050: Business-Building Metaphors—Are You Running a Machine, House, or Restaurant?

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Hello. Hello my friends. Welcome back to FreeTime. Two orders of business before we get into today's show, one Cal Newport is going to be one of the first interviews for free time. He's interviewing me in just a few short weeks and I am going to tack on some questions at the end to hopefully include the entire thing. As bonus for the Freetime audiobook. I want to know what do you want me to ask Cal Newport? I really would love your input on this because it feels a little more permanent than a podcast. He's been on Pivot and Freetime. We've done an episode, I think, for every single one of his recent books, Deep Work, A World Without Email, Digital minimalism. And now I have this opportunity to chat with him about free time. So he's going to interview me for most of the show and then I get to tack on a few questions at the end. Tell me what would you love for me to ask Cal Newport as it relates to the intersection of these two topics? Send me an email hi'sfreetime.com and also if you're listening to this, wondering if you should send something or if other people will and it will be fine, it's you. I remember when Seth Godin first launched his podcast Akimbo. I asked him how do you get enough listener submissions at the end? And he told me as he said on the air many times, he said I want you to go submit. He had to really remind people and tell them the inbox is empty. There's nothing that I can answer if you don't submit. So he said it's this process. You really have to let people know. It's not like even for Seth Godin, he wasn't getting droves and droves of questions in the beginning. I don't know if droves can apply to questions, or is that only to people and crowds? I don't know. Also, on a related note, I have to apologize. I think that something was broken with a backend system related to our contact forms. So the FreeTime website is still relatively new and I have not worked out all the kinks since launching the podcast, writing the book, getting the book sent off to the printer. There is a good chance that something has been broken for the last two weeks because I've put out a call for input and questions and comments and I have a feeling that at least one person would have sent something. So I have to apologize. If you submitted through the contact form on the FreeTime website, if you went to itsfreetime.com contact and you submitted a message in the last two weeks, I think there's a good chance that I didn't receive it because we switched email addresses. It's a long story dealing with tons of customer support stuff that I will spare you the details, but I would kindly ask you to a Forgive me for not responding and b resubmit if there were any recent episodes. I'm pretty sure since the one I did episode 46 on are you drowning, treading water, or gliding? That nothing really came in after that. And I think that was right around the time we were troubleshooting some domain and email issues. So I sincerely apologize. And if you're listening to this far into the future then this is one of those non evergreen announcements. But I'm leaving it in here anyway out of stubbornness. So email me if you sent a message recently. Please just resend it so that we make sure to get it. And I'm sorry if that means typing out something thoughtful that you had already sent a question or a comment related to anything really since episode 46. And I really do want to know from you, yes you what questions should I ask Cal that will go in the FreeTime audiobook bonus? Send me an email hi freetime.com and everything is fixed now, so I will get your message.

There was something on my mind throughout working on the Free Time book that's still in the back of my mind today. And it is the metaphor that we use to talk about and think about running a business. Particularly the focus area of this show are businesses with delightfully tiny teams that have a value of high net freedom that you're optimizing for time freedom, financial freedom, and the freedom for everybody on the team to Work according to their strengths and do their best work. In the workshops that I did called you'd Book and Big Idea. Those are available on the Pivot Podcast and in the Author Toolkit. If you go to itsfreetime.com authors, it's totally free. You'll find your book and Big Idea. I talk about how helpful metaphor is to encapsulating your big idea, both for you while you're working on a project or a big idea, and for your audience or your readers. This became clear to me with Pivot that the the metaphor I used was of a basketball player. When a basketball player stops dribbling, they plant one foot, and that's their source of strength and stability. And then their pivot foot can scan for passing options around the court.

