← Mondays with Matt
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Today, the beverage aisle looks a lot different than it used to. America's beverage companies are working together. We're delivering the options everyone wants. In fact, nearly 60% of beverages Americans buy have zero sugar. You'll find more variety than ever, including more of your favorites now available with zero sugar. You'll also find more sizes and clear calorie information on the front of every can, bottle and pack. We know when it comes to finding balance, the more choices, the better.
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You're listening to the Build you'd Business podcast, powered by Turnkey Coach, where we help business owners find freedom over fear.
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I'm Matt Reynolds.
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And I'm his brother, Chris Reynolds.
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Join us as we help build your business and move from fear to freedom. You're listening to the Build your Business podcast. We are your co hosts, Matt and Chris Reynolds. I'm Matt, he's Chris. Yo, man. Welcome to the show. Today we're going to talk about something that we are actually have struggled with in the past and are actually. We felt like it was good to talk about right now because it's a struggle for both of us, like right now in the present. And that really is founder isolation, or we joked about maybe it could be called overworked and isolated, something like that. And so it can be a real problem when you found a business and the business is often doing well, or at times it's in crisis mode and not. But it's absorbing all of your time and you find yourself almost like you're living in a cave of only the business, of only the work, and everything else in your life goes away. And so I'm going to turn it over to you here in a second. I will say there is a time period that you'll hear about from especially some of the world's greatest founders, when they were in college and they dropped out of Stanford and they're working in a garage and they're 20 years old or 21 years old, that's a great time to be isolated and overworked. You don't have wife, you don't have kids, you don't go to church. You don't have that. Okay, that's fine. If you're listening to this and you're 21, or the beginnings of Silicon Valley, which I've got to go back and watch again now that my business reflects that way more. Have you watched that whole show?
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B
Yeah, I have. It's fantastic.
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Yeah. So when you're 46, which is what I am, and 43, which is what you are, overworked and Isolated is not a great place to be for very long. It's unsustainable. There are times when you have to have it. And so I'll take that and use that as the lead in. And tell me what your. Your initial thoughts are on this concept.
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B
Yeah, I mean, so look, everybody goes through. Doesn't last forever. I think that's an important thing to start with.
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Yeah. This too shall pass.
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Yeah, I mean, look, always does. I'm an extremely positive person. My tendency is probably to be overly optimistic about everything.
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So the Reynolds trait, that even since both of us work, I'm the CEO of my company. You're kind of a fractional CTO for our company. Our company recognizes that in us. They like that in us. But sometimes they're like, hey, we got to get down to the gross nitty gritty. Like, yeah, what. What has to be fixed? But I am. I am an ultimate optimist, as are. As are you.
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B
Yeah. So, I mean, I think it's important to address this because, I mean, it's going to be something. It can be something that you start feeling like is going to completely take you out. I think it's important to understand that the legit feelings of depression, anxiety, all these things, those are real. And as a founder, you're going to feel them sometimes, and usually they compound on each other. So one of the things that I think is hard is you normally will start with a nice little hefty dose of anxiety around something that, you know, truthfully is probably just not in your control. Like, you're trying to make it in your control.
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Right.
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But it isn't in your control. And nine times out of 10, it's a bad thing that you're avoiding. You're. You're avoiding dealing with the consequences of a thing that just need to be dealt with. Right?
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Yeah. If the work is in your control, this is a horizon.
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Yeah.
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Yeah. The hormozy says this all the time. Something along the lines of anxiety is just unfinished work that, you know you have to do that you don't want to go through. Like, it's just hard labor, whether that's mental or physical that you don't want to do. But the anxiety really comes from the fact that it's the cloud hanging over you. It's when you were in college, and I can remember, like, when I was writing my master's thesis, until it was done, it was the only. It just. I couldn't really enjoy anything because it's just everything was bad hanging over my head until it's done. And then the day I turned it in, that anxiety all went away because that was the thing that was hanging over the head, right?
