Build Horizons copertina

Build Horizons

Build Horizons

Di: Jeff & Katy Schiesser
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Build Horizons is the show about doing the hard thing before you feel ready, becoming someone new in the process. If you're done waiting for permission and ready to build a life of your choosing, this one's for you.© 2026 Bravely Studios LLC Igiene e vita sana Successo personale Sviluppo personale
Episodi
  • 004 - Time, Priorities, and Discipline: Spending Your 112 Hours a Week on Purpose

    004 - Time, Priorities, and Discipline: Spending Your 112 Hours a Week on Purpose
    Jul 28 2026
    Katy kicked this one off with a question: how do you prioritize when you've got a bunch of things you want to change? My honest answer is that trying to attack five big life changes at once is the surest way to finish none of them. And usually the thing you actually need to work on isn't even on the list. If I want to build a writing habit, the real work is spending less time on my phone, or moving my morning routine, or going to bed earlier so getting up earlier is possible. Katy pointed out that setting your alarm 15 minutes earlier only works if you also go to bed 15 minutes earlier, because sleep is a zero sum game and almost nobody I meet is getting too much of it. So we did the math on the page. Sleep eight hours a night and you've got 112 waking hours a week. Give 40 to your job and you're still holding around 70. That's a big chunk of time, and you either allocate it on purpose or you let it get allocated for you, which is how most of us ended up in the situation we're in. We also talked about what discipline actually looks like, and it's smaller than the Rocky training montage in your head. If you want to start running in the morning, the discipline is laying your clothes out the night before, when the decision is easy. By the time the alarm goes off, you're just continuing something you already started. We got specific about our own trade-offs. Katy's weekly screen time report has dropped dramatically since we started this show, and she didn't set out to make that happen. The time just went somewhere better. I've basically stopped playing video games since starting the business, and there's some melancholy in that, but I'd make the trade again. Katy made the point I want people to hear: don't deprive yourself. If you love video games, put a video game Saturday on the calendar. The goal isn't optimizing every hour for money. It's making sure how you spend your week actually adds up to the life you want, and then following through on what you committed to. The back half is about how much more you're capable of than you think. Katy taught herself Photoshop by fumbling through it for hours upon hours, and six and a half years later about half her last 24 hours went to graphic design. I went to school for computer science, didn't finish it, took a psychology degree partly because I was ready to be done, and landed right back in a computer science career anyway. Fifteen years of that still has tremendous value in what I'm building now. We also talk about who gets a vote in your life, how we handled our first mean comment on the internet, and the Chuck Close line I keep coming back to: inspiration is for amateurs, the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you've got a question, a topic you want us to cover, or you just want to say hi, email us at us@buildhorizons.com. We'd genuinely love to hear from you. Thanks for building with us. We're cheering you on. Chapters 0:00 Welcome and subscriber goal 1:21 Travel and marathon training 4:05 The Build Bravely cattle mix-up 6:28 How to prioritize changes 13:26 Your 112 hours a week 20:00 Discipline as small acts 27:30 Trading hobbies for the business 33:10 You're more capable than you think 43:12 Choosing a college or career path 51:28 Handling mean comments 52:21 Internal vs external validation 57:12 Show up and do the work
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    1 ora e 1 min
  • 003 - Courage Over Comfort: Willpower, Discontentment, and How Change Actually Sticks

