Next Level Pros - #28: Richie Norton,Co-Founder PROUDUCT—an INC, Top 40 Under 40, Best Selling Author

Episode Date: August 25, 2023

Introducing a thought-provoking episode of the Founder Podcast featuring Richie Norton, the author of "The Power of Starting Something Stupid."  In this captivating conversation with host Chris Lee, Richie shares his journey from growing up in San Diego to becoming an entrepreneur and making impactful moves across the globe.  He recounts how a seemingly "stupid" idea of selling irregular-sized watermelons led to an early entrepreneurial lesson and reflects on the subtle ways he learned not to trade time for money. Richie's unique perspective on life and business comes from experiences like starting a cashmere business in Mongolia, a taxi company in Samoa, and a pig farm in Cambodia.  Richie explains the concept of "Gavin's Law" which urges us to live to start and start to live, embracing creativity and taking risks along the way. He emphasizes the importance of aligning actions with values, debunking the myth that we have endless time to achieve our dreams.  HIGHLIGHTS "You're going to be working your whole life. You said your job right now. And I get that I'm super privileged in this way... I had the privilege of having, you know, mom and dad in the home that showed me that." "I was actually taught how to be an entrepreneur. And it was subtle. And I learned how to not have to trade my time for money. And it was subtle." "You actually can't fly without that little string... you don't, I mean, it just kind of flops around on the ground." TIMESTAMPS  00:00: Introduction  01:43: Making Money  07:30: Business In Mongolia  10:38: The Power Of Starting Something Stupid 15:30: Live To Start, Start To Live 20:38: Continued Growth  22:41: Sacrifices  27:28: Living In The Present 33:46: Having A Working Title 35:27: Writing A Book 42:00: Book Pitch 51:17: Self Mastery Ve Self Management 57:05: Advice To Younger Self  CONNECT Move From Distraction To Action with Richie's FREE Time Tipping Toolbox! Download now-http://richienorton.com/time 🚀 Join my community - Founder Acceleration https://www.founderacceleration.com 🤯 Apply for our next Mastermind https://www.thefoundermastermind.com ⛳️ Golf with Chris https://www.golfwithchris.com 🎤 Watch my latest Podcast Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-founder-podcast/id1687030281 Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/1e0cL2vI1JAtQrojSOA7D2?si=dc252f8540ee4b05 YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@thefounderspodcast

I was actually taught how to be an entrepreneur and it was subtle and I learned how to not have to trade my time for money and it was subtle and I had the privilege of having you know mom and dad in the home that showed me that I'm not going to downplay that. What's up founder nation? Hey I just wanted to first and foremost before we jump into this episode just thank you so much for all the many listeners, all the many downloads. I cannot believe the response to this podcast. When I launched this thing two and a half months ago, I had no idea the momentum that this thing would create from the incredible guests to so many listeners. I've had so many of you guys reach out to me directly and thank me and give me so many great testimonials of what you've been able to take from this podcast.

First and foremost, thank you for being such a loyal listener. Thank you guys for bringing so much value into my life because the reality is the reason I do this is for you to hear the feedback. So if you aren't following me already on Instagram, it's at Chris Lee QB, like quarterback at Chris Lee QB. Make sure you go ahead and give me a follow. You're going to see all my different posts there. You're going to be able to see the little short clips from different episodes. So be sure to be giving me a follow there. Also October 17th, 18th and 19th, I am going to be hosting a remarkable mastermind right here at my house, right here at the Founder Studio. This is where SoulGen was launched, where it was nurtured and created for two and a half years before finally we left and eventually had a nine-figure exit.

So we're going to be doing this mastermind. We're keeping it to 10 people. Right now, I actually already have six seats filled. I have so many people that have been reaching out to me. If you are interested in knowing more and what a mastermind like this would look like, go ahead and just message me directly on Instagram, the word mastermind at Chris Lee QB, and we'll be happy to give you a little bit more information. So let's go ahead and dive into this episode. Yo, yo, yo, yo, yo. Welcome to another episode of the Founder Podcast. Today, I am joined by Mr. Hawaii himself, Mr. Richie Norton.

Mr. Hawaii. There you go. I don't know. Mr. Hawaii. North Shore, baby. I think you have to earn that or something. I don't know. Mr. Hawaii. North Shore, baby. I think you have to earn that or something. I don't know. Dude. Dude. Man, although Hawaii, man. Hawaii's in the news for a whole different kind of craziness going on right now. But geez. So yeah, Richie is a well-published author.

He's written three different books. Has been nationally recognized in all different kinds of publications for his work with CEOs and coaching, consulting, all different types of stuff. So really excited to have Richie on the podcast today. Welcome to the podcast. Hey, man, I'm super excited to be here. I love you. I've seen your stuff. We've met in person. So finally, we get the chance to do this thing. So I'm pumped. Yeah, dude, this is going to be a good time. Yeah, we keep it pretty casual. Just open questions, shoot it from the hip, and make it happen. So dude, Richie, for those that don't know who you are or your story or whatnot, like give us, give us kind of the, the basic,

the basic rundown, who you are, where you grew up, the story, kind of what makes you, you. You know, I grew up in San Diego and when I was 16 to make this relevant to like business and stuff, I told my dad that I wanted to make money and I wanted a job. And it was the summertime and my dad says, you don't want a job. And I'm like, what dad tells their kid not to get a job? And he goes, look, you're going to be working your whole life. He said, your job right now. And I get that I'm super privileged in this way. I get it, I get it. He says, your job right now. And I get that I'm super privileged in this way. I get

it. I get it. He says, your job is to like get good grades and hang out with your friends and have fun. And I said, yeah, but I want money. And he says, fine. If you want money, go to El Centro, which is several hours away from where we lived to where the watermelon farmers are. I'm like, what are you talking about? And so we took it all the seats in our, in our family van and me and my brother went down to El Centro and he told me to ask them if, if we could buy the irregular sized watermelons that they couldn't sell to the stores, not because they weren't perfectly good and delicious watermelons,

