343: 🥳 Five Questions and Attempted Answers for My 40th Birthday

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The times that I have been the most vulnerable, I get the best response. And it's always so surprising. And I just sometimes have to remind myself that I'm willing to take the risk. So I'll ask is what I want to say or talk about? Is it worth the risk?

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 Pot 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.

Welcome back Pivoters. You know I love celebrating big milestones here on the podcast. So in honor of my 40th birthday tomorrow, Monday, October 9, I decided to do something a little fun. In today's solo episode, I asked my husband Michael if he could think up four questions for me to answer. He threw in a bonus fifth and he sent them to me. This morning as I headed out the door on my way to the podcast recording studio, I thought about doing something like 40 things I've learned in 40 years on this planet, but honestly, I just learn less as I age. I know that that's a common refrain. I'm sure somebody very famous and more famous than me said it, but I feel like every year I just get more unsure. Or I feel like there's more caveats and more paradoxes in the world. I don't presume to know 40 things that you should know, and I could give you some kind of listicle around this, but honestly, I think we'd both get tired after 40 items of whatever I could cook up in honor of my 40th. So instead let's just go with these four simple questions plus a bonus fifth that is going to make you laugh because I laughed out loud almost spit out my coffee this morning. And big thanks to my husband Michael for submitting them. I will link to one of our earlier conversations in the show notes. We did a whole series when the pandemic first hit.

The first question Michael asks, in this new world full of daily disasters, how do you find the courage to be so vulnerable? What I think he's referring to is starting my Rolling in Dough project in the summer. And what he said, you're sharing the mess so vulnerably. I actually just recorded a bonus episode for the BFF community. There's a free preview and the rest is for paid subscribers. I'll link to that in the show notes in case you want to listen. That one's how I got over vulnerability hangovers, because I definitely have them, but they do get easier over time. So if you take this question and answer with a huge grain of salt, maybe a bucket of that Maldon salt, that's like huge, huge flakes kind of grain of salt, if I were to take it with a tone of generosity of the courage to be vulnerable, even though I personally think there are many people far more courageous than just kind of sharing financial challenges or the challenges of being a breadwinner or running a business, I have gotten a lot of questions along these lines of people saying, how do you do it? Maybe I want to be more vulnerable. Or your vulnerable writing is really helping me feel less alone, and it makes me feel better. Through the ups and downs and highs and lows of my business. The number one thing that allows me to be vulnerable, that gets me over my own insecurities and neuroses around it, is imagining that it could help other people feel less alone. To that end. So I don't do it to get likes or clicks. I mean, that temptation is always there. Oh, what are people gonna like? What's gonna make people happy? What's gonna resonate the most? But when there's something very vulnerable to share, I often feel like pressure is building. And sometimes I normally lean toward optimism or I wanna put my best foot forward. But sometimes I just can't help but feel that the pressure itself is spilling over. Or I'm having so many conversations with other people feeling similarly and hiding it, or feeling bad about it, only saying things on one, on one phone calls when catching up with friends, that I realize people really need to hear this. And so when I know that it's not just me, and I start hearing these whispers among so many different friends and community members, listeners and readers, that's what gives me the courage to be vulnerable. Because I know that I'm not the only one. And it feels very important at that point to talk about it openly, to air things out a little bit. Not to the extent of cannibalizing our lives for content, as I talked about in episode 342 with Nicole Antoinette. I'll link to that in the show notes. So there is a middle path. It's not going overboard. It's not performative vulnerability or increasingly escalating vulnerability to where it's just kind of encouraging people to rubberneck, as if you're looking at some kind of accident. Like, look what a mess I am. And now even messier, and now even more messier to keep raising the stakes. I mean, there's really horrific stories about people doing that and it going haywire, whether it's on YouTube or TikTok or any other platform where they start overly catering to the audience and what the audience wants. It's called audience capture. So I kind of have that in my mind. I'm not being vulnerable to get something. It's really an offering. It's to give something. And I also find that vulnerability is a skill. It's a practice. There are certain aspects of my life and work where I am willing to be more vulnerable than others. I stopped talking about dating and relationships in real time long ago because I very quickly realized there's more than one person involved and the other person that I'm dating, or in this case now married to for five years, they didn't sign up to have their dirty laundry aired publicly. And there's always two sides to every story, if not three. There's me, there's them, and there's the relationship itself. And so I do draw lines. I'm not going to be as open and vulnerable about ups and downs in our marriage because that's not what Michael signed up for. And I don't think that's fair to him. And I don't want it. I don't want to build a career on. Speaking of those topics, I'm cool with career and business. And this year, mid summer, I just felt that the changes of the last few years had gotten so dramatic and were affecting me so much, I didn't even want to pretend they weren't happening, even to myself. So it became where being vulnerable and putting myself out there was the way to open up the pressure valve a little bit and by talking about it, connecting with other people and creating something entirely new in the process. So I do think it's important to pick what you're willing to be vulnerable about, what is in service to you and your broader career goals and career path. You can always ask a question I borrowed from Tosha Silver. What is in the highest good for all involved. And if you are going to take a risk and be vulnerable and put yourself out there, you just don't know till you try. You don't know how it will be received time and time and time again. The times that I have been the most vulnerable, I get the best response and it's always so surprising. And I just sometimes have to remind myself that I'm willing to take the risk. So I'll ask is what I want to say or talk about, is it worth the risk? If it resonates, if it helps people feel less alone, is that the risk? Am I willing to take that risk? Even if it makes me feel silly or nervous or takes away from what from some kind of image I'm trying to project? I'm not really interested in that. It's very hard to to keep up with that. That's why increasingly over the years See also why I'm not doing 40 things I've learned in 40 years. I would rather just share the ups and the downs, what I've learned. Sure, especially if I've gone through something and I can systematize or streamline or save you time by sharing it, but also the messier parts, because that has learning too. And if it doesn't have learning, that's okay. Sometimes all we need to do is relate, and that's usually what I look for in the podcasts I listen to, too. I get tired of overly prescriptive business best practices. Sometimes I just want to hear people honestly talking about their lives, the good, the bad, and the ugly. And that's when I feel most connected to whatever I'm listening to.

