Embracing Change To Build A Better Business With Jason Feifer

Chris Ronzio (02:24)

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Organized Chaos. I'm your host, Chris Ronzio, and today we've got with us Jason Feifer. Hey, Jason.

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Jason Feifer (02:27):

Hey.

Chris Ronzio (02:28):

Good to see you again.

Jason Feifer (02:30):

Thank you. Good to be here. Appreciate you reaching out.

Chris Ronzio (02:33):

Yeah. We had the honor of hosting you at Trainual's event Playbook in 2020, it was the end of 2020. At that time, you were starting to work on the book, but new this week, your book Build for Tomorrow is finally hitting bookshelves and available for people to get. We're going to dig into that, but I want to take us back to end of 2020. You were in a room working remotely. You had shut down your office. There was a big bear photo behind you and people were commenting on the pillow colors and all that. So what's your remote situation these days or your working situation?

Jason Feifer (03:08):

What you were describing was me being in Boulder. I uprooted, as so many people did, uprooted my life. At the very beginning of the pandemic, my wife and I and our two little boys went from Brooklyn, where we live, to Boulder, Colorado. We moved in with my parents. We were there for 18 months, much longer than we expected, and it was a real... I'm hesitating on whether to call it a full life changing experience, but it illuminated things about me and what I want that I did not expect, as I think this pandemic has done for so many people. Anyway, we eventually left 18 months later and we came back to Brooklyn, so I am now talking to you in a much smaller space than there was in Boulder. There's a noisy street just outside, but life, I don't know... Life, you follow it where it leads you.

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What We Can Learn From The Bubonic Plague

Chris Ronzio (04:11):

Well, that's great. Glad you're back in New York. I am in the same exact room that we did the last interview, so some things don't change. But we're going to talk a lot about change today. I know one of the stories you told last time, which not everyone listening to this was at that event, so you talked about the bubonic plague and how something like that has influenced the modern economy, and it really set the stage for change. I know that that appears in your book too, so can you share that story to just kind of set up this conversation?

Jason Feifer (04:41):

Yeah. This is something that I like to open talks with because it was so mind-blowing to me. At the very beginning of the pandemic, like March, April 2020, I got to wondering, did anything good come out of the worst version of what we're about to go through? We didn't know in March or April 2020 what we were in for, at all. What kind of disruption is this going to be? How safe are we? I just thought, just to get a sense for what we're in for here, let me talk to somebody who knows about the worst version of this. So anyway, I called this guy Andrew Rabin, who's a medieval scholar at the University of Louisville. And I said, "Andrew, did anything good come out of the bubonic plague? You know, 1300s, killed upwards of 60% of Europe, anything good come out of that?"

He said, "Yes, actually, a number of really great things came out of it, but one of them was this." So, take you back to grade school. The medieval economy was a lord and serf system, which is to say that the lords owned the land and they owned the serfs. The serfs worked the land for no pay, with slavery. We're talking about a slavery. Then the bubonic plague comes along and it kills upwards of 60% of Europe, rich, poor, does not matter. At the end of the worst of it, the lords go back to the serfs and they're like, "Well, it's time to get to work, right? Let's get back to making some money here." But something has changed. What has changed is that there are no longer enough serfs for all the lords, which means the lords are now competing against each other for the serfs.

They're saying, "Come work for me. No, no, no, come work for me. No, I will give you this, I guess. No, I will give you that." Out of this is born the very, very beginnings of the employment contract, as we know it, the idea that labor has a value and that the people who do that work should be compensated for it. The thing that is bringing you and me, Chris, together right now and drives people to listen to this podcast comes out of the bubonic plague. That is such a powerful reminder, I think, that through all moments of change, big or small, we will reach what we can call a "wouldn't go back" moment, a moment in which we have something that is so valuable that we say, "I would not want to go back to a time before I had this."

