Ep. 29| Why You Haven't Seen Me in 3 Months (And Why That's Normal for Entrepreneurs)

Where have you been for the last three months?

If you're an entrepreneur, you've heard this question. From friends. From family. From people who genuinely don't understand why you disappeared.

And you don't know how to explain it without sounding crazy.

This episode is the explanation. Share it with the people who don't get it. Because they need to hear this.

In this episode, Josiah Ryan breaks down the brutal reality of entrepreneurship: the redline periods. The 60-90 day (sometimes 6-12 month) stretches where you work 6 days a week, 8 a.m. to midnight, saying no to everyone and everything just to get a project off the ground.

This isn't hustle culture. This isn't grinding for the sake of money. This is the energy requirement of turning an idea in your brain into a physical reality. And it's non-negotiable if you want to build something that matters.

Most people have absolutely no clue how demanding entrepreneurship really is. They don't understand why you missed the pool party, the dinner invite, the family gathering. They think you're working too hard. They think you need balance.

But they don't understand the game. And this episode will help you explain it.

What you'll learn in this episode:

What a "redline period" is and why every entrepreneur goes through 60-90 day (or longer) stretches of intense work Why turning an idea in your brain into a physical reality requires astronomical energy output The difference between starting new projects (which can't be delegated) and managing existing projects (which can) Why you have to say no to everyone and everything during redline periods—and why that's okay How to protect your Sabbath even in the middle of redlining (and why it's non-negotiable) Why rest periods are just as important as work periods—and what to do during them How to train friends and family over 3-5 years to understand the life you live as an entrepreneur Why God Himself rested on the seventh day—and what that says about you needing rest too The flip side of redlining: the rest period where you delegate, mend relationships, and recover Why platforms and screens are programming neural pathways in your brain—and why you need to get off them during rest

Entrepreneurship is one of the craziest things a person can engage in. It tests you physically, mentally, spiritually, and emotionally. It requires you to constantly level up. And it demands periods of intense, unrelenting focus that most people will never understand.

But on the flip side, there are rest periods. Periods where you delegate, recover, invest in relationships, and prepare for the next push.

This is the game. And nobody warned you about it.

Share this episode with your friends and family. Help them understand why you do what you do. And remind yourself that what you're going through is normal—even if it feels crazy.

Subscribe to The Christian Business Podcast with Josiah Ryan and join a community of entrepreneurs who get it.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:14

