229: Create What You Need

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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 recording today on a day where there is quite a lot of construction in the background. I don't know if you can hear it. There may be trucks backing up, noises, jackhammers. I would say this is the nature of working from home during the pandemic, but I work from home all the time and I don't have a fancy podcast studio. Although shout out to Dave I did just get the Chaotica eyeball. So if you are a podcaster and you have a microphone and you want it to sound better, hopefully this is helping a little bit. It's this giant foam eyeball that goes around the microphone.

This episode is an encouragement to have you stop consuming for long enough that you can reflect on how to create what you need. As I shared in episode 142, Creative Economy Lessons from an article called the Great Race to Rule Streaming tv. We have entered, as reporter Jonah Weiner calls it, the golden age of Good Enough. We have so many streaming platforms and apps now. What he says are piling on the digital heaps of great ish content so that we don't go looking at elsewhere.

This is not going to be news to you. There has been for a long time now a competition for our attention. In this article he talks about how these streaming platforms are not just competing with each other, they are competing with sleep. They are competing for your time, for your attention.

For you. What that means is that if you consider yourself a creative, you are going to have to be increasingly more disciplined to put down the phone, to put down the remote and stop and pause and really think about what is it that you need. I bring this up for two reasons One, I'm getting a lot of questions about how can people find new work? How can entrepreneurs pivot? How can people experiment with new creative projects or streams of income, especially during these times? Quote, quote. You know what I mean? I don't know how long I'm just going to be saying the pandemic. Because yes, it's the pandemic, but it's also the new future. This is also this unfolding, ever present changing reality that we are all living in. So I'm hearing a lot of questions about how do we find our footing and how do we find this place that we can uniquely contribute? The other reason I bring this up today is that it's easier now more than ever to find ourselves in passive receiver mode. What I mean by that is that we are passively receiving our content and our media. Even if you think you're choosing what show to watch, what app to be on, how long to scroll in the infinite scroll of these apps, we are still receiving content.

If any of you took a comms 101 class or 201 communications in college, you probably heard about Marshall McLuhan. He was a very prominent communications thinker. He wrote a book called Understanding the Extensions of man that he published in 1964. In that book, this is where we get the idea that the medium is the message. A book he later wrote with that exact title. He proposed that a communication medium itself, not the message it carries, should be the primary focus of study.

Related to our conversation. He even says in his book Understanding Media, he describes the content of a medium as a juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.

So it means that we are focusing on the obvious, what's in front of us, the content to provide us with information. But we're missing the larger, more structural changes that are introduced more subtly over long periods of time given the medium. Look at the shift between tv, which he calls a push medium. TV pushes content out to us and it's passive. It doesn't require a lot of our concentration to understand or to engage with.

Consider how apps and technology. Social media is also somewhat of a push. Of course, when you're creating for those platforms it's different. But notice how the infinite scroll of the home feed. In a way, that's a new medium of content delivery that is pushing out to us where we're not necessarily that intentional we find ourselves in an infinite scroll. Nothing is more addictive than TikTok. I have since taken the app off my phone for this exact reason, I was finding myself stuck there for an hour at a time when maybe I only intended five minutes because their algorithm is so incredibly sticky. Something about the videos, the dancing, the music, the clips, the memes. There is something very, very engaging about TikTok.

Again, when you're not the one creating for that medium, it is pushing. It's pretty passive. You can lay there in bed or on the couch and just scroll and watch and be entertained.

