How to Thrive in Change and Uncover Your Core Value | Jason Feifer | Glasp Talk #44
This is the forty-fourth session of Glasp Talk!
Glasp Talk delves deep into intimate interviews with luminaries from various fields, unraveling their genuine emotions, experiences, and the stories behind them.
Today's guest is Jason Feifer, the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, author of the bestseller Build for Tomorrow, host of the podcast Help Wanted, keynote speaker, startup advisor, and community builder. With a track record of editorial leadership at Men's Health, Fast Company, Maxim, and Boston Magazine, Jason has become a recognized voice in entrepreneurship, having shared stages with Google, Microsoft, Alibaba, and more.
In this interview, Jason reflects on the adaptability lessons gleaned from top entrepreneurs and lays out his four phases of change: panic, adaptation, new normal, and wouldn't go back. He explains how to identify core personal values that transcend job titles and how AI can help us stop doing what people hate—ultimately propelling innovation rather than just replacing tasks. Jason also highlights the importance of not defining oneself too narrowly, urging us to experiment and see opportunity in unexpected places.
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Transcripts
Glasp: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Grasp Talk. Today, we are very excited to have Jason Pfeiffer with us. So, Jason is the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, a podcast host, book author, keynote speaker, startup advisor, and community builder. Also the co-founder of CPG Fast Track, an online coaching community, and the author of the best-selling book, Built for Tomorrow. His podcast, Help Wanted, reaches over 1 million downloads per month.
His newsletter, One Thing Better, is read by over 65,000 subscribers. Recognized as a top voice in entrepreneurship by LinkedIn, Jason has had a distinguished career in media editorial roles at Men's Health, Fast Company, Maxim, and Boston Magazine. Jason travels regularly to speak for the world's greatest companies and organizations and has given keynotes for Google, Microsoft, and Alibaba, to name a few. Today, we will dive into his journey, his insights on business and media, and his approach to building for tomorrow. Thank you for joining Jason today.
Jason: Thanks for having me. Appreciate you having me.
Glasp: Thank you. So, first of all, we love your book, Built for Tomorrow.
Jason: Thank you. Yeah. Awesome. Great to see it. Thank you.
Glasp: And, you know, it's all about embracing change. But we want to know what inspired you to write it, and what's the number one takeaway you want our readers to have?
Jason: Yeah, well, the number one takeaway is that, as I have traveled the world, studying and learning from the world's most impressive leaders and entrepreneurs, I've studied patterns in how they succeed. And the thing that emerged among all others is that the most successful people are the most adaptable. And so that's the thing that I wanted to understand. What is it that they are doing? Because I don't think that adaptability is something people are born with. I think that it's a skill that you can learn. And I wanted to understand what is happening for these people who can navigate great changes in their business, great changes in their industries, and come out on top. And so the book is a chronicle of that, of understanding how that change happens.
And the thing that I know... I don't use this language in the book because it's from a couple of years ago, and I've kind of evolved the way that I talk about it. I now say that the most successful people who are the most adaptable have all developed a unique personal relationship with change. It's a matter of rethinking some of the fundamental ways in which you react to change and how you relate to your work. And when you can get down to that fundamental understanding of who you are despite all the changes around you, and what you do, and what value you have to offer people despite what changes around you, the more focused you can be, and the more in which you can deliver real value.
And to your other point of the question, I got interested in this because, honestly, I just had access to all of these incredible people. And people kept asking me, What makes success? What are the patterns that you see among all the incredible leaders that you get to meet with? And so I started thinking about that and trying to understand it. And when that pattern emerged, I wanted to make sure that I was able to capture it and share it with others.
Glasp: Thank you. We know the concept already, but we want to ask this question to our audience. But you mentioned four phases of change in the book, right? Panic, adaptation, new normal, and wouldn't go back. You also mentioned self-determination theory, three things to be happy, and so many great things. But could you explain briefly about the four phases of change and how people can adapt to change and go through the panic?
Jason: Yeah. So this four phases of change idea, I came to during the pandemic. I had watched... I'll tell you a quick story, which is that the last dinner, the last social event that I had before everything shut down during the pandemic, was my friend Nicole's birthday. She had just gotten eight or 10 people together at a restaurant. I was sitting next to a woman named Megan Asha. Megan is the founder of FounderMade, which is a trade show for the consumer packaged goods industry. And so it's a live event company. And here we were staring down the pandemic. At that point, the NBA games had been shut down, and people were being dissuaded from getting into large gatherings.
And I said to Megan, I said, "Are you concerned about what's going to happen? Because you've got this live events business, and it kind of looks like live events are being shut down now." And she said, 'You know, I'm actually," this is her voice, she says, "You know, I'm actually kind of excited. And the reason for that is because as a live-events business, we have all of these other ideas of things that we could be doing to grow the business and develop new lines of revenue. But we've been unable to explore any of that because, of course, the live events absorb all of our time and energy. And so we are so busy doing these things that we never have time for the other things. And now we'll have this chance to hit pause in the live events and start to explore these other avenues."
