Jason Feifer Transcript
Clint Betts
Jason, thanks so much for coming on the show. You have done an incredible amount of things. I was looking at your resume and what they've put here as your bio and it's unbelievable the things that you've done. And you're currently the editor-in-chief of entrepreneur.com.
Jason Feifer
Entrepreneur Magazine, yeah.
Clint Betts
Yeah, Entrepreneur magazine. Tell us about that. How did you get into that?
Jason Feifer
Well, my background is in media. And so I'll be honest, when I took over Entrepreneur I was at another magazine and there was an opportunity to be executive editor at Entrepreneur and I went for it because I saw it as a great learning experience. And then nine months later, the editor-in-chief left and I thought, "Wow, I have an opportunity here that I did not expect at this stage in my career." I was 34, 35 or something.
So I made a play for it. And the play that I made for it was that I articulated this vision, which is that Entrepreneur had been thinking of itself for a very long time as a small business brand, but times change and you want to be as relevant as you can to the maximum number of people that you can. And as it so happens, 40 something years ago when Entrepreneur Media was created, the word entrepreneur was a pretty niche word that meant a very narrow thing. But that is not the world we live in today. We live in a time where the world entrepreneur has been embraced as a mindset, as an identity, as a badge of honor for a very broad range of people. And I thought if we can speak to them and understand them, then we have something that is really truly unique in the market.
And I had spent enough time at this point with entrepreneurs to understand that the thing that they all had in common, this was basically my argument for what we should do, the thing that they all had in common was the experience of entrepreneurship, feeling lonely and crazy, problem solving their way through walls.
You can get a bunch of sellers on Etsy together with CEOs of venture-backed companies in Silicon Valley, and they both share the experience, the emotional experience. And so I said, "Let's live in that space. Let's talk about how to manage ambition and risk and how to come up with problem solving strategies and how to think about yourself differently depending on the needs and scale of your organization." These are really human things that go beyond tax tips or whatever. You can find tax tips anywhere. That was my argument and they liked it. And we've been really thinking bigger and bigger about this brand ever since.
Clint Betts
What have you learned about entrepreneurship and what makes a good entrepreneur or even a great entrepreneur and what makes some entrepreneurs maybe stumble?
Jason Feifer
Yeah, the number one thing that I think defines a successful entrepreneur is their ability to be adaptable. I mean, that's the book that I wrote called Build for Tomorrow, which I know we'll talk about in a little bit. So just so that I don't pivot hard into that for right now, I'll tell you that the other thing that I have found that really intrigued and surprised me as I got into the world of entrepreneurship more was that entrepreneurs think differently than other people in this really fundamental way. It's really interesting actually.
So I first realized it for myself back in, oh, I can't remember what it was, maybe 2017 or something like that. I had co-authored a romantic comedy novel with my wife.
Clint Betts
Awesome.
Jason Feifer
Yeah, it was a lot of fun. We had started working on it years before I had gotten to Entrepreneur, but by the time I came out I was an Entrepreneur. And so I had started to get known for being, I mean for lack of a better term even though this term is stupid, a thought leader in the space. And so now I've got this romantic comedy coming out that has nothing to do with anything, and I was noticing these two very different reactions to it. So my media friends, my writer friends, when they heard that my wife and I had written and sold a romantic comedy, we sold it to a major press with this book where the TV rights were purchased, they said, 'Wow, that's awesome. Congratulations! So cool." Entrepreneurs did not say that. When I told entrepreneurs that I had sold this book, they said, "Oh, that's interesting. What are you going to do with it?"
And at first I couldn't understand that reaction and then I realized, "Wait a second. That's because to an entrepreneur the only reason to do something is because it is the foundation upon which the next thing will be built." It is what I like to think of now as horizontal thinking, that everything drives something else. Even though of course you cannot control the exact direction in which things are going to move, you know that by doing something, you're going to learn a certain thing and you're going to be able to apply that to whatever's coming next.
