Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Jason Feifer on Embracing Change | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Episode Date: August 24, 2022Did you know that people were once afraid of things like bicycles, elevators and teddy bears? Humans are naturally resistant to change, even change that helps us. We are scared new technologies, new i...deas, and new ways of living. The people who embrace change are the ones who succeed most in life. Today we’re talking to Jason Feifer, Editor in chief of Entrepreuer Magazine. Jason is recognized as an authority on change— providing thought leadership on why people resist it, and the importance of embracing it. On this episode of #YAPClassic, learn how Jason rose to the top of his field as a journalist and developed his personal brand. We’ll also dive deep into change and how entrepreneurs can both better embrace change and help their customers more easily accept and adapt to new technologies. Topics Include: -Jason’s background in media -Why did Jason quit his job at Gardner News? -Why does Jason have so many side hustles? -Taking opportunities that aren’t assigned to you -How to ‘work your next job’ -Skill stacking -Being aware of what you need to learn -The importance of challenging yourself -What makes a thought leader? -The power of embracing change -How have people historically feared change? -Why do people fear new technology? -How to showcase new & innovative ideas -What new technology are people resisting? -Replacement vs. integration of new technology -How do we falsely romanticize the past to resist change? Jason Feifer is the Editor in chief of Entrepreneur Magazine who has led an amazing career as a journalist, working at publications such as Fast Company, Men’s Health, and Maxim Magazine. He hosts two podcasts: Build For Tomorrow and Problem Solver. Earlier this year, he released a book called Build For Tomorrow that outlines how humanity has rejected and embraced change over time. His goal is to help you become more resilient and adaptable in a world of constant change — so you can seize new opportunities before anyone else does! Sponsored By: Shopify - Go to shopify.com/profiting, for a FREE fourteen-day trial and get full access to Shopify’s entire suite of features Sabio - Go to sabio.la/yap and save $125 on your total bootcamp cost! Resources Mentioned: YAP Episode #70: Build For Tomorrow podcast: https://www.jasonfeifer.com/build-for-tomorrow/ Jason’s Instagram: Jason’s website: https://www.jasonfeifer.com Connect with Young and Profiting: Hala’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Hala’s Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Hala’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/yapwithhala Clubhouse: https://www.clubhouse.com/@halataha Website: https://www.youngandprofiting.com/ Text Hala: https://youngandprofiting.co/TextHala or text “YAP” to 28046
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You're listening to Yap, Young and Profiting Podcast, a place where you can listen, learn, and profit.
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button because you'll love it here at Young and Profiting Podcast.
If there's anything the past two years has taught us, it's that change is inevitable and
those of us who resist it will fall behind. But how do we become more comfortable with change?
Today on Yap, we're chatting with Jason Pfeiffer to answer that question. Jason is a renowned
journalist, author, and public speaker. He also is the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine.
Jason has led an incredible career as a journalist holding senior editor positions at outlets like Fast Company, Men's Health, and Maxim Magazine.
Jason is a host of the popular podcast Build for Tomorrow and is recognized as an authority on change, providing thought leadership on why people resist change and the importance of embracing it.
Jason first came onto the show in June of 2020 when there was a lot of change taking place for everyone.
Some entrepreneurs were resisting those changes while others were using them to their advantage.
In this conversation, we hear about the silly things people used to be afraid of in the past,
like teddy bears, elevators, and bicycles.
And we learn why people naturally fear the new.
Then we get into how companies and entrepreneurs can overcome our human tendency to fear new things
and the tactics we can use to get our customers to accept and adapt new innovations.
This is a truly fascinating episode.
If you want to understand why historically people have been afraid of change and then hear actionable
strategies that can help you and others adapt faster and thrive in a constantly changing world,
then this is an episode you don't want to skip.
Hey everyone, it's Hala from Young Improfiting Podcast.
I'm here with the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, Jason Pfeiffer.
Welcome to the show.
Oh, hey, thanks for having me.
I appreciate it.
So I am very excited for this interview.
So, Jason, for those who don't know anything about you, you do a lot of cool things.
Could you just let us know who Jason Pfeiffer is and how do you spend your days?
Yeah.
So thanks so much for having me.
I am the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine.
I also host three podcasts.
They're called Pessimists Archive Problem Solvers and Hush Money.
I do, did, I don't know how to say it in a world of, in which we're all still semi-lockdown.
I did a lot of public speaking and we'll hopefully continue to do that.
I'm a novelist and working on another book now.
And generally, I think of myself as someone who likes to inspire people to feel good about doing hard things.
The entrepreneurs and people who have adopted that mindset of entrepreneurship are setting out on a journey that they know is going to be difficult.
And yet, even though they know it's going to be difficult, as you get down the path,
you feel lonely and crazy and you look around and you're like, did I do the right thing? And I want to be
there to say yes. Not only did you do the right thing, but the thing that you're feeling is something
that everybody else who has taken this journey is feeling too. You may feel alone, but you are not.
You are actually having a very shared experience. So I see my role as being something of a guide for that
and helping people through it and also helping people to embrace the change that is necessary to get through it.
Cool. And so tell us about your profession. Like what is your, I know you have a day job and then you have lots of side hustles. Yeah. Well, I mean, I, my background is in media. So I started as a community newspaper reporter. That which means that I was, you know, a reporter for a very small paper. It was the Gardner News in Gardner, Massachusetts, circulation is 6,000, like covering nothing. Like, nothing was happening in this town. And I quit after a year.
because I had this realization.
The realization was that nobody was reading the Gardner News
at a place that I wanted to work at.
I imagined working at the New York Times or the Washington Post.
I wanted to do big things and reach big audiences
and write about important stuff.
And I realized not a single person at the New York Times
was ever going to read this piece about local diners
that I wrote in the Gardner News.
And so I needed to stop sitting around
and thinking that they would come to me.
and I needed to go to them.
And so I quit that job, and I sat in my bedroom for nine months.
I was living in an apartment next to a graveyard in Holden, Massachusetts.
I would sit there looking out, you know, like a pawn in the graveyard, feeling like it was my career.