At the time, I thought, "This is a person with no fear. Just no fear. How is she able to navigate this insane challenge in a way in which she is hopeful?" But I came to learn, as I met more and more people like Megan, that this is not a person with no fear. Rather, in her case, she is looking at two different kinds of fear and almost making a choice about which one she finds more useful. So, there are two kinds of fear. There is the fear of losing what you already have. And that fear, when change comes to you and you start to fear losing what you already had, forces you to hang on tightly and start to panic that that thing is being lost.
Or you can be like Megan, and instead of fearing losing the thing that you already had, fearing not finding the next thing fast enough, which is a forward-looking fear, which propels you. It tells you something new. There is some new opportunity coming. I need to be able to find it. And that is the thing that I think Megan was embodying, this understanding that some new opportunity will come, and her concern is not being able to find it fast enough.
Now, the reason I tell you this story is because as I met people like her, what I... and then followed them across time and saw the changes that they made and how it improved their business, I came to realize that all change for everybody happens in four phases. Panic, adaptation, new normal, wouldn't go back. First, you panic. Then, you start to look around at what new resources are available to you. Then, you start to build new comforts and familiarities. And finally, you reach a wouldn't go back moment, that moment where you say, "I have something so new and valuable that I wouldn't want to go back to a time before I had it." And that became the framework for the book that I wrote about how to make it through each phase and how to move quickly through that panic phase, which Megan was moving herself through very quickly, but other people were caught in for months or years, or maybe you still feel, you watching at home, still feel some kind of panic over changes that are happening to you. So I want to understand what that evolution is like, tell you that at the other end of it is great transformation, and then figure out the best, most methodical way to move across that experience.
Glasp: Thank you. Yeah, I did it like that. And regarding change and the panic, and you mentioned in the book and also in newsletters that, you know, we should find opportunity in everything, like choices or options. But at the same time, so meaning, you know, we should, you said, you know, saying yes to, you know, if it's unknown thing, but if you do, if you say yes, and you will find opportunity and a new interesting opportunity in the end. But at the same time, some people say, "Oh, when you make a decision, if it's a hell yeah or no, you know, like approach, right?" If it's not a hell yeah, hell yes, you should say no. So, what are your thoughts on this? Yeah, some people, you say, you know, you're finding opportunity in every aspect, but some people say you should pick, you know, the option carefully.
Jason: Yeah, well, I think, I mean, I like that idea of, if it's not a hell yes, then it's a no. It's not how I tend to always think of things, but I think that it's a good way. You know, look, I mean, where that idea comes from, and for people not familiar with it, it's, you know, when you start to get overwhelmed with lots of opportunities, lots of things that you could pursue, you start to wonder, you know, like, are you using your time in the most effective, impactful way possible? How do you start to filter for new opportunities? And one of the ways is you evaluate things by whether or not you're like extremely excited about it, or otherwise don't do it, because there's just, there's too many opportunities.
I like, you know, it's an abundance mindset kind of thing, and I think it's a good one. I tend to work a little differently, which is that when I'm evaluating new opportunities, I'm asking myself, "Does this advance my overall objectives?" So I want to make sure that I understand what the larger goal is that I am working towards at any one time. And then, does a new opportunity help me advance that objective? If so, is it better than any of my current opportunities, right? You know, when we take things on, that doesn't mean that we're taking them on for the rest of our lives. So we should always be evaluating, "Does something new do a better job of advancing my opportunities than something that I'm currently doing? What do I have to sunset to adopt something new?"
And then something else I'm thinking about a lot, and I haven't written about this yet, but I've been noodling on it for a while, is I like opportunities that require what I think of as 30% of my brain space, but where I can deliver 100% of the value. So in other words, if I'm going to be, you know, helping a friend formulate something, or if I'm going to join a team for a project, or if I'm going to be an advisor somewhere, or whatever the case is, a company just recently, you know, I do a lot of keynotes speaking, I'm traveling, I'm working off of the same material generally.
A company just recently asked if I'd be able to do a workshop on something that I don't normally do a workshop on. I'm evaluating it by whether "Can I do this in 30% of my brain space?" but just to say, "Is it building off of my existing talents and skills? Is it something that I can walk into and generally intuitively understand how to be helpful without a huge steep learning curve, without spending a lot of time trying to develop new skills?" If I can build off of things that I already have, knowledge that I already have, if someone asks me to do a workshop and it's on a topic that I already talk about a lot, and I just haven't assembled it into something, then that's good to me.
That's good because that means that I get to use only 30% of my brain space. It's not going to take up all my thoughts, not going to take up all my energy, but I'm going to deliver 100% of the value, which means that I feel entitled to whatever the compensation is, and I feel like it's going to be adding value for everyone involved. That's how I start to assess opportunities. I say no to things all the time, but if it's advancing my general interests, if it's moving me towards my overall goals, and if I get to be able to deliver a lot of value without having to fully commit my brain and my time to it, then that to me is where I want to go.
