Ryan Rutan: Welcome back to the episode of the Start up therapy podcast. This is Ryan Rotan joined as always by my friend, the founder and ceo of start-ups.com will Schroeder will. The constant in the world of start ups is the shit show shit storm that's constantly flowing around us and that we're navigating when and how can we make it stop?
Wil Schroter: It, wouldn't it be great though? Wouldn't it be great if we could make it stop? I think we've got a fantasy and it's really just a fantasy that like if I just solve all of these problems. Like if I just address all this stuff, like the problems will finally be gone. And, and what we don't realize is like, almost like for it's not even whack a mole because whack a mole like you hit it and it goes to somewhere else. Whack a mole was
Ryan Rutan: exactly what was in my head. I was like the only way to make whack a mole stop is to unplug the machine ie like close your start up. That's the only way to actually make it stop and go away. The
Wil Schroter: difference. Difference here is every time you whack the mole two more moles pop up. Yeah. Yeah, that,
Ryan Rutan: that board just keeps getting bigger. It goes from 6 to 12 to 8. Yeah. It just keeps growing, growing,
Wil Schroter: growing. I think where we tend to break as founders when we think about how to, you know, get our heads around. This, this calamity and chaos is we keep trying to make the chaos go away. And, you know, one of the things that I've learned is the chaos cannot be contained but it can be managed. And I think that's what we talk about today. Like how do you manage all of this chaos? And honestly, if you learn to manage this chaos and it is actually a skill, I'd probably put it up there with maybe top three skills a founder can have because I certainly didn't have them early in my career because I just assumed again, I kept thinking like if I solve the problems, then at some point the problems go away, that
Ryan Rutan: problem goes away. There's nothing that says it won't come back, but that problem goes away. Yeah. Yes. OK. Let's dig into them then. But I think the the other thing worth noting here is that it's sort of a preliminary step is embracing the fact that this is the situation, right? That it will be chaotic, it's always going to be like this. So embrace the suck and move on, right? Like this is what we have to do. That's sort of the, the core thing here is no, you will always be at the tiller in a storm and it's becoming comfortable with that, that I think is the, the very first step to not going in. Completely insane while, while running a start up company.
Wil Schroter: Yeah. Ok. So again, we can't stop the chaos because here's what's going to happen. Ok. We'll just, we'll give it some scenarios we're growing the start up really quickly. Let's say things are going well because a lot of people associate chaos with bad. Right. But let's just for the sake of argument, just take that off the table and just say things are going well. Ok. Cool. Things are going well, so chaotic. Right? So now I hire somebody, you know, we really needed a director of sales because, you know, we had all these different inbound requests and nobody was handling them and blah, blah, blah. Ok. Cool. We hired a director of sales that problem solved. Right. No, now we have a new person, a new fountain of problems. Now when she shows up. Right. She's got 28 problems of her own. Right. And then she hires some staff and guess what they do, they show up with some more problems and guess what they call on more clients who guess what? Have more problems. Right. Like, like I, I don't think we understand that solving the near term problem is actually an incubation process for the next problem. That bru. And that's OK. OK. Like, again, like creating chaos is literally what we do, but we can actually do it. Well, we can be good at how we manage it. Going back to what I said earlier, early in my career when crazy stuff would happen. Here's what I thought the answer was, I thought the answer was we have to solve all of this at once, right? Every problem, no ma no matter what it is has generally an equal weight because it's happening right now. Right. So, you know, recently and if I just work harder, if I just put more time into it and I'm smarter and I solve more problems, then I'll have fixed the whole thing. And, you know,
Ryan Rutan: it's funny, I think that actually, I, I think there is a they sense that we have to whack all the moles really fast and all at the same time because then no more moles will come back. I think the general impression I remember at least in my case I thought about like, if I don't solve all these, then they'll, they'll keep coming back around. Somehow. There was some magic in being able to say that we'd killed them all at once. Right? Like it needed to be a ubiquitous clean slate. We've killed all the problems and now nothing bad will ever happen again. Clearly, that's not the case and not even the right approach.
