SPI 736: How to Build Your Vision with Jason Feifer

SPI 736: How to Build Your Vision with Jason Feifer

Jason Feifer: I would write a story for a magazine and then I would move on and write another story for a magazine that had nothing to do with the first one. I was never accruing anything. I wasn’t accruing audience. I wasn’t accruing knowledge. I was starting from zero every single time.

Entrepreneurs do not operate that way. They operate vertically. You do something so that it is the foundation upon which the next thing is built, so that it is the foundation upon which the next thing is built. That is not, I would argue, a natural way of thinking. You have to learn that way of thinking.

And once you do, it totally alters the way that you do everything.

Pat Flynn: We are making some big changes here at SPI. It’s going to be an exciting end of the year here and an amazing 2024. Hopefully, for all of you as well. If you heard last week’s Friday episode, we had Terry Rice on, somebody who’s now gonna be officially a part of the SPI team, but not on payroll like an employee of SPI like some of our other amazing people, but as something that we like to call Experts In Residence.

And later this month, we’re launching the EIR program specifically for the SPI Pro community. The SPI Pro community, as you might know, is for the people in our audience who have established businesses who want to connect with each other, mastermind, get coaching from established business owners like Terry and today’s guest, Jason Feifer. These experts are bringing different styles, different experiences, and different skill sets to you inside of SPI Pro, and we’re going to use the opportunity today to speak to Jason Feifer. We talked with Terry last week. We’re talking with Jason today, and you’re going to hear a very different approach to business, a very different style, and Jason is an incredible communicator.

He’s an author. And he’s got JasonFeifer.com where he runs a newsletter that you can get access to in a book that you might want to check out if you haven’t already. We’ve heard him on the show before when we’ve had our entrepreneur roundtables. He is the editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine.

And here he is for episode 736, the official welcome as a part of SPI’s EIR, or Experts In Residence, program. Jason Feifer, here he is.

Announcer: You’re listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, a show that’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, he wants to eat hot wings with Sean Evans on Hot Ones one day, Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: Jason, welcome back to the SPI podcast. Thanks for joining me today, man.

Jason Feifer: Always great to be here.

Pat Flynn: It’s exciting because we’re going to be talking about your involvement now in SPI, even more than already. You’ve been a guest here on our Friday episodes with Matt and our round table with Terry as well, but now you’re going to come in a little bit more pronounced as one of our Experts In Residence.

And I couldn’t be more excited about that. And the community couldn’t be more excited about that either. So we’ll talk about that in a little bit, but just thank you so much for being here and. Before we dive into that kind of stuff, I want to know a little bit more about just you as a person, actually, you and I haven’t really had a chance to just sit down and get to know each other in a more outside of business arena, but outside of business, what do you love to do? What gives you energy?

Jason Feifer: Yeah, I appreciate that, Pat. It’s, it’s, yeah, it’s funny. You are one of these people for me. I’m sure we all have these people who we’ve really only gotten to know in like work and meeting settings. Right. It’s like, it’s like I know how to talk business with you. So I love that question of yours.

What gives me energy? It’s something that I’ve thought a lot about. I have a friend whose name is Katherine Morgan Schafler. She’s a psychotherapist. And she said this question to me a little while ago, as we were talking about balancing work and life and all that. And she said, what’s the point of building something if you can’t maintain it?

And that question haunted me. What’s the point of building something if you can’t maintain it? Because I have spent many years building something that feels, in a way, a little unsustainable. And I’m motivated by a real window of time, which I know sounds really abstract, but I’ll put some specifics to it in a second.

And I, I know that window of time won’t be open forever and I want to use it to its maximum availability. What I’m talking about is when I became Editor in Chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, I realized, wait a second, this isn’t just job. This isn’t just an opportunity to do really good at this thing, which is, which has been my whole career.

My whole career had been being hired at a magazine and doing a good job at that magazine and figuring out the next magazine to go to. And when I became editor in chief of Entrepreneur Magazine and people stopped treating me like a It’s a magazine editor, and they started treating me like an authority, which was a very weird, unfamiliar role for me.

