Finding Opportunities in Hard Situations | Jim Kwik & Jason Feifer

Welcome back to the Kwik Brain Podcast. I am your host and your brain coach, Jim Kwik, and I am excited about this topic. We're gonna talk about how to reach your wouldn't go back moment. And you might be thinking, what is it? And I'm gonna say, this is something you wanna pay attention to. This is gonna be a transformative conversation. And one of the reasons why is, is our guest. We have Jason Pfeiffer. He's the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, and he's the author of a brand new book called Build for Tomorrow: An Action Plan for Embracing Change, Adapting Fast, and Future-Proofing Your Career. Thanks for being on the show, Jason.

Oh, Jim, it's an honor to be here. Thanks for having me.

I've been on the receiving end of conversations with you as you've interviewed me for Entrepreneur. So I've been really looking forward to this conversation.

No, me too. Me too. I've loved talking to you. We've done it in so many different mediums, and now we get to do it on your show. So I'm really honored to be here for it.

Yeah. Well, I appreciate that very much. We titled this conversation something to do with wouldn't go back moment. Maybe we could start with defining what is a wouldn't go back moment.

So I noticed through the pandemic, you know, the pandemic was a fascinating experiment because Everybody went through the same change at the same time, and then you got to watch what happened afterward. And I saw that some people seemed naturally adaptive. They seemed to be able to move through these disruptive experiences with— I mean, ease is maybe overstating it, but faster than others. And I, I got to wonder, I got to wondering, what was it that was driving their ability to Do that. But I also noticed, and this is really where we get to the wouldn't go back moment, I noticed that everybody, regardless of if they were really good at adapting to change or they were really bad at it, they all went through change in the same 4 phases, which was panic. That's the first one. Then adaptation. I mean, everybody's familiar with that, right? Like, possibly there are people listening right now who are still in that phase, which is understandable. We've all experienced it. So panic, Adaptation, new normal, and then wouldn't go back. And wouldn't go back is that moment where someone says, I have something so new and valuable that I wouldn't want to go back to a time before I had this. And I realized that that is available to everybody. And I think that the thing that drives success and drives people's ability to identify opportunity in change is their belief in the wouldn't go back moment. They know that moving through these painful phases has a purpose because ultimately they will get there. And so I wanted to help people get there basically as fast as possible.

First, people panic, and I think everyone could see themselves in the past couple years. And then we adapted, and then we found a new normal. And then finally we reach a phase where we could not even have imagined in the beginning, right? That moment we realized where we wouldn't go back. Can we give a couple examples, maybe a large example and maybe something like a macro and then also a micro?

Sure. Well, I mean, if we're going big, I think that one, one thing that everybody can relate to is new ways of working, right? This is something that we, we have all in some way shifted the way that we work. I now, for example, work completely remotely. I mean, you and I are talking right now. I'm, I'm in Maine with my in-laws, but I'm also working. And now this is not weird, but years ago it was. And so I think that that's a really powerful way of thinking because here's, here's the important thing to remember. It's not like remote work was invented three years ago, right? It was always available to us. It was always an idea that was around, but we didn't take it seriously. And that, I think, is a really key element to reaching wouldn't go back is that oftentimes what we're doing is we're reconsidering the impossible. I called around to experts and I asked, what is it about disruptive moments that drive our ability to find wouldn't go back moments? And my My favorite answer came from this guy named Brian Berkey, who was a Wharton professor, and he said that moments of disruption cause us to shift the window on what we're willing to collectively take seriously. Which is to say that, you know, there's a broad band of options in front of us at any time, but we limit them. We have to, right? You talk a lot about how your brain is a filtering mechanism, right? We can't possibly consider and engage with every single idea all the time. We don't have the time or the bandwidth for it. So we make a little window. We make a little window that we look through. And when we do that, we leave out all these other valuable, really powerful ideas. And we say, you know, the things that are in our little window are the good ideas, the important ideas, the possible ideas, and everything else is impossible, too difficult. And moments of disruption can force us to look outside of that and discover that some of the best ideas were the ones that we had left outside. So anyway, so that's big. I'll give you a small example. I talked to this woman. Her name is Lena. She runs a wig store in Baltimore called Lena's Wigs. And it used to be operated as a storefront. So people would walk in off the street and they would shop for wigs. And that's how she thought she had to run her business. And as a result, she also— she had an employee who would greet people who would walk in. Pandemic arrives. She cannot operate like a storefront anymore. People can't walk in. What is she going to do? Well, the first thing that she can think of, the only thing she can think of, is to do appointment-only viewing. Now, again, this is not some radical idea. This is something that she had left outside of her window. She said, this is a terrible idea, too much friction. Who wants to make appointment to come in and shop. I don't want to do that. I want to have my storefront. But when she moves to appointment only because she was forced to, something fascinating happens. Number one, consumer happiness goes up. Her customers are happier. And then number two, sales and profits rise.

