Beauty in the Journey | Dylan Bost

This is The Chris Project, where we discuss mental wellness, self-awareness, and mindset with entrepreneurs and experts. Set your perceived ideas and biases aside and let's go on our journey for yourself, for your family, for the world.

Welcome to another episode of The Chris Project. I am your host, Christian Brim. Joining me today, Dylan Bost. Dylan, welcome to the show.

Hey, Christian, thanks for having me.

So you're welcome. Thank you for coming on again. I had you on The Profitable Creative and it's been a while, but my recollection was your story was compelling enough that I needed to bring it to this audience. So why don't you give a brief synopsis of your entrepreneurial journey?

Yeah, so, you know, I think when I look back, I just kind of fell into it. It seemed more natural to me. I'm really very comfortable in a place where I think a lot of people are uncomfortable with that— figuring it out, not knowing where a paycheck's coming from, running projects. And so from, you know, early on, even when I I was in college, I ran a company and did design work, and that took me into— once I was done, I was educated in architecture and design. And then, as my wife says, I did nothing with it. So, but it, it helped me build where I am today. You know, it took me to Walt Disney Imagineering and learned a lot of things from those folks, incredible culture, and started an agency after that for about 10 years, crashed and burned in that agency. And we can get into that. And, and for a brief stint in between that and what I'm doing— well, what I was doing then and now what I'm doing now— I, I kind of toyed with, do I just go work with, you know, for somebody? It sounded so easy, right? Um, you know, it was a moment for a couple years where I thought, you know, if I could do what I've done for hundreds of people at a time and companies, you know, how easy would it be to get my just, you know, teeth around one product and, you know, to advertise market one product. And it was really wonderful. A mentor of mine told me, he's like, "Dylan, you'll never be happy doing that. You maybe do it for 6 months and then, you know, you're just not the kind of person." I'd never really heard that. It's just what I did. And he was right. So I started Sunny HQ, the company that I've been running for about 9 years. And then since then, I've branched out and actually wrote a book last year and started a whole personal brand and coaching and speaking. I've started another company recently for my wife around in-home lice treatment. And I just find myself in that place of, I like, the thing that's attractive to me, I listen to a lot of podcasts in the entertainment business. And something that's always sounded attractive is these guys essentially have projects, right? They're doing a film here, they're producing something there, and they've just, and that's really where I sit. If I was in that industry, I'd probably be a producer. I really enjoy that, that fast-paced setup and not knowing what's going to happen the next day. And so that's just where I've lived and I'm really comfortable in that area.

Perfect. That's a great synopsis. Something you said that resonated with me was that you're comfortable where a lot of people are uncomfortable. And I think that's a distinguishing characteristic of entrepreneurs is they are much more comfortable with the unknown, moving forward specifically without the knowns, uh, than, than most people. Um, something else that you said resonated with me was that, like, you would not be happy, uh, working for someone else. I was having that conversation with my adult children, two of them independently, uh, over the last weekend, and They were basically complaining about their ineffectiveness in the job, underutilization, that kind of thing. And I flat out told them, and I came to this conclusion, not intellectual— well, maybe intellectually, but just at a gut level, very early on when I was 26, 27. That I was never going to be satisfied working for someone else, that I knew that I could do more than they would ever allow me to.

Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. But, you know, being an entrepreneur, you trade those frustrations for other frustrations. So the idea that you're going to be living without frustration is a myth. So, let's, you know, if you don't mind, let's talk about the— you described it as crash and burn. What does that mean?

