249: Systems for Selling Over One Million Books with Josh Kaufman

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If someone goes to Google and they type in cash flow statement, I want to be one of the first things that they find because I can educate them, I can help them in that moment. I can help them understand what that is and how it is constructed and why it's useful and why it's valuable to know. It's almost a type of service marketing. Like I'm just trying to think about all of the places where people might be open and interested in this type of information and I want to make sure that I'm right there.

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Welcome back Free Timers. I am so excited to bring you a returning guest today who was the first person I interviewed in November of 2020 as I was getting ready for the first drop of 10 episodes of this podcast to go live. That is one of my longtime friend doors, Josh Kaufman. Josh, this is our 13 year friendiversary. In episode 12 we were talking about knowing each other for a decade and we were talking about how to generate momentum. Specifically he was just about to hit the 1 million books sold mark with the personal MBA. And so here we are now three years later, the book has surpassed million copies sold which is absolutely epic. And his TEDx talk on the first 20 hours, another one of his books now has over 37 million views. So today we're going to be talking about the systems and the systems thinking that goes into this kind of epic success. And it's not what you think. So I encourage you to check out episode 12 first, maybe to get the overall lay of the land on Josh and his genius. And with that, Josh, welcome to the show.

Jenny, it is an absolute pleasure to be with you. You are one of my favorite people.

To Talk to well, thank you. We did our joint book launch with a personal MBA in life after college at south by in 2011, and it's been so fun just following along the arc of your career from near and far. And I really appreciate you coming back. I can't believe three years has passed.

I know. Seriously, it is hard to believe that we've known each other that long, but like, seeing you go from life after college to free time and beyond has just been amazing.

Well, thank you so much today. I mean, ever since that first interview, we were talking about the systems you set up around sales. Because we talked on that episode about both of us not wanting to have a big team, liking to have a very delightfully tiny, minimum viable team, and your way of facilitating that while still having so much success was through systems. We talked a little bit about it on that episode, but I'm hoping in this one we just do a deep dive. And this is partly to scratch my own itch. The first question I have do you have any sense of the pie chart of your book sales, where they're coming from? For example, I know SEO was something we talked about in that earlier episode. Do you have a sense? Okay, 50% of sales comes from SEO and how much from speaking and how much from other activities that you do?

Sure. Publishing is such a weird industry because you can't tie the chains of causality back in a very clean and crisp sort of way like you can in tech. One of my persistent frustrations, particularly doing marketing experiments and trying different things. Sometimes it takes a while and there's, let's say, a lag in the data. What's been interesting in publishing over the last 10 or 15 years? I remember when I first started working on personal mba, ebooks had just started to become a real force. Kindle was relatively new. I don't know if Apple had launched the Ibook store quite yet, but books in electronic formats were a brand new untested thing. It was still paper on shelves at that point. And the biggest thing that has changed over the past decade, decade and a half, is the rise of audiobooks. Completely different format with its own strengths and its own weaknesses. And what's been really interesting to see, particularly over the past five to 10 years, is so much volume of publishing is moving toward audio and away from paper and even to a certain extent away from ebook. It's been really interesting to see, like I can tell when I'm out in the world doing things, which for me mostly involves being on podcasts like this one. It's fun to talk to interesting people. It's fun to do that in a way that seems to have a pretty direct correlation with how the book sells in all formats. But in particular, podcast listeners generally like listening to audiobooks. That translation seems to be pretty straightforward. The big kind of dark matter of the industry, and I think something that absolutely played a big part in the personal MBA selling as many copies as it has, is it's been translated into a lot of different languages, and it's on physical bookshelves all over the world. The random person roaming into a bookstore in Paris that finds the book, it resonates with them. They pick it up and they read it. That's something that doesn't feel like I have a whole lot of visibility into or control over. But it's also one of those things that random discoverability is a very valuable thing, and having the book in physical bookstores is a very valuable thing. I think it's all of those things like the Internet and how it's changing, giving rise to new formats that are making books kind of a different product in some sense. And then also the being in a lot of different places where people can discover your work, and then it becomes a marketing challenge. How do you talk about this? How do you grab someone's attention and keep it long enough for them to take a look at something and say, yeah, this is, for me, this is something that I might benefit from.

