[00:00:00] Camille Diaz: Welcome. This is Money Heart, where we explore the emotional side of money. I’m Camille Diaz, and today we’re discussing the emotional side of time. My guest is Conrad Ruiz. He’s the founder of Well Aware and co-founder of Intro’d. Conrad studied biomedical engineering after he was made aware that he had only one kidney with multiple cysts. Rather than continue down his path of study, Conrad’s ultimate reflections on struggling with his and his father’s health led him to focus more on time and time management. Conrad, welcome to Money Heart 🙂
[00:00:44] Conrad Ruiz: Thank you, Camille. It’s a pleasure to be here!
[00:00:46] Camille Diaz: Yeah. So glad to have you on the show. And as we alluded to there in the title, we focus on the emotional side of money, but we decided to call this episode the emotional side of time. How did we get to that?
[00:00:58] Conrad Ruiz: I guess during our conversation earlier about, being a guest on the show you asked me a little bit more about, what kind of subject matter I would broach about when it comes to money and talking about the emotional side of money. And for me, when it comes to looking at money,
[00:01:14] Conrad Ruiz: I really look at time as a kind of an operator behind money and behind income, and it’s something that I think a lot of us, recognize as the other account in our lives. One that we certainly cannot deposit any more into than we currently have. And I dunno, I think it’s a very unique factor in our worlds.
[00:01:34] Conrad Ruiz: I think time is something that we sometimes treat almost as emotionally, if not more emotionally than money. And it can have a similar effect on clouding our judgments, our ability to do things and see things clearly. And I just thought it was worth having a similar conversation around the emotions of time.
[00:01:50] Camille Diaz: Yeah. Yeah. So let’s talk about this concept of, the common phrase, “Time is money”.
[00:01:57] Conrad Ruiz: Yeah. So I think “Time is money.” is something that we’ve said, especially in American culture where, we realize every hour on the clock is something that, if we’re not generating an income through, then we’re expensing.
[00:02:09] Conrad Ruiz: And we look at this infinite opportunity cost, if you will, of all the things that we could do with our hour and how we can go about generating the most income from that. And granted I’m doing this without putting any preface around ” what’s the service” or “what are you offering?”
[00:02:23] Conrad Ruiz: ” Is this passive income or active income?” And all these kind of things, there are so many different ways that I think people end up getting really emotional about like how they go about generating income. But I think the underlying premise of that is that
[00:02:33] Conrad Ruiz: We are all under this pressure, this societal pressure that our time is our money and we need to figure out a way to make the most of it, the most out of it. And so whether as a means to an end – frankly, not often, as an end in itself, we are often trading time for money.
[00:02:48] Conrad Ruiz: And I think we all know very well to each of our own extent what the consequences are.
[00:02:52] Camille Diaz: Yeah, let’s talk about that a little bit. So that concept of, cause you just said a whole bunch of things, passive income, active income. I loved, what you called it and I’ve already forgotten the word, like an infinite something currency…
[00:03:04] Conrad Ruiz: infinite opportunity costs.
[00:03:06] Camille Diaz: Infinite opportunity costs, yes.
[00:03:08] Conrad Ruiz: Yeah. I could spend an hour reading a book – okay. There are infinite number of things like else I could’ve done that would have, “generated a certain return on my time or return on value”.
[00:03:17] Conrad Ruiz: Like we like to think of it as a return on interest. So, typically books and readings and studying as an activity of our time, it tends to be something that generates a much longer term effect. It’s something that we have to see paid forward much later in our time. Typically. There could be a situation where it’s I need to figure out how to solve this problem,
[00:03:34] Conrad Ruiz: and if I do, I’ll make a thousand dollars and the answer is in this book okay, cool, great! Your ROI is the second you finished figuring out the problem and solve it. That’s your ROI right there. But for the most part, a lot of activities tend to take a little bit longer and when we look at the infinite opportunity costs perspective… on the emotion side,
[00:03:51] Conrad Ruiz: a lot of people I think get caught up in saying “I just spent my hour doing this.” “Was that the most productive use of my time?” “Was that the best way I could spend my time?” “Did that generate the greatest ROI, if not now, in the future…” And especially when people are trying to rest. Or when they need to rest.