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B
So the thing is though, there are times like that's defined, right? You know, in that circumstance that you need, you have a thing you need to do, you need to go get, you know, some coffee, you need to, whatever papa's in, whatever you're going to do, sit down, get the thing done. In this case, it's not going to be like that actually. It's going to be a bit different. And so what this is more about is there is legitimately more to do than can get done, right? Like, period, like. And you haven't accepted that, like, as a founder, part of, part of what makes us effective is that things that others look at and say, you know, that can't get done, you're like, nonsense, that will get done. We're going to get done. Right? That's the positive side.
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That's the, like, that's what elon's built his M.O. on. Because people look at Elon and they're like, how can he get so much stuff done? There's a lot of the testimonials in my Undoing Urgency book of people that have that perception of me, and I'm certainly not comparing myself to Elon, but they're like, Matt seems to be able to get the amount of work done in a day or a couple days that would take the rest of us several months. And I don't understand why. But this book lays out how to do that. And I'm here to tell you I'm in a period of my life right now where I'm drowning in urgency and overwork and isolation. This is not a one day, two day event. This is now a four week event of bad sleep, anxiety, depression, which I'm not wired for. But I can tie those things back to a thing. I still don't fully grasp people. And this is not. I'm not trying to be unsympathetic. I just can't sympathize when people who are naturally wired to be depressed for no odd reason or anxious for no odd reason, they have no idea why they're anxious or no idea why they're depressed or whatever. The thing is, for me, it always ties back to a reason. And so when the reason is a thing, that is a task list that is so long that for the most part only I can do, and I've outsourced everything else, then that's when it starts to feel like this I'm, you know, I'm dropping into the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland and I'm just falling and I can't catch myself. So every project finished just takes one project off the list and there's still another 75 to do that have to be done.
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I think the thing that really caused this to be bad is when you know you've got a list of 70 things to do, you grind through one that is just like super hard and you hit every branch on the way down of everything that could go wrong. But three new things were added when you did the one thing right. So you're not making your way out at all.
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Fixing a problem just eventually adds more problems. I mean, we solve problems and we put out fires, and that's our job. And sometimes the fires and the problems. There are so many problems. There's so many fires surrounding us that were like, the house is burning down and I can't. I don't have enough fire extinguishers and firemen to put it out. Yeah, I put one out and three more pop up.
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B
That's what it is, right? That feeling is the thing that will snowball on you and just. And just take you out. And I mean, I. So just like you just said, by the way, you said, I'm in the middle of this whole thing right now. I'm in the middle of this whole thing right now. Same like, we got two guys here that are just like, oh, God, this is a lot going on. And part of it is just that there's. There's legitimately so much to do. And I think there's some false. I can feel what some of them are. I think I've got some false beliefs in here that are actually causing some of the internal angst around it and where I've been able to find some relief in this process. So look, we've gone through a lot of podcasts where we've talked about how do you delegate, how do you make sure that you've got SOPs in place so that you can do, you know, all the things that need to get done. There are circumstances that arise that are very resistant to both of those things. Okay. And so maybe that's a good place for us to dig in. One of them is when you're inventing the future, you don't have an SOP yet. You're inventing on the fly, and you're doing it as a problem solving founder. That's what you're doing, right? You're like, I'm the kind of person who can solve this. I like, it needs my special judgment, it needs my special founder sauce, whatever that is. Right. To get this thing done. And who are you going to find that can do that thing? Right. The whole nature of what it is you do is that, you know, in this specific space for this specific problem set, not only am I the expert, but I am also the inventor of solutions to problems. And when what you have is a giant list of problems that need to be solved, then it is very, very difficult to delegate at that point. The answer, I think, lies in this idea that the same trait. So funny I can point to almost. I can point to podcast episodes we've done, where the trait that is the ideal trait in the circumstance that we were talking about is the one that gets you on this.
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Right.
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So one of them is where your.
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Greatest gift is also your greatest detriment.
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That's right. That's right. So as a founder, we've said you gotta be the cheerleader. The cheerleader. Right.
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Like everybody else is, you're rallying the troops. You're. You're leading from the front.
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Yep.
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It's all that sort of thing.
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Yeah. Everybody else can get down in the dumps, but you can't. I mean, if you are, that's understandable, but they can't see it. Right, Right.
