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The "No BS" version of how startups are really built, taught by actual startup Founders who have lived through all of it. Hosts Wil Schroter and Ryan Rutan talk candidly about the intense struggles Founders face both personally and professionally as they try to turn their idea into something that will change the world.
EP251_Podcast_Audio
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Ryan Rutan: [00:00:00] Welcome back to the episode of the startup therapy podcast. This is Ryan Rutan joined as always by my friend, the founder and CEO of startups. com Wil Schroter. I'm super excited about this episode because this is something that I end up talking to people a lot about how it manifests in the founder's life, how it manifests in the entire team's lives.
We are talking to founders. When you think about, let's just go back in time, think about our own teams, all the people that we've worked with. All the founders we work with and the teams that they described to us, how many of them say that they're working hard?
Wil Schroter: All of them. That's it, right? How everybody works hard.
Yeah. Somehow everybody works hard. My question always is by what measure, but I think it's a gross misunderstanding by both the workers and founders. And I think for us as founders, We have to be wildly conscious of what it means when we say people are working hard because our organizations are based on everyone working hard.
What if no one is? What if [00:01:00] everyone believes that they are getting ground to the stone? But in fact, they're not getting shit done. Massive problem. I've been dealing with this for three decades. I know you have too. I can't wait to talk about this book. Yeah,
Ryan Rutan: it's funny. It's one of those things. It's one of those things that I think just goes by the wayside, right?
Like it's just, it's an assumption that we just check the box. Everybody's working hard. It's one of those things though, that because it's so foundational. I don't know. Is there any more dangerous assumption in an organization than people are doing their jobs at all? Let alone they're working hard, right?
I think it's one of those traps that we fall into. And because it's easier just to believe that it makes you happy to believe that your team's working hard and that everybody's pulling. But because startups are so like herky jerky at the beginning anyways and progress is hard to measure and it's not clear, if we've got six horses hitched to a wagon.
And only one of them is actually doing anything? Pretty fucking obvious. Like we know, we're just not moving, right? [00:02:00] Alright, it's a problem. But in a startup organization, it can be really hard to actually see that. And so I think that it's easier just to assume, everybody's probably doing their thing.
It's just going to take some time for it to all come together. There's some truth to that. But there's a whole lot of dark corners in that assumption that can absolutely kill a startup.
Wil Schroter: Yeah, and I think, when I talk to founders and I say indirectly, are you working hard? Their answer is always yes, right?
I almost always hear founders say yes. When I follow that up with by what metric, all of a sudden it gets real fuzzy. It blows my mind that three seconds ago, You answer that question with absolute certainty. But as soon as someone asked you the most basic question, by what metric, you couldn't answer it.
And so again, this radiates out to our whole organization. Now imagine this, now imagine we've got an organization, let's say we're a small startup, we've got a half dozen people, everybody's mind, They're working really hard. What does that mean if they're wrong? It means a bunch of things. Number one, it [00:03:00] means that the output you should have been getting, if people were, optimized and doing what they were supposed to be doing, would have been very different than what you are getting.
Right there, we shouldn't even need a number two. That alone is a problem. The next thing is when people are working hard, they feel an entitlement to be rewarded for it. What about when there's an entitlement for a reward, where you didn't do the work to get the reward? Yeah. I'll give you an example.
Super dangerous. I've never met someone that's I get paid way too much money. No matter how much money someone gets paid, in their mind, they've earned it. And then some, usually. And then some, yeah. I've never heard somebody say I'm overpaid, right? No matter what. And I find that to be fascinating because, again, it's tied to work, output, etc.
And take somebody that's working a 20 an hour job, which by the way is a 20 minimum wage in California now. If you work at McDonald's, you get 20 an hour, right? And you're saying, I work super hard. It's maybe, but you're gonna get paid the same amount either way. Even if you work very little, you're still going to get 20 bucks an hour.
And I think people lose sense of that. Like you were going to get paid either way. Oh no, I wouldn't. I'd get [00:04:00] fired. Nah, not really. Like probably not. Anyway, I think as founders, as leadership in an organization, it is incumbent on us at the most basic level to understand what hard work is, when it's actually happening and when to call bullshit.
