Ryan Rutan: Welcome back to another episode of the Actually, hang on, hang on, just a second guys, gals, everybody. So look, we've been doing this for like 100 and 50 plus episodes now. Um and and we know because we hear from a lot of you that a lot of you have listened to like all 150 of them and you've talked to us about a lot of these, well I know you get constant emails, tweets, linkedin, messaging socials wherever people can find us. They're talking to us about these episodes, which is great. I love hearing from all of you and I don't want you to stop doing that. But what we would like to see is to take this discussion a little bit more public. We want other people to know how amazing we are, right? You've told us this isn't me saying I'm amazing. I mean I know and you know because you've told me right, so I feel amazing and that's great, but we want to take this conversation a bit more public. I find it hard to believe that you don't know, somebody else that's going to benefit from this, right? That you don't have another friend, founder pal, somebody that will benefit from hearing what we're saying. And yet the socials there real quiet right outside of you guys talking to us directly. We're not seeing enough chatter around this, right? So if you would be so kind as to help us out, we would love to see you. Um and I'm just gonna I'm gonna roll my roll my dice here, hang on, linkedin, we're gonna take it to linkedin. Okay, so I rolled the dice that came up linkedin. Hit us on linkedin, Pick your favorite episode, pick a snippet, pick whatever. Let's talk about startup therapy on linkedin at myself at will directly on our on our on our profiles. However you want to do it, But let's get it out there. Let's talk about this stuff. More people need to hear this narrative and so we need your help to spread that, right? No, no mystery here. This is how the socials work. You all know it, We're now coming to you and saying please. Okay, so this is me saying please please come help us with that said only 100 and 50. Yeah, it's like we're like, we should probably deliver more value before we ask for anything in return. I think we may have overshot the mark will 150

Wil Schroter: hours later.

Ryan Rutan: Yeah, that's okay. That's okay. Alright, so without further ado, welcome back to another episode of the startup therapy podcast. This is Ryan Rutan joined as always by Wil Schroder, my friend, the founder and Ceo of startups dot com will let's talk about something that is absolutely pervasive in founder life, which is urgency. This sense of time compression shortened deadlines, everything has to happen now and that, you know, if it doesn't disaster will ensue how real is that?

Wil Schroter: You know, it's as real as we perceive it. And I think this, this concept that the world is constantly closing around me that I have to get this done by a certain imaginary age marker in my life, or that if we don't get this done now, our competitors are gonna crush us right away. Just all of these anxious, self directed, really false narratives that we create. And I think it's worth talking about today how consistently wrong they are. This isn't saying that this is an argument against urgency. You know, we love urgency, we love getting shipped done. That's that's not what we're talking about. Well, we're talking about is the false narrative that founders like us, we've all been through it and we'll talk about our own experiences create that, put so much stress and so much anxiety on us and they're just not true, just straight up not true. And I think if we talk about how we create them in our personal lives, how we create them in our business, how we create them, when we think about our own financial freedom and everything else like that, the actual outcomes don't match up whatsoever to this monster in the corner that we've created. And so, you know, let's dig into that. Alright, so before we get into this next topic, I just want to let you know what we talk about here is like 1% of the conversation, you know, really, this conversation is going on all day long online at groups dot startups dot com. where Ryan and I pretty much talk endlessly with founders about every one of these topics. So if by the end of this discussion, you like the topic and you want to dig into it a little bit more with Ryan and I just had two groups start startups dot com and we'll pick it up from there.

Ryan Rutan: Yeah, man, this is such an important one. This drives so much stress anxiety for founders that we really do have to unwind this and so much that's baked into the sort of popular narrative. Right? I feel like it's it's almost the skeletal bones of of the startup narrative, which is like fail fast, scale fast, you know, speed to market all of these things that we use and and look nothing wrong with any of those things taken in context and taken with with some measure of responsibility. But like when it's always just go, go go all the time, urgency, urgency, urgency. And to your point, it's just not really like, especially when we're when we're looking at the pressure from the outside. Right? So we've got our own desire to move forward. And then we have these other things like competitive pressure, my own age, my need for, you know, money or funding or whatever those artificial things that we put in front of ourselves that create all this additional pressure just aren't really as real as we'd like to think they are and I will argue that they're often counterproductive to actually making those things happen. So this is why we really need to spend some time today unwinding all this stuff. So that said, where you want to start, man,

