How to Build a Career That Can Survive Drastic Change | Jason Feifer

A lot of times we think about how hard this is going to be, what a terrible road this is going to be. Most of the time sticking your neck out just means putting in some effort without knowing how it's going to be rewarded and then enduring a lot of non-reward. And if you can do that, then you can put yourself in a position to learn. Do it over and over and over again. Fail, fail, fail, fail. Eventually you will get somewhere. You don't win by following the playbook. You win by rewriting it. 700 episodes deep with the people who actually built something real. No theory, no fluff, no shortcuts. This is right about now with Ryan Alford. Hey guys, what's up? We're talking with the Champion of Change today. My friend Jason Pfeiffer, editor-in-chief at Entrepreneur Magazine. What's up Jason? I appreciate the enthusiasm by which I was just introduced. Hey man, we all have to do something well. Welcome to the show. Great to have you. I study all my guests and from afar I've been a fan. Been listening to your show. Certainly have heard of The Little Magazine, you're right. Post of Build for Tomorrow. You've got your podcasts and stuff. You've done a lot of interviews. A lot of our listeners enjoy hearing that professional journey. I'd love to give everybody a little taste for yours. I started not having any idea what it is that I wanted to do, but I knew that I liked to write. I knew that as a reporter, people will just tell you stuff. It's kind of amazing actually. You just go out and you say, I would like to interview you. And they say, come on into my home and let me tell you all the things. That was a pretty unbelievable experience. I started as a community newspaper reporter. It was just the only job that I could get. The very, very beginning. I was at Gardner News, Gardner, Massachusetts. Tiny little paper, North Central, Massachusetts. It's covering nothing because nothing's going on in the garden. I did it for about a year. It was a grumpy year for me because I felt too good for this place. I have all these ambitions and I should be writing for the New York Times. Two things about this. Number one, what a jerk because the thing is, if I was too good for that place, I wouldn't have been at that place. We need to stop wherever we are and say, what can I learn from this experience right here right now? Instead of wishing that I was somewhere else, why don't I work towards that somewhere else by starting right now? Aluminum where you're planted. There you go. That's a nicely shared. That's for good reason. And then number two is that I, after a year, thought to myself, all right, well, look, if I'm really serious about this, and I'm not just grumbling, what does it take to go somewhere else? What does it take to work at these large publications? And I realize that, well, working at the Gardner News is not going to get me there. Because at no time in the history of the world, both somebody at the New York Times, pick up a copy of the Gardner News, read the story I did on the middle school play, and call me up and say, yeah, we're bringing it up to the big time. It's like, never going to happen, ever, ever. I needed to go to them. I quit the newspaper, and I sat in my bedroom bird nine months, and I cold-pitched everybody. I didn't have any connections. I knew nobody. And I writing editors of the Washington Post and the Boston Globe and the Associated Press. Eventually, I start to lay in stories in these publications. It takes a long time. There's a lot of being ignored. And even when I do lay into story, as exciting as that sounds, I will tell you that the money that comes along with it is not that exciting. So I would bust my butt to get it $500 out of the Washington Post, or something like that. But after nine months of this, I had proven something. And what I had proven was, I can work at a different level. And I didn't do it by just sitting around and grumbling and expecting somebody to hand it to me. I went out and I did it myself. I went to them. And that is a lesson that I've carried forward throughout my career as I then got into magazines eventually, moved to New York, worked at a whole bunch of different magazines. Maxum, that was a terrible decision. Men's Health, a better decision, fast company, a good decision. Entrepreneur, a great decision. The lesson that I always took was, go to that, never, ever wait for somebody to come to you with an opportunity. They never, ever will. You go to them. I love it. A lot of us is a lot to impact there. And as I was listening and I was saying, I joked about the, blue and not even joke, but just stated the bloom where you're planted. But then you just expanded from there. It's funny. People, there's a lot of talk now about manifestation and all those things. And I buy some of that. But there's still an action that has to take place. It doesn't just happen. I love that notion of just sticking your nose in it. I don't know if like enough people have the grit to do that. But that's really what I'm hearing. Yeah, that's right. The funny thing is it doesn't take that much grit. Literally what was involved in the grit of me trying to write for these publications that didn't take me seriously. Well, I had to go out and find some stories. You do some research, talk to some folks, you find some stuff. You learn how to pitch, go out by a book, learn some stuff, figure out some people's email addresses, send it off. What's the worst that could happen? I'll tell you. They ignore you or they say no. That's the worst. Can you live? Can you survive that? I could. Turns out it's not that hard. It's not that hard. It's not that hard. It's not that hard. It's not that hard. It's not that hard. It's not that hard. It's not that hard. It's not that hard. It's not that hard. 