but because stores don't want weirdly sized watermel Not because they weren't perfectly good and delicious watermelons, but because stores don't want weirdly sized watermelons because they have their systems, their sole supply chain. So my brother and I did that. We fill up our family van full of these watermelons. Our family van is just fully low riding. And we come back to our town, call up friends and family. We go hang out at a park, you know, around the 4th of July. And we made more money in one day selling all those watermelons than we would have made working minimum wage at the time, the entire summer. And doing that, I didn't, you know, you're as a kid, like I didn't think about it like that much. I was just like, cool. But looking back when people ask me about my upbringing and what's happened, I realized like, oh, I was, I was actually taught how to be an entrepreneur and it was subtle. And I learned

how to not have to trade my time for money. And it was subtle. And I had the privilege of having a mom and dad in the home that showed me that I'm not going to downplay that. People are like, well, how did you grow up? How did your parents teach you? I was like a kite on a string. Me, my brother, and my sisters. We felt like we had all the freedom in the world. But looking back, I didn't know it, but looking back, they actually had us on this little string where they would bring us in and let us go up.

Because you actually can't fly without that little string. You know what I mean? It just kind of flops around on the ground. So I feel like I had a, fortunately, had a good upbringing. And, you know, I lived in Brazil for a couple years. I was a missionary there came to hawaii but what what's interesting is when i was in brazil i saw a lot of people in poverty so i told myself when i retire because this is the american mentality when i'm 65 this is what we're taught our whole lives i can't't wait to come back and help. I can't wait to come back and help people work their way out of poverty. So naive. And then I thought to myself, even if I could help people, imagine waiting 45 years to do something.

This is the way America thinks, or at least they used to. It's changing. But think about it as generations. Let's say there's someone that is also in their 20s. Let's pretend that they do have children. If you don't, whatever help looks like, whatever assistance looks like, whatever contribution or value can make looks like, whatever that looks like. If you don't do that thing now, you're affecting the generation now, your similar age, their kids. Then you're affecting, in 20 years, grandchildren. And in 40 years, possibly, assuming every generation is about 20 years. Right. Great grandchildren.

Meaning there are three to four generations of people you screw over by waiting. Wow. And lulling your way along. Man, I love that. That is a powerful, powerful just narrative and really way to look at it. It's a similar principle that my parents taught me. If you're waiting to be charitable, you'll never be charitable. If you want to give a lot when you're rich, you got to give a lot when you're poor, you got to give a lot when you're 20, when you're 25, 30, 30. Right. And so that's, that's so powerful. I appreciate it. And people, people in no matter what situation you're in, which, which, which is weird. Like when I wrote this book called the power of starting something stupid, see what, what, what happened was I didn't just sit and not do something with this. I started a center for entrepreneurship at my university by pitching it that would help people in their home country start jobs. I did this not knowing what I was doing, having no money, just having ideas.

And I learned this is super hard. I don't know what I'm doing. So it forced me, like a a positive constraint to look for mentors. And because I had a, not necessarily a specific goal, but an idea of the outcome I was trying to create, people came out of the woodwork, shared their resources, shared ways to make it happen. And now there's this foundation that helps thousands of people every year to work the way out of poverty. I've been to, my first business was a cashmere business in Mongolia. There wasn't even a McDonald's there, man. Like actual nomads still like wild stuff. It started building business all over the Asia Pacific rim. So timeout, timeout, do that.

Timeout. Yeah. Timeout. Too many things, too fast. Dude, no, no, no, no. This is fascinating. And when you hear crazy stories like this as the end user, people that are listening to this podcast, they're like, wait, what? How did you start in Mongolia? Dude, walk us through that. What led you to that? Kind of just the process, the introductions, the people, like what, how, how do you get there? Okay. This, this, this is, this is also like in the beginning, as I was saying, like, I love to create space for, for opportunity. Right. And the idea is how can everything I do create an impact, but also more time and availability and autonomy and ability to do things. I'm saying this now as like an author who has thought through it. At the time, I didn't have this vocabulary. You know?

It was just more of let's just see what happens by not waiting. Yep. What's it going to hurt? Oh, you might lose this. You might lose that. What if I don't? How do you end up in Mongolia though? How does that even happen? So I wrote this business plan for an idea to start this foundation. And they told me, you don't know what you're doing. The devil is in the details. It'll cost too much money.

And I didn't even make it past the first round. There's a written round, and then you get to pitch. Didn't make it. So it only incentivized me to prove them wrong. I'm like, you guys, I don't even know what you're talking about. There's people out there that need this stuff. So instead of seeing it as a failure, I just started asking around, what am I missing? What do I do? And there was a professor that introduced me to

a student who had won the business plan competition years earlier from Mongolia and was already back home. And they said, if that's what you want to do, you should talk to her because she would be a good one to start with. And she happened to be visiting Hawaii. She was working as a translator for the embassy. I met with her, went to Mongolia, met her husband, met the people around. We figured out – they said at the time the country was incentivizing them to do cashmere products because cashmere comes from these goats that grow this fine hair in very cold climates. And I mean, I can keep going through the details, but like-

No, dude, I love it. Because like what you're sharing is like, in people that aren't in business or that wanna be in business or whatnot, a lot of times they think that there's like this hand that controls things, right? Like that's like, no, you can't do that. Or, you know, you can't go and take this risk. It's just like hearing what

you're saying. It's like you met somebody and you're like, all right, let's go to Mongolia. You buy a plane ticket, you head over, then you start seeing opportunity. You're just taking this just really stupid action, right? Like, like you're, like, you're talking about the name of your book was the power of starting something. What stupid. So the power of starting something stupid, like there's so much power in that, right? Like going, going and just like something that doesn't necessarily make sense or the action that doesn't necessarily make sense, but you're out there, you're putting yourself out there. You come across this incredible opportunity with cashmere in mongolia like dude

yeah that's awesome this this turned in yeah and then this turned into inspiring people that this happened especially her and her husband's story and inspired other people from mongolia other people started doing things that that organically turn into people reaching out. What are you doing? I don't know, but do you want to do something too? And it just becomes this virtuous upward spiral. And I started a taxi company in Samoa. I started an inflatable bouncer company in western Samoa.