Wil Schroter: I mean, let's start with the overarching narrative, which is all of the the reason this is a problem is because it buys us nothing, all this anxiety and and, you know, all these these false narratives by us nothing and cost us everything, right? So that that I've never in my life and then we'll talk about, you know, X personal experiences. I've never had a bigger waste of energy than creating false narratives around time. Here's where it started for me in my twenties, I was so convinced I started my first business when I was 19, I was so convinced that if I didn't make it whatever that would, you know, my version of it was at the time, by the time I was 30, my career was over. And and it wasn't I wasn't being hyperbolic. I actually believed that I actually believed that every year that would go by would be the end of it. And when I talked to founders now that are in their 20s, they almost always believed this and I always kind of reset the meter a little bit. When I say two minus do you realize that you've only been a career adult for like three years. And they're like, well, no, I'm I'm 25 you know, this is a quarter of my life. I was like, no, it's not,

Ryan Rutan: it's not,

Wil Schroter: this is there's only three years where you actually do this,

Ryan Rutan: right? You've you've been allowed to make your own decisions for seven years at that point?

Wil Schroter: Yeah. In like as far as being a person building your career, you're like, you know, three years in, if this were a football field, you're like on your own two yard line at this point, right? Like don't oversell where you're at and by way of that, You have 50-70 years to figure this out. And they're like, can you imagine if somebody told me that like in my twenties, like, again, I wouldn't wouldn't have listened to an idiot, but it was just blowing my mind though and it took me a long time to figure that out. And so I think this idea that I'm getting too old that I have to get it done by this age and we always use like a twenties thirties, forties kind of, you know, metaphor is bullshit. It's, it's just, it's such a crock,

Ryan Rutan: it is, you know, it's funny for me, man, like I had those feelings more when I was younger, which is ironic, right? Because that's when you have all that time, right? So that feeling of getting older of needing to move further forward and again, it comes from so many places, A big part of it was the comparison around, I chose the entrepreneurial path out of university, so did you? Well, while we were both in university and then I had friends that, you know, they, they took the job at PNG and got the haircut and the black tie and all that stuff, right? They drank the kool aid, and then I was looking at them, they were like, hey, look at my Lexus, hey, just bought another house, just hey whatever, and like I wasn't doing that at that point, I was working my ass off and hoping to be able to pay everybody else and not even thinking about paying myself, right? So like there were definitely things like, okay man, I'm so far behind, I'm so this, right? And again, all of this bullshit comparison, which helped to drive this feeling that somehow time was getting away from me that time was the issue. Time had nothing to do with it, right, luckily as I've gotten older, have developed a better relationship with time and kind of an understanding of that And kind of your point man, I'm not sure if anybody had told me at an earlier stage that I would have believed or listened or been able to absorb or comprehend, but I wish somebody had at least tried, so this is us trying to hear us hear us 20somethings, you've got all the time in the world, slow your roll homies, there's plenty of time to get this done

Wil Schroter: well, right? And the other thing that we don't understand in the earlier parts of our careers, not just our twenties but our thirties and then some, we are at our least capable

Ryan Rutan: at

Wil Schroter: those ages, right? Just for all the obvious reasons

Ryan Rutan: that I definitely wouldn't have believed I was very full of myself in my twenties, sure we have

Wil Schroter: energy, no question right, but our networks are as small as they're ever going to be right, our knowledge is as small as it's ever gonna be right, um unrefined, immature, our understanding of how to solve problems and everything else is as shitty as it's ever going to be right. In other words going forward, it will always be better.

