Welcome to Making It!  This weekly show explores the lives and stories of entrepreneurs as they share their unique perspectives on their success and the path to making it. 

Episode summary: When computers were young, in the eighties and nineties, Abe Crystal, co-founder of Ruzuku, loved digging into things and trying to understand how they worked at every level. He refused to take things for granted. That curiosity led Abe to study how people actually use technology and what is now called “user experience.” In 2010, he co-founded the online course platform Ruzuku, which was built from the ground up with a focus on streamlining the course creation process. 

     Building and running a great online course can be challenging. But Ruzuku improves the user experience so authors, coaches, speakers, and other independent experts can create their own online courses and learning communities.

     In this episode of Making It, Abe also describes "making it" as having consistent access to the flow state. 

“What making it means to me is being able to work on things that are meaningful, in a way that is satisfying. So it's more about the process than the outcome. ” 

– Abe Crystal

Guest bio:  Abe Crystal is the CEO and co-founder of Ruzuku, an online course platform focused on student engagement. He’s also a strategic advisor to Mirasee. 

Abe helps authors, coaches, speakers, and other independent experts create their own online courses and learning communities. He and his team at Ruzuku are on a mission to usher in a new wave of independent, authentic teachers around the world and invest them with the tools and support to succeed--everything the clients need to create, sell, and teach amazing courses.

     Abe is also the author of The Business of Courses, about the process of adding online courses to your business’s product and services offerings.

     Abe is an adjunct professor in the School of Education at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.  He specializes in learning design and user experience research and earned his Ph.D. in human-computer interaction at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Resources or websites mentioned in this episode:

1. Mirasee
2. Abe Crystal’s Ruzuku website
3. Abe’s  LinkedIn
4. Abe’s book

Credits:

• Guest: Abe Crystal
• Associate producer: Danny Bermant
• Producer: Cynthia Lamb
• Assembled by: Geoff Govertsen
• Executive producer: Danny Iny 
• Audio Post Supervisor: Evan Miles, Christopher Martin 
• Audio Post Production: Post Office Sound
• Music soundscape: Chad Michael Snavely 

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Music and SFX credits: 

• Track Title: Sweet Loving Waltz

Artist Name(s): Sounds Like Sander

Writer Name: S.L.J. Kalmeijer

Publisher Name: A SOUNDSTRIPE PRODUCTION

• Track Title: The Sunniest Kids

Artist Name(s): Rhythm Scott

Writer Name: Scott Roush

Publisher Name: A SOUNDSTRIPE PRODUCTION

• Track Title: The Sweetest Thing

Artist Name(s): Brent Wood

Writer Name: Philip Barnes

Publisher Name: BOSS SOUNDSTRIPE PRODUCTIONS

• Track Title: The Changing Tides

Artist Name(s): Brent Wood

Writer Name: Philip Barnes

Publisher Name: A SOUNDSTRIPE PRODUCTION

Episode transcript:

     I'm Abe Crystal and you're listening to making it, I run a business called rescue and we make it easy for passionate experts to create their own online courses and learning communities. 

     Okay, so what does making it mean to me? It's a concept that I kind of resist in some ways I think, but unpacking it a bit, I guess what making it means to me is... it's being able to work on things that are meaningful, you know, in a way that is satisfying. So it's more about the process then the outcome, you know? Even though I definitely wanted certain outcomes when I started, to kind of become less meaningful over time. And like this is something I've heard, for example, athletes talk about that they work so hard, you know, to win a championship or to break a record to achieve whatever successes in their particular athletic field they worked so, so hard to do that. And they, you know, in some cases they're fortunate enough to accomplish it. And then they kind of feel like, well, you know, I thought it would be the most amazing thing in the world to win the championship or to achieve this record and it's kind of not right, like the pursuit was engrossing, but actually having achieved it, it just feels kind of flat.

     The journey to making is more important than actually making it. The feeling of, you know, solving interesting challenges and that feeling of progress, right? But like yesterday I was on step one, but tomorrow I'm going to be on step two. Like that's kind of more exciting and motivating than just, you know, saying that you've achieve some, you know, some larger milestone. 

     So I grew up in the 80s and 90s and it was kind of still relatively early in the sort of personal computing era. So computers weren't fancy and polished like they are today where you just open up your gleaming Macbook Air from Apple and it's this smoothly integrated, you know, hardware and software that just works out of the box and the internals of it are completely hidden. Back then it was like, you research to understand, hey what CPU do I want for my computer and you know, what's the l...