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This is all stuff you would really appreciate out of basically no budget. It drove so much interest that it made Deadpool one of the highest grossing movies. It was very, very successful. How do you do that? Well, the answer is that you're willing to be bad. You are willing to go through the transition where you're in an uncomfortable place and you don't exactly know what's next. But you just have the commitment to know that moving forward is literally the only way to get to something better. I see that. I see people do that. Over and over and over and over again. They have an ability to get past the barrier that I think most people slam into when there is some kind of change or they're trying to do something that they're not familiar, which is that they panic. That's the first thing most people do is they panic. I've panicked. I'm sure Ryan Reynolds panicked. Jimmy found definitely panicked. We talked about it. Then you get to a place where you say, all right, there has to be more than panic. There has to be more than this. And the people who are able to get through that first wall are the self-selected group of people who can build something that is successful. I love it. And you know what? I almost lump it in because I get asked that same question sometimes. And I almost lump it in. It's a little different. There's something about highly successful people and risk tolerance that are highly correlated. What you just described, though, it's a little different than financial risk. It's still risk. This adaptability to change in risk tolerance seems to go hand in hand. That's right. It's funny. I was just doing a TV segment on a local New York station called Pixel 11. And we were talking about people starting their own businesses. In particular, we started about franchise. It was the segment about franchises. One of the hosts says, but isn't that really risky getting into that? And I said, well, you're sure, but there's risk involved in anything. I mean, there's risks staying at the job that you have right now. You could get fired tomorrow. There's also the risk if you want to really think of it as a risk, which I think that you should. There's a risk of staying somewhere too long and not learning enough so that you can give it in a changing world. The person who, like, stuck it out for 20 years as a movie reviewer at a regional newspaper, as soon as there were no need anymore for somebody to be hired or employed full time as a movie reviewer at a regional newspaper, this person had nothing else to do with themselves because they hadn't taught themselves anything else. And put themselves in the position where they could learn new things that the marketplace desires or rewards. That's a risk. Everything that you do is a risk. It's funny. In some ways, it is risk tolerance. In some ways, it is just risk perspective. It is just saying, I would rather place my risk here than there. I'm not necessarily taking a larger risk. Life is a risk. Every single thing that I do every day is a risk. I would rather put my risk to better use. And that's not to say that starting a new business is right for everybody. It is not. I certainly would encourage whatever it is that you do, that you think of every opportunity as an opportunity to spend that risk most wisely. Very well stated, my friend. Talking with Jason Pfeiffer, editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine. I really like this quote one of your latest articles. When you narrow your path, you limit your chances of finding what will make you happiest. I want you to expound upon that a bit if you don't mind for everybody listening. The very first time that I noticed people do this was years and years ago, when I was still mostly identifying as just a pure magazine guy, a journalist. And I would be invited to come speak in journalism classes. As I talked to these college kids who all aspire to work in magazines. And they would inevitably, every class, one or two kids would raise their hand and they would say something along the lines of, my goal is to work at Entertainment Weekly. What do you think I should do to get to Entertainment Weekly? I just think that this is a terrible way to think. It's just an awful way to think. Because fine, you have a goal of working in a place that's good. Having a goal is great. Having some direction to move in simply so that you can start