Jason Feifer
Appearances
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
Thank you for the dual book plug. Yeah, Jen and I wrote a book together. And that was a great project. But we also didn't then immediately start merging all of our work things. In fact, we use each other pretty intentionally in each other's work. For example, my newsletter, I have found that Jen is a great last sounding board before that thing goes out.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
So I send my newsletter out Tuesday mornings. Monday night, I read the newsletter to her. And after that, I fussed with it all week. And now I just want her to hear it and to call out anything that doesn't work. And fortunately, she hasn't heard it and been like, this thing is terrible. You should throw it away because then I wouldn't have anything on Monday night.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
But I really like that as a process. The newsletter is mine, but we share this part of it together, which is this check-in just before it goes out. I think that if you have a partner who you have some professional entanglement with, it makes it often more fun. There's more things to talk about and to do together. But you just have to know whose is what's, if that makes sense. What is whose?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
Stick around. Help Wanted will be right back.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
Welcome back to Help Wanted. Let's get to it.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
Oh, my God. Would you call him and ask him? Nicole, if you would. If you would call him and ask him, I got some questions for him. Did you think about saying something? And then also, if Nicole noticed and just wrote you and gave you what is the actual explanation, which is, okay, so just to be clear, I don't actually call him daddy.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
It was like a joke and it was from the TV show and the whole thing. Is that worse than Does that look like you're making up a story? How do you clean this up? I guess is the question. That's what I really want to know. How do you clean this up? And what is Ryan thinking? Can we call Ryan? Okay, let's call Ryan. Do you hear a hear?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
So number one, we are so glad to hear from you right now. Number two, we're going to tell you something. It's not going to be embarrassing for you. It is going to be embarrassing for Nicole.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
Ryan, I have a simple question for you. Ready? When Nicole sent you an email and introduced you to Jared, did you notice anything funny in that email?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
Well, because when Nicole noticed it, she was mortified. And then she sent me and Morgan a voice memo about it in which she could barely breathe. It was possibly the greatest couple minutes of audio I've ever heard. And our first question is, what did you think? And our second question is, what did you do next?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
The PSA, Ryan, is that Nicole had absolutely no idea that the way you list someone in their phone is how they show up in the email. That was not a thing she knew until she sent this email.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
Oh, I didn't sign up for that. All right. Well, talk to you soon.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
This is Help Wanted, the show that makes your work work for you. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
And on Thursdays, I give you one way to improve your work and build a career or company you love.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
Are you going to be able to keep it together for this one?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
So, Nicole, we have a real topic to discuss today. But before we get there, we got a real story we got to hear. I'm not going to give anything away about this story of yours. Uh-huh. But I will just tell you that I received this voice memo, which you sent to Morgan and I. We were about to play it. I happened to be sitting in a very drab airport eating a awful airport stromboli.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
And I nearly spat that thing out. Can we just play this?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
All right, we're back. How do you feel about that being heard by everybody? I...
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
Right. The mistake is telling your friends who you make a podcast with about anything that happens that's embarrassing because it immediately will go in the podcast. All right. You sent me a screenshot of what this email looked like because I couldn't quite picture it.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
Yeah, I did not know that either. This is a public service announcement for anyone who doesn't know that. So just to be clear, here's the screenshot you sent me. Imagine looking at an email, right, everyone? So first it says the subject line, which in this case is a very boring thing that says, re colon brand lift and case study.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
Yeah, it's like preparing for a big presentation and just absolutely nailing it. And then you get off stage and someone was like, there is toilet paper attached. Yeah, that's a good one.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
I could just marinate in the absurdity of this all day. But to try to make an actual purpose of this outside of just that I wanted to share it with our listeners, what's the big idea here? The big idea here is that mixing personal and business relationships, particularly romantic and business relationships, can be complicated. Because why? I mean, you tell me, because you've had to navigate...