And then I would just cold pitch.
And I just reached out to editors.
And I just sat and came up with ideas and hustled.
And that's how I got into the Washington Post and the Boston Globe and Associated Press in New York Times.
And that taught me something as I then eventually kind of went back into the,
normal workforce, which was I always needed to be going to people. I always needed to be thinking
about what I could do to get in front of people to constantly build myself. Because if I just sat
around and waited for people to come and like recognize my genius, it was never going to happen.
So that's how I have continued to build my career. I mean, that's the reason why I run a national
magazine, but I'm doing all these other things on the side. The entire point of it is to be aware
that no matter how good I am at doing the thing I'm already doing,
the other stuff, the stuff that I'm just digging up, that I'm exploring, that I'm trying,
that I'm expanding, that stuff is ultimately more valuable.
And I always want to be pushing myself.
That's very cool.
Yeah, I've listened to so many of your interviews,
and I know it's really important for you to be in a learning environment.
And I'd like to kind of stick on that point.
So it wasn't your end goal to actually be editor-in-chief of some national-man.
magazine. That wasn't really your goal. Talk to us about how you had the grit and kind of worked your
way up to landing that role and the mentality that you had while you were going on your career
journey. Because everybody always tells us, like, you know, have your end goal in mind and then
work backwards from that or look at somebody who has that role that you want and see what career
they had. What did you do to get to have such a prestigious role? So, you know, I think that that's
fine advice to a point that you should identify your end goal and then work backwards from that
or find people who are doing the kinds of things. That's fine, but I would encourage you to at the same
time as you're doing that, be completely okay abandoning that. Just straight up abandon it.
And the reason for that is because you have no idea what it is that you will learn along the
journey and you will, I guarantee, discover things that are exciting,
that might fit you better as you get a better understanding of what you love to do and what your
real skill set is. And also, you may have an idea of where it is that you want to go,
but there's a chance. I want to prepare you for the real chance that if you got there,
it wouldn't be what you thought it was. It would be terrible. I'll give you an example,
which is a friend of mine, I will not name by name, but a friend of mine,
His dream, his entire career, was to work at GQ magazine.
And then he got there.
I mean, he got to GQ magazine and he was elated.
And then he realized it is kind of terrible.
Like, it was terrible working there.
The working environment was kind of terrible, working under the editor-in-chief at the time,
who was a very smart guy, but was very hard to work with.
And there was no joy in it.
And he was stuck there because he had had this one,
idea of what he was going to be when he achieved. And that was to be an editor at GQ. And then he got
there and he was stuck. So here's how I've thought about my path. I always thought, okay,
I thought, you know, this is, it kind of builds off of something that I said a minute
ago, but I want to like dive into it because I think it's, it just sort of gives you a picture of it.
I have this idea that I call work your next job. And work your next job means this. In front of you,
in front of you, in front of me, in front of everybody watching this, everybody listening
to this. Right now, there are two sets of opportunities. Opportunity set A are the opportunities
that are the things that are being asked of you by your job, by other people, the way that
you're being evaluated, what is your KPI, your key performance indicator, right? Like anything
that you're being judged on, that's opportunity set A. Go to work. These are the things that
being asked of you, that's Opportunities Set A. Opportunities Set B is everything that's available to you
that nobody's asking you to do. And that can be stuff at your work. And that can be stuff that is not
at your work. That is just, you know, if you freed up some time at home, you could get into it.
You could learn how to podcast. You could learn anything. I always think, and I've always felt
my entire career, that Opportunity Set B was more important, that I would go to a job. I would take the job.
And the reason I would take it was because I had a sense of what I would.
learn from it. I worked at men's health. I do not care about fitness tips. I do not care about
weight loss tips. What I cared about was learning how to do a specific kind of editing called packaging
that magazines, that men's health does really well. And I wanted to do it at a national level.
That was my first national magazine job. I knew I would come in. I would learn that skill at the same time
as I was doing that, I would find other things that I wasn't hired to do, that I could learn and grow
and build, and then I would get out of there and I would do it all over again. And the reason that I
have been able to build my career in the way that I have and end up in this really awesome role
that I could not have possibly anticipated was because I focused on those skills and just building
those skills and I focused on working my next job, constantly developing new things that nobody
was asking me to do that would put me in a position to succeed in a way that I couldn't imagine.
And that path has ping ponged me around the world of media and has forced me to redefine myself
over and over again, but has been so much more satisfying than if I tried to follow some straight
path. Yeah, I love that. I think you just brought out so many great gems. The thing that resonated
with me is that you were more concerned about the skills you were going to learn rather than
like the brand name that you were going to work for. And I think that's really important. Sometimes
you take a job to learn new skills and you might not really resonate with the brand's mission,
but you actually gain new skills. And then you can transfer those skills to another job where you
might align better with those missions. It's kind of like something we talk about on the show a lot is
skill stacking. So, you know, you take one skill from one experience and then you use it in a
different way in another experience and you just keep layering on these skills until you're
really desirable in the marketplace in your field. So that's right. You know what? I love the phrase
skill stacking. I'm just going to add another one to it. I was talking a while ago to a guy
named Greg. He's the C-O-O. I don't know. He's one of the co-founders of a company called
Foodsters. They make like baking mixes and stuff. And Sarah Michelle Geller, famous as being Buffy,
the Vampire Slayer, she's one of the co-founders. Anyway, he said this thing to me, which really
stuck with me, which was that when he's looking for co-founders, looking for partners, looking for people
to work with, to build something. He's been through this many times. He's always looking for what
he calls situational awareness, which is to say he wants people who are aware of what they're
good at and aware of what they're not good at and that they can are able to focus on their
strengths and then partner with people who are really good at the things that they're not and that's really
valuable for you to always have situational awareness to be very very open about the things that you need
to learn i mean that's how that's how i carved my path i mean i went from boston magazine to men's
health to fast company to maxim to entrepreneur like that doesn't make any sense unless you know
that I was constantly aware of what I didn't know.
So why did I go from Men's Health to Fast Company?
