The Liz Moody Podcast - Secrets of Entrepreneurial Success: How To Start A Business, Networking Tips & Daily Habits of Top Performers with Jason Feifer

Episode Date: February 22, 2023

Practical tips for addressing the challenges that come with entrepreneurship and identifying your skills, plus exactly how to communicate your unique message.  the one trait successful entrepreneurs have in common  how to get over fear of loss or failure (+ turn failure into the best thing that ever happened to you) why vertical thinking is key for success + exactly how to do it the first thing anyone should do if they want to start a business actionable ways to actually figure out what kind of business to start how to know when it’s time to throw in the towel on an idea networking secrets of top entrepreneurs daily habits that successful entrepreneurs have in common  how to identify what it is that you’re actually good at  figuring out your unique message to share with the world 3 game-changing tips for public speaking and so much more!  For more from Jason, check out his new book Build for Tomorrow: An Action Plan for Embracing Change, Adapting Fast, and Future-Proofing Your Career and follow him at @heyfeifer on Instagram.  To join the Healthier Together Podcast Club Facebook group, go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/healthiertogetherpodcast. Don’t forget to grab my brand new, limited edition Strawberry Black Pepper Cashew Butter from Ground Up! Use code LIZMOODY for 10% off anything on grounduppdx.com. This episode is sponsored by:  AG1 by Athletic Greens: visit athleticgreens.com/healthiertogether and get your FREE year supply of Vitamin D and 5 free travel packs today.  Paleovalley: head over to paleovalley.com and use the code LIZM for 15% off. Cymbiotika: get 15% off using code LIZ at cymbiotika.com.  GoMacro: use code HEALTHIER30 for 30% off your order and free shipping on orders over $50 at gomacro.com.  Healthier Together cover art by Zack. Healthier Together music by Alex Ruimy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, friends, and welcome back to the Healthier Together podcast. I'm your host, Liz Moody, and I'm a best-selling author and long-time journalist. This podcast is all about helping you live your healthiest, happiest life, whether we're learning how to figure out our personal style, busting myths about gut health, or getting tips for overcoming imposter syndrome in work and in life. And yes, those are all real episodes, so if any of those topics sound good to you, scroll on back in the archives. I am so excited to welcome Jason Fyfer,

to today's episode. Jason is the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, a podcast host, an author, a startup advisor, and a popular keynote speaker. His new book, Build for Tomorrow, an action plan for embracing change, adapting fast, and future-proofing your career was released last fall and presents a fresh perspective on overcoming obstacles in business and in life. His work has been featured in major publications like The New York Times Today, The Washington, post and more. On this episode, we get into all things entrepreneurship. We get into the one trait successful entrepreneurs all have in common, how to get over fear of loss or failure and turn failure into the best thing that ever happened to you, why vertical thinking is key for success plus

exactly how to do it, the first thing that anyone should do if they want to start a business, actionable ways to actually figure out what kind of business to start, how to know when it's time to throw in the towel on an idea, networking secrets of top entrepreneurs, daily habits that successful entrepreneurs have in common, how to identify what skills you're especially good at, figuring out your unique message to share with the world, three game changing tips for public speaking, and so much more. I would love to hear your thoughts and your biggest takeaways as you're listening, as always, so definitely screenshot and tag me. I am at Liz Moody, and Jason is at Hey, Fifer, F-E-I-F-E-R on Instagram.

This episode is both incredibly pragmatic and helpful for people thinking about starting a business, but you will also just hear a different way of looking at life through an entrepreneurial lens, which is a really helpful reframe for motivation, success, and thinking in a long game way, regardless of your chosen career path. If you know anyone who's thinking about starting a business or who just needs a fresh way to look at things like failure. Please send them a link to this episode. Thank you so much for continuing to share the podcast with friends, with family members, coworkers, neighbors, internet strangers, I don't know, whoever it is. It is the best way to support the podcast so that we can

continue to have amazing guests on and it is so, so appreciated. Before we get into the interview, one more quick and very exciting update. I created a nut butter flavor with Groundup, one of my favorite companies around. I first wrote about them maybe five years ago when I was an editor at MBG because I love their flavors. And more importantly, I really love their mission. They provide job skills and individual training to women overcoming adversity who have a desire to work but don't have employment opportunities. When they reached out and asked if I wanted to create my own dream flavor with them, I was like, um, yes, please. We went back and forth for more than six months and did so many iterations until we had a product that I was 100% satisfied with,

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fridge because you are going to miss this nut butter when it is gone. And of course, they gave me a special code to share with you. Go to Groundup PDX and use code Liz Moody for 10% off. You can use that code for any of the nutbutters on their site. So if you want to try any of their other flavors, now is a good time for that too. Again, that's code Liz Moody on Grounduppdx.com. Go stock up. I don't want you to miss out.

This flavor will change your life. Okay. Let's get into all things entrepreneurship with Jason Pfeiffer. Jason, thank you so much. much for joining me on the podcast today. I am a huge fan of your book and all of your work. You're the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, which is super impressive. I am. Thank you. Thank you so much. So you see thousands of entrepreneurial success stories in your role as editor-in-chief at Entrepreneur. I would love to just kick us off with a few qualities or actions that repeat over and over in

success stories. We would love some specific things that success stories have in common. The stories that I hear of entrepreneurs are people who are throwing themselves into circumstances that they don't feel totally prepared for. And then, of course, the unexpected happens. It's kind of all unexpected. And their ability to succeed depends upon their ability to recognize new opportunity and not hold on to what used to work or what their original idea was of the thing that they wanted to do. And as a result, entrepreneurs tend to end up in this totally different direction than whatever it was that they set out to do. They marvel at how they got there. Like, what am I doing running this thing when I started over there? Or I was

originally in this line of work and now I have a soap company and that doesn't make any sense, except that it kind of does because this happened and then this happened. And I will tell you, that did not come naturally to me at all. My background is in media. I've spent the majority of my career in magazines. And I had this really interesting experience early. on when I was editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur magazine that crystallized to me the way that entrepreneurs think differently than other people. In 2018, my wife and I had a romantic comedy novel that came out. It was called Mr. Nice Guy, and it was about two people who each week sleep together and then critically review each other's performance in a magazine. It had had nothing to do

with entrepreneurship or anything else. We had started working on it like years before I had been at entrepreneur. And anyway, the reason I'm telling you this is because when the book was coming out, I know I was telling people about it, I got these two completely different reactions to it based on what kind of person they were. Media friends of mine, writer friends of mine, they would always say, congratulations, that's so awesome that you wrote this novel and you sold it. Entrepreneurs would say, oh, that's interesting. What are you going to do with it? And what I realized was happening was that entrepreneurs think in what I now call vertical thinking. which is to say that the only reason to do something is because it is the foundation upon which

the next thing will be built. That's not how most people think. Most people, including myself for a very long time, think horizontally, horizontal thinking, which is to say, I'm going to do something, I'm going to put it out in the world, I'm going to move along, then I'm going to do some other thing and I'll move along. And those things don't build. And entrepreneurs are so incredibly mindful and thoughtful of how one thing that they do must lead in some way to another, which doesn't mean that they act totally linearly because they don't. And it doesn't mean that they're not afraid of failure because if they fail, they will recognize the thing in the failure that gives them some insight for the next thing that they do. And therefore, the thing that they did is the

foundation upon which the next thing was built because they learned something really important. This is how Stuart Butterfield launches a video game company that goes nowhere, and then he shuts it down and thinks the internal chat system inside this video game was really cool and people liked it. Maybe I spend that off into its own product, and that becomes slack. That's the way in which they're thinking. It's that vertical thinking that I think people either learn or they had a little more embedded into them than others that I think also drives the kind of success that I see among entrepreneurs. I have three questions about that.

first of all, do you think that in any way takes away from the feeling of accomplishment or satisfaction or sitting in the success? When you were telling the story of your book, I was like, well, are they not letting you enjoy this accomplishment, this huge accomplishment that you've done by publishing a book because they're seeing it as a rung on a ladder that goes somewhere else. And then that ladder can be never ending. And then your life is just always aspiring and never being satisfied. I think in a way, yes. And it's the reason why entrepreneurs will talk a lot about having to remind themselves to stop and appreciate successes because they don't. And I have learned not to as well. I didn't throw a book party for myself for this book because to me,

having released the book was not the accomplishment. Now I've got to go out and sell it. And I've got to get people to read it and enjoy it. So like, what am I throwing a party? for it. I think that's the wrong way to think. I think I should have stepped back and appreciated the thing that I did at the time that it happened. But there's a flip side to that. And the flip side is that that kind of mindset also helps you get through setbacks easier. Because what you're doing is your flattening experiences and you're trying to place everything that happens to you, even if it's happening in the moment, as part of a longer journey. You can see backwards. You can't see forwards, but you know that there is forwards.