Ryan Rutan: Yeah. A hundred percent. And it's this starts with just even entering, being willing to enter into the exploration. That's not true. I so frequently see this at the founder level even, right? Where they're like they're confusing being busy with working hard. Let's dig in there.
So one of the places, and we just had a fairly lengthy conversation with four or five founders last week on this very topic, three of the four were in a position where they wanted to leave their full time thing. So they could go spend more time on their startup company. And look, of course, there are times where that makes a ton of sense.
And, but as we started to dig in and say why do you need to do that now? Because it destabilizes a lot of other things, right? These are all people who were making money and the startup was the side hustle, meaning it can basically [00:05:00] continue forever. And they were like I just need to spend more time.
I do more things, do more of this, do more of that. I need to work harder on my startup. And it was funny because we started to dig in, I started to call into question whether there was going to be real value in that extra time they were putting in. Was there truly a 40 hour or more per week job for you to do in that startup right now?
And in most cases it was like, probably not. The fourth founder started laughing. He's I did this two years ago. I quit my full time job so that I could go and hustle at my startup, be full time. It was like, I very quickly realized that yes, I could fill my days. There's an unlimited number of things your startup will demand of you.
It turns out most of them don't do shit for the organization. And so all of a sudden I was now super busy, but I wasn't super productive. I wasn't getting anything done that actually mattered. So was I working hard? I was having a hard time doing all of it, but that doesn't mean that it's hard work.
Different story.
Wil Schroter: Yeah. We're confusing effort with progress. We're confusing effort with progress. With progress. And, the example I give, [00:06:00] dude, if it takes me 40 hours to create a paper airplane and it doesn't fly, that's not progress, right? The amount of effort it took me is not considered working hard, right?
Where I'm like, Oh, I spent so much time on that. Yeah. Were you any good at it? I spent, it took me 40 hours to make that plane. What do you mean? It didn't, it didn't work. Do you know how much time I put into this? Yeah, it didn't work. It doesn't matter that the fact that you put 40 hours into it.
You should be crying about, you should be ashamed of, I worked so hard. And I think that, for some folks there's a pride in effort. It's the ultimate participation award. It's look, man, the effort doesn't mean squat unless the outcome is there.
Ryan Rutan: Here's a great way to start rewarding that.
Here's a great way to start rewarding hard work, hand them an invisible medal. And when they're like but. There's nothing here. And then you tell them, but I worked really hard to make this for you. I know it's not actually here. Nothing actually happened, but I worked really hard to recognize your hard work.
All right. So I think we're even [00:07:00] now that should illustrate the case right there.
Wil Schroter: I got to tell you, the first year when I was learning that to skate, to play ice hockey I probably worked harder than anybody else on the team, but you know what I also did? Scored zero goals. Yup. Yup. And the fact that I was skating year round where most of the kids that were playing were not, okay, didn't make a lick of difference.
All my quote, hard work was useless, right? Now granted, it's part of what you have to do in order to get to that level so you can start, so you can
Ryan Rutan: play. But stick on that point, because I think a lot of times this is exactly what we're doing. When hard work is making up for a deficit to get us to a baseline of being able to work at all, That's not hard work, right?
We're just playing catch up. Yeah, it might be difficult. It might be hard, but that's not what we're talking about here, right? So if we're not applying force that creates progress, and of course, yes, there's progress. You went from not being able to skate, to being able to skate at a marginal level, to being able to skate at an average level, to being able to skate well enough [00:08:00] to get on the team.
That's the baseline, right? Getting on the team is the first step. All the work that led up to that isn't the hard work that matters. Was it difficult to do? Did you have to push yourself to do it? Yes. But that's not where the rewards come from, right? If you absolutely suck at coding and you spend four years of hard work to learn how to code, to release a marginal landing page for your new business, you get a reward for that.
No, if people start to convert on that landing page, there's the beginnings of the reward for that. But that's not what we're celebrating, right? The hard work to get to baseline is just the required prerequisites to do anything at all.
