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 what they were doing and reached this point, this wouldn't go back moment that I described earlier, and I wondered what is it that is enabling that?
1
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And I called around.
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The best answer I got was from a guy named Brian Berkey.
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He's a business studies and legal ethics professor at Wharton.
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He said that moments of massive disruption
1
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 force us to shift the window on what we're willing to take seriously.
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You can imagine, there's a large band of options.
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And what we do, very naturally, is we create a little window and we look through it.
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And the reason we do that is very natural.
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It's because we can't possibly consider every option.
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You just can't.
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You don't have enough time to do that.
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So you create a little window.
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 What we do when we do that is we take our best guess as to what is the valuable stuff.
1
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What's the possible stuff?
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What's the things that are going to drive us forward?
1
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And everything outside is either too difficult, too complicated, too impossible, whatever it is, we're going to leave it outside.
1
SPEAKER_00
And then a moment of disruption comes along and it forces us to shift that window because the things that are inside of our little window don't work anymore.
1
SPEAKER_00
So we've got to look elsewhere.
1
SPEAKER_00
 And what we discovered is that oftentimes the greatest ideas, the greatest opportunities weren't, they weren't beamed down from Mars, they were some crazy, they were just things that we had discarded.
1
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I love this story.
1
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So there's a woman named Lena, go to a wig shop in Baltimore, Lena's Wigs.
1
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 she ran a storefront.
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And you know what a storefront is?
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Storefront, you walk in, you walk in off the street and you can shop.
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And so that's how she ran her store.
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She had hired someone specifically to greet people and to help them out as they walked in.
1
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And then the pandemic comes along and she cannot welcome people into her store anymore, as everybody had to deal with.
1
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And so she's trying to think, well, what can I do to keep the lights on?
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And she realizes the answer, the only thing she can think of is appointment only.
1
SPEAKER_00
 Now, that's not a radical idea.
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It's something she was very aware of, but she had discarded it.
1
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It was outside the window.
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Because who wants to create friction for their customers?
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You don't want to make it harder for people to shop for you.
1
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And so instead, she had always run the storefront in the way that it always was, but now she had to change.
1
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So it becomes appointment only.
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And something amazing happens to her surprise and delight.
1
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 Sales and profits increase, customer happiness increases.
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Why?
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Because it turns out that you know who her customer isn't?
1
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 The average person walking down the street.
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Nobody walks into a wig shop at random and buys a wig.
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People buy wigs generally because of very personal reasons.
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A health reason, a religious reason.
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Those people do not want to shop for wigs with a bunch of randos who are walking in off the street.
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SPEAKER_00
 So, Lena, because she had been operating a storefront the way that she thought she had to operate it, very naturally, had instead actually been spending money on a person to greet the people who were never going to buy wigs.
1
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And instead, those people were just actually creating a bad environment for the people who would buy wigs.
1
SPEAKER_00
So, by getting rid of all of that, she saved money, she didn't have to hire anybody to greet these people off the street anymore, and instead now, she was able to offer
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 Customized, very personal experiences for people who would love nothing more than to make an appointment, come in, and shop for a wig.
1
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Without all these random people on the street.
1
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And so this was a moment in which Lena was reconsidering the impossible.
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She had taken this idea and she had put it in the impossible bucket.
1
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Appointment only, no good.
1
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But now she was forced to reconsider.
1
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So that's what it looks like when you get forced into it.
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My argument is you do not need to wait
1
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 for some kind of crisis to push you to do that.
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How can we start thinking in an innovative way when there's no crisis or no friction to start thinking out of the box?
1
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How often should we be doing that too?
1
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Is that once a month?
1
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Is that once a year?
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And what does the process look like to brainstorm that?
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So I think that it's worth coming up to start with maybe a couple valuable questions that you want to ask and take very, very seriously.
1
SPEAKER_00
 And maybe depending on the work that you do, you could set a marker every six months, every year.
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I'll give you one example.
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There's a guy whose name is, let's see, so he's Kyle Hanselofen.
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And I meet so many entrepreneurs, I'm like, how can I pull this name out of my memory?
1
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So anyway, he's the founder and CEO of a digital security company called Huntress.
1
SPEAKER_00
 And Kyle asks himself at the end of every year, this is an annual tradition for him, at the end of every year, he asks himself, is this the end of the line for the CEO?
1
SPEAKER_00
And this isn't just a personal exercise where he's basically asking himself, am I done as CEO?
1
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Because I'm no longer the right person for this company.
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Anybody who's run a company, and again, I want to stress, this doesn't have to be for people who lead companies.
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This could be anybody doing anything.
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You should be taking stock of
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 Am I doing this right?
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Am I doing the best for myself?
1
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Am I serving myself in the best way?
1
SPEAKER_00
So for Kyle, who runs a company, he asks himself at the end of the year, am I still the right person to lead this company for what this company needs going forward?
1
SPEAKER_00
And then he answers it to everybody at the company.
1
SPEAKER_00
 So he sends out an email, everybody expects it at the end of the year, where he is either going to make the case for why he will remain CEO or one day, he insists to me, one day he really will make the case why it's time to step down.
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And I really love this because it's just a simple exercise and it's being held accountable by everybody because this is a public thing.
1
SPEAKER_00
 And at this point, he's now setting up a moment in which he must step back and ask himself an important question.
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It doesn't have to be that question.
1
SPEAKER_00
It could be other questions.
1
SPEAKER_00
I remember at the very beginning of my career, when I was at that little newspaper, I knew I wanted something bigger.
1
SPEAKER_00
 But I didn't know how to get there.
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SPEAKER_00
And I was really frustrated.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so I asked myself these three questions.
1
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They're really simple.
1
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What do I need?
1
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What do I have?
1
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What's available?
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Because if you take that really seriously, the answers are very telling.
1
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 What do I need?
1
SPEAKER_00
Well, what I need is to learn from more experienced people.
1
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Because I wanna do better, and if I could do better, I would be there.
1
SPEAKER_00
I was working at a tiny newspaper, I wanted to write for national magazines and newspapers, and if I had the skills to do that, frankly, I'd be doing it.
1
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You'd be there.
