Justin Welsh: From Burnout To Solopreneur (Podcast)

[00:59] Paul: Welcome to The Pathless Path. I'm Paul Millerd, and in this podcast, we examine the invisible scripts that run our lives and dare to imagine new stories for work and life. Today I am talking with Justin Welsh. He is a fellow solopreneur on a really interesting path. He had a also very similar experience of burning out in his former job and sort of figuring out what he really wanted to do. I think Justin's been really interesting at, really impressive of taking former skills and applying them in very targeted ways to create opportunities for himself and also still have fun along the journey and create the work around his life.

So I'm excited to talk about all that and we will dive in. But Justin, the question I start with most people is, what are the stories and scripts you grew up with that sort of shaped who you thought you were supposed to be as an adult?

[02:04] Justin Welsh: Yeah. First of all, it's great to be here, Paul. I'm really thrilled to be talking with you, man. So good to see you again. The scripts and stories that I grew up with, I think, came mostly from my dad's side of the family. Just to give you some quick context that may shape shaped these stories is my mom grew up very middle class from New England, moved to Pennsylvania when she was like, I don't know, 13, 14, or 15.

I can't quite remember. My dad grew up very poor. So they met in middle school and they've been together ever since. And so my dad knew in order to support my mom, he had to get a good job. And he came from a family of people that didn't have good jobs. Nobody went to college.

Nobody did anything except for working you know, the mill, which by the way, not a bad job, but he didn't have the traditional sort of white-collar job to look at in his family. And my dad worked really hard to get a good white-collar job. He was the first person in his family to do so. And I think that shaped a lot of his thoughts around money and work. Work hard and do excellent at your job. Save your money, you know, pay yourself first, as he always told me.

And he passed a lot of those things sort of on to me. But I struggled to sort of see those things when I was super young. I was much more lazy. I grew up in a much more privileged environment than my dad grew up in, and I didn't understand why anyone would want to work hard. Like, I was like, it's so much more fun to have fun with my friends and like work out and like do fun things. And I didn't get that.

So my dad basically pushed me to say, you have to get this kind of good job. You got to take care of somebody in the future and you got to save your money. And I rebelled and did all the opposite things. I got into a lot of credit card debt. I got fired from my first 3 jobs. So in a weird way, work was shaped in an intentional way by my father.

And then I went down the opposite path, almost like a rebellion of sorts. But as I got a little bit older, Paul, all the things that he told me came rushing back to me at like age 28. And like, I became my dad in a really weird way. And that was like, work hard, do excellent at everything you do. If you're going to put your name on something, like, you better put a stamp of excellence on that thing. And, you know, save your money, buy a house, have a couple of cars, you know, a family with children somewhere in Ohio, probably.

And those were all the things that, that he had instilled in me. But the big one was work ethic. I mean, my dad can outwork me and probably most, most guys and gals around him. And so that has come to fruition. The older I've gotten, I find myself more and more like him. Hard work.

And, you know, it's hard to disconnect from that, which is, you know, talking to you and having read The Pathless Path, like the idea of going hard for 80 hours a week probably isn't very exciting to you or members of your audience. But that was what was instilled in me.

[05:06] Paul: Yeah, it's an interesting thing. I've sort of gone full circle and I'm curious to dive in a bit more into what you think you were rebelling against, because I think what has happened in a way is there's sort of these like copy-paste work scripts that get handed down, which is that like you should work hard. But then I don't know if you had this experience. I worked at a gas station. And the idea of like working hard at this gas station, like it like didn't fit, right? And then finding myself in an internship my first year of college doing bullshit work, like hard work on bullshit work, like didn't compute for me.

So I think I was very much rebelling. And honestly, not even until I found writing did I actually realize you could like work.

[05:59] Justin Welsh: Yeah, it's interesting. You know, I just told the story through the lens of like rebelling against my dad, but perhaps that's not entirely true, right? Perhaps as I think back to my jobs, my dad dropped me off at a McDonald's on July 11th, 1995. That was my 14th birthday and said, you got to work. You're 14. That's when we could work at McDonald's.

And so I had a job there and I hated it, right? And I got fired. I had a big scene at the McDonald's. I actually got banned from my local McDonald's when I was a kid. I was not a very good kid. And then I ended up going to Burger King and became the youngest manager there at age 16, managing people who were in their 60s and 70s.

And I hated it. I had to be there every morning at 6 a.m. and, and run the whole store in a shirt and tie at age 16. I hated it. And eventually I followed my dad's footsteps. Pharmaceuticals, med device.

Hated it, hated it, hated it. Did not like the idea that my effort didn't generally pay me anymore, but I knew that my effort put pennies in the pockets of the Mr. and Mrs. CEO of the company. And I was trying to become an expert in something that I had absolutely no interest in. I didn't care how beta blockers worked.

I don't care how angiotensin receptor blockers work. I don't care about that to this day. And I certainly didn't care about it when I was 24 years old. So while I think about it as rebelling against my dad, there's probably some more truth in there to say I don't like doing things I don't like to do, and I don't think I'll ever be good at doing things I hate. And I'm not sure that there's like a reason to be good at things you hate, uh, for the most part in my life at this point.

[07:35] Paul: Well, I think one of my perspectives on work is that perhaps it was true at some point that learning how to work hard at things you hate was a virtue, right? Maybe 100 years ago. Yeah, right. And you literally like can't get a job unless you show up at a factory and do stuff, right? And so I think what sort of happened is we sort of took that as a noble virtue instead of sort of an incidental virtue of the culture or industry or the economy we had. And sort of we haven't, we haven't woken up to like, oh, there's actually like a lot of cool stuff now.

So developing this capacity to suffer doing stuff you don't like, might not be the ultimate virtue when it comes to work.

[08:23] Justin Welsh: Yeah, I think it's changed, right? I think you're right. Probably back in the day when, you know, let's take it back in '30s, '40s, '50s, even probably up through the '70s and '80s, like you kind of had to grind through the stuff, the mundane or the boring or the pure just shit, right? Stuff you didn't like to do. I think today you're less likely to have to do that if you're well-equipped. If you have the resources, if you're well-connected, you might have to do some things that are hard and challenging, and they might be ranked below other things that you like, right?

