What if the harder path isn't something to avoid—but actually your greatest competitive advantage?

In this episode of the Growth Mavericks Podcast, Adam Callinan sits down with entrepreneur and author Joshua Waldron to explore how deliberately choosing difficult problems can create resilience, competitive moats, and businesses that are exceptionally hard to replicate.

At 15 years old, Joshua broke his spine in a severe car accident and was told he would never walk again. Four years later, after repeatedly choosing the comfort of his wheelchair over the painful process of walking, he removed the option entirely: he dismantled and destroyed his wheelchair and never sat in one again.

That decision became a framework for the rest of his life.

Joshua went on to co-found SilencerCo in 2008, entering a highly regulated and poorly understood market. Rather than avoiding those barriers, he leaned into them—educating consumers, helping build an industry advocacy organization, navigating regulatory complexity, and creating demand in a market where only a small percentage of potential customers even knew the product was legal. The company ultimately grew into an eight-figure business.

Adam and Joshua also dive into patents, competitive moats, constraints, asymmetric upside, failure, founder identity, and why blindly following "best practices" can prevent companies from discovering the right practices for their specific business.

The conversation culminates in Joshua's framework from his book Productive Difficulty: how to distinguish hard work that compounds from pointless suffering, deliberately choose problems your competitors won't solve, and build capabilities that continue paying dividends long after the initial work is complete.

Whether you're building a company, navigating adversity, or trying to develop greater resilience, this episode is a masterclass in choosing the hard things that actually matter.

Key Takeaways

How breaking his spine at 15 completely changed Joshua's relationship with adversity.
Why destroying his wheelchair became a defining moment in his life.
How deliberately removing the easy option can force growth.
Why perspective is one of the most powerful tools for navigating adversity.
How Joshua went from photography to founding SilencerCo.
Why difficult markets can create powerful barriers to competition.
How consumer education helped expand an almost nonexistent market.
Why growing the category and capturing market share can happen simultaneously.
How constraints force founders to find better solutions.
Why patents can sometimes become a crutch instead of a competitive advantage.
The difference between "best practices" and the right practices for your business.
Why the middle of the entrepreneurial journey is often more valuable than the outcome.
How founder identity can become dangerous when it becomes inseparable from the company.
Why founders should prioritize asymmetric opportunities: limited downside with compounding upside.
How to separate productive difficulty from pointless suffering.

Chapters

00:00 From paralysis to productive difficulty

01:03 Joshua's early life in Utah

02:08 Breaking his spine at 15

04:45 Perspective, adversity, and "it could always be worse"

08:30 Learning to walk again

10:00 Destroying his wheelchair and removing the easy option

11:20 Perspective, constraints, and entrepreneurship

13:45 Creating his own first job

16:00 Building a photography business

18:00 Finding a bigger entrepreneurial opportunity

20:30 Building SilencerCo during the Great Recession

23:00 Why difficult businesses create competitive moats

25:30 Discovering the real customer problem

26:30 Educating an entire market

28:45 Changing regulations and expanding the industry

30:50 Growing the pie and capturing market share

32:00 Patents, IP, and when protection becomes a crutch

34:15 Best practices vs. right practices

37:15 Why asking "why?" is uncomfortable

38:30 Using discomfort to reset perspective

41:00 Why the journey matters more than the outcome

42:10 Losing the company and rebuilding identity

46:00 Productive Difficulty

47:00 The seven questions for choosing worthwhile hard problems

49:30 Productive difficulty vs. pointless suffering

51:15 Asymmetric upside and celebrating wins

52:50 Where to find Joshua and Productive Difficulty

Explore

Productive Difficulty / Hard Is Fun
https://hardisfun.com

Joshua Waldron
https://www.instagram.com/hardisfun/

Growth Mavericks Podcast
https://www.growthmaverickspodcast.com

Pentane
https://www.pentane.com

Creators and Guests

Host

Adam Callinan

Adam Callinan is the founder of Pentane, a financial and advertising command center that empowers brands to drive predictable revenue and intentional profit. Previously, Adam co-founded BottleKeeper, a bootstrapped consumer brand that scaled to $8M in sales within three years – without employees – and was later acquired in 2021 as an eight-figure business with a team of four, marking Adam's second successful exit.

What is Growth Mavericks?

This podcast dives deep into the tactical moves that drive business success, as well as the mental and physical resilience required to sustain it.

Hosted by Adam Callinan, a seasoned entrepreneur with multiple exits, an avid outdoorsman, and an family man with crystal-clear priorities, each episode unpacks real-world challenges, actionable insights, and the mental and physical disciplines that fuel long-term personal and professional growth.

Whether you’re scaling a startup or refining your mindset, disrupting your default is how business and life strike a balance.

Adam Callinan (00:00)
At 15 years old, our guest broke his back and was told he would never walk again. Four years later, he took apart his wheelchair, absolutely destroyed it, removing the option of ever sitting in it again. This decision became the foundation of how he approaches everything from building an eight-figure business to deliberately choosing the harder path where the payoffs compound.

This podcast is an absolute masterclass in resilience, productive difficulty, and why the easiest path is rarely the most valuable one. Our guest today is Joshua Waldron. I'm Adam Callanan. This is Growth Mavericks.

Adam Callinan (01:03)
Where where are you located? You're on the east coast, is that right?

Joshua Waldron (01:05)
I'm

yeah, I'm in Virginia Beach.

Adam Callinan (01:09)
Have you always been on the East Coast?

Joshua Waldron (01:10)
No, I I lived in Utah. was born and raised in in the West. lived in Utah. I grew up in Alpine, which is like a little farming community about forty five minutes south of Salt Lake. And then spent most of my life in Salt Lake before moving in twenty eighteen out to Virginia Beach, so

Adam Callinan (01:33)
You have a a really interesting and compelling kind of early life story that I from what I can tell via the internet stalking that happens before these conversations

Joshua Waldron (01:49)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Callinan (01:50)
kind of led you led you down a path that's really in line with with kind of what I'm about and and what we tend to have a tendency to talk about here on this podcast. can you

Can you start there in that sort of teenage years? I mean, you the the stage is yours, you can set it however you want it, but let's go back.