Eventually I realized, oh my gosh, I will not be editor in chief of this magazine forever. Nobody holds a role forever. But being here right now, gives me this chance to transform and to be the thing that everyone thinks that I am. Some kind of authority, some person who can speak with authority, some person who has access to lots of people and can transfer all that knowledge in compelling ways.

I can build a personal brand. I can build new businesses for myself. I can do a lot of things. Doors will open for me right now for a limited time. How do I take advantage of that? And I just started running as fast as I could. And figuring things out, figuring out my voice, figuring out my perspective, figuring out who I am to an audience.

How do I even build an audience? The kinds of things that SPI really guides people through. And it’s the reason that people are so attracted to this community is grappling with the things that I’ve been grappling with. And years into this, I had a lot of successes, put out a book, built a really thriving speaking business.

I’ve built an online audience. I have the kinds of things that I wanted to have, but what I didn’t have was time anymore. Thrown all of it at this project and when my friend Katherine at the beginning of this year said what’s the point of building something if you can’t maintain it, I realized it is now time to try to figure out how to stop running as hard and build into my life the things that give me not just professional success, but the energy towards continuing to build that professional success.

And what is that energy? Where does it come from? I’m still working on that, Pat, I’ll be honest with you. Comes from taking long walks, comes from screwing around on the guitar, comes from coffee with friends, comes from recognizing that sometimes like people like you, which is to say, like I said, those people who I only know in these work settings, maybe it’s time to just like carve out time and take a walk, get a pastry with somebody, just like talk about something that’s not work related.

Those things are important. We sometimes forget those things and I’m trying to remember them.

Pat Flynn: I mean, that’s an amazing and vulnerable and very honest answer, and I think we’re all still, all of us are striving to find what makes us wake up in the morning beyond just kind of the work and the paycheck and those kinds of things, and what’s really neat is with the community, you’re able to find people who you might not have found otherwise who can lift you up in different kinds of ways, and I found that You know, I’ve joined several mastermind groups for the purpose of growing my business over the years.

And I’m in two that have been around for over a decade. And what’s funny is most of the conversations that we have, I mean, we do talk about business, but we talk about life. We talk about family. We talk about all these other things that I didn’t join really the group for, but that’s what. Really gives me the energy to, to join them every single week.

And, and I’m just so grateful for that. And the opportunity to now chat with you, not just here on the podcast, but even more so as colleagues inside of SPI is just really great. And it feels like that you love to build things. I mean, you’ve written a book called Build For Tomorrow. So building as a, as a part of your repertoire, if you will, what gets you so amped up about building things and now building community inside of Pro, and also just All the projects that you work on, like what about those things do you think is the common thread line for you?

Jason Feifer: You know, it’s funny. I bet my answer will be very familiar to the people who are listening to this. In the earlier parts of my career, I thought of myself as being in skill set building mode. I was a magazine editor. What I wanted to do was make sure I was really good at all the different elements of that, which kind of build up from what’s called packaging, these kind of small bitsy things in magazines to more long form editing, to long form writing, to managing other writers, to having a broader vision.

I was skillset building, but my desire was always to build towards ultimately having my own voice and my own perspective and being able to create things because I have a vision, not that I’m stepping into somebody else’s magazine and understanding their mission and then helping to contribute to it.

But what is my vision? And I knew, you know, earlier in my career, I didn’t have a vision. I was learning. But what, what has always excited me was getting to that place, and that to me is building. Building is when you get to the place in your career or your life where you can envision something that doesn’t exist, or you know that by putting something on your shoulders, you can do it.

You can create something that didn’t, it wasn’t there. You can make something work in a way that other people can’t. You can get it over the finish line that there’s just so much, there’s an incredible power to that, especially when you marry it with the reason you’re doing this is because the thing that you’re creating is going to be useful to other people.