And so you always have a kind of idea in mind of, "I'm going to do this because it is going to possibly lead to these outcomes." Whereas most people just don't think like that. They just don't. They think horizontally, which is to say that they do something and then they move along. They do something else, they move along, they do something else.
And the more that I started to adapt my own way of thinking to this vertical thinking, the more I realized that I and anyone who thinks this can put themselves in a better position to learn and grow and apply to take the experiences that you have and be incredibly mindful about what it is that you need next in order to grow and open up future opportunities. And that has been the big game changer for me.
Clint Betts
What did you do with the book?
Jason Feifer
The book—
Clint Betts
Did you build off on it?
Jason Feifer
Oh, well, I mean, I'm trying to. So you and I are talking in January of 2023. The book came out in September of 2022, so it hasn't been that long, but—
Clint Betts
What's the name of that book?
Jason Feifer
So that book, well it's just right behind me here, it's called Build for Tomorrow.
Clint Betts
Okay.
Jason Feifer
The subtitle there is An Action Plan for Embracing Change, Adapting Fast, and Future-Proofing Your Career. It is a book about how to become more adaptable, how to see opportunity in change. And that was because I had found that the most successful people, the people who had built incredible companies who had been building for a very long time, the thing that defined them was their ability to adapt, to see changes coming and react to them before they were forced to, to have a sense of themselves that went beyond the specific thing that they make or the role that they occupy, which I think really enabled them to be able to pivot and continue to provide value in any way because they were resilient to change because the thing that they had defined themselves by didn't change even in times of change.
I wanted to understand how they were doing this. And so I spent years talking to people, kind of processing stories through the lens of what it was that you did that enabled you to navigate uncertainty. And the book is the result of that. And I came out with it now because we're all going through these endless ripple effects of massive change through the pandemic. I started writing it during the pandemic.
And so how am I going to build upon that? Well, this is a very interesting question. So it came out on Penguin Random House. It came out on a major press.
Clint Betts
Yeah, it's a big publication.
Jason Feifer
Yeah, it's an honor. They did a great job of getting it into bookstores nationwide and in airports and all that. So it's a lot of visibility and I'm getting people who reach out to me now to say, "Hey, I read the book. Would you come speak to my law firm or to my YPO group" or whatever. And that's great because one of the things that a book does is it raises your speaking fees, and so I appreciate that. But I'm also thinking about how does it position me. One of the things I am ever mindful of is that I am best known for right now being editor-in-Chief of Entrepreneur magazine.
But there is a problem with that, and that is that I don't own Entrepreneur magazine. It's not mine, it's the Shea family’s. And so I want to be very mindful of what I can build that I own. What foundation can I create so that I am not just solely renting somebody else's status? I mean, I love Entrepreneur. I'm not running out the door. I'm very happy to be there and to continue to be there, but I think that it would be foolish for me or for anyone in a position of platform that they don't own themselves to be really mindful of, "What am I able to build right now that I can walk away with later?" And so the book and some of the other things that I do, podcasting and newsletter and a lot of writing, is really driven very much by trying to create a space in the marketplace of ideas and business leadership that is distinctly mine that is complementary to the role that I have as an entrepreneur.
Clint Betts
How did you know Build For Tomorrow was a book and not a blog post or a series of blog posts? As a writer, you've probably written all sorts of things, you write a newsletter, you've got the podcast, all these different things. How did you know, "Hey, this idea is worthy of a book"?
Jason Feifer
It's funny. I think that your question is premised on a real problem. And that problem is that a lot of business books could have been blog posts and a lot of blog posts could have been tweets. And that's a problem. Here I will just risk sounding obnoxious, but I think that that is in many ways also a product of a lot of people not writing their own books. And so they have a particular idea and then they basically hire someone to try to stretch that idea out into a book.
And that's not me, because writing is what I do for a living. And so I really had the opposite problem. And that was I wanted to make sure that my book was a coherent idea and not a collection of magazine articles, because that's how I started to write it. I mean, to get really book industry-ish with you, I came up with a proposal and I worked on it for quite a while with my book agent. And then he went out and we had an auction and a bunch of houses bid on it, and Penguin Random House was the winner, particularly Harmony which is a division of Penguin Random House.
