Natalie Franke
When I first started my wedding photography business, I had to print out knock quest directions to every single event that I photographed. At the time, I didn’t have enough money to buy a GPS, which was a luxury. But I was able to print out these directions and turn by turn hope that I wouldn’t miss an intersection along the way. Back then I never could have imagined that today, we would have not just access to a GPS, but one on a phone that I carried with me all the time, everywhere that I went, that would even reroute itself when traffic occurred, or could tell me if there was a speed trap up ahead on a highway. Why am I telling you this story, because in business, we don’t know what the future holds. And uncertainty can at times feel overwhelming, it can bring about a lot of fear. But what I’ve come to understand in my decade and a half as an independent business owner is that change is inevitable. We may not know what that change will look like or what the future will hold. But I can promise you that it won’t look the way that it looks today. In this interview, I have the opportunity to sit down with Jason Feifer, the editor in chief of entrepreneur, magazine, keynote speaker, podcast host and author to talk all about our fear of change, and how as business owners, we can turn that fear into fuel and forward progress. Hey, everyone, this is your host, Natalie Franke, and you’re listening to the independent business podcast, more people than ever are working for themselves and building profitable businesses in the process. So on this show, I sit down with some of the most influential authors, entrepreneurs and creators to break down the science of self made success so that you can achieve victory.
Natalie Franke
Jason, thank you so much for joining me.
Jason Feifer
Thank you for having me.
Natalie Franke
I want to dive right in to talk about change. Now, in your career. What has changed that has ultimately led you to becoming the editor in chief of Entrepreneur Magazine? Are you always you know, gunning for that type of job? What interested you in entrepreneurship, tell me about the leaps and bounds that you’ve gone across in your career to arrive at the place you are now.
Jason Feifer
When I interviewed Malcolm Gladwell A while ago, I asked him this sounds like I’m not answering your question, but I promise if I asked him what makes a Malcolm Gladwell project because you know, Malcolm Gladwell best selling author, podcaster, etc. And everything he does has this distinctive Malcolm Gladwell Enos to it, and I wondered what is his filter to identify those projects? And his answer to me really stuck with me, which was, uh, he said that to the best of his ability, he never tries to define himself or his projects. Because he said, self conceptions are powerfully limiting. And that is the language that I wrote down on a piece of paper and stuck it on my wall self conceptions are powerfully limiting, which is to say that if you have a specific idea, a too narrow idea of who you are, and the kind of work that you do, you will limit yourself to that very narrow definition and therefore turned down all sorts of other opportunities along the way. And I also really love that I love that, first of all, because it was great advice, but then also because it described it put words to the thing that I had been doing. So to answer your question, How did I become editor in chief of Entrepreneur Magazine? The answer is that I was open to constantly revising what my goals were. And really even my understanding of the work that I did, I came to the phrasing that I used for a long time was that I want to have a plan, and then have a plan to abandon the plan. Because I think that having a plan or having a goal is useful in that it gives you a direction to move in, you have to go somewhere. So if you’re lost in the woods, it is not useful to wander in a circle, you will never get out of the woods. So you have to pick some direction, and then go but that doesn’t mean that it’s the right direction. And some other information may reveal itself along the way that’s going to help steer you towards actually how to get out of the woods. And that is more or less what I’ve been doing in my career, which is I started with an idea. That idea in the very very beginning. graduated college took my first job at a newspaper. The very first idea was either I want to be a reporter at the at like a New York Times or some large paper or I want to be some kind of columnist, maybe a political columnist, I didn’t know. And then as I did more as I gathered more Information, I would start to revise that, oh, I’m actually pretty good at this, oh, this is actually pretty fun. I’ll be honest with you the idea of entrepreneurship, and even working with people in business, that was a late revelation. And it really only clicked for me, after I got to entrepreneur, which originally I saw is just another media job. And then once I started to realize that entrepreneurship wasn’t just about business, but it was about thinking, and that’s really where I live, I’m not, I can’t tell you the best way to price a product, I can’t. But I can tell you how smart people think. And that’s always been the thing that’s really driven me is understanding how people think and how to apply that kind of thinking to your own work. And so once I realized that that was also a part of this world of entrepreneurship, I realized I can live in, and I own that space, and provide value in ways that I had never done before in my traditional quote, unquote, media jobs. And that became very exciting. And that was the latest step in a lot of evolution.