[00:04:03] Conrad Ruiz: And they’re trying not to rest, they’re trying to be more productive still. That’s usually where that infinite opportunity costs loop – the emotional side of that loop really starts to come into play and people will be like, “man, I really didn’t generate ROI in this past hour.”
[00:04:15] Conrad Ruiz: And I think that really sucks.
[00:04:17] Camille Diaz: So do you think, cause I would postulate that there are diminishing returns on something like,
[00:04:25] Camille Diaz: (Conrad nods)
[00:04:25] Camille Diaz: yes. Okay. On something like sleep. Cause I love that example of rest. If I stay up and work another hour, I can earn X more dollars by doing, whatever I’m billing my clients for or making another product or whatever it is…
[00:04:39] Conrad Ruiz: and in turn you may lose more hours later – you may be running into a sort of a time debt, if you will, that you’ll have to pay off later. We talk about that with sleep a lot. We talk about sleep debt a lot. Yeah.
[00:04:50] Camille Diaz: Yeah. Yeah, because that whole concept of, okay, so I’ve spent an hour now working longer, when my body was telling me I needed sleep. So I didn’t, but now the next morning I’m attempting to be productive, and the ON switch is nowhere to be found.
[00:05:07] Conrad Ruiz: You burnt the midnight oil, that oil was meant for the next day.
[00:05:11] Camille Diaz: Yes! I liked that way of thinking about it, cause I think we, we do think, “oh, burning the midnight oil.” We didn’t think. “Oh wait. That was tomorrow’s ration.”
[00:05:20] Conrad Ruiz: Yeah. That was the morning gas.
[00:05:22] Camille Diaz: Yeah, that was the gas for the morning. And three cups of coffee will not make up for one cup of midnight oil.
[00:05:27] Conrad Ruiz: It will make you alive awake alert, but not enthusiastic.
[00:05:33] Camille Diaz: Like the song. Yes. Not enthusiastic at all. And in fact, I’ve see that happen pretty often I think – people will have that sort of drag on a Monday or a Friday or whatever day of the week where they’ve overextended themselves and then try to make up for it with something else, when what they’re really trying to make up for is misappropriated time, perhaps?
[00:05:58] Conrad Ruiz: I would say there’s a balance that’s hard to constantly keep on one side? So it’s really hard to consistently overwork… at some point your body and your brain just decide almost against you on a conscious level to be like, “Nope, sorry.”
[00:06:13] Conrad Ruiz: Usually what this ends up doing is this ends up reverting people to poor comfort habits and poor choices that are gonna end up costing them further down the line. One way of describing this, there’s a guy I really admire who speaks a lot about this philosophically. His name is Josh Terry and what he does is he talks about the sort of ups and downs of one’s progress.
[00:06:36] Conrad Ruiz: And the goal is obviously to go from the bottom left to the top [right], as much as you possibly can, or, sorry for the zoom folks here who – reverse camera screen – were gonna go that way. So what ends up happening is you go up and then you go down and up, down, up, down.
[00:06:47] Conrad Ruiz: And what sucks is in these sort of jagged experiences of really trying to push discipline, and then your body and brain are like “NO MORE.” Boom, you go right back down into chaos, because that’s what you’re craving. And then you try to go back up again and it sucks.
[00:07:03] Conrad Ruiz: Like it’s just a lot of demand upon you on both ends to go all the way up and then go ” Yes, I’m at the peak!” And then crashing all the way back down then coming back up… Josh, I love this. He says, “Hey, smooth it out.” Once you’re reaching that point of the peak of your discipline as you’ve been able to stand it, start to invite some chaos and lower things down, smooth out the peak of that ride and then come back down.
[00:07:23] Conrad Ruiz: But then as you reach the trough and things start to get really chaotic, we’re to bring things back into discipline. Again, it’s just a much smoother way of going about the experience of your time.