Because I knew that I had no real idea how to write and edit, like long 3,000-word stories.
And I needed to know how to do that.
And so I didn't care what magazine would let me do it.
I wanted that.
Why did I go to Maxim?
Maxim's a disgusting magazine.
I have no interest in working at Maxim.
But the reason I did it was because there was an opening for a deputy editor job,
which would have put me into a management role.
And I knew that I really didn't know how to manage people.
and I needed an opportunity to do that.
So I would walk into this disgusting magazine
and I would learn how to manage
and then I would get out of there.
And that's fine, that's great
because what matters most to skills
because those are transferable
the rest of your career
far more than like whatever random thing
you happen to be doing at the job that day.
Yeah, totally. I totally agree.
And I can definitely really,
I used to work at Hewlett-Packard
and I was in marketing.
And I kept getting promoted.
I got promoted five times
and I was really rising up the ranks.
But Hewlett-Packard is kind of an old-fashioned company
and I knew that if I stayed there, I wouldn't have advanced my skills.
Now I work at Disney streaming, and I'm at like that cutting edge of marketing and technology
where previously it was kind of old school.
And it turns out when I started at Disney, I was so overwhelmed because I was like,
oh my God, I was the most technical person at HP.
And now I'm just like everyone else, if not a little bit behind the curve.
And I've got to learn all these things.
But now I've learned so much.
And it's been totally worth it.
And pain is growth.
So it was challenging.
It was hard, but it worked out.
That's awesome. And I love, so it's so interesting that you said, you know, you were, you were at the most technical person in your department at HP. Because had you stayed there, you would have never been challenged to be more, to be smarter, to be better, right? And the people who I've worked with throughout my career, who I would say were the worst, or like when I think back to a previous magazine I worked at and I, you know, one of the very senior people who I worked with, I consider to be the single worst person I ever worked with. Just,
unbelievably rude, no opening in this guy's head for how to think differently or how you could
reimagine what you do. And he was so stuck in his ways and he was so mean about it. And it should
not surprise you at all that that guy had spent his entire career at that magazine. He started as an
intern and he worked his way up and he'd been there for like 15 years. Nobody ever challenged him.
He never had to go into new environments and learn new things and discover that, oh, maybe I
I was pretty good at that over there, but I actually suck at it over here and I need to rethink what I do.
Right?
Like, he never had to do that.
And that's why he was so terrible.
Yeah, it definitely could stunt your growth if you don't go out there and get more opportunities.
And you can be like a big fish in a small pond very easily and not be able to expand your skills.
So totally agree there.
So, Jason, I wanted to understand if your personal brand happened first or if your job at Entrepreneur Magazine
actually happen first because I have a full-time job like I just mentioned and I have this podcast
on the side and sometimes it's difficult to navigate having a personal brand while representing
a corporation and I wanted to understand your perspective on that, how you balance that and,
you know, what came first? Did being the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine kind of pushed you
to the limelight or were you doing that already? I think a lot, a lot about my relationship,
as a personal brand with my relationship with my employer.
So this is a great subject.
I mean, the very quick answer, and then I'll give you the long answer,
the very quick answer is that for this version of my personal brand,
entrepreneur came, the job came first.
So here's what happened.
I had throughout my career been very interested in stepping out
and being more forward-facing as a person and speaking in my own voice.
But I have to be honest,
for most of my career, I had no idea what my voice was.
I was developing a writer's voice, but I didn't know what I meant to people.
I hadn't thought through that.
And I had really been given no opportunity to do it.
I mean, occasionally I'd be on TV for this or that interview or whatever.
But I just, you know, and I'd created a couple like random viral things that got me some attention.
But I didn't know what it was.
And then I got this job as editor in chief of Entrepreneur Magazine.
I was originally executive editor, which is the number of,
two at a magazine. And then the editor-in-chief left and I made a play for the top spot,
and I got it. And at first, honestly, I thought of it as a magazine job, right? I thought of it
as a media job, the way that every other job of mine was. I was like, I'm going to scrap this
magazine, white sheet the whole thing. We're going to rethink what this is. We're going to rethink
how we communicate as a brand. You know, the editor-in-chief of a magazine is basically the face of a brand and
also the person who is in control of all the editorial, everything that we put out. So I wanted to think
about what entrepreneur could be now in this new world in which the word entrepreneur is not, like,
obscure. It's now a mindset and identity. So I spent about a year doing that. And then after I felt
like I got it into a good place, I started accepting interview requests. And I would go on these
shows or in these podcasts and people would introduce me as a thought leader in entrepreneurship.
Jason Viver, we got Jason Viver here. He's a thought leader in entrepreneurship.
And I, my instinct was to say, what, no, so I'm not a thought leader. I'm actually, I'm a
journalist, right? Because if you're a journalist, you're trained, you're not the story.
You're just reporting the story. And so I was like, I, you know, what I do, and I'm not even,
I don't even have a business background. I really have like a generalist and I tell
It was like falling down the stairs.
It was terrible.
And you could hear the hosts would then try to reel it back in because I was ruining the reason that I was on their show.
They were like, well, we think of you as a thought leader.
And so I was telling my wife about this.
And she said she gave me the greatest advice that I've gotten for this phase of my career.
And that was if they want you to be a thought leader, then be a thought leader.
And I realized that the only difference between someone who's a thought leader and someone who's not a thought leader is that the thought leader is willing to say they're a thought leader.
Like, that's literally it.
It's the only difference.
And so I spent a long time thinking about what I am, how can I be relevant to this audience
that I'm, like, what overlap is there between my passions and my personal experiences
and the things that people are looking for?
And I came up with this philosophy for personal brands in case anyone's interested
in being sort of personal branding, which is that you are not, you know, I think
people think, well, personal brand is like, oh, you just put yourself.
out there and people. No, be a character. You are a character. You are a very simple version of
yourself, a version of yourself that is constantly delivering at the same time, predictability and
surprise. Because that's what people want from a brand. That's what they want from media,
right? I mean, if you turn on a TV show, there's a predictability to it. The predictability is,
you know what the show is, you know you like the show, you like the characters, you like
where it's going. The surprise.
is that you don't know what's happening next, right? But it's all in part of the same thing.
