Beauty in the Journey | Dylan Bost

Summary

In this episode, Dylan Bost shares his entrepreneurial journey, the importance of self-awareness, and how to navigate challenges with resilience and purpose. Discover insights on building a life aligned with your values, overcoming failure, and the power of course correction.

Key  Topics

• Entrepreneurial journey and self-discovery
• The importance of self-awareness and pattern recognition
• Resilience and course correction in business
• Aligning business with personal values and happiness

Feeling stuck in your business?  Book a free call with Christian.

https://calendly.com/cbrim/30min

Transcript

Christian Brim (00:01.26)
Welcome to another episode of The Chris Project. I am your host, Christian Brim. Joining me today, Dylan Bost. Dylan, welcome to the show.

Dylan Bost (00:10.778)
Hey Christian, thanks for having me.

Christian Brim (00:13.536)
So you're welcome. Thank you for coming on again. I had you on the profitable creative and it's been a while, but my recollection was your story was compelling enough that I needed to bring it to this audience. So why don't you give a brief synopsis of your entrepreneurial journey.

Dylan Bost (00:37.938)
Yeah, so, you know, I think when I look back, just kind of fell into it. It seemed more natural to me. I'm really very comfortable in a place where I think a lot of people are uncomfortable with that figuring it out, not knowing where a paycheck's coming from, running projects. And so from, you know, early on, even when I was in college, I ran a company and did design work. And that took me into, once I was done,

I was educated in architecture and design and then as my wife says, I did nothing with it. but it helped me build where I am today. You know, it took me to Walt Disney Imagineering and learned a lot of things from those folks, incredible culture and started an agency after that for about 10 years. Crashed and burned in that agency and we can get into that.

And for a brief stint in between that and what I'm doing, well, what I was doing then and now what I'm doing now, I kind of toyed with do I just go work for somebody? It sounded so easy, right? You know, there was a moment for a couple years where I thought, know, if I could do what I've done for hundreds of people at a time in companies, you know, how easy would it be to get my just...

know, teeth around one product and, you know, to advertise or market one product. And it was, it really was wonderful. A mentor of mine told me, he's like, Dylan, you'll never be happy doing that. You maybe do it for six months and then, you know, you're just not the kind of person. And I'd never really heard that. It was just what I did. And he was right. So I started Sonny HQ, the company that I've been running for about nine years. And,

And then since then I've branched out and actually wrote a book last year and started a whole personal brand and coaching and speaking. I've started another company recently from my wife around in-home lice treatment. And I just find myself in that place of I like the thing that's attractive to me. I listen to a lot of podcasts in the entertainment business and you know something that's always sounded attractive is these guys essentially have projects, right? They

Christian Brim (02:49.463)
you

Dylan Bost (02:49.51)
They're doing a film here, they're producing something there, and they've just, and that's really where I sit. If I was in that industry, I'd probably be a producer. You I really enjoy that fast-paced setup and not knowing what's gonna happen the next day, and so that's just where I've lived, and I'm really comfortable in that area.

Christian Brim (02:58.241)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (03:10.615)
Perfect, that's a great synopsis. Something you said that resonated with me was that you're comfortable where a lot of people are uncomfortable. And I think that's a distinguishing characteristic of entrepreneurs is they are much more comfortable with the unknown moving forward specifically without the knowns than most people.

Something else that you said resonated with me was that like you would not be happy working for someone else. I was having that conversation with my adult children, two of them independently over the last weekend, and they were basically complaining about their ineffectiveness in the job, underutilization, like, you know, that kind of thing.

Dylan Bost (04:08.625)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (04:11.149)
And, know, I flat out told them and I came to this conclusion, not intellectual, well, maybe intellectually, but like just at a gut level, very early on when I was 26, 27, that I was never going to be satisfied working for someone else. That I knew that I could do more than they would ever allow me to. Yeah.

Dylan Bost (04:40.305)
Mm-hmm, yep.

Christian Brim (04:40.941)
But, know, being an entrepreneur, you trade those frustrations for other frustrations. So the idea that you're going to be living without frustration is a myth. So let's, you know, if you don't mind, let's talk about the, you described it as crash and burn. What does that mean?

Dylan Bost (05:02.651)
Mm-hmm.

Well, on the surface it means alcohol. That didn't help. know, I essentially built something that, you know, the way I described it, looked great on paper. know, big agency, well, to the world, probably a medium-sized small agency. But, you know, I'd grown something to 25, 26 people, lots of clients, lots of awards, driving the Range Rover, had two cars, all the things. And yet...

had a moment where I stood in my office and just, and it was an existential break. I really thought, what's the value of this? Like, you know, I mean, yeah, I'm building these great things for people and I marginalized it by saying, you know, the work that we do helps companies grow, great, and it helps them employ people, great, but long term, no one's gonna care about this stuff in 10 years.