Wil Schroter: I had this conversation with my wife and we had one earlier today, in fact. Right. Some problem that she's dealing with and she's pretty worked up about it. Not always, but, you know, from time to time she get pretty worked up about something and I'm always unflappable. Right. In other words, like, no matter what happens, she's like, you never seem to care about this stuff. I'm like, it's not that I don't care. It's that I've just been around long enough to know. It just doesn't matter. I'm not saying that the problem doesn't have consequence or, or merit. I'm saying, no matter how much energy I invest in this problem, there will be 50 behind it. And so I think I've certainly exercised that muscle over the years. So like, you know, Ryan, when you, when you and I get into situations where we've got, you know, like back in the day we're doing an acquisition or a sale of a company or something like that and things are getting crazier or we just have, you know, th times like COVID, you know, when things go crazy, whatever. And I'm just like, hm, been here before. Yeah, that's the thing. This is not how I responded in the past,
Ryan Rutan: even if it looks relatively new. Like this is a different scenario than I've ever faced before in, in its details. They're all some version of the same thing, right? Which is, it's a, it's a challenge. It's somehow important. It's gonna have some priority which we have to determine. I think that's one of the other challenges. And I was thinking back to like the early days and around like why I was trying to whack all the moles. I had very little ability to determine which one of those was the most dangerous. Like what of these things actually is the most dangerous or which one of these represents the biggest opportunity? Because it's your point like it's not always negative, right? Growth and, and growing comes with its own challenges and chaos and needs to be managed. But prioritizing those can be really tough. And I think at the early stages, that was something I particularly struggled with. And as time has gone on, even as I'm presented with new problems, like I had never dealt with a global pandemic before, but we didn't freak out in the way that we would have 20 years ago. It's like, OK, it's a new problem, but it's a problem. Like most others, there will be some solution for it. We need to figure out, you know, what are the criteria here for, for making it through this successfully with our sanity and then you just do it right. But to your point about being unflappable that just comes from having, you know, it's like I remember talking to a friend of mine once who's an M MA fighter and I just said, like, man, like, I don't know how you're doing this thing. He, he started doing bare knuckle and he's like, look, man, at some point, you just get used to the sound of getting punched in the face. Like I was like, I actually have a really good analog for that. It's a different sound and I'm not actually being physically punched, but it feels like that a lot of
Wil Schroter: time. This actually sticks to a similar analogy. And I think I told you this story years ago, I was at some Forbes conference. I don't know why I was there, but it was me and a bunch of speakers where I sit in the green room waiting to speak on something. I don't even remember what it was in. One of the speakers was this guy who was a former SAS specialist. Yes.
Ryan Rutan: Right. Love this story.
Wil Schroter: Yes. So what this guy would do is was his job was to like kick down the door rush in and basically start a firefight. And since then he, he had left the SAS and he had created a munition that you can practice with basically a munition that you can be shot with and not die. Delight hurts. Like
Ryan Rutan: a of all the things I've wanted to experience in life and thought, I wish they could simulate that. That wasn't one of them. Here's what he
Wil Schroter: told me. And I just thought this was fascinating, two things, one that has to do with him being shot at and the other has to do with, with what we're talking about, which kind of has the same feeling. The first thing he said, he said the reasons people die in firefights, like when they bust in the door and start firing isn't the wound. It's because they tend to go into shock and they tend to not treat it. In other words that they don't know how to take a punch to your point. In this case, a bullet, right? He said, I've been shot six times and I thought to myself at the same time, he's like, no, in six different occasions, I was like, dude, you've been shot once and like, hey, I'm gonna go do that again,
Ryan Rutan: fool me once. Shame on you shoot me twice. Like why am I still here? You've been
Wil Schroter: shot six times, which means he's been shot at in more, right? But he's been hit six times, right? Anyway. So he, here's what he said. He said the first time I got shot, you know, I freaked out like anybody would, right? Because it, it's terrifying and, and I almost died because I almost bled out. He's like, it wasn't a mortal wound at all, right? But I freaked out. He said, so what we learned and this is kind of the second part, he said in a firefight and this is generally in combat. But, you know, in a high stress situation, he said, you have to focus your energy on one micro objective at a time. My only mission in life is to take two steps behind that cover. That's it. My only mission next is to check my ammunition. My only mission like in this amazing singular focus that he talked about just blew me away. Not as much as him saying he got shot six times, he got out. It's like I was like, you're the biggest badass I've ever met. But that always stuck in my head because I thought to myself, man, if I could just have that laser focus, the intense firefight that is start ups, not comparing these two things directly. But if I could have that focus and I could shut out everything else help powerful, would that be?
