45: Happy Launch Day!! Pivot for the Podcast: James Altucher Interviews Jenny

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Do you want me to start? I can start.

Good question. I was like, how do we do this?

No, I'll start. I have a good way of. Because I've taken over other podcasts.

I love it.

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.

I'm taking over Jenny Blake's podcast for the day, the Pivot Podcast. This is James Altucher, and I'm so excited for you, Jenny, because your book Pivot comes out today. I've been waiting anxiously for this release. Congratulations.

Thank you so much. And I'm so honored to have you here taking over my show.

Yeah, I'm taking over and I'm going to ask you all about your book. Is that okay?

That's perfect. And you also took over the back cover because you're front and center on the back. Your blurb.

That's excellent. And you got a lot of great blurbs, by the way, for that book. I mean, I feel like six or seven of those blurbs. The guys have been guests on my podcast.

Like, the thing that I feel so lucky about is that many of these people are friends. And I've been doing this 10 years now of the online blogger thing. And so it felt really nice that in asking for blurbs, I wasn't just emailing strangers. These are actually people who I've interviewed on my show. I met you just by running into you five times in a row in New York. And I think New York is such a wonderful place for continuing to build those relationships and deepen them.

It's true, you know, and this is off on a T. I'm gonna, I'm gonna ask you all these questions of.

The book, but, like, everyone's sick of me by now. Tangents are good.

No, no one's Ever sick of you. So. So do you think, you know in. In New York City and in San Francisco and let's say in Austin and other cities, there's some serendipity that happens where you running into people. Like I ran into you. I don't know when the first time we met was maybe Michael Ellsberg's conference, but then I ran into you at Lewis. How's book launch. Then a week later, outside the Gray Dog, which is a restaurant near where we both live, I was meeting Matt Kepnes. You know, nomadic Matt, who's also been on one of my podcasts. And you were there.

VIP party for Flavor Pill.

Oh, yeah, yeah, Right, right. The Flavor pill party.

Dude, it was like the fifth time we had run into each other and we actually got to talk for longer.

And then I was on your. Wasn't I on your first podcast?

Yes. You kicked off New Year's January 1, 2015.

2016.

What the heck year is it? Yeah, 2016.

Yeah, I remember doing that. So, okay, so pivot comes out today. Tell me the basic idea and then we're gonna dive into your. I wanna really dive into your history. You used to work at Google. You used to do all these things or. And you still do. I'm gonna dive into everything and I wanna get into the details of how. I am personally in need of a pivot. So I'm gonna ask for your advice.

I love it. Okay. Can't wait. And let me also say, I live for serendipity. So I love. For that exact reason and for this reason. It's how we're here right now.

But what if you live in like, I don't know, a suburb and you don't have that serendipity? Can you still kind of get, you know, get what you need?

I do think you can. Cause I think serendipity doesn't play. We live in a nonlinear universe. Time and space are just constructs. The exact city doesn't matter. But certainly if that person could take a trip to New York, they might find they would double down on the serendipity magic a little bit.

It's true. I feel like. Like a friend of mine's visiting New York from a suburb outside of somewhere in California and he's here this week and he's just stacked his days with lunches and dinners. So I guess he gets. He forces in a 10 day period that serendipity.

That's why so many people say they could never live here. Because I think when they come, they cram the days so full, whereas you and I have learned to create routines and have more of a calm, steady existence.

But it's amazing how many people I've met just by simply lying down on the sidewalk and letting people walk around me. And people are like, is that you? Yeah. And then I do meet people.

I've run into you at McNally Jackson. Sometimes if I'm having a hard day, I go to the bookstore. It's my happy place. And one time I just saw James in there, and I was having kind of a rough afternoon, and he was sitting there having coffee, and I sat down, and next thing I know, it's two hours later and I've had now the best afternoon. And I was on my way.

I was worried I wasted your whole day.

No, but.

Okay, so tell me first off, tell me who you are. Where'd you come from?

Well, I was born and raised San Francisco, and then I moved to Palo Alto in seventh grade. So I've always loved technology and computers and.

Were your parents in technology?

My mom almost majored in computer science, and then she got really sick of programming cards. She went to UC Berkeley in the late 60s, and so she pivoted to a history major and later landscape architecture. And so wait, I looked at the time and says, she could have been rich. She had stayed with it.

It's true, she probably could have gotten wealthy by staying with it, particularly at that time, if she was young, in the late 60s. It's sort of like how Bill Gates was a teenager in the late 60s. But.

In your book, you kind of talk about how pivots are sort of related based on, you know, kind of how your different backgrounds overlap. So she was in computer science and then history, but then ended up in landscape architecture. How did her pivots actually work?

My mom is. She's a genius. She has a very analytical mind, and she's been the campus planner, the head landscape architect for Stanford University for 20 years.

Wow.

So anyone who's been there has seen my mom's influence on the campus. And I think that that sort of linear problem solving brain, she has kind of say over everything that happens outside of the buildings, where the buildings go, where the trees go, where the bike racks go, whether they should put in a roundabout.

So it's almost like a kind of a programming problem. Like you have to think five steps ahead.

Exactly, to figure things out. That's a very major piece is that's kind of the culture and the history and the feeling of a place. And I think she explored. She Dabbled. But by the time that she went to graduate school, it was a nice confluence of things. And then she is someone who has then gone really deep in that career path. She didn't think I should leave Google. When I did, I put this in the book. We still don't agree because my mom's been at Stanford 20 years.

Even after you've been on my podcast, she doesn't think it's been the great move for you.

She just says, to this day, we agree to disagree on when I made the decision to leave, she would have liked me to keep working at Google and move to New York while working for Google. And I felt like when I was ready to go, I was ready. It would not have been fair.

Well, how did you get the job at Google? Let's start there. What were you doing?

This is really interesting. So I had been the first employee at a startup company. I left school early. I took a leave of absence, and I would have minored in computer science as well, actually at ucla. But I left. I figured, what better than help build a startup? And it was doing political polling, and it was during the 2004 election. So cool. That's right where I wanted to be. Because my other ideal career at the time was to be working on a political campaign.

Okay, so this really was the combination of two interests.

Yeah. And it was in Palo Alto, which was my hometown. So I moved home as the first employee, helped set up the office as the office manager, webmaster, and marketing assistant. One of my many, many tasks was managing our Google AdWords accounts. And when I hit a plateau at the startup, and I had at one time three managers all telling me what to do, and I just felt bored. And I say, this is the career conversation I regret the most is the one I never had, which was to say to the founder, I'm struggling here. And instead I just started looking elsewhere. I only applied to one company because I had stock options at the startup, and so I wasn't going to leave for anything. It had to be a good opportunity. I applied to only Google, so I did not really diversify my risk or my eggs in my basket. I put them all into Google. It's kind of how I date too.