So I remember, for example, talking to this guy, Adam Singolda, who runs Tabula. Tabula's gigantic company, a billion-dollar company, they were engineering a merger with their largest competitor called Outbrain. And Adam was going to be the CEO of both. And he was incredibly excited about this. I remember getting drinks with him right after they announced the merger. And we were talking about how this was a dream of his. And he was preparing to take over this much larger company now. And then a year or so later, the merger fell apart.

The economics of it didn't work. And I called Adam up and I said, I just wanted to understand how you're processing this now. Because you must have basically stopped thinking of yourself as the CEO of Tabula and started to think of yourself as the CEO of this larger combined company. And now it's maybe like a bummer to go back to your old role. And he said, you know, it was emotionally difficult without question. but he started to think back to all the other times in his company's journey when it felt like this thing was over. All the other times where he couldn't find investors where people didn't believe in him,

where some major client pulled out and it created absolute chaos and all those other times in which it seemed like everything was going to be over, but it wasn't. And then he thought about how when Netflix in its early days tried to sell itself to Blockbuster, for I think it was $50 million. And Blockbuster said no. He's like, I could imagine Reed Hastings, CEO, going home and saying, well, I failed. I failed to build this company. This was the moment.

But of course, this wasn't the moment. That was an insignificant moment in the growth of Netflix. And if we can put our failures into context, well, then they don't feel like they are game-stopping experiences. They feel like they are just part of a longer journey. journey and journeys have ups and downs. So yes, I think you're absolutely right that thinking like this can mean that you miss appreciating some of the highs, but what it mostly does is that it is the price of admission for thinking long term. And the price of admission for thinking long term

is that you are flattening the highs and the lows so that you can focus on the long. That makes a lot of sense. I've had to be so conscious of bringing those moments of appreciation into my career. I just finished writing my book last week and I'm celebrating that tomorrow. And I'm celebrating literally just turning in the draft because I'm like, I know so many things can go wrong that are out of my control from here on forward. And I think we have to celebrate the things that are in our control because there aren't that many of them. That's awesome. What are you doing to celebrate? I'm having a little spa day with my husband. We're going to go get massages and sit in a sauna. That's great. I love that. Good for you. I don't think it has to be huge. But I think

celebrating those little things along the way has been really important for me, at least personally, to continue to feel motivated and also to remind myself that the act of producing is enjoyable rather than just the reception of what I've produced, if that makes sense. That's a really, really nice thing that you're doing and I should learn from it. I'm like, I want to make you have a book party. Like, go have a book party, friend. You wrote a beautiful book. Thank you.

I really appreciate that. I've started to use this line for myself. The line is, I am the project. And by that I mean that no one individual project is the book is not the project. The book is a project, but it's not the project. I'm the project. And so any individual professional achievement to me doesn't feel like it's a big thing. It feels like it's contributing to the broader project, which is me.

I like that mode of thinking because it's. helps me frame, well, is this worth doing or not doing? Does this build the project or does it not build the project? Years ago, when I had a different kind of career, I would take on all these like freelance assignments for magazines. I don't do that anymore. Why? Because it doesn't help with the project. Writing for New York Magazine no longer helps me achieve what I want to achieve. So like, why would I do it? But the downsides of it is that the project, me, is never ending or hopefully not for a long time. That means that there are fewer moments to step back and say, I've done really good. And I think that I should recognize and celebrate that.

I love the I am the projecting. It highlights to me one of the things I love about your book so much, which is that you're using entrepreneurship almost to create a framework through which to look at life and optimize all parts of our life. And I feel like that sentence is just an example of that. The way we can use entrepreneurial thinking, whether we are entrepreneurs or not, to live our best lives in all of the capacities of our lives. That's exactly what I'm doing. I don't think of entrepreneurship. as a kind of career. I think of it as a way of thinking and a identity if people choose it. And it's just a useful way to think. It's grounding. It gives you purpose. It gives you direction. And you can

apply that however you want. I love that. Second question, if we are in a moment of failure, perceived or otherwise, if we're in a moment of setback, could you give us one tip for reframing that and feeling good when we're in that pit of despair? I'd like to say that failure is You go back to that Stuart Butterfield example of how a failed video game became Slack. There's just so many examples in which some large setback led to some lesson, and that lesson is the thing that drove success. When I experience some kind of failure or setback, and whenever your listeners do, I would suggest doing the thing that I do, which is trying to identify the thing that a week, a month, a year from now,

I will say, I'm really glad I know that. That's just a really useful starting point. And also because it allows you to step back from the failure that you feel like you're in and look at it as an object. It doesn't mean that you emotionally detach from it. I sure wish that that was possible. That just takes time. Every time that it happened to me, I know that there is something in here, if I rifle around enough, that I can find that is going to be really useful later. And if I can figure out what that is now, then it gives me some sense of purpose over it.

I'll give you one kind of quick example. So I have spent a lot of time promoting this book. And doing so meant calling in basically every single favor that I ever had. This goes back to vertical thinking. Like horizontal thinking was I moved through the world and I meet people and I move through the world. Vertical thinking is everybody who I meet can be useful later. So I need to create a spreadsheet, which I did called good contacts, and literally everybody who I

engage with in any way who I think I should keep in touch with this person because knowing them is valuable. And I don't mean this just purely in a transactional way. I want to expand my relationships and networks, but let's be honest, we also are thinking how are people fitting into my lives and productive ways. I add them to good contacts. I've been doing it for years. I have this spreadsheet.

And I called in all those favors. And some of those were big. For example, Gary Vaynerchuk. I've known Gary for years. I've never asked him for a thing. I asked him to go on his podcast and talk about the book. And he said yes. And we did it. And I don't know what happened that day. But I wasn't as sharp as I like to be. You know when you kind of like half stumble and then for a while you're kind of like running, but what you're really doing is just trying to stop yourself from falling. I felt like that was the experience of doing Gary's podcast. I just couldn't find my footing. It was not Gary's fault. It was my fault. And afterwards, I was in my bedroom because it's where I was recording at the time, because we were doing it remote. And I got off and I just felt empty inside. When I was thinking about, I just called in this favor. This was a big opportunity. I did not do as well as I wanted. But then I was like, you know what? Maybe it was okay. Maybe it was fine. And then I started to repeat to myself like a crazy person pacing in my room.

It was fine. It was fine. It was fine. It was fine. It was fine. And then I had to go because I had a talk that I had to give across town. Now I'm like on the subway. and I'm repeating to myself, it was fine. Now I'm like, a person in New York talking to themselves. And I thought, what can I do? I need to do something now because I hate feeling like this. I feel like I was a missed opportunity and a failure and I hate it. And I thought, well, okay, what am I doing right now? What is this? What's happening? I started Googling for descriptions of the experience that I'm having right now. What is happening is that I am obsessing over how I could have done better on something that just happened. Is there a term for that? Turns out there is. It's called

counterfactual thinking. I found it after a bunch of Googling. Has anybody researched this? Oh, yes. Actually, a whole bunch of people have researched this. Then I just started contacting them on my phone in the subway, onto my next event. And then a week later, I'm on the phone with all these researchers and psychologists talking about counterfactual thinking, which was helpful to me in a way to understand me. But what I realized was, as soon as the emotions of this experience pass, what I have now is Liz, exactly what I'm doing right now, which is I have a good bit. I have a thing that I can say on stage and in podcasts, I have this anecdote of me experiencing this and that I have this insight, counterfactual thinking.

