The One You Feed - Jessica Hagy

Episode Date: January 16, 2014

This week on The One You Feed we have Jessica Hagy. She is an artist and writer best known for her award-winning blog, Indexed. A fixture in the creative online space, Jessica has been illustrating, consulting, and speaking since 2006.In This Interview Jessica and I discuss...The One You Feed parable.What is the Happiness Principle.Does the bad wolf look like Brad Pitt or does he look like he has scurvy?What the secret language of graphs and charts looks like.The value of small explorations.Where we can get Leonard Cohen's email address.What is the biggest business virtue you can have in today's world.Why being authentic makes you more interesting.How many good stories are there to every "Chris Hanson have a cookie" stories.How even the very succesful face imposters syndrome.Special Cards from Jessica for The One You FeedDetailed BioJessica Hagy is an artist and writer best known for her Webby award-winning blog, Indexed (www.thisisindexed.com). A fixture in the creative online space, Jessica has been prolifically illustrating, consulting, and speaking to international media and events since 2006.Her work has been described as “deceptively simple,” “undeniably brilliant,” and “our favorite reason for the Internet to exist.” Her style of visual storytelling allows readers to draw their own conclusions and to actively participate in each narrative. “Her images don’t always tell us what to think; quite often, they elegantly offer us ideas to think about.”She mixes data (both quantitative and qualitative) with humor, insight, and simple visuals to make even the most complex concepts immediately accessible and relevant. Her commissioned work frequently appears in various web formats, galleries, books, magazines, newspapers, television outlets, and advertising campaigns.Jessica Hagy LinksHow to be InterestingJessica Hagy homepageIndexedJessica Hagy page at ForbesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Everybody has a tribe out there and all you need are two or three or four people and you're unstoppable. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living.

This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like... Why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor? What's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer.

Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Our guest today is Jessica Hagee, an artist and writer best known for her award-winning blog, Indexed. A feature in the creative online space, Jessica has been illustrating, consulting, and speaking since 2006. Her latest book is called How to Be Interesting, and she recently produced a series of illustrations for Forbes magazine based on the classic Art of War. Hi, Eric and Chris. Hi there. Thanks for doing this. Sure, sure. Thanks

for having me. Okay, let's go ahead and get started. So our podcast is based on the old parable where there's a grandfather who is talking with his grandson and he says to him, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always battling. One is a good wolf, represents kindness and love and peace, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents self-pity, hatred, greed, name your poison. The grandson thinks for a second and says to his grandfather, well, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So that's the premise of our podcast. So I'd like to start off by asking you, what does that parable mean to you? And how does it influence both your life and your work?

As far as sort of a life philosophy, I've always, whenever I heard Jeremy Bentham's happiness principle, which is the greatest good for the greatest number of people is what you should do. It's sort of like a guiding humanist thought. That's what I always thought of is like that is when in doubt, go with that. And so sort of thinking of what should I do? What should I do here? It's what makes the most people happy. And so sort of guiding there is the best answer.

And usually that ends up being something that's not necessarily greedy, but it's greedy in a long term way, as opposed to like short term, quick, quick jabs and things like that. That's an interesting we had a we had another author and musician on a couple weeks ago. And when we talked about it to him, he his his thing, he said, was, you know, feeding the good wolf for him was really about how did he find time to do the work or the art in this case. And we got into a conversation about how short term, a lot of times it's easier to do what the people around you want you to do short term, because that makes a short term happiness. But the long term greater good comes from pursuing that thing that is yours and your book, you know, How to Be Interesting really touches on that an awful lot about how do you find that thing that is yours? How do you pursue it despite what other people around you might be saying or what the crowd is

saying and how that sort of does lead to the greatest good. Yeah, a lot of times it's weird. The crowd doesn't want other people to be happy. It's sort of the bitter voice rises above the really encouraging ones so often, and I don't know why that is. I think we hear compliments and we dismiss them, but we hear an insult and we carry it with us for just years. And getting through that and really thinking what's encouraging and and what's the good thing that's really hard sometimes but if people can

