The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 514: Jason Feifer - How To Embrace Change, Adapt Fast, Future-Proof Your Career, & Build For Tomorrow

Episode Date: February 27, 2023

Text Hawk to 66866 to become part of "Mindful Monday." Join 10's of thousands of your fellow learning leaders and receive a carefully curated email from me each Monday morning to help you start your week off right... Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com Twitter/IG: @RyanHawk12   https://twitter.com/RyanHawk12 Jason Feifer is the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur magazine. He is also the author of a great new book called, Build for Tomorrow: An Action Plan for Embracing Change, Adapting Fast, and Future-Proofing Your Career. Notes: Define yourself… What is your one sentence? Jason's is "I tell stories in my own voice." That's what he does as the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur magazine. That's what he does when he writes books. Records podcasts… Everything. What is your one sentence? What do you do? How to lead through change – Remember... You've had time to think about it prior to the meeting, they haven't. Show some grace. Communicate why the change is happening and how it impacts them. And… "People hate new things, but they love better versions of old things." People hate loss. Remind them of what's staying the same, but getting better. In 1348, The Bubonic Plague happened... What occurred as a result? 60% of Europeans died. It led to an opportunity for employment. Prior to that, there were the rich and the poor. The rich had the poor work for them, but did not pay them money. "If a city isn't growing, it's dying. The same is true for people." In your career, "Don't ask for the opportunity... BE the opportunity." The Four Distinct Phases: Panic Adaptation New Normal Wouldn't Go Back The first thing a person should do when navigating change is to identify the thing about themself that is not going to change. This is tough because we naturally identify with the output of our work. If somebody at a party asks you what you do, you're either going to tell them your job title, your role, the way in which you do your work, or the thing that you create. And that's natural—it's a good way to understand ourselves. "We are programmed for loss aversion." "Build a bridge of familiarity from them to you." "That's something Ryan Reynolds told me. Ryan is an actor who also started an extremely successful advertising agency called Maximum Effort. He also owns Aviation Gin and Mint Mobile. Ryan told me that the thing that distinguishes people is not whether they're good at something at the beginning (because nobody will be good at something at the beginning), but rather whether someone can tolerate the natural state of being bad at the beginning. When trying something new, there cannot be an expectation of mastery from the start. "Can you tolerate being bad long enough to be good?" In front of you are two sets of opportunities. Opportunity Set A is everything that is asked of you, for instance showing up at your job, things your boss needs done, etc. It is necessary to do a good job at Opportunity Set A. Opportunity set B is everything that is available for you to do that nobody is asking you to do. This could also be at your job, but it could also be something outside of work like taking a class to learn a new skill. With every single thing you do, ask What is it for? This forces you to make sure that the things that you do have a valuable outcome. It's okay if that outcome looks strange, or if that outcome will come after some time working towards it. We want to know which things we should devote our time and energy to, and we want to understand how to maximize opportunities. Answering What is it for? clarifies that. So, What is it for? Content now is for relationships. People will trust you and like you because of your content. You build a relationship with people when you put something out into the world. Life/Career advice: Try, quit, and learn Life is a series of experiments

Life is a series of experiments. The worst thing that you can do is be afraid of taking some step because you think that it's going to lock you into something. It's not. Don't sit around waiting for the perfect thing. The perfect thing doesn't exist. Whatever your dream job is, if you actually got it, I guarantee you it's not a dream. Build something great yourself, and you're going to do that by learning and calibrating along the way. Welcome to The Learning Leader Show presented by Insight Global.

I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. text, Hawk to 666866 to become part of Mindful Monday. You, along with tens of thousands of other learning leaders from all over the world, will receive a carefully curated email for me each Monday morning to help you start your week off right. You'll also receive details about how my book The Pursuit of Excellence will help you become a more effective leader. Text, talk to 66866. Now on to tonight's featured leader.

Jason Pfeiffer is the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine. He is also the author of a great new book called Build for Tomorrow, an action plan for embracing change, adapting fast, and future-proofing your career. During this conversation, we discuss the exact words to use in your next team meeting when announcing a change. change. And then how to be both excellent at your current job and be overly prepared for the promotion that you want. Then Jason shares a story that he learned from the rock when he interviewed him for Entrepreneur Magazine that completely changes how he approaches each day. I think you'll

really get value from that story. This one was so much fun, wide ranging, full of stories. very useful. Ladies and gentlemen, it's Jason Fifer. Jason is so great to have you here on the Learning Leader Show. Welcome. It is great to be here. Let's get started. I want to actually go all the way back to 1348. The bubonic plague, it breaks out in Europe. What happened as a result of that? What happened was, let's take some context here. I'm going to back up even further. Why are we talking about this? The reason we're talking about this is because what you are ultimately setting up here is this example that I use at the beginning of my book,

Build for Tomorrow, about why moments of massive disruption can lead to great opportunity, can lead to what I call a wouldn't go back moment. And at the very beginning of the pandemic, I didn't know, nobody knew what was coming. And I was looking for some glimmer of hope, March 2020. Is anything good going to come back? out of this incredibly terrible thing that we are staring down. And so I called Andrew Rabin, a professor of English who focuses on medieval law and literature at the University of Louisville, who I've interviewed before. And I asked him, did anything good come out of the bubonic plague?

