Ruben Gamez on Staying Focused and Shipping Your Product

My guest for today is a software developer that worked hard to slowly become an entrepreneur.

He spent several years working as a manager for a billion dollar payroll company. And in his spare time he played around with some ideas.

In early 2009 he created his first online product that failed to garner any attention or traffic. so back to the drawing board he went (two more times) before hitting on something good.

He is now the founder of Bidsketch, which is online proposal software for web designers.

He bootstrapped Bidsketch while working full-time and was able to grow it into a stable and profitable business. In fact, he has grown it to the point where he was able to quit his job, surpass his previous income, and enjoy the freedom of being an internet entrepreneur.

Now, let’s hack …

Ruben Gamez.

In this 35-minute episode Ruben Gamez and I discuss:

• How Ruben stays focused and productive
• Why there is no easy way to build a successful business
• The discipline of staying with boring tasks
• The single, sad, but true step to winning
• Why not all challenges are worth overcoming
• Find out what’s working and double-down on it

[episode]

The Show Notes

• Bidsketch
• Ruben’s blog
• Ruben on Twitter
• Jon on Twitter

[episode_ad]

[episode_transcript]

Ruben Gamez on Staying Focused and Shipping Your Product

Jonny Nastor: This is Rainmaker.FM, the digital marketing podcast network. It’s built on the Rainmaker Platform, which empowers you to build your own digital marketing and sales platform. Start your free 14-day trial at HacktheEntrepreneur.com/Rainmaker.

Voiceover:: Welcome to Hack the Entrepreneur, the show which reveals the fears, habits, and inner battles behind big-name entrepreneurs and those on their way to joining them. Now, here is your host, Jon Nastor.

Jonny Nastor: Welcome to Hack the Entrepreneur. I’m so glad you decided to join me. I’m your host, Jon Nastor, but you can call me Jonny.

My guest for today is a software developer slowly turned entrepreneur. He spent several years working as a manager for a billion-dollar payroll company. In his spare time, he played around with some ideas. Early 2009, he creates his first online product that fails to garner any attention or traffic, so back to the drawing board he went for two more times before hitting onto something good.

He is now the Founder of Bidsketch, which is an online proposal software for web designers. He bootstrapped Bidsketch while working full time and was able to grow it into a stable and profitable business to the point where he was able to quit his job, surpass his previous income, and enjoy the freedom of being an Internet entrepreneur.

Now, let’s hack Ruben Gamez.

I want to take this opportunity to thank our sponsor, FreshBooks. They’re designed for small business owners. FreshBooks is the number one cloud accounting solution that helps millions of entrepreneurs and small business owners to save time billing and get paid faster. With FreshBooks award-winning mobile apps, you can do it all from anywhere on your Android or iOS devices.

To start your 30-day free trial today, go to FreshBooks.com/Hack, and don’t forget to enter ‘Hack the Entrepreneur’ in the ‘How did you hear about us section?’

Welcome back to Hack the Entrepreneur. We have an extra special guest today. Ruben, thank you so much for joining me.

Ruben Gamez: Hi. Thanks for inviting me.

Jonny Nastor: I think this is going to be a lot of fun. Let’s jump straight into it.

Ruben Gamez: Sure.

Jonny Nastor: Ruben, as an entrepreneur, can you tell me what is the one thing that you do that you feel has been the biggest contributor to your successes so far?

How Ruben Stays Focused and Productive

Ruben Gamez: I thought a lot about this, mainly because I feel a good strategy is to find what’s working and just double-down on that. I think it’s the same thing with mindset. For me, I’d probably have to say focus is the thing that I seem to do better than a lot of other people that I know. A lot of people seem to struggle with focus.

Jonny Nastor: Focus in your work, on your products, or just literally being able to sit down today with a coffee and actually stay focused all day and be productive?