All right, guys, welcome to another episode of the Christian Business Podcast. I'm your host, Josiah Ryan. You guys, today we have a great lesson in entrepreneurship. Basically, what we're going to be talking about is the highs and the lows and the energy requirements uh required to really succeed in business. You know, uh the purpose of this podcast in particular is I want you guys to have something that you can share with your friends and your family when they ask you, how come I haven't seen you for the last three months? All right. You guys need to share. You have to have something that you can share with them because most people have absolutely no clue how demanding entrepreneurship really is. So, with that being said, I want to start the episode in prayer today. So let's go ahead and let's kick it off. Father God, just thank you so much for this day, Lord. I thank you for this podcast. I pray that you just put this in the hands of anybody who can stand to benefit from it. Lord, I ask that you use this podcast to just bring healing, bring communication, bring openness amongst family, friends, loved ones. And uh Lord, I just ask that you really use this thing to uh just spread good and bring ultimately bring people closer to you, because that's what this is all about. Father, we love you so much. Jesus, thank you for everything. We pray these things in your name. Amen. All right, guys, let's get into it. So I recently had a very interesting conversation with some friends recently, and uh basically they haven't seen me for a while. And really the reason for that is because I'm in what you would refer to as a red line period, and this is what I personally call it. But if you think about a car, all right, when you are pushing the vehicle really, really hard, you're gonna see that odometer go up and you're gonna see it, you know, you're gonna hit, you know, 3,000 rotations per minute, 4,000, 5,000, and all of a sudden, and maybe it's not the odometer, I don't know what the heck it's called. Um, but basically you're going to see you get to a certain point where the lines turn red, okay? Because you're pushing the vehicle. At that point, then your vehicle shifts and it goes into the next gear, so on and so forth. But the term that I like to use is redlining because you're really, really just pushing yourself and you're pushing the vehicle as hard as it can possibly go. All right. So this is a very normal thing. If you guys are newer to entrepreneurship, man, this is going to be a wonderful lesson. You're gonna learn a lot. If you've been around in entrepreneurship for, you know, a couple years or decades at this point, you're gonna know how true this thing really is. Okay. So the fact of the matter is that what we do as entrepreneurs is very, very difficult. The world simply does not understand. It is the craziest job that a person can possibly have. Um, and yes, it is a job. No matter what kind of an entrepreneur you are, you have a job. All right, you have a purpose. I don't care what you say about that. God's given you a job, He's given you a purpose, and He's given you a mission. No matter how much you want to say you're, you know, earning your freedom and what a cool person you are, and all your accolades and all that kind of stuff. No, all right? You have a job because you have a mission for this planet. All right. God has you here for a reason. So, with that being said, though, entrepreneurship is one of the craziest things that uh a person can engage in. It really tests you physically, mentally, spiritually, emotionally, and probably in a lot of ways that we don't even understand right now. All right. It requires you to constantly level up as a person. It requires you, if you want to be successful, I mean, hey, if you want to just kind of stay where you're at, be comfortable, work four days a week or three days a week or whatever, you know, make a couple thousand bucks a month, fine, you can do that too. Um, but what I'm really talking about is hitting it, all right? Really doing big things that stretch you outside of your comfort zone. And uh that's what's required to succeed in business. You have to get extremely uncomfortable, all right? So here's what I found, and this is something that's pretty well known in the entrepreneur community. So um this is important to for for pretty much everybody to understand, all right? Here's how entrepreneurship works. All right. You come up with an idea. Maybe you're not the visionary, maybe you're not the person that came up with the idea, um, but you have an idea or you have a project that you're working on, okay? From there, that requires an insane amount of energy to take a thought, which is literally just electrons moving around in your brain, and it's probably actually a lot more than that, but we can look at it that way for now. It takes an tremendous amount of energy to take an idea from your brain and turn it into a physical reality. It just does. It just does. And so as we go through, you know, our entrepreneurial careers and our stages and all this kind of stuff, maybe you're starting a business, maybe you're launching a new product, maybe you are restructuring your business, maybe you are, geez, I don't know. There's a million scenarios that we as entrepreneurs, you know, pursue in this. But essentially, there's going to be periods where you're starting a project or you're pushing a project or you've got some sort of a new thing that needs to be addressed. Okay. That is going to take you, you know, generally speaking, 60 to 90 days of your complete and absolute attention. And guys, sometimes it's more, sometimes it's 120 days, sometimes it's six months. I know people, and I got a ton of reset respect for these types of people, but I know people where you can be in the middle of it for six to 12 to 24 months. All right, that's hardcore. And I would argue, you know, you probably should find some balance somewhere in there. I'm not big on the work-life balance because the way I look at it is, you know, all of us should be taking a Sabbath every Sunday. That's a commandment from God, but it's actually an invitation to live in a way the world does not live. So you need a recharge day every single week. Um, even in the middle of re uh redlining, you really should be taking a Sabbath. That's it's seriously your antidote and your cure while you're going through these phases. Um, but with that being said, you know, I know people that can just hit it two years straight. All right. I have a ton of respect for those people. I'm not personally that way. Um, and those people are your unicorns. Okay, if that's you, great for you. You're probably very successful. And if you're not, you probably will be soon. Well, and when I say successful, okay, you probably make a bunch of money. You got to ask it yourself at what cost, right? Um, money is not the only thing that makes the world go around. All right, contrary to popular belief, it's not. All right. There's so many more things that are so much more important than money that you should really be taking in inventory. We, okay, I'll stop saying you, we as entrepreneurs, we should really be taking an inventory of how much our money is actually costing us in life. It's so important. But with that being said, there's just this is just a fact of life. There's going to be projects, there's going to be new things where you require where in order to get those projects working, in order to get those things off the ground, you're just gonna have to red line, man. You're gonna have to do 60 to 90 days of just hardcore strenuous stuff, maybe four months, right? That's just the game. That's just how this thing works. Now, here's the part that sucks, all right? During that time, you're going to have to say no a lot to a lot of people that you really love. You will. You're not gonna have the time to do this stuff. I'll I'll tell you right now, I'm going through a red line period right now, and uh I work six days a week, 8 a.m. till the work is done that day. Sometimes that's five, six o'clock. Other days that's easily 10:30, 11 midnight. All right. I know that sounds insane. Um, and maybe not. I mean, for you guys as entrepreneurs, that's just another, another day in the life, really. Uh, but basically that's what I'm doing right now. And I go hard for six days, and then on Sundays I have a little bit of ministry