Sol Orwell on Being Relentless and Not Giving Up
My guest today has built companies in several different industries and has been successful enough to hand the companies over to someone else to manage and run.
He had more or less retired when he co-founded Examine.com, an independent and unbiased evidence-based organization that investigates the science behind supplementation and nutrition. He’s trying to make a difference in this industry and with over one million people visiting the site every month he appears to be doing just that.
My guest is also fitness adviser at Schwarzenegger.com and, in 2014, he was recognized as a Game Changer by Men’s Fitness.
Now, let’s hack …
Sol Orwell.
In this 32-minute episode Sol Orwell and I discuss:
- Why Sol’s friends call him relentless
- Learning to do things that you don’t know how to do
- Why scratching your own itch is a great business model
- Why you need to be confident with your ideas
- The downsides of outsourcing too much work
The Show Notes
Sol Orwell on Being Relentless and Not Giving Up
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 back to Hack the Entrepreneur. I am so glad you decided to join me today. I’m your host, Jon Nastor, but you can call me Jonny.
My guest today has built companies in several different industries and has been successful enough to hand those companies over to someone else to manage and run.
He had more or less retired when he co-founded Examine.com, an independent and unbiased evidence-based organization that investigates the science behind supplementation and nutrition. My guest is trying to make a difference in this industry, and with over 1 million people visiting his site every month, he appears to be making that difference.
My guest is also a fitness advisor at Schwarzenegger.com, and in 2014, he was recognized as a Game Changer by Men’s Fitness.
Now, let’s hack Sol Orwell.
Before we get going, I want to take a minute to thank the awesome sponsor of Hack the Entrepreneur, FreshBooks, for making my life easier and for sponsoring the show. What is the one thing that I am not good at? I am absolutely horrible at staying on top of my bookkeeping and accounting for my business. I just am terrible at it.
FreshBooks is designed for small business owners like you and like me. FreshBooks integrates directly with three things that I use every day in my business: PayPal, Stripe, and MailChimp. It goes beyond that now. I can fully integrate it with my credit card and my bank accounts, so I don’t even have to worry about keeping track of my expenses. It does it all for me. Really, I think the only thing it doesn’t do for my business is actually make the money, but it keeps track of it all on the other side — which is amazing to me.
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Welcome back to another episode of Hack the Entrepreneur. Today, we have another one of these extra special Canadian entrepreneurs.
Sol Orwell: Yeah.
Jonny Nastor: Sol, welcome to the show.
Sol Orwell: Thank you for having me, Jon.
Jonny Nastor: Absolutely. My pleasure. All right, Sol, let’s jump straight into this.
Sol Orwell: All right.
Jonny Nastor: Sol, as an entrepreneur, what is the one thing that you do that you feel has been the biggest contributor to your successes so far?
Why Sol’s Friends Call Him Relentless
Sol Orwell: I think the actual answer to that would be is that I don’t give up. My friends call me ‘relentless.’ I think the reality is, when you’re trying to deal with other important people, people are busy all the time. They get an email. They read it. They don’t respond in an hour, and they forget about it. Their inbox just piles up.
Boomerang, if you’ve never used it, is a Gmail app. It lets an email come back to your inbox, and you can specify ‘only come back if someone hasn’t replied to me.’ I stay on top of people. If I send an email to somebody, and I don’t hear back in a week, I’ll ping them again. I’ll be like, “Hey, sent you an email. Assumed you were busy. Have you had a chance to think about it?” I’ll ping them on Twitter, or I’ll message them on Facebook.
At the same time, I do it with respect. I don’t inundate them. I don’t overwhelm them. I let them know that if they don’t want to work, or if they don’t want to answer or whatever, that’s fine. I understand that. I realize that people are busy. I realize how busy I am, so when I’m on to somebody, or on something, I don’t let go very easily. I think too many people, they send one email, they don’t hear back, and they go, “That guy’s such a jerk,” or whatnot. They just forget that everyone’s pretty busy right now.
Jonny Nastor: That is an excellent clarification. First of all, Boomerang, I just discovered it in the last year. It’s a life-saver.