In long term, no one's going to care about that ad campaign or that logo or that website. And it's even hard to understand what that meant right now because there was value in it, obviously. for me, was interesting. I didn't have some grand idea of I want to change the world. But it was this root of why will people care about this later? And I couldn't answer that question.

Christian Brim (06:19.266)
Right.

Dylan Bost (06:27.249)
I did a lot of bad things, right? Didn't ask for help. That's probably the chief thing. didn't reach out to the people because I was the person that always could figure it out. And here's a thing I couldn't figure out. 2008 hit, huge financial crisis, of course, for a lot of people. And that created, even though we were somewhat insulated, a lot of our business was real estate and development. And so about a third of our revenue just evaporated.

Christian Brim (06:56.781)
Yeah.

Dylan Bost (06:57.091)
revenue that we had worked for. So that created pressures. you know, I say this, you know, almost had no business in business. The reality is when we started that agency, I had absolutely no clue what I was, I knew how to create things, but did not know how to run a business. You know, three years in, I like to this story. I was, finally had, we could afford to have someone help with, you know,

receivables and all that kind of stuff. And they said, where's your business license? And I was like, my what? You know, I had no idea what that was. So, you know, that kind of frames up. And of course we fixed that little thing. But the reality was when the crisis hit, I had no clue how to really deal with that. You know, I had a family, a second family, right? I had my family, but then I also had this group of employees that counted on me. I didn't lay people off when I should have.

you know, pressure, pressure, you can see it start to go, right? And so all of a sudden, you know, we're paying money we don't have. And I'm drinking through that just to say, well, that's a tomorrow problem. And just it was a really slow burn of instead of making some decisions and shifting and pivoting, it was more the, you know, constant issues for about a year or two before we finally had to close the doors, declared personal bankruptcy.

Christian Brim (07:55.553)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Bost (08:22.225)
All of the things that come with that, you the cars are repossessed, the homes are gone. Of course, now created huge issues with my real family and really had to go through that whole mess to figure out what in the world to do. So it was, I don't recommend it to anyone out there, right? You know, ask for help, you know? I mean, the reality is we all have people we can reach out to and...

That was the key thing that I didn't do. And I don't know if part of that was ego or part of it was just not wanting to show that vulnerability. I don't know how to do this. Help me. Will everything, it's funny, It's catch 22. It's like, if I tell people, then the business will go away. Well, the business is going away anyway. But that non-acceptance of what I know is going to happen.

Christian Brim (09:14.029)
Hmm.

Dylan Bost (09:20.465)
It is really what led me down that path.

Christian Brim (09:25.783)
Do you, if the financial crisis hadn't happened and therefore push your business into stress, what do you think the outcome would have been?

Dylan Bost (09:40.21)
think it probably would have been the same, but it would have been a lot slower. I mean, think that, and probably would have ended up even worse because I think that I would have lost my family at that point because I would have pushed further. So pre-40s, family was a checkbox just like anything else at the office. mean, yes, I was there and then I have lots of great memories with my family and my children.

Christian Brim (09:44.077)
Hmm.

Christian Brim (10:03.277)
Hmm.

Dylan Bost (10:08.335)
But what I know now compared to then, what it means to be present and what it means to be part of their lives is completely different. So if I really think about that, it would have been more of a separation. Maybe the company would have survived and maybe that unhappiness would have set in much later when I divorced and lost that part of my life. At the end of the day, I'm a child of divorced parents. So it's funny to look back and it's like I just repeated a pattern.

Christian Brim (10:14.093)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Bost (10:38.373)
Right? Fortunately, I broke it and I made my way out of it. But I think that had that not happened, yeah, I we would have continued, probably would have grown it, had a lot of personal, a lot of professional successes, but at the complete detriment of the personal side of my life.

Christian Brim (10:42.37)
Right.

Christian Brim (10:57.633)
But you didn't have that pattern recognition in the moment, or did you?

Dylan Bost (11:04.525)
No, not at all. Yeah, not until years later.

Christian Brim (11:09.099)
Yeah, and that's what I've discovered. You know, it's.

It's fascinating how we, well, I, I could see the pattern, intellectually, but I couldn't understand the pattern at the subconscious or the heart level, if you will, right? My family,

Dylan Bost (11:38.225)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (11:44.34)
And my origin story was a family business that ended in bankruptcy. intellectually, I thought even at a young age at university, it didn't have to end that way. Why were they not more responsible with their money so that when a crisis happened, they didn't have to fall apart?