The dark matter of the publishing industry is such a good way to put it for listeners. If you go with a traditional publisher, they will often give you your royalty report nine months. So, like, a statement will close in May for the previous, I don't know, six months. And then you'll get that statement in September, and it will show you how many books are sold across different formats, but not at all where those sales came from. So if you have a friend who can look up Ingram or Bookscan results, you can see actually which bookstores have sold the books. And you can kind of guess if there's an ebook format, but it's incredibly opaque, just like you're describing. So when it comes to marketing activities, let's say an author, it usually doesn't pencil, but you want to run an ad campaign or you. You want to run Amazon ads. My publisher turned me down to run those on Pivot, and they wouldn't let me. And they have to do it because they own the rights. Maybe that's changed now. They just said, no, I couldn't even spend my own money on that, which was ridiculous. But even that, you don't get the data you need because you might run the ad campaign and Amazon might show you how many clicks and purchases, but you can't connect all these data dots. So it's very frustrating.

In some ways, I get a kick out of this sometimes if I think about it too much. Like publishing as an industry, new formats aside, and the rise of the Internet aside, the paper part of the publishing industry hasn't really changed much in the past 200 years. It's fundamentally the same business.

And the reason that royalty reports take six to nine months to come back is that's how long it used to take for publishers to go out to all of their distributors and randomly collate this information and have an assistant or a secretary compile everything and have an accountant look over everything and all. Like, it's a very traditional industry in that sense. And that part of the industry hasn't changed much, even though, like, there are a lot of systems now that, yeah, when you distribute a book on Amazon, you can see how many books you sold yesterday and potentially where that came from. Things are changing, they change slowly. And I think it's up to folks like us who are kind of the bridge between that very old world and the very new world of the Internet, to push things forward. And the more crazy, fun, cool, potentially useful experiments we do. I know, like when we were talking about the SEO experiment that I did for personal mba, that was something that took literal years to convince my publisher was a good idea, that it would raise sales of the book instead of diminish the value of the book. And it took quite a bit of persistence to get to the point where it's like, yeah, let's give this a try, see how it goes. And if it doesn't work, that we can take it offline or do something different. And the more people who are out in the world doing experiments and doing things in a new way, the more we learn and then the more we share that information with each other. Like, we all make the industry better. And that's something that I love about publishing and authorship in general. Books are complements, they're not substitutes for each other. There's a real incentive for people to say, yeah, this is what I'm doing, this is what worked, this is what didn't work. And here's something that I'm looking at trying. Do you have any thoughts about that? Because the more we experiment, the more we learn and the more we share, the more we learn together.

I'm going to put a sample Book excerpt that SEO optimized page in the show notes so listeners look for that because this idea was so genius and like you said, Josh, you knew it was a great idea. It took a long time to convince the publisher. Can you break down that system that you set up for listeners?

I think the biggest thing kind of going back to what we were talking about in the first episode that we recorded, I want to be in the places where people are looking for business information. And sometimes that's an adult learner saying, I'm serious about learning business. I'm going to search for MBA programs. I want to be there. That's a good place for someone to learn about my book because it's a good first thing for people to look at. I also want to be in the places where people are looking for specific types of business information. So if someone goes to Google and they type in cash flow statement, I want to be one of the first things that they find because I can educate them, I can help them in that moment. I can help them understand what that is and how it is constructed and why it's useful and why it's valuable to know. But then I can also do that in a way that makes them aware that Personal MBA is a book that exists, that is relevant to them, that is valuable to them, and they should think about picking up a copy. It's almost a type of service marketing. Like, I'm just trying to think about all of the places where people might be open and interested in this type of information. And I want to make sure that I'm right there. And so the SEO strategy was I used portions of what I wrote about concepts in Personal MBA and I made webpages about them. They were designed for people who were looking for that information to find me first and get value from the book.

