181: Be Irreplaceable with My Creative Coach Jay Acunzo

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If you are not present, if this is not work only you can create, if you have not gotten your creative fingerprints all over the work, if you're only focused on the things that are the most replaceable and repeatable, why are you required in that work? You may be replaced by creating the things we want to exist at the very same time we're creating the things that others want to. It's a very weird like mental yoga move that I think us creative people are always trying to figure out. And at least at this stage of my career or chapter that I'm in, I found that it's very useful for me to just let the version of myself win that says the work is for me.

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Welcome back Free Timers. Get excited because we have one of my favorite people on the pod today, Jay Acunzo. Jay is one of the world's most sought after business storytellers and brand consultants. He is amazing in so many ways, but I have to say that Jay is such an advocate and has such a deep commitment to quality and to helping people who do creative work do more of their best work. So much of what Jay does has been an inspiration to me over the years. Actually we both worked at Google at one point in time, never in the same offices. He has also worked and partnered with companies like HubSpot and ESPN before launching his award winning podcast, Unthinkable and authoring multiple books on creativity including Break the Wheel, Question Best Practices, hone your intuition and do your best work. He has helped other people develop all kinds of original podcast series. He had a show called Three Clips that I loved that he ended up selling. So bravo to Jay for even seeing the arc of a podcast all the way through to an acquisition. And now he's launching a brand new membership platform called the Creator Kitchen of which I Am delighted to be a part. So Jay, welcome to the show.

I'm smiling ear to ear because like it's a rainy morning here in Boston and on mornings like this I get romantic and I reflect back on like trudging to a coffee shop. Before I had kids, before I was like creator full time writing to 12 people and my mom. So like hearing you read that stuff, I'm like, maybe I should take a moment and just go, you know what, I've worked really hard and I've done some stuff like. Cause I don't think any of us do that. Maybe we should.

I totally agree. I was just thinking about that this morning because the day that we're recording this, it's almost one year anniversary of the book launching and two years of the podcast and I was thinking, gosh, I have such a tendency to just focus on where I haven't gotten yet and I think that's natural. But then there's all this great work behind and all this impact.

We're told about what happens when we start. I don't think we're told what happens when we put in a bunch of reps or ship a bunch of projects or experience a tiny bit of forward momentum. We're not told, hey, you know that yearning feeling you had when you started? It's not going to go away. If anything, it gets worse. Your ambitions change, the world changes, the projects you're working on will change. So I find myself going, cool, I'm here now. And sometimes have to gut check against like the initial, I don't know, impetus is to just keep going, keep going, keep going and not take a. I don't want to say it this way because it sounds self congratulatory, but I guess it is. Take a victory lap once in a while, for crying out loud, for yourself.

Speaking of that yearning, how do you reconcile that feeling? Do you ever have a yearning that you could reach more people with your work than you do? Because I know you're so focused on quality, not quantity. We're going to get into all your great sayings around this, but do you ever have yearnings to reach a bigger audience or do you feel that your work could reach a bigger audience than it does?

Yeah, I have to keep the ego in the cage and only let it paw at the world a little bit. But not unleash it. Because if I unleash it, it's going to tell me, hey, you know that stuff you see spreading virally on social media? Why don't you create that stuff, Jay? Or hey, you know the podcast that you think is above average, that you create and have shipped like 200 plus episodes now, that should be bigger. It should have a bigger audience. And one of the things that almost gave me permission to embrace the style of work that I do, because it's hard to listen to people, good or bad, on the Internet sometimes. And so sometimes you need that one person that you hang on their every word and they say something that relates to you, even if they didn't know it, even if it's like a digital mentor, it's not someone that you talk to. And sometimes you need them to summarize what you've suspected for a while. And so recently that happened to me where I was listening to my favorite comedian, Mike Birbiglia, who he combines sentimentality and comedy. I love stories that dance right up to the line of sentimentality without tipping towards the trite. That's my jam. Those are the stories I want to tell and the ones I want to consume. So he does that through his comedy and his one man shows. And he said, there are more popular ways to execute my craft. There are more popular things I could create. And he was just expressing gratitude that anybody likes the way he does it. And I just found that both beautiful and freeing because, yeah, there are more popular ways to create a podcast about work than mine. Write a newsletter. My newsletter is incredibly long and it comes out every other week. There are more popular ways to post on social media than I do, but at the end of the day, it just doesn't feel right to me. That's not the stuff I want to exist in the world. And I sort of have to reconcile the fact that I'm going to go deeper with fewer people, and that's okay. There are business models that support that. And I can lay my head on my pillow at the end of the night and feel better about myself at the same time. So I think it's just a marriage of where my values are, what I want to see exist in the world, and also trying to construct a business model and a career that supports that and not fall victim to, oh, I'm a creator. So I need a $5, $50, $100 offering, which means my revenue is tied to my traffic, which means I have to do the work that doesn't sit well with me. No, you can actually create a business that maps to your values. And, you know, as a content creator, that's just harder to see because optically, the stuff you see is not the stuff I want to do.

