MYM #93 Paul Eckheart ~ It Is Never Too Late To Follow Your Dream

and why was he your nemesis? - Well, in many ways Brandon showed me what could have happened if I had just committed to writing from the beginning and said, you know what, the backup plan is nice, but we'll deal with that if it becomes necessary. - All right, all right, welcome back to the monetize your mindset podcast where we talk about creating financial security by monetizing what we already know or do. I like to talk about it as a memory jogger of all the opportunities that are around us and having the gumption, the willingness to take the action to turn those into a stream of income and don't leave any opportunities on the table. Today I had the opportunity to sit down with an author who lost his way a couple of times and settled for what was right there for him to make money not that it was a bad thing 'cause I'm sure he got picked compensated well. But I really like this episode and I'm excited to share it with you so stick around. But you know what we gotta do now, roll it. - Are you prepared for what happens when what happens happens? Life happens when you least expect it. Create financial security, monetize what you already know. Welcome to monetize your mindset. - Monetize your mindset. - Identify your ideal side hustle so that you have the resources to deal with whatever happens when what happens happens. It's time to monetize your mindset. Here's your host, Bart Merrill. - All right, let's get this thing going here. But before we get it to Paul, let's talk about rescue rovers. Rescue rovers is a dog rescue organization that takes dogs from down like in the reservation area or even down across the border in Juarez, Mexico, they have a partnership with a couple of shelters down there that in those shelters, those dogs don't have a chance. They get taken to the shelter once they're in take, they put them down. And but now they've partnered with rescue rovers and they bring loads of dogs from down there and we foster them until they can get adopted out up here. Mama's puppies, all sorts of dogs. If you have a place in your heart in your home to foster a dog until it can be adopted out, it's a tough but rewarding proposition. Now, we have only rescued one dog and it wasn't from Juarez, Mexico. It was from the West Jordan shelter. And we are what you would call a foster fail because we are gonna adopt him. He's a monster, he's a rot-wider puppy. I call him a puppy, but he's already 85 pounds or more. When we first got him, he was 80 pounds and that was maybe a month and a half, two months ago. He, anyway, so we are a foster fail, but we're still gonna do some fostering along the way. If you have a place, like I said, if you have a place in your heart or home or both, connect with rescuerovers.org and apply to be a foster. All right, now with that, let's get to Paul, who is an author and he'll introduce himself here in a second. So let's get to Paul and what he has to say now. I met him in a toast master's organization where he shared a story about his nemesis and how his nemesis did what he wanted to do and that's why it's his nemesis. And now he is following in the nemesis in his nemesis, I don't know if that's proper in his footsteps and going after what it really is that he wants. So everybody, welcome Paul. All right, welcome Paul to the monetize your mindset podcast. Thanks for joining us today. You're welcome, it's good to be here. So Paul, let's start out by introducing yourself to our audience. Just tell us a little bit about what you do and kind of where you came from and where you're going. Let's start with that. - Well, I have always been a writer as a hobby. I started off in high school and my original desire was to write plays. I wanted to get into theater. I did get into theater for a while, performed it a couple of things locally, kept that going and actually let that carry me into a minor in creative writing at the University of Utah. So always had the desire in the back of my mind to write full time. But I always said, you know, that's kind of a dangerous road. And I don't know if I'm going to be able to support myself, let alone my family if I just go down that pathway. So I always said, let's get a backup plan and make sure the backup plan is solid. And that led me to computer science, which was also a keen interest of mine. Some say I came by it genetically because my dad is in software his whole life. But kept that going and graduated from college got into computer science and engineering full time. It really took a crisis in the daytime job to kick me back into a place where I remembered how much I had enjoyed writing and how much I wanted to be doing that. And so for several years, I devoted myself to writing and all of the spare time that I had. Use that for my vacations for seven years would travel around to workshops. Ultimately, I fell back into bad habits again. And said, hey, I'm going to be an engineer. Well, you know what, here's another moment of crisis and another moment where I'm looking at my own life and saying, what do I really want to do? So I am at the point now where I am restarting my writing career. Had some moderate success with it before. And this time, it's time to commit to it and go in with everything I've got. Awesome. You and I met in Toastmasters. You gave your icebreaker speech per se to my club just yesterday. And you talked about your nemesis. I did. Many of your listeners are probably already familiar with him, too. And I think I have told him face to face that he is my nemesis. I'm sure he doesn't remember it. But we are talking about the fantasy writer, the premier fantasy writer in the world right now, Brandon Sanderson. Well, in many ways, Brandon showed me what could have happened if I had just committed to writing from the beginning. And said, you know what, the backup plan is nice, but we'll deal with that if it becomes necessary. Brandon and I are the same age. We had many of the same experiences growing up. Some of the first