Well, on the surface, it means alcohol. That didn't help. You know, I essentially had built something that, you know, the way I describe it, looked great on paper. You know, big agency— well, to the world, probably a medium-sized, small agency. But, you know, I'd grown something to 25, 26 people, lots of clients, Lots of awards, driving the Range Rover, had 2 cars, all the things. And yet, had a moment where I stood in my office and just— and it was an existential break. I really thought, what's the value of this? Like, you know, I mean, yeah, I'm building these great things for people. And I marginalized it by saying, you know, the work that we do helps companies grow. Great. And it helps them employ people. Great. But long term, no one's going to care about this stuff in 10 years. In the long term, no one's going to care about that ad campaign or that logo or that website. And it's even hard to kind of understand what that meant right now, because there was value in it, obviously. But for me, it was— and trust me, I didn't have some grand idea of I want to change the world. But it was this root of why will people care about this later? And I couldn't answer that question. And so I— did a lot of bad things, right? Didn't ask for help. That's probably the chief thing. I didn't, I didn't reach out to the people because I was the person that always could figure it out. And here's a thing I couldn't figure out, um, you know, 2008 hit, huge financial crisis of course for a lot of people. And that created— even though we were somewhat insulated, a lot of our business was real estate and development. And so about a third of our revenue just evaporated, revenue that we had worked for. So that created pressures. I, you know, I say this, you know, almost had no business in business. Um, the reality is when we started that agency, I had absolutely no clue what I was— I knew how to create things but did not know how to run a business. You know, 3 years in, I like to tell this story, um, I was— I finally had— we could afford to have someone help with, you know, receivables and, and all that kind of stuff. And, and they said, where's your business license? And I was like, my what? You know, I had no idea what that was. So, you know, that kind of frames up, and of course we fixed that little thing, but the reality was when the crisis hit, I had no clue how to really deal with that. You know, I had a family, a second family, right? I had my family, but then I also had this group of employees that counted on me. I didn't lay people off when I should have. You know, pressure, pressure, you can see it start to go, right? And so all of a sudden, you know, we're paying money we don't have. And I'm drinking through that just to say, well, that's a tomorrow problem. And just, it was a really slow burn of instead of making some decisions and shifting and pivoting, it was more the, you know, constant issues for about a year or two before we finally had to close the doors, declared personal bankruptcy, all of the things that come with that. You know, the cars are repossessed, the homes are gone. Of course now, created huge issues with my real family and really had to go through that whole mess to figure out what in the world to do. So it was, I don't recommend it to anyone out there, right? It's, you know, ask for help. You know, I mean, the reality is we all have people we can reach out to. And that was the key thing that I didn't do. And I don't know if part of that was ego or part of it was just, not wanting to show that vulnerability. You know, I don't know how to do this, help me. You know, will everything— you know, it's funny, right? It's, it's, it's a catch-22. It's like if I tell people, then the business will go away. Well, the business is going away anyway. So, but, you know, that non-acceptance of what I know is going to happen is really what led me down that path.

Do you— if the financial crisis hadn't happened and therefore pushed your business into stress, do you— what do you think the outcome would have been?

I think it probably would have been the same, but it would have been a lot slower, right? I mean, I think that— and probably would have ended up even worse, because I think that I would have lost my family at that point. Because I would have pushed further and further. So pre-'40s, right? Family was a checkbox just like anything else at the office, right? I mean, you know, yes, I was there and then I have lots of great memories with my family and my children. But what I know now compared to then, what it means to be present and what it means to be part of their lives is completely different. So if I really think about that, it would have been you know, more of a separation. Maybe the company would have survived, and maybe that unhappiness would have set in much later when, you know, I had divorced and lost, you know, that part of my life. Um, you know, that's— at the end of the day, I'm a child of divorced parents, so it's, it's funny to look back and it's like I just repeated a pattern, right? Um, fortunately, I broke it, um, and I made my way out of it. But I think that had that not happened, yeah, I mean, we would have continued, probably would have grown it, had a lot of personal— well, a lot of professional successes, but at the complete detriment of the personal side of my life.

But you didn't have that pattern recognition in the moment.

No.

Or did you?

No, not at all. Yeah, not until years later.

