106: Jason Feifer – Moving From Fear to Opportunity and Turning Challenges Into Success

Jason Feifer 0:00 - 0:49

Life to us feels like it's changing because it's only relative to what we were familiar with when we were growing up. But I think it's really important for people to understand, and I make this point repeatedly in the book, through all these stories of the history of technology, that every time in at least modern history is a time of great change. And you could argue that some of those times were more transformative than the ones that we're going through now. I understand that. I'm 43. In my lifetime I've seen the rise of the Internet, and now I'm seeing the rise of AI. And those are just two of the big ones. But you and I could have been alive at the time in which Samuel Morse creates the first commercially viable telegraph, which is the first time in human history that information moves faster than a physical object.

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Jonathan DeYoe 1:17 - 1:19

Jason, welcome to the Mindful Money podcast.

Jason Feifer 1:19 - 1:20

Well, thank you for having me.

Jonathan DeYoe 1:20 - 1:23

Great, I'm glad to have you. So where do you call home?

Jason Feifer 1:23 - 1:24

Brooklyn, New York.

Jonathan DeYoe 1:24 - 1:26

Brooklyn, New York. Are you connecting from Brooklyn today?

Jason Feifer 1:26 - 1:32

I am connecting from Brooklyn today in a house full of children. So we'll see how much that interrupts our recording today.

Jonathan DeYoe 1:33 - 1:39

It's the work from home world. It happened. Sometimes you got dogs jumping on the keyboard, cats crawling around, sometimes it's kids, all kinds.

Jason Feifer 1:39 - 1:46

I have made a decision that I don't need any more dependents than I already have. So we have children, we have no other animals.

Jonathan DeYoe 1:47 - 1:48

I like to classify them as animals.

Jason Feifer 1:48 - 1:49

That's perfect.

Jonathan DeYoe 1:49 - 1:52

I'm not gonna ask ages. So did you grow up in Brooklyn or are you from somewhere else?

Jason Feifer 1:52 - 2:17

Jonathan DeYoe 2:17 - 2:22

Yeah, sounds good. I love New York, but I can't live there. I can only visit for like a week, a year.

Jason Feifer 2:22 - 2:40

I find that when I am not in an environment like New York, I enjoy it. It's nice, but I also get bored very quickly. I need the amount of stimulation that's in New York. I find that New York attracts New York people because everyone else comes and hates it and leaves. So that's fine. I don't hate it.

Jonathan DeYoe 2:40 - 2:51

I love visiting, but I can't. Too much stimulation for me. I was raised in South Dakota, so I need. Oh, that's very different, less concrete. So I'm curious, how did your journey with entrepreneurship begin?

Jason Feifer 2:51 - 5:32

Jonathan DeYoe 5:32 - 5:59

Jason Feifer 5:59 - 9:17

Jonathan DeYoe 9:17 - 9:27

So the control your destiny comes from to build the thing. Like, if you build the thing and you build on top of the thing and you build the next layer, thats how you get to control your destiny? Yes, yes.

I mean, if you build a thing, then it is yours to do with, and it is also yours to profit off of and to succeed with. This is like the most basic thought in the world. But its kind of revelatory when youre just getting into it. Is the difference between incremental and can I tell you, every time I want to say exponential, I always want to say excremental, which would be poop. Exponential. Like I always go, my brain always goes to excremental. Yes, incremental or exponential. And this is like a useful question that I use with friends when we're building things and we're trying to decide like, you know, is this decision, it would lead to incremental growth or exponential growth, but also when you're thinking about your own career path, do you want to be in a space where there is only incremental growth? I mean, if you only work at a company, then the only thing available to you is incremental growth. But if you build something yourself, it is certainly not easy. But there is a opportunity for exponential growth. There's also, I guess, a possibility for excremental growth, but that is a more appealing pathway that I wanted to go down.

This actually just rings so true now. My son is home from UCLA and he's been producing his own music. He's got a second album kind he's like really, really into the stuff. And for the first time ever, he sat down, he said, dad, I just don't want to do it all. I kind of want to have a job where I show up and I leave, you know, that's fine, you can do that. But the benefits of exponential over the incremental are huge if you do it all, if you decide to step in and take that role.