Joshua Waldron (02:08)
so yeah, when I was fifteen years old, I got in a a pretty severe car accident and i I guess I could back up a little bit more by saying growing up in in Utah, and especially where I was situated, my farm b basically had like twenty or sorry, two hundred and

50 degrees of mountains that surrounded me. And so my life was extreme sports, skiing, mountain biking, rock climbing, always was camping, always was hiking, always gone out outdoors. And and so you know, at 15 years old, when you wake up in the hospital not knowing what has happened, and then finding out that you broke your spine and

you know, no longer have the use of your legs. That's that's a significant pill to swallow at that age. And the my whole identity was was basically just taken from me and it was really my first kind of understanding of of what that meant, you know, having an identity and and having something to hold on to you know, to anchor you into who you are. it was completely different at that point. I I had to figure all that out again and it seems like

you know, kind of stayed in that trying to figure that out the rest of my life until getting through significant other challenges that kind of

made me look back and make connections and and that's really what created the you know the books, the the writing and everything that I've been doing was looking back, that self-reflection and that making the connections and patterns over or over many, many years. But at fifteen years old, waking up in the in from a coma in the hospital and hearing, You broke your spine, you'll never walk again? It's tough. It's a really hard one to start with. But

What it did immediately, well I shouldn't say immediately, over the next you know, few years of really leaning into the struggles, it it redefined my relationship with hard things to where I don't feel the same level of of apprehension or avoidance or or or fear when I'm looking at things that are daunting to most or or or you know n

not people are willing to do a lot of things that I naturally I'm just open to because of the the difficulty level and and when I was looking back at why, that's when I really started to to put together the framework of the book and and and start writing. So

Adam Callinan (04:46)
So at fifteen, how long? And I would imagine there's probably kind of like a grieving cycle that comes with getting news like that, probably at any age, but I I would think it probably to to be more severe the younger you are, maybe beyond an age. How long did it take you to come to the realization that there was a way out of that chair?

Joshua Waldron (05:17)
you know, first you have to kind of get over the the the victimized position that that you naturally put yourself in. You know, the the stages really do start with like why? Why me? and the the anger of it all and all that. That that really do is where it all starts. And then but

The thing is is if you're paying attention, there's natural things around you that will stop that pretty much dead in his tracks. For example, when I got into my first roommate situation out of ICU and into a shared rehab facility, my roommates were in far worse condition. You know, here I was laying in bed, you know, feeling sorry for myself and then in wheels my first roommate who is

A man that got shot in the throat and was quadriplegic and couldn't use any any function from the neck down on a ventilator. And I was immediately like, well well, at least I'm not that guy. And and then my next roommate, so there was three of us in this one one room, thank you, University of Utah Hospital for that.

But the other guy was had a stroke and it really affected his cognitive abilities and his his his speech. And again, I looked at that and and I'm like, yeah, this it could be worse thing is is a serious anchor to to hold on to because it allows you to to see what things really are for you. and so that's that my first lesson I think.

in that whole process was it could always be worse. No matter how bad it gets, it could always be worse. And that kinda allows you to free your mind to say, okay, so then what? What's next? Where do I go from here? So then, you know, there was always I guess there was always something in my gut

And I it's I think a lot of that there's that nature versus nurture kind of question of like, did you earn the grit or did you like were you born with grit? And I think i to me it was a little bit of both. I was the youngest of six siblings who were all very torturous to me. I knew how to deal with a lot of adversity and challenges just be because of my crazy siblings who I love and and and I loved back then. That was part of the problem, this that when they said, Hey, jump off this cliff, I would do it 'cause I wanted to make proud.

But it didn't always end well for me. So so I had grit to begin with. But what really happens during a process of recovery is you really start to look, you s self-reflect, and you start to connect to all of the the the people and the places and the things that put you in the situation where you are trying to find any reason why you can like answer the question. And it's not until you

sit

with the fact that there is no reason. You know, like a and philosophically I think there's a million people that could disagree with me, but I am not a believer of fate. I because I think that as soon as you believe in fate, you're giving your control over to something else and that's not you. And and so, you know, that was I guess my second lesson was I am no longer going to allow life to dictate my reaction to it.

because that is when you start making really poor decisions. And that was another big lesson, right? So I have to then, you know, you have to start to like build the self efficacy and and doing small things to to prove that you can do bigger things and and and just kinda wait to see what happens. As long as you're pushing, it took years. I guess the long answer took me a while to get there is it takes a lot of years to be like

You know what? I can redefine my box. They put me in something far too small, it doesn't fit, I'm gonna redefine where that is. And I think it might have been

when I accomplished getting out of my wheelchair. There was a period of time that was maybe a year where I could actually walk. not very good using crutches, canes, braces on my legs. I still use braces and crutches and canes. but but when I first started, I fell all the time. It was extremely difficult. It was very painful. the falling, you know, I hurt myself a lot. and

The e the the easy solution was just to stay in the wheelchair. And and so there was a there was a good solid year to where I was like doing the dance of in and out, in and out, you know, like going to school is a lot easier in the wheelchair, high school kids knock you over, it's just the way it is. So I would just stay in the chair, stay in the chair. And it was one day where I was like, I I I'm always choosing comfort because it's always easier. How do I stop doing that? I removed the option.

And so I took my wheelchair, which was extremely expensive, and I destroyed it. I took it apart in every conceivable piece, chopped up the parts that could be chopped up, threw every part of it out in the yard. And I have never sit sat in a wheelchair since. And that was at nineteen years old. and

And so I removed the option and and then that is the that was the beginning of everything for me. That was the beginning of s of like me believing in myself and having the confidence that I could do things that people said that were never possible. And that was so profound for me, so big at the time, that like starting a company is actually a lot easier. You know what I'm saying? Like when

I got

Adam Callinan (11:08)
Yeah.