Yeah, and that, that's what I've discovered. You know, it's, uh, it's fascinating how We— well, I could see the pattern intellectually, but I couldn't understand the pattern at the subconscious or the heart level, if you will. My family and my origin story was family business that ended in bankruptcy. And, you know, intellectually, I thought even at a young age at university, like, it didn't have to end that way, right? Like, why, why didn't they— why were they not more responsible with their money so that when a crisis happened, they didn't have to fall apart. But I, I didn't see that pattern redevelop in my own behavior, um, until, you know, much, much past it, like after I had survived it and didn't go into bankruptcy but came damn close. And then only looking backwards Did I see it? And then I had to figure out, okay, why did I do that? Like, I sure, sure, I didn't want to do that. I knew that that would— right. And so it's like the, um, the inability of your conscious cognitive mind to, to make the changes in the pattern to keep it from happening. That, that's what really has shocked me. Like, I thought intellectual knowledge was sufficient. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, well, it's interesting, right? Because it's easy to see. And this is a huge part of the reason why I wrote this book. And, well, in hindsight, but it's, it's so easy to see this stuff around us. It's easy to see this in our parents. It's easy to see this in our friends. But the minute that we For some reason, I'm the same way. The minute that we, even if we want to look at ourselves, I think there's no training for this. There's no, there's at least, I mean, there's a lot of things that you can go find now. But the reality is it's not like in school or even around those worlds, right? That people train us to say, what's going on for you and analyze that just like we're probably doing, we're analyzing all these patterns in our business. I mean, like we recognize things, But we— it's a real blind spot. It's interesting. But when you start to see, when you take a step back and really ask yourself some hard questions, even just for you, and sit with it, right? You sit with those moments of, of, of how have I, you know, how have I been behaving? What have I been doing? What hasn't worked? What has worked? Um, you know, we don't tend to do that. And, and I think if we can do that more, the reality is we can start to chart a whole new path. And things, you know, then you have to, you, you have an opportunity to change, right? You have an opportunity to implement those things. That's a whole nother part. But it starts with that awareness. Um, you know, I say awareness is this beautiful medicine to me because it's like once now I become aware of something that I'm doing in any repeated pattern, right, I, I, I can't ignore it, right? It becomes something I'm like, oh I can choose, I can still choose, I can still choose to go down and do the same thing with my son over and over and over, with my partner over and over and over. Or I can be like, man, that's really not working, um, now how do I change it? But it has to start— you can't jump that step, right? You have to have that awareness before you get the opportunity to, to make a change.

Yeah, and doing that in crisis mode is not ideal, right? Like, I mean, if, if you've got business stress, chances are you're not going to put your energy and time into self-reflection.

It's survival, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Which compounds the problem because you go back to your most basic instincts. And, you know, for me, that was two things. One, fundamentally, it's about control. It's, you know, when things felt out of control, were not working the way that I wanted, it was to take more control. And one, that limits, like you said, you don't involve others, right, in helping solve the problem. But two, it just reinforces your behavior pattern, right? Like you're just doing more of the same things, right? Right.

Yeah.

And, and two, I had this money belief that, you know, a lot of people grow up in a scarcity mindset household. You know, I was fortunate enough to be raised by entrepreneurs and an entrepreneurial family. But what that led to was this, this belief that more, more always solved the problem. So like, you could always make more money, do more, and that would fix things. But that obviously is not true, right? Sometimes more is actually worse.

Yeah.