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
this a number of times given the number of very professional and personal connections you've made through your dating life. So what's the balance? What's the thing that you have to walk?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
I have to say that feels like a really compelling question that I relate to. Can this just be my thing? Because when you have a partner who you share a lot with, including professional interests and ambitions, then there are going to be these overlaps. And some of those overlaps are great.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
But also, I think many people, as they get deeper into a relationship, they start to ask themselves, what's still just mine? What's mine and not ours? And that's been a very important part of my relationship with Jen, my wife, is we have our own things and then we have our things together. But we also do somewhat similar work in that we're both in media.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
And so there are a lot of times where things just overlap. And what's interesting is that sometimes they overlap in a way that forces a reduction of something. I'll give you a tiny example. We have a friend named Andy. Andy's a very successful writer. And we've been meaning for Andy and her girlfriend to come over and catch up with Jen and I who haven't seen for a long time.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
But at the same time, also, Andy and I had a whole bunch of work things we wanted to talk about, like newsletter strategy and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I realized, you know, if Andy and her girlfriend come over, we're not going to talk business. And I actually kind of want to. And I want to talk about stuff that like Jen's not that interested in, which is like newsletter strategy.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
So we decided to create two plans. There was week one, Andy and Julia came over and we had dinner and we talked about the things all four of us are interested in. And then literally the next week, just Andy and I got together and we talked newsletter strategy and other stuff. And that felt like a really good way to do it because- It's intentional. Yeah, it's intentional.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
You get these intersections and one doesn't subtract the other, right? It's not like Andy and I couldn't continue to develop the kind of worky relationship that we would have because it doesn't fit into the relationship that I would share with my wife. And so doing both felt really good and useful. And I think that that's where I want to make sure I'm always living in.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
I want to share as much as we can, but I also want to make sure I'm being mindful of how some things, even things I might share, can still just be mine.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
I love that. Tell me about the area that you're in and what you think is possible that would achieve that sentence that you just said.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
I totally get that, but let's challenge that for a second because I think it's important. Of the jobs available where you are, how many of them are government?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
I'm asking that because it's just like, what are the realistic expectations here? Because if where you are right now is tied to government and the forestry thing is tied to government, maybe that's something that you have to just accept and then say, you know what?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Even though government is a very slow-moving organism, I'm going to figure out how to do my best work inside of it because it is the work that's available. And also, frankly, you know, look...
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
libertarian or not everyone can agree like we're better when we have a government full of people who want to do good work right so that would be you if you so choose right and then i guess i was thinking maybe of learning a skill trade like iron working there's a lot of jobs that are
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
But wait, you just said the goal of having my own farm. Is everything that you're doing leading to that? Because you're telling me contradictory things, and I get it because this question of yours is tied up in so many other things. It's tied up in your past, in your present, in your future.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
but I just want to point out to you the contradictions of one telling me you'd be open to reskilling as an iron worker. And then also my goal is to have my own farm. You're probably not going to have your own farm as an iron worker. Maybe you can, but that would be a unique farm. So Pick these things apart for me. What is the most important? What's not? Is having your own farm a fixed thing?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
That's what we're working towards? Or is that just an idea, one of many?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Stick around, Help Wanted will be right back.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Welcome back to Help Wanted. Let's get to it. Okay, it feels like the foundational decision that needs to be made before anything else is... Do you quit farming or anything like farming? Do you quit being the kind of person who utilizes the skills that you have developed to work on a farm or anything that resembles farming? Is that the first question that you need to face?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
where my focus is you know but you don't just want to work outside is the thing because I call you back to autonomy feeling challenged feeling fully utilized and finding meaning at work right because I'm already working outside yeah so obviously that's not it yeah yeah So that's not it.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
And spending years and years or whatever it takes to master ironworking and then working on buildings in the city, I mean, that doesn't sound to me at all like it's going to fulfill these really core things that you laid out before. If you're working with an ironworking team on a building, you don't have a whole lot of autonomy. You can't change the structure of the building.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
You're probably not even going to feel all that challenge, to be honest with you, because once you reach a certain level of mastery, you're going to be repeating that skill instead of constantly reinventing something. You may feel fully utilized, or you may not, because what would be nagging at you is going to be all this time that you spent learning farming that is not being utilized at all.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