Ryan Rutan: Yeah. And just focus on the thing. Part of the challenge there is what I was talking about earlier, which is knowing what thing is the most important thing to focus on at that point. Like when it's something glaringly obvious, like I've just been shot, I assume that there's very few decisions that have to be made at that point. Right? Is assuming you're trained and you're, you, you understand you've been shot, you know what to do about it. You sort of have two main ones I can think of, right? But I've not been in this scenario myself, but I can imagine too, there's the wound itself and there's the fact that someone just shot at you and if they're still shooting at you maybe that's the priority but really high on that list is do something about the wound, a personal story with not nearly as dire a consequence. Similar theme here which is focus on what's most important. The first time I was choked unconscious by my Brazilian jiu jitsu instructor. When I came back around, he said, OK, so let's talk about a few things and I'm like, yeah, let's, let's do that now that I've regained consciousness. He said, do you know what you were doing just before you went unconscious? And I said, I have some vague recollections. He's like I can tell you exactly. We're doing. You were fighting my right hand with both of your hands and it was gripping you by your belt. Like what made you go unconscious? I was like, I'm gonna guess your left arm that was wrapped around my neck. He's like bingo. So what should you have been doing? I'm like, uh huh I get it. I get it. I was fighting the wrong thing and I think so often in, in, in, in start up world, we're doing the same thing. We end up exhausting ourselves by running around again trying to whack all the moles. Instead of saying this is the mole that's currently choking me unconscious. Let's focus on
Wil Schroter: him. But let's stick with that. We can only focus on one thing that we can accomplish at once when I tell founders, hey, you can only focus on one thing at once. I, no, I can't, I can focus on 20 things. Correct. You can, you, you can get infinitely distracted. Yes. The difference is you can only focus on one thing that you can get done. And the analogy that I always use is if Serena Williams shows up and she's gonna fire a tennis ball at you on the tennis court, depending on your skill. Maybe you have a chance of defending and responding and volley, my only
Ryan Rutan: chance of not getting hurt is to get close to the net and get below it. Right. That's it.
Wil Schroter: Exactly right. I was like, but if her sister Vita shows up, but at the same time also fires a ball or like, you're not going to like, get both. That's the way problems work. You can focus on both, you can see both coming at you, but you can only react and respond to one. And so a big part of this again, trying to kind of uh tame this chaos if you will is I isolating the chaos into small solvable problems. You know, it goes back to what we said about that, that officer being shot. He said, look my first and only objective, get behind cover. There's no other objective, nothing else matters right. Then make sure I have ammunition. So when I go to fire back, I'm not shooting blanks so on and so forth. But like this is the same thing we, we can only like respond or, or volley one all at a time,
Ryan Rutan: right? Pick those battles literally and figuratively, right?
Wil Schroter: We can say here's 20 things, but we have to pick one. I would argue the moment you pick two, you're screwed because everyone's like, oh, well, fundraising is important. But so is product. Sure. Yes.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah. Pick one. Pick one. Would you like to accomplish one or none? Because that's really your choice. And everybody believes they can, they can accomplish both at the same time. The reality is just, it's, it doesn't work that way.
Wil Schroter: And I think it's hard to believe that I know it was for me for a long time. It was hard for me to believe that I couldn't just like respond to both volleys and like the truth is sometimes you do in the most extreme circumstance, but it's, you're just got lucky, right? If you start to realize that there's only, you know, one thing you can focus on at a time, the difference is, and this is the big, the big game changer of all of it is you actually get it done. I see the problem with chaos, right. But you know, let's, let's use another doomsday scenario. The ship is going down, the Titanic has hit iceberg, right. The problem with chaos is we tend to divert all of our attention or just chaos. This amorphous thing that is fear that is, you know, all these things. If in the time that the ship is going down, we took the time to in an orderly way to determine where our highest and best use of our time was orchestrated properly and execute. We'd probably survive right short of the fact that there weren't enough boats. That's, yeah, I was gonna
Ryan Rutan: say, yeah, you're, you're also on a sinking ship. It reminds me of a quote from George Carlin who said he's doing a bit on the uh you know, put the mask on with the mask strap, you know, put the mask on and breathe. Normally he's like, yeah, in a crashing plane. Of course, what I'm gonna do is breathe. Normally, I'm also gonna shit my pants. Normally. It's like there are certain dictated reactions here depending on the severity of the situation. But now
Wil Schroter: let's multiply OK? This is what it's really interesting to me. Now, let's multiply this bit. And let's say that we're trying to focus our energy as the leader of the organization, focus our energy. That is a microcosm of where this focus needs to exist. Now, maybe you're the only person, you're a single founder and it's just you. OK? Cool. Then forget what I'm about to say. The reality is, it's the rest of your team that you have to equally focus, right? Because we're thinking, oh damn, there's 20 things that need to be done. It's a problem for me, dude, if it's a problem for me, for
Ryan Rutan: everyone.