times that we each wrote stories, the mirrored up really well. And Brandon just went for it. He went to college, got his degree, and started writing out of a friend's basement. And I've always looked at that and said, you know, I could have done the same thing. But I decided to go a different direction. Well, and I heard your story. I thought, man, I need to have him on my podcast because he is going through and doing things that did things and is doing things that a lot of people probably are right now with the current situation that the COVID-19 thing is just getting over. For a lot of people, they do exactly what you did. They didn't go for what they really wanted. They settled for what was there. You know, that's something that I believe, if you have a monetized mindset. So in monetize your mindset, I asked three questions. Well, let's take it to six questions. What do you like to do? What do you need to do? What are you already doing? Can you monetize it? Then I take it one, you know, the other three questions are what do you want to learn? What do you need to learn? What have you already learned that you could monetize? And I believe that it's monetize your mindset as being aware of the opportunities all around you and then being willing to act on those opportunities so that you make things happen. And a lot of people settle. Then they get to a point where they have to reconsider and do exactly what it is that you are doing right now with your writing. Before we get into some of that stuff, though, let's go back into your computer. You've done some pretty interesting things, simulators and stuff like that. So you've done some really, really amazing stuff. So tell us what you can tell us about what you've done. Sure. When I got out of college, I went to work in the games industry. I spent my internship in another year working for a subcontractor, for Hasbro software, for Sierra online. We released several games that people might even still be familiar with. We did the board game conversion for Clube. And did that for a couple of years. And when they shut down their Salt Lake office, I was referred to another company that was a break off from Evans in the South of the Netherlands. They were doing driver training simulation. So if you think of any kind of job where you would drive for a living, commercial truck drivers, emergency response, police, we did the training for those kinds of systems. And while I was there, I wrote the 3D graphics engine. That was my main responsibility. Worked on that for eight years, then went and did a project for the military. And after that, that was where I said, I need to refocus on the things that I have always said, I wanted to do. Is that project for the military was a 18-month project that they gave us six months to complete? - That's a lot of time. - Yeah, needless to say, we did not ship on time. We relate on that one. And all of engineering had spoken up and said, you know, we can't really deliver this. And management said, well, we've already signed the contract for it. So we're going to have people here 24 hours a day and whatever it takes to deliver this thing. It was a painful experience. It was my first real death march. And we ultimately did pull it off, but I gave my notice the day that I flew out to install the simulator. So I came back, spent a week doing documentation and then was unemployed. I was so burned out I left without having a place to go. And this was back in 2007. So it was before the big crash. It didn't have any real concerns about it. I was pretty convinced I could find the job readily. But the opportunity came up to attend my first professional writers workshop. And that was with Orson Scott Card. He brought a workshop to Orham. And I just said I'm going for it. So I submitted a sample of writing and was accepted to the workshop. So after I had given notice, I'd done the documentation, left the job. I took a week off and then went to the workshop. And honestly, I pretended I was a writer for a week. And it was great. I loved it. But with time and the need to have a paycheck, it became necessary to go back to engineering and let that kind of consume me again for quite a while. Well, it sounds like you've done some pretty amazing stuff. And when it comes to your engineering work that you've done. And when it comes to doing what they wanted you to do the 18 months in six months. And they had someone 24 hours a day working on it. That had to be just mind numbing to be there. How many hours a day were you personally working? I was putting in between 80 and 100 hours a week for 14 months straight before we finally shipped. Wow. That's a lot of hours. That's a lot. I could see how you could get burnt out after that. I'm assuming the pay was quite well. Maybe I'm wrong. I was still young and stupid. So I didn't know better. I didn't know market rates. What I didn't know was it was a great opportunity. Since I was the team lead for it. I took advantage of that and decided it was worth it for the experience. Awesome. But now going to your getting to spend a week pretending you were a writer. How did that feel? How did that feel to be going down the road where you wanted to go? You know, it was intimidating. I have a very distinct memory of being on day three of the workshop. And we were starting to get the feedback from Orson Scott Card on our stories. Everybody was reviewed in the order in which they turned things in. I was still working on my story. I felt like I was stuck. And people were turning in their stories and we were doing the review sessions and the critiques and comments coming back on other people's stories were amazing. It was an incredibly talented group of writers. And I felt like I was an imposter. I felt like I absolutely did not belong. I kept turning away on that story and ultimately ended up throwing it away and starting from scratch on the last day before-- the last day I could work on it before it had to be turned in. It turned in something completely different. That process of writing