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I noticed you have a Header at the top that has a 3D image of the book. And then by the book print, Kindle audio. And then there's even a link that says get the audio free. So two questions. Is that block, because I know you are a teacher self code. I don't know what to call it. Not amateur coder, because you're very sophisticated at it. But does that block, Is that a dynamically inserted block that automatically goes to the top of every page? And then just for listeners, you also have links along the bottom. It's almost a bottom navigation bar, Personal MBA book, ebook, audiobook reading list and manifesto. So the page, the content itself, I'm looking at one called what is the iteration cycle is sandwiched between book plugs. Like, did you like this? Was this helpful? Here's where to get the book. So how do they get the audio free? And then just talk to us about how you implemented this because it's probably a pretty thick website with a lot of pages.

Yeah, it is. The technical term is a partial in the language that I'm using. I can have blocks of code that show up on every site, which is great because if I need to update a sales link or link to another retailer or whatever, I need to update one file instead of hundreds of files for the book. And then the design of the page is very deliberate. Books are seen as high quality, valuable sources of information still in our culture. I want to make it very clear that this is a book, this is from a book. This is something that is highly targeted and relevant to the people or to what it is that you're searching for. And then one of the benefits that I was able to do is actually include a little bit more information. So I have some questions for consideration on that page, which kind of get the reader thinking about, okay, now that I know this idea, what can I do with this? How does this help me? Does this give me some perspective or a different approach to whatever problem it is I'm trying to solve by learning this piece of information? Starting with this is from a book having the first and the last things that people see. The term is call to action. Like go here, click this link, buy this book, you'll get value from this information. That's deliberate. And then one of the things that has always been true and is a fundamental principle of marketing in many senses is that people love free stuff. They really do. Because retailers are experimenting all the time too. One of the things that audible.com decided to experiment with is was giving away free audiobooks in exchange for a Trial membership to their subscription program. And I think they've been doing that for 15 or 20 years. And all signs point to it is an enormously successful marketing program for their company. One of the primary ways that they bring in new subscribers and one of the interesting things from a publishing standpoint is.

Someone getting a free audiobook to the publisher of the audiobook, in this case me, it just looks like a sale. There's no difference. In fact, sometimes depending on the time of year, it can be an additional profitable. They call it a bonus or a bounty. But that can be an extremely profitable sale. To me that's great for the reader because if they don't yet subscribe to Audible, they can get my book free. It's an 18 hour business course which if it were sold separately would be multiple thousands of dollars. They can download it for free from Audible and if they don't like it, they can cancel their subscription and they return the audiobook and it's fine. So it's a win for the reader, it's a win for me, it's a win for Audible and that makes that one of those things. That is something additional that I can add that's a little bit unique and attention grabbing and that works really well.

You also have never miss an update. So a nice newsletter embed to subscribe and then there's a copyright at the bottom, maybe a couple other links, but something you were very deliberate about that you told me when we were just catching up as friends. You said there is no central navigation where they can just click through and get the entire book and that's on purpose. So I imagine your publisher was very paranoid about all this IP being spread out on the Internet for free. Just tell me your thinking behind that so that people do still buy the book and they don't just go digging over every single page.

That was very deliberate. I think about this from multiple levels. Like the publisher's primary concern was not wanting to devalue the book as a valuable product, as a valuable object. And the primary objection is if this is available for free on the Internet, then why should anyone buy it? They should just go read it on the Internet. And part of my response, which I have a lot of sympathy for, I put a lot of effort into this book. I would really like people to read it. I would really like people to buy it. I have no interest in giving away literally years of work for no discernible benefit to anyone. And there's another thing that's true, which is reading a 450 page book on the Internet is a horrible experience. It's awful. There's a way to make the content of the book useful in the marketing and the sales of that book. That is very true. But if someone is interested enough in the book to derive value from it, the very best experience they can have is to buy the paperback, to buy the ebook, to buy the audio. In many senses, I hear from readers that they buy all three because each format has different things that are unique and valuable to it. I'll have someone who downloads the audio because they treat it as a business course and they go from start to finish all the way through, and it's kind of a survey of the overall material. And then they buy the ebook because they want to be able to search the contents of it, and then they buy the print book because they want to have it search sitting on their desk as a quick reference. And each of those things, it's the same information. But the format and the delivery of the book adds some unique benefits or some unique use cases that are valuable in and of themselves. I think that's one of the cool things about publishing. You can tailor the format and tailor the delivery to what's going to be most useful to a person in a given set of circumstances.