And the interesting thing, but maybe you were my monogamous diversifier. So maybe if Google hadn't said yes, maybe you would have applied to later.

Yeah, exact.

Some other company.

But I tend to get very focused, and when something in my gut feels like the right move, I just focus really on that. And so after four months of interviewing at Google. One of the things I had to do because I was managing AdWords accounts at the startup and I applied for a role on the AdWords training team at Google. I knew I used to get hives when I was public speaking, but I also knew I wanted to be an author someday and this would be help me. It was like immersion therapy to get me better at being in front of a room. And so I had to give a mock presentation. I had to learn Google Earth and give a mock presentation to the whole training team. 15 people teaching them how to use Google Earth as if they were real estate brokers. And in a 45 minute presentation, one little thing I did, I was showing them how to add a listing to Google Earth. And I added a snippet of code to add an image. And I just casually added it in because I used to do web development tutoring in college for small business owners to make extra money. And so.

I had no idea at the time. But after I started and I got the job and after I started, they said, when we saw you write that line of code, we knew you were our person because.

Wait, you wrote the line of code like on the fly?

Yeah, just, you know, where the code. It was an image source, like image source equals. And I put in, I think it was one of my dad, My dad's an architect, put in one of his listings at the time. And so I just hard coded it, essentially. I didn't. There was no, like, file, insert image.

Yeah.

And it turns out. And I was very green. I was very nervous, I was shaking, my voice was shaking. It was, you know, it was okay, but I was very entry level. I was 21 at the time.

So you were kind of pivoting from. This is like a very early pivot in your life. You were kind of making a change from startup to Google. And would you say, like kind of the, the takeaway from that is make almost an inventory of your skills. So you had software, you understood Google very well because you were managing the Google AdWords team. You understood startup culture, which Google probably still somewhat had. I mean, even though they were a giant at that point, they always sort of had that startup culture. Then you had to learn some new skills, like presentation skills. So you sort of had to make an inventory of those. And then kind of that together allowed you to. Not quite seamlessly, you were scared, but that allowed you to do a pivot. It wasn't like, okay, now I'm gonna be a fireman, and then you just jump on a fire Truck like there's this whole thing that has to happen to do a pivot.

We just recorded James podcast for his show that will also come out today. And I love James podcast, so everyone go listen to that too. It's the James Altucher show. But he brought up Steven Johnson about the adjacent possible. What is interesting to me. So to just cap that story, turns out the training team needed a global training website. And that was not in the job description. And I had no idea that that stupid little line of code was part of the thing that got me hired. So I think what's interesting is that when you do diversify your skill set, you won't always know how they're going to combine and how even I would never have even listed web development, HTML, CSS as a trait to get this training team job. I thought it was totally irrelevant. How would I have known they needed a global training website? So it was very interesting that just by naturally combining multiple things, it ended up being the thing that got me the job.

But that's why often we were talking about serendipity earlier. That's why often you kind of have to try several things because you don't know where the sort of chance lightning is going to strike where this combination of skills will suddenly flourish into something that works.

That's why when people come to my website and they say, oh, I love your site, or something like that, and what they don't always realize is this has been 10 years of a thousand tiny iterations. None of us come out the gate and just launch the most perfect blog with all these readers. And it's not like that for me. It's just been testing the tiniest things over and over and over. And I think if you're experimenting and doing these really small pilots, as I call them in the book, within fields you enjoy, that's half the fun.

So I want to get more into what an experiment is and what a pilot is. But tell me more about Google. Did you have, first off, did you have to take one of those tests, those famous Google tests? No, thank God.

I would have failed that. I would have failed that.

How many jelly beans are in this big container?

Even taking the SATs was not my strength. Standardized tests were never my thing.

Did you finish ucla?

Yes. I took classes at Stanford while working at the startup and then I went back for 1/4 to graduate with my class. And that was an interesting moment because most of my friends, I kind of lost touch with my college friends. And to this day, Google almost feels like my college experience. And I'm in touch with many more people from my five years. I spent two and a half years at ucla, five and a half years at Google, and Google feels like my alma mater. And I learned so much.

So, okay, so tell us about Google. What's that like?

It's really intense. I mean, everybody's friendly, everyone's googly, as they say. But if you consider how strict Google's hiring parameters are, and then you put, at the time I worked there, 35,000 of them together in the same company, there's no way that the pace isn't going to be unrelenting, which it really was. And for so many of us, that's what made it exciting. But it was very challenging not to burn out. And I don't say that it's Google's fault. You know, it's like, I take responsibility for that. But there's just such. The campus always seemed really fun and calm, but anytime guests would come, they're also like, yeah, I can tell it's intense here, you know, even though there's people playing volleyball, like, what was the.

Most intense thing that happened to you there? Like, what was something where you felt like, oh, my gosh, I can't believe I'm doing this, or I can't do this.

Now. I call them call walls, where if I have meetings back to back all day. There was a period of time where I'd become a manager. 24. I just had meetings all day, every day, to the point where my friend Julie and I had to throw email parties on Sunday afternoon. We would eat pumpkin seeds, red wine, chocolate, and watch say yes to the Dress and try and go get four hours of email done together. It was the only way we could stomach getting caught up, and that would only get us caught up.

That's disgusting. You didn't at least watch Real Housewives of Beverly Hills?

I don't even know if that was accurate.

Say yes to the dress.

Duh, James, it's such a great show. Come on.

I've seen it and I know what kind of show that is.

And, yeah. So having to work on Sunday and then have meetings all day every day.

Were the meetings useful? Like, what happened in a meeting? Like, did things get done?

It's a very collaborative environment. Nothing is autonomous, really. I mean, you have some autonomy in terms of getting projects going and off the ground, but so much of it is around consensus, and so many of them were productive. But at a certain point, I did question, what is. Why am I? I felt like I was probably working in my zone of genius about 30% of the time.

Well, you alluded earlier to the tension between you and your mom about when you should quit Google. Like what? Obviously an external pivot that happens where you change a career or a business changes the direction is usually preceded by an internal tension. So what kind of. And this tension was big enough for you that you and your mom didn't even agree on what you should do? Like what was the tension that caused you to hit some sort of plateau at Google, the best company in the world where you said I have to get out of here?

Well, two and a half years in I hit that if not two years in. And I know we talked on your show about your pivots are kind of every two years Also I was really unhappy and I'd become a manager. I had to tell several of my former friends now direct reports that they had to go find other jobs within the company or leave.

Why is that?