Dylan Bost (12:01.67)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Bost (12:09.595)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (12:14.753)
But I didn't see that pattern redevelop in my own behavior until much, much past it. Like after I had survived it and didn't go into bankruptcy, but came damn close and then only looking backwards,

Dylan Bost (12:23.172)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (12:40.907)
Did I see it? And then I had to figure out, okay, well, why did I do that? Like I sure sure I didn't want to do that. I knew that that would right and so it's like the The in inability of your conscious cognitive mind to To make the changes in the pattern to keep it from happening that that's what really has shocked me

Dylan Bost (12:45.475)
Mm-hmm. All right. Yeah.

Dylan Bost (13:05.435)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (13:09.803)
Like, I thought intellectual knowledge was sufficient.

Dylan Bost (13:13.549)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, well, it's interesting, right, because it's easy to see, and this is a huge part of the reason why I wrote this book, well, in hindsight, but it's so easy to see this stuff around us. It's easy to see this in our parents. It's easy to see this in our friends. But the minute that we, for some reason, I the same way, the minute that we, even if we want to look at ourselves, I think...

there's no training for this. There's no, know, there's at least, I mean, there's a lot of things that you can go find now, but the reality is it's not like in school or even around those worlds, right, that people, you know, train us to say, you know, what's going on for you and analyze that, just like we're probably doing, we're analyzing all these patterns in our business. mean, like we can recognize things, but it's a real blind spot. It's interesting, but when you start to see,

Christian Brim (13:43.703)
Mmm.

Christian Brim (14:02.359)
Right.

Dylan Bost (14:08.699)
when you take a step back and really ask yourself some hard questions, even just for you, and sit with it, right? You sit with those moments of how have I, you know, how have I been behaving? What have I been doing? What hasn't worked? What has worked? You know, we don't tend to do that. And I think if we can do that more, the reality is we can start to chart a whole new path. And things, you know, then you have to...

Christian Brim (14:14.679)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (14:34.679)
Yes.

Dylan Bost (14:36.657)
you have an opportunity to change, right? You have an opportunity to implement those things. That's a whole nother part. But it starts with that awareness. know, say that awareness is this beautiful medicine to me because it's like once now I become aware of something that I'm doing in any repeated pattern, right? I can't ignore it, right? It becomes something I'm like,

Christian Brim (14:58.189)
Mmm.

Dylan Bost (15:00.099)
I can choose, I can still choose, I can still choose to go down and do the same thing with my son over and over and over with my partner over and over and over, or I can be like, man, that's really not working. Now, how do I change it? But it has to start, you can't jump that step, right? You have to have that awareness before you get the opportunity to make a change.

Christian Brim (15:02.304)
Right.

Christian Brim (15:21.953)
Yeah, and doing that in crisis mode is not ideal, right? Like, I mean, if you've got business stress, chances are you're not going to put your energy and time into self-reflection. It's survival, right? Which compounds the problem because you go back to your most basic instincts. you know, for me, that was...

Dylan Bost (15:35.439)
Right, yeah, yeah.

Dylan Bost (15:40.026)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (15:50.124)
Two things, one fundamentally it's about control. It's, you know, when things felt out of control, were not working the way that I wanted, it was to take more control. And one, that limits, like you said, you don't involve others, right, in helping solve the problem. But two, it just reinforces your behavior pattern.

Dylan Bost (15:53.649)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Bost (16:04.176)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (16:18.293)
Right? Like you're just doing more of the same things. Right. And, and two, I had this money belief that, you know, a lot of people grow up in a scarcity mindset household. You know, I was fortunate enough to be raised by entrepreneurs and an entrepreneurial family, but

Dylan Bost (16:18.715)
Mm-hmm.

All right, yeah.

Christian Brim (16:46.509)
What that led to was this belief that more always solved the problem. So like you could always make more money, do more, and that would fix things. But that obviously is not true, right? Sometimes more is actually worse. And really getting to that point was very

Dylan Bost (16:53.957)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Bost (17:03.419)
Right.

Christian Brim (17:16.737)
very painful and it kind of goes back to what we said in the green room is this this theory that entrepreneurship puts a lot of puts you in a space where you're going to have stress that most people don't encounter. Maybe if you're a special operator in the military or you're a paramedic where

Dylan Bost (17:37.713)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (17:46.166)
You're going to get certain stresses that other people don't but there's not a real good Comparison in any other profession maybe a surgeon. I don't know but as an entrepreneur you get into these situations where You're gonna be stressed personally in a way that you wouldn't Otherwise and the question is do you use that as a vehicle for self-growth?

to refine yourself or do you succumb to the old patterns and you you may be successful financially but you may lose everything else that's really valuable to you.

Dylan Bost (18:19.8)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Bost (18:33.585)
Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, it's, know, we hear this all the time, right? And, you know, these people who have made everything and on their deathbed, they're like, it's worth nothing. You know, they don't have the people that are around them. And, you know, I mean, I see this stuff all the time and it's so funny now I read or watch something and I'm like, if we look for these things, these messages are there, but they become part of the vernacular in a way that, that is almost not activating.