Why?

Well, because as it turns out, her, her customer was not exactly who she thought it was. So she was running the storefront. She was paying somebody to greet people who were coming in off the street. You know who doesn't buy wigs, Jim? People who walk in randomly off the street, they like to browse, they like to look. They're not buying. You know who is buying? People who are buying for really personal reasons, often medical or religious. They are very happy to make an appointment, have a private showing where they're not trying on a wig with a bunch of randos who walked in off the street. So here Lena was paying somebody to greet people who were not her customer, and she was in fact creating a worse experience for her customer. And then this disruption forced her to reach her wouldn't-go-back moment where she did something she would've said was crazy before, and instead it transformed her business.

In a way, when I was reading this book and I could see myself in it, you know, for myself, my family, friends going through things, our team, this book gets you through those first 3 phases so that you could arrive at your wouldn't-go-back moment. For this example, she probably panicked, you know, right? She adapted, and then she found a new normal, and she wouldn't go back to what the way it was. She couldn't even imagine that being Like I could, I couldn't imagine, like I, I had years of panic not being able to learn. And then all of a sudden I had to adapt and, and focus on learning how to learn. And then that was my new normal. I can't even go back to the way I used to read or the way I used to focus or the way I used to, to study. I was listening to your podcast, which is amazing, 'cause I, I love your energy. You're very high energy. I think everyone should book you for like the beginning of every conference that I, that I speak at, at these business conferences. And this bi— this book here, it's not exclusively for entrepreneurs, right? Even though you have amazing connections, you've interviewed like a who's who because of the position that you hold there. But I would imagine a lot of people get a lot of value regardless of the, maybe the age or stage or the roles, responsibilities, if they're an entrepreneur or an executive educator.

Yeah, that's totally right. Because I don't think of entrepreneur as a word that means a specific kind of career choice. To me, an entrepreneur is a mindset. It's someone who makes things happen for themselves. And so that's who I'm really speaking to. And so you're totally right. Look, I mean, I think that we all, regardless of what it is that we do for a living, we have all felt some kind of shakeup. And it's scary. And it makes us ask big things about ourselves. You know, I mean, to go back to maybe just to talk for a second about why it's so scary, like, why are we panicking? I think that the reason why people panic when they experience change is because they equate change with loss. You know, there is something changes, and the The first thing that we do is we say, oh, I can no longer do X or Y thing the way that I used to. I, I, I no longer have access to this thing that I was comfortable with. And then because of that, well, we start to try to think, well, what's going to happen next? And because all we're focused on is loss, we start to extrapolate the loss. So we say, well, because I've lost this thing, I'm going to lose that thing. And then because I've lost that thing, I'm going to lose that other thing. And that very quickly you start to feel like there's no foundation under you anymore, right? And this, this goes back— I mean, Jim, you're sure very familiar, probably thinking this right now as I'm talking is, is sort of basic psychology about loss aversion, right? Like, this is something that's been, that's been shown over and over and over again for decades, that we focus on loss over anything else. And so one of the things we need to do if we want to get to a wouldn't-go-back moment is we need to start shifting the way that we think towards gain. How can we find gain even if it's harder to see? How can we imagine what we will gain from any kind of change and then extrapolate it so that we say, well, if I'm going to gain this, then maybe I'll be able to gain that and then gain that? And that way you can move with more confidence through this scary And actually identify what that wouldn't-go-back moment is gonna be.

You know, you, you are really an agent of change or a student of change. I've, I've, I've listened to many of your podcast episodes, which I highly recommend. We'll put links in our show notes, articles, obviously. But, you know, this book, I mean, think about it. We're, we're, how do you manage change? 'Cause that's the constant, right? You keep adapting. We have to see change as an opportunity, as you talk about, and you have to have a vision for where we're, where we're going. This book is incredibly tactical too.

