Nir Eyal Interview with John Jantsch - Nir&Far

Hi, I'm Nir Eyal and this is the near and Far Podcast. This podcast is about business behavior and the brain. On this show, I do a few things. I read quick articles I've written about topics shaping your behavior. I interview authors of books I enjoy, and from time to time I devote episodes to answering your questions. If you want to ask me a question, visit the podcast page on itunes, go to Ratings and reviews and ask me a question by leaving a review, I promise to read it and possibly include your question in a future episode. Please ask me anything now. Enjoy the episode and for more, you can always Visit me@nearandfar.com.

John Danch welcome to the near and Far Podcast. This is a little bit of a different format from what I usually do. I usually don't have guests. But you know, you are such a force in this industry with your amazing website and your training program around everything that you do with duct tape marketing. It's just a fantastic program and I've been watching you for many years and you're just such a great guy first and foremost. And when I heard about this new book that you have around being a Self Reliant Entrepreneur, it just intersected with so many things that I'm interested in in terms of self efficacy, around agency and of course around entrepreneurship that I just want to make sure we could get you on the show as quickly as possible. So how are you John? Welcome.

I am great and I appreciate you stepping outside your comfort zone to do a new format of your podcast.

Absolutely. Well, you are the inaugural guest here, so it's an honor to have you. So tell us about this new book, the Self Reliant Entrepreneur.

Sure. So this is my sixth book and I have written my five other books are very squarely how to do some aspect of Marketing. And I really wanted to write a book that I think entrepreneurship is the greatest personal development program anyone can embark upon. And I feel like I'm in my third decade of owning my own business and I feel like I have been on a personal development journey of sorts because I think underestimate in our kind of trying to build these businesses and figure out and stay up with change. I think we underestimate the physical, mental and spiritual toll that running a business can take. And so I have over the years developed practices to kind of work on myself to not just get better at building websites, but get better at building myself. And so in a lot of ways I wrote a book that is a reflection of of my own personal development, but it's structured As a daily devotional, if you will, that kind of helps people. Instead of taking a book on vacation and reading it and kind of knocking it out, it's more like a practice that you come back to it two minutes a day. Hopefully it gives you some sort of centering thought to go out there and think about and to realize that know you have to work on yourself as much as you work on your business.

Yeah. And part of the thing that I think is so interesting about this, as you know, it intersects with something I'm really passionate about, which is habits and routines. And so I think it's so interesting that you decided to write this book as something that you interact with. Like you said, you don't just consume it on a flight, you don't just read it on vacation. You have to interact with it daily as part of your daily practice. It almost becomes like a daily prayer. The first thing you do when you wake up or the last thing you think about at night. Is that how you intended this to fit into people's lives?

Yeah, I think so. I mean, I wrote the book. A lot of people don't realize this, but authors a lot of times write books for themselves. Oh, yes, yes.

Research is me. Search.

So this book fits into a practice I've had for years, whether it was reading some Eastern wisdom tradition or Wayne Dyer or something. Deepak Chopra. I've always kind of had a practice where I'll get up in the morning and I'll meditate and I'll read something that hopefully is inspirational to me. Journal. And I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs that do that same thing as a habit to get themselves kind of going the right direction for the day. So in a lot of ways, the format and even the content that's in this book and every day ends with a question that hopefully you carry out there. And a lot of people tell me that they don't have the answer usually, and it just haunts them all day.

But what it does, I think, is it allows. It allows you to be a little more mindful. If you're pondering this question. What I typically find happens is that then something happens that sort of triggers like, oh, yeah, I guess I do react that way in certain situations. Or I haven't really thought about that, but now I am thinking about that. So I think that kind of mindfulness is certainly near and dear to your heart, certainly with your last book.

That's right. Yeah. Actually, that's exactly what I was going to ask you next. I mean, it's almost like you're asking people to meditate on these internal triggers, as I call them, these uncomfortable emotional states. And I don't know if people who are not entrepreneurs appreciate how much of your daily existence as an entrepreneur is filled with, at least in my case, dread, fear, uncertainty, anxiety. I mean, there's a lot. I mean, I think people think, oh, if I just didn't have a boss, how great life would be. And what they don't realize is that all of your customers now become your boss. And you're not free from having to perform. You're not free of obligation. You even have more obligations. And so what's your advice on how to combat with those. How to deal with all those demons?