Ryan Rutan: We have as little resources we will ever have in life, right, that's

Wil Schroter: Exactly it. And so when I was 28 I thought that I had just pretty much figured everything out right, like I become ceo of a company and you had grown or whatever and so I must have just figured everything out. So everything from here must be a

Ryan Rutan: formula,

Wil Schroter: it must be a flat

Ryan Rutan: line from here

Wil Schroter: which is such an immature line of thinking because I was immature, But when I look back that's almost 20 years ago, I have, like so much more experience, so much, so much more connectivity and all these things that I had back then, That for me to project that age that 20 year old age for the rest of my life and when I say it now, it just seems ridiculous. It seems silly, but I believe that at the time,

Ryan Rutan: yeah, it's it's, it's hard, right? And you know, it's to hearken back to that period of time, it did feel that way because it, it and I think you said something earlier today, a couple of days, gonna remember around the fact that like at that point you haven't crossed any meaningful milestones necessarily in terms of your career. And so I think that really, really feeds into this, right? So you have all of this urgency around getting something done. The problem there and we talked about this a lot too, is that that bar keeps moving, right? So it's like, let's get the product in the market, right? Let's get our first customer and you just keep moving the bar and none of those milestones carry any weight anymore and you just develop urgency around the next one because you're trying to get to the end of the game, which is just a hell of a lot further out. There's no way you're going to compress that into the timeframe you want, it's going to take longer than you wanted it to end of story. So I think that's a big part of the problem is that you've never gotten like through an entire game, right? And so you don't know how to control that expenditure of energy, how to, how to, to, to ward off this false time pressure or that's not a great analogy Ryan because sports games do have timers. Um, so it's not that gang. It's not that your career is an entire open ended season.

Wil Schroter: If we were carrying that that metaphor, it would be like saying if we don't win this game in the first four minutes of the game, we've

Ryan Rutan: lost. It's

Wil Schroter: Like, I'm pretty sure that you have an entire 4/4 to play in this game. And so I think from a, from early in our career standpoint, there's a few things that just haven't happened. We just haven't, like you said, crossed an age milestone. Here's the funny thing that happened when I was in my 20's, I spent every waking moment in terror of turning 30. I was absolutely sure that once I turned 30 they just take me out back, put a bullet in my head and bury me. Really, that's that's the end of it. You know, like he had his moment, you know, he's good

Ryan Rutan: Was the end of an era for me. That's how it felt. Again. It really like feeling my 20's ending and having that close and and getting to 30 felt like just Awful. I mean it started at 25 for me, which like is so laughable now. The idea of like how, you know what I was and and more so what I wasn't at 25 compared to what I thought I yeah, it was like, I remember thinking like Quarter century, like one more of these, you know, if I, when I double I'll be 50, which is, you know, ancient at that point in my mind right now, I'm staring at it and I'm not, I'm no longer scared of it right now, that it's now, it's getting closer, it's not so scary. But yeah, it was just such a weird feeling. And then I remember hitting 30 and it basically felt like my odometer reset right? Like somebody pushed the trip button and I was like, oh back at zero,

Wil Schroter: nothing happened,

Ryan Rutan: nothing happened negative. But like for me, it was actually a really positive thing. All of a sudden it was like, I had been given a new go back to our analogy or metaphor there. I got a I got a new set of downs, right? I was given a brand new timer That started at zero and that felt amazing. And that's sort of been the experience from the 30s. And then again, in the 40s, with the exception of, I didn't go through all of the weird time related age depression that I went through at the end of my twenties as I reached the end of my thirties, I just kind of got excited about like, hey, we're gonna pop into a new decade here, we're gonna get the forties, this is gonna be brand new again and that's sort of the way it's been, we'll see what happens at 50. I haven't decided yet.

Wil Schroter: I'll be there before you are. So I'll tell you how it goes. But here's where it gets interesting before we had that moment, that odometer reset, we assume that all of these, these demons will become real, that all these things will, like all these awful things will happen and then it happens and we realize nothing happens. And we're like, well, okay, well, 30 you know, and I'm in my thirties now 40 I'm definitely, if I hit 40 and I haven't accomplished all these things, I'm, you know, must be put out to pasture And then you do hit 40 and literally nothing happened. So the one thing that we've got in our heads constantly is our age is such a breaking item. Here's what I'll say if you are a rock star and not the way that developers call themselves rockstar. I mean a literal rockstar, then yes, you're, you've got a very finite time window, if you are a professional sports player in motion