And that was devastating because there was a big Reorg, it was 2008 around then and that was really devastating to me. And also at the time when I started at Google, I worked under Sheryl Sandberg's organization and I was not her direct report by any means.

You call her up on the phone.

And say, hey, definitely not. No. But the point is when I had hit that wall and I felt so awful and I just felt sick to my stomach and I would cry at work, which is so embarrassing. And I was 24 and going through all this and I kind of looked to Cheryl, who we all really admired and I had this realization. I don't want to be her. I don't want to keep climbing the ranks of management. I don't want to have all these one on ones and performance reviews. And yes, I love coaching people, but I don't necessarily love managing them. Nor do I want to be CEO of some giant company someday the way that I thought that I did.

Well, let me ask you a question. Why not like obviously Cheryl has achieved much career success and satisfaction. Like she's helped run Google, she runs Facebook, she's a multi billionaire. I mean obviously everybody has unfortunate things that happen in their lives and she has as well. But she's a best selling author, she's had so many great significant accomplishments.

Why not strive to be exactly like her?

That's a good question. For me I think for some reason a more quiet existence fits me better and a more.

How do you recognize that in yourself?

At 24.

I just didn't want the treadmill of stress and Expectations and responsibility, that all felt very heavy to me. Whereas when I looked at what I was doing on the side of building this new blog, life after college, that was really joyful. And I guess, I don't know, even now I'm a solopreneur and I have no ambition to build 100 person business someday. That's just not, it doesn't feel like the day to day tasks that I really enjoy. I love a lot of quiet time. I love being lean. I like being able to go work from anywhere whenever I feel like it and not be tied down to a location or to people. I mean, in this really weird way, I don't know if you get this a lot. A lot of people will sometimes pitch me, let's partner on something, let's create this, let's do an event together, let's do a retreat. And I just cringe. I'm like, I don't want to work with you. I just want to work on my own and just have the total freedom and flexibility. And I know that African proverb, those who go alone go fast, those who go together go far. And I'm down to do some, you know, things like this where we're kind.

Of, we're going fast, collaborating.

Yeah. But I don't, I don't want to like co start a business with anyone. It just, it doesn't feel right to me.

So you were hitting this. So it sounds like two things that's relating to the pivot style in your book. And this is on individuals. But also we'll talk about for companies, but for individuals, there was some, again, some depression that was happening.

Oh yeah.

Just like how you felt at your startup. Just like how you probably felt at UCLA before you joined the startup. So you some sort of physical feeling of unhappiness.

And let's also add, physically I was 20 pounds heavier than I am now and I had a thyroid problem. I had an overactive thyroid. So my body was also not thrilled. Well, what's going on?

I think people are more and more science is connecting the dots that how you feel internally is gonna reflect how you feel and externally, whether sick or healthy and so on. So this was happening to you. And at the same time it wasn't just that you also had something and you used the word joy, which is a great word. You also had something you were doing that was joyful at the same time. So what was that?

Blogging. And you know the funny thing? So at the time I thought, oh, I gotta go to business school. That's what all the managers are doing. And I was interviewing informal interview with managers, asking where they win. James. I ordered five MBA books, like how to Take the GMAT and Get Into Business School.

Oh, my God, I feel the day.

I haven't touched them. When they arrived, I shunned them to a corner. I love books more than anyone, but couldn't touch them. That's the same way I feel about all the marketing books that land on my shelves right now.

It's so interesting because physically then your body was telling you almost the direction of the pivot.

Here's the funny thing.

And pivot's a very physical. The original definition is you're facing one way and now your body's gonna face another way.

Absolutely. The funny thing was I had the initial idea to create life after college because I thought, well, if I wanna get into business school, I should start something. I should show I'm enterprising. And I was also practicing how to hard code a website from scratch using only css, no tables. And that was the cool thing at the time. And so I didn't start life after college for these huge ambitions. I mean, yes, I did wanna help other people. I wanted to make college experience more efficient than mine was, which I felt was a little floundering. But I also wanted to practice HTML, which we talked about, and I wanted to maybe get into business school. The funny thing is that two years later, once I wrote the book and.

Got a book deal for Life After College.

Yeah, it totally circumvented the need for business school, because then all of a sudden, I was an author and a speaker and doing all the things that I wanted without having to fork over 150k.

So it's so fascinating because I think people think, oh, if I don't.

Go from Google to Facebook, my life's over. Or if I don't go get this one thing, I have no purpose in life. But you were like, again, as you described in the book, you were doing these small experiments, these small pilots. So you were like, okay, you were at Google. You were feeling that plateau, which suggests a pivot is on the way. And you figured, okay, maybe business school. But first, let's do this blog. The blog got popular. Oh, maybe it could be a book deal. Oh, oh, got to be a popular book. Now you could be a speaker consultant. So all these things started happening. It wasn't necessarily your purpose in life because you're not doing those things now, for instance, but it was a way to pivot into something where you from something where you previously had joy, then you had depression, now you found a new joy and it was along it was it by accident because you thought you were going to pivot into business school.

Right. And I ended up pivoting internally to the career development team. So I did I talk in the book about unrealized gains and diminishing returns that if you leave a thing too early, you might leave unrealized gains on the table. And in my case I absolutely would have because I ended up doing creating a global coaching program at Google that is really helpful to me now it's on the front of the book cover. But one thing that's important is I always.

What's a global coaching team at Google?

Yeah, I would train managers and directors all over the world coaching skills so that with 10% of their role they could facilitate drop in coaching sessions for any Googler. So it was part of my vision with my friend Becky. I wanted coaching to be as easy for people to sign up for as a massage. And at the time it was only available to executives or people who took leadership.

What's an example of coaching I don't understand?

Just you could have a neutral person to come talk to either about a challenging situation or just what you're interested in or maybe you're at your own plateau or pivot point and instead of having to only talk to your manager, there could be this other person in the company that you could informally talk with.

So Google has these coaches that are kind of like the third, you know, kind of indirect people you could talk to as opposed to just that you're a direct manager.

Because I had the experience of getting coached and it was so transformative and that's what kicked all of this off. And my common thread is I always enjoyed expressing. When I was 10, I started a family newspaper called the Monthly Dig up and I would write about technology trends, I would do interviews and that was also about synthesizing information and then sharing it. So that started young and I knew I always liked being helpful and kind of, you know, even tech trends I've always enjoyed. But yeah, how it has manifested has been different over the years and yeah, and then, and then leaving, I mean, let me just say I talked, we talked on your show about Pivot Runway and finances and the topic of business school. I had about six months savings in the bank when I left, let's say 25,000 cash. And then I had a car, red velvet, my Prius, of course, because the Bay Area. But I wiped that out. I've cleaned that out in the last five years, like, that is gone. And everyone will read about that in the book. That's what sparked the pivot method, was trying to figure out how to dig myself out of that hole. But I'll say when I look back, okay, So I spent 25 grand on the last five years to make it to today, where I'm the happiest and healthiest I've ever felt. And instead of spending 150 grand to go to business school. So I still think that it's, like, the cheapest, smartest decision that I could have made, Even though it was very stressful to lose that money, when I put it in the context of not going to business school, it all shakes out well.