do that then it saves everybody a lot of hassle that's the bad wolf being very powerful yeah the bad wolf tends to get a lot of press and i don't know why that is because i think people like like that sort of like gossip nastiness but that's that's not as fun even for a minute I guess I think he gets a lot of press because he looks like Brad Pitt I mean it's just a parable but that's what I've heard when I pictured the two wolves that you guys have I pictured one is sort of like old and sort of like afflicted with scurvy and like in rags with a big stick and sort of like gray teeth and of like afflicted with scurvy and like in rags with a big stick and sort of like gray teeth and yellow eyes and just scowling. And the good wolf seemed really young

and quiet and sort of hiding behind a tree, like a little kid instead of an old man. Interesting. You were saying about the, the, the bad wolf, um, and those voices somewhere in your book. And I don't, I was trying to find it, I can't find it exactly, but you talk about, you know, working on improving your thoughts about yourself. And you have a quote that's really interesting where you say, and caution, this could take years. Oh, yeah. That's ignoring the people who are nasty and sort of that old wolf sort of tone. And when you hear nasty words,

you almost associate like a halitosis or a sickness with it. And as soon as you get that sense of things to sort of mix up your senses is when you should run away. That bad smell is just... It almost makes it comedic when someone is saying something to you like that and you think of it like bad breath. It sort of could help take some of the sting away. Yeah, there's another part where you talk about, you know, you've got a little one that says just, you know, basically do something, anything.

It doesn't really so much matter, you know, if you're spending all your time thinking about what you should be doing versus just doing something. Sort of the old, you know, as being an entrepreneur for years, the saying is, you know, ready, fire, aim, right? It's just make something happen. Oh, totally. And I see that so much with my artist friends who have a thousand ideas and a thousand different ways to make beautiful, wonderful, fantastic objects and things. And if they just picked one thing and send an email to 10 people, they'd be so much better off than making 10 things and never telling anybody about any other things they did. It's just sort of like take something and run with it.

And odds are, it'll be great because if you like it, somebody else will too. So tell me a little bit about how you, your creative process. Do you make yourself sit down and try and sketch out 10 index cards and you find one that's good? Do the ideas come to you? Can you talk a little bit about how that works for you and maybe how it's changed over time? going to school at night for my MBA because I was working as a copywriter and my brain was going to mush because I was just sort of over and over and over again repeating headlines and repeating sort of like cliches and wasted lines that would get approved and I knew I needed something else because like part of my brain felt like it was atrophying in some way and I was taking a finance class and everything was expressed in these charts and And I was like, you can tell the whole world's history in these weird little charts. So I started jotting them down and I'd read around the same time that every writer needs a blog. So I put those two things together so I wouldn't have to write about what I had for breakfast or how my commute went.

And it just sort of took off. And over time, I realized that charts and graphs are basically sentence structures, and they have their own sort of visual grammar. So the is symbol, the equal sign is the verb of being. So equals is is, be, all of that. Venn diagrams are basically sentences with conjunctions, and xy-axes are a causes B, subject predicates. So if you can use the English language, you can use a lot of graphs. And over time, it's gotten easier for me to take sentences I hear as sentences in my head and turn them into graphs. I will say it now and it'll be in the show notes, but people should definitely be going out and looking at your things. And one of the favorite ones that you've done that I've got hanging on my wall in my office

is the one that's got two circles. And one is a little one that's got an arrow going to it saying your comfort zone, and the other is the big circle that says where the magic happens. And it's that sort of constant reminder that if we spend all our time being comfortable, nothing really special happens. And I think at least for me and a lot of people I know, we tend to equate comfort with happiness, and they are not the same thing. And I love the way you sort of diagram that here. And a lot of the book really seems to sort of be about pushing yourself out of your comfort zone and out of sort of the same habitual repeated patterns and finding variety in life. Yeah, I think that diagram itself went all over the place.