Joshua Waldron (11:08)
to that point in my life, I was like, All right, let's do it. You know.

Adam Callinan (11:12)
How old were you when you when you got up the chair?

Joshua Waldron (11:15)
So nine I was nineteen when I when I finally was full time out. So

Adam Callinan (11:21)
Man, there is so much packed into that alone, like that what a roughly like four year journey that has so many parallels outside of just personal development, professional development, entrepreneurial development, like life in general. And there are two two words that I wrote down on my notepad that really that stand out to me in things that I actively seek out and is one of the big

on again, like components of this show and why I do this show. And the first is perspective. There's something tremendously valuable about that reset of perspective, about going into that other room and seeing how much worse it could actually be. Right.

Joshua Waldron (12:07)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Adam Callinan (12:11)
And there's it is finding perspective is something that I actively seek out because I have seen without having to go through that traum anything even remotely close to that traumatic experience that you, you know, you did at a young age. I seek that reset of perspective out because I have seen through self-reflection what it does to me mentally and what it does to me as a father and as a entrepreneur and as a husband and just like as a human in general.

And the second thing

Joshua Waldron (12:42)
Yeah.

Adam Callinan (12:42)
that really stands out, again, all these things have such epic parallels to startups and entrepreneurship is constraint. And that was cutting up the wheelchair. You forced a constraint that had only one possible result, and that was to walk. That's so epic.

Joshua Waldron (13:06)
Yeah, it

Adam Callinan (13:06)
So how have you yeah, like how have

you taken you know, we just covered a lot of ground in thir thirteen minutes.

Joshua Waldron (13:12)
Yeah.

Right.

Adam Callinan (13:15)
How do you, you know, you've mentioned in that, in that story or series of stories, having gone through that and persisted and proven to yourself that you can do far more than you surely thought you were capable of at the beginning of that journey? How do you like let's let's go into the business part? Like how have you approached, how did you approach business when you started it? How did you get into it? How did it evolve?

Joshua Waldron (13:44)
Yeah, that's a it's a great question 'cause it it actually goes back to the persistence thing or the perspective thing, right? So getting out of high school and still being in a wheelchair for a little while after before I was out full time, I had to get a job and and I put in applications like I I phew

probably

over fifty applications. And this is low level stuff, right? This is me being a disabled eighteen year old kid in a wheelchair, right? So it was Radio Shack and Chick-fil-A kind of stuff, right? And I got I I didn't even get phone calls. And all my friends were getting hired and and they were all like in, you know, either worse grades or they looked like they were little thugs or whatever it was. And I'm like, how are you guys getting jobs? And it was my first kind of realization and

of discrimination and what that actually means. you know, growing up in a in a small farming community, everyone is pretty much the same, right? So like that discrimination thing w that was a first my first big lesson in in that. And I was like, wow

Adam Callinan (14:52)
Where were you living when

when this was happening? Were you out of Utah at that point? Still in Utah. Okay.

Joshua Waldron (14:55)
No, I was I was in Utah still, yeah. Mm-hmm.

And and so I was like, Well, I I need to create my own job. I mean, the biggest reason that I need a job right now, because I was still s you know, trying to go to college, somewhat living in ho in my house, being disabled, my parents were a little, more apt to help me out financially. And so like I really just needed that that insurance. This is this is pre you know Affordable Healthcare Act where

you there's more options. Back then it was like you have to have a job or you don't get to have insurance. And so I said, well I I guess I'll have to create my own job. And so I

Took out a loan, found a a camera system, bought into a Hasa Blaud medium format system, got some lighting. I ended up finding a a cool little spot, signed a lease, opened a photo studio. I had no idea what I was doing. Like none whatsoever. Like I I had taken pictures of landscape and and you know, I was on the yearbook staff in high school and and I I did stuff like that, but like I knew I loved photography.

I knew it was a great way for me to maybe start a business and and to get some insurance. I was like, Yeah, let's do this. Man, this just went all in. It's crazy because I keep thinking about all my like these points in my life where it's just like I'm it's it's kind of impulsivity, but it isn't. Because like I I think that it's like kind of like a a self dare to do a lot of the stuff that I do, right? It's like, Yeah, I'll try that. Let's do that. So, you know, I started this thing,

started advertising, and then people would would call me and say, Yeah, I want family portraits and I would say, Okay, let's talk about what you want to do with your family portraits and I would book it like two or three weeks out and then I would use my own family or of people that I knew to actually learn how to do it before the shoot. And that's how I created that company. And I got really good and that career it suited me well and during the same time I I started

I'm

a musician as well, so I I was playing a lot of studio music, hired by different bands to do studio work or go on, you know, small tours and things like that. And so I was having a great experience with the you know, in that early part of my life. And then things got really challenging when the rise of digital photography came and and things started to change, the landscape of my finan financial life started to really change at that point, and I said, All right.

The art world is cool, it's fun, it aligns with me f but like I only have so so many hours in a day. And I could very e plainly and easily see that like my success was capped. I had a ceiling on what I was able to earn. And I was like, how do I create wealth? Okay. I got I got the I got the insurance thing figured out, I've got the you know the the job thing figured out, I'm making money, so like how do I actually make wealth?