Okay, so you have the book out. You're starting to get speaking opportunities. Did you think to yourself, wow, this is gonna be my career? Or, like, what's the next pivot that happened?

I had taken a sabbatical March 2011, when the book came out, and I totally agonized about whether I should go back. I did not take the sabbatical thinking, yeah, I'm gonna peace out in three months. This is gonna be great. In fact, I wish I had known, because I spent money as if I was still working at Google. On those three months, I went to south by Southwest. I probably dropped 2,500 on the hotel because it's insane there. The hotel cost. I mean, that's so stupid. Like, if I knew I was gonna quit three months later. Point being, I really didn't know until the last minute. And then I finally decided. Up until 27, you know, I had. I bought a condo. I had a car, I had the job. I had become a manager. And all that was missing was, like, insert husband and 2.5 kids. And all of a sudden, I just realized, I do not want that. I do not. That is not for me. And yet, up till that point, I felt so much pressure. I just felt, that's what you do. These are all the boxes that you check toward the American dream. And when I realized I rented out my condo, I sold my car. I did that cliche of packing two suitcases and moving to New York, but I've never felt so alive. And I live in this small studio apartment, but I love it so much. People would say, it's expensive to me, it's cheap for how much I love the city and how much I get out of being here. So essentially, at that time, I just thought, you know what? I'm willing to spend every dollar of my savings and in six months, if I haven't earned a dime, fine, I'll go find another job. There was finally that moment where I was willing to try and lose what I had.

Well, I think it's an important point that the six months is sort of a magic number. I think if you're young, single and you're pivoting to new career and you're a little unsure how much money you need, I do think six months is a fair amount of Runway to have. And with some idea that you could potentially make more like you were speaking to, you could probably have gotten another book deal if you had really worked at it, worked for that in that direction.

And the thing is, because once I think once someone, once you do make these big in the book, I call it the launch. This is the fourth stage. And once you make your big launch decision. For me, what was such a relief was at Google, I used to have 20 okrs, objectives and key results that I was responsible for every quarter and if not more. And it was so much to juggle and think about. Yeah, it was this huge. I could never even remember. Oh, it might be increased career guru session attendance from 35 per month to 135. You know, it could be something like that. Launch career guru in Dublin and Korea. So things like that. But sometimes they were increasing metrics here, comms plans. Point is, when I left, I was so relieved. My only OKR was pay the rent. And all of a sudden I felt so free and actually felt so focused, like, oh my goodness, now I have all month and all day every day to meet this goal. And of course, I think once you're.

Meeting your goals, it was good to know that you had the six months Runway in the bank and I didn't.

Need it for the first. From month one, I started earning money because I could redirect all my creative energy to that. Whereas. And I think it's not just about the money and certainly not for me, but once the basic needs are being met, then I turned toward meaning and impact. But in the beginning I just needed to know, okay, I can support myself. And it was a rollercoaster. I kind of came to my own daily practice, which you talk about and choose yourself. Because I was waking up with such mood swings every day and feeling so lazy and inconsistent and that I realized my body is my business. If I don't treat my body, I'm my only employee now, right?

Cause if you're sick, you can't pivot, is the bottom line. Well, you can't and if you're self.

Employed and you're suddenly like hungover tired or eating too much sugar and you're at 50%, well then so is the business.

Right.

That just seemed like bad business to me.

So, so, and, and also everybody look, it's a dream thing to be able to be your own boss. And so there's a lot of competition for dream jobs obviously. So you can't be at 50%. You have to be as close to 100% as possible. But you say the fourth stage is launched. Tell me about the first three stages.

The first three, and that's really what you can repeat as many times as needed to get to the launch. And the first three, really it came to me of thinking like a basketball player that when they stopped drib, they plant, they have one foot grounded, it's not moving.

And that's like you at Grogo Stone. So it's so important.

The plant foot is about what's already working, what are your strengths and also what's your vision, what do you want a year from now. These are all your known variables. Once you're rooted in that, instead of ignoring all those assets under your belt, then the pivot foot can scan for opportunities so the basketball player can look around the court looking for where to pass the ball. And then pilot is the third stage and that's passing the ball around. Where's your best shot? That's testing small experiments. Google, Silicon Valley, it's all of out lean launch and iterate, get scrappy, test a lot of things.

What's some other examples of experiments that both individuals and companies can do?

Well, career pilots, things like starting a blog, taking classes. I tell people think of your career like a smartphone and it's up to you to download apps for things that you want. So James, I know you just took a DJing class.

Yeah.

You did a study.

Definitely a little survey.

These are pilots.

Yeah.

Because you're not quitting all your other income streams and just going full time into DJing.

Definitely not come to my next show.

At right or stand up. And yet these are things that you really are curious about and compelled by and they fit your something that should be ongoing.

Like people should be doing this all the time. So what are some other examples? So apps, courses, maybe little businesses they could start or websites they could build.

Skill building. If someone works at a company, 10 or 20% projects. And I think there's a myth that at Google all of us had 20% of our time every week to do whatever the hell we wanted. Not at all. In fact, most of the time it was a 10% project that you pitched to your manager, and then that was added to your current job. So it was 110% that these employees were now putting in. But that's how Career Guru started. And it's now a global program that's cited when Google is listed as top 100 companies to work for. And so it started as a 10% project that my friend and I were willing to go above and beyond on. And anyone can pitch that at their companies. So it doesn't just mean. And I don't. I'm not someone that says, oh, everybody should be an entrepreneur, even running your own business. You and I talk for your show. You've got to kind of pilot new areas and new income streams, and that's to stay fresh and also to stay ahead of the curve and also to stay interested.

So when you first, okay, so you ended up in New York after the Life After College book and speaking and so on. What was your next? How did you find it? What was your next kind of plateau? And then plant and then pivot, and then, you know, experiment and launch.

I hit a total. It was a pivot point, but it felt like a crisis. And by the way, I felt like there must be something wrong with me because every two years I feel like I'm having a midlife or quarter life crisis. What is wrong with me? Am I just being unhappy?

I mean, like, how old are you right now?

32.

Okay, so I'm 48. And I can tell you it never stops.

Exactly.