And one of the things I actually thought about when I was trying to draw up that idea was the idea of inertia, which is when you start going in one direction, it's easy to stay that way. But if you think about it, when you make any one direction, you have out of 360 degrees, you're taking one degree. And there are 359 degrees that you didn't take. And to ponder some of those every now and then, I think is not only healthy, but it's really comforting because you don't have to stay on the direction you're on. You can always pivot around and spin that circle a different way. Do you want to spend a couple minutes and talk through some of the key points in your sort of how to be interesting? What are a couple of the key, you've got 10 steps, you want to maybe share a couple of them with us? Absolutely. I think the most, the most important one is probably the first one, which is go

exploring. And people, a lot of times think that means I have to quit my job and buy a boat and circumnavigate the globe and learn five languages and go to 10 countries and figure out how to fall in love with people of 10 different races and backgrounds and take up five different jobs. And it's so much smaller and more palatable than that. It's that if you just sort of go outside and listen a little bit more, you'll find out so many other things. And a good exploration doesn't mean decades spent off doing something else. It could just mean 10 minutes listening to a station you don't otherwise, or talking to someone you otherwise wouldn't have spoken with. It's just sort of varying from what you're doing just a little bit, and it doesn't have to be

painful. Okay, so that's step one. How about step seven? Give it a shot. Yeah, that is one thing I found through the internet that is the most amazing thing. First of all, everybody has an email address. And if you can find anybody in the world, anybody you like or want to talk to or want to meet, and you can find their email address, you can connect with them almost immediately. And now you can do that with Twitter and Facebook and all these other things. And everyone is literally fingertips away from you. And you can find advice, help, anything from anybody in literally seconds. And people a lot of times are so afraid to do that, that they don't. And when people actually do, they get through a lot more than you think they would.

So just even taking a shot and reaching out, the first step is huge. It is kind of amazing how close everybody is if you at least have a shot to talk to a lot of people. Although the person I really want to talk to, and I don't know that he's got an email address, or if he does, he probably doesn't check it very often, is Leonard Cohen. So if you come across Leonard Cohen's email address, anybody listening to this, send it my way. I'm sure he can make that happen. Yeah, when he's not writing songs, he's often on a mountain somewhere meditating. But we'll track him down sooner or later for the show.

Even if he just gets a note that's like, yep, heard you, thanks for that. I mean, wouldn't that be sort of an accomplishment in and of itself? Yes, it definitely would. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor.

We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by.

Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us tonight. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging.

Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really That's the opening? Really, no really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Can you tell us a little bit about how this book came to be? Oh yeah, this is kind of a

weird story. So I write for Forbes, which Forbes is fantastic saying like, oh yeah, come post what you want to think about and we'll help share it with the world. So at the time I was living in London and I was putting things together and one of the things that kept coming up was, okay, there's only so much time in the day. And what is the best, what is the biggest business virtue that anyone can have at this point in time? And it wasn't being nice and it wasn't being skilled and it wasn't being anything other than being really interesting. So sort of a tongue in cheek, like here's how to be interesting. And I threw it up on Forbes and it I put it up in October of 2011 and around New Year's a lot of people sort of latched on to be I'm going to be

interesting as a New Year's resolution which sounds bizarre but it just started to go everywhere and people started to forward it around and share it and it got all these crazy hits and so then we put it together as a book and expanded on the idea and people really run with it. And it's been it's been a lot of fun because the more I think about it. It really is. It's true. If you're not interesting, you're going to be overlooked for pretty much everything from do you want to go to lunch to do you want this job to do you want to be president of whatever country you live in? And it's a fun word. It's a loaded word. you live in. And it's a fun word. It's a loaded word. More and more, it does seem that as the noise level increases, as everybody can talk to everybody and the noise level increases, and this is nothing new, everybody talks about this, just how you do have to find a way to stand