You were one of the first authors I knew to keep your audio rights. This was also very prescient because in the early days when you were writing and got the deal for Personal mba, audiobooks was not nearly what it is now. Neither were podcasts. This was 2011. Like, people didn't really start paying attention to podcasts until years later. Now publishers, they cling to these audio rights. They will not give you a book deal if you're trying to take audio rights. So I'm curious, Josh, what gave you the impetus to ask for that so early on? Tell us a little bit about how successful that's been. You don't have to share exact revenue unless you want to. And also, has that allowed you to do anything more creative because you have the audio rights in terms of systems for book sales?

Yeah, totally funny story here. I don't know if I've shared this one publicly. Actually. Originally my publisher did have the audio rights to Personal mba. As you said, this was back before audiobooks were a big thing. It was back before podcasting. And really the only audio market that existed at that time was books on tape, which mostly sold to libraries. It was a tiny, tiny backwater fraction of the overall publishing market. So the first edition of Personal MBA came out at the very end of 2010, my publisher had a heck of a time trying to sell these rights because in a sense the sales pitch didn't seem great. Who wants to read a 450, 500 page business encyclopedia which would be on like 15 CDs, something like that? At the time, it was a hard sell. It didn't sell for maybe a year, a little bit longer. And then finally they got an offer from a very small audio publisher that was on the verge of bankruptcy. They said, we'll give you $500 for the rights. My publisher sent this offer saying it's not the best offer, but it's the best that we could get. We recommend taking it. And I remember having a conversation with my publisher at that point saying, this doesn't feel like a good idea. If this is all we can get for it, I don't know what I'm going to do with it. But I'm pretty sure that I can do something that's more valuable than that. I ended up negotiating with my publisher to buy back the rights.

And it's also not rocket science to produce an audiobook. Let's also say that like you have a whole studio built out in your house. But it's also not that hard to hire audio engineers. I hired a team in New York City, recommended from a friend. That's it. You hire a team, it's a couple thousand dollars if that. You go into the booth and record, that's it. I mean, the recording's arduous in some ways. It's also joyful. But it's not rocket science. Sorry to interrupt you, but I just have to give this for the listeners. I think we got a $5,000 advance for the Pivot audiobook and Penguin Random House has probably raked it in on the audiobook sales ever since. So my cut of that was five grand. The rest is going to pay back my advance, which was 150k that I'll probably never see another dollar from. That was in 2014 that I started getting those payouts and they're raking it in for them. It kind of amortizes all the other costs in terms of the physical copies. Yeah, but it's not hard. So let's just say that as well. Because when you bought back the rights, again, not rocket science, because you're right.