At least I don't think it ever stops. Like every two years, Almost every year, sometimes in some cases. But definitely every. Definitely every five years, massive pivot every two years, mini pivot. Every one year, stuff happens.

And that was news to me because I thought, what the hell is wrong with me? I'm not even happy at Google. The Disneyland of companies where everyone wants to work. Am I destined to be unhappy forever? And then I quit. And I had been, you know, kind of launching life after college. And about a year and a half in, I realized, I don't want to do this anymore. I don't want to talk about life after college, because I was 28, 29, and I just had moved on past the topic of life after college, and yet I couldn't see in front of me.

But how do you, like, given that, you know, that your entire audience that you had built up, that you spent years building up, was for that life after college. And you knew that people, the Only reason people were writing to you for help and for this and for that was because of this. How do you say I'm gonna turn my back or I'm gonna pivot away from that audience that loves me?

Well, it was so hard. I had to look at what they were coming. I didn't know how to do that. And I felt like, yeah, I felt really, I'd become known as the girl who left things. Whenever I worked at Google, people, if I met them at a networking event or a bar or something, they would say, what's the food like? And all of a sudden I would just disappear as soon as they knew that it was no longer about me. And after I left, everyone wanted to talk about leaving Google. And so once again, I'm like, well, who am I? What do I have to add to the world? I was very worried that when I used to help run the authors at Google program, and I was worried that when I left, people like you would not want to be my friend, that I would lose all the value, all the reason that people I admired had to connect with me and that I would vanish into Internet nothingness of just not being an interesting person. This was a big fear that I had.

Well, was it even partially true? I mean, it might have been partially true.

It was definitely true.

People are not going to return your calls as much if you're not at Google.

It was definitely true that while I worked there, I would return your call, I would see a name I recognized in my email and I would get so excited and then I would open the email and it was Coors. It was not that they wanted me. They wanted some connection. And I believe in earning respect as well. So part of it was I wanted to find something that the youths of the world of people would want to connect with me around. And I felt life. After college, I created a 15 tab book marketing spreadsheet that many authors have downloaded like 8,000 times. So many authors have used it and written to me. That felt really good to be able to create value for my peers. And so as I stopped coaching, I really slowed down all my income streams, which I wouldn't recommend. This is my big mistake. That led to my aha moment. But it got to the point where I had to move apartments. My rent doubled overnight, My business income did not. And all of a sudden I was not going to be able to pay the rent in two weeks. And I felt horrible. I wondered if I was delusional, like, am I an idiot to think that I could have done this? Whole entrepreneurial thing is the jig up. And the reason for that was I didn't know what was next and I didn't know how to figure that out. And so it was not until this moment where so convinced that I was not ready to leave New York or quit my business, I just said, I, I have to look at what's working. I have to build from what's already here, which included life after college stuff. I cannot just ignore it. And that's where the basketball player thing came to me. And I started doubling down on what was already working. And that ended up that year being the most profitable year ever in my business.

Well, what experiments did you start doing?

I called all my previous coaching clients. So one of the things I realized, I've been working with coaching clients independently for three years at that point. These are people I love. These are people who love me. We have a great relationship. Hired me at one time. So I actually called all of them and said, I want to build something for you. Here are these ideas. And by the way, I structured these as 30, 30 calls, which means, hey, are you willing to jump on the phone? I'd love your feedback for 30 minutes on something I'm cooking up and then I'm happy to help you brainstorm anything you want for 30 minutes. That's how I like to do this kind of thing. So it's a two way favor right from the get go.

That's a great way to structure it.

And by going back to all them, I got their feedback and input. I crafted a program that I called Brilliant Sparter. It was kind of a community meets coach. And.

That got the rent paid for one more month. And then that bought me more time to.

So how did it get the rent paid for one more month? Like what happened?

Because enough people signed up to just cover my monthly debt. But again, my monthly net was now twice what it had been for the previous two years. So I had to think bigger.

So you were selling these 30, 30 phone calls?

No, those were just to do research in design thinking. They call it empathy interviews to understand this group of people that I already knew I loved working with. And so when I created the coaching program Brilliant Sparter and wrote to them to launch it, they already were familiar. And so many of them signed up. And also. Cause I had built it with their feedback in mind.

Right. And so out of those, what happened?

So then that got me, that started paying the bills and I could start to exhale. And then I started doubling down on speaking and I did things like Rebuilding my speaking reel or how do you get a speaking. My website. I think a lot of it is, for me, it's incoming because I'm not a salesperson. I don't really go proactively pitch myself. But thought leadership. One of the reasons I was struggling so much during this time was I really value original thinking and big ideas, and I didn't feel I had one. But the irony of it is that going through this experience and having to wrestle my way out of it because.

There was no other choice is what then created. And now here we are three years later. And so I think I'm one of those people that my life experiences lead to the books.

Well, it's interesting because I always sort of feel you can't write. You don't write the book. You know, you write the book, you need. Exactly. So like when I wrote the Power of no, it's not like I was such an expert at saying no. It was that I needed to learn how to say no. And in that discovery process, you write the book. So you going through this process of pivoting over and over again on your personal career and finding greater and greater success throughout was sort of the. That that becomes the book. That process is art, really. Yes. So what are the. So you talked about some of the key components of, you know, from kind of planting to launch the key stages in pivots. What are the other things people need to kind of have in their arsenal to pivot?

Having marketable skills is so important. I mean, and when I say marketable, meaning, do other people want this thing from you? And I think that it requires us all to become futurists a little bit. It's hard for anyone to predict the future. I mean, no one really can. But to look ahead and say, what can I get good at? What will people want from me? How can I add value? And I think that's an important question to be asking a lot. I know you're starting a VR project.

Like hedge fund, Like a venture capital fund.

Yeah, exactly.

But let me ask you this. Let's take a harder example than me.

A lot of women, after they raise children and maybe a divorce happens, who knows? And I'm making these stories up, but this is a common demographic. They find themselves in a career workforce that has changed completely since they were last in the workforce. They don't even know what it means to pivot or what marketable skills are necessary for them. What can they do to pivot? They haven't been working for years trying to figure out what Their skills are. What would you say to someone like that?

Well, that's a great example of, I do not think that any person is starting from scratch. It's so important to look at one's existing strengths. Even if they haven't been in the workforce in a technical sense, what have they been doing? What do they most enjoy? What are their interests? What do people come to them for advice on and what do they want? Not everybody wants to go back into the workforce. In some cases, they just want a little extra income, or some might need a full time job, some may want to go right back into corporate. And so parsing out what those known variables are, then I think you're more focused in your scanning about ways to get there. And so for some that may be getting new skills, and for others, it may just be creatively coming up with a business. So I've worked with a lot of coaching clients who are moms. One of them, she does career coaching and interview coaching, and she said she wants to lean sideways. You know, she has no idea, no desire to go back into corporate, but she also does love working. And so she wants to now pivot from coaching grad students at UCLA to coaching moms on exactly this topic.