And Is there a small part of you? Because sometimes I wonder, well, is that true that it means going deeper with fewer people? Or is there a yes and or a both and where Sometimes I feel like people like you, whose work I love, and it's been so helpful to me, every single thing you create, whether it's a podcast or a newsletter or we did one on one coaching even, doesn't part of you say, well, yes, I can go deep and the work can be such high quality and it could still reach a lot of people because, I don't know, I tell myself the same story that, well, it's okay the way that I like to create, because I'm not focused directly staring straight at marketing or numbers. That doesn't motivate me to create what I do. But I wonder for someone like you, do you ever think, well, what if it could be both? Or how could it be both?

We're living in a world that's very obsessed with reach, and I'm obsessed with resonance. So reach is how many see it. Resonance is how much they care about. And no amount of reach can ensure that people care. And I came out of marketing and specifically content marketing. I wanted to be a sports journalist. That's where I started. My internships in college were all pointing that way. And when I got into marketing, someone said, oh, you can write for a living. And I was like, great, I'll show up for work. And then I was surrounded by people who didn't really care about the craft. They didn't say to the writers on their marketing team, hey, you know, the way you open that piece really hit me where I live, thank you for that. They would only say, hey, that piece was great, because here's the metric. And that just wasn't motivating to me. And so I just want to pursue the craft. I want to pursue the intrinsic motivation of it all. And I find that the more I do that, the more I let the rest of it drop, the more people like you, Jenny, go, Jay, create some good stuff. Bill, Sam, Michael and Mary, you should know about Jay. And like, there's no analytics chart that will tell me. Good for me. I did that right. It's word of mouth, but I do think people are starting to get smart to the fact that there are things that you have to earn that you can't buy. And we ought to be measuring those things too. Like you can buy downloads for a podcast, you can't buy episode completions. You have to earn it. You could buy newsletter subscribers. You shouldn't but you could, you could buy an email list. You have to earn replies to that list, to your sense, to your essays or your articles or your curated roundups. You can buy website traffic. You have to earn repeat visitors. So you can put like a marketing lens or a business lens over the stuff that to me sounds like make good art. Very lucky I came out of sales and marketing and so I was sort of taught how to do that stuff. I like to joke that there's a character in Marvel called the Winter Soldier who was just a guy, just a friend to Captain America. And when he was abducted by the bad guys, they gave him super soldier serum, they made him super strong, they gave him a metal arm, and he became superpowered. And then when he woke up one day and went over to the good side again, now he's capable of being a superhero only because he spent a little bit of time with the bad side, with the dark side. I'm not saying that like high growth tech companies are the dark side. I have a lot of friends who work for companies like that, but I did too. And it showed me a world of how to think about or speak the language of brands and business and sales and marketing. So that now that all I want to do is create stories that I love and others love, I can find a way to earn a living on that. So I think the hesitation that some people feel like, oh, I gotta make this spread, is because they're just seeking more. They have not defined enough and they don't have the mechanics or the motions or the muscle memory to take the thing that should be enough for them and thrive on it. So their only recourse is to say, well, I guess I need more. And I'm very, very, very privileged. And to say that I don't feel that impulse anymore. I did when I was a little bit younger, but I don't anymore.

That's awesome. Yeah. That reach versus resonance is one of those great jaisms. You have all these, like, do more of what matters so your work can matter more. Like you have all these kind of dualities.

I do like to play with words, Jenny. I like the words.

One of the ones that I love that I sing from the mountaintops is don't be the best, be their favorite. And that's a great example of redefining the metrics that matter. And you gave us this great example in Creator Kitchen to say, what are some of your fun, playful, even more meaningful metrics? You gave some examples of Reach downloads, newsletter subscribers. So tell us some of your even More meaningful metrics that help you gauge whether you're somebody's favorite doesn't have to be the best.

I'm glad you appreciated that prompt. The whole point of the creator kitchen is to push people creatively, especially people who have already started where getting started is not necessarily where they're at anymore. Now they want to create remarkable things and be more memorable, not just create more things and be more visible. We're trying to push each other creatively, necessarily. That has to point to the metrics, the way we measure and evaluate the craft, because we are so focused on the craft in the kitchen. The metrics thing, it started with me saying to a friend that a lot of creative people, a lot of entrepreneurs, they tie their overall awareness or their traffic growth or their audience growth to their revenue growth. And I'm very proud to have a higher revenue per subscriber or revenue per download or revenue per person who follows me or knows me than the average creator is. And I think we ought to think more about that. That set me down a rabbit hole of like straight up making up metrics to point me in that direction. And it didn't look like something that somebody who is very serious about business would think is valuable, but I found it incredibly valuable to my business metrics, like urr. So this is where it actually began for me. Urr, Unsolicited response rate. If you publish a piece for me, it's an essay every other week, a podcast episode every other week, a story. Anywhere you find me, it's. If I publish that story and it hits you, it resonates so deeply with you that you feel urged to respond, to say something nice about it, or to build on it, or even to challenge it or ask questions about it without me having to prompt you, without me having to give you. What do you think is going to be in the next Marvel film? Is it this character or that character? Drop a comment on YouTube? It's not that. It's just here's the thing, and it moved you to take an action. If that's happening, I've done my job. So urr, should be something I care about. Should be something I track the unsolicited response rate. And then the other, which I think is the one that I saw you light up with Jenny, was cpp.