Christian Brim (18:46.029)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (18:57.901)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Bost (19:02.577)
It's somewhat saturated to a point, yet we don't go, know, how can I implement that in my life? And you're right, I think more to me, the more it's just a distraction. know, I mean, if I've got, you know, now I've got, you know, we're on the par of getting, not now, mean, this theoretical word.

Christian Brim (19:18.605)
Mm.

Dylan Bost (19:26.937)
looking at getting another house. So all the decisions that get made around that, right? And now we're the vacation and the this and the this car and I'm going to look for this thing. Those are all distractions that take us away from really answering these questions. You know, the reality is if you, you know, we all can't be a monk, right? But if you go sit in a cave for a year, the reality is you're going to achieve something different in your.

in your body, your mind, in that connectivity that will enable you to be resilient in any situation in your life. know, once you've done that work, then not that those things don't matter, but your approach to them is the intent behind them is different. You know, I'm all for everybody, hey, go get all the things. But, you know, how many times, too, do we see this? You know, I'd look at this cliche of, you add money to anything?

It just makes you more of what you already are. So if you haven't healed those things inside, man, you might be just the worst asshole or you'll be the most, you you won't be connected to the people around you and your family because that's what you're about. But if you've done that work, right, if you are, if you have some grounded foundation and who you are, then your approach to that is very different. and there's so there's, yeah, I think you're, you're, you're definitely right.

Christian Brim (20:22.495)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (20:50.679)
Yeah, I'm blanking on the author and I can see him. He was a Navy commander in the SEALs. But his story, he ran a program for people that thought they wanted to try out for special forces. You know, like getting ready for the training, training for the training.

and and the story he used was the man that that came to the you know ancient monk warrior and and said, you know teach me everything, you know and the the monk proceeded to make tea and He sat down and he was like impatiently waiting for him to impart all this knowledge, right?

Dylan Bost (21:19.664)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (21:45.77)
And the monk starts pouring the tea and eventually the tea starts overflowing into the saucer and then on the table and the guy's like, why are you, what are you doing? You need it's full. And the monk said, well, yes, just, just like you. Like if, if, if you are not emptied, I can't fill it. Yeah. and that, that, that stuck out.

Dylan Bost (22:03.386)
Yeah.

Dylan Bost (22:08.12)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (22:14.135)
to me because I think for me, entrepreneurship, it was a great coping mechanism. Yeah. in that I could, feel like I was, worthy that I was important that I was worthwhile. rather than

Dylan Bost (22:24.421)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (22:43.607)
dealing with the wound of origination that caused that gap in the first place, right? And it worked until it didn't work. you know, I thank God that I went through that to be able to come to that understanding without ending up in...

Dylan Bost (22:51.707)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (23:10.847)
a worse situation that I'd put myself right because to your point it it can be worse and I I've I see so many entrepreneurs that have success and and like their wives divorce them and then they're and then they're sitting there like Yeah I don't even know that they have the self-awareness that like they they've lost the most important thing that

Dylan Bost (23:27.345)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (23:40.449)
they had and gained something that's really worthless.

Dylan Bost (23:44.402)
Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's tough. mean, it is. I think about, you know, until you have even a glimpse of that awareness, you know, I was running a program, right? You know, what works? I'm running this program of, I see, and, you know, here we are in the U.S., right? It's our entire culture is built on this. It's, you know, we're crunching it today, you know, where everyone has got side businesses and, you know, and all of these things.

Christian Brim (23:57.225)
Yes, that's exactly right.

Christian Brim (24:08.653)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Bost (24:14.081)
And the reality is it's keeping us from asking some of those core questions. And am I happy? Am I truly happy? Do I experience joy? Or am I waiting for the weekend? Or am I looking forward to the vacation? Am I burning up on reentry? I love that statement. I heard that years ago when I'd come back from a vacation.

Christian Brim (24:21.741)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Bost (24:38.581)
And I'm just dreading that next Monday when I go in and I've got this mound of things to do. To me, you can have both. It's not that you don't have a mountain of work, but if you're in alignment with who you are and what you want, and hey, it may mean that you need to not be in that job. You may need to pick a different company. You may need to completely divert from what you're doing. making that core decision,

Christian Brim (24:47.711)
Yes.

Christian Brim (24:59.191)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Bost (25:07.665)
is key if you could because you can't have I don't think you can have happiness in both of those unless you address that. mean you you know to me it's it's too easy to get wound up in because listen the successful people out there have have figured that out that like I've got this drip of wonderful things that comes but that will end at some point right. I mean you know our parents and grandparents

right, they had this model of, I'm going to go do this job, work for the phone company for 20 or 30 years, and then I'm going to retire. And you would hope that at the end of that, I mean, you know, maybe that worked, maybe it didn't, but my point is, if you get to the end of that, and then you're sitting there, and you're on the beach or by the lake or whatever it is, and maybe there are people around you, but you have no connection with them, man.