Ruben Gamez: I think all of that. What I hear a lot when I listen to podcasts or when I talk to people and I ask them how their product is going later on, it’s often the same thing. They get distracted. They say, “Oh yeah, I have ADD, and I jump on new projects and get excited about this or that and sort of move on. I have a lot of products,” stuff like that. I tend to have one product. I tend to just have a few things that I’m focusing on as far as tasks, just one or two things for the day. I see things through, and I ship.

The Discipline of Staying with Boring Tasks

Ruben Gamez: What’s kind of interesting about that is that a lot of people will say, “Well I get bored, so it’s hard for me to just do one thing.” The thing is that everyone gets bored. It’s easy to just let yourself get distracted and go do things. I don’t focus better than some people because I prefer just to work on one thing, or nothing else enters my mind, or there are no distractions that hit me.

I get excited about new ideas all the time. I have to actually fight these urges all the time. I sometimes hit days where I don’t feel like working on the important things, but I still do it. So that’s the difference.

Jonny Nastor: Yeah. Do you think with the boredom — because everything, no matter how much you’re into what it is that you’re doing, there’s a certain point where the excitement kind of wears off, at least temporarily, and through phases where, “I still got to stay focused. I still have to work.”

It’s just a part of it. I love podcasting, and there’s so much besides having these brilliant conversations with people like you. There’s so much around it that has to be done to get out three shows and record, book, and publish three shows a week.

Why There Is No Easy Way to Build a Successful Business

Ruben Gamez: Right. The people that easily get distracted with new projects either end up having a lot of new projects, products, and things going on, and they basically half-ass everything — because you can’t do a really good job if you’re not focused. Your attention is split and the quality of whatever it is that you’re working on isn’t going to be that great. You’re not going to be able to market those things that well. Not as well as if you’re really focused on one thing or maybe two things. One thing, I’d say, is best.

New stuff, new projects come up all the time. It’s just really about considering which one is the most important, which one is the better thing to do long-term-wise. You also have to think about the reward aspect and sacrificing in the short term because a lot of things that are really valuable long term just basically take a lot of work. You don’t see a payoff for a long period of time, which a lot of people, it’s hard for them to get motivated to do day in and day out.

Like you said, they’ll get excited immediately. They’ll put in a good effort for a little while, but then, when things get tough, they’ll slow down. They’ll move on to something new, or basically abandon what they’re doing, or put it in a maintenance mode or something like that.

Jonny Nastor: Yeah. It’s such bad news to most people that everything that has that big reward at the end takes a lot of work. There’s no easy way. There’s no, “Here, do this. Do these three steps, and you will be a success.” It just doesn’t work.

Ruben Gamez: Right.

Jonny Nastor: No one wants to hear that.

The Single, Sad, but True Step to Winning

Ruben Gamez: Absolutely not. Everyone wants, “What’s the shortcut? How do I win really fast and easy?” Way back, certainly as I can remember in school and things like that, I just saw that people really struggled. That, basically, you will win a lot of times if you just show up, if you just ship. That doesn’t mean even doing an amazing job a lot of times, which is sad.

That’s only the case because so many people fail to finish. Obviously, you want to do a good job so that you have more success. A lot of times you won’t see a certain amount of success if you don’t put in the work and come out with a quality product or something like that. It’s amazing how far you can get just by showing up.

Jonny Nastor: So true. Let’s go back a little bit, I guess to where you started to show up is probably where this happened, but from the hundred or so conversations I’ve now had with entrepreneurs, there seems to be this time in every entrepreneur’s life when they realize one of two things. Either they have this calling to make a really big difference in the world or they simply cannot work for somebody else. Could you tell me, Ruben, if you fall in to one of those two camps, and when you realized this about yourself?

Ruben Gamez: Yeah. For me, it was I had trouble working for other people. It was very rough. Ever since I was young, I always had this idea that I’d own my own business and I’d do something, different things. Before I got into computers, it was real estate, rentals, and other things like that I was thinking I’d do. Then later, as I got into computers, at some point, it became, “Well, I can build software and just sell it.”