The next question Michael asks Systems play a big role in freeing up your time. What is the system you implemented that had the most significant positive impact on your life? Oh my goodness. Okay, well, on my life, that's such a big question. In the last five years, moving everything over to notion has been an absolute game changer for my business operations, for my creative process. I wrote my third book by outlining and moving cards around on a notion board. Notion is everything. Tiago Forte calls it a second brain in free time. I call it an externalized mind. We're all getting at the same thing, which is that, as David Allen said many, many years ago, one of the very first business and productivity books that I ever read, the mind is for having ideas, not holding them by getting everything. It used to be an evernote. Now it's entirely a notion. I even created a Done for you dashboard. If you run your own business, the key thing is that I know how to find everything and I know where to save everything, whether it's information about the vet and when riders do, or the plumber and how much we spent on plumbing fixes over the years. Or a little quote that I read and I'm inspired by a prompt that I want to write about my taxes, paying contractors. Every single thing. The life of a podcast episode. It's all in one place. And what I like about Notion, and the mark of any good system, first of all, is that it makes your life easier. So people who say they don't like systems, they don't think, well, well, yeah, if they're bad. If they're bad, they're just going to confuse you further and cost you money and drain your time and energy. But a strong system frees your time so much that it's much harder not to use it. What I like about Notion is that it's searchable. You can search for everything at your fingertips. It's customizable. You can pretty much make any page, any database, do whatever you want. And it's interlinkable. So I can eply people on my team. I can eply pages. For example, I use Readwise IO and that imports all my Kindle highlights and then it exports those Kindle highlights to a library in my Notion account. So when I'm working on a podcast episode like this one, I can actually reply a page with Kindle notes from any book that I'm reading. It's super helpful when I'm preparing for podcast guests, for example, or I even just want to quickly pull up a reference or pull a quote from a book that I liked. I don't even have to go open my iPad or my Kindle. It's all here.

We'll be right back just after this.