Sadness is going to creep in. mean, and most likely, they're not going to be there. If you haven't done some of this work for yourself and then forged these real connections with the people around you, then that's not going to work. I argue that you can start early and start to integrate those things. Maybe you're on a path of this career that you thought was great. I mean, listen, we got a college and I mean,

Christian Brim (26:09.005)
Yeah.

Dylan Bost (26:34.097)
Fortunately, yes, I am someplace now because of all that. And I found my weaving path to end up where I am today. But I'm obviously not doing today what I went to college for. And the thing that I talk to my kids about is like, you're going to live three, four, five, maybe six, eight lifetimes. I know you can't fathom that, but just set your course for today. What makes you happy today? Don't think about.

Christian Brim (26:45.42)
Right.

Christian Brim (26:53.293)
Mm.

Dylan Bost (26:59.983)
Don't think about 20 years from now what that looks like. Just do that today. But the core is happiness, right? The core is what can you go do every day that you're not coming home every day bitching about, right? And, because those are the red flags, right? When you're coming home for weeks on end, you're like, can't believe this and that. The reality is you've got to shift something in that. And it begins with a tighter integration between

that personal side of your life, if you have to declare a real distinction, right? It's like instead of, when I look at it, was the core of what I want, well, I need money. I want money, I like money, and so I'm going to, least I layered it, I did, with things that I enjoyed doing. But at the end of the day, what I didn't do until my second go around, right, is I didn't evaluate more wholly.

What does that mean in the greater part of my life? Now I have these other beings. I have three kids, right, and a wonderful wife. when it's not just about me, but it's about me and them, what does that actually look like? It's interesting. I'm going through this process with this team, and we were asking some questions. And they said, well, how much time should people have for their family?

Christian Brim (28:01.741)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Bost (28:20.631)
And you know, it's like, you know, in my mind, I'm like tons, you know, they should have, you know, hours a day. And this, and we started to do the math and it's scary math, right? You're like, well, once you sleep for eight hours and you work for eight hours, right? Then you've only got eight hours left. And once you do some personal things and others, you kind of only have like a true hour a day that you could, if you were really doing the math on it. And if you think about that, that's not a lot of time. I mean, to say when we.

Christian Brim (28:29.313)
Yeah.

Christian Brim (28:44.94)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (28:49.314)
No.

Dylan Bost (28:50.193)
especially when we work for eight and we sleep for eight, but we're only saying one hour or maybe an hour and a half. And so, you know, I look at it like, well, A, at very least you got to make that count. B, you know, what I'd love to do is, and what I work on is how to integrate that more. So yes, maybe I'm working, you know, four, six or eight hours, but maybe there's a tighter integration that I'm switching back and forth. I'm not.

Christian Brim (29:03.639)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Bost (29:18.149)
You know, at its worst, I'm not annoyed when my personal life ekes in, right? But let's get past that. Now, more importantly, how to fully like pull them in. Maybe we can work together on something. Or even if we can't, maybe I can switch between. Maybe there's periods of time throughout the day when my personal life is more integrated in with my work life. And listen, I know everybody can't do that, right? If you're working it.

Christian Brim (29:22.209)
Yes.

Dylan Bost (29:43.482)
Citrix or the power company or something you you know that gets difficult, but we can still find ways I think to integrate that so that it's You know I say that because you know my dad was was very much When he was at work he was at work and even if I went to work with him You know it's like don't talk to dad right and so I learned this thing where it's like and if you do talk to dad It's like you get this stern look and like well, man. I'm just your eight-year-old kid right But that could have been different

Because, you know, and I think about, you know, there's a lot of bad to COVID, but one of the cool things it did is everybody's in their house and we're all on Zoom, a cat's walking by or their son's walking by with no shirt on or whatever accidentally. And you can treat that two ways. You could welcome it and just laugh about it and no one else cares. Or, you know, you can be like.

Christian Brim (30:32.631)
Right.

Dylan Bost (30:34.777)
you doing? And the same thing goes in business, right? Instead of being annoyed with those text messages or whatever, you can allow that to happen and it be okay. And what the cool thing is I've seen is if you make that okay, the people sitting across from the table go, like they have the same issues, right? And so you kind of train everybody around you that it's, and especially if you're in a leadership position, if you can guide that.

Christian Brim (30:36.183)
Right.

Christian Brim (30:54.923)
Yeah, yeah.