And you may or may not find meaning. Or you may tell me that in the way that working for the government bothers you, that also just building this next bank building is also not going to be incredibly meaningful for you. I think that it's helpful to pick some things that you can stay with for a little bit.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
and then figure out if there's a way to achieve greater happiness inside of them before saying, and I think it's great that you are willing to say, I'm open to anything. But the problem with saying that I'm open to anything is that you're giving yourself infinite directions to go in, which means that you're not going to do any of them. So let's narrow. So the reason why I asked you
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Is it time to quit farming? Which I know quit is a very, is like a harsh word there, but was because I wanted to see like what you're willing to utilize as the starting point of a series of decisions. And your answer was you're willing to consider leaving it.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Right. Okay. That's interesting. But What you didn't say is, yes, I have to. So let's start with this. I'm not telling you what to do, but for the purposes of the thought experiment, you will stay in farming unless it turns out to be a really bad decision. You will stay. Next, you want to do something with this skill set that you have in the geographic area that you live in.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Next, what are those jobs? And we need to start looking at those. The forestry one is great. You're talking to them about that. You've identified something that you might not like about it, but there are going to be other things that you do. And maybe you could take that job and autonomy goes up to seven and fully utilized goes from a four to five to a six or seven. And that's progress.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
So tell me now that I have made some decisions for you, which you can dispose of at any time, but tell me other things that you could do that you haven't done yet or people to talk to that you haven't talked to yet.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
You need to start experimenting. And I would start with... what feel like pretty reasoned experiments, like incremental experiments, right? Testing out the watercress farm, which also is not a thing I've ever heard of, is a much smaller experiment than reskilling as an iron worker. And the reason I'm using the word experiment is because experimentation is a liberating concept, or it should be.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Because one of the great things that drives analysis paralysis that you've been experiencing as you're sitting here looking down infinite highways in infinite directions is is that every decision that you're considering feels like some kind of large commitment, or it feels like a major shift, or it feels like it's going to set your path in some totally different direction.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Because you don't know which one to commit to, you feel like you don't know which direction to go in at all. So what happens if you just treat it like an experiment? What experiments can you run that don't require years of new work, To see if you can find situations that move you a little closer to that goal. And maybe taking a forestry job and saying, you know what?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
I'm going to give this six months. I'm going to see if I feel better about it. Maybe even... Set a goal and see if in six months you have achieved it. Here could be a goal. I've given you these four things that you want. Autonomy, feeling challenged, feeling fully utilized, and finding meaning. And you have given numbers to these things for your current situation.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Take the forestry job six months later, fill out that chart, one to 10. Did everything move up at least one or two notches? If so, I would say good experiment, right? Like good experiment. If they moved down two notches, then the experiment was a failure and it's time to do something else. But maybe that was progress.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
And maybe that means that you stay in forestry for another six months or whatever. Or maybe it means that, you know, it's time to go try the watercress farm or whatever, right? But...
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
I think that once you have some sense of exactly what you're working towards and a way to measure it in some way, then making changes that don't feel crazy but feel logical are really just going to start to expand your understanding of what you want and the many different ways you can get it.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Yeah. Or you change one factor. The problem that you have, I think, after hearing you for a while is that you have conceptually at least opened yourself up to changing every single factor in your life. And as a result, everything seems crazy. It's like impossible to figure out what to do.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
And if you think about trying to fix a computer, which I know very little about trying to fix a computer, and you probably do too, considering your line of work. But one thing that we can imagine here is that if you want to try to fix a computer, what you don't do is get your hands in and just change every damn thing every single time and see what happens. No, you change one thing at a time, right?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
You're like, is it plugged in? Yeah. Yes, it's plugged in. Okay, let's try the next thing. The next thing is, is it on? Okay, let's try that. Now the next thing, right? You do one thing at a time. And I would say that right now, it's really useful to say, okay, here are the things that are fixed.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
What's fixed is that I'm staying in the industry that I'm in and that I'm staying in the geography that I'm in. So the next thing is, what is the variable? The variable can be where I work. All right, so let's try that. And let's say that you go around and you try a couple of those and it's not quite solving the problem for you. Let's pick changing one other variable.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
What is the next variable to change? The next variable to change maybe is where I live. Maybe it's you've tapped out everything in that area and it's time to try farming somewhere else. Or maybe it's, I'm going to stay here and the variable that's going to change is the industry that I'm in.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
But like one thing at a time, because when you start changing every variable, you give yourself too many options. And there's a study I love. The study is this. These students from some university, I can't remember, you know, they're working with some professor. They set up a stand inside of a supermarket. And they pose as people who work for a jelly company. And they are doing samples.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