[00:07:31] Conrad Ruiz: And again, to the emotional side I think it just does a world of wonders to minimize the suffering that is going to end up being humanity anyway.
[00:07:38] Camille Diaz: So really recognizing when you were starting to get a little too far out of balance and saying, “okay, let me come back to the middle somewhere.” And then if you start to get too far out of balance the other way, going back, because I could see this easily happening, even with the sleep thing.
[00:07:56] Camille Diaz: It’s ” I’m not going to sleep for several days on end or not sleep enough.” Not not sleep at all, four or five hour range instead of seven, eight hour range. And then by the weekend, “Okay, now I’m just going to sleep for 12 hours, every night.” Or something like that.
[00:08:11] Conrad Ruiz: I recognize that a lot in folks who have really demanding weekday jobs, I’m not even going to call them nine to five. That’s not what they are. They’re seven to seven…
[00:08:22] Camille Diaz: like five to nine.
[00:08:23] Conrad Ruiz: Yeah. And not PM to AM. If that was the real case, we’d be in a whole other world of problems, but yeah, I would say that design in particular it’s really destructive.
[00:08:33] Conrad Ruiz: It always lends itself at the end of time for most people to be like ” This sucks. I can’t keep doing this.” Or, people just end up shutting down and being less productive overall. I think in response to that right now, there’s been a big push towards creating, the three-day weekend or the four day work week.
[00:08:50] Conrad Ruiz: And also even within that minimizing the time within that work week to not be, an eight hour stretch, but rather, broken down in whatever way people makes it work. Remote work has allowed this to be more receptive and more opportunistic because at the end of the day.
[00:09:02] Conrad Ruiz: It’s just get the job done, and show up at meetings when people need to show up, and obviously. Don’t overdo meetings. But beyond those little tactical details, I think just working less and getting more stuff done. That’s what really matters.
[00:09:14] Conrad Ruiz: You can’t just put in more time, in a similar way, you can’t just put in more money to solve a problem.
[00:09:20] Camille Diaz: I like that you said you can’t just put in more time, you can’t just put in more money. I’ve feel like that’s something that even I have fallen into is if I just had a little bit more time to spend on this, I could make it work.
[00:09:33] Camille Diaz: Not always the case. Huh?
[00:09:35] Conrad Ruiz: Sometimes putting in less time is the solution, sometimes be more scrappy with how you invest into something from a money standpoint is the solution. Because you end up creating something that you wouldn’t otherwise do so because you created a different constraint.
[00:09:54] Camille Diaz: Yeah. I’m thinking about the last-minute final exam paper or project or presentation, ” We have to present this tomorrow at work! So I guess I’m going to get it done!”
[00:10:06] Conrad Ruiz: That one’s really interesting. And those kinds of deadlines, there’s some really cool stories out there about people who’ve been like, “I waited until the very last minute and I’ve never written something so spectacular…”
[00:10:15] Conrad Ruiz: I’ve also seen horror stories of that. That starts to get to the conversation around like flow. And there are some folks who, in that state of desperation and urgency, their skillset and their abilities and the amount of time that they truly had – it wasn’t so unreasonable that it was challenging, but it wasn’t outwardly over their limit of skill and talent. Like it wasn’t out of their range. And as a result, surprisingly, as much as it looked like they were doing these last minute, honestly they put in just the right amount of time with just the right amount of pressure, which happened to be a lot.
[00:10:47] Conrad Ruiz: And frankly, if you ask those people after, oh, so what happened after “oh, crashed and burned for a little while, like it just recovery mode.” And that was the other thing that I was going to say is the, in terms of planning for your time, Towards these kinds of moments where you’re not expecting to have a lot of sleep – all the parents out there – you’re expecting to have a really tough couple of days ahead…
[00:11:10] Conrad Ruiz: okay, plan for the week thereafter to be a lot more relaxed, right? Give yourself crests and troughs. Because if you just try to constantly hit crests, you’re going to end up crashing really hard. Sometimes it’s hard to get out of that.