Oh, my gosh, yes. I love this one.

Yeah. So cpp.

I love this one.

This is the crystallization of moments that I have. CPP stands for cackles per piece. It started with me editing unthinkable, unthinkable is a highly designed show. It's not an interview show. There is an interview driving it. But then we do a lot of editing. There's a lot of little moments, little vignettes and asides and immersive experiences. I like to describe it aspirationally, as if Radiolab was only focused on a creator's career, you might get something like Unthinkable. The premise of the show is really what happens when you trust yourself more than the conventional thinking, all the seemingly unthinkable but very refreshing and wonderful things you create as a result. And so when I'm editing that, I'm finding moments where, like, I found this Free Use song and I add it under Jenny's voice and Jenny says something of profound meaning. And right as she does, without me having to touch the song I just dropped as a music bed underneath her, the music cuts off and. And it leaves like a lingering note hanging as Jenny sounds profound. And I'm sitting there and then I hear that snap into place. I anticipate how others will feel because I'm feeling something in that moment and I'm alone in my office just cackling to myself. So whether it's that or something a little bit sillier or smaller cackles per piece. If you're finding meaning in the process itself, if you are falling in love with the craft, if you are bringing your full self to the making of the thing, if it matters to you, it will matter to someone else. So cpp, again, sounds silly, but it really does change the trajectory of the project. I've seen a lot of marketers in my day, a lot of entrepreneurs and creators too, who are going through the motions because someone said this is what works, and they're not present. They have not gotten their creative fingerprints all over the work. And I'm saying, what's for you? Where's the wink and the nod to your own reflection? What's making you cackle? Right? Where's your cpp?

I love that. I feel like you and Alana must have had a very high CPP rate for your Rishikesh episode that you recently did. He's the host Song exploder. I'll link to that great episode you did in the show notes, but I feel like that also struck because I know you, we've talked about it strikes like a number of heroes connected with the stat. So tell me, like, what is it that you admire about Rishikesh's work and what was it like actually getting to talk with him?

Rishikesh Hosts Song Exploder. I think he started in 2013, and the premise of Song Exploder, if you're not familiar, is artists, musicians. Sometimes a musician, like an artist and a producer, will come on the show and take one single track, which he actually asks for. It's not their biggest single. It's the one that has the most meaningful story or most meaningful emotions behind it for the artist. They'll take a single track, break it apart, and piece by piece, tell the story of how it's made. Richard Casey is also a longtime veteran musician, where he calls himself a middle class musician. Like he's had several albums, he's not selling out stadiums, but he approached, even tipped past financial viability for his music career. That's kind of his primary thing. His secondary thing was Song Exploder, but it emerged as more popular for him. Vulture even called it the best use of the podcast medium ever. So that's me being a hype man for what I think is one of the best craft driven shows on the planet. And Alana Nevins, our producer for Unthinkable, she and I were talking about this renewed premise that we have about when you trust yourself more than the conventional thinking. And one of the things that we realized was when an idea like Song Exploder just clicks when you encounter it, like, of course it would exist. There was a moment where it didn't seem that logical, where he had to step out over the wire and say, you know, everybody doing these long form interview shows with the biggest and best names that they can is not the style show I want to copy or create, even though that's the precedent. Or what he told me on the interview was he would listen to musicians being interviewed elsewhere and they would get asked these very general questions, or maybe craft driven questions, but in a poor generalized way, like the name of your band is X, why is it that way? Or what does this line mean in your song? There was little deconstruction and interpretation of the making of the thing, which is what he wanted as a musician. That's a very simple observation, but he took it seriously enough. In other words, he trusted his own intuition there to say no one else is doing it this way. In fact, there's a lot of precedents pushing against zooming in this narrowly with big name artists, but I'm going to do that. So when we talk to him, first of all, he's just an incredibly nice guy, very accomplished, very visible. I mean, he's given a TED Talk, he's done spin out series, he had Song Exploder turn into a two season Netflix run. So the televised version of this show, I mean you look at him and optically you're like, yeah, I'd want that kind of career. But he's incredibly humble, he's very self critical. He lives in the micro moments of making stuff. And I think above all he's someone who I could point to and say that person has planted a flag for quality and he's made it work. And he's made it work not just because he pursued the finances of it all, the money of it all, with his craft. I mean, he had a great quip on the show, which was if you're starting out and you're trying to reconcile that people who do it this way tend to get followers, tend to get revenue. People do it that way, it feels more financially difficult, but I want to do it that way. He's like, at first it does not have to be the same thing, maybe ever. You know, do the thing for your clients that earns you revenue. Compartmentalize it, systematize it, productize it, and then over here, create your art. Like do the thing that's just for you. And slowly, over time, maybe they come together. So it was just a wonderful episode and it was our return from episode 200. We took a break after that milestone and I could think of no one better to do it than him. So you could definitely check out my show, but you should absolutely check out Song Exploder.

