool and in lots of other areas we talked about this on the show before the concept of the 1% infinity the slight edge or the compound effect this idea of getting a little bit better every day and how developing that habit over time really leads to exponential in the world.
Exponential improvement exponential gains as they start to stack up but to race against yourself you do need to have a baseline a starting point which goes back to the piano thing in not letting perfection stand in the way getting started. Lesson number seven is until you try and sell it you'll never know.
I remember getting all excited my friends and I about certain baseball cards that we collected and we would look up the prices in the back at magazine price guide and some of them would say they're worth $10 $20 sometimes even more and remember dad can bring us down a peg like guys.
There pieces of cardboard look if you find a buyer willing to pay that much that's when you know it's actually worth that much which we didn't love hearing at the time but it was a good dose of truth a little truth bomb from dad now in terms of your side hustle this is the one about validating your idea with real customers ask someone to my that's the only real validation is this paint job worth $2000 is this photography gig worth $2000 is this online course worth $2000.
Until you find a buyer all you got is an idea. Let's take a break here to pay the bills are you struggling to close deals be to be selling is tougher than ever and that's why I'm excited to partner with LinkedIn sales navigator for this episode.
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More visibility at indeed dot com slash side hustle show just go to indeed dot com slash side hustle show right now and support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast indeed dot com slash side hustle show terms and conditions apply need to hire you need indeed lesson number eight is your eyes will adjust again another very literal piece of advice from when we're camping at night and you're going to get a little bit more.
And that night I'm going to run get the flashlight and dad would always say that you don't need the flashlight your eyes will adjust come on you know let's have some fun after playing with fire and pocket knives flashlights were pretty high on the list of cool stuff about camping but now it was always your eyes will adjust and you was right if you give it time you can actually see pretty well in the dark in this was one that I definitely carried with me because the first time I went camping with my wife I pulled the exact same line on her hey you don't need a phone call.
Hey you don't need a flashlight your eyes will adjust and she looked at me like I was crazy but to vastly over analyze this one I interpreted as a call to be happy with what you got make to with what you have you probably don't need the next shiny thing give it time your eyes will adjust.
And not adjusting or on the other hand always grabbing for the flashlight that can be dangerous that can be expensive it can be taking the easy way out maybe you've heard the theory of he don't like adaptation which to summarize is a luxury once experienced becomes a necessity.
We become accustomed to certain things and it's hard to go back the other way and what was once a luxury is now your normal and that leads to chasing the next level the bigger house the fancy car maybe your eyes will adjust is a call to avoid lifestyle creep a call to avoid buying stuff because you can afford it like six hundred dollar stereos and sounds like the the wrath of grandpa really put a scar on this guy he's been very frugal my entire life growing up so.
Maybe the stereo episode saved him a lot of money down the road but I call to avoid buying the stuff just because you can afford it without questioning whether or not you really needed or really want it lesson number nine is rip off that bandaid or more accurately rip out that tooth the story behind this one is dad is sick of me constantly playing with a loose tooth the wiggly tooth so he takes me out on the deck grabs his needle nose pliers and proceeds to extract the tooth.
By force and in his defense it must have been just hanging on by a thread because I did not feel a thing but this is the take action lesson this is the call to do the thing you've been putting off the obstacle is the way right it's probably not a scary as you're making it out to be so you might as well get it over with I've had to rip out that proverbial to several times over the years from knocking on my first door cold calling posting help wanted ads for positions in my mind.
To the first podcast if there's a wiggly tooth in your life that's driving you and driving everyone else around you crazy maybe time to grab those pliers. And lesson number 10 is it's only money I remember another time when we were camping and pulling out of the campground in Oregon dad backs are minivan into another car that's parked behind us and he is frustrated with this mistake this obviously being in the days before backup sensors and
the repair is going to cost him a few hundred dollars still instead of letting this episode ruin the day ruin the camping trip he took the attitude deep breath it's only money you can't take it with you and that stuck with me money isn't a finite resource like time you can always make more and that was a good perspective to see because I was always very money motivated as a kid and I'm a teenager at this time and it still seemed like this scarce hard to get.
Hard to get thing and in some ways it still feels that way but this was a good illustration of money not being the end goal it's only money was a dismissal of something that is obviously still a really important thing but at the same time not the most important thing that makes sense.
Now I didn't grow up alone and it's interesting how two people exposed to the same environment can have different reactions different memories so when I ran these lessons past my brother he remembered several of them to which is awesome and then he added these as well.
Hey this is Nick's brother Chris I write at endw tutoring calm and becoming better dot org when Nick asked me if there any bits of fatherly advice from our dad that stood out to me a couple things came to mind one is you shouldn't have to wait to be told what to do anticipate what others need.
Dad said this to me when I was helping him rebuild the deck at our house dad was doing all the complicated work and I was his inept assistant I did what I was told but I wasn't being observant enough to predict what dad needed and I wasn't taking initiative.
Being a 15 year old it had never occurred to me to do more than I was asked to do this advice wound up helping me a great deal in every job I've ever had whether I was a server in a restaurant or doing marketing and web design for a tutoring company. And this also applies to side hustling entrepreneurs don't wait for customers to tell them what they want the anticipate the needs that people have and identify pain points and create solutions.
However the most important things dad has ever taught me weren't expressed with words at all he leads by example which is the single most powerful thing parents can do to influence their children for instance. If we went to someone's house for dinner dad would always do the dishes he never told me this was the right thing to do he just did it and then I was at a dinner party in college and I found myself automatically getting up to the dishes and I realized I was becoming my father.
The power of leading by example extends far beyond parenting it's essential for influencers and leaders of all kinds and sales they teach you to buy your own product and if you're in the business of giving advice you'd better be following your own advice. As all of our golds said you can preach a better sermon with your life than with your lips.
That anticipation point is a really powerful one and when I will readily admit I've got plenty of room for improvement on Chris's second point about leading by example will that brings you back to where we started the show with your life is your lecture and I'm incredibly grateful to have had such amazing teachers both mom and dad in this journey and I know our little guys are paying attention so it's something I'm reminded of every time they repeat something that we say.
If you liked this episode please go tell a friend go call your dad if you have any dad ism from your own household you want to share you can do that in the comments for this episode at side hustle nation dot com slash dad or hit me up at and local on Twitter or Instagram that is it for me thank you so much for tuning in until next time let's go out there and make something happen and I'll catch you in the next edition of the side hustle show hustle on.
You know what the stuff what kind of stuff do you know I know like 25 what else 68 just numbers I know numbers and math I don't know what you ask that I do a lot of numbers. Yeah what's the biggest number that you know seven I mean I mean 10 that's the number I know.
Did you just say like 68 oh yeah and 25 yeah 25 what else do you know I know 6 plus 8 sure anything not number related like writing your bike or being nice to brother don't know much of that but I can do trips on my bike lots of stunts on my bike yeah what happens when you get hurt I just get a backup get back up and keep writing that's what I usually do.
What's the best stuff to read about guys who are you sure who's the smartest person that you know I don't know anybody that's smart nobody are you super smart. Not super but I am medium just medium well you're learning more all the time right I know what's the best way to make a new friend. Am I used to be like close them and I was almost able to play with me okay see you're not too or not yeah I don't want to I don't make a new friend with that.
What does daddy do for work recording call type recording calls and typing that's pretty accurate actually. Do you want to be done with this.