Natalie Franke
I love that I agree. 100%, around mindset and the power of how we think not just about ourselves, but we begin to think about our role in the world. And it sounds very much like throughout your own journey, you were open to change, you were open to the possibility of new things coming your way and your trajectory evolving as you evolved as you became more aware of your own skill sets and what existed for you. And as you said, you know, moving into entrepreneur, like just uncovering the possibilities and leaning in when you have those opportunities. One thing, though, that I see a lot within our community and I can personally attest like I’ve experienced it myself is that fear of change, that fear of the unknown, and actually just turned it out for a second in a recent newsletter that you shared one thing better is your newsletter highly recommend to anyone listening, you say it’s so good.
Jason Feifer
You can find what Mises will tell people how to find it, which is yeah, if you just plug one thing better dot email into your browser, one thing better dot email, you will get it.
Natalie Franke
It’s it’s a fantastic newsletter, super digestible, super impactful. And you said in a recent email to your audience, he said, Today, I will give you a simple truth. You cannot make the fear go away, but you don’t need to. And you also say fear doesn’t have to hold you back. You just have to fear the right thing. Let’s dig into that, you know, there is so much fear around the unknown around change, especially as a business owner, and yet the ability to lean in to that possibility of change is also something that propels you into success. Yeah. How would you recommend you know, an independent business owner think about the unknown, think about change as they’re facing things like AI and economic headwinds, and all of sort of the confronting realities that we’re navigating right now?
Jason Feifer
Yeah. So love that question. Let me actually back up and then answer it. First, I just want to show you how methods of thinking can port like import from one place to another because I find that to be an incredibly useful way to pattern match and to gain insights into new spaces. So when I wrote that the fear doesn’t go away. Honestly, what I was channeling was this insight from a friend of mine in a completely different space, which was I was friend Katherine Morgan Schaeffler, she wrote this book called The perfectionist guide to losing control. And it’s really aimed at women who struggle with this, this idea that they’re perfectionist, and they’ve been told that that’s a bad thing. And she wants to help women reframe that as a superpower. Yeah, think
Natalie Franke
about that, by the way.
Jason Feifer
Production is losing control is great book. And I have heard her say over and over again, that it is purposeless to just tell yourself, Oh, stop that, like stop thinking that way stop being like that, because it’s not a useful way to think because you can’t do that. You can’t stop on a dime a thing that is just a part of you or the way that you think. So if you so you spend a lot, you can either spend a lot of time trying to stop it not succeeding, and then feeling like you’re a failure because of that. Or you could take as the starting point that this is not a changeable thing. And if it’s not a changeable thing, then the next question, how does it has to be? Well, then how do I use it? How do I make it purposeful? And hearing her say that got me thinking about all the other ways in which that exact framing can be applied? So when I think about fear, I also think is not reasonable to tell people Oh, just stop fearing that because they won’t, and they can’t. So it’s not a useful way to think instead, why don’t we start with there is the fear and that’s not going to go away. So how do we make it useful? Now I tell the story in the newsletter, which I’ll just repeat briefly here, which is that the very last social event that I went to before COVID, shut everything down was my friend’s birthday party at a crowded restaurant. And I was sitting next to Megan Atia who runs founder made, which is this trade show event series thing. And I’ve spoken at her event many times. And so you know, she’s a live events, business, and live events at that point were shutting down, we didn’t know it was gonna happen. And so I’m sitting next to her. I’m saying, Megan, what are you going to do, because these live events are shutting down. And she said, I actually am really excited about this, because we have had all these ideas for new lines of business. And we have never been able to explore them because the Live Events absorb all of our resources and energy. So now if they’re going to go on pause, we have time to explore all these other things. And at the time, I thought, this is a fearless person. But later I realized, no, that’s not what’s happening. Megan, like, everybody very reasonably was afraid of what was going to come next. But she was using fear to propel her forwards, she was using fear to think what am I missing? What is the solution that is going to be available to me that I need to find. And if I don’t work hard, I won’t find versus what could have happened, which is using that fear, to just say, Oh, my God, I can’t lose this thing that came before. And therefore I need to look backwards and try to clean as tight as possible. So in everything, if you feel like, there’s just something that’s a part of you, and fear is a very natural thing. We need to accept that it’s there, and then start to think about how can it be useful.