Dylan Bost (31:02.545)
then I would argue that work environment becomes a better place because we're not robots. Yet, I think a lot of us kind of guide that whole process as a more robotic, this is why we're here. You have to optimize your life. You have to be on the phone or do this for eight hours. And we can't do that. I mean, not effectively and definitely not sustainably.

Christian Brim (31:09.09)
Right.

Christian Brim (31:24.597)
You said something there that I don't want to skip past. said, you know, integration of knowing what you want. And, and I think that that is something intellectually I knew for a long time without having a heart knowledge of it and being okay with receiving what I wanted. Right. But it starts with the question, what do I want?

Dylan Bost (31:49.851)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Bost (31:54.843)
Hmm.

Christian Brim (31:55.214)
and having permission that it's okay to want something, not that you're gonna get it, not necessarily that you're gonna get it and you're certainly not gonna get it all the time, but like the idea that you should, as an entrepreneur, build your business around what you want. I think there is, with,

Dylan Bost (32:02.385)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Bost (32:15.505)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (32:26.133)
You talked about like the hustle culture. You didn't call it that, but I, that's what I name it with entrepreneurs and you know, people also having jobs and side hustles. And then of course the deluge of digital distraction that's available to us. It's, it's, very possible to never have that moment of silence and reflection. it reminds me of the lyrics from

Dylan Bost (32:31.515)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Bost (32:41.585)
Hmm

Dylan Bost (32:51.035)
Hmm.

Christian Brim (32:54.989)
social distortions ball and chain. I don't know exactly late 80s, early 90s. When he says, you you can run all your life and not go anywhere. And wherever I went, I was sure to find myself there. Right. And, you know, I'm like, as I listened to that song now, I'm like, yeah, that was pretty profound. I wish I would have listened to that when I was 20 something. Right. You know, but but

Dylan Bost (32:58.545)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Dylan Bost (33:13.231)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Bost (33:22.619)
Yeah.

Christian Brim (33:25.353)
You know, it's the difference between running from something and then run and running towards something right like You can run away from your situation all the time because it's uncomfortable You don't like it. Whatever whether that's job relationships, you know Whatever it is, but are you running towards something and that towards something should be what you want?

Dylan Bost (33:32.251)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Bost (33:40.421)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (33:52.462)
and it's perfectly acceptable and not selfish. Maybe it's self-centered, but it's not selfish to know what you want and ask for it and design your business and your life around it.

Dylan Bost (34:02.437)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Bost (34:08.229)
Yeah.

Yeah, it's super important. I mean, I didn't talk about this all the time. When I started my first business, was pretty much, you know, this is what we're going to do because it feels good. With no real thought to what it meant outside, you know, was like, and I was married at the time and had a child. I did not think about what it meant to my family at all. Not that I wouldn't have done it, but the point is,

Christian Brim (34:37.389)
Hmm.

Dylan Bost (34:40.625)
Like without even acknowledging that, that was a key issue to start that process because, and yeah, when you start any business, takes a lot of your time, but without an acknowledgement of that, I didn't actually define what it would look like. Okay, I'm, know, hey honey, I'm gonna need to push on this for six months to get it to this place. There was not even a thought of what's this next place. It's like, this is what I'm doing today. And, and.

Christian Brim (34:46.349)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (35:07.232)
Yeah.

Dylan Bost (35:08.687)
I don't know what I'm doing tomorrow, but it's probably going to be just like today until some magic, yeah, until some magical place in the future when I've envisioned that it looks not as much like this, but I don't know what that looks like, but it's probably just a lot more of this.

Christian Brim (35:11.757)
More of this.

Christian Brim (35:24.321)
Yeah, which becomes an un... it just becomes a hamster wheel. Not any different than the hamster wheel that you'd be on if you worked for somebody else. You just created your own version of the hamster wheel.

Dylan Bost (35:28.965)
Yeah, yeah.

Dylan Bost (35:38.321)
Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And the opportunity so much more. And I think that's when I started the second business, Sunny HQ, I very clearly started with the guideline one, I had an exit strategy, which that was new to me. Well, at least it was new in the first business. People had asked me about exit strategy a year or two years in. was like, man, I just started doing this. What are you talking about? I'm not leaving. I just started. And of course, no business school. so, you know,

Christian Brim (35:51.915)
Hmm. Mm-hmm.

Dylan Bost (36:07.089)
Didn't understand that but when I started this second business it was about what does my life look like? Right. How much am I working? Granted I'm going to need to work a lot in the beginning But didn't even let that be overwhelming. I read this great book by Jen Sincero. You're a badass. I don't know if you've read that It's really fantastic. And then This was about 12 or 13 years ago. She was actually still doing like

Christian Brim (36:14.701)
Hmm.

Christian Brim (36:27.565)
Now I have it.