So, you know, but if you, if you picked up Entrepreneur Magazine and it was 17 magazine,
bad surprise, right? You need the predictability. A personal brand is the same thing.
People have to know why they're tuning into you. What do you offer to them? What kind of,
what is, what is the way that you fit into their lives? And the way that you do that is that
you simplify yourself down into this predictable surprise package that people know what they're
getting. And so I started to realize that.
the thing that I, you know, I said it in the very beginning when you asked me to define myself,
I realized that the thing that I was doing, the thing that I was able to offer was this kind
of combination of like motivation and perspective all around change, all around how you have to
change in your journey, you have to change the things that you work on, you have to change
inside of yourself. I had gone through that personally, and so I could speak to it, even though,
let's be honest, and I'll be totally transparent, I haven't built a company. I'm running
entrepreneur magazine. The only company that I've built is like my own
personal brand of my podcasts. It's not the same, but the journey, the emotional experience of it
is very similar. And so I've been able to speak to that. I flattened myself out. I came up with
the voice that I speak in. I came up with the attitude. I came up with with some ethos.
So like I thought, okay, one of the things that I always am is accessible. That's a word in my
personal brand, accessible. What does that mean? It means that I will respond to everybody. If you
DM me, you will get a response. It means that I do things in a kind of raw way so that it feels a little
imperfect and it feels like more real. Like you're just there with me. Right. I mean, like I don't have
a background here. I'm just like in a living room. So that's all intentional. That's all thinking about
the personal brand. And now I'm always constantly evolving it. I'm putting things out. I'm experimenting.
I'm seeing how people respond to it. But I'm always thinking of myself as a character. You right now are not
talking to Jason Pfeiffer. You're not.
because if you were talking to Jason Fiver, I got all other things.
I bore you with talks about my kids and, you know, like boring things.
You're talking to me because of a very small slice of my experience, which is the slice that's
relevant to your audience.
And I'm aware of that and I'm constantly, constantly drilling into it.
That's what I mean.
You are a character.
You're a personal brand.
So they're related.
I think that my personal brand helps entrepreneur and I think that entrepreneur helps my
personal brand.
But I do see them as distinct entities because, of course, you know, you have to remember.
Unless you work at a company that you own, that relationship is not forever. That relationship is also
uncontrollable. I don't own an entrepreneur. I do own my personal brand. And so I want to be a building both,
but aware of how they're distinct. Let's hold that thought and take a quick break with our sponsors.
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Young and profitors.
I know there's so many people tuning in right now that end their workday wondering why certain
tasks take forever, why they're procrastinating certain things, why they don't feel confident
in their work, why they feel drained and frustrated and unfulfilled.
But here's the thing you need to know.
It's not a character flaw that you're feeling this way.
It's actually your natural wiring.
And here's the thing.
When it comes to burnout, it's really about the type of work that you're doing.
Some work gives you energy, and some work simply drains you.
So it's key to understand your six types of working genius.
The working genius assessment or the six types of working genius framework was created by Patrick
Lencioni, and he is a business influencer and author.
And the working genius framework helps you identify what you're actually built for and the
work that you're not.
Now, let me tell you a story.
Before I uncovered my working genius, which is galvanizing and invention, so I like to rally
people and I like to invent new things.
I used to be really shameful and had a lot of guilt around the fact that I didn't like
enablement, which is one of my working frustrations.
So I actually don't like to support people one-on-one.
I don't like it when people slow me down.
I don't like handholding.
I like to move fast, invent, rally people, inspire.
But what I do need to do is ensure that somebody else can fill the enablement role,
which I do have, K on my team.
So working genius helps you uncover these genius gaps, helps you work better with your team,
helps you reduce friction, helps you collaborate better, understand,
why people are the way that they are. It's helped me restructure my team, put people in the
spots that they're going to really excel. And it's also helped me in hiring. Working Genius is
absolutely amazing. I'm obsessed with this model. So if you guys want to take the Working Genius
assessment and get 20% off, you can use code profiting. Go to working genius.com. Again, that's
working genius.com. Stop guessing. Start working in your genius. I love that. I think you talked about
so many great things. It reminds me of something I had Eric Edmidi's on the show. He's like,
a popular public speaker. He worked with Mind Valley. And he talked about something called a story
journal. And he inspired me to create a story journal. And basically what I did is that there's
like basically chapters of your story journal. So for me, like overcoming rejection is a big topic
that I like to talk about. Skills stacking is another big topic that I like to talk about.
And just like so on different categories. And then you start to like fill in like what are the
different stories that I have in these categories. And you start to have like a journal of all your
stories. So before you go onto a podcast, you can think about what is relevant to this audience,
and you can basically pick the stories that you're going to keep in mind for that episode.
And then you end up being a lot more, it's like a lot easier. It's not reading the story
word for word. It's just like trying to remember your experiences and memories. So I think that's
great advice. I have the same thing. I just use a different term for it. I call it interlocking parts.
It's a menu of interlocking parts that I have in my head that every time some new thing happens.
I talk to somebody interesting.
I'll test it out on a podcast.
I'll test it out on stage.
I'll test it out in conversation.
If people like it, it feels like it works,
like it adds some value,
then I'll kind of refine it.
And I have it in my head.
Like you said, it's not a scripted thing.
It's never been written down,
but they're little bitty interlocking parts,
things that I can just,
as you're asking me a question right now,
I'm rifling, anytime you're doing that,
I'm rifling through my head
to the interlocking part
that I know is going to fit.
Because I know it works.
And I've done it a bunch of times.
and I know how to say it and I know what the point is and I know what the beats are.
And I think that you nailed it.
I mean, like anybody who wants to do this, you need to be constantly every second of your day
alert to what can be your interlocking part or part of your story journal or whatever you want to call it.
Yeah.
So we do a lot of research here on Young and Profiting Podcasts, as I mentioned to you.
And so I was looking through all your YouTube videos and doing my typical research.
