Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Jason Feifer on Build for Tomorrow by Embracing Change EP 186

Episode Date: September 8, 2022

Jason Feifer (@heyfeifer) joins us to discuss how you adapt fast and embrace change so that you can build for tomorrow and future-proof your career. Jason Feifer is the editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine, host of the Build for Tomorrow podcast, and author of Build for Tomorrow: An Action Plan for Embracing Change, Adapting Fast, and Future-Proofing Your Career. -► Purchase Build for Tomorrow: https://amzn.to/3x2kmPm (Amazon Link) -► Get the full show notes: https://passionstruck.com/jason-feifer-build-for-tomorrow-embracing-change/  --► Prefer to watch this interview: https://youtu.be/xK0RK4GWbq8  --► Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here: https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnRMiles --► Subscribe to the Passion Struck Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/passion-struck-with-john-r-miles/id1553279283  Thank you, Dry Farm Wines, For Your Support Dry Farm Wines Have No Chemical Additives for Aroma, Color, Flavor, or Texture Enhancement. Dry Farm Wines - The Only Natural Wine Club That Goes Above and Beyond Industry Standards. For Passion Struck listeners: Dry Farm Wines offers an extra bottle in your first box for a penny (because it’s alcohol, it can’t be free). See all the details and collect your wine at https://www.dryfarmwines.com/passionstruck/. In this episode, Jason Feifer and I Discuss His New Book Build for Tomorrow: Jason Feifer shows us how to navigate these decisions on our journey to becoming passion-struck. During our conversation, we discuss how to chase the gains that come with change while avoiding the gaps, achieving long-term success in our world, why we should reconsider the impossible, and so much more. Why is it so important to harness the power of change? The four phases of change Which of the four phases is the most important The concept of interlocking parts How to be a successful public speaker The most significant piece of advice for those in college or just entering the workforce The importance of sustaining change. Why you need to reconsider the impossible Where to Find Jason Feifer * Website: https://www.jasonfeifer.com/  * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-feifer-b04543a/  * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/heyfeifer/  * Twitter: https://twitter.com/heyfeifer  -- John R. Miles is the CEO, and Founder of PASSION STRUCK®, the first of its kind company, focused on impacting real change by teaching people how to live Intentionally. He is on a mission to help people live a no-regrets life that exalts their victories and lets them know they matter in the world. For over two decades, he built his own career applying his research of passion struck leadership, first becoming a Fortune 50 CIO and then a multi-industry CEO. He is the executive producer and host of the top-ranked Passion Struck Podcast, selected as one of the Top 50 most inspirational podcasts in 2022. Learn more about John: https://johnrmiles.com/  ===== FOLLOW JOHN ON THE SOCIALS ===== * Twitter: https://twitter.com/Milesjohnr * Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnrmiles.c0m * Medium: https://medium.com/@JohnRMiles​ * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/john_r_miles * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/milesjohn/ * Blog: https://johnrmiles.com/blog/ * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast * Gear: https://www.zazzle.com/store/passion_sruck_podcast

Coming up next on the Passion Struck Podcast. We should remember that everything that we do, everything that we love, everything that we think, everything that we consume on a daily basis, at one point, do and scary to somebody else. I mean, just think about it with John Pope Susie. He was opposed to recorded music. The phonograph has ultimately led to you and I being able to talk together right now on a podcast. Welcome to PassionStruck. Hi, I'm your host, John Armiles. And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people

and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guest-ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck.

Hello everyone and welcome back to episode 186 of PassionStruck. Ranked by FeedSpot is one of the top 40 most inspirational podcasts in the world. And thank you to each and every one of you who comes back weekly to listen and learn, how to live better, be better, and impact the world. And if you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here. Or you would like to introduce this to a friend or family member. We now have episode starter packs both on Spotify and on our website, which are collections of our fans favorite episodes that we organize and topic, especially now that we have over 180 episodes to give any new listener

a great way to get acquainted to everything that we do here on the show. Let's go to passionstruck.com slash starter packs to get started. And in case you missed my interview from earlier this week, it featured Dr. Cassie Holmes, who is the foremost expert in the world on time and happiness. And we discuss her new book, which launched this week, Happier Hour. And if you missed my episodes from last week,

they featured Dr. Dominic Dagostino, who is one of the world's foremost experts on the topic of ketosis and metabolism, and we unpack the keto diet and its impact on how you can lose weight, sustain weight loss, and also how it can help with chronic conditions. And I also interviewed Dr. Abbey Medcalf, who's a specialist in relationships and how to grow them and heal them. And if you missed my solo episode from last week,

it was on the key ways that you can best use your time. Please check them all out. And I wanted to say thank you so much for your ratings and reviews and helping us grow the popularity of this podcast. And if you loved any of the episodes that I mentioned or today's, those five star ratings mean so much to helping us sustain and grow the popularity of the show.

Now let's talk about today's guest. Jason Fyfer is the Editor-in-Chief of Entrepreneur Magazine. A startup advisor, host of the podcast, Build For Tomorrow, and Problem Solvers. He has worked as Editor at Fast Company, Men's Health, as well as Boston Magazine. Jason is the author of the new book that just released this past Tuesday, Build For Tomorrow, an action plan for embracing change, adapting fast and future proofing your career. And in our discussion, we go into why it's so important who harness the power of change. We discuss the four phases of change that are the sections

that make up the four sections of his book. I ask him which one of those four is the most important. We do a deep dive into the concept of interlocking parts and how they have transformed his speaking career, his biggest piece of advice for those who are in college, or someone just entering the workforce, and the importance of sustaining change. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life now. Let that journey begin. to creating an intentional life now. Let that journey begin. I am so excited to welcome today Jason Fifer to the Passion Struct podcast. Welcome Jason. Hey thanks for having me.

