15: Special, Not Special — How to Work Your Way Out of a Dip

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Hi, I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot Podcast and author of the book Turn what's Working for you into what's Next, which comes out with Portfolio Penguin in September of 2016.

In this podcast, I talk with peak performers to reverse engineer their most successful career. Pivots interview experts on what it takes to be agile in a rapidly evolving economy and open the kimono on what happens behind the scenes of my book envision. You can learn to capitalize on risk, fear and uncertainty as the doorways of opportunity. My promise is that you will leave every episode with practical tips, tools and tactics for show notes from this episode. Visit jennyblake Me Podcast.

If change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Pivot Method Podcast. I am Jenny Blake and today we are going to talk about the dip. How to know when you've hit one. Though I'm pretty sure you would already know how to methodically work your way through one. Some resources you can use, how to separate what might just be internal gremlins from actual valid external based concepts, concerns, and I'll share some resources at the end. What's really important to me about today's call and why I'm going into this topic now is because I want to give you fresh perspective from the trenches. It's so easy just to give Rah rah cheerleading. Ah, you're gonna hit a dip. Push through it. You can do it. And I don't think that's as helpful as it can be. My goal today is going to be to share my most recent experience with the DIP as it relates to writing my new book and the actual practices and habits that got me out of it. And resources as well.

Let's jump in. Back in October I found out that I got a book deal for the Pivot Method, which is really exciting. Dream come true. It was a long time. I would say a couple Solid years of figuring out what's next for me in my professional career and how I could add value to the world in book form once again. So right away, I knew October was going to be my busiest time of year. And yet I wanted to start writing in the month of November. I set up a big accountability group, invited anyone and everyone to join, coinciding with National Novel Writing Month, which is the month of November. That practice has been going on for 11 or 12 years now, and I wanted to set one up that would encourage people to write for 1 to 2000 words every day with the aim of having 50,000 bloggable words by the end of November. This pretty much seemed impossible to me, but I was determined to give it a shot. Felt like running a mental marathon. And I did. Day by day, I committed to writing first thing in the morning. And I was really surprised that writing just sometimes even just 10 minutes, all the way up to occasionally 30 minutes, sometimes an hour, really moved the needle forward. It was approaching the third week of the month, and I could tell I needed to write about 2,000 words a day to finish. At that point, I could have let myself off the hook and said, it's okay, I don't have to hit 50,000. But it was really important to me to just meet the goal. It was something that I set, and I wanted to see if I could do it. By the end of November. I really pushed myself. I put in some couple hour marathons. I did it. I hit 50,000 on the nose without trying. And I was so excited. There was a couple days there, maybe two max, where I really felt like I did it. I did this thing I set out to do. I wrote not just when I was feeling inspired or full of a good idea, but I wrote every day as a practice. One of the things that was most helpful was having a scratch pad in Evernote where I would keep topic ideas throughout the week. And then each morning I would pick. I would actually queue up three topic ideas. The day before that I could choose from the next morning. That really helped so that I wasn't trying to think of a good idea at the same time as writing about something. I found that thinking about ideas and having good ideas would come to me at all times of the day, at all hours, and I didn't want to be doing that heavy lifting when I was actually trying to get my word count down for the day. So all that seemed well and good, right? And I had been working on my new book. I wanted to make as big a push as I could. And so then I excitedly, and some of you may know this if you read my recent blog post, I excitedly exported all my Google Docs. I wrote each chapter in a Google Doc. Thank you, Shane Snow, for that tip. I exported everything, took it to Kinko's, printed it all out. It was 370 pages. The guy had to put it in a box. I took it home, I curled up with a pen, cup of tea, started reading, and all of a sudden my heart sank as I went through page by page. I just felt so disappointed reading everything back. It just, it didn't resonate. It sounded cheesy, it felt sloppy and it wasn't working. And then the next day I would see articles and books, in some cases books that had come out years ago that when I flipped back through them, I realized so much of what I had written had already been said.

Now, some people will say that everything in the history of the world has already been said and there's nothing new, but it hasn't been said by you. And yes, I'm a big believer of that school of thought. At the same time, though, originality is really important to me. I would never set out to write a book with the intention, oh, there's nothing new in here, you know, that's not exciting for me to write or think about. And why would that be exciting for you to read? And I think there are many different ways to be original. Part of it's what I'm saying, how connecting it to current events. Maybe it's the book format, but at the end of the day, it really is important to me that the book feel fresh and that it feel different and that it actually feel helpful. Part of what really frustrated me during my own pivot was that I. I looked at the hundreds of business and personal development books on my shelves and I felt so disappointed by them. None of them solved it for me, it being that massive question, what's next? Some came close, some were more helpful than others, but no one book gave me exactly what I was looking for. And that's what I'm hoping to capture with my own, with the pivot method.