And I saw your speaking real.
and it turns out you call yourself, and you mentioned it before, a champion of change.
Yeah.
So tell us why you feel that you are a champion of change and what credibility do you have behind that.
So funny, you know, speaking of personal branding, I've been experimenting with language to describe myself
and champion of change is something. I honestly, I mean, you know, like I said,
a totally open book on these things.
I came up with that two, three months ago and just kind of started throwing it out there to see
what would happen.
You're the second person to have asked me about it.
it. So it's like not, I don't know. I don't know how well it's working. You tell me if you think
it's any good. Here's the reason that I put that out there. So I came to this realization,
which is that, well, okay, a couple things. Number one, I was trying to understand at the very
beginning of my kind of personal brand journey how I am most useful to people. And I realized
something. And that was that if you listen to the questions that people ask you, that
you will get a sense of what they think that your value is. Because, right, they're coming with
some assumption about how you can be useful. So the question that I got a lot was, what are the qualities
that I am seeing in successful entrepreneurs? Because I am constantly talking to entrepreneurs.
Like the greatest thing that I have, the greatest asset that I have right now at my job is that I have
access. I have access to everybody, right? Big and small. Entrepreneurs you've never heard of. And
just before lockdown, I was sitting down and talking to Dwayne the Rock Johnson and his business
partner, Danny Garcia. Like, I get the full range. And so I'm able to see these patterns of how
people are succeeding and the things that they're doing that are allowing them to thrive.
And so I started looking for the patterns because that's what people were asking me for.
And the thing that I realized was that the people who succeed are the ones that embrace change
that are able to not just understand that they themselves need to change, that their businesses
need to change, that their industries are going to change, and that they have to be proactive
about it. They can't be reactive to it. They can't be changing when they're forced to, when it's
too late. They have to do it first. They have to do it sometimes when it's very painful.
And so that was a really useful piece of information because they said, okay, people think that my value to them is that I'm seeing the patterns.
So let me identify the patterns. And the big pattern is change. At the same time, I was also working on an ongoing, I think of it as a research project, which is this podcast that I do, which is called Pessimists Archive.
So Pessimists Archive is a show about why people resist new things and then how they come to embrace them.
Because the crazy thing is that everything in your life right now, everything in our world,
things that you do not even think about, that you totally take for granted, those things
were once scary and new.
And what does that mean?
I'm talking literally everything.
I'm talking teddy bears.
I'm talking novels.
I'm talking chess.
I'm talking bicycles.
And it's really fascinating when you look back and you see how people were afraid of
these things.
One of my favorite ones, the bicycle, when the bicycle came out, late 1800s, the bicycle is a brand new thing.
And merchants were totally freaked out about it because it was changing people's behaviors.
So bar owners were very upset about the bicycle because people weren't coming in and drinking in the middle of the day anymore,
drinking beer because they were now drinking water.
They were riding in the bicycle.
Cobblers were very upset.
There was a great 1898 newspaper article that I found in which a guy who sells fancy felt hats said,
that he wanted Congress to pass a law mandating that every cyclist buy two fancy felt hats a year
to compensate him for the loss of sales because cyclists weren't buying these hats anymore.
They were biting cycling caps.
And as I look back on this, I realized that I am able to see the patterns in the same way that
I was able to see the patterns in how entrepreneurs are embracing change.
I was able to see the patterns historically in why people are afraid of change.
And then how great change makers, people who invented the elevator, people who inventing the elevator,
people who invented the car, how they're able to get people to come along for the ride, so to speak.
And so I put those two things together, and I realize that what I have is actually a really
fantastic window into the history of and the embracing of change.
I have come to understand change in a way that I don't know that anybody else is doing.
And so that's why I came up with that phrase, champion of change,
because I feel like that's where my role can be.
I'm just going to tell you a quick story.
One of the story that I love of an entrepreneur
who really embrace change
and embodies not just that you need to change,
but that you need to be ahead of it,
that you need to proactively change.
And here's what it is.
Okay, so maybe some of you are familiar with a beer called dogfish.
Dogfish Head is a brewery in Delaware, very popular.
And many years ago,
This is a guy named Sam. Sam is the founder of dogfish. Many years ago, Sam had created this beer called 90-minute IPA. It's a 9% alcohol by volume beer, which is very strong and I'm knocking on the floor. And so he was being told by people who liked the beer, you know, listen, this is great, but can you create a version of this that, like, I can drink standing up. So he created a 60-minute IPA, 6% alcohol by volume, easier beer to drink. You can have a few of them. You won't go on the floor. And this thing,
takes off. Just absolutely crazy takes off. And it takes off so much. People love this beer.
They want this beer. They need this beer. Restaurants, bars, Amtrak is calling. Everybody wants
this beer. And this beer very quickly starts rising in sales such that it could become,
it was on track to becoming 80% of all sales of dogfish, which is to say that this company,
which makes a lot of beers, 80% of what they were selling was going to be this one beer.
It was one beer, 60 minute IPA.
Now, you might think, amazing, love this.
Such a great, like, wow, I'm an entrepreneur.
I've got a hit product.
I'm going to sell this beer.
I'm going to sell this beer and I'm going to make as much money as I can on this moment.
This is my moment.
But that is not what Sam thought.
Sam thought something else.
Sam thought change is coming.
He realized that he was right now going to be
selling one style of beer, which meant that everybody was going to know him for one style of beer.
Every time you went into a bar, 60 minute IPA, every time you went into a restaurant, 60 minute IPA,
every time that you went into, you know, took an Amtrak, 60 minute IPA.
So he says, if everybody just experiences dogfish through this one beer, if everybody just knows
me as the IPA brand, well, one day, people are not going to like IPA as the way that they do now.
One day, the market is going to change.
And when that happens, when people are no longer interested in IPAs the way they are now,
then I am not a hit brand anymore.
I'm an old brand.
And so, Sam decided to do something that sounds crazy.
Now, remember, I said, this beer was on track to become 80% of everything that he sold.
He decided to cap sales of his best selling product at 50%, which meant that a lot of restaurants
were calling him and saying they want 60-minute IPA and he had to say no.