Yeah, but you know the other way to think about it for. And look, everybody has to make their own a balance, right? So your son is a musician, so that's great. How many people have we met? If music is the thing that they love, music is a really hard thing to make a living off of doing. And there are a lot of people who start out by trying to be the artist, and then eventually they discover that they can make a great living in music in some other way, supporting the artist, distributing the artist. But look, when you're young, you might as well just take a shot at being the artist because you can survive on ramen, so why not? And so in that case, I think it's fine to sometimes to balance, maybe get a job that just doesn't drain your energy and that you don't have to take home with you so that you can retain a lot of your energy for the thing that you're passionate about, which is your music or your art or your whatever, and maybe that will hit and maybe it will just lead to the next thing. I think the most important thing for people to do is not like choose one path because somebody said it's better, but rather to just be intentional about the path that you're choosing. And if your son is looking at things and saying, this is the calculation I need to make. I need to make some money and I need that effort to not drain my creative energy so that I can put it towards this thing that is a bit more of a gamble, then at least he's being intentional. And I think that's wonderful, Trey.

So I want to talk about the book a little bit actually for the rest of the time if possible. But I want to start with maybe a sideways question so I know that it came out at the perfect time. AI has taken over the world. Did you intend that build for tomorrow to come out with some sort of AI thing or was that just luck?

So you mentioned lots like that. We are in this AI, just more proof of this. We're in this time of great change. Can you put that in perspective? I sort of wonder if theres this general geometric change model, and is it the geometric change is accelerating, or is it just geometric?

Well, there are all these interesting theories about the speed of innovation, but I actually take my answer to this, is actually going to, in a way, contradict something that I just said, which is that were in a time of great change, were in a time of great change, in that we are always in a time of great change, like life to us feels like it's changing because it's only relative to what we were familiar with when we were growing up. But I think it's really important for people to understand, and I make this point repeatedly through in the book, through all these stories of the history of technology, that every time in at least modern history, is a time of great change. And you could argue that some of those times were more transformative than the ones that we're going through now. I understand that. I'm 43 in my lifetime, I've seen the rise of the Internet, and now I'm seeing the rise of AI. And those are just two of the big ones. But you and I could have been alive at the time in which Samuel Morse creates the first commercially viable telegraph, which is the first time in human history that information moves faster than a physical object before him. If you needed to get information from one place to another, then you needed to write it down on a piece of paper and have someone carry that piece of paper on a horse wherever they were going. And then suddenly information could move through a wire at the speed of something. I don't know if it was the speed of light. It was speed of something, and that was radical, that completely reoriented the world, and it changed people's understanding of what's possible. Do not think that you are in some kind of uncharted moment. You are just in our version of endless uncharted moments. And what that should tell you is that all of this is manageable. Everyone else who came before us did it. They got us to where we are now. They delivered the world up to us, and we should never be throwing our hands in the air and saying, oh, my God, this is too much, or, oh, my God, this is going to break us, or, oh, this technology is too powerful. That's all ridiculous. Everyone has said that about literally everything that came before. It is our job. I say this in the keynotes that I give all the time, which is, we spend far too much time debating whether or not something should happen, when it has already happened, and what we need to do is spend time figuring out what to do next.

I just love everything you said. That'll be some sort of an intro clip for sure. Do you think that. I don't want to pick on any specific generation. It just seems like there's a lot of fear right now. Not around AI, but just around, oh, it's too hard. It's all changed. Inflation. It's too expensive. No one can get anywhere. And yet, I'm a seed investor, and sort of my. And I also do some advising. I see these people coming out of college that are building things. You're just like, that's amazing. Like, how do you swear a bunch of people are terrified of it and a bunch of people engaged in it? How do you tell the people that are terrified, hey, you don't need to be terrified. Just dig in.

Brilliant. So I found this topic throughout the book that really resonates with me, and that's the idea that good comes from bad. So how did you get to that understanding personal experience? Can you give an example from your own life? Or is this through interviewing entrepreneurs? And what was a good example in one of those interviews?

So critical. We are stimulus response machines. We control the response. Right, that's it. We're getting close to the end here. So, and I want to respect your time. So pretend for a second that you're talking to one of these folks that are paralyzed by change. They feel like the change is like thrust upon them. What's one thing they can do to kind of shift from being a victim of change to being a participant in the change?