When I was working for companies that were paying a lot of money for software that, at the time, I was looking at and I was maintaining and seeing that this is really bad software. “I can build something better. I’m sure I can make a lot of money if I build something better,” which was the wrong way of thinking about it, but that’s what I was thinking at the time.

When I got into computers, early on, I was learning how to program. That was exciting. I got a job doing it. I really enjoyed it. Then as I got promoted and moved away from what I wanted to do — and even programming, while still fun, it sort of became, “OK, what’s the new language that I’m learning?” It was kind of more of the same. I was ready for something new. I’d spent many years doing it.

I was managing a team of, I don’t remember how many people, but managing managers. At that point, I was just not very happy. I was making more money than I’d ever made in my life, but that made no difference at all. Zero. It was around the time that I was doing Bidsketch, and it was starting to gain a little bit of traction. I remember having a conversation with a friend, telling him that, “I think I’m just going to really invest more time in this. I think I might be able to get it to a point where I can quit this job.”

I remember him saying, “Why would you want to do that? You have a really high-paying job, you’re director level, and all that stuff.” I remember telling him, “I don’t care about the pay at all. It makes no difference. They could double my salary tomorrow, and it wouldn’t make one difference. I’d still be extremely unhappy.”

Jonny Nastor: Funny how that works. The things that, it seems from the outside, that those are what we strive for. That’s why we go to college. That’s why we do good in school all the way along. That’s why we do what we’re told, right? Is to get that director-level position. That’s the end goal. You’re just like, “That’s not really what I want.”

Ruben Gamez: No. Early on, for me, I grew up poor. I didn’t have a lot of money. Nobody in my family or none of my friends had money. To get to a point where I was making $8 an hour, when I finally got to $8 an hour, it was amazing. It was a lot of money. More money than a lot of other people that I knew were making.

When I started moving, eventually, into computers and I started making more money, I started reaching levels to where no one that I knew made those amounts of money. I felt like, “Wow, if I can just make whatever amount” — I don’t even remember what the amounts were — “if I can get to this point, then I’ll be set. Then I can vacation all the time. I can do this, that.” I had all these ideas.

Then I’d get there, and I was like, “No, I think I need to get to … ” It was always something new. Then when I got to a level to where it was like, “Yeah, I can do a lot of things that I wanted to do easily,” in reality, I could have done them anyway, before, if I approached it the right way. Buy a nice car, buy a nice house, travel, et cetera.

When I got to that point, it was like, “Wow, I spend most of time at an office working with people that I don’t really understand. They don’t truly understand me. Applying other people’s policies that I don’t generally agree with. Just doing things that I don’t like, an environment where politics is really heavy. This is not ideal. This is not what I want to be doing.” The worst part of all of that, still, was having to do what somebody else tells me. That goes back to not being able to work for other people.

Jonny Nastor: Right. When you were thinking about making the transition, even, to full time with your own stuff, with Bidsketch, and your own business, did you think, “I’m going to make a lot less money overall, but it doesn’t matter because I don’t have to deal with the politics?” Also, “Who am I to run a business? I know how to make software, but really, can I run it?” Was there this sort of thing in your head? Thinking like, “Maybe you’re just being ridiculous, Ruben. Maybe you should suck up this really great paying job that I have and just do it?”

Ruben Gamez: No, I actually never had that thought at all.

Jonny Nastor: Nice.

Ruben Gamez: Like, “Maybe I should just do this work.” Because it didn’t matter. To me, yeah, I thought initially, “You know what? When I quit the job, I’ll quit it at a lower salary level.” I knew that because I didn’t need all that extra money. It was completely worth it to be making less money and have all that freedom. I was working for my freedom and to work for myself. It was just a very clear thing to me that it was something I just had to do. I’d get to that point.

Then when I did quit, I wasn’t making as much money as having that job, but then it didn’t really take that long to where I did. Then I surpassed that by a lot nowadays, which is great, but that wasn’t really the reason why I started doing that. I would have been totally happy, and I was, during the period where I was making a lot less money.