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Not to say that anybody wants 60% of Europe to be killed in a bubonic plague. No, we do not, but seeing as it happened, the outcome was beneficial. That I think is the thing that we all need to be looking for, and I think it's valuable to remember that these things come out of difficult, challenging, disorienting moments, and that there is a way to look at them and say, hard as this may be, it is also a reordering of things. It is a pushing outside of boundaries. It is a prompt to think differently and perhaps better about the things that we do and find ways to grow our lives and our businesses.

Chris Ronzio (08:01):

Yeah, so when we talked about this last time, it was about 18 months ago and we kind of left it with this open-ended, "Well, we'll see what happens. It's 2020. We'll see what comes out of it." So over the last 18 months or so, what has come out of it? What trends are you seeing that have emerged from this thing that we were thrust into?

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Redefining What's Possible

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Jason Feifer (08:21):

The most powerful thing that I feel like I saw was a reconsidering of the impossible. This to me is what defines the great phase that so many people moved into, in which... I had watched all these businesses and all these entrepreneurs change the way that they work, to change who they serve, change how they served them, really rethink what they were doing. I wondered, "What is it about a moment like this, that it is enabling that?" One of the people I talked to was this guy whose name is Brian Berkey. He's a legal studies and business ethics professor at Wharton. I always want to call it the University of Wharton. That's not what it is at all. Wharton. "What is it about these kinds of moments that enable this kind of change?" And he said, "Moments of disruption shift the window on what we are willing to collectively take seriously," which is a very academic way of saying we all build, and it's so natural that we do it. We build these boundaries around ourselves.

We build this filter and we let what we think the good ideas are through. We surround ourselves with the good ideas. Then we say, "All the bad ideas, the impossible ideas, the too difficult ideas, those are over there. Those are outside, not interested in those ideas. They're terrible. They're stupid. They're harmful. They're going to waste my time." Again, we've got to do this. Chris, you're a busy guy. You don't have time to engage with literally every possible idea that comes your way. It's not possible. There's too many things to do, so we have to build these filters. But the problem is that they are very imperfect systems. We will leave great ideas outside the boundaries. We will filter out fantastic ideas and we will not realize it and we will not really find the incentive to go searching for them.

What's the incentive to disrupting something that works and going to find something that we thought didn't work? That doesn't make any sense. But then a moment of great change comes along. In this case, it was a pandemic, but it could be anything, and it forces us, as Brian said, to shift the window what we're willing to collectively take seriously, or what I've just called reconsider the impossible. We say, "Well, these things that are now inside of our box, they don't work anymore. We've got to look outside." And we find that some of the greatest ideas, the most transformative ideas were not, boom, the product of supernatural forces. They were not beamed down from Mars. They were just there, and we had discarded them. We had said that they wouldn't work. Now, in fact, they're exactly what we need.

So this is what I saw. This is the end of the story, to me. The end of the story is that this was a moment of disruption. People did not know what to do. They panicked, as they should have, and then they slowly adapted, they built a new normal, and then they discovered that some of the greatest opportunities were here all along, but they were not looking at them, and then they seized them, and they, I hope, will learn from this moment that this is the thing we need to be constantly doing. That we don't need a pandemic to force us to reconsider the impossible, that we don't need a moment of massive disruption to say, "You know what? What am I missing? What am I leaving out?" That we could be doing this all the time, and I hope that we do.

Chris Ronzio (12:03):

In some ways, one of the massive changes that's happened over the last couple years is people reconsidering where they work and shifting jobs a lot more frequently. It almost relates back to that idea in the bubonic plague in Europe and where there's not enough people to go around and they can start to have, instead of employment contracts or wages for the first time, a lot more choice than they ever did to pick the right environment. Are you seeing more similarities that you didn't expect from that story?

Jason Feifer (12:37):

Hah! It's funny. In a way, yes. The other thing about that story, which I hadn't mentioned, but that goes perfectly to what you were just saying, is that a lot of those serfs didn't take the lords... They weren't like, Oh, okay, well, lord, now that you're offering something, I shall go work back on your land." A lot of them said, "You know what? Screw it, and I'm going to go... " I mean, they didn't have the word back then, but what we would now say, "I'm going to go be an entrepreneur." And they started the first merchant class. They moved to the cities and they started selling textiles or whatever else was in need. You see a version of that now where people say, "Why am I doing this exactly? What was the reason for this?" They're going on to create, to define their lives in ways that are more meaningful to them.