This is this thing that we do in which we start to compare our vision of what an event should have been like against what actually happened. And that is a terrible thing. It puts us in this loop that we can't get out of. It felt like it was helpful to my career now to have this additional insight and information that I can utilize in some other way. Maybe that will be part of my next book, is counterfactual. actual thinking. But it couldn't have happened unless I stepped back from that experience and I said,

what about this is useful? And then started to dig in. And once I did, eventually the whole experience reframed. It's almost like you're activating a different part of your brain than the emotional part. And maybe that overrides some of those emotions of shame or anxiety, depression, all of the negative emotions that would be coursing through you about that. I wonder if activating the logical part overrides those and can help you feel better. That's a great analysis. I think that you're right. It's giving me something to do.

It's purpose. Not just purpose. Yes, purpose, but also agency. One of the reasons why we feel lost is because we don't have agency. Self-determination theory states that there are three things that people need to be happy. They need to feel like they have some control of a situation. they feel like they need to have some competency in what they're doing, and they need to feel connected to other people. These are the three things that we feel like we need. This is a decades-old psychological

theory, self-determination theory. And I read it and I realized that's exactly right. Every time that I have been unhappy, it is because I either didn't feel like I had, I was competent in a situation, that I had agency in a situation, or that I wasn't connected to other people in a situation. And I think that what we're describing when we have a moment of failure is that we are feeling not competent and we're feeling like we don't have any agency. Like we've lost control of this situation. And shifting towards how can this be useful is giving us something to do. I can't go back in time and go on to Gary V's podcast and be better. I can't. It's gone. That's the thought so many of fixate on over and over and over, the thing we actually have no control of whatsoever. Right. But what I can do

is do something with the experience of feeling really bad about that. I love that. Okay. Third, can you just give us one really actionable tip, something we can start doing today to shift into vertical thinking a little bit more? You can understand what your mission is. I think that the great challenge that we all have is that we identify too closely with the output of our work, which is to say that we think of ourselves as tied to the thing that we make or the role that we occupy. And so if somebody comes up to you at a party and asks what you do, you would say some version of, I make this or I do this or I work at that place. And that's fine.

But the problem is that when you do that, you are anchoring yourself and your whole identity to something that is easily changeable. Because the thing that you do or the thing that you make or the service you provide, if you run a business, or the role that you occupy, is going to change, just flat out will. And when that happens, if your identity is so closely tied to those things, then when they change, you will feel like your identity itself has changed or that you have lost control of it. And that's how we start to feel really unmoored. Now, the reason I'm bringing this up in response to your question here is because I think that the first thing that we can do to develop vertical thinking is we have to have a sense of where we're building to. And we don't

want to have something that's too hyper-specific. It wouldn't have made any sense at the beginning of my career to say, I want to be editor-in-chief of Blank Magazine because I don't know that I would have ever gotten there. And I'll tell you what would have happened, which is because it happened to a friend of mine who was obsessed with one thing and one thing only, and that was to be an editor at GQ. And he basically made all of his career decisions based around, well, will this get me to GQ? and then he got to GQ after a long time, and it turned out to be not at all what he expected, and it was not that satisfying. And he stuck around way longer than he should have because he didn't have any other idea of what to do.

And then they laid him off, and then he had no idea what to do. That's terrible, right? I ended up an entrepreneur randomly because what I was focusing on was building something more abstract, which was building myself as a communicator and finding a kind of purpose. and it gave me more avenues. So how do you figure out what it is that you're building towards? My suggestion is that you need to figure out the thing about you that does not change in times of change.

What does that mean? Well, try to come up with a sentence, a single sentence in which every word is carefully selected because it is not anchored to something that is easily changeable. It starts with I. What is an example of this? I will tell you for me. I am not a magazine editor. I am not a book author. I tell stories in my own voice. That's my sentence for myself. If somebody comes up to me at a party and says, what do you do? I don't say, I tell stories in my own voice. That's obnoxious, right? But that's what I tell me.

And the reason for that is because I tell stories, stories, not magazine stories, not newspapers, because stories is something that I have control over. If I am a magazine editor, if that's my identity. Well, I don't own entrepreneur magazine at any time, including literally right now, my boss could fire me. He could call me on the phone as we're recording this podcast and he could fire me. I have no control over that. So if my identity is I'm a magazine editor, then I'm one phone call away from losing my identity. That is a very dangerous place to be. And so I like, I tell stories. I can control that in my own voice. That's me sending the terms for how I want to operate. Once I understand that, I can start thinking vertically because I can start to make decisions

about what should I and shouldn't I do and what do I need to learn next in order to be better at this. Should I start a podcast? Maybe I should because I tell stories and I should explore this medium and be better at this medium and understand this medium. Somebody is going to pay me a bunch of money to consult with them on something that's boring and it'll pay a bunch of money, but I can't see how it's going to lead me towards a greater version of the project, which is me, well, then you know what, I'm going to turn that down because

I'd rather spend the time working on things that I think are going to help me grow. And I have. I turned down a lot of opportunities as a result. Because once we understand what we're building towards, not in a hyper-specific way, but rather in a core mission-oriented way, then we can start to make really smart and strategic decisions about what it is that is correct for us and what we can leave behind. How does that notion play into your litmus test question of what is this for? Ah, so I love this question. What is this for? What is this for is almost doing what I just described, but for external things, right? Finding the mission is for you so that you understand. And then once you do, you can ask of everything that you do, what is this for? And see if it drives a functional purpose. And what that

is and then take it seriously. I came to the question of what is it for like this. I do a lot of speaking and I would go out and I would talk to these audiences and I would talk about change and adaptability. And then somebody inevitably, one of the first questions is you talk about being adaptable, but you also run a print magazine, which is from like 1950. What an old idea. So why? And what's What's up with that? And I struggled with that for a little bit. And then I started to ask myself, what's the print magazine for? Business-wise, it makes some money.

It doesn't make the kind of money that a print magazine made decades ago, but it's not a money loser for entrepreneur. But what is it for? And then I started to think, well, what is the world in which it's occupying? It's occupying this kind of world of content. What is content for? And I came up with this answer, which is that decades ago, content was for monetization. You could sell ads against content.

You could sell subscriptions to content. Two ways to make money on content. Now, what is content for? It's very hard to make money. You can, obviously. There are still plenty of companies and individuals who do it, but it's hard. You're fighting for a smaller slice of advertising dollars, particularly if you're a traditional media property. So what is it for?

Well, I think content is for relationships because content builds relationships. It's the craziest thing. I go out in the world. I remember when I worked at men's health, It was my first national magazine job. I was in my 20s. And I would go out to a bar or something. And someone would ask me, what do you do?

Oh, I work at men's health. I love men's health. That's awesome. And I would say, oh, that's great. Like, what did you read recently that you really liked? And they would say, oh, I haven't looked at it in a long time, but I really love it. So, like, what's happening here? What's happening is that the content built a relationship.

And then people felt good about it because of the relationship, even if they weren't engaging in the content anymore. So what do you do if you're in the business of content? I think that you start to think about those relationships. really seriously. You start to say, what would people trust me to buy product or service because of the trust that I've built because of the relationship because of the content? Once you start thinking that way, you start to see totally different business models ahead. And that's what I have thought about for entrepreneur where I work, but also for the content

that I make myself, which is to say, I'm not out to produce things just to monetize those things. I'm out to produce those things because they're going to build relationships. And then once people are in my orbit, I can offer them other things. And that's what it's for. Once you start asking, what is this for of the way you spend your time, the thing that you're doing, I make a podcast and it doesn't make me any money and I have 500 listeners. What is this for? It's worth asking. And maybe there's an answer. Maybe there's a great answer. The answer is that what it's for is that all I need is for three people to listen to this show and decide to buy something from me or be a client of my consulting business, and that justifies the whole thing. Great. Well, then

you know what it's for. But if you don't know what it's for, then you either better find it or you stop doing it and put that energy towards something that's actually going to help you grow. I ask that of everything that I do, everything that I spend time on, what is this for? And then whatever that answer is, you have to take it seriously. Look, I'm never going to make everything that I wear organic. But your sheets, your pillows, your comforter are literally touching your skin for eight hours every single night. That is a third of your life right there with one simple swap. And if your bedding is worn out, it's trapping heat or it's made with questionable materials, your sleep is going to suffer. And so will everything that depends on it. You want a bed,

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Yeah, you have a big printout of it in the book so you could rip out that page and put it up next to you. Can you just give a few more examples just to really hammer the point home of other times in somebody's life that they would be asking, what is this for? So they could change their direction or change their actions based on the results of that question. What is this relationship for is a good one? There are people in all of our lives, some of whom survey a function and some of whom do not. And that function doesn't have to be work-oriented. That function could be, this person just helps me think. I'm just calmer when I spend time with this person. There are other times where you're just like, you're in a habit of seeing someone or spending time with someone. And if you really

ask, what is this relationship for? It doesn't seem to be for anything. It's not helping me advance. I don't feel that great when I'm spending time with this person. I don't know why I'm doing this. During the pandemic, I started to send a lot of voice memos to people. And some of my friends turned out to be really into that. And after a while, I was just trading tons of voice memos all day long. And I started to ask myself, why am I doing this? What is this for? What's happening?