Ryan Rutan: richards just sat up out of a coffin and shook his head. No, you know, like

Wil Schroter: if you're a professional sports player at a high impact sport, yes, you have a, you know, a certain number of years, but we are none of those right. Like we have a job thankfully that we can do better and better and better for the rest of our life, every year should be considered a building block to the next year, Not a time is running out moment. It's a goofy way to think,

Ryan Rutan: you know it is and I think we do this not just with age, but sort of with everything that we always feel like somehow our peak performance was somewhere just behind us or a peak opportunity was somewhere just behind us and our peak performances somewhere unreachable ahead of us, right, That we're somehow running from the best time that this ever should have happened. And the fact that we haven't reached that that that next precipice that we wanted to, we haven't hit that next peak and it's just complete utter bullshit. It's just it's completely fabricated narrative that that we create for ourselves. And this is I think this is the worst part of this, of all of the founder wounds and most of them are self inflicted, this is the one that we just sort of do everywhere, right? Because it's not just around age, it's around literally any part of our startup, anything that we're thinking about changing, fixing, building, doing away with whatever it is, there's always just so much damn urgency around it. So

Wil Schroter: not just urgency, lack of perspective, which in and often drives here, I'll give you an example a couple of years ago, I was having lunch with a friend of mine, a guy named Jeff Wilkins Jeff for anybody old enough to remember that started a company called compuserve, which was the internet before the internet and sold to A. O. L. But he also had happened to start the school where my kids go to school which he claimed was his greatest achievement, Jeff and I spent time on boards together. So I've known him for a long time, he's a great guy And he's about 35 years older than me. So a couple of years ago when we were having lunch, I asked him, I said Jeff just out of curiosity when when what was your peak here? Like if you could rewind back to a peak here, what was it? And Jeff at that time, I think it just turned 75 to put in perspective and he thought for a second he goes 46 he was like I can't believe when I was 46 I knew you know, I knew everything I needed to know, I was so young, I was so full of energy and I'm like bro, I'm 46 now, I don't feel like any

Ryan Rutan: of those things like I was like this is

Wil Schroter: peak energy, oh my God,

Ryan Rutan: I'm screwed.

Wil Schroter: And but what he was saying was He has a much broader perspective, he's looking at a window of 75 years in picking his best year, what was silly for me to even respond like that Was that I've only had at the time 46 years on the planet. And so my entire purview was based on that. And one more thing I just want to mention that I thought was hilarious. My son will, who is five years old, came to me the other day and he was talking about something that he used to do when he was a kid, but that he doesn't do anymore. And he's like, dad, that was way back when I was four. And he's like, I'm thinking to myself in relation to how long he's been on the planet, Right? That's a 20% period of his life, his entire life, right? So in his mind, one year might as well be 20

Ryan Rutan: on that relative scale

Wil Schroter: and the relative scale, right? And when Jeff told me that Jeff Wilkins from times when he told me that it just stuck with me and I was like, man, you know, what's broken is my my scale, But you know, when I look at the entire, the entirety of what my life is, I don't have enough perspective because I haven't seen the whole thing through and and it really threw me, you know, by the way, I just want to mention if what we're talking about today sounds like the kind of discussion you wish you were having more often, you actually can, you know, we're online all day everyday, working through exactly these types of topics with founders, just like you, so any question you would have, or maybe some problem you just want to work through. we're here and we love this stuff and we're easy to find, you know, head over to groups dot startups dot com and let's just start talking.