And I wanted to congratulate you first and foremost on your brand new book. And we will put a copy of that in the YouTube video so that everyone can have look at it but what an accomplishment. Thank you. Thank you. Writing a book is a lot of work. Marketing it turns out to be even more. Well isn't that true in almost any business? Yes. One of the questions I love to ask, yes, is we all have moments that define who we are today. What's a moment that defined who you are and why? When I was in my first job at a college, I was a community newspaper reporter, a newspaper called The Gardener News Circulation 6,000 at the time. I don't know what it is now, covering as far as I was concerned, nothing.

Like nothing was happening in that time. It's a tiny little time. After a year or so, I got really, really frustrated because I felt like I wanted to do bigger things, and I kind of expected that I would be able to. I wanted to work for bigger publications, I wanted to expand my career, and here I was to stuck at this little newspaper I was very frustrated.

I came to realize a couple things. Number one was, if I was better than this job, I suppose I wouldn't be at this job. There was still more for me to learn. But two, was that nobody was ever gonna reach out to me from the places that I wanted to work at if I dreamed of writing for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, or something, you know, some kind of national publication. Nobody was ever gonna call me from the Wall Street Journal. Be like, kid, really love that story you did on the local diner? We'll bring it up to the big leagues.

You're covered in the White House now. They weren't gonna do that. So I needed to go to them. I couldn't sit around waiting for people to come to me. People that recognize me. I had to go to them. So I quit. Quit that job as living in a dumpy apartment with some friends

and holding Massachusetts, just kind of rural community, next door of rapier, at literally the house next to Griga, and paying $500 a month. I just started cold pitching, started freelancing, I started emailing editors. My ideas took a long time, took maybe nine months to get any traction.

I got stories, so I can kind of, newspapers around the country, taught me this lesson that I've taken with me forever more, which is to get any traction. I got stories, so I can kind of, newspapers around the country taught me this lesson that I've taken with me forever more, which is to go to them, to not think that just because I'm doing good work that I will be recognized and that people will come

and hand me opportunities. I don't think anyone ever comes and hands you opportunities. Instead, you make sure that you are connecting with the people that can matter and that you are doing your utmost to make sure that you matter to them. I think that's a great lesson. Yesterday, I interviewed Don DePonny. I'm not sure if you know who that is,

but he does consult with a lot of entrepreneurs. He was a monk in a monastery for about 10 years, but he's all about the power of focus. And so I asked him, is there a tip that you could give the reader? And he said, read the whole book, because there isn't a shortcut to learning how to do this. You have to go through all the motions. And I think so much of that is true in life, whether we want to be a successful entrepreneur, successful athlete, business executive, what name it. So I think you saying that is a good story of,

you've got to do the work and be intentional about it, and eventually, the fruits of your labor will come forward. So yeah, thank you for sharing that. I've heard you talk in the past about the importance of interlocking parts. Can you explain what that means and how you employ it? Yeah, so this is a theory I came up with when I was starting to get into public speaking. Put a foot. I do a lot of talks now to companies and conferences and so on, but at the very beginning, people were asking me to do this stuff, and I wasn't practiced in it, and I didn't really know how to do it.

And I was paying attention to what people were doing, and in particular, actually, my father and the law, and my wife's dad, because he spent his career in the State Department, and now it was on television and radio all the time. They interviewed about international affairs. I was noticing that he was doing this thing where people would ask him questions and we would be on her wife and I would joke that we would hear the same answers out of him all the time. But I realized that what he was doing, I don't know that he had ever put a name to it or anything, but what he was doing is he had

built this menu, this kind of menu in his head of short interlocking parts, these stories and these points that he could use depending on whatever people answered. And I realized that the secret to public speaking is actually to build this menu that I called interlocking parts. And I started to think, well, what are my interlocking parts? And I realized that they're basically a big idea with within name and a story, typically a story of me trying to figure something out. And then sometimes the story of an entrepreneur trying to figure something out.

And sometimes I swap those, sometimes I off the boat. And those are my inner lock and parts. I realize that if I have enough of those in my head, then I can speak on the fly in any circumstance. So even in a podcast setting where somebody's asking me a question like you and the first thing that I'm doing is I'm right Through my head and thinking well what? What answer do I have for this that already exists now?

That's not because I'm being lazy, but rather because I want to make sure that I'm bringing my best material and these are I should also know these aren't like you don't write the parts and memorize them right because I think the key to public speaking is To never be working off of something that you've memorized The reason for that is because if you've memorized it, you're gonna sound like you're reading it in your head It's not gonna sound organic and natural and also if you lose your place and perhaps everyone who seems somebody do this If they lose their place because they have memorized something work the word then they kind of forgot a word They are a train off the tracks. It is a terrible thing to watch. So instead, what you do is you actually kind of practice these interlocking parts out

in the real world. These are the stories that you tell people that people find extremely engaging. These are the points that you come back to over and over again when you're trying to explain something to people. Those are the things that you're refining. You're practicing in the real world, out in the real world. And the more that you do this, the more that you will just become a, just a really dynamic engaging speaker.