Wil Schroter: So if I'm not focused, if I am not solely focused on this singular goal, I can sure as hell bet everybody else is. And you can start to see when you go back to the, the whack a mole, the mole is multiplying, right? You can start to see where this lack of focus or ability to control chaos creates an exponential effect across the organization. You can actually make the rest of the organization worse off. You know, something that's really funny about everything we talk about here is that none of it is new. Everything you're dealing with right now has been done 1000 times before you, which means the answer already exists. You just not know it, but that's OK. That's kind of what we're here to do. We talk about this stuff on the show, but we actually solve these problems all day long at groups dot Start ups.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 for
Ryan Rutan: sure. So for the devil's advocates out there who are thinking, OK, but how do we keep from becoming so myopic? And we're, we're so heads down on this one particular problem that we miss something else, right? Like horrible example, we go back to like, OK, you've been shot now, you found cover and you somehow missed the fact they're lobbing grenades at you and the cover is not gonna help. Like how do we avoid that? Well,
Wil Schroter: OK, so in this case, if we put it in a start up context, I'll give you a common one. Do we work on product or do we fundraise? Right? Because you know, we need more capital in order to grow the business. But if we don't work on products, we won't be able to generate any cash and we'll also go
Ryan Rutan: out of business. How much funding do you have to raise before your product doesn't matter. I, I forget this one.
Wil Schroter: No, no lack of people have tested that. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And so we look at that but it goes back to priority, right? Everything has what we call a stack rank of problems. OK? So when we look at our problems and, and we, we talk about with founders about this stuff all the time when you and I talk to founders and, and kind of coach them through this stuff. We say you're solving lots of problems or you're addressing lots of problems, et cetera. But what's the priority of those problems? And it's amazing how rarely a founder that I speak to has ever been asked or thought to stack rank the problems. I'm maniacal about this stuff personally. So I just do it every day. You have
Ryan Rutan: to be, you have to be otherwise like you just, how do you know whether you're spending your time on something that actually matters? Or not, right? Like if your objective is to spend time, go get a job because if you want to build a start up company, you need to think about how you're spending your time and, and what the results from that are gonna be. But yeah, but you're right. It is. It's so funny that, and we see this, we see this manifest in a lot of ways. It's not just within the problems that they're facing even. We asked them about the product they're building. When you ask them like, hey, what problems does it solve? And you know, founders love to, to run through the laundry list of, oh it does this, it does that it does is right. It's like the, you know, one of these kitchen gadgets on QVC and it's like, OK, but which one of those things is like the thing if, if you're gonna like from your user perspective, which one of the problems you solve is their most pressing and they're like, oh shit, I don't know, hadn't thought about that. And when they do, then that becomes a powerful same thing, right? When we're thinking about our own problems internally, we have to think about it from a priority standpoint. Otherwise, you know, kind of guarantee that we're gonna let big things slide while we deal with small shit or, you know,
Wil Schroter: whatever. Again, I'm not trying to be so draconian here to say that like, hey, if this, if fundraising exists that we somehow magically ignore everything else. I mean, it's just, life just doesn't work quite like that. But what ends up happening is this, I'll give you a good example. This happens with developers all the time, right? Hey, I'm working on a major project. Someone calls and says, hey, there's a bug that I need you to fix and now I'm working on bugs right now. The justification at the time is simply, well, it's just a two minute problem. Like it's not a big deal, which if that were it, if that were the only thing you were to deal with. Probably true. But because that stacks up and it really takes you off your focus, et cetera.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah, it's that it kills the flow, man and it's just, it's so hard to come back into it. Then it feels
Wil Schroter: minor, you know, you're managing your organization, you're trying to get big objectives done and someone comes to you with some nitpicky thing like a cultural thing, you know, I don't this person, I don't like this person, you know, something like that. And now because they just showed up, right? Like now you're focused on that. I think a big problem to not what I'm gonna call stack ranking your problems, which is literally just listing them and giving them priority is that you find yourself putting an inordinate amount of attention on what's new versus what's most
Ryan Rutan: important. Yeah. Which is what's right. In front of you. Right. It was one of the big realizations I had when we left the physical office, how many of these problems that I was overhearing or just picking up on through osmosis just by being physically proximal to our team, didn't actually need my attention or solution and certainly didn't need it in that moment and how many of those distractions existed and how bad a job I was doing in hindsight at prioritizing those, right? Just because somebody is in front of you, you think like, well, I guess I better deal with this. Now, you're here now, we're here. Let's solve this right now. I mean, and part of that does feel good and part of that does send the right message to your team. But on the other hand, right, you have to be unflappable first. But if you want your team to be able to remain focused and they learn that anytime they come to you with a problem that they can divert your focus to something else that's a really, really strong and really poor message to send to the team in most cases.