something really quickly and out of desperation did something interesting to me. I connected with the characters that I was writing about in a way that I never did when I was in high school and college and getting my degree. Those were exercises. But this time when I just cramped that out at the last minute, emotionally, I understood what the characters were going through and a way that I never had before. And I still remember when I got to the end and wrote the last paragraph, I had tears screaming down my face and the only thought in my head was, I did it. I am a writer. Wow. And I'm sure a lot of us going through different situations, even myself, talking about multiple streams of income, monetize your mindset. I get into the imposter syndrome hiccup or get that feeling sometimes, because I'm not a millionaire. But I have never had a real job. And I've done pretty well. I haven't-- like I said, I'm not a millionaire. I don't claim to be a millionaire. But I just have done things. I have been willing to take advantage of the opportunities that-- let me rephrase that. I have been prepared to take advantage of the opportunities that come my way and been willing to step out and take action upon those opportunities, most of them. There is an opportunity that if I probably have taken advantage of, I would be a millionaire. So I kind of kicked myself in the butt on that one. So I helped to take the first commercial bungee jump to Japan back in the '90s. And while I was there, I went to this golf club called F1. And it was a driving range where the balls pop up out of the ground and you hit the ball and another ball pops up and you hit the ball. And you just, man, and I saw this. And I'm just like, within-- before I knew it, I'd ran through $100 to hit and buck its balls. But you didn't know it because you bought this card and you put the card in and then you just swing away. And I'm just like, man, this is a money-making machine. I didn't-- I was young. I didn't-- we're talking million dollars of facility and equipment and stuff like that. Millions of dollars to get it started. But then what's popular now is the top golf, which is a similar system. And if I had gathered the money, put the money together, and helped bring that to America, I could be in a different situation. But I just didn't have the confidence and the-- I don't know-- the gumption to get her done. And I didn't do it. But we all fall into that imposter syndrome situation. Yeah, it's really interesting that you mentioned that. I've been watching-- well, a handful of different things on reality TV lately. I never thought I would get into reality because I would be in my jam, right? And it's always the competition shows that fascinate me. So from any of the things like chopped on Food Network to what's the one on the History Channel forged in fire, and lately I've been watching blown away on Netflix. All of these competitions where people are highly skilled, they have to be highly skilled to be there. But almost without exception, when they start talking to them and saying, why are you doing this? What would it mean to you to win? Almost without exception, the answer is, well, it would give me validation. Yeah, it would prove that I had made a right choice in my life. And I think that's fascinating. The conclusion that I have had to come to is that you are what you do. And so when it comes to the whole imposter syndrome and do you fit into something, well, for the case that you were talking about, if you had done that, yeah, you could say, I'm an entrepreneur. Succeed or fail, you're an entrepreneur. For me, with writing, I've had reasonable success. I've got a dozen published stories. I've had some stories on years best lists of one a major international competition with the writers of the future contest. Without exception, when I came back from those, I should have been validated. I should have been able to say, hey, look, I showed up on these lists. I won this award. It doesn't happen. You don't get that real validation that you belong there. You'd have to earn it. It has to be, I am a writer, therefore, I write. Or because I write, therefore, I'm a writer. That's the way it has to work. You're not going to get the validation from external things. It doesn't happen that way. It doesn't stick. Yeah, yeah, I get that. So I'm actually a published author. I don't think I told you that. I wrote a book called Monetizer Mindset, but it's a how to think book. It's how to think about those questions that I asked. It's a memory jogger. I go through several examples, both mine and other people that I've told their stories on some of the stuff they have monetized and how the successes and failures that they may have had. But writing something like a fantasy novel or a story, that's something I've never even attempted. So tell me a little bit. I know we don't have a whole lot of time to get deep into how you do something like that. But how do you do what you said you did in that short period of time where you connected with the different characters and stuff? Tell me a little bit about that process. That's kind of interesting to me. Where do you even start? Do you start at the end or do you start at the beginning? Or how does it work? Well, I'm trying to figure out the best way to answer your question because every story is its own thing. Okay, I can't say that there is a set process because every piece that I have written has been its own unique thing. The most recent story that I published followed that same kind of pattern. as the Orson Scott Hardwork Shop. I was submitting to an anthology. There was a midnight deadline, and I had been working on a piece for a week, and it just wasn't coming together, or at least it wasn't coming together within the word limit that the anthology put on us. I had a maximum of 7,000 words for the story, and the editors had specifically said, if you are coming close to 7,000, it's gotta be something really special. We really want stories between 3,000 and 5,000 words. So I'd been