What I realized was that the pandemic had, not just for me, it's for everybody, created this sense of isolation where I wasn't seeing people as much. And then even afterwards, the shape of my life has changed. I now work from home instead of an office. And I think that what I was doing was I was finding some way through these voice memos to just have human interaction, to just connect. I don't have time for phone calls all day, but voice memos are great because they're asynchronous connection.

That serves some function, and that's nice, but it also just made me really aware of what else I was missing. You know what? I need to get out more. I need to be more intentional about it. Like, can I just find someone to get lunch with once a week or just something? because what this was for was for human connection, but it wasn't enough. Now I'm aware of the problem so I can start to really address it, which will, number one, reduce my voice memo load,

but also number two will just make me happier. What would you say to somebody listening who is doing the what is this for exercise and they were coming up over and over again with some different iteration of obligation? Like, I need to make money. I have to have these relationships in my life. I have to do these things, but they're not adding up to a greater part of the story of me. I think that you need to start by running some thought exercises on what would happen if you stopped. What is the worst case scenario version of this goes away? I'm doing this. I feel like I'm obligated to do it. But what would happen if it went away? Well, okay, what would be the consequences of that? What would be the upsides of that? Would you have more time that you could spend on something else?

We should not fill our lives with obligations that do not get us anything because we don't have that much time. I think we need to be incredibly intentional. I remember interviewing Bethany Frankel for the magazine once, and the thing that she said that stuck out to me the most was the way that she thinks about her life. She calls it the theory of buckets. And the theory of buckets is this. In your life, you have an infinite number of buckets. and you have a finite amount of water. So how do you want to distribute the water among the buckets? The water is your energy and what you're going to get out of things. And do you want to be doing a million things?

It's like I have a million buckets and each just has a little splash of water. What are you getting out of them? What are you getting out of each of those buckets aside from just saying I have them? Or because I was afraid of getting rid of them, I'm holding on to them. And they're going to take a little of my time. What would happen if you just got rid of the majority of them and said, you know what, I got three buckets and I'm filling them almost all the way to the top. That's how I'm going to distribute my water. I think about that a lot. It's just a really nice metaphor visually because I do a bunch of stuff that I think of as obligation. I then realize, wait a second, what would happen if I stopped doing this? I'll give you an example of one of them right now. Built for Tomorrow, which is the name of the book, is built out of a podcast that I have called Build for Tomorrow. I love that show. I've loved making that show. I've been making it for years. years. I'll tell you a problem with that show, though. The problem is, I can't scale it. I just can't. I cannot scale it. I've been doing it for years. It is not an interview show. It's incredibly

labor intensive. It's almost like a radio documentary. It's like each episode is an hour long. It takes me a month to make. It's like an 8,000 word script. I interview multiple people. I write this thing. I write this thing. It just takes forever. For a long time, I said, what is this for? Here's what it's for IP. It forces me to interview people and I get these stories and these stories I can use in different ways. And that's great. And then it's for relationships. People have met me through it. They've reached out. It's like an opportunity magnet. And then it led to this book, which is great. But here's the thing. At this point now, my life is so busy that when I step back after a month and I think my head is spinning, I didn't accomplish everything that I wanted to.

What was the problem? One of the biggest problems was I spent way too much time working on that podcast. And it reached a nice audience, but roughly the same size audience as it reached a year before. It took an enormous amount of my time. This is what I went through like two, three months ago. I think possibly I've gotten everything out of this that I'm going to get. And now I'm just making it because I'm attached to it. So next question, what would happen if I didn't do it? It sounds simple, but when it's your thing and you've spent years doing something,

that is actually a pretty heavy question. What would happen if I wasn't doing it? God, I don't know. Well, I'd have a lot more time on my hands. What would I lose? Okay, some people would be disappointed. I'd get a bunch of emails from people. I wouldn't have an excuse to like talk to historians.

But what else would I do with that time? Well, there are all these things that I keep saying I want to do, things that I'm pretty sure will make me a hell of a lot more money than that podcast and that will probably advance my career, build the project a lot better than that podcast. And I just keep saying, well, I'll find the time for that stuff. But wait a second, what if the time that I'm going to find is actually by putting this podcast to the side for a while? I don't have to kill it.

I can make an announcement. It's going on hiatus. I have some other projects. I got to do them. That's what I'm going to do. I don't know when I'm going to make that announcement. I'm scared to, but it'll probably happen in the next month or two or three. And that's going to be hard.

But I'm already thinking about how to spend that time, and I already have big ideas for how to spend that time. I have to try it. I talked once to Katie Milkman. She studies behavior and how people change. And she said, one of the most important things that you can do is also one of the simplest, and that is experiment. Run experiments.

We tend to think that everything that we do has to be a full, commitment. And that is scary. That means that we don't try a lot of things. But what happens if just everything's an experiment. And whether it works or not, doesn't really matter because an experiment is designed for some of things to work and some things not to. So just do it and see what happens. That is what I'm going to do. That's scary. But once you start approaching the things in your life that way, you realize that things are not as fixed as you thought they were. I love Katie. We had her on the show. And I told her that she's probably the most cited guests that I've had on. Like the most other guests have talked about her work because her work is

truly phenomenal. You talk about in the book how a lot of the reasons we don't take risk and we don't go after our goals is because we have quite a large aversion to loss. Are there any other ways that you think we can start to tackle that aversion to loss so we can go after the things that we want in our lives? And then also I'm curious, if you have any advice for how we can evaluate when our losses are actually too big. it's actually a sign that we should reevaluate and change direction. What you're referencing is I have this explanation for why change is so challenging. And my argument is that it's because we equate change with loss.

And when we do that, we don't allow ourselves to focus on the gain. Because there is gain in every change. We just often don't see it or don't see it immediately or takes us a while. And part of that is because we're just so freaked out by the loss. This isn't my own groundbreaking psychological research. loss aversion theory has been around for decades, showing us that we are more concerned with protecting against loss than we are in focusing on what we gain. And in times we even experience gain and then still focus on loss in that we could have gained more. I use this example in the book of, I bought two

Bitcoin when it was $4,000 a Bitcoin. I sold when it was $16,000 a Bitcoin. I made some good money. But then Bitcoin kept going to like $60,000 a Bitcoin. And suddenly, instead of feeling good about the money that I made out of stupid cryptocurrency, I felt terrible about the amount of money that I didn't make. I was focused on perceived loss instead of actual gain. And we do this over and over again. So what can we do? This is going to sound kind of simple. A mental exercise of asking what new thing is happening, what habit or skill am I learning as a result, and how can that be put to good use? Just those simple framing questions I find have been really helpful for me because it allows me to just start to hypothesize how the thing

that I'm going through can lead to some kind of value. We were talking about this in a way earlier with processing that Gary V. experience. There is no magic formula for you. to identify how something is going to add to your life. It is unpredictable. But what you can do is you can start to hypothesize it and then start to explore those hypotheses. What would happen if this was valuable because is learning this going to help me in that way and then maybe just start to commit to a few of them? The very first thing that we need to do is recognize how we tend to process things, because then we can catch ourselves in that moment and start to redirect ourselves. Here's maybe somebody else who gets often cited, which is Annie Duke. Annie just wrote this book called

quit, which is a argument for how to think of quitting as a decision-making tactic rather than as a failure. Her argument is quitting gets a bad rap because we tell these stories over and over again of people who just gritted their way through something. And entrepreneurs are full of those stories. I mean, I'm guilty of sharing them in Entrepreneur Magazine where somebody was told no 100 times and they kept going anyway, and now they showed them all. And those stories are great.