Glasp: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, and yes. And also, sorry, it's a little related topic, but thinking about the change and opportunity, and you say two types of thought plus like a school of thought in this part, and one is like, "Is it a door-related issue problem coming to you, or is it engine-related?" Could you explore this concept with our audience, too? Oh, yeah, is it a door, or is it an engine?
Jason: So, "Is it a door or is it an engine" comes from my friends who run a consulting practice called Pen Name Consulting, Adam and Jordan Bornstein, and this is something that they run their clients through as they're looking out at change that's coming to them, and projecting what is worth reacting to, and at what degree you react to it. So, it's a visual metaphor. If you're, I'm in Brooklyn, New York right now, so if I'm traveling, or rather, if I'm driving down the street in Brooklyn, New York, and the door falls off of my car, can I still drive the car? Can I still get to where I'm going? The answer is yes, of course. You should get that fixed; it's not very safe, but you can keep driving the car.
But if I'm driving down the street of Brooklyn, New York, and the engine falls off the car, can I still get to where I'm going? And the answer, of course, is no. If the engine falls off the car, then you're dead. Some changes are doors, and some changes are engines, which is to say that some changes are just going to impact you on the periphery, or it's something that you can continue to do what you're functionally doing right now, but just make some kind of adaption and tweaks, and that's fine.
But other changes are going to radically alter the foundation of the business that you are in. Those are engines. You should always be assessing when you see new changes coming to you, when you see competitors doing something new, or when you see some kind of changes in the marketplace. You need to be assessing: Is this a door, or is this an engine? Because understanding which it is and playing it out, if this changes, if this change comes to my business, do I still have a business? Can I still operate as I am? If the answer to that is no, you have an engine, and you need to start acting as fast as possible before you are even forced to make the change to adapt to it. I found it a really useful framework for thinking about what is worth reacting to and at what level.
Glasp: I like the framework. But, I think the people who read your book and understand the concept of four phases, how you see the change, if it's the impact of change, as you mentioned, at the same time, still some people are afraid of the change or are concerned about the change. And especially, I think, identity, or that kind of related issue. This means that for most people, their identity is tied to their job, job title, or company. "Oh, I work for, let's say, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, so I see my value in myself," or something like that. But you mentioned that we should find the value, not only the company you work for, but your value, and skills, and so on. I did adapt the framework. And so, yeah, in my case, in your case, you said you tell stories in your voice, and so on. But in my case, at Grasp, I collect ideas and stories worth sharing. So I think this is my identity and also a core value. And so, could you explain how we can go through these ideas and how we can find the core value and identity, not something attached to the job title, and so on, so that they can, I think, so that they can adapt to the change, and so on?
Jason: Yeah, so this is one of the foundational mistakes that people make, which is that they tie their identity too closely to the output of their work or the role that they occupy. Which is to say that if someone were to come up to you at a party and ask what you do, your answer would probably be some version of the tasks you perform or the role that you occupy. You know, you might say, "I do this work," or "I hold this title at this place." And there's nothing wrong with that.
But the problem is that all those things are so changeable. And so, when we tie our identities to changeable things, then when something changes in our work, and I use the word when there, because it will happen, when something changes in our work, it doesn't just feel like a change to our work, it feels like a change to our identity. And that's scary and destabilizing, and it's the kind of thing that forces us to go back and try to hold on to what came before, in possibly very unproductive ways.
So, what we need to do is develop what I call "the thing that does not change in times of change." That is a fundamental understanding of what you do, down to the level in which you could articulate it by using words that are not anchored to something that's easily changeable. I know that sounds kind of dense, so let me break it apart. What I want you to do is, I want you to consider how to articulate what you do. Tell me what you do. If I were to come up to you at a party and ask what you do, I want you to tell me what you do, but I don't want you to use any words that are tied to anything that's changeable.
So, it should be a short sentence. This is a mission statement. It is a short sentence, and it starts with "I." Then, after that, every word is carefully selected because it's not anchored to something that's easily changeable. I keep repeating myself there because it's important. So, it's the difference between, "I'm a magazine editor," that is technically correct, right? I am a magazine editor, it's what I do for my day job. I'm a magazine editor, also all very changeable. One phone call from my boss at Entrepreneur Magazine telling me that I'm being fired, and now I'm not a magazine editor. So, that's not a good identity.
Here's a better identity. "I tell stories in my voice". I tell stories in my voice. Seven words, every word carefully selected, because it is not anchored to something that's easily changeable. I tell stories, not magazine stories, not newspaper stories. I used to work in newspapers, not just on podcasts. I could do it anywhere. Books, I've told you stories here today. When I advise founders, I'm telling them stories. And then "in my voice" is just me setting the terms for how I want to operate at this stage of my career.
When I travel and do keynote talks at companies, I often run them through a kind of exercise to help them develop a mission statement like this. And it's incredible to hear what people have to say. They'll tell me, these very experienced professionals will tell me things like, "I help teams achieve greatness," or "I solve the most complex problems." There was a woman at an event in Chicago who came up to me afterwards and said that she had built a very successful consulting practice, and that consulting practice was put on hold so that she could raise her first child. She just had a baby.