Yeah.

You have amazing stories. One of the things is, you know, our perception or, or the point of view that we have, our mindset around change. And one of the chapters I was reading that I highlighted a lot, and, and I highlighted your book, uh, very much, is the difference between your what and your why. Maybe you could talk about the distinction and how people focus a lot on the what and, and, and sometimes get locked into something, right, as opposed to their, their why.

Well, Jim, it's, it's so cool to hear you talk about highlighting my book because I've done the exact same thing with you. It's like, you know, I, I, I love telling people when you put things out into the world, the world changes as a result. It's just, it's so powerful to see how even people whose work you really admire will then receive your own work. It's very cool. So anyway, so thank you for that. Here's the important thing. And this is what you're getting at. I think that we identify too much with the product of our work. We define ourselves by the things that we do, by the output of our work. And this makes a lot of sense, right? I mean, we think all day about what we do, we identify with the job or the company if we run a company. And yet we are setting ourselves up for disruption when we do that because the thing that we do or the way that we do it or the product of our work is so easily changeable. And I've experienced this myself. I started as a newspaper reporter. People, people would, you know, if they asked me at a party what I did, I would say, I'm a newspaper reporter. I loved it. But the problem is that after a couple years when I realized that newspapers were pretty unstable and it wasn't probably where I wanted to spend my career, it was really scary because, well, if I identify as a newspaper reporter and I'm not working at a newspaper, then what am I? I'm nothing. So I, I, I eventually came to realize that entrepreneurs have a completely different way of thinking about this, and, and it's a powerful one and one that I think we all really can adopt for ourselves, which is that they split apart what they do And, and why they do it, the, the, the, the kind of output of their work and the core thing that drives them. And as a result, they have identified this thing about themselves that does not change even in changeable times. So for me, for example, I have come to realize after a long time that if I define myself as a newspaper reporter or a magazine editor or whatever, that, that is, that is easily disrupted and I will feel lost and And I will feel ungrounded if something changes. But if I can define myself in a way that does not change, then I can go forward into any change feeling like I understand what my value is and what my orientation is. So here is my definition of myself. I suggest coming up with like a sentence, a short sentence. My definition is I tell stories in my own voice. Very important components there. I tell stories, not magazine stories, not newspaper stories, not any other kind of stories. If after our conversation right now, I check my email and Entrepreneur has decided that they hate me and they want me to go away as fast as possible, I hope that doesn't happen. But you know, that doesn't take away I tell stories. It would take away I am a magazine editor. And then also in my own voice, I'm setting the terms for my work. I don't tell stories in other people's voices. I'm not here to carry the ball for somebody. I am going to do distinctive work of my own. I tell stories in my own voice. Now, I think everybody should push themselves to define what they do in a way that is so simple and so core to them that it will drive the development of skills that will enable the tasks that we generally think of as the thing that we do. And once you have that, you can move forward into change knowing that something about you will not change.

And that gives you a level of confidence, a level of certainty, you know, in a time where things are disrupted. Like for me, so I, my, my mission is to build better, brighter brains, right? So I'm kind of agnostic if it happens to be through a book or a podcast or online courses, supplements, video games. You know, I wanna have that positive impact on people's brains. And so the world could change and the medium can change, but the tasks and, and the capabilities could change, but not the reasons behind why I get up every day and do what I do.

That's right. And you've identified right there a value that is not going to change, right? Until humans don't have brains, we have a need for you, right? And that's, and that's, that's a really valuable and, and important thing to recognize. What is the thing that you can do that you can bring to people? And look, it doesn't have to be that you have some kind of specialty like, like you do, Jim, right? It could be, I build things, or I love helping people achieve what their goals are, or right, or like, whatever it is, when I mean, I run people through this exercise when they work at companies, and they will, they will often come up with stuff like that. Like, I love solving big problems. Great. That's fantastic. Because there's always going to be some big problem to solve. And if, if you're working at some company and something happens and you're out of a job, well, you know what, you are a problem solver, there are always going to be other problems. The more that you can define this in just the most core but also kind of abstract way, I think the more that you will feel like you have a sense of where you are, regardless of what's changing around you.