I think this is wonderful. I realize the disruption that it causes and the soul searching that it's going to cause for everybody, but how can we go wrong by having everybody step back and say, "I could be a more enthusiastic, productive contributor to our economy and more invested in my life and in the people that I work with and serve, if I do things on my own terms." That's going to force a lot of employers to say, "Well, what can I do to avoid people leaving?" That's a good thing. We should always be doing that, right? I mean, nobody should be comfortable. If I have no fear that my team will ever leave me, what on earth is my incentive to create a good working environment? I have no incentive. I think the danger of comfort is that we stop evaluating. We stop reevaluating. We stop trying to come up with new ideas.

Things should always be near breaking, as far as I'm concerned, because that forces us to constantly work to fix and to improve. So I love it, I love what I'm seeing. I recognize that it creates a lot of hardship and what I don't love is people struggling to staff their businesses and all that. I mean, that's terrible, but I do love on a societal level that we are all really thinking hard about what it is that we want and how to get it, and there is nothing wrong with asking those questions.

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Entrepreneur Boom

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Chris Ronzio (15:16):

Yeah. It's a positive forcing function. I mean, if it's creating more opportunities and better cultures, because you feel like you have to do that to compete, that's a good thing for everybody. Startups and entrepreneurship seem just completely on the rise. I saw some stats that in 2020, it was up 24%. Then in 2021, startups were up 35%. I'm sure you have better data than I do as editor of Entrepreneur, but are you seeing this just boom in startups?

Jason Feifer (15:45):

Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the numbers absolutely bear it out. I'm so bad with statistics that I don't remember it, but I do know that the number of new business applications in the United States reached a decade high, and then I think went on to far surpass that. It's pretty wild and awesome, and we see it in the energy that people bring to Entrepreneur, the brand. I mean, we've just reached record highs in terms of just a lot. Our traffic, our interest, our circulation. It's just we are perfectly positioned, which it's a great time to be in a magazine called Entrepreneur. But I think the real winner, of course, is us all. Look, people are going to start these businesses and a lot of them are going to face this statistic. Here's the statistic that people throw around a lot. I'm sure you've heard it, which is what is it? 50% of businesses fail in the first four years. I think that's the statistic. I could have that a little bit wrong, because again, like I said, not great at statistics. That's why I'm not a math major.

There's something really interesting about that, because you see that thrown around a lot and it's often thrown around in the context of, well, it's real risky, real risky, what you're doing. Yeah, that's true, there's risk. There's risk involved. There's risk involved in everything. There's risk involved in crossing the street. You have to decide where you want to place your risk, or there's risk in staying in a job for 20 years too. Sure, there's risk involved. But I think what's most important to understand is that [inaudible 00:17:35]-

Chris Ronzio (18:53):

Yeah. Yeah, I think it's a misnomer to say that the businesses fail because it looks like a positive thing when a business pivots, but in one sense, the original idea failed and they moved onto something totally different, maybe just within the same entity, right? Or someone was grinding and learning, and then they took a job that they weren't qualified for before that this business created for them. So I think there's a lot of ways to transition.

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Opportunity Set A VS. Set B

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Jason Feifer (19:19):

That's right, and you just don't know what you're going to learn until you put yourself into a learning environment. I have this piece of advice that I always give people as they're struggling with their careers. I tell it to students a lot, and it is that I feel like you always need to be working your next job. In front of you at any one time, in front of me, there are two sets of opportunities, opportunity set A, opportunity set B. Opportunity set A is everything that's being asked of you. Show up at a job, you've got a boss, the boss needs you to do things. You got to do it, or you're going to get fired. That's opportunity set A. Be good at that. Opportunity set B is everything that is available to you that nobody is asking you to do. That could be anything.