Like when you know what you have to offer and you know who you have to offer it to, there’s a real magic to that. And that’s the thing that’s come into focus for me in the last number of years. And I have really leaned into where I think I’m strongest, and where I’m strongest is, is in communicating, is in helping people understand things, see things.

I feel like I’m a processor of information. I can, I can hear a lot, I can, I can learn a lot, and then I can turn around and, and help. it be relevant to other people. I’ll tell you what I suck at. What I suck at is like sales and like product development. And so I’m, I’m working on that. And we’ll talk a little bit more about my role as expert in residence at SPI.

And one of the motivations for me doing this with you guys is actually to get a good inside look at how organizations are structured and and how a company like SPI is has built the kind of thing that it’s built because I know how to communicate with people inside a community. I don’t know how to build a community.

That’s like a, it’s like an organizational thing that I haven’t figured out. So I’m, I’m like thrilled to see how things operate. And at the same time, I want to maximize the thing that I do best, which is, which is to build, which is to create, which is to know what you’re really, really good at. Nobody ever said Shaquille O’Neal was a bad basketball player because he couldn’t shoot three pointers, right?

Like he was really good at the thing. He was really good at I Have come to a place in my career where I know what I’m really good at and it excites me every day to get up and be good at that thing and to build things off of that and to then find the right partners who can take care of the parts of building that they’re best at too.

Pat Flynn: That is amazing I mean Communication is key in everything and to have a communicator come on board who can also not just say things and motivate like you do, but also discover, you’re able to discover perhaps the hidden talents or the unknown attributes of a person to be able to kind of unlock that and turn that into something else.

And I’m curious, like as your role inside of Entrepreneur Magazine, you’ve been in this role for how long now?

Jason Feifer: Oh I joined in 2015.

Pat Flynn: So I’ve been a while 15, so eight years coming on nine, right? You’ve been able to experience a lot of different voices as a person sort of overseeing the magazine being put together before it’s published.

What are some of the skills that you’ve picked up and things that you’ve kind of siphoned from your work at entrepreneur, which you’re still there, obviously. But, you know, I’m curious what. What are the skill sets that you picked up there that would be very beneficial for the communities that we are involved in now at SPI Pro?

Jason Feifer: So, I love that question. I’ll split it into two answers. There’s what I’ve learned from having access to incredible entrepreneurs, which is a big part of the job at Entrepreneur. And then there’s what I’ve learned by navigating this work myself. What I’ve learned from other entrepreneurs… It’s funny. I wouldn’t have had words for this for most of my career, but it snapped into focus a number of years ago.

So in addition to Build for Tomorrow, that book that you mentioned that I did, which is a book for anybody navigating change in their career. Before that I wrote a romantic comedy with my wife. It’s very, very different. Yeah. It’s called, it’s called Mr. Nice Guy. It was so fun. You know, really explored like a different area of creativity, which I know is, is a, you know, a big driver for you too.

And that many things that you do. And so we wrote this romantic comedy. It’s a novel that came out on St. Martin’s press. And when it came out, this was years and years ago. When it came out, I had this really interesting dual reaction. Writer friends of mine, when I told them that this book was coming out, they would say, Oh my God, that’s awesome. Congratulations.

And entrepreneurs, when I told them that this book was coming out, this romantic comedy that had nothing to do with my work is editor in chief of Entrepreneur Magazine. They would say, Oh, that’s interesting. What are you going to do with it? Mm. Mm hmm. And… Oh, man. I couldn’t understand what was happening for a while.

And then I realized what was happening. And what was happening was that to entrepreneurs… The only reason to do something is because it is the foundation upon which the next thing will be built. And so when they heard that I was publishing this romantic comedy novel that I wrote with my wife, their immediate assumption was there’s a next move here, right?

We’re gonna put this book out and then we’re gonna open a It’s like school to teach writing, novels, there’s something, so there’s got to be some next play here. And there wasn’t, Pat, there was no other play. It was just that, you know? And look, that’s fine. There, it’s, it, not everything has to lead to everything.