Wil Schroter: I feel like over time, as a society, we're also getting to a point where our reward loops are so tight if everything I do doesn't get a like and a comment, I feel like somehow, I've been, misled by the world, right?
Yeah, exactly. And it's yeah, that's not the way the world works. Maybe it [00:09:00] does now, and I'm the one that's off. It's the way the world doesn't work, right? It's a great way to put it. It's the way the world doesn't work. In this particular context, I think this idea that if I've done something, if I've exerted I'm to be rewarded for that is such a broken concept that I think as leadership in an organization, when we start just rewarding time, when we just start rewarding quote effort without the concept of reward comes with outcome.
Now, don't get me wrong. If you put in all those extra hours and get an outcome, by all means, it deserves a reward. It does. It just does. That's the whole point, right? But we've done episodes about this where I said, Hey, I was a hundred hour a week warrior for 20 years. And so no question, effort was expended.
And to be fair, I had some success with it. So you could probably quantify it. But I was willing to make an extraordinary amount of sacrifice in order to get to those ends. If I looked back and I said, Hey, I would have gotten to the same place with half the effort. It wouldn't have happened, right?
I just, it wouldn't. I had so many things like ice skating [00:10:00] that I just had to make up in gross hours in order to be able to play the sport that I just had to do it. If I were to have said, I want to start on the hockey team. But, I'm not willing to skate year round, why would I be on that hockey team? But I skated really hard
Ryan Rutan: when I did, no one cares, you suck.
Yep, exactly. The investment does not equal the reward, right? We have to make investments in time. I I was, I had a great morning today actually. I woke up at 5 like usual but then something unusual happened, which was that my 9 year old daughter showed up in full soccer regalia, Sweater up, cleats on, ball in hand.
I said, Hey, can we go play? I was like, hell yeah. So we went out to the goal in the backyard and we started working on some stuff right. And she's, I wanted to work on some fundamentals. She wants to volley the ball. Okay, we'll do that. We'll do some volleys, it's just you and I, we can do it.
And she was getting frustrated. And as a father, but also as the coach and also as a player, like I want to see her actually make progress, not just put in time. And so like she was getting closer. And so she started to make [00:11:00] contact a little bit. And in the back of my head, I'm going like, we need to celebrate this a little bit because it got better, but this isn't the full reward.
And so this is exactly that point. I think, unfortunately, to your point, we overdone it with this, like use reward to motivate people and shorten those reward loops so significantly that they just don't mean anything anymore. And so I gave her the subtlest of nods. It was like, that was better, right?
That's better. It's not what we're trying to accomplish, right? You didn't score. You didn't make the right conduct, but we improved. But I basically said we're getting closer to baseline. We're getting closer to the point where then we can start to say now good things are going to happen.
But I think we have to be really careful about this, right? And again you don't want to demotivate. I don't want to be out there still sucks, right? I think you can't do that. But we can also go, wow, that was amazing, right? You barely made contact and it went out of bounds. We're getting closer.
This is awesome. Let's call it quits. We didn't, right? We continued and then we talked about what went right and then how do we build on that so we're actually getting the thing that we really want. I [00:12:00] think this is one of the things that I routinely see get lost as we're trying to motivate our teams.
We start to celebrate the efforts and we forget about the desired goals, right? We can't lose sight of that. Yes, it's great that we're making progress towards the goal, but if we don't talk about the fact that we're still a long way from the actual goal, the thing we want to achieve, we are doing ourselves and our teams a huge disservice.
And it's going to kill the actual progress.
Wil Schroter: Something that's really funny about everything we talk about here. Is that none of it is new. Everything you're dealing with right now has been done a thousand times before you, which means the answer already exists. You may just not know it, but that's okay.
That's what we're here to do. We talk about this stuff on the show, but we actually solve these problems all day long at groups. startups. com. So if any of this sounds familiar, stop guessing about what to do. Let us just give you the answers to the test. And we also have to set what that baseline of hard work, [00:13:00] or that baseline of reward and outcome even is.
