The Transcript

How to Ditch Your Perfectionist Mindset

Jonny Nastor: Hack the Entrepreneur is part of Rainmaker.FM, the digital business podcast network. Find more great shows and education at Rainmaker.FM.

Voiceover: Welcome to Hack the Entrepreneur, the show which reveals the fears, habits, and inner battles behind big-name entrepreneurs and those on their way to joining them. Now here is your host, Jon Nastor.

Jonny Nastor: Welcome back to another episode of Hack the Entrepreneur. It is so very, very cool of you to decide to join me again today. I’m your host, Jon Nastor, but you can call me Jonny.

My guest today is a serial entrepreneur, speaker, blogger, consultant, and coach at Systems Scientist. She’s a podcaster and the author of Owning It: Embrace the Best AND Worst Parts of You to Thrive in Life and Business.

She is the founder of Mydzik Media, the host of the Off-Road Millennial podcast, where she talks about the future of work and millennial entrepreneurship, and she also writes about personal branding and life/work balance for her personal site. She is a scientist by trade, so she uses a mixture of her analytical and creative mind to help others identify the deficiencies and strengths within their personal lives and businesses. Now, let’s hack Mallie Rydzik.

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Welcome back to another episode of Hack the Entrepreneur. We have a very, very, very special guest today. Mallie, welcome to the show.

The Two Essential Elements of Successful Entrepreneurship

Mallie Rydzik: Hi, Jon. How you doing?

Jonny Nastor: I’m doing excellent. Thank you so much for coming on. I appreciate it.

Mallie Rydzik: Yeah, of course.

Jonny Nastor: All right, Mallie. We’re going to go straight into this if we can.

Mallie Rydzik: Okay, I’m ready.

Jonny Nastor: Mallie, as an entrepreneur, can you tell me what is the one thing that you do that you feel has been the biggest contributor to your successes so far?

Mallie Rydzik: This is interesting, because I was listening to another one of your guests, and they were talking about how planning had really contributed to their success. And I’m going to go completely the opposite here and say that my flexibility has really contributed to my success.

When I was growing up, I was an Army brat, and so I learned adaptability really fast. I’ve really applied that to my entrepreneurial journey. That means when things get thrown at me, there’s failures, like everybody has, I feel like I’m bouncing back faster because I no longer have that perfectionist mindset of, It has to be this or it’s nothing else.

Jonny Nastor: Wow. I like that. Did you say an Army brat?

Mallie Rydzik: An Army brat. Yes. Those of us that grew up as children of military parents.

Jonny Nastor: Oh, okay. That’s what I thought, but then I was like, Does that mean you were in the Army and just not good at it or …?

Mallie Rydzik: and I was a jerk. Yeah. I was a jerky soldier. No.

Jonny Nastor: Oh, wow. So you mean lots of moving around, that sort of thing, and adapting to new environments?

Mallie Rydzik: Yeah, it was lots of moving, getting to know new environments, new ways of working. It seems silly when you think about it. It’s like, well, how difficult is elementary school and middle school? But as a kid, you have to learn those skills pretty quickly, or you’re going to not make any friends, or you’re going to do poorly in school, not have any extracurricular activities. So by learning how to be adaptable back then, I really feel like that s helped me today.

Jonny Nastor: Yeah, exactly. I don’t think we should say, “How hard is grade school? and stuff because it means everything when you’re a kid, right? It’s your whole world.

Mallie Rydzik: That’s true. Right.

Jonny Nastor: There’s nothing more important because you’re in the trenches, literally, to bring the Army brat back to it, at that point. You are, and it’s hard, right?

Mallie Rydzik: Right.

Jonny Nastor: It’s interesting because people ask me about my daughter. We travel, do stuff, and they go like, “How does she deal with it?” I’m like, “Well, I didn’t know anything really about kids except that I was one at one point, but they’re super adaptable. They’ll adapt to anything.”

Does this get bred out of us as we get older? Because I think you’re right. I think it’s a super-necessary skill to have, especially as an entrepreneur and going for big, cool things. Not just, “Well, I’m going to go to this office for the next 30 years,” because not a lot of adaptation needs to go on at that point.

Mallie Rydzik: Right, right. I’m sure some people who are still working in corporate would say, “Well, you have to be flexible with where you are on the ladder and everything,” but it’s a different world in the entrepreneurial spaces, as we both know.

Jonny Nastor: Yeah. Okay, so from Army brat to now an entrepreneur. There seems to be this time in every entrepreneur’s life when they realize one of two things: either they have this calling to make this big, giant difference in the world, or as seems to mostly be the case, they find they simply cannot work for somebody else.

Mallie, could you please tell me where you sit on that fence, or which side of that fence? Hopefully, not on the fence. Maybe. And could you tell me when you discovered this about yourself?

Mallie Rydzik: I was never really approaching work as, Okay, I’m going to do the 65 years of working. I don’t know. How long do you work? How long do normal people work?

Jonny Nastor: I have no idea. What do normal people do?

Mallie Rydzik: Like my father-in-law, who’s been at the same company for 35 years. If it were back in the day, it would have been the golden-watch type of thing, but again — man, I feel like a therapy session here. With my father being in the military, he retired from the military after 20 years and completely had to find a new career when he was 42 or whatever it was. He was an Army test pilot, but he got a degree in accounting. Those two things don’t really go together, so even though my parents weren’t entrepreneurs, I still have that model of, Okay, sometimes people do things differently.

Then, as I was growing up, I was focusing a lot on school, because as we moved, I found I was good at school, so that was what I really liked to focus on. So I went to college. I went to grad school. And I was actually in a PhD program. When I was in the middle of my PhD program, I had a bit of a mental-health breakdown. Obviously, it was very difficult at the time, but I ended up with diagnoses of OCD — obsessive/compulsive disorder — chronic depression, and an eating disorder. That really threw me for a loop.