Ryan Rutan: Yeah, no, it's it's it's a great point and I think this is this is key to this entire discussion, right, is maintaining that perspective and being able to zoom out enough and say right, I can treat this as something urgent, Is it actually right? Is it actually? And even even if I say yeah, it's kind of urgent play it out like we talked about this a lot to play out that worst case scenario, what if you don't hit that time milestone right? I'll go back to this is a really specific and small example, but I had a client pitch back in There have been 2000 and I had

Wil Schroter: decided

Ryan Rutan: I had decided right, another one, another one of the things we talked about a lot, these these one person conversations that we have, I had decided this client that I was going to pitch in two days, needed, they were going to need some animation done through action script Which is absolutely dating. Well I already dated myself, I said it was this was 2000, so I have decided that they were going to need to see something built and demonstrated in action script and animated. I wanted to do something for them, They didn't ask for that like I created this this false milestone. I kept myself up for like 48 hours straight. Learning enough of this to be able to put something together to demonstrate. It got to the pitch. Haggard tired, but I managed to do it right. The urgency one out. I I got something together, went through the entire pitch and then kind of saved this as the, as the coup de gras the cherry on top, the thing I knew was going to convince them and I, I showed them, they all sort of nodded their heads and washed and they're like, okay, you know, we, we then talked through the different aspects of the proposal a couple days later and they came back and they were like, yeah, this is this is great. You know, except for that. The part with like the flashy animated stuff like we don't want or need any of that. Right? Really? I killed myself for that, right?

Wil Schroter: It's part of it

Ryan Rutan: do this all the time. We convinced ourselves that these things need to happen and it turns out didn't need to happen at all. Right. So,

Wil Schroter: it's that I think, you know, part of our narratives within startups, Ryan is the idea that if I don't get to market, if I don't get this business ramped up all my competitors going to crush

Ryan Rutan: me competitor crush that happens all the time, right?

Wil Schroter: Here's here's what's hilarious and I hope founders are listening on this one, Ryan and I talked to literally thousands of founders. So our purview as two in there, all different industries, every industry could possibly fathom. So not just tech or something like that. Every single one of them believes that it's their specific market that the entire industry is trying to rally around and if if they don't get to market, if they don't get this product out there etcetera, they're the one industry that everything is gonna is gonna be the the next next now, every now and again, that's true, right? Every now and

Ryan Rutan: again, like

Wil Schroter: 1% of the time that actually proves to be true where all of these massive market forces all headed the same direction at the same time, it's Uber lyft, right? You know, like, like at that time it did have this snowball effect that this was going to be a massive market and billions of dollars of capital, we're gonna get poured into it right away and it was a race to the finish line. It does happen. It's probably not going to happen in your industry as much as you think otherwise that all of our competitors, this whole thing is going to be The whole story is gonna be told in the next year or two again, false narrative, you made that up. It's actually probably not true, but you're gonna kill yourself and probably make a lot of bad decisions

Ryan Rutan: and believing it stick on that for a second the bad decisions, right? Because this completely changes that when we look at things through a lens like that where in our mind, what we're seeing is all of our competitors are out there and they're like vcs throwing money at them. Like remember the old footage of like the stock floors where the guys related during the trading tickets up at the guy like the market maker, like just like screaming, you know, that's spitting, uh, sweat flying, right? Yeah, exactly. And then there's just VCS throwing money at all their competitors like this. They just isn't right. And, and the, the real challenge with that isn't just the fact that competition is not going to come in and crush you because of that. It's that you're going to start making decisions based on that lens based on that rubric, right? That we have to do this because of that. Well, you're gonna make very different decisions, right? You're going to choose to push things in certain ways or extend yourself and others or forego proper exploration of things because you feel the need to move forward with pace or take a particular direction or copy what a competitor is doing rather than following, you know, your, your path, right? And so it just, it can absolutely fundamentally change everything and it's made up, right? You made it up. This is this is your own machinations, right. This isn't something that's really happening and it's so damn dangerous. Like look as founders, we need things to motivate us. We need, you know, things to keep us moving. This is not a good one, right? You know, inventing boogie men that are going to eat your lunch. Not a great way of doing this for ourselves.

Wil Schroter: Let's dissect that because I want to make sure people understand exactly the line we're drawing here, right, urgency is awesome, urgency gets shipped. Done awesome. Wonderful. But it's not the same as this false boogeyman. Right? For example, if we look at a spectrum on one end of the spectrum is we actually do need to get things done right? Like urgency matters, get it done by friday, gets things done. Like it's what builds a good company on the other end of the spectrum is just this irrational fear that the walls are closing in and if we don't get it done by this time that we're all screwed. That actually while that could drive some urgency over a long enough period of time, just makes us straight up miserable. Okay. There's, there's no version where I've seen a founder who's operated on that schedule for long enough to be like, you know what, I feel really good. That actually just makes us miserable.