Sol Orwell: It’s amazing.
Jonny Nastor: It is absolutely amazing. Not that it keeps my inbox clear. Email is a big thing, right? I totally get people that get frustrated. They’ll email me, and then they don’t get back. They just, “Oh, you don’t respond to people.” It’s like, “Man, you have no idea. Sorry. I’m sorry, I will.” Is there, say, a certain time of day, Sol, where you get into your email to get through that inbox, or do you just have it pile up?
Mastering the Art of Inbox Zero
Sol Orwell: I am a huge fan of Inbox Zero. My inbox is almost always empty. One of my favorite things is, you read about these people who are successful, and a lot of them, they talk about their morning ritual. They do this, they do this, and do that. Then they get to work. Whereas, in my case, the first thing I do is, I wake up, I go to my computer, and I start hammering out email.
The reason I do this is I know I have about 30 minutes before my girlfriend’s going to work and I’m going to walk my dog with her. In that 30 minutes — you know Parkinson’s law, right? — your work expands to fit the time that you have available. I have 30 minutes. I know I need to get through as much as I can before I can start relaxing. Right off the day, I’m just going at it.
Other than that, to be honest, I take weekends off. I don’t answer emails on Fridays unless there’s some kind of crazy emergency. I find that keeps my energy high so that, when I do get emails, I’m like, “All right. Time to tackle it.” Just this week, on Monday, I gave a guest lecture at a university, so my entire day was gone. Yesterday, I had maybe 60, 70, 80, 90 emails to deal with, but because I hadn’t answered an email for four days and I was excited to get in the groove, I absolutely crushed them. It wasn’t that big of a deal for me that way, if that makes sense.
Jonny Nastor: It totally does, yeah. I don’t usually stick to emails so much, but my email inbox is overwhelming me right now. Yesterday morning, it was early. I had to get up and write an article, so I was up at 6 o’clock. I was at this coffee shop already. I was done by 7. I’m like, “I’m going to spend an hour in my inbox,” and 15 minutes into responding to people, because I’m on the West Coast, it’s already 10 o’clock for people in New York.
Sol Orwell: Right.
Jonny Nastor: My inbox starts filling up again with responses. I was like, “I can’t win!
I cannot win this game.” I’m wondering, “Is there a way you can word things, so that this is the final statement?” I was wondering, “How can I make it so that when I respond to them?” It’s like, “Just take this and don’t tell me ‘okay.’ Don’t tell me anything. Just be done with it. I want to stop you from flooding back into my inbox.”
Sol Orwell: Fair enough. I think there’s three things. One, I do have a team now, so anytime something needs to be dealt with, I can forward it. I can CC them, and I say, “Carolyn, take care of this,” or “Kamal can answer your question.” I can offload work that I don’t need to do to other people.
The other thing is I do have a relatively very brief kind of style, and I find that people try to mimic the style that you write to them in. If somebody emails me back on something that doesn’t require a response, or if it requires a two-word response, I’ll just do it quickly. If it’s a two-word response, I’ll say, “Sure, yeah” — whatever, done. They understand that I’ve read it. I’ve gone through it, and that’s it.
The last thing was I type really fast. I type around 150 words per minute. Grinding through emails is less of a chore for me because it’s not hunting and pecking on the keyboard. It’s not a slow process. I can grind through emails faster that way, I find anyway.
Jonny Nastor: Nice. I love the shortness of it, too. Chris Ducker, I learned it from was three sentences or less. He puts that at the bottom of his email, “This is why it’s like that.” Then it leads to a blog post on his site if you want to read and get the idea of why he’s doing it.
Sol Orwell: 100 percent. I agree with.
Jonny Nastor: Okay, Sol. 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 this huge, huge, massive difference in the world or, as seems to mostly be the case, they find they simply cannot work for somebody else. Sol, can you tell me which side of the fence you fall on, and when you discovered this about yourself?