And although she doesn't relate to the term "stay-at-home mom," that is what she is functionally doing right now, but her identity had always been tied to her work, and she just didn't know how to think of herself. She doesn't know how to understand this moment in her life. And the exercise helped her get to a really interesting place, which is she now says, "I help people become the best versions of themselves." And that applies to the consulting practice as much as it applies to raising a child.
Now, what's the point of all this? The point is that when you can zero down to building a mission statement for yourself, what you're doing is you're identifying the thing that does not change in times of change, which is to say that you're identifying what your core value is. Your transferable core value that is not tied to a specific role. It's not tied to a specific task at a specific company. It is the thing that you are best at, that you continue to be able to provide value in no matter the circumstance.
Once you think of it like that, you can recognize that any new change, anything that changes in your work, is just a new opportunity to do the thing that you are already best at. So once you understand what your core value is, once you know how to articulate it to yourself, I mean, let's be honest, you don't have to articulate it to other people that way. If someone comes up to me at a party and asks what I do, I don't say, "I tell stories in my voice." That sounds very weird, but it's what I tell myself. It's how I understand my value.
So if new opportunities come along, I ask, "Does this draw upon my ability to tell stories? Does this draw upon the perspective and my ability to articulate things in a very clear voice and point of view?" And if the answer is yes, well, then those are more opportunities that I'm interested in and that I think I can create value for. So anyway, that's how to do it. That's the reason why we should be anchoring our identities to something that is truly, truly ours and not anchored to something else.
Glasp: I see. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. That's really helpful advice. But especially, let's say for people who are in the early days of career and they, they have a, they have a job, but they don't know actually what their core value, what they are good at and what advice would you give them like to find in their core value and identity?
Jason: Well, I, you know, I think that it doesn't matter at what point in your career you are in, you have some understanding of what your core value is, and you can adjust that as you develop further. So I wouldn't have said in the early days of my career necessarily that what's important and what my real value is that I can write in a distinctive voice with a very distinctive point of view. That's something that came later, once I had a distinctive voice and a creative point of view. But back then, I might've said what I'm good at is, I might've said, "I process complex information and make it useful to others."
That might, that might've been something that I said, which is true that, that, that's the core skillset that I have as far as I'm concerned. So when I got out of college, my first job was at a tiny little newspaper, that's what I was doing. I was running around town trying to figure out things that were happening in the community and then digesting that information and turning it into local newspaper stories that would be useful for people. But I didn't want to identify as a local news reporter. That didn't feel like my identity.
And, at the time, I would've just thought of myself as a newspaper reporter, but I now realize that that's too limiting. So at any stage of your career, you can still push yourself to ask, you know, the exercise that I do is to have people first ask themselves, "What are your," if someone were to come up to you at a party, here, here's the, here's the quick version of the exercise.
What we're going to do is we're going to run that scenario three times and just change a little bit each time. So imagine that someone comes up to you at a party and asks what you do. What's the first thing that you talk about? The first thing you talk about is your tasks, right? I do this and that. This is what I do every day or something like that. That's fine. So now let me ask it again, for the second time, someone comes up to you at a party and asks what you do, but anything that you just thought about, anything that is related to your tasks, to your job, whatever, it's off the table. You cannot access it anymore. So now, what do you talk about?
Well, now you would talk about, I think your skills, you talk about what you're good at. Like I said, "I'm good at gathering information and processing information and making it useful to others." Okay. So now we're going to do it one more time. Someone comes up to you at a party and asks what you do, but now you can't talk about your tasks, and you can't talk about your skills off the table. So what do you do? Well, now here we are, we've arrived at the mission statement, that sentence in which every word is carefully selected because it is not anchored to something that's easily changeable that, you know, you ask, "What about people who are earlier in their career?"
I guarantee that even at the very, very beginning of your career, you have some idea of what you are good at, and it can be broad, and that's fine. Right? I mean, at, at this point early in your career, one of the things that you should just be good at is, is you should be good at absorbing information and being useful. Right? Maybe that, by itself, is a wonderful skill for that phase of your career. What do you do? What you do is absorb information quickly and find ways to be useful. If you think of yourself like that, well, then it doesn't matter what team you're put on. It doesn't matter what happens to your company.
It doesn't matter if you get laid off tomorrow because your core skillset is being able to show up in an environment, understand it, and find ways to be useful. And that by itself is valuable. That is a great core insight for you because someone who has that kind of skill set is going to be able to do any number of things. And as you develop in your career, you might discover that you have a particular skill at doing that in one kind of environment or in one kind of way. Right? I mean, if I talk to people at a conference for HR and I talk to people who are in a conference for IT, you know, they're going to have different ways of articulating their value. But at the core, it's kind of the same. They look at complex sets of problems, and they come to solutions in ways that they think they are uniquely qualified to produce.