out and how being yourself is probably the best way to do that. But I think for a lot of people, that still remains very challenging, and even finding out who or what that is, what is, is, is that process of discovery part of what you are leading people through in the book? A little bit, I think the book really sort of pokes at without directly stabbing at the idea of vulnerability, which is if you can just let what your natural inclinations are lead you, you'll be more likely to become an interesting person than if you were to sort of go with the flow and behave yourself and sort of mask the things that sort of stand out to you while you're rolling along in the flow of everything else. And really being yourself is

a lot harder these days than you think, because so many people have this idea of what they're supposed to look like and dress like and talk like and sound like and tweet like and everything else. And even finding a minute variation in that anymore is becoming incredibly difficult. We started off by talking about feeding the good wolf for you was sort of the idea of the greatest good for the greatest number of people. And I'm interested in how that, how you see that tying into a lot of what you're talking about in the book and your work, which is really about finding out who you are and not going with sort of the crowd and the, and the greatest, the number of people? How does that work its way

back around to being the greatest good for the greatest number of people? When I was writing advertising, I was writing for JPMorgan Chase. And I was writing a lot of brochures about home equity lines of credit. And I was writing about how subprime mortgages are the best thing that ever happened to you, how you can get whatever you need right now if you just refinance your life. And something about that, even before everything crashed, just felt kind of weird. And even if I was getting a paycheck and doing what I was supposed to do work-wise, it was still kind of sketchy. And I couldn't really articulate why it was sketchy because people would just sort of be like, it's a bank. What are you doing? And guessing at what's more fun is just sharing fun ideas and being, if nothing else, benign as opposed to negative out there. And at this point

in my career, I get to be positive, if not benign. And I count that as a win. One of the things that, as we've talked to more people about this, that seems to come up about feeding your good wolf is that it takes help. That a lot of us tend to fall into sort of habitual patterns or a lot of the things that you're even talking about here take a lot of bravery and courage. Can you talk a little bit about the help that you get in your life, whether it be in the past or now for people who sort of help you to feed your good wolf? Absolutely. And the one thing I have to say is more than any other venue, the internet, and as much as you can be afraid of the internet and

the bad, sketchy folks out there, it's full of good people too. And when you reach out and you say, here's me, here's what I care about, good people will reach out to you. And so if in your life, you're sort of being bombarded and you're beaten down and you're sort of just listening to negative voices, there are really good people on the internet who will encourage you and say, no, this is good. This is a good idea. This is useful. Keep doing this. And at the time I started, I was just sort of living in this sort of miasmic, bubbling, blah, work, work, work, go to sleep, go to school, go to work pile. And the internet really gave me a sort of outlet to be like, no, this is bigger than that. You can be, you can be smarter than that. You can be better than that. You can do other things. And the encouragement you find

from strangers can do a lot, even if in your day-to-day life, you're sort of being beaten down and told to behave and all of those nasty things. Did that even answer the question or did I talk myself in a circle? No, it sort of did. My question following would be how has that sort of finding people who are supportive virtually, how does that translate into finding people in your physical life that are supportive? So say you start from a place where maybe you don't have a lot of that. You find that sort of support on the internet or virtually. Do you find that that over time starts to translate into your real life or your physical

life? Absolutely. There are so many people that I knew from the internet that once I met in person, it was just like, oh, it's you. You're one of my best friends in the world and I've never met you. And now I have to hug you and we have to do everything together. And they aren't just on the internet. They're real people out there too. get on a plane, you can go to whatever meetup or conference or crazy thing where all these people actually are. And when you meet them, you will feel so relieved. It's insane. Because everybody really is, everybody has a tribe out there. And all you need are two or three or four people. And you're unstoppable. That's one of the things about the internet that just I love. I mean, I'm one of those people often talk about one of the things you can do to sort of feed your good wolf is to do sort of gratitude or think about gratitude. And one of the things that I just every time I think about gratitude, I think about the internet. It just blows me away how wonderful and amazing it is and And, and how I sometimes think about what my life

would have been like, because I'm a little bit older, if the internet had been around when I was a teenager, you know, if I could have found and reached out broader than sort of the small area that and people that we, you know, that I was surrounded by, if you know, had the whole world been sort of available at that point, what that would have been like. And I do think it's really exciting. And you hear these really touching stories about, you know, people who are somewhat isolated in some way, whether they live in a small town or, and they, they are able to connect to something bigger themselves outside of that in the internet. And it is really transforming for them. outside of that in the internet. It is really transforming for them.