Again, I have no idea what I was doing. And so I started kind of playing around with some stuff in my garage and and at the time it was like we had this little garage, me and my my best friend, and we had wood shop tools and we had metalworking tools and welders and all sorts of stuff and we were just screwing around with everything. It was just what we did. and we started playing around with the the firearm industry and and

quickly realized that we had some pretty good ideas and we're like, we should get licensed so that we can do this legally. Yeah, that's a good idea. So we got that done and and you know, it was very similar to you know, the the photography career when it was like it felt impulsive, but it it really wasn't because I I I kept seeing opportunity, walking through doors, opening things, turning over stones, getting all of the excitement and all of the vision and the and the strategy kind of like

penciled. So when the when the opportunities said you should do this thing, it everyone around me said you're so impulsive. But it was because I had followed like it's because I was living outside of my comfort zone. I was allowing

Adam Callinan (19:11)
Mm-hmm.

Joshua Waldron (19:12)
myself to see all of the different, you know, opportunities and angles and perspectives because I was always on the move. and it was, you know, I there I was again. All right, let's start this business.

And it was two thousand eight and the hardest most crazy time to start a company was in like the through the Great Recession and and yeah, that was I guess that's well we'll take a little breather from talking, I feel like I'm talking a lot, but yeah. So

Adam Callinan (19:39)
No, that's the point. Yeah. No, it it it really

is the it's like you have these these never-ending compounding things that to the to the outsider, and this is the way that it works, and again, why I think it is so important to actually talk about all the things that go into it. From the outsider, it looks like overnight success. Like from the outsider, you hear the headline, was in a wheelchair, then walked. What you don't hear is the five years or four years of

All the struggle and the stuff that comes with that, all the iterative teeny tiny, in this case, like quite literal footsteps to get to that point. And it's the exact same in every business on the planet. I don't care what the headline on Inc magazine says. They all

Joshua Waldron (20:22)
Right.

Adam Callinan (20:23)
take this amount of time and take this amount of, you know, background and paying attention and and getting really comfortable being uncomfortable and living in that space. So what was the in two thousand eight, what was the company that you started?

Joshua Waldron (20:36)
It was Silencer Co., which is a firearm company that makes silencers for guns. But Hollywood calls them silencers, they're actually suppressors. So yeah.

Adam Callinan (20:47)
Yeah.

Joshua Waldron (20:48)
So Silencer Co. was the company I started. I started that in 2008. and I doubled revenue. had my first year just over two hundred thousand in in revenue, and I doubled revenue every year for ten years.

when I exited and and got recruited to go to Vista Outdoor, w we were doing in one month the revenue that the entire industry was doing in a year when I started. So

I created this company in a really, really tough market, in a really obscure market that had a very that didn't really exist. And and so I had to make that market. I had to change laws, I had to do all sorts of things to even make it work. It was the it it was the path of most resistance, I think, for a for a career

Adam Callinan (21:33)
Yeah, that's what it sounds like.

Joshua Waldron (21:34)
at the time. So

Adam Callinan (21:36)
But it's you know, you also by going into a space that has significant resistance, you also largely eliminate the capacity for competition. So got

Joshua Waldron (21:49)
And I love that I

I'm sorry, I I and I love that because you know, when you're doing a pitch, like we're all familiar with it that are here listening, right? Like we do pitches and one of the biggest questions that that are is always answered, or is always asked, I guess,

what what differentiates yourself or or what are the barriers to entry? The barriers to entry. I you know, the reason that that's asked is because the the higher the barriers, the harder it is. It it creates more opportunity. And I I don't think that in business school or anywhere else I ever heard anyone just say it that plainly and simply, right? It's like

there's if it's harder to do, there are less people going to do it. And it's that simple. And and so that's that's really what the the foundation of productive difficulty my book is. But you know, obviously with a a framework and and everything around how to how to make those choices in r in real time in your company, but yeah, it's sorry, I've got too many there's too many things going on in my life right now to drag my attention. So apologize if

You see me looking away.

Adam Callinan (23:01)
When

When you look at, I mean, I I guess I've always thought of I like complexity. Like I like complex problems. And I've always believed that doing that adding constraints to things that I do very intentionally. in the case of my last company, Bottle Keeper, it was I wanted build a business that could scale with no employees. Zero employees. I wanted to operate it from anywhere in the world with internet, which means that I had to solve problems differently. And we got to

Joshua Waldron (23:29)
Yeah.

Adam Callinan (23:30)
10 million in revenue with zero employees. And then got

Joshua Waldron (23:32)
Wow.

Adam Callinan (23:33)
Beyond that and got acquired by private equity with only as an eight-figure business with only four team members, in addition to my cousin and I. And I'm doing it again in this company,

Joshua Waldron (23:40)
That is incredible.

Adam Callinan (23:41)
which is a tech company, where again, like I didn't go raise a bunch of money. with three people total. Like I want to go

Joshua Waldron (23:48)
Yeah.

Adam Callinan (23:48)
see, can I get a business to a hundred million dollars with under five people? Because that those constraints force you to solve problems in different ways.

That are that's where the value is. It's the complexity, it's the hard thing where the value is. It's not the easy or obvious thing. So, how as you've built like in that crazy space of silencers that has federal laws and state laws and like all of that, all of that stuff, how did you approach the complexity?

Adam Callinan (24:17)
When I was running Bottle Keeper, Meta got more and more expensive every single year and then would just randomly shut off our ad account. There was no warning, there was nobody to call, and it seemed like it tended to happen during the holidays, which was the craziest, most critical time of the year. We just had to eat it. It was awful. Here's what I didn't know. Outside of search and social, there is an enormous amount of advertising inventory that is dramatically less expensive. The challenge is that it is locked behind contracts and crazy spend minimums that don't make sense until you're doing nine figures.

That's why we built Plenum. If you are an e-commerce brand that can invest a minimum of $3,000 a month into testing ad budget within Plenum, we are going to totally waive the $5,000 setup fee. We are going to totally eliminate all of the management fees.

Go to pentaine dot com forward slash growth to get started now.