I mean, that could be opportunities at your job that simply just nobody's asking you to do, but it also could be just anything that you can learn outside of your job. You want to start a podcast, for example, nobody's asking you to do it, but you could go do it. It's really easy. You just buy a microphone, plug it into a computer and start talking. It's not that hard. It's hard to make it good, but just starting is not hard. I am of the belief, and this is how I've run my career, that opportunity set B is always more important, infinitely more important. It's not to say opportunity set A is unimportant. It's not. You have to do a good job at the things that are asked of you or you'll get fired. But if you only focus on opportunity set A, you will only be qualified to do the thing that you're already doing.

Opportunity set B is where growth happens. It's where you add to your value. It's where you become more qualified. Even if you have no idea what you're going to be qualified for, just by adding to your skill sets, you create opportunity in a real, crazy zigzag way. Or because you do this, now you know how to do that, and then you're going to go do this, and then you're going to do that, and then whatever. It's like you don't know where it's going to go until you're actually there. Starting a business, let's say, it's one of those things. It's not the only way to do it. But I mean, to your point of how you'll learn something, you'll become more qualified in some way to do something, that's totally true. Nobody's asking you to do it. Nobody asked you to start a business. You did it. It is opportunity set B. We should always be chasing it.

Chris Ronzio (21:37):

So you've got this broken down on your website in your bio and anybody should just go there, go to your website and look at this, but can you just give us high level? What's the example for you? What is your A and your B right now?

Jason Feifer (21:48):

Yes. Well, so I'll give you A and a B from before, so you can see how it plays out, and then I'll tell you what my A and B is now. So my A and B before, when I was at Fast Company, this was years ago, I was an editor at Fast Company, we started a video department. Scott was hired, he built a video team and I was not expected to be a part of this in any way. I was a print editor. But I thought I should learn how to be good in front of a camera. Why? I don't know, just seems like it'll be a good thing to know how to do, and so I volunteered. It was an opportunity set B, and I got in front of the camera and I was pretty good at it. Scott gave good direction and I grew, and I ended up with... I made these two different series.

I was thinking as I was doing it, "What is the point of this? What is this for?" Which is a question that we should maybe circle back to. I'm obsessed with the question, "What is it for?" I didn't know. What is this going to be for? Is it that I'm going to get a TV show? Nobody ever gave me a TV show. I'll what it did. It taught me how to talk on camera. It taught me how to talk with an energy that is unnatural when you're just talking at a table to somebody else, and that helped me, once I started getting opportunities on stage as a speaker. It helped me when I started to think about becoming a podcaster, and it helped me be more comfortable when there were suddenly television opportunities to go onto the Today Show or whatever and talk about something.

Then years and years and years later, couple jobs later, I am talking to the president and the CEO of Entrepreneur Media about becoming the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur magazine. One of the things that they really liked about me was that I had the skillset to go out and advocate for the brand, that you could put me on TV as the editor-in- chief of Entrepreneur magazine and I'd be good at it. I got the job, obviously. I still have the job. Not to say that that was the only thing that got me the job, but it certainly was a factor. Now when I look back on it, I say, "Well, look, I stood in front of that camera at Fast Company for reasons that I did not know and reasons that I could not have anticipated, and it paid off in ways that I mean, I would've never possibly planned for. I don't think that I would've been nearly as qualified to be the editor-in-chief of this magazine had I not stood in front of that camera when I was at Fast Company.

That is important and powerful, and it's a lesson that I continue with today. So you ask, "What's my opportunity set B now?" Well, I mean, opportunity set A is doing a good job at Entrepreneur, making sure we're producing high quality stuff, we're helping our audience, that the brand is growing, all that stuff. But opportunity set B, I mean, in a way, it's what I'm doing with you right now. I mean, I wrote this book and I'm talking about it on podcasts and I'm getting my name out there, and what on earth is the point of this? Why am I doing this? I mean, I have some theories, but I don't know, man. I'm doing it because it seems to be really valuable to helping me create a bigger version of myself, to making sure that I have a clarity of purpose to an audience that I am extremely fortunate to be able to reach, and then to be able to reach beyond that audience and build a platform that I can own myself.