1
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I'd be there, but I'm not, I'm here.
1
SPEAKER_00
 So let's be honest about that, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
Let's be honest.
1
SPEAKER_00
I have big ambitions, but I don't have the talent to match.
1
SPEAKER_00
So what do I need?
1
SPEAKER_00
I need to learn.
1
SPEAKER_00
What do I have?
1
SPEAKER_00
Well, what I have right now is access to colleagues at the same paper.
1
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They're at the same level as me.
1
SPEAKER_00
They can't really teach me that much.
1
SPEAKER_00
I have an editor.
1
SPEAKER_00
It wasn't very good, let's be honest.
1
SPEAKER_00
That's it.
1
SPEAKER_00
That's what I have.
1
SPEAKER_00
 What's available?
1
SPEAKER_00
Well, let's not do what's available in like the fantasy sense, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
You know, like, I gotta go to the New York Times, I gotta bang on the door or something, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
Like, that's not gonna happen.
1
SPEAKER_00
 So what's available?
1
SPEAKER_00
Well, in my industry, what's available is freelancing, which is to say that instead of getting a staff job somewhere, you can actually pitch an individual story to an editor.
1
SPEAKER_00
You go out, you have an idea, you do a little research, you send them an email, you're basically like, here's a really good idea for a story, I'm the right person to write it.
1
SPEAKER_00
And that's a low-risk way for somebody to work with you.
1
SPEAKER_00
It's one story, they're not gonna pay you that much.
1
SPEAKER_00
 If I could make that work, I would then have access to the people who could teach me things, go back to what I need.
1
SPEAKER_00
So that's what I did.
1
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I quit my job.
1
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And I sat in this bedroom in a dumpy apartment in Holden, Massachusetts, next to a graveyard, looking out upon my career in this graveyard.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I just started cold pitching.
1
SPEAKER_00
I was like, this is what I need.
1
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The only thing that's available to me is this.
1
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And so this is what I'm going to do.
1
SPEAKER_00
 And nine months later, I convinced the editor at the Washington Post to run a story in the Washington Post.
1
SPEAKER_02
Nine months.
1
SPEAKER_00
It took a long time.
1
SPEAKER_00
I mean, look, like you said, this doesn't happen overnight.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
1
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Was this 2004?
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, this would be like 2003, 2004.
1
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And those questions guided me.
1
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What do I need?
1
SPEAKER_00
What do I have?
1
SPEAKER_00
What's available?
1
SPEAKER_02
Wow.
1
SPEAKER_02
What do I need?
1
SPEAKER_02
What do I have?
1
SPEAKER_02
What's available?
1
SPEAKER_02
And what are the four parts to change?
1
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Panic.
1
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Panic.
1
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Adaptation.
1
SPEAKER_00
 go back.
1
SPEAKER_02
Did you panic a lot during that time?
1
SPEAKER_02
I panicked so much.
1
SPEAKER_02
Really?
1
SPEAKER_00
Oh yeah.
1
SPEAKER_00
So much.
1
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I mean it's terrifying right?
1
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It's terrifying and it should be but you know what you need to do is look at the moment of panic and
1
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 Reframe it.
1
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Because there's a reason you're panicking, and that's because the thing that you had access to, you no longer do.
1
SPEAKER_00
But that's not to say that you can't have access to more.
1
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In fact, you should.
1
SPEAKER_00
The greater risk
1
SPEAKER_00
 was staying at a job, right?
1
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You weren't growing, you weren't being fulfilled, you weren't achieving new skills.
1
SPEAKER_00
I'll tell you a funny story.
1
SPEAKER_00
I'm a history buff, and I once interviewed this guy about the history of music, and he told me this story.
1
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Turn of the century, the phonograph is a brand new thing.
1
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Phonograph, earliest record player.
1
SPEAKER_00
 And consider how absolutely revolutionary this technology was to people.
1
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The phonograph record player was the first time in human history that you could listen to music without a human being playing an instrument in front of you.
1
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Crazy.
1
SPEAKER_00
It's crazy, right?
1
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For all of human history,
1
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 Until that.
1
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And so this thing comes out and people are fascinated by it.
1
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People didn't believe that it was real.
1
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They thought that there was a musician in the other room.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so eventually people loved it and it became popular.
1
SPEAKER_00
You know who hated it?
1
SPEAKER_00
 Who?
1
SPEAKER_00
Musicians.
1
SPEAKER_00
Really?
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, because they saw themselves being replaced.
1
SPEAKER_00
Oh, wow.
1
SPEAKER_00
Right?
1
SPEAKER_00
They don't need me anymore to show up and perform.
1
SPEAKER_00
Because they got the machine, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
Because my job, if you're a musician at that time, your job is entirely to perform live.
1
SPEAKER_00
It's the only thing that you do.
1
SPEAKER_00
There's no other way.
1
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What else are you going to do?
1
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You perform live.
1
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And now there's a machine that can do it for you.
1
SPEAKER_00
 And people are scared.
1
SPEAKER_00
Musicians are scared.
1
SPEAKER_00
The leader of the resistance was this guy named John Philip Sousa.
1
SPEAKER_00
You ever heard of the name?
1
SPEAKER_00
You know his music.
1
SPEAKER_00
Like all the military marches?
1
SPEAKER_00
He wrote that.
1
SPEAKER_00
So John Philip Sousa was a gigantic figure at the time.
1
SPEAKER_00
 And he started making this very public case against recorded music technology.
1
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He wrote this piece called The Menace of Mechanical Music in Appleton's Magazine, I think 1906.
1
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And he made all these arguments for why the phonograph was terrible.
1
SPEAKER_00
And my favorite one goes like this.
1
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He said, so, if you put a phonograph in a home,
1
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 there will be no reason for anybody to perform live.
1
SPEAKER_00
Why would anybody perform live music in a home?
1
SPEAKER_00
That was a form of entertainment back then, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
People would have pianos, they would sing.
1
SPEAKER_00
There's no reason why you would perform live in a home once you have a phonograph.
1
SPEAKER_00
And because there's no more live music in a home, mothers will no longer sing to their children.
1
SPEAKER_00
Because again, why would they do that when there's a machine that can do it?