Natalie Franke
And so much of fear is just hardwired in you’re 100% Correct. It’s, there’s a purpose for it. I mean, a lot of our fear is meant to keep us alive. And whether or not it’s rooted in the right thing in our modern world is, you know, to be determined, but 100% to say to someone, just don’t be afraid doesn’t work, turning that into something that feels you turning it into kind of a force for good in your life or in your business. I love that advice. I talk a lot about competition through that lens where, you know, we we have a big monster here community over competition, and it’s not to say that you’re not going to compete, you will, you’ll compete fiercely. But it is to say that you want to ensure that the type of competition you’re operating with is one in which, you know, it pushes you forward and others forward, it raises the tide rather than destroys from within. And it’s the exact same thing. It’s like, okay, competition can be a force for good if it spurs innovation pushes us forward, right kind of gives us that tiny dose of fear that there’s somebody nipping at our heels. So we show up as our best selves, we do the best work that we can, versus becoming obsessed with the competition, right, paying more attention to what competitors are doing, than to the actual clients or customers that are in front of us. And I really love the power of that mindset shift. Is that something that, you know, you see, kind of being really critical in this moment, in particular, my brain just go straight to the AI changes. And, you know, I’ve talked a little bit about them with our community. And there’s a mixed bag of emotion, there’s a lot of excitement around the power of AI to reduce some of these mundane tasks that a lot of these independents are doing. Because again, we wear all the hats, right? Like you are the solopreneur you’re doing it all you are everything from sales, to marketing, to customer support, you manage everything. So this excitement around that possibility. But there’s also so much fear, is this going to take our jobs? Is this going to, you know, change the way that we do business? I’m curious, like, you know, how can we apply some of that that mindset to the day to day? Or how are you applying that to your thought leadership in these spaces, like as you share, you know, out to entrepreneurs, is there something we can take away from that with the current landscape that we’re looking at?
Jason Feifer
Sure. Oh, well, I wanted to stop you 20 times as you were asking that question, because I have like different answers for every little part of it. But let me go with this. Okay, let’s talk about AI. And as a way to think about AI and then also just as a way to think about change. I was speaking I was speaking and I was speaking at a gathering of attorneys are going attorney retreat for mid size. I don’t know how to evaluate Law Firm for a law firm for bigger a bigger law firm. They had hired me, they hired me, I flew out to San Francisco, I’m at this nice fancy hotel, and I’m addressing with 300, lawyer lawyers or something. And after my talk, which is about how to find opportunity in times of change, the questions come and they are all asking about AI and Chachi pt. And afterwards, I was talking to the CEO. And I said you know it was so interesting that all of your attorneys are obsessed with GPT. What is that? And he said, I’ll tell you what they’re really concerned about then say it I’ll tell you what they’re really concerned about, that they’re really concerned about is that they are afraid that AI GPT are going to is going to make motion writing more efficient. And lawyers function Going on billable hours. So if their work becomes faster than they build less, and that’s what they’re worried about. To which I immediately said, that is so fantastic. Because you know, who likes billable hours? Nobody, nobody likes billable hours. Everybody hates billable hours. billable hours is a terrible, horrible system. Clients hate it. And lawyers hate it, right? I mean, it’s the way that they operate. So they had their, that’s their incentive structure, but like they hate it, too. Everybody hates it, it is a crappy system that we have, because nobody was incentivized to come up with anything better. But now, AI is going to break that, because it is going to make legal work more efficient. And law firms are no longer going to be able to function on billable hours. And now there is an incentive for somebody smart, perhaps the CEO of that law firm, to figure out a different way to operate. So if you zoom out, what have we actually seen here, what we’ve seen is that AI is going to break something that was already broken. And when it does that, we can finally come up with a solution. That makes sense. And once you start to think of it like that, you see that that’s actually what’s going to play out over and over again. So for example, I have friends who are college professors, and they are worried that their students are all using Chachi, pte to write their essays, and therefore they can’t evaluate whether or not those students are actually