Ryan Rutan: It does. Imagine if the entire Star Wars, right? Imagine if the entire Star Wars right took place in the trash compactor on the Death star, right? That wouldn't have been a fun movie to watch. Wouldn't wouldn't be

Wil Schroter: good for looking the crew.

Ryan Rutan: No, no, for sure. Right? But and that's but that's the way we treat this, right? That we just sort of jumped from one of those to the next, right? That we're in this constant compression and and not just the compression in the time and the urgency, but that somehow at the end of that there's a finality and disaster, Right? I think that's the other side of this, is that that's the part that just isn't true, right? In this case the walls might feel like they're closing in, they're not actually gonna squash you. Right? Nothing's going to happen. Right back to your point from earlier, nothing changes

Wil Schroter: the false part of the narrative that this is predicated on. Is that if we don't somehow succeed right now, that there's no opportunity to succeed in the future. As if every time somebody becomes the successful party, no one else is allowed to compete, right? Like if Uber wins, then lift, just can't compete. Well, kind of lift one public too, by the way. Right. And so if you think in those terms back in the seventies and really the eighties Microsoft one, right? You know, on a numeric basis, right? And if you look at penetration of Pcs, you could you could argue that Microsoft one and yet Apple seems to be doing just fine. Apples seem to have made it through. Obviously mobile was where they kind of made their transition. But that's my point if you genuinely believe in your company, if you genuinely believe in your market, there's not one year that's going to end it all for you, right?

Ryan Rutan: Yeah. We're not all speaking Persian. We're not all speaking greek, we're not all speaking italian

Wil Schroter: right

Ryan Rutan: points, right? They were the the incumbent, right? They were the power. They dominated the markets. Alright. We're not all speaking chinese. There's always room, right? Competition will continue to exist. There's room for more than one, right? So

Wil Schroter: there's always room to build a good company and there's always time for it.

Ryan Rutan: Yes, 100%. Yes.

Wil Schroter: We've been building tools, let's say for the startup community for really about 20 years. Startups..com has been around for 10. But even prior to that, when different companies that we did, we're all in the startup space Every single year that we've been around for 20 years, there's been some company that's got into our space. That was going to be the the end all be all that was going to fix all startup problems. And now I just laugh whenever I hear that, I'm like, you know, either one don't know anything about how this market works or two don't realize there is an endless supply of people who don't know how to build startups, right? It's not like one person is going to magically teach them all, you know who it's also not going to be us, no matter what we do this market is going to be big enough thankfully. And we're in a weird space because we're one of the weird companies that actually appreciates the fact that if more people help our customers, we just generally want to help our customers. But if if you're in a meaningful market, there are going to be other competitors, there's going to be like, you know, ups and downs between those competitors. When Tesla tried to enter the market, it's not like they said, well, everybody else has figured out cars. I guess we can't do cars anymore. Right. Uh, and yet somehow they did, okay. Right. When netflix wanted to enter the market, it's not like, well people getting videos, I guess like the blockbusters just cornered it. We're done there in every case a good company. If there really are a good company and it really is a good market dude, you've got all the time in the world to figure it out

Ryan Rutan: there and there's niches to start in. Like, you know, funny. Like let's go back to that one for a second blockbuster. Right. So there was a blockbuster in our hometown. There was also a video barn. Video barn. Absolutely kicked the ship out of blockbuster in my hometown. On the video game side of things. They had interesting, much better selection. And so that drug people in, right, anybody that had a, you know, anybody kids from 6 to 14, they were showing up at video barn because they had the massive selection across all the platforms. Right? That was the big deal. So there's always room, There's always ways to find and carve out your niche, you know, in and around that competition. And almost to the point where like, I'm not sure that they did that as a competitive advantage. I think the guy that in the store was just a gamer and he was like, this is the business I want to build, right, I'm gonna build my business. He wasn't thinking like, oh, what do I do to compete with with blockbuster? He just built what he wanted to build. He built a good business focused on that and kept seeing happy people come through the door and come back and all that. Right? So it worked out fine.