Joshua Waldron (25:09)
So when I first st started the company, I really needed to understand where to put my very thin dollars that I had, right? Like there's a very small marketing budget, we have to get as much lift as we can so that we can get the sales, get the revenue, rinse and repeat. And so in being new to the industry, sure, I grew up

shooting and hunting and and fishing and being outdoors. So I c I knew generally, but I really didn't understand the the pers the the avatar, right? Or the persona or the people that I needed to sell to. So so I'm like, all right, let's go figure that out. And, you know, coming from the art world, that was an easy thing for me to say, that's what I should do. So I stood out in front of gun stores, and these are gun stores that literally sold silencers, right? And I would interview people coming in and out.

And interviewed hundreds of people in different different stores. 3% of the gun buying community knew that silencers were legal to buy. 97% had no idea they thought they were illegal. And I was like, ding ding ding. This is why this is a

Adam Callinan (26:14)
Yeah.

Joshua Waldron (26:15)
super small, obscure market, because nobody thinks that they're even legal to buy. So then I, you know, I I just allocated a hundred, literally a hundred percent of my marketing budget.

I wasn't doing print collateral, I wasn't doing w like anything. It was all education. Everything I did was an education campaign. I created these book books called Yes, Silencers Are Legal. Super easy to understand.

Adam Callinan (26:41)
Yeah.

Joshua Waldron (26:41)
Beautiful booklets, you know, laid out very well. had had great content with like legal legalities by state, how to purchase all this kind of stuff. And I sent a box to every single

FFL or dealer in the country and said, whether you sell or not, here's some information. And so now all of these dealers all across the country have put my booklet out on the counter that says yes silencers are legal and with my catalog in the back of it. So I'm expanding a market and educating and doing all of those things benefiting the the the the industry. Who's going to pick up the market share when it's created, right?

So so that was step one. Step two is like, all right, so the education is working great, but the biggest problem now on the on the growth of the industry is the legalities. The laws are crazy. And at the time there was like 32 states that allowed purchase and I think 17 that allowed for hunting. And over the over about well, so I I'm like, I need to go to DC. Because in my head, I thought this tells you how naive I was at the time.

That if that DC controlled all of the state laws too, right? I'm like, I need to go change state laws. Went to DC. Found out very quickly that I was an idiot. For two reasons. One, state laws are a thing. Two, you can't go and lobby for your company. Like that's illegal. Like people like representatives, sure, they probably do that in the backdoor. We talk about it on the news and media all the time about backdoor deals.

They

don't happen when it's that blatant. Like, I can't just walk in and be like, hey, do this thing for me. Yeah.

Adam Callinan (28:20)
Yeah. Yeah. They hire lobbyists to do that professionally. Yeah. Yeah. There's a whole industry about that.

Joshua Waldron (28:27)
Yeah. So I was like, I need to create an NGO. the NRA and the other trade organizations within the firearms community at the time literally did not recognize silencers as something worthy of their attention.

And I nearly had to put the NRA in a headlock to like get them to do anything at all. And and so I'm like, we gotta start an NGO. So I founded the American Suppressor Association, which is still kicking butt and taking names right now, without me involved, which is fantastic because I'm tired of the lobbying thing. But over four years we changed thirty-seven laws state on the state level.

And we planted seeds in 2014 to start the process of deregulating silencers, which happened this year. No more tax on silencers starting in January 26. And that that process I started in tw in 2014. So that's how long it took to move the needle. So so yeah, then so so that was kind of the steps on how I I created that like massive growth in the industry, and then

th all of those pieces fell in line and then then I was like, well well now I have to bring people into this new end industry and I and and get them aware and further expand it outside of firearms. And so I started doing so then I started marketing instead of educating, instead of lobbying and and politicking. Then I then I started my real marketing finally. And

And with that we brought in celebrities from all sorts of different d like extreme sports and racing and like NASCAR and all sorts of different places that had similar demographics to the firearms community. And we started getting these people to do like influencers and and brand ambassadors and things like that. And that's when the gas pedal went to the floor. Unbelievable growth at that point. So

Adam Callinan (30:29)
So it was a combination,

which again, this is not this is not like a f a firearm specific thing. It's like a business in general thing. You can either grow the pie or you can get more of the pie, preferably do both.

Joshua Waldron (30:39)
Preferably do both. Yeah.

Adam Callinan (30:43)
Got it.

Joshua Waldron (30:44)
yeah, the you know, and and that's exactly what Silence Recover did. We expanded the we expanded the pie by orders of magnitude. It's it's hard to even say. I think I I did the calculations once and it was thousands of percent increase of the market. But, you know, then I had to attack the inside the industry with the world's best.

customer service, really high end technical stuff that's like solving problems and and getting, you know, patents and IP to protect it and so then you have to do that kind of stuff at the same time to to to win the market share. So definitely do both.

Adam Callinan (31:25)
That was my

that was my least favorite part of my last company was the dealing with and defending intellectual property. We had like forty

Joshua Waldron (31:32)
I hate it too.

Adam Callinan (31:33)
forty something patents, forty two patents at the end of it, and the amount of mental bandwidth and brain dump I spent fighting with people over patent infringement was mind numbing.

Joshua Waldron (31:43)
Yeah.

Patents are a a funny thing too because so many of them are just unnecessary. You know, we we we like it we we grew up thinking that this is the thing that we have to have to make something like defendable and it isn't. Sometimes it is, a hundred percent. obviously there's industries where the patents are extremely important, but I think that just taking a and using the framework in my book for something like this actually works too, but like

Just taking at face value that you have to get a patent on a product or a pat patent on on your your idea to protect it is insane. and sometimes not even possible. And that definitely shouldn't be the you know, the gate that keeps you from starting a company. But forty patents is a lot. That's a big bill too.

Adam Callinan (32:25)
Yeah. And adding

to it to be fair, in our case, it was a huge part of our transaction. Like our the private equity group that bought us the first five hours of meetings we had with them, they did not ask us about our revenue one time. They didn't care. They wanted the patent portfolio. So

Joshua Waldron (32:41)
Just all IP.

