Focused - 184: Solving Problems, with Jay Clouse

Episode Date: August 15, 2023

Jay Clouse of Creator Science joins us to talk about the sawdust problem, the focus benefits of community, and finding the balance between quality and quantity.

Welcome to Focus, the productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm David Sparks and joined by my fellow co-host, Mr. Mike Schmitz. Hey, Mike, how are you today? Doing great. How are you? Excellent. Excellent. And I'm really happy we've got a guest today that I've been looking forward to sharing with the audience. Welcome to the Focus podcast, Jay Klaus. Hello, Mike and David. Thanks for having me. Yeah.

So I first heard about you jay at the craft and commerce conference i feel like if i would have had my eyes open i probably would have came across your stuff earlier but you gave this phenomenal talk on the sawdust problem and when you talked about that i thought for sure we need there's a focus angle to this we got to have this guy on the show but for people who are not familiar with you, you want to talk a little bit about who you are, what you do, creator science, all that kind of stuff. Sure. Um, well, I'm a creator, uh, a meta creator, even my business is called creator science and it is helping people become professional creators. We do that with a weekly newsletter, a weekly podcast, YouTube channel that publishes about twice per month, everything with the goal of helping you

become a smarter, more financially successful creator. That's pretty much it. I try to keep it simple these days because there are periods of my life and this is this will appeal to you guys as focus guys. There are periods of my life where I was doing so many projects at once that when I would go on a podcast like this, people will be like, this is Jay and he does this. He also does this and this and this. And there are too many things. It was not useful. And I realized not only is that not helpful for somebody listening in to know how they should think about me, organize me in their mind, but there's obviously also a clear trade-off of where I'm spending my time as a creator across all these projects. So everything has been pared down, rebranded, combined. Creator science is the thing.

I've always felt, Jay, that you could take all of the books ever written about productivity and summarize them with two words, do less. Yeah, probably. If you just picked a few things and focused on them, that's the trick. And it's so hard. Right. I mean, I bet when you made that decision, it was scary because like, well, wait a second. Some of those things make me money and I need to do those things. a limb in some ways and other things it was it was really just an uh organizational challenge because like there was no reason that i needed to have a named newsletter that was different than my named podcast they are both media properties talking about the same general information same premise but through a different medium but by having both of those things, it became harder to understand who is this guy and what does he do? So the way that was scary was to combine things under one umbrella. You're talking

about a rebranding process, which is just a pain in the butt. Hopefully nobody listening to this has to or has had to deal with. Yeah. Well, I guess you take this moment to announce that I'm changing the Max Sparky field guides and Max Sparky, the whole brand is now going to be called the letter Z. And that's just it. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Don't put me down that rabbit hole.

Now when you, but when you made the decision, it was scary. How long was it before you're like, oh yeah, that was the right thing? I do a lot of speaking things into existence. So I was speaking about this desire to pull everything together for probably about six months before I did it.

And then the hardest switch to flip was the podcast because there are also partners involved with that. The ads partner, the network partner. So there were just more places where there were other people in charge of the asset being shared on my behalf. So I had to coordinate some things. But it was probably a six-month process all in,

but a focused effort for about a month. It's definitely scary. I'm kind of going through that that same thing uh with the decision a couple months ago to become an independent creator a lot of the stuff that i was doing as a creator on the side in addition to the day job is there's something over here there's something over there how do i consolidate that and so uh it's been inspiring to see you go through the the process uh and looking back at like jclaus.com because you kind of talked at the the conference about you still maintain that that personal site but it to something you said earlier when people are going to put you in

in a drawer and they're going to organize you in their mind what are you going to be known for and you can kind of tell based on the the regularity of the post on jclaus.com you know they they stopped a couple of years ago and you kind of went all in with the creator science stuff so i don't know it's it's it's inspiring to me and i also like your scientific approach uh creator science right you're looking at data around making better decisions in terms of being a creator but do you mind just kind of talking a little bit about your approach to that and how it influences your decision making sure the thing is i just don't i've never had like

a breakthrough pivotal moment in terms of like results. You know, sometimes we look at these models of success and you can see there was an inflection point where something they made led to a change in everything. I've just never really had one of those moments. And so to improve and grow and grow in a broad sense, you know, that could be revenue, that could be audience. I've just had to take a very rigorous data led approach to get there because it just seemed like luck wasn't happening for me. So I was like, well, screw it. I'm just not going to rely on that at all. What can I do to bring this into my own power to continue to grow and evolve? And the answer is often in the data. So I just I just spent a lot more time being rigorous in thinking about, okay, what am I trying to do? What is my hypothesis? What is my approach going

to be based on that hypothesis? And let's, you know, now measure the results of that experiment. And that is what informs my next actions. A lot of that is intuitive at this point, more and more of it is becoming documented, because those experiments can themselves be content that's useful to other creators. But it's just been a lot of small iterations and tweaks. I mean, tiny, tiny iterations, things like realizing, hey, there's a link in my footer that I don't want there that's there because the website theme I'm using

puts it there by default. I'm gonna figure out a way to get rid of that. I'm gonna edit the CSS to get rid of that. It's tiny things like I'm out at a concert and my podcast guest this week just shared the podcast episode that we did together. I'm going to take the six seconds away from what I'm doing right now and retweet that because there's algorithmic forces at play that the sooner I give him engagement on that suite, the better it's going to be for both of us. Tiny, tiny decisions like that every day, every week, every month, every year for six years add up to what is now a pretty

sizable, resilient business. And what I love about that approach is that it doesn't just have to apply to building a creator business. When you're talking about the data-driven decisions and the place my mind goes is kind of like the quantified self and the personal journaling. Any sort of tracking that you would do for personal development or personal gain is simple as weighing yourself every morning if you're trying to lose weight. David and I literally talked about this last episode and now when it comes to like time tracking and measuring the amount of time you spend on your screens it can be jarring at first people think they're better off not knowing but really knowing is the first step to making the improvement you can't manage what you don't measure totally i until a few months ago my website's built on ghost maybe this is two in the weeds so pull me back if it's two in the, my website's built on ghost. Maybe this is two in the weeds.