I cannot tell you how many times I shared this metaphor over and over and over. And the aha moment that I had that sparked the pivot method framework, plant scan pilot launch, came from me being exasperated in my business. I had two weeks to pay the rent. I didn't have the money to pay it. And I said, I cannot keep spinning out about what I don't have, what I don't want, what I don't know. I have to double down on what's already working. I have to start where I am. And at that point, I was forgetting the fact that I already had a book, I already had a platform, I had so many things going for me, but I was so focused on what I didn't know and what I didn't want that none of that was moving me forward. So when I had my aha moment about what I needed to do to fix my business, it came from this metaphor of a basketball player. And it came from this idea that I need to plant. I need to have one foot planted. Then I can start scanning for passing options around the court. Once I had that metaphor, I could build the pivot method accordingly and talk about it in a way that could really connect something very abstract. How do you navigate what's next and connect with people to say, aha? Okay, I can get that. I can wrap my mind around that later as I was refining how I talk about pivot, especially when I would get to the pilot stage, which is all about running small experiments. At that time, nobody was talking, no one was really talking about career pivots. I'll start there. But especially career pilots. When you'd hear a word like pilot, it was often piloting projects or piloting business ideas. But there wasn't this idea of career pilots and not having to answer this question, what's next up front? But rather I would use this metaphor. It's like horses at the Kentucky Derby. You don't know which one is going to win. You need to line them all up at the starting gates, lift the gates, say go and see which ones pull out ahead. That you cannot answer your question about what's next when pivoting up front. In fact, you have to line up several small experiments in parallel and let them show you which one starts gaining momentum and traction. Which one are you enjoying, which one's working, which one has ease and joy involved. And you cannot know that upfront until you put things in motion and start getting real world feedback. So already I've introduced to you two metaphors that wrap around these big ideas. For more on the power of metaphor and analogy, I recommend the book Shortcut by John Pollock. I have not even finished this book, but it's in my mind all the time. The subtitle is How Analogies Reveal Connections, Spark Innovation, and Sell Our Greatest Ideas. I'll put a link in the show. Notes I want to read you an excerpt because this book says what I think we all intuitively know, which is that when you land on the right metaphor for something, it's a very powerful way to communicate clearly, and it gives people something that they can tie tie into. We hear a lot about the power of storytelling, and I think that's equally powerful that when we tell stories, that's what people will remember. And I have to say, storytelling is not a strength of mine. But I really enjoyed the book. Storyworthy for starting to develop and build that muscle. Let me read you an excerpt from Shortcut. John Pollock writes, when I set out to write this book, I intended to explore the subtle yet powerful role of analogy and persuasion. Because while they often operate unnoticed, analogies aren't accidents. They're arguments, arguments that, like icebergs, conceal most of their mass and power beneath the surface. In many arguments, whoever has the best analogy wins. As my research progressed, it became clear that analogies do more than just persuade. They also play a catalytic role in innovation and decision making, often with dramatic consequences. From the bloody Chicago slaughterhouse that inspired Henry Ford's first moving assembly line, to the domino theory that led America into the Vietnam War, to the bicycle for the mind that Steve Jobs envisioned as a Macintosh computer, analogies have played a dramatic role in shaping the world around us. Despite analogy's importance, many people have only a vague sense of its definition. In broad terms, an analogy is simply a comparison that asserts A parallel, either explicit or implicit, between two distinct things based on the perception of a shared property or relation in everyday use. Analogies appear in many forms, including metaphors, similes, political slogans, legal arguments, marketing taglines, mathematical formulas, biblical parables, logos, TV ads, euphemisms, proverbs, fables, and sports cliches. Wearing such disguises, analogies can play a much bigger role than most people recognize. Not just because analogies make arguments, but because they often trigger emotions that override the circuits of reason and sometimes at a subconscious level. All day, every day, in fact, we make or evaluate one analogy after the other because such comparisons are the only practical way to sort a flood of incoming data, place it within the context of our experience, and make decisions accordingly. We never know what assumptions, deceptions, or brilliant insights these analogies might be hiding until we look beneath their surface. Despite the ubiquity and impact of analogical thinking, most people are unaware of just how much this core process influences their decision making. Such lack of awareness comes at a cost. Evidence suggests that people who tend to overlook or underestimate analogies influence often find themselves struggling to make their arguments or achieve their goals. The converse is also true. Those who construct clearest, most resonant and apt analogies are usually the most successful in reaching the outcomes they seek. How fascinating, right? Just to understand the power of a metaphor and analogy and then apply it is for me it's an intentional act. I don't always think in metaphor or analogy, but I do always strive. Now, now that I know the power and it's so explicit for me, I do try to connect metaphor whenever I can and analogy whenever I can in conveying ideas. For example, in the last solo episode 48 about creating timeless content using Evergreen and others principles, I talk about working on the process, not in the task. Now I could tell you that and you might remember it, but I could also tell you what I did in that episode. The floor is lava and that's in free time. That's a metaphor to say are you in the lava in the tasks or are you working on process, AKA building furniture? So one thing that was really on my mind when writing freetime is what is the core metaphor that we use for our business and is it resonating? Is it working? Or do we need to rethink that? There are three metaphors that came to mind for me. One is that of a machine, one is of a house, and one is of a restaurant. And I'm going to explain to you how I see all three metaphors and I'm curious which one resonates most for you. And I think this is important to understand some kind of metaphor for what it is that we're building so that you don't feel trapped by trying to fit your business or how you're running your business into a metaphor that doesn't work, that creates stress and friction. A lot of business literature talks about building a machine. So I found this machine metaphor to be very, very prominent in business speak. One book that comes to mind is the Goal by Eli Goldratt. This is supposed to be one of the best selling business books. It's been around for I think, 30 years. And it's all about systems and process and bottlenecks and it's told in a parable sort of way. I could not get into this book. I don't know why these are the topics I love, but it's so dry. Many people would disagree with me. So my opinion is not fact. But I just could not get into this book. And I had the same problem when I was reading E. Myth Revisited. He was talking about franchising, creating a business as if you were going to open 4,000 franchise locations. And at the time that I read it, this machine or franchise model metaphor didn't really work for me. What's positive about creating a machine is the notion that once you build the machine and you test the machine and you know this working, you can put in certain inputs and get expected outputs, and that is a big goal of business. And streamlining operations and having clear process for sales and marketing and customer support. Because without creating some machines and process, it's just a jumble and it's inefficient and it creates more room for error. However, machines are not organic emergent organisms. So you might find it quite frustrating thinking that here you are trying to build your business as a machine and think parts keep breaking down or things aren't working, or when something unexpected happens or the economy shifts in a massive way, you. You feel that something's wrong or broken with this machine metaphor.