working on this, and man, I was getting way up there. It was obvious. I was going to go over the acceptable word count. And, but just now that I was telling a bigger story, then would have worked for what they were looking for. It doesn't mean I gave it up. But at 9 o'clock at night, I just said, this isn't gonna happen. If I want something submitted to them, I've gotta go for it. So at 9 o'clock, I started with a single image in my head of a guy waking up inside a religious temple for that society, where it was completely pitch dark, and he had to fumble around in the darkness to figure out where he was. And from that image, I ended up with this whole story of 4,500 words finished at 11.50 pm. - Wow. - So I had time to do a spell check on it and submit it. And I was absolutely convinced that thing would not sell 'cause I hadn't spent any time doing polish. I hadn't had time to do anything other than just type one word after the other. And you know what, that's the one that sold. - Huh. And in this, these, I don't know, so let me give you an example that you may have watched. Did you, by chance, watched the series on, believe it was Netflix called 100? I've heard of it, I haven't watched it. - I mean, that was kind of a fantasy, well, maybe not fantasy, more sci-fi. Anyway, very interesting, very complex story. And it was, I don't know, there was seven, eight seasons and 24 episodes per season. So it was quite lengthy. But I just think about writing something like that and how complex it has to be. I mean, my book that I wrote between me and my creative editor that I had, we spent, probably took me five months and I would write out the stories and write out each page and then I would go over it with my creative editor and he would make me sound better. And even, and then I even had it proofread two times and there's still mistakes in my book. I paid someone twice, two different people to proofread my book and it still has mistakes and then I just go, man, writing is a pain in the behind. I don't know that I'll write another book, but I probably will. And now that we're having this interview, it kind of intrigues me about how to tell a story that is not your own. So my story's in the book or the stories that I told of other people, I interviewed the people and then I just put it into words. But to create a short story, and I used to, I mean, I used to read a lot as a kid. I would read Stephen King, I read Edgar Allan Poe, when I was in second grade, my parents took my books away for me because I was waking up in the middle of the night screaming 'cause I was watching, I would read like the short stories tells of the midnight hour or something like that. And I just, I may attempt writing a short story sometime just to see if I can do it because it seems a little bit intriguing on how to make everything come together. Do you draw a lot on your experiences that you've had to create your stories? - Some certainly. - 'Cause I just, I mean, as we're talking here, I'm just kind of thinking about things and how we, like I said, I don't even know do you start at the beginning and just go with it? Do you have the end in mind already? And then you just fill in the spots. You know, you have the beginning in the end and you fill in the spots, but I find it very intriguing and I salute you for being someone who can write a story. I had a companion on my church mission that I served for the LDS church in Japan and he was an amazing writer. You know, he would write short stories and stuff and I got to read them while we were together. But, I mean, he was genius level, where he read Tolstoy for fun. Encyclopedias for fun. I don't, by any means, consider myself at that level. In fact, I remember I sent him my book before I had it proofread to several times and I just asked him for his opinion and he sent him back and he said, "You want me to do all the editing work for you or what?" He says, "Don't send it to me unless it's ready to publish and then I'll take a look at it." But anyway, I think it's very intriguing what you have done with your main job and what you're doing with your side hustle and I commend you. Well, let's get into some questions that I like to ask people on my podcast. And the first question is, what is a failure or a mistake that you've made where you've learned the most and what did you learn? Well, I'm going to go back and just touch a little bit on what you just said in the way of answering this question. Awesome. I truly believed that to be a good fiction writer required a university degree. I bought into that completely. I was going to go get the degree in English. I did minor in creative writing. I don't regret it. I had some great teachers. There was one in particular who taught play writing and since that was the direction I thought I was headed, I absolutely loved that class. But a lot of those university classes are taught by people who still aspire to be published and income earning, you know, all of their income coming from their writing. They still aspire to that. They're not there yet, right? So the couple of the big lessons, I would say, are number one, learning from people who aren't much further down the road. If you learn from people who are only a step or two ahead of you, you can still pick up some good things. But in many ways, they're still figuring it out themselves. And I blew that when I was getting my original education, a lot of what I've learned came later. So if you were to ask me today, how do you learn to be a fiction writer? I'm gonna go to something that I think it was David Mammett who said, when he was talking about how to learn to be a playwright. He said, you learn to be a playwright by writing something, getting it, you learn to be a writer by writing something, getting it in front of an audience and learning from the audience's response and repeat. That's really the only way to do it. I like that. And I've heard that in another, you know, just not that, but I've heard I had a mentor of mine who teaches social media marketing