So pull me back if it's two in the weeds. My website's built on ghost and ghost doesn't have very good really any built in analytics. So since I've been building the creator science brand, I didn't really know how many people are visiting the website, which pages and that goes beyond just the main website into things like my course pages, which is where a lot of revenue comes from. So for the last three months, at the first of the month, I go back and look at the previous month and see how many visits each course page, how many sales that I have, what's the conversion percentage. And now I feel like I have a baseline to say this is how these pages seem to be performing at their current state. That empowers me to make educated changes about the current state to try and improve that baseline. If you don't have data to back that up,

you're just taking guesses. And sometimes that works out for the better. Sometimes you make a change that performs better, but it can also work out worse. There is easily a world where you make a change that actually makes things perform worse. But if you don't know how they're performing before, you won't actually know that you made something worse and that you should revert it. And so it's important to me to measure the status quo of things so I can understand where are things trending, things I'm trying to influence, where are they trending right now to help me make decisions about where do I put my time and effort? Yeah, any change requires a baseline because otherwise, how do you measure it?

Yeah, totally. But a lot of people just operate blind. They'll say like, this doesn't seem to be working. Let me make a change. And then they'll operate on gut feel of, does that seem like it's working better? And sometimes the gut feel says yes, but it's actually not a change in performance of the thing. It might be a change in how much traffic you're getting to it. If you suddenly had twice as much traffic to a webpage that's selling a product and conversion went down, you may still see a net increase in revenue and think that the change you made to the copy or the sales page generally was a positive change. And it wasn't.

Yeah. And that's a struggle for a lot of creators because for me, I know that my creator journey is largely built on gut feel. And there are things I do that don't make the most economic sense, but I feel like I have a relationship with my audience that I know kind of what they want. But that's no excuse for not knowing how it's working anyway. And that's actually been something that's been a struggle for me. But I think we all deal with that. Jay, I'd like to go back even a little bit further, though. I mean, you don't just wake up one day and run an online business. I mean, how did you get to where you are? Well, I grew up the son of K through 12 educators and not even just a son, like my entire extended

family seemed to be K through 12 educators. And I didn't have a model of what entrepreneurship was as a kid. It wasn't until I went to college and in my freshman dorm room, I shared a wall with two other guys who had started businesses in high school. And it just blew my brain wide open to know that, oh, I don't have to pick a path that I work for 35 years and then retire with a pension because that sounded terrible. I didn't want to work 35 years and retire with a pension. They showed me that there's a new path. And in fact, you can create that path for yourself. That got me involved with the entrepreneurship organization at my college, Ohio State University. It got me involved with an organization called Startup Weekend, where we would organize and

run these three-day events to build a company, quote unquote company. And it just got me really interested in entrepreneurship. Out of college, I co-founded a ticket marketplace that was kind of like a StubHub competitor. We went through an accelerator, we raised funding, we sold that company. That was a pretty good outcome, but it was also exhausting. And I didn't have an idea that I wanted to do next. So I started working at a venture-backed healthcare startup. And that was tough because I went from being a co-founder in the room for and usually making decisions to now I had a boss. There were conversations being had above me that I didn't have influence or even line of sight into that impacted my day-to-day. You were a boss and then you were a donkey.

Yeah, it sucked. It sucked. It was really, really hard for me. But I didn't know how to get out of it because I had this lie. I was telling myself that I wasn't creative. I didn't have my own ideas. I was a really good operator. I could execute on somebody else's vision, but I felt like I didn't have my own ideas to put into place. And it wasn't until I worked with a coach who helped me see that limiting belief and then change that limiting belief that allowed me to quit that job, go out on my own. And that's what I've been doing ever since. Well, no wonder you and Mike Schmitz are good friends. Yeah, I told myself the same lie.

I remember you sharing that note card. And that was pretty powerful. And just let's expound on that a little bit. Because that term creativity, I think a lot of people maybe think about that and they think of internet creators. is creative and I had to overcome that limiting belief that you did. But it doesn't matter if you're a lawyer, an ex-lawyer, right, David, an engineer. Everyone, I would argue, has the potential to be creative. And a lot of us don't express it even in those fields that maybe don't seem like creative fields. Creativity is simply just connecting dots in different ways, finding different and innovative solutions to whatever problems that you're facing. And as long as you are telling yourself that lie, you're kind of stuck. You are preaching to the choir, my friend. Problem solving is an inherently creative act. If you're a good problem solver, you just need to get a little bit better at recognizing

when you identify problems, because that is a canvas for you to solve if you want to do it. You know, when I when I went down this path, I didn't assume that I was going to be a creator. I just done a software startup company. I assumed that I'd probably come up with some idea to build a company around at some point, and I was just going to freelance until I discovered that. It was just, I found a different path as I began freelancing that pushed me into the creator direction.