Then I got to thinking about the metaphor of a house. So we own our house here in New York, and right after we moved in, the boiler needed to be replaced. The pipes weren't organized correctly to fix a plumbing issue. We had mice in the house and we didn't know where they were coming and nor did we want to just blast them with exterminator spray. So Michael and I would set these humane traps and then if we caught mice, he would feed them like a true Lebanese host. He would feed them, give them a little almond before taking them back out and releasing them in the park. But there are all kinds of things that will go wrong with the house. It's not like you build a house once and then you're done. Even there was these articles about all these new developments in New York that were not free of problems. People didn't know they paid all this money and they paid a premium to have a brand new condo and they moved in. And then there were still issues. Someone said to me that you don't know what you're dealing with when you move into a new house until you've lived through every season. As this relates to building a business, consider you don't build your business once and then you're done. That's just not how it works. It's more like a house you can build, and you want to build a strong foundation. You want to know generally your business model and what the layout is. At the same time, you'll still need to deal with things breaking down, needing to be repaired, or just proactively wanting to make improvements, renovating, adding something, changing the functionality to fit how you and your family evolve in that house. Houses are more organic than a machine in that they are subject to the laws of entropy. Let me read you an excerpt from Free Time. Nowhere is this entropy more evident than in older homes or ones in nature. I remember staying at a cabin in the Catskills where I could see right before my eyes all forms of plants and animals encroaching on the once pristine house without upkeep. A dead tree teetered precariously toward the roof. Weeds started overtaking the grass. Spiders made themselves comfortable in bathroom corners. Giant carpenter ants traverse the kitchen counters. And we spotted a garden snake crawling into the crevices of the outdoor hot tub. Entropy, defined as gradual decline into disorder, is intrinsic to all organic systems. And it is happening in your business too. As author Lex Sisney explains, in organizational physics, all systems are subject to this disorder or disintegration. He writes, an organization's available energy first flows to manage and counter the disintegrating force of entropy. If entropy in the system is high, it costs the system a higher amount of available energy to maintain itself and get work done. So now this is Jenny again. What Les Sisney is saying in Organizational physics is that entropy is a fact of life and it's a fact of home ownership and it's a fact of business. And the more entropy you have in the form of sort of decaying or just that increase that tendency toward chaos, without addressing it, the more resources and energy in your business will be spent responding and handling that chaos, that gradual decline into disorder. I was very excited to find that there is a term for the opposite phenomenon, negentropy, which means that things are becoming more orderly, more organized than their surrounding space. Oh, I wish this was true for my house. So our house, we have an entropic, I don't know how to say it, clutter problem. Where every day if we don't counter the clutter, it just devolves the entropy of our clutter. It's like it devolves into this crazy, chaotic house that drives me nuts, but it takes effort. My friend Sarah told me about an article where the author was saying, every time you leave a room, take 10 things with you. That would be a negentropic way of thinking that you go, every time I leave a room, I'm going to make it cleaner than when I arrived. Or I'm going to take 10 things out and put them back where they belong, or even donate them to charity. The reason I find this house metaphor helpful for thinking about a business is that it allows for the fact that entropy exists. And I think sometimes when we just focus on the machine element of a business, oh, I'm trying to create a smooth running machine. We don't recognize the level of maintenance and upkeep truly required to address these forces of entropy. Think about the very start of this episode. I told you one of my contact forms. There was an issue that was from a series of glitches and errors that we needed to fix. There was a certain amount of chaos introduced in the system as we were trying to build a new website, automate workflows, fix a domain issue in Kajabi, switch email providers. I mean, there's so many things going on that it took a lot of energy. It's still taking energy from Brenna on my team and I to address this and from any of you that are going to have to resend an email that you already sent. So with a house metaphor, at least now we're getting into a little bit more of an organic system. But a house is still not as. As organic as, say, a tree. A tree or a root system is inherently organic and emergent. My dad taught me the word rhizome. It's like this network of the root system where each node connects to another node. I mean, think about this vast network of roots below ground. It's always growing and emerging unless it's dying. But with an emergent organism. There's no stasis, there's no there there. And I find that reality more helpful to consider than a machine that is not inherently alive. It's not growing, it's not organic and emergent. The machine only responds to what you give it. So we can think about a business like a machine. We can think about it like a house. The third metaphor that I find helpful is to think about it like a restaurant.