I think for every story of bullying or kiddie porn or weirdness or like Chris Hansen, like, please sit down and have a cookie stories you find out there. There are 10, 100, a thousand other stories of people who were like, I met my true love online. I met people who made everything happen for me online. I found my new job online. I figured out how to get my life on track online. And it's not just pixels. It's real people behind it. And I think that's the power of it. Yeah, I think in your acknowledgments you have in the book, you've got a great chart that sort of, again, it's going to fail trying to describe it.

But it's basically your thanks internet chart. It shows that you can do more things and you can know more people as a result of the internet. And I think certainly that's why we're talking. Well, yeah. I mean, half the time I'll get an email from somebody that's like, so have you heard about this? Or do you know anybody about this? I'll be like, yes, I do. And I have nothing to do with that, but I know somebody who does and I can play matchmaker. And if I get to play matchmaker once a day online through my silly Yahoo email address, I've done all sorts of good. What's next for you? So you've, you've done this book.

You've been running the, the, this Is Indexed blog for a long time. What's the next big project? Right now I'm illustrating Sun Tzu's Art of War, which sounds very antagonistic and weird. But when you really read it, the whole idea behind it is the more you think, the less you fight. And so taking that entirely old, really, I am an MBA, watch me destroy title and turning it into something a lot more thoughtful and a lot more useful is really fun for me. So that is Up on Forbes 2. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast,

our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer.

And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. God bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just

stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called really know really. And you can find it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Less crankiness, more marveling, right?

That's your line. Yeah, I think, I think there's a, idea of, what is it, bark less, purr more, or something like that. I've seen it on bumper stickers, where it's just sort of stop complaining and really think about what's going on. And you know what, it's not so bad anyway. And the more you get on that, the better you feel. Because I can, my husband calls it my worst case scenario brain where i can take something that's minorly irritating or awful and just spin it into okay this is the worst case scenario our house is going to implode i'm going to die a tumor is going to spring out of my brain everything's going to go to hell we're all going to get arrested and really you can just step back

and say no actually it's it's going to be fine. And getting to that point is hard, but it's healthier. And so how do you do that? Because that does seem to be for, you know, as we've talked to people and we've sort of explored this theme, that is, you know, the bad wolf's biggest job is that sort of internal negative self-talk, job is that sort of internal negative self-talk, whether it's impending doom or you're not good enough or all those different things. So how do you battle that sort of day-to-day? Have you found that over time it just sort of goes away because you've sort of trained it? What's been your experience with that? I am battling imposter syndrome, every step of everything. It's always sort of, you're just a fraud and you just got away with

this and you're just lucky because somebody linked to it. And you just, you just sort of got away with this and you're just sort of this dumb person who's throwing things on the internet and you're not really smart at all and blah. And I can talk myself into that corner until I'm just like, ooh. And even when you stack up, I did this and I did that and I accomplished this and I moved over here and I did this and this and this and this and this, no matter how big the stack is, there's still that voice in the back of your head that's saying, yeah, you're just a fraud. You just got away with it. And I don't know if that will ever go away, but you really have to keep eroding it every day. It's sort of a tidal thing, like the sand comes up and the sand comes out, and you just have to sort of keep plowing ahead.

I don't think I'll ever be really confident in what I'm doing. I just have to keep trying to earn where I am. I think we all suffer from that to one degree or the other, but in my book, you deserve all the success that you've had. So with that, we are out of time. So Jessica, I want to thank you for being on the podcast. It's been a real pleasure to have you. I encourage people to check out your work online. And thank you very much. And we'll talk to you soon. Thank you. you can find out more about jessica and her great illustrations in our show notes at one you feed.net slash jessica