But all businesses are solutions to problems. So if you are a problem solver, you could start a business. But that's also a decision to take seriously that is not for everybody. that's also a decision to take seriously that is not for everybody. Yeah. But I want to also just push on that button of I'm not creative in the sense that I think so often limiting belief is the right way to, to phrase it. But I also think it's just people are very conservative with their definition

of creative, right? I can't draw, so I'm not creative, but like I, as Mike referenced, I was a lawyer for 30 years. I know a lot of good lawyers who are very creative, who would not consider themselves creative people. And I think there's lots of people out there, no matter what you do to pay for your shoes, you're finding creative ways to do it, but you don't acknowledge that or recognize it in yourself. And I think making that connection actually frees you up to be even more creative

and find more better solutions and ways to solve a problem. And just looking at your website, Jay, and all the advice you're giving to creators, and a lot of it is very much out-of-the-box stuff. I've been digesting it over the last few days, and it's like, oh yeah, I never thought about it that way. And that is applying your creativity muscle to everything you do. I think a lot of people listening to the show who don't think they're creative are doing the same thing without realizing it. Totally, totally agree. This episode of the Focus Podcast is brought to you by Squarespace, the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. If you need to set up a website, you need to check out Squarespace.

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and use the offer code focus to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Once again, that is squarespace.com slash FOCUS when you decide to sign up and get that 10% off your first purchase and show your support for the FOCUS podcast. And our thanks to Squarespace for all of their support of the FOCUS podcast and all of RelayFM. Jay, you have this video that we're going to share with the audience called the sawdust problem. And as a woodworker, of course, that immediately got my attention. And I need to talk to your dad at some point, but I'll leave that for the audience. Woodworker, former lawyer, man, David, you have layers. A jack of all traits, a master of none, as they say. But either way,

tell us about the sawdust problem, Jay. Well, back in 2020, there was this really great idea that I credit to Jack Butcher. Who knows if it came from somewhere before Jack? But Jack is a wonderful distiller of concepts into compressed truths. And he said at the time, he said, you should sell your sawdust. And the idea was, you are building something you're creating, in his audience's case, probably long form creative work, things like books, YouTube videos, essays, newsletters, things like that. His point was, in the creation process of long form, deep work, there are things that get edited out. There are byproducts of that process that also have value that you can sell or share. And that was a really smart idea. You know, imagine writing a book and you realize,

actually, this chapter doesn't belong in the book and throw it away. James Clear, when you sign up to his newsletter, he will offer you an extra chapter of his book. That is him selling his sawdust. Same thing happens with like director cuts of movies, you know. And so this gave people who were doing long form work a really great way to start producing and showing up on short form as well twitter instagram linkedin whatever as short form platforms became more dominant you know think about tiktok taking over reels coming out to try to compete with tiktok shorts from youtube coming out to try to compete with youtube and or tiktok and re began seeing, oh, the path to being successful as a creator is to create and share a ton of short form content on social media. You grow on social media,

that's what you build the business on the back of. What we have is a lot of people with a lot of shallow content. The sawdust was not the byproduct of the product. The sawdust became the product. And so that might attract people into your world, but where do they go from there? There's not a lot of there there. And that's what I'm seeing with a lot of creators today is they are playing the social media slot machine. And sometimes they hit it. But even when you hit it, there's not much beyond it. And it's because there's not any more depth that they've thought through and are building. And so I'm encouraging people to flip the scales a little bit. Think more about what is the long form, more enduring work, body of work that you're creating

and can be known for and can be leveraged over time. Because I think about social media content, usually it's active for 24, maybe 48 hours, but then for the most part, it's not used anymore. You know, it's out of circulation. It's out of the algorithm and it's not working for you anymore. What is the work that you can create that keeps working for you once it's done? That is where I think people should spend more time if they aren't doing that now. And that is focus in a nutshell, I feel like, because we're living in an age where the short form stuff feeds the dopamine, right?

So we go to the place that makes us feel better. And focus is really just developing a little bit of self-discipline and an awareness of the long game and being able to say, you know, this thing is hard right now, but I'm going to do it because ultimately it's going to produce a better outcome in the end. Totally agree. I think that is something that is available to anybody, whether you're doing, you know, this content creation thing or not. But I love the question, what is the enduring body of work that I'm creating here? And am I approaching the process backwards? If by doing the long form enduring work leads to all this downstream sawdust, downstream byproduct, focusing upstream is the higher leveraged thing for you to do to lead to even more byproduct.

But a lot of people are really seeing that, oh, people are having success on these short form mediums. People are having success with the byproduct. Let me just focus on that. And I think I think that's backwards and it puts you on a treadmill that you can't step off because that work does not continue working for you. So you you have to constantly be in it. I mentioned James earlier, but another part of that talk that I like to call out, he published Atomic Habits in 2018. It was Amazon's best selling book of the year in 2021, three years after it was published.

Like he didn't do any extra work on that, except maybe showing up on podcasts to talk about it. But can you imagine that the work you did three years ago is not only still successful today, but more successful today than it was? That's amazing. But it really is a great context for this, this thought of, am I making the sawdust or am I making the furniture?

And I think that encapsulates the modern world so many of us are making sawdust because it's easier right it gives you the dopamine hit it it uh it's just the the easy thing to do but what good is sawdust in the future it's not any good piece of furniture. It's got some value. And I felt like, man, this really resonated with me. Not, not only as a creator, but as, as a human in 2023. And it seems like an easy message, but I had never heard it before and it just really landed. Have you heard from people that are struggling with this? And you're like,

now that you've started talking publicly about it, what are the ways people can get off the sawdust train and into the furniture train? I think I'm torturing your analogy and I apologize. No, I love it. I love it. I love to extend analogies as far as they can possibly go. Well, I think the first step is just recognizing that this isn't really a treadmill that's important. Like people have this assumption that, well, this is the system I've built. So if I stop running the system, bad things will happen.