They're inspirational. But here's the problem. You only hear about the ones in which they were right at the end because they're the ones who are left standing. Everyone else, it turns out that those 100 people who said no were correct. And this was a bad idea. At some point along the way, the person who got told no 100 times and the problem was that their idea just wasn't very good,

they should have found some way to recognize that so that they could spend their time on something else that was going to have a better chance of success. Sometimes sticking with something is actually just robbing us of time that we could have shifted towards something else. So how do we know? These two things that Annie told me that really stuck with me. Number one was, think of it like this. What would happen if you had, to marry the first person that you dated. What would happen is that you would never go on any dates because you would never put yourself in the position where you got locked into that first person. So you just would never do it. The reason why we are able to hopefully find the right person for

us is because we have given ourselves the freedom to quit a lot of other people, to try things out, to see what works, to leave. And so now apply that to everything else. You are not just dating people when you date people, but also throughout our lives, we date ideas. We date projects. These are things that we're going to try and maybe we're going to quit. And that's fine because that is what enables us to find the right one. So how do we get there? One of her suggestions is to use what she calls a kill criteria, kill criteria basically being

to look out into the future and say, this is what this project needs to look like in order for it to be on track for success. nine months from now, this needs to be doing X in revenue, or nine months from now, I need to have built out this amount of something for this to be worth continuing. And that now gives you the time to figure out how to get there. If I need to be there in nine months, what do I need to do right now to start to get to there? And then by nine months, you can take a look, a cold, hard look. Did I reach that or did I not? And if I didn't, well, then maybe that's a sign that I need to seriously consider quitting, leaving this. Some of the losses are just not going to get regained

unless you make a large change. There's a kind of Marie Condo thanking the shirt for what it did for you before throwing it away. And I think there's something to be said for that for the things that we took losses on too, but rather, what did I get from this and did I get all that I was going to? Like the podcast that I just described, I got lots of things from that. But maybe I got all I'm going to get from it. And if that's the case, well, then it was a success. It wasn't a failure. There's no failure in walking away from it. I got what I was going to get from it. There's that line nine out of ten businesses fail, which is not true. But what is true is that after four years, 50% of businesses closed down. But if you look into the businesses that closed down,

what you find is that they're not failures. A good percentage of them reached a natural conclusion. which is to say that whoever started that business did so for some particular purpose and it fulfilled that purpose, or they sold it, or they moved on, or they started something else, or they retired. And even the ones that failed by some traditional definition, which is to say, like, it ran out of money or it just never caught on, that's not to say that the people who started them failed, because the people who started them learned something. And they're going to take that learning and they're going to apply it to something else. We have to think about that sometimes even loss is gain because we got something out of it. If we can recognize what it is, then maybe that

makes us a little more confident saying we got what we needed. I love that. I feel like we've gotten into a lot of the sort of philosophical and mindset shifts. And I would love to just get into a few, almost a quick fire, but just some tactical tips for somebody who is thinking about starting on an entrepreneurial path. So do you have one tip for us to know if an idea is worth pursuing if there is a business there? Go around and ask people if it solves a problem that they would pay for.

As simple as that, if you're going to put something out into the world, it has to solve a problem. And sometimes it can solve a problem in a really direct way. Consumers know exactly the problem that they have,

and here's your solution. Or sometimes it's solving a problem in a way that people didn't anticipate. Famously, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. Nobody would have said, if he went around asking, what do people want? They wouldn't have been like,

what I want is a phone that actually can do, Nobody would have described that, but he was solving people's problems. The mistake that people often make at the very beginning is that they start with their idea and not with what people need. If you want a good idea for a business, don't sit around with a whiteboard in a room for a month until you come up with something. Go out and start asking people what their problem is and how you can solve it.

Pick an industry. You're going to solve something in the restaurant industry. Go start going to walking into restaurants and find the restaurant owner and say, what is holding you back from running this restaurant? What are your problems? They'll tell you. Start coming up with solutions for that. That's what you need to do. Understand what people will pay for because you're solving a problem. How important do you think being unique in your solution is I talk myself out of all sorts of products that I want to create release because I'm like, well, that already exists or by the time I get this out, it will already exist. But then I see people launch

skincare lines and there's been a zillion skin care lines before. And then that skincare line sells millions and millions of dollars. So how should uniqueness fit? into our thinking about this. There are two ways to think about uniqueness. There's uniqueness in product and there's uniqueness in story. And you need to know where you are unique and how that addresses people's needs. Because sometimes the reason why a new skincare line works, even though the world does not need a new skin care line, is because that skincare line is telling a story that connects to an audience that

doesn't feel served or doesn't feel served well enough. There's a reason why every new generation finds new products, and that's because they grow up with products that feel like they're for their parents. And then somebody comes along with basically the same product, but different packaging and importantly a different story. They understand this consumer and how the consumer thinks everybody wants to feel heard. They want to see themselves reflected in the things that they're going to purchase. So how can you connect with them in a way in which you are serving their supposedly or perceived to be unique needs? That matters. Story matters. Really interesting research came out of University of Iowa that one of the primary drivers of purchasing decisions by consumers

is the founder's story. Isn't that interesting? What they're looking for is do they connect with the with the founder's purpose, with the mission. Imagine that you are in the scissors business. You have a new pair of scissors. Here's what you cannot compete on. You can't compete on these scissors cut things really well. You can't. Why?

Because every scissors cuts things pretty well. We're in a age of manufacturing excellence. It is possible that 200 years ago, there was not the expectation that a pair of scissors that you bought would actually cut things. But now you can pretty well assume. So you can't compete on that. So why on earth would somebody buy scissors from you?

The answer has to be because it is telling some kind of story. How can you tell a story through a pair of scissors? Well, I don't know. Why don't you walk into the offices of people who buy scissors or who need scissors and haven't bought scissors and look around to see what they like? Possibly what it is is that it's about design and about aesthetics and about that they're looking for a scissors that they feel like kind of meets their kind of cultural desires. Possibly it's that the scissors are packaged with some other something. Possibly it's that

the scissors are part of a line of something and it comes with a great story about how your grandfather was a farmer and you want to break, whatever the hell. This is what drives success often. It's incredibly hard to create something new. Like brand new, people haven't seen it before. Was it being John Malcovic the last time somebody put out a movie that was totally new? It's not easy. So what do we do? what we do is we understand basically what are people feeling and needing right now and how can I maximize the thing that I can control. What I can't control is every other product in the world. What I can control is what I have available to me, the way that I can present it and the way that I uniquely can connect with others. If you are starting a company right now, what is one thing that you

would definitely do and one thing that you would definitely not do? One thing that I would definitely do is I would do consumer insights research early and often. And this builds off of what I was just saying before, and that I think that a lot of people create something based on what they think the world wants rather than focusing on what the world actually needs. I often go back to this story a friend of mine told me. Her name is Rochelle DeVoe. She is a Consumer Insights researcher. We were talking about how people do not understand her work and that she struggles to communicate the value of her work. People ask, what do you do? And she gives them this long technical thing, and people don't know what she's talking about. What she's doing is she's going out and identifying a company's best

customers, and then she's interviewing them in this strategic way to try to understand them better than the company does themselves and then to recognize new opportunities. And I said, all right, well, if people don't understand what you're saying, it's because it's kind of abstract. Tell me a story. Tell me a story of somebody you helped by doing this. And she was like, oh, okay. So there's this company called Vim and Vigour, and they're a sock company, started by this female athlete who was looking for compression socks. She couldn't find anything that she liked. And so she starts this company and her athlete friends all like them. And so it becomes Vim and Vigour, this athletic compression sock company. Grows and grows, then it plateaus. And that's when they call

Rochelle, because they can't understand what happened. Why did sales plateau? So Rochelle goes out, she identifies the people who buy the most of these socks, who tell people the most about them, gets to know who they are. What do they like? What do they dislike? What isn't Fimin Vigure doing for them? And then she comes back to Vimma Vigur with this report. And the report is basically, guys, your best customers are not athletes. Like, you are selling to athletes, but your best customers are people who spend all day on their feet at work. They're like nurses.