That's it. So what will she do? Well, she'll help moms figure out how to get more skills.

Exactly. Kind of like you said, the service she might have needed two years ago.

I see. So that's interesting. So, okay, so what are some other examples of what are the things we need? What are the tools we need to. To have a successful pivot?

Well, I think one of them is also to realize that what you and I just said that I think right now, a lot of people, there's a lot of shame and blame around hitting career plateaus. And we certainly throw it all at millennials, like, oh, they're so entitled, these job hoppers. And certainly in some cases they are. But I think one of the biggest things about a pivot is not to take it personally. And that's why I called this book what it is.

I think it's critical not taking it personally.

Yeah, I wanted a term that was gender neutral and judgment neutral. Pivot is a continuous process. And so the thing to realize, I think what I did for far too long was beat myself up. Like, I'm such an idiot. Am I delusional? Am I not cut out for entrepreneurship? What's wrong with me? Why don't I have anything interesting to say? And I took it so personally that I was in this position And I think I wasted a lot of time on that instead of just piloting and experimenting.

Well, you know, I don't know.

Do you take your reinventions personally or did you used to?

I still do. Yeah. It's hard because you think to yourself, why am I hitting this plateau? Is it the plateau because I'm bad? Is it because I don't want to?

Yeah. And we want to be self aware. I want to take responsibility.

And there's uncertainty too, like what am I going to do next? Like a pivot always involves like what's going to happen next. So I think there's a psychology to it. But I think you mentioned earlier when we were talking the three E's, and I think that helps to find, you know, everybody's sort of out there saying, well, what's my purpose in life? And I don't know if there's any one purpose in life. Like you went from, you know, the polling startup to Google to several things within Google, the life after college to the coaching to this book writing. So there's no one purpose. We kind of go from joy to joy in some sense. So what are the three E's that kind of help you figure out which direction is the right place to plant?

Well, sure, I call that project based purpose in the book, which is that you don't have to know for your whole life. I happen to have a strong sense that my purpose for being on this earth. Earth is helping as many people as possible, being as helpful as possible to as many people as possible. That's why I exist. It's why I wake up every day that anything else that happens in my life is nice to have compared to that. Not everybody has that feeling about something. So project based purpose is if I'm going to work on this project or take this job for the next two years. Why? That's all you have to know. You don't have to know any purpose beyond that. And so that I think gives people a sense of relief. You can just ask yourself, what's my project based purpose for this next phase for you, for DJing, for standup for any of those projects?

Like, what's an example of a project based purpose? Like for me, like let's say I wanted to do, let's say I wanted to drop everything and at least experiment with stand up. I'm not gonna drop everything, but I'm gonna experiment. What's a project based purpose?

You tell me like two years from now, what's. What would you hope to have happened by investing in Standup, I guess that.

I would have a one hour set of jokes that people would laugh at and I was regularly like, let's say at least once a week or more.

And what would that get you?

Probably nothing. So that would be just for fun.

But if you got better. No, but I think it might. If you got better at stand up and you were regularly performing and you wrote jokes that made people laugh, what would be possible in your life?

I guess then my writing would be different. Like I could write more humorously. I could write for a show, maybe a comedy show. I don't know. I'd have to really think about it. But I could see how that building those marketable skills, you know, cause their skills in performance, their skills in writing jokes, that that could transform into something totally.

And you do podcasting, you do writing. I can't see it not helping any of these activities that you do and.

Then also merging with those activities to create something new.

If nothing else, networking with the people that you really love and respect. Because I think you love standup comedians and you watch it for fun before you do things like this podcast recording session. And so I think so much some of project based purpose. I talk about optimizing for revenue and joy. Yes, it's nice when we can make money, but it's also nice when we can really enjoy it. So that's the question.

Get to that. Tell me the three E's.

Okay? Oh yeah, the three E's. A good pilot or experiment will test the three E's. One, do I enjoy this? Two, can I become an expert at it and do I want to?

That's a really important one because a lot of times you can't. Like I could appreciate basketball, to use that example. I could appreciate it, but I'm never gonna be a pro basketball player. But that might suggest then, well, maybe I can be a writer about basketball. So you start to then kind of slice. What are the different skills within the umbrella of basketball? So expertise is at a glance. It seems like a yes, no, or can you be an expert or not? But then you could slice it. And I can find areas within basketball where I can be an expert.

Right? Well, for example, I had to learn the hard way that I love coding. I love HTML and CSS and the technical side of building websites. I'm terrible at design. I had no. Even when I was doing the tutoring and someone asked me to build a site, I hit such a wall. My brain just does not think in terms of beautiful visual design, period. I really am convinced no matter how much I try, it's not how my brain works. And so I use my web dev skills now to kind of tweak my blogs and stuff, but I always have to hire someone when it comes to the big brand strategy. And so that's an example of, yeah, I enjoy web design in a certain regards, but I could never become an expert at it because of that limitation.

I would say so again, it's just a matter of taking inventory of your skills and seeing which ones you have, which ones you can learn, which ones you simply don't have. But at the same time not being afraid of saying, no, I don't have these skills. I'm never gonna be a web designer. But I can slice it in different ways. Like I could help people find web designers or I can, you know, guide people on functionality of what should be on the front page of their website.

I'm fascinated by AI and VR and mixed reality too. And I want to think about, can I create some kind of career bot? You know, so like, I do turn my attention that way where maybe I don't become a full time programmer, but I create projects in that space. And so then the third E just we get it out is expansion. Is there more room in the market where that came from? And I don't think we always know that. I mean, I spend a few years and about $10,000 building a meditation app and in hindsight I learned a lot. It was like a 10 grand MBA course in app building. But what were we thinking? I mean, there's so many meditation apps that are venture funded and blew us out of the water. And I realized in hindsight it was never going to be my strength to manage the details of app development and maintenance.

You know, all this reminds me of do you know who Matt Berry is? So he's the fantasy sports anchor at espn, which is like, I don't even really know what fantasy sports is. And to think that they have a whole hanger for it. But he's great at what he does. But he was a screenwriter, a movie writer in Hollywood making a ton of money. He was writing successful movies and decided at some point, I just don't like this anymore. He was getting unhappy. He was having that plateau that you discussed and, and what he really enjoyed. We're gonna get to the three E's he really enjoyed. He was already a writer and he really enjoyed fantasy sports. He knew he could be an expert at writing about fantasy sports. So he dropped everything and he started making $100 per blog post. Writing about fantasy sports. He had a little bit of money in the bank and it was a wide open field. There were no blogs or certainly there were no TV anchors focused on fantasy sports. And he became the first, and he's even written a book on it. Now when I walk into a restaurant with him, people are coming up to him saying, hey, thank you for everything you do on ESPN or your picks or this or that. And so it became like this huge pivot using the three E's you describe.