And then I got on the phone with my editor who acquired the book, Matthew Benjamin, incredibly smart editor. And he basically told me, "All right, really excited. The structure that you pitched in your proposal is not going to work, but you'll figure it out as soon as you start writing." And because he's worked with enough writers, he knew that as a magazine writer, I was not going to know off the bat how to write a book. I was going to have to learn along the way, because what I'm used to is writing 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 word pieces that are coherent, completely self-encapsulated ideas. It turns out that you can't actually just write 14 of those in a row and call it a book. That doesn't work. That's a short story collection.
So I really struggled through how do I take a lot of ideas that I have that all are going in different directions, they're engaging with not just why do people panic about change, but then how do they manage that change, and then how do they prepare for the future and then organize them in a way that feels like it coherently builds upon itself. And I will tell you, one of the best ways to do that is to start writing and then have someone very smart, in this case Matthew Benjamin, read it and then tell you why it's wrong and then to step back and start looking at what other successful books do. You're not copying their ideas, but you are looking at their structure. How do they structure a book? And what are they doing at the beginning and ends of every chapter to make it feel like each idea is building upon itself, right?
Because what you definitely don't want, and this is a blog post thing, what you definitely don't want is a book that functionally repeats the idea over and over and over again.
Clint Betts
Right.
Jason Feifer
That's tedious. So what you should have is something that makes people feel like they are progressing through a very complicated big idea by giving them a lot of really interesting small ideas that are going to be ever more logical because of the way that you're laying them out. I tell stories through storytelling. That's sort of a circular statement, but by which I mean that what I tend to do is I have a big idea, I want to articulate it by telling a story. And I because I'm a reporter, by nature, these are stories that I've reported out myself. So they're interviews and experiences that I've done myself instead of hiring a ghostwriter that is just sort of working off of public material.
So anyway, I'll tell you the breakthrough moment was when I picked up Essentialism by Greg MckEown. I just looked at his structure. How did he structure that book? The way he structured that book was that the book is in four sections and each section has four chapters in it. Those four sections move you through the big idea. Each of those chapters helps you gain a great understanding and immersiveness into, whatever, I'm making up words now, into this idea. And once I saw that, I thought, "What would my version of that look like?" I basically put all of my ideas down onto a sheet of paper and I started moving them around and then I realized, "Oh my gosh, I have been telling this story that was never central to the message, but was always something that people really connected with, which is that change happens in four phases, panic, adaptation, new normal, and wouldn't go back."
I've been telling this story for a long time and people really resonate with it and I've always found that it's a really good framework for a lot of the other ideas that I have. And I thought, "Wait a second, that's the book." Each of those is the sections, right? If I were to just steal basically Greg MckEown's structure, which he didn't come up with, I'm sure he just stole it from somebody else. Just a four section book, each of those, my section 1 can be panic, my section 2 is adaptation, my section…
And so on. And then I have my chapters, which is where I arrange the big ideas that I have and then I have to make sure that they all coherently flow. It was a lot of work. The result of that is something that I'm really proud of, but that I also now know has to come from doing.
Clint Betts
Mm-hmm. You know what would be interesting to learn from you as well is how you launched the book, what preparations you were making as you launched it because I'm sure it's similar to launching a product or launching kind of anything in today's day and age, but a book probably even more so because you kind of got to build a community around it, you've got to build an audience, all these types of things. So what were like the six months or year leading up to the actual like, "Hey, we're going. This thing is coming out in November 2022."
Jason Feifer
So a book is an incredibly hard thing to launch. Incredibly hard. I would say harder than a product. The reason for that is because you can revise the product but you can't revise the book. So if you're putting out a product, you should put out a minimum viable product and then learn from what people say and then revise the product and revise who you're targeting it to and everything. But you don't have that luxury with the book. The book is the book.