Yeah, it's so awesome. What a moment to get to interview one of your creative heroes too and be connected.

We'll be right back just after this.

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Speaking of episode 200, welcome to the jumble. That one also cracked me up because it's you kind of, well, let's say spinning a little bit. You were celebrating 200 episodes, and you were like, should I keep the podcast going? I don't know. And you're kind of talking to yourself and creating these open loops of, are we ever gonna hear from you again? And Alana pipes in. She's your wonderful producer, as we mentioned. Here's my question. So were you at a legitimate fork in the road at 200, where you thought, should I just shut this thing down? Cause I think we all hit moments like that, Jenny.

I was at a legitimate fork in the road at episode 12, at episode 15, episode 25, at episode 75. And definitely as we approached episode 200, one of my questions when I talked to Rishikesh in that episode was, you know, there's leaner ways to edit a show than the way song exploder or unthinkable sound. And every so often when I'm editing, I think, why do I do this to myself? And I asked him, why do you do this to yourself? I was legitimately at a crossroads where I'd been doing this show for a while, and Unthinkable. It's an interesting beast, not only because it's atypical in the workplace to sound like that and have a show like that, but also because if you were to draw the classic marketing funnel for my business, people might assume that unthinkable sits at the top of the funnel. By the way, I think a podcast is terrible for top of funnel growth. It's great for straightening the funnel. It's great for getting closer to people who already like and trust you and truly earning passionate super fans. So put the marketing lingo aside for a second and just look at, like, my business. It is not in the marketing funnel. It has marketing advantages. But what I realized is where it started is actually where it belongs. Where it started was a really great friend and mentor named Andrew Davis, who I think is one of the best business speakers alive. He's just like an absolute dynamo on stage and has huge ideas. Kind of like if Malcolm Gladwell and Alton Brown, one of the guys from mythbusters, focused on business, you'd get Andrew Davis. He helped me start my speaking career, and he also helped me craft the initial vision for Unthinkable, which was not as a marketing thing. It was as an IP development engine, a laboratory to aerate ideas, collect stories, find a way to extract insights from those stories. You know, very useful for developing a speech, very useful for developing the book, very useful. Contributing now to the creator kitchen. And I lost sight of that for a time. And I think because I lost sight of what it was for and who it was for at episode 200, I went. I could see myself walking away and I don't know what to do for 200 to make it special. And I didn't want to do like a victory lap because it didn't feel like I'd arrived victorious to that episode. So I did, like, essentially an audio existential crisis. Yeah, if you can call it that. It was called welcome to the Jumble, because I was really trying to throw you into the jumble. That was all the threads in my brain that I was struggling to pursue.

And that's an example of also letting us in, which is who you're serving, because you are serving people, creating things and trying to redefine success and this commitment to craft. So, I mean, it's also to get meta, just kind of spoke to all of us who have those same questions.

My work is incredibly met. I make things for makers, and so I can give you what I made. And hopefully you think it's good enough that you also want to know how I made it, which is a very big impetus behind me starting a membership program for makers. But with the show, it's always been this mini existential, sometimes not so mini existential crisis that I face, because if I could wave a magic wand, I would have the time, the day to also pursue six or seven other shows. That was another reason I was like, do I set this aside because I have more in me? So I needed to find a way to be more intrinsically motivated by what the show is for and who it's for. And at the end of the day, the who it's for is very simple. It's for me. I'm creating something I want to exist. And at the same time, that makes it a lot better for you. And I think a lot of people lose sight of that when they walk into the business world and search for a generic sense of what works or a best practice. But I'm a big believer in what David Bowie said, which is never played at the gallery. That's when an artist does their worst work. And I don't think there is a reason that you can't create some things that are certainly just for the audience, because that's what they want. But, I mean, increasingly, we're Seeing with the rise of AI, this has never been more clear to me. If you are not present, if this is not work only you can create, if you have not gotten your creative fingerprints all over the work, if you're only focused on the things that are the most replaceable and repeatable, why are you required in that work? You may be replaced by creating the things we want to exist at the very same time we're creating the things that others want too. It's a very weird mental yoga move that I think us creative people are always trying to figure out. And at least at this stage of my career or chapter that I'm in, I found that it's very useful for me to just let the version of myself win that says the work is for me.