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And. And by the way, most of the time they shouldn't.
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Right? That's right.
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Except for, I think, where you're going in this for the time scenario.
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And I think what. What happens is going to reverse this a little bit. So everybody who's ever worked for somebody else, which I'm guessing is close to 100% of the people listening to this, unless you're like a, I don't know, a trust kid or something. But like, if you're not, then you've worked for somebody. You're constantly looking for their approval for whatever. Right. Like you're looking for. Look at how hard I'm working at this thing, boss. Like, like, you know, how, you know, I'm. I can grow in the organization and I can do more and I can, you know, all these things. Right. Everybody knows that feeling. When you were in that role, how frequently did you think about the intensity of the role of the boss? My guess is never.
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Never.
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Right. It doesn't happen.
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What under pressure are they under?
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You never think about that.
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No.
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It does not cross. That does not cross the mind.
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Usually like them.
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Right.
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They're the boss. Right, Right.
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While you want their approval, you don't think about the fact that they are potentially suffering under an enormous load as well. Until you are that person, right? And when you're that person, you start going, oh, like I've been shielding people from all of this stuff. And like, I've been like the shield against the universe here, trying to keep everything up and running. And. And the reality is I think that, I think that role that we play sometimes is the thing that can crush us. I think it is better to let a little of that, not all of it. You gotta be careful here, like a little of that out. Maybe the route through it is you put a meeting on the calendar for your top people, whoever they are, Right. And all the different leadership, it doesn't.
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Have to be just C suite, but like say all leadership in the company.
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And maybe even super, maybe highly skilled people in the thing that you're a good technician at, if that's part of the situation, you know, where it's like a technician type of problem. So in that circumstance, what I think you want to do is you want to get these people together and you want to be pretty facts based. Like, I wouldn't drive super hard on the emotion piece, but a little, I'd let a little of it leak out and it needs to be like, listen, in the last three days, I did three 17 hour days in a row and laid in bed and couldn't sleep. Got up after three hours of sleep, super stressed, trying to get, you know, this giant list that is currently crushing me done. And my reward for that was five additional things that I added to the.
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List or that is expected of me from you, the team. Yeah, because of that. Right?
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Because of that, right. And so what you do, I think when you get them around you, I think this is like step one. The primary problem probably is isolation. I actually think that's maybe the main thing.
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A
To be clear on this podcast, we want to talk about the problem of being overworked. And we're talking about overworked long term, not. Yeah, yeah, like overwork. 16 hour days, 17 hour day for three days is nothing.
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Fine. This is called being a fan.
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Four, six, eight weeks, three months, a year is unsustainable and will break anybody. It will break anybody.
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You can't survive that long term. And so what I think you have to do is again, you know, it's your job to figure out the difference between is this a short term sprint or is this a long term problem?
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Right.
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And as it starts turning into a long term problem, I think you've got to get the people together and you have to, you have to explain this thing. Ultimately, it is in that that you can ultimately find your way out of it. And I think the way you do it is you, you bring everybody together, you let them see, like, hey, just, you know, it's not gonna be everybody, but some of them are gonna have some empathetic response to be like, oof, that would be tough. That would be tough to be in that position. And you know, they start to get it and they're like, okay, and what you're doing here is more of an idea brainstorm. This is not an accusation situation. Especially like if a lot of the pressure and a lot of the items are coming from employees. I think one of the things that it could become that would not be helpful at all is it could become a little bit of a, an accusation meeting. And that's not going to help anybody. What you want to do instead is you want to say, listen, you all are waiting on me and I'm becoming a bottleneck here to a lot of things and I can feel it. And the bottleneck is actually the thing that's driving me crazy. It's the thing keeping me from sleeping. It's causing, you know, the quality of my work is dropping because I can't get all this stuff done. And what I need are ideas. I need us to work through some ideas about how to get through this. This is not a one time meeting. While I'm feeling this way, we're gonna need to have this meeting like every other day or something. Like maybe it's every day until we're on top of it for the meeting.
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Can't take. I was gonna say, but the meeting can't take an hour.
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It may have, because I don't have to.
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But yes, I understand what you're saying and I think you do too, but it is.