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Astute listeners will say, well, of course, Jenny, of course a business is like a restaurant because a restaurant is a form of business. So we're getting into a little bit of a circular logic here, but hear me out. Restaurants are very special type of business and I think that small business owners solo pluspreneurs with delightfully tiny teams. I think that we can learn from how restaurants operate not just at a macro level, but at the micro level of even how chefs prepare their mise en place, which we'll talk about in a future episode. And I have some great books to recommend to you on that subject too. One of my favorite restaurants in New York when I like to visit every holiday season, is Gramercy Tavern. It's just above Union Square. It was a restaurant founded by Danny Meyer, who wrote a fantastic book about his career. I'll put that in the show notes. It is just so warm. It's so delightful. It's so professional. And when you eat at Gramercy Tavern, you know what you're going to get. You're going to get great food and impeccable service. And I love that about a lot of fine dining experiences. I have to say, whether it's because I'm a Libra and I love luxury I love a good, delicious, Michelin star restaurant meal out in New York City. I think that that's half the reason that I live here, is just to make sure I can always find my way to, to a new and delicious and bustling restaurant spot, large and small. They don't all have to be Michelin star. Just yesterday, Michael and I got ramen on the Upper west side in this little tiny cozy spot. And the service was also impeccable and the food was delicious. So what I love about the metaphor of a restaurant is that it conveys this symphony of activity and when it's done well, joyful delivery, all the components are flowing harmoniously. Some of my best memories come from these delicious meals out with friends and family. And I remember, I remember the ambiance and the service and everything I just described to you. So consider all the moving parts of running a restaurant. There's the owner I mentioned, Gramercy Tavern, Danny Meyer, providing the startup capital. Whether solo or they get investors. And the owner is making key strategic decisions at the outset about what they're creating. A restaurant has to make choices. Are you high end or more accessible? Are the meals going to be served where you order at the counter or sit down? Are you going to deliver food service fast or slowly? Maybe it's meant to be a restaurant for really fine dining, as I described, or something more experimental. So you have the owner really setting the tone and the vision and the differentiation for the restaurant. The owner will often hire a chef. Sometimes the owner and head chef are one in the same. But at some point, typically the owner will hire the head chef who brings his own vision and talent and experience and mentoring to the rest of the team. You have a sous chef who's the right hand to the chef, working with the rest of the team to bring that chef's vision to life. The sous is often coordinating with outside vendors and specialists like the sommelier, the butcher farmers, wherever they're sourcing their ingredients from. I dated a chef once for a year and a half, and he was the sous chef, one of the sous chefs at Google. I saw how much work he had to do behind the scenes to do meal prep, to plan in massive quantities how much food and from where Google was going to order. And what he said was the most challenging at working at a place like a Google cafeteria was that the menu changed every day, whereas in a restaurant it might only change once a month or even once a season. So there's a tremendous amount of work that the sous chef does that goes beyond the Food that you see on any plate. Then you have the line cooks. The line cooks are preparing the ingredients for each recipe with simple repeatable steps to execute every recipe just so according to the chef's vision. So this would include mise en place, getting their workstation set up. It includes prep, prepping all the ingredients and also final presentation on the plate so the line cooks are there. Every chef may have a different way to make an omelette. That's like one of the famous tests for a chef's culinary skills. Every chef might have a different way to make spaghetti, spaghetti, a twist on spaghetti and meatballs, or one of my favorites, cacio e pepe. And so the line cooks need to be able to read these recipes and the prep instructions and presentation to get it according to the vision. You also have a menu. So the menu itself is what customers are looking at, the selections that that restaurant offers to reflect the vision and focus of the head chef and the owner. So the restaurant again, cannot be all things to all people. Is it going to be Michelin star or McDonald's? How many guests per night? What types of prices, what types of ingredients? Is it luxuriously high or conveniently low? Does the menu reflect core values of the business, such as sourcing farm to table or organic ingredients? In addition to the menu, there's best practices, staff, how they uniquely prepare meals, how they uniquely serve guests, ambiance, decor. Then you can even get into the fridge and the pantry containers where all the ingredients live. Prep tools like pots, pans, knives, compost bins. There's so much going on and we talked about a little bit the specialists like the sommelier. Okay, so if you consider your business like a restaurant, I think what happens sometimes is that as business owners, we conflate all of these