And really getting to that point was very very painful. And it kind of goes back to what we said in the green room, is this, this theory that entrepreneurship puts a lot— puts you in a space where you're going to have stress that most people don't encounter. Um, maybe if you're a special operator in the military or you're a paramedic where where you're going to get certain stresses that other people don't. But there's not a real good comparison in any other profession, maybe a surgeon, I don't know. But as an entrepreneur, you get into these situations where you're going to be stressed personally in a way that you wouldn't otherwise. And the question is, do you use that as a vehicle for self-growth to refine yourself? Or do you succumb to the old patterns? And, you know, you may be successful financially, but you may lose everything else that's really valuable to you.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, it's, you know, we hear this all the time, right? And, you know, these people who have made everything and on their deathbed, they're like, it's worth nothing. You know, they don't have the people that are around them. And, you know, I mean, I see this stuff all the time and it's so funny now. I read or watch something and I'm like, if we look for these things, these messages are there, but they become part of the vernacular in a way that is almost not activating. It's somewhat saturated to a point, but yet, We don't go, you know, how can I implement that in my life? And you're right, I think more to me, the more it's just a distraction. You know, I mean, if I've got, you know, now I've got, you know, we're on the par of getting, not now, I mean, it's theoretical, we're looking at getting another house. So all the decisions that get made around that, right? And now we're gonna do the vacation and then this and this car and I'm gonna look for this thing. Those are all distractions that take us away from really answering these questions, you know, the reality is if you, you know, we all can't be a monk, right? But if you go sit in a cave for a year, the reality is you're going to achieve something different in your, in your body, in your mind, in that connectivity that will enable you to be resilient in any situation in your life. You know, once you've done that work, then not that those things don't matter, but your approach to them is the intent behind them is different. You know, I'm all for everybody, hey, go get all the things. But you know, how many times too do we see this? You know, I'd look at this cliché of, when you add money to anything, it just makes you more of what you already are. So, if you haven't healed those things inside, man, you might be just the worst asshole, or you'll be the most, you know, you won't be connected to the people around you and your family because that's what you're about. But if you've done that work, right, if you are, if you have some grounded foundation in who you are, then your approach to that is very different. And there's so, yeah, I think you're definitely right.

Yeah, I'm blanking on the author and I can see him. He was a Navy commander in the SEALs. But his story, he ran a program for people that thought they wanted to try out for Special Forces. You know, like getting ready for the training, training for the training. And the story he used was the man that came to the, you know, ancient monk warrior and said, 'You know, teach me everything you know.' And the monk proceeded to make tea. And he sat down and he was like impatiently waiting for him to impart all this knowledge, right? And the monk starts pouring the tea. And eventually the tea starts overflowing into the saucer and then on the table. And the guy's like, 'Why are you— what are you doing? You need It's full. And the monk said, well, yes, just like you. Like, if you are not emptied, I can't fill it. Yeah. And that stuck out to me because I think for me, entrepreneurship was a great coping mechanism. You know, in that I could feel like I was worthy, that I was important, that I was worthwhile, rather than dealing with the wound of origination that caused that gap in the first place, right? And it worked until it didn't work. And, you know, I, I thank God that I went through that to, to be able to come to that understanding without ending up in a worse situation that I'd put myself, right? Because to your point, it, it can be worse. And I've— I see so many entrepreneurs that have success, and, and like, their wives divorce them. And then they're, and then they're sitting there like, yeah, I don't even know that they have the self-awareness that like, they've lost the most important thing that they had and gained something that's really worth worthless.

