Episode 826 | How to Find, Hire, and Work with Owner-Level Thinkers

When I first started my career, I was a task level thinker. I just couldn't do multiple things at once. I couldn't prioritize. I couldn't manage it. I couldn't keep all the plates spinning. And then over the course of the first five ish, six ish years, I remember getting to the point where I was really comfortable running projects, and I think I became a a solid project level thinker at that point. And then as I dipped my toe into becoming an entrepreneur, I wasn't an owner level thinker because I needed too much certainty. I couldn't make hard decisions with incomplete information. I didn't know how to do that. And then it took me another five to eight years to really feel into it and to to be confident in my own ability to trust my founder gut and to develop my founder gut to the point where I was making good decisions because that's what being an owner level thinker requires. Welcome back to another episode, Startups with the Rest of Us. I'm your host, Rob Walling. And in this episode, I'm gonna dive into themed listener questions. So if you don't know, I've recently started writing again, publishing essays for the first time really since about 2011, and I'm doing that over at robwalling.com. If you enter your name and email in any of the forms on that site, you can start receiving a weekly thought from me. And some of these are mental models, they're frameworks, they're questions that I'm often asked by founders, whether that's from tiny seed on this podcast, in the micro comp community direct via email. And most of these are concepts that I have not covered in a prior book. Some of them are concepts that I've developed here on this podcast or am developing on the podcast. And I realized that I'm putting out a ton of audio content every year, a ton of video content on youtube.com/@robwalling, but I haven't really done serialized written content in quite a long time. And I decided that I wanted to double down on that modality this year because I feel like there are a lot of folks who maybe don't wanna listen to audio or video, and the way they learn best is through written content. So if you head to robwalling.com, you'll hear a new thought from me every week. As I've been doing this, though, it's been this great feedback loop because I'm sending out these emails and receiving a lot of questions about them. And when it's as easy as just hitting reply to an email and shooting me a question, I feel like I get a lot more questions about the topics. I'm also getting a lot of thanks, and I'm glad you're writing again, which makes me feel really motivated and, makes me feel grateful to have such an awesome community. But recently, I sent out an email about task level, project level, and owner …