Dylan Bost (36:36.369)
like small group coaching. And so I took this course from her and it was basically how to, you've got this big goal, how to achieve that goal without it of course being overwhelming. So at the time I was just, you know, licking my wounds from all the past and deciding on what to start. And so mine was I've got this idea for this company, but I really want to do this the right way, right? I don't want to do it the way I did before, which is basically just start.

Christian Brim (36:38.925)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (37:01.089)
Mm-hmm. Right.

Dylan Bost (37:04.465)
And so she had this whole process over eight weeks of essentially deciding what you're going to do and then chunking it down. And so I just worked these steps week after week. I did everything on paper. And I got to the end of it. But a big part of that whole process, it was really cool. It started with this investigation. It was a meditation. It was a really great thing in business, right? Meditate and project yourself into the future.

Christian Brim (37:26.53)
Mm.

Dylan Bost (37:31.485)
and it doesn't matter if it's five years or 10 years, that's irrelevant. Just you sit and meditate. What does that look like to you? And I had probably been meditating about a year or two, you know, on and off, but hadn't really done anything with like intent like this. And so of course I resisted it. and, and, and then after you're supposed to write a story of everything that you explored. And I thought this is going to be really hard.

It actually wasn't. It was really this beautiful thing where I wrote this entire story. I live someplace that in my head looked like Hawaii. I described the house, the cars, the one I remember waking up in the morning and seeing my wife. So was like, that's really cool. I'm still married. I haven't completely destroyed that. But in that process, so it started with not who are your customers and where's the money coming from? And it started with what does your life look like?

Christian Brim (38:15.521)
Right.

Christian Brim (38:23.98)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Bost (38:29.005)
And so it was this really cool thing because the company then became, it had a foundation in what do I want my life to look like? And everything, all the decisions then were based on that. And it was of course, you I want to get to a point in six months where I'm not working more than four hours a day. So that started to help me understand.

What kind of business is it? Well, it had need to be a subscription based, right? Something with renewable revenue. It needed to be something that didn't involve like a huge staff, right? I mean, it needed to be something where I could scale it easily. And so that kind of gave me the tools to figure out exactly. But the point is it was integrated not just from a business perspective. Sure, that was there. And of course, there needed to be a revenue model. But it was rooted in.

Christian Brim (38:56.471)
Right.

Christian Brim (39:02.444)
Right.

Dylan Bost (39:20.719)
What does my future look like in relationship to my entire life, not what's my career or what's my job or what's the function I'm serving.

Christian Brim (39:32.94)
Yeah, I think, you you said you started with exit strategy and I think that's something that virtually no entrepreneur does unless they've done it before of beginning with the end in mind, like because that helps you define what it is you're what it is you want. Right. And, Dr. Cuts, was on this program, his book, contextual intelligence. He talks about,

Dylan Bost (39:43.761)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (40:02.505)
envisioning, you know, the future and the, said the disconnect most people have when they think about the future, they think about what is going to be different in their lives except for themselves. They don't ever contemplate, okay, you know, I'm going to be here. I'm going to have these things, you know, whatever, but they don't really contemplate what they have to do now differently.

Dylan Bost (40:18.257)
Mmm.

Christian Brim (40:30.273)
to be different in order for that reality to come into place. And he said, if you don't think about yourself, you're just dreaming, you're fantasizing, you're not bringing it to something that you can act on.

Dylan Bost (40:38.349)
Mm-hmm. Mm.

Dylan Bost (40:43.515)
Yeah, no, I love that. Well, yeah, and it's, that's really cool. I love that. You have to know, it's interesting. And wound up in that, right, to me is for you to also achieve something, really only have to know two things. You have to know where you are now and you have to know where you want to go. The how to get there is a figure it out on the way.

Christian Brim (41:07.081)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Christian Brim (41:12.301)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Bost (41:12.497)
And I love this analogy. heard this years ago that when we went to the moon, right, we'd never been to the moon before. It's a long way away. A lot of physics involved. I don't claim to understand them. But in reality, a bunch of smart people thinking about something, they could have easily said, there's no way we can do this, right? I mean, yes, we know we want to go there. But what they figured out is we really need to know two things. We're going to start on Earth. We're going to end up over there.

Christian Brim (41:20.365)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (41:33.837)
Sure.

Dylan Bost (41:42.15)
And then it's going to be a process of course corrections over that distance. You know, we're going to look out, you know, 1,000 meters or 10,000 meters. And we're going to start heading that direction. And the moment that something doesn't look right, we're not going to keep going that way. We're going to course correct. We're going to say, OK, that didn't work. Do this. And that's really the simplistic version of the guidance that I use right now. I don't know the things. I've never.