You know, you walk into a supermarket, you see somebody's giving out samples at a table. And they're sampling jellies. Every hour, they change the number of options of the jellies. They go back and forth between like four jellies on the table and 20 jellies on the table, right? So it's like one hour, there's four jellies that people can sample.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
The next hour, there's 20 jellies, and then they go back to four, and they go back to 20. And the result of this is fascinating. The result of this is that when there are more jellies on the table, more people come by and sample. But when there are fewer jellies on the table, more people buy. And I think you are putting too many jellies on your table.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Right, exactly. So... Thank you for rolling with my metaphor here. So right. So it's like you need fewer jellies. Who doesn't? There's not enough jelly metaphors in the day. So you need fewer jellies. And I think that we are just for the purposes of like thinking about what's next, we are taking some things off the table. Doesn't mean that they can't come back on the table at some point.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
But for right now, you got to figure out the singular change that you're going to make. And it means reducing choice. And once you've done that, I think you will see some other options that are worth taking seriously or considering, and you should try them, and you will learn something. And whatever that something is will leave you more informed about what's next than you are now.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Great. All right, so... At the very beginning, I asked you, what do you want in a single sentence? And your answer was, I want work to be as fulfilling as other parts of my life. And that's, I'm sure, still true. But after thinking about what you're going to try to do next, what's another answer to that question?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Yeah. I love that. And that's what I was hoping you would do, which is basically go from... At the beginning, you were like... Your answer was actually pretty passive, right? You're like, here are the things that work, and then there's a part that doesn't work. And now your answer is, here's what I'm going to do to try to make this part work. It's more active. Yeah.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
And that, I think, is a good start.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Help Wanted is a production of Money News Network. Help Wanted is hosted by me, Jason Pfeiffer.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Oh, I didn't sign up for that.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
This is Help Wanted, the show that tackles all the big work questions you cannot ask anyone else. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
The helpline is open. So feeling unfulfilled at work sucks because you don't even know where the problem is or how to fix it. And suddenly you start thinking, maybe I just have to throw everything away. Maybe my whole life has to change. And that is probably what drove this seven minute long voice memo that we got from a listener who is in this exact spot. You can hear it for yourself.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
We will not play all seven minutes for you, but here is just a sampling.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
You can hear it there, right? It's the panic. It's the analysis paralysis. It is the, I need to do something. So maybe I just do everything. So I invited her on the show to help her choose a path forward. Here's how it went. Melissa, welcome to Help Wanted.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
So you sent in a lot of thoughts in a lot of different directions, and we will unpack them in a bit. But I feel like it would be helpful to have some context on you. But even before that, I want to ask you something now, and then I'm going to ask it to you at the end of this conversation. And we're going to see if the answer changes. So ready? It's this.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
In your voice memo, you said a lot of things that you want. But if I forced you to answer the question, what do you want in a single sentence? What is the answer?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
That's a great answer. I love that. What are you doing right now?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
The way that you answered the question a moment ago was that you wanted work to be as fulfilling as the other parts of your life. So tell me about those more fulfilling other parts of your life.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
So wait, but why is work, which also sounds like it's very outdoorsy and work in the land and all that stuff. Like, why is that not as fulfilling as what you just described?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Right. So if I can break that answer down into a couple component parts, it's like one of the things that you really want is autonomy.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
And then another thing that you really want is to feel like you are fully utilized.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
If you just took your answer and broke it up into concept parts, what else is there?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Now, let's just use these three component parts, autonomy, feeling fully utilized, and having meaning in the work that you're doing. On a scale from one to 10 for each of these, how would you say they rank with your current work situation? So like autonomy, scale from one to 10, what do you get?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
That's pretty interesting because it depends on like you've just defined autonomy for yourself because some people would just be very happy with being left alone. But what you want is actual influence. You want autonomy to shape an organization, not just to be left alone inside of an organization, right?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Yeah. And that overlaps with the next one, which is feeling fully utilized because they're utilizing some skills of yours, but there's a lot that isn't being utilized. So what would you say, scale of one to 10, how much are you as a whole talented person with a body of knowledge being utilized?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
And then meaning sounds pretty low.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
The reason I wanted to do that was because I have a theory of work and change called the 1% problem. And the 1% problem is that sometimes we're like 99% there towards what we want. And then there's 1% that's missing. And that 1% nags us so much that it feels like the entire thing is actually broken. It's a kind of princess and the pea problem. And...
