212: Virtuous Circles in Pivot Portfolio Planning

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What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot Podcast and author of Pivot. The only move that matters is your next one.

For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast if Change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Hello my friends. Welcome back to the Pivot Podcast. I'm so happy to have you here. Two quick favors and reminders. 1. I have been so thankful to see the survey responses come in. You're making my day, my week, my month. Thank you so much. To those of you who have already filled out the survey, it's@pivotmethod.com survey I am just beside myself. It's so helpful. I love knowing who's out there listening. I love knowing what some of your favorite recent episodes are, what you'd like to see more of. I even love when people's differing opinions are sort of the opposite side. You know, some might say I love these type of episodes and the others say the only ones I don't like are the very same type. I love that. I love that you're really giving me a lot of energy and ideas and assistance to plan future episodes of the podcast. And in fact, the survey inspired today's episode because a lot of you said you really appreciate the systems and specific tips sometimes. Although I love systems dearly, I worry that I'm gonna bore you to tears if I only talk about systems or things that are too specific. So that's the kind of feedback I'm talking about. And my heart is so full that I'm gonna figure out some kind of bonus or goodie for those of you who have taken it. So if you haven't yet and you want something coming your way, go to pivotmethod.com survey not that you need it. I feel that Pivot listeners, you would do this out of your own desire of wanting to help. It's not like you need a bribe. I like how Jonathan Fields said on his website for a while back. You don't need a bribe to join this tribe. Pivotmethod.com survey the other quick announcement favor. OMG. We are now at 198 reviews for Pivot on Amazon. Thank you so much. Again, seeing the ones that have come in that I think I was at 194 when I asked. And as I said before, I don't ask for things like this often and I don't go for straight up numbers. I don't obsess about them very often. But with Pivot approaching its four year anniversary and several other books with the same title, and the fact that everybody right now is talking about Pivoting, I do want to do my best to try to give it a burst of energy and momentum and intention and attention. So by us revisiting it, if you've read the book and you're willing to leave a review, I would be so thankful. Look, you're. Sometimes I hear messages like this on a podcast and I think, yeah, yeah, someone else will do it. It's like voting. But alas, we are two away. So if you submit a review, you will genuinely help us push us into the 200 milestone. And I say us because you're here, I'm here, this is ours. The Pivot would be nothing without readers, and the podcast would be nothing without you here listening. So this is our collective project. And each of you who have read the book, as I say in the afterword, each reader gives the book its soul. If you just go to Amazon and search Pivot and my name, Jenny Blake, you're going to find it because again, they're a couple with the title. So search on Amazon, Pivot and Jenny Blake and. And if you're willing, please leave a review. I don't care how many stars you give it, whatever you give is valid. But let's get over that 200 hump. Thank you in advance, everybody. Today I'm talking about virtuous circles in business and career, but I think it applies more if you're a solopreneur or even a gig worker, quote unquote. I don't love that word, but we'll talk about what might it be to be gig plus or Solopreneur plus or even for your creative projects. And how can virtuous circles help us think strategically about our business or about our Pivot portfolio? When I say pivot portfolio, that's kind of my term for gig workers. Because gig, gig workers, it's just you can get kind of stuck in the trade of time for money. It's not a bad thing at all, the way that sometimes that exchange really gets villainized in the entrepreneurship media. But I also don't think that you want to only trade time for money, because then you're not creating any buffer if you get sick and you can't work or you want to take vacation and you can't work. It just from a systems perspective, isn't as antifragile or as resilient as gig pivot portfolio, something that reinforces itself in a positive way. One thing that I've been really enjoying about daily podcasts and by the way, in the survey, I appreciated that so many of you said, yay, I'm enjoying the daily and I can't keep up. So I've been picking the episodes that resonate and skipping the rest. I love it. Don't worry, the archive will be there. You can go back through them at any time. I figure that's exactly what's going to happen. Some episodes will resonate, others won't. But I'll tell you what I've been really enjoying about daily podcasts and why you might think of some creative challenge that really pushes you outside of your comfort zone is that it has me asking every day, okay, it's a new day. What can I talk about today? And not just what can I talk about that already exists, but what can I create? What ideas can I synthesize? What am I curious about at the moment? Or what am I learning or practicing in my own life and work that would be relevant? I enjoy that challenge and I wouldn't have it. Honestly, if I was still doing weekly, I would probably make sure that I interviewed at least one guest every week, and I wouldn't be pressing myself as hard to say, oh, okay, really? Time to think of something new. That's an example, in a way, of a virtuous circle. So first, let's define a virtuous circle. And this comes from strategic toolkits, just so I can give you an official definition, then I'll riff on it. A virtuous circle is one where a good event feeds on itself to improve business. Further, it is a positive feedback loop. A virtuous circle can be a small operating over days, or it can drive a whole company strategy for