Knowing When to Ask for Help, When You Need It

Mallie Rydzik: Sometimes, people feel a little weird that I’m so open and talking about this, but I feel like it’s good to show that you can come through these things if you’re adaptable, if you go get the help that you need. So really, my path was never intentionally corporate. It was academic, so from there, I really had to re-evaluate how I looked at work, how I looked at life.

I realized that, Okay, I’m already kind of taking this academic path of, eh, I don’t really want to work for somebody else. Then I also realized, I don’t want to work for somebody else, but I also want to make a difference. I was wondering how much academia I was really going to be able to make a difference in it.

To very succinctly answer your question, kind of a mix of the two. I think it was really both a mixture of not wanting to work for somebody else and also wanting to make a difference.

Jonny Nastor: Wow, I love it, and I really, truly appreciate the honesty. It’s interesting. I guess it’s the all-American dream: college to grad school into a PhD. That’s taking it to the ultimate end. Then you obviously hit these huge stumbling blocks and made it through the other side, and then it changed your path. That’s really interesting.

I guess that could be brought back to your flexibility, your adaptability. You dealt with something so massive — I mean, between OCD or depression or an eating disorder, any one of those takes a person down oftentimes. You put three together, and wow. And you still come out the other side stronger.

Mallie Rydzik: I’d like to think so. I feel like I definitely came out stronger. The path wasn’t really clear from academia to, Oh, okay, well, entrepreneurship is a lot like academia. I had to go through a couple of hoops to find that connection, and it is interesting. Now I’ve written a couple of blog posts of, well, my goal as an academic was to have my own lab, get my own funding, run a small team of grad students who would help me with my research. That’s kind of the entrepreneurial path, but different. I’ve always found that pretty interesting.

I left academia. I got my master’s degree instead of my PhD, and I did a couple of odd jobs. Those included dog walking, nannying, those types of things. Then I started to discover this online business world, and so I took on some work as a freelance writer. What I found was a lot of people were really interested in people who had science degrees who could also write.

I never had to go into those content mills, the people that are getting paid cents on the dollar. I was able to jump in. I wrote for USA Today. I was hired by a local company to help with their science editing, and that was super helpful. Now, I was doing this all while working a corporate job, and I took the corporate job just because I knew I wanted a steady paycheck. I didn’t really know exactly what I was going to get out of this online business world, but honestly, after like two days, I knew that corporate wouldn’t work for me.

Jonny Nastor: Two days!

Mallie Rydzik: Going back to the previous question.

Jonny Nastor: I love that.

Mallie Rydzik: I was so not happy. Yeah, you can ask my husband all about how exciting that time was for both of us when I would come home, and I was like, “This sucks.”

Jonny Nastor: Wow!

Mallie Rydzik: But I’d had that taste. I’d had the taste of grad school and the freedom that came with that, the idea of academia, and I was working online already. The bureaucracy and everything that went into the corporate space was just mind-numbing to me, and I’m sure plenty of your listeners agree. That’s why we’re all here.

After six months, I gave my two-weeks’ notice — or I think I gave them three-weeks’ notice so I could help with the transition — and just hopped off and took on a bridge job, a part-time job as a tutor, and continued working my freelance and building that up. Then from there, I went and tried an e-commerce business, drop-shipping fulfillment for a pet-store-supply website. I built up the freelance bit. Tried out life coaching. Tried out an Etsy shop. I’m so not artistic, so that was really silly.

Then that’s when I really started to find my niche of coaching. As people were watching me do these things, they started asking me, “How are you doing this?” I realized there was this space for business coaching.

Jonny Nastor: That’s awesome. That’s awesome. I love it. Wow. The very beginning of that answer, you said, “I didn’t know where I was going, or it didn’t make sense at the time, but now looking back …”

Mallie Rydzik: Right.

Jonny Nastor: It’s like imagine if you would have, at the very beginning, been like, “Okay, this is exactly what I’m going to do,” and it was this crazy zigzag path. There’s no way. There’s no way you could have known that in advance.

Mallie Rydzik: That’s right, and it would have been really boring to know, Okay, you’re going to do this weird zigzag for seemingly no reason and end up here.

Jonny Nastor: Exactly, exactly. Interesting, though, freelance writer, especially with science, and getting paid well for it. You’re right, not like the content-mill people, like $10 an article.

Mallie Rydzik: Right.

Jonny Nastor: Did you ever go through … I mean, they call it impostor syndrome, but I don’t know if it would be the same. I don’t know anything about academia, but I have a brother-in-law who’s a PhD, so I know when you write something, it doesn’t just get published. It’s a huge process. Now, you’re writing for USA Today, and it’s going through an editor or two, but then it’s published.

Mallie Rydzik: Right, right.

Jonny Nastor: Was that hard? Were you like, “Should I be doing this? Is this right?”

Mallie Rydzik: It seemed too easy coming from academia. Actually, I have two first-author papers from academia, so I’ve been through the wringer of the peer-review publication process and going back and forth with the revisions. I have a paper that never ended up seeing the light of day after three years of work.

With USA Today, they were like, “Hey, can you write this article?” and I did. Then the editor checked it, and she was like, “Oh, cool,” and then she published it. I was like, I don’t … This seems wrong. Yeah, so I definitely had … if that’s what you’re asking.

Jonny Nastor: I totally am. I was wondering. But it’s also cool, because you started out in the hardest possible way. To most people, they think, “Wow! Writing for USA Today would be the hardest thing ever,” and you’re just like, “Wow! Is it that easy? It shouldn’t be,” because you started with this PhD hurdle. I mean, writing for academia is hard.

Mallie Rydzik: Right.

Jonny