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
I wanted to put this to you, and this might not apply to you at all, but I'm voicing it so that you think about it, which is like, is this situation, it's not good for you. It's not perfect. You shouldn't stay there forever or maybe even much longer. But I'm curious about when you step back and you look at all the things that it does provide you, and then whether or not
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
There's a way to leverage what you're doing there or the connections that you've made there to fill in like the 1%. Like, do you need to hit reset and try some totally different random thing? Or is a lot of the structure of this environment actually working? It's just that it's the wrong farm. It's the wrong challenges. It's the wrong people. but it's like almost there?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Or do you need to say, you know what, screw it. I just cannot work on somebody else's farm. This is a hundred percent problem. And I like have to start my own thing. It's the only way in which I will have these things.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
As you're talking, there's an interesting little ecosystem of challenges that you're grappling with. And one of the big ones that I think we need to address before we address anything else is what in your world actually needs to stay the same? Because you just told me, for example, that you don't want to move again, which is fine. Moving sucks.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
And you have found, like when I asked you the things in your life that are going really well, the thing that you described was your living situation. You really love it. And so giving that up would be a huge bummer. But, you know, you have to know in any situation, like what is fixed and what is variable.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Because that's going to impact not just the next decisions, but also maybe how you come to think about those next decisions. So is that fixed? Should we proceed and should you proceed as you're thinking about what's next with that your living situation or at least where you are is a fixed thing? We're not going to change that or is that changeable?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
And the things that you want in your work are that you're going to want some autonomy, you're going to want to feel challenged, fully utilized, although you're saying you are up for some reskilling, so that could be a kind of different utilization, and you want to find some meaning. Can you go through a little exercise with me, which is, can you come up with a sentence.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
It starts with I, and it should be really short. And every word in the sentence should be carefully chosen because it is not subject to change, but that this describes the thing that you want to be, or the thing that is your mission statement of sorts. I'll give you an example from me. So throughout my career, I have been a magazine editor. I've been a newspaper reporter, podcaster.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
But I have found that the challenge with creating identities around any of those descriptions is that all that stuff is really changeable. You know, like I could get fired from a magazine and then I am not a magazine editor. And so if my identity is I'm a magazine editor, then I don't know what to do. So I came up with this sentence for myself. And the sentence is, I tell stories in my own voice.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
And the reason I like that is because stories gives me incredibly broad latitude. It's anything. What is the thing for you? What is the mission statement? The sentence that starts with I, that has words that are really specific about you, but also aren't easily changeable.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Exactly what I had in front of me. Okay, perfect. This is why we work well together. Okay, yes. So that's exactly correct. Let me just read this to you. And for context, my newsletter, for those who haven't read it, my newsletter is about a thousand words. And it's usually broken up into three or four sections.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Sections are just, you know, it's like a big header that makes it a little easier for you to feel like you know where you are in the newsletter. And so this is the beginning. This is what I think of as the opener for a newsletter that I just published. The headline was How to Prevent Miscommunications. And here's how it starts. You're being misunderstood today.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
You shared a great idea or made something wonderful or told someone something and they are confused, unimpressed, maybe even annoyed. Now you're upset. Why don't they just understand? But here's the problem. You started in the wrong place. I fall victim to this all the time, including here in this newsletter.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
So today I'll share some of my own stumbles and a powerful two-step exercise that will make your intentions and ideas clearer so everyone understands you. So that's the opening. And then it goes on, the thing that you see underneath that is the first header for the first section, and the header says, first, my own mistakes, and then I tell a little story about how I screwed up.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
So, okay, now we've established that. Questions?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Yeah. Okay. A couple of things. Number one, as a young writer, I loved stem winders. I loved the idea of like starting in some random place and building with some narrative and eventually getting to the point. I thought that was really fun. And as a consumer, I sometimes do enjoy that style if someone's really, really good at it.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
The only person right now who I can think of that's really good at it is the host of this podcast called 60 Songs That Explain the 90s Colon the 2000s, which you must listen to. It's fantastic. And it always it takes for like it takes like 20 minutes to get to the point of the podcast. He's such a good storyteller that it works. But generally speaking.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