I started a pig farm in freaking Cambodia. And it's not just me. There's all these people involved. But once you like say, I'm going to do this thing, people go, two camps. You cannot. Or what? You need to meet so-and-so. Right.

That's how it works. That is how the universe works. Right. Right? Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. So, so people are either, yeah, they're voting you down or they're excited and they're going to present you. You know, it's, it's interesting. I shared a, shared a post today on the day of this recording on is like Facebook and Instagram regarding experiences that me and my business partner have been through. And like, you're sharing like all these crazy things, right? Like pig farms in Cambodia and all this other stuff. Like, you know, I love hearing stories like this, that there's just like so many efforts, so many tries, so many things that you're just putting out there. And I'm not sure if you had an opportunity to see my post or not, but, but it's like literally everything. I saw it. I saw it. And you, you and your business partner

like hugging there, like it's some kind of prom photo or something. It was amazing. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes. That was, that was actually, that was from a cruise ship to Alaska. Our wives were in the bathroom. We're like, let's go take a couple's photo real quick. And, uh, gosh, it was so good. It was so good. No, you, you, you got it. Yeah. Let me make this like super real for a second. Like, so I, um, even as I was writing that book, the power of starting something stupid, I thought it was going to be called the power of start because I realized successful people started things and it was pretty evident, called the power of start because I realized successful people started things. And it was pretty evident. But as I did research and started listening to people's stories, there was something that kept popping up.

And I know there's some good alliteration there with the word stupid, but it wasn't just because of the alliteration. People would say they wanted to do something, including Henry Ford, including the founders of Twitter. I mean, I guess Steve Jobs, Oprah, all the famous people you think of, but then the everyday people too. They would say, this is stupid. I can't do this. This is crazy. This is something for someone else. Or someone would tell them that.

And I realized – I started doing interviews. I interviewed hundreds of people that were in retirement or approaching retirement, right? Because this is my new mentality. And I said, like, what made you successful or not? And the ones that were, I won't say definitively if they were successful or not, but in their own minds, the things they wanted to do, whether they accomplished them or not, the ones who did not, they said, I waited for a time, something like this. I waited for a time where I'd have more time, more education, more experience, and more money, only to find out that when I got here, I still need more time, more experience, more education, and more money. And when that like,

it was like just the bells like going, wake up, wake up. It's not about time, education, experience, or money. It's about desires and action. Wake up. But I say that like, oh, this is so easy. He's making stuff up. Yeah, that's exactly what I'm doing. I'm making stuff up.

But let me tell you this. My brother-in-law passed away at 21 in his sleep out of nowhere. He was living on and off of this for like five years and when he died not only was it so crushing to us our souls mentally like it just takes a toll on you physically i thought dang he didn't get the chance to live longer. He lived a great life. Great dude. Love him so much. He lives on in our minds and in my kids' lives constantly. But when that happened, I realized,

oh, I don't think I have as much time as I think I do. Right. A few years later, we had our fourth son, and we named him Gavin after my brother-in-law Gavin, who had passed away. And one day he gets this cough. And the cough isn't that bad. We take him to the doctors. They say it's nothing. We take him back to the doctors. They say maybe it's RSV. We take him back to the doctors. We don't know what's going on. It gets really bad. We take him to the emergency

room. They say, we don't know what's going on. They keep us in the hospital for quite some time, like days, until they finally test for something called pertussis, also known as whooping cough. And it turned out that's what he had, and it was too late, and it was too much on his little body. And I remember a nurse came in and said, hey, you guys need to stay the night, which was like the most odd thing to say because we obviously stay the night every night. And what she was doing was trying to be kind and gentle in her way and say, this is the end. And I remember they took out all these little wires and all the tubes, all the little monitors, so that I could hold him for a second,

handed him to my wife while she's in a rocking chair, rocking him. I have my hand on his little heart. We're singing lullabies. And I felt those last beats of my son in my wife's arms as we were singing lullabies. And it's those kinds of experiences, and everyone has their own experiences, so there's no comparing pain here. But it's those kinds of experiences that make you realize, like, 99% of the stuff we're doing is insignificant. And when I realized that, so somebody later asked me, and there's something you don't realize.

When someone you love, especially a baby, a child, dies in the hospital, I guess it could happen anywhere. But you leave the scene empty-handed. They keep your child. And there was a nice nurse that rocked our baby that had passed on who helped us do that. But someone said, what did you learn from your brother-in-law passing away, from your son passing away? Which is like an audacious question. And my wife asked me in the ear, year and i'm like i don't know but i thought about it and i came up with something that i call gavin's law after after them which is live to start start

to live because when you live to start those ideas that are pressing on your mind even if they don't work out, you really start living. So I started coupling this idea of Gavin's Law, live to start, start to live, with starting something stupid because that is what successful people do. If it was smart, it's already been done. It has to be, quote unquote, stupid for it to be creative. Otherwise, it would have been done already. Facts. So when you start reframing your fears and you couple it with how much time you have, you just do stuff. You make it happen.

You take the risk. I wrote this, my next book, I wrote, it's called Anti-Time Management. And I wrote it because after I wrote The Power of Starting Something Stupid, I became the stupid guy. And if you Google my name, you Google stupid Richie, I'm everywhere. I'm the stupid guy. So people would come to me with their stupid ideas for help, consulting, coaching, whatever it was. And I'm like, I am not the subject matter expert in their bizarre idea, but I can't help them put the strategy together, the mindset together, the thinking together to make it happen. It's not hard, even though I know it seems hard. And it is hard, but like in reality, it's not crazy difficult to make money. You either sell your time or you sell a product or you sell a service or you sell an asset.

That's what you do. You sell something. What is hard is doing it in a way that allows you to live your life because most people are anchored to when they're 65, which also is a metaphor for when the kids are out of the house, when the kids graduate, when the mortgage is paid off. I had a meeting with Stephen M. R. Covey. He wrote a book called Speed of Trust. His dad wrote Seven Habits.