It doesn't mean that every single thing that you say has to come from these parts, but I think that it gives you the foundation to build upon. And now if anybody asks me to stay in on stage and talk for 30 minutes, and it's, it's deviates from my kind of traditional keynote, all I have to do is know what it is that they want from me. And I can step back and think, okay, well, I guess I'll do this part and this part and this part and this part, they just snap together.

And then off I go, that's the secret of public speaking to me. Well, I think that's great advice because storytelling is so important, I think, in anything that we do. And I heard you on another podcast talk about your recipe for success and some of the ways you write articles. And if I have on another podcast talk about your recipe for success and some of the ways you write articles. And if I have it right, it was big idea, followed by a great example

of that big idea in your case, an entrepreneur magazine, through the story of an entrepreneur, and then relating it to yourself personally and how perhaps you've overcome what you're talking about or move through it. Did I get that correct? Yeah, well that's basically right. So I mean, that's a version of what I was talking about within our locking parts, because I often do that within our locking parts. But also whenever I'm writing a column for the magazine, that's what I tend to do.

I give a big idea with the name and then a story of somebody who figured it out and then a story of me trying to work through it because then I get to stand in for the audience and present myself not as an expert but rather as someone trying to make it work which I find really helped people connect. I scale that out. I mean, the book that I wrote built for tomorrow uses that for me to look quite a lot. I mean, not exclusively because it would just feel extremely repetitive.

That's what I was doing over and over again. We were to break it down here, right? Like what you want is you want to give people a big idea, you want to give them a good way to remember it, right? Which is why it's really helpful to name your ideas. Whether it's the theory of interlocking parts or work your next job as another one of mine or whatever I have a deal in them, then you want to tell a story because people understand things through stories. You can't just be theoretical. So I find that by telling a story of somebody else who tried to figure something out, first of all, it just diversifies the amount of storytelling that I can do. Obviously, if I just told stories of myself all day, it would be pretty boring and also just seem extremely self-serving. But then, once I do that, I want to say, well, look, now we

basically, we have an idea here. We have something that we can build into our lives, but it's not easy, and it's going to take some learning and doing, and I can also be honest in a way that sometimes someone I'm interviewing is not going to feel comfortable being honest. They're not going to go to their deepest, darkest layers, but maybe I will, because I have control over my own story. And so that's why I will sometimes turn inward and then share that about myself, because I have control over my own story. So that's why I will sometimes turn inward

and then share that about myself, because I think that it helps people come along the journey. So through doing this, I've found a way to tackle big ideas in a way that feels really relatable and also that feels like it feels a relationship between me and the audience. Well, that's great. And one of the other things I wanted to explore

before we deep dive into the book is, as a person who used to be a senior executive at Fortune 50 companies, those companies did not really want you to have a personal brand. They wanted you'd work for the company. And you have done a pretty masterful job of not only having your identification with the magazine, but in creating your own personal brand alongside it. And I know many of the listeners are entrepreneurs or aspiring leaders, how are you able to do both

and what would be some of your words of wisdom to a listener? So I think that corporate America is shifting ever so slowly towards an appreciation of the individual with the personal brand. If you go back to earlier days or social media, you're right that I don't think any fortune that the company wanted that.

And I'm sure a lot still don't because they're sort of old-minded, but I'm seeing some cracks in that foundation. And I think that's a good thing. I actually think it's extremely foolish for a company to dissuade people from building personal brands. If they want to, which is not everybody's

going to want to do that. But for those who do, I think that it's useful, because one, if they do it right, they become wonderful representatives of your brand. And yes, fine, they may not stick around at your company the entire career, which means that you're sort of renting this personal brand and reputation from them, goodwill from them. That's kind of the nature of the world, and I think you should be

happy if you're a company, if you're an employer, to get the best of your most talented people for as long as you both work together. What I have found is that if I do it in a way in which it feels complimentary to my employer, which in this case is entrepreneur, right? So just to be clear, because sometimes people are confused. So I am the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur magazine. I do not own Entrepreneur magazine. Entrepreneur magazine is owned by the Shea family. I'm just a salary employee. Now I do also have my own media company called Haypiper Productions, which produces some other things. So when I'm out in the world, I kind

of think of myself as representing Boat. I represent Otspriner, and I also represent myself and my own brand. And I want to kind of bring value and grow cash for Boat. And Otspriner understands that because they see that when I'm out in in the world and I'm doing things that even maybe are kind of driven to benefit me like we're on this podcast together and I'm here talking about my book. Entrepreneur didn't publish this book. They don't make anybody out of this book. I do. But this gives me an opportunity to go out there to talk to a lot of people to become very visible. I am a representative of entrepreneur and so that reflects well in the brand. Also, I think this is really important for companies to understand and appreciate people connect with people. They don't connect with brands. They connect with people.

It is great if you're a company to have the most symbolic people out there, your CEO, your founder, I think that's really important. But frankly, there can be other ways in. And so for me, I am often for people the way in which they connect on a human-to-human level with Otsuner Media Otsuner magazine. They see me on social, they see me at conferences, they have a relationship with me, and then those good feelings transfer over to Oskar.

And yes, it may be that at some point in time, Oskar and I will not be a unit, but that's okay, because we both benefited from this relationship, and I think that that's wonderful. So what I would do if I were somebody looking to build a personal brand is I would step back and think, how can I be a brand? You have to really take that seriously.