[00:11:23] Camille Diaz: Yeah, it is. It really is. I love that you brought this up because this is something I’m putting into my next book of having these, I call them race blocks and then cruise blocks.
[00:11:33] Camille Diaz: So you have those times that you’re really going. And then you have those times that we’re just going to put it on like cruise control and not quit working, but not go full out as much as we can, stay up late, pressure ourselves type of thing. And then my third one of course is the rest block, which is like vacation.
[00:11:52] Camille Diaz: You’re just done. Totally off. So
[00:11:54] Conrad Ruiz: It’s not that you’re not being productive. In fact, those are incredibly productive states of mind. It may not make sense at the surface when you look at it, it may not look like drinking a Mai Tai at the beach is productive. But if you look at it from a broader standpoint of time and say “by investing in this rest, I’m able to show up for several months thereafter with incredible performance.”
[00:12:18] Conrad Ruiz: Okay, good. And that was well worth its time and money. But I think we get too caught up in the short-term.
[00:12:24] Camille Diaz: Yeah, I think there’s an excellent point too, is cause you said you called the rest an investment. So by investing in the rest time, by investing in the more relaxed time we basically put a down payment on the productive time being more productive.
[00:12:42] Conrad Ruiz: Yep. And it’s a deposit if you will, in some senses. Yeah. Either, either a refill or a deposit, or maybe some of both whatever floats your boat, whatever jives with you on the mindset side of it. I think we are, at some point we spent so much time trying to find the right words for it.
[00:12:56] Conrad Ruiz: Just experience it. You’ll feel it. You’ll know when you’re doing it.
[00:13:00] Camille Diaz: Which is really the critical thing of the whole idea of balancing time and what we’re doing and where we’re investing our time is to truly show up wherever it is we choose to be.
[00:13:11] Conrad Ruiz: Yeah. Yeah. And I would say showing up at our best, showing up with reasonability. It’s one thing I remember. I really made a bad choice when I was in my junior year of college. And I was choosing between, I had lined up a research opportunity that was not going to pay me anything, but it was right next to home and it was super cool.
[00:13:31] Conrad Ruiz: I was going to figure out how to stabilize rat brains so that we could throw electrical conduits through them. It was wild. I had to choose between that and a $28 an hour internship an hour east painful traffic ride to and from home every day.
[00:13:48] Conrad Ruiz: I think I chose poorly for money over time in that very particular instance. And I think about it a lot. But one of the things I really hated was when I showed up to that internship, there’d be days where I was just so exhausted from having to wake up so early to do that morning drive…
[00:14:03] Conrad Ruiz: my roommates weren’t the best at that time either. They were having a lot of fun and that didn’t help me sleep. So I would show up and I would frankly fall asleep in meetings and people would be like, “what’s going on?” “What? I’m here.” “no, you’re not. You’re physically here, but you might as well be mentally somewhere else.”
[00:14:19] Conrad Ruiz: I think that’s another way to look at showing up. You have to be present.
[00:14:24] Conrad Ruiz: All the way present. Be here and make sure you’re doing the things that allow you to be here. Cause that’s what creates the most value for the time. No matter what the time is. Rest time, active time, productive time, exercise, nutrition.
[00:14:36] Conrad Ruiz: Be here.
[00:14:38] Camille Diaz: Yeah I’m thinking about that in terms of family time. People showing up and while “I left and I came to the baseball game” or ” I’m here at the movie” or “I’m at the dinner table”, but if you’re so wrapped up on all the other things, then you’re not really.
[00:15:00] Conrad Ruiz: Yeah. Yeah, you didn’t really invest that time.
[00:15:03] Camille Diaz: Would have been better for you to just miss it and do whatever you were doing and then come back and really be there when you were done.
[00:15:11] Camille Diaz: How did you get into all of this time stuff? What made you go down this path of thought and study?
[00:15:17] Conrad Ruiz: So my sort of origin story, if you will, is I was born and raised by a guy who is now – by a guy – my old man.