But for the most part, you can find a way to spend a majority of your time doing things that are at least interesting. And I think if you find something interesting and you're curious about something, you may not like it at first when you start it. But I found that when I'm interested or curious and I get really good at something, Naturally, I actually start liking that thing. And so I don't want to swing an ax and cut wood all day. Like, I'm not interested in that type of work. I don't want to work on a factory assembly line.

That type of hard work doesn't interest me at all. But like, figuring out how to build a complicated email funnel for my business, while it's not my favorite thing in the world, what I was just doing before, before this call, certainly not my favorite thing in the world, but the better I get at it, The more I spend time being interested in it, the more I actually find myself enjoying it. So that's sort of how I think it's come around now that the internet is sort of the main, you know, tool for building business. This is why I talk a lot about like social media. As much as I actually like am not that thrilled with talking about social media, I do think that in order to have more fun, it's great to be connected. And the more connected you are online, the more fun you can have and the more interesting things you can do with curious and interesting people.

So that's why I kind of push that narrative on people who follow me.

[10:18] Paul: Yeah, I think social media is just a tool, right? And I think the amount of people who want to steal your attention are more than ever, right? And they're more skilled than ever at capturing your attention. And so you, like everyone I know who's doing things like we're doing, are so intentional about creating blocks, filters, like app limits, like all these things, because it's the scarce thing you have is your own attention. Right. And you don't want to actually get that stolen by other people.

I always find it funny when like somebody reads my entire book and doesn't like it. It's like, you should quit the book earlier. There's so many good books out there. Not everything needs to be for everyone.

[11:09] Justin Welsh: Yeah, totally. My wife and I turned on something on Netflix last night and 15 minutes in, we looked at each other and we were like, I don't like this. And she's like, I don't like this either. I'm like, great, let's just quit it then. Let's watch something we do like. But yeah, totally, man.

And I'm finding myself not necessarily struggling with that, but To give you an example, like you saying putting limits or turning off apps and things like that. Just earlier I was working on a project and I was like very much in the zone and I got a WhatsApp message and I was like, oh, and I answered it and then it took me off my game and I was like, normally I would have that turned off and it kind of threw me. Whereas I WhatsApped a friend this morning at like 8 o'clock and like took me 10 hours, took him 10 hours to get back to me. And I was like, that is the kind of thing that I need to be focused on. And it's just like a good— it's a good reminder when you see someone sort of embodying the characteristics that you want to live in your life when you forget to do them.

[12:03] Paul: Are you surprised how much you like your work now?

[12:06] Justin Welsh: I don't think so, because I have an arc in my work of every job that I've ever had. And this is probably true for this job as well, just to be very candid, which is it looks almost like a curve, right? I start and I'm like, actually kind of looks a little different. Let me try this again. I think, let me take a step back. I really start liking something when I first do it.

And then as I hit the challenge, it like dips and you're like, oh, you're hit with the reality of the fact that this is much harder than you think. And you got to sort of slog through that initial challenge. Once I get through those initial challenges and I start figuring out the work that I want to do, and this could be what I'm doing now, this could be when I was a VP of sales and chief revenue officer, once you figure it out, I'm on like a high, right? Like I start, the curve starts flying upwards. Like the enjoyment and fun that I'm having, uh, is, it just gets higher and higher. But I have a 5-year shelf limit.

I know that about myself. And generally my fun peaks in year like 3 or 4, and then it's a slow degradation for like the rest of the time towards the 5-year limit. That's true at my job in Zocdoc. That was true as my job at the CRO at PatientPop. And it's partially true now. Like, I don't think that I'll do what I'm doing now for that much longer because I'm too curious and too interested in doing other things in my life.

[13:26] Paul: Yeah. This is year 5, right?

[13:28] Justin Welsh: Yeah, this is year 5 going into year 5. Yeah.

[13:31] Paul: Yeah. It's— that's so interesting. I actually love the challenge part. I think I hang out too much in the ambiguity and like the unknown and the uncertainty. I actually really like that. Like I love testing the images, edges, and like sort of like waiting as long as possible to actually like exploit any opportunity.

And then when I get to the part you're describing is like, oh, I love going all out. And it's amazing watching you because I can tell from the outside you absolutely love that. Yeah. But to me, as soon as I'm like selling something, I'm like, let's create the next thing.

[14:06] Justin Welsh: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[14:07] Paul: Like I lose interest. And I think we had this exchange where you were like, I love goals. And I'm like, I don't do any goals. Water break.

[14:19] Justin Welsh: That's funny, man. You know, it's weird because I do like goals. I set goals for this business. Like when I started this business, I wanted to make a total of $5 million. Why? No idea.

[14:32] Paul: In 5 years?

[14:33] Justin Welsh: Yeah. I just thought I wanted to make it in some period of time because when I started this job, to me, Paul, that was like a goal that was completely impossible. I just threw it out there as like this giant goal that I was going to try and hit because I thought it would be fun to hit a stretch goal. And as the business went on, I stretched the goal further. And like these monetary— it's not just monetary, it's any number. I love numbers goals.

I love checking boxes and hitting milestones. The problem with any job that I do is I get that shiny object syndrome because I have this dueling confidence inside of me where it's like when I start something, I'm generally not confident, but in the back of my mind, I think that I can do anything really well over a period of time. So for example, like—

[15:28] Paul: That can be very dangerous working on your own.

[15:30] Justin Welsh: Totally. So for example, like I believe that if I quit being a solopreneur on the internet, that I could go open the best restaurant in my county. I don't know how to run a restaurant, but I believe that I could figure it out. And so that, that confidence leads me to believe that there are so many things I want to do in my life. I want to live multiple acts. I want to do multiple things.

I became a salesperson. I worked all the way to the top of that, becoming the chief revenue officer. It's about as high as you can go in sales. And then I quit and I started at the bottom as a creator. And over the last 5 years, I'm certainly not at the top. but I've made a mark in the creator space and like, I'd like to go start at the bottom again with something and work through getting all the way to that top and then quit and start something else.

That's just interesting to me.

[16:15] Paul: I'm fascinated by paths. This is like the thing that I'm fascinated with. Um, might be an interesting— let's go back. Okay. You, you worked in pharma. Um, you switched over to tech, you helped grow a couple companies and You're at your last company and you ended up burning out.

[16:36] Justin Welsh: Yeah.

[16:36] Paul: I'd love to hear a bit about what year was that in the journey at that company? Was that year 5, 6?