Why Scratching Your Own Itch Is a Great Business Model
Sol Orwell: I think I’d be more of the latter. I cannot imagine working for ‘the Man.’ The quick backstory is, I’m an immigrant. Moved to Canada when I was 14, and my father’s always worked for a petrochemical company that’s based in Saudi Arabia. Because he wasn’t Arab, they would never promote him past manager. If he was Caucasian, he would’ve gotten as high as general manager, but if he was Arab, he would’ve been president by now, easily, for one of these companies.
Off the bat, growing up, I always had this distaste for working for anyone else, working for people’s political reasons, or personal reasons, or racial reasons, all that kind of junk. Off the bat, the idea of working for someone else was never something I wanted to do. At the same time, the first thing you were talking about, the passion and whatnot, everything I’ve ever built for myself or anything I’ve ever been involved in, has always been to solve a problem for myself.
Examine.com, right? I used to be 50, 60 pounds more heavy than I am right now. As I was losing weight, I realized all these supplement companies are pitching you garbage, and that’s why I got into Examine.com. Before this, I was in daily deals.
I was in New York at the time, and we were getting 40-50 emails a day for daily deals, and I said, “Why can’t I just put this in one place?” I created a little aggregator for myself. I put it in one place. My friends were like, “Hey, you should share this.” At its peak, we were sending out maybe 40-50,000 aggregate emails per day.
My view has always been, I don’t want to work for ‘the Man,’ but it’s never been about, “Oh, this is my passion. This is what I think I’m great at.” It’s always been for me, “This is a problem I’m having. I can’t find a solution for it online or anywhere. Why don’t I try to fix it?” That tends to work out really well for me.
Jonny Nastor: Nice. I love it. Basically scratching your own itch.
Sol Orwell: Yeah, 100 percent.
Jonny Nastor: So daily deals. I didn’t even know about this, actually.
Sol Orwell: I’ve been in a lot of industries. I started off with programming. I was in online gaming. I was in domains. I was in local search. Then I was in daily deals. Now I’m in this. I’m already moving on to my next two, one of which does data mining for email addresses so that you can figure out who your leads are, or who the people are on your email list. Then after that is a pet website. I find dog behavior fascinating and interesting. There’s not really a lot of good places online to find information on it, so I’m currently trying to work with a few vet researchers to see how we can make this pan out.
Jonny Nastor: Wow. It’s awesome because when you first go to your LinkedIn profile, it says ‘retired,’ but you just keep going project to project.
Sol Orwell: Yeah. The thing with it is, Examine.com, it’s a seven-figure organization, but I take $1 a month. That’s my symbolic salary. I don’t take any money out of it. All these other things I’ve built from before, I have my number two, and he runs the organization. He runs the day-to-day, so I don’t have to deal with it. For five years, I basically traveled and lived in the States and in South America, and I didn’t have to bother with anything. It was only when I came back to New York that I got into daily deals. Then it was when I got back to Toronto when I started losing weight that I got into Examine.
Retired, to me, is in the context that none of the stuff I do is for money per se. I’m a pragmatic individual. On Examine.com, the highest paid researchers we have, they’re getting $700 an hour. These guys aren’t cheap. I know how important money is, but all the money I make is from stuff I’ve done before. None of this actually directly generates any revenue into my bank account.
Jonny Nastor: Wow. It’s interesting. Daily deals, as an aggregator of deals, right?
Sol Orwell: Yeah.
Jonny Nastor: Examine is looking at an industry. It’s not creating a product itself, which is interesting. It sounds like with, say, the dog project that you want to get into, that’s a thing you’re creating yourself. Do you ever think, for new projects going into them — you also want to scratch your own itch — but are you like, “Well, I’ve been successful with aggregation. I shouldn’t try something else because I don’t know that, that works.”
Learning to Do Things That You Don’t Know How to Do
Sol Orwell: To be honest, I actually do the exact opposite. I try to do something else I haven’t done before because it’s a lot more interesting that way. Daily deals was a technological solution. We were getting emails that were coming into our system. We were parsing them out. We were figuring out if there was any duplicates, because that happened at times, and then we were trying to categorize them. So ‘spa,’ anything that was mentioning a manicure, would be categorized or tagged as ‘spa,’ whatnot. That was a very technological solution.