Wil Schroter: That's why I'm saying like this muscle isn't just about you. It's about you setting the tone and in, in maintaining the tone, not just setting it but maintaining the tone for the entire rest of the organization. Because when I look at a chaotic organization, I can guarantee it's got a chaotic leader. Conversely, when I see a buttoned up organization where people clearly have their priorities aligned, you just go back to the leadership and it's reflective every time. Right. So, if we're thinking in the early days, we've got five people in a room so to speak. Right. Or it's us and four contractors kind of doesn't matter. And you're like, oh, this doesn't apply to me as much yet because, you know, yeah, we have a lot of things to do but you know, there's not a lot of people to manage. That's where it starts. This is where the foundation starts. If we start with a very structured foundation, like at start ups.com me telling our audience this, we have very, very, very simple but consistent project management techniques, right? We start off with, here's exactly what will get done for this week. That's it. And we talked about this in, in episodes of a long time ago where we said we basically work in one week sprints. What can you get done by Friday? Right? Why? Because it forces priority. If we say, what will you get done in all of next month? We've just taken priority off the table.
Ryan Rutan: You've also got to get some of that stuff done by this Friday and the next Friday and the Friday after and the Friday after, right? Like so, but if you can't break it down, I mean, look, there are projects that run longer that's OK. You can still break those down into smaller milestones. And like again, what are you gonna get done this week?
Wil Schroter: You bet. And so I think a lot of it comes down to priority. OK? Again, we're gonna go back to stack ranking. So if you were to look at your team as kind of a proxy to your own efforts, but if you were to look at your team and say, hey, you got four things you're doing. Can you just tell me in order of importance, how you, how you're putting those? What if those, that order of importance is backward to what you think it should be? Yeah,
Ryan Rutan: that's an important understanding.
Wil Schroter: Or here's another great one. You look through the list and you say, hey, just to be clear, like some of the stuff was important three weeks ago, but it's not important now. And that person says to you, how do I know that? Yeah.
Ryan Rutan: How was I supposed to know that?
Wil Schroter: Right. I think part of what we don't understand again, is this relationship between our priorities and everyone else's. And so part of the exercise is again, just ranking our priorities. So what's the most important thing right now? Right now? You, you and I talk about this stuff every week again when we go through this stuff, hey, what are we working on this week? What do we worked on the past? Is that still important? Is it as important as before? No cool guy, right?
Ryan Rutan: This is one of the conversations with founders all the time and it's around, you know, I'm sure you could ask the same thing and I've talked about this in the podcast before. But people ask what's the most important characteristic of a founder. And, you know, I, I used to, I, I've had number of answers over the years, but the one that's kind of consistently for the last couple of years has been this ability to zoom in and zoom out, zoom out to where you can see the context of what's going on again. Like get the universe of problems in front of you. Take a look at all of them, determine priority and rank and then zoom back in and get that shit done and then zoom back out to where you can see it all again. Because if you don't to your point, you end up working on things. It's like, OK, yeah, that was important a month ago, but it's not anymore. We've moved away from that. The market shifted, the product shifted. Something else has happened that has made that less of a priority or something else has come along that simply outranks that from a priority standpoint. If you're not constantly zooming in zooming out to make sure that you're aware of these things, you can end up digging a ditch in the wrong direction for a long damn time and have nothing to show
Wil Schroter: for it. Also, you know, from a lot of as the organization gets bigger, especially for a lot of folks, they don't understand why, why their stuff wouldn't be the most important stuff, right? If
Ryan Rutan: you're working on it for you, it probably is the most important stuff, right? Which
Wil Schroter: makes sense. But I have no context for how that relates to somebody else. I always see this in companies when they're talking about budgeting and the person says, well, I need budget for this and there, well, you know, that comes out of something else, right? There's not just like this amorphous bucket. So if you get something, it means you're taking it away from someone else, right? But nobody thinks like that
Ryan Rutan: Bob needed all the money for gas. Unfortunately, we didn't give Tim any money to buy the tires for the car. So.