So you don't have to define yourself too narrowly. You shouldn't define yourself too broadly. You should instead just be thinking of what you are excellent at and how that is transferable.
Glasp: I love the practice and the thought process. And yeah, thank you. But you know, this is related, but you know, another aspect of seeing the issue, but you know, since AI is trendy and people use AI in every use case and nowadays at work and for their hobby and so on. So for some people, they are concerned about, oh, AI is taking my job because AI is replacing their core skill set for some people. How do you see the impact of AI for some people, for some work, and for their skill set?
Jason: So I think that AI is a couple of things. The first thing is that AI is a microwave oven. Foundationally, AI is a microwave oven, which is to say that a microwave oven is incredible technology, and I can't even begin to explain it. I can't, at least. Try to explain a microwave oven to someone from a hundred years ago. I wouldn't even know where to start. It's amazing technology. It's commonplace. It's in all of our homes right now, but we don't make every meal in the microwave.
The reason that I bring that up is because what we know now as what belongs in the microwave and does not belong in the microwave, that I'm going to, you know, I'm going to heat last night's leftovers, but I'm not going to make a steak dinner in the microwave. That is the result of a lot of experimentation. That is a result of that technology being put into the world and us figuring out what it's for and what it's not for. Eventually, we came to some pretty clear understanding of the use cases for the microwave and the use cases for the oven. We don't have that guidance yet for AI.
AI is too new, and there are too many different, interesting ideas floating around. And, of course, the technology itself is still evolving very rapidly. And so we don't have the concrete, "This is what AI is good for, this is what AI is not so good for." And so right now, we're just experimenting with everything, and we're saying AI could be for that, and AI could be for that, and AI could be for that. And I would bet that in five years, in 10 years, we will have a far more definitive understanding of what it is for and is not for.
And a lot of the things that we're talking about today, like putting an AI layer on top of it, will be seen as absolutely ridiculous. Just ridiculous, right? I mean, dating apps are now using AI wingmen. That's ridiculous. That is just simply not a thing that's going to be popular in five years, but it is now because it's very in vogue to try to explore AI in every possible use case.
So, all right, number one is let's not get carried away here. We're in an experimentation mode. It's very interesting. It does not mean that AI will do everything. The next thing to understand is that AI is foundationally going to not break things that we hold dear. It's not going to destroy all of our jobs. What it's going to do is it's going to break things that are already broken, which is to say that it is going to exacerbate processes that don't work perfectly, but that we've just hung on to for a long time, and it's going to make those things now seem untenable.
So, you know, for example, I kind of first came to this realization when I was speaking at a convention of lawyers, and the lawyers were all very focused on ChatGPT, and afterwards the law firm CEO told me that what they're concerned about is that AI can make the act of writing motions, motion writing, more efficient and faster, and if the lawyers' work becomes faster and more efficient, then they're not able to bill as many hours, and lawyers work on billable hours, and that's the thing that they're worried about.
And, when I heard that, I said, "Well, that's great, isn't it? Because nobody likes billable hours. Like, billable hours is a terrible system. It's a terrible system that everybody hates, and everybody should hate because it's obnoxious, right? Like, in what other way are you paying for an incredibly important, expensive professional service, and you're paying, like, by the seven minutes for someone to respond to emails? It's completely stupid. But the reason we have it is because when something breaks in your home, you throw it away, but when something breaks in your business, you tend to keep it. Or just to say that there often isn't an incentive to make a change, even if something is foundationally broken.
So, AI is going to exacerbate that. AI is going to make motion writing more efficient, which means that billable hours are not going to work anymore as the system for paying for law. And at that point, somebody is finally incentivized to step out and say, 'I have a system that works for now.'" And that is great. That's what we want. What we should always be doing is asking ourselves, "Does this work? Does it work? Or is it full of things that people hate about it? Is it creating inefficiencies? Is it, does it feel bad to use?" The more in which we are willing to challenge ourselves and say, "Like, I've built this thing, or I'm running this thing, or I'm offering this thing, is there something about this that people hate?" And if there is, then what would it mean to just stop doing that?
Stop doing what people hate. Stop doing what people hate is not my language, by the way. The creator of the Savannah Bananas, which is this amazing kind of Harlem Globetrotters, a baseball team that travels around the country now, is a huge phenomenon. That all started because this guy, Jesse Cole, bought a tiny baseball team in Savannah, Georgia. It nearly went bankrupt trying to run it. Nobody wanted to go to his games. He stepped back, and he asked himself, "What do people hate about baseball?" They hate all sorts of things about baseball. They hate that baseball's slow. They hate that it's boring. They hate that the food is expensive.
And then he said, "Well, what would it mean to stop doing what people hate?" which meant hiring players who would do funny dances on the field and creating a real spectacle that moves much faster than a baseball game and offering all-you-can-eat food. He offered those things. His stadium started to sell out. He got an ESPN show. And then now he's touring nationwide. All because he asked, "What do people hate and how do I stop doing what people hate?" That is ultimately the thing that we're going to be doing with AI right now. AI is going to change things, yes. It's going to create new opportunities, yes. It's going to shift previous opportunities, yes. It's going to outmod some things, yes. But at its core, people will use it if it enables them to stop doing something that they hate. And that will be the most useful thing. And that is the thing that will stick around, and everything else is eventually going to go away.