What am I going to do with that? Again, I have theories. I have theories. I have an LLC called heyfeifer productions. I make a whole bunch of media. We'll see, but I will tell you what, there's no way that any of those theories are ever going to play themselves out, if I don't just go do it. So I figured out how to make time, despite all the crazy things that I'm already doing, to write a whole damn book, to market this whole damn book, and we're going to see what this does for me. This is the only way to do it. You go figure it out, but it starts by doing.

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The Only Way To Anywhere Is To Go Blindly Into The Darkness

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Chris Ronzio (26:13):

I know you spent time in Boulder. Did you ever rock climb? Is that something you're into at all?

Jason Feifer (26:17):

No, that terrifies me. I did a lot of hiking, a lot of-

Chris Ronzio (26:21):

All right, hiking, rock climbing. I went with a group of friends once up to Colorado and we did this bouldering kind of thing where we're scaling a wall. As you're describing opportunity A and B, I'm thinking about how, when you're climbing something, you've got one foot that's on stable footing and you've got the other one that's like, "Oh, here we go. I don't know where I'm going to land. I don't know what this is going to do." And it resonates with me. I just love this idea. I think whether people are working at a company, running a company, it's something everybody can learn from.

Jason Feifer (26:52):

Yeah, that's totally right. I like that visual metaphor, and you're right. It's the only way... I mean, look, to boil it down this simple, it almost sounds stupid, but I'll say it. It's the only way to move, right? You can't go up or down the side of that cliff based solely on the foot that is planted. Not going anywhere. You're just going to stay where you are, so you got to move and you're not going to know where it is. That's why I said earlier, I was like, there's a great risk in staying at a company for 20 years. There is.

The risk is that you don't do anything. You got to move and you don't know, there's just no possible way to plan where you're going to land. It's not possible. I think people get hung up on this and they stay in one place and they think, "Well, I'll do it when I have a good plan or I'll do it when I feel confident that I know where it's going to end up." You're not going to. You're never going to, so you're going to stay where you are. The only way to get anywhere is to go blindly in the darkness.

Chris Ronzio (28:02):

Let's talk more about the book Build for Tomorrow, again, available this week. You started writing this book how long ago?

Jason Feifer (28:11):

I wrote it from January to August of 2021. That's how long it takes to make books. I sold it December of 2020. I wrote it January to August 2021. After that, editing, marketing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Chris Ronzio (28:30):

I know this is a combination of your own experiences and lessons from the past, but it's in a big way about change, which is what we've been talking about. Why do people, business owners in particular, need to learn to harness the power of change, and can they control it?

Jason Feifer (28:52):

You can't control it, but what you can do is put yourself in the best position to benefit from it. I think that people fear change because change is often equated to loss. When you see something change, when you feel change coming to you, the first thing that you see is the thing you're going to lose. This has changed, and therefore, this thing that I am comfortable with, that I am familiar with, perhaps this privileged position that I have either gained or earned is going to be challenged. I don't like that. That sounds terrible. So you get nervous and then I'll tell you what you do next. You extrapolate the loss. So you say, "Well, because this is going to change, that is going to change. Then, because that is going to change, that other thing is going to change." Very soon you are down just an absolute rabbit hole of panic and it does you no good. Does you no good.

You can see how people can get themselves worked up into it, but it leads to kind of crazy-making and illogical assumptions. I'm a big fan of history, as you with the whole bubonic plague thing. I'll tell you quick story, there's this guy.... The dawn of recorded music, late 1800s the phonograph is introduced, for the very first time. Consider how absolutely astounding the very first record player, phonograph, would've been. Prior to that, for all of human history, all of human history, the only way that you could listen to music was if there was a human being playing an instrument in front of you, the only way. Then suddenly this machine comes along and it can play music by itself, because it has recorded it at some other time. Shocking, shocking. For the average consumer, this was wonderful. It was great fascination. For musicians, it was terrifying, because they saw themselves being replaced.