That's a big part of this, because left to their own devices, folks just don't know. If left to their own devices, let's say you didn't stipulate, I'm just using this as a benchmark, that you had a 40 hour work week. You just said, we have a job, work as many hours as you think you need to. He would work like 12, right?
Fuck, people probably only work 12 now, right? In the grand scheme of things.
Ryan Rutan: But they worked hard. But they worked hard. So it counts as 40.
Wil Schroter: But in their minds, they worked hard. And I always say, hard compared to what? To what? Oh, yes. To what? Yeah. I worked hard. Dig in.
Dig in. And you were talking about your daughter. My seven year old son, Will, he comes up to me every day to work out. And, we've got a gym in my house while I'm working out. He always wants to lift the same dumbbells. And his thing right now is there's a 65 pound dumbbell that he likes to deadlift.
Show his dad that he can lift more than his weight. Which is pretty cool, honestly, it's he does it, and he's straining every muscle in his body to lift it. Discredit he does it! Dude pulls it up, little jack little seven year old apparently, right? But then I take the weight, and I'm lifting it and I'm using those as my, my bench dumbbells, right?[00:14:00]
And it's not a lot of effort to me.
Ryan Rutan: So who was working hard? What's that? Yeah.
Wil Schroter: I'm thinking to
Ryan Rutan: myself Were either of you
Wil Schroter: working hard? It's the same outcome, lifting a 65 pound dumbbell, but his strain and my strain are different. Now, again, this is a physical thing but the metaphor holds up entirely because if you look at that and you say, Take a task, and if someone tries to do that, and for them, lifting the 65 pound dumbbell takes all of their effort and they can barely do it, but someone else could just as soon do it in two seconds, should that person be rewarded because they had to strain, or penalized because they had to strain?
Back to the paper airplane example. I worked 40 hours on this, blah blah blah. I'm like, it should have been four minutes. If you were taking your time. The fact that it took you 40 hours isn't a defense, it's a problem.
Ryan Rutan: You know what, let's break it down like this, let's break it down like this assuming that you do need to get to a baseline assuming that you do need to get to a baseline, let's recognize the effort, but let's [00:15:00] celebrate outcomes, right?
Recognize effort. But celebrate outcomes, right? Because even in this case, right? So were either of you working hard? Maybe not, right? In the sense that we're talking about today, where it makes progress, because even so when we look at you and go, okay, you can do it with less effort.
If we're talking about if that was the outcome that we needed if the work that needed to be done was lift 65 pound dumbbell, yeah, then you would be the better person to do that in this case. But was that what we needed? Was that progress? Or have we been lifting 65 pound dumbbells for the last 15 years as a company?
In which case that's just status quo. If we're trying to grow. We've got to lift 70, we've got to lift 75, all right? So I think that's, again let's recognize effort, but let's reward or let's celebrate outcomes and let's make sure that we're baselining them against something important, right?
Because it isn't even just a relative scale. One person relative to another might describe whether, the amount of effort that's required, but the amount of effort that's required has nothing to do in most cases with the actual outcome, right? Some outcomes that we [00:16:00] need, turns out. Don't even need that much effort.
Some require incredible amounts.
Wil Schroter: If you go off people's self reporting, I believe in my experience, you're going to lose every time. You talk to anybody in the organization and you say, hey, are you working hard? In their minds, no matter what they're doing, by any metric, they're going to say yes.
So when you respond to that, or more specifically, let's say that you say, hey, is this person on your team working hard? Oh my God, yes, they're absolutely working hard. Compared to what? But if part of
Ryan Rutan: that goes back to the culture, we create the way we lead and what we've told ourselves, because if we've told ourselves as the founder, cause remember at some point, this started with just us, right?
There was nobody else when, at least when we had the idea, maybe we hired somebody eight minutes later, cool. You've added teams to the beginning. Most people don't do that. There's going to be some period where you were the founder. If you start to celebrate constantly and celebrate just the effort start to celebrate the effort, then guess what, when you start hiring people, you're going to start to celebrate their effort.
If it turns out there's the same celebration around effort and outcome, [00:17:00] Why would I worry about the outcome? I get celebrated for the effort, right? So a lot of this, unfortunately, is actually coached into people, right? We teach them that this is what we're after. I want to see you putting in effort, right?
