Near a y'all, welcome back to the Indie Hacker's podcast. Thanks. Great to be here, Cortland. It's good to have you back. You were last on the podcast, I think two years ago, around July of 2017. We talked about your book hooked, How to Build Habit Forming Products, which has since gone on to become a Wall Street Journal bestseller at it number one in the products scattering are on Amazon. And it's also one of my favorite books. It's giving me a couple of useful mental models that I use on a regular basis. Today, you've written a new book. It's called Indistractable. Why don't you tell us a little bit about it and what it means to be indestructible? Yeah, so the definition of becoming indestructible, by the way, it's a made-up word. And so the benefit of having a made-up word is that you can define it any way you like. So I define indestructible as a person who strives to do what they

say they're going to do. It's about personal integrity. You know, none of us would think it's

acceptable to lie to our friends, to our family, to our colleagues. We would never do that. And yet, we lie to

ourselves all the time. We say we're going to do one thing. We don't. Right? We say we're going to work out. We don't. We say we're going to eat right. We don't. We say we're going to sit down at our desk and do that hard project that we've been putting off. We don't. We say we're going to be fully present with our kids and family and friends, but we're distracted. And so that's really what the

book is about, is how do you become... we don't. We say we're going to be fully present with our kids and family and friends, but we're

distracted. And so that's really what the book is about, is how do you become indistractable? How do you become the kind of person who lives with personal integrity, who does what they say they're going to do? Obviously, this stuff is important for everybody, but as an indie hacker, especially as the founder of like a very early stage tech

business, it's doubly important. If you're not able to do the things that you've committed to doing, if you can't do the things that you've told yourself you're going to do, then nobody else is going to step in and do it for you. You don't have a bunch of coworkers. There's no system in place. You don't have a bunch of employees. It's really just you. And so if you consistently don't get things done, then your company's

not going to progress. And you know this well, near. You've started and sold a couple of tech

businesses yourself. How can becoming indistractable help us to become better founders?

You know, one of the hardest things about running a company is prioritizing properly and then executing on those priorities. Because when you're

in the fog of war that is a startup, there are so many things coming at you all the time. And so

it's absolutely critical to know what to work on and then to actually execute on those tasks.

I mean, as a founder, that's pretty much your only job. That's your job in a nutshell, Michelle, just prioritize and execute. That's it. That's all you got to do. But that's, of course, extremely challenging. And many times what we see is it's kind of one or the other. We see a lot of founders, I do a lot of angel investing. So you see folks who are really bad at prioritizing or really bad at executing. And of course, we need both. And so where distraction

comes to play is if you are constantly distracted, we used to call this the shiny pony.

When I was at my last startup, I've helped start two companies. And we used to call this the shiny

pony of like, oh, there's a new idea, right?

Let's all do that.

And it would be strategically we'd have shiny ponies distracting us.

And we'd also have, you know, during the day, you know, whether it's office gossip or the latest thing trending on Twitter or a flurry of emails that something's important

and now everything else has to come to a halt. So, you know, being able to do what it is you say

you're going to do, this is a macro skill. I mean, this is the skill of the century that I believe

that the world is becoming a potentially more distracting place and we're bifurcating into two groups of people.

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