Because I just thought, you know, if anything came out of the worst version of this that I can think of, then maybe something good comes out of whatever is going to happen in COVID. So he tells me this story. He says that the medieval European economy was a lord and surf system. The lords owned the land. They also owned the serfs. The serfs worked the land for free. It was slavery.

We're talking slavery. And then the bubonic plague starts. It ultimately kills estimates are upwards to 60% of Europe. 60% of Europe gone. And, you know, as the dust settles, the lords want to make some money. They have to get their businesses back up and running, and they say, go to the serfs,

and they say, serfs, it's time to go back and work the land here. But something has changed. The thing that has changed is that there are no longer enough serfs for all the lords, because so many of them have died. We have what today we would call a labor shortage. And the lords start to compete for the serfs. They start to say, can work for me. No, no, no, come work for me.

they start to offer incentives to come. They start to build. What the serfs realize is the opportunity for compensation. And so begins the very, very start of the employment contract as we know it. The idea that labor has a value, that the people who do that work should be compensated for it. The thing that brings you, Ryan and I together and all of our listeners right now together. starts at the bubonic plague. And would we say, I want 60% of Europe to die for that?

No, we would not. But it happened. But it happened. And the lesson that I draw from this is that we spend too much time and energy debating whether or not something should happen when it has already happened. If the change has come, if the change is here, that it doesn't really do us a whole lot of good to spend time focusing on how to stop it or why it should not have happened because it's here. And so instead, the best that we can do is we can look at the situation and say, where are the new opportunities? What is going to be created here that wasn't created before? The Bubonic Plague was a massive cultural and economic shift.

And of course, that wasn't the only thing that came from it. But we have versions of that all the time in our own lives, things that change, sometimes radically. And the only real smart choice that we can make is to spend some time figuring out what good we can get from it. Let's make this practical for today, Jason. for the avatar, we'll take an SVP at a Fortune 500 company who is doing fine, doing well, in fact, not crushing it, not bad, but doing pretty well. And so sometimes when you're in that situation, you don't innovate because you just want to kind of keep it on the tracks, keep whatever growth rate you're at, don't disrupt things too much that could potentially get you fired, but you always.

then don't innovate enough to really think about growth because sometimes in those roles you are thinking more about survival not getting fired than incredible growth or taking risk so for that specific person what are some ways to think about I know this is broad but what are some ways to think about maybe some ideas or even exercises they could do to certainly understand and minimize risk, but also give themselves a chance for a big idea to flourish or for incredible growth despite the fact that they might be a little bit scared about making a mistake that could cost them their job. Here's my advice.

You should start by evaluating what your core mission is that is separate from the role that you occupy or the tasks that you do every day. Can you define yourself by a single sentence, starts with I, goes on for a few words, in which every word is carefully selected because it is not anchored to something that is easily changed? What is the part of you that does not change in times of change? I'll give you the example for myself. I started as a newspaper reporter. That was my first job. I was a newspaper reporter for a couple of years. I loved being a newspaper reporter. Then I became a magazine editor. Love being a magazine editor. At some point throughout my career, however, as I saw newspaper reporters being laid off, as I saw

magazine editors being laid off, I started to realize that if my entire identity is built around this thing that can very easily be taken away from me, because, you know, if I'm a magazine editor and then I lose my job at a magazine. I am nothing. It's an uncomfortable place to be. And what I need to do is figure out who am I and how can I have transferable value outside of that organization? And so I've come up with the mission statement for myself. Here it is. I tell stories in my own voice. I tell stories, stories, not magazine stories, not newspaper stories, stories. You cannot take stories away from me. The president of Entrepreneur Magazine,

or Entrepreneur Media, which is the parent company of Entrepreneur Magazine, could call me right now while we are talking and he could fire me. And if my identity is tied up, if you're totally an entrepreneur, then I'm one phone call away from losing everything. Terrible place to be.

I would imagine that a lot of people who relate to the avatar that you just laid out are people whose identities are pretty well tied to that role that they're in right now. They've made it pretty far. They're senior. They may be earning good money. They have people who defer to them.