Examine.com was a very human thing. When you read research, you cannot do that in an automated fashion. You need to have experts. You can’t have just one kind of expert. You need to have massive breadth. Instead of depth, you also need breadth. When we were first hiring, originally we were thinking, “We’ll hire somebody for $100K a year, or whatever, some researcher who’s really good.”
Very soon we realized that’s not going to work. We ended up hiring three people part-time. One was an MBA MPH, which is a Masters of Public Health, which is policy and whatnot. He was doing his Ph.D. in nutrition. Another guy was a biomedical engineering Ph.D. Another one was a Pharm.D., which is a doctorate in pharmacy. All three people brought in their skill set that was critical for us to be able to look at something in the big picture.
There was that human involvement that Examine.com had. My pet one is more about, “All right. How do we look at pet behavior, pet intelligence? How do we apply that to training or nutrition for pets?” For Examine, we’re an encyclopedia. We don’t give any individualized advice. We don’t say, “This is how you should be doing it,” whereas for pets, we would look at a more direct way of doing it. We would look at a specific, “If you’ve got a dog, this is the kind of exact nutrition you should be giving him or her, except in case of this or that.”
Every new project I do, it’s always something, in a way, uncomfortable for me. My next one that I mentioned was the email data mining. It’s a SaaS project. Every day, we download your email list if you’re using any one of the big ESPs, we run them against different APIs. We data mine them, and we say, “Okay, these are the people who are influential, who are interesting on your list that joined yesterday or last week or whatever, that you may want to contact them.” This is nothing I’ve ever done before, but it’s an interesting something I built for myself originally. Now, years later, we’re going to release it to the wild, to the public, something like that.
Jonny Nastor: Nice. What makes you confident that there’s a market for these ideas?
Why You Need to Be Confident with Your Ideas
Sol Orwell: Absolutely nothing. It’s for myself. That’s the retired tagline right there. I can throw in 50 grand or 100 grand, and I’m okay with it. Even if it fails, it really satisfied an itch for me. People make money to get their expensive cars or big houses or all that kind of stuff. I don’t have a lot of these vices. I would like to think it’s probably because I was an immigrant. I don’t really need any of these expensive things in my life.
To me, I spend my money on, “Let’s try a new project. Let’s try a new business, and see how it pans out.” It is always for me, at the end of the day — even if it’s a fail, and my lord, I’ve had so many failures — I know that it satisfied my itch. I felt good doing it. It didn’t work out. That’s cool. You can’t be talented or great at everything, so then on to the next.
Jonny Nastor: Wow. I love it. You’re probably right with the fact that you were an immigrant. You came to Canada, and now you don’t have this … I think lots of us, we grow up in the West and we feel entitled to the fancy cars and the houses. Not even that it’s a cause of failure in business. It’s the cause of failure in the fact that people don’t even get to leave their high-paying jobs ever. The higher paying they get, the more in debt they go. It’s brutal.
Sol Orwell: It is a concern. To be honest, I’m not one to cast any kind of judgment. If you like fancy cars or expensive cars or fast cars, or expensive watches, that’s cool. But that’s not for me. The best example I can give is, two years ago, my sister got married in Canada. We’re Canadians now. About half our relatives could not come to her wedding because their visas got denied by the Canadian Government. The Canadian Government said, “Listen, we don’t know if you’re actually going to go back to your home country.”
Now, I can understand that from the government’s point of view. I’m not complaining about that. But, also, it’s one of those, “I am very lucky that I got to leave, and I got to come here.” A/C’s not a big deal, and electricity all 24 hours a day is not a big deal. My view on things is a little bit different, I would say, than people who have grown up in Canada.
Jonny Nastor: It’s obviously helped you so much.
Sol Orwell: Yes.
Jonny Nastor: Every blog post now, every expert talks about the 80/20 rule. Do 20 percent of the work. Get 80 percent of the results. Do what you’re good at. Delegate the rest. Sol, in your business, can you tell me something you are absolutely not good at.