1
SPEAKER_02
And because- They'll get lazier, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
They'll get lazier, they'll just outsource it.
1
SPEAKER_00
The machine will replace everything.
1
SPEAKER_00
 And then, because children grow up to imitate their mothers.
1
SPEAKER_00
 The children will now grow up to imitate the machines that have replaced the mothers, and thus we will raise a generation of machine babies.
1
SPEAKER_00
That was the argument, a real argument, a very smart and accomplished person making that case.
1
SPEAKER_00
And that seems ridiculous to us today, but it made sense back then because what he was doing was this thing that we were talking about earlier, he was extrapolating the loss.
1
SPEAKER_00
This thing changes and I lose this, and there, because I lost that, that's gonna be lost, and then because I lost that, that's gonna be lost.
1
SPEAKER_00
But what he didn't do
1
SPEAKER_00
 was he didn't step back and ask himself some very basic questions like, what new thing are people doing?
1
SPEAKER_00
In this case, well, people are listening to music on a machine.
1
SPEAKER_00
 what new skills or habits are we learning as a result?
1
SPEAKER_00
And this is valuable questions for anybody, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
Like anything that you're going through, what are we doing?
1
SPEAKER_00
What new thing are we doing?
1
SPEAKER_00
What skills or habits am I learning as a result?
1
SPEAKER_00
In this case, well, people are learning that they can listen to music whenever they want and that they don't have to be limited to the musicians who are in front of them.
1
SPEAKER_00
Okay, possibly scary, except
1
SPEAKER_00
 how can this be put to good use?
1
SPEAKER_00
And once you ask that, how can this be put to good use, well you wonder, well, in this case, I guess I could record music.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I could sell it to them.
1
SPEAKER_00
And now people could listen to my music, even though I can't travel to them, and possibly never will travel to them, because they live in some remote place, and they're never going to see me live, but now they can buy my music.
1
SPEAKER_00
John Philip Sousa was in fact, by arguing against recorded music,
1
SPEAKER_00
 arguing against his own economic interests because he was panicking.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so you talk about panic and it blinds you to all the opportunity ahead.
1
SPEAKER_00
And the greatest thing that we can do is recognize that there is that opportunity there and then start to seek it.
1
SPEAKER_02
 Yeah, it's kind of like when Napster came around, all the artists were like, oh, we don't want our stuff digital out there, online, and people can download it.
1
SPEAKER_02
But then it's like, OK, then Apple Music and Spotify created a whole new marketplace for artists to be discovered digitally and to make more money and all these different things.
1
SPEAKER_02
But people resisted and panicked.
1
SPEAKER_02
 I don't know when that was, 2001 or something.
1
SPEAKER_02
But it created a whole new opportunity for the way people consume music.
1
SPEAKER_00
Right, that's right.
1
SPEAKER_00
And also, it also started to introduce the idea of more on-demand listening.
1
SPEAKER_00
Not just radio.
1
SPEAKER_00
No, not just radio, which leads to all sorts of other things.
1
SPEAKER_00
If you start to think entrepreneurially about some big change that's happening and saying, well what value can I add here?
1
SPEAKER_00
 Right, like people want value.
1
SPEAKER_00
They don't really care how it gets delivered to them, they just want value.
1
SPEAKER_00
So if you say, well, this is what people are doing now, here's something that I have, I bet that I could communicate to them in this new way and add some value to their lives, you better believe that they're gonna start paying attention.
1
SPEAKER_02
Right, right.
1
SPEAKER_02
What would you say are the biggest lies when it comes to achieving success?
1
SPEAKER_00
People feel nostalgic for what came before.
1
SPEAKER_00
If you're going through a major change,
1
SPEAKER_00
 If you've had some success and now you're feeling like you're going through another change, you're not sure if you can repeat that success, one of the things that you do, the lie that you tell yourself, is that something about this particular circumstance, something about the thing that I was doing, something about the people that I knew, something about the breaks that went my way, these are the things that drove the success that I have now,
1
SPEAKER_00
 and the thing that's gonna come next isn't gonna have those same ingredients and therefore I may not have success.
1
SPEAKER_00
I think that a lot of people fear that they can't repeat their success.
1
SPEAKER_00
Very successful people, I have talked to so many extremely successful people who feel, yeah, because they built themselves into one thing.
1
SPEAKER_00
I remember I had this really interesting conversation with a super successful DJ.
1
SPEAKER_00
 like LeBron James' DJ, okay?
1
SPEAKER_00
And he was telling me that he's built this career, extremely successful.
1
SPEAKER_00
 and now he's going through some changes in his career, he's getting to an age where maybe he doesn't wanna be on the road all the time and he doesn't think or he worries that he's not gonna be able to repeat the success again because so much of what drove this success was in fact these very special circumstances from before.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I think that this really holds us back.
1
SPEAKER_00
I've felt this, I don't know if you have, but I remember I was working at Boston Magazine
1
SPEAKER_00
 And this was after the newspapers.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I got an offer to work at Men's Health in New York.
1
SPEAKER_00
It was my dream.
1
SPEAKER_00
I wanted to move to New York and I wanted to work for national magazines.
1
SPEAKER_00
Here it was.
1
SPEAKER_00
And yet I thought to myself, I have succeeded at Boston Magazine.
1
SPEAKER_00
I have good friends here.
1
SPEAKER_00
I'm writing stories.
1
SPEAKER_00
People like me.
1
SPEAKER_00
Possibly the reason for that is because of a special circumstance here.
1
SPEAKER_00
Special thing right now.
1
SPEAKER_00
I don't know if it's repeatable.
1
SPEAKER_00
 And if it's not repeatable, then maybe I shouldn't take the risk.
1
SPEAKER_00
Maybe I should stick with what I have because I know that this is good.
1
SPEAKER_00
So how do we dismantle that?
1
SPEAKER_00
I'll tell you how.
1
SPEAKER_00
Start to understand how you understand yourself.
1
SPEAKER_00
I talked to these memory researchers.
1
SPEAKER_00
 And particularly this one guy, Philippe de Brigarde, he is a memory researcher at Duke University.