Wil Schroter: Right. Right. Right now and, and so the stack ranking of problems, right? And the more you can, you can externalize this within the organization, the better to say, hey, everybody, these are the biggest things that I'm working on so that other people can kind of compare, you know, we do this as a management team and say, oh, ok, I see you're working on that or by the way, you're not working on this other thing, right? Take your relationship with our CTO, right? When he says, hey, here are things that I'm working on this week and you see that none of them have to do with what you're doing as the CMO, right? You could, you could look at it and say, OK, I guess my shit's not getting done. You can adjust your priorities based on how his priorities change. Now zoom out of touch and say what if that conversation doesn't happen again? We're not stack ranking and aligning priorities. You're sitting around wondering why your stuff's not getting done. He's not even working on it. It's not even a timing thing.
Ryan Rutan: Now, this is where things like a frameworks like Kpisokrs are so powerful to break down that siloing to make sure that the thing you're doing is actually pointing towards that greater goal and that we're all aware of what the greater goal is and what limitations exist within that. I think it's super, super important that we have that level of visibility because again, like to your point, even if you are prioritizing, you're doing a great job of stack rank ordering things and you know exactly what the priorities are and somehow that stays locked up in your head as the founder or just any individual within the organization who interfaces with other people and their outputs have to do with everybody else's outcomes. That's a problem, right? It's a huge issue.
Wil Schroter: I agree. So the last factor I think we should talk about is the factor of time. And what I mean by that is the fact that time changes problems and it actually solves a lot of problems and we we, we kind of touched on this a second ago when I said, hey, is that still a priority? Right? Here's one of the most fascinating things that I, that I found years and years ago, back in the day, like pre slack, like back when everybody's like, email was your main, you know, uh function of communication, whatever was in my email box was essentially my task list, especially as a manager, right? Because, you know, your coms tend to be like, like tell you where to go. Right? And one of the things I learned when I actually started to take vacations was I had, let's say 200 emails that I had gotten within the week. Right? In me, I was maniacal. I was always checking my emails, but I always said, ok, here are the ones that I need to get back to. Then I come back a week later and I started to realize how many of those emails ergo problems. Just one away, right? Just run away with time, right? Think of how many problems you've had in your life, how many frustrations you've had that time solved. Now, think about it in terms of what if you just knew that time solved a lot of problems? I'll give you the most obvious one, angry customer right now. I'm not saying angry customers aren't a bad thing. This is I'm talking about human psychology right now.
Ryan Rutan: You're just saying to ignore them and see if they go away.
Wil Schroter: Yeah. Exactly. Right. No, no. What I'm saying is if I am an angry customer over anything, right, I'm gonna be most angry on day one. In most cases. I mean, 50% less angry on day two and, and 50% angry, less angry on day three and blah, blah, blah. Part of that's just human psychology. Just things burn off. Right. An argument you get in with your spouse, it
Ryan Rutan: burns off when we have so much energy to dedicate to these things before we want to divert that energy elsewhere.
Wil Schroter: But the problem is at that time in that moment, it is the most important thing in the world. And so when I go back to my inbox, a week later of 100 messages that were incredibly urgent last Tuesday are meaningless now, right? Part of the order to chaos is recognizing that half your problems are just going to go away, right? Whether they were more important, you know, more important problems come along or whatever you thought the biggest issue was just kind of went away, go back a year, a year ago and think about all the problems you had. How many of those did you hardcore solve? How many just kind of went away?