Knowing the Limitation of Your Ego
Sol Orwell: In the context of nutrition, for example, I am not someone who should ever be reading any of the research. Any nutrition information we put out has 0.0 percent involvement from me. I’m extremely underqualified. Also, in a more general way, I have a computer engineering degree, but I’m actually useless when it comes to administrating servers. My number two takes care of that. We also pay for rack space managed hosting, so we don’t have to worry about the simplistic stuff. I could learn it. I could. But I’m terrible at it anyway, so why even bother?
Jonny Nastor: You like to do things that … how’d you say it? You like to do things that you don’t know how to do them, but you also realize the value of your time and the fact that, why would you bother figuring out servers?
Sol Orwell: 100 percent. I understand the broad strokes, but I also know that the fine details require an investment of time and knowledge. It’s opportunity cost. To be honest, I’d rather use it on something else than that.
Jonny Nastor: When you say you’re extremely underqualified in reading research about nutrition, did this ever cross your mind when you go to start Examine.com, “I really shouldn’t be starting this site”?
Sol Orwell: To be honest, off the bat, I brought in a co-founder. He’s the one who did the reading the research. I have a huge ego in many ways, but I also know the limitations. I know that I could try to muddle through it. I could try to pretend it. I could likely do it better than 99 percent of people, but that’s not good enough. That’s not good enough to be the best, to be an industry leader.
It was at no point in time at all that I ever thought, “I’m going to read the research,” or, “I’m going to write this research,” or, “I’m going to give talks about nutrition.” No. I give a lot of talks stemming from Examine.com, but they’re all business-related. None of them ever go into nutrition or supplementation.
Jonny Nastor: Nice. To go into the server part, that in general, how you know the broad strokes of it. How much of a business do you feel the entrepreneur, to be successful, needs to know the broad strokes of each section?
The Benefit of Broad Strokes Knowledge
Sol Orwell: To be honest, I think you should know broad strokes on everything. Anything from email marketing and funnels to web design and UX, to whatever content you’re producing, to server administration. I think it’s important to be able to understand a language that an expert uses. If someone’s talking about a server and we’re talking about SSL and they’re talking about, “Oh, we need this,” an appreciation of what SSL is, is important. I don’t think it’s that hard to get an understanding of all these subjects over time.
I can understand when you’re starting off, servers can be so inundating, and Linux and whatnot can be so scary. You don’t need to know Linux. You need to understand how a server operates. You need to realize that a server is software that can sometimes mess up, that can get hung process, or something can go wrong. Email can go down.
My favorite example, Ted Stevens, who was the Alaskan senator who was essentially in charge of the Internet thought it went through a bunch of tubes. That’s absolutely ridiculous. You need to have at least an understanding of it, but you don’t really need to be able to go in and roll up your sleeves, figuratively, and get right into it.
Jonny Nastor: Yeah. I absolutely agree. I like the clarification. Everyone’s focused on that 80/20 and, “Delegate everything you’re not good at.” That doesn’t mean not ever learning it. With a server, it’s true. You could literally go on Wikipedia and spend an hour a day learning about different aspects of business, and over a year, you’ll know so much more. It’s just really understanding that language. When you hire an expert, at least when they’re talking to you, you’re not just glazed over.
The Downsides of Outsourcing Too Much Work
Sol Orwell: Absolutely. We talk about this 80/20 rule and outsourcing everything, but part of the downside of outsourcing everything is you also lose a lot of control. If everything is completely outsourced and you don’t know what’s going on, someone could take advantage of you. Someone can make up stuff, and you are in no position to say, “Wait a minute. That’s not right.” You’re literally going, “I have to trust this person.” Especially online, that can be a little bit dangerous at times.
Jonny Nastor: I absolutely, absolutely agree. So we are going to end on something I’m playing with that I’m calling the ‘entrepreneurial gap.’
Sol Orwell: Okay.