And so the first thing that you do is that you start preparing for this long before you have the book. Don't write the book and then figure out how to market it. Uh-uh. No, the other way around. Start years early. So for me, for example, it started to go back to that idea that I had shared the difference between horizontal thinking and vertical thinking. Once I got the idea of vertical thinking and I was thinking how can everything that I do build towards something larger even if I don't exactly know what that is, one of the first things that I did was that I created a spreadsheet. That spreadsheet is called Good Contacts.
And literally everybody that I met for years started going into that spreadsheet. Now that was not something I did before. Years and years worth of great contacts that I just didn't attempt to keep up with anybody. I didn't hold onto their email addresses. Why didn't I do that? Because I wasn't thinking about how to collect things.
And so I have that and I've thought for years, one day I will have a book. And I just knew that that had to be part of my kind of growth as a brand in positioning myself. And so I was thinking one day I will need all these people that I'm meeting to help me. So what am I going to do? I am not going to ask anybody for anything for years.
And instead I am just going to do. I am going to do favors. I'm going to be... Look, I should say, this is one way to phrase it, which is transactional. The other way is I like building relationships. I like meeting people. I like understanding how I can be helpful to them, how they can be helpful to me. This is life. And so I try never to be purely transactional, but let's be honest, I mean we all have to think of the people who we need, how can we grow together? I mean, I just kept up with everybody for years and years and years. And I also focused a lot on building a social following and really deeply engaging that social following. Not just putting stuff out again, not just hiring a ghostwriter to write my social post for me. But no, like me, and then me in the DMs responding to everybody.
And then identifying some of the big hit opportunities. So whether that's big podcasts or years and years ago I helped Nasdaq out with an event, a virtual event that they reached out to me and they're like, "Hey, would you help put this together?" And I said, "Yeah, absolutely." But you better believe that years and years later when my book was coming out, I know they have a billboard in Times Square and they occasionally put books up on it. Can they do that for me? The answer was yes, because I built a great relationship.
So I'm spending years and years doing this. I did hire PR. In this case, I hired Forty Eight PR, which was one of the big book PR firms. They delivered basically what everyone told me would happen. Literally, every author that I've ever talked to about this, my book agent, my book editor, they all said, "Don't have too high of expectations for PR because a lot of the success of a book is just going to rely on the author." It just is. It's very hard to pitch a book. I know that because I'm getting pitched books all the time and we feature very few of them. It's very hard to get media coverage for a book. It is much easier to work off of existing great relationships that you have.
So Forty Eight did as well as they could and they got me some nice spots and some big podcasts that I wouldn't have got myself on. But a lot of the opportunities that I got, I got myself. And then the other thing that I did that was really key was I looked for moments that just looked really big even if they ultimately weren't.
So for example, that Nasdaq billboard, here's a fun fact or fun secret or something that if you ever see somebody on social media, they have their Nasdaq, they have a photo of themselves in front of the Nasdaq billboard and their book is on it, it's not up for very long. It's up for five minutes. But you know what? Five minutes is enough to take some awesome photos. And then I did something that nobody else has ever done, I mean they told me. Because usually what people do is they just come and they take photos. I took some photos and then I had a camera guy run around with me in Times Square where I just ran over with a microphone, like accosting tourists as they're walking down the street saying, "That's my book, give me a high five." And they're like, "What? Huh?"
And I just did that for the rest of the time. And it turned in and I was able to produce this really fun TikTok video over it. And then I put a bunch of money into promoting that. I did versions of this a lot. What I was looking for were these moments that just looked really big that I could then socialize, which creates the impression that this thing is everywhere. And that gets people very excited and they start to think, "Oh my gosh, you've got this enormous book," right? And then that shifts your perception because a book is very much in part about perception. So it worked for me. It's getting me a lot of nice results.
Clint Betts
Yeah, it's funny you mentioned that. I've actually been on that Nasdaq billboard as well because we have a strong partnership with them. The big thing that came out of it, I didn't do anything like what you're saying or I probably even put no thought into it, but the big thing was the social media post after. I had people reaching out and saying, "Hey, I saw you on the Nasdaq billboard live." It really was that thing. And same thing when you go on local news, I'm sure you've done this. The big thing is the social media post that shows you, kind of like the cameras with the hosts and not actually the appearance itself, which is really strange.