1
SPEAKER_00
He told me about fading affect bias.
1
SPEAKER_00
Okay, here's what fading affect bias is.
1
SPEAKER_00
Fading affect bias is the scientific term for the phenomenon in which we lose the emotions attached to bad experiences faster than we lose the emotions attached to good experiences.
1
SPEAKER_02
Say it one more time, we lose the emotions.
1
SPEAKER_00
 We have good experiences, we have bad experiences.
1
SPEAKER_00
We have feelings attached to both of those, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
Later on, when we recount those, we feel the feelings of the good experiences much longer than we feel the feelings of the bad experiences.
1
SPEAKER_00
Really?
1
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
1
SPEAKER_02
Interesting.
1
SPEAKER_00
This is a natural thing that our brain does for good reason because our memories are not designed to be a recall device.
1
SPEAKER_00
 These cameras that are watching us right now, these are designed to be a recall device.
1
SPEAKER_00
The point of them is to capture, in full definition, everything that happened.
1
SPEAKER_00
That's not what our brains are for, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
We don't remember things because we wanna remember them.
1
SPEAKER_00
We remember them so that they help us move forward.
1
SPEAKER_00
That's the point, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
And so what we retain is in fact the things that can help us move into the future.
1
SPEAKER_00
And good feelings help us do that.
1
SPEAKER_00
 bad feelings don't because and that's not to say that you haven't had a bad experience and that it doesn't come back of course it does right and that's not to say that trauma can't completely change this but generally speaking our brains operate on fading affect bias which is to say that we lose
1
SPEAKER_00
 the access to those really bad emotions from those bad experiences.
1
SPEAKER_00
Because if we didn't do that, we would be caught in the past all the time.
1
SPEAKER_00
If every time that you thought about a really embarrassing experience from the past, you started to feel it, you started to feel anxious, that would not be useful to you.
1
SPEAKER_00
Your brain is supposed to be useful to you.
1
SPEAKER_00
It is a tool that helps you move forward.
1
SPEAKER_00
That would hold you back.
1
SPEAKER_00
So this is what we do.
1
SPEAKER_02
 That's why trauma holds people back.
1
SPEAKER_02
If it's an extreme event, you are triggered by that memory of the past and you're kind of defensive or guarded or triggered in life if something like that comes up.
1
SPEAKER_02
Exactly.
1
SPEAKER_00
And what we're talking about here is normal experiences.
1
SPEAKER_00
Trauma is a totally different thing.
1
SPEAKER_00
 So, okay, understand that about how you think about things, which is to say that when you think back to the past, what you have done is you have started to erase the really bad experiences.
1
SPEAKER_00
So you've forgotten them.
1
SPEAKER_00
So when you think back, you think, oh, everything that led up to my success right now was because of a series of very fortunate events.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I don't know if those fortunate events are repeatable, but you've forgotten a whole bunch of important stuff.
1
SPEAKER_00
Now, next thing, and this is crazy, when you remember something,
1
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 You are not remembering it the way that a camera remembers it because what your brain does is that when you have an experience, it breaks it apart into a whole ton of little things and it stores them separately.
1
SPEAKER_00
And then when you try to recall it, it tries to reassemble it.
1
SPEAKER_00
Philippe at Duke University described it to me like a paleontologist trying to put together a bunch of dinosaur bones.
1
SPEAKER_00
Right?
1
SPEAKER_00
So the problem is that when you put together a whole bunch of dinosaur bones, there are a bunch of pieces missing.
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SPEAKER_00
 You gotta fill in those pieces.
1
SPEAKER_00
Now the scientist does that with the best understanding of what that dinosaur was like.
1
SPEAKER_00
You know what we do?
1
SPEAKER_02
What?
1
SPEAKER_00
We imagine.
1
SPEAKER_02
We imagine.
1
SPEAKER_02
We elaborate our memories probably, right?
1
SPEAKER_02
The good and the bad.
1
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Because our functions of memory are very closely associated to our functions of imagination.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so we fill in the gaps with things that we imagined and we experience them as memories.
1
SPEAKER_00
 And now we have a combination of very interesting things that can help us move forward in life, but also that skew our understanding of our own success.
1
SPEAKER_00
Because if you are coming from a place and you're thinking, you know, everything that came before here was fortunate, and I had a series of successes that led to this moment, and I don't know that I can repeat that.
1
SPEAKER_00
Well, I will tell you something.
1
SPEAKER_00
You've forgotten a lot of the hard stuff.
1
SPEAKER_00
The hard work you put in.
1
SPEAKER_00
 and you have imagined some of it.
1
SPEAKER_00
And think back, I do it, that job at Boston Magazine that I was so sure I could never repeat the success of,
1
SPEAKER_00
 I was a screw up at Boston Magazine.
1
SPEAKER_00
I botched a story so badly that a staff writer didn't talk to me for weeks.
1
SPEAKER_00
There was one story that I tried to edit that I had gotten taken away from me because I didn't know how to do it.
1
SPEAKER_00
I messed up so many times.
1
SPEAKER_00
But I forgot all those things because I was focused on the good things.
1
SPEAKER_00
Because I wasn't keeping myself up at night feeling that feeling of pissing off the staff writer because that doesn't help me move forward.
1
SPEAKER_00
And what we ultimately need to do is have the awareness that does help us move forward.
1
SPEAKER_02
 I love it.
1
SPEAKER_02
Who do you think is the top three most inspiring entrepreneurs in the world today?
1
SPEAKER_02
Oh my gosh.
1
SPEAKER_02
The people that you've studied, the people you've talked to, the people you've observed from a distance, who do you see is, from an entrepreneurial standpoint, maybe their personal life is whatever, but entrepreneurially, you're like, wow, they've really
1
SPEAKER_02
 You know, they take on the framework that you've got here.
1
SPEAKER_02
They're willing to take on the risk.
1
SPEAKER_02
They see the future.
1
SPEAKER_02
They take actions.
1
SPEAKER_02
They eliminate stuff if it's not working after years of work.
1
SPEAKER_02
And they keep changing and moving forward.
1
SPEAKER_02
Who are a few people that come to mind?