Jonny Nastor: You have done a lot of things already, and you get to have ‘retired’ on your LinkedIn profile. You’ve had some huge successes as failures, as you also say, but the entrepreneurial gap is this thing where, as entrepreneurs and dreamers, we’re always looking ahead. We’re always setting goals one month, three months, six months, a year, three years, five years down the road, and before we even hit those goals, we set five or 10 loftier ones into the future.
We’re always, “When we get there, when my business gets there in six months, I will be successful. When it gets there in five years, I’ll be successful.” We fail to stop and just turn around and look at what we’ve come through, what we’ve accomplished, what we’ve learned, and really, truly appreciate it.
Sol, right now, if you could, please, for me, stop, turn around, look at what you’ve come through, what you’ve accomplished, and tell me how you feel about that.
The Benefit of ‘Lifestyle Design’ and Setting Personal Goals
Sol Orwell: I feel pretty good. I’ve got to be honest. I was talking about that immigrant thing. I got a full scholarship to go to university, and I lost it pretty much immediately because I was working on my business. I tell this actually to a lot of people now. The nice thing about being in this position is you can be 100 percent honest. You don’t need to worry about offending someone, that they’re going to go and complain to your employer, or they’re going to make an impact on your business or make a big stink about what you do.
I totally hear what you’re saying. It’s interesting. You were you’re talking about setting goals for your business. I actually try to set personal goals more than business goals. What I find is that, when I’m hitting my personal goals, my business goals kind of go lock and step with them. That’s what I try to do to fully appreciate that I have come some ways. I’ve come in a nice position, and I should remember to enjoy it at all times.
Jonny Nastor: Yeah. Well said. Do you think the personal goals, setting them instead of business goals, does that allow you to … it’s like ‘lifestyle design’ rather than just creating a business, focusing all on the business, and then realizing it’s created a horrible life for yourself?
Sol Orwell: Yeah. I’m very anti-business, to be honest. Like I was saying, I don’t email on Fridays. I mostly take Fridays off. Fridays, I just read stuff. I go watch a movie. I love watching Friday matinees by myself where I can just watch whatever I want, no matter how garbage the movie is. The other thing I find with personal goals that’s really important — you were mentioning about business goals, you’re never happy. “I made a million dollars in sales this month. Man, I want 2.5 or I want five million.” With personal goals, it’s so easy to hit. It’s so easy in the context that you put in the time, you get there, and you’re like, “I did it.”
Let’s say we want to swim 10 laps. You hit 10 laps, you go, “Damn, I did it!” Right? Maybe you want to go a little bit faster, a little bit further. But that satisfaction from hitting a personal goal, I find, is a lot better than the satisfaction of hitting the business goal.
Jonny Nastor: Yeah. All right, Sol, this has been a lot of fun. We got to talk about you, and your business in the background. Can you specifically tell the listener where to find out more about you and your business?
Sol Orwell: Sure. I blog at SolOrwell.com. Then, my nutrition organization is Examine.com, pretty much exactly as the word is.
Jonny Nastor: Excellent. SolOrwell.com, Examine.com. Are you on Twitter, Sol?
Sol Orwell: Yes, I am. It is @sol_orwell. I actually had SolOrwell. Then I lost the password, and I have no idea what email I used. I actually legally changed my name four years ago, so I was doing it for that. Then somehow, it somewhere slipped through the cracks.
Jonny Nastor: Nice. It happens. It happens. I will link to Examine.com, SolOrwell.com, and your Twitter handle as well on the show notes, so it’s easy for everyone to find.
Sol Orwell: Fantastic.
Jonny Nastor: Sol, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me today. Please, keep doing what you’re doing because it’s really awesome and inspiring to watch.
Sol Orwell: It was an absolute pleasure, Jon, and thank you for the kind words.
Jonny Nastor: Sol, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. I really do appreciate it. I always love talking to brilliant, smart entrepreneurs. Then when you’re Canadian to boot, it helps. It helps. That was a lot of fun, though, and I really do thank you.
You’re out there listening. You got to hear Sol talk about business, talk about how he’s dealt with being an immigrant into this country of Canada. Then using that, of what maybe some would consider a setback, he used it to thrive and become a very, very successful entrepreneur at a fairly young age, at this point, which is really, really, really cool.