And the reality is like social media is so ephemeral and so much like junk, that usually this trade off that you think you're going to make doesn't really exist. If you stopped producing the sawdust for a period of time, things will not go as badly as you might expect. And so it's really helping people recognize like, hey, let's just run a thought experiment. What if you stopped publishing or producing the sawdust for three days? Let's see what happens. And generally people like, wow, nothing happened. I had way more time. I felt great. Awesome. Let's just like do more of that. It's really, it's really like a retraining exercise more than anything else. And if you really do feel like maybe you're a content creator and you need

to put out short form content. Take a week off. Try to produce two weeks of social content in that week and do that a couple of times. Suddenly now you have runway. Now you have sawdust to share for weeks without any active time doing it for a couple of weeks either. It's really about runway. If you are dead set on continuing to do short form production, and it's just getting ahead of the curve a little bit. And usually I just tell people, hey, if you want to be two weeks ahead of producing short form content, stop sharing

short form content for two weeks, do all the same work. just don't share it, schedule it out from two weeks from now, and then try to readapt your process to, you know, be a little bit ahead all the time. And you're just gonna, you're just gonna have runway. That's like, sounds simple. But really, I think that's the best approach. And you know, it's even better than that is when the short form content generates itself as part of something bigger that you're making. Totally. Yeah, that's the thing. Like if you clear enough space that you can focus on the furniture, you're going to get a byproduct from that. And you don't have the pressure of feeling like, ah, I need to figure out what to

post today. You already have something there. So not only are you generating a byproduct, you can even vet and be a little choosy with what parts of the byproduct you actually utilize. And that's going to have a better result too. Somebody recently reminded me of this phrase that sales is the transfer of enthusiasm. And I use the word sales very flexibly because we're selling ideas. We're selling thoughts constantly. Anything that we're trying to get agreement on is sales.

You want your whatever you're producing to transfer enthusiasm or positive emotion, because if you are in a place of like anxiety and you feel like you're on a treadmill and you're just posting because you feel like you need to post something, you're probably not going to transmit enthusiasm. You're probably going to transmit or transfer that anxiety. And it's not going to be something that gets results anyway. On the topic of sales, I grew up with a family business. My dad owned a software company and he developed assessment skill building software primarily for special education. But a lot of the stuff that he did was related to emotional intelligence. And one of the scales in the assessment was sales orientation. And that was we always got pushed back from that being sold to schools like, well,

I don't want to be a salesperson. But really, it's just leadership. Essentially, people are only going to follow someone who they believe is going to get them where they want to go. And something I tell people who have a significant other whenever they tell me they don't want to be salesy is like, well, you sold yourself at least once. Yes, yes, totally. We're selling ourselves constantly. And I think it's one of the most transferable skills that we have. Can we win other people over to our way of thinking? It applies in any collaborative setting. How am I transferring the right type of emotion in my actions, in my content? It helps. It helps the production. And the transfer of enthusiasm isn't bad when you start with something that is actually

quality and worth being excited about. Totally. But you can't approach it from the other way. That was one of the things that stood out to me from your talk was if you start with the sawdust and then try to make some furniture you end up with the particle board junk that falls apart yes exactly probably david when you saw that i'm sure you uh you were a little bit sad right as a woodworker well i actually what i wanted to say is jay you're talking about medium density fiberboard. But anyway, there was something else you said in that presentation.

And I guess if you haven't got the message listening, go watch it. We're going to link it because I feel like this has application to the whole world. And something you said that just really landed with me is at the beginning of your presentation, you said, I'm trying to solve the problem of long-term relevance in a short-term world. And I feel like that is a problem that everybody in the sound of my voice is suffering with. We truly live in a short-term world. And whatever it is you do, once again, I feel like that is something that you have to address because the world thinks short-term, but long-term relevance is what's going to ensure your survival. And I don't think enough people have even identified that that's a problem, but you're, you're on it. There's this great book that I love to recommend any chance

I get because I don't hear people talking about it. It's called Hitmakers by Derek Thompson. He's a writer for The Atlantic. He has a great podcast called Plain English. Very thoughtful guy, great writer. He wrote this book Hitmakers in 2017, which I think was probably three years too early. I think if that book was released in 2020 or later, people would talk about it a lot more, but it's studying the science of popularity. And there's a chapter in that book talking about fashion versus tradition. And to give you kind of an idea, I don't think he had this exact analogy in the book, but this is how I think about it. Every Christmas that rolls around, we have Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas Is You. It doesn't go away. I mean, we have Christmas hits that go back to the 50s, right? At the same time, most things that catch the culture's attention

get churned out very, very quickly. You know, like things that are popular, often get popular quickly, and then become uncool and unpopular very quickly as well. Those are fashions, things that come in. They might come back into fashion over time, but they come in and they go out. And a lot of people model success after what I would call fashion ideas. Things that get hot real quickly and like, oh man, I want to be like that. Not thinking about the fact that that person, that idea, that thing might have to be reinvented very quickly because it wasn't designed to be enduring.

It wasn't designed to be evergreen. And I think about that a lot as a creator because I see a lot of people blow up quickly with their content and then they either burn out or get kind of stale and uninteresting pretty quickly after that. I really think intentionally about how do I safeguard myself from that?