Ryan Rutan: I finally got just enough masks to go with all my favorite outfits and then we stopped having to wear them, right? It was a huge issue for me for a while. Like you know,
Wil Schroter: I'm surprised more people are aware of this. Right. It, it, I, I think every day at a high level gets it, but there's a difference between that at a high level. I get it and I actually plan for
Ryan Rutan: it. I'm gonna go back to the, the same concept, which is, I think in a lot of cases it's hard, especially for the earlier stage founders think you and I have the benefit of being old and experienced. And so we have a better ability to kind of read the tea leaves a little bit on what problems will fade with time and which ones won't. And so I think in my case, it was just a matter of having so many problems and without the ability to stack rank, order them, some of them just don't get solved. And then over time you realize, huh I didn't solve that, but it went away on its own. And, and so I think over over time you end up with a bit better measuring stick for figuring out which ones you can leave. Because I remember in the early stages, like everything feels like it has to be dealt with. Every email, had to be replied to every angry customer, every every employee issue, every every product desire, demand, whatever it was felt like it was important. And so you want to deal with all of them. And you cannot imagine in that moment simply just not dealing with it and just let's just not deal with it. And let's see if time solves it. That was never something I said to myself aloud or, or otherwise, until I'd had the experience of simply just failing at doing everything, which then taught me that sometimes time will just solve the problems. I think for early founders, this can be a really tough one to figure out again, like that stack rank ordering to know which one of these is safe to leave for time to handle.
Wil Schroter: I'll give you a parallel kind of situation that I I deal with when I get asked to do things. I love helping people. So I I don't have any problem being asked to do things, right? What I've found over the years is that if people ask me to do something once and I do it, it just occupies a ton of my time. But if they ask me once and I don't do it and I'm not being a jerk, right? I'm actually, I'm fully willing to be supportive, right?
Ryan Rutan: I have adopted the same process, my friends.
Wil Schroter: OK? You already see where I'm going with this and, and then I basically say just if they ask me again, I'll do it.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah, exactly. 85% of the time it never comes back around again, right? Meaning that I would have spent 85% more time doing shit. I didn't need to do that. Apparently it wasn't important particularly when it was somebody else prioritizing that for me. Hey, can you do this for me? I can, should I do you need me to, does it matter? Is it important? And so I found also a kind of an intermediate step to that one is just asking if they asked me to do something like why this, why now, right. And oftentimes they'll come back and they're just like, yeah, you know what actually Like, let's just, let's just kick that can down the road a bit. Let's punt for now and we'll, we'll see if that's still important. Cool. Right. That three line email saved me, you know, hours or days of time doing stuff. I didn't actually need to do. It's, it's
Wil Schroter: unbelievable again, early in our careers though, we don't know that we have that I'm allowed to do
Ryan Rutan: that. I'm allowed to just not do things holy shit
Wil Schroter: or like when folks ask me to do something right. Again, I'm, I'm always willing to do it. So there's no issue there. It's what I've come to learn though is they never needed me to do it. Right. My kids asked me to do a million things, right? Because my kids never really consider, well, number one, they assume my time has no value. But number two, like, like they're just like, like my, my son will be, hey, dad, I need this and I'm like, hey, buddy, have you tried to do it yourself? Right. No.
Ryan Rutan: Right. Turn it off and turn it on again. It'll be fine. You know,
Wil Schroter: you can do it yourself. Right. Like you actually don't need me or I hate to make this analogy, but I know you'll appreciate it because I remember talking to you about it years ago when someone, a junior member of the staff is like, hey, I don't know how to do something. Did you Google it? Oh God.
Ryan Rutan: Yep. No, not
Wil Schroter: yet. Come on, dude, I'm
Ryan Rutan: gonna, I'm gonna share two secrets with you. One of them is called Google. The other one is owned by Google and it's called youtube. If it doesn't exist in either of those places, I probably don't know how to do it either.
Wil Schroter: It's funny is I always double check myself before I ask somebody like, right. If I'm gonna slack you a question and say, hey, man, can you jump in and do something? My first thought is, well, if he knows that I could do it myself, he shouldn't say yes. Right. And what I'll do is I'll say, well, shit, I'm willing to work a little bit harder to do it myself just so I don't have to be that guy that asks the question that he could do himself. But now take that like, zoom out a little bit, go back to our utility belt that we're developing here of all the ways to manage chaos. One of them is saying, can they fix it themselves. 100
Ryan Rutan: percent. It's such an important question to ask. Correct,
Wil Schroter: correct. And look, if you let people take your time, they will take it. But if all of a sudden you do this magical thing where you say no or you ignore the request, which again, I'm not a fan of like, I, I don't like ignoring anything but it is pretty effective. That's why I
Ryan Rutan: love that question. It doesn't have to be that one but some type of clarification around basically sense check. Have they prioritized this? Are they clear that this is what needs to happen and that I'm the person that needs to do it?