It's a terrible, terrible way to open something. And the reason for that is because people are very busy. And especially if you are serving any kind of business audience, those people are really utility oriented. They want to know what they're going to get from this because they have very limited time and they have too much coming at them all at once.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
And the only things that will survive are the ones that are clear in value. I have this concept that I wrote about in a previous newsletter, which I call the first question. The first question is the first question that anybody asks about anything. And that question is, is this for me or is this not for me? They're always asking that. I mean, think about it. You are asking that.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Every time you encounter anything in the first couple seconds of this episode of this podcast, you were like, is this for me or is this not for me? And then, you know, Morgan said something that answered yes. And that's why you're this far into this episode. But, you know, could it could have gone the other way? People might have been like, I don't care about newsletters. And then they're out.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
So when somebody opens my newsletter, the first thing I want to do is identify why this is for you, which is why I open by stating the problem, which in this case is you're being misunderstood. Now, you don't have to do it exactly like that, but I do think that it's really important to be as straightforward as possible so that people appreciate value. You had asked about structure.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
I do it for a couple of reasons. Number one, I do it because I want the newsletter to be an easy read. I don't want anyone to ever feel lost in it. I know that a lot of people are reading it on their phone while they're on the go or on the toilet or who knows, you know, there's a lot of distractions. So like the format is basically this, it opens like that.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Then it steps back and it tells some kind of story. Sometimes it's about an entrepreneur. Sometimes it's about me. Sometimes it's some, some interesting psychological study. And then it applies that story to you. and your problem, and then it gives you some kind of exercise, a couple questions to ask, something to do, and then it just kind of takes it home with a big idea thought.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
I repeat that every single time. It's because the world is full of so much noise that you have to create signal for people. And you do that by being repetitive, but useful. And so I created a structure that was useful for my reader, but also very useful for me.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
I know now every single time, once I have an idea for what the newsletter is, I basically just need two things, three things, I need three things. I need to know what problem am I solving. I need to know what compelling story or anecdote illustrates it. I need to know what the exercise is. And once I have that, I can sit down and I can write the newsletter.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
This newsletter now only takes me, I mean, people email me and they're like, you must work on this all week. No, the answer is it takes me about an hour and a half to write the newsletter. And then I like futz with it and polish it. My wife reads it and gives me feedback. But like the actual writing of it is like an hour and a half.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
And that's because I have set this formula up and therefore I know exactly what I'm doing and I know what I need to do. And that makes writing so much easier.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Oh, yeah. How do you even describe that? Well, Matt has a deep background in building companies, mostly digital companies. He was the CEO of Smart Passive Income. Now he's building a whole bunch of different companies, some of which I'm involved in. He's just one of those guys that builds a lot of things and knows everybody.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Oh, yeah. Yeah. That you know what? That was funny. I think that's a great prompt for a dinnertime conversation. I have all sorts of answers like, you know, this thing that you've like wanted to do forever, but you haven't done. But I've actually tried that in a couple of spaces. And most times people don't have an answer to that. But you did.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Okay. So the mission statement exercise is a way to feel grounded in a time of constant change. So many of the things that you do or that you identify with or that you think you're good at are things that are very easily changeable. And so it's helpful to anchor yourself into something that won't change, to find the thing that does not change in times of change. And so
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Anyway, what I tell people to do is to come up with a single sentence that starts with I, and then every word is carefully selected so that it is not anchored to something that's easily changeable. The example that I always give is it's the difference between me saying I am a magazine editor, which is very easily changeable.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
All it takes is one phone call from my boss at Entrepreneur Magazine saying you're fired, and then I'm not a magazine editor. So very easily changeable. Two, I tell stories in my own voice, which is not changeable. Stories can happen in any format, in any medium. In my own voice is me setting the terms for how I want to operate at this stage of my career. So for you, it could be,
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
I solve the most complex problems. I help teams achieve greatness. Whatever it is, once you have that clarity, you realize that anything that changes in your work or life is just a new opportunity to do the thing that you already do best.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Yeah, okay. Global warming, that's a problem.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Things that people are just not going to do.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
There are parts of it I like. There are parts of it I don't like.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