The word brand means that you are a singular thing that has a purpose in somebody's life. So what is that? And then how can you be really diligent about articulating that over and over again? And how can you make sure that that's feeling complimentary, not promotional, but complimentary to the work that you do for your employer. And I think that if you do that, and you do it right,

and you're contributing positively to your followers, I think that your employer would be absolutely foolish to look down upon that. Yeah, and I'll just add that one thing that worked for me is to try to find the one word problem that you were called to solve because only other side of that is typically what your brand should be about. So I'm sure for you in helping people change there are problems that you're trying to help people solve for. Many of what you

discuss in the book. Yeah that's right. I came to that because I was putting myself out there. People started asking me this question all the time, which was what are the qualities of the successful entrepreneur. And I came to realize that if you listen to the questions that people ask you, you realize what they're really doing, is telling you what they think your value is to them. And if people were asking you this over and over again, what are the qualities of successful entrepreneur, I realized, well, okay, the reason they're asking

you that is because they're seeing me as a pattern matcher. I'm the guy because of my job because I talked to everybody. And so I should be able to see patterns. And then also, I should have a good answer to that question because that good answer is ultimately going to be the way in which I could evaluate the people. So my answer was that it was that the most successful people are adaptable. And then I really threw myself into understanding that and that a small slice of the larger value proposition that entrepreneur media has, right?

Entrepreneur media offers help in all sorts of ways to people. I decided that I would when I throw myself personally into it, that I would really address a very specific question and kind of orient my personal brand around that. Well, and I just had one last question and that is we have a lot of younger audience, kind of 18 to 25 who listen to the podcast as well. And I know many of them have written into me saying they want to get advanced degrees or even if they're going for their undergraduate,

they're really struggling in a world where technology is changing so quickly. Jobs are going to be displaced in the future. What should they study? And I was wondering if in some of these conversations you've had with small business owners or mega entrepreneurs, have you gotten some tidbits of advice from that that you could share? Yeah, that's a very interesting question.

I hear thoughts about education that are all over the map. I will talk to Naveen Jane, who is a serial entrepreneur, extremely successful, who talks a lot about how being an outsider to an industry is actually an advantage. Is it allows you to see things more clearly? That I talked to people who started a very complicated business or entered a really challenging industry, and the way they did so is that they had an educational background in it.

I don't think that there's a kind of stock answer that I can give you because their world is so varied and the things that people are going to be looking for is so varied. What I can tell you is that I think that it's worth, there are two ways to look at it. One is that you can look at it proactive in the other way as that you can look at it kind of reactive, right, which is to say proactive, you could say, if you have a particular idea for something, a particular direction that you want to go in, you can do the research, you can talk to people who have pursued that path and see in what education

they pursued and whether they felt like it really mattered to them. Right? If you were interested in journalism, for example, I think that it would be helpful for you to go and talk to people who went to journalism school. What you'd probably find is that most people would say, no, I don't know if that was actually all that useful. That's been my experience when I talked to peers of mine.

The way that you could do it reactively is that you could go and if you don't have the idea for the business, but you do have an idea of what you're interested in studying. I don't think there's anything wrong with doing that. And then stepping back and saying, okay, what is it that I know, what connection have I made? What could I put myself in utilizing the assets and resources that I have now provided to myself and see how I can build from there? I mean, I do that for myself all the time. I am constantly kind of stepping back and looking at, okay, what do I know now? What have I learned now? Because I just spent a year or

two developing this, learning how to do that. What is it that is available to me that wasn't available to me before? Those are useful questions to ask. And I think that it means that there isn't necessarily one way to think about the formula in front of you, but rather is to just go do whatever you think is going to be most useful as a spend of your time and then you can assess what you can do with it. Okay, well thank you for that. And let's get into build for tomorrow. Sure. In the book, you lay out four phases of change. And I think that's the best starting point because the rest of the chapters coincide with that. Can you lay out what those are and which one that you feel is the most important to pass through? Yeah. So the four phases of change,

as I was watching, Ashwin or his navigate the pandemic, I realized it's a really interesting moment because here you got to watch everyone go through the same change at the same time. And yet some people were moving pretty fast towards something new. And other people seem to be more disoriented, more left behind. And as I talk to people, I realize that even the people who were moving fast was still experiencing the same things that people who were left behind were experiencing. I realized that everybody was really going through

change in these four phases. Phase number one was panic, very familiar. Phase number two, adaptation, phase three, new normal. Phase four wouldn't go back. Wouldn't go back to the moment where you have something to do. A valuable, you say, wouldn't want to go back two times before. I had this. being at the moment where you have something to do, evaluate what you say. We don't want to go back to a time before. I have this. I'd be very curious about how people were doing this, how were the people who were able to speed through panic doing that, how were the people who were not able to speed through panic,

getting stuck upon it. We can dive into the specifics of it, but you would ask about the most challenging of them. I mean, obviously, the panic is the most uncomfortable of them, but you would ask about the most challenging of them. And I mean, obviously, I think the panic is the most uncomfortable of them. But funny enough, I think that, I've thought about this quite a lot, I think that actually wouldn't go back is at once the most gratifying part, but also it can be the most dangerous part. And the reason for that is because this is not the only time that anyone will have to go through change. You will go through this whole cycle of panic adaptation you normally wouldn't go back. And you will reach the end of it and you will

now feel like you have something that you want to carry forward forever and then change will come again. And you will have to do the whole thing over again. And you will once again become extremely protective of what your previous wouldn't go back moment is. We have to be excited for it, have the faith in the value of this process, but also recognize that nothing is permanent, including the outcome of change. So, in the book, you discuss composer John Philip Suza, how did he help you realize that you come from the future? Yeah, I have this podcast, which is also called Build for Tomorrow, where I dig into

the history of change, and that's where this story came from. So let me tell you about John Phillips, is a because the lesson here, I think it's just really powerful. Okay, so the phonograph, turn of the century, the phonograph is a brand new invention. this is the first record player. And you should be able to consider how incredibly revolutionary this was with people. Really wild. For all of human history, all of human history, up until like the late 1800s, the only way that you could listen to music is if a human VA was playing an instrument in front of you, for all of human history. And then suddenly that changes, that changes because of the phonograph. People did not believe it at first.