Jason Feifer
Well, there are two ways that you have to think about big moments I guess, which is to say that you have to know what they're for. I actually have a whole chapter in my book called What is this for? Because I just think you'll get a lot of clarity of purpose when you ask what is this for, of the things that you do. In books, very, very few things that you do will just drive sales. If you can get reviewed in the New York Times book review section, which they never review business books, so probably everyone who's listening to this, don't even try, but that moves books. A feature on NPR, that moves books. An appearance on the Today Show, that moves books. But pretty much everything else doesn't move books. Just doesn't. I mean even what would seem like big things, big newspaper features, big magazine excerpts.
I'm well connected in media. I've been working in media a long time. I had a lot of friends at different publications run excerpts of my book. That didn't do anything. It doesn't sell books. So what's the point of that? Well the point of it is that a lot of it is what you make of it, or it's getting that audience a little familiar with your book and then you can try to target and reach them in other ways. These are the things that matter. And so when you think about those billboards—I mean look, even if the Nasdaq billboard is up for five minutes, but I have a friend who buys billboards for her podcast. And big billboards, I've seen them, they look really cool.
But when I ask her, "Why are you doing this?" The answer is not because it drives podcast listens. It doesn't. But what it does do is it raises the perception to the right people that the podcast is a hit. So if you get a billboard on the highway towards LAX, a lot of people are going to see it.
And that can lead to great other opportunities. And it's funny, she put me in touch with her billboard guy, like the guy that she buys the billboards through, and he gave me this whole long speech about exactly that, that he sells billboards for a living and he's like, "Do not buy this because you think that it's going to convert anything because it's not. But what it will do is drive perception if you think strategically about where you're buying the billboard."
So that's how you have to think about everything that you're doing. It's like some of it is about actual conversion and some of it is about appearance, which can lead to conversion.
Clint Betts
Yeah. Speaking of Entrepreneur magazine, what do you think is the future of publishing and the future of magazines given that everybody now can have a Substack. Particularly if you're a great writer, it seems like you can make money right now being an independent great writer. So what is the future of magazines?
Jason Feifer
So I think that we make a mistake when we think of innovation and new technology as zero sum. So the media narrative around Substack for example was, "Oh my God, now that every writer can make money as an independent entity, the traditional media ecosystem will collapse." But no, that doesn't make any sense. Instead, we can have both. And that's not to say that every traditional media company will survive. It's also not to say that every writer can make a living off of Substack. They can't.
Clint Betts
Right.
Jason Feifer
So what do I see? Well I think that the shifting economics of media can be really scary for the wrong companies. It can be really exciting for very nimble companies and also for nimble writers who have developed a following and have built a Substack. And I think that that's great because the more opportunities the better. But it goes back to, actually I just said that question, what is this for? This is why this question is so powerful. Imagine applying this question, "What is this for?" to content.
So here I am, I'm the editor-in-chief at a traditional media company. What is content for? Good question. Well, decades ago, content was for monetization. And there were two ways to do it. You could sell ads and you could sell subscriptions. And that was a very good business. And that is for everybody, not just talking about Entrepreneur here. That for everyone is a harder business now.
It's really hard to get people to subscribe, to pay for things because they can get so much of it for free. And it's hard to get advertisers to advertise against your content because they have so many options, and particularly targeted options through Facebook and Google.
So what the hell is the point of it? Well, what is content for? Let's ask it now. Let's ask it clear-eyed now what is content for. Here's the answer. Here's my answer. Relationships. Content is for relationships because people really trust you if they like the thing that you produce. So content builds trust and trust builds relationships. And we all know that you can monetize that because you can build products and services that people will buy because they trust you.
And so I think that media companies are increasingly going to have to start thinking, "How can the content that we produce serve the function of trust building? And then let's find other business models that actually monetize that trust." And instead of just thinking of the thing that we sell as basically someone's attention, we earn people's attention and then we deliver even more value on top of it. That's not going to be for everybody obviously, but I think that for a vast majority of media that wants to survive into the future, they have to start thinking about how else they can be relevant.