Adam Callinan (32:42)
yeah, it was just like it was it it we were a premium brand in a portfolio for them that was less premium brand. I mean, we got we got acquired by the private equity group that acquired Arctic Outdoors. It's called Wimpoint

Joshua Waldron (32:51)
nice.

Adam Callinan (32:52)
Partners, and it was an amazing experience. They really were good.

But Arctic Outdoors, if you know that brand, like their historical brand was sort of a chasing Yeti at a lower price point thing. And now they do all a lot of their own stuff since that acquisition, which is they're kind of a different company now. But so it fit well inside of their portfolio. However, I do end up spending a lot of time talking to people about patents that have questions about them and are and are asking these same kind of questions like, Do I need it? What do I do when I get it? I feel like I have to have it. And most of the time I'm talking them out of it because it's like

Joshua Waldron (33:21)
Yeah, yeah.

Adam Callinan (33:22)
Yeah, I mean, no, you can do it and then you can go and spend seventy hours a week for a year and half a million dollars fighting about it to make them have any value because just getting it doesn't mean anything. And so

Joshua Waldron (33:31)
Yeah.

Adam Callinan (33:32)
why don't you just go focus on doing the other parts of the business like growing it and making it defensible that way?

Joshua Waldron (33:38)
Yeah, and you know, there's a pretty healthy argument that says without a patent you stay scrappier because you have to stay fast and you have to stay ahead of the game and you have to you're not gonna be complacent, that's for sure.

Adam Callinan (33:50)
Yeah, it it kind of

becomes a crutch, you know, to the like constraint area.

Joshua Waldron (33:56)
Yeah.

But you know, that it reminds me of like just how important it is that we don't stay on the idea of best practices, right? And and like because you know, business schools or or just how we grew up or whatever it was always teach you gotta have IP and like and it's even kind of confirmed in weird ways like private equity, for example,

It's the first question that many times they ask you when they start any type of process. It's like, what's your IP look like? It's like, c can we talk about the business model first, right? Like, because that's cool.

Adam Callinan (34:32)
Yeah, I yeah.

Joshua Waldron (34:33)
But like to just say like this blanket thing for any f any best practice or idea of best practice. Like the idea of being vertically integrated or not being vertically integrated, right? Or

Or outsource HR or not. Like any of that stuff really needs to be understood per company, right? Not just and and that's a perfect example of that is silencer co was a hundred percent vertically integrated. And when I say a hundred percent, I mean it was like a hundred percent. We even did the implementation of robotic arms, so we had like an implementation department.

It was extremely vertically integrated. The new silencer company that I'm involved with right now, it's called Angled Spade Technologies, we're fully outsourced and because the business model has changed. And for me as as a business owner, as an entrepreneur, to walk into Angled Spade and just use the silencer code playbook because, I was the biggest in the world. I should I I should succeed immediately if I just put it over here. It doesn't work. You know?

Like you will fail. you know, I I did the I did the the the hard part, which was understanding what the new industry needed, what the new like what this new company needed to s to succeed and then created a strategy around that. Not best practices but right practices. So best practices are floor that everyone's standing on. And if everyone's standing on the same floor, then you're like, what's the point? It's the wrong floor.

Adam Callinan (36:07)
That's the wrong yeah, it's the wrong floor. Yeah. I yeah. I mean we're

we're yeah, I completely agree with that that thesis. And don't know if you can see this sign over my shoulder. I realize my background's a little bit blurred. It says question everything. And that's not

Joshua Waldron (36:19)
question everything.

Adam Callinan (36:20)
not a like conspiratorial, although that's kind of fun sometimes too.

It's it is a

Joshua Waldron (36:24)
Yeah.

Adam Callinan (36:24)
like ask why three times. Just because somebody does it a certain way doesn't mean it's the right way to do it. And frankly, it probably means it could be done better. Every in in every circumstance, it can be improved and done differently.

And I think that's really important to approach each of those things independently with a whole lot of why and truly

Joshua Waldron (36:43)
Yeah.

Adam Callinan (36:43)
understand why the thing needs to be done a certain way. And that you you may go do it and find out quickly that you're wrong and you have to be able to tweak and adjust quickly.

Joshua Waldron (36:52)
And I think just the the asking of the why. that is often avoided because we know that it's going to open the book to a challenge. Right? It's like if I ask why, I'm it's going to expose the answer and then I'm gonna have to deal with it. And so then we're we're just naturally inclined to not even ask. It all of this stuff is conscious and deliberate activity that has to happen. It can't you can't run on subconscious, right?

Adam Callinan (37:19)
Isn't I mean a big part of that is

is the the we as a whole sort of chase the comfort and the asking a why is an uncomfortable place. It gets into an uncomfortable place. And so

Joshua Waldron (37:36)
Absolutely.

Adam Callinan (37:37)
and so we avoid it and that's where all the good stuff is.

Joshua Waldron (37:40)
Yeah, it is. I mean th think

Adam Callinan (37:43)
So when you go ahead.

Joshua Waldron (37:45)
about the think about the last time that or that you or or just think about any memory that you can feel c that you felt comfortable. Like and then think of any mem memory that you don't and let it sit for a second. And I'm not saying that do that right now 'cause we gotta talk, but like but like

Listeners, do that because it it's it is it'll amaze you immediately how much you will be able to feel the weight of the two differences, right? So

Adam Callinan (38:16)
And frankly, I think there's a really there's a really important connection between intentionally finding that discomfort and its capacity to help reset perspective. This like all comes kind of back full circ circle back to the beginning of this, which is really that perspective. If you can get out into the discomfort, whether that's a physical thing, it's a mental thing, generally it's combination of the two, that reset of perspective is unbelievably valuable.

Joshua Waldron (38:44)
Yeah, the question is is how often do we try to reset, right?