absorbing the material. But guess what? essays were always a terrible way to evaluate whether or not students had actually absorbed the information an awful way, and everybody hates it, the students hate it. And the professors hate it. Because it sucks to write an essay, just just for one person who’s only going to read it with the eye of like, Did you suck at this? And then professors don’t want to sit and read a million of these things. It’s terrible. But again, there’s never been an incentive to move away from it. So we’re gonna break something that’s already broken. Okay, so let’s take that now. First of all, what do we have we there was scary, that AI was going to change things, until you actually investigate what it’s changing. And you ask an important question, which is, is this actually worth changing? And the answer is, yes, it is. And then next, we have the opportunity to shape what comes next. Because AI isn’t a black hole, it doesn’t just absorb things, and then it disappears into foreverness. It there’s a future something happens next. So why don’t you be a part of making the next thing? That’s the opportunity? And that to me is exciting.
Natalie Franke
Talk about a mic drop moment? Yes, yes. And yes. 100%. And it’s part of the reason why I’m encouraging, you know, our community to lean in at this moment in time, even in spite of that fear that a lot of them have, you can’t influence the trajectory of something, if you’re not a part of it. If you’re not, you know, educated on it, and experimenting, and I say you don’t need to become an expert in AI. Just stay curious. Stay curious and stay open to the possibility in looking at the future, though, of Independent Business of small business of entrepreneurship. You know, what, what do you see on the horizon? Do you think it’s a good moment to start a business, we’ve seen, for example, these record setting numbers of new business applications in 2021. Also maintaining strength of new business applications in 2022, we’re seeing a shift in how people want to work. Gen Z is more entrepreneurial than any other generation, I could go on and on and on. does the future look bright? For entrepreneurship? If not, what are some of those broken structures like you want to see us change, you want to see communities like mine fight to change? I’m really, really curious to hear your perspective on this.
Jason Feifer
So I’ve been very excited to see those new business application spikes. Also very interesting to see that as you and I talk, right now, we’re in a economy that nobody can figure out where you have very large companies, laying lots of people off and declaring bankruptcy. But if you look down at the small business level, it’s actually very strong, strong growth, strong hiring, investment, optimism. So what is that? I mean, I think that what that is, is that you have a layer of entrepreneurs at the small business level, who are incredibly close to their customer, and understand what that customer needs at a very focused granular level, in a way in which large businesses sometimes drift away from them. And you know, what, why, why are big tech companies laying people off? And then oftentimes, it’s because what they were doing was spending money just on gobbling up talent with the thesis that that talent would produce something but they didn’t actually have in mind what their audience needed. They just figured they figured it out. later, which is fine until the economy shifts, and suddenly you’re just holding it back. So I feel pretty good to be honest about entrepreneurs. And I think there’s a reason why Gen Z is so entrepreneurial. And the answer is because they came up in a completely unsteady economy and a completely unsteady world. And the lesson, I think, that they took from that was that nobody will take care of them as well as they can themselves. And that breeds a kind of self reliance that I think is excellent. And so what’s gonna happen next, well, we already see him what people say all the time, it’s never been easier to start a small business. And that’s true, because we have these tools that are available to us in a way that decades ago, we’re not I mean, just think about all the things that people decades ago had to build from scratch every single time. And you don’t have to do that now. And that’s incredible. And that will only become I think, easier, as things like aI start to automate the most drudgery of small business. So I would say that for anybody who is in business now, or who’s thinking about getting into business, the thing that you should be thinking about is this, you may feel a lot of change in disruption in your own environment. But don’t forget that you are not the only one experiencing that everybody is experiencing change in disruption. And that means that they have new needs. And those needs may not be well fulfilled by the incumbents that they used to rely upon who are not as nimble as you are. And so now is actually a pretty amazing time to step back and say, what do people need now? Because they need solutions. And I am in the business of solutions.