That's so interesting. Yeah, I didn't expect you to say, who's it for? I'm like, oh, you'll have some brilliant answer of what certain type of creative. And yet it is. Because if it's for you, then it is for us, those of us who resonate with you. And reminds me of Tim Urban, who talked about creating for a stadium of 10,000 of himself. Did you ever encounter that?

Yeah, he said that. It's one of those lines he takes with him. See, he said that on my show as well.

Oh, he did?

Ooh, yeah. He said, I create for a stadium of Tim's. The other one I would point to is from. One of my absolute storytelling heroes is Anthony Bourdain. And he said that creative people. There's a little bit of. I think the phrase he actually used was monstrous thinking. But he also went on to say what he means by that is, it is not rational that you would think I can take this story or press this perspective through my own lens and out into the world. And you will buy the book. You will stay past the commercial. That is not rational thinking. Or the author, A.J. jacobs, who says, you need useful self delusion. I think emphasis is on useful there. But you need useful self delusion as an entrepreneur, as a creator, as a communicator, because you need to proceed as if, like, this is gonna work. Of course it's gonna work. Even though you're doing something that is unproven, that may not work. Of course that they'd want my perspective or my lens. And if you're struggling with imposter syndrome, I think a great way to do that is. That's what motivates me, all those ideas. But you can completely drop that and run in a different direction and treat Yourself more like an explorer. I mean, that's what A.J. jacobs does. He has a book called Thanks a Thousand where he tries to thank every single person involved in his morning cup of coffee. And. And he goes on this journey. It's a very exploratory style that he writes with. Well, when he says useful self delusion, he's saying, I am delusional enough to think that I can go and explore. He's not saying that I am the best or I am the show. And I think that's useful for imposter syndrome, because then it's not about who you are or what you are. It's about the thing you found. And if you don't like it, no problem. I can go find other things or I can go find people who like what I found. But nobody who goes and rummages around in a closet or digs a hole in the ground is wondering, am I worthy of doing this? Am I worthy of trying to find something? Right?

Right.

So at once, I'm having this debate in my head again. Back to episode 200. Welcome to the jungle. I'm thinking to myself when I walk on a stage, when I fire up the mic, when I'm talking to you on your podcast, Jenny, I'm thinking to myself, I'm the baddest mfer in town. And I'm also thinking to myself, I'm not worth a damn. I'm just a vessel for the. I'm just going to go find some stuff and present it to you. So I don't want to make it out to be this nice, clean, simple solution. I think creativity involves so much mess, so much jumble, that on my show, I risk oversimplifying it and saying, just act like an explorer. It's what you found. That's your work. So don't feel imposter syndrome or walk up on that stage like you're the baddest person in town. Right. No, I wanted to take you into all this interconnected, ridiculously messy processing that I'm always doing, because maybe then you're listening, going, oh, okay, so I shouldn't have any negative self talk over the fact that I'm also feeling this way.

Yeah, it's almost like that healthy dose of delusion. We do need it in order to create anything at all and have any hope for the work at all. And then it's just like not drinking too much of the delusion. I think about this all the time because when I was writing free time, I thought, I want to set 50 million hours free. And I just picked a random mega number, you know.

Yeah.

Who knows how many hours I've actually set free or ever will. It's just the delusion of imagining what could be possible and then only applying that to the extent that it's motivating. Because at some point, it just becomes yet another metrics bar to hit, which is then becomes meaningless.

I found that when I set a number, there's no one right way. There's only the right way for you in this situation right now.

Right.

Best practices don't matter. It's about finding the best approach for you. I mean, that was the principle behind Break the Wheel, my first book. That, to me, means you have to try out a lot of things for size. It's like trying on clothing. It's like, does this fit? It looks good in theory. Like, when you hold it up to me, Jenny, it sounds or looks really good. Like, yeah, I could see myself wearing that shirt, but until I try it on, I'm not really gonna know. And so, like, dropping and picking up stuff just becomes what you do. And the way I learned that is for the macro level or foundational stuff. I learned that in the minutia. I learned that in where creativity happens, which is these tiny little messy decisions you're making. Creating one piece, you know, to see my process recorded, which is a very small percent, but still a percent of the creator kitchen content that I share, I'm like, here's a draft of an intro for the Rishikesh Hereaway episode of the show. I have a draft. It's messy. It's a lump of raw clay. I'm gonna try and read it out loud to you on camera and rearrange and rework it. And I had a member contact me and say, I didn't realize how much you're just figuring this out as you go. And I'm like, yeah, what do you think this is? Do you think I sit down at my keyboard, crack my fingers, and go, all right, brilliance come to me? No, it's making a mess and cleaning it up every time. You know, Jad Abumra, the creator of Radiolab, he talks about the jungle. Every story he created feels like he threw himself and his team into a jungle, and they have to find a way out. And eventually they do. While they're in it, however, it does not feel like they will. And when they exit it, they're looking back going, don't know how we got out of that jungle. Next episode, it's another jungle. And so I couldn't say welcome to the jungle on my episode because then you would have expected me to play the Guns n Roses song and I don't have the lights to play that song, so I had to say welcome to the jungle. Anyways.