decades. The same positive feedback loop can also run in reverse, however, to create a vicious cycle where a bad situation feeds on itself to make it even worse. On the subject of a virtuous circle, think about the flywheel effect. This is popularized by Jim Collins in his book Good to Great. But even if you haven't read that book, you've got to check out the Flywheel monograph. It's a little smaller book that he released that speaks directly to this flywheel effect of attaining almost unstoppable momentum once you reach the critical points of leverage in the business, such that each one naturally feeds into the next, and the flywheel becomes almost unstoppable at that point. Here's how Jim Collins defines it. No matter how dramatic the end result, good to great transformations never happen in one fell swoop. In building a great company or social sector enterprise, there is no single defining action, no grand program, no one killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no miracle moment. Rather, the process resembles relentlessly pushing a giant heavy flywheel, turn upon turn, building momentum until a point of breakthrough and beyond pushing. With great effort, you get the flywheel to inch forward, moving almost imperceptibly at first, you keep pushing, and after two or three hours of persistent effort, you get the flywheel to complete one entire turn. You keep pushing and the flywheel begins to move a bit faster. And with continued great effort, you move it around a second rotation. You keep pushing in a consistent direction. 3 turns. 4, 5, 6. The flywheel builds up speed. 7, 8. You keep pushing. 9, 10. It builds momentum. 11, 12. Moving faster with each turn. 20, 30, 50, 100. Then at some point, break through, the momentum of the thing kicks in in your favor, hurling the flywheel forward. Turn after turn. Whoosh. Its own heavy weight working for you. That's an excerpt from jimcollins.com I'm going to put it in the show notes if you want the full URL, Jim Collins.com concepts the flywheel so good I could keep going. What I love about this is that he's saying you're pushing the flywheel. It's so heavy that at first you push, push, push, and you don't seem to be getting anywhere. There's no visible movement and no visible traction. But if you keep pushing this flywheel and as he gets into in a business context, if you keep identifying these core actions with the most leverage, that there will come a point where the momentum of the flywheel starts working for you. The example he gives even back in good to great of the most One of the most powerful companies and their flywheel is Amazon. Look at how, let's say with Amazon prime you pay a small membership and you get things sooner, so you start shopping there more and then they really matter. Master their delivery to get you things in 24 hours. So you go back to Amazon and now all of a sudden you're visiting Amazon for everything you need. Now they can easily sell you Amazon prime movies and Amazon Web storage and they can introduce all these other things. But the core flywheel, the customer obsession, as they always say, was that this virtuous circle of by mastering having a vast database of products. So if you go to Amazon, you have a feeling they're going to have what I need. Then super fast shipp Amazon Prime. The whole thing perpetuates itself to where all of a sudden now for so many of us, Amazon is absolutely indispensable in our lives. I know some people who try to protest, you know, for so many good reasons. I completely understand. But at this point it would be really hard not to go to Amazon for at least something, especially with things closed down. I was listening to a great podcast with Donald Miller, the Story Brand podcast with Mike Michalowicz, who just wrote Fix this Next. I interviewed Mike in episode 160 and they use the analogy that business is more like a body, a biological system than a building. You don't just build a foundation and then build up, up, up and then you're done. Nor is it a pyramid. So in in Fix this Next, Mike talks about the business hierarchy of needs and it's illustrated like a pyramid. Which by the way, I don't know if those of you who are here listening know that even Abraham Maslow himself did not visualize the hierarchy of needs as a pyramid. I thought that was really interesting. I'll try to find that article that debunks that he ever visualized it that way or described it as a pyramid. And I'll put it in the show notes because that might change how we think about going through our own hierarchy of needs. More like a cycle than this one step at a time linear climb up until you get to this little peak at the top. And I even talked about that in my 2011 TED talk, which please don't go watch it. It's embarrassing. It's like my first talk I ever gave in public and it's now it's a TEDx for TEDxCMU. Oh my gosh, talk about embarrassing. In part because I was the first speaker of the day and there were massive technical problems like my slides not showing in the talk I share that self actualization is not some tiny peak where we get there and we stay there. Neither are careers. That's the whole point of that. What I said in that talk, that our careers are in some ways, like a pyramid, in that you can move laterally and you build this strong lateral, horizontal foundation. But even then, you just don't want to get to this peak at the top. Even CEOs don't want to stop learning and growing. So what can we. And that's where the analogy of career as a smartphone came to be. That instead we're always downloading apps, switching up apps, deleting apps. Sometimes, like right now, we are all being asked to upgrade our os, our, our operating system. There were bugs. There's literally a coronavirus bug that needed to be fixed. So the whole os, we're all getting reformatted to deal with public health, safety, our own hygiene, collective action, global pandemic. I mean, there was a lot that we're reformatting ourselves to adapt to. To adapt to constant change, to adapt to all kinds of limitations on the lives we were used to living, to adapting to the new normal, which we don't even know what that looks like. Here's the thing about the new normal. Do