[00:15:25] Conrad Ruiz: I was born and raised by a man who is now 95 years old. I’m 26. So to give context that he was around 70 years old when I was born and between me and my dad, there was always this expectation of, ” Hurry up kid. There’s not a lot of time. I wouldn’t say the pressure was insurmounting. It was just there, it was a very apparent thing.
[00:15:46] Conrad Ruiz: Like people would – the comments would be the thing that really would give me awareness around ” Hey, is that your grandpa? Is that your old man?” And I said “no, he’s my dad.”
[00:15:54] Conrad Ruiz: And growing up, recognizing his history and sort of our expectations about what it meant to be, an adult, what it meant to grow up and be mature.
[00:16:02] Conrad Ruiz: There was a lot of wisdom thrown in there. Getting that from someone who’s a lot older in life, there was a lot more to unpack and start off, and distill. So I took on a lot of that growing up. And at a certain point in my time, when I thought about what I wanted to do, based on that knowledge and awareness, I thought, okay whatever I need to do, it needs to be successful quickly because, I want to show my old man what I’ve been capable of and I want to make sure he was there to see it.
[00:16:28] Conrad Ruiz: Pass over to 17 years old. I ended up going to the hospital for appendicitis. It wasn’t really much of a big deal. I knew what was going on, but what I didn’t realize I was going to find myself in was I was getting an ultrasound to make sure that I had appendicitis and it turned out they couldn’t find one of my kidneys. And that was a weird scenario to be finding myself in. So after doing a little bit more digging into that, it turned out I only had one kidney. Turned that I have one kidney, and it had multiple cysts. It turns out that polycystic kidney disease is something that affects 1 in 10,000 people and it has a a high rate of creating problems for people, come their forties, fifties. That’s when the disease tends to progress a little bit further and the cysts start to grow in size and number. And you basically go from having a kidney, the size of a fist to that of a football.
[00:17:15] Conrad Ruiz: And obviously with that comes a lot of problems. The main one being you’d suddenly no longer have a functioning kidney. So the options from that point on are pretty gruesome: it’s dialysis, which is, I think a fate worse than death. Especially with the way that is being treated commercially in this country more than anything else.
[00:17:31] Conrad Ruiz: But the other side of the story is, you’ve got to find a replacement. And the challenge for me is I only have one kidney. So whoever’s going to replace me, has to figure out how to take their one kidney, which has probably had a partner all that time and suddenly work the function towards two kidneys, which is what my kidney has had the luxury of experiencing since day one.
[00:17:52] Conrad Ruiz: So needless to say, I was like, “man, I am really screwed.”
[00:17:55] Conrad Ruiz: and I was like, okay it’s one thing for me to try to meet my old man’s expectations in the lifetime of living to a hundred. Because if you look at him, I’m in it for the long haul, but then realizing, okay, now I only have half the amount of time I thought I had. That’s urgent.
[00:18:07] Conrad Ruiz: So I went to go study biomedical engineering. I was like, “I’m going to solve this problem. I am not going to die in 30 years.” And eventually I realized this is the big issue. There are so many complicated things to worry about. This whole in-depth field of study – nuts.
[00:18:23] Conrad Ruiz: And at the same time I was then thinking back like ” that was the second time bomb I had. The first one is still my old man he’s only with me for so long. Even if I get to the age of 40 and resolve my own problems, what about my time with him?
[00:18:37] Conrad Ruiz: So I started feeling myself being pulled in all these directions and I wanted to appease everything. I couldn’t, I wasn’t smart enough to just do it all. And I really beat myself up for it. I tried to be more productive, try to be more efficient, try to do more. I tried to shortcut success in whatever ways I could.
[00:18:52] Conrad Ruiz: I eventually turned that into, like an entrepreneurship ploy where I just took my biomedical engineering knowledge, as I understood it then, and said ” let me just do something that’s not going to take me 10 years to solve and so actually went it to cosmetics because that turnaround time for a commercial product was so much faster.