Then there was that one thing he said. There was. There was that one thing he said that just really, really stuck out to me. Did you get it? Did you hear it? Let’s do it. Let’s find the hack.
Sol Orwell: People make money to get their expensive cars, their big houses, or all that kind of stuff. I don’t have a lot of these vices. I would like to think it’s partly because I was an immigrant. I don’t really need any of these expensive things in my life. To me, I spend my money on, “Let’s try a new project. Let’s try a new business, and see how it pans out.” It is always for me, at the end of the day — even if it’s a fail, and my lord, I’ve had so many failures — I know that it satisfied my itch. I felt good doing it. It didn’t work out. That’s cool. You can’t be talented or great at everything, so then onto the next.
Jonny Nastor: And that’s the hack.
Wow. Sol, Sol, Sol. I love that. There’s two big things in here. First of all, is the idea of it’s not about not buying fancy things. It’s not about that. You can do that. I do find lots of people trying to get out of their comfortable job, and they’ve dug themselves so far in. They have all these expenses, and they can never get to the point of taking that leap into entrepreneurship.
I’ve talked to, now, over 100 really smart people that have ran some cool businesses. There seems to be this parallel between having to cut back, at some point, expenses to make a business work, and then that business will scale up and above anything you’ve ever made before. But you do have to, at some point, make that connection. I love that.
Rather than buying fancy, shiny things, Sol is like, “Hmm. I’m going to build new projects. I’m going to start new projects. I’m going to put my money into that.” I love that. That’s how I like to think and work. I like to put my money into new projects as well as to new experiences, meaning traveling and doing cool stuff. That’s just what I like to do. I think it allows us to promote and find happiness a lot better.
Then I also love how Sol, later in the hack — it’s a 20-second hack — he says so many amazing things. I love this guy. I like how he says his projects and his new things he goes for are to scratch his own itch. It’s something that he wants anyways. He so doesn’t get bothered by, if it doesn’t take off, big deal. You can’t be good at everything. Just brushes it off. It doesn’t matter. I’ve at least done a project.
Even if the project isn’t to scratch your own itch necessarily, at least be proud in the fact that you created something out of nothing. That, to me, is a huge success. Even if the marketplace doesn’t think so and you don’t sell and make a bunch of money off of it, you created something out of nothing. Most people in this world will never do that, and you deserve a pat on the back for doing just that.
Find these things. Do something. Create something out of nothing. Who cares if it succeeds? You’ve already succeeded, in my book and in Sol’s book, by just creating something out of nothing. You came up with an idea, and you executed on it. Most people will never execute on those ideas. That’s why before, and previously, and I will continually say ideas are worthless until you do something with them. Thank you, Sol, so much for that. I truly, truly do appreciate it.
Thank you so much again. I hope you know how much I appreciate you stopping by listening. There’s a ton of podcasts out there, but you stop by and hang out with me. I really, really do appreciate that.
If you would like to extend that appreciation of the show even further, go to iTunes. It takes two minutes. Leave me a review and a rating. It will help the show so much, and I will thank you so much.
If you can, and you are on Twitter, which you should be because Twitter’s awesome, put your Twitter handle, your “@yourname” into the review. I would love to be able to come on to Twitter and say thank you. iTunes does not allow me to figure out who you are, and to respond, but I would love to thank you for that and just to be able to have a conversation with you on Twitter. Please, iTunes, leave me a review.
If you don’t use an iPhone, I don’t blame you. Half the people out there don’t use iPhones. Totally cool. Stitcher.com is the place where most people, it seems, with Android phones are going to get their podcasts. If you’re listening on there, you could also leave me a rating and review there, and I would totally love it.
Actually, I’m recently on SoundCloud as of last week, and you can go there. I don’t think you can leave me ratings and reviews, but hey, share it. It’s got this cool player you can share across Twitter. I’m just talking now. Thank you. I do appreciate it very, very much. We will be back.
Until next time, please, keep hacking the entrepreneur.