The New York Times will always be able to live off of the authoritative news that it delivers, but there's only one New York Times. Maybe two. The Wall Street Journal occupies a somewhat different role than the New York Times.
Clint Betts
Right.
Jason Feifer
But everyone else, going to have to figure something else out. We talk a lot about that at Entrepreneur. I mean we're starting to build out products and services and thinking about basically how we diversify revenue so that we're not an advertised dependent media organization. Because you look at the last 15 years of media organizations dying, they were advertising dependent media organizations. And you have to think differently.
Clint Betts
And when it comes to trust, I wonder. We're seeing trust evaporate so much for these legacy media institutions. What would you recommend for them in order to do that? I'm talking about the legacy ones, not just the kind of private war kind of independent publications now, but basically other than the two that you mentioned who were always going to have this built in trust with at least someone. How do you do that?
Jason Feifer
Gosh, it's so hard. I mean let's just pick an example out of thin air just so we have a thing that we're talking about. Are you imagining like the Cleveland Plain Dealer for example? Is that—
Clint Betts
Yeah, something like that.
Jason Feifer
Right. I mean, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which I don't know anyone at the Cleveland Plain Dealer but my wife's family is from Cleveland so I'm there often enough and I see it's very thin. And so the Cleveland Plain Dealer has a problem. I mean, I used to work in regional newspapers. I worked at the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. I saw the same thing happen, which is basically as you have a more interconnected country where local people are interested in national news, they start to gravitate towards either the national publication, the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, or the hyper, hyper, hyper local which may not even be their local newspaper. It might just be a blog or a Twitter feed or something like that, right?
So that means that your audience is kind of drifting in one or both directions away from you and it's hollowing out your ability to run a news operation. So what do you do? Well, I mean, look, there are two answers to this. Number one is that the Cleveland Plain Dealer finds another business model, which is entirely possible.What can the Cleveland Plain Dealer for example, have built into people's understanding of them that drives trust?
Well for some people it's going to be their authority as the local paper of record. But for others it's just going to be the greatest example of communications in the region. Because if you're a local business, there may not be a great marketing and advertising company within your reach in Cleveland.
And so what if the Cleveland Plain dealer, and I'm not coming up with this for the first time, this is a conversation that's happened in local news for a while, but what if the Cleveland Plain Dealer can also build out a advertising marketing arm where they they can be the company that helps local businesses with their advertising and marketing? What other kinds of products and services can you offer? I've seen a lot of local newspapers start to get into the events business, become more community-oriented. They get into the funeral business because obits are a big, big thing.
So that's partially an answer. And again, I'm not reinventing, if I knew the real answer to solving local news, I'd solve it.
But here's the other way to say it, and I hate this and people can get angry and yell at me for it. But maybe the answer is that the thing dies and something comes in its place because it is an old institution with let's just kind of weighed down by decades of cost and layers of management structure and the cost of printing a paper and that in its place will raise other things. Now I realize that that's easier said than done.
The country is full of communities that have lost their local paper and nothing like it has been replaced. There's no question about that. But I think that's also a short term outcome right now. Like we are in the middle of this transition. I think that the reason we have newspapers is because literally hundreds and hundreds of years ago, as soon as we had the ability to disseminate information, we started to say, "People need to know what's going on and we're going to start to collect that information and distribute it."
That's not going to change, that's not going away. People want to know what's happening in their communities—and you can define communities however you want—whether that's local community or business community or interest community. And so I think right now we are figuring out what is the model that makes sense in today's marketplace that supports that, that interest and that drive. And I think that we'll find it. We're already finding them.
There are a lot of interesting experiments and I'm excited to see them. It doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of short term pain and that communities are vastly underserved by news, but I don't think that just because one model disappears that it is gone forever, or that the fulfillment of the need that drove that model to exist in the first place has gone forever.
Clint Betts
When someone visits your website, and I highly recommend they do because there's a full even more description of your book and everything you've done, but your first thing that you say is kind of like a call to action which is you want to help them reach their "wouldn't go back" moment. What is a "wouldn't go back" moment?