That is so interesting. Thank you for that. Great example. I'm curious, do you ever feel like you're too early to the market? Cause testing that third piece, expansion is sometimes tricky, sometimes hard to know. I know you've started many different businesses.

Yeah, all the time. And I think that's why having small pilot programs or experiments helps. Like, when do you know when to give up on a pilot?

Yes. Well, actually, I'm curious to know your thoughts and then I'll share mine, too. How do you know? Because sometimes all the cliches, oh, it's darkest before the dawn. That's what killed me during my, as you would call it, reinvention. For me, this moment in 2013 was like.

How do I know when to call it? I didn't want to be delusional about staying past my due.

I think the first thing you just said there is, the first thing is you always have to kind of do a double check every single day, every single hour if you're being delusional.

Gut instincts is so key here.

But the problem is the gut will always tell you you're not being delusional because there's sort of this sunken cost fallacy, like, oh, you're doing this, Jenny, so it must be correct. Otherwise why would you be doing it? Your brain wants to protect you, so you always have to do a double check on that gut to probably to build a better gut instinct. But so you have to make sure you're not delusional. Then you have to decide, am I dealing with that plateau that happens in other pivots, or am I fearing failure? So you have to kind of know, is this a fear of failure feeling, or am I really hitting a plateau? And that you kind of only know through experience. You have to basically pivot a lot, which you will over a course of. Here's what people don't realize. When you're 22, 25, 30, you're going to try things and some of them are going to fail. And you want to minimize the effect on your life of Those failures. So you want to make sure that.

You get experience with lots of these little one year, two year experiments or smaller, so that you build up that gut of determining is this fear of failure that I'm feeling or is this that plateau feeling? Because then you know when to go on. And you only get that through experience.

Yes. And once I started to realize that, at least for me, my sort of pivot cycle time is every few years. And even right now, I'm pivoting within my business. It's not like I'm quitting and going and doing something totally different. But every few years, I am pivoting. And when I recognize that, I get much more resourceful quicker. So here's an example. My book was supposed to come out in March of this year and what, in September?

It's September 6th today.

I know. And when my editor first told me we were behind schedule and we weren't gonna hit it, I cried. And for 24 hours, I was so upset. And I thought, you know, what am I gonna do? How am I gonna earn income for those extra six months? I was relying on this March 2016 launch. I've already stretched so far trying to make the last few years work because there's less incoming interest. Cause all my best ideas are in the computer. And it was fear. Exactly as you just talked about. And right away then I realized, ha, ha, ha, joke's on me. Once you write a book about something, you will get tested on it. It's like the final exam or a midterm because there's many of them. And I realized, oh, I need to pivot method this. I need to look at what's working, double down on that and get my business. Right before the launch, I realized that I was treating my book like a child. It was entering a child beauty pageant when the march launched. Like, you need to win this launch or else we're not gonna survive in business. And I realized, no, that's the wrong thing. I needed to build the structure of my business. Now, James, this book could not have come out a day sooner.

So what did you do? How did you survive? How'd you build your business the past few months?

I made the shit out of it. What I'm saying is, like, I used this method exactly to a T, exactly as I wrote in the book. And I was very satisfied because it helped me turn things around, both my mindset and the income, immediately.

What did you specifically do?

Okay, so I created Momentum. Well, I had already launched Momentum, this private community for side hustlers. And solopreneurs. I am trying to think what I did exactly in March.

Oh, I started building a whole bunch of programs. I started conceptualizing and now launched a group of pivot coaches so that when the book is launching, now that when I'm on the road, there are six amazing, incredible people who can do pivot jump start coaching sessions. Kind of like what I used to do at Google. I started building a workshop in a box for companies so they could run a pivot conversation in their organization.

And did you sell that to the companies? Like, did you. Were you able to get clients?

It's ready now. So part of what I did was I took on more coaching clients than maybe would have been in my ideal state.

How'd you get them?

Usually for me, I'm pretty fortunate that people come to me. So I was just more kind of like generous of how many people I was taking on and, and. But then I have to say, I don't know if you feel this sometimes energetically. First of all, if I energetically don't have the capacity or the mental space for more business, it stops coming speaking gigs or coaching clients. But then secondly, there was a point where I thought I had four or five new clients and they all dropped at the same time. And I intentionally left my schedule open. And I felt like this is such a critical time. There's so much I want to be building behind the scenes that I let myself really get low financially. Whereas two years ago I would have panicked. This time around it felt very intentional. And I do think that there's a certain amount of going with the flow when you're in business of sometimes are more behind the scenes. And for me, I'm preparing and the launch is a bet. This is a risk I took of investing three years in this and hoping that it helps take my business to the next level and makes a big impact and reaches a lot of people. At this point though, there's no way I can control those things beyond what I've already done. So at a certain point we talked about serendipity at the start. A little serendipity and a little magic are gonna have to come into play.

And also there's something, there's the anticlimactic moment like today's the book launch. It's almost like kind of the eye of the hurricane in that you're gonna feel like, oh my God, I'm in the middle of the biggest hurricane. But actually nothing's going to happen today. Like you're not gonna feel any anything like Something happened like the book launched, but that's the hurricane that's all around you. It's not like it'll feel. It has that anticlimactic feeling on that day, I think.

And that's what I think is so important about the. You call it the daily practice for me, meditation, exercise, all these things. But also recognizing for anyone listening to this show, because it's a pivot podcast, I call them high net growth individuals that we love. The complexity of building the thing. I love troubleshooting business and piloting new income streams and working on the book. It's a very complex task. And so it's also not pinning our happiness to these one off moments like launch day and expecting life to.

I think that's a good point.

It's like truly enjoying the whole process. And so even in the months leading up to the launch, I would say to myself, everything is great. I'm so grateful for my life and business as it is right now. If nothing else changed, it's wonderful. And anything else is icing on the cake.

So I feel like from reading the book, from talking to you, from having gone through many of these experiences myself and talking to many people with these experiences, here's what people can get out of the book and correct me if I'm wrong or add to it. First off, recognizing when you need a pivot in your life, that's critical, but combined with the fact that you should always be having the eye towards the pivot. So learning new skills, building your network, constantly taking inventory of your skills, being aware of what's out there and what excites you, and so on. But again, most importantly, being aware of that plateau that you might feel when you need to pivot, then learning kind of the skills needed to pivot. So what else are you interested in? How can you combine your old interest to build something you're the best at? Like when you take A plus B, have something that you're great at, the combination of A and B, and then finally the actual execution steps required. How much Runway do you need? What's the psychology of a pivot? What steps do I take with my network?