So there's a longer exercise here, which you can find in my book, if you so desire. But what I ask people to do is to come up with a mission statement for themselves. And that mission statement should be a single sentence. It starts with I, and then after that every word is carefully selected because it is not anchored to something that's easily changeable. So what does that sound like? Well, it's the difference between my mission statement being I am a magazine editor, which is very easily changeable. It takes one phone call to tell me that I'm fired from Entrepreneur magazine and then I'm not a magazine editor anymore. Very changeable. If that's my identity, then I am fearful of change because so many different things can impact that identity. It's the difference between I am a magazine editor and I tell stories in my own voice. That's the mission statement that I came up with. Again, let me just restate it. Your mission statement is a short sentence. It starts with I. After that, every word carefully selected because it is not anchored to something that's easily changeable. Mine. I tell stories in my own voice. I have told stories with you today for the last half an hour. I tell stories when I'm hired as a consultant. I tell stories on stage. There's just endless ways in which I am telling stories. That is the thing that I consider to be my skillset and in my own voice is me setting the terms for how I want to operate. When I've had this conversation with people, they tell me awesome things. They say I solve the most complex problems. I help teams do great things. I had a woman who was a consultant who had put her consulting work on hold to raise her first child. And she realized, when I gave her this exercise, she realized her answer was, I help people become the best versions of themselves because it applies to consulting and it applies to parenthood. Like, when you find the purpose of this is, this is not just like a frivolous exercise. The purpose of this is to identify what I call the thing that does not change in times of change, you want to recognize what your transferable value is. You want to know what you have that is unchangeable, so that every new thing becomes just one new way to do and articulate and enact the thing that you are already great at. And that's why I tell stories in my own voice, because it helps me recognize where opportunities are good for me and where they're not. And if entrepreneur disappears tomorrow, and I hope it does not, but if it does, I'm going to be fine, because I know what my value is and I know where else I can do it. And that is the grounding. That's what we need. I can't convince you. I can't just tell you you got to change. I can't just tell you it's good. What you need to do is. Again, I said this at the beginning of our conversation, but now you understand what it means. I said that what I found was that entrepreneurs and leaders, like the most successful ones, developed a unique personal relationship with change. And that's the starting point for what that sounds like and feels like. It's to understand who you are in times of change. And if you can understand that, then everything else can orient around it.

It's beautiful. Just before we wrap, tell people, what was the last thing you changed your mind about?

Oh, last thing I changed my mind about. It's funny. I mean, the answer is probably something like frivolous, like, this band is bad. And now, actually, I think this band is pretty good. But on broader scale things today, I wrote this thing on LinkedIn about. I'm very active on LinkedIn, and I wrote this thing on LinkedIn about why journalists keep bashing LinkedIn and all these stories. It was precipitated. There was like a Business Insider piece about how cringy LinkedIn is. That's the word they always use, cringy. And I remembered that. I used to think that, too. I used to think LinkedIn was so stupid and lame, and I, like, I would see the people writing on it and I wouldn't understand it. And now I do because I kind of switched because I came to relate to the people on LinkedIn more than I relate to the media people. And I was encouraging other media people to appreciate that. Right? Like, media people are kind of uncomfortable with earnestness and self promotion, but business people don't think of it as earnestness, as self promotion. They think of it as relatability and bringing value to others. And like, that kind of shift is really useful. So that's not the last thing. Like, the last thing was probably like, the happy fits are a lame band, and now I actually like them. I listen to them on Spotify. Like, that's probably what it was. But something like LinkedIn, that was a big change, and I spent a lot of time there as a result.

So aside from LinkedIn, tell the audience how they can connect to you. Where do they find you?

Yeah. So I'll give you two ways. Number one, I mentioned the book a couple of times where we talked about it. So again, that's called build for tomorrow. You can find it in audiobook, ebook or hardcover, any of your all your favorite formats. And the other thing that I would like to tell you is my newsletter. The kinds of things that we talked about today, and in some cases, specifically the things we talked about today, show up in my newsletter. It's called one thing better each week, one way to be more successful and satisfied at work and build a career or company that you love. And so you can find that by just going to one thing better, email. That's a web address. Plug it into the browser. One thing better, email. Like I said, each week, just one way to improve.

Sounds good. I'll make sure that's in the show notes. Jason, I appreciate your time. I know it was limited. I think we took more than you had offered us, and thank you so much for that. But thanks for being on the show.

Oh, yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me and my screaming children in the background.

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