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Yeah, this is the snowball.
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Yeah. So part of my overworkedness is the number of meetings that I'm being forced to attend that right now I'm like, listen, we have AI now record the video, give me the transcript, give me the thing. I'll watch the video in 2x time and can cut that meeting down for me by 50%. There are times I've talked about this about like the big rocks. There are. Here are the major projects that I'm working on. I have identified. I've, I've put them in order of priority or a combination of priority and urgency. And sometimes the priority, because of the urgency, it drives up to priority. Especially for a company like yours. If you have a big tech crisis, then it is both hyper urgent and hyper important. And so I have to work on this. But also I'm still the CEO of the company and have all these other things that I have to do. And so what I've done with my team and what I think I'll end up doing today is saying these are the big rocks that have been put on my shoulders. They are all important because they're all big rocks. These are not pebbles or sand or water. The things that go in the jar that aren't the big rocks. But I can't do them all in the time period that we have laid out and they need to get done. Which means I have to focus my attention on these two or three things and everything else. I need people to step up and often you can assign that based on their skill level to do the best you can to get as far as you can on that big rock. On big rock, number four, number three or number five as far as you can to take that load off my shoulders so that I don't feel like I'm the bottleneck. So, and I'll give you an example. So as we've moved from a B2C company to a B2B company, we don't have a sales manager right now. We do have a sales team. But we are, we are sort of redoing the entire sales process of how you know how you sell B2C versus how you sell SaaS is completely different.
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Yep.
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And so, and I've done a lot of this. I'm getting pushed to write the SOPs for the sales team. Problem is I got. Not to exaggerate, let's say I have eight other bigger rocks than the SOP for the sales team. So what's happening right now is the sales team is sitting on the bench waiting for the SOP so that they can go and I have to put somebody in charge of say just write the SOP and get em going and figure out where it's breaking and then we'll come back in a couple weeks once these big rocks are taken care of. Because right now I'm the bottleneck with all of it. I fly to Vegas in a few days. By the way, hate Vegas. Gotta do a big trade show. Me and the coo. It's just two of us this time. Going to that and stupid stuff I shouldn't have taken on. I mean like buying all the, you know, gift baskets for the presenters.
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B
Yeah.
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And I'm packing that up and I'm.
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Packing it always comes back and bites you.
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A
Well, and this is the problem with owning an online business where like nobody's in Springfield. So you know, the, you know, the booth and the booth backdrop and all the stuff is here and trying to figure out shipping to get it to Caesar's palace and all that sort of stuff at this point, that is just something that has to be done. Like, nobody on my staff can do it. So what I did is I hired my sister and hired my wife and said like, get it shipped. Here's, here's like, so that the overworked part has to feel every day like the list didn't grow, but like the list shrunk a little bit and the list shrunk a little bit. Even though you may have and will have to come back to some of those other big rocks number three, four, five to ten. I've got to focus on one and two right now. And I need you to let up on me on all this other stuff and take it and run with it. And so that's the overworked part that I think has. And by the way, I have a great of a great executive assistant who had been my executive assistant for several years. He got promoted in the company. We hired a. I may have told this story on the podcast. I hired a third party company. They suck. They all third party EA company. If you're a third party EA company and you think you're awesome, reach out to me, it's fine. But in general, I need somebody who can write as me from my email address who can give short answers that, you know, we were talking before this about like, did you see this email? And you're like, I saw the email. I didn't read the email. I don't have time to read the email. So that's what the EA does. The EA takes the little things off your shoulders that are those five minute, the book getting things done and the EA does that stuff, gets it off. And then you take that leadership team C suite, et cetera, and you say, look, I'm going to focus as hard as I can on big rock one and two and I need you guys to focus on big rocks three through seven. And do not ask anything of me. Don't tag me in it. Just go. Now this also comes back to previous episodes of Core Values and Culture. If you've built a team who has been through crisis mode with you. And I think it's, I'm very careful to not use that term. By the way, we call this problem solving mode once every five years or so three years, five years, we go through crisis mode, which is literally like live or die in the next, whatever, four days. And we're all going to work 24 hours a day, and it's going to be awful. But if we don't make it work and we don't fix the problem, the business dies. That's crisis mode. I'm on the edge, but I'm in deep problem solving mode. And we have to solve the problems. We're not in crisis. I'm not talking about, like, I can't make payroll in a week, which is a. That's a crisis. Like you, you gotta make payroll. There's not enough money in the bank. What the f do you do? That's crisis mode. This is. I have. We have so many things that are going on in the business. The business is growing. So much is on my shoulders. Oh, by the way, I've also taken on this VP of sales role, this sales manager role. And I just can't do it right now because I'm selling. Because I'm actually selling. I'm actually in the trenches doing the thing. And I can't even build the SOP until I know exactly what the selling process looks like and I know how to do it in HubSpot and use the CRM and stuff. And I can use people to help me put those tasks in the CRM. But, like, I need to. The things that only I can do that are the most important are the things I'm going to do and everything else must be taken off my plate.
