#17: Building Something that Outlives Yourself with Zachary Murray

Hosted by Josh Gonsalves

9.28.2020

41 MIN 39 SEC

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Episode Description

This is part 2 of 2 of this conversation with Zachary Murray.

For part 1 go to https://bit.ly/mindmeld-16

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Josh and Zach discuss passion projects, having many obscure / niche interests, accumulating wealth, scaling businesses, the endless pursuit of learning new skills, building things that outlive your own life, productivity hacks, building a "horizontal to-do app", and much more.

Zachary Murray is the Founder & Creative Director at Foreplay, a Toronto based performance marketing and creative agency helping e-commerce and D2C brands scale alongside their own internal ventures including Nomadic Fabrics which scaled to over 7 Figures in the first year.

Connect with Zach is on Instagram @thisis_zach (http://instagram.com/thisis_zach)

Foreplay is currently hiring @weareforeplay (http://instagram.com/weareforeplay)

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Zach wants to find a passion project where he could be the customer
Having obscure / niche interests
Combining your passions and hobbies with your work
Have the same lifestyle as your customer to stay relevant and empathize with your customers
Josh talks about how his new company Longboi started
Traffic Secrets book by Russell Brunson
Zach's advice for doing more than one project at a time
Zach wants to accumulate wealth via an exit of a company or asset he sells to fund future projects
Scaling a software business vs. product-based business
Selling a software business vs. a product business
Building and marketing a successful D2C (direct to consumer) brand
Dollar Shave Club
Marketing to a focused niche audience
Zach is looking to sell his company Nomadic Fabrics
Zach talks about the moment he realized he shouldn't be working on Nomadic
E-commerce companies typically sell at 32x their monthly profit
Zach's YouTube channel
Zach's journey creating YouTube videos since he was in the 10th grade
Diversifying and having multiple streams of income
Zach started getting into leather working
Penn and Teller Magic Masterclass
The problems and decision fatigue associated with having some many hobbies and things to do
The endless pursuit of learning skills
Learning lots of new things to make connections between them all
Eliminating distractions
Building something that outlives yourself
Jason Silva
Josh tells the story of Steve Jobs telling Pixar President Ed Catmull how their stories will outlive Apple products for generations
Building works of art that live on for generations
Leonardo Da Vinci saw himself more as an architect and scientist, but is known for being an artist
The Buddha and the Badass book by Vishen Lakhiani
Mindvalley
The Code of the Extraordinary Mind book by Vishen Lakhiani
Sleep Mastery course on Mindvalley
Chronotypes
Becoming financially succesful, while avoiding complacency
Incorporating journaling as a daily practice
Atomic Habits book by James Clear
Habit chaining / habit stacking
Thomas Frank's note-taking Notion template
Roam Research
Zach thinks "horizontally" rather than "vertically", more like a timeline than a vertical document
Zach felt like he had more time in a day when he laid out his schedule horizontally in a timeline rather than a vertical list
Biodiversity of people who think on an X axis vs. a Y axis
Chronodex
Josh and Zach brainstorm building a time-tracking tool in Google Sheets or Airtable with multiple views depending on how you want to visualize time
The changing of seasons moving from summer to autumn

Thanks for coming this far! if you're reading this, it is no accident. The universe brought you to this corner of the internet for a reason, and you're on the right track. I already know that you're an amazing person and I can't wait to connect with you!

— Josh

Episode Transcript

Josh Gonsalves

Mind Meld Podcast Host

Hi, I'm Josh Gonsalves, the host and producer of Mind Meld. I'm also a Canadian Academy Award-nominated director and Co-founder of Contraverse, an immersive media company. I'm a multi-media experience designer living and working in Toronto, operating at the intersection of design and exponential technologies to develop solutions that change the world for the better.