[16:43] Justin Welsh: Like it was like early year 4.

[16:47] Paul: Yeah. And so how did that like sneak up on you? Like I think I had a similar experience of not realizing till after I was burned out because I wasn't working crazy hours. And that to me was always how you burn out. But for me, I was so disconnected from anything I cared about, and I was also not surrounded by people that inspired me. So I was just so unmotivated.

But I only realized it upon looking back. I'd love to hear like how you thought about that. Yeah, thinking about it now.

[17:21] Justin Welsh: Yeah, I don't think of burnout as working too hard. I mean, I can work hard. I can work hard right now and not burn out if I'm loving what I'm doing. So to me, it's not really related to how hard I work. To me, burnout was a loss of control. I was unable to control the outcomes that I needed to control in the job.

And so to give you some context, I started as a VP of sales in 2015 at age 33 or 32. I thought I was going to grow this business to a million dollar run rate and like then they would go replace me and get someone older and need more experience and all that stuff. And like I went on a roll and, you know, got past $50 million in 4 and a half years. And as we hit like $20 and $25 and $30, like every dollar was a new dollar I had never seen before. It opened up problems I had never seen before. My team was getting bigger every single day.

My responsibility was getting bigger every single day. And the problems that arose from me not having seen those situations before began to compound. And so, like, you're trying to solve one problem. It felt like Tetris, you know, when like the pieces are falling real fast and they're like starting to stack up on one another and you're like, whoa, I like, I can't, I can't even get going because things are stacking up so fast. So to me, I just couldn't impact anything. I couldn't fix any problems.

I couldn't get out from underneath the weight of all of the difficulty that I was dealing with. And so the way that I handled that was relatively poorly. It's in the past ways I've handled other highly stressful situations, which is I stop sleeping, I start eating a lot more, I drink a lot. I just kind of go into like a cavernous area where like I numbed myself with food and alcohol. And I did that for probably a year straight at the last year of that job. And when you take the pressure and anxiety and stress and stacking of problems, and then you compound that with lack of sleep and alcohol and not exercising or taking care of yourself, it's a recipe for disaster, right?

And I had a panic attack on December 16th, I think, of 2019. So that would have been year 4. That's right. It was the morning after a Christmas party and like we had gone out all night, stayed out late drinking too much. And like next morning I just didn't know what was happening. Like, I just, I'd never had a panic attack before.

I don't know if you've ever had one before, but like I just thought I was dying. Like I was hallucinating and screaming and down on my knees and my wife called 911. It was, it was one of the worst days of my life. I've had a, I've had a second one since and that was another terrible day, but Uh, that was how I burned out.

[20:11] Paul: That's scary. Um, I, I've had several people recount almost the same exact experience with, and there's always a sort of numbing involved, right? Because you have the underlying emotions and then you sort of numb the emotions, but all you've done is numb them. They're still there and stronger than ever. And your body sort of needs to feel them. How do— and a lot of what I see is like people don't actually have the power to make dramatic changes right away.

Like, how long did it take from there to actually taking some sort of action to move in a new direction?

[20:49] Justin Welsh: Basically the next day.

[20:51] Paul: So faster than—

[20:54] Justin Welsh: I mean, I had to. Like, it was such— it was such a chaotic experience. I felt so lucky to be alive the next day. Because I was like having a heart attack. I didn't know like what was happening, right? I just, I don't think people can understand unless they've had one, just how like you just don't know what's going on.

So I committed to daily exercise. So my wife and I started walking 8 to 10 miles a day. We lived in LA and we lived on flat land. And so after breakfast, after lunch, after dinner, every day, 3.3 miles around our neighborhood. It was a 1.1 once around and we just did it 9 times a day. Cut alcohol completely for 90 days, stopped ordering takeout and all that stuff and just started cooking at home.

My wife's a really good cook and I went and told my boss and I said like, hey, this thing happened. I don't think that I can continue to work here. And I'm still really close with the CEOs of that company and currently an investor and an advisor on their new project and love those guys. And they were super like bought in and they're like, hey, you can't leave tomorrow. You'd really put the business in a bind. Um, but we'd love to hold on to you for the next 7, 6, 7 months while you kind of go through getting better.

We'll help spell you. We'll get you a little more support. And to their credit, they did that. Um, but I knew it was time for me to leave. Like I just, I didn't have any interest in seeing the business to the next level and putting myself through that. And it was time for me to try something new.

[22:20] Paul: So it was like, How were those next 6 months? What were you thinking about? I mean, you knew you were sort of closing that chapter. That must have been as stressful. That's also pandemic, right?

[22:33] Justin Welsh: It would've been right before the pandemic.

[22:37] Paul: Oh, okay.

[22:37] Justin Welsh: Yeah. Because the pandemic came, I think, in 2020, right? The first, yeah. I think it was really in January of 2020. This was 2019. Okay.

It might seem like it's stressful, but I actually found that time to be much easier because I'm a quasi-chapter closer. So once I tell my boss, hey, I got to leave, the chapter is quasi-closed in my mind. And it's like all the pressure and stress kind of melts away. I'm no longer like, am I going to get fired if I don't hit my target this quarter? I'm leaving. So all that stress sort of melts away.

In a funny twist of, you know, of what I probably should have expected, I actually did really well in those last 6 months. And like, with that stress and pressure gone, with that, like, with a little extra support also from the company, like, it was a magic 6 months. Like, we hit all of our targets. I went out on top, you know, my last day, like, got to hold a trophy and walk around the office and everyone celebrated the almost 5 years that I spent there. And it was like, a really relieving experience. So I enjoyed those 6 months and I'm really glad that I had them, 6, 7 months, whatever it was, because it allowed me to go into building my own business with like this clear, fresh mindset.

And by the time I launched my business in August of 2019, I was lean, healthy, sleeping well, eating well, and like really prepared to go into that.

[24:08] Paul: Yeah. Did you bring with you the question of maybe I can take a little off and still succeed?

[24:15] Justin Welsh: When you say take a little off, do you mean take a little pressure, stress off, or take some time?

[24:19] Paul: Yeah, the pressure.

[24:22] Justin Welsh: I think so. Yeah. If I look back and I think through that time period, I was amped to go. So I was running 100 miles an hour because I was excited. I never thought I would be an entrepreneur my whole life. I never identified as that or thought I had the skills or knowledge or expertise to do that.