I you know, a and I I'm just asking this as a rhetorical question more than anything 'cause I just thought of it. But like what what would what is the right answer for that? Like because you don't

Adam Callinan (38:58)
I think it's a

Joshua Waldron (38:59)
wanna you don't wanna to do a daily reset, like

you

Adam Callinan (39:01)
Well yeah, it doesn't have yeah,

I think I mean I could tell you the way that I look at it. and I'm, you know, it admittedly I have access to things because of where I live that allow me to go and do these things. So I I I sort of preach that it it's all up to you and what your baseline is. But for for me, the next in the next six weeks, I'm gonna go out and get fantastically uncomfortable. And that's because archery season starts on Saturday. And I'm gonna go spend time

Out in the backcountry, hiking up and down mountains with a heavy pack, pulling big crit critters out of the woods. Sometimes that's gonna be with a horse, sometimes it's gonna be not. Every little bit of that is

Joshua Waldron (39:40)
Yeah.

Adam Callinan (39:40)
uncomfortable and it's epic. And I freaking love it. And I come home a better dad and a better husband and a better entrepreneur because it helps me reset my perspective on what comfort and discomfort is, how they interact together.

Joshua Waldron (39:52)
Yeah. Well i I mean and and that's just the thing is people have such a tendency to only think about what we naturally just think of as as comfort or fun or or enjoyable, which is like leisure or excitement or whatever it is. And all of that's fleeting when you look at it. But what's not fleeting is the grind of of taking, you know, of the of the stock. I mean

Archery hunting is no joke. It's something that I've never been able to do because of my disability. Like you really have to stalk. You have to like be wildly uncomfortable in the elements most of the time in the open. It's not like East Coast hunting, you know, in a tree stand when you're just sitting on a

Adam Callinan (40:35)
Mm-hmm.

Joshua Waldron (40:35)
chair. Like this is rough stuff. And why do we do it?

Adam Callinan (40:40)
Because it's hard. I mean literally because it's hard.

Joshua Waldron (40:44)
Yeah, a and not because it's hard because the accomplishment is what you want, because if you don't harvest an animal, you still enjoy the entirety of the trip. It doesn't matter.

Adam Callinan (40:52)
Yeah, it doesn't matter. It's almost not the point.

It it it's literally it's not the point. It's the you know, and again, all of these things tie back to business. It's the journey, it's the experience

Joshua Waldron (40:59)
It does. It is the journey.

Adam Callinan (41:01)
that's the point. And so using this

Joshua Waldron (41:03)
That's why I I get

tired of the the whole like the the middle or that you know the the the valley of doom or the middle is the where the hardest that that that's where the excitement lives. Like the middle is where if you allow yourself to to start making those connections and start understanding understanding how to

track the middle like the suck the stuff that takes a long time you can find so much more lasting l joy out of that time than you know the exciting startup is obviously hard to ever match but then the end the accomplishment is fleeting it is the middle it's everything

Adam Callinan (41:47)
So when we look at your experience, you know, going through, you know, getting to the company and following your your logic of starting at 200,000 and doubling for a decade, puts it at, you know, into the 60, 70, 80 million range, maybe more. I mean, that's a big company. And then you get acquired. And and I can tell you from my own experience, we didn't get to 80 million, but we, you know, we owned all of it.

And we had the weird call with the private equity group on the day where it's like I own the company this second. And at the end of all of these 12 people all saying I, which is like the weirdest thing ever, I now

Joshua Waldron (42:22)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Callinan (42:23)
no longer that's no longer my thing. Like I no longer own that thing. And it that had a profound impact on me in a way that I did not expect. Like I it was very, very emotional and again in ways that I didn't expect. How did that work for you? Like that transition from building that thing from nothing to something, like really something. And that.

Joshua Waldron (42:42)
So

my yeah, my ex

Adam Callinan (42:43)
Moving in the first time.

Joshua Waldron (42:45)
my experience was a little a little different than what you had. And that's because I got pushed out of my own company. and so after that ten solid years of of doubling growth, we had a bad year. And and there was a lot of y reasons that I could point to directly.

And there was a lot of things that were done around the time that were not desirable by others. there's there's a lot of dirt, I guess, which I'm which I'm not gonna go because like quite frankly,

Adam Callinan (43:18)
Sure, a lot of stuff there. Yeah. That's fine.

Joshua Waldron (43:21)
it's it's in the past, and it doesn't matter. What matters is that I had to kind of come to terms with losing something and it was

a s very, very similar loss as what I had with my c my accident at fifteen. The parallels between the two are profound because my identity was so completely and utterly wrapped around who it was that got changed, right? So before but my accident, I was the extreme sports guy, the outdoorsman. And then when Silencer Co

I had created that was my identity. I was at the top of my game. I was the biggest company in the industry. You know, I had a lot of respect in the industry. I was on boards all over the place. I was flying private jets and I was taking amazing trips and all of these kinds of things. And I allowed that to become who I was, which is stupid. because that's not who I was. and so when when when I was

voted out from the board. that was a a really profound impact. And it and it took you know five more years from that time before my exit happened. So when my exit happened, I was like, thank God that is a chapter behind me I

Adam Callinan (44:49)
Yeah.

Joshua Waldron (44:49)
can

Put it to bed and never think of it again. Other than

Adam Callinan (44:51)
Yeah. Close the door. Yeah.

Joshua Waldron (44:53)
thinking of the all of the lessons and the fun and the excitement and but mostly the lessons. And I write a ton about them. And that's you know, one of the things that I'm getting a lot of feedback on my book is is like I'm one of the only authors that admit my faults, right? Like I I messed up a lot of things.

And I am not going to hide those because the lessons that I've learned from them are creating a a far better position for myself going forward to succeed even bigger. And and that's that's what the game is, right? It's like we fall f we we wanna fail forward, as the term goes, right? We want to fail forward, and that that's why.

Adam Callinan (45:38)
So let's talk about your new book. What's the title? You know you've mentioned a couple of but I'm gonna bring it up here at the end.