I think we're in this age of adaption and the human brain, it's created to change, right? It's created to respond to our environment, to neuroplasticity. And so you, in the book, it's interesting because for this kind of reinvention, it's not about grit then, right? This is a process, according to your book, that anybody could learn.

Yeah, it is. It absolutely is. I mean, look, I think that you will get through it. Here's the crazy thing about change. First of all, it's not optional. So it's coming for you regardless. And also, you're gonna get through it regardless, right? We just do. And so I think the best thing that we can do is to be mindful that we are going through a process and that we have some control over it. One of the worst things that we can do for ourselves is to feel like we do not have control, that things are simply happening to us. And that's, that's not the case. We always have some way to shape the things that we do. We can be proactive about learning new skills, about developing new connections, about thinking bigger about what we are and who we are. And we could also be very aware of— well, I mean, you know, let's talk for a second about, about, about like being aware of, of what our brains are doing to process our information. Because I mean, look, you know, you know, you know the brain well, I imagine your audience is obviously very fascinated by this. So let me tell you one of the most fascinating brain things that I learned in reporting this book, which is I talked to a lot of people who, one of the reasons that they struggle with change is because they are feeling nostalgic for what came before, you know?

Mm-hmm.

And I think that that holds them back because they think, well, what came before was better. And maybe was, maybe it was even some kind of luck. Like the reason that I have the success that I have was because I lucked out. I was in the right position at some period of time. And as a result, we are so focused on the past that we aren't willing to embrace the future. So I was talking not long ago with some memory researchers, particularly this one guy, Philippe Desbrégard at Duke University, and they told me about this really interesting thing that happens in our brain called fading affect bias. Familiar with the term?

I am.

So, okay, fading affect bias, which in sort of simplistic terms means that the emotions associated with bad memories will fade much faster than the emotions associated with good memories. And The reason why this happens, these researchers told me, is because the brain is not supposed to be a recording device. It's not like the microphones that we're using right now. That would be purposeless. The brain's job is not to create a record for you of everything that you ever did. The brain's job is to help you move forward in the future. And if you were able to immediately pull up all the terrible emotions that are associated with bad memories, well, boy, you'd get yanked backwards into the past all the time. And that's not what the brain is for. That's not good for us. So instead, our brain kind of deletes those things. Doesn't mean that we forget bad memories, and of course trauma can change this, but that's just that. And then also I learned that memories are not stored like files, which is to say that they're not some complete object that you can recall. Instead, a memory, an experience, is broken up into a bazillion little pieces and stored differently in your brain. Every time you remember it, it's basically reassembling it on the fly, and as it does it, if Philippe That regard at Duke University told me, he's like, it's like a paleontologist putting together dinosaur bones, which is to say, you're going to have all these fragments of bones and there are going to be little gaps and you got to fill those gaps in with something. Now, the paleontologist does it with the best knowledge about what the dinosaur looked like. We do it with our imagination because it turns out that memory and imagination are very closely associated in the brain. And so here we have this situation where we are forgetting some of the worst parts of our worst experiences. And we are also not fully remembering something from the past and we're filling in those gaps. with imagination, which is to say that a lot of the nostalgia that we have for something that came before us is kind of made up. And when you really push yourself— and I've done this myself, and, you know, Jim, maybe you have too— but like, when I've really pushed myself to say, you know, you know, this job— like, like, for example, when I worked at Boston Magazine, it was my first magazine job. I did really great there. I had made good friends. I did good work. And then I was really afraid to take the next job that was offered to me, which was Men's Health, which would move me to New York. It was opportunity. And I was thinking, you know, maybe should I say no to this? Because I don't know that I can repeat my success at Boston Magazine. But, but then I pushed myself to be like, well, okay, this has been a really good experience. But am I forgetting things? Oh, yes, I am. I'm forgetting the time where I messed up a story so bad that a staff writer yelled at me and wouldn't talk to me for weeks. I forgot that time where I didn't know how to edit an article, and they literally took it away from me and gave it to somebody else. Like, there were all these bad things that I had just forgotten. And This is good. I think that we should own our failures because what it does is it shows us that we have the ability, the innate ability to navigate difficult things and to see the upside in our own experience. And if we can do it once, boy, we can do it again. We have that control. We are not at the mercy of whim.