So, you know, as I'm sitting with my draft and I had to read it over a course of a couple days, I just got really discouraged. I knew the dip was going to come. I knew when I signed the contract that, okay, here we go. It was kind of actually, I haven't signed the contract yet, but when we accepted the book deal, it kind of felt like, all right, I'm strapping In my seatbelt. I know this is going to be a ride. I know from the last time around that there are going to be some dark days. It's going to be frustrating and I don't ever want to go into a project assuming it's going to be difficult. I think a lot of people will say, oh, writing a book, that's so hard. And I try not to hold that perspective when I'm writing. I aim for the motto, let it be easy, let it be fun. And yet still, I just kind of knew that I would hit one, probably several pretty big dips throughout the course of the project.

So here was one. The first one had shown up loud and clear. And the thing is, it came after just a month. So in some ways people in the engineering community, there's the term fail fast. In some ways, great, fantastic. I spent a month writing every day and now I have a shitty first draft. That was the entire goal. But it was a morale drop for me to be reading the shitty first draft. And yes, while I was proud of the word count, to be honest, I felt like 70 to 80% was not usable. And that was scary to me because it felt like I have such a gap between whether it's my ideas or my writing skill set or my content, there's this huge gap between where I want to end up and where I am now. Okay, so that kind of sets the foundation. What did I do about it? How did I work through the dip? One thing that I think is really important is to separate internal gremlins or fears versus external process based concerns. So that's first and foremost. It's really important to parse out those two things. Internal gremlins or fears are things like, you're not a good writer, you're not going to write a good book, this isn't going to be successful, you don't have what it takes.

You don't have any original ideas, you're not good enough. Everything is some variation of you're not good enough or you can't do this. Those are the internal gremlins. And I would say there's the gremlin variety that's oh, you're not good enough. But there's also a really subtle type of internal fear which is just, can I do this? Am I cut out for this? And I don't think that's a gremlin necessarily. I think that it's a reasonable question to ask, do I have what it takes or do I need to fill in those gaps? Somehow that brings me to external process based concerns. External concerns are valid.

Things to think about. In the case of my book, it would be I need to learn how to cite things properly or an external concern. I want to have more stories in this book and I didn't write any during the month of November, or what format is going to resonate most with people? Or how can I differentiate this book from everything else that's out there? Those are real concerns and they're good ones to have and they're good ones to ask. So the first thing to know when you hit a dip is to separate the internal, more emotional side from the more tactical things that you actually can address, whether it's through research, talking to other people, or experimenting.

I want to share a quote from Seth Godin. He wrote the book on the dip, a little book that teaches you when to quit and when to stick. I love that he says the opposite of quitting isn't waiting around. So you know, Seth is saying, don't quit. Set a goal and see it through. And there are some cases to quit, but mostly see it through. He says the opposite of quitting is rededication. The opposite of quitting is an invigorated new strategy designed to break the problem apart. It's a mistake to view the dip as static, to imagine that you are merely a passive passenger on a slow moving boat ride, sitting there as you move through the doldrums of the dip. The dip is flexible. It responds to the effort you put into it. In fact, it's quite likely that aggressive action on your part can make the dip a lot worse or a lot better. Let's try for better. Okay? Seth has three questions that he asks or he encourages you to ask if you hit a dip and to make things a lot better. They are 1am I panicking? 2 who am I trying to influence? And 3 what sort of measurable progress am I making? I have a slightly different framework that was helpful for me. One was before even asking those questions. Distance. Take a step back. It's a totally different type of brain processing to be in the thick of the kind of quick, sloppy mode of writing a shitty first draft versus that deep reflection and questioning about differentiation. So take a step back. Actually, it was really important for me not to even look at my book, to read the pages, to talk to people about it for a few days. I needed to be with the fact that I didn't like what I was seeing. And it was important for me to take distance and not try and fix it right away, not try to put a Band aid over a gaping wound. I needed to just. Maybe that's not a good analogy, but I need to give it time and give it some oxygen. Then I asked myself some questions, and the three questions that were helpful to me were, what is most important to me? What is most important to my market or to the people who will be reading this book? And what is my differentiator? I guess you could add a fourth question. What's my biggest concern? So. So if you hit a dip, it's important to know why. What put you there? In my case, I was really disappointed in two things. One, the quality of the writing and two, the feeling that my book wasn't original or differentiated enough from what's already out there.