in the network marketing industry. And he said, when it comes to marketing, create something, create a piece, put it out there and let the market decide. Don't not, don't create something and don't put it out there because then you're deciding instead of letting the market decide. And so I like that. He also said, if you want to, how do you put it? If you want to affect the least amount of people in the world wait until it's perfect. And two things that I have a hard time with. One, putting stuff out there that I don't think is perfect and two, letting the, you know, putting stuff out there and letting the market decide instead of me deciding before I put it out. Can you let's flip that question on its head? And we're going to talk about what is the success that you've had and what did you learn from that success? Because I believe if we can, if we can pinpoint some of the key factors that helped that success happen, we can recreate success. - So the story that I wrote, that when the writers of the future contest, I may never write anything that good ever again. It's one of the only times that when I was writing something, I knew it was a great story. I've never had that with any of the other things, but that one I knew. So if I look at what happened in the process of writing that story, I really devoted myself to it completely for a period of time. I used vacation from work. I was at a writing workshop. And so I had been going through the workshop exercises for several days before that was written. So that got me into the right mindset for it. That got the skills up to speed. And I had really no other focus for the period of time that I was working on it. And it came together, I can't say easily, but it came together in a way that I knew was going to work from the time I got the complete outline of the piece in my head to the time it was done. I knew I was onto something. And what are some of those, you say some of the exercises? What are some of those writers exercises that people do? A number of them were based on establishing a setting or character, writing the first three or four pages of various scenes, putting myself in different characters, points of view, making sure that the setting was clear. And because it was a writer's workshop, I was able to get feedback along the way and make some tweaks and adjustments. But those were all just the exercises, the story itself. That was one that once I started it, I didn't show it to anybody until it was finished. And the feedback, as soon as I started showing it, was amazing. So, So like I said, I knew pretty quickly that it was going to be something special. Awesome. So, if people wanted to get in contact with some of your work or find out more about you, where would they go? I do have a website, [email protected], and that's @cart with an H-H-E-A-R-T. I'm also on Facebook, but social media isn't really my thing. So the website is probably the right way to see what I'm up to. Okay, I'll put your website in the show notes. And then final question as we wrap things up here. Just in your story, you've had some, you know, we've talked about what you started out in, what you wanted to do, where you ended up. There are probably people out there who have ideas, have desires that they want to do, past that they want to follow. But for some reason, they're sitting on the fence, and they can't take that first step. What is your best advice to them to help them get off the fence and get into action? I would refer them to a book that has been on my mind a lot this past couple of months. It's called Soundtracks, and it's by John Akaf, ACUFF, I think, along just a second. I have it right here, so I'll look it up. Yes, ACUFF, and it's not J-O-H-N, it's J-O-N-A-C-U-F. His concept of a soundtrack is a thought that is unrepeat in your head. How often do you get yourself stuck into a way of thinking or a repeating thought? I'm not worth this, or this is difficult. This isn't what I want to be doing. His entire book is about how we change the soundtracks that guide our lives. The more I have considered what he's talking about and started to put some of those things into practice, the more I'm seeing the value of it. I would say it all comes down to the way you think about things and being able to build those correct patterns of thought that will turn into the correct patterns of behavior so that you can then accomplish what you really want to do. I like it. I'll have to. It's not a book I've heard of. I mean, I say that. I did hear you mention it in your speech in Toastmasters the other day. Once again, really good speech. Thank you. And so it's something that I haven't read or looked into, but I'm going to have to look into that because I like that about, you know, what's the soundtrack in your head that's playing and knowing that they can affect your outcome. Absolutely. On your soundtrack. Paul, thank you for joining me today. I appreciate your time. And I really, I really think you gave us some valuable things to think about when it comes to doing what you want to do versus doing something to pay the bills. Now granted, we know that you have to pay the bills, but that's what's great about a side hustle. You can do what you enjoy and until it becomes your main hustle or is able to cover the bills, you can still have something else helping you cover the bills. And so I just really like your story and I like what you're actually doing by going out going after what it is you want to achieve as an author. So thanks for joining us today. Thanks for your insight and for everybody else out there. Go monetize it. Thanks for listening to the monetize your mindset podcast, podcast to identify your ideal side hustle. Go to your idealside hustle.com here. Take a deep dive into what you like to do, what you need to do, what you're already doing. And then ask, how can I monetize it? Come on back next week for more on how to create financial security so you can deal with whatever happens when whatever happens happens because it will happen.