But when my pipeline started building, as I was building that company, my own company, I got really excited. And so my natural inclination upon excitement is to work really hard because like I was like, oh, I could really build something meaningful and cool here. The interesting part was like problems didn't compound because problems didn't have a deadline. So like I knew how to serve my clients. My clients were all early-stage healthcare companies back in 2019. They were all under a million in revenue.

So like I had seen that movie before and I knew how it ended and how it played out and I knew what to do. So the client work was not that challenging. What was stressful was like when things in my business broke or like when automation didn't work or I didn't know how to bill someone or retain, you know, all these different things. But there was no deadline. I didn't have to figure it out by tomorrow. There wasn't someone who needed a raise or wanted to have a difficult conversation.

It was just like I could figure it out in my own free time, my own spare time. And the urgency was like, okay, maybe I wouldn't make as much money if I wasn't as urgent, but like, that's a choice I got to make. And I really enjoyed being in control of my choices and in control of the outcomes. And I still have that today.

[25:51] Paul: Yeah, I experienced a similar thing. I quit my job and I was sort of shocked at how much ownership I had. And not only that, how much I enjoyed it. Like I had gone from a consulting firm where there's like 50 people involved in every project of like admins and support and all these things and suddenly I'm closing the deal, doing the work.

[26:14] Justin Welsh: Yeah.

[26:14] Paul: And basically just like deciding everything myself, sending the invoices. And it was like, it one, took so much less time. Yeah. Um, but I was like, why would anyone not want this? Um, did you have similar realizations of like, oh wow, I wish I had like explored this sort of path a little earlier?

[26:35] Justin Welsh: Yes and no. I think your initial instinct when you get into your own path is like, oh, I should have done this earlier, which is dangerous because you discount all of the stuff you learned up until that time period. And I think a lot of what I learned was really important. A lot of what I learned being a chief revenue officer has come into this business. So I wish I was younger. I think that would be nice.

I started my own business when I was 38. I see a lot of, they're not kids, I don't mean it like that, but I see a lot of folks much younger than me.

[27:10] Paul: I know what you mean.

[27:11] Justin Welsh: I'm similar age. 24 starting their own business online. I'm like, oh, that's cool. I wish that opportunity existed when I was 24. So no, I don't regret having started earlier. And I'm also really, as much as I joke about like, I wish I would have started younger.

I think part of the reason that I've been successful is because I'm older. I think if I had been online trying to get attention, trying to build an internet business when I was 24, I was really immature and stupid. And I don't think I would've been— Yeah, I think I would've been a really, I think I would've been probably canceled. I was a real dumb kid and I'm glad that I was a little more mature when I started my business.

[27:53] Paul: Yeah, same here. I think I was very lucky that I think being in my mid to late 30s, I'm 39 now and I don't want to burn out. I want to keep doing this for a long time. I want to enjoy what I'm doing. And so if I was in my 20s and still had to like prove myself, I'd probably push myself to do things I didn't want to do or scale too fast and all these things. And so yeah, there's just more patience I have at this age, I think.

[28:27] Justin Welsh: Yeah. I find myself often falling in the trap of, and I don't recall if we talked about this via email or anything, but I bring a lot of the bad habits of being a chief revenue officer to my own business. I wish I could say, oh, I've slowed down. Like, I'm super slow. Like, I'm meandering through this or like taking my time. The very candid truth of the matter is I hold myself to exceptionally high standards, and standards are generally defined by results.

And I bring a lot of that results-oriented business thoughts from my last job. And what I've come to realize, and probably why every 5 years I hit the reset button, is like it's hard to turn those off, number one. And when those are turned on, you're on the hedonic treadmill. You're always trying to grow more and to do better. I have a challenge in myself internally that if things aren't going like this, right, then that is a reflection of my ability as a human. And first of all, internally, I know that's not true.

But it's hard to disconnect from that thought. I don't know if that makes sense.

[29:48] Paul: Yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense. It's— I've actually purposely tried to practice because in like leaning against that impulse and a lot of people think I don't have that impulse. I worked in strategy consulting at the best companies in the world. I have a very impressive career. Like I know how to like exploit opportunity. I think when I left my former path, I sort of asked myself the question of, what if I do the opposite of everything I was doing before?

And I think because I fell in love with writing, there's this unique thing of actually just being able to write about this stuff. But early on I said, well, what if I see an opportunity and then I don't go after it and I just see how it feels? But here's the thing, it feels terrible. Like, interesting, you feel like a loser. And but over time, it's like it's just a feeling and you're like, oh, whatever, that's interesting. And it sort of dulls.

Now, I don't advise other people following this because it's basically like, here, take an approach to make less money and be less successful. But it's been really interesting to like practice leaning against that. So for example, put yourself in my shoes. You've written a book, you spent 14 months on it, and you're done with the book. I decide not to do a launch. All I do is send out one tweet and one newsletter post and just let it release it into the universe.

How do you think that would feel for you?

[31:27] Justin Welsh: It's interesting. My natural instinct is to say I would do the exact opposite, right? Like I would build up a huge launch and then like launch what I would deem as like quote unquote successful. But to be—

[31:40] Paul: There's so many playbooks out there for doing it, right? There's all these detailed things and like, yeah.

[31:47] Justin Welsh: But I'll tell you this, like in all honesty, like I'm very jealous of that. So part of my mind is like, it hurts by that. I hear that and I'm like, oh, there's so much opportunity. Like, here's all the things I would've done. The other part of me is like, oh, I wish that I could do that because to me, there is a big part of me that wants to embrace creativity in a way that it's not tethered to monetary success, where I can create for the sake of creating. Where I can write, draw, video, whatever I feel like doing in the creative spirit and put it out into the universe and let people discover it without the pressure of having it be a monetary success.

So while my initial instinct is to say, oh, here are all the things I would've done, deep down inside, I'm very jealous of that. Like, that would be, That would be a win for me if I did that and was able to define my success as simply being creative and being successful in my own mind from that.

[32:55] Paul: Do you have anything you have that sort of relationship with?

[32:59] Justin Welsh: It's a great question. I don't. I have a challenge, and this is sort of another me challenge, right? Which is like Anything that I get involved with, generally, I know how to turn it into a business. And that is not a great— it's great if you want to be successful in the stereotypical definition of success. I'm very good at those things.