Natalie Franke
We saw that resiliency in our community, in particular, during the pandemic, just you talked about the live event space, we have a ton of event professionals, wedding professionals, and as we know, the world shut that down. And that’s precisely what they did. Right? It was that moment of, you know, okay, what’s the need today? What is changing in the landscape? How can I show up and serve and looking at problems, not necessarily as problems but potentially as entrepreneurial opportunities? What would you say to a business owner who, you know, maybe has started this on the side over the past couple of months, they have this side hustle, or maybe it’s even evolved into something where it is full time, they’re looking at the potential of growth, they’re looking to go all in and to scale. But as we’ve talked about, with fear, we’ve talked about with the unknown and uncertainty. They’re in that mindset of like, I can’t leave, I am clinging to the cliff with everything that I have. And I refuse to trust that my bungee cord is going to get me right like and protect me if I leap off. Or even what do you say to yourself in those moments? Like, is there a mantra or an affirmation, inspirational story in history to look to give us a little bit of hope, give us a little bit of inspiration, obviously speaking for a friend here.
Jason Feifer
So here’s the thing, no time will ever feel like the perfect time. There’s no way that you wake up. And you look at your watch. And it says today, like today’s the day right? And then you just like feel it you don’t you don’t feel things the way that you wish that you would feel things. This is this reminds me of something that is a little unrelated. But I want to tell you this quick anecdote as a way of of framing it, which is I read this thing that Ryan Holliday wrote years ago, Reinhardt is his best selling author. And he wrote about what it was like to learn that he was a best selling like New York Times best seller for the first time. Like, what’s that? Like? What’s the experience like? And the experience was that he was mowing his lawn. And he got a call from his agent. And his agent was like good news. You know, you’re on the New York Times bestselling list. And Ryan, you know, surely thought like anybody does, like, that’s awesome. And then they talked for a minute or two, and then hung up the phone. And then Ryan like, looks around. And he’s like, Well, I’m, I’m still out here on the lawn. And I still, you’re still got the lawn mower. So I guess I’ll keep mowing the lawn, right, like a external event does not change you in the way that I think we often think that it will. Because oftentimes, from the outside, we see people who seem like they transformed. And we’re waiting for that inside of ourselves. And it doesn’t happen, because that’s just not how things work. Because your life is actually one of increments. So if you’re building something, it is a little bigger and a little better today than it was yesterday. And yes, sure. For somebody who may be new you at the very start of it, and then close their eyes and didn’t hear anything and then open their eyes and it was like five years later, now you have this thing. It looks like boom, oh my God, but that’s not how you experience it. So there’s never going to be a time where you look inside yourself and you’re like I have changed. And now I am the person who can do this big step. So what do you do? How do you actually get there? Look, I think that the answer is that we have to start to map it for ourselves, we have to have a sense of what it looks like an means to trigger the change. It might be worth you stepping back and looking. I mean, look at look, a lot of these things are emotional, but a lot of them are also financial. So it’s worth stepping back and saying, alright, what does it look like, for me to safely or comfortably or whatever it is that you need in your life, make the shift into whatever it is that I want to be doing next? Maybe that’s it, I turn a side hustle into a full time business and I leave my job. Is there a revenue marker? What do you need to be making? What kind of growth do you need to have so that you feel confident that this thing is on a trajectory where it’s growing? Well, and if you put more effort into it, it would continue to grow even stronger? There are way right like in Annie Duke, who wrote this great book quit about how quitting can be a decision making tool she calls a cause these kill criteria, where if you want to know whether you should quit something, then you set about, you know, six 912 months out, what does it look like, for this thing to be failing like, this is either this is happening at this time, or it’s not this level of growth or not. And that helps you make that decision about quitting. But you can do that on the flip side, too. And you can do that about growth, what’s the growth criteria, I’m going to make this decision if I’m bringing this amount in, do that. And then you will know whether something changed because you yourself inside of you will never feel like something changed.