Right? Yeah. Yeah, it's tough. I mean, it is, I think about, you know, until you have even a glimpse of of that awareness, you know, mind— I was running a program, right? You know, What Works. I'm running this program of, oh, I see. And, you know, here we are in the US, right? It's our entire culture is built on this. Our— it's, you know, we're crunching it today, you know, where everyone has got side businesses and, you know, and all of these things. And the reality is it's keeping us from asking some of those core questions. And am I happy? Am I truly happy? Do I experience joy? Or am I waiting for the weekend? Or am I looking forward to the vacation? Am I burning up on reentry? I love that statement. I heard that years ago when I'd come back from a vacation. And I'm just dreading that next Monday when I go in and I've got this mound of things to do. To me, you can have both. It's not that you don't have a mountain of work, but if, if you're in alignment with, you know, with who you are and what you want, and hey, it may mean that you need to not be in that job. You may need to pick a different company. You may need to completely divert from what you're doing. But, you know, making that core decision is, is key. If you could, because you can't have— I don't think you can have happiness in both of those unless you address that. I mean, you, you know, to me, it's, it's too easy to get wound up in, um, because listen, the successful people out there have, have figured that out, that like, I've got this drip of wonderful things that comes, but that will end at some point, right? I mean, you know, our parents and grandparents, right, they had this model of I'm going to go do this job, work for the phone company for 20 or 30 years, and then I'm going to retire. And you would hope that at the end of that, I mean, you know, maybe that worked, maybe it didn't. But my point is, if you get to the end of that and then you're sitting there and you're on the beach or by the lake or whatever it is, and maybe there are people around you, but you have no connection with them. Man, sadness is gonna creep in. I mean, and most likely they're not going to be there. If you haven't done some of this work for yourself and then forged these real connections with the people around you, then that's not going to work. I argue that you can start early and start to integrate those things. Maybe you're on a path of this career that you thought was great. I mean, listen, right, we go to college and I mean, Fortunately, yes, I am someplace now because of all that. And I found my weaving path to end up where I am today. But I'm obviously not doing today what I went to college for. And the thing that I talk to my kids about is like, you're going to live, you know, 3, 4, 5, maybe 6, 8 lifetimes. You know, I know you can't fathom that. But just set your course for today. What makes you happy today? Don't think about Don't think about 20 years from now what that looks like. Just do that today. But, but the core is happiness, right? The core is, is, is what, what can you go do every day that you're not coming home every day bitching about? Right. And, and because that's— those are the red flags, right? When you're coming home for weeks on end, you're like, I can't believe this and that. No, you know, the reality is you've got to shift something in that. And it begins with a tighter integration between that personal side of your life, if you have to, you know, declare a real distinction, right? It's like instead of, you know, when I look at it, it was, you know, the core of what I want. Well, I need money. I want money. I like money. And so I'm going to at least— at least I layered it. I did with things that I enjoyed doing. But at the end of the day, what I didn't do, and I— until my second go-around, right, is I didn't evaluate more wholly What does that mean in the greater part of my life? Now I have these other beings. I have 3 kids, right? And a wonderful wife. And, you know, when it's not just about me, but it's about me and them, what does that actually look like? You know, it's interesting. I'm going through this process with this team and we were asking some questions and they said, well, how much time should people have for their family? And, you know, I was like, well, you know, in my mind, I'm like, tons, you know, they should have, you know, hours a day. And this— and we started to do the math, and it's scary math, right? You're like, well, once you sleep for 8 hours and you work for 8 hours, right, then you've only got 8 hours left. And once you do some personal things and other— this— you kind of only have like a true hour a day that you could, if you were really doing the math on it. And if you think about that, that's not a lot of time. I mean, to say when we— especially when we work for 8 and we sleep for 8, but we're only saying 1 hour or maybe an hour and a half. And so, you know, I look at it like, well, A, at very least you got to make that count. B, you know, what I'd love to do is— and what I work on is how to integrate that more. So yes, maybe I'm working, you know, 4, 6, or 8 hours, but maybe there's a tighter integration that I'm I'm not switching back and forth. I'm not, you know, at its worst, I'm not annoyed when my personal life eats in, right? But let's get past that. Now, more importantly, how to fully like pull them in. Maybe we can work together on something, or even if we can't, maybe I can switch between, maybe there's periods of time throughout the day when my personal life is more integrated in with my work life. And listen, I know everybody can't do that, right? If you're working at Citrix or the power company or something, you know, that gets difficult, We can still find ways, I think, to integrate that so that it's— I say that because my dad was very much— when he was at work, he was at work. And even if I went to work with him, it's like, don't talk to Dad. And so, I learned this thing where it's like, and if you do talk to Dad, it's like you get this stern look. And like, well, man, I'm just your 8-year-old kid. But that could have been different. Because, you know, and I think about, you know, there's a lot of bad to COVID, but one of the cool things it did is everybody's in their house and we're all on Zoom. A cat's walking by or their son's walking by with no shirt on or whatever accidentally. And you can treat that two ways. You could welcome it and just laugh about it and no one else cares, right? Or, you know, you can be like, what are you doing? And the same thing goes in business, right? Instead of being annoyed with those tech text messages or whatever, you can, you can allow that to happen and it be okay. And what the cool thing is I've seen is if you make that okay, the people sitting across from the table go, oh, like, they have the same issues, right? And so you kind of train everybody around you that it's— and especially if you're in a leadership position, if you can guide that, then I would argue that work environment becomes a better place because We're not robots yet. I think a lot of us kind of guide that whole process in a more robotic— this is why we're here, you have to optimize your life, you have to be on the phone or do this for 8 hours. And we can't do that, you know, I mean, not effectively and not— definitely not sustainably.