How do I future-proof myself as a creator? Because really my livelihood as it is designed right now is that people want to continue learning from me specifically. If I were to flame out really quickly, I better hope that I was able to capture that opportunity and save adequately and then allow that into something else. But if I want to have a sustainable career as a teacher or a thoughtful person, then I've got to think about how do I design myself

to not be a fashion creator? And the question related to that, that kind of automatically, I think, moves you in that direction is something that you were hitting on a little bit earlier is like, what are the things that you're doing right now that are going to last, maybe framed a little bit different? You know, are the things that are on your task list today going to matter five years from now? And that's the thing that I instantly thought of when I saw that sawdust flywheel that you were sharing in the talk. Sawdust flywheel isn't the right term, but you start with something that is a long-term enduring asset and how that provides the residual value in addition to the sawdust

instead of trying to do it the other way around. As the one on this call who has most recently quit a day job, I think there's an office application of this as well where you just have your task list in front of you. That is the, maybe for lack of a better term professional application of a version of the sawdust right is the things that are on my task list and i got to do these because people are expecting me to do these but you never take the time to step back and think about what is this actually in service of because if you were to use that that clarifying question will these things matter in five years i know there was a lot of stuff on there that like the minute that you ask that question, you're like, well, why the heck am I doing this thing? It's because you've built this system, right? And that's the other thing you hit

on is like, this is the system that I built. And it's easy to just default to, I got to just keep feeding the machine without ever stopping to think about why. I have a little bit of a passion project right now where I'm cataloging questions that I hear that I think are really impactful because I think questions are more flexible and enduring than advice. Question I heard yesterday that really struck me was, what are the most important questions in your field and why aren't you working on solving them? Like if you, this is a two parter because the original question is what are the most important problems in your field?

And if you ask people that they'll typically have an answer. I bet they can quickly come up with a couple of answers like, oh, this is like, this is a big problem. So the follow up is, well, why aren't you working on that? Because we often know what the biggest questions are, but we're working on something entirely different. Our task list or the things that we're asked to do have nothing to do with those questions. And so it's a really confronting question to say, well, yeah, why aren't we focused on that? Why are we focused on these things over here if they're not the most important and challenging problems?

here if they're not the most important and challenging problems. It's easy to get stuck playing whack-a-mole, the things that are urgent without even recognizing that they're not important at all. Or even just identifying the interesting questions. We've talked about that in prior episodes. I think that can often lead you down an interesting and fruitful path. Totally. lead you down an interesting and fruitful path. Totally. This episode of the focus podcast is brought to you by indeed joined more than 3 million businesses worldwide using indeed to hire great talent fast. Just go to indeed.com slash focused

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of the focus podcast and all of relay fm jay one of the essays that you had published on Creator Science is quality versus quantity and why it's not that simple. And I think this again has application to just about anybody who cares about focus and maybe hits at the heart of why focus is so hard. You want to unpack your model here for quantity versus quality and maybe the right way to think about this? Yeah, it's a contested topic in the world of creators because there are a lot of people who say, hey, all that matters is that you are getting shots on goal. It's a volume game. If you play a numbers game, then you are sure to get some outcome. And there's some truth to that. There are other people who say, that doesn't matter though, because that distracts you from the most important thing,

making the highest quality work possible, something that stands out and attracts people to you. That's all that matters. If you do that exceptionally well, then volume doesn't matter. There's some truth to that. Oftentimes there's truth to both sides of all arguments. And my point is, I'm not going to pick a side to say, focus on this versus this, I actually see that people go through seasons and usually in a pretty linear direction. You cannot create exceptionally high quality work without a lot of practice, without getting good at it, you know. So to me, you start from a place of quantity. Let's get the reps in. Let's focus on not just 10,000 hours, but 10,000 iterations to get better at this. Once you do that, you kind of start to feel this like gnawing feeling at you over time where you just like yearn to stop producing at such a fast pace

or such a high clip because the trade off of doing that is removing more time from each individual thing that you're making. So once you start to feel that gnawing of like, man, I feel like I'm capable of better, but my schedule is forcing me to compromise on quality. Then I think you should give yourself permission to move into a season of removing that schedule a little bit, focusing on quality. Once you start doing that, I feel like I'm kind of in the space right now.

The signal that I've been noticing is people are using certain words to say, I've hit the bar. I've crossed the threshold of what quality is. The word that I've honed in on is binging. Again, I'm a content creator. So when people say, I just found your podcast, I've been binging it, or I just found your YouTube channel, I've been binging your videos, or I've been binging through your essays. To me, that says, okay, the work is good. It encourages people to continue reading more of it. So I've hit the threshold of what quality quality is for me. Stage three is trying to maintain that threshold and increase output, which I call quality quantity, you know, so it combines both

of these things. You can't come out of the gates and do quality quantity. You may think you are, things. You can't come out of the gates and do quality quantity. You may think you are. You're probably delusional. If you look back on your quality of work six months ago, 12 months ago, you would probably admit that what you're doing now is better than what you're doing before. We just get better at things over time. And I promise you, if you think you are able to do quality quantity out of the gates right now, you're probably going to feel differently six months from now or 12 months from now. I will too. So I would encourage you to focus on quantity first, get the reps, try things out, find your voice, get practice in. Once you start feeling draw to focus on quality, go ahead and do that. And then it's a game of how do I scale up the

systems to support both of these things? I am a recovering perfectionist. So this essay resonated with me because my default approach is to try to make the first version perfect. Totally. But I have learned the hard way that it is never going to be perfect because I don't know what I don't know. And to your point, the iterations are the things that reveal the path forward. You could sit there and you could tweak things and you really have no idea after a certain point what difference any of it is making until you put it out into the world and you start to get some feedback.