Wil Schroter: You just described our business the run like startups dot com is literally that version where this is just the business we want to build. This is what we want to do all day. And will we become the biggest, I don't care, right? Like that's not meaningful to me. I just want to be good at what I do. Does that mean I'm not competitive? No, I'm competitive as hell. I'm not one of those competitive people out there. But over time I'm starting to realize that our body of work and kind of what we set out to do, it's going to take decades to do. It's like, well we're gonna do as much as we can this year, we're not looking at it, like that time is running out, we're looking at it as we have a long time to build something great and every year we want to be cumulative in our personal lives and our professional lives and certainly in the business that we build, I think when we start thinking in terms of time is running out actually, you know, let's just shift gears a little bit when we think about personally, time is running out. The one thing that I see the most often among founders, it's from a financial standpoint, I've got a certain amount of time to secure my financial freedom or I'm totally eft Yeah,

Ryan Rutan: This is a Big one.

Wil Schroter: Yeah. And as I'm thinking about it, it's well, yes, as we get older right time quite literally is running out, there is a point where we would like to say retire etcetera. We usually have that concern like I have to secure financial freedom etcetera. Like in our twenties, like, you know, again if I don't make $20 million by the time I'm 30 you know, I'm a I'm a giant failure, right?

Ryan Rutan: Yeah, I was gonna say also, yeah, we also have, yeah, so in addition to being really unrealistic about the time we're often really unrealistic about the amount we don't need to talk about that today, we've talked about in other episodes. But yeah, like what it actually takes to be secure and when you need to achieve that, we tend to get both those things wrong, which is always fun, we like to compound our

Wil Schroter: problems. What we overlook in every single case is we keep forgetting that whatever that age milestone is, again, you know, false time running out feeling whatever that age milestone is, we assume that we're just not working after that, which is ironic because we're likely going to be far more productive or capable in that year than we are in this year. Right? And so again, I went through all this myself and a lot of this is just self reflection, But I believe that if I wasn't a billionaire by the time I was 30 that my days were numbered, that I would just like to be put out to pasture somewhere. It didn't occur to me, it actually didn't occur to me back then that I had my thirties, my forties, my fifties, like I had so much time to build wealth, right? It wasn't all like constrained into one tiny capsule of time that if it wasn't done by then for some reason I wasn't allowed to build wealth afterwards, so blown,

Ryan Rutan: it's a bad, bad, bad way of looking at it, right? Yeah, we again, we have, we have lots of time again, like go back to the notion that urgency and stressing yourself out about this, not really going to help you get there anyways, right? So yeah, in terms of when you need to achieve that and how you get there, you know, being anxious about it, probably not a great ally in the mission in moving forward. So, look, there are hundreds and hundreds of things, I think that that we, we end up getting caught up in that drive urgency as founders. And again, we're not anti urgency. We're not against getting things done, but we're definitely against building up a narrative that's counter to actually achieving that. And it puts undue stress on you as a founder on your teams, on everything that you're doing and working to build, where urgency helps let it work for you, right? But when it becomes something that's just driving stress anxiety in your life, get rid of that ship and I'm gonna take you back to the very top of the episode now and suggest that you come and talk to us about it on linkedin dot com. Right? Look for Ryan, Rutan and Wil Schroder and let's continue the discussion there.

Wil Schroter: Alright, so that was fun. But let's actually keep this conversation going. You've heard what we think about this, but you know, Ryan and I would really like to hear what you think and we're online, like all day long, pretty much talking about every startup topic you could think of from fundraising, the customer acquisition to just really had to get all of this crazy startup stuff out of your head and there's tons of other founders just like you, they're weighing in on these topics so you'll get a chance to just hang out and meet some really smart founders were also super, super easy to find. You head over to groups dot startups dot com and let Ryan and I hear what's on your mind. Let's get to know each other a little bit and let's just start having more of these conversations.