It's hard for me to enjoy something without finding a way to turn it into an opportunity. It really irritates my wife, to be quite frank. We'll see something like a cool house or something that you could redo, and she'd be like, oh, it'd be so cool if we could scoop that house up and redo it, make it a little guest house. And I'm like, yeah, but think about this. We build a website and I create this SEO plan. And she's like, no, no, what the fuck are you talking about?

And that's just very natural to me to think that way as soon as I see anything. And it's just who I am. And it's hard to fight against that, against your sort of who you are as a person. But I'm trying.

[34:18] Paul: Yeah. It seems like you enjoy the meta process of actually building a business and systems though. Is that— do you see that as a creative act?

[34:28] Justin Welsh: It's a really good question. I hadn't considered it like that.

[34:32] Paul: That's actually like when I see your path and from the outside I see, oh, Justin loves building like the operations and systems and like that's like his good work that he cares about. And like, I would imagine that's sort of the skill that like flows from the different chapters. Or is it not?

[34:55] Justin Welsh: Yeah, yeah, it is. It is certainly something I like doing and I enjoy. You know what? I'll give you an example of something that like I could do for fun all day long. I think I would probably turn it into something monetary, but like I would do it even if it didn't, which is like, I really love building websites. Like it's just something I just really enjoy.

Like I'm the guy who buys a domain for a thing that doesn't exist without having any plans to make it a business, logs onto Card and spends like 5 hours building like the dopest website you can build and then never publishes it. I just love that. Like I like the creative aspect of like figuring out how the blog works and how the forms work and how the email works and everything like that. I really enjoy that. It's interesting because I like, I was talking to you earlier and I said, oh, I was just working on this complex email segmentation earlier. When I'm doing things like that, there's the creative side, writing the emails, and there's the system side, putting everything together into process and systems to make it work.

I enjoy those two things separately. Like, once you start putting them together, it actually becomes really cumbersome for my brain to work on projects like that, where I'm trying to build a system while also writing the emails to be creative. Like, my brain just doesn't work that way. And so I think over time, that has the biggest potential to burn me out at this job, is taking two things I love, combining them and finding them to be not as satisfying. But if I had just like 8 hours free on a day, I could either write a lot or design websites and processes or systems or architecture. But as soon as you're asking me to do both at the same time, it becomes a recipe for disaster.

I'm not quite sure why. Probably because it requires both sides of your brain and like trying to do them at the same time. Just, it just wires me up all wrong.

[36:52] Paul: Yeah, it's— I find I'm like an industrial engineer. I used to be in like process and operations and all these things. And I love thinking about like the theory of process. But as soon as— right, same. If you put me in an email system, I need to like force that through. That is like a painful 2 hours, but I know I'm going to be like happy I do it.

But I put that stuff off forever. It's really hard to do. And I think one of the challenges when you're a solopreneur is like, sure, you can like outsource that. But in reality, you can't just outsource tons of stuff.

[37:31] Justin Welsh: That's right.

[37:32] Paul: Right. There's so many small things that you sort of have to do a bunch of little small things yourself. Sure, you can find like a virtual assistant, but there's even limits on that. Like sometimes you just need to literally do all this stuff and those switching costs are just very hard on this path, I find.

[37:49] Justin Welsh: Yeah, I find the same thing. Like I've been staring at this project that I was working at before talking to you for like 2 weeks and just like staring at it and staring at it, starting and stopping, starting and stopping. And like today I just finally said, fuck it and just like sat down and pushed through and like completed it in basically 45 minutes, which is like what I should have done 2 weeks ago. But you're right, like you can't outsource everything. You can outsource a few things, but the one thing I never want to outsource is creative. And so I love writing.

I love doing the videos. I love building my products. Like I don't ever want to outsource what's up in here to somebody else. And so that's like a steadfast rule for me.

[38:30] Paul: What's the most fun thing you've created?

[38:33] Justin Welsh: Most fun thing I've created. That's a really good question. I think the thing I had the most fun creating was my first digital product.

[38:42] Paul: So that's the LinkedIn one?

[38:45] Justin Welsh: Yeah. The most recent one was less fun because it's so much longer and so much more detailed and so much more robust. But that one was like 90 minutes. It took me maybe 90 hours to build. And it was my first one. And so I enjoyed it because there were a lot of new things that I was figuring out.

I was figuring out how to create a narrative, tell a story for the first time, because really courses are about stories. You're a guide on someone's journey and you're guiding them through a story so that they can effectively apply the teachings. That was really fun to learn how to sort of frame that narrative up. It was my first time like doing a recording on video of myself. And so like scripting and like really getting the teaching down. I had to become a teacher.

I've never been a teacher. You know, I've been a sales leader, but I haven't been an instructor, you know, someone who does instructional design, right? So I don't know what a good class should look like. So I had to figure that out. Then I had to figure out how to price it. I had to figure out how to promote it.

I had to like figure out how to design the landing pages and get the emails up. That was the first time I had done any of that. And I can recall back when I was doing that, just how much enjoyment I had uncovering, like when you get it set up the right way and you test it and it works, you're like, oh, this is like, this is what science feels like, you know? Like it was really fun. I really enjoyed that.

[40:05] Paul: That's cool. Yeah. What is the number one ranked global LinkedIn influencer know that we don't know?

[40:12] Justin Welsh: Oh, God.

[40:14] Paul: Did you think you'd be the number one ranked LinkedIn person when you grew up?

[40:19] Justin Welsh: No, it's not something— it's certainly nice to be recognized, but it's, you know, it's— I don't want to be the guy from LinkedIn, but—

[40:29] Paul: I actually think, like, the thing I'm curious about is LinkedIn 10 years ago was for people like us in the corporate world, networking, all these things. Your framing ideas are solopreneurship. It's pretty interesting that your you have gained such resonance with that crowd. Like, what do you think's going on? I have some hunches, but there's some luck involved. I mean, just with the solopreneur topic.

[41:01] Justin Welsh: Yeah, but I think if you look at the solopreneur topic in a vacuum and you say like, oh, Justin's really getting a lot of traction with that, I think that's the iceberg above the water. And I just think it's really important to realized that in 2018, when I wanted to be a creator on the internet, I didn't really know what that term meant. I just knew I wanted to write stuff on the internet.

[41:21] Paul: I don't think people used it then. Yeah, 2017, I was just unemployed.