Go back to your hundred hour week hero days, right? Yeah, clearly that would have permeated into more of the organization where people thought like in order to show up, in order to be celebrated, in order to be lauded as another hero on this team, I got to be putting in a hundred hours too, right?
This is the baseline. This is what we do. Regardless of what the outcomes were, you're teaching your team. This is what we expect from you. And this is what you'll be recognized for.
Wil Schroter: So let's stick with, let's build on that. So so we've got, let's say three layers of management in a company. Just using this as an example, right?
You've got the founder C level. You've got the mid management level, and you've got the front end line worker level. Again, I'm using very basic terms, just so you see the separation. If at the executive level, if there isn't an expectation that work is going to be like, [00:18:00] effort plus outcome, of course is going to be an A minus or better, then there's no version at the mid tier where that level, that grade is going to go up.
And there's no version at the next tier that grade is going to go up. So whatever we accept at the top level sets the benchmark for the best it's going to be. And then we have to start degrading that as you move. Absolutely. And so if my expectation, and by way of that, my understanding at the C level, Is that everybody should be at least a B or better.
Just make, making up a grade because people understand letter grades. Then I have to assume it'd be ridiculous for me not to, that the frontline folks are C minus or better, because I know there's going to be a meaningful degradation. In expectations, in perception, right? From my standpoint, again, if I'm like, Hey, is this person working hard?
And I'm going through two layers of people to get that answer, I have to remember the filter! Because I'm taking my version of what work is working hard, then I'm dividing it by [00:19:00] their version, or subtracting in this case, then I'm subtracting by the next version, right? So my quality level kinda sucks.
Now there's two ways to fix that. One, I increase my letter grade. So at least when it dilutes, it starts from a higher baseline. I start with an A if I want to get to a C, right? Or two, I find out how that next layer of folks is actually grading the talent. Yep. By what measure? By what measure?
When they say, Oh yeah, team's working hard. You sure? By what measure? And we start to look at that. And I think that part of it, here's one thing I've learned. You and I've gone through this many times. When you ask people to show their work, the people that are working can't wait to show you.
People that aren't, it's not hard to figure out. Yep. Yep. When I'm working hard, I want people to know it. More specifically what I'm performing. I want people to know it. I always joke that there's never been a salesperson that forgot to tell you that they were top of the board this month.
Never existed in the history of history. Yep. Justifiably yep. But boy, are salespeople quiet when they're at the bottom of the board. Yeah,
Ryan Rutan: Yeah. A hundred percent. [00:20:00] Yeah. No chest pounding. True of anybody.
Wil Schroter: You're right. It's true of anybody. And we have to look at that and go, shh, when things start to get quiet over somewhere let's take a look at what's going on over there.
Ryan Rutan: It's funny, man. When I ask people to show me their work, I can almost guess what I'm going to see based on the initial answer of how long it's going to take them to get it back to me. If I'm hey let's give me a rundown on this project that you're working on.
Give me, that, that work journal, whatever it is, if they're like, if there's like some arbitrary sounding delay between yeah, I can get that to you next week. So what you're saying is you have to go and really think hard about this and fabricate what you're about to send me versus here's all the things I'm excited to share with you.
All right. Cause to your point, people who are killing it, know they're killing it and know exactly how to describe how they're killing it.
Wil Schroter: You bet. And again, this isn't a case for overworking anybody. I just want to be clear about that. Oh my God, these guys are these evil overlords. Oh God. No. What we're saying is we're looking for underperformance. We're looking for when folks think that they're working super hard, but they're not, which is the ultimate kind of misunderstanding because [00:21:00] if I go into organization every day. And I'm like, man I'm killing myself at this company, but I'm getting nothing done.
We both lose. Everyone loses. Yeah. Everybody's
Ryan Rutan: losing at that point. Because we don't want you to be working hard and getting nothing done at that point. You might as well just not be working. So you don't need to feel overwhelmed. I'm still going to get the same result. If you're on my team and you're doing a lot, but nothing's happening, right? If you're just kicking up a bunch of dust, but once the dust settles, nothing changed, might as well not be working. And so I think this is the point. And look. We're talking about a spectrum here, right?