When the holidays start to feel a bit repetitive, reach for a Sprite Winter Spiced Cranberry and put your twist on traditional a bold cranberry and winter spice Flavor Fusion Sprite Winter Spice Cranberry is a refreshing way to shake things up. This sip and season, and only for a limited time. Sprite Obey your thirst with Venmo Stash. A taco on one hand and ordering a ride in the other means you're stacking cash back with Venmo Stash. Get up to 5% cash back when you pick a bundle of your favorite brands. Earn more cash when you do more with Stash. Venmo Stash terms and exclusions apply. That's $100 cash back per month. See Terms of Venmo. Melissa, the third question. Do you still love Tim Ferriss more than me? Why or why not? Okay, he's crazy. Michael, of course I love you more than Tim Ferriss. Hello, Mala. Michael and I have been together seven years, and we first bonded over my bookshelf in the early days. If you've read Free Time, you know that we met walking down the street, opposite directions. And one of the things that Michael said stood out was that when he came over, first of all, I had so many books, they were stacked on an IKEA shelf, four by four, and then all the way up toward the ceiling. And that we had read and enjoyed a lot of the same books. So early days, we were bonding over Cal Newborn and Ramit Sethi and Tim Ferriss. These were books that he read even back in Lebanon that gave him the courage to. To run his own design business and pursue his MFA as a painter and do voiceover for the Middle east big clients like McDonald's and Oral B and Dobleman gum and make his way to the US So we bonded over a lot of these books. And I have to say, Michael, right back at you. Because when Michael and I went to south by southwest together in 2017, right after pivot launched, Tim Ferriss was doing a book signing next to Cheryl Strait. So this is the twofer. And these are two authors that I love. When we finally got to the front of that line, you should have seen the look on Michael's face. I have a photo that captures this moment. I will try to link to it in the show notes. It was like pure love of Michael's eyes over to Tim. Like, I have never seen this much adoration or affection. It was so sweet. Michael looked so happy. I was even thinking, hey, why don't you look at me that way? So we have a shared love of Tim Ferriss, or Timmy as we call him for short. I hope that he doesn't mind. I got to meet him one day back in, I want to say, 2009, when he came to Google, and I was lucky enough, my friend who organized that talk, the four of us had lunch together. And so, you know, it's the kind of thing where Tim has no clue that I exist. But I do have a photo with him, too, just not with the googly eyes that Michael and Tim had looking at each other. Now. Do I still love Tim Ferriss? Of course. He's given me so much. I've learned so much from his books. I've read every single one of them. I own every single one. And of course, one could nitpick now, 25 years after the fact of what he could have done differently in any given book. But the world doesn't work that way. When you publish a book, it's like an artifact frozen in time. And every single time I read one of his books, I learned something. I was inspired to do something differently. And the same is true for his five Bullet Friday newsletter. I always find new gadgets. I have probably five Timmy recommended eye masks in our house. I'm always forwarding quotes or articles or different things to people. I get ideas of what to watch. I even ordered his coffee, the new coffee that he created as part of his project, which I will not say the name aloud on this podcast. He did that by design, but I will link to it in the show notes. He purposely wanted to mess with journalists who wanted to talk smack about the project by naming it something very silly. So if you know, you know. And if not, I'm not going to say it. So I do still love Tim Ferriss. But Michael, of course I love you more. That's not even a question.

Question number four. What are you most looking forward to in this new decade of your life? Well, I have to say I don't have a great record of being in a great place on my big decade birthdays and I get very melancholic approaching the big decade. I think when I was 20, I was doing okay. I don't think I was in quite a quarter life crisis, but I might have been going back to UCLA to finish the semester with my class after taking time off to work at the startup. And I remember feeling a little bit left out, like they already had plans after graduation and I just wasn't part of anything. I had been gone when I was turning 30. Oh my gosh, that was 2013, my apocalypse year. Oh, it was one of the hardest years of my life. It was right before I got the idea for Pivot. And that year was hard from day one all the way to the end. It started with a breakup on January 1st and it never let up. No matter how much yoga, how many gratitude lists, how much journaling, nothing mattered. It was hard all the way through. I will say that's the year I read Outrageous Openness. And that book did change my life and it really saved me from some dark days at the end of that year. Now in this new decade, I feel very exhausted. The last few years have been hard. Not just for me, for all of you, I'm sure. But I kind of look forward to like there not being a pandemic, knock on wood. I mean, I'm hoping that the pandemic is a once a every hundred years kind of thing, but as we know in pivot, nothing is guaranteed and if change is the only constant, let's get better at it. I'm tired though, so I think I'm looking forward to, I don't know, maybe having somewhat of a handle on being a breadwinner and running a business and trying to support three of us and doing that in New York City. While my income is so much lower because there's a pandemic and companies haven't been doing as many in person events or hiring me to speak, I'm still working my way through all of that. I will say though, that having launched Rolling In DOE a couple months ago, I feel newly invigorated. I feel much more creatively inspired. I'm excited to continue improving the craft of writing. And now that Ryder is 4 years old, I feel that we are in a better groove of who's taking care of him and when and how, and vet appointments and medication and I mean, gosh, I'm nervous to even say any of this out loud because as I wrote in a recent DOE post, makes me afraid that the other shoe is gonna drop. So if I tell you anything I'm looking forward to, I'm just now also utterly dreading what could possibly go wrong. So I just look forward to continuing to try to find equanimity amidst the greatly increased complexity of being married, of being a breadwinner, of feeling responsible to take care of all of us, of running a business during a pandemic. Like I do hope to settle into these things a little bit. Having ramped my video game up to boss level.