And they were doing these demos at the phonograph and people literally had to be shown that there wasn't a musician standing behind a wall or something like that. It was so crazily revolutionary. So anyway, once people believed in this technology, they were fascinated by it. They really loved it. But who hated it was musicians. Because musicians saw it as replacing them

and as a challenge to their livelihood. And the leader of this resistance was a guy named John Phillips, Susza, whose name you may not know, but whose work you definitely still do. He's the composer of all the marches, the military marches that he still know today. So, da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da. John Phillips, Suza.

And it's a John Phillips, Suza. He was exceptionally famous at the time, arguably the most famous man in music. And he started making these arguments against what he called mechanical music. He wrote this essay, which is a wonderful read. I'd strongly recommend googling it. It's a lot of fun. He's called the menacing mechanical music at Rann in Alpacan's magazine in the 1960s. He made a bunch of arguments against mechanical music. One of them goes like this. he said that if mechanical music, the photograph enters the home, it will replace all forms of why music in the home.

Is it why would anybody form music at the home when there's a machine that can do it for them? And then because nobody's performing live in a home anymore, mothers no longer sing to their children. Because again, why would they do that when there's now a machine that could do it for them. And because children grow up to imitate their mothers, the children will instead grow up to imitate the machine and thus will raise a generation of machine babies. So this is the argument. And now this is, it sounds kind of funny and crazy, but I think that we should pause to appreciate that we do a version of this all the time. This is what I call extrapolating the loss, right? You see something that has changed, you equate it to loss, and then you start to extrapolate the loss because I lost this, I will lose this, because I lose this, I

will lose this. This is how something changes at work, and suddenly we're thinking that like the entire thing is going to collapse upon us, so that we're not going to be valued anymore, that we don't know how to do our jobs. Like this is what we do. I think it's just, it's worth remembering. If we are naturally extrapolating loss, we need to flip that and start to figure out how to extrapolate gain. To say, well, why don't we start to look at what is changing? How could that be put to good use? Because if you did that, which John Phil Susa did that, he would have seen all sorts of benefits, right?

Now, he would have seen that he could, in fact, record his music and sell it to people who he didn't physically have to be in front of. That's a massive economic benefit for somebody who makes their money up until then, simply by performing in front of people that's such a limited thing. You can't scale that, but you can scale yourself

if you're recording. So in fact, John Fulksuza was really protecting a system that was limiting his economic opportunity, but more so, bigger idea here in this way, you would prompt it on the you come from the future. So, you come from this future as this idea that I have, which is to say, I think we should remember that everything that we do, everything that we love, everything that we think, everything that we consume on a daily basis. What was, at one point, you would scary to somebody else. I mean, you know, just think about it with John Pope Suza,

he was opposed to recorded music, or the phonograph has ultimately led to you and I, being able to talk together right now on a podcast, it's basically the same technology. And so, we're the same technological idea. And that expands, that extends. Coffee, leaders, governmental leaders try to bang coffee for nine hundred years. The car, it was called the devil wagon, people threw rocks at it. The teddy bear, it was banned in churches and schools nationwide in 1907. It was a great moral panic over it.

Every single thing that you love, you know, the bicycle, people from the bicycle would make people go insane. Nobles, they said the novels would make women infertile. Everything, everything that you think is good was once new and terrifying and scary to people at the past. So you should look at it and say, well, you know what, I don't think that these things that I have today are new and scary. I think that they're great. I think that I'm, in fact, the beneficiary of wonderful things.

And so that should mean that the next time that something comes along and challenges something that you're comfortable with, that you feel like, no, no, no, I want to hold onto this, rather than try to embrace this new thing, this new thing is terrible and my old thing is better, you should think, no, no, no, this is exactly what everybody has always said.

I, in fact, am the product of change, I am the evidence that change can be good because it was good to me. And therefore, I have the opportunity right now to participate in and shape the thing that comes next. I think that's a great backdrop. And I want to continue down this lens of loss and gain. I'm interviewing author Benjamin Hardy here in a couple of weeks on the podcast and he wrote the book, The Gap and the Gain, where he says that unsuccessful people focus on the gap, but successful people focus on the gain. Basically, we all have an ideal, which is a moving target that is always out of reach.

And when we measure ourselves against the ideal, we're in the gap. However, if we measure ourselves against our previous selves, we're in the gain. And I was hoping you could kind of unpack your concept of loss and gain a little bit more with that as a backdrop as well. Yeah, I really like that framework that he uses there. This is something that I've observed as I watch people navigate change. It's a natural psychological phenomenon. It's been a kind of mainstay of psychological research for decades now called boss a version period And what it shows us is that we are naturally more concerned about loss We focus more on loss and we refrain things as loss

Then we are in gain. I'll give you a personal example a friend told me to buy Bitcoin when Bitcoin was $4,000 of Bitcoin. And I said, ah, this thing sounds stupid, but I guess I've heard of it enough. And I trust my friend. So I'll buy two of them. So I invested $8,000 in Bitcoin. Then it went up. And I was excited. And then it went down and it stayed down for quite a while. And I said, I shouldn't have done this. And then it came back. and when Bitcoin got you $16,000 of Bitcoin, I decided to sell because I thought it can't possibly go any higher than this. Now we all know that that turned out to be a very poor financial decision, but I sold and then as Bitcoin went up and up and up and up, obviously as we talk right now, it's down

quite a bit but who knows, at least in the 50s or maybe you hit the 60s, 60,000, I can't move. I gotta tell you, I like could not stand it. I could not, I didn't wanna hear about it. I didn't wanna talk about it. I used to text with friends about crypto, and now I didn't wanna do it. Why?