He brought me into his office. I was young, mid-20s, and he said, Rich, you're a great speaker. I want you to work for me. And I'm like, what? And he goes, I want you to train executives. And I go, I literally said this to him. He's kind of a balding man. And I go, look, what am I going to say anything at all that could help the gray hairs?

Okay. I'm like this kid. And he told me something that blew my mind. He said, Richie, people say they have 20 years experience when in reality they have one year's experience repeated 20 times. And when he told me that, I was like – that just – it just tore open these windows. He wasn't saying experience isn't important even though experience is overrated. He was saying I could learn, continuous improvement, continuous learning. So when people said they wanted to start this stupid idea and I helped them make money and have time with their family, what I really realized was they would lose often. Everyone does this. They have a dream to have time and freedom with their families.

They can travel the world, and they can do whatever they want, and they can make contributions. But what happens is they often, and most likely, because they don't know how to do stuff, they're managing their time like they have for the last 200 years since the Industrial Revolution. They do it in a way where they did it to get time and freedom, and they lost their time and freedom to the business. So anti-time management solves that problem, where it's not managing your time. It's who

owns your time, and it should be you, not a calendar. A full calendar is an empty life it's uh and it teaches people how to how to do it in a way that accelerates their ability to make contributions well i'll tell you one thing and then you can ask me another question what when you sacrifice what you love for success you get neither how you spend your time is how you show your love. So you have to bake in your values from the start. If you say, I'm going to live my values at the end of a timeline, you're essentially saying your values don't matter. You can't live a life on it. It's like baking a cake without sugar. If you bake a cake without sugar, unless you're a keto person, you sprinkle something else in it. But if you bake a cake without sugar, you can't expect it to be sweet.

If you don't live your values from the start, how can you expect to live a life on value? So the idea is value your time. Don't time your values. So can I share something with you about your book? Yes. So I've actually never shared this before. So, um, so in March this year, uh, I was doing a program called 75 hard. Are you familiar with 75 hard? Yeah. Yep. So part of, part of 75 hard, you, you exercise every single day, twice a day. You read a book that's a self-improvement book, 10 pages or whatnot. And I had up until that point, so I was on day 45 or whatnot. And I finish a book and then I find your book on my bookshelf. You had given me a copy of it when, when we met. And, and so I, I pick it up and I start reading

it and I'm reading it for the next 20 days. And when, uh, so about day 67, day 68, I get in this traumatic car wreck. Oh, my gosh. That is a drastic. In fact, your book was with me on that car wreck. And so, for anybody that follows me, you can look on my Instagram. You can see it. We were in a head-on collision. Me, my 14-year-old son, and son and my nine year old boy is in the back.

We're in my Tesla model Y head on collision with a, uh, a drunk driver that's coming at us 130 miles an hour. And, uh, and, uh, at this point, um, there was, there was a lot of decisions and stuff going on, uh, on, on going on in my life and my business. And there was a lot of just like regret that I was feeling towards like spending quality time with my kids, with doing things because I was slaving away to my business and whatnot. And so this, and it's interesting because at this time I was reading your book and it was really inspiring me. Okay. Like what, what do I need to do? What do I need to change? How do, how do, how can I better be involved in my children's lives

and, and, and make it less about like trying to balance all this time and whatnot. And, and so I get in this car wreck and it's just in my mind, like just a, a sign from God, we walked away from it. There's like, there's no reason we should have survived. And if you, if you look at my car, it's like completely destroyed. My son who's in the, in a, doesn't have a seatbelt in the back. And literally my whole left rear axle is gone. And my, that door and backseat is gone. And my son in the back seat without a car, without a seatbelt walks away with a fat lip and a, and a, and a bruised, a bruised face. And, uh, anyways, so this all, this all happens. And along with another series of events that were happening in my business, some arguments that we had as a board and different things like that. And ultimately, a few weeks after that, I made the decision to walk away from my business and take the chairman role and step down as the CEO my business. And which has ultimately led to me producing this podcast.

And so your book, your book is very, very, has inspired me and change and really helped change my life. And, and the time that I've been able to like, just live in the now, spend time with, with my, my wife and my kids. So thank you. It's, uh, geez, that is a heart wrenching story, brother. Oh my gosh. I'm so sorry. I'm so happy that you guys survived that. I'm glad the book helped, but you did the work, man. I mean, I mean, just look at like, like, like even look at you sharing the story. It's like, we can talk about business stuff all day, but like, we don't work for work sake.

You know, dude, I love that story. Thanks for sharing that. That, that, that means the world. You're going to have me thinking about that for a long time, brother. That's, that's. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there was just a lot of realization that I came to, to your, your exact points of like, man, like, what am I doing? Am I, am I just chalking it up? And, and then, and then, you know, once I decided to step away, you realize that like, okay, retirement and everything else isn't what it's all cracked up to be. And then like, I can still do really cool things like shoot a podcast while spending all the time that I want with my kids. And it doesn't have to be one for the other. It's just like living in the present. You know, I think Gavin's law, you know, from your book has really like helped me understand that like, yeah, life is so fragile. I have no idea if tomorrow is going to happen. So in the moment I am going to live to the fullest. I'm going to do really cool things

and be present, be loving, be communicative, do all these things. And, and so, yeah, dude, thank you. Dude. I love that. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Oh oh my gosh that's amazing uh that is just so powerful you know let's uh go go ahead you can comment and then i want to shift yours i'll just i'm just going to say it and it's not at the sacrifice of productivity you know like i like to say one of my weird cliche funny things i like to say in the book is like no one's more productive than a procrastinator with an impending deadline. And so when you kind of build the castle first and then the moat – because most people are working in the moat trying to figure it out with this dream of living in a metaphorical castle, and they don't get there. But if you just set up the castle first – and we can get into the weeds here with this metaphor, but let's just stick with it.

