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

Jason Feifer 0:00 - 0:49

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

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Jonathan DeYoe 1:17 - 1:19

Jason, welcome to the Mindful Money podcast.

Jason Feifer 1:19 - 1:20

Well, thank you for having me.

Jonathan DeYoe 1:20 - 1:23

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

Jason Feifer 1:23 - 1:24

Brooklyn, New York.

Jonathan DeYoe 1:24 - 1:26

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

Jason Feifer 1:26 - 1:32

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

Jonathan DeYoe 1:33 - 1:39

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

Jason Feifer 1:39 - 1:46

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

Jonathan DeYoe 1:47 - 1:48

I like to classify them as animals.

Jason Feifer 1:48 - 1:49

That's perfect.

Jonathan DeYoe 1:49 - 1:52

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

Jason Feifer 1:52 - 2:17

, which was a while ago,: 2008

Jonathan DeYoe 2:17 - 2:22

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

Jason Feifer 2:22 - 2:40

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

Jonathan DeYoe 2:40 - 2:51

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

Jason Feifer 2:51 - 5:32

And I got to Entrepreneur in: 2015

Jonathan DeYoe 5:32 - 5:59

repreneurial magazine back in: 1980

Jason Feifer 5:59 - 9:17

esting experience when it was: 2018

Jonathan DeYoe 9:17 - 9:27

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

-: 10:31

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

Jonathan DeYoe: 10:31

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

Jason Feifer: 10:56

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

Jonathan DeYoe: 12:12

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

Jason Feifer: 12:26

No. If I had really timed this, then I would have started working on this book like a year later. It's funny because when I started working on this book, it was COVID that was the big change I had been working on. I should just orient people. So the book is called build for tomorrow. The subtitle is an action plan for embracing change, adapting fast, and future proofing your career. Which, now that I say it, sure does sound like I'm talking about AI. But the problem is that you will find almost no talk of AI in the book. And the reason for that is because I had been studying change. I had come to this conclusion pre pandemic, which is that the most I was studying, the stammering is me, like trying to block out hearing my wife trying to control our two boys like right outside the door. I don't know if this is getting picked up by the microphone, but this is what happens, so just bear with me. So I had learned by interviewing the most successful entrepreneurs and leaders that they have all developed a unique personal relationship with change. And that unique personal relationship enables them to do things and grow in ways that others couldn't. And I wanted to understand that and then help other people do the same. And I was primarily doing that through some writing and some talks that I was giving. And then the pandemic hit. And it was fascinating because everybody went through the exact same change at the exact same time and then radically diverged. It was like a fascinating experiment. And a friend of mine, a friend Matt El Blanc, whos also a book agent, and wed kicked around the idea for a change related book for a while. He calls me in the middle of the pandemic in March or April of 2020 or something. And he said, everybodys talking about change right now. Like, everybodys going through change, now is the time to write that book. So I kind of plotted it out through 2020. I wrote it in 2021. It came out in September of 2022. And generative AI became a subject months later. So I totally missed it. But I've since come up with a lot of things to talk about with AI, and it does totally relate to the book. But look, this is a lesson in anything, right, which is you can't never even try to get timing right because you just literally cannot. The best you can do is just move forward and be as relevant as you can and adapt.