Yeah, I mean, I think what you're tapping into is that we entrepreneurs are, you know, we have to make. It feels like we have to make thousands of decisions a day. Nobody's making decisions, you know, for us, necessarily. There's a lot of people telling us, you know, we shouldn't do this, or we, you know, we. What are you thinking, you know, going into this? So we're, I think we're constantly fighting that fear. We're literally making stuff up that didn't exist before. I mean, you know, that, you know, all of that comes, I think, with a lot of baggage. I think for me, the most important thing is to really get a sense of what I control, which is next to nothing. And I think a lot of times the stress that we feel is because we are trying to control everything. And really, you know, the only two things we can control are, you know, how we show up and how we respond to everything that happens all day long. And I know that's really easy to say in this calm, quiet environment that you and I find ourselves in. But I think that that's one of the keys to really having any level of joy in your business is to, hey, it's okay to have this objective, to have this big, hairy goal, but you sometimes have to detach a little bit to how you're going to get there.

Yeah. Sorry to interrupt. There was one thing I just want to hit on real quick. What I found was so useful, I think, about a lot of what you put in the book. You filled the book with a lot of these 19th century authors and quot and it's interesting because I think you get a sense of calm almost, or at least control in that you realize that these problems are not new. Right. Some of the best business advice I ever received was from a buddy of mine who, when I was really stressed raising money for my company. And if we didn't raise this money, we would go out of business. And we were. I was going up and down on Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley, you know, begging for millions of dollars. Who the heck was I to ask for that money? And I remember my friend told me, it's just prom. Like, you know, in your life when you were a teenager, prom was such a big deal. Right. It mattered so much. And the viewpoint of having some time passed in your life and you realize, wait a minute, this is all just prom. None of it is actually that big of a deal. And there's something about, like reading that entrepreneurs who have come before you, sometimes hundreds of years before you had the same problems. And these are not new challenges, even though they might seem new in your life. And it gives you that historical perspective that I actually thought was really, really nice.

Yeah. And doing the research for this book, that's one of the things that struck me the most. I did mine a very narrow historical band of literature, mid 19th century, about 1850. Few leaked into 1900s, but it always struck me how often I would read some passage and go, well, that is just. That just couldn't have been written 150 years ago.

And I do think that. I do think we think all this technology has changed and all these, to borrow your title, these distractions that are in our lives are like new. Yes. We're not having to build our own homes and kill our own food and whatnot, but I think the human condition has really not changed.

Yeah. And sometimes having that perspective and thinking what the person who wrote that daily passage had to deal with in addition to everything else that was going on in their life. Right. The fact that we don't have to go hunt our own food or make our own clothing or chop down our own wood to keep our house warm kind of makes me think, like, what are we complaining about? We have it so much better. Well, I have gotten so many ways.

I have gotten three texts while we were on this recording.

Okay, maybe Thoreau didn't get three texts. Okay, I'll give you that. Speaking of particular authors, was there a particular day in the book or a particular author that you thought was particularly surprising or gave some unexpected insights that you might want to share?

Well, you know, many people are familiar with Emerson and Thoreau and some of the fiction that I cite in this. It was important for me to really try to get a big cross section of the writing. And there were a lot of female authors of that time whose work really didn't see the light of day in a lot of cases, and only, you know, 50, 75 years later was put into journals and collections and things. And so there were a lot of writers from that time period that I wasn't familiar with. I mean, somebody who's probably done feminist studies or something, probably knows Margaret Fuller's work for certain. But those were probably the ones that were the newest to me, and maybe the most surprising.

One of the ones I enjoyed the most. I had never read any Oliver Wendell Holmes, and he was a very funny writer.

He was also very serious at times as well. But just really, I wanted to go deeper than the Pinterest boards and Instagram quotes. And so I really did get into letters and journals and some pretty deep stuff. And one of the things that, I guess it shouldn't be that big of a surprise, but that was kind of fun, was that a lot of these folks, you know, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, you know, Emerson, Thoreau, were all friends and they wrote letters back and forth to each other and had, you know, they had their own little network of folks, much like, you know, we do today.

Yeah, interesting. You know, one of the things that I oftentimes hear from people who are trying to change their habits is how do I create a habit of reading more books? And here you are. You know, I so appreciate that you, you've, you've mined for these gems, but I am sure that along the way, you had to do a lot of digging for three stuff that wasn't all that interesting and wasn't all that relevant. How did you make that time in your day to get into this routine of. Of doing all this research? And then also, how did you make sure you didn't get distracted by all the boring stuff to find all these gems?

Well, so one of the things that I. So, so when I started, I just, you know, I read up on the period. I, you know, I was reading historical stuff, not only just the books that I was going to cite, because I just wanted to get a sense of the sort of global nature of this period. And a lot of the writers in this period were called transcendentalists. And so it was. It was kind of easy to find, you know, work that covered kind of that period. And at first I really was just highlighting things. And, you know, at some point I went, how am I going to organize this? And so I gave the book a structure because it's an annual book. The seasons metaphor was there for the taking. And so I have experienced seasons in kind of repeated times it doesn't just happen one time over your career. And so I put them into discovering, growing, evolving.