If you start with the dream, you start with your values, it may take up so much time, like the time with your family and doing these things, that you actually literally have less time to do the work. Now, that's not necessarily true. You might actually be surprised and have more time because you freed up time from the things that didn't matter you know what i mean so you're only focusing on what does does you essentially have more time but let's just say for the sake of argument you have less time as a responsible person it creates a forcing function or a positive constraint where you have to think differently and what ends up happening is you actually get more stuff done in less time right and then you you so you get it all like you get your family and your time and the work and a new process that allows you to not be the bottleneck in your business but to maybe be the

chairman so to speak in your situation and things still run that is the paradox is that when you stop spitting, architects don't build buildings, they draw them. General contractors make the lion's share of the money. They don't even fricking pick up a hammer. Like, why don't we think like that? Well, you can, you, you simply can not easy, but if you do, you will solve the problem. It just takes a little, a little bit of effort. Yeah. Yeah. You're exactly right. Appreciate you sharing that. So shifting gears, you've written three different books. And I think this is a question that all entrepreneurs have, myself included. So I'm, I'm in the middle of writing the book. There's a million different

ways in which you can, you write books you can go through ghost writers you can do the record it on your phone and then have it have it dictated and then go through and edit yeah there's you know uh taking some of your old speeches your you know your literary whatever walk me through your process and how you've written your three books. Okay. I'll tell you my process, and then I'll just say to whoever's doing a book, do whatever it takes to get it done. You know what I mean? So like whatever works for you. But my process goes like this.

Oh, I have a good thought. You know? Or I have an interesting angle. I will post it on social media. Now, social media is weird. Some people will see it. Some people won't. Like, we don't even know anymore if it's working.

Like, it's a whole, it's a whole, like, thing, you know? But if people, if people like it and share it or comment on it, just haphazardly, then I go, oh, that's a thing. And if it's a thing, then I might have notes on my iPhone where I go, this sentence. I just literally just write it. Just copy and paste it right there. Yeah. And I just fill up notes with it just over time, over the years, over the day. And I might turn it into an article. I might turn it into a podcast.

I might start using it in conversations to see if it pops. I'm just trying to see what works. But at the end of the day, I am downloading the information from my brain into a space where it could go. When I grew up, I was in a punk rock band. And at this time, there weren't fancy smartphones. It was – so I carried a piece of paper and pen in my pocket. So whenever I had an idea for a certain sound or a certain lyric, whatever it was, I would write it down. And then I would, you know, a lot of times it would end up getting lost in the laundry or like, I can't read my own handwriting, but I got in the habit of writing things,

writing simple ideas down. And they were even the full thing. It was just a little thing that would help me remember the rest of it. So let's say you had a story pop into your mind. That would be a good story to tell in a book. Maybe it had something to do with somewhere you went. Just write one or two words that will trigger your memory of what that is. So I fill it up like that.

So I'll fast forward through this. You're good? I love the detail. You do? Okay. I'm also a fan of like – it doesn't always work this way, but I'm a fan of having a working title. Like, oh, that's a good title. So at one point, I wrote all these things I was doing, some of the things I shared. And somebody asked me on social media, hey, I'm trying to get a job. I was in 2010 or 11. He goes, I'm trying to get a job, and I've done all these resumes every single week, and it's not working.

And my wife was dropping me off somewhere to meet with someone, and I turned to my wife and go, look what this person said. And I said, resumes are dead. And then I was like, that's a great title for a book. And so in 2010, 11, I self-published and then later got picked up by a publisher, a book called Resumes Are Dead, which was 10 to 15 years ahead of its time. Now it's like, yeah, it's normal. Back then it was the most aggressive resistance you've ever seen in your life. I'm like, that's not how you get a job. They're already filled. Like they're sifting through this crap. The hiring managers are using it to sift you out, not get you in. So anyways,

the working title helped me get amped about a real life experience and try to help my friend get a job. And I just started like, just downloading it, downloading it, downloading it. Okay. So once I get all these ideas, if I really want to sit down and write a book, which is, for me, horrible. Like it is not fun. It is bloody. It is painstakingly hard for me. It is not something I enjoy doing. But what I'll do is I'll try and create – if you look at a book and you look at the table of contents, you'll see they have kind of the title. You'll see they have a little structure.

There's like three or four parts. This would be for like a self-help business type book. You'll see they'll have like three or four chapters under each one. They'll write it out. I will write that because now I just have like a skeleton of what – it can change obviously. Then I'll go back and take all those bullet points. I might have tens or hundreds of them, and I'll place them underneath each of those fabricated future chapters.

Now I have several pages of a document. It's not a book proposal, but it's a pretty clear outline. And you look at it and you go, this could be a book. Then I'll go – I learned this. I've taught and I've done all kinds of stuff, but I learned something about principles. And I learned this over 20 years ago. A principle can be easily identified or taught as an if-then statement. So I will write down, if they read this chapter, then they will learn this, or they will do this. So now I have a clear expectation of what this is going to look like. Then I might write a paragraph about it. See how this builds? It's very – when you think about it this way, you could rush through this. But over time, there's no rush.

There's no timeline. It pretty quickly turns into a really 30- to 90-page book proposal. So now you have this if-then statement. You have a couple paragraphs. You have bullet points, the principles you're going to teach, and you're like, dude, this is good. In fact, at that point, you could probably use it as a lead magnet or spin it off as a small e-book. But then I go – and I've learned this talking with a lot of bestselling authors. Then I go, what if this chapter was an article? It's because articles are designed to capture your attention from beginning to end.

And if it's a self-help business type thing, they're supposed to be actionable. So then I'll write an article as if it's a chapter. And now you want them to stand alone. It's called being evergreen. So someone could just flip to your, the middle of your book on fear and just understand your chapter on fear without understanding the rest of the book. Yep. So I'll do that. Meaning, meaning I'm not writing my book from beginning to end, if I feel excited about writing a chapter on procrastination, which happens to be at the end of the book, you know what I mean? On purpose, whatever. I will write that one, you know? And I will go mix and match between chapters and then later start integrating them so they all make sense. Because I already know

most people will never know the book exists. Most will never read it most people who ever see it will only read the title and after that the most red pages will be the first chapter so i write the first chapter i have it kind of there but i refine that one the most because that is the 80 of the time more, the only thing they're ever going to read. Right. If they get that far. Right. Right. So that's kind of how I do it. I could get more detailed. But if you use that process, you will have a book.

