In this solo episode of the Founders Journal podcast, Alex Lieberman (co‑founder of Morning Brew) opens with a paid sponsorship for Gusto, explaining why the HR platform meets his three criteria of intuitiveness, affordability, and all‑in‑one functionality for his multiple businesses. He then shifts to the episode’s core theme: discovering one’s “zone of genius,” the work a person is uniquely good at and loves doing. Alex references his new coach Dave and the conscious‑leadership framework from Jim Dethmer and Diana Chapman’s book The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, highlighting Commitment 8, which focuses on excelling in your zone of genius. He introduces the “best stuff” exercise – a three‑step process for uncovering personal genius moments: (1) identify eight specific, high‑quality experiences you enjoyed; (2) write concise summaries answering who you were, what you did, why it was enjoyable, and what skills you used; (3) look for recurring themes across those summaries to articulate your core gifts. Alex walks listeners through his own examples – a high‑stakes JPMorgan pitch, building a Taj Mahal Lego set, early Morning Brew whiteboard brainstorming, and coaching a founder – and shows how he distilled the themes of storytelling, problem‑solving, coaching, brainstorming, creativity, novelty, and playfulness into two personal statements: “invention, storyteller, coach” and “practicing creativity, storytelling, and teaching through the vehicle of business.” He encourages listeners to run the exercise themselves, share results with trusted peers, and aim to spend as much time as possible in their zone of genius to maximize value and enjoyment. The episode concludes with contact information for feedback and future episode ideas.
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What's up, everyone? This is Alex, the host of Founders Journal. As you may know, I built Morning Brew from my senior year of college until we sold the business in 2020. And now I'm building a variety of businesses in different spaces and different stages. I'm basically averaging 1 to 2 new businesses per year. And because of that, I have had the opportunity to test a ton of different products and services, ultimately landing on a core software stack that serves as my business operating system whenever I start a new company. I have my go-to banking service. I have my go-to formation service. I have my go-to domain hosting service. But probably the most important of them all is my HR service, Gusto. If you're a longtime Founders Journal listener, you know how much I think about people in the context of business. A business is nothing without its people, which means a platform that helps me manage and take care of my people is invaluable. And that means I've tried every HR platform under the sun, always with the same exact goals in mind. First, I want a product that's intuitive and delightful to use. As a non-HR person, I find the intricacies of payroll, benefits, taxes, compliance, and expenses to be painful. So I just want something that makes my life easier. Second, I want it to be affordable. I'm a bootstrapper at heart. I started Morning Brew with $0 and I started StoryArc with $0 as well, which means I don't have infinite dollars to drop on SaaS products. And third, I want a platform that acts as my one-stop shop for all things people. I want it to handle payroll, benefits, hiring, onboarding, and taxes, all while integrating with all of the other tools in my business stack, whether it be QuickBooks, Slack, or Google Workspace. Well, Gusto hit the trifecta, which is why I am a customer and use it for every single one of my businesses. Yes, this is a paid sponsorship by the amazing team at Gusto, but I would sing their praises even if I wasn't being paid to do so. So if you're looking for a platform that takes the pain out of payroll, benefits, and HR, I highly recommend you check out Gusto. And if you sign up at gusto.com/alex, you will get your first 3 months free. Now on to the episode.
What's up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Founders Journal. I'm Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew. Today's episode is about finding your zone of genius, which is the work that you're uniquely good at and brings you joy. I've been thinking a lot about time recently and how to best use your time to leave your mark on the world and do great work in your career. And I believe it all starts with finding your zone of genius. So I would like to take you through the process for searching for it and finding it so you can spend more time within it. Let's hop into the episode. As I mentioned a few weeks ago on the podcast, I recently started working with a new coach. His name is Dave, and our work together has been great so far. And part of Dave's coaching includes education around a form of leadership that is called conscious leadership. And without getting into all the details, conscious leadership is a type of management and leadership technique that was created by Jim Dethmer and Diana Chapman. And its goal at its core is to teach people how to run healthy, sustainable, and successful businesses. Its principles are laid out in a book that is called The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, which is the greatest book for founders and CEOs I've ever read. That's not an exaggeration. I literally have the book on my desk at all times. And one of the commitments in this book of the 15 commitments is commitment number 8. And commitment number 8 is around excelling in your zone of genius. And your zone of genius is the work that you do that allows you to be the highest version of yourself. When you are in this zone, when you're sitting in the zone of genius, you are spending time doing what you love and you're spending time doing what you are uniquely gifted to do. With zone of genius activities, all sense of time disappears, and they're often activities that you get appreciated for, even if they feel like nothing. But because they feel like nothing, because you're not actively aware that you're great at them, activities or skills in your zone of genius can be hard to identify. And that is where the best stuff exercise comes in. The best stuff exercise is a process by which you identify genius moments from throughout your life, and then you draw themes between these genius moments to try to understand what your actual zone of genius is. So what I'm going to do is share the steps for this exercise, and I would encourage you to actually take out a piece of paper and go through it with me. me now, or feel free to replay the episode later and go through it if you're, I don't know, say operating a motor vehicle or doing something that, um, prohibits you from doing this exercise. And also I'm gonna link to in the show notes a template that Conscious Leadership Group has created and offers for free that basically is just a templated version of the best stuff exercise so you can fill in the blanks. So here's how the exercise works. Step 1, identify 8 specific accomplishments or experiences across your entire life that you enjoyed doing, meaning it was fun and satisfying. And second, you believe you did well, meaning you provided high quality, right? And as you think of these experiences, you should keep in mind a few things. They can be related to work or home