stuff, and then, you know, uh Sunday afternoon, that's my Sabbath time to recharge and rest and recuperate. And uh, you know, we we have a good rotation with the ministry stuff where other people fill in and all that kind of stuff. But I will say, especially for those of you who are, you know, maybe you're uh preachers, maybe you have ministry things that you're involved with, involved in, Sundays can very quickly spiral out of control. And uh, you know, you can lose the Sabbath on that day. And in that sense, you know, you'd really want to be taking another day of the week to the best of your ability to really honor God, spend time with God, spend time with your family, you know, journal a little bit, pray a little bit, take a nap, right? Read some books, get off your freaking phone, okay? Get off the screens. Every time that you're on somebody else's platform, you're being manipulated mentally by whatever it is that they want to program into you. If you don't, if you think you're smarter than them and you think you're smarter than the algorithms, you're not. All right. I'm just gonna tell you that the platforms own you, and the more time that you spend on those platforms, they are programming neural pathways in your brain of how to think. Okay. There's no such thing as a screen that is not manipul that is not manipulating you. Period. Okay, so that's an important thing. But long story short, you're gonna have those times and you gotta say no to everybody and everything. All right, you're gonna miss all sorts of fun stuff. Everyone's gonna, you know, invite you out to the pool parties. They're gonna invite you over to, you know, just Friday night getting together with friends for dinner, right? That can be completely impossible when you're super exhausted and you've already freaking you got nothing left in the tank because you've been going for six days straight, five days straight. You forgot to ate lunch, you know, three times, four times this week. By the end of the week, you're just completely exhausted. Oh, and you've talked to like 50, 60 people, and maybe even 100, or maybe even 200, 300. All right. If you really track all the stuff that you're doing as an entrepreneur in these red line periods, you're gonna find that your output is astronomical in comparison to no offense, but somebody who's just working a nine to five and you got one task, one job, one thing, no way. That's not entrepreneurship. Yeah, right. We all wear a million hats, and there's still not enough time in the day to get everything done that we have to do. That's the way it works. Here's the other pitfall kind of of these 60 to 90 day red line periods is the fact that while you're building out these projects and while you're doing these new things and you're literally being the frontiers person and you're going out and you're trekking through the woods and you're and you're claiming new ground and all this kind of stuff, right? That's all metaphorically, but maybe not. I don't know what kind of a business you're in. But here's the thing about when we're going out and we're claiming, you know, like new ground, new territory, all that kind of stuff, and and we're doing these new projects. Well, when you're the one that's leading the charge, it can be very hard to delegate leading the charge because you don't know what you don't know. All right. When you start new projects, when you have new things that need to be taken off the ground, when you're doing all these this new stuff, you're figuring out the process as you go. And you don't know what the process requires because this is new to you. Okay. Ideally, you'll hire people for these things, but but here's the thing: your mission is not to hire people for new things, your mission is to forge the things that God puts on your heart. You you were born for that purpose. So there's just this is a fact of life. I said this earlier. This is the way that entrepreneurship is. Nobody's gonna come to save you, nobody's going to, you know, be able to rescue you or anything. There's simply put, there are going to be times during these time periods where you cannot delegate what it is that you need to delegate. You simply won't. And I know that goes against blah blah blah. What anybody's ever told you or any of this, that, the other thing. Simply not the truth. Okay. You'll heal you will hear billionaires talking about this exact concept. There's a period in every project or every new thing that you simply cannot delegate. All right. Okay, so now there's a flip side, and this is the good news, all right? Once you go and you've been redlining for 60 to 90 days or however long it is, all that kind of stuff. Well, now there's the rest period that comes on the back end. And this is where I would encourage you guys to get really, really intentional. But once you spearheaded that project, now you can delegate. Now you do know what you know, and now you are able to either hire out or train another person to basically take over whatever that thing is. And at that point, now you take your foot off the gas pedal. This is your time for mending relationships. This is your time for rest. This is your time really for data analysis. Don't get lazy. All right. You definitely now want to monitor whatever that project is, whatever that thing is to make sure that it's, you know, going in the right direction, stewarding it correctly, right? But now you have a rest period during this time. And I would encourage you guys when you find yourself in a rest period to really invest into your relationships and invest into, you know, like for me, this is usually when I got to start fixing things around the house. This is usually when I try to do, you know, a little bit more woodworking. This is when I'm, you know, trying to get together with friends and family. And, you know, lucky for me, I've been through this, you know, for a number of years at this point. You know, I've been doing this stuff since like 2010. So I've got a lot of people who I've trained. This is my life. Um, I've trained, and when I say I've trained, you have to train them. Okay. It takes, in my experience, it takes three to five years to train people on the life that we live. You have to constantly explain to them over and over and over again because they don't do not understand it. And uh, but during that time, you know, when you do have the rest periods, this is an excellent time to basically just get caught up with your life. And you don't want to waste that time, and you definitely don't want to just, you know, jump onto the next project and redline whatever that project is. That's not the point of this. We are humans, okay? God himself rested on the seventh day of creation. Maybe that's saying something. Are you are you do you have as much strength and energy as God? I doubt it. I I highly doubt it. Okay. Even God rested. We should rest too. All right. Rest is very, very important. But basically, this is the this is the game, man. You're gonna have really, really intense periods that nobody understands why you do what you do. It is just part of what needs to be done during that time. And then you're going to have down periods where you can finally relax, take your foot off the gas pedal, and then you can invest into other things that aren't just making money things. All right. I love you guys. That's basically the episode for today. If you guys have any questions about this, please list them in the comments. I'd love to hear about it. Um, if you have any friends or family members who are asking you why do you work so hard, please send this episode over to them. I hope that it makes some sense. I really do. Um, this for me has been probably the most difficult aspect to manage of all of entrepreneurship is managing relationships with people who simply just do not understand the requirements, the energy, the exhaustion that goes into what we do. Um, and so that's why I made this episode today. I really want to bring some healing and at least, you know, without giving too many specifics, everybody's situation is different, but everybody's situation is the same in this sense that what we do is freaking crazy. All right. I'm gonna leave it at that. So I love you guys. Share this with somebody who could benefit from it, and uh, I just hope that everybody's having a wonderful day. Thanks so much. Bye bye, and then you're gonna be able to do that.