Well, to build on your kitchen metaphor, it reminds me how my husband cooks. So he's a. He's an artist, a fine artist painter, large scale, abstract, contemplative, thinker type. Okay. But he can cook like a Michelin star chef. I'm talking the plating is epic and gorgeous, the flavors. He's kind of a synesthete. He doesn't have any formal training. However, the kitchen will be an absolute disaster. But he will make the tastiest, most creative, most inventive, most beautifully plated food. And I'll post pictures on my family album because, you know, I'm not on social media and my family will be like, what is this? Are you at a five star restaurant? Like, what's going on? Or three star, let's say. Yeah, but the kitchen is as if a hurricane went through there. Whereas when I cook, it's like orderly and neat, but there's really no genius happening when I make a meal. That's just not my zone of genius. And so I picture you working on your podcast episodes, like creating the messiest possible kitchen. And you have Alana, your producer kind of also helps clean things up and tidy after the fact or before.

In my downloads folder on my computer, I have like all these little scrap pieces that, you know, I've re recorded and compressed and exported and added and subtracted and it's just a mess. And not until I publish the final episode do I like go back and delete it. And I'm deleting like a dozen files that may or may not have been in the episode. I mentioned Jad from Radiolab, although he's no longer working on that show. He decided to step away after 20 years. I love when people that I get their art and when they go on someone else's show, they talk about how they make their art because you get these little windows into how they do it or at least how they think, which I think is more important than how they do it. You know, he had his co host and his own voices stipped and clipped and saved. So if he needed Robert laughing, he had files of Robert laughing five or six different ways. I mean, like, that's crazy talk, but it does show up well in his process. Doesn't mean you should do it that way. I think the more important point I'm trying to make with my process or Jad's or your husband's is giving yourself permission to go and muck around is a wonderful way to find yourself. And what I'm worried about with AI tools, for example, is you can outsource the mucking around. And I'm saying I know that's where it feels most painful, but that is also where the best stuff emerges. You head in thinking it was one thing and it turns out it was another. You head in thinking I'm going to say it this way and you figure out I should say it that way. You come up with a clever metaphor, a memory is triggered that would be a great open to the piece that you wouldn't have considered unless you were making a mess. It's in the mess that we find our best.

There's another one.

We'll be right back just after this.

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You also said something that I just want to highlight. I want to underline of pressing an idea through each of our own unique filter. And I want to give listeners an example of this because I did engage with Jay at the end of the year to kind of just check in on the podcast, see if it's going the right way. He has all these incredible templates and all this. And one of the things you told me, it's like every interview or every conversation or even solo episode should be pressed. I'm thinking now continuing with the kitchen, like a garlic press or a pasta press. You know, you put the raw ingredient in and you press it through. And you told me somebody should not come on my podcast because they have a book out. I, Jenny, have a lens. I have a mission for the show. I have a journey that I'm taking listeners on and I bring them on because I'm going to press them through my lens for free time or for pivot, not simply because they have a book. And therefore, when you talk about creative fingerprints all over it, it will sound different and unique than the other fifty or a hundred interviews they do on their book podcast tour. That was so helpful.