moving is wonderful. Because we've got to move somewhere. We've got to go somewhere. But do not limit every decision that you make based on an ultimate goal. Because you don't know if that goal is actually going to be any good. You could get to Entertainment Weekly and it could suck. And I will tell you something. I have so many friends who aspire to work in certain places and they got there and it was not at all what they expected. You cannot limit yourself like that when you limit your options along the way. All you are doing is turning down all these amazing new opportunities to learn to grow to discover a path that you didn't know was available. One of the reasons that those kids are saying I would like to work at Entertainment Weekly is because they only know of a certain number of outcomes for their career. They're only aware of a few. And I am going to hazard to guess that although a small number of them may have landed at their dream job that they aspire to do the vast vast majority of them and I include myself in this ended up somewhere that they could not have possibly predicted and that frankly they may not have even been aware of. When I started my career I never heard of Entrepreneur Magazine. What the hell is that? But eventually because I made enough choices throughout my career. Choices that were based not on one ultimate goal but rather of seeing something and saying I wonder what's over there. Maybe there's something that I can learn. I got to a place where I had the necessary skills to take over a magazine called Entrepreneur and then see what else was available to me because of it. Speaking book writing, podcasting, going on TV, all this stuff. This is not stuff that I ever thought that I was going to do. It would not have been possible unless I took those unexpected paths. And that's what we all need to do. We cannot close ourselves off to those. That's where the real opportunity is. I like that a lot and there's a couple terms I use. There's unintended consequences in self-limiting behavior. We all think we know what the consequences but the unintended consequences, what you just described. Because everybody thinks, oh I'm hyper focused. I'm going to get to that one destination, all that. But if you only go down that one road, you may or may not get there. There's just unintended consequences in every decision. When you get too narrow, that's what ends up happening. I do want to ask you Jason, what for you makes good story? You described the humble beginnings and it hasn't always been as easy as telling a story about Fallen maybe. And I'm not going to say that's a layup but I'm just saying. Those are easy. Those are great. You work to have those kinds of things in your pocket but they certainly don't come easy. Yeah, you work for them. But what's a good story to you? What gets your attention? This is more for you writing and evaluating and doing what you do because you're a storyteller. More of that. It doesn't actually start with storytelling. It starts with the audience. What does the audience expect? How am I serving the audience? The way that I tell a story and entrepreneur is so different from the way that I tell a story in my podcast is different from how I tell my story in some other way. Because what I have to be mindful of is I imagine my audience to basically be impatient and very, very expected to see value immediately. What is in it for me? Why am I listening to this? Why are you demanding my time? People's time is the most valuable thing that they have. And I am out there demanding it. I'm out there demanding it. I'm out demanding their time and pie in everything that I do. I have to think. I got to earn that time. I got to earn that time on a second by second basis. I cannot take it for granted at all. I have to know what is this for? What is it for? To me, the very first thing that I have to evaluate is do I have the thing that they want? Why am I writing about you may fall in an entrepreneur magazine? The answer is because putting a celebrity on the cover of a magazine is a much better way to sell a magazine than putting a piece of fruit. You are a business to try to sell copies here. That's right. And there's nothing wrong with that. No. I want to make sure that it's valuable to people. It can't just be Jimmy Fallon for the sake of having a photo of Jimmy Fallon. It's got to be valuable. Jimmy Fallon does a thing that most people do not do and never will do. The level of success that he's had, he's hosting the Tonight Show. Most people are not going to do that. In some ways, the basic outline of Jimmy Fallon is very unrelatable. I have to start with why does somebody pick up a copy of entrepreneur magazine? Well, the answer is because they are looking for some kind of growth and insight for their careers or their business. That's why they're picking up the magazine. What could they want from Jimmy Fallon? First of all, I've made a selection of Jimmy Fallon because I think that they can get something out of Jimmy Fallon. And now I got to go in and I got to deliver on that. When I go in to talk to Jimmy Fallon, I am talking to Jimmy Fallon