Because to me, that sale felt like loss. It wasn't, it was gain. I made money, but it felt like loss because I was comparing it against the profits I could have had if I had done something else. I think this is, we do way too much of this. We are constantly comparing ourselves against what could have been rather than looking at what is.

I think the line I like to use on myself, and I also share it with others all the time, whenever I'm feeling stressed out, I feel like I'm not accomplishing enough. Here's your mantra, I will do the best work with the resources available. I'll do the best work with the resources available. Really, really important, with the resources available.

I think part of the reason that we always feel that we're not doing enough is because we are comparing ourselves against what we would do if we had infinite resources. But we do not have infinite resources. We have the resources available. I don't have 48 hours in a day, so I can't accomplish 48 hours with the things in a day. I don't have a million dollars to spend on advertising myself. So I could imagine how much larger my presence could be in the world if I had a million dollars to advertise myself, but I don't. So let's not think about that.

And I think the more that we bring ourselves down to, or the more that we recognize that we are going to do the best work with the resources available, we are going to work with what we have. We are going to focus on gaming based on what we have available to us instead of what we either don't have or what we think that we've lost as a result. The more we'll be able to focus on the thing that really matters and work at the pace

in which we can actually grow. Next question I wanted to ask. And in chapter five, you go into what you do and why you do it. Basically, we are what we practice. And the reality today is that most people are not conscious of the fact that they are practicing distraction all day, every day, and hence why so many of us

are masters of distraction, which absolutely gets in the way if we want to change. So I want to ask you, if that's the backdrop for a lot of people today, what should we be practicing instead? The thing that you're highlighting here is this observation I have that we far too often identify ourselves with the product of our work, the output of our work. We identify, and sometimes before our identities of Brown, the product of our work. We should be proud of the product of our work, but we are really setting ourselves up for a lot of anxiety and feelings of disorientation if we ultimately are too closely identified with it. I'll give you an example. I used to be a newspaper reporter and that was my first job at a college I had mentioned

earlier, so I worked at two different newspapers. I wanted to be a newspaper reporter. I loved it. And for a long time I identified with being a newspaper reporter. If people came up to me at a party and said, what do you do? I'm saying, with being a newspaper reporter. If people came up to me at a party and said, what do you do? I'm saying, I'm a newspaper reporter. This was good and fine for a while,

but once I realized that newspapers were not actually where I wanted to be because it's kind of an unstable industry, I didn't love the hours. There's just a lot of things that didn't love. One of the things that held me back from making a change as fast as I should have was that I thought of myself as a newspaper reporter. And if I am a newspaper reporter, and I'm not going to bring a newspaper, then what am I?

I'm nothing. That's a scary thing to do. That's a scary place to be. I stayed in that job, I think, too long as a result. And I've made that mistake again, thinking of magazines, and I think myself as a magazine editor. And anyway, what I found is that entrepreneurs think totally different. Entrepreneurs have this way of framing what they do, what their company does, in a way in which it is not tied to any one particular output, and therefore it is less subject

to change. I remember talking to the CEO of Baking Mix Company and they were going through a major change and I asked him how he was managing it. He said, look, our mission is to upgrade sweet baked goods and bring joy to people. If that's your mission, to upgrade sweet baked goods and bring joy to people.

Well, that is not subject to change, right? People will always want joy, people will always want joy. People will always love sweet. And so as a result, you have an infinite variety of ways to do that. It doesn't matter the product that you make. It doesn't matter the way in which you deliver it. It doesn't matter how you reach people.

Right? If he had said our mission is to make chocolate chip cookies in a box, look, maybe chocolate chip cookies sales go up and down and they would be a lot more disorienting. So I think that the more that we can identify what we are, in a simple way, where we have a real clarity of value for ourselves. I think that the more that we will be able to feel like we

are grounded and that we are oriented in times of change. And for me, instead of I'm a newspaper reporter, I now, for example, think of myself this way, I think I tell stories in my own voice. I tell stories, stories, not magazine stories, I'm newspaper stories, not podcast stories, not book stories, not, you know, stories on stage. Take one of those away from me, I can still function.

I can still fulfill my mission. I am not subject to change. And then in my own voice, I'm setting the terms of my work, high-tell stories in my own voice. And somebody else's voice, not caring the ball for somebody. And as I do this, I am really making sure that I have a clear eyed understanding of what changes and what doesn't. How when something changes around me can I rise up to meet that change, to fulfill those needs, because I understand what about me is never going to change.

To me, that's the difference between what and why. And the more that we can separate those, the more that we can really understand who we are no matter what. Yes, and I just going back to distraction for a second. I think there's so much that kids growing up today and even the millennials are exposed to that it's so hard for people to put focus on things.