And bars were calling him.
He said no. People were furious. They were screaming at him on the street. I have walked around Delaware with Sam. He is like a celebrity there. They were screaming at him. And yet, Sam understood that this short-term pain was necessary for long-term stability. He understood that when people called and yelled at him, that he had an opportunity, not to cower, not to apologize, but to say, I understand, I'm really sorry. We make this beer very fresh. And that's the reason why I came.
give it to you. In the meantime, we would love you to try one of our other beers. And eventually,
the anger disappeared. Eventually, people discovered that they liked the other beers that he made.
And eventually, Sam became known not as a brand that made one kind of beer, but as an innovative
brand. And last year, Sam sold that company for $300 million. And that would not have happened
If he had been afraid to say, you know what, this needs to change.
If he had just seen this hit product and decided to run with it and just become the moment,
just sink in to the thing that was presented to him instead of taking action and saying
change is going to come.
So I have to change first.
If he hadn't done that, he would not have a longstanding business.
But he did and he sold it for $300 million.
And that's why I believe that change is important.
I think that's a great point. It's so important. You say that like entrepreneurs play the long game
even when it hurts. I love that phrase. I do. So you already gave a real life example. So I don't
need to ask you that question anymore. Let's talk about your podcast, The Pessimist Archive.
Yeah, sure. Such a cool concept for a show. Honestly, like it's something that I would definitely
listen to. It reminds me of Freakonomics a little bit, which was like one of my favorite podcast before
I even started one. So tell us about that show, how you got the idea for it, and maybe give us a few
examples of how historically people have been resistant to new technology. Yeah, sure. So thanks.
So pessimists archive is, it's a show, like I said, it's about why people resist new things.
The reason that I started it, honestly, goes right back to what I said earlier about work your next
job. I had a fascination with this, with the history of people saying that things that today we know of as
commonplace and not scary were scary, right? You go back in time and you and you find that teddy bears
were accused of harming young girls. The argument was that girls will stop playing with dolls and start
playing with bears and therefore they will not learn how to be mothers. That was that was the argument.
Novels, people worried that novels were going to become too engrossing, too distracting. Basically
everything that people say about screens right now,
about, you know, like, get that kid off a TikTok or whatever.
I don't know it's sound like an old person.
But, you know, like everything that people say,
they were saying about the novel.
Coffee throughout history, throughout hundreds of years.
Governments have banned coffee.
The governor of Mecca banned coffee in the 1600s,
the King of England banned coffee,
because they thought that coffee made people revolutionary.
And, you know, I could go on for kind of ever.
But the point of it is that it was so interesting to see
how when things are new, we treat them as if they,
They are scary and damaging.
We identify the loss without being able to see the gain.
We see, oh, this thing is coming in.
It's going to replace something that I already know.
And therefore, I'm going to lose something.
And they never think through what the possible gain could be.
Yeah.
How we could build a new culture, a new society.
The elevator is a fascinating one.
So let me give you sort of like walk through a good example with the elevator.
So the elevator is a long and fascinating history of it.
Basically, you know, if you live in a city, you can thank the elevator for that.
Because prior to the elevator, they didn't build buildings more than like six,
eight stories tall because it was just too much of a schlep.
And also the way that people thought about height was totally different.
So before the elevator, poor people lived at the top of buildings and rich people lived
at the bottom because, of course, it was easier to get into your home if you were in the
bottom.
And then when the elevator came along, people were able to build tall buildings.
That totally shifted.
and now the rich people wanted to be on top,
and they shoved all the poor people down to the bottom.
But the moment that I find most fascinating about the elevator
was the moment that the elevator became automatic.
Think about it.
Before that, we all just walk into an elevator right now.
It just takes us where we want to go.
Maybe we press a button.
Maybe we don't even because it just knows.
Before that, there was a human being in there.
Now, at the very beginning, that human being literally physically moved the elevator up and down.
Like, by a rope, they would grab it.
pull a rope and it would move it up and down.
And then eventually that wasn't necessary anymore.
And then the elevator operator operator was in there to press the button and make sure nothing
went wrong.
And then technology improved enough.
And now we're talking about like the 1950s, technology improved enough that the elevator
could go up and down by itself.
And people were terrified by this, absolutely terrified by this.
They were terrified for a lot of reasons.
They were thinking about how the elevator must have a mind of its own now.
There are newspaper stories about.
how what does the elevator think?
There were also concerns about how, you know,
if there's an automatic elevator,
well, then there's nobody in the elevator,
which means that the elevator could be very dangerous,
rather dangerous people could come onto the elevator.
And the elevator industry had a problem,
which is that nobody was getting into this elevator,
even though automatic elevator could be very good,
could in fact be considerably better,
because here's another fun thing about elevators when they had operators.
Operators don't work 24 hours a day,
which means, much like the train,
you had to catch the last elevator.
So if you were on the high part of the building and you didn't catch the last elevator,
you had to take the stairs.
It was just crazy, right?
It was a different world.
And so here's what they did.
They realized, and this is so important for anybody who wants to create change,
anybody who's inventing, anybody who's innovating, they realize that just creating something
and just knowing that it's good is not enough.
People don't know the thing the way that you know it.
People don't see the value, the way that you see it.
You have to build a bridge of familiarity.
You have to bring them along with you.
And that often means giving them something
that is already familiar
so that this new thing doesn't feel like a radical new thing.
It just feels like a new version of the old thing.
And this is why when you walk into elevators,
I mean, they don't drill it that much anymore
because we don't need it so much anymore.
But decades ago, you can still see it.
If you walked into an elevator,
you would hear a soothing female voice
that would say, going up,
going down floor one, floor two. That's the reason for that, because that was what gave people
the comfort that when they walked into this thing, there was a human presence. They were used to a
human presence. And we need those things. We, if you're an innovator, if you are going to go out there
and create change, you have to remember that you have to bring people along with you. It is your job,
not just to create something great, but to also show people the way, show people how it fits into their
lives, show people that this is something that is additive to their world and not scary and
subtractive or replacing something in their world. And if you do that, then you can bring people.