On the flip side, McLuhan defines pull media as media that draws the viewer in and requires a higher degree of sustained concentration to understand, such as abstract art. Think about going to a museum. Now, I'm going to admit, even with my husband's an artist, my dad's an artist, my mom studied art history, my grandma studied art history. I used to find museums incredibly boring, probably because I was not allowing myself to be pulled in and engaged. This is terrible to admit out loud on the podcast, but I remember many years ago, before I lived in New York visiting MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art. And I felt that looking out the windows of the moma onto the street, at the people and the cityscape was more interesting to me than navigating the crowds, standing by art and looking at the art. I know, I know, I'm a terrible person. I'm learning, okay, now I find museums more interesting. There's history, there's cultural considerations, there is the meaning of the piece, there's our own interpretation of the piece. And then if you go to a museum with someone else, you might even be in conversation about the content or the construction or the composition of the work in front of you. And of course, art is always interesting when taken into consideration given the historical moment or the new innovations that that person was experimenting with. So I've been to museums where you're looking at white boxes, white cubes. There's. It seems as if there's no painting there. You know, some of this contemporary or modern art that is a. Is a head scratcher. But then the engagement happens when you ask, well, why is this innovative given what has come before it, even if now many similar works have come after it, how was this breaking the rules at that given time? That's a digression about art, but it gives you an example of medium that involves pull, or media that involves pull. Back to the whole topic of this episode on creating what you need the first step to get yourself out of having media pushed at you and passively receiving and consuming what's in front of you. It actually requires an Intentional stop or pause.

Before you get involved with your phone or the TV or any device. Even your email inbox is pushing a lot of content out at you. It requires stopping and asking what do I wish I had that doesn't exist?

This could be as simple as an article, a podcast, a product, some jerry rigged solution around the house. This isn't new. This question isn't new. You've probably heard this said in many different contexts in terms of the best ideas solve a problem that you have, the best apps, the best startups always start with something that frustrates you that you wish a solution existed. Both of my books came from reading dozens if not over a hundred books on each subject life after college and then pivot if not 200 on each subject and finding myself still frustrated by the lack of cohesion and clear next steps even after reading all that I could find that was out there. Your magnet means something. You have a magnet within you that is drawn to certain types of content. Pay attention to that. You have a magnet that is secretly hoping some kind of article message podcast topic will come into your feed. So I encourage you to pause for long enough to ask this question. What do I wish I had that doesn't exist?

In the episode titled I Don't know, I talked about not knowing what to create or what next episode to create for the podcast. And in that episode I shared part of my process, which is pausing and tuning into my own intuition what is true for me today. I encourage you to do the same thing. You can create from something you know very well, some piece of expertise, some solution, some problem that you've already solved, and you can create from what you wish you had. You can be the one that says I wish I could hear more podcast episodes about this certain topic. And of course it's worth a cursory search if you feel like it. To say, does this already exist? Is somebody already doing this? But you don't need to. Maybe your perspective on that very topic, even if somebody else has covered it, is what the world needs.

For example, my friend Sarah has a fantastic podcast for moms who are also working in startups or starting their own businesses or running their own businesses. Her podcast and platform is called Startup Pregnant, but during this pandemic I saw her launch a new show called let's Talk. The episodes are shorter. She's creating them using Anchor fm, which is software that makes creating and launching and even editing your own podcast very easy. Although if you want to be in this for the long haul, I do recommend creating it on your own platform just so you have more control over it eventually. But her let's Talk podcast is meant to be more ad hoc in the moment because she's got two kids at home, she's working from home, there is inherently going to be noise in the background, kids crying, kids coming up to her wanting to sit in her lap, laundry that might need to be done. So the episodes are a little more divided. I won't even say choppy, because she somehow magically ties them together really well. But this is an example of her not stopping the original more interview based format of Startup Pregnant, but then also launching not just what she needed for herself, but what she could create given the new circumstances that she found herself in. With a family of four at home in a New York City apartment, trying to create content that again involves trying to have a quiet home. How can you do those two things? So instead of not podcasting at all, maybe putting that out front, this is another thing that you can do. Take the thing that you think is a liability, the thing that might be holding you back from creating something, and how do you put it out front? How do you make that almost central to what you're doing?

Of course there are going to be some products or some topics that you wish you had. Back to this question, what do I wish I had? Or what do you wish you had that doesn't exist, that maybe you don't, you genuinely don't feel qualified to make, or you don't have what you need to make it. We had a mask shortage for a reason, because we simply didn't have the resources yet as a country to produce as many masks as healthcare workers needed and of the quality that they needed.