[00:19:08] Conrad Ruiz: And at that point, the real irony for that for me was I found myself in an industry that’s designed around vanity when the one thing that mattered to me more than anything else, was depth and philosophy. And it was at that point where I said, “stop. Stop everything that you’re doing and take a look and step back and collect what is really important.”
[00:19:28] Conrad Ruiz: And that’s when I stopped looking at me and started looking at everybody else. “So what is everyone doing with their time?” Because if I’m running around with my head cut off, certainly I must be the one who’s crazy.
[00:19:37] Conrad Ruiz: Everybody’s crazy. Everyone’s running around with their heads cut off.
[00:19:40] Conrad Ruiz: Everyone’s doing it different ways with different sacrifice, different means, but we are all sacrificing our time in the pursuit of some future time and some future expectation. And if anybody is like me they’re not doing a great justice of it. They’re not making a great trade.
[00:19:56] Conrad Ruiz: They’re really paying for that opportunity cost. So I stopped. I started looking at others. I eventually started dedicating my time to helping others just directly and saying, “don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. What do you need, what can I do for you? And what can I do to help you with your time?”
[00:20:12] Conrad Ruiz: And that became the spawn of what is now Well Aware. That’s how I got here. That’s how I got into time. Like as a, like an obsessive study.
[00:20:20] Camille Diaz: Yeah. Yeah. What a great gift you got handed there. I just thought “this is so cool!”
[00:20:27] Conrad Ruiz: You talked about this earlier, but the whole idea of the unicorn costumes to me, I feel very rare in my circumstance. That I have this situation befallen to me.
[00:20:37] Camille Diaz: And how cool that, I’m just thinking about that level of wisdom that was gifted to you by having such an older parent and thinking about myself, raising my kids. We had our kids fairly young and so they’re close to becoming adults now. And they’re teenagers. And I’m just thinking like how much smarter I am now versus when I had them. And it really, it’s been in the umpteen years, how much wiser, I guess I could say, would I be if I waited another 40 years, before having children, my gosh, I would be so much better as a parent so much better.
[00:21:18] Conrad Ruiz: Everyone gets drawn a different set of advantages. For a really long time I didn’t grow up with any extent of physical exercise or sport. It’s not like I was playing baseball with the old man, we had a very different type of baseball going on, very mental. So there’s sacrifices. There’s opportunity costs even in choosing to have kids late. And to take the benefits of your wisdom then, or your career progress then, and whatever you might be able to generate from there, it’s all choice.
[00:21:45] Conrad Ruiz: But I would say the fact that the old man pulled something like that at 70 is pretty remarkable in itself. The other side of the story is, being imprisoned by choice, and that goes back to the idea of the opportunity cost, where you have all these different options before you, but you have to choose something or you get to choose something that you think makes sense because just sitting there and consistently analyzing and thinking about it. I think this goes back to the emotional side of money and time. Deciding is an important factor.
[00:22:13] Conrad Ruiz: And sometimes the circumstances decide for you and okay, you have to deal with that. But otherwise, if you really want to live life, you have to decide.
[00:22:21] Camille Diaz: Yeah, waiting to decide usually doesn’t serve you
[00:22:27] Conrad Ruiz: there are circumstances where it does, but I think for a lot of the things that people wait upon, it has negative value.
[00:22:32] Conrad Ruiz: I think every financial advisor deserves this pat on the back when they say, “if you haven’t started investing already, you’re literally throwing money down the drain because you were waiting, but why are you waiting? There’s a lot of things that usually people have to process about that in order to get through that, and I think going back to the time scenario, there’s a lot of worry about “if I’m so busy focusing on processing my ability to handle my money, am I wasting time not making money?” I’m like, wow you’re going to have to work on that one.
[00:23:01] Camille Diaz: Yeah. Yeah. You get stuck in that sort of analysis loop and thinking about it and not knowing which way to go and then end up, especially when you’re talking about time, you spend all the time thinking about how you want to spend the time.