you think we're just going to get there and then we're going to go, oh, okay, everybody, this is the new normal. Back at it, most likely. No, the new normal is going to be this almost elusive. It's always evolving. There's a new normal right now. Okay, now there's a new normal. Tomorrow, there's a new normal collectively, and there's always a new normal for us individually. I shared that podcast and that metaphor because it helps to think about business and career and your pivot portfolio as an evolution. I've also been trying to give a lot of thought lately to how do we grow a business? And if you recall, in the episode with Jen Louden that we just did called why bother? It's episode 210, she talked about how one of the big mistakes that she made earlier in her career was thinking that if she could just get picked by the right person, kind of the business hero, then her whole life would change. And she even got on Oprah. She was even picked by Oprah, the holy grail of pickers in our society. And she said that didn't create this magical tipping point where everything was different after that.

That ties in with this concept of the flywheel and the virtuous circle, which is that look for places that you might be waiting to get picked, waiting for one lucky break, one moment. It's so much more than that. I think often about the saying that overnight success takes 10 years. I feel that way. I feel that if I were to hit some tipping point where the number of podcast listeners, let's say, skyrocketed up at an exponential growth or something that was very different than the trajectory we have now. That I would say to myself, well, yeah, I've been building an online platform since 2005, so it would have so little to do with the lucky break or that lucky moment that just happened. That would be important. It would be wonderful. It would feel like a miracle. But it would be so small relative to all the other activities. Large and small and ups and downs along and nearly 15 year journey. That doesn't even count earlier career steps. It just counts. The day that I made my first website live, which was in 2005 at strategictoolkits.com where I read you the definition of a virtuous circle. It says that they are everywhere in business. Of course I thought too about self fulfilling prophecy, snowball effect. Those are similar ideas. And then the vicious circles in business are also called doom loop, slippery slope, death spiral, domino theory. What I like is that they say the virtuous and vicious circles are a key component of systems thinking, reinforcing loops. Your business environment includes hundreds of virtuous circles and vicious circles operating at economy, industry, company strategic department teams, or even within an individual's head. They operate on cycles of decades, years, months or even days. Harnessing even one virtuous circle can form the foundation of a successful strategy. One area you might apply this is thinking about how one key activity in your business either can tie into a virtuous circle of reinforcement or how could you reinforce some activity by tying it to other things that you do. Let me give you an example. Shout out to Richard in Southern California, who I was lucky enough to take an Uber with. This was in Malibu. Richard, you'll know if you're listening. Hello. And we just got to talking because it was a long drive. I think I was actually going from Santa Barbara after filming a LinkedIn learning course down to Malibu to end up in LA, to end up at grandma's house in SoCal. Nonetheless, Richard and I had an hour to chat and so we did. And just recently he reached out and said if he finishes writing his book, can he mention me? Because we talked about the podcast too. So this is an example of you could call Richard a part of the gig economy. Doesn't matter if it's full time, part time, whenever he feels like it. And yet if Richard is driving for Uber with a mind on collecting interesting stories and then eventually rolls those stories into a book, then it means that every Uber ride that he gives doesn't just start and end with that ride. And okay, this yielded X amount of income for him or this amount of a T tip. Was it worth it? How do you calculate with the cost of the car and the gas and so on? That's fine. Again, I'm not denigrating doing something like that. But look how much leverage he could get and how energizing it might be if every time someone came in for a ride and the conversation. And he could ask for permission as well, just like he did with me. But where all of a sudden every ride creates a virtuous circle that you're building a book as you do this other thing that has a more finite start and end. That would be an example for me of leveraging one activity in your business or pivot portfolio to catapult or springboard some other aspect. I'll give you another example. Tim Ferriss does his Five Bullet Friday. I don't know how I got here, but this morning I was on a mental path. I don't know, I was going to call it a rabbit hole of just thinking about all these things and what to podcast about and social media. And I think I'm actively trying to solve how to create strategic leverage in my business without bifurcating my attention too much with small things, many small things. And that's my biggest beef with social media. It's not other people. And don't worry, I'm not going to just go rants like I always do. I think I rant too much about that on the podcast. But I'm trying to solve this question of how do I do big strategic work and spread the word without diluting my thinking or my attention or my ability to engage my mind at the highest possible levels. For some reason, that's just I have a hard time doing too much of both. In Tim's Five Bullet Friday, he says, please don't reply to this email. There's no way. I think he gets thousands of replies to everybody, every single one. He says eplyme on Twitter. So in his newsletter he's actively promoting his Twitter handle. And that makes sense too, because you can only write so many characters. Easier for him to keep up with. What I also noticed was that when he joined Instagram, or at least made a point to become more active there, he would always link in