[41:27] Justin Welsh: Right, exactly. Everyone was creating on Twitter and YouTube, and I chose LinkedIn because I felt less intimidated. That lucky choice gave me a head start. And so by the time I started talking about solopreneurship, which wasn't until like 2022, I had already been writing on LinkedIn for 4 years. I had probably at that time 300,000, 350,000 followers, and I just changed the narrative slowly. And they all, or a great deal of them, continued to follow me.

And so now as I talk about solopreneurship, yes, I get a lot of engagement and a lot of impressions and a lot of reshares and people like my content and things like that. But what I think we're not seeing there is the 4 years where I got to be— I was the guy because there was nobody else writing like me on LinkedIn. I was even more so probably than guys like Gary Vaynerchuk. I think I brought the creator mindset to the platform.

[42:26] Paul: Yeah. And just sharing. I think there was this huge arbitrage opportunity because everyone in a job couldn't actually say what they thought.

[42:33] Justin Welsh: That's right. And I had quit. Yeah, I had just quit my job.

[42:37] Paul: Yeah. And so you could basically just show up and start posting.

[42:40] Justin Welsh: Yeah. I mean, I was writing about healthcare SaaS companies back in 2019, so like very different than what I write now. And it was hard to make that compelling and interesting, but I had less competition, you know.

[42:51] Paul: So when you, when you left tech, you were making pretty good money.

[42:55] Justin Welsh: Yeah.

[42:55] Paul: How do you think that shaped like your expectations of coming up with the $5 million goal and all that? One thing I mean, one thing I've found is that a lot of people eventually like settle in with their creator incomes close to where they were in their previous full-time jobs. And I think there's sort of like an expectations gravity, right? It's like, oh, I used to make $500 grand here. Eventually you like sort of end up creating something that enables that. I'm wondering if you buy that theory.

[43:27] Justin Welsh: I do. I do buy that theory. I buy that theory because How do I say this without sounding— let me think about the best way to say this. I think the way that I think about that is I think when most people go out on their own, their goal is to hit that. They want to just recoup what they were making at their job while creating a better lifestyle. Talk about that a lot.

And I think if I were to rewind back to 2019, potentially I could have been thinking that way. But I think if I was being more serious, I was thinking about like, how do I perform? How do I become exceptional at this? How do I set the standard for what I'm about to do? And to me, that wasn't making the same money I made at my job because again, I do look at money as an indicator of success. It has been, it's not necessarily how I was raised, but as I became more successful in my career, It's just what happens, whether it's a good thing or bad thing, right?

I'm just trying to be candid and honest with it. So I buy it, but I think when I started, I had grander ambitions than recouping my salary at PatientBob.

[44:42] Paul: Yeah. So was the $5 million, did it feel bolder than—

[44:46] Justin Welsh: Well, it was interesting. I probably should throw a caveat in there. There's a little gap in there. When I left my job in August, I had not set that $5 million goal or any of that. That didn't come on day one. When I left my job in August of 2019, I anticipated that I would do this stupid consulting thing I was doing.

You know, that in my mind, it was just a piddly wink little thing that I was building. And then I would go back to work. I'd go work for another company. I'd go be a VP of sales or chief revenue officer again. That was the whole plan. It's only when I got traction in consulting that I was like, oh, this life is actually a lot better.

I can serve a lot of clients. I can charge way more. I'm making more money. And then I released my first digital product. And when that thing started selling, then I was like, wait a minute, there's a whole world here outside of healthcare technology. There's like social media, there's building your own business.

There's a lot more fun stuff I can talk about than like healthcare SaaS, which doesn't get me up out of bed in the morning. And as I started to become more successful in that, that's when I like set this number. And that probably happened in middle 2020. And I was like, I'll never hit this number. So that's a fun number to throw out there. And that became the climb sort of towards this revenue target.

[45:57] Paul: That makes sense. Yeah. I've said like the first dollar of internet income feels like $100 grand of salary. If you're like 10 years into your career, it just, it explodes your brain with possibilities. You're like, I could do this. I could do that.

And I think that's what I felt very much. I was not aiming as much at money at the beginning, but I sort of had this hunch of like, if I just keep going and don't quit, and I just noticed that a lot of people basically quit, that some good things would come. And actually the last year, last year was the first year I ever beat my former salary, but it took me 7 years. But yeah, it's still like wild. It shocks me that like this works and I'm having as much fun and I have this flexibility in my life and it's pretty wild.

[46:57] Justin Welsh: If you think that's fun, man, like one thing I really get a kick out of is, you know, it's fun. It's fun to be successful and make money. Like, don't, don't let me tell you any, you know, anything different. But it's really fun when like one of my friends is building a business and they can't figure out how to make money with it. And then you see it and you're like, oh, I know exactly what the problem is. I know exactly what the solution is.

And then you show them how to do it and then they make money. That's really fun. When you unlock someone else's business for them, that's a blast. And so I do get a lot of enjoyment out of that as well.

[47:29] Paul: Is that what you're trying to do with the Creator MBA?

[47:33] Justin Welsh: In a way, I would call when I help my friends or when I help other people on the internet, that's generally just one-on-one or coaching or just like, you know, helping just a friend for free, right? But with the Creator MBA, I want to equip people with their ability for them to go on their own, right? And basically find the problems that I would normally find in their business, understand the solutions that I would normally implement, and then implement them themselves, right? That's the whole genesis of the Creator MBA is like, instead of me telling you how I built my business, Really what it does is it takes a bunch of knowledge from me and all the people that I know who have built successful businesses, puts it into a product, and then shows you how to think about it. It's not like, do this step 1, do this step 2, paint-by-numbers, because businesses don't get built that way.

It's much more of a holistic approach around like, if you're here and you think about this, then probably ask yourself these 3 questions. If you get these answers, then here are 5 things you could consider doing. Because again, there's no right way to build a business. So it's more, I guess, theoretical that way.

[48:41] Paul: Yeah. Who are you learning from now?

[48:44] Justin Welsh: Brennan Dunn is a guy I'm learning a lot from right now. I love Brennan.

[48:47] Paul: Yeah, he's— I love how, like, how much he cares about, like, what he's doing. I feel like he's— shout out to Brennan Dunn. He's probably made me, like, more money in my— I run a strategy consulting skills training business and like his sequences and personalization have dramatically helped me.