And that has become so much of their identity that they don't want to do anything that risks rocking that. But I'm telling you something, it's going to get rocked at some point whether you want it or not. So how can you understand your value? Spend some time with this. I run through, I run executives through an exercise. like this when I speak. I'm often hired to speak to executive teams. And it is awesome to hear people come up afterwards. Seasoned, seasoned executives who have not thought about this for themselves. And there are like giddy to have come up with something. Come up to me and they tell me things like

I help solve complex problems. I help teams achieve greatness. I bring joy to people at work. whatever is. And once you do that, you realize, oh my gosh, I can do that in any number of ways. I can be more creative about how I do that now, but also if I take a risk and it doesn't quite work out, there are infinite opportunities for me to do this thing. It is just a liberating way to understand yourself. And it opens up lots of other avenues. So you come up with this statement. You work for somebody else who could fire you at any moment, correct? but in addition to working for that person or that company, you publish books,

you publish podcast episodes, you write, your shipping work regularly, you are telling stories in your own voice. So you're saying you don't have as much fear to be fired because of you came up with your kind of mission statement of what you do and what it means. to tell stories in your own voice?

I mean, it's not, yes, it's, it's, it's not just, let me fill in the gap there because it, maybe people are listening to this and saying, well, you know what, I don't see how one sentence changes my life. It's not about one sentence. It's about everything that you do because of that one sentence. It's the source code. So now what do I do now that I understand myself differently? If you rewind a bunch of years when I thought of myself as a magazine editor,

I didn't have all this other stuff. But once I started to think, I tell stories in my own voice, I started to think, well, how can I live that? What is that? If I tell stories in my own voice, that means that the magazine job that I have is just one articulation of a broader set of value that I can bring to the world. So what else can I do? Now, everybody's going to be in a different situation, right? I happen to work in an organization that does not mind and, in fact, is very encouraging of me doing these other things outside of the company. So I wrote this book, Built for Tomorrow.

That was a independent project. Entrepreneur was not involved in any way. I travel and I speak. I make podcasts. I do all of these things. And entrepreneur, to my great fortune, sees these as additive to my role and to entrepreneur. it helps it helps amplify my voice and therefore helps amplify awareness of entrepreneur. So that's great.

Not every organization is going to think quite like that, but you surely have opportunities inside and out where you can start to express and engage with the thing that is of value to you. If you are an SVP somewhere and you have a lot of expertise that has been hard earned, Well, okay, fine. Maybe you don't want to stick your neck out so much as to write a book and start to promote yourself as a speaker. But can you go be an advisor, an informal advisor to a bunch of startups? I bet that they would really value your insights.

And I bet you would get a lot out of it. You'd be extremely excited to be taking these. I mean, this is what I do. I also am an advisor to a bunch of startups. I get one of my founders who texts me and says, hey, do you have five minutes? I got a problem and I get him on the phone and he's panicky. And it's fun. I get to talk through this stuff.

I love it. And, you know, what do I get in exchange? I mean, you know, I get a small amount of, you know, advisor equity. So it's great. It's a bet. Maybe it'll pay off. Maybe it won't. But it's a nice way for me to engage with my core value, to help others to think about

what I would want to do next. And maybe, maybe, frankly, if today entrepreneur does fire me, some of those things that I've been doing will turn into the next main opportunity. Right now, they're all side opportunities, but what happens if the deck shuffles? So it's not just about coming up with a sentence. It's about coming up with a sentence and then figuring out what it really means to live it. What does the editor-in-chief of entrepreneur magazine, that's your role? What does that entail?

What all do you do for that job? Entrepreneur. So Entrepreneur Media is the organization. And entrepreneur media does, it's an independent family owned company. It does a lot of, has a lot of products, but they're all really under that entrepreneur banner. So entrepreneur magazine, entrepreneur.com, podcasts, events, video, social media, so on. So I serve as the face in a way of the organization.

I don't own it, but I'm the guy who will go out and represent it. That's obviously not something that takes up all my time. but it is often the reason I'm most visible. I run the print magazine day to day. So that means that I'm making all the decisions with my team, but it's ultimately my call about what goes in the magazine. I assign and edit stories myself. I'm negotiating with the celebrities who are going to be on the cover.

I'm often doing the interview and writing the profile too. And then I serve in a kind of guidance advisor role throughout the organization. So, for example, I help the books department think about what books we should acquire and write down to what their titles should be. I work with the executive editor of Digital, who oversees the day-to-day operations of digital on larger strategy for editorial. I am on sales calls because I'm a great representative for the brand.

And so the sales team likes to have me come in when they're talking to clients and say, you know, they can do all the sales stuff. but then they bring me in basically to drive authority to say, look, I'm the guy who's in touch with our audience. I understand what is happening in these small and medium-sized business world. And let me tell you what our audience is thinking and how what we're talking about with you can be relevant to them. And so that's what I'm doing.

Right. So it's like, it's like I'm deep in the weeds on the print magazine and then my hands are just in everything else. Sounds like a cool job. It is a fun job. How did you earn this role? I stumbled into it. Oh.