Christian Brim (41:45.911)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Bost (42:10.801)
You know, a year ago I'd never written a book. I could have easily said, and many times I did in my head, like, I have no business doing this. You know, I mean, the last time I wrote something was in college, and it was probably, you know, 2,000 words, and, you know, I'm looking at a book and it's supposed to be 50,000 words, what the hell? But I just said, that's the direction I'm going. feel like something in me that says you need to do this, you want to do this, it feels good to do this. So I'm going to chart a...

course in that direction. And then every time I didn't figure, you know, I didn't know how to do something, I just course corrected. Every time I failed at something, I just course corrected. And I think that's it. It's really helped me to not get too wound up too. And even when is it going to happen? actually never, it never entered in my head, you know, when am I going to be done with this? You know, I thought,

Christian Brim (42:48.653)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Bost (43:07.523)
some time in the future, but I'm just going to stay the course. just going to figure it out now. I got, you know, seven chapters. Okay. Well, at least I know where I am in the path. but then of course I ended up rewriting it three times. So that kind of got thrown out, but at the end of the day, it's just a series of minor course corrections to end up, you know, and, and then, and we're always on that path too. We get to that point and we say, okay, there's another one. but just to, continue to know where you, but you have to define where you're going.

And I didn't do that in the first business. It was just, I'm going. I'm going to start walking in some direction that feels good without a real idea of where it ends up.

Christian Brim (43:42.103)
Yeah.

Christian Brim (43:47.724)
Yeah, and I think the moonshot is a great analogy. think Jim Collins was the one that first brought that into the business, the moonshot, your B-Hag, where it's time-bound. that's one I've struggled with because, yes, mean, you want some kind of accountability and time frame. But a lot of times, you know, the...

There's a book, I don't remember his name, he was a computer scientist. The title of the book is Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned. And he went through all of the truly great discoveries, movement forward, could not have been predicted because none of the necessary elements existed, right? And so like, the moonshots are great, like, okay, well.

Dylan Bost (44:39.249)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (44:43.447)
Do we even have a rocket that can get us off the earth? Right? Like, okay, well, we got to start there, right? And the idea that the path unfolds as you go on the journey, you do have an idea of your destination, but really how you get there is a great unknown. the idea that you can lay out the path in a straight line is fantasy. doesn't work that way.

Dylan Bost (44:47.397)
Yeah. Yeah.

Dylan Bost (45:01.755)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Bost (45:11.003)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, yeah, it's the antithesis of what, at least the way I was built, right? I mean, but I find now that is the beauty of every bit of it, right? I stop almost every day. And most of the time, it's when I'm frustrated doing something, is to recognize you're going to look back on this and realize how wonderful that was, even for as

Christian Brim (45:40.471)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Bost (45:40.678)
Difficult of time as I'm having right now and and yeah a lot of that's wisdom and having screwed up a whole bunch But the reality is it's it's important that you know to that point that is actually where the beauty is I mean the things that you're going to remember are Are those high and low points during the process? It's really not going to be getting to the end of it You know it's not going to be I think yeah winning an Oscar might be a wonderful thing But I think the reality is that came from the work that happened to get to that point

Christian Brim (46:01.388)
No.

Dylan Bost (46:10.339)
And so that's a wonderful acknowledgement. But I think if those people, you know, with any great success like that, when we think back, it's the reality is it's the work in between. So acknowledging that along the way is a real big thing for me is to really be in that moment and go, yeah, I'm not sure I want to do that today, but man, I know I'm going to grow through that. There's going to be expansion. I'm going to look back and enjoy the fact that even more so that I enjoy doing it.

Christian Brim (46:22.593)
Ciao.

Dylan Bost (46:39.185)
even the hard things.

Christian Brim (46:42.177)
Yeah, and as you're talking about that, I was thinking about the book, Why Greatness Can't Be Planned, his default, and this is as a computer scientist, was the default mechanism to achieve greatness is to seek out the novel. And that kind of dovetails with breaking the pattern, right? Like if you're just, if you're doing the same thing over and over, you're not going to get different results, or if you're trying to

Dylan Bost (46:52.603)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Bost (46:59.227)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (47:12.233)
reduce it to a predictable equation, that's not going to work. It's seeking out the new. What do you not know?

Dylan Bost (47:20.429)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

Christian Brim (47:24.673)
Dylan, I have very much enjoyed this conversation. How do people find your book?

Dylan Bost (47:29.713)
Just go to my website, dylanbost.com, and there's a clear link. It's called The Seven Mirrors, and I'd for you to check it out. We're in publishing right now, so it'll be later this year, but we'll have the first chapter available for anyone that signs up. And so I'd love to share that with everyone.

Christian Brim (47:49.044)
Love it. We'll have that listeners will have that link in the show notes that Dylan. Thank you very much for your candor and your time listeners. If you like what you've heard, please rate the podcast share the podcast subscribe to the podcast and until next time remember you are not alone.

Dylan Bost (47:57.169)
Yeah.