about Jimmy Fallon. But I am really mindful of the reader. And I'm mindful that people don't care about Jimmy Fallon's just career arc. They could find that somewhere else. What is the story that I can tell? What is the unique value proposition that entrepreneur has because it understands its audience? And to me, the way that I approach these stories is that it never really can be about the person who I'm writing about. It is, but it's really about something else, something unique, something that anybody can learn from this person. Because this person is actually a great representation of and they have fought through this thing. For Jimmy Fallon, it was a story about finding your why. Finding your mission and your purpose, how to identify it and how to put it into action. That's what that story was about. Every question that I asked Jimmy was in some way pushing him to articulate that, to identify it, to dig into what it was like for him as a way of helping other people do it for themselves. Every other story that I ever do is about that. I profiled Bethany Frankl. What was that story about? It wasn't about Bethany Frankl. It was about time management. I profiled Mark Wahlberg. That wasn't a story about Mark Wahlberg. It was a story about diligence. How did he learn diligence? This is the way that you have to approach all storytelling. You have to start with what your audience wants and then at every step along the way of developing that story. You have to make sure that you're creating the material and then delivering the material so that your audience feels satisfied. So that they're not saying, stop wasting my time. Whenever you're telling a story, have that in your head and a chorus of people. A Greek chorus, we're basically singing, stop wasting my time and you better not waste their time. You know what everybody's favorite radio station is? W-I-F-M. What's in it for me? That's what you just described, brother. It's true though. It's true though. It is. What's in it for me? That's fine. I don't begrudge people that. Why would I begrudge people that? Because that's what I'm doing. What's in it for me is how I consume things too. I don't have time for your random crap. When I was in my teens, we just wanted to burn Saturday nights going into the movies. I'll watch anything. But boy, as we get older, we don't have that kind of time anymore. You got to understand what is in it for your audience and deliver on that relentlessly. The days of showing ex celebrity and the mansion they live in and the porch that they drive or whatever. I'm not saying there's not a time and a place for that article. This is what I love about what you guys are doing in entrepreneur. It's more of that aspiration motivation. I've been quasi successful in my career, but not Jimmy Fallon successful. But I can aspire to be like him when I see everyday things his why that motivates what's made him successful. It has guided a lot of what I've done at entrepreneur. Anytime that I talk to the entrepreneur audience, that is I realize that there are a lot of people in this world who call themselves entrepreneurs. It's a word that has in some ways ceased to have any specific meaning, but also that I think has a lot of meaning to me. I define entrepreneurs as someone who makes things happen for themselves. It's a mindset as much as anything else. How do I serve all those people? How am I useful to those people? It's really hard. I can't put 30 pages of advice on how to do your series C round because that's just not relevant to a broad enough range of people. How do I do it? There is one thing that everyone who identifies as an entrepreneur has in common. Only one thing, whether they are selling stuff on eBay or they're running a venture back company in Silicon Valley. One thing, the experience of being an entrepreneur. That's it. That's the one thing that they have. The experience of being an entrepreneur because whether or not you are struggling to sell something on eBay or your Jimmy Fallon, you have the same emotional experience of your journey that it feels lonely and crazy. You don't know what you're doing at times and you've got to put yourself out there. Everybody relates to that. I don't think of it necessarily as motivational and aspirational, though it can come off that way. What I really think of it as is let's talk to that thing that is so core to what you're doing. That in some ways people miss it. People don't acknowledge it. I have found that by being real about that stuff and by getting other people to engage with it, I create something that feels like community because now there's a belong and there's a reason you come to this brand and you say this is something that I'm not seeing elsewhere. I feel as I need this. This is speaking to me. This is a part of storytelling too, knowing what your audience needs. I have approached it that way and I filter every story through it in some way. People pitch me to your point about there used to be all these shows about people's mansions and stuff. Who cares about that? I never liked that. I say I don't like success stories. I like problem solving