Natalie Franke
That level of accountability as well, like the ability to have the forethought to say okay, when I hit these metrics, or when I see this particular thing happen, that is my indicator to make the leap, and I’m going to hold myself accountable or, you know, leaning into the power of your community, other people that do similar things to what you do, that’s where you have them help to hold you accountable to that I absolutely love that strategy, for kind of giving yourself that point in time when you know, you’re going to leave when you know, you’re gonna push past that fear or turn that fear into your fuel and move forward. I’d love to know you obviously read a lot. You’re a bookseller, a book nerd like me. Was there one book in particular, that was a game changer for you, or one book that you think every small business owner absolutely needs to read to put on their TBR besides your book, which we’re gonna talk about in a second, which obviously, is on the TBR. But beyond that, was there a book that for you, that was like, in particular, like, if I’m going to tell you one book, this is the book you need to be reading?
Jason Feifer
Hmm. So here’s, here’s the thing, I actually don’t read a lot of business books. And the reason I don’t do that is because, number one, I write so much that I don’t want to accidentally absorb and then steal someone else’s idea. Totally. So I don’t want to see what other people are doing, and then have it slip out as my own. I also when I consume things, I tend to really like to find things that show me that the boundaries are not where I thought they were. And so the the works of art, or of any kind of writing or like are the things that stick with me, or when I’ve read something, and or I watch something, and I and I say, Oh, I didn’t know you could do that. I didn’t know that you could tell a story that way. I didn’t know that you could write that way. I didn’t know that you could relate to an audience that way. It encourages me to then question my own boundaries. What if I did something a little different? And you can find that in fiction? The first book that I remember reading that did that, to me was A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers, which is a memoir is just written in this incredible way. But for what it’s worth, I would say because you’re asking about like things that entrepreneurs could read. I do think that any any Dukes book quit was really, really smart. And also I injured Chen’s the cold start problem, which is about how to grow network effects. It was was just really insightful and helped me understand that concept. A lot better. And I don’t know, I’m sure I’ll come up with others later.
Natalie Franke
I those are all great. And I’m a big believer in fiction as well, I think sometimes, you know, I’ve there have been multiple books for the past year where I’ve leaned into them for escapism, and like, take me to a magical land where there are Fe and magical powers. And you know, like a warring political system, I want to just be immersed, and all of a sudden I’m reading it, I get into a point in time, you know, where I’m just reading a quote from a character and I step back and I go, whew, I needed that as a leader today. Like I needed to read that heading into this meeting with an employee and it’s has nothing to do with entrepreneurship has nothing to do with business. So I also love books that challenge and open our minds or even just take us to to a unique place. I love that you threw a fiction option out there before the business books, but I want to kind of pivot then into your book. So tell us a little bit about your book. Tell us about you know what we can expect when we dive into the pages and what the key takeaways are going to be,
Jason Feifer
yeah, so the book built for tomorrow comes out of this observation, which is that the most successful people are the most adaptable and that it’s not a skill that you’re born with. It’s a skill that you learn. And I wanted to know how people did it. And I was very interested in this before the pandemic, but the pandemic was the moment where you got to see everybody go through the same change at the same time, and then radically diverge. And so I spent the first 220 20 years when I wrote this book proposal, and then 21 is when I wrote this book. And what I really wanted to understand was through the combination of the stories of the most adaptable entrepreneurs that I’ve met six, famous and non famous stories from history, and then also psychology, to understand what it actually means to navigate change and to understand your relationship with change, and to start to see things that feel scary as not scary, which is a weird thing to do. But once you get there, it starts to reveal doors where other people see walls, which is, which is why when I was at that lawyer retreat, and I heard about AI, and in billable hours, my mind immediately went to but wait a second is billable hours a good thing, because most people will think we have to protect the thing. But the foundational question is actually is it a good thing, right? Like, if you build the reality of change into how you process the world and think about yourself, then suddenly, things that seem like they must be protected, are actually things that might want to be replaced with your good idea. And that’s an incredibly exciting shift.