1
SPEAKER_00
 I'll tell you what, I, like you, have the privilege of having access to incredibly impressive people.
1
SPEAKER_00
And they tell me really interesting things that lodge into my brain.
1
SPEAKER_00
Like, for example, you know, I interviewed Ryan Reynolds and we were talking about getting into new lines of work.
1
SPEAKER_00
You know, you went from acting to you started this advertising agency and Aviation Gin and all that.
1
SPEAKER_00
And he told me,
1
SPEAKER_00
 in order to be good at something, you have to be willing to be bad.
1
SPEAKER_00
I love that.
1
SPEAKER_00
He said that, I wrote it down, I was like, I'm gonna repeat that forever.
1
SPEAKER_00
Malcolm Gladwell, best-selling author, podcaster, I asked him, how does he see what a Malcolm Gladwell project is?
1
SPEAKER_00
Because I was curious, everything just feels distinctively Malcolm Gladwell.
1
SPEAKER_00
How does he see something and say, this is for me?
1
SPEAKER_00
And he said, to the best of his ability, he tries not to do that because,
1
SPEAKER_00
 And these were the words he said, again, I wrote them down immediately.
1
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Self-conceptions are powerfully limiting.
1
SPEAKER_00
Self-conceptions are powerfully limiting.
1
SPEAKER_00
That if you have a very strict idea of yourself, then you will limit all the new options available to you.
1
SPEAKER_00
So the best that he does is try not to do that.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so when you asked me that question, the first things that I think of are like, who are these people that everybody knows?
1
SPEAKER_00
 because those are the people that I'm gonna say their name and you're gonna say, aha, I understand what they do, but I gotta tell you something.
1
SPEAKER_00
The things that almost impress me the most are the random people you may have never heard of.
1
SPEAKER_00
Who make these decisions that are very high stakes and that seem crazy to other people, but that ultimately,
1
SPEAKER_00
 They're seeing something that others aren't, and it's driving their success.
1
SPEAKER_00
Can I tell you a quick story?
1
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_00
All right.
1
SPEAKER_00
So have you ever heard of a brewery called Dogfish?
1
SPEAKER_02
No.
1
SPEAKER_00
So Dogfish, there's some beer lover out there who's now really angry at you.
1
SPEAKER_02
I don't drink alcohol, so that's why I didn't hear yet.
1
SPEAKER_00
All right.
1
SPEAKER_00
Fair enough.
1
SPEAKER_00
So then you have a great excuse.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
1
SPEAKER_00
Dogfish.
1
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So Dogfish.
1
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Dogfish is a brewery in Delaware.
1
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 and is a very successful one.
1
SPEAKER_00
And in the early days of dog, so Dogfish started by this guy named Sam.
1
SPEAKER_00
So Dogfish started by Sam, and in the early days, they make an IPA, Sam makes an IPA called 90 Minute IPA.
1
SPEAKER_00
Now, just some terms for folks who may not know beer all that well.
1
SPEAKER_00
So IPA, Indy Pale Ale, it's a bitter, very popular style of beer.
1
SPEAKER_00
And then 90 Minute IPA, the nine is a reference to 9% alcohol by volume, so it's a very strong beer.
1
SPEAKER_00
 That's strong.
1
SPEAKER_02
What's typical?
1
SPEAKER_00
Like a Budweiser is like a four, four and a half percent.
1
SPEAKER_02
Oh, so this is like double.
1
SPEAKER_00
It's like double that.
1
SPEAKER_00
So it's like drinking two, two in one.
1
SPEAKER_00
It's a beer that puts you on the floor.
1
SPEAKER_00
So beer comes out, people like the beer.
1
SPEAKER_00
Sam's distributor says to him, hey, good beer.
1
SPEAKER_00
Can you make a version that people can drink standing up?
1
SPEAKER_00
 And Sam says, okay, smart idea.
1
SPEAKER_00
Like less alcohol.
1
SPEAKER_00
You know, 9% alcohol is gonna put you on the floor.
1
SPEAKER_00
Can we have one that people can like have a few of?
1
SPEAKER_00
And so he creates 60 minute IPA.
1
SPEAKER_00
6% alcohol by volume.
1
SPEAKER_00
That's a nice drinkable beer.
1
SPEAKER_00
You can have a few.
1
SPEAKER_00
You're still upright.
1
SPEAKER_00
And this beer comes out.
1
SPEAKER_00
People like this beer.
1
SPEAKER_00
Then they love this beer.
1
SPEAKER_00
 than they need this beer.
1
SPEAKER_00
They have to have this beer.
1
SPEAKER_00
They want this beer.
1
SPEAKER_00
And he is getting calls from everybody.
1
SPEAKER_00
This thing just becomes the hot beer.
1
SPEAKER_00
Everybody's talking about it very quickly.
1
SPEAKER_00
His company becomes transformed by this beer because this beer starts rocketing up to, it becomes on track to be 75 to 80% of all sales.
1
SPEAKER_00
And 75 to 80%, everything that he sells is gonna be this one beer.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so Sam,
1
SPEAKER_00
 thinks a little differently than everybody else does in this moment.
1
SPEAKER_00
And this is why I love these kinds of stories.
1
SPEAKER_00
Because, and Sam's telling me that, I mean, I heard this story, I'm walking around his brewery with him.
1
SPEAKER_00
He tells me, look, a lot of people would be excited by that, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
You got a hip product, who doesn't want a hip product?
1
SPEAKER_00
What do you do with a hip product?
1
SPEAKER_00
You try to sell a hip product, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
Sell, sell, sell, make more money.
1
SPEAKER_00
Sam sees this as a problem.
1
SPEAKER_00
He's got a hip beer, it's gonna monopolize all sales of his company,
1
SPEAKER_00
 That means that most of the time in which people encounter his company, they're encountering this hit product.
1
SPEAKER_00
Good in a way, but Sam knows something.
1
SPEAKER_00
Tastes change.
1
SPEAKER_02
 Maybe it's good for three to five years, but then what?
1
SPEAKER_02
People don't like it anymore, they're on to the next thing.
1
SPEAKER_00
And then, because they only knew him from this one style of beer, he goes from being a hot company to an old company.