And so you are succeeding in a way despite yourself because you are not marketing to the people who want your product the most. In fact, you're actively telling them that you are not for them. And they're buying you anyway. With this information, Vim and Vigur radically changed. change the business and the marketing and the framing and everything. And that unlocked growth. And that is something I have experienced myself with my own audiences. I met Rochelle because she did Consumer Insights Research on my podcast. And I discovered that I had no idea who my audience was.

And I didn't know what they wanted and I didn't know why they were listening. And understanding that helped me refine the podcast, but also then helped me refine everything else that I do. And it was incredibly illuminating. I don't think that people do that enough. I think they focus too much on what they make and not enough on the people who are receiving the thing that they make. So that's what I would do. What I wouldn't do is I wouldn't immediately spend a ton of money on online ads. I think that people often think that the key to success is just to pump a bunch of money into marketing.

But the problem with that is you can buy sales. You can. You can buy sales. If you spend enough money, enough people will see your product and they will be. buy it from you. But you have two problems there. Number one, you may be spending a lot more on the advertising than you're getting back in revenue. So that's not good. But then also, too, you haven't built a relationship with these people. You have no base of people who know you and like you and want to tell their friends about you. And therefore, you're on a treadmill where you have

to continue to spend in order to get the sales. And as soon as you stop spending, your sales are going to disappear because you have nothing organic. So I would instead spend time, give myself some runway, think we're going to do slow, careful, steady, realistic growth. We're going to connect with people on individual basis. We're going to create fans. We're going to go out there and be meaningful to people rather than just blast. I think I was talking with Barbara Corker not long ago, and I told her for as much as I love Shark Tank, and I really do, the one real downside to Shark Tank is that it has taught a generation of entrepreneurs that they need to go out and raise money in order to do anything. She agreed with me. She said that is a real problem.

Because the fact of it is that most businesses don't need investor money. But people think the only way that I can get this off the ground is that I have to go out, have somebody give me a bunch of money, and then I'm going to go spend that money as fast as I can on marketing and stuff. And that's just not always the way to stand up a business. It's the way to stand up some businesses, but not all of them. And ironically, I think the success a lot of people find due to Shark Tank has to do with the relationship they're building from being on the show and people hearing their story far more than the investment from the sharks. Oh, totally.

Totally. Totally. There's companies that don't get investment on the show and they take off because people were able to hear and connect with their story. That's right. These companies are coming in and they're often asking for what are in the grand scheme of business very small amounts of money, right? 50, 60, $75,000.

That's not a game-changing amount of money. The thing that's actually game-changing is what happens on the back end of that experience. Let's say that Barbara Corcoran invests. Who cares about the $75,000? What matters is that Barbara Corcoran knows manufacturer. and knows how to get your cost down and has a smarter customer acquisition strategy. And those are things that really matter, but you don't need investor dollars to get those things. I remember talking to a woman who started a cookie company.

She was in her 40s. She said to me, look, if I'd started this company in my 20s, maybe I would have gone for very slow growth and I would have tried to keep the whole thing myself. But I was like, I'm in my 40s. I don't have time for this. I'm going to get moving here. So what she did is she went around and she found a manufacturer. She was having trouble finding manufacturers who would make her product because manufacturers would rather be doing larger deals and setting up a line specific to a very small run of cookies.

Who's going to do that? So you've got to cut them in. So she finds this manufacturer and she basically makes them a partner in the business and gives them equity in the business. And then wouldn't you know it? Suddenly, it's very easy to get these cookies manufactured, at which point she's able to get them scaled out and into more stores faster and she's able to grow the thing. She didn't need an investor to pay a lot of money to a manufacturer. She just needed to build the right relationship with the manufacturer who understood her vision and was incentivized to buy in and work with her.

I hear stories like that all day long. You've got to be really clever. You have to understand what really, really matters and what doesn't. Do you have any concrete tips for building those relationships that you're going to need if you're getting a business off the ground? Number one, you need to have done enough research to show traction. and consumer potential. Her name is Shira, and she runs Goody Girl cookies.

You can find them all over the place. They're gluten-free. And I think that the reason why she succeeded was because she was addressing something in the marketplace that didn't exist. And that was gluten-free cookies that had attitude. The packaging just is fun. It has attitude. It doesn't look like a health food product.

And then also that was very similar in taste, in experience, in looks. to familiar non-gluton-free cookies. She was making Girl Scout thin-min style gluten-free cookies. And this had originally grown out of she was like making these cookies for her kids. And then she was bringing them to their kids' school. Then people started buying them from her and just sort of grew and grew. And one of the first things that she did actually, because she didn't know anything about business. She was in PR was that she started trading her expertise for somebody else's.

So she didn't know, for example, anything about retail. How do I get into retail? She found people who did know this and she said, here's what I know. I know PR. I'd be happy to help you with PR. I will consult with you on PR, but whatever it is that you want, if you will help me understand retail. We all have something that is useful to somebody else. So what can we go around and like trade for? That allowed her to get into some stores, drive some traction and identify a real marketplace. Because then once you have that data, you can go out and start to convince people, not just based on your own sales pitch, but based on what you're seeing out in the world,

even if it's small, that can show you that you're onto something. And by the way, you need that data. How do we know whether or not to just cut our losses? And the answer has to be that you have internal insights that tell you whether or not something is succeeding. I remember talking to Michael, who started Fatherly, this media company for dads. And he told me that he had this idea for a media company for dads. And he went around and just nobody believed that this was a good idea.

He was trying to find investors. Everyone was like, there's plenty of a market for mom media. Moms like to read content for moms. Dads don't like to read content for dads. Nobody is interested in this. I said, well, how did you know that this was worth pursuing after all these people said no? And he said, the answer was he decided to just do a market test. He said, what is the smallest, most resource light version of this?

I can put out into the world to see what happens. He started with a newsletter. It was like an aggregator newsletter, just content for dads that other people were producing. Really simple to make. There's no original reporting. And he started to put this newsletter out. He started to contact dads organizations and show up at dad's events.

And then watch what would happen. Okay, people would sign up. Would they tell their friends? Was this thing growing? And because he saw that it was growing, he knew that it was worth continuing to invest it. Then the next step was, instead of just doing like no original work and just aggregating other people's work,

I'm going to hire a writer and that writer will write the newsletter and it'll now be original work. Let's see. Does that help grow this thing? Yes. Great. Let's keep going. Eventually, he had more and more data, which was convincing him to stay on the path. If that data had been flat and nobody subscribed to this newsletter, he would have given up because everyone would have been proven right. But eventually he had enough data that he could go back out to the investors who had said no to him and say, look, I totally understand your perspective back then, and a lot of people agreed with you, but you were wrong. And I have the data to show you. People are really interested in this. Here's the growth that we're seeing. Here's the projection once we're able to invest in this and this.

And a lot of those investors at that point said yes, because now he had something to prove to them that this was real. You need to go out into the world. You need to collect some amount of data. You need to show some kind of traction. If you have headaches, allergies, brain fog, skin irritation, or you've been dealing with hormone issues, you are especially going to want to listen to this ad. Every single thing that I just listed has been linked to chemicals and household cleaners. One study found that regular use of cleaning sprays was associated with a lung function decline comparable to smoking 10 to 20 cigarettes per day. Synthetic fragrances are a well-documented migraine trigger and a number of studies have linked

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So I'm protecting them too. Branch Basics is now available at Target.com, Amazon and branchbasics.com. So it's easier than ever to make the switch. And if you want to grab their premium starter kit, you can use code Liz Moody for 15% off at branchbasics.com. That's code Liz Moody for 15% off the premium starter kit at branchbasics.com. and when they ask you where you heard about us, please make sure to mention the show. That is branch basics.com and use code Liz Moody. The number one rule of habits is to make the things that you want easier and the things that you

don't want harder. Yet so many of us want to eat healthier, but so few of us actually take the steps to make eating healthier easier. That's where Marley Spoon comes in. What I love about this company and what's different than all of the other companies out there that are doing like stuff in the same arena is that you can customize your choices based on the effort that you want to put in. So if you want them to send you ingredients,

so you can make your own 20-minute meal and get into your chef energy, they'll send it to you to all be in perfect portions so you'll eliminate waste. Great, that's sorted. But they also have meals that you can just heat up. They have ready-made breakfast, which is always such a tough time of day