Glasp: Yeah, love. But do you use AI tools in your daily life and daily work?
Jason: Yeah, I do. I mean, you know, like everybody, this isn't going to be very exciting, but like, you know, like everybody, I use ChatGPT a lot. I don't use it to write anything for me. I've experimented with it, and I don't like its output, frankly, but I use it, number one, I use it as a kind of on-the-go curiosity answerer, right? So, if my wife and I are talking about something and then we're like, you know, I wonder, they're like, "Why do, we bought a hamster for our kids recently. So we've had a lot of questions about hamsters, you know? Like, why are hamsters nocturnal? Why are hamsters solitary?"
You know, in the past, I would have gone to Google and hoped somebody had written an article about that. But now I just plug it into ChatGPT. I ask ChatGPT, "Why are hamsters solitary?" and it gives me an interesting answer. So I use it for that. I do use it for research purposes. That's also really useful. So for example, not long ago for something that I was writing for my newsletter, I had observed this phenomenon through stuff that I saw on social media and in some marketing of sharing your mistakes, of screwing up in some way and then sharing those mistakes publicly and then being rewarded for it. People would find it charming. They would like you more as a result.
And I wondered, "Has anyone done any research on that? Like, why is that? What is that phenomenon?" So I went to ChatGPT and asked. I said, "You know, here are a couple examples that I'm observing in which somebody reveals a mistake that they made, and they seem to be rewarded for it. People seem to like it. Is there like a psychological study about this, or is this a known phenomenon?" And indeed, it turns out that in 1966, a psychologist did a study that identified this and called it the Pratt-Fall effect, and it's become known as the Pratt-Fall effect. So that's great. Now that I know that, I can research the Pratt-Fall effect. And then I wrote a LinkedIn post about it, and then I did a newsletter about it. And you know, it's great.
So anyway, I use ChatGPT for that. I am experimenting with some specialized tools for AI. So, for example, this is one of my favorites: there's a company, a startup that I'm an advisor to called Crowdwave, Crowdwave. And Crowdwave, which is at crowdwave.ai, is AI-powered audience insights research. So, in other words, if you wanted to survey consumers on a specific question, then you could just ask Crowdwave to mimic your target audience and then ask questions of that target audience. You could say, "I want to talk to 500 millennial moms who buy peanut butter for their children," whatever. Then, ask them all sorts of questions, either multiple choice or long form answer. And it'll think like them and respond like them.
This isn't meant to replace talking to your consumer, but it's a great supplement to that. You're able to do it a lot more and cheaper than actually talking to consumers. But I started using it to test out email subject lines. So I would have it think like my newsletter audience. I have a newsletter called One Thing Better, and I would have it think like my newsletter audience, and then I would have it, and then I would give it like 15 subject lines from that I am frankly, ChatGPT, thought of for my next newsletter.
And then I would ask Crowdwave, "Would you open an email with this subject line? Would you open an email with that subject line?" And then I take the top two performing subject lines, the two that the AI audience thought were the most compelling subject lines. Then, I use those two as my actual live A-B test when I send the newsletter out. So, therefore, I'm not just picking two subject lines out of nothing and then testing them live, which is what an A-B test is. Instead, I get to pre-test it. I get to test 15 and then just take the top two and then put the top two into the test for the actual live newsletter launch.
And I found that doing this has increased my open rate by like 7%, which is great. So these are places where I'm finding efficiencies, I'm finding value that didn't exist before, which is exciting. But again, it's not to me replacing perfect systems from before; it's replacing a lot of guesswork or kind of inefficient searching around, and it's just making all of that faster.
Glasp: Wow, that's amazing. Wow, 7% by A-B testing. And also, you mentioned about your newsletter, and we are huge fan of your newsletter, One Think Better. And we are always wondering, we're always talking, "Oh, how does he get the ideas? Like this amazing idea, like how to be a powerful communicator." And you mentioned like the thoughtful effect and so on. I recently read your newsletter. How do you usually get the idea? Do you have someone you follow, or is that something you came up with while you're walking or taking a shower? And I'm always curious about that.
Jason: Yeah, so I appreciate that, just for context for people who don't know. So my newsletter is called One Thing Better. Each week, we will discuss one way to be more successful and satisfied and build a career or company that you love. And you can find that at... onethingbetter.email. Just that it's a web address. So plug it into a browser, onethingbetter.email. So it comes out weekly, and true to its name, each edition is about one thing that you can do, but it's told in about a thousand-word essay. What I usually structure it in that I have a kind of opening where I articulate a problem that people have. Then, I introduce a story that brings that problem to life and drives towards a solution with an exercise. That's usually the format that it follows.