And to me, something that you brought up about the outputs is something that I like to talk about and that is the psychology of progress. And I think a lot of times we get too consumed with the outputs when instead we should be really focusing on the inputs, because ultimately it's those choices that we make thousands of times a day that determine those long-term outputs.

And if you're not putting the focus intentionally in those moments, you're not gonna have the desired result you want. And when you let distraction come into much, I think that's what ends up happening is you're not using those moments intentionally and as productively as you can. Let me add something else to that. Sorry, just as I kind of forgot that you originally teed me up with distraction. You had pointed out kids today have so much so much distraction. And you know, that's true. There's a way in which I think sometimes people think about

these kinds of things like distraction, where they think I am up again and some kind of level of distraction or technological change that is so overpowering that I am helpless against it. And I think that's just a really, really damaging way to think about things for yourself. Yes, email and social media

and whatever it can be super distracting, but you know what? When Samuel Morris, the inventor of the commercial telegraph, the very first time that people could move information faster than a physical object, right? Consider that. Before the telegraph, the fastest thing that you can do to get information from point A to point B was to write it down and put it on something that moves. Of course, a train, whatever. Like, now they could move at the speed of a telegram. Anyway, when he was retiring, his peers threw him a party.

And they went around and they gave toast. This was told to me by an author of a book about the history of the telegram. One man stood up and instead of toasting Sam Morris, he chided him. He said, before you, I was able to go home at the end of the day and work would never interrupt me. But now, information can come to me at all times. I'm constantly on call. You have sped up the pace of life

in a way that is unmanageable. This is a complaint that we've had for an exceptionally long time, and sure our versions of it today are different than our versions of it we've heard from yesterday. But what we have is not something that is so overwhelming that we cannot control it. What we often have is a habit problem, right? Near a author of indistractable likes to call it overuse, right? We're not addicted to technology. We're not. I've talked to addiction researchers. It's not really what's happening. What we do have is we have bad habits. We overuse it. When you reframe it as overuse, you realize that you

have control. You have control. You are not the victim of something. Things are not outside of your circumstance. You can change your habits. And so while we are surrounded by distractions, and I certainly am, I check my phone all the time, anybody can slack me at any time. But these are choices that I'm making. And I can adjust my habits. I have that within my power. And I think that we all need to remind ourselves that we have that and empower ourselves

to make those kinds of changes. Because we cannot create a learned helplessness and say that just because these distractions are around us, I therefore am a forever victim to them and our children are forever victims to them. We have control of our lives and we can make change. And those are good things. Well, thanks for adding that piece on because I think it's an important aspect. I wanted to dive into chapter 7.

You use the story of Blockbuster as a cautionary tale of the need to change before you must. And I think it was a really good point. I remember when I was going through my MBA in the late 90s, one of my professors in a lecture talked to us about the companies in the 1970s who were on the Fortune 500 list. And he said, I'm gonna give him to you. He goes, now I want you to go look at the list today and tell me how many of them still remain. It was only like 20 to 22%. The rest had either gone out of business or been acquired.

But I liked in this chapter because I'm a big beer fan and I love 60 minute IPA. How you brought in the story of Dogfish beer. And I was hoping you could cover two things with that story. One is why you need to change before you must. And the other is the importance of playing the long game. Yeah, sure. So I'll tell you the quick version of Dogfish

because you'd mentioned Blockbuster and obviously the story of Blockbuster is a kind of classic one, a failure. But I think that the real lesson of the story of Blockbuster I don't think that they were stupid people with Blockbuster. I think that they saw Change Coming and they just couldn't do anything about it because they waited for the structure, the way the expectations there are investors, there's actually Carl Icon plays a whole role in the story of Blockbuster, but it's really, really hard to see Change Coming and be able to do something about it.

But this is exactly what Dogfish did. So super quick, version of this is that, so Dogfish is a brewery in Delaware and they have made this beer called 60-minute IPA and Sam is the founder, Sam made this 60-minute IPA, 60-minute, referred to 6% alcohol, by volume and then IPA,

they're very popular side with beer IPA, very popular in the side of the year IPA. You need to peel out. So people love this beer, they need this beer. These are sales, we're just skyrocketing. Very quickly, this beer was going to become 75% to 80% of all sales of dogfish. And Sam thought differently than perhaps most people would about this, because most people might say,

well, this is fantastic. I have a hit product. I'm supposed to sell sell sell sell sell sell sell. But that's not what Sam thought was. Tastes are gonna change. Change happens. And so if he allows this beer to dominate all sales of dogfish, well, it's going to ensure

that every time that people encounter dogfish, they will encounter it as an IPA brand, which is fine for a while when IPAs are hot, but once something changes, he will not be thought of as an IPA brand, which is five for a while when IPAs are hot, but once something changes, he will not be thought of as an IPA brand, he will be thought of as an old brand. So he makes this decision. This decision to, as you say, change before he must, to take control of the situation, to not put himself in a position where he's going to have to scramble to react to change,

but rather to do it so proactively that he can control the dynamics. What he does, he decides to cap sales of his best selling product of 50%. So this beer, 60 minute IPA, could have been 75% to 80% of all sales, he caps it at 50%. As a result, people are very angry. A lot of people cannot get this beer that they want, but Sam turns it into an education experience. He says, I'm really sorry, it's not available right now, but in the meantime, why don't you try our saize on? Why don't you try our pumpkin out? And as a result, he gets

all of these other beers out there, and he establishes dog fish not as an IPA brand, but as an innovative brand. And that is how he sells it for $300 million. The lesson is valuable for us all, which is that change will come. It's inevitable. And therefore, the very best thing that we can do is bake that assumption into everything that we do and make sure that we are not just building for today to use the title of my book here, but we're building for tomorrow. We're making sure that the things that we do now really keep tomorrow in mind because that's how we are flexible. And that's how we would follow.