As I considered what's most important to me was to be insanely helpful. I really wanted my book to be the kind of thing you hand to a person who is confused about what's next, and it actually holds their hand through that process of figuring out what it is and how to get there. What's most important to the people reading my book? I actually think a lot of business books are formatted in a way that's really boring and really dense. I went back and tried to do some research this weekend and pull out salient ideas from key chapters of key business books, and I couldn't find them. So many books have this format of speed stories and research, and the main points are kind of buried. And so it's important for me with this book to have a very accessible format and one where it's very easy to understand the key takeaways and that there are many key takeaways. And that was my goal with life after college as well. Not every nugget of information will be for every person, but format was important to me. And then what makes me different? This is a question where I had to call in the troops. I needed to ask my family and people close to me who knew me well, help. I'm in a dip and I'm really close to it right now. What do you see from the outside that makes me different? And I explained my concerns. I don't want to just be more of the same. What value do you think that I bring or that I can bring that is different? And that was really helpful because sometimes some of what people said to me I knew and some of it I didn't. It's fun to hear it from different people's perspectives. People said things like, you're really action oriented or you're focused on tools, or you have a Very clear way of explaining things. And first, this was a great morale boost, and I wasn't asking for that reason, but it was so wonderful to have people say such nice things. But second, it started to help me go back to what I'm best at. And I will be the first person to say, I am. I do not see myself as a pro writer. I'm not. I don't have the most beautiful prose or this natural talent for, I don't know, really deep, rich, prolific writing. It's not my strong suit. I like to simplify complex ideas, and I try to do that as best I can in writing. So maybe I don't need to be the next Malcolm Gladwell. Maybe that's not gonna be my niche. And that's okay. So this is where you're gonna laugh at me. Those of you who are still listening, I asked myself, I said, well, isn't it funny that I'm writing a book about pivoting and change and being agile? And I'm now in this scope of this project being asked to. To do exactly that, to shift directions. Ha ha ha. At Google, we would call this eat your own dog food. That if we were going to create products like Gmail, spreadsheets, Google Docs, we started using those internally in 2006. When I got to the company, there was this directive.

No more Microsoft Word or even Excel. And a lot of people were using these. We need to eat our own dog food. And tried docs and spreadsheets, and they were full of bugs. But that's actually by testing internally, what helped those products get ready to be released. So now here I am writing this book on the pivot method, and I thought, all right, well, what would I do if I needed to apply the pivot method to this situation? This dip, this feeling of not knowing how to proceed? What would I do? And the pivot method is plant scan pilot. So let me take you through each one of those. Plant this. Think of the pole vaulter who sticks their pole in the ground, and that is the leverage that catapults them over the bar. Plant is what are your assets, what's working for you, what is already under your feet, and where do you want to go? Planting can be your values. What's most important to you, your vision. What do you want from this project or outcome or next career move? And then your strengths. What are you best at? What is already working.

For me? My values, Originality, innovation, being insanely helpful. My vision for the book is that it's really going to help People. I want it to be very action oriented, easy to read, but also full of interesting ideas and give people some new material, but also really solve the problem of helping them figure out what's next. That this would be a book people would read and want to tell their friends about strengths. What am I good at? I'm good at tools and templates and I live in New York, so I meet lots of very interesting people. Okay, great. I can start there. I can go back to my basic framework. Life After College actually did quite well. And I think part of that was because of the format. Okay, great. So now I'm giving myself permission not to have to write the same type of book as everyone else. And in fact, seeing how kind of unoriginal some of my thoughts and ideas were, fantastic, great. I don't have to write that book now. That book is already out there. In a way, I was relieved. The next step of the pivot method, Scan now from a foundation of strengths and assets and what's working. Scan for opportunity and for skills. I've taken a few writing classes and I should probably take another one, for example. That would be a great scanning for opportunity. And part of the pivot method is from the plant step, you're kind of identifying where am I now and where do I want to go? And now there's a gap. And now we need to solve for X. We need to solve for what is the thing that's going to get me to where I want to go. That's where Pilot comes in. And Pilot is all about small experiments. You're not going to get there overnight. I'm not going to write this perfect book overnight. No, it doesn't work that way. So with scanning, I needed to go back. I went back to books that I liked. What did I like about them? I went to people I could talk to and I started calling and having coffee with very smart friends. Scanning is also about just opportunity. It's recalibrating my scanning.