So, where do I get my ideas? Honestly, the answer is that I get my ideas from the real world. I am not much of an idea generator, like standing in the shower and just coming up with ideas or walking down the street and coming up with ideas. Generally, I come up with my ideas through conversations with people. And this, I think, is one of the most valuable and overlooked ways to generate ideas for anything, which is when you are out in the world talking with people, you are constantly coming up with or being presented with interesting ideas. Sometimes, let's say you're talking with a friend and they have a problem. And in trying to solve that problem for them, you give them some advice. And in the process of giving them that advice, you kind of come up with something on the fly. We've all done that. Maybe it's just sort of combining something that you did in the past yourself with some advice you heard somewhere.
And I don't know, you just kind of make a connection, and you tell them this, and they say, "Wow, I never thought of it that way." At that moment, as soon as they say, "Wow, I've never thought of it that way," you need to stop, and you need to write that down. Write it down. I use just a reminders app on my phone. The reminders app on my phone is full of every time that I said something and someone found it useful, every time someone asked me a really interesting question, or every time someone said something and it got me thinking. I just write all that stuff down. And that now is the log of ideas that I have for my newsletter.
So that's step one is that I need to know, I need to sort of be capturing ideas and idea generation in real time. And then also, by the way, sometimes I'm just exploring my curiosity. So I might notice, like I said, that when people share their mistakes, they seem to be rewarded for it. That's just something I noticed. So that's interesting. Take it to the next step. If you notice something, be curious about it, and then do something about it. Sometimes you got to call someone, but now with ChatGPT, it's kind of amazing. You can just kind of ask it: "Does any research exist on this? Are there any insights on this?" And that'll help you kind of get to a really interesting starting place.
So I know I'm capturing ideas. And then the next thing is kind of unpacking something that I told you a minute ago, which is the structure. So I have this structure of my newsletter and the value of the structure of the newsletter, which, again, is I open by stating a problem. Then, I tell a story that brings the problem to life and drives towards a solution. I have a solution. I generally have some kind of exercise or something, so you can do it yourself. So that means that I have a checklist for every idea.
So when I write an idea down in my like reminders app because it came up in conversation, then how I know that idea is ready to be turned into a newsletter is I ask myself, "Do I know exactly the problem that this idea solves for? Do I have a good and compelling story to share about it? And can I come up with, or do I have some kind of exercise that can help bring the solution to life?" And when I have those things, sometimes it comes through just kind of thinking or playing around with it. But sometimes, it comes from writing down an idea, I shared earlier, 30% of your brain for a hundred percent of the value. I've been saying that now in conversation, and I like it, but I don't have a good story attached to it yet.
I don't have a good, perfect way to bring it to life. So I haven't written about it yet, but one day I bet I'll talk to somebody and they'll have done something. And I'll be like, "That's exactly like my 30% thing." And then, suddenly I will have what I need because now I have a story, and then I can introduce the idea and I can come up with some kind of formula or exercise to find it. So that's how I'm coming up with ideas. I'm just capturing them. And then I'm weighing them against, like the structure that I know I need to communicate it properly.
Glasp: And then when you distribute your idea, and one of my favorites, your newsletter is how to be, how to become a powerful communicator. And in the news, in the content, you mentioned that, oh, we should always think about, you know, for the audience that, you know, oh, is this for me or not? So because people care about, "Is this for me or not" when you convey an idea, do you have that in your mind always when you structure an idea or when you, you know, it's like putting some facts and some, you know, takeaways and so on? Do you think this always?
Jason: No, well, so two ways to answer that. I mean, number one, what you just said, to be clear about it, what you're talking about is what I call "the first question." So the first question is the first question that anybody is going to ask whenever they encounter anything. So if that, that means that if you make a product and that product is on a shelf, then it's the first question they will ask when they see your product on the shelf. If you make a podcast, then it's the first question they'll ask when they first encounter the very idea of your podcast and when they download or try every single episode of your podcast.
And that question is, "Is this for me, or is this not for me?" That's it. That's what they're going to ask. That's what you ask whenever you encounter anything. So, effective communicators anticipate that question and answer it before someone even has to ask it. And that means, you know, if it's in, if it's, if it's something about communication, oh, I see that I froze. I don't know when I froze. So sorry. Have I, have I been frozen for a while? Oh, there we go.
Glasp: No. Just three seconds.
Jason: So, you know, if that's a communication issue, then you are going to want to know, like at the, at the opening of a podcast episode, you're going to want to signal to your audience, what kind of value they're going to get from this so that they're going to stick around. In a newsletter, you better start it by explaining what is coming next. If you have a product with a package, then that package better explain clearly, like what this thing is, what the value proposition is, what the benefits are, right? That's what we're doing here.
So when I'm writing, it is a mix of, do I know how to articulate that at the very start? Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't, honestly; sometimes, I will; I have a good idea for a framework or a solution to something. And I write it, and then I kind of figure out exactly how it's most relevant to people. What problem is it solving? And, and, you know, I always have my wife read all my newsletters before they go out. And sometimes, she will tell me, she's like, "You know, I feel like you're promising something at the top, but then the rest of your newsletter is kind of actually about something else. Like it feels like it's actually about this thing." And I'll say, "You're right." And then I will just rework the top of the newsletter so that I'm now talking to the problem that I've solved in the newsletter.