You said something there that I, I don't want to skip past. You said, um, you know, integration of, of knowing what you want. And, and I think that that is something intellectually I knew for a long time without having a heart knowledge of it and being okay with receiving what I wanted. Right? But it starts with the question, "What do I want?" And having permission that it's okay to want something, not that you're going to get it, not necessarily that you're going to get it, and you're certainly not going to get it all the time. But like, the idea that you should, as an entrepreneur, build your business around what you want. And I think there is— with— you talked about the hustle culture. You didn't call it that, but that's what I name it with entrepreneurs and people also having jobs and side hustles. And then, of of course, the deluge of digital distraction that's available to us. It's very possible to never have that moment of silence and reflection. It reminds me of the lyrics from Social Distortion's "Ball and Chain." I don't know exactly, late '80s, early '90s. When he says, you know, you can run all your life and not go anywhere. And wherever I went, I was sure to find myself there. Right. And, you know, I'm like, as I listen to that song now, I'm like, yeah, that was pretty profound. I wish I would have listened to that when I was 20-something. Right. You know? Yeah. But, but, you know, it's the difference between running from something and then run and running towards something. Right? Like, you, you can run away from your situation all the time because it's uncomfortable, you don't like it, whatever, whether that's job, relationships, you know, whatever it is. But are you running towards something? And that towards something should be what you want. Uh, and it's, it's perfectly acceptable and not selfish It— maybe it's self-centered, but it's not selfish to know what you want and ask for it and design your business and your life around it.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's super important. I mean, I didn't— I talk about this all the time. I— when I started my first business, it was pretty much, you know, this is what we're going to do. Because it feels good, with no real thought to what it meant outside. You know, it was like— and I was married at the time and had a child. Um, I did not think about what it meant to my family at all. Um, not that I wouldn't have done it, but the point is, like, without even acknowledging that, that was a key issue to start that process. Because, um, and, and yeah, when you start any business, it takes a lot of your time, but But without an acknowledgment of that, I didn't actually define what it would look like. Okay, I'm, you know, hey honey, I'm going to need to push on this for 6 months to get it to this place. There was not even a thought of what's this next place. It's like, this is what I'm doing today. And, and I don't know what I'm doing tomorrow, but it's probably going to be just like today until some magic. Yeah. Until some magical place in the future when I've envisioned that it looks looks not as much like this, but I don't know what that looks like, but it's probably just a lot more of this.

Yeah, which becomes an un— it just becomes a hamster wheel. Yeah, not, not, not any different than, uh, the hamster wheel that you'd be on if you worked for somebody else. You just created your, your own version of the hamster wheel.