1
SPEAKER_00
And that's death.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so Sam makes this decision, which is that he caps sales of his best-selling product.
1
SPEAKER_00
 at 50%.
1
SPEAKER_00
So remember, this thing could be 75 to 80% of all sales of his entire company, and he caps it at 50%, which means that there are a lot of people... Meaning he has limited runs, or he doesn't... He's just literally not making as much beer as people want.
1
SPEAKER_02
So there's a demand that keeps going... The demand is going through the roof.
1
SPEAKER_00
The demand is going through the roof, and he is not... It's like, we're sold out.
1
SPEAKER_02
We're sold out.
1
SPEAKER_02
You have to wait till next month.
1
SPEAKER_02
That's right.
1
SPEAKER_02
Wow.
1
SPEAKER_00
I'm really sorry.
1
SPEAKER_02
Buy the other stuff, though.
1
SPEAKER_00
Buy the other stuff.
1
SPEAKER_02
Yes.
1
SPEAKER_00
That's it.
1
SPEAKER_00
So, he says, when people call him,
2
SPEAKER_01
 And like Amtrak called him and wanted this beer.
2
SPEAKER_01
I'm sorry it's not available, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
People are, people are.
2
SPEAKER_00
We want to buy this in bulk.
2
SPEAKER_00
We want to distribute this everywhere.
2
SPEAKER_01
Sure, we want it in our restaurant.
2
SPEAKER_01
We need it, our customers are asking for it.
2
SPEAKER_01
People, he said people were screaming at him on the streets in Delaware.
2
SPEAKER_01
 because of this, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
Because you got local liquor stores and people want this beer.
2
SPEAKER_01
It's sold out.
2
SPEAKER_01
And it's sold out.
2
SPEAKER_01
And they're pissed.
2
SPEAKER_01
And they're going to him and they're angry and they're yelling at him.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so I asked him, did you regret this?
2
SPEAKER_01
And he said, no.
2
SPEAKER_01
And the reason was because I understood that this was the only way to ensure the long-term success of this company.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so when people would call and they would ask for this beer and we would say it's not available, we would say, really sorry, trying to meet demand as fast as we can, which is sort of a lie because it's actually limiting it.
2
SPEAKER_01
But in the meantime,
2
SPEAKER_01
 Why don't you try some of our other styles?
2
SPEAKER_01
And this is how Sam introduces the world to a wide range of his offerings.
2
SPEAKER_01
And therefore, it doesn't become known as an old brand, but becomes known as an innovative brand.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then a few years ago, sells that company for $300 million.
2
SPEAKER_00
No way.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
And you don't do that if you just stick with the hit product, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
Or if you just make as much money as you can quickly.
2
SPEAKER_00
Right.
2
SPEAKER_00
As opposed to innovate and say, how can we make this sustainable?
2
SPEAKER_01
 And for that reason, I believe, the lesson here for everybody is you need to make sure that you are willing to take some short-term pain in exchange for long-term gain.
2
SPEAKER_01
You have to change before you must.
2
SPEAKER_01
Don't wait for somebody else to force you to change.
2
SPEAKER_01
Don't wait for some other circumstance
2
SPEAKER_01
 to get away from you.
2
SPEAKER_01
Instead, say, I'm going to take control of this right now.
2
SPEAKER_01
I understand how my actions today are going to impact what's going to happen tomorrow.
2
SPEAKER_01
So even though it's going to hurt, I'm going to do something right now that ensures my tomorrow.
2
SPEAKER_00
 I think it's a great mindset for everyone just in personal life.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that's like, okay, I'm gonna work out hard today so that my future self thanks me that I'm still in shape and I don't have a disease or something, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
It's like, I'm gonna do the thing, I'm gonna eat well today so that in a year from now, I don't have to work out harder then to lose the weight.
2
SPEAKER_00
I'm gonna invest in my company by hiring two new people today.
2
SPEAKER_00
 and then maybe it's more money and it's more time and I have to train them, but in six months or 12 months or two years, we're gonna see the fruits of that investment and that pain, let's say, by investing in that.
2
SPEAKER_00
Same thing with my Spanish channel.
2
SPEAKER_00
I was like, this isn't gonna make any money right now, and it's costing a lot, but in a year, I can see it paying off.
2
SPEAKER_00
Same thing with launching a new publication, Greatness.com.
2
SPEAKER_00
When there's how many million websites?
2
SPEAKER_00
Hundreds of millions, it's like, okay, I'm gonna launch this thing today.
2
SPEAKER_00
It's not gonna make any money.
2
SPEAKER_00
 But hopefully in a year, two years, we start to see that it is expanding and serving more people.
2
SPEAKER_01
You know what it's gonna do is it's gonna teach you things, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
A lot.
2
SPEAKER_00
You're gonna learn a lot of information.
2
SPEAKER_01
You can't guarantee money, you can guarantee learning.
2
SPEAKER_00
Absolutely, and you're gonna gain skills, because this is going back to option B, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
Opportunity set B, exactly.
2
SPEAKER_00
Opportunity set B is like, that's not what we were doing, it's creating something new, which took a year to launch.
2
SPEAKER_00
Design, develop, launch, come up with the idea.
2
SPEAKER_00
 High riders, all that stuff.
2
SPEAKER_00
It took a year of time and energy and money to create a new opportunity in set B.
2
SPEAKER_00
 that we just launched, we'll see what happens.
2
SPEAKER_01
We'll learn a lot.
2
SPEAKER_01
You're not gonna know what's gonna happen.
2
SPEAKER_01
And here's the thing, I hope for you, I hope for everybody that it's a great success, but it's possible that what happens is that instead you launch it, you spend a lot of time on it, and the form in which it takes is not a success, but it drove you to learn all this stuff about digital publishing, and you take those learnings and you put it somewhere else, and that's a success.
2
SPEAKER_01
There's this terrible statistic out there
2
SPEAKER_01
 about how, you've heard it before, people will say nine out of 10 new businesses fail or something like that, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
When you look at the actual numbers, that's not true at all, first of all.
2
SPEAKER_01
It is true that a substantial number of businesses stop operating after, I think, five or six years, but a good percentage of those people
2
SPEAKER_01
 Either number one, they had come to the natural end of whatever it is that they were building.