Well, okay, so I was a newspaper reporter out of college. I graduated college in 2002. I am 42 years old. And I worked a couple of newspaper jobs. I quit both of them because I thought that I would get greater opportunities as a freelancer. And I was right. The freelancing ultimately landed me at Boston Magazine. That was my first magazine job.

Then I got a job at Men's Health. I moved to New York. And then I started freelancing for everybody. In media, freelancing means, well, freelance writing means it's sort of independent contracting for a specific story. So I might have a story idea and I would email an editor at GQ and I would say, you know, here's my idea. I've done some research. Here's why I think it would be good. And if they like it, then we'll come up with a fee for that individual piece.

And then I'm off to the races and I write that one piece. So it's independent contracting. And that's, if you pick up a publication, you're seeing a lot of free, staffs have smaller and smaller people. The staffs are, staffs are smaller. And so it's a lot of freelancing. So it doesn't pay very well, to be honest with you.

But it's good for getting your name out there and building your brand. So, so I was freelancing as I was growing. I went to Fast Company. I was an editor of fast company for a number of years. I went to Maxim, the men's magazine. I didn't want to be at Maxim, but there was a deputy editor opening there, which was really my first taste of management. And I wanted that experience, so I took it.

And then from there, actually the next management step for me was to be an executive editor, which means the number two in a magazine. And that role happened to open an entrepreneur. And so I took that job in 2015, and nine months later, the editor-in-chief left, and I made a play for it. I mean, I basically came up with a philosophy for how I could improve the magazine and then ultimately help the brand grow and had a whole lot of conversations. And my argument at the time was basically, look, entrepreneur for the vast majority of its

lifetime, brand has been around for 40-something years, has really talked to entrepreneurs, if they are specific small business people. But that is not the case anymore because the word entrepreneur now is a cultural word. It is a mindset. It is a badge of honor. People who are kids selling stuff on eBay, people who are NBA, you know, NBA athletes, people who are senior vice presidents. They all use the word entrepreneur.

So we need to stop treating ourselves like a small business public. and start talking to all of those people. And my argument is that the best way to talk to all of them at the same time is to talk about the one thing that they all have in common, which is the experience of entrepreneurship. That's it. The experience, the emotional experience of it, the challenge of putting yourself into constant new situations, not knowing how to succeed, but knowing that you must, feeling incredibly lonely, crazy, problem solving your way through walls.

This is what they all, everybody who calls themselves an entrepreneur has that in common. Let's talk to them about that. That became the kind of guiding force of the print magazine. Digital is such a sprawling enterprise that you can't come up with a theme quite like that. But we do that kind of stuff in print in digital as long as well as many other things. Anyway, they bought it. They bought it and I became editor-in-chief. And then I basically evolved into the kind of role that I have now.

So when I started, it was a more limited scope of responsibilities. and then it's just it's grown over time. I want to highlight that story real quick because I think there are a lot of growth-oriented, ambitious leaders who want to be promoted. And I think you're interviewing for your next job every day, right? I don't think it's necessarily an interview process, although that's still a part of it, and it is important.

But it feels to me, and correct me if I'm wrong, that you focused more on the needs of the company and how your ideas could help create more revenue, create more ideas, could make the company better, could grow the company versus saying, look at me, look what I've done. Now, that's part of it because you need to have the credibility, but you focused more on what they want, what they need, how you could help them and less on, look how awesome I am. Am I accurate in that statement? Nailed it. So I went through a shift in that moment. Prior to that, I had always thought of career development as being about skill set development and having situational awareness.

So every job that I took, I mean, I rattled off all those jobs, but I told you the reasoning for one of them, which was that I went to Maxim because it gave me management experience. I had an answer for all those other ones. Why did I go to men's health? It wasn't because I cared about, like, weight loss. I don't care about that. It was because I wanted to learn a specific style of editing, which is generally the entry point for young editors,

which is called front of book editing. Men's health did it exceptionally well, and it also gave me the opportunity to work at a national scale, which I had. So that was the reason I went. And then why did I go to Fast Company? It wasn't because I wanted to go into business magazines. I didn't really care about business at the time. I was in my 20s.

It was because I knew that going to Fast Company would give me long-form writing and editing experience that I wasn't able to get at men's health. I was being mindful of what do I not know and what do I need to know? And I really drove my decisions in every step by asking those questions. What do I need to learn and have I learned it? And when I learned it, it was time to move on every time. I have never once in my entire career, and I'm not, this is not a piece of advice because I, it's not practical for everybody and, but it just happened to work for me. I have never once gone out to get another job offer and then taken that offer back and said, you know, give me, give me something so that I'll stay here.

I got job offers when I was time to leave and then I just said, thank you for your time and I left. I was moving on. What do I need to learn? I learned it. It's time to go. It's time to learn something else. And so I really always focused on skill set, which was really focusing on me, right? It wasn't look at me, look at me, but it was, what do I need from this role?