Like audiobook production is a lot of work. It's effort, it's time, it's physically taxing. There are a lot of technical specificities that you need to account for to have a production ready file. But that's like producing anything, there's a bit of a learning curve. You figure out how to do it, and then it's pretty straightforward. So I talk to a lot of publishing people, and publishing people generally are not big fans of Amazon in the grandest sense. Some for good reasons and some for kind of competitive threat sorts of reasons. But one of the things that I have to give Amazon a lot of credit for is one of the big things that changed in the 2011, 2012 sort of timeline is Amazon bought audible.com, it used to be an independent company, now it's a part of Amazon, and they opened up publishing on Audible to all publishers, including independent self publishers, instead of it being a closed system. So at the time that I originally published Personal mba, the only way that you could publish something on Audible was to be set up as a publishing publisher. And the minimum catalog of titles that you had audiobooks for to publish on Audible at that time, because I had these conversations, was 10 titles, and if you had less than that, you just couldn't do it. Amazon bought Audible and Amazon opened it up. So anybody who had a book, if you recorded the title within proper specifications, anybody could publish an audiobook. And that was absolutely groundbreaking. It had never been done. And in a lot of sense, a lot of the popularity of audiobooks as a format comes down to the success of Audible as a product and as a subscription. So that shifted, I think, beginning of 2011, if I'm remembering correctly. And I remember because I was at. So there's a huge publishing conference, Bea Book Expo America, that happens in New York City every year. And I just happened to be visiting New York City and had a meeting already set up with my agent. And she said, bea's happening. Like, let's go. That'd be fun. I was sitting in the meeting when Audible announced that they were opening the platform up for independent publishers. I remember talking to Lisa, my agent, afterwards, and saying, this is a really good thing. This shifts a lot because one of the things that happened is after I bought back the rights, Lisa was doing her wonderful agent thing and she got an offer for the rights from Random House Audio. And that happened almost simultaneously with Audible opening up the platform.

Can you share how much it cost you to buy the rights? Was it expensive? You don't have to. You could give us a range even. Yeah, but are we talking ten grand? Fifty grand? A hundred?

Yeah, ten grand, give or take.

Okay.

So some of that conversation too was in the way that publishing advances happen. I was still owed part of my advance it became a very easy thing saying, all right, let's agree upon the price. Just knock that off of the advance that we've already negotiated and it's fine, we'll call it good. And that ended up being the best business decision that I have ever made in my entire life.

That's so amazing.

How come the audio rights for Personal MBA are a very, very valuable source of revenue for my company.

That's awesome. And it probably gets paid out monthly, right? Through ACX and otherwise.

Yeah, just like Amazon. Kdp, like all of the modern self publishing platforms will do sales statements, royalty statements monthly, and then it's the more traditional things that are like six to nine months.

Right. And it's so helpful for just cash flow and having this recurring income. There's another one if you can either go Amazon exclusive or ACX exclusive and you get a much higher royalty. Or there's the other distributor, Findaway Voices, that was just purchased by Spotify and they'll distribute it to all the other ones. Which one did you do?

So it's Audible exclusive for now.

Okay.

There are a lot of benefits to doing that. And I kind of go back and forth. The thing that I really like, particularly about self publishing, is not only can you just make unilateral decisions about things you want to try or things you want to do, you can change your mind. Right now, in the analysis, the vast majority of my readers are buying audiobooks on Audible. And so it makes sense to have some of the benefits of being exclusive with them. If that changes at some point in the future, I can change with it, and that's fine, too.

And I'm pretty sure that the royalty is twice as much. I think when I was recently looking for free time, you get 50% more if it's exclusive. So that's pretty significant. I didn't do it on principle, but I was this close. I just get mad at Amazon for how much they control. And they've done really stupid things with free time, like taking down all the reviews, and 50% are still missing. So they make me so angry that I decided not to. But I'm forfeiting a lot of money just on principle.

Totally. And that's the thing. Like, as an independent publisher, you can do that. I know a lot of people are like, I don't want to do business with Spotify. I'm not going to do it. I don't care how valuable it is. I'm just not going to. And controlling your rights in some senses, controlling your destiny and just being able to make a call of like, this is fine. I am great with the trade off that I'm making here. And so I'm just gonna do it. A more fun thing that I did in that regard. My third book, how to Fight a Hydra, I decided that my favorite format of that book is the audio because I decided to do something really fun and kind of weird. It's a short book. It's like a 10, 15,000 word sort of thing. You can read it in a couple of hours. It's also fiction, which I'd never worked in before. I really liked it. I really liked writing fiction. I often envied fiction writers because, you know, coming from the research based nonfiction world, when fiction writers get stuck, they can just make something up. I was always kind of envious to that. Once I started writing fiction, I'm like, yeah, this is actually pretty great. I can just do whatever I want. Try something now.

You can just ask ChatGPT to continue the story.