2
SPEAKER_01
They run a business.
2
SPEAKER_00
And they launched something else.
2
SPEAKER_01
Or it failed.
2
SPEAKER_01
And because it failed, they were on the front lines of learning why it failed.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then they took those learnings and they put it into something else that was a success.
2
SPEAKER_01
You hear that all the time from everybody who's successful is that the things that they did early didn't work and they learned from them.
2
SPEAKER_01
 And so that's why when you zoom out and you just say, oh, well those things didn't work and therefore maybe it's not worth trying, that's ridiculous because what those people were doing were putting themselves in a position to learn and then those learnings are what drove success later.
2
SPEAKER_00
 Yeah, you pay for business school in a different way.
2
SPEAKER_00
In the real world, business school is opposed to going back to school for that.
2
SPEAKER_00
I love this stuff, man.
2
SPEAKER_00
This is exciting.
2
SPEAKER_00
Your book, Build for Tomorrow, again, I think this is something that we try to instill here at Greatest Media, which is,
2
SPEAKER_00
 What are we doing now that's going to serve our audience and serve us a year from now, two years from now?
2
SPEAKER_00
What's the innovative thing?
2
SPEAKER_00
What's the thing that's outside of the box?
2
SPEAKER_00
How can we try something?
2
SPEAKER_00
And not everything works right away and some things fail completely, but like you said, you're always going to learn.
2
SPEAKER_00
And if you are not constantly saying, how can I evolve and change?
2
SPEAKER_00
Something will make you change.
2
SPEAKER_00
Something will make you change.
2
SPEAKER_00
And you'll be behind.
2
SPEAKER_01
And that's the scariest thing.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
2
SPEAKER_00
You know?
2
SPEAKER_00
You'll be panicking for longer.
2
SPEAKER_01
Think of it this way.
2
SPEAKER_01
 You come from the future.
2
SPEAKER_01
You know that?
2
SPEAKER_01
You come from the future.
2
SPEAKER_01
Which is to say that everything that you love, everything that you do, was really scary to somebody beforehand.
2
SPEAKER_01
Really scary.
2
SPEAKER_01
The history of innovation is a history of people being terrified of things that then later people loved.
2
SPEAKER_01
 There was a national moral crisis in America in 1907 over the teddy bear.
2
SPEAKER_01
People were banning teddy bears.
2
SPEAKER_01
They were scary and new.
2
SPEAKER_01
People called the car the devil wagon.
2
SPEAKER_01
People tried to ban chess.
2
SPEAKER_01
 uh coffee 500 years people were trying to bank it it's wild um bicycles when bicycles first came out there was a big scare over bicycle face did you know that that if you ride a bicycle the strain of turning the wheels is going to harden your face it was a thing that people were afraid of this is this is our past and the reason i tell you that is to say that
2
SPEAKER_01
 All of those things were scary.
2
SPEAKER_01
Today, they're things that you just use every single day.
2
SPEAKER_01
You come from the future.
2
SPEAKER_01
You come from a terrifying future.
2
SPEAKER_01
But you don't think of it as terrifying.
2
SPEAKER_01
You don't think of the things that you do as scary.
2
SPEAKER_01
But that also means that you've gotten comfortable with these things.
2
SPEAKER_01
And you are prone to say, whatever comes next... Is scary.
2
SPEAKER_01
Probably not as good as what I have.
2
SPEAKER_00
Right, right.
2
SPEAKER_00
You gotta constantly be evolving this thing.
2
SPEAKER_00
Constantly be leaning into embracing change like you talk about in your book.
2
SPEAKER_00
 Build for Tomorrow.
2
SPEAKER_00
I think this is going to be a powerful framework and book for a lot of people.
2
SPEAKER_00
Make sure you guys check this out and get a copy for yourself or for some friends as well.
2
SPEAKER_00
People can follow you, Jason, all over social media.
2
SPEAKER_00
Where's the main place we can follow you and connect with your content?
2
SPEAKER_01
 I would just go to jasonpfeiffer.com.
2
SPEAKER_01
There you can find out how to subscribe to my newsletter, which is also called Build for Tomorrow, where you can get these weekly doses of insights about how to be more adaptable.
2
SPEAKER_01
You can also follow me on Instagram and LinkedIn and all that stuff, but jasonpfeiffer.com, a good place to go.
2
SPEAKER_00
 Jason, you got a ton of wisdom.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, there's so much content going out on Entrepreneur Magazine and on the website that you're at the epicenter of.
2
SPEAKER_00
You're seeing and deciphering all this content and information about entrepreneurship and leadership and change and adapting.
2
SPEAKER_00
So you've got a wealth of information.
2
SPEAKER_00
There's a question I ask everyone at the end called the three truths.
2
SPEAKER_00
So imagine, hypothetically, it's your last day on Earth.
2
SPEAKER_00
You live as long as you want.
2
SPEAKER_00
 but it's your last day and everything you've accomplished, you've gotta take with you.
2
SPEAKER_00
Like your content is no longer here, this interview is gone, this book people don't have access to.
2
SPEAKER_00
But you get to leave behind three lessons to the world, three things you know to be true from all of your life experiences.
2
SPEAKER_00
Imagine yourself in the future here.
2
SPEAKER_00
What would you say are those three truths for you?
2
SPEAKER_00
Oh my gosh.
2
SPEAKER_01
I wasn't prepared for this.
2
SPEAKER_01
 I think truth number one is it's all going to be okay if you're open to it being okay.
2
SPEAKER_01
We often are so concerned about comparing our experience or our accomplishments with some possibly unrealistic idea of what it was going to be.
2
SPEAKER_01
 And that can make it not feel okay.
2
SPEAKER_01
But if you're open to that the greatest things that are going to come out of life are probably going to be the ones that you didn't prepare for or seek out in some way, then it's all going to be okay as long as you're
2
SPEAKER_01
 willing for it to be okay.
2
SPEAKER_01
I think number two is that the greatest thing that you can do is make sure that you know what others need.