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Yeah.
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And that's the conversation you have with your team and you let them jump in and say, I can take that, I can take that, I can take this, and we can meet again in two weeks when this stuff is slowed down a little bit and we can get there. To me, that's how you do it.
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B
I agree completely. I actually think there's really two telltales that are important here for anybody else going through this or may go through this at some point in the future. And it's what I heard you say that is also consistent with mine, is that you're currently inventing something new, right? You're inventing a new sales process, new sop, right? This. And it's one that you have an opinion on that is very important. Right. Like, it is critically important, the thing that you're currently doing. And so I think the thing that makes this hard is whenever you need to invent a lot of stuff fast, right? You need to be. You need to be the one who's at least reviewing and sort of editing and putting final touches on it. And I do think that is maybe where you find a little pressure valve is get somebody else to do some of the drafting and then you go through and do sort of the final edits. You can also lean on AI to help you with this and go back and listen to our AI podcast where we talk about how to do that. There are some good, good opportunities to make that, that happen. But, you know, I think it's a great example of when you start recognizing that as a founder, I'm, I'm inventing a lot of new right now. I'm out there with the machete in the jungle and I'm just like knocking back. I'm. I'm cutting a brand new path.
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A
Right?
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B
That's the moment that you find out that, you know, you thought, well, it won't be a big deal. I'm going to order some packets and get those shipped to a particular place. You know, it's really important to me, you know, that it'd be really nice and do all the things, whatever. That's the time that that one steamrolls you.
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A
Yeah, that's right.
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B
And. And you have to be super disciplined. That even though you may have the ability to do it, even though you might care a lot about a thing where you can delegate, you must delegate, because the speed at which you will get overrun if you don't is higher than you think. It might work out once, but the time that it doesn't work out, it'll be when there's a hundred emergencies going on at the same time and you're dealing with everything. So I think what you said is right. Get the team around you, get all the trusted people in one place and figure out how you can spend some time having them come up with ways to lift stuff off your shoulders, get stuff off your plate, and do it in a way that helps them understand the gravity of the problem. You know, most of them want to get stuff done and literally are waiting on you for some stuff. Right. So, like, okay, how do we do it?