Yeah, yeah. And the opportunity's so much more. And I think that's when I started the second business, Sunny HQ, um, I very clearly started with the guideline And one, I had an exit strategy, which that was new to me. Well, at least it was new in the first business. People would ask me about exit strategy a year, 2 years in. I was like, "Man, I just started doing this. What are you talking about? I'm not leaving. I just started." And of course, no business school, and so, you know, I didn't understand that. But when I started this second business, it was about what does my life look like, right? How much am I working? Granted, I'm going to need to work a lot in the beginning, but didn't even let don't let that be overwhelming. I read this great book by Jen Sincero, You're a Badass. I don't know if you've read that. No, I haven't. It's really fantastic. And then, this was about 12 or 13 years ago, she was actually still doing like small group coaching. And so, I took this course from her. And it was basically how to— you've got this big goal, how to achieve that goal. Without it, of course, being overwhelming. So at the time, I was just, you know, licking my wounds from all the past and deciding on what to start. And so mine was, I've got this idea for this company, but I really want to do this the right way, right? I don't want to do it the way I did before, which is basically just start. And, and so she had this whole process over 8 weeks of essentially, you know, deciding what you're going to do and then chunking it down And so, I just worked these steps week after week. I did everything on paper and I got to the end of it. But a big part of that whole process, it was really cool. It started with this investigation. It was a meditation. It's a really great thing in business, right? Meditate and project yourself into the future. And it doesn't matter if it's 5 years or 10 years. That's irrelevant. Just you sit and meditate. What does that look like to you? And I had probably been meditating about a year or two, you know, on and off, but hadn't really done anything with like intent like this. And so, of course, I resisted it. And then after, you're supposed to write a story of everything that you explored. And I thought, this is going to be really hard. It actually wasn't. It was really this beautiful thing where I wrote this entire story. I lived someplace that in my head looked like Hawaii. I described the house, the cars, the one I remember waking up in the morning and seeing my wife. So I was like, that's really cool. I'm still married. I haven't completely destroyed that. But in that process, it would— so it started with not who are your customers and where's the money coming from? And, you know, it started with what does your life look like? And so it was this really cool thing because the company then became— it had a foundation in What do I want my life to look like? And everything, all the decisions then were based on that. And it was, of course, you know, I want to get to a point in 6 months where I'm not working more than 4 hours a day. So that started to help me understand what kind of business is it. Well, it had need to be a subscription-based, right? Something with renewable revenue. It needed to be something that didn't involve like a staff, right? I mean, it needed to be something where I could scale it easily. And so, that kind of gave me the tools to figure out exactly. But the point is it was integrated not just from a business perspective. Sure, that was there and, of course, there needed to be a revenue model, but it was rooted in what does my future look like in relationship to my entire life? Not what's my career or what's my job or what's the function I'm serving.

Yeah, I think, you know, you said you started with exit strategy, and I think that's something that virtually no entrepreneur does unless they've done it before, of beginning with the end in mind, like, because that helps you define what it is you're— what it is you want, right?

Yeah.

And Dr. Cutts was on this program, his book Contextual Intelligence. He talks about envisioning the future and he said the disconnect most people have when they think about the future, they think about what is going to be different in their lives except for themselves. They don't ever contemplate, okay, you know, I'm going to be here, I'm going to have these things, and, you know, whatever. But they don't really contemplate what they have to do now differently to be different in order for that reality to come into place. And he said, if you don't think about yourself, you're just dreaming, you're fantasizing. You're not bringing it to something that you can act on.

Yeah, no, I love that. Well, yeah, and it's— that's really cool. I love that. You know, you have to know— it's interesting— and wound up in that, right, to me, is, is for you to also achieve something, really only have to know two things. Um, you have to know where you are now, and you have to know where you want to go. Um, the how to get there is a figure it out on the way. And I love this analogy. I heard this years ago that when we went to the moon, right? We'd never been to the moon before. It's a long way away, a lot of physics involved. I don't claim to understand them, but in reality, right? Bunch of smart people thinking about something. They could have easily said, "There's no way we can do this," right? I mean, yes, we know we want to go there, but what they figured out is, is we really need to know two things. We're gonna start on Earth, we're gonna end up over there, and then it's going to be a process of course corrections over that distance. You know, we're gonna look out, you know, 1,000 meters or 10,000 meters, and we're gonna start heading that direction, and the moment that something doesn't look right, we're not gonna keep going that way, right? We're gonna course correct. We're gonna say, "Okay, that didn't work. Do this." And that's really the— I mean, the simplistic version of the guidance that I use right now, right? I've never, you know, a year ago I'd never written a book. I could have easily said, and many times I did in my head, you know, like, I have no business doing this. You know, I mean, the last time I wrote something was in college, and it was probably, you know, 2,000 words. And, you know, I'm looking at a book and it's supposed to be 50,000 words. What the hell? But I just said, that's the direction I'm going. I feel like something in me that says you need to do this, you want to do this. I love this. It feels good to do this. So I'm going to chart a course in that direction. And then every time I didn't figure, you know, I didn't know how to do something, I just course corrected. Every time I failed at something, I just course corrected. And I think that's, it's really helped me to not get too wound up too. And even when is it gonna happen? I actually never, it never entered in my head you know, when am I going to be done with this? You know, I thought sometime in the future, but I'm just gonna stay the course. I'm just gonna— I figured out now I got, you know, 7 chapters. Okay, well, at least I know where I am in the path. But then of course, I ended up rewriting it 3 times. So that kind of got thrown out. But at the end of the day, it's just a series of minor course corrections to end up, you know, and then— and we're always on that path too. We get to that point, we say, okay, There's another one. But just to continue to know where you— but you have to define where you're going, right? And I didn't do that in the first business. It was just, I'm going, I'm going to start walking in some direction that feels good without a real idea of where it ends up. Yeah.