I will say though, that scanning hits a maximum effectiveness where at a certain point it's going to create analysis problem paralysis.

Today, as of recording this right now, I realized I have got to stop scanning and researching. It's driving me bananas. It's driving me up the wall. I can't. I'm so paralyzed by knowing how much is out there because I read so voraciously both books and articles that every time my brain thinks a thought, another one will kick in saying, tsk, tsk, tsk, that's already been written. And it will cite the article and I'm getting kind of sick of that. So I think there's going to be a point where the scanning has got to stop and you move to action. Okay, Pilot small experiments. So how this is showing up, as far as the book is that I am taking, I actually kind. I had 100,000 words written across many different Google Docs and I just thought it's so complicated. So I actually set up a new doc and I thought if I had to write a primer, a several page document to convey the most important ideas, what would I say? If I were talking to someone as if they were sitting across from me, what would I say? And so I bit off a much smaller chunk of the project to tackle the other thing that I did. I kind of ranked the state of affairs of every chapter that I had drafted, the chapter on finances was the strongest because that's what we submitted with my book proposal and that's what helped get the book deal. Okay, great. That's one out of, let's say 15 at least it's not zero. Second I picked what's the next closest? Which one most closely models where I want to go, even if it's not that close, what's number two? I picked that one out and then I picked two or three more. But instead of trying to revise everything all at once, I am going to go back and try and nail one or two more chapters and then see how I feel. So making smaller and smaller experiments is really helpful. The other thing for me about piloting is it's really important for me that I don't write this book in a vacuum. So piloting is also talking to people, interviewing people I've had some very fascinating conversations with. During the dip when I was taking space from the book, I interviewed the former number three guy of the FBI who was in charge of cybersecurity and now took a job as president at a cybersecurity startup. I interviewed a fascinating professor on his new area called Robo Psych, the psychology of working with robots and what that's going to be like. And so these conversations were so energizing to me. And they, and they gave me great ideas. I mean, I'm not citing them as my own. I'm going to quote them and tell their stories, but they really breathed new life into the book. And a part of that is to say community and people are a really important asset as well. And so their ideas and their energy and their career history and philosophy, that was so energizing for me and so interesting. That it gave me some new lenses to filter for what I had written and to add more new and interesting material. So I think part of piloting and scanning is also getting out there. Find people who really light you up, who you really resonate with. And for me, it's so funny, sometimes I'll just hear someone speak at a conference and I'll get this urge like.

The guy from the FBI where I don't even know what to say to him, but I just know I need to go up and say something and I'll be so embarrassed and nervous and I don't know what to say, but I'll give them a compliment on their talk. And in this case, he told me some fascinating information, like, oh, wow, I pivoted 13 times in 23 years. And from there I said, wow, that's incredible. Can I interview you about that? And those 13 moves, by the way, were all within the FBI, which is so interesting to me.

All right, so that's the pivot method itself and that's how I used it to work through the dip as far as my book draft, plant scan, pilot. And then I would say some other things that have helped me using post it notes on my walls to restructure. This is where we get back to those external based concerns. And it's so incredibly important to actually understand what am I trying to do here? I went back and remapped. There's a common learning and development, a way to figure out your objectives for a learning initiative. It's no feel do. And I know Alexandra Franzen uses this. If any of you have taken her workshops after reading this book or reading this chapter or taking this course, what do I want people to know? What do I want them to feel and what do I want them to do? So before digging back into the writing, I actually created some tables on a piece of paper. But I did no feel due down the left and I did the chapters of the book across the top. And I did this for every single chapter that I had drafted as well as the book itself. And that was really, really important. I want people to know practical tools for how to move forward but that aren't that same boring career advice like update your resume and create a LinkedIn profile. I wanted them to feel a sense of momentum, invigoration, just I don't even know if that's a word, but I want to be able to feel supported, inspired, and truly momentum really captures it. And then what do I want them to do? I want them to run small experiments. One of My new mottos Always Be Piloting that we're never not changing, we're never not pivoting. We're either getting ready for one, we've just done one, or we're coming out of one. But it's kind of this, I think that we're more in a state of flux than we're in a state of omg. Everything's so perfect. I don't need to change a single thing. At least I know in my life that's not the case. And of course I try to be present and very grateful for everything in my life. But I also love change and I love new ideas. Well, I know I resist change sometimes, but.