- [25:01]
A
They also want to sort of impress you with the work that they do. And so they should. Yeah, if the culture is right. And so, for example, I have a draft sales SOP written for the company. It's just not ready to release yet. And so rather than me doing all the rest of the editing, I can take that thing and tell the team this is what I'm dealing with. I have to crowdsource this out to the rest of you at this point to finish this thing out, add the little screenshots and pictures and the links to HubSpot and all this stuff. Those are the things that take up tremendous time on my part. Like, I can write the system pretty quick, and I did, but it's not perfect and it's not ready to go out to the sales team until you have those things. And so I'm gonna crowdsource that to you, to you guys, to the sales team and to the editor in chief and to the head, the CMO and to like, I need help there. That's where we get help to try to get ourselves in a place where we don't feel overworked. I told my wife and I wanna transition now into the isolation piece. When you're in this overworked mode, this is my experience, but I bet it will be yours as well as the listeners. Is that because you're so overworked, everything else sort of goes away? So you become not a great husband, not a great father. I'm really active in my church or if it's your community or your kids, ball teams or whatever the thing is, group of buddies or guys that you would go on a camping trip with and you're just like, I just can't right now. Those things all go away. And so I told my wife, I said, I go every morning. I still wake up every morning, often way too early. I'm also underslept, which comes with this. Not typically in a two to three day sprint, but I guess I wake up at two now, which is not what I want to do. And so I took an 8:30am nap today, which I don't know if I've ever taken a nap at 8:30am I slept so hard that I woke up and thought it was tomorrow.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And I slept like 40, 45 minutes, sleep mask, you know, and everything. So it was pitch black. And. And so anyway, what you end up doing is you end up isolating yourself entirely in the business. Isolating yourself away from your spouse, your children, your community, your loved ones, your hobbies, your whatever those things are. And so I told my wife last night and this is not very healthy. So I'm not suggesting this, but I was trying to help her understand. I wake up in the morning ready to go, raring to go, here we go. And I knock out work. And because my sleep is so bad, by the time I get to about lunchtime, my IQ. Typically my IQ drops at like 6 or 7pm now my IQ is dropping at Noon and I take a nap and I wake up. And in the past I will get up and do a whole nother round of work for six or seven hours. And now I take a nap and I wake up at 1:30 in the afternoon and I'm like, work is not getting done very well. Work is still slow because I'm still slow. And what that leads me to is it leads me from a feeling of pressure and overworkedness to a. All I can describe is a feeling of depression, which I'm not prone to, so I'm not really even in tune with what that feels like. And then the only way to relax at night, which is the problem that I'm struggling with right now is, well, I guess I could take some anxiety medicine or I could take an antidepressant, which I don't want to take either. I've never taken an antidepressant. Not once in my whole life I've taken anxiety medicine. I don't like the way it makes me feel. I could have two cocktails. I think that's fine every once in a while. But I think that you're self medicating with cocktails in order to get that crap out of your head so that you can go to sleep and start the problem all over again the next day.
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B
Yeah, it's not good.
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A
We're eating at the dinner table with my family, we're eating in the living room, my wife and I watching a TV show. There's no connection with the people that matter in my life. And so let's talk a little bit about the transition out of the overworked and the effect of the overworkedness, which is often isolation mode for the entrepreneur or founder.
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B
Yeah, gosh, I wish I had. I wish I was an expert in this. I'm probably an expert in doing this terribly so.
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A
Yep, me too.
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B
What I'll do is I'll just reflect back my own experience as well in this, which is that the worst of it is always when I think that the answer is for me to put my headphones on and go head down and get work done. That's a super strong muscle for me that is enormously effective in certain contexts and is probably the thing that would eventually kill me if I continued doing it when it is not being effective and so.
- [29:54]
A
Or there's lots of real, like real life downstream effects. Certainly. First, personally, that's the sort of thing that leads to heart attacks and strokes and a life that you look back on and we're like, I just overworked myself to death. It leads to divorce. It leads to not great relationships with your kids, who, even if you give them what seems to be a wonderful life of a great house and we can travel anywhere, when you fly first class and do all these things, they're like, but dad, you know, dad.
- [30:24]
B
Yeah, no, I get it. Dad's not there.
- [30:27]
A
But dad missed the musical or the softball game. Sorry. Which, by the way, I'm very careful not to miss those things. But there have been times when I have where you miss the birthday, where you miss the whatever. And so the downstream effect of long term overworkness and isolation doesn't just affect you. This is what's so important. It affects the entire network that you're in, from your family to your community to your company to your employees. They are all affected by those things. And so.
- [31:08]
B
So here's the thing, though.
- [31:09]
A
You stay out of that. Yeah.
- [31:10]
B
Think about this. I think this is one of the reasons that this can become such a difficult downward spiral. You already have a hundred million pounds of pressure on your shoulders. That makes it even harder.
- [31:24]
A
That's right.