And then once I had that opportunity to become editor-in-chief at entrepreneur, I had to make that shift. Because now this is a real leadership position. And so it was no longer now just about let me get the skill set of being editor-in-chief, though that was appealing, but rather I knew that the way to get this job was to understand how to identify an opportunity for the company that I was uniquely positioned to unlock for them. And therefore, to make myself incredibly valuable. But that's, people don't care about just you. They care about what you can do.

How you'll solve their problems or. yes, how you'll make their life better or easier or make their company stronger, grow it, whatever their goals are, how you can be the answer. I think that's the thing we miss in the process of trying to have look at everything that I've done as opposed to saying, here are real ideas that I can implement along with my team to then this is how it will impact the company. This is how it will impact that. I definitely messed this up, Jason.

When I was going through that process, I remember this is why I paused to actually dig into this area because I think it's important. Especially when talking about building for tomorrow, we're talking about building your career, building yourself up. Like, to me, I'm blown away by how strategic of a thinker you were when it comes to acquiring skills that would make you a more valuable person to these companies. I wasn't thinking of that at all. I was just like, what's the next job? What's the natural promotion for that? Oh, it's the manager. Okay.

I mean, where does that come from in your mind to think about tomorrow? To think about the skills needed that will make you more well-rounded. That will make you a more attractive candidate for a job. I'm curious how your mind was set up that way. What you were just saying there reminds me of this term that I use a lot and I share with people, which is don't ask for an opportunity, be the opportunity. opportunity. Like, that's the difference, right? Like, you, you don't, you don't just go around asking for property. People do that. People ask for opportunities. People, people, people will email me, right?

Every day, I'll get 10 of these by the time we're done with this conversation in my inbox where somebody's emailed me and they'll just, they'll just say, can I have, can I, can I, can you write an article about me, right? But no, the answer is no, because I'm not a service provider who, whose job is to hand out opportunities. My job is to serve an audience. And that means that, you know, that I'm always mindful of what does my audience need. And if somebody can tell me something that I can see as relevant to my audience, because they're going to learn, my audience is going to learn something by understanding how you, entrepreneur, thought through some challenge,

well, then I will want to tell it to them. But that's being an opportunity, not asking for an opportunity. And the same is true in promotions and growth in your career. Make sure that you understand the needs of the people that you work with and the needs of the organization and show them that you all, are the opportunity that by putting you in a position to grow, they grow too. That is it, right? You carry value on your shoulders. And that is when you can succeed. Let's talk about change. This is one of the biggest questions I feel like I get from leaders. Change is the only constant.

It's the only thing that will always be happening. And you write about the four distinct phases that people go through when they experience change, all high level it and then you drill down. Okay. So the four phases, panic, adaptation, new normal, and the fourth is wouldn't go back. Can you explain what these four phases are and how understanding them will make you a more effective leader? The week before COVID lockdowns, when we were all like, this thing's crazy, but we're all still going out, I went out to a friend's birthday dinner at a restaurant. And, you know, there are like 12 of us sitting around a table.

And I'm talking to this woman who is sitting next to me. Her name is Megan Asha. And she runs a company called Founder Made, which, among other things, runs a series of trade shows for the CPG industry. And I, you know, I knew Megan already. And I said, Megan, it looks like live events are shutting down for some amount of time. What are you going to do? And she said to me, you know, I'm pretty excited, actually. And the reason for that, it's scary, but the reason for that is because we have had all of these other ideas about how to drive growth that founder made and how to identify new revenue streams.

And we've never been able to really explore any of them because all of our resources have to be put on making sure that the next trade show goes well. And so now that we're being forced to hit pause on that, I can start to shift resources towards figuring out all these other opportunities. That really, really stuck with me because what happened next, of course, was that the whole world, like, the, the brakes slammed. And you got to watch everybody go through the same change at the same time and then radically diverge in what they were doing. And some were like Megan and they moved very quickly towards figuring out how to adapt. Others spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to do the thing that they used to do.

And in talking to them through that time, I came to realize this thing, which is that everybody goes through change in the same four phases. Panic, adaptation, new normal, wouldn't go back. Wouldn't go back being that moment where you say, I have something so new and valuable that I wouldn't want to go back to a time before I had it. The difference is that some people move through them a lot more efficiently than others, and they use. use the experiences in different ways. Megan, as she sat there next to me, was not not panicking. She was totally panicking, but she was utilizing that panic to say, what can I do to unlock future opportunities where a lot of people used that panic to say, how can I hold on tighter to the thing that I think I'm losing? And so what I wanted to ultimately help people do was,

recognize that this is a process and it's a natural one and that just because you fear, just because you feel fearful doesn't mean that you aren't either on the right path or not set up to discover a better path. But if we can figure out how to move as efficiently as possible through these, we can reach the thing that is waiting for us at the other end of it, which is wouldn't go back. So any big change happens. That was one of the monumental ones, hopefully one of the biggest ones of our lives,