Joshua Waldron (45:45)
Yeah,

it's called productive difficulty. Looks like this. although it doesn't have the advanced reader or author copy mark on it, not for

Adam Callinan (45:54)
Yeah.

Joshua Waldron (45:55)
resale. it comes out September twenty sixth. I don't know when this is going to air, if it's gonna air before that or or not, but but right now you can pre-order the book on hardisfun dot com.

But the the book is, you know, it's a how choosing hard creates competitive motes for your company. And it's a it's a really great framework. as a decision framework basically that that you can use as a companion real time in your company for any decisions that you have. And then I have a matrix that's also very helpful at at at

prioritizing tasks and putting them in the right places for your activities. so like for example

Adam Callinan (46:42)
I can employ.

Joshua Waldron (46:43)
the the the two by two matrix if if well I I should probably explain more of the book first. So productive difficulty is it takes you through the framework of of what challenges

Compound and payoff, right? So there's a seven-step framework, and that's step one is does it build capability that compounds, right? So solves a whole category of future problems, not just one problem. so so that's question one. Question two, does it create a moat? question three, does it solve problems that customers actually value? because you know, a lot of times we

We will say, we have to do this thing because whatever it is. Let's put a ton of money into an ERP system. Well, the ERP system that you already has works fine, but your CRM sucks, right? so choose the problem that the customer cares about first, right? does it differentiate from competitors who won't do the work?

Does it have an asymmetric payoff? That's a big one, right? So finite paying upfront compounding gains after. does it build expertise through the doing? So even if you fail, do you take away something? and that's a big one. Because you know, like if you have your own company or your own department that does the implementation of of

of tech or or machinery or things like we did at Silencer Co. If you fail at that, you still learn, you can still apply it to the next implementation, all that kind stuff. So that's an example of that. And then seven, does it align with your strategy and core strengths? Because oftentimes we pivot because of a shiny object and it's not in our core, it's not in our vision. And then you have to ask yourself, do we need to change our vision? And it just gets ugly. So you run those seven questions. If you have most yeses, you're you you're in productive difficulty. If you're answering

And most knows, that puts you in a different quadrant that's called pointless suffering. And that is hard work that doesn't compound. And and really, life is hard, right? Everything is hard. So choose the hard that compounds and gives you something that that is asymmetric and that teaches you and and and creates significant value in your life, and then get rid of the pointless suffering.

So then when you have a ton of tasks, and and like Monday morning I do this a lot. I have a lot of things that I have on my plate for the week, and I will just quickly put them into the matrix as a two by two. So strategic value is on the one matrix and then the difficulty. So high strategic value and high difficulty is pointless stuff, or sorry, is productive difficulty. so that is where you want to spend most of your your cognitive efforts.

Pointless suffering is the is when it's really high difficulty and low value. that is what you want to eliminate. Quick wins are when they're really high value and low difficulty. so those are what you wanna do quickly.

Enjoy the the the win, celebrate that and bu use that for momentum. And then the maintenance work is that's low low difficulty, low value. That's what you automate. That's where I constantly am telling people, get really good at AI, have it automate a lot of your tasks, you know, delegate, get stuff off your plate to allow yourself bandwidth to do the things that actually matter. So the book basically covers those

theories but with a lot of stories, a lot of practical ap application. All of this is based on experience, none of it from academia. in fact I didn't even go to college until I was in my forties. so yeah, I it's it's I'm a builder and and I wanted to write a book around that. And I wanted to be very transparent with with who I was and all of my mistakes in the process so that others don't make

Adam Callinan (50:51)
Well, I will double and triple down on the building for asymmetric risk, something I talk about a lot. Minimize the risk, maximize the upside in everything that you always do ever. I've also found or seen that those quick wins have a tendency to not be planned. They'd have a tendency to be accidental and be these things that happen and are and are amazing and can cr can create really powerful inflection points, but you can't often plan them.

So it's sort of,

Joshua Waldron (51:20)
Yeah.

Adam Callinan (51:20)
you know, a big thesis here is like, how do we build the resilience and the durability to stay in the game for long enough for those things to happen?

Joshua Waldron (51:30)
Yeah, mean one of the things to to stay in the game long and to have that resilience is to make sure that you're you're doing your daily self-reflections and you're writing your wins you in in and celebrating those wins and that's really what drives momentum. As soon as you start being complacent about that part of it, things will start to slip.

But if you'd stay conscious and deliberate.

about choosing that then th then you'll stay on top of it. It's easy. It's you know, in theory.

Adam Callinan (52:10)
In theory, yeah. Important projects

Joshua Waldron (52:12)
Simple, I should say.

Adam Callinan (52:13)
to build. Yeah, it's yeah, maybe that's it. It's simple. It's maybe it's not easy, but it is simple.

Joshua Waldron (52:17)
Yeah, simple.

Adam Callinan (52:19)
Well I will make sure, we'll make sure that everything is in the show notes with links to the book and the pre release. This should be out ahead of that, so should be good there.

Joshua Waldron (52:27)
that's great. Wonderful.

Adam Callinan (52:28)
And then where else do you want people to find you to find the book or you didn't spend any time screaming on the socials or anywhere out there?

Joshua Waldron (52:35)
Yeah,

so I've got Hardest Fun on Instagram, at Hardest Fun. I've got Facebook and and X and I've got a website, Hardest Fun. Books like I said, twenty-sixth of September it'll it'll be released. and you can pre-order now at my website at hardestfun dot com.

Adam Callinan (52:57)
Thanks a ton, Josh. This was really a really particularly fun discussion because of your story is is amazing. What you were you're

Joshua Waldron (53:07)
well, thank you.

Adam Callinan (53:07)
you're capable and obviously willing to share is is incredibly powerful. So thank you for sharing it.

Joshua Waldron (53:13)
Appreciate that. Thank you.