John Phillips Sousa, famous composer. He wrote all these military marches you're still familiar with today. He led this resistance and he wrote all these just fantastic, wonderful, crazy arguments against recorded music. One of them, my favorite, goes like this. He says, "Well, so if recorded music... " I think he wrote this in 1906. He says, "If recorded music, if the phonograph, enters the home, well, there will be no more live performances of music in the home because why possibly would anybody play music with an instrument when they can just have a machine do it? And because there are no more live music performances in the home, mothers will no longer sing to their children, because again, of course, why would they do that when there's a machine that can do it for them? "Because children grow up imitating their mothers, the children will now grow up to imitate the machines and thus we'll raise a generation of machine babies." That was his argument.

It's funny, but you look at it and you think, well, I do a version of that too, right? That's exactly what we do. That is extrapolating the loss. "This is new, therefore I will lose that, therefore I will lose that, therefore I will lose that." And suddenly we're in crazy territory real fast. What I think we need to do instead is we need to figure out how to extrapolate the gain. You cannot control the change, to your point, but what you certainly can do is control your response to it. If we can start to figure out how to start to recognize the gain, to ask ourselves some basic questions, like what are we doing differently because of this thing and how can that be put to good use? Just simple guiding questions.

What are we doing new? Well, we're listening to music on a machine now. Well, here's another question. Kind of second question is like, "Well, what skill or habit is that developing?" Well, people are now listening to music whenever they want, and they're listening to whoever they want. How can that be put to good use? Well, by God, if you're a musician, you now have the ability to reach people at any time who you may not have ever physically been able to reach. I mean, previous, John Phillip Sousa could only perform to people that he could physically reach. He's only one man, can only travel so far, but now he could reach everybody. It's marvelous. It created so many more jobs, so many more opportunities to participate in music, so many new ways to make money in music. As it turns out, John Phillip Sousa was protecting something that was limiting his industry. It's absolutely crazy, but it happened because he was extrapolating loss instead of extrapolating gain. That's what we need to do. That's the way to start to face change.

Chris Ronzio (34:05):

That's such a great example. Thank you for walking us through that. Random tangent, but do you know what the first thing ever recorded with the phonograph was? I feel like you would know this.

Jason Feifer (34:15):

Do you know it? Is this a pop quiz?

Chris Ronzio (34:17):

I think I do. I did a science fair project when I was in third grade or something, and I'm second guessing if I'm right, but I think it is Mary Had a Little Lamb. Does that sound right to you?

Jason Feifer (34:31):

Yeah, I think that is correct. I don't know if that was the actual literally very first, but there is an unbelievable, very early recording of Mary Had a Little Lamb. So yeah, I had a-

Chris Ronzio (34:37):

Yeah, I had it playing at my booth.

Jason Feifer (34:40):

Did you? Oh, it's amazing. That's awesome. Yeah, no, go back and you can find them on online, just these old recordings. It's amazing. It's the closest you can get to hearing a ghost. It's so cool.

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4 Phases Of Change

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Chris Ronzio (34:52):

Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy. All right, so you touched on this a little, that panic phase of extrapolating all the loss and just going down this rabbit hole. But that's part of the four phase approach in the book, right? So can you walk us through just the process that you describe in the book?

Jason Feifer (35:07):

Yeah. Well, I used the language earlier here, but I'll use it again. The book is structured in how I argue change happens, which is panic, adaptation, this is phase two, new normal, phase three, and then wouldn't go back, phase four. Look, in each of these, what we're ultimately doing is trying to guide ourselves through the most challenging parts, the parts that feel like we're the most lost, and get to a place where we're constantly evaluating the opportunities in front of us and moving with a kind of trust that there is value at the end. Panic, for example, I spend quite a lot of time talking about why we panic, which I think a lot goes towards this idea of extrapolating loss and how we tend to misunderstand new things. We misunderstand the value that they have for us. We oftentimes, for example...