Natalie Franke
I can’t wait to read it, we end every podcast episode with a single question. And I have a gut feeling. I may know which direction you’re gonna go with this. But I also have been surprised many times before. Okay, that question is what do you believe is the biggest differentiator between the businesses that succeed and the ones that fail?
Jason Feifer
Hmm. Ryan Reynolds told me that to be good at something, you have to be willing to be bad. Because he’s gone from being an actor to being a very savvy business guy. And when I interviewed him for entrepreneur, we were talking about that transition. And he said that like to me to be good at something, you have to be willing to be bad. by which he means that we often think that when we try something new, the dividing line is whether or not we are good at early does this take naturally to us? Are we good at this thing. And we see other people who are good at it, and we are not. And that feels like maybe we’re doing it wrong. But what Ryan is saying is no, the dividing line is not that the dividing line is whether or not you are willing to tolerate being bad long enough to get too good. And I would say that, that is a pretty good explanation of why businesses succeed or fail as well, which is to say that, when you start out with a business idea, it is almost certainly not going to be the idea that actually wins the day or the one that scales. But it is at least the idea that just gets you out and gets you out talking to people engaging with people and discovering what they need, and how you can fulfill that and know the journeys that you’ll hear. And that I hear all the time. And then I’m sure you know, you hear all the time is, is not one of I set out to do a thing, and everyone loved it. And then I just made a bazillion dollars, instead of the journey is I set out to do a thing. And then I learned that that wasn’t quite right. But it was actually on to something else with this other thing. And then I started talking to these people, these people told me this thing, and that really got me thinking about that. Right. And like, that’s how it works. And so do a stat that I hate is the step in nine out of 10 businesses fail. Because even if that were true, and it’s not the failure part is too definitive. Because if someone sets out to start something, and it doesn’t work out, that does not mean that that person failed. Maybe that idea was a failure. But maybe they take the lesson from that idea, and they build it into the next thing, and that’s what’s successful. And you hear those stories all day long. That’s for example, Stewart Butterfield, who started this video game that he raised a lot of money for, but that just didn’t work. And so he decided to shut it down and return his investors dollars. And then he realized, hey, wait a second. We Build this internal chat function in the video game. And that was actually pretty useful. What if I just started a company that was just the internal chat function, and that became slack. That’s the story of slack. And that’s how it happens. It does not happen with an idea that succeeds. It happens with a person who goes out and learns. And that’s the difference.
Natalie Franke
And with those powerful words, thank you so much for joining me, I have no doubt our listeners are going to want to learn more about you find your book, where can they do that? Where can they you know, engage with you further.
Jason Feifer
Oh, thanks. So you can find the book wherever you find books available in audiobook ebook, hardcover, whatever, anything but stone tablet, and then I’d mentioned the newsletter, you’d mentioned the newsletter. Thank you. So again, once again, that’s one thing better you can find it at one thing better dot email. And, you know, reach out to me on social media. I’m very active on LinkedIn, and Instagram and website and whatever, get in touch.
Natalie Franke
Awesome. Jason, thank you so much. Thank you.
Natalie Franke
That ends our episode of The Independent Business Podcast. Everything that we’ve discussed today can be [email protected]. Head to our website for access to show notes, relevant links and all of the resources that you need to level up. And if you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, be sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss our future content. Drop us a review and leave our guests some love on social. Thanks again for listening.