And then I took each season and gave the three months in that season a theme of failure or congruence or trust or love. And when I did that, it actually gave me a structure for my research. So now, instead of just saying, well, let's see what Ralph Waldo Emerson had to say about everything in life, I'd actually go, what did Ralph Waldo Emerson have to say about congruence? And by doing that, it allowed me to really find the nuggets that I wanted around those themes and basically turn the research into more of a spreadsheet project than just massive dump of content.

Yeah. Wow, that's interesting. Now that you say that. That's exactly what I did with both of my books once I had the four parts of the model, which took actually longer than the writing was the collecting, figuring out the picture in my mind. And then you could fill in when you needed more information with some kind of structure. That's really great. Before we wrap up here, is there one particular day in the book that you perhaps would like to share that was a quote or a thought that you thought was particularly resonant?

Well, I'm very. I found that I was very drawn to Thoreau's work, so I do find myself reading his quite. Or pages that include his. But I'll also give you one chance to. Is there a page, is there a date that's special to you that you would like me to just page to and read it?

Sure. How about, my wife's birthday is December 26th.

Whoa. Day after Christmas. Poor thing never got a birthday gift in her life.

So every day starts with a title, then the reading, then 150 words or so for me, and then a question. So I feel like we should have her here for this, but you'll have to convey it to her so she actually gets a poem. All right. So today, December 26th, how to wait. The wisest person could ask no more of fate than to be simple, modest, brave, true, safe from the many, honored by the few, to count as not in the world or church or state, but inwardly in secret to be great, to feel mysterious nature ever new, to touch, if not to grasp its endless clue and learn by each discovery how to wait.

As James Russell Lowell in a book called Jeffrey Wyman, which was written in 1891.

Concepts like scrum and lean and agile, iterate and minimally viable product crept into the business vocabulary as ways to suggest faster ways to do things. Including fail. There's nothing inherently wrong with that idea. But stick with this a while, and you'll discover the magic of waiting for the gears to align. Not to be perfect, but to be orchestrated. From a practical perspective, patience is sort of sexy. The less desperate you seem to want a sale, the more the buyer wants you. That's a hard one, but a valuable one. Ask a question and then be silent and wait. Bite your lip if you must, but wait. Patience permits you to set timelines that allow for everyone's point of view and working style. Go stomping through the subalpine woods, and you'll never see a wild animal. Go quietly, sit quietly and wait. And as long as you're not wearing some hideous fragrance, a mule deer or a moose, an alpine chickadee and maybe even a pika or two will come scrambling on the rocks. May wander within feet of you. A black bear may as well. But that's a risk we all take. Today, as you have a conversation, consciously consider how the other person is feeling about the conversation and learn by each discovery how to wait. Your challenge question today. Can you recall a time when impatience in a situation might have cost you? What did you learn.

That is so. I got goosebumps because of that for so many reasons. Number one, it's exactly what we were saying earlier about how these same challenges keep popping up.

Since time immemorial, right? This problem of patience and when we talk about distraction, how important it is to not impulsively reach for something to take your mind off of your current discomfort, is just as relevant back then as it is today. Now that we reach for our devices to take ourselves out of these mental uncomfortable states. And then the other thing that gave me goosebumps is that my wife is the most patient person talk about, you know that you even use the word sexy, right? That is so true to my wife, like the fact that she. That she is this patient does make her sexy. It's true. Like when we throw ourselves at someone, whether it's in a romantic relationships, whether it's for a business deal.

It does degrade the product in some ways, it makes it less desirable. Whereas when we are patient, when we give things the natural course of time to let people make up their own minds and come to us as opposed to us begging them, makes such a difference. Very great. This is wonderful.

Thank you. Thanks for letting me do that.

Absolutely. Thank you so much. John Jantz. This was awesome. Tell people where they can find you. I know dunktapemarketing.com is fantastic, but where else can they learn about?

So the book, of course, can be acquired anywhere you purchase books. If you want to hear some other interviews like this, we publish them all atself reliant entrepreneur.com youm can find more about the book there. And then, as you mentioned, Duct Tape Marketing, which is duct tape marketing.com awesome.

Thank you so much John. It was a pleasure to have you on the show.

Oh, I love doing it here. Thanks.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the near and Far Podcast. You can always find more at my blog, nearandfar.com and don't forget, if you have a question you'd like me to explore in a future episode, leave me your question. The former review for the podcast on itunes.