And I think the moonshot is a great analogy. I think Jim Collins was the one that first, you know, brought that into the business. You know, the moonshot, your BHAG. Where it's time-bound. That's one I've struggled with because, yes, I mean, you want some kind of accountability and timeframe. But a lot of times, you know, there's a book, I don't remember his name, he was a computer scientist. The title of the book is Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned. And he went through all of the truly great discoveries, movement forward could not have been predicted because none of the necessary elements existed. And so, like, the moonshot's a great— like, okay, well, do we even have a rocket that can get us off the Earth? Like, okay, well, we got to start there, right?

Yeah.

And the idea that the path unfolds as you go on the journey. You do have an idea of your destination, but really how you get there is a great unknown. And the idea that you can lay out the path in a straight line is fantasy.

It doesn't work that way. Yeah. Well, yeah, it's— It's the antithesis of what, at least the way I was built, right? I mean, it's— but I find now that is the beauty of every bit of it, right? Is I stop almost every day. And most of the time, it's when I'm frustrated doing something is to recognize you're going to look back on this and realize how wonderful that was, even for as difficult of time as I'm having right now. And yeah, a lot of that's wisdom and having screwed up a whole bunch. But the reality is, it's important that, you know, to that point, that is actually where the beauty is. I mean, the things that you're going to remember are those high and low points during the process. It's really not gonna be getting to the end of it. You know, it's not gonna be— No. I think, yeah, winning an Oscar might be a wonderful thing, but I think the reality is that came from the work that happened to get to that point. And so, that's a wonderful acknowledgement, But I think if those people, you know, with any great success like that, when we think back, it's the reality is it's the work in between. So acknowledging that along the way is a real big thing for me is to really be in that moment and go, yeah, I'm not sure I want to do that today, but man, I know I'm going to grow through that. There's going to be expansion. I'm, you know, I'm going to look back and enjoy the fact that even more so that I enjoyed doing it, even the hard things.

Yeah, and as you're talking about that, I was thinking about the book Why Greatness Can't Be Planned and his default, and this is as a computer scientist, was the default mechanism to achieve greatness is to seek out the novel. And that kind of dovetails with breaking the pattern, right? Like if you're just, if you're doing the same thing over and over, you're not going to get you get different results. Or if you're trying to reduce it to a predictable equation, that's not going to work. It's, it's seeking out the new. What, what do you not know?

Yeah, yeah.

Dylan, I have very much enjoyed this conversation. How do people find your book?

Um, just go to my website, dylanbost.com, and there's a clear link. It's called The Seven Mirrors, and love for you to check it out. It's going to be We're in publishing right now. So it'll be later this year. But we'll have the first chapter available for anyone that signs up. And so I'd love to share that with everyone.

Love it. We'll have that— listeners will have that link in the show notes. Dylan, thank you very much for your candor and your time. Listeners, if you like what you've heard, please rate the podcast, share the podcast, subscribe to the podcast. And until next time, remember, you are not alone.