roles. And if we do not step back and step aside and get some perspective and see that we are the owner and yes, we are the head chef, but no, we don't have to be the sous chef and the line cook and the waiter and the server and the busser in the delivery of our products and services. A book that I find very helpful to this end is Built to Sell by John Warrilow. He talks about streamlining. If you're a service based business, pick one key service that you offer and productize it. Set your menu and get the systems in place and the people in place to deliver that menu, to deliver clients a repeatable, well oiled experience within the broader chaos of a restaurant environment. If you think about your business in the way that a Restaurant owner would. It means that you don't have to do everything and that you can't do everything. And unlike a machine, which again, this machine metaphor for running, maybe building the back end of a business, or you could, you could build a sales machine or a marketing machine, but the fact is, at the end of the day, you are a human running a business and you partner with other humans to create things in your business and you other humans hire you. So there's all this inherent chaos to being a person and dealing with other people that the machine metaphor just does not do, does not capture. There's a funny line about this from Greg Alexander, who wrote a book and has a podcast called the Boutique for Scaling Service Based Businesses. I'll put it in the show notes. He says, all your problems are walking around on two feet. I thought that was pretty funny. Whether or not it's true, it's funny to think about not just in business, but in life sometimes. In fact, all our biggest problems are either walking around on two feet or are about the relationships between other people. That's the book, the Courage to Be Disliked. He kind of talks about that, that all problems are interpersonal problems, which is very interesting. Food for thought. So if you think about your business, not even like a house or a machine, both of which are more static, but like a restaurant or a forest, you know, something that really has a dynamic ecosystem of things interacting and responding to and in relationship with the environment and people around it. You can acknowledge how much inherent chaos is involved in doing something as bold and brave as running a business and then start to say, okay, where am I taking on too much? Where am I expecting myself to be everything? Owner, chef, sous chef, line cook, dishwasher, busser, server. And how can you start to parse out those roles and create clear process? Do you have a clear menu of services? Does your menu have clear recipes behind each item on the menu so that it is repeatable how to deliver that well? And this is why sometimes paring down your menu, not offering so many things, in my case, I had to pare down from 12 streams of income so that I could refine the processes that are happening behind the scenes. I'm reading a fantastic book by Don Charnas about mise en place and he interviewed all these chefs and he makes parallels to how they set up their workstation with how, let's say, information workers can do the same. I'm only halfway through. It's called Everything in its Place, but it's fantastic. It's about how we can apply the principles of mise en place to organize our work and our life and our mind. And quick summary and then I'll share more in a future episode. And I even would love to get Dan on the show and just interview him directly. He talks about three central preparation, process and presence. He said when practiced by great chefs, these three mundane words become profound. The byproduct of these values may be wealth or productivity, but the true goal is excellence. He talks about preparation, a life where preparation is central, not an add on or an afterthought. He talks about process, that chefs have to be able to execute a prepared plan in an excellent way. And he talks about presence, that chefs commit to being present in ways from the mundane to the sublime. After months and years of repeated prep and process, the cook acquires a deeper kind of presence, becoming one with the work and the work becoming a kind of meditation. I hope thinking about your business in any of these three ways, or all of them at different points, Maybe you're applying these metaphors to aspects within your business of the machine, the house, the restaurant, the forest. See how it changes how you think about different elements of your business. And by the way, these are not the end all be all of business. Building Metaphors I'm really curious. What do you think is missing? Can you think of a different metaphor that relates to building a small business, particularly one with a delightfully tiny team? I would love to hear if you have ideas or other metaphors come to mind, and I encourage you to try this thought exercise as you're working on your own big ideas and things that you want to communicate to clients and your community. Whether you're writing, speaking, creating a podcast, whatever it is you're doing. When you think of some kind of complex or abstract topic, just ask yourself, what is this like, what is a metaphor that I can weave in here that will help people better understand? Or quickly and immediately and again, even somewhat subconsciously, make a direct connection? Thank you so much everybody for listening. Have a beautiful rest of your day and drop me a note at hi'sfreetime.com with questions that you would love for me to ask. Cal Newport.

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