but who knows? But there are usually like smaller changes. Oh, we're going to, on a sales team, okay, we're shifting to focus more on this product, maybe because it's better margins, whatever. Right. And as a manager, I mean, as a frontline manager, I remember at times handling that very poorly

versus when I grew up a little bit and learned some and handling those kind of announcements to my team better. What are some of the basic core tenants, the principles of a manager who is going to communicate a change to their team? What are some of the basics that you have to do? You've got to get these few things right in order to be somebody who can effectively help a team lead through change. step one, remember, you have probably had a lot more time to sit with the reality of this change than the people you are introducing it to. This is particularly true if you're at a level in which you were involved in the development

of the change. You had time to think about it. And your team hasn't. You're introducing it to them right now. So give them some grace because they need it, because you had time to address. and adjust and absorb, and they need that time to. You also then need to communicate to them that there is a value and a purpose to this, that it serves a role, that it can help them, and that frankly it's not that different

from the thing that came before. Here's what I've found. Here's what I believe. People hate new things, but they love. better versions of old things. Because everybody wants to do something better, they just don't want to be thrust out into something that feels like loss. Remember that people experience change as loss.

They immediately think of the thing that they know really well that they won't have access to, and that feels like loss to them. We are programmed for loss aversion. This is decades of psychological research have confirmed. this or we are more concerned about protecting against loss than we are at identifying and pursuing gain. It's the reason why we'll make decisions that are sometimes really counter to our own self-interest because we're mostly concerned about losing something or we perceive some kind of gain as a loss. If you get promoted and a colleague of yours at the same level gets promoted to a

higher level, you feel like you lost something, even though you gained it. So let's recognize how people are going to process this. And then the most important thing is, and this will should guide your communication. I can't give you the exact words that you use. I think it's about your leadership style and it's about the needs of your individual team. But I'll tell you that, I think that for managers introducing change to a team, they often run into the exact same problem that a company does when it's, tries to introduce a new product to its consumer.

And that is that they understand the value of this change or this new thing a lot better than the people that they're introducing it to. And they don't recognize that gap. And as a result, they start to talk about and introduce concepts and new things from the vantage point of this is really good. Let me bring this to you. Instead of where they need to start is not with them, not with the manager, not with the company introducing the new product, but rather with the recipient of that information, with the team, with the consumer. Where are they right now?

What are they comfortable with? What are they familiar with? What do they value? And then start to build a bridge of familiarity from them to you. You start with them. This is the smallest, but I just love it because it's so colorful example of this, which is, I was talking to this guy named Jason Wright. He has a snack brand called Wild Brands. And he made these, he made these chips made out of chicken meat, which sounds disgusting, frankly.

But like a kind of processed chicken meat and egg whites that came out looking and feeling like potato chips. and healthy snack is what he's thinking he puts them out in the market when he's sampling them at whole foods people try it they love it they buy it when he's not sampling at whole foods nobody buys this thing it just won't move off the shelf so he knows the product is good he knows people like it why aren't they buying it well he starts to think about and he starts to watch consumers as they engage with his packaging on his packaging the very first words that you read are these. Chicken chips. Chicken chips. And he comes to realize for most people, that sounds disgusting. It sounds disgusting. So after a long process of testing the marketplace,

he hadn't tested the marketplace before, they put out new bags. These bags, the first words that you see are protein chips. Now they sell. Why? Because people are familiar with that already. They already have protein shakes, and they already have protein bars, and they already have all these sorts of other protein things. Now it's protein chips. This is starting with the language and the framework that the consumer is already familiar with. And once you have that, now they're on board. And now you get to have a conversation with them and say, which is now what the rest of the packaging is, which is say, protein chips, you know all about that. Here's the thing. What makes ours special is that it's only whole ingredients. It's a whole ingredients. It's a whole. only chicken breast, it's only the right. And, um, and now you're building trust, but you got to start where they are. The problem, the first was that he thought chicken chips was a good idea, so he assumed everyone else would think so too, but no, there's nobody's ever heard of that because it sounds disgusting. So instead, we got to start with where people are. What do they value? What are they familiar with? Build from there. Okay, a couple more things. You got some advice from

Ryan Reynolds, the famous Ryan Reynolds. In order to be good at something, you have to be willing to be bad. Can you expand on what you learn from him about this willingness to be bad in order to get good? Yeah, I interviewed him for the magazine a year or so ago, incredibly smart guy. We were talking about how he's made this shift from acting into all sorts of business. He started an ad agency, owns a gin and mobile phone company. Anyway, he said, in order to be good, you have to be willing to be bad. What he's saying is that we make this mistake, which is that we think that we should be good at new things. And if we're not,

then maybe it means that we shouldn't do them, that we're just not cut out for it. But the thing is that everybody is bad when they start something new, everybody. And so the thing that makes the difference isn't whether or not you are good at the new thing. The thing that makes the difference is whether or not you are able to tolerate being bad

long enough to get to good. Because most people aren't. Most people bail. Because most people don't like being bad. at things. It's really uncomfortable. So I love that piece of advice because it really helps you reframe an experience of trying something new where, yes, it's frustrating, but you have to recognize that it's also part of the process and that success doesn't look like being good at the beginning. That's impossible. Success looks like sticking with it and adapting.