Wil Schroter: Yeah, I tell you what, like for my standpoint, I used to all the time. I used to ask people whether or not, you know, they'd want to grab lunch, dinner, whatever. And I always had this assumption that if I wanted to spend time with you that you must also want to spend time with me. And then I'll never forget. I asked the guy who's the CEO of Reddit at the time when I was living in San Francisco if you wanted to grab lunch or something like that. And he wrote back, he said, why? And I was like, just have lunch catch up, right? Like he was like, state your
Ryan Rutan: purpose or intake conversation. Yeah.
Wil Schroter: Yeah. Well, it was funny about it. He, I'll never forget he wrote this because nobody else had ever said this to me. He said I only do meetings with purpose, right? And I remember thinking to myself, wow, you sound like a ton of fun. Like no, I'll find another lunch date. Thank you. He's not
Ryan Rutan: wrong. He he he's not on the other hand,
Wil Schroter: also not fun, right? So my my point is there is something really interesting about creating a filter to your time, but also to your priorities, right? Again, if someone says, hey, we want you to guess, speak at something, why does it benefit me? I understand why it benefits you because you get to, you know, have somebody on your speaking circuit, right? Why does it benefit me? And by the way, most people haven't even thought about that.
Ryan Rutan: It's God, I, I get this all the time. I'm sure you do as well. It's the the request for intros like I'd really like to talk to. So and so my question back to them is OK, cool. What should I tell them about why they wanna talk to you? And then they're just like, oh shit, you're right. They don't. Of course there's a benefit to you talking to them, but there's no benefit in them talking to you. And so let's think about whether we wanna spend this bullet or not and generally it's no, right.
Wil Schroter: And so OK, let's just zoom out once again. So we've got a, we've got chaos. That's, it is perpetual. You know, we start at the top of the episode with chaos is perpetual. We can't make chaos go away. It will never go away. It's
Ryan Rutan: the soundtrack for a start up.
Wil Schroter: It kind of is. But it, and the more we try, the more futile it becomes what we can do though is we can organize it, right? We can actually get good at organizing it. We can start with saying, hey, there are only so many things we can actually solve for. Right? And I think when we start there and we say, look, we've got 100 people running at us. We've got one bullet, right? Gotta choose where to fire it because we're not gonna get everybody right. And I think it's hard for us to, to get that mindset that we can't fire all the bullets at once, right? So I think that one's important and I think the more the rest of the team understands that it honestly, I think takes stress down a level because if I'm like, hey Ryan, look, you know, you and I have seven problems in front of us. We get to pick one. Let's just solve that. And yeah, we'll worry about the other ones. We're human, but we know intellectually, we can't do anything about them until we get through this
Ryan Rutan: one. We're gonna work on one of them until we've solved it.
Wil Schroter: With the crazy idea being you actually solve it because it's possible just work on everything, solving the problems. Is kind of what moves the ball for it.
Ryan Rutan: I had this experience once where there were like 14 different initiatives, 14 different initiatives. And at the time, my thought was to try to make incremental progress on all 14 of these things. And guess what happened? What a shocker there may have been some progress on each of them, but they it was so slow and so small that it was not beneficial in any way to the organization. And so like then you're waiting until all 14 are done to get the benefit of one of them being completed, right? And so it became very obvious like, OK, let's just focus on one and get that done. Yes, that means deprioritizing the other 13, but actually means something will happen and you will start to benefit from having that thing done and ready,
Wil Schroter: it will actually get done, right? And so if we look at this onslaught of problems, this infernal chaos that, that you will not stop. All we can do as founders is create focus in chaos, all we can do is create focus. We have two things we care about our own focus, which is paramount because if we can't focus our own stuff, then the rest of the stuff doesn't matter. And then the team's focus. If we do nothing else in all this chaos, but organize everything and chunk through and say one by one, we're gonna knock out each of these problems we may not be successful, but we sure as hell won't be disorganized. That is the one thing we can do in every cases, founders to actually move things forward and kind of bring order to chaos as much as we possibly can. So, in addition to all the stuff related to founder groups, you've also got full access to everything on start ups.com that includes all of our education tracks, which will be funding customer acquisition, even how to manage your monthly finances. They're so, so much stuff in there. All of our software including BIZ plan for putting together detailed business plans and financials launch rock for attracting early customers and of course, fundable for attracting investment capital. When you log into the start ups.com site, you'll find all of these resources available.