And you go back and you can make it look pretty with, I don't know, frameworks and little drawings. You can do all the things that you want to do. People do it differently. I get it. But the way I do it works for me. And if you do that process, you will have a book that looks like 95% of a New York times bestselling book. Then you obviously give it to an editor and then cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut until it's right. Do you, do you, do you edit? Uh, so once you have like something that you feel like is, is produced, do you go through and read it yourself and edit it and edit again and again and again? Or do you just push that off to an editor? How do you go about things?

So, so, so, so like it is a disease to edit your own work and it is a never ending battle. And so you never get out of it. And yes, I have that problem. Okay. I definitely have that problem. So, but you have to, you have to ask yourself this, am I writing a book for me or am I writing a book for a reader? Right. And if you're writing a book for you, it doesn't matter. It literally doesn't matter. You wrote it for you. Who cares? It's your fricking journal, right? If you're writing it for you. Who cares? It's your freaking journal. If you're writing it for a reader, you have to give it to readers and let them go. So for example, I'll give it to my wife. Like the power – sorry, we wrote that together.

I'd like write stuff. She'd read it, and she'd go, what are you talking about? None of this makes any sense. What is going on here? What do you mean? You know what I mean? It's like not a good situation. I'm like, well, here's what I mean.

She's like, why would you say that? You know what I mean? So I'll rewrite it. Nice. My second book, we didn't work on it together, but I would just do my best, give it to an editor, clean it up, you know what I mean,

and then have like a final content slash editing person, whatever. There's a million people you could work with, but I have many eyeballs look at it. A few close professionals that either are part of – if I'm – look, I've self-written stuff, but my last books were written with publishers like i mean hashet's one of the top five publishers in the world like they have all the people in the world right and so they have a process um but at the end of the day their process if you're not going to go with a publisher it's not that much different if any different than just hiring somebody for a little bit of money to professionally look at it and edit it there's a walk walk us through so walk us through like your first book was self-published right and then later was picked up like how did how did you go from self-published to published

like what was the process was it because your first book was a hit that a publisher picked it up or yeah i mean and and then like once you have been published how do you get another publisher on like kind of what's that process like okay let's just say it's different for everyone but i'll share my experience okay yeah yeah when i wrote the power of starting stupid um i pitched it to a mid-sized publisher shadow mountain and they oh i didn't write the book i wrote a proposal they then they picked it up and we've signed a contract and then i write the book for a year or two that's how that's how's how it works. This is how it works. It could be different. A lot of people are like writing whole books and trying to send it in that, that is not traditional. Like in traditional publishing, you don't write a book. You, you write a proposal. I, I could be

wrong on that, but in my experience and most of the authors I work with that use big publishers, that is how it works. Okay. So, so at that point, at that point, when you have like a proposal, like how much of your book is written, are you talking like a 20, 30 page, like outline of the book? Yes. Oh, two. Okay. Yes. Like, like kind of what I wrote, what I just described to you, it will look something, something like that. And some people who already have a publisher, then they can just kind of whip them out and it's like they don't have to prove anything anymore. Whatever. Okay. There's so many things we could talk about, but I'll try and stay on task here.

No, this is great. I think there's a lot of listeners that are just like curious or have this hope of someday being able to do these things. So you giving actual details gives them like, wow, oh, that is potentially something I can do. Okay. Let me tell you, just so everyone knows, a little background, then I'll share somewhere. I have printed hundreds of thousands of books.

I have a company called Prouduct, and I created it, products you're proud of. I created it after I wrote The Power of Starting Something Stupid to serve my readers so that we could make, package, warehouse, and ship their products that they wanted to create, physical products. If they want to do coaching, consulting, online courses, also have that service as well. And it turned into where we're making yoga pants. Like where you and I met and the people in that room, we make a lot of their stuff. Like that's what that's what I do. I didn't try to do that. It was people asking me questions and I'm like, oh, I can do that. Right. And it ties back to that whole international social entrepreneurship thing I was doing. That's where it came from.

OK, OK, OK. So you never know where things are going to end up. I love that. I love that. So I print hundreds of thousands of books. He's like, how do you print hundreds of thousands of books? Well, one time I was on a podcast with John Lee Dumas. I've actually been on his podcast several times. And by the first time he's like, yo, we need to talk afterwards. I'm like, okay, what? He's like, I want to create a journal. I'm like, okay, let's make a journal. So we made the Freedom Journal. If you're familiar with it, we raised, I don't know, 365. Remember it was 400? I can't remember the number. Some astronomical number on Kickstarter for this journal, and the Freedom Journal, the Mastery Journal, the Podcast Journal, we made those together. You can see his numbers on his website of how much money they make with these books. Okay. So I'm coming to you from the aspect of, I do love self-publishing. I do love printing physical books. I know you can put them on Amazon for free and they will print

them for you. Those books are great. You can do it. They look like crap, but you can totally do it. You know what I mean? Like there's everything there that you can do or in just a digital books. Fine too. I know people that sell a digital book for a hundred bucks and they make way more money than any, any other author that would do with a physical book for $25, right? Like it just depends on your goal. If your goal is to work with a traditional publisher, it just looks different. And the, proposition that a traditional publisher has is not the same as it was 50 years ago. You know, like when there was all this distribution and they could control it and you could only get it here and they were going to make you famous. It's the opposite. They're looking for people that already have a following in, in, in that will do all the work for them. And yes, they will print the book like I could, and they will get it into Barnes and Noble if, if it's one of the, one of the top ones, because they have those channels of distribution, but at the end of the day, they are sharks and

they know it and they love it. And it's traditional and it's a hundred year old thing, but they will take 90% of your book. And when I say 90%, I literally mean like they have different scales of like, if you sell this many, you get 7%. If you get this many, you get 10%, you get 15%. When it, when it goes from a hardcover to paperback, then you only get this amount. It's on and on and on. But in essence, they keep 90% of, of, of the revenue. Right. And you keep more or less 10. So if you're trying to make money with a book through traditional publishing, you have to sell a lot of books to do the math.