- [31:25]
B
Right. Like, oh, my path out of this is to work my ass off until. Until the thing is done. But I can't do that because I also have these other things that I need to do that that will ruin, you know, or will lead to. And so in some ways, it's a. It's an interesting way of thinking about it. But what I really think it is is constraints. I think that. I think it becomes a very good and valuable constraint. And what I mean by that is just to say that, look, that no matter how strong that muscle is, of being able to go head down, get the work done, bring your laptop everywhere you go, get everything done. And trust me, like, this is me talking to me. I live this life day in and day out. You are making the problem worse. And the reason you're making the problem worse is because now you're doing a bunch of stuff without enough time. You're not including people in it because that slows it down. Right. It's faster if it's just in your head and coming out of your fingers on the keyboard. And that kind of thing is faster that way. Great. It maybe isn't the quality level that you want all, all of that unless you know you're doing it. But now no one's involved in it. And now no one can take that baton and run. And so what I've kind of come to the conclusion of is that the isolation becomes a downward spiral. That just gets worse and worse and worse if you don't interrupt it purposefully and just go like, I can't do this, I gotta be around other. I need to socialize. It's bizarre how when things are really, really bad like that, if you can just get. It doesn't take a lot. Like, let's say you can get 12 hour period of time at night with a group of friends or family or somebody where it's not. Where it's enjoyable. You're sitting there, it's not work. Like it's. And you're not going to talk about work like it's. I mean, you might, you might tell them about the difficulties you've got going on. I think one thing men struggle with in that whole toughness thing that we do, we tend to not talk about like, you know, I'm drowning here. I am, I am drowning and I need help. And I'm not entirely sure how to get it. I think it's perfectly appropriate to do that. But I think it's weird. You get done with that type of interaction. You're like, oh, things actually don't look as bad as they looked before. And this is what it takes.
- [33:43]
A
It's the concept of touching grass. You've heard this term lately on you. I can say it all the time. And I'm like, I really just need to touch some grass. Which I don't think I literally need to touch grass. I probably do, but I, you know, it's. It's that concept. But that man, it's. For me, I. I am, I love my church. I love the guys in my church I go to. The last several weeks I've gone to church and I think to myself, I'm going to be here for the next seven hours because we go to kind of a reformed, very traditional liturgical church. And I am like, but if I was home, I could be doing work. And that's not a great place to be. Last night my wife was like, do you want to go on a date? I never turned down dates. I turned down a date last night. I was like, babe, I don't think it's possible for me to go out. She's like, the kids are out of the house. It's just you and me. Let's go get dinner. And I was like, I actually don't think I physically can. I can't. I could, I could have. And so maintaining that relationship or those relationships with people who are, remember that no one lays on their deathbed and wishes they worked more. No one's ever done that. No. They go back to the things like the reason that we work is for these other things. It's for our children and for our spouses and for our community. And so in the midst of the hardest work. And by the way, fitness falls into this too. This is another one where it's like, and I know because I coach you.
- [35:11]
B
And so let's just be honest, same camp man, not training right now.
- [35:14]
A
You're not training right now. And we're not training because we're so busy and we both know. So I also can go back. Rachel asked me last night, my wife asked me last night. She's like, well, what has made you feel better in the past? I said, well, getting up and training every single morning and eating well and hitting the sauna and the cold plunge and cooking all the food from home and not door dashing and those sorts of things. Well, those are all time that feels like I don't have right now. That it just feels like, well, but If I'm working 16, 18 hours a day, how is it possible that I could work out or that I could make a meal at home or that I could do that thing. Thing. And so at some point, I think what it really comes down to, use a different word, but comes down to boundaries. Like at some point you just have to set boundaries and you just have to say like, hey team, at 6pm I am shutting down and I am not turning and I'm going to put my phone in my top drawer next to my bed and I'm going to turn my computer off and I'm going to leave it at home and I'm going to go have a date with my wife. And if blows up in the next four hours, like I got a great C suite, take care of it.
- [36:25]
B
Yeah.
- [36:25]
A
And, and the reality is that 99.999% of the time nothing blows up when.
- [36:31]
B
You get in this state. I actually think that you make, you can tend to make it worse. Right. Because what happens is in being so. I don't know what the word is, there's just like you're just, you're manic in some ways. It's not like a necessarily a good manic, it's like a bad manic.