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feeling like you feel like you're at a nice restaurant. We're talking like chicken Milanese with a crunchy cucumber arugula salad or everything bagel salmon with truffle chive potatoes. My favorite recent meal was the creamy lemon chicken tray bake. I had one of those moments where I looked at my plate and I was like, wait, I made this. And so quickly, like so easily. It's just so little for so much reward. Marley Spoon just makes eating well feel easy instead of stressful, and honestly, that is everything. This new year, fast track your way to eating well with Marley Spoon. Head to Marley Spoon.com slash offer slash Liz Moody for up to 25 free meals. That is right, up to 25 free meals with Marley Spoon. That is Marley Spoon.com slash offer slash Liz Moody. So remember to get the offer

slash Liz Moody for up to 25 free meals. I also love the vote for starting small in that story. I think sometimes we can get intimidated because we compare what we want to create in our head to the stuff that's already out there that's very finished, very polished. And we're focusing on our logo and our branding and sinking all this money into a business before we've even tested the nugget at its core. That's totally right. The term in business is MVP.

minimum viable product. Take that seriously. I have a friend right now who a long time ago he built and sold a recruiter business and now he has an idea for like an app that will hopefully in his vision totally change the world of recruiting. So what's the first thing that he's going to do? It's not spend a million dollars to build this app. Instead, it was a website that he put together himself that described the very basics of the product and invited people to join the wait list or to learn more. And then he ran some ads. Really basic. He spent like $500 on some Facebook ads to just get it in front of recruiters to see, would people click on this? Would they sign up to learn more? That by itself is a nice test to see if people care. And if people do, well, now it's worth

kind of moving to the next step and seeing what else can he develop. You don't need to invest in a perfect thing. Reed Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, has this wonderful line, which is if you aren't embarrassed by your first product launch, then you launched too late. The point being, there is no way to put something perfect out into the world. So the best that you can do is put something that frankly, you will be embarrassed about, but that gets you what you need, which in those early days is literally just someone reacting to it. That's all my early podcast episode. It rings very true. Are there any daily habit that you find that successful entrepreneurs have in common? Yes. One of the most important and that I have adopted for myself is entrepreneurs have learned how they work and then built their world around that. That can mean on an hour by hour basis. I'll give you an example for me. I write best in the morning. I'm just, I'm fastest. I'm most creative in the morning. I'm fresh. So I will not let you book a call or meeting or anything with me before 11 or.

or noon if I can help it. That is my time because it's the only time that I'm going to get all the creative projects done. And then everything else can happen later in the day. I started doing that after having these days get away from me and then me trying to write at 4 p.m. and discovering that it was taking forever. And then the next morning, I would look at it and it was like garbage. It was like, why did I even bother? Now that I understand that about myself, I've built my day around that. I know entrepreneurs do similar things where they're structuring meetings around the way in which they best interact or they best ideate. They're carving out a day, a week or a day every month, whatever it is for no meetings so that they can step back and not work in the business,

but work on the business. I think that's incredibly important. If you want to zoom out further, it is the more that you can recognize about where your strengths are, the more that you can surround yourself with people who complement those strengths and fill in where your weaknesses are. but then also come to respect what you do really well so that you can continue to provide that consistent value and not worry about something else. My favorite story about this was Mark Randolph. Mark Randolph was the co-founder and first CEO of Netflix. And he started with Reed Hastings. They got it off the ground and they grew it a bit and then it kind of stagnated. And one day, Reed walks into Mark's office. Again, Mark is the CEO. And Reed says, I got a presentation for you.

Mark says, great. So Reed pulls up this PowerPoint presentation and walks him through this whole presentation, the punchline of which is that Mark should step down as CEO. That's not an easy thing to hear. And Mark told me when he told me the story that Reed left and Mark sat there until everyone had gone home. And then he went home and had a bunch of wine with his wife and was really trying to absorb this. And then he realized, you know what, Reed is right. And the reason why Reed is right is because Mark has a skill set. And that skill set is he is really good at taking something from idea to execution. He's really good at it. That's a really hard thing to do. But you know what he's not good at? He's not good at scale. He's not good at taking

something from $10 million to a billion. It's not him. But maybe it's read. And so Mark had to recognize and respect what he was really good at and realize that that is not just enough. That is, in fact, everything. Because once you know what you're really, really good at, you can put yourself in situations in which you excel and other people excel because they are working with you. Nobody said Shaquille O'Neal is a bad basketball player because he can't shoot three pointers. Who cares? Doesn't matter. He's really good at slam ducks. That made him great. And we need to recognize that in ourselves. What are we really, really good at and then respect that. Is there anything tactical we can do to recognize what we're really, really good at or to know

what we're really, really good at? We can see it in the patterns. If you look back across your career. I think that you'll recognize the places where you felt most comfortable and where you excelled. I think we can also get it in feedback. We should surround ourselves with people who are willing and able to give us very honest feedback and prompt it. People may not give it to you unless you ask for it. But if you ask for it and you take it seriously and you show them that you appreciated it, you will get more of it. as the boss in many ways now, at least of my team, what I have most valued is when I have people who are generally on the team for a while before they get comfortable doing this, but then they tell me that I'm wrong. I love that. I need that because otherwise, as a leader,

people will just agree, they'll just do whatever you say because it's the easiest thing to do. But that doesn't mean that my ideas are good. So prompt feedback, ask. You don't have to ask people to give you a whole 360 degree review, but maybe after a project, I feel like, hey, what went right and what went wrong there? And how could I better help you? I say this. I'll be like, look, I feel like I'm stretched in a million directions. I'm probably not nearly as helpful to you as I could be. What's missing right now? And how could I be better? That's really helpful because I can take what I've learned from whatever they say and build it into my leadership style and be better at it. Or maybe one day discover or decide, eh, you know what? I'm actually not a very good leader at all. I'm a

better solo operator, which is also totally fine. We have to know these things about ourselves. And it's such a good point that the way that we receive feedback influences whether people are willing to give it to us in the future. So I do think being cognizant of if you're defensive or if you're receptive is a really good point. Okay, I can't let you go without getting a tip for public speaking. You're an amazing public speaker. It is a huge fear a lot of people have, but it's so important in finding entrepreneurial success. So how can we get comfortable? And how can we also be great at it? I appreciate the compliment. I care a lot about that subject. And I could talk. We could do a whole other hour and a half on this. So let me see if I can

compress it into like three minutes. First of all, I was not always good at this at all. one of the things that helped me get over that was in the way that I described earlier, stepping back from a failure and seeing it as an object, stepping back from myself and seeing myself as an object. Because when I stand on stage and talk to, sometimes it's a room of hundreds of people or thousands of people, and sometimes it's a room of 15 people, and I will tell you, both are intimidating in their own way,

whether I'm doing that or I'm talking to you right now, I think I am not bringing me into this. That wouldn't make any sense. I am a full person. I'm a whole person with parts of my life that you don't need to hear about because you don't care about like my kids. We didn't talk about my kids for the last hour and a half and why would we? But that's a whole part of my life. Let's start with you are not bringing your whole self to this.