[49:09] Justin Welsh: Yeah, he was my partner in the launch of the Creator MBA.

[49:12] Paul: Oh wow, that's great.

[49:13] Justin Welsh: It's really the first time I've outsourced heavy work. And so I just did a presentation inside my private companion community to the course and basically said, I pulled back the curtains and said, this is how we built the launch. The launch was a really successful launch and Brennan did a lot of heavy lifting on the segmentation, personalization, side. And now that I saw the success of that, essentially I'm leaning on him again to basically say like, okay, cool. There are so many other things that I can segment and personalize in my business that I'm not doing today. So like, how do we do that and then automate that so that like I can continue to create fun content and get more bang for the buck that I write?

[49:57] Paul: Yeah. How'd you structure something like that? One thing I've always struggled with is I'm just so independent. I never think to like bring other people on, but it's a clear opportunity to get the 1 1 3.

[50:10] Justin Welsh: Yeah. It actually started unintentionally. So I had moved over to ConvertKit and I wanted to start leveraging it to build a better newsletter, to do a little personalization. I hadn't even conceived the course yet, I don't think. Maybe I was just in the beginning, first few months of thinking about it. And I got introduced to Brennan by Nathan Barry, the CEO of ConvertKit, and I booked a half-day consulting session with him.

And so he jumped online with me for a half day, taught me everything, and then I was like, I don't want to do any of that stuff. How much does it cost for you to do all that? So basically his customer acquisition cost was very little because I paid him to acquire me as a customer, which was a great business, great model. So he's like, yeah, cool. And so basically what I really like about Brennan is he's very similar to me in a couple of ways. And one way that he's similar to me is he has a high standard.

He's also not super internet marketing. Like I'm not Lambos, private planes, Dan Lok, Golden Wealth Triangle, any of that stuff. Like that's just not me as a person. And Brennan is very practical, thoughtful, valuable. And so we're very similar. And so he could look at all my stuff.

He's familiar with my business and say like, I think I know what this launch should sound like. I think I know how we should position, you know, the emails. I think I know how we should segment your audience. And so we just spent really 3 to 5 months. I can't remember exactly how long. And I just paid him, you know, to do it.

Basically, that was the arrangement. I was like, I'm going to build this course and you and I are going to work on WhatsApp together asynchronously. To like build out all the personalization segmentation.

[51:57] Paul: Yeah, I love that. So this, this episode, I mean, we've been talking for a while, but you ended up reading my book. You sent me a really nice email, which I just love reading emails from people that read the book. It means so much. And you wrote about a couple of things you said about the fears, challenges, worries in your head and being overly money-focused. We sort of talked about that a bit.

And then also you wrote, I'm worried about building myself a career that can often feel like a job. I'm wondering, like, is that still alive for you? How are you thinking about that? Does the 5-year cycle need to be true, or are there other ways you're thinking about it?

[52:40] Justin Welsh: Good question. No, no, I don't think the 5-year cycle needs to be true. I think my urge to be creative in other ways can be satisfied without burning the boats. I think that would be a silly move. Do I have the worry that I build myself a job? Yeah, the worry's there.

I don't think that worry will ever go away. Have I done, have I put process systems and sort of stops in place to make sure that doesn't happen? Definitely.

[53:14] Paul: Like what?

[53:15] Justin Welsh: So I've reduced myself down to a 3-day workweek this year. Oh, wow. Yeah, it's pretty awesome.

[53:20] Paul: I'm doing a 3-day workweek too. I do childcare the other 2 days. So that is a different kind of work.

[53:29] Justin Welsh: I do Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursdays. And like, people will be like, oh, but I saw you on Friday interacting on LinkedIn. It's like, that's not work to me. Like showing up for 30 minutes in the morning to engage with people I like is like not work for me.

[53:42] Paul: That's how I feel about Twitter too. It's very fun.

[53:45] Justin Welsh: Going to the gym, going out to lunch with my wife. So we've got that down to a science pretty well. I've done that. The other thing that I've done is start to do a little therapeutic training around some of the issues that I have with money. And for anyone that is listening to this, maybe their takeaway was that I'm super money-focused and therefore greedy. Which I think is the wrong way to think about it.

No, I'm, I'm money focused because I worry about money.

[54:15] Paul: Yeah, I think that's very real.

[54:17] Justin Welsh: My dad worried about money much more so than my mom, and I worry about money much more so than my wife. And I think I worry about it because I think it chips away at me as a provider. And like the idea that I won't be able to provide for my family is a fear. And so just to give you some context or give you a little bit of context around that, I look at my numbers daily and if something looks wrong for one day, in my mind, my initial instinct is to have alarm bells go off and be like, action time, got to fix everything. With some therapeutic training, I have been able to see my financial situation for what it truly is. And I was just having a conversation, we were talking offline before this with Steve Schlofman up here in the Hudson Valley and having a conversation with him about it.

And basically he told me something that I already know, which is like, you are fine. You've built a very successful business. It's been running for a long time. You're in great financial shape. You're smart and capable. Like it would be highly unlikely that you would find yourself in a financial situation where you couldn't, you know, support your family.

But those fears and worries are real to me. So through therapy, through good conversations, through a lot of math, right, going into my financial— it is helpful to do the math sometimes, looking at things and being like, okay, even if this business reduced by 80%, I think we'd be okay. You know, through those, those different things, I've been able to reduce my worry.

[55:58] Paul: Yeah, from what I've seen, money fears are completely independent of actual money quantity. And if anything, people with more money tend to have higher anxiety. That's how they acquired the money.

[56:11] Justin Welsh: 100%.

[56:13] Paul: Sometimes I wish I wasn't so content. Yeah, but like, I still have the money anxiety too. It's much easier from the outside to look at your path and say, oh, Justin's fine, right? But you don't feel that in your body, right? And I'm experiencing this now too. People see the success with my book and they sort of assume like, oh, you made so much money last year, you're going to succeed.

The reality is the course for my consulting skills, the sales have been declining. Uh, my book sales have been declining for 4 months and I do worry about money. But I also have like 17 years in adulthood of never really being in debt. Yeah, always making more every single year of my life than I spent. And so I know that, but there's still that tension, right? And it's like, it's very— I don't know if you can ever solve that.

It's just, it's also just the culture we live in, which is just like, you never have enough, you should be worrying, and people dump their worries on you. So it's Yeah, it's very real.