How do I combine learning skills with making money? How do I balance all these things at the same time? So this is kind of like the bible to what we now need in our economy so much, which is that we're moving from this kind of of career economy where people would spend 40 years at a job, to this sort of. I don't like the phrase gig economy because that implies smaller money But I think we are moving to a more personalized economy where each person is like Me, Inc. And you have to make sure Me Inc. Flourishes, you know, regardless of what's happening in the economy or what's happening in the companies around you. And this book is really about how to make ME Inc. Flourish.

You've captured it so perfectly. And I would just say that the reason it's called a pivot and not a 180 is that you're doubling down on something. You're shifting in a new, related direction. One of the things you're.

I feel like it's not a 180 at all. Like, it's not like, yeah, you're not going from being like a gardener to being a basketball player. You're going from maybe being a gardener slash historian to a landscape architect.

And that's why it's like, stop driving yourself crazy by trying to look too far outside yourself and really look at what's already under your feet, what's already you're already doing. And what I realized, though, because pivoting, I kind of co opted this term from Silicon Valley. Anyone in Silicon Valley would say, oh, it's so played out by now. But when startups and businesses pivot, it's because they have failed at their initial strategy, so they need to pivot to save the business from collapse. However, as you just so eloquently said, when it comes to our career, pivot is plan A. It's not a failure. It's actually the new mindset.

Right?

You have to do this. You're constantly doing this. Constantly. And then the pivot points are less sharp because you're just in the habit of pivoting. And again, the pivots can be small and they can be large. So that's. I'm not saying you have to quit everything every two years, but pivot is a mindset and it's a method.

Well, for your listeners.

The listeners who read the book and who benefit from it, what five books? What five other books should they read to really kind of take it to the next level and understand what they need to do? And what other books inspired you as you were writing this?

Number one, Choose Yourself by Tim Valster. Thank you.

Thank you.

Truly, it's fantastic. And even if we weren't sitting here face to face, I highly recommend it. And that really inspired me before writing Pivot. I love Antifragile by the Steve.

I love Antifragile as well. And you know, that's a book about economics, but I actually Think it's an excellent book to apply to personal life.

Completely.

Completely.

And every piece of adversity that I experience in life or business, I think about, how does this make me antifragile? How am I better because of this chaos and uncertainty?

Love it.

And so part of pivoting is embracing that chaos and uncertainty. And to see me till I even says to a point, if you have too much.

And Antifragile is important to realize it's not about being resilient, it's about being antifragile. It's about actually getting better. Better from chaos and uncertainty as opposed to just surviving.

Yes.

Okay, so that's two books. Love it.

Third would be the Antidote by Oliver Berkman.

Love it.

It's happiness for people who can't stand positive thinking. Cause as cheerful as I am, I really don't like all the Pollyanna self help. I have what I call the personal development police that sort of like beat me up every time I have a negative thought in my brain. And what I love about Oliver's work is it's kind of like, just relax, it's okay to think about worst case scenarios or your own death or failure. I love it.

Yeah, he's got that. It's an excellent book. Oliver's been on my podcast. He's got that kind of stoic view of things and he really applies that to looking at all the real popular self help books and genres that are out there. So I think it's a great book.

Next up, 10% Happier by Dan Harris.

Also has been on my podcast. Great guy.

I know, James, you've had everyone under.

The sun, but you must have run into him when you were doing your meditation app. Cause now he's got an excellent meditation app out there.

Yes, I did. And I went to his book launch in New York. He gave a talk and I asked a question and I was so nervous, but I asked if he felt nervous to talk about drugs so publicly because he still works at gma. His book is so funny. And sometimes I feel bad when I give advice on podcasts about meditation because it truly has rewired my brain. I used to be very anxious and I would worry a lot. And all the way up until three years ago, coincidentally when I started meditating. Anyway, his book is so funny and so I feel bad because it sounds like, eat your spinach, you should meditate. But he actually shares the research and his journey to finding it, and he's.

I think his journey also is what makes the book too. Like just he Was like, I don't know. At the time, he was the anchor for a nighttime news show at abc, and he just, like, fell apart because of this combination of drugs and panic attacks and so on. He writes all about it.

Yes. And he's so sharp. And I love his podcast too. His is a great one.

What the heck? I didn't even know he had a podcast. He hasn't asked me to go on his podcast.

Dan Harris, where are you getting on it? We need to make this connection happen asap.

All right, so fourth book.

Oh, my gosh. So that was four. So the fifth one. Now I'm gonna have to say wild card. Pick something that makes you laugh. I love reading. I just finished You'd'll Grow out of it by Jessi Klein. Amy Schumer's book is coming out at some point. I love her. So I think.

Yeah, I think her book's coming out in October.

Yeah.

And Jesse Klein's book, which Jesse Klein's a head writer on the Amy Schumer show or Inside Amy Schumer, Laugh Out Loud.

Funny. And so I think, you know, go sideways. And that's true for life as well. I talk in the book about having a hobby and one of my hobbies. The last I've lived in New York five years, was learning how to do a handstand in the middle of the room without coming down until I chose to. And something like that literally turns me upside down on a regular basis, and it feels so playful and fun. So I would say add to the reading repertoire one thing that just has nothing to do with your work or that is totally sideways, like how you're learning DJing and standup comedy. Maybe there's something that someone's curious about. I read a lot of finance books that are kind of worked into Pivot. I really do. You know James Rickards?

Yeah, yeah. Death of Money, James Rickards. Yes.

Yes. So I found stuff like that really inspiring to come back to this adjacent possible idea.

Yeah. Interesting. All right, well, Jenny, I've taken over your podcast. Congratulations once again on the book launch of Pivot. It's a great book. I encourage everyone to read it, and I will return this podcast to you now. Here it is. Have it back.

Oh, my goodness. It's better for it. James, thank you so so much for being the guest host on launch day today, for writing such an awesome blurb for the back of the book, and just being one of my favorite neighbors and New York friends. I'm so grateful for you. Thank you, Jenny, and thanks everyone for listening.

All right, that wraps up this episode of the Pivot Podcast. I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did and Pivot is officially out, so grab your copy wherever books are sold. Even better, tell a friend and leave a review on Amazon. Reviews help other readers decide whether to purchase a copy, and it helps build a lot of momentum in these early days of the launch. Thank you all so much in advance. I couldn't do this without you.

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 at ennyblake.

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