Yeah, right.

She gets stuck.

So the thing that I did with the audiobook for Hydra is I reached out to a wonderful composer, his name is Tim Roven. And I commissioned a score and sound effects for the audiobook.

Wow, that's amazing.

It's like a little hour and a half, two hour radio play almost. And it adds so much to the book that is absolutely unique to the audio format that I think had I published that one with a publisher, I would have received pushback because doing that was expensive. It added another contractor. It added time to the project.

I would never do it. It's just too unknown.

Right. And the decision thing for me was like, am I willing to write a check to make this happen? Yeah. And so it just happened and it was great. And I would do it again in a heartbeat.

I really wanted to drop all kinds of sound effects into free time, like popcorn popping or plane flying across the Times Square. And I was too tired. I think. I like I had the vision, but it is a tremendous amount of work to do something like that. Yeah, kudos. And now we're all going to have to get the Hydra book on audio. I have it the physical version, but not audio.

The audio version of Hydra is my favorite by far.

Wow. I'm going to put that link in the show, notes listener specifically because we have the link to the other version, but on audible. That's epic.

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Is there anything we're missing in this conversation about systems for selling, which is now over a million copies? You shared a little bit of your systems mindset in the last conversation. But as you encourage other authors not just to focus on the launch burst followed by exhaustion and then disappointment, how they can actually build this into their business so that marketing becomes a system and a process and not just this opaque, disappointing activity, at least I'll speak for myself.

Yeah, kind of building on something that we touched on the last time we talked, but deserves a lot of emphasis. Like writing a book and publishing a book and marketing a book is not a six month process, it's a five year process. A six year process. This is a pretty deep Internet cut. I remember Seth Godin talking about how he went about blogging and I think what he's blogged every day for 20.

Years at this point, something incredible.

Yeah, I remember he was talking about it and he's just like, yeah, every day you add another brick to the wall. That's all you need to do, just one more brick. And then over time that builds and that builds and that builds. And then you have an enormous structure from a lot of tiny actions over a long period of time adding up to the same end result. At this point with regard to personal mba, I don't know how many podcasts I've been on. I've lost count. I've lost track. I've talked about these ideas so many times I could probably not just probably. I have taught courses on the personal mba, the content, and it's such a part of me now that just being able to express these ideas and talk about them and get the word out and help people understand that there's a resource here that can help them a lot about things that they care about and will improve their life tremendously in all Sorts of different ways. Part of the Secret Sauce is doing that every day for 10 years. I wish there was a shortcut, and there are ways to make that more efficient or to accelerate the process. You can be very strategic about where you show up and how. How you talk to people, how you grab their attention and how you keep their attention over time. So things like podcasts, things like email newsletters, building an audience and making things that you think that they'll enjoy or think that they will find useful, that's part of the secret Sauce, too. Some of the benefit of doing this over time is I can be a lot more assured now that the books that I'm working on now are going to find an audience much faster, because I already have an audience that's waiting for them to arrive. It's a lot of figure out where your people are, figure out what they want, how to talk to them, and then just keep doing it day after day after day. And the more you invest that effort in creating assets that will continue to exist or assets that will continue to last, to use Seth's metaphor, that's the brick, that's the thing that's going to stick around. And in the aggregate, that adds up to a lot of.

And when you say figure out where your people are, you've had a long career at this. Now, has that ever changed for you? Has it changed who your people are and where they hang out? Or has that stayed pretty consistent for you over the last two decades?

You know, it's funny, I had much less of an idea who my people were, particularly for personal MBA early on, because I was coming from a very corporate background and getting very deep into entrepreneurship. And part of the design to personal MBA was trying to talk to everybody, trying to make it useful for someone in both sets of circumstances. And now the audience is much more entrepreneurial, up and coming. I talk to a lot of accidental entrepreneurs. So people who have a skill in some specific area and find themselves kind of accidentally running a business and knowing full well that they have no idea what they're doing. The general audience for personal MBA has always been, let's imagine someone with no knowledge, no experience, no context about what businesses are or how they work or how to do it well and teach them everything that they need to know in order to be a successful, sustainable business person. What has shifted over time is I talked a lot more to, like, early stage career folks early on in my career. And now I'm talking a lot more to aspiring or accidental entrepreneurs because they know that they need this, and it's relatively urgent for them to learn it.