It's not oh there's people who just work hard and nothing ever happens. But I think by and large, when you see people, to your point, when they think they're working hard, they may even be doing things that are hard, like working extra hours or whatever it is, right? Pushing themselves in a lot of ways.
But if it isn't, Generating any kind of a meaningful outcome, it's not worth doing. Effort doesn't equal output. There's no point in the effort.
Wil Schroter: I'll give you an example where this is like contrasted a lot for me. So my stepfather is a landscaper, career landscaper. He is in his seventies [00:22:00] now, is still a landscaper, right?
Years ago you probably remember this, I decided I was going to redo all of my landscaping at the house myself, I always want to take on these epic projects. I think I still have,
Ryan Rutan: like a pulled muscle somewhere in my back from,
Wil Schroter: Carrying,
Ryan Rutan: how many bags of mulch did we spread that day?
Wil Schroter: A lot of mulch. We destroyed everything. My house went from Not great landscaping to looking like the surface of Mars, but I had executed everything. I call my stepdad up and I'm like, Hey, dad, I don't know how you do this every day, right? I knew your job was hard, right? Physically hard, but I've been doing it now for eight weeks straight, while doing my regular job and I can barely move.
I also don't understand how you've ever gained a pound in your life, right? Yeah, how is this possible? Like 5, 000 calories a day. Anyway, I'll never forget his response. His response was, it was just perfect. He's and I was like, dad, how do you keep doing this? Like physically, how do you keep doing this?
He's it's easy. I wake up and I'm broke. I
Ryan Rutan: have to go do this. But there's something else to that. And I think you and I've talked about this before too. It's possible to do hard work without working hard.
Wil Schroter: That's where I was headed. And my [00:23:00] dad would come to me and, from time to time, he'd be like, look, you've done really well for yourself and whatever, I've worked just as hard as you.
I was like, whoa, stop right there. I was like, you've done hard work. You have not worked hard and there's a massive difference, right? Like my dad stepdad, he's he'll work as few hours as possible. I think every landscaper on the planet,
Ryan Rutan: there's a lot of shovel leaning time, right?
There's a lot of things. Oh yeah. It's hard work, but are you working hard or are you hardly
Wil Schroter: working? Oh right here. But he does not want, there's never been a version where he's The job was done, but I just felt it could be done better. So I just stayed extra long just to get it done, right?
Yeah, never ever in the history of history, right? And I was like, what did you sacrifice? What, where did you put an extraordinary effort that the average person wouldn't have done in getting paid the same thing? Where have you applied risk or anything else like that? And obviously he hasn't, right?
So when he looks at my effort, he's my back hurts and I'm straining and all of these things. I get it. You did some hard work. Yeah, my father was a carpenter. Yeah. Same thing, right? You need to eat all these strains, whatever. But my father never worked [00:24:00] an extra 30 seconds that he didn't have to.
And that's the nature of that labor. Dude, if I was doing that all day long, and I guess I do because I am a carpenter. I do it because I love it. But it's, there is a physical limit, right?
Ryan Rutan: Just done.
Wil Schroter: But I think when people look at this concept of I've done hard work in, therefore it's the same as working hard, we generally don't get rewarded for hard work, look
Ryan Rutan: at hard jobs.
Most of them aren't compensated very well. And there's a reason, because hard work doesn't imply amazing outcomes, right? It just means something that was hard got done, right? Very different. Correct.
Wil Schroter: That's a bit different. And I think for the reward structure, that's the part that we're missing.
And by the way, I want to make sure I'm not disrespecting anybody that does hard work. The opposite. Having done it myself and being in the process of building my own house, I feel like I'm well aware of hard work, right? What I'm saying is that alone doesn't buy you anything. When my son tries to pick up a dumbbell and it's very hard, it's hard [00:25:00] work, that, that doesn't mean anything.
It just means it's hard.
Ryan Rutan: He still moved the same 65 pounds that you and I can do with one arm, right? Yeah, exactly, right? Okay, both my arms, whatever.