Jason Feifer
You know, it's funny. Right, if you go to my website—I'm going to pull up my website right now so I have the exact language. Whoops. It's sticking me to my WordPress login. That's not it. Well, if you go to the very front of my site, it says—
Clint Betts
Yeah, change is inevitable.
Jason Feifer
It says, "Change is inevitable, thriving is up to you. I'll show you how." It's funny. So it originally said something else. It originally said, "Champion of change. A guy who gets you excited about the future." That's how I had the website designed, with that language because I had just been using that language for a while. And then out of nowhere, this freelance copywriter emails me, he was really smart. He was basically looking for business, but the way he was doing it was by going to people's sites, identifying things that they were doing wrong and then creating little screen videos about it where he was explaining.
And he told me, he was like, "Look, you go to your website and it's all about you, but your website should be all about the person coming to the website. So it shouldn't be about what you are. Who cares that you're a champion of change. It should be what you are going to deliver of value to the person who's arriving."
And I was like, "Crap, you are exactly... Like, I told people that and then I didn't do it myself." So I'm working on it, right? But right now it says, "Change is inevitable, thriving is up to you. I'll show you," which is my effort to turn that around. And if anyone has a better idea, please let me know. But the "wouldn't go back," which I guess appears on some other page of the site I think—
Clint Betts
Yeah, just scroll down. You talk about it. It's, "I can help you reach your 'Wouldn't Go Back' moment."
Jason Feifer
Oh yes, that's right. It's in the very beginning of my bio. "Hi, I'm Jason. I'm the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur magazine, a podcast host, book author, keynote speaker, startup advisor, non-stop optimism machine." That's a little phrase I came up with that people like and so I keep using it. "And I can help you reach your 'wouldn't go back' moment," right?
So “wouldn't go back” comes out of that four phases of change that I told you about that is really the payoff to my book. The argument there is that everyone has waiting for them a "wouldn't go back" moment, which is to say the moment where you say, "I have something so new and valuable that I wouldn't want to go back to a time before I had it," which we all can think of, right? We all are the products of these "wouldn't go back" moments where we went through some kind of great change and on the other side of it had some new way of thinking about ourselves or a business and we wouldn't ever want to give that up. We're grateful to have had it despite how challenging it might have been to get there.
And as I was searching for, I mean just sort of stepping back and getting meta about it in a personal branding way, but as I was thinking about what is the language that I can use that is distinctive but also that really builds off of the work that I have, what can I offer? I'm kind of obsessed with the way that other people do this.
If you go to marieforleo.com, I mean Marie Forleo is sort of like a life guru. It says, "Are you ready for a whole new life at the very front?" That's so interesting, right? Then you scroll down and it says, "Learn how to get anything you want." It's so focused on the visitor. And I'm not like a life guru. I'm a more practically grounded business guide, but I also am mindful that for a lot of people, business is also their lives and also the tenants of entrepreneurship and business also teach you a lot about how to manage your life because it's all about ambition and goal setting and so on.
So I'm trying to live in that space and "wouldn't go back" became this phrase that, one, feels like a great payoff to that four phases of change story that I tell, but also then it becomes a fairly clear, even if you don't exactly know what I mean, you hear "wouldn't go back" and you think, "Well, that sounds good. I want that. What is that?" And so that's what I've been playing around with.
But yeah, I talked to some people who... I was just talking to Lewis Howes who got a gigantic personal brand. He has hired people to sit down with him for days to talk through his story and refine his story and pick apart his life and put it on sticky notes and put it on a wall. That sounds like such an interesting process. I've never gone through it. And so I'm a constant work in progress to figure out how to take what I know and make it as clearly relevant to people as possible.
Clint Betts
Jason, I could talk to you for hours. Thank you so much for coming on. I highly recommend everyone go check out Build for Tomorrow, check out your website. Best of luck with everything and I'm sure we'll see you around and we'll see you back.
Jason Feifer
I appreciate it. It was great to be here.