Okay. There are two different opportunity sets. Opportunity set A and opportunity set B. What are the differences between the two? So this is from a concept that I have called work your next job, which plugs into some of the things that we were talking about earlier, particularly I'm thinking about that SVPs, who's maybe feeling stuck or at least afraid. So work your next job is this. In front of you right now, there are two sets of opportunities, just like you said. Opportunity set A, opportunity set B. Opportunity set A is everything that's available to you. So that could be, whatever you are measured on, whatever you're supposed to do every day that whoever above you expects you to do, do a good job at that. That's Opportunity Set A. Opportunity Set B is everything

that's available to you that nobody's asking you to do. That could be at work. It could be, you know, new responsibilities, new team, but it could also be outside of work. And it could take any form. You like podcasts, start a podcast. Earlier I talked about, you know, you've got a wealth of knowledge as an SVP, I guarantee that there's some entrepreneur out there who would love to have you as an advisor. These kinds of things, I think, are always more important, infinitely more important than Opportunity Set A. Not to say Opportunity Set A is unimportant. You've got to do the things that are asked of you. But if you only do that, you will only be qualified to do the things you're already doing, whereas Opportunity Set B is where growth happens. That, as we had talked about my own

career path. You can see, I was always focused on opportunities at B. I'm going to freelance. I'm going to learn these new things. I'm going to put myself in these new positions. I started podcasts. Nobody asked me to start a podcast. I joined the video team at Fast Company. Nobody asked me to join a video team, but I did it because I wanted to learn how to be good on camera because I thought that that would be useful and it has been. So the more that you can focus on what is available to you, the more you will open doors in the future. When you think about all the people you've interviewed for Entrepreneur magazine, whether it's The Rock or Ryan Reynolds or Gary Vee or tons of others,

what have you found to be some of the commonalities among those leaders who have sustained excellence over an extended period of time? All of them are, first of all, to the theme of our conversation, adaptable. They think a lot about it. They're also very self-aware and they have found a way to process their mistakes or failings and find value in them. That's my favorite part of those conversations, always. Everybody who you mentioned and then some, I immediately think of you know the thing that the rock told you know he told me this great story about we were kind of trading stories about moments where we were accidentally obnoxious to other people and he for

example told me this story about being it was he he and he and danny garcia who's his business partner uh they were early early days he was like a wrestler and maybe you started just acting was trying to figure out how to grow his career and they had had a bad day something could knock on raw and they were out at a restaurant and And somebody comes up to him, a couple, and they ask for an autograph. And he gives them a big, like, he, like a big, you know, like very clearly does not want to do this. And he kind of scribbles his name. And he said that they immediately started apologizing.

I'm so sorry for interrupting. And then they walked away. And he said he and Danny then spent the rest of the meal kind of breaking down that moment and trying to see. see what just happened from the fans standpoint. They saw him from across the room. They talked about it for a while. Oh, my God, is that the rock? I think that's the rock. Should we go to talk to him? We shouldn't bother him. No, no, no. And they did it. They gathered the courage and they went over to him. And he plays some role in their life, whatever it is, just entertainment, but there's some role that he plays in their life. And probably the only in-person experience that they will ever have

with him is him being an asshole. He's like, I realize like, what a lucky, these were his words to me. He's like, what a lucky son of a bitch I am that somebody would want to come over and ask me for my autograph. I'm a lucky son of a bitch. And it changed the way that he thought about what he is like in public, what he owes the people who have invested their time in his work. And he's never forgotten it. And I will tell you, everything that I ever read about that guy before I met him was that he is just incredibly gracious man. And it's true. All of it's true. He was incredibly, like, you know, I interviewed him maybe three years ago at this point. I included a very small amount of something that he said to me in my book. And I mailed it to him afterwards. I mean, not to his home. I don't have

his address, but I mailed it to his office. You know, months went by. he probably gets a lot of mail, but I'll tell you, a couple weeks ago, I wake up, I check Instagram, I've got a DM from The Rock. It's a voice, it's a voice memo. And it's a voice memo. And I play it and he's like, hey Jason, DJ here. You know, I was just, I was in my office. I just saw your book. I'm sorry. I don't know when you mailed it to me, but I just want to say, congratulations. And he usually went on for like a minute talking about the book and talking about our time together and like things that he's thought about since. And like that guy has so,