it is making until you put it out into the world and you start to get some feedback. And I feel like this applies to really any form of tracking productivity. It's not just for creators. If you have quantified output at your job, there's also this balance of like, you have to have the iterations before you figure out what good enough is. And then that's the point where you really try to apply the, okay, how can I make this more excellent mindset? But if you try to do that at the beginning, you're just going to be frustrated. And I think you'll more than likely give up or decide that I'm just not good at this. I don't have this in me. Other people can do this, but I can't because it looks easy for them when it's really hard

for you when really you just haven't given it enough reps. I saw this great, I think it was probably TikTok or a reel. Actually, somebody had found this video of Jason Alexander, who you probably know as George from Seinfeld. He, um, he's been an acting teacher for a long time. Now you, you think like, ah, after Seinfeld, you just couldn't be anyone other than George, but actually he really enjoyed teaching acting. So he's been an acting teacher for a long time now. You think like after Seinfeld, you just couldn't be anyone other than George, but actually he really enjoyed teaching acting. So he's been an acting teacher for a long time.

Someone found a video of him in his class saying, we don't get mad at a seedling for not being a tree. You know, like some things take time and it's just part of the process. There, there was another phrase we used in product management. You can't take nine women and have a one-month pregnancy. Like some things just take time.

It's horrible, but it makes some like immediate sense. Some things take time. You can't solve it with pure intensity. You need deliberate practice and time to get the outcome that you want. I also think that there's a lot of people that don't pursue an endeavor because of this quality question, right? You come into it like Mike Schmitz's of the world saying, well, I need to be perfect the first time out of the gate. And as a result, they never enter the race. And I feel like that is a very common experience because I hear from people,

I I've made a bit of a career out of being a creator and people write me and they're like, well, I'd like to do that. And, and I just tell them, you have to have the balls to push the publish button at the end of the day. And I can tell you, if I go back to some of the earlier stuff I do, it's not great, you know, but I, I was learning and, and I did push the publish button, you know, and if you don't do that, you are never going to evolve. I guess that was, that's another piece of advice that probably goes beyond creators, but particularly with creators, there is this hangup about not, not releasing something because people you admire are doing it at a high level.

Well, guess what? They sucked when they started to. Something I've realized is the great thing about publishing frequently is that feedback is pretty immediate, which is great. Yeah. But what's not great is that progress when you're publishing constantly is fairly indiscernible. It's similar. I like to use the analogy of a haircut. You go get a haircut today.

Tomorrow, you look in the mirror. Hard to see that much has changed. Same the next day. Same the next day. But a few weeks from now, you realize, oh, I need a haircut. After the haircut, you realize just how much had grown. When you publish consistently, your engagement or whatever you're looking at as signals of progress, they're indiscerniblely different day to day.

It's only when you look back over months or years that you see just how far you've come. But if you don't realize that, sometimes you don't even give yourself the chance to have that feeling because you get stuck in the indiscernible progress of the day to day. And that kind of goes back to your point earlier about getting metrics, because you can also look at that over time, which gives you some indication that you're getting better at it or not. Yeah, it reminds me a lot of the gap versus the gain model by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy, where you have this spot where you are, maybe you're at the point where you're thinking about making the leap. I think that's kind of where this is most dangerous, but that's not the only scenario this applies to. So you got this dot in the middle where you

currently are, and you have this picture of this ideal, and it could be comparison to somebody else who's been doing it for a long time. David, people who write you, you know, they're looking up. I was in that, that position. You look up to certain people and you're like, I wish I could do what they did. And you think that the gap there is, is a closable by information. If I just knew what they knew, I would be able to do what they do that's not the case uh you have to start moving and then the path forward becomes clear but the other thing that you're just hitting on and uh the the numbers provide the the metric of progress right so you can look at where you are in your ideal situation, measure that gap. And ultimately, even if you have a goal, I want to do this by a certain time,

it doesn't happen as fast as you want it to. You get frustrated because I feel like I should be further than I am right now. But the alternate way to think about this, which really is where journaling helps me a lot is to look at where you are and compare that to the, uh, where you started. Right. And then you can see, from that first podcast episode that I'm not going to go back and listen to, but if I were, I would be able to see how much I've improved. And at that point, it's like, well, I obviously keep getting better. I don't see the day-to-day changes that you're talking about, Jay, but I know that compared to where I was, I am improving. So I guess this is working and

that creates motivation to just keep going. I like what you said about you think the gap is if I know what they know, I can do what they do. And theoretically, maybe, but there's like a there's a difference between hearing information and experiencing information and and how you learn from it. You know, like there have been lots of times where people have told me truths that I've only begun to understand and appreciate years later. You know, like I heard it and I thought I understood it. But you experience it and you understand it differently. And that changes the way you put that into into practice and that's where the quantity versus quality is so important because you won't ever realize that until you

experience it you can listen to a podcast hear people talk about it be able to cite the references right you really don't understand it yet and the minute that you try to do it that's when it's like you see those curves you're like oh i'm, I'm learning some things. I know everything. And then you reach a point like, oh my gosh, there's so much that I don't know. Same with what David shared earlier about focus. You know, I heard so many times that, hey, focusing all your attention on one thing is where you're going to get the best results. It wasn't until I felt the pain of the opportunity cost of focusing on multiple things that it was a problem. In the beginning, when there wasn't until I felt the pain of the opportunity cost of focusing on multiple things that it was a problem. In the beginning when there wasn't much opportunity cost because nothing was working, focusing on multiple things didn't feel like there was any cost to it. It's when you realize, oh, I see the fruits of focus that you understand that advice better. matter. But also kind of to circle that back to your original post, it was in trying a bunch of stuff where you found what resonated for you as a teacher and for students. It's a weird cycle,

