#258 – From $0 to $36k/Month in a Year with Dashiell Bark-Huss of WishTender

What's up, dude? I I got a question for you. If I asked you what are the things that motivate you, what would you say? Do you have, like, a ready answer? Do you know? I have a ready ish answer. We played RPGs all the time. So in an RPG, you're constantly trying to level up. And I would say that with me in real life, I see my life as basically an RPG. Right? So I'm really excited about, you know, leveling up my fiction writing skills and, like, publishing a novel. I'm really excited about leveling up how many people we reach with indie hackers and, like, being a better founder, etcetera, etcetera, being a better boyfriend. The list goes on and on. So, like, getting getting better at stuff is your number one motivator. Exactly. What else? It's just that? Motivator? I don't know. You could say the inverse. I've, like, fucked up in the past at various things, and I'm pretty motivated at, like, not making the same kinds of mistakes I've made in the past. It's a carrot and a stick. So I was talking to a mutual friend of ours, Brandon, and he was talking about how he met this doctor who was, like, just like a leading surgeon who had retired, and now he's an expert at pottery. And this guy, apparently, when he was 24, saw somebody spinning clay to make, like, a pot or something or a cup or something and was so transfixed that immediately he had, like, an moment and was like, this is what I have to do. And for the rest of his life, he basically was a surgeon, and then he retired and immediately went into pottery. And Brandon was saying that he does he's never had one of these moments. And I think I had one of those when I was a kid when I was, like, you know, using computers. And I was like, shit. This is what I have to do. But I was thinking last week, okay. What if you break it down even further and ask what within that particular career like, you like writing, but what is it inside of writing that you like? And I guess for you, it's the leveling up experience. But for me, I picked four different things that always motivate me. And I've been, like, trying to mix and match them to find other things in life that I would like. So for me, they are spending time with people that I like, working on something that's, like, mentally challenging and engaging, like puzzles of some sort or things I don't know how to do, Building some sort of cumulative project that, like, gets incrementally better and better over time, like building a website or building an Airbnb. Like, every day I go to it, it's bigger and better. That just, like, makes me feel good for some reason. And then number four, getting …