We are often missing... and if we are in the position of introducing new things, I think that this is especially important, because we often... If you're an entrepreneur, you're doing two things at the same time with change, you are often the creator of change. You're introducing new things to people. You're trying to get them to embrace them, but you are also going to be navigating change yourself. In both cases, I think it's important to remember that people don't like new things. They don't. You know what they like? They like better versions of old things. They love better versions of old things. A better version of an old thing is the best thing possible because you're comfortable, you like it already, and now it's just going to be a little bit better for you.

What I've found as I've looked at innovation throughout history is that sometimes the most transformative technology is deeply resisted because it is seen as too radical a change, too much loss, and the creators of that technology oftentimes did not think about how they had to build, and here's my language, a bridge of familiarity. You got to bridge familiarity. You've got to recognize where people are coming from. What are they already familiar with? Then how can you lead them in a way in which they will feel like they are upgrading the thing that they're already familiar with, rather than abandoning something and feeling lost.

Fun example from history, the car. Everyone thinks that Henry Ford was the guy who turned the car into a mass consumer product, and in many ways he was, because of manufacturing. But something happened before Henry Ford that was equally important, and that was that in the very early days of the car, people hated the car. They called it the devil wagon. They threw rocks at it. People yelled, Get a horse" at a car when it passed by on the street. Then the auto manufacturers realized they had a problem here, and the problem was that they had been talking about the car as a replacement for the horse, but people like their horses. They don't want you to come along and say, "Get rid of your horse."

You needed to start talking about the car, and this is what they did. They started talking about the car as a better horse, not a replacement to the horse, a better horse. Why don't we use some horse language, where it's like horsepower, start to name cars after horses, give it a sense... There were fake horse heads on these early cars. Give it a sense that this thing is just an upgrade of something that you're already familiar with, build a bridge of familiarity. We often don't do that, but we need to do it, and I think that we also need to find, when we are going through moments of change ourselves, find the thing that can be the bridge for ourselves.

I mean, I've talked to so many people who have made radical career changes and it seemed absolutely terrifying. I had a version of this myself. It seemed absolutely terrifying until they figured out what it was that is already inside of them that is useful in that next job. How can they make this massive change without actually changing all that much? That is so... I remember this crystallized once. I was talking to Stacy London who used to have this show called What Not to Wear on TV.

Chris Ronzio (39:48):

Oh yeah. Great show.

Jason Feifer (39:49):

Great show, and Stacy's wonderful, she's become a friend. Stacy recently made a massive career change. She basically left television and she became the owner and CEO of a company called State of Menopause. They make products to help people through menopausal symptoms. At first she was like, she just did not know how to wrap her head around this possible change. She'd been trying to get a new TV show and it wasn't working out, and she was feeling very dejected. Then this company came along and they were basically like, "Would you like to buy us?" Because she was a beta tester, she was very active. She was really, really wracked about it, until she came to this realization, which is that there is something in her core that is transferable from one to the other. It is not all about... Sure, there's still going to be lots to learn.

But at her core, she realized, she is a truth teller. That was the core of what she did on television. It's the reason why What Not to Wear worked, because she is a truth teller. She will go out and she will tell you the truth and she will tell it to you in an unvarnished way. She is now being asked to lead a company where she is talking to people who are going through menopause, and she's going to have to have open, honest conversations about herself and about challenges, physical challenges, things that are uncomfortable to talk about in public, and that requires being a truth teller. And she realized everything else is learnable. "I can learn how to run this business, but the thing that's going to make me a success is the thing that I already have."

Chris Ronzio (41:28):

Yeah, so the bridge of familiarity for her is that trait inside her that she can bring to this new opportunity.

Jason Feifer (41:34):

That's right.

Chris Ronzio (41:35):

Yeah. Stacy and Clint always made me want to have blazers, so that was where I got my first blazers, from watching that show.

Jason Feifer (41:45):

Oh, that's so funny. That's funny. Yeah, I learned nothing from that show, as I speak to you in my ratty hoodie.