    003 - Courage Over Comfort: Willpower, Discontentment, and How Change Actually Sticks
    Jul 21 2026
    Katy and I are back in the basement, this time in matching Bravely hats that showed up smelling so bad our poor dog got blamed for it. After a would-you-rather about pause buttons and my longstanding wish for the power to rewind life 15 seconds, we open with a Brene Brown quote I once heard her deliver in person: we can choose courage or we can choose comfort, but we can't have both. Then I make the case that the barrier to choosing courage has never been lower. I learned to code by typing every letter by hand on a TI-84 calculator. Katy, who will tell you herself she's not a techie, now builds Excel spreadsheets with AI that she couldn't have made in a thousand years before. The time to start the thing is now. From there we take on the question Katy asked me: how do you know something is actually worth changing? For me it starts with discontentment, and discontentment cuts both ways. Pointed at the right thing, it keeps sending you back up to the plate. Pointed at everyone's highlight reel on social media, it just drains the joy out of your day. The big idea in this one is that willpower was never going to carry you. Advertisers will spend roughly a thousand dollars this year, per person, trying to shape what you want. Fight that with willpower alone and you lose every time. The real move is changing what you want until the thing becomes who you are. I'm a runner, and runners run. I also tell the story behind that. Six weeks before my first half marathon, my knee wouldn't let me run more than half a mile without stopping. I ran it anyway, and the next morning I could barely roll over in bed. I gave up on running completely, bought a bike on Memorial weekend, and two days of pedaling fixed what months of physical therapy couldn't. Within a week I was running pain free, and I only found the fix after I let the dream go. We talk about quitting drinking too, and how the identity I was terrified to lose became one I genuinely don't miss. Then Katy shares the hardest one, our infertility journey, watching friends start families while it wasn't happening for us, and how the wisdom and friendships only came into view after the phone call from the clinic saying we were pregnant. We close with a Sydney marathon training update, six weeks out. Fifteen brutal miles past a sign reading 126 degrees, me yelling at cardinals for being red like the sun, and a full reset at a gas station where Katy walked out to find my socks and shirt laid out on the pavement. It's marathon number four, and for the first time we're running it together. If you've got a question, a topic you want us to cover, or you just want to say hi, email us at us@buildhorizons.com. Thanks for building with us. We're cheering you on. Chapters 0:00 Hats and Would You Rather 5:22 Courage Over Comfort 9:16 No Shortcuts in Marketing 12:34 AI for Non-Techies 16:24 Voice Prompting with SayCopyPaste 21:08 Knowing When to Change 27:46 Social Media Comparison Trap 32:08 Willpower vs Identity 36:21 Unexpected Paths 40:36 Infertility and Gratitude 45:42 The Knee Injury Story 50:54 Sydney Marathon Training
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    1 ora e 1 min
  • 002 - If You're Not Embarrassed, You Launched Too Late

    002 - If You're Not Embarrassed, You Launched Too Late
    Jul 14 2026
    This week the apps are officially out in the world, Google Play approvals came through (thanks, Google), the App Store is pending, and Jeff explains why getting one app on Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android is such a rare, long road. That leads into the to-do app conversation: the Getting Things Done philosophy behind it, why having a trusted system is the difference between 40 overwhelming obligations and the three that actually matter today, and how a shared list feature has quietly improved the honey-do dynamics of the Schiesser marriage. From there it's the Sydney Marathon looming seven weeks out, the brutally hot Utah Valley Marathon that humbled them both, and what you actually take away from a race that feels like a failure, consistency over outcomes, surviving the next 60 seconds, and not tying the result to the validity of the journey. Katy pushes Jeff on how you discipline your mind, which opens up a surprisingly honest comparison of their very different flavors of imposter syndrome (Katy would show up to couples pickleball night one; Jeff would need ten practice sessions first). The back half goes deep: Jeff's sobriety journey, 1,098 days and counting, how many day-ones it took before one stuck, why identity change beats willpower, and the sobriety tracker he built from what he wished he'd had. They close on Reid Hoffman's line 'if you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late,' why that truth applies to podcasts, marathons, and books alike, and why journaling is the only way to see how far you've actually come. Subscribe to help them hit 1,000 so they can finally livestream, and get in touch through buildhorizons.com with questions or topics. 0:00 Intro and Livestream Goal 1:50 Softball in Brutal Heat 3:39 App Store Approvals 5:34 Why To-Do Systems Matter 12:30 Shared Lists in Marriage 14:51 Marathon Training and Utah Recap 23:29 Disciplining Your Mind 28:19 Imposter Syndrome 36:35 Jeff's Sobriety Journey 46:23 Launch Before You're Ready 55:20 Journaling to See Growth 59:05 Housekeeping and Sign-Off
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    1 ora e 1 min
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