his newsletter Instagram post of the week. So that became a virtuous circle for his Instagram account because maybe not that many people were following him relative to his podcast. In his newsletter, but by linking to it from his newsletter or picking the most popular one of the week, then people click over and they go, oh, I guess I wasn't following him before, I'll follow him now. Here's another example. We have pivot coaches. If you go to pivotmethod.com coaching, you can sign up with one of the wonderful, incredible, amazing pivot coaches. And they're not me, because I stopped doing one on one coaching so I can build the business, work on the business and not in the business. That's my choice for 2020. I'm still working with VIP clients, clients that have been with me a long time. And that feels good right now because I'm trying to do exactly what I'm talking about. And so I'll come back to one on one coaching in a minute. But a couple years ago, we were very lucky. Shayna interviewed me and one of the pivot coaches, Rebecca Fraser Thill, for a insider article on what is career coaching. And the reporter Shayna went through and shared her experience of it and working with Rebecca. Turns out now that article is one of the top search results for career coaching, which is just incredible. So during this pandemic, we've seen the number of inquiries for pivot coaching skyrocket. It's crazy after almost four years of offering this service and really not getting that much traction relative to other parts the of of the business. And I will say, of course, it's kind of difficult. If somebody's just finished reading Pivot by Jenny Blake, they might want to, they might seek me out or they might expect to work with me on the website. So there is a small chasm to cross to introduce the pivot coaches. And I mean, they're incredible. I have so much respect for every single one of them and I know that readers and coaches will be in the best possible hands. But needless to say, we weren't getting any kind of snowball effect, that's for sure. And now we are. And it's from one article that is really well written, talks about what coaching is. We didn't write it, by the way. Notice that we didn't even write it. But I had worked with Shayna when Pivot first launched for different we did a little video series and so I did have a relationship with her prior to this article. But now the interest is skyrocketing so much and we're in the right place at the right time with the right SEO working in our favor. This has really stuck to me. So now we have A virtuous circle of if someone Googles career coaching, they see this feature from Business Insider and then they go check out pivot coaching. Pivotmethod.com coaching and that's a really positive thing. That in itself might not be considered a cycle or a circle because unless they then joined, let's say, the Momentum Membership community, which is for solopreneurs. So it's not always the same audience. Somebody getting pivot coaching might be looking to change careers and they're not a solopreneur, they're not a heart based business owner. But where the virtuous circle really comes in would be that then they join Momentum or Pivot Insider for the podcast, the monthly Q and A call and kind of stick around and that each thing that they do in the business encourages other activities and a deeper and deeper relationship. I mentioned I would come back to one on one coaching. What I recommend to coaches, either if you're just starting out or you're a little ways in or long ways in. And one on one coaching can be so rewarding because you're really getting to roll up your sleeves, partner with somebody and create such powerful and important realizations and transformations. It's so joyful, it's so rewarding. And sometimes what you do in the coaching stays there. So the hour that you spend times 10 or times 100 or times a thousand per year stays in this highly confidential cocoon of the coaching relationship. Because of course you want to keep all of your coaching very confidential. And I was trained to not ever even say who my clients are unless they explicitly give me permission. So if someone said, oh, we have a mutual friend, it's so and so. I would never be the one to offer, oh yeah, I've been his coach for five years. Five years. Or her coach never. I would say, yeah, oh, amazing. Or if I were introducing a person, I would never say, I'd like for you to meet my coaching client. So and so. I mean, who wants to be introduced that way? I would say my friend. And then if my friend, my coaching client wants to say, oh yeah, Jenny's been my coach for X amount of time, that's fine with me. They can say whatever they want. They can share their coaching notes. I always take very detailed notes, but I'm not going to be the one to do it. So for many years that had me kind of the content and the challenges that we would solve and the problems and the templates and the homework. A lot of it did help me create templates that I then made public. But I always hesitated to even talk about too closely related content to what was happening. Because even if I were to anonymize it, I just. I don't know, I kind of thought it would feel bad. Maybe I'm projecting or assuming incorrectly, but I sometimes hear podcasters or writers say I'm anonymizing the name, and then they still share the specific problem. And I think if I were that client, I mean, they've told me that sometimes their clients feel good about that. They're like, oh, that's me, that's me. And they like recognizing themselves in this anecdote and maybe how they solved it or what the challenges are. But when I put myself in that person's shoes, I don't feel comfortable. So maybe I'm overcorrecting. But if I were the coachee, I don't think I'd always be delighted to see my problem make it into a newsletter, especially if it wasn't solved yet, even if it was anonymized. So for that reason, I've always been very conservative about what I extract and talk about. Of course, when I'm working on Pivot, I asked many clients, is it okay with you? I'd love to share your journey from A to B to C. And we talked it through and it was a conversation with follow ups and fact checking.