Jonny Nastor: Yeah. Beautiful distinction. I think if you’re doing it just for the money, you’re not going to have that level of success. I really think you have to be doing it for other reasons. You’re going solo and bootstrapping a business. You really need to have other motivators.

Also, as you said, you knew you were going to take a cut in income, and you were OK with that. I think that’s where people really get stuck. They want to take that leap, but first they’re like, “I got to replace this income first, and then I’ll do it.” Well, no, maybe you don’t need that new car. Maybe you don’t need that new … Maybe that’s the problem.

So many people I talk to, myself included, I had to seriously reduce expenses and stuff for the first year to do that, and to be comfortable doing it. Then, of course, your income increases again, and you’re good to go. It’s hard to really just expect to be able to quit one day, and just “Oh, this is how much money I make still.”

Ruben Gamez: Yeah. That’s really tough.

Jonny Nastor: Then you get stuck in it. Twenty years later, you’re like, “Well, maybe one day … ” Well, that day was 20 years ago.

Ruben Gamez: Yeah. The problem is that the more money you make at a job, the harder it is to get to a point where you can quit. Because, generally, most people’s expenses go up with their salary. They get more expensive homes, more expensive cars. Then, the minimum that they need so that they can quit is a lot higher than somebody who’s just starting off and has lower-paying job and all that.

Then it’s about taking a really hard look and seeing what you can eliminate. Well, maybe the car payment or some of the bigger stuff. Things like a mortgage payment is a lot tougher because you have to sell it, or just leave the property, I guess, and get it foreclosed.

Yeah, it starts to get a lot more difficult the longer you’ve been working for different companies, and the more money you’re making, and if you have a family — all these things make it a lot more difficult. But in every situation, there’s always room to cut and to eliminate things.

Jonny Nastor: Exactly, and so counterintuitive. The more money you make at your job, the harder it is to leave. “If I just make this much money for a year, I can save all … ” No, you’ll get a new car. You’ll get extra trips. Your expenses will go up.

Ruben Gamez: The more money you need as a minimum to be able to quit your job, the less likely it is that you’ll get there because doing things on the side when you have a job is hard. If you need a higher minimum, that means you need to go for a longer period of time. Basically, the point is to not run out of gas and not give up before you get there.

Jonny Nastor: Exactly. Excellent. Let’s move on to, say, work and what it is you do. We learned what you are good at. You’re good at the focus. You’re good at determining what to do. Every blog post now, an expert is talking about 80/20. Do 20 percent of the work, get 80 percent of the results. Do what you’re good at, delegate the rest. Ruben, while you are working in your business, can you tell me something that you are absolutely not good at?

Ruben Gamez: I’m not good at doing videos. A while back, a friend of mine asked — she was putting together these video courses – she asked me to do a short six-minute video to where I show my face and I’m talking and all that stuff. I did it, but it was one of the hardest that I’ve ever done. I’m so bad at it. It just took so long. Yeah, I’m sure if I do it over and over and over, I’ll get better at it. It’ll get easier.

But it’s not a strength. It’s not something that I want to do. Right now, I’m bad at it. Same with public speaking. I get offers from time to time to speak at conferences or something, and I always decline because it’s not my thing. Not something I look forward to. It’s not something I want to do.

Jonny Nastor: You haven’t done it yet?

Ruben Gamez: Nope.

Jonny Nastor: Nice. Interesting. That’s cool. That’s something that I’ve struggled with myself. This year I’ve decided that I’m not going to say no anymore. I actually just accepted last week to be on a panel for the first time in the summer.

Ruben Gamez: Oh wow. I think that’s a good first step.

Jonny Nastor: I think so, too, but if it would have been actually speaking, I would have just said yes. I probably would have puked or something right then just out of nerves. As soon as I type the email, “yes.” To me, it’s something I need to do with the podcasting or something I want to do, I guess.

Ruben Gamez: Yeah, that’s the thing. Do you want to do it?

Jonny Nastor: I do.