So that's why I do the show, because I'm totally fascinated by that and the world is full of it.
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So is there a modern example
of people resisting technology
and maybe how an entrepreneur
bridged that gap
in terms of the old and the news
so people weren't so scared about it anymore?
Oh yeah, it's great.
It's great question.
I mean, we are going through quite a lot of it right now
and the pandemic, I think, has shifted
quite a lot of our pre-pandemic techno fear thinking.
So, for example, remember how everybody was scared about screen time?
Kids are getting too much screen time.
So much screen time.
Nobody's worried about that anymore, right?
Nobody's worried about that.
Also, social media, you know, there used to be so much talk about how social media is
making kids depressed and social media makes us antisocial.
That was all based on completely faulty research.
It's really interesting.
So, you know, like, let's just take you, you may have seen it.
There's tons of headlines.
Go to Google and type in like Facebook depression and you'll find.
So the thinking was when they did surveys, they would find that there was a high percentage
of teenagers with depression who used Facebook.
And so the original research hypothesized that Facebook was creating the depression.
But that's not true.
As it turns out now that we have a few more.
years of research to look at, and some of those old studies have been reviewed, what we're seeing
now is that it's actually, it wasn't a causation. It wasn't that Facebook was causing the
depression. It was a correlation. It was that there was a higher likelihood that if somebody was
suffering from depression, that they would use Facebook. Now, that's a different thing. And it's
really important to know that because the solution then is different. Because if it was true that
Facebook causes depression, well, then one of the things that you might want to do to help people
is get them off of Facebook. But if it turns out that, in fact, they have the depression,
and that's why they're using Facebook because they're finding a community and it's some kind of
help for them. Well, then if you took them off of Facebook, you're making the problem worse.
And this is what we do when we jump to conclusions, when we see something that's changing
and we say, oh, that's scary. We have to stop it. You create the wrong solutions. And that is so
dangerous. So yeah, there are really interesting shifts happening right now in which things that people
were afraid of, things that people resisted, they were forced into using and they're discovering that the
sky didn't fall. Another is remote work right now, right? Of course, we all, there were studies. Before the
pandemic, there were plenty of studies showing that remote work actually improved employee happiness,
improved employee retention, and also improved productivity. Great things. Why didn't
companies do it because they were so stuck in their old ways. And the managers, managers only understood
how to manage people who were in an office and the managers didn't want to feel outmoded.
So we kept everybody in the office, even though it was totally against the purpose of the company,
which is to create great things and to do it efficiently and to make people happy. And now,
here we are. We're all distributed. It turns out it's fine. And that's going to change the way
that we now think. So those were exceptional examples. One thing that I want you to drive home is that
You say that technologies don't replace everything all the time. They integrate. Could you explain that point a little bit?
Yeah. Yeah. No, thanks. Thanks for picking up on that. I love the research that you've done for this episode.
So, right, this is a really key thing to remember, which is that we often fear new technologies and new things because we think that they are total replacements to old things.
And so I think that drives a lot of the concerns that you may have seen about social media
because people saw the way that young people were interacting on social media and they said,
oh, no, this is going to replace every other way that young people used to communicate.
If young people only communicate online, well, then they'll never have any idea how to talk to each other in person.
There's a woman named Sherry Turkle who writes books about this, whole books about this,
about how we've lost the art of conversation and nobody knows how to talk to each other.
This is all based on this faulty understanding of how new things enter into our worlds.
New things do not wholesale replace old things.
They integrate.
So here's another great example.
Both of us are wearing headphones of some sort or another your earbuds right now.
So if you go back to the 1980s, what you'll see is you'll see all of these fascinating and really funny
news stories about how awful the Walkman was. Because the Walkman was the first real portable
music device. It was the first time in which you could create your own environment. And so people were
saying this thing is antisocial. This is digital snubbery was a line that was used on CBS
news. And the fear was that people are going to be always walking around constantly without any
desire or need to interact with other people.
Now, what has actually happened now that we've had a couple decades on it?
Well, what actually happened is that people interact with each other just fine,
but they also take time for themselves.
What the Walkman did is it gave us another option.
It gave us a way to give ourselves some privacy when we wanted it
and then take it off when we didn't.
And we can share things.
I've seen people on the subway sharing headphones.
It's an opportunity.
Everything that we're given is just an opportunity.
And you know what?
This is an important thing to remember
when we're talking about replacing
is that we often will romanticize,
falsely romanticize the past.
So when people were talking about,
oh, well, people are walking around
with their headphones,
and that means that they're not talking.
That imagines a world that didn't exist
in which everybody was having
deep, meaningful conversations
with everybody that they came across.
Could you imagine that world
That world sounds tedious, and it also sounds imaginary.
I mean, I ride during normal times, I'm on the subway multiple times a day in New York City.
And, you know, people are largely quiet, although some people are talking.
And if you rewound 50 years and you walked onto that same subway, you didn't see a bunch of philosophers like having powwows.
What you saw was people quietly reading the newspaper, reading magazine.
So it's not like we were exiting some world in which we were all communicating.
and we were entering some world in which we're all isolated forever.
No, all we were doing was giving ourselves one more option.
And if you believe that people are fundamentally, to their core,
social creatures who are also interested in learning and growing, which we are,
well, then, you know, some piece of technology that we created is not going to alter the fundamentals
of who we are.
It's absolutely nuts to think that we are so fragile that somebody could,
invent the Walkman and it would literally destroy the entire way that we evolved to be social
people. It's not how it works. So I get worked up, as you can see about this whole thing. But the
point is, and I'm glad that you asked it, the point is that when you see something new, you shouldn't
say, oh no, this is going to completely replace everything that I love and know and I'm comfortable
with. And instead, you should say, this is a great new or possible great, not everything is great,
but this is a possible great new addition to my world. And let's see if it fits in.