Jonathan DeYoe: 14:30

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

Jason Feifer: 14:47

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

Jonathan DeYoe: 17:04

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

Jason Feifer: 17:39

So, there's a couple of different ways to answer this. So, number one, I think that we are not in some kind of unique moment of fear about technology that existed at every other time. Just go back and find the waves of fear over radio addiction and the belief that telephones were going to isolate us. Cause nobody would ever wanna see each other in person anymore. Or, like, why schools were banning teddy bears in 1907, which is a real thing. And, like, it just. It goes on and on and on, right? There are always people who reject, and then there are always people who embrace and innovate, and by and large, the people who embrace and innovate win out. What do you tell those people? I'll tell you two totally different approaches. Approach number one, which I think is, like, satisfying and feels logical for people who are more, more innovation minded is to say, hey, you guys come from the future. Like, you are the product of things that people previously thought were scary. Like, whatever it is that you were comfortable with. People hated that. People hated that. Like, you're talking about, like, how terrible YouTube is, but you grew up on rock and roll. People hated rock and roll. They thought it was the devil. But you are fine. And that means that you are evidence that new things are fine because you don't think that you're bad. But that's not satisfying. That doesn't work. What I found that's more important or more valuable, it is really incumbent upon us, people who are more forward thinking, people who can move faster through changing times. It is incumbent upon us to show the people who are more resistant feel less resilient. We need to build a bridge of familiarity between where they are and where we are or where an innovator is, where a leader is. And that bridge of familiarity does not start with like, us. And, oh, we got great stuff over here. Come on. Come try all the generative AI. Come try web three. Like, it doesn't work. It doesn't work. Instead, what you need to do is you need to understand what people are comfortable and familiar with, and then you need to start with what they need and where their problems are and what they're comfortable with and then build a bridge from them to you. Here's the thing, people don't like new things. You know what they like? They like better versions of old things. That's what they like. A quick story about this, which just like this is a marketing branding story more than anything else, but it illustrates this point. I met a little while ago, a guy named Jason Wright. He has a company called Wild Brands and they're, it's a snack food brand. And the hero product, the first product to the market for this company was called, and this was, you saw it big on the bag, chicken chips. C h I p s. Like potato chips. Chicken chips. What is that? Well, Jason was sitting on the couch one day and he was eating potato chips and watching tv and he was feeling very unhealthy about himself and he thought, wouldn't it be better if I was snacking on something that was healthy, that had, like, protein in it? And then he thinks, wouldn't it be better if this was like, made out of chicken? And that's a crazy idea, but, you know, this is what entrepreneurs do. So he goes to a bunch of food labs and he gets a find somebody to do this for him. To take chicken breast and transform it into a crunchy potato chip like experience. And then he thinks, brilliant. This is exactly what I wanted. Other people will want it, too. He creates wild brands. He makes bags. It says chicken chips, and he gets whole foods to pick it up. Now, when Jason is in the store and he's doing sampling, people buy this product. Like, they come over and they're like, what is this? And they try it and they like it and then they buy it. It's great. When Jason is not sampling, when he is not sampling, when just the product is in the store, nobody is buying it at all. No. And so Jason cant figure this out. Hes in the store and Hes sampling. People buy and they like it. Its not a product problem. People like the product. But when hes not there, nobodys buying. So whats he doing? Whats the problem? So he goes to whole foods and he stands around and he watches people engage with his product and he sees what happens, which is that they pick it up and they read the word chicken chips and then they grimace and then they put it down because it sounds disgusting. And we all know that. Like, I've been telling the story for the last three minutes, everyone listening, Jonathan, like you knew this sounds disgusting. It's exactly what you were thinking. But Jason didn't know because he made it. And so he started to talk to his consumer and understand, well, where are they and what language do they use and what are their needs and what are they comfortable and familiar with? And then he rebranded this thing, same exact product. But now the first big words that you see on the bag are not chicken chips. They are protein chips. Because people eat protein powder and drink protein shakes. Right? Like, protein makes sense to people. You're reaching people where they are. Again, people don't like new things. What they like are better versions of old things. So you start with the old thing. What do they like? And then once you've started that conversation and they see how this is not challenging them, it's not making them lose access to something that they previously had. It's not scary. It's something that fits into their existing architecture of information and desires and needs. And now you can have a conversation, where's the protein come from? Chicken. And that unlocked growth. That company is doing extremely well once he made that change. We need to do a version of that as innovators all the time. I watched this whole web three cycle, and I watch all these people talk about how web three was going to, like, change everything. That's a stupid way to talk to people. Stupid, because nobody wants that. Nobody wants you to change everything. What they want is a better version of the thing that they're already doing. So show them that you can do that, and then they will come along.