that guy doesn't need to do that. He doesn't, he doesn't need to do that, but he does. And I guarantee that it all came, it all came back to that one moment where he recognized something in a moment of failing. And everybody who I talked to, who has found great success, has found a way to recognize the low moments

as learning moments. You probably have a lot of younger people earlier in their career coming to you after they look at your resume and they look at your career arc. You're still like right in the middle slash prime of your career, the early stages, but at a very high level. And so I would imagine that there are questions you're regularly asked. And so I'd like to ask you the same ones for that person who is in there early to mid-20, graduated college, want to leave a positive dent in the world, build a cool career, something

that makes a difference, something that they have passion for. What are some general pieces of life slash career advice you'd give to that person? Try and quit. I mean, I can only tell you the thing that worked for me, right? And what worked for me was that I had an idea of something that was the starting point of what would be a career that I loved, I knew that I wasn't going to start at the end point. I couldn't start at my goal. I started at a tiny community newspaper because that was what was in front of me. And I tried it and I learned something and then I quit. And then I did it again. What now is available to me? Try it, learn it, quit. Then, the next one. Try it, learn it, and that time it was leave for another job. And I did that over and

over again. Don't be afraid. Like, life is a series of experiments. And the worst thing that you can do is be afraid of taking some step because you think that it's going to lock you into something. It's not. Take the step, whatever it is, learn something. Every experience you will learn something from. Don't sit around waiting for the perfect thing. The perfect thing doesn't exist. Whatever your dream job is, if you actually got it, I guarantee you it's not a dream. Instead, you're going to build something great yourself and you're going to do that by learning and calibrating along the way. So good. The book's called Build for Tomorrow, an action plan for embracing change, adapting fast, and future-proofing your career. Extremely well-written, awesome stories that then

tie into the themes and the practical application so you can implement it into your life and your career. So well done, Jason. I am thankful for whatever person on Twitter said, hey, I need to connect to you guys. You should record a podcast together. This has a happened months ago. And I said, I had not seen your work at that time. And then I dug in and did an hour's worth of deep diving and said, oh, Jason, let's do it. I think you responded pretty quickly and away we go. So it's kind of neat how I think both of us with Opportunities Set B, putting our work out into the world, then a random stranger who I still don't remember who it is said, you two need to talk. This is another, I think, great example of why it's useful to put your

work out into the world. You never know what could happen. A random person may connect you so that you can have this cool conversation and build a relationship with somebody who I think will both benefit from it. Holy cow, you're totally right. I forgot that that's how we got connected. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, my God. Thank you to whoever that person is. I wish there was an easy way to find. I'm sure they're listening. They probably listen to both of our stuff. So I thank you to them. I'm if I'll go back and find it and I'll connect with them. But it's just cool. I think it's it's another good. reason to do that. I just I search it really fast. So it's at double deuce who doesn't actually use their their real name. So at double deuce, super, super appreciate you. Yeah, that's right. You put something,

look, you put something out into the world and the world changes as a result. That's what I've learned. Yeah. And it creates a serendipity vehicle and that's how this happens. So Jason, thanks so much, man. I'd love to continue our dialogue as we both progress, man. I would absolutely love that. Thank you. By the way, I'll just also note the book is available in all forms. So audio book, ebook, hardcover, whatever works for you, wherever you find that stuff, you can find it. This has been such a pleasure. I really appreciate your time. Thanks so much, man. All right. Jason's a super thoughtful dude, really good storyteller, not surprising, giving all he's done in his career. And I actually didn't expect to get into that much of his career arc, but I found it fascinating and useful for

anyone who's trying to build a career. I was not that intentional and didn't think that far ahead when I was working on building my career. So it's really showing there are different ways to go about it. But I think Hiss is certainly useful. A few takeaways from my notes, The Rock's story about how he responded to the couple at the restaurant and what he learned from it. A commonality among those who sustain excellence

is they learn from their mistakes and become better for it. I'd ask you, when is the last time you messed up? What did you learn from it? How are you now better off? of it. Then define yourself, your one sentence. Jason's is, I tell stories in my own voice. That's what he does as the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine. That's what he does when he writes books, records, podcasts, really everything that he does. What is your one sentence? What do you do? And then how to lead through change. A few things. Remember, you've had time as the leader typically to think about it

prior to the meeting, prior to the announcement, your team hasn't. So give them some grace. Show them grace. Communicate why the change is happening and how it specifically impacts each member on your team. And then his quote, people hate new things, but they love better versions of old things. People hate loss. Remind your team of what's staying the same, but getting better.

Once again, I want to say thank you so much for continuing. to spread the message and telling a friend or two, hey, you should listen to this episode of the Learning Leader Show with Jason Fiver. I think his stories and message will help you become a more effective leader. And because you continue to do that, and you continue to go to Ryanhawk.net, which launches you into Apple Podcasts, and you write reviews,

and you rate the show hopefully five stars. You are giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis and for that I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk to you soon. Can't wait.