I love that. You have so much energy. You're so wonderful. I think you brought up some great points,
both about how we can kind of bridge the gap in terms of if we're an entrepreneur, we're coming out
with a new product, what's the best way to put it in the market? And then you also gave us some
great advice in terms of how we can accept change by knowing that it's just getting integrated into
our lives and it's not going to necessarily replace anything. So that's amazing. So today is June 19th.
It's a holiday called June Teeth.
It's over 150 years old.
It marks the day when slaves were truly released in Texas.
The last slaves were freed two years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
So I thought a great way to end of the show would be to ask you
if you have any inspiring stories from black entrepreneurs that you've interviewed in the past.
Yeah, thank you so much.
I love that question.
A great way to end on this important day.
So, you know, I mean, I've talked to so many people.
I'll tell you one.
who I just very recently talked to.
So his name is Mustafa Nur.
He's actually a Somali refugee
who came over here after his father
was killed by terrorists in Somalia.
And he started a company called Bridge
in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
And the idea of it is to create cross-cultural events.
So, for example, a local Syrian refugee family
will host locals, right?
Just, you know, locals,
from Pennsylvania in their home for dinner.
And they'll also, they do lots of other events.
And the idea is to get immigrants, refugees, locals together talking
because once you see how similar somebody is to you,
it's a lot harder to be afraid of them.
It's really valuable work.
And the reason I was talking to him was because I wondered
what had happened to his business once you weren't allowed to have people
in your homes anymore.
No, I mean, his whole idea was,
was get people together, and suddenly you couldn't get people together anymore.
And he at first, when lockdowns began, he was really scared because he wasn't sure how to continue his work.
And then he realized that he actually had an opportunity here, which is that young, healthy, immigrants and refugees could become lifelines for local elderly people or people with compromised immune systems who weren't able to go out.
And so now you've got, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania,
you've got Syrian refugees who are delivering groceries to an elderly woman who just before the
lockdown was having dinner in their home. And I should just note, like an elderly white woman,
who has very little otherwise experience with Syrian refugees. And they're calling these people.
So the Syrian refugees are calling this woman every day at 6 p.m. just to check in because she lives
alone. And somebody's got to make sure that she's okay every day. And they've built these new ways
in which these different groups of people can interact
and can be valuable to each other.
And I asked him what this has made him think about
as he's looked at how the connections that he's built
and the way that he originally thought he was going to build connections
has evolved.
And he said, and I really loved the way that he put it,
he said, he looks at it and he says,
this is how life should always be.
Like what he's built is something that should just always be there.
That communities, no matter how different they are
from each other should be connecting, should not just be connecting, but should be useful to each other,
should be understanding how they are additive to each other. And so the thing that he, I think,
is going to do, which so many other entrepreneurs are going to do in their own lines of business,
which is that they're going to take this thing, this new way that they found to be valuable
to people and to interact in this time in which the way that they could do something before
is just not available to them anymore. And they're going to continue to do it. They're going to
use it. It's going to become a new way that they can connect. There will be a time in the future where
Mustafa Nur's bridge will go back to hosting dinners in people's homes, but maybe also we'll
continue to deliver groceries and do errand runs and do check-in calls. These are all new things that
we can do. And I think that just the power of him being very conscious about bringing people together
is something that we should all be thinking about today. Yeah. What an inspiring story. Thanks for sharing.
And where can our listeners go to learn more about you and everything that you do?
Yeah, thanks.
So a couple ways you can check me out.
One, we talked about pessimists archive as a podcast.
I'd love for you to check that out.
If you want to reach out to me, Instagram, I'm very active on at Hey, Fyfer, H-E-E-I-F-E-R.
And like I said earlier in the episode, I'm super accessible.
I respond to every DM.
Test me.
I will respond.
So you can check that out.
And then also, if you want to go to Jasonfeiffer.com, you'll get
prompted to sign up for my newsletter. It's once a month and it's five inspirational insights that I
had in entrepreneurship that month that, you know, I hope will help push people forward.
Thank you so much for coming on the show, Jason. You were so energetic. You provided so much
value around how you developed your personal brand and how we can all better embrace change.
It was such a pleasure to have you on. Bye. Thank you so much. Well, young improfitors, I truly enjoy
having Jason on the show. He's a great friend of mine. And he's just super-entered.
very smart guy. He's actually coming back on the show to talk about his new book,
built for tomorrow soon. So very excited about that and happy we were able to replay this
original conversation. And Jason is a true authority on change. I remember Jason was telling me
how he ended up becoming an authority on change. And he told me that people would constantly
be asking him what quality all successful entrepreneurs shared. And he's interviewed hundreds of
entrepreneurs because he's the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine. And he realized, after all these
talks, that incredible entrepreneurs have the ability to adapt to change. And so once he realized
that he started to study successful entrepreneurs through that lens, trying to understand how
they were able to adapt to change and what their behaviors and habits were like. And at the same time,
Jason was doing a lot of research and learning from his podcast, Build for Tomorrow, where he
looks into the history of innovation, and he started to see patterns in why people resisted
and ultimately embraced innovation. So he put his unique experiences together, and it gave him this
deep insight into how change happens and how to find the opportunity in it. And now Jason
shares these insights with the world on stages in front of thousands of people and his magazine.
And even here on Young and Profiting Podcast, he shared some great actionable advice on how we can
embrace change and how we can get others to embrace change. And a big takeaway from this conversation
is that the greatest entrepreneurs understand that change is inevitable. It's coming whether they like it or
not. It's coming whether their customers like it or not. And that means that you should be proactive
in responding to change. Rather than wait for change to come to you, you should take action first
and change on your own terms. The world does not remain static. Today's successful ideas are tomorrow's
old ideas. And if you try to resist change, all you'll do is stay in place while everyone
passes you by. So don't forget that young and profitors. Make sure you embrace change. Make sure you
change on your own terms before it's too late. Don't let the world pass you by. Don't be those people
that are scared of teddy bears and elevators. Be innovative. If you enjoyed this episode,
be sure to drop us a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform. And with that,
episode of Young and Profiting Podcast is in the books. Thank you for tuning into this Yap Classic.
Shout out to my incredible Yap team. And without further ado, this is your host, Halitaha,
signing off.