[00:23:15] Camille Diaz: It’s painful.
[00:23:17] Conrad Ruiz: Really painful! It seems insane but then you ask yourself if you logically understand that, why are you emotionally, so caught up?
[00:23:25] Conrad Ruiz: And what’s cool is once you become aware that you have an emotional issue, then it becomes “I’m not trying to solve the problem logically anymore. I have to solve the problem emotionally.”
[00:23:33] Conrad Ruiz: I think it’s very interesting that on this subject of emotions: we know the answer, but we don’t know how to effectively utilize the answer. We don’t know how to get ourselves to seek out the answer, even though we’d been told it over and over again, or we know it so well.
[00:23:48] Conrad Ruiz: I think that’s where we got to get from that point of awareness to what I like to call well awareness.
[00:23:55] Camille Diaz: It just occurred to me the whole concept of you can bank your money, but you can’t really bank your time.
[00:24:01] Camille Diaz: It goes and it’s gone and you can’t save it. You can’t add more. You don’t know how much you have…
[00:24:08] Camille Diaz: it’s a very strange making system. If you were to try to institutionalize it, you’d be like, there’s something really wrong about this place.
[00:24:16] Camille Diaz: Yeah. The ledger is there, but we can’t seem to really see it. There’s no reasonable Pro Forma for this.
[00:24:23] Camille Diaz: This is so cool. What kind of stuff are you excited about now? What are you working on next?
[00:24:27] Conrad Ruiz: So I’ve been consulting people on time management and one thing that I’ve been particularly enamored with during that process is I’ve had to do a lot of networking to find clients. I’ve gotten to do a lot of introductions and getting to connect people as a result. And one of the things I realized in space of networking and network marketing and talking to other people is, we’re all investing a rather large amount of time getting to know and build all these relationships.
[00:24:52] Conrad Ruiz: And what I find really unique is that in the span of spending all that time, we seem to be doing a certain disjustice. We’re not sharing the information around who we’re meeting with, to the people that we’ve gotten to meet with or coming to meet with in a way that I think makes the most sense. It’s one thing for me to sit down with you for an hour and say, Camille, here’s all the 300 people that I know really well.
[00:25:12] Conrad Ruiz: I would drive you nuts. It’d be another thing for me to say, “go on my LinkedIn and search filter based on what you’re looking for as of late.” there’s challenges with that as well. So the big thing that I’m working on is I’m building what I call a CRM for networking or an NRM, if you will, it’s called Intro’d.
[00:25:29] Conrad Ruiz: And it’s a side project that’s turned into its own business at this point. Something separate from Well Aware. I’ve got a co-founder. We’re doing a lot of really cool stuff. We love networking education because again, so much time is invested into that for a lot of people that we know and we really want to start getting people to try out our systems and really experience what we like to call the best practices workflow of networking, where if I wanna introduce you to someone, Camille, instead of just getting an instant introduction without any context – any details about who this person is, instead I send you a nice, very thoughtful, “Hey, I’m wondering if you’re interested in this person. Here’s everything you need to know about them.” LinkedIn profile, intro, paragraph reason. I’m trying to connect you with them. And then you tell me if you’re interested and all you have to do is click on my email, there’s literally a hyperlink that’s provided in that email that says “Yes!” Or “No.”
[00:26:11] Conrad Ruiz: And if you click “Yes!” Great! If the other person clicks “Yes!” As well, you get connected. I don’t have to do any of the work from there. The system follows up in two weeks from there saying, “Hey, is this relationship still working out for you? What can we learn from this introduction?”
[00:26:22] Conrad Ruiz: if it was positive or negative, and if you said no, equally, so what was it about this introduction request that wasn’t a good fit for you?
[00:26:29] Conrad Ruiz: Let me go ahead and take that information and make better introductions in the future. And I think if we all did that, if we all treated our whole network activity as as a large dataset I think we’d get a lot quicker results about finding the people who we really need to talk to right here right now, and avoid wasting time communicating with folks who we simply cannot help at this point.