Ruben Gamez: I’ve talked to a lot of people about it, and they’ve said, “Well, you need to conquer it.” Why don’t I want to do it? Why do I keep saying no? Public speaking is terrifying. I don’t want to do it because it’d be a really big thing.

Why Not All Challenges Are Worth Overcoming

Ruben Gamez: If I look at it objectively, I’d say, “Well, that’s an area for personal growth. That’s definitely where I can improve, and I should just do it for the challenge and all that stuff.” But the thing is, not all challenges are worth taking. For some people, if forwarding your personal brand and you have, let’s say, a podcast or something like you do, it makes sense if these are the things that you want to do. If you eventually move in that direction, it makes a lot of sense.

For me, it would be more of a distraction. Say I did it, and then I did it again, then again, and I started to get better. Then what? Then nothing. This doesn’t dramatically impact my business. I don’t want to do anything related to my personal brand or anything like that. When I’m spending all the time doing that, there are a lot of other challenges that I’m not taking on.

Jonny Nastor: True. It’s a very logical way of looking at it. It’s smart. Would you think to ever put somebody or bring somebody in to your company that does do that PR — the speaking, the getting out there in front of people, and building the audience?

Ruben Gamez: Maybe. I certainly wouldn’t be opposed to it. I would think that would be a benefit. If you’re hiring people, it’s always good to bring in somebody who has strengths where your weaknesses lie.

Jonny Nastor: Yeah. Excellent. OK. As entrepreneurs, as human beings in general, one of our greatest struggles is the fear of being wrong, making mistakes, and failing. This is probably why we’re both freaked out about speaking. Can you tell me within your business, how to be wrong and still work through it?

Ruben Gamez: What do you mean by how to be wrong?

Jonny Nastor: To maybe if that’s how you do it, say, follow your gut on, say, a new part of the product, new idea you guys are going to go forward on, something that just comes back that you were all in and being like, “This is the right direction we need to go,” and then the market or whatever it is you use for metrics, come back to you in a month or two and like, “Ruben, no, that’s not how it works.” You’re just like, “Oh wow, I was so confident, I was so …” and not get totally wiped out or sidetracked by it and knocked off your game for too long.

Ruben Gamez: Got it. This probably has happened to us with some big features that we work on for the product. Especially with bigger features, they can take a lot of time to develop, create. It’s always best to iterate, to really quickly iterate and get feedback and all that stuff. Sometimes you’re just not going to be able to do that very quickly. You’re not going to be able to do that in a week or two.

In the past, that’s happened with features. That’s happened with pricing really early on. Probably spent maybe, I don’t remember exactly how long, maybe the first year. I think it’s the first two years with pricing that was totally wrong for my product — would’ve grown a lot faster with better pricing — but it was a big mistake. These big mistakes happen from time to time. Little ones happen all the time.

Jonny Nastor: And you just brush those ones off. You make a huge pricing error for what seems like a long time in hindsight, but then to go and change that pricing and to confidently do it now or to do it again, does that get harder when you have that mistake lurking over your shoulder? Or do you now know what you did? Do you go back and learn and figure out why you made that mistake?

Find Out What’s Working and Double-Down on It

Ruben Gamez: I always try to go back and learn, but I see what you’re saying. With pricing being wrong, I didn’t know I was wrong until I got to a point of where, “Oh, this works a lot better.” I gave it a thought way back, but really didn’t follow through and test it appropriately to know that this was going to work better. As far as thinking that something is going to work really great, spend a lot of time doing it, test it out, and then it not work out — we have had those situations, too, where it was one of the things.

Importing, we spend a lot of time coming up with a way to import and manually help people out and copy their content in, set up their account, and all that stuff. Maybe we did it the wrong way. We tested this for a few months, and it just didn’t work. There was no impact to trials at all. In that situation, yeah, it’s a downer. My initial thought, I don’t think of it is as “Oh, that didn’t work. OK, now let’s move on.” I approach it that way, but my initial thought is, “I really want this to work. Shoot. Why is it not working, and what can we do to make it work?”