But, but what I realized was that I had come from a world previous, like my career in media up until then was really career oriented around what I now have come to think of as horizontal thinking, which is to say, you do a thing, you put it out in the world, you move on. You do another thing, you put it out in the world, you move on, right?

I would write a story for a magazine and then I would move on and write another story for a magazine that had nothing to do with the first one. I was never accruing anything. I wasn’t accruing audience. I wasn’t accruing knowledge. I was starting from zero every single time.

Entrepreneurs do not operate that way. They operate vertically. It’s vertical thinking. You do something so that it is the foundation upon which the next thing is built, so that it is the foundation upon which the next thing is built. It stacks. It stacks. That is not I would argue a natural way of thinking. You have to learn that way of thinking.

And once you do, it totally alters the way that you do everything. I have been thinking and stacking that way ever since it clicked in my head. Everything that I described to you, building the audience, getting the book, doing the speaking, like all those things are connected. I do one so that it builds to the next.

I understood that writing this book was going to drive more speaking business. It was part of the reason I did it. That’s how I’m thinking about it now. I wasn’t thinking about it then. That has given me an ability to build towards a kind of purposefulness that was really exciting. So, so that is one way in which I was really transformed.

I like to translate that for other entrepreneurs. A thing that I’ll, I’ll love talking with the community, in SPI about is, is helping people get a clarity of purpose and vision. Helping people understand how the thing that they’re doing now fits into the next thing. People oftentimes get anchored down to the way in which they’re doing something, and it inhibits their ability to see how what they’re doing now transfers to the thing that they need to do next.

And that I have learned from other entrepreneurs. It’s been, it’s been tremendous as a person navigating this. Also myself, you know, learning how to connect with and understand an audience has been a really powerful thing at entrepreneur and every other magazine that I worked at. I was basically handed the audience.

Here’s who we reach. But an entrepreneur had the opportunity to define the audience. Who should we reach? And I’ll give you one example of how I thought about this. When I started at Entrepreneur in 2015, Entrepreneur really thought about itself as a small business brand. But I’m looking around and I’m seeing that so many different kinds of people think about themselves as entrepreneurs.

They talk about themselves as entrepreneurs. They don’t all own small businesses. Some of them do. Some of them just aspire to own something. Some of them are entrepreneurs, really, functionally. And I thought they’re all coming to entrepreneur because they all relate to this word, but we’re only speaking to a small segment of them.

What would it mean to speak to all of them? And what I came to realize was that the thing that everybody who calls themselves an entrepreneur has in common is that they all have the same emotional experience of being an entrepreneur. Sense of loneliness, of problem solving your way through walls, of challenging, of trying to create doors where others see walls.

That’s a thing that it doesn’t matter if you’re running a venture backed company in Silicon Valley or you just started a business last week. Everybody feels that emotional journey the same way. And I thought if we can speak to that, I think that we brought in our reach and we brought in our relevance.

And I have become obsessed with how to understand audiences and how to connect with them. Not just media audiences, but consumer audiences, business audiences. And so that’s another thing that I, I love taking to and helping entrepreneurs decode.

Pat Flynn: That’s so good. I mean, there’s a lot to unpack there. The idea of stacking versus just going horizontally.

I mean, you’re not saying that you shouldn’t also have your projects. And if you are curious about creating a romantic comedy yourself, that that’s something you shouldn’t do, right? But it’s just how does that fit into the sort of overall package of what it is that you’re building and creating? Because you’re right.

I think a lot of us go through life horizontally. It’s just one thing. Okay, that’s done. Move on to the next, move on to the next. But as entrereneurs we’re stacking. And that’s what’s really great about SPI pro in the way that we and credit to Matt and the entire community, Jill and everybody who has built this structure in a way where it allows entrepreneurs who are coming in to see that stacking ahead of time to go, okay, this is, this is where I’m starting, but then I’m going to add an email list to the audience building factor.

And then I’m going to have a podcast that builds a deeper relationship with those who may have found me in other different kinds of ways. And now we’re bringing in different voices, different experts with different styles. And I’d love to ask you with relation to that, what is your style and what do you hope to bring to the community at SPI Pro through the EIR program?