gang. I'll tell you, I was talking to a friend recently about anger at other people and how that it has a cost on you only. You know, I learned that lesson very young. A teacher told me, you know, anytime you're angry at somebody, the only person that pays is you. And, and I was like 25 when I had that lesson taught to me. And I was like 50 when I learned it. All right. It just, you know, you don don't sometimes you just have to get enough life experience for it to to land with you hopefully it sticks up there long enough to be relevant at the time you need it the most the other thing i want to hit on with this is kind of the different modes that you go back and forth with like quantity versus quality or focus versus trying a bunch of things right and with the scientific approach

that you're talking about and basing it all in the numbers and measuring these things i feel like that enables you to switch back and forth a little bit more quickly but that's essentially the path to progress you want to try several different things. You want to measure the results. And then once you figure out this is the one that actually works, I'm going to focus on that. And again, this doesn't just have a creator application. I feel like anybody who is looking to be a little bit more productive has to be able to go back and forth between I'm focused on this thing right now and I'm going to do that for a short period of time, but then I'm going to step back and I'm going to see the big picture and reevaluate because maybe I focused on the

wrong thing. Totally. You guys are, you guys are speaking my language. This episode of focused is brought to you by ZocDoc. Have you ever been on the hunt for a new doctor and you ask everyone that you know for their recommendation? I mean, it makes sense. You want a doctor who actually gets you, listens to you, and makes you feel super comfortable. And then finally, after weeks of searching, you find the one. They meet all your requirements and then some. So you call their office, they have an appointment available, and then you find out your perfect doctor doesn't take your insurance. Well, don't worry. Head over to ZocDoc to find and book the doctor who is right for you and takes

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rated doctor today. That's Z-O-C-D-O-C.com slash focused ZocDocdoc.com focused zocdoc.com focused our thanks to zocdoc for their support of the focus podcast and all of relay fm all right so one of the things that you do jay is you run a community and i believe you have some experience here with this, even outside of your creator science experience. So you have managed a community for a while. You've talked about the SADA's problem, balancing the quantity versus quantity, a lot of focus applications of this. I figured there is probably no better person to speak to the topic of focus as it pertains to community than you. speak to the topic of focus as it pertains to community than you. So I wanted to ask you, how, in your opinion, does a like-minded community help or hinder your ability to focus?

Well, there's an obvious hindrance, which is like, there's just, there's a cost. Like there's, there's a cost of putting attention anywhere, including the community, especially the degree to which you are tuning into that, you know, like one of the one of the hardest things about a community is that you have an active community, you're going to have a lot of notifications, a lot of draws on your focus, which then can plunge it into becoming an inactive community because people turn off their notifications or say, like, I've got to get out of here. So it's a really tough balance to strike. But the design of the lab, which is my membership community, what I'm trying to do there is create a hive mind of experiments. Like this community is built for professional creators to experiment and grow together. We literally have dedicated

areas in the community where I encourage you to share what you're doing in a formatted experimental template to say, this is the goal. This is the hypothesis. This is our experiment. And these are the results because of it. Because I know that those members are doing experiments, whether they realize their experiments, whether they want to go through the rigor of structuring them or not, they're running experiments. So the more that I can encourage people to be more rigorous and to share the design and results of their experiments, the more we all benefit because then I don't have to run the same experiment.

I can glean insight from your results. glean insight from your results, I can prioritize where I want to try to pull the lever or influence direction based on the experiments of others, because any experiment usually leads to another experiment. So if I am seeing your results, I can run a better first experiment based on what I know from the results of your experiment. So it can really help in that way to help people make smarter decisions as it comes to resource allocation, time and money, based on what they're learning from other people. I think the underlying assumption or thing that needs to be true in order to experience the value that you're describing there is kind of this shared understanding of this is why we're here right everybody being in that community with a specific purpose of learning whatever it is the topic happens to be. So obviously yours is focused on creators, creator science, but there are lots of other communities where like-minded people can

get together and share ideas. And it occurred to me that this role of community, I am very much an introvert. I tell my wife all the time, like, okay, I've had enough people. I need to go home. Yes. Oh my gosh. I relate to that. So my default is I would rather just sit at home with a book and try to figure this out myself. But I am learning that there's this old African proverb. If you want to go fast, go low. And if you want to go far, go together. Right? So the more meaningful stuff happens when you place yourself in a community. Uh, I guess the caveat here, the, the advice is just be careful about, um, the communities that you're choosing to engage in. There are lots of different types

of communities. There's online communities. There's real world communities. I live in a neighborhood and there's a community here belonging to a church. There's a community there. But you get to choose the communities that you're going to participate in. And I would argue that the ones that you choose to engage with, you should have a specific reason for being there. It's not just, well, I'm going to show up and see what happens. But really, it's more powerful and the magic happens. Things get multiplied when everybody's there with the same purpose. And then also, maybe you can speak to this a little bit.

I'm sure you've seen this inside your own community. But my experience, if you go into a community and you think you're just going to get something, you'll probably receive a little bit, but it'll be limited. The minute that you start giving, that's really when it starts coming back to you. Totally. I mean, you see this most clearly in the engagement on people's posts. If you have been a giver in the community, you will receive more support when you make your own posts. It's the folks who only jump in when they have a question that typically get the lowest rate of engagement. And I think it's because, you know, people feel a sense of not only just loyalty, but almost obligation for other people's success.