Then I try changing a few things. If I really believe in it and keep pushing forward, and at the end of the day, if it just doesn’t work, “Alright, this didn’t work. It’s a good try.” Maybe there’s still room for something different with the same overall general direction, but then I’ll sit down and really analyze.

In that situation with the onboarding, I went back and looked at the templates we were importing, looked at types of customers that sign in. Look at what went right because, oftentimes, there is something that, even if the whole thing doesn’t work out, especially if it’s a big thing, there’s some small things that do go right.

I try not to ignore that. A lot of people just sort of say, “Oh, this didn’t work,” and the whole thing is just wrong and bad.” And it’s always wrong going forward. Or somebody else says, “Hey, thinking of doing this” — something very similar with the onboarding — “and doing the content, blah, blah, blah, for different type of product — what do you think about that?” “Oh, that doesn’t work. We tried, and it doesn’t work.” Maybe it works for them. Maybe we did it in a different way where it didn’t quite work. It’s important to maintain the right perspective on things like that.

Jonny Nastor: Yeah. Exactly. I love your, “Oh, I wish this would work. What can we do to make it work?”

Ruben Gamez: Right.

Jonny Nastor: Your attitude, it’s good. It’s not black and white. The way you say, “Well parts of it work.” It’s not just like, “Scrap it all. Let’s go on to something else.” That’s probably the mindset you would need to do this stuff successfully.

Ruben Gamez: One of the things that, recently, I love, I heard from … what’s his name? He’s leads Growth for HubSpot, I think for new products. You know his name? He’s pretty new.

Jonny Nastor: I can’t remember.

Ruben Gamez: He has this thing where after something works, “Why did this work?” Three questions — I don’t really remember all the questions. “Why does this work?” Which I try to ask, but the other question that’s really interesting is, “Where can we apply this as well? Where else can we apply this?” So, basically, looking at something that’s worked, finding out why it’s worked, and then looking around on other parts of the application site, whatever, in different areas, and seeing how you can apply that. Still as a test because it might not work in different areas, but I love that. You can do that both with successes and failures.

Jonny Nastor: I love the way it ties back to your one thing, which is find what’s working and double-down on it. That’s exactly how you opened this. That was awesome.

Ruben Gamez: Right. Yep.

Jonny Nastor: It sounds like you came from growing up from a place where you didn’t have any money. You went up in a career that was really good and paid you a lot, and then you left and moved off and did your own thing, which now makes you even more money and is more successful, and allows you freedom to do other things and also to focus on this.

Ruben, personally, could you just stop right now and look behind you at where you’ve come from, what you’ve accomplished, and what you’ve achieved in life and in business, and tell me if you are happy with where you are at this point?

Ruben Gamez: Yeah. I’m very happy. I’m happy, but I also want more. I’m not satisfied. I want to continue learning, continue moving forward. For me, one of the things to where I know I’m moving in the right direction, I’m doing the right things, one of the signals for me is whether or not I’m learning a lot. It’s not necessarily money. A few years back, I remember revenue was growing at a nice pace, but I didn’t feel like I was learning a lot. I wasn’t feeling very good about the business. Again, money didn’t matter at that point. Then I started learning a lot again, doing new things, and I felt better about it. Since then, that’s just how it’s gone.

Jonny Nastor: Nice. I like it. Happy, but not satisfied. Hopefully, you are at least taking the time, day to day, to really appreciate what it is you have accomplished because it’s a lot. It’s really, really impressive.

Ruben Gamez: Thanks.

Jonny Nastor: Ruben, we’ve got to, in passing, talk about your business. Can you specifically tell the listener where they can go find out about you and your business, please?

Ruben Gamez: Sure. For my business, Bidsketch, you can go to Bidsketch.com. That’s the best place for that or on Twitter. It’s just @bidsketch on Twitter. For me, it’s @earthlingworks on Twitter.

Jonny Nastor: @Earthlingworks. Excellent. You also have a personal blog.