This is the way it is. This is not a secret, but it's a myth that people have that they're going to go get rich and famous by selling a book. I believe I could be wrong on this, but I think most people don't sell more than 2,500 books. I think that's somewhere around that.

That's through a publisher. Wow. That's, that's really, really low. Wow. Um, I mean, I mean, it just depends. I mean, it just, it just depends. It depends on who you are, what you're doing. But I mean, if you don't have an audience in today's world, are they going to create one for you? You, you, you would hope so. Right. It doesn't work that way. It doesn't work that way. Maybe it used to work that way. I'm not hounding or being hard on traditional publishers. I'm not saying anything they don't know. They will disclose this to you. This isn't a secret.

It's just it is what it is. But with self-publishing, you would keep 100% of the proceeds, more or less. It depends on what fees Amazon takes, et cetera, et cetera, less your costs of production. Okay, so there's more we can go into that. But for me, I actually got this deal with Shadow Mountain, which is a general audience imprint of Deseret Book. And that book did well. I love them so much. It's in like a dozen or more

different languages now. So cool. While I was writing the book, I went to a publishing conference in New York with only 100 people with Seth Godin. And this was at a time when people were like really worried about the internet and it destroying traditional books. People still have that, but at that moment in time, it was a crossroads. And he was describing how books are going to become like records. They're just nice things to have on your shelf. And most people will be consuming digital books,

and now obviously we've seen they're consuming audios. Somehow the book has survived. People are still buying them. they like to snuggle up to on the couch you know what i mean like it's a thing okay so it's still a booming booming booming business but i asked him i already have a deal with a publisher, and he went on this whole thing at the time of these – if you go back in time, you'll look. It was a very popular thing to write a manifesto, and they were these PowerPoint-like looking e-books, and they were going viral because they were very easy to share. And he says the fastest way to spread an idea is for it to be free, and he is right. It's frictionless. So he said – I said I'm unknown at the time. Nobody – I haven't written a book.

I do have a deal. I was fortunate to figure that out. And he says you have to write a book before you write a book. You have to write a book before you write your real book. I'm like, what? Like, what does that even mean? And that is why I wrote resumes are dead and what to do about it. I wrote resumes are dead and what to do about it while I was already under contract for the power of starting something stupid. And I gave it away for free as a way to build an audience for people to go. Richie is an author. So when my real book quote unquote came out, it wasn't like, who is this guy?

I was like, Oh yeah, he does this. So I became it before I became it. You have to become it before you become it to become it. Dude. I, I, I think that is such just a, I think that's such a powerful principle just in everything. Right. Like, you're not going to be successful on the first one. So you got to get the first one out of the way, right? Like, like, so the first one's not what you're going to be known for, or it's going to be your crowning jewel.

It's the same thing, like with my business, right? Like I, I had several businesses before I had the one big one that, that took off and sold for nine figures and everything like that. Same with books, same with everything. And I think this goes back to your point, the power of starting. The power of starting something stupid. Just getting it out of the way. Yeah, step into it.

When you step into the future and you just act from that future, you think differently. So when you start acting like that person you want to become, you start doing the things that person would do, and you start making the magic that you wanted to make. This is my frustration with timelines. When we were kids in kindergarten, they taught us, like, hey, you have to make. This is my frustration with timelines. When we were kids in kindergarten, they taught us like, hey, you have a goal. Oh, cool. You can finish it at the end of the day, or you can finish it, or you can do it at the end of the year. That had nothing to do with the goal

because to be honest, especially in kindergarten, you could have gotten that done in one second. It was about controlling the children in the room and keeping them incentivized to be good, to listen, to shut up. This is real. This is not like some crazy thing. We know this as fact now. But the sad thing is we keep carrying this on. So the idea is if you can rescue your dream from the end of a timeline and do it now,

thinking from the dream and not endlessly toward it, you're more likely to achieve it. And this is why entrepreneurs have, who executives who become entrepreneurs have such a hard time is because they learn as an executive that to become successful, you have to manage yourself and you have to manage people. But when they move, don't get me wrong with these words. Like I know they mean something to certain people, but when you manage yourself, I know self-management is a good thing, but there's a difference between self-mastery and self-management. When you manage yourself and you manage people as an entrepreneur, you lose your soul. You don't get any time.

So like sidetrack, time management, I studied it in depth to write this book, Anti-Time Management. The book was going to be called Time Tipping because I call these people who do it time tippers, but settled on anti-time management for other reasons. But what I learned was back in the day, there was no word for this. It was a guy named Frederick Taylor. They called it Taylorism, and he saw people not working on the factory floor. He called it soldiering. So like when a soldier would be called into the military but didn't want to be there, so they would like drag their feet and like be slow to obey orders. He saw that happening on the factory floor. It happens today. Go anywhere. Everybody does this, right? So he started watching

people. They called it like, they started watching their motions, these time motion studies. And it got to the point where they started telling people, oh, this is the fastest way to move bricks from here to there. Here's how you pick them up. And as you roll up this whole idea, it turned into what they called scientific management. I'm not saying this is necessarily wrong, but I'll tell you the effect of it. Back in the day, these people, it was the first time in history that the mind and the head had been removed from the body. Back in the day, they were creators and they would just kind of make stuff and they'd do it and they'd put it out there, and it was done.