I love that. Thank you for sharing so much. You now get to give your second permission slip to this lovely group of listeners. So if you could give fellow business owners or authors permission to do something differently or drop something altogether, what would it be?

Try more random experiments, Things that you don't know whether or not it'll work. Just things that you're curious about, things that pique your attention, things that you'd like to try. Because at least in my life, in my experience, the biggest successes and the biggest breakthroughs have come from the random side projects that I had no expectation would turn into anything. Personal MBA was a random side project, an experiment for me. I was doing it for myself. I had no idea it was going to turn into what it turned into. First 20 hours, same thing. I had a problem. I decided to do some experiments to see if I could learn some things that I cared about as quickly as I could with some pretty substantial family constraints involved. That turned into a huge book and a huge talk. Hydra started off as like a research based nonfiction book that kind of went sideways in a weird way. And I didn't like it and I didn't know what to do with it. And then one day I'm like, what if I did it this other way? And then tried it and got feedback from people that I trusted, they said, yeah, this works. Keep going here. There's something the more you do, the more you try, the more weird things you experiment with that just increases the number of opportunities you have to stumble upon something that works really well or works really well for you. And the more you do that, the faster you find them.

I love that. Josh, thank you so much. And so epic that your curiosities happen to coincide with epic sales and what the market wants. I feel like I'm someone, oh, yeah, I'll follow my curiosities until there's no more money left in the bank.

Yeah. And that's.

That's okay.

The art of it.

Yes.

I think I read about this in the new edition of Personal mba. It's an idea I've gotten a lot of mileage out of. So it's called Explore Exploit, which is an algorithm that comes from computer systems. If you have a lot of different options that if you try them, they're going to pay out in some way, shape or form, and they might be huge successes and they might just be a waste of time, but you don't know which options are good and which ones aren't. The Best approach is to spend a period of time just exploring, like, try a whole bunch of different options, gather a lot of information, figure out what works, collect some data, see how you feel, and you enter that exploration phase deliberately. I don't care about payout. I'm just going to try a bunch of things and collect information here because that information is valuable. And then over time, once you've collected that information, you start what's called the exploit phase, which is you spend more and more of your time doing the things that are working. Instead of the experimentation being completely random, you pick what appears to be the best option that you're aware of right now, and you spend most of your time doing that and then experimenting kind of around that general area and as a way of identifying the most rewarding things out of a large number of options. It's a very, very successful strategy. In the same way that computer systems can do that, we can do that in our lives, too. We can explore, we can collect data, we can experiment, and then you just notice and pay attention. The things that are rewarding, the things that people respond to or like, and then just shift more and more of your attention in that direction.

Now, if I Google Explore exploit, will one of your one pagers come up?

Do it right now.

Okay, listeners, I'm doing this live. Okay. Should I search with your name or. No, do it without. Let's start without. Okay, Wikipedia. Let's see. I'm scrolling. Okay, not yet at the top. Now I'm going to say business.

This is really funny. This is like our bonus content. Okay, Josh, we got to work on this one's SEO. I think on the first page it.

Might have slipped with an algorithm update, right?

Oh, there it is. Okay, well, if I put your name, then I get. I get Explore exploit on your personal website and on the personal mba. Yeah, that's so cool. I'm going to link to these, of course, in the show notes, too. Thank you so much for always sharing your genius with us. I appreciate you so much. And I'll put all these links in the show notes for listeners to check out.

Thank you, and thank you for spending so many years sharing your genius with us. Doing a podcast like this is a lot of work and is an act of generosity and is an act of service. So thank you for sharing so much of yourself with us and with the world.

Thank you so much. Just my own meandering explorations.

And that's what it's all about.

Yes, big thanks, everybody, for being here listening.

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