And I think that that should be comforting. Part of the challenge that people have is that they feel exposed, that when they go and they stand in front of somebody or they talk in some way, it's similar to a reason a lot of people are afraid of putting themselves on social media because they feel exposed. Like they're putting all of themselves out into some spotlight, and that's uncomfortable. So stop. And instead, think about this. You are a character. You are a character. You are a character named Liz Moody.

and Liz Moody, the character, looks exactly like Liz Moody, the real person, and speaks similarly, but here's the thing. The character is built for an audience, and the audience has an expectation, something that they want to derive from that character, and that character is built to deliver that. It doesn't mean that it's false. Doesn't mean that you're offering some nonsense. What you're really doing is you're taking all of you, you're identifying the 5% slice of view that is 100% relevant to that audience. And then you are creating a whole character around that and you're delivering that to them. Now, let's start asking other questions. How does that character speak? How does that character hold themselves? What is that character's primary attribute? For me,

for example, the character of Jason Fiver, which is similar to, it's part of the broad Jason Fiver. The character of Jason Fiver talks the way that you're hearing me talk. If you and I were having lunch, I wouldn't talk like this. This would be annoying. But it works well on microphone. And the reason it works well a microphone is because I know that a camera, or they say, I don't think it's actually true. The camera adds 10 pounds, people will say. The microphone or the stage subtracts 10 energy points. So if you stand on stage and you were talking at your normal dinner time conversation level, you sound low energy. So turn it up, turn it up. And then when you turn it up and you stand on stage, you will be exactly what people want to hear. I had taught myself, I just play,

laid around with, and I listened back to my old podcast episodes, for example, and I didn't sound like this. This is something that I developed over time, this voice, which is basically me emphasizing and being energetic, but for a while, I was too over it. I was all over the and my wife literally would heard me and she was like, you got to tone that down. Like, that's too much. I had to calibrate it. So that's who you are. Here's the next question. What do you say? What do you have to say? I have this theory, theory of public speaking. is the theory of interlocking parts that the secret to great public speaking in any form, whether or not you're giving a speech or you're on a podcast or you're doing a five minute

or a three minute television bit or whatever, the secret is to have a large menu of interlocking parts, three to five minutes, in your head that you can then stitch together in whatever order is called upon. What I'm doing at any time, whenever I'm, whenever I'm, I am in any kind of public speaking is that I am drawing upon this body of ideas that I have that have just been refined by repeating them over and over again. And that way, I'm never at a loss of material, but I'm never working on something that I have memorized because if you try to memorize something and you forget one word of it, you're a train that fell off the tracks.

And I've watched people just freeze and it's excruciating. So you never memorize. You just know your material because it's just stories and ideas. Totally agree. All right, Jason, can you tell us a little bit in your own words about your wonderful book? First of all, this was such a delight. Thank you. The book is called Build for Tomorrow. It is a lot of what we talked about today here. It's really about how to find opportunity and change, how to feel more adaptable, how to future proof yourself, how to just feel like you are

in control when things feel out of control. And you can find it wherever you find bookstores. You can find it on audiobook where I read it myself. You can find it in e-book. It's not in Stone Tablet yet, but we're working on that. And you can also, reach me at my website, which is jasonfeiffer.com. Amazing. And there's so much in there that we weren't even able to cover today. So I highly recommend everybody pick that up. How do you think we did? Do you think this was better than your Gary Vee interview? I feel very good about it. I just want to check in. Don't want you pacing around after. I will not be pacing around. I really appreciate it.

I think this was wonderful. You have such an interesting approach to all of this stuff. And I found it absolutely fascinating. And I do want to ask really fast before we go, did you ever get negative actual reaction from Gary V or no? Oh, no, no, as it always is. No, I didn't. This is part of the problem of counterfactual thinking, which is that we're focused on what could have been better, but all everyone else hears is just what happened. Nobody's listening to me on Gary Vee, and they're hearing me tell a subpar version of this story you're making this point and thinking to themselves, oh, he could have done better there. I bet actually if he told this other story, it would have resonated a lot more. They're not thinking that. The only person who's really aware

of how poorly I did relative to my standards is me. It's hard to absorb that, but you need to. Thank you so much, Jason. Thank you. Well, he is just a font of knowledge. I'm going to be writing what is it for on a Post-it note and sticking it on my computer. I also ran to Zach after doing this interview to talk about everything that Jason said in the context of Healthy ConvoCo, our company. There's just so much relevant, interesting stuff that I had never thought about before. Please share a link for this episode with anyone that you think would benefit. There is so much to discuss in here and I feel like it's a good one to share just so you can digest it with someone. And if you're new here, make sure that you're following the podcast on whatever platform

that you like to listen on. You're just going to go to the main podcast page, the one that lists all of the healthier together episodes. And you will see the word follow under the logo on Spotify. And then there's a little follow with a plus sign button on the top right of that same page on Apple podcast. That way, all of the new episodes will show up right in your feed so you will never miss out on one. And you are definitely going to want to be notified because we have some incredible episodes coming up, including a science-backed sex tips episode and an episode that shares a research-backed approach to self-care unlike any you've heard before. So make sure that you're following so you do not miss out. And don't forget to snag your jar of my new strawberry black pepper nut butter collab with Ground Up. It's here for a limited time only. So get your jar or jars. Trust me, you're going to want more than one once you taste it. Get them now by ordering directly from Ground Up PDX and use code Liz Moody for 10% off.

Okay, I love you and I will see you next week on the next episode of the Healthier Together podcast. When you think about strength and resilience, like your ability to feel energized, to recover well, to stay strong as you get older, what do you think that actually comes from? Most people say working out or good nutrition, and yes, of course that matters. But there is a biological foundation underneath all of that that most people are completely overlooking. I have been diving deep into this lately with the team at timeline and what I've learned has genuinely shifted how I think about my own health.

Every single movement that your body makes, every step, every workout, every muscle, contraction depends on energy produced at the cellular level. And at the center of that is your mitochondria. Here's the thing that nobody tells you, certainly nobody told me, starting around age 30, our mitochondria naturally become less efficient. More get damaged, more become sluggish, and over time that impacts your energy, your strength, your recovery, and your resilience. Most of us respond by pushing more. We're like noticing these things and we're adding in more protein. We're trying to fix it with more supplements. We're trying to do harder workouts. And those things do help. But timelines research suggests that we also need to be supporting the cellular

machinery underneath. And that is exactly what their supplement, Mitopure, does. It contains urolithin A, which helps your body clear out damage mitochondria and support healthier ones so that your cells can produce energy more efficiently. Because this is happening to your cells, it's going to impact your entire body, your immune system, your muscles. One study found that taking mitochondure increased muscle strength by 12% in four months with no change in exercise routine, it's going to impact your energy, your sleep, your skin, your cell health impacts all of this, and urolithinea keeps your cells healthy. Timeline has done over 15 years of research and testing on this one product, urolithin A, which, by the way, most of us lack the gut bacteria to

synthesize naturally. That's why many of us need to supplement it to get the benefit. this has become a staple supplement for me. It is my top way to sport how I want to look and feel as I age. Support yourselves and how you age with mitopure gummies from Timeline. Visit Timeline.com slash Liz and save up to 39% on your mitopure gummies. That is timeline.com slash Liz. I very rarely get genuinely excited about skincare, but this is one of the most innovative products that I have come across in years and I am so obsessed with it.

I've been telling all of my friends to get it, so now I need to tell you guys. Here's some science first. Your skin isn't just getting older. It's being actively broken down by something called senescent cells. These are cells that have stopped functioning but refused to die. They sit there releasing inflammatory signals, breaking down your collagen, degrading your skin barrier, and accelerating every visible sign of aging. Scientists call them zombie cells and as they accumulate, they are one of the primary drivers of how old your skin looks and feels. The team at one skin, a group of female longevity researchers and PhDs, spent five years testing over 900 peptides to figure out how to help reduce the accumulation of senescent cells. And they finally landed on it.

OSO1, the first peptide scientifically studied to reduce skin's biological age at the molecular level. OSO1 goes in and it clears out the senescent cells so it helps skin function like healthier, younger looking skin. It is not masking the signs of aging. It's not targeting one thing. It is actually rolling the clock back at a cellular level. I've been using the face moisturizer for almost six months now and I love it so much. It feels amazing. It goes on really smoothly. It's not tacky at all. And I actually see a difference, which I just feel like is never the case with skincare. You want to always like see a real difference and you're kind of like, do I? Do I? And this I genuinely do. Because it's clearing the in essence cells, it doesn't just target one thing. So my skin looks firmer. It looks glowier. The texture

feels dramatically smoother. And I feel like you can see that too. I also love the body moisturizer. It dries down really quickly, which is always a pet peeve of mine with moisturizers. I hate that like sticky feeling when you go to put your clothes on. This does not do that. But it does moisturize really, really well. And then again, I'm reducing my skin's biological age. I am not making it just look younger. I am making it actually younger. OneSkin has four peer-reviewed clinical studies in over 10,000 five-star reviews. The data backs everything up. For a limited time, get 15% off with code Liz at oneskin.co slash Liz. Again, that's 15% off at oneskin.co with code Liz.