What I like is that you have a point of view. and that you are approaching it in a way that feels relatable and useful to an audience. I think that's great. I like that you have identified that you have a specific approach that differentiates you in a market. What I don't like is how complicated it is.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Because I don't think that you can actually sustain doing a different kind of experiment on yourself every week in a weekly newsletter. I think you will burn yourself out instantly on that. It's too much work. I think you need to find ways to produce a newsletter that really don't take you that much time. Because putting together news, look, consider the experience of a newsletter for people.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
It's pretty short. People are going to open it. They're going to read it once. They're going to likely delete it. Some people tell me that they save my newsletters, and that's cool. But it's a pretty... It's like an experience in aggregate. It's about building a long-term relationship with people.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
So each newsletter should be good, but you shouldn't pour a full week's worth of personal experimentation effort into each newsletter. You will run out of topics too quickly, and you will burn yourself out. I'll give you an example of something that is... much smaller in scale, but takes this same sort of approach of distilling academic information to something that's useful.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
There's a guy I know named Thomas who has a newsletter called Science Says. And it's very simple. Each week, he finds some academic paper on marketing where they're studying like You know, if you put the price above or below the product in an advertisement, which drives sales more? But these things are buried inside of complicated academic papers. And so he makes it simple. He just...
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
brings out the biggest, most important piece of information, quickly summarizes the main points of the study, gives you some actionable takeaway. I find it very useful. It's a great distillation of insights that are otherwise trapped inside of academic journals, and it's great for marketers, which I'm interested in. I feel like you could probably do a version of that.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
There's got to be all sorts of interesting science out there about the climate that could be made useful for people without... consuming a full week's worth of your time. And also, look, you also, one other thing, you have to, especially when you're starting a newsletter, you have to guard yourself against the dispiriting experience of not that newsletters are hard to grow.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
And if you get like a, you know, if you get a 40% open rate, you are killing it. So you're not going to reach that. You're not reaching that many people. And so if you spent like a full week, not eating meat and like chronicling everything and putting together this like loving thing, and then very beginning, like a hundred people read it, you're going to be like, screw this. I hate this. Right.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
So you've got to do something that's just lighter for you and lighter for your audience. But I like the starting point that you have. And I think that there's a lot to build from there.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
I can because I've spent a lot of time thinking about it. Each week, the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, which is me, gives you one way to be more successful and satisfied and build a career or company that you love.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Yeah. So my newsletter has gone through three phases. And then I have spent a lot of time iterating inside of each of those phases. So let me give you the quick rundown. The newsletter began as The Pfeiffer Five, which is a terrible name.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Yes, that is before your time. That was a terrible name. And the idea was simply that each month I would send out five things that I found useful. And it was called the five for five because my last name is Pfeiffer and there were five things. Terrible, absolutely terrible. Because it didn't communicate anything about anything.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
It set absolutely no expectations for why you should sign up for this thing. And then the cadence at monthly, you forgot that you even subscribed to it by the time the next one showed up. Then it became Build for Tomorrow, which was the name of my book and I thought would also be the name of my newsletter. And the book is about change.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
And so I thought I would make the newsletter about change, how to navigate change, how to thrive in times of change. But I found that to be too abstract, too difficult to write to. And also, you know, change is like a thing people deal with, but it isn't a thing that people wake up in the morning saying, I need to read about, you know? Mm-hmm.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
So then I rebranded it as One Thing Better, which is what it is now. And my thinking behind it was people get too many newsletters and they get too much information inside of those newsletters. It is a deluge inside of a deluge. And... I know that if you give people 10 things to do, they'll do zero of them. Instead, why don't I orient this newsletter around a promise?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
That promise is that every time you read this, it will be simple. It will be straightforward. It will be one thing that you can do. It feels very manageable. I was dealing with the problem of I speak to a broad audience. I think that newsletters actually have an advantage if they speak to a very specific audience. I speak to a broad audience. So that was my way of approaching it.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
And then how did I get to that line? Each week, one way to be more successful and satisfied and build a career or company you love. Honestly, the answer was... that I kept changing the words in it in response to things that people would be most responsive to in the newsletter. I eventually found that people like the idea of success.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Newsletters that were in some way or another about finding satisfaction, finding happiness, finding calm, seemed to really resonate. I still always... have the impulse to change this language.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