What, what, what are you most excited about and, and what, what have you got to bring?

Jason Feifer: Huh? What do I have to bring? Well, we’ll find out, won’t we? Look, I. I’m really excited to get involved in this because a thing that fuels me is helping people getting involved in ongoing challenges that people are grappling with.

I do a lot of startup advising and the reason I do it is just because I love being able to step into a moment where someone is grappling with something really hard like entrepreneurship is so hard and to be able to bring fresh eyes and pattern match what they are working on against the infinite variety of similar situations that I have got to witness gotten to witness that other other entrepreneurs have gone through right?

I often will hear somebody’s challenge working on something and say, you know, this reminds me of something that I learned from this CEO over there and then tell them that story and give them a framework through which they can now look at their challenge differently. I was afraid Pat, at first, when I got into this world of entrepreneurship, I was afraid that I wouldn’t be useful to people.

It might even seem like an imposter to people because. Something that I have not done is built and sold a company for some, you know, grand exit, which is what a lot of people I meet and interview have done. I’m not that, but what I came to realize was that I don’t need to be that. Other people can be that.

You want to talk specific financial strategies, don’t talk to me, but Matt is really good at that stuff, like you know, so it was almost like, great, there are, there are other people out there who know really well the things that I don’t know, and I don’t have to worry about knowing those, what do I know really well?

What I came to realize is that the thing that I understand really well, the thing that naturally clicks with me is how people think. And I think that ultimately business is a human thinking pursuit. Business is a, is a series of problem solving strategies. And you can learn as many tactical strategies as you want, but at some point it comes down to how do you implement that stuff in a human way?

How do you think through the challenges that are in front of you? I have spent so many years absorbing that kind of pattern recognition from entrepreneurs that I now find that I can walk into basically any situation with any entrepreneur and hear what they’re up to and have something to offer. And that feels like a magic power.

It’s like that’s incredible. It’s in full credit to the, who knows, thousands of entrepreneurs, tens of thousands that I’ve met along the way who have been open and vulnerable with me and have shown me how they’ve thought through the hardest things in their work and in their lives. And I got to absorb that.

I don’t show up at SPI saying I am the singular authority on one, two, three things. What I carry with me is It’s a really good sense of how people think and a really good ability to hear you and to understand you and to draw a line between what you’re going through and what somebody has already gone through.

And I’m excited to see where that goes.

Pat Flynn: I’m excited too, man. And I think we all are just. Access to what you have experienced over time and who you’ve chatted with is far and beyond just anything that I could ever have access to myself and that’s, this is why I sort of partnering with you in this way is, is really amazing. And we have Terry and, and many others who are coming on board later and into the future and of course our existing team, Matt and Jillian with their expertise, you know, it’s, it’s not just me anymore.

And I think that’s, what’s really great about this is, and I’m involved in EIR now as well in a more formal manner. So I mean, I’m showing up even more personally. So. Yeah. to the SPI pros that are out there, like, look out, you got a lot of great minds coming your way to help you out in whichever way you might need help.

And a lot of different styles. And if you’re not an SPI Pro, definitely check it out, SPIpro.com. To finish up here, Jason, I want to ask you if you and I… Have just a day not doing business together and we can just do the one thing that you’d want to do more than anything. What would you show me how to do?

And what are we enjoying together?

Jason Feifer: Oh my gosh. I haven’t had that day in so long that I say that’s like, it’s like asking me to flex a muscle. Well, we’re going to make it happen at work. I’m excited. I’m excited. Let’s do it. I mean, I’ll tell you this. This is not the best answer in the world, but when the pandemic began in March of 2020, my wife and I and at the time, two very little boys they were, I don’t know, four and crawling at the time.

They’re now four and eight. We were living in a tiny apartment in Brooklyn with no outdoor space, two bedrooms. We were just like, we’re going to go crazy in here. We don’t know how long this is going to last. The day school shut down, we basically raced to the airport and