It was a big jump the last few years. So I don't know, finding a little peace, equanimity. That's all I ever ask for. And I know just even asking for that is a privilege and it's a lot. So I'm just going to take it one day at a time and say that I look forward to some years that hopefully aren't quite as hard as the last few. You can see how wishy washy I'm being. These are hard. This is why I didn't do 40 questions.

The fifth and final question. Who are the three people dead or alive that you would love to have on your podcast? The first person that comes to mind? I would love to have Oprah on the podcast. I would be so nervous and guaranteed I would be at absolute, utter peak awkwardness. But she has interviewed so many other people that it would be really fun to go meta and interview her. Purely about interviewing, she has shared her life story many times throughout the show and in her books, but I would specifically want to just dig into the craft. Exactly how does she prepare for interviews? What has she learned? And she said, I attended her Vision 2020 tour. That was in February at the Barclays Center. 15,000 of us crammed in a month before the world was going to shut down. And she said every single guest, after they stopped recording, after the tape stopped rolling, said, did I do okay? And she said that every single guest always wanted to know some variation of was that okay? Do you like me? Did I do good enough or did I do well? Something like that. Like, everybody just wanted to know that they did okay and that they were worthy, that they were enough. I'll try to find that quote and put it verbatim for you in the show notes because pretty sure I just butchered it. So I would start with Oprah interviewing her. On interviewing the next person I might invite is Irina Maria Rilke, because I quote his perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses just waiting to see us bold and brave. I quote that at the beginning of Pivot. And he just wrote such profound letters in the book that's now Letters to a Young Poet. And so I feel like he would have a lot to say. And I really love how he talks about when we're entering a change process. Sometimes the sadness comes into our life before we know what it is. And I took such great comfort many times in my life at the idea that when a sadness is present, a new thing has entered upon you and you just don't know yet what it is. So be quiet and patient in your listening and patient in your heart while you allow this new thing to unfold. And that it's not necessarily bad. It's just the sign that change is afoot. So my second would be Rainer Maria Rocca, my third guest, in lieu of sharing something ultra profound like Jesus or the Buddha, you know, I feel a little bit judged if my three people are not highbrow enough, given all of humankind across all of history. But a name that's just popping into my head, she's no longer with us either, is Edith Wharton. Now, when Michael and I decided to escape the city in 2021, we booked three separate Airbnbs for six weeks. One of those was in the Berkshires, which I had always heard. It's this fancy sounding enclave in western Massachusetts where people on the east coast summer. Because, yes, summering is a verb out here. And I didn't really know what to expect. We were technically in Stockbridge, but my friends Jonathan and Stephanie Fields invited me a couple months prior, and it was just so beautiful. We got there and it's full of culture. There's Tanglewood Symphony, Kripalu's right there. I had no clue. I had been there many years prior to there's botanical gardens, there's a Norman Rockwell Museum. But the gem of all gems that I found right as I was putting the finishing touches on Free Time, my third book, I would go to the Edith Wharton estate in Lenox, Massachusetts. Her books were famous for kind of Gilded Age takedowns of aristocracy, and she wrote about what it was like at that time. She was kind of one of the original, not necessarily gossip columnists, but she's right alongside Henry James and even Fitzgerald and the Great Gatsby. And so I would sit, I would have lunch at the Mount. I would try to absorb her writerly vibes. Fun fact that I don't even know if I've shared ever. I sent the final, final version of the Free Time manuscript to press from the Mount, which is what her estate is called. And while I was there, I saw in the gift shop they had a book, which is my introduction to her work, called Three Novels of New the House of Mirth, the Custom of the country, and the Age of Innocence. Many of these have been made into movies, but there's a lot to appreciate about her writing style itself, and it's so rich and vivid of just social commentary, which is what I loved. And this book was celebrating the 150th anniversary of her birthday, her three greatest novels. So I'll link to that in the show notes. Why would I want to have her on the podcast? I mean, I think it would just be so interesting to understand what it was like for her to be writing at that time. In a way, she was straddling multiple communities. She had wealth, but she was also in the creative community. And I don't know, maybe just digging for details among the hoi ploy of that time. That would be pretty fascinating. Those are my three. I'm so curious to know who your three would be. If you feel like sharing, you can actually head on over to Substack and leave comments on any podcast episode now and I will see them. So you can go to substack.com ennyblake and everything I create under the sun is now in one unified feed.

I want to say thank you to Michael for submitting these fun five questions. They really did surprise me this morning and big huge thanks to you for being here listening. Have a beautiful rest of your day and Happy Birthday to you too. Whenever yours is past, present, future. If it was recently, if it's far into the future, I'm just going to give some Happy Birthday well wishes all around.

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 podcast and connect with me on Twitter ennyblake.

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