or leisure or relationships, but the goal here is to focus on the highlights in your life regardless of when or where they occurred. And also, as you think of these experiences, you should be identifying experiences that were important to you versus things that you think were important to other people. And you should be as specific as possible with experiences. So let's just say you have an experience from work when You feel like you did a really good job giving feedback, as an example. That should not be your experience. Your experience should be on this day in this year, you were giving feedback to this specific person, and this is what you were giving feedback about. And the way in which you gave feedback showed a great deal of both empathy and candor, as an example. Okay, so that's step 1, is identify 8 specific accomplishments or experiences across your life that you enjoyed doing and you did really well. Step 2 is write a short summary statement about each of the 8 achievements or So you have these 8 achievements and experiences. You're gonna write a short summary about each of them. And in each summary, you should try to answer the following questions. How were you involved in the experience? What did you actually do in this experience? Like, how did you have a hand in it? What was particularly enjoyable or fulfilling about the experience to you? And what skills or abilities did you use? Okay, so first step, identifying these 8 called genius moments in your life that you enjoyed doing and you did well. And then you're gonna write a short summary that answers these questions of how you were involved. What did you actually do? What was enjoyable about the experience and what skills or abilities did you use? There is one more step. There's a third step to the best stuff exercise. But what I want to do is take you through my first 2 steps and my 8 experiences so you get a sense of how you can do it yourself as you're following along. So I'm literally pulling the template out in front of me that I did earlier where I wrote down my answers, and I'm going to share a few of my experiences and the summaries that I had. One experience is the JPMorgan pitch. In 2018, I pitched JPMorgan and their media agency on working with Morning Brew. I was one of 8 media companies to be invited to give this pitch, and it was one of the most high-stakes pitches that I've ever done. And I remember walking out of that pitch and the senior-most marketer at JPMorgan walked out and said to me, you crushed every other company in there. And I felt when I think about what did I enjoy about this experience, I enjoyed feeling deep command over something that came very naturally to me, which was telling a story and painting a picture. About the future that Morning Brew is building and why that's a future that JPMorgan would find enticing and exciting to align with. And my skills and abilities that I used were an ability to storytell, an ability to play into people's emotions, and an ability to, in a short period of time, build a connection with an audience. Okay, so that's one example. Another example, building Legos. And honestly, as I think about this now, I should be more specific. So when I was building the Taj Mahal Lego set during the pandemic and I wrote, I can build the shit out of Legos, nothing matters, and all I can focus on is completion. When I start a set, it is oddly therapeutic and I'm at peak focus when building. Time feels like it melts away when I am building a Lego set. And I'll share 2 more. Brainstorming on the whiteboard during early Morning Brew days. I vividly remember brainstorming the design and structure of Morning Brew's newsletter in my house on East University at Michigan during my senior year. And I remember brainstorming organic growth strategies to get new readers to subscribe to our newsletter in East Quad dorm with Austin. And I felt skillful because I was just an absolute explosion of ideas during these sessions. It felt like my brain was going in 50 different directions and it was kind of like its natural way to be wildly creative and think of ideas that it felt like I could only think of. And I enjoyed it because the feel feeling of being creative felt really playful to me, and it played into my deep curiosity to explore new ideas. And then I'll just do one more for the heck of it. Talking through a real problem with a founder who I know well. A founder recently presented a problem with a leader in their company. I was good at both asking questions to understand the problem. I was good at simply spelling out different ways to view the problem or how the other person in the company views this problem. And I was good at articulating a tangible go-forward plan. And I enjoyed this because it both tested my knowledge of running a business and managing effectively, because I only would be able to know if I was knowledgeable, if I could explain it. And I enjoyed it because it seemed like it really helped this founder in thinking about how they were going to navigate this situation. So those are a few of my experiences, and I ended up cheating and writing down 9 of them, but I shared, I think, 3 or 4 of them with you, which leads to the final step. Step number 3, look at your notes. Do you see any common threads, as in adventure, risk-seeking, selling, giving, ideation, etc.? And from those common threads, you should make a first pass at what you believe are your gifts or the things that are within your zone of genius, i.e., your ability to focus, relationship building, inspiration, etc. And you may also consider sharing your 8 experiences with others, especially those close to you, and asking for their reflection on the themes that they hear. So I want to close this out by using me as the example again, so then you can kind of compare what I did to your process as you hopefully go through the best stuff exercise. So to use me as the example, I went through the first part of step 3, which was identifying the common themes in my 9 genius moments or best experiences in life. And the 7 common themes I identified were storytelling, problem solving, coaching, brainstorming, creativity, novelty, and playfulness. And so then I took those themes and I narrowed them down into 2 statements that could reflect my gifts and that I'm going to share with my coach Dave and get feedback from him on. And after I get feedback, I'm sure I'll share it on an upcoming episode. The first statement that I made is more of a compilation of words. It's a compilation of 3 words I wrote down: invention, storyteller, and coach. And the second is a more complete sentence, which is practicing creativity, storytelling, and teaching Through the vehicle of business. And so that is the best stuff exercise, which is a vehicle for better understanding your zone of genius as a leader. And obviously your goal as a leader is to spend as much time as humanly possible in your zone of genius, because it will be how you can add the most value to your company while most enjoying the work that you do. That is it for today's Founders Journal. As always, thank you so much for listening to the pod, and I will catch you next episode. And if you have any questions, you want to say what's up, or you want to recommend a future episode or topic I should talk about, shoot me an email to alex@storyarb.com. That is alex@storyarb.com.