Jonathan DeYoe: 22:51

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

Jason Feifer: 23:06

Yeah, good comes from bad. So, yes, this is something I wrote about recently in my newsletter, one thing better, which perhaps is why you're prompting me on this so well, look, I'll tell you the very brief, like, the 32nd version of my personal trauma, which is that I was sued. I was sued in 2015. It was a totally frivolous lawsuit, and it was awful, and it went on for five years because the court system is just an incredible mess, and if you can never, ever engage with the legal system, it will just eat you alive, as I found. But anyway, I was sued, and it was awful, and it just made me fear the worst. And I couldn't eat, and I couldn't sleep. But a funny thing happened, which was that when I was sued in 2015, I was actually starting a freelance. I decided to leave magazines and be a freelancer, and I lined up all this work. I was, like, ghost writing a celebrity memoir, and I lined up a bunch of interesting editing work and including at Entrepreneur magazine as a freelancer, and there's a whole bunch of stuff. And I kind of had this idea that maybe I was going to be, like, a freelancer and a celebrity ghost writer. And, I don't know, I'll see where my career goes. And then I got sued, and I was terrified. And I felt like this is not the time to be gambling with my finances. Also, my wife and I had just had our first child, like, months before, and entrepreneur had been asking me to join the staff, and I had been saying no. But once I got sued, I felt like maybe I just need to, like, run undercover here. I just need a roof over my head. So I took the job. And you already know how that turned out because it's what we talked about at the earlier part of this conversation. It totally transformed my life. And I think of myself completely differently as a result of that. And the lesson that I've drawn from that, which I now see over and over again, is it's a little too simplistic. To say good comes from bad, right? Look, it's more that life is not linear. Life is reactive, which is to say we often fear that a new thing will destroy us because you sort of play out the. Play it out. We're like, I got sued, which means I'm going to lose all my money, which means that my marriage is going to fall apart, which means that my career is going to be destroyed, and it's just this linear progression downward. And that's not how life works. Instead, what we do is we react in ways that may not have made sense before whatever new input came along, it didn't make sense for me to join the staff of Entrepreneur magazine before I got sued. Once I did get sued, it made sense for me to do that. I reacted to it and as a result, I just pinged myself in a completely different direction. And that is how we always operate. Anybody who has a business knows that, that some great trauma in your business can be the thing that causes you to react and create some completely new idea. Stuart Butterfield is a video game company, and that video game company is failing and he just cannot get traction on it. And he returns all his investor money and then he's sitting around and he's thinking, man, I wanted to have this video game company, but I created this interesting communication system inside of the video game and people liked that. I wonder if that can be its own product. And that idea is slack. Like, that's slack. That was the creation of Slack, and that was a bad thing, which led to a reaction, which led to a good thing. Stuart Butterfield there was no linear path to creating that video game being successful. And then making slack like that wasn't a linear story, that's a reactive story. And so it's worth us asking, like, whenever something bad happens, and this is not to diminish bad, the lawsuit was bad, and there's nothing good about that lawsuit, that it was bad. I think literally everyone involved in that lawsuit was bad. They're bad people. I feel badly about them. I hate them. But, like, I'm not going to say, like, that was good. And if you had a loss, like a personal tragedy, that's not a good thing, it's a bad thing. But the reaction that can come from it can create good. And that's why my friends Kelly and Peter have this thing that they ask themselves whenever something bad happens in their careers, which is that they like to say, we don't know if this is good or bad, right? It's bad now, but in 510 years, is this the precipitating event for something that is good could be, and we just don't know. So we want to be open to that and we want to explore it and we want to not get trapped in linear thinking. And instead the thing you can always do is react. You can't control what has already happened, but you can absolutely control how you react to it. And so we need to put our energy there.

Jonathan DeYoe: 27:17

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

Jason Feifer: 27:35

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

Jonathan DeYoe: 30:31

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

Jason Feifer: 30:35

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

Jonathan DeYoe: 31:43

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

Jason Feifer: 31:47

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

Jonathan DeYoe: 32:26

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

Jason Feifer: 32:33

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

Ad: 32:46

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