Jason, I was really intrigued when I read chapter 15 and it happened to feature a personal friend of mine, Jim McElvey, who if people don't know, was one of the co-founders of Square. And when you talk to them, it was about the 99% problem that you highlight in that chapter. Can you highlight what that problem is and what Jim meant when he told you what you see isn't all there is? Yeah, the 99% for their problem is something that I've noticed in struggles, in innovation, where people react negatively to something new and they believe that that new

thing is kind of rotten to its core. But oftentimes what's actually happening is that there's kind of one, like it's like 99 percent valuable, but there's one little problem with it or there's one way in which it's something about it has not been properly implemented or fixed or addressed. It's a kind of through the baby out with the bathwater situation. The example that I use is lime scooters, when those scooters had to hit the streets several years ago, people were calling for bands and then they thought

they were very dangerous, lime dug into the problem and found that what was actually happening was that a kind of infinitesimal percentage of their ride, like a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of 1%. We're actually leading to serious injury and that if they dug into the user behavior there, what they found is that both of those people

in those serious accidents were on one of their first five rides. So you didn't have a technological problem, what you actually had was an education problem. And so they started to run these clinics to just get people to do their first five rides and to control the environment so that when they hit the street, they were more competent on them.

And it really helped address that problem. It was a 1% problem. People thought it was a 99% problem. So anyway, I took that to Jim because he's such a great thinker about innovation to ask him what he thought of my theory of 99%. And he liked it. And then he gave him this other interesting, kind of related way of thinking about it, which was he said when Square introduced the Square reader, a lot of lot of people trying to knock it off because they thought that it was a simple hardware device. And what Jim said was, people thought that the innovation was the hardware,

but really it was these 14 other things that they had done in their innovation stack. If anybody wants to understand the value that they bring to the world and really investigate what it is that they need to move forward, they better understand their buttaly. That the more that you can challenge yourself to identify the thing that other people don't see, he said people thought the innovation was the heart of where. But Ealy, it was these 14 other things that they had done

in their innovation stack. Like square, gym, they understood what they had done to innovate in this space to bring the ability for the average small business owner to process a credit card other people did it and That was their competitive advantage. They understood their butt really in a way that others didn't and I was a really powerful way of thinking about it And I think it's worth us all writing down because it can bring clarity to why we're doing something. You know, I'm, I took this job, I took this new job, but really what I'm doing is I'm learning this new skill. I made this change in my life. But really what I'm doing is that I'm preparing myself for something else. So whatever it is, I think the more that we have a clarity of purpose that goes beyond

the visible, the more that we are going to be able to navigate the change in front of us. Jason, if there was one thing that you hoped a reader would get from Bill for tomorrow, what would that be? I hope that readers are inspired to do what I call reconsider the impossible, which is to say that I think that oftentimes we divide our options into things that we think are possible and things that we think are impossible. And what change often does is that it forces us to move outside of the options that we thought were possible because they don't work anymore. And towards things, it maybe had discarded.

And what we often find is that some of the best things, the most powerful options for us, the greatest changes are the ones that we have discarded, that we had said were impossible. We should always be pushing ourselves, not just in moments of great disruption, but all the time we should always be pushing ourselves to reconsider the impossible. So what is it that we had not taken seriously? What have I not considered that is really

going to be defined in my future? Jason, it was wonderful having you on the show. Congratulations on your new book and best of luck in all the next steps that go to releasing it. Oh, well thanks. Look, I really, really appreciate it. I appreciate your time. Build for tomorrow. You can find it wherever you find books. If for some reason you cannot think of a place that sells books, Amazon is a place that sells books, then Jason Piper.com slash book is also where you can find it. Again, it's called Build for Tomorrow. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview

with Jason Piper. I wanted to thank Jason, 48 Harmony Books and Penguin Random House for the honor of having him on the PassionStruck podcast. Links to all things Jason will be in the show notes at PassionStruck.com. Please use our website links if you buy any of the books from the guests that are featured here on the podcast. All proceeds go to supporting the show, making it free for you, our listeners. Advertisers, deals and discount codes are in one convenient place at passionstruck.com, slash deals, please support those who support the show. And if you'd like to watch our interview, please go to our YouTube channel at JohnArmiles, subscribe, and view over 400 different videos that we have.

I'm at JohnArmiles at both Twitter and Instagram, or you can also find me on LinkedIn. And if you want to know how I book amazing guests like Jason, it's because of my network. Go out there and build your network before you need it. You're about to hear a preview of the PassionStrike podcast interview that I did with Seth Goodin, who is the author of 20 New York Times Best Selling Books, but our interview goes down a different path. One that Seth believes is the most important project that he has ever worked on. The Carbon Almanac. And we will discuss all things that in climate change. One of the things that we need to understand about the climate is that we cannot simply

reduce our way out of this problem. Say, I'm going to compost a little, recycle a little, which by the way, plastic recycling is a fraud invented by the plastics industry. I'm going to cut back a little bit. I'm only going to fly six times a year instead of eight. It's not a solve problem. We have a systems problem. And the system problem is very simple, which is that carbon extracted from the ground in the form of concrete, combustion, and cow is underpriced. We have been stealing from our future by burning stuff way too cheap.

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