Why You need to Be the Smaller Fish in a New Pond.

How do you drive impact in your career, whichever field you're in?

Yeah.

From Claude G. Theroux.

Oh my God. Get out of your comfort zone.

Okay. Number one.

Okay. I actually think, you know, this is a tricky one because it's two things. So focus. So find out what you do, do it as much as you can and nail it. Like really, like in those, in your 20s when you have all that energy, you know, you should be wasting it trying to become the best in something. Okay. And doing that as much as that work as possible. And then, you know, and that means getting out of your comfort zone.

So basically focus, right? Find your superpower and triple down on it to become the best at it. And then thirdly is get out of your comfort zone.

Yeah. Like getting out of physics.

Like, so when you become very good at something, just go.

Well, yeah, sometimes inside that field you have much bigger impact outside of that.

Mm-hmm.

Right?

'Cause you're leveraging what you've learned to import it into a different domain, and then there's—

And that's really a lot of your comfort zone because I was a decent physicist. Like, I wasn't great, but at least, you know, I had— Going to startups, I started from nothing. Zero. Like, and then on top of that, when you're a professor, no one wants to fund your startup. Right? Yeah.

'Cause they don't know if you're gonna be real applicable in the real world, or if you're just— somebody's going to—

theories. Well, I finished, uh, so there was something in Canada called the CIX Exchange, which is a competition of the 20 best startups. I finished like third way back when, when I started Nixology. And I remember I had a spy kind of like on the admission committee helping me out, and like he said the biggest thing they had against me was that I was a professor, right? There's this whole like, oh, he's not going to be an entrepreneur, and none of that. But nobody knew I grew up in poverty. I was a cattle dealer before I was a professor, right?

So it's like you've had this history of really like overcoming adversity, reinventing yourself.

But getting out of your own field, starting from zero is colossal. Most people never want to do that. They always want to be—

On top of the game.

On top of the game. Bigger fish in a smaller pond.

It's amazing. Well, thank you so much, Claude, and super excited about this episode and what the future holds for you and Ex Machina and all the wonderful things you're going to do.

Katheline, it's fantastic to see you again. Thank you. I'm so glad you're back in Montreal just for this, and it was really nice. Thank you.

Thank you.