But that doesn't mean that once you finish a coaching call, you can't pause and give yourself your own homework and say, what was the real challenge here? And what creative solutions or homeworks did I assign? What resource could I create to support this client and release it publicly? That has always served me. And in fact, sometimes I just got so busy with coaching and calls that I forgot to do that. And the times that I was the most strategic or creating the most new stuff, even while delivering services like coaching, were when I remembered to take a step back and do that. And in that way, something like coaching again quote, trading time for money can still create a virtuous circle in your business, where it is the catalyst to get you to think strategically about your own ideas for solving problems that then you could share on something like a podcast. This podcast has become a reinforcing loop. This virtuous circle because of the fact that it's daily. So to go full circle to how I started this episode by me do upping the frequency, upping the challenge that is reinforcing the muscle of strategic thinking and original thinking as much as possible. And it's also reinforcing the muscle of observation and Problem solving and looking at my own experience and my own solutions that are often invisible to me, that I don't realize are worth sharing or talking about until I ask for something like the survey. And then you weigh in and that creates a virtuous circle, because then you're also contributing and saying what's on your mind, what you would love to hear more of, what kind of content would be helpful to you. And the virtuous circle there is that then I, Jenny, can create it. So you find the podcast even more helpful. I know even more what to create. And we have momentum. We start to have momentum. And then maybe it's so helpful that you share it with a friend or you leave a review in itunes and then that becomes a virtuous circle. Because when you share it with a friend, we start to spread the word. And word of mouth can actually grow exponentially because if every listener, if each one of you shared at least one episode with a friend, we could grow very quickly without me, Jenny, having to go into my drainers, as Helios would call it, my real drainers, of like, frantically figuring out all the places I could promote this episode and how can I chop it up into a million parts and then get those parts out on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and TikTok. And I'm already tired. I'm already not thinking about the next strategic episode. But if you could listen and you can tell one person, we can create a virtuous circle, because what if then that momentum helps in other parts of the business? That then frees me up even more to do even more episodes like this or even more strategic thinking. Imagine if I'm generating more revenue through the podcast, let's say, and then I'm able to continue doing it daily instead of running out of gas or having to shift my attention back to major client work or who knows what. I still have no clue how long this is going to last. But I'm just giving you the upside of what I'm enjoying about it and how I like to think about marketing and sharing. It's really what is marketing. It's sharing. Whether I'm the one sharing or you're the one sharing. To spread the good word with that, I would like to encourage you today and this week to think about what virtuous circles already exist in your life, your business, and your career.

And then what is a current challenge that you might be facing where a few nudges, a few tweaks, one or two highly leveraged activities could potentially create a virtuous circle. If you want to share your story or your experiments, I would love to hear them and I'd love to release them. Back out to the podcast. Leave me a voice note@pivotmethod.com ask take the 5 minute listener survey@pivotmethod.com survey and if you do want to do me a really big favor this month, I would be so grateful if you could review Pivot on Amazon again. We're just a handful away from hitting the 200 milestone. Review pivot on Amazon. If you've read the book and share either the book or the podcast with a friend, I would love to see how that experiment goes. Of course, only if you find it helpful, but I really appreciate it. Thank you for being here listening and I can't wait to see what this next round of content will bring us. Thanks for being here everybody.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for Pivot List, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to, and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com.

And connect with me on Twitter @jennyblake.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.