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The Best Thing To Do When Introducing Change Into Your Life

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Chris Ronzio (41:52):

Last question I want to ask here is, when there's change happening, sometimes businesses are the ones that are rolling out change and for our employees or our customers, it can be uncomfortable for them. What would you recommend for people that are creating change to do in order to communicate it and soften the blow, I guess?

Jason Feifer (42:12):

I think people need to understand what the ultimate purpose of it is, and they need to be bought in on that. I'll give you a... This is the side steps it a little bit, but it'll bring it back. One of my favorite "laws" is Goodhart's Law. Goodhart's Law says that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. What does that mean? Well, it's really a commentary on incentives. When my wife and I were potty training our oldest son, we would give him an M&M every time he peed in the potty, and this kid very, very quickly discovered that he could go to the potty, pee a tiny bit, hold the rest in, get an M&M, wait a minute, go back to the potty, pee again. Right? So this is Goodhart's law. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

He quickly understood what the incentive was, and even though the incentive was driving him towards one action, he realized that the action was not required to get the incentive, and so he just shortcutted it. This is what happens whenever we incentivize things through measures. The business example could be that when, let's say, that you're running a car dealership and you want to sell more cars, well, what would you do? Or you want to increase sales, I should say, what are you going to do? Well, you might want to give all of your sales people a incentive. Whoever sells the most cars this month gets a bonus. Well, what's going to happen? I'll tell you what's going to happen. All the salespeople are going to start steeply discounting their cars. You're going to be giving them away for free, because you have just incentivized numbers of cars sold, and so they don't care how much it sells for because you've incentivized them to simply sell the number of cars.

The reason why I'm telling you this is because oftentimes I think we create some kind of change, we need people to do something and we simply give them a direction. We say, "Go there." That's now the thing to do, and that doesn't work, right? The reason why Goodhart's Law happens is because people are not bought in holistically on the full vision of what it is that you were trying to achieve. They don't feel bought in. They don't feel like they are involved. My son had absolutely no understanding of why we were trying to get him to pee in the potty. He just knew that we were doing it, and so he was trying to figure out what's in it for him, and what's in it for him are M&Ms.

The more that you can help people feel bought in on the full vision of what's happening, if you are introducing some kind of change to your organization, how do you make sure that people feel like the work that they are doing is driving towards great purpose, and that the work that they are doing is needed, is necessary, is valued? That the change that they're going through, you understand it's a pain, it's inconvenient, but that you patiently and honestly explain what the purpose of it is and how it benefits them and how it helps them do the best work that they can do, the work that they love to do, the work that they have to care about or else why on earth are they showing up, especially when they can leave and go somewhere else, as we talked about earlier. Because, boy, now in this economy, they can. They better understand that.

I think that the greatest thing that we can do when we introduce change or when we go through change is that we define the purpose of it and the big picture. We make sure that everybody who is impacted understands it. Because without that, it's all chaos and it all seems stupid and purposeless. But it's not, it's valuable, but as is such the problem with change, we just don't always understand that until the end. So we need to get to the place where we can see the "wouldn't go back" moment as early as possible.

Chris Ronzio (46:47):

So well said. I almost don't want to talk. I want to just kind of end the podcast there on your statement. But I do want to just close the loop here because you've got your new book Build for Tomorrow, and I want everybody to go out and get it now that it's available. It also sounds like one of your opportunity B is maybe your son turning into a business mogul because he's pretty smart, if he's already gaming you for M&Ms. Where can people find the book?

Jason Feifer (47:12):

That's true. That's true. Well, kids, yeah, kids figure out how to game you real fast. You could find the book absolutely anywhere, so wherever you buy books is where you can find the book, but you can also go to jasonfeifer.com/book, and I have all the buttons to every possible retailer that you would want to send your money to. Please go anywhere or also jasonfeifer.com/book.

Chris Ronzio (47:40):

Amazing. All right, check out Jason's website, push all the buttons, get the book and listen to everything cool that he's doing, both personally in his opportunity Bs and at Entrepreneur. Jason, always great talking with you. Thank you so much.

Jason Feifer (47:52):

Hey, thank you. It's a pleasure.

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