These people came in and intentionally – you can read it in the book – exactly like they intentionally said, what are they doing exactly? Let's take that away from them. No joke. Manage them and tell everybody how to do it in the exact same way at the exact same time. Now, we have lots of good things because of it. But they told themselves, the people who experienced this for the first time and we hear it today in other language but back then they would say that they felt like they were wooden men they called themselves automatons which are those weird wooden robots

you like you see like the tiki tiki room you knowiki room at Disneyland and stuff like that. They were the first human beings to become robots. And we're seeing this more and more today, and we can keep going deep down the line. But here's the idea. Time management was never designed to give people freedom. It was specifically intentionally designed to measure and squeeze every drop of blood, sweat, and tears from workers. That is what time management is for. Even today, it's for that, even though they try and make it cool. So when self-help, I want to say idiots, but because they don't know the history, but when self-help people go,

you just got to manage your time better. They don't realize because they already know that it doesn't work. They already know that when they manage their time, they just fill up their calendar and they don't live their dreams. This happens. Who in their right mind says, I'm going to manage my time and all of a sudden they have all this freedom? It doesn't happen.

And that's because it was never designed as a tool to give people their time back. It was designed to fill up their time with more work. That's why when you finally have free time, you fill it up with more work. Okay, so anti-time management solves that problem. Like literally it was designed to be the next hundred years of how we live in this new age of AI and when things are done for us. What do you do with your time?

How do you get out of the grind? How do you do it now? How do we not wait? to like books and stuff, if you're doing a book for status and credibility, it's probably going to work whether you get with a publisher or whether you self-publish it. If you're really going for like this publisher thing, which is a great thing to do, and I have chosen to do it several times now, three times now, unless you sell tons and tons of books, you shouldn't be going into it thinking this is for money. The business model is on the back end of the book.

If you self-publish, that is the same thing. However, you might make more money. But at the end of the day, are you writing a book for more credibility? Sure. Are you writing a book in a way that destroys and sacrifices the things you love and your family? You shouldn't be writing the book this way. You need to write it in a way that allows you to freeze up your time so you can actually live the principles you're teaching instead of just being another one of these

bully pulpit people. Awesome. Awesome. Richie, how old are you now? I just turned 43. 43 years old. So if you could go back to Richie, return missionary, 21, 22 years old, what would you tell Richie to do differently? I would say, bro, life's going to freaking suck. There's going to be so many hard things. Tragedies are going to happen. I didn't even mention we had foster kids that came and went, which was wonderful to have them.

Horrible when they left under difficult circumstances after years of being with them. My wife had a stroke and lost her memory. My son was hit by a car and almost died. I can go on and on and on. But I would probably tell myself this. At some point, you're going to look at your life and you're going to question – if a bunch of bad things have happened to you, you're going to question God. Does God hate me?

I ask myself that. Does God hate me? And I said – I had this little inspiration. I thought, no, love God unconditionally and go to work. And when I started to say I'm just going to love God unconditionally because he loves us unconditionally, we always blame daddy in the sky when things go wrong, which means that the unconditional love is not reciprocal. You can love me unconditionally,

but I'm going to love you conditionally. That is a bad method of thinking, no matter what you believe in. So I thought, if I love God unconditionally, what I found was it allowed me to have the power to go back to work and do the things that I wanted to do while keeping my faith and keeping my family and being hyperproductive. So I would tell myself, I'd warn myself, Richie, grief is a tunnel, not a cave. Keep walking.

Wow. So powerful. Man,, appreciate you sharing that. Richie, man, you have just dropped so many incredible bombs today. So much just, yeah, I love the, the thing I love about this podcast is I have no idea which direction is going to turn or what questions are going to pop in my mind or what conversations are going to have. And man, there, there was just so much great conversation today. Last question for you before, before we jump off, if, what would you tell somebody that's stuck right now, somebody that's, that's in that slave mentality, that's the, guy that's living the robotic life, that wants and dreams of when they're 65. What do you tell that person? Maybe they have dreams of becoming an entrepreneur.

What advice do you have for them right now? There's two things that maybe they can remember. I'd say start, which is an acronym I created for serve, think, ask, receive, and trust. I can give you all the empathy in the world. And I empathize like it's, it's a thing, you know, I, I understand that it's hard, but you serve first. Even if you don't make money, serve and you create that genuine connection and opportunity by serving, not I scratched your back, you scratch mine. Just without expectation.

None of this weird manipulation crap people do. Just serve. Dude, I'm typing that out right now. The opportunity to serve them. I'm typing that out right now. It's serve. Give me the five. It's serve, think, ask, receive, trust. Serve, think, ask, receive, trust. So you serve

them, you thank them for the opportunity to do it, then you earn the right to ask. People think they can just ask things. I mean mean you totally can't but you can also destroy relationships that way like earn the right to ask man like be a normal person and then you receive like a football player like a quarterback throwing it to receiver if receiver knocked the ball the air on purpose or put his knee down people be like what are you doing we have all these cheerleaders and we have all these people like blocking like you were set up to win the best way to give back to a giver is to take the ball to the end zone and to win. That is what they want. So you want you to succeed. So you serve,

think, ask, be a gracious receiver and trust. So you put those together. It is a winning formula. I could go deeper. You can read in my books. I talked about how Gandhi followed that process. Not that he thought about that process, but that was the process he went through. And you just go on and on and on. And to that note, one of the first things Gandhi did when he went to Pretoria and saw the racism that people were experiencing was he taught them English. He served them. That was the first move he made that created a movement. So anyways, we can go on and on about that. And the last acronym I would share as you put these two together is time.

Time for me is an acronym that means today is my everything. So if you serve, think, ask, receive, and trust and put it under the urgency of today is my everything, then you put your values first, your priorities first because most people put priorities last because of the way they learn time management. It doesn't make any sense. And then you have magic. And you know, at the end of the day, every day, I'm fortunate. I live at Sunset Beach. I go look at the sunset wherever I am in the world. We travel a lot, but I tell myself like every sunset is an opportunity to reset. So at that time, as the sun goes down, I really do this. I think what a cool, like what a cool sunset. You know, I enjoy that. And then I go, what worked today? What didn't I'm going to reset? Well, fresh eyes with the sunrise tomorrow, you know, and that's, that's what I do. Dude. I love it, Mr. Richie, man. So much value, so much great advice. I appreciate it. Thank you for joining us today. Until next time. Peace. Thank you.