When you're friends with them, you're close with them, you're rooting for them. You know, if, if you are someone close to me and I see that I can have an impact on your ability to succeed at whatever you're trying to do, I'm going to do that. But if I, if I don't know you and I don't feel like I am enrolled in your journey or invested in you, then my human self-interest will probably win out. Yeah, on that topic, I'm kind of curious if you can speak to this a little bit more. You did something interesting with your community where you've capped it at 200 people, right? So what has been the result of that forced limitation in keeping the community small? Well, the result is that it's allowed me

to continue to have enough time to be a creator outside of running the community. But there are a bunch of other results as well. The thing is, I've been a part of much larger communities and they can be great, but usually larger communities are great for small periods of time. It's just, it's just really easy for those communities to degrade into people talking at each other and not to each other because there's no closeness felt like the magic of a community is when there is closeness and people know the other people around them.

They are invested in their journey. They want to help influence their trajectory. And I just think, you know, the smaller the community, the more likely people are going to feel closeness to the other members. The 200 number was fairly arbitrary. You know, we got to be about 50 members

and I just did some mental extrapolation of all right how am i feeling on capacity what do i think i can support here i wanted to be a nice round number you know does 200 make a meaningful difference between 225 maybe not but i wanted to make it a nice round number and it's also had some really great impacts on uh retention Because when we hit that cap, I raised the price and said, okay, if you weren't one of the original 200, if and when somebody turns, we have a new spot, you can still join, it'll be at a higher rate. And so people know if they leave, one, they're gonna have a hard time getting back in. And two, if they do, it's going to be at the new established rate. So there's been a lot of really positive outcomes to this. The

biggest downside is that I am on the daily refusing revenue, essentially, you know, like it's it's a near term revenue cost for what is the biggest revenue driver of my business to enforce that, that scarcity. But that's a trade off I'm willing to make because back to our conversation about traditions versus fashions, I think a lot of people grow membership products quickly because it becomes a fashionable thing to be a part of, but there's not enduring value there because the thing that made it fashionable,

just probably like the people that are a part of it becomes less valuable as it gets bigger you don't feel as close to those people who are in there who are a big deal and you don't have access to regularly so i'm trying to in in even this product's existence future-proof this as a place that has enduring value that people want to join year after year or renew. Jay, we're the Focus Podcast. What does focus mean to you? Focus is oftentimes my enemy, sometimes my friend, depending on how well I am embracing it in the moment. Focus is a choice. It's a choice you have to make every day. It's a battle that you have to fight all the time to say, I am going to remain focused. There is no declaring victory on focus. You don't say, well, I've achieved it. I am focused. No, we are fighting the scientific concept of entropy.

of entropy. Things will become more chaotic. Things will become more disordered. And focus is what brings order back to your world. And it's a choice you have to make constantly. As a content creator, I often say my biggest challenge is resource allocation. Where do I put my time and energy? And often the best answer to that question is focus. I love the idea of treating it as really a journey and something that you never win. It's a temporary form of existence, but not a permanent one. 100%. As soon as you start thinking in it as a permanent one, you are in trouble. Where does it get hard for you?

What's your focus challenge? I i mean it's never not hard to to embrace your inner creativity what you're building is often a muscle for ideas and what was once scarce ideas i thought i was not a an idea person now that is no longer scarce that's not the scarce thing now focus is a scarce thing because i my ideas outnumber the available resources to achieve them so it's just hard to balance focus with enthusiasm and excitement for what are often distractions what do you do to help yourself focus on the things that are important? In addition to the data and the numbers, what sort of tactics or practices do you employ

to make sure that you're able to focus on what's important? Well, I need to see positive trends in the results I'm trying to achieve. And if I'm not seeing those trends, I need to see positive trends and the results I'm trying to achieve. And if I'm not seeing those trends, I need to change my strategy. And usually what I realize when I look at, well, why are things trending in the wrong direction? It's because I'm not focused on the most important things. And I can usually achieve outsized results

by focusing on the things that have the most leverage. So I've also built into my system a lot of public accountability because I'm very transparent with what I'm doing and what I'm achieving. So if I want to continue to look like I am improving and growing,

then I better be focusing. I love that, the public accountability. I also like the not explicit but more implicit message here is kind of adjust and repair. So you're going to focus, you're going to have these small wins, you're going to fall off. And you look at the data, you figure out what went wrong, figure out what you can try and experiment to produce a better result. But it's never, okay, I've just locked this in and now it's going to be perfect because I know exactly what to do. Yeah, it's perfect is always a warning sign. I guess I've said that already. Look, Jay, you clearly are pretty good at being focused because

you've created quite an empire over there. And gang, if you are at all interested in becoming a creator or getting better at being a creator, go check out creatorscience.com. Jay has podcasts, he's got videos and essays and just a lot of great content there. But I really, like I said, consuming your content, the reason I really want to have you in a show is I feel like your message is transcendent. It's not just for creators. And thank you so much for coming on today and sharing it with us.

Where else should people go if they want to learn more about you? Creatorscience.com is where I would send folks. I get a lot of people asking me about the different tools that I use as a creator myself. So actually just this week, I pulled all that together into a free document called Toolbox. You can go to Creatorscience.com slash slash toolbox to see all the hardware and software I use to achieve what I'm doing in my creative business and get that for free. Excellent. Thanks, Jay, for coming on.

Thank you to our sponsors today. That's our friends over at Squarespace, Indeed, and ZocDoc. You can find us at relay.fm slash focused. We do have a little bit of a community over at talk.macpowerusers.com. We've got our own separate room there just for the focus podcast. So let us know what you're thinking and we'll see you next time.