stories. Success stories are not relatable. Nobody wants to know about your success because your success is only exciting to you. Everybody wants to know about your problems because your problems are there problems. There aren't that many problems in the world. Everybody is experiencing some version of the same few sets of problems. How do we get through it? What can we learn from each other by getting through it? The more that you can identify that universal thing that's bringing your audience together, the better you're going to serve them. Bingo. Ding, ding, ding. I've had my sound effects going. You know that. I do want to talk a little bit on the bill for tomorrow. What can you tell us about bill for tomorrow? Here's the thesis behind builds for tomorrow of the book. Change happens in four phases. All change happens in four phases. Panic adaptation. New normal wouldn't go back. What I want to do is help people get through those three phases in the beginning. Panic is terrible. It's a panic. It's the thing that you slam into the wall. You can never recover from adaptation. What is it that you do? What is it that you have available to you? New normal start to build a foundation up from this shifting ground and then get to wouldn't go back. Wouldn't go back. Is that time where you say this new thing that I have is so valuable to me that I wouldn't want to go back to a time before I had it. This is the cycle of change. You've gone through it ten times before. You just may have forgotten because the things that you're comfortable with now, you forgot or once knew and replaced some old thing that you used to be comfortable with. Let's get to this place where we understand change, where we feel comfortable with it. We're not fearful of it and where we can start to build greatness for ourselves and for others because we can get to wouldn't go back. That's what the book is. It's kind of a guide to doing that using the stories from the smartest people that I've spoken with, a couple of whom we've mentioned here as well as the history of innovation. I dive into crazy things. Why the car was once feared and then was accepted. Why recorded music? Why musicians used to want to try to stop recorded music technology and what we can learn today about changes in our industry from what happened to them. That's the book. I love it. Bill, for tomorrow, I'm going to look it up. I, Jason, I need you for a lightning round. I'm going to give you four keywords. You can one word. I'm very, very bad at one word answers, but let's see what we can do. First one. The Metaverse. Metaverse. It's a fad now in that the version of the Metaverse that we have right now is not the version of the Metaverse that we ultimately will have. But it's a starting point for an idea that will be very exciting in the future, but don't feel like you have to join the Metaverse right now. Boom. TikTok for the masses. We were in the 15 to 20-year-old stage. We're in the 25 to 35 stage. Is this going to be a mass, mass, mass, players? It's always going to be niche, IE, Snapchat. All right. I'm going to go simple on that one. Rad. NFTs. Oh my God. I'm going to get a lot of hate for this answer, but I'm going with fad. The technology behind NFTs is exciting and interesting. What you're seeing in the marketplace right now is unsustainable and is probably a lot of garbage anyway. People buying their own NFTs to pump the numbers. Oh, I just don't think that that lasts. You're smart, man, my friend. Where can you right keep up with Jason Fyfer? Hi, man, social. That, hey, Fyfer, et cetera, et cetera. Podcast. Built for tomorrow, just like the book. But if you go to JasonFyfer.com. J-A-S-O-N-F-E-I-F-E-R.com and you click that button. This is free training. What you will get is an hour-long free audio course that I put together about how to become more adaptable. How to feel more comfortable with change. I have heard from so many people who have gone through it and who have really appreciated it. It is there for you. Please go and check that out. I love it, brother. Add and value left and right. And there is youth of Entrepreneur Magazine. The biggest, the best one was Champion of Change. I just wanted to call you that. Thank you. I appreciate that. It's funny. You put something into your social media bios and people just start using it. It's a funny thing. Yes. You need a jersey. Champion of Change. Get your ring. Nice bling. It's a bling. Yeah, this is our gold chain. Yeah, I don't have enough of that. I don't know if I can pull it off either, brother. I really appreciate your time. Thank you. I appreciate yours. Search for Champion of Change. You'll find all the content from today. We really appreciate Jason Fiverr. We'll see you next time. Here's the truth. Information doesn't change your life. Execution does. So don't just listen to this episode and move on. Take the idea. Make the call. Launch the thing. Fix the problem. Build what you keep talking about building. For more, follow Ryan Alford on Instagram at RyanAlford. And watch or listen to every episode at RyanIsRight.com. This is right about now. Now quit waiting. Go win.