I love the feeling of growing and learning and challenging myself. And so for those reasons, always be piloting fits because. Cool. I'm always kind of running experiments to see what new areas to move in and how to enhance existing projects under my belt.

I think part of Always Be Piloting too is reduce complexity. If you are tackling a really massive project, it's important to simplify. For me, the example was choosing one next chapter or choose one concept to flesh out at a time and really just bite off small chunks as possible.

All right, finally, I want to share a few resources that have been helpful to me and will hopefully be helpful to you. I've already mentioned Google Docs and Evernote as sort of core tools. Also, Ohm Writer has been wonderful. It provides a widescreen, the little click click typewriter noise, which I love. Some background music. It's really nice. And it's. I'm pretty sure it's free, so I'll put all these links in the notes. Hemingway app is this incredible tool where you copy and paste prose into the online editor. It's not a software program, it's just done within your browser window and you paste your text and it will actually mark up the text with edits about the complexity of your sentences and what are very easy to read and understand and which ones are hard to read and understand and where you've used too many adverbs or where you have spelling mistakes. This blows my mind. If we want to talk about I'm also obsessed with robots and the video Humans need not apply about how robots and automation are taking over. It's so crazy to me here. This Hemingway app. It's like paying a professional editor and it's a great way to do a first pass on your own. I'm all for hiring professional editors, but but maybe before you do that, save you both some time and look at this app that can actually analyze the structure of your sentences in seconds. It doesn't even take a long time. So for me, now I actually have to do it because I know it's there, but I haven't used it yet because I know I have my work cut out for me. I tend to write long run on sentences, so it's going to be good to break me of that habit.

The community that I set up for tracking word count and if you want to do the NaNoWriMo challenge, I called it NaNoBlogmo because the goal was 50,000 bloggable words. But that template is still alive and running kicking. Some of us are using it in the month of December. Off and on you can go to Bit ly nanoblogmo and again, I'll put that in the comments too, but just add your name to an empty row at the bottom and have at it. Finally, my friend Alyssa just launched an online content community for writers and I'm really excited. I'm a founding member and just looking forward to masterminding, giving and receiving feedback. Alyssa is a total pro, not just at content and copywriting and editing. She's a Forbes columnist, but also running mastermind groups. She was the strategic force between the Dynamite Circle Mastermind for three years while living in Southeast Asia. And she's just a genius. Every time I talk to her, I'm learning something new and she'll send me a recap email with a whole handful of resources. So that's@craftyourcontent.com I believe enrollment is closed, but I'm sure you could send her a note and pester her and tell her I sent you. She might let you in. Or she can at least let you know when it opens for enrollment again. All right, I think that's everything that I wanted to cover for today. Most of all, I just want to encourage you. And this is where I will do my rah rah cheerleading. But truly, if you've hit a dip, it does mean that you're on the right track. There is nothing wrong with you. I think that it takes a lot to continue with a project after the initial adrenaline has worn off. And I know that one way to I think for me, I have this gremlin that oh, you're so negative. You're assuming the other shoe is gonna drop. Like, oh yay, I started a project. I'm so happy. When is the dip coming? And for me, it's not about that so much as it is being realistic and saying in the history of big things I've done that are important to me, 100% of them have involved a dip of some kind. So it really, I do see it as a rite of passage. I'm not saying it feels any suck less suck terrible when you're in it. No, it's still gonna suck. It's still not gonna be fun. And the whole definition of it is that kind of brings you to your knees a little bit. But the point is that it can be worked through and it will be worth it. I believe that for me too. I'm actually so glad to have experienced a dip this early on in my process. Thank goodness it's not coming when the book is due tomorrow or something. You know, I'm glad that I have time to work things through. So quick recap on today's call. When you hit a dip, separate your internal fears and gremlins from external process based concerns. Take some distance. Give yourself a few days. Let your brain return to that high level 50,000 foot view processing. Ask yourself these questions. What is most important to me? What is most important to my market or the people who will be using this? And what is my differentiator? Then you can go through the Pivot method itself. Plant values, vision, strengths and assets, scan what's out there, what are the gaps that I need to fill or address, and pilot what small experiments can I run and how can I break that complexity down into even more basic steps? Thank you so much everyone for listening. If you want to keep in touch with me and my process, go to jennyblake me and you can learn more about the book at thepivotmethod.com until next time. Bye.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot Podcast. To learn more and get in touch, visit JennyBlake me where I blog about systems at the intersection of mind, body and business. Or find me on Twitter at Jenny Underscore Blake. And remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.