Wil Schroter: The other day, I'm I'm on TikTok or something like that and and there's this this influencer that's just on this massive rant about how hard he works and how he's not getting rewarded for it.
And the gist of it was something like this. The gist of it was like, screw you old people. You had it so easy. I'm working over 30 hours a week, and I can't see it, and and I can't buy a house. Are you kidding? Yeah, I'm dead serious. This wasn't satire, this wasn't irony, this was, this the, what made it so juicy was that it wasn't satire.
And he's I'm working over 30 hours a week, you guys were able to buy a house, you're able to afford like a nice car, whatever. He's I'm settled in college debt, I've got a degree. And I'm 30 something years old and, I'm still serving coffee, right?
Ryan Rutan: Yeah. Yeah. They also stormed the beaches of Normandy, right?
There, there were a few other fucking details in there that might be accounted
Wil Schroter: for. [00:26:00] They didn't have college nor was it paid for, but anyway but in his mind and I always try to be empathetic about this, right? Like I'm just not just like pointing fingers. I try to put myself in his position and I try to think in terms of by what measure does he believe that he deserves that.
Where the reward exists, right? And the truth is, he just doesn't have a comparison. In his mind, relative to what's been asked of him, 30 hours is a lot. And truth be told, if you didn't want to do much work, and you were given 30 hours of it, it would feel like a lot. Where he's misled, where he's misled, is he actually doesn't understand the effort it takes and the outcome more specifically, in order to get to that house, in order to get your college debt paid off.
Those people who accomplished at that level, They weren't phoning it in. That's why they were able to do it, right? They were in a dramatically different work reward structure. 100%. And so he, he just doesn't, he doesn't understand it, right? And and when I [00:27:00] say not his fault, he's an adult, theoretically you could but I understand where that comes from.
But look,
Ryan Rutan: Without that comparison, without that baseline, without a benchmark it doesn't matter how smart you are, you're not going to figure it out. You need that relative measure to push off from. And I think that's what we're getting at here which is that hard work or working hard, not hard work just implies like it's hard to do right.
I have to pick up something heavy. I have to work longer hours than I want to or that I'm physically capable of. That's hard work. Working hard implies that we're putting in extra effort that we're going somehow above and beyond. The requirements, but in order to achieve and with some reasonable expectations, we actually achieve that out, right?
Because again, if we don't tie this to something happening. What are we doing? You're just applying effort. And this isn't exactly a work smart versus work hard thing. But I think that before we can say I'm working hard, again, to your point, relative to what? To what end? And are you working hard?
Are you just doing the work? There's a certain amount of work that's required for the job, right? Again, baseline, [00:28:00] right? You working really hard to skate, to learn to skate, to get on the team, right? That was an accomplishment in itself, right? To get on the team. But you don't hang up your skates at that point, right?
You gotta go suit up and actually play a game, try to score a goal or save some or whatever it is. That's the outcome that we're after.
Wil Schroter: I think you and I are all for rewarding people for, making extraordinary contributions if they make extraordinary contributions.
Ryan Rutan: Yes, there it is, extraordinary, not just extra of the ordinary, right?
There's
Wil Schroter: a
Ryan Rutan: difference
Wil Schroter: between those two things. I think for us, the danger as founders is to not set that baseline and expectation. That is literally our job to set those expectations. What is the difference between the baseline effort? In the extraordinary effort, what is the reward between just putting time in and having an extraordinary outcome, even if time isn't a factor?
And I think if we don't set those baselines, starting with ourselves, looking inward at ourselves and how we perform, And then apply that to the rest of the organization. We can't [00:29:00] possibly build a high performing organization. If we don't understand the difference between hard work and working hard and what reward everyone should get the difference in the tip, overthinking your startup,
Ryan Rutan: because you're going it alone, you don't have to.
And honestly, you shouldn't because instead you can learn directly from peers who've been in your shoes. Connect with bootstrapped founders and the advisors helping them win in the startups. com community. Check out the startups. com community at www. startups. com to see if it's for you. Could be just the thing you need.
I hope to see you inside.