- [36:46]
A
Yeah. Like your adrenals are fried. You're constantly like you're hyper. Adrenaline.
- [36:51]
B
Yeah.
- [36:52]
A
You are head on a swivel.
- [36:53]
B
You're checking slack, you're checking email, you're checking.
- [36:56]
A
Yeah. What's gone wrong now? What gets added to the task list that's that's exactly right.
- [37:01]
B
Even in timeframes where you might have had 30 minutes of legit downtime, you don't have it because you're checking it over and over and over again. You're looping in your head about all the things. This is all correct, right? Like you. You gotta get to the point where you have some boundaries. What are those boundaries and how do you enforce them? I think that's one of the things I've done before because I actually can't relax. Like, I cannot relax if I know that my phone is, like, I can't get it. And no one can get a hold of me in the case of an emergency. So what I've done in the past is to a very small number of people, one or two, I will give them my wife's number and I'll say.
- [37:35]
A
I've done the same thing.
- [37:36]
B
You have to interrupt my wife. And now she is a gatekeeper, right? Like, she will not hand that phone to me if it's not critical. Right. And so there are things you can do. You gotta put, you know, your own guardrails in place. But I think all these are the same. I think when these boundaries are being interrupted, they're ultimately signals to you that you're doing something that is not working. I'm not gonna say that you're doing something wrong. I'm just gonna say that you're doing something that's not working. It's the same thing as.
- [38:02]
A
Or that's unsustainable, right? So again, there are times when it's not your fault, you are not the problem, or your business isn't the problem, but that you. When one of your clients has a massive tech problem that you didn't create, but they've hired you to solve, okay, it's all hands on deck for a short period of time. Or when you get handed the lawsuit and you get served, okay, life just changed. Here we go. But the problem is the perpetualness of that. That will often stem from one of those things that occur, one of those crises or incidents that occur that then puts you in that mode. And the next thing you know, you're six weeks in, or eight weeks in, or six months in, and you've been in perpetuity of crisis mode, which has led you to be overworked and isolated from all the people that you care about. So that if you give yourself a heart attack and you die, you know, your headstone is like, let's. Okay, the guy worked his ass off to build a thing to not serve his, like what was the purpose, Right. And so that's the key.
- [39:15]
B
Both.
- [39:15]
A
That's why, that's why I think the episode is so important. To see the relationship between the long term overworkedness of many business owners and founders and the isolation that comes with that. And to break that pattern in order to allow yourself some time, some freedom from the business, to spend time with the people that you love and care about, whoever that is, your family and friends and spouse and church and community and whatever the thing is. And so it's hyper important. And again, I don't know if we've ever done a podcast that's probably preaching more to ourselves. So please, as you listen to this, don't think that we're preaching at you, we're preaching at ourselves. And these are lessons that we are learning in the process of growing business. And so thanks for listening. Thanks for giving us another of your Friday. I hope you get to take a great weekend, by the way. It's a great time of year. The weather is nice, the sun comes out, the grass gets green. It is a great time to like legit touch grass, to get out and throw the ball around to your kids or mow your lawn or something that is not your normal work pattern. And so there you go, that's an important pattern to break. If you've received value from this, we would love a five star review on what was called itunes, Apple Podcasts. Now on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, share it with a friend or family member, especially one, even if they're not a business owner, by the way. This happens sometimes with like upper level managers. You get these projects that you just can't seem to get out of and you're just in it. So for someone that just seems overworked all the time, this is a great podcast. Just share to open it up. I've had a lot of great feedback from people who aren't even business owners who are like, man, there's so many good life's lessons in here and I love the fact, I hope we're able to maintain the fact that we're just vulnerable and honest about how much we suck at a lot of this stuff. Because we do, we suck at a lot of it.
- [41:11]
B
We'll also do a reflection one. I think we'll, I'll put this on the list of podcasts, but I want to do a reflection where we go back and say what did we do? And did any of it work like, or how do we get through it. So the fact that we're both going through it at the same time is good. It should sort of trigger, you know, something that could be helpful, I think, to the listeners out there.
- [41:29]
A
So, yeah, absolutely. Thanks for listening. We'll see you guys next Friday.