So Jason, if you were to give our audience maybe just one, one takeaway, and I— and the takeaway really should be to get your copy Of your book. If you're— I'm showing a copy if you're watching this on YouTube or on social media. There's so much usable, practical content. You're an amazing storyteller. And there's so many things for people to do to implement right away to help them through these 4 phases, to be able to come out at the end and have those moments that we talked about that they wouldn't change. Where's a good place for them to start? Let's say they— I highly recommend people buy the books and get 3 copies, one for themselves, gift out a couple to friends, family members, teammates. If there's something that they could do after they finish listening to this conversation, what would you say?

I think that the best thing that you can do is to ask yourself 3 questions. And these 3 questions come out of this observation that I made earlier about how we often experience change as loss, and then we start to extrapolate the loss. And I think that we need to shortcut that. And a simple way to do that is to ask yourself, Just the 3 basic questions here. And so let me tell you what they are. Number 1, what is this new thing that I'm doing? Should be pretty easy to answer that. And then let's dig a little deeper. Number 2, what new habit or skill am I learning as a result? And then once you're now thinking about how the thing that you're doing kind of drives some sort of tactic or some takeaway, ask yourself, and just be, just, just, just be really serious about it. How can that be put to good use? How can that be put to good use? Because I realize that it may be difficult. You might be saying, well, you know, that my job just changed the way that we do these things, and it's really annoying, and I hate it. But I don't care about that. Put that to the side because that's not that useful, right? I mean, we're talking about usefulness here, and the only thing that is useful is trying to figure out how can this be put to good use. And I have found that once I run myself through these little questions. I find that this thing that I didn't want to do or the changes to the way in which I was communicating with people or the opportunities that I had in my own career, that once I started to ask, how can this be put to good use? I started to realize, well, you know what? It can be. And if I don't know exactly how it can be put to use, then I start. I start to figure it out. I start to experiment. I think that we do not do enough experimentation in our own lives. We should think of things as experiments. Not everything has to be a permanent decision. And the more that we drive ourselves through this quick little mental exercise, the more that we can reframe the changes that we have as changes that can drive positive outcomes. And then it is our job and our opportunity to take advantage of them.

Listeners, if you want to have more of those one-change moments, if you want to adapt more quickly, if you want to use The power of change to your advantage. I think in every disadvantage, there certainly is an advantage. Jason has access to the smartest minds in business. In this book, he's giving you— he's extracted some of the best practical wisdom so that you could go out there and act on it right now. Where can people get their copies of the book?

Thanks. You can get it literally anywhere you buy books. Amazon, a perfectly fine place. If for some reason you cannot think of a place that sells books, which Well, then I will help you, which is at jasonpfeiffer.com/book. It has links to every retailer. But truly, go onto Amazon, search for Build for Tomorrow, you will find the book.

Absolutely. So if you want to thrive in these times of change, this really starts with your messages, is changing yourself, right? You change yourself and you could change your life. You change yourself, you could change the world. And I would challenge everybody actually to take a screenshot of this. And post it. Maybe if you have one aha or an example that you want to share with your followers, your fans, your friends, and make sure you tag Jason.

I'm @heyfeifer, @H-E-Y-F-E-I-F-E-R.

Perfect. So tag Jason so we see it. Tag myself. I'll actually gift a copy of Build for Tomorrow to one person who does that. So when you tag us, I'll get to see it because I love gifting books. But I highly recommend everybody get 2 or 3 copies for themselves. Go to jasonviper.com/book. Go on Amazon. We know you read to succeed. Jason has decades of experience and he's put it into his book and you can download it in a handful of days. And that's an incredible advantage for our quick readers out there. Jason, thank you so much for coming on our show.

Oh, well, Jim, thank you for all that. Thank you for everything that you do. And I just want to stress one more time because you said it earlier in our conversation, you know this subject better than anybody. Our brain is meant to change, which meant that our lives are meant to change. And the greatest thing that we can do is be aware of that and embrace it, and then find the opportunity that comes next.

There's so much of it. Change your brain, you change your life.

Absolutely.

Thank you so much, Jason. Thank you everybody who's listening. Again, make sure you check out the show notes at jimkwik.com/notes. Put the link to Jason's website, links to his books and podcast and so much more. And until next time, everybody, she be limitless.