But look how many people companies pivoted to making masks and selling those masks. Although I have to say I'm very disappointed in some masks that I bought. I paid quite a lot for them and they arrived and they are terrible. I could have made these myself. So you see many people also creating masks themselves from interesting fabrics, scarves, old clothes, this repurposing or upcycling old materials from home. You see people sharing their blueprints for how you can create a mask from home and lots of creative new ways. There's even we typically think of a mask of this kind having two elastic bands that go around your ears. Well, now I've seen and this is what I got from that company that kind of annoyed me. But the big oval that they just cut ear slits into, I'm thinking, I don't know why I paid $12 for this oval that I cut. Ear slits. Yes. I definitely could have done that from an old T shirt lying around the house.

That does speak to a certain resourcefulness. And maybe if you're not the one that has all the resources you need or the skill to create something, you can also be a connector. So this question, what do you wish you had or what do you need right now in this moment? How can you collect information, collect expertise from others, and try to pull together what your interests are, what you do have the skills in, and then be the researcher. Take the lead on figuring out how you can get for yourself and others. And then, you know, first you solve it for yourself, then you do this for others. Of creating what you need or connecting people to what they need. I just read a big profile on Bethenny Frankel, how she's a reality TV star from Real Housewives of New York, but she has a passion for disaster response. So although she doesn't have a production facility to make masks, she was doing a lot of research and trying to figure out who's legitimate, who's producing real masks, who was selling masks that were part of a hoax. Fraudsters, which she said, unfortunately, she's had a lot of experience with in this crisis and in others, that it tends to bring out the best in people and sometimes the worst. But that's an example of a person whose passion is to help. She picked an area which was helping get healthcare workers masks, and she started making calls and connections. That counts, too. Creating what you need, creating what you feel is missing requires a pause to stop and even ask yourself, instead of being lightly dissatisfied, how many of you have sat there on these streaming platforms like Netflix, like Hulu, like hbo, Showtime, et cetera, and just felt, meh, there's so much there, and yet maybe you're not in the mood to watch any of it. Take that as a signal. Take that as a little alarm clock. Aha. There's something that would be soothing to your soul that might not exist yet. Of course, if you can put the ingredients. I'm looking for something that. And describe what it is that you need. You could also put the call out to your network and ask, what. What shows have you watched that fit these three criteria? Or what podcasts do you listen to that help you feel calm, confident, and capable? Yeah, I'm just picking three random words from that. Or what podcasts do you listen to that help you feel educated and entertained at the same time? Just getting clear on what you need and what you wish you had can help you start to solve your own problem and can also help you figure out if this doesn't exist, there is an opportunity for you to create it. And that is where some of the best stuff comes from. Trust yourself. Trust yourself that if there's something you're craving, if there's something you're needing, that that magnet signals you're onto something and you can be the one to create it. As the Buddhist saying goes, it doesn't have to be permanent, perfect or personal. That's helpful in navigating any type of crisis. This isn't permanent. Nothing is perfect. And don't take it personally. But it can also help. When you're piloting and thinking about what you can create, don't think about yourself too much. Actually think about who you're creating it for. Who else would feel relieved to get whatever this thing is that you're going to make? So actually don't take it personally. Or if you're going to use personal, at least make it what's relevant to me personally and trust that that can extend outward. Do not wait for things conditions to be perfect or for what you produce to be perfect. Never going to happen. And it's not permanent. Whatever you create can be a pilot. It can be an experiment. Take the pressure off. So I'm going to add that as the fourth p pressure. Take it off. How can you start small, as Alexander Fransen would call it. A tiny project, a tiny book, a tiny podcast. I can't say we'll make a tiny mask, but you can make a tiny prototype of something to help you understand what I share in Pivot are the three E's for any good pilot. Do I enjoy this area? Can I become an expert at it? And is there room to expand.

With that? I encourage you. When this episode ends, hit pause and ask yourself what do you wish you had that doesn't exist?

And how can you create what you need?

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 PivotList, 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 podcast and connect with me on Twitter ennyblake.

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