[57:23] Justin Welsh: Totally. It's, it's the thing that keeps me up the most at night. Like if I look at my sales and for a week everything looks haywire, like it's very hard for me to sleep. It's, you know, I'm— my wife would describe me as just a crazy person. That's generally how she describes me when I'm sort of thinking about the business. But I get very wild-eyed and very wired when things are not going well.

And I believe that I can effort my way to the fix, like little elbow grease over a few-day period and I'll fix everything. It may sound crazy in a weird way, and I think I did a lot of this as an executive. It's worked.

[58:08] Paul: Yeah.

[58:09] Justin Welsh: So I keep doing it.

[58:10] Paul: Is there an emotion you're avoiding?

[58:13] Justin Welsh: That's a really good question. Sort of emotion I'm avoiding. Probably, probably.

[58:22] Paul: This is Joe Hudson's framework. I'm not sure if you've come across his stuff. No, I haven't. I found it really helpful for my own sort of relationship with money. He has this idea of a golden algorithm, which is that every problem is us trying to avoid an emotion. And then by avoiding that emotion, we basically recreate the problem.

[58:44] Justin Welsh: I don't know if I'm avoiding an emotion. I don't know how to name the emotion, but like I was picked on a lot as a kid. I was like a real fat, like, kid and I got picked on a lot. And my high school was up until like my junior, senior year, my middle school and high school experience, pretty miserable. And I think a lot of what I'm trying to do is like prove to the world that that person no longer exists, if that makes sense. I think a lot of what drives my desire to win is to— and this may sound really strange— is almost like vengeance in a weird way, where I'm like, maybe not proving it to somebody else, but maybe proving it to myself.

And so I think that drives a lot of what I do. I have no idea, actually, but that's my first instinct.

[59:33] Paul: Yeah, I think— I mean, a lot of insecurity in high school and college. I looked young and didn't have confidence with women. I think a lot of that drove my desire to succeed. Right. It's, it's very easy, especially for men, because if you do succeed, it like, it also works. Like people will pay attention to you.

You will get some of the things you're looking for.

[59:56] Justin Welsh: I recently went on a trip to Mexico with a bunch of really successful entrepreneurs and I mean, most of them far more successful than I was or that I am. And I described to them like a Jekyll and Hyde confidence issue where it's like, I told you earlier, I have confidence I can do anything. I think I could run for mayor of the town that I live in and win and turn that into a political career. I just believe in myself. At the same time, whenever I'm in a room, and that room could be physical, that room can be virtual, that room can be social media, I never feel like I belong there or that I've earned the accolades that people may associate with me on social media. It just doesn't feel comfortable for me.

It feels very fraudulent. And so there's this dynamic, again, like Jekyll and Hyde confidence. Drastic underconfidence often in terms of, especially when I'm around other people. I'm terrible at a party. I'm very introverted. I don't like small talk.

I have a lot of confidence issues in terms of that. But when I'm by myself, like taking on a work or business challenge without other people who are surrounding me who I'm intimidated by, I feel unstoppable. It's a very strange thing that I go through often. Talk with my wife about it quite often.

[01:01:18] Paul: Yeah, I think that's very real. I mean, this is the thing, like, we're all like— when you're on a solo path, independent path, self-employment path, I think what most people are doing is creating a path for themselves where they can grow as a person. Right. And so maybe, maybe you're trying to put yourself subconsciously in those rooms so you could face it.

[01:01:44] Justin Welsh: Yeah, that's interesting. That's a really interesting take on it that I hadn't considered. But yeah, I mean, I think what it all comes down to is no matter who I meet, no matter what business hero I meet, everyone is complicated. And I think once you learn that everyone is super complicated, I just met someone recently who I hold in very, very high regard and in a very intimate setting, like shared with me their struggles. And it's just like, I don't— I'm not happy they have struggles, but it's refreshing to know that you're not— you know, the people that you hold in high regard are just normal people, right? Just average normal people with tremendous challenges of their own.

[01:02:29] Paul: Yeah. Most people have normal problems because everyone has some sort of problems. Yeah. It's cool. What's alive for you right now? What are you excited about for the next few months?

[01:02:42] Justin Welsh: Yeah, I'm excited about building. Building isn't the right word. I'm excited about making this house our dream home.

[01:02:51] Paul: And you're not going to create a webpage for it?

[01:02:53] Justin Welsh: No, I will not. We bought this house in the Hudson Valley a year and a half ago, and we knew we wanted to be in this area, but we thought this house, we kept saying this isn't our dream home. But the more work we put into it, the more we're like, oh, this is sort of becoming our dream home. And it's really fun to like feel super comfortable where you live, to be really excited about where you stay. I think we get a lot of joy out of that. And being up in the Hudson Valley provides access to a lot of like really awesome food ingredients, agriculture.

And so my wife and I are getting a lot more into like really healthy, strong cooking around here with local ingredients. I love that. And we're building a social life here. And as I mentioned, I'm quite introverted, but I can be an extrovert once I get to know people really, really well. I just don't like small talk like strangers and parties and things like that. So, we've built a really strong social circle here.

So, I'm excited to continue to build that social circle out. And then maybe last, the thing that's got me really alive is I've been investing in some companies that I believe in, in the healthcare space, and like I have that itch to be helpful and useful in that space again. And so I'm following that itch and without having any idea of where it will take me.

[01:04:11] Paul: I love that. Embrace the unknown. Let's see where it leads us.

[01:04:15] Justin Welsh: Doing a little bit of Paul.

[01:04:16] Paul: Fantastic. Where can people learn more, find more about you?

[01:04:22] Justin Welsh: Yep. They can go to my website, which is justinwelsh— Welsh is W-E-L-S-H—.me, justinwelsh.me. Beautiful.

[01:04:30] Paul: Well, it's a pleasure. I hope you continue on this and it's not just a 5-year journey, or at least reinvent it and stay engaged. I think you've provided a lot of value and unleashed a lot of people who have things to offer the world. So I really appreciate people like you. I feel like you're creating new customers for my book too. And I don't really have to work for it.

So it's— I appreciate that too. Cool, man.

[01:04:57] Justin Welsh: Happy to be helpful. And, you know, just very candidly, your book's probably the best nonfiction book I've read in the last 5 years. So congrats on writing a great book, man.