[00:26:49] Camille Diaz: This is a really cool idea. Cause you know, whenever you’re doing networking, people are always talking about your circle of influence and all of the people that you know, but when you go to a networking thing and you meet somebody, you really have no way of knowing who they know, unless you get on social media and backtrack to their connections or their friends or whoever, and like look at what that person is and zero people have time for that. Cause if you’re working, you’re like, if you’re doing your job, you don’t have time to be doing that. So you have to rely on the person that you meet to introduce you to someone that they know. And you have to find a way to ask a question to say, I need to meet a person who is blank.
[00:27:31] Camille Diaz: And then that has to trigger them to remember the person they know that does the thing, or that fits that qualification that you said. So that has to go into it. And it sounds like the idea behind your system is to remove that barrier of us having to rely on our memory to figure out who’s a good connection for who and or whom I guess is how is that?
[00:27:53] Camille Diaz: What did I say it right? Had a grammar moment there.
[00:27:56] Camille Diaz: I need my grammar book (lol)
[00:27:57] Camille Diaz: You need your grammar book. Okay. I’ll Google the grammar thing later. I’m going to get emails now. Somebody going to fix that. And they’re going to tell me because the people that know that, it’s important to them.
[00:28:06] Camille Diaz: So this is a really cool concept of if we’re in your system and I meet somebody new, it will let me know who is out there that might match with them and give them the opportunity to say yes or no. If they feel like that’s a good match, am I getting it right?
[00:28:25] Conrad Ruiz: Yes. And I would say on the topic of the system being the one that makes the suggestions based off of the feedback that everyone’s providing about. We’re still working on that.
[00:28:35] Conrad Ruiz: Beyond that while we’re getting to that point of saying ” Hey, Camille, I just met with these five people this week and based on what you’ve been looking for and been successful with in the past of your introductions, I think two of these people are gonna be a good fit for you.”
[00:28:48] Conrad Ruiz: And I didn’t make that suggestion. The system did because it was the one that recognized the opportunity and whether or not those folks ended up being successful or not that just becomes more data points. Yeah, that would be really cool.
[00:29:01] Conrad Ruiz: Cause you know, I’ve met hundreds of people and relying on my memory to remember that the person I met three years ago is the person that you need to meet today… That’s spotty. I’ve slept a lot of times since then. So three years is a lot of time for things to change. So keeping up with each person in and of itself is really tough.
[00:29:21] Conrad Ruiz: And I think digital networking has made us overzealous and given us way too many people to talk to. And so as a result, we’ve been having less information about even more people.
[00:29:30] Conrad Ruiz: Yeah. More people less info. So this would be more info on as many people as you want that you don’t have to remember all the info at the same time.
[00:29:38] Conrad Ruiz: Yeah, that’s really cool. I think this is a really neat concept. I love it. I love it. Thank you so much for hanging out with me today. This has been so much fun.
[00:29:49] Conrad Ruiz: It was an absolute pleasure. I really appreciate this. I never get to wear this costume. For those who were just listening, we were both wearing unicorn costumes and this was Conrad’s suggestion.
[00:29:58] Conrad Ruiz: He’s – “I need to wear my unicorn costume.” And I was like “I haven’t been a unicorn yet! Let’s do it.” So jump on Instagram and then you can see us in our costumes. If you want to get in touch with Conrad, he loves communicating by email. So you can send an email to cruiz@wellaware1.wpengine.com
[00:30:15] Conrad Ruiz: thank you as well to all of our listeners and viewers.
[00:30:18] Conrad Ruiz: I’m your host, Camille Diaz. I’m a business optimization coach, financial educator, author, and speaker. You can contact me and find out what I’m up to through my website. www.camillediaz.com.
[00:30:28] Conrad Ruiz: Follow me on social media at Cam Unfiltered. Be sure to follow Money Heart at Money Heart Show. And our website is www.moneyheartshow.com
[00:30:36] Conrad Ruiz: Today’s money mantra provided by Conrad is “Money Is Time”. Thanks so much.