Well, I'm glad. Thank you. The thing I've realized, and it's hard won, believe me, through a lot of shows I've made for myself and clients, it's when you have a very guest centric show, you know, a very easy example of that is you have a long form interview show. What's often missing is the premise to the show. You have a great premise, Jenny, but a lot of people don't. It's sort of like a general success show. Or like I say, you can kind of white label a lot of these shows and call them all the same thing. Talking topics with experts. And there's nothing wrong with that, especially if that's what's inside you and you want to be great at an interview. But I think what we make the mistake of doing is thinking that the focus of the show, the point of my interview, the value to the listener is the guest. Especially when you have a focus, when you have a premise to the overall show, like Unthinkable has a premise they somehow broke from Best practices. They did what felt unthinkable. And then you hear their story and you're like, huh? To them in their situation, based on their taste and their humanity and their goals and their audience. It actually sounded smart and logical. Maybe I should question best practices too. That's kind of the emphasis that I'm placing on, you know, why I'm doing the show. I want more people to think for themselves, to trust themselves creatively. Okay? If I'm doing that show, I need to enroll Jenny into that journey. And the reason Jenny's coming on the show is, yeah, of course, Jenny's got a book. Jenny's great. Jenny's amazing. Jenny's smart. Jenny's got something to say. But I want her to help us understand that premise, to advance the journey we're on together, me and the listeners. How can I do that? Well, I need to, like you say, press somebody through a lens. I need to maybe emphasize certain parts of your backstory and not just do it end to end. Even the way I structure things. And granted, it's highly edited on my show, but it doesn't need to be to do it this way. The expected approach, the conventional approach, is you start with the backstory and bio. How'd you get here, Jenny? Tell me about yourself. Where'd you begin? Let's start there. And then you have, like, 10 plus minutes of your backstory. The backstory is, like, fourth or fifth in the typical rundown. And we actually have it documented of what the typical rundown is for. Unthinkable. Because if the premise is you should question best practices and trust your intuition, make that leap. And, oh, by the way, it's not actually that unthinkable when you hear it told. Well, okay, the first thing I have to do, the first section of the show, once you get past the intro, is I have to build up the best practices. If we're talking to Rishikesh Hirway, I have to make the basic interview show sound inescapable. It is the best way to do it. And then I have to quickly share with you how he does it a totally different way. It seems unthinkable. So A block is make the best practices seem like the best. And B block is reveal what seems unthinkable. C block is. And why was it not unthinkable? And so now, Rishikesh, you're going to hear sound bites from him and voiceovers from me explaining why. Well, this is why I wanted to do it this way. And you're going, huh? I'd never considered it that way. That's really logical. It's not actually a leap to break from a convention in his world. Maybe it's not in yours either. Well, how did he get here? How did he arrive here? Okay, now, here's where he began. Here's how he got here. So the backstory, which is usually inescapably first in every show, is fourth in ours. Not because we're trying to go rogue and like, because we hate the way it's done elsewhere. It's because we're trying to be specific. We're trying to explore something. We have a lens over talking to our guests or telling our stories. And so that's what I mean when I say have some point of view, have a premise, and press the people that you're talking to through it. Inevitably, you'll get an original if you're careful about what you're doing.

Like you said earlier, being an explorer rather than an expert, it makes your curiosity is that press that filter And I know you've talked about AI and ChatGPT, and it's also, what's going to differentiate from just something a machine can spit out? Because it's going to have your voice, your lens, your filter.

I'm really fascinated by how we got here. I'm not so fascinated by where AI goes. A lot of people are like, I'm not interested in what AI can do. I'm interested in what Jenny can do. I'm interested in what Sally can do. I'm interested in what Sam can do and trying to play some small role in pushing that forward. My personal mission is to help people make what matters to their careers, their companies and their communities. So how do we do that? Well, the first question I was answering when it came to AI specifically this year was how did we get here, to the place where so many creative people are worried? They're worried that they'll be replaced. They're worried that if they don't adopt this technology, they'll be left behind. And I think it's because we've taken a narrow view on what mastery of the creative craft is. I think we believe it's one thing. I believe the combination of mastering three things. So the one thing we think it is, this speaks to your husband making a mess. And maybe me as an amateurish cook in my real kitchen here, I'm much cleaner, Right. Because I think mastery of the cooking process is about. Process is about what are the steps I have to take, what is the tool, et cetera. We think about the workflow, the technique and the tools as mastery, but that's one narrow view of it. And also it's the thing AI is remarkably good at doing, is just following this checklist or this recipe and doing it in a way that feels repeatable. That's what we think mastery of the craft is process. But there's also two other P's. There's your posture and your practice. So your posture is how you see yourself and the world. It's the messy bag of humanity you haul with you. It's all the quirks, all the things you are that actually should come out proactively and intentionally in your work. The creative fingerprints idea again. But we just leave it to chance. So that's a problem. We need to more proactively hone our mastery of posture. The posture of a storyteller, the posture of a podcaster, and then practice. Like, are you shipping regularly? Not once in a while, but on a cadence to yourself for yourself to get better. Can you actually articulate what your practice is and you're shipping, not because you feel amazing, but because it's Friday, if you have the right posture and you bring it with you to the work and you have a practice inescapably. Now, I say that like it's a reactive thing. You've been proactive about ensuring that you were there, that you were doing something with a purpose that is original, that is masterful. And the process part almost emerges last because it's like your process, Jenny, is tailored to you. It's bolted around who you are and what you're trying to achieve. And if you need it, you can go get a part or a piece from someone else who says, oh, tell stories this way, use this story structure or use this technique. That stuff should come last. But it's the stuff we place first and obsess over. And so as a result, because it's the thing that requires us the least, if it's the thing in our world, well, we might not be required because technology can just do it. I think that's the danger that we're all facing.

Yeah. I love these conversations around mastery, quality, craft. You and I both have a shared passion for rebelling against best practices that we don't believe in.

Yeah.

One of the things that made me laugh so hard, I think it was our first coaching session, or no, no. This was deciding whether we should work together because we wanted to make sure it was a fit on both sides. And you're like, listen, if you want growth tactics, I'm not your guy. I'm really not here to tell you how to, like, what did you say? Like, take a shiny piece of poo and then slice it up 20 ways and then push it.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Put too many pieces out into the world.