But I think the best thing that you can do is put something out in the world, see how people respond to it, try to identify the language that they use to describe why you are valuable to them and start using that language back to them.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Okay, so my answer is pretty hyper-specific to me, but I think inside of this answer is something that's really useful to everybody, so let me just tell you what it was. The Build for Tomorrow version of this newsletter, so that was the second iteration of the newsletter, coincided with me getting this incredibly sweet deal from Facebook, which I dragged Nicole into as well.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
So Nicole got this sweet deal from Facebook too. So the sweet deal from Facebook was that they were launching a competitor to Substack. For those who don't know, Substack is like the leading... free newsletter tool that you're supposed to monetize with subscriptions. So in other words, you don't have to pay to use Substack. You do have to pay to use some other tools like Kit or Beehive.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
These things have a cost associated with using the product. Substack is totally free to use. They hope that you will create a paid version of your newsletter and then they'll take a cut. And they had been... To launch, Substack had been paying creators to use the product.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
So they would find some popular blogger or something, and they'd be like, hey, we will pay you $200,000 a year to put your newsletter on Substack. So when Facebook was creating a competitor to Substack... which was called Bulletin, they started calling people like me and basically making that same offer. They were like, we will pay you gobs of money to just use this product.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
And that was pretty good. They were offering a lot of money. So I said, yes. And then I said, oh, you should talk to my friend, Nicole. I bet she would like your money too. And so that's how that happened. So I took this deal and I rebranded my newsletters, Built for Tomorrow, and I started getting paid by Facebook. And a couple of really interesting things happened. Number one was...
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
The way to grow on Facebook at that time was to write a newsletter that could be promoted inside of Facebook News, which barely exists anymore if it does at all. But back then, Facebook's attempt at being something of a news aggregator. And so they would surface your newsletters inside Facebook News. So that created this incentive to write newsletters that would show up in Facebook News.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
which were very different from the kinds of newsletters that were really good to readers as they showed up in inboxes, right? Like I had a different audience in mind. I was writing differently. And so my newsletter would grow only when it showed up in Facebook news.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
And when Facebook eventually killed that product and I was out in the cold with nothing but my money jacket from Mark Zuckerberg, I started to think, what works about this newsletter? And I realized that the only time in which I got any feedback or I heard from audiences or I saw any growth in this newsletter was when it showed up in Facebook News. Otherwise, nothing was happening.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
And the reason I tell you this story, the reason I think this is relevant to you, even if you don't get a bunch of zuck bucks, is because you have to have the right incentives in order to build something for your audience. So you need to be out there in the cold. You need to be able to see and feel what people respond to and what they don't respond to.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
You need to live or die by whether or not people really genuinely like and care about and want to read and share the thing that you make. And if you are not seeing that, no amount of... like paid growth or partnerships or whatever can get you to escape the death spiral that that will be. So I really liked actually getting kicked out of this Facebook thing and having to figure it out on my own.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
And what I realized was I was not being something that people were excited about. and the newsletter was not growing organically by itself. And I stepped back and I thought about why. And I thought, if I subscribed to this newsletter, I would not know what in the hell it was. Just like day in, day out, this newsletter shows up. I don't know what this is. I don't know why I'm getting it.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
I believe, Morgan, we do a good job of this on the podcast that we make, but I don't know how explicitly we ever think about this. So here's a formula for media that that you inherently know, but that you need to apply to your newsletter and that everyone should apply to everything that they make.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
The formula for media, whether you are just thinking about this for your own Instagram channel or a newsletter that you make or anything, the formula for media is the right combination of predictability and surprise. That's it. So predictability, it has to reliably deliver upon something that people want and they know how it adds value to their lives. Surprise.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
They don't know what you're going to say next. If you get that balance wrong, if you are too predictable and therefore too boring, or if you're too surprising and it's just like every week a newsletter shows up and it's like, what is this? Why are you writing about that now? That's bad. People will tune out. I needed to figure out what can I do that really lives in that.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
I need to establish a promise. I need to pay off on that promise reliably, but I need to do it differently and surprisingly each time. That is what took me away from the old formula and forced me to come up with something that would actually resonate.