Ruben Gamez: Yep. It’s ExtendsLogic.com. I don’t blog there very much because one of the other things that’s very hard for me to do, has been for a while, is writing. Writing is just very slow process. I don’t do it that much, but I do post. I try to post from time to time.

Jonny Nastor: Excellent, and Bidsketch does what exactly?

Ruben Gamez: Bidsketch is proposal software. It’s a web app. It’s used to create really professional-looking client proposals and helps people do it much faster than what they’re generally using. Typically, it’s Microsoft Word or Google Docs that they’re using. When they switch, they find that they save a lot of time creating those proposals.

Jonny Nastor: Excellent, and it works with FreshBooks.

Ruben Gamez: Yep. FreshBooks integrations and a few others.

Jonny Nastor: Very cool. That’s awesome. Yeah, FreshBooks has been a show sponsor since October, I believe.

Ruben Gamez: Oh yeah?

Jonny Nastor: They still are. Every single month. So I saw that on there, that’s cool. It’s good.

Ruben Gamez: Very nice.

Jonny Nastor: Ruben, thank you so much for your time. This has been a lot of fun. Please just keep doing what you’re doing because it’s awesome to watch. You’re doing really cool stuff.

Ruben Gamez: Thanks. Thanks for inviting me. This was a lot of fun.

Jonny Nastor: My pleasure, sir.

Thank you so much, Ruben. That was a cool conversation. I think I failed to mention in the introduction that Ruben actually hasn’t even really been working for the past four or five, six weeks. He’s been moving. His wife had to move across country in work, and he picked up and moved, too. I believe all the way across the country.

He’s so thankful that he has a business that allows him to completely have the freedom to choose when and where he works. It took us a little bit of psyching him back up to get him back into business mode, but it was a lot of fun. I do thank you for that, Ruben. You said a lot of smart things, and the conversation really grabbed me many times.

But he said one thing. He said one thing, didn’t he? He did. Did you get it? Did you hear it? Let’s do it. Let’s find the hack.

Ruben Gamez: Not all challenges are worth taking. For some people, if forwarding your personal brand and you have, let’s say, a podcast or something like you do, it makes sense if these are the things that you want to do. If you eventually move in that direction, it makes a lot of sense. For me, it would be more of a distraction. Say I did it, and then I did it again, then again, and I started to get better. Then what? Then nothing.

Jonny Nastor: And that’s the hack.

Then what? Then nothing. I love that. Ruben, I love that. All challenges are not worth taking. It’s absolutely true. All skills are not worth learning. You need to find out what it is you want to do, where you want to be in a year from now or six months or three years from now. Then find your path. Figure out the things you need to learn. Figure out the challenges you need to accept to get there, but they’re not all for you.

Ruben doesn’t want to learn how to public speak. Ruben doesn’t want to learn how to podcast, although he’s really good at it. He should podcast. He’s got a great voice. He’s funny. He should, right? But he doesn’t want to. There’s no end benefit for him, so he doesn’t need to. It’s a challenge he doesn’t need to learn.

I don’t know how to code a website. I don’t need to learn how, and I refuse to learn how because I can go off and do things and face challenges that I need to face. You need to do the same thing. Ruben, I thank you for that, because that’s awesome.

That was it. We did it. Hack the Entrepreneur, again, been so much fun. Have you been to the website, checked it out? I think you have. Probably. Stop by. HacktheEntrepreneur.com. Get on the email list. I’d love to be able to talk to you every Sunday afternoon.

And if you have a chance and you’re on a phone now or on your computer, HacktheEntrepreneur.com/iTunes. I would love to hear or read a review from you on iTunes. It helps the show so, so much. I would just really love it.

There’s like 260 reviews on US iTunes right now, and it blows me away. If you’ve left me one, I thank you so much. If you haven’t, please, literally, it’ll take a minute and a half if you write a short one. I’m cool with a short one. I really am.

Thank you, either way, for listening. Thank you for taking the time. Thank you for joining me. I do appreciate it. Please, until next time, keep hacking the entrepreneur.

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