I mean, maybe it was made famous by, like, a Gary Vaynerchuk or someone. But, I mean, essentially, the marketing advice of the day seems to be, take your big piece of crap, take little pieces of the crap, and smear it all over the Internet. But the problem is actually not where do you smear it or how many pieces of crap do you need from the big piece. The problem is you started out with a big piece of crap. So if you make the thing genuinely good, genuinely effective and resonant with your audience, like, there's a lot of things built into the making of your product or your content that does the growth for you or at least makes the thing growable. But what most people are doing is they're trying to force the issue. Like, it's a Lot easier to get a well built rocket into orbit than it is trying to take a bunch of cardboard and duct tape and nuts and bolts you found in your garage, put something messy and awful together and then yeet it into the sun.

Right. So we've talked about quality and craft. How do you define it? Like, for your lens on the world and you really caring deeply about this. How do you know a quality piece of content or mastery in somebody's craft when you see it?

They're very different answers because it's very contextual. Like there is some kind of objective way of evaluating quality. Probably Seth Godin talks about on specific, like quality in one regard is like, here's the spec. Did you meet it? Did you deliver? You're a freelance writer. This is what we asked for and this is what we got. That's great. And then you add taste over that and that's anticipatory. That's like I'm giving you something you didn't know to ask for or didn't know you wanted until you experienced it. So quality plus taste is like, oh my gosh, that's remarkable because it's on spec. And you also went above and beyond to anticipate or envision something. But I think of it in much more personal terms. It's much more subjective. You mentioned at the beginning of our chat, don't be the best, be their favorite, which I love urging people to do. My favorite sports team is the New York Knicks, and for decades they were not the best, they were one of the worst. But they were still my favorite because it was a personal choice. And you can plot this on a pyramid. I've kind of constructed a diagram for some of my clients that I call the audience Resonance Pyramid. At the bottom is relevance. It's relatable stuff. It's topically, thematically. Yeah, it's. For me, it's how to build a great podcast and all the different bits of knowledge therein that's relevant to you and me, Jenny. We're not going to look at anything irrelevant. So congratulations, you get a look at best, if you're relevant. A lot of people agonize over that because they think that's the job, but that's table stakes. So you move up the pyramid and now you're enjoyable, you're entertaining. I think that's also table stakes. It wasn't always, but people don't endure excruciating educational experiences or any kind of experience anymore because they have so much choice. They can just go with the one that feels Better. So if you are relevant and you are enjoyable, that's table stakes. But at least if you're enjoyable, you're among fewer. Then you go up to the third level of this pyramid, which is you're impactful. You've actually done something for the other individual. You have moved them, you have helped them reflect or take an action that benefits them. And of course, in some ways benefits you too. I think that helps you become part of a few, a smaller crowd today because you're putting service, you're putting the help first instead of your own aims. Coming out of marketing, as I have, when content became such a thing for marketers, it was like showing you that I'm helpful, telling you that I'm helpful. Moving through the motions of being helpful. Writing a blog took precedent over actually just being helpful because people just wanted a sales lead. So that's not what I'm talking about. If you're genuinely impactful and helpful, that's the third tier of this pyramid and the very tippy top. If you are relevant and enjoyable and impactful, you might also ascend to becoming personal. You then are among the choice few things that feel irreplaceable. Your favorite shirt, your favorite restaurant, your favorite team in our world, your favorite podcast, your favorite blog, your favorite speaker, your favorite individual personality. You might come to me and say, you know, Jay, there's a better show out there about this topic. And I go, I don't care. My favorite show is Mike Birbiglia's Working It Out. My favorite show is Free Time because there's this irrational bias in your favor, this personal feel to it. I think that's the holy grail. That's what we're on. The mission, that's what we're on the path to do is to be among the choice few things in their lives that feel irreplaceable. And it's not because it's relevant or entertaining or not even helpful, but because it feels personal. It causes them to throw up their hands and go, oh my gosh, this. I feel so seen by this. That's the job. It's not to create content. The job is to create connection.

I love that last question, Jay. It's permission slip time. So if you could give fellow business owners permission to do something differently or drop something altogether, what would it be?

The most important area of permission is to focus on resonance before or even at the expense of reach. We can all reach some people today, and if the some people we reach are not engaging, responding, subscribing, buying, sharing. I think our tendency is to go and find more people. But perhaps the problem is not a reach problem. It is a resonance problem. Because if it's not going to hit for the 5, 6, 7, 100 people who already know, like and trust you, why do you think getting in front of other people or more people is a good idea? Because the people who already are closest to you are signaling to you. This doesn't resonate. So solve that problem first. Put resonance first. Get a small number of people reacting in a big way to your work, not as a final stage, but as a signal that you're onto something. Because then you can invest with confidence. So prioritize resonance over reach. Everything gets better and easier, including reach.

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