You know, you don't, you, you, you don't need to know at the very start of creating something exactly how to communicate it to people. You need to create something good and useful and compelling, but then you need to figure out how it is it going to address people. How is it going to hook them? That's basic storytelling and human behavior.
You need to understand that people are driven by a kind of desire. Donald Miller says in his book, Building a Story Brand, that everyone wants one or two things. They either want to survive or they want to thrive. So, you know, which of those are we working from? And then what specific problem are people feeling? And then how would they articulate that in their own words, right? How, how would they wake up in the morning and say, "I have this problem," because if you can articulate that from their perspective, using their words, they're more likely to listen to you. Whereas if you're talking about a problem that they don't relate to, or they're, you're using words that they don't use themselves and they may miss it. They may not see that it's relevant to them.
So I'm always thinking about that, but sometimes I do write something or create something and then figure out how to connect it to people. But, you know, as long as you're thinking about it and you're making sure that at the end of the day, before you ship the thing, you've figured that out. It doesn't matter when in the process it comes.
Glasp: Totally. Yeah. Thank you. So yeah, since time is running up, two things: one, we want to ask you for advice since our audience is founders, executives, and also writers. Do you have some advice for them, or in other words, what's the best advice you've ever received?
Jason: Yeah. Either way. Yeah. Well, I'll do the latter because I'm full of random advice, but it's hard to know how to speak to a broad audience like that with a piece, one piece of advice. I get to interview a lot of famous people. One of the ones that stuck with me was talking to Malcolm Gladwell. So Malcolm Gladwell, bestselling author and podcaster and so on. I wanted to know from him, it wasn't the reason we talked, but while we were talking, I was curious to understand what is a Malcolm Gladwell project to Malcolm Gladwell. How does he filter for what is going to be Malcolm Gladwell-y? How does he know that something is right for him?
And he said to me that, to the best of his ability, he tries not to think that way. He does not want to define himself because he said, "Self-conceptions are powerfully limiting." That's what he said. "Self-conceptions are powerfully limiting," which is to say that if you have too narrow a definition of yourself and what you do, then you will turn down all of these interesting and exciting opportunities around you that don't match that narrow definition. But those other exciting opportunities might be the most transformative ones.
So you do not want to define yourself too narrowly. And I would say that is very relevant for your audience of founders, executives, and writers, all of whom will be called upon to do things outside of whatever original narrow definition of self they have. I am a writer by trade. I am a writer. But if I defined myself only as "I only write for consumer audiences," for example, "I only write magazine stories for consumer audiences," then it would have never occurred to me to, or I would have never permitted myself to build out a keynote talk that I now travel the country and the world doing, or to start advising founders or to co-found a business, helping CPG founders.
All of that stuff that I'm doing is drawn from my abilities as a writer to be a strong communicator. But it's because I didn't narrowly define how I am a writer that I gave myself the space to grow and build. So anyway, self-conceptions are powerfully limiting. That's my favorite piece of advice.
Glasp: I love that. Thank you. And this is the last question. Since Grasp is a platform where people share what they are reading and learning as their digital legacy. And we want to ask you this question: What legacy or impact do you want to leave behind for the future generations?
Jason: You know, I don't think it matters. I don't think it matters. Think about this for yourself. I realized this a little while ago, and I found it kind of horrifying, but it's true. So you don't have to do this, but I'm just going to ask you and as a means of asking everyone watching. Okay. Tell me your parents' names. You should probably know your parents' names. Tell me your grandparents' names. You probably know them. Tell me your great-grandparents' names. Maybe you know them. Tell me your great-great-grandparents' names. You probably have no idea. And in every generation that went back, you also have less and less information about them.
So I can tell you some of my great-grandparents' names. I know that, for example, that my great-grandfather was named Abe, but I couldn't tell you anything about Abe. All I know at this point, for this generation of human beings, Abe lives on as just a guy with the name Abe. And in the next generation, my kids probably won't even know that. So I don't think that we should spend a lot of time worried about legacy because we will be forgotten. Instead of worrying about what future generations will think of us, because they will think nothing of us, just as I do not spend any time thinking about the person who lived in my house. My house was built in 1925. I spend no time thinking about the person who moved into this house in 1925. I don't know who they are. I will never know who they are. It's not relevant to me.
So why would I expect that someone 100 years from now would have any care about me? Instead, I would focus on what you can do right now to build a fulfilling life to serve the people around you and create things that you're incredibly proud of. And you can. Don't worry about the legacy because it's meaningless.
Glasp: Thank you for a beautiful answer. Thank you. And thank you for joining today. And we learned a lot from you.
Jason: Thank you. Yeah. Oh, my pleasure. Hey, well, thanks, guys. I appreciate it. It was a great conversation.
Glasp: Thank you.
