Experimenting to Create Your Own Dream Job! with Colin Murdy

Today’s guest is Colin Murdy. Colin is the founder of the Murdy Creative Company. Murdy Creative makes these freakishly cool... beautifully simple leather binders. I'll tell you, I came across Colin and his story on Instagram. I was not aware of him, not aware of his company, not aware of the binders, any of that, but I'm scrolling through the Instagrams, as one does, and all of a sudden this pic with this gorgeous binder comes flying by. I am a sucker for high-quality leather goods, so I see this thing, and I am hooked. I take the bait, click it, and I realize these things are beautiful, but I'm also realizing there is this great story behind it. The more I dug in the more I realized… this guy is a true DREAM THINK DO-er. I knew I had to have him on the show, so now we’re all up to speed. Listen To The Podcast: RESOURCES: Website: murdycreative.co INTERVIEW: Colin Murdy, welcome to DREAM THINK DO. Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be on. Absolutely. Okay, you hooked me early on because I see the binders. They're gorgeous. I have one on my desk. It's right next to me. It's become my blankie. I love it, but it's that thing, and I click through. I start reading your story, and I'm like, "Man, we're like family!" Because you started experimenting with this idea in high school, right? Absolutely. It's funny how you kind of get into things and you didn't really mean to. I was actually a theater kid, and I did band, and I was in a lot of advanced math and science courses. When you do that, your schedule is really full in high school, and so I didn't really get an opportunity to take an actual art course. I always wanted to take a real live art course. The only one that was able to fit in my schedule was the experimental art class, and I thought, "This is going to be awesome. I love experimenting." I had no idea what it was going to be. It ended up being all of these old traditional styles of art, screen printing and all types and all these other cool things. One of them was this thing called stab bookbinding. I had been an avid journaler since my brother went off to college. My older brother, Marcus, went off to college my sophomore year of high school, and so I thought to myself, "This is awesome. I can recreate movie props that I love, and I can have ... I can take control of my destiny, and I can do all of these things with the journals that I like to write in and I spend all those dollars on. I can make my own." That’s how I got into it almost by accident. It became a hobby, and I was selling them on Etsy. I started another company in the middle there where I thought it was going to be huge, but then it failed. I'm still making books on Etsy, and people were still ordering them. Things kept moving forward, and then it developed into what it is now. I love it. That's a huge thing we talk about on DREAM THINK DO: the power of experimenting. I think, especially with entrepreneurial dreams, to find the passion but also look for the proof, and the proof is always will people buy it, right? Absolutely. Am I creating something that people will buy? We’ll get into the experiment that didn't work, at least in the way you thought. But you learn from those as much as you learn from the successes, right? Now, as people hear your voice, they probably realize you're not 76. Let's just say high school wasn't that long ago. Can I ask how old you are? Actually, I am 24. Awesome. So this whole experiment started in high school. At what point was it where you said, "Yeah, I'm just going to throw some stuff on Etsy"? Was that while you were still in high school still in that class, or was it while you were in college? Well, I've always been a big believer that if you like doing something as a hobby, if you can figure out a way to make that hobby pay for itself, that's always the best policy. Some hobbies can get really expensive if you don't properly capit...