2
SPEAKER_01
I think that way too many people have structured the way in which they approach the world and approach people with a real focus on what they need first.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I will tell you,
2
SPEAKER_01
 I'm a guy who a lot of people want something from because people want to be in Entrepreneur Magazine.
2
SPEAKER_01
And that means I get a lot of pitches.
2
SPEAKER_01
And most people reach out to me without clearly putting any thought into how they can be of
2
SPEAKER_01
 to the people that I serve.
2
SPEAKER_01
They're looking for value for themselves, and I get it.
2
SPEAKER_01
We're both looking for value for ourselves, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
We've built the things that we have because we were looking for value for ourselves.
2
SPEAKER_01
But I will tell you something, that when somebody reaches out to me and they basically say, hi, I would like to be featured in your magazine, it would really be good for my business.
2
SPEAKER_00
 It's the worst way to approach it.
2
SPEAKER_01
It's the worst way to approach it.
2
SPEAKER_01
Because that doesn't give me any value.
2
SPEAKER_01
And you're not serving me personally, but you better understand what it is that I do.
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And what I do is that I serve my audience.
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So you better understand how I serve my audience so that you can come with something that I see immediately.
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This is of value.
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It's a win-win.
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Right, it's a win-win.
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People don't do that.
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And so I think that when you reorient yourself by thinking,
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 I gotta be value forward, right?
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I gotta think about how I'm gonna serve others, not because you're Mother Teresa, but because that's the way that you build.
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You don't build by just going around and taking.
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Maybe you can take for a little bit, but I'll tell you, people will catch up.
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So, number three is, I would say, keep track.
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It's so interesting, we go through these
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 cycles of change.
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You and I have both gone through many of them in our careers.
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We'll go through many more.
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And as we were talking earlier, I think one of the greatest challenges that people have is that once they reach, you know, I've got these four phases of panic.
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Panic, adaptation, new normal, wouldn't go back.
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The scariest part of wouldn't go back is that it's not going to last forever.
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That something else is going to change and you're going to have to go back to panic.
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That sucks.
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That sucks.
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 And so what do we do?
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How do we process that?
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How do we get ourselves prepared for these endless cycles of change?
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Because maybe the first couple ones felt fine and we don't even remember them because the stakes were so low, we were at the beginning of our careers, we didn't know.
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But eventually you get to a place where you've built quite a lot and then change is coming and now you are freaked out because you're gonna start thinking, well, I built this.
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I built all this.
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I can't afford to change now.
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 And so the reason why I say keep track is because the cycle of change is inevitable.
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And I really do believe that getting to a valuable place towards the end of it is also inevitable.
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The thing that you can do differently now in this cycle of change
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 is you can be aware of it.
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You can make it a conscious cycle.
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Be conscious of the cycle.
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Because if you keep track now, do it in any way you want, write it down in a notebook, keep a log, or just be so mindful of it that you're gonna remember these things.
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Have a lot of conversations with people so that they can remind you what it was like at the time.
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Whatever it is that you do,
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 in the next cycle when you're feeling panic, when you're feeling lost, you can go back to your own evidence because you kept track and you can say, I know good things are coming.
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And if I know good things are coming, then I can position myself for them instead of trying to hold on to what I'm losing.
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 I love that you said these three things because I have this, in the last few years I developed this thing for myself.
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A lot of people say hindsight's 2020.
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I like to have hindsight now for the future.
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And I like to see, okay I'm going through this challenging time in my life right now.
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Okay, if I was two years out, I'm gonna look back at the now
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 and see how this is gonna be helping me for the next two years and develop me into a better human.
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So try to have hindsight, future hindsight now.
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And I think, like you said, keeping track, oh you went through this two, three, five years ago and look where you are now because of it.
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Start seeing the future in that way too.
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 I really love that, man.
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Jason, I wanna acknowledge you for your constant reinvention of yourself.
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From 20 years of reinventing yourself and really developing a lot of wisdom to share with us.
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You do this personally in your newsletter and your content online, but also by...
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 really being the channel for all things Entrepreneur Magazine and making sure that the best information is out there to serve the maximum number of people in this space.
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So I really acknowledge you for 20 years of developing yourself and reinventing to get to this place to be of service now.
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It's really inspiring.
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I really, really appreciate that.
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You know, it's funny, when I got to Entrepreneur Magazine, we realized we were in this interesting moment.
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 which is that the word entrepreneur had stopped meaning one specific kind of job.
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I talked about that earlier.
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And so we thought, well, what could it be now?
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Brand is 40-something years old.
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What could it be to people now?
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And we realized the one thing that everybody has in common who identifies as an entrepreneur
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 is the emotional experience of entrepreneurship.
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It's the one thing, get them all in a room, doesn't matter, somebody running a venture-backed company in Silicon Valley, somebody selling stuff on eBay.
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Get them together, one thing they have in common, emotional experience.
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And so we thought,
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 that's where we need to serve.
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That's the thing that can bring everybody together and that others aren't really talking about.
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And so I appreciate your acknowledgement of that.
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And the reason I'm saying that is not to just plug our work though, I think we do good work, but rather to say like, I think it's always worth stepping back and saying,
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 what is the thing that the most people need from me, and how do I deliver it in a way that other people aren't?
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Because that's what'll separate you, and that's what'll keep them coming back to you during moments of change, and that's what'll help clarify your purpose to others, so that when change comes, you understand how to be valuable to them.
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Beautiful, man.
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Final question, what's your definition of greatness?
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 To me greatness is simply the ability to keep going.
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 The people who I have met who I am most impressed with, the people who I think have achieved greatness have done it because despite many challenges, despite hardships, despite feeling totally lost, despite lots of losses, they had a willingness and an ability to keep going.
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To understand that the path doesn't stop just because one of the things on the path stopped.
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 That's a really, really hard thing to do.
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It's easy to maybe check out.
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But the more that you can just say, I don't know what's next, but I know something's next.
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 That drives greatness.
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Jason, thanks man.
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Appreciate it.
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Thank you.
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Amazing man.
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 I really love hearing feedback from you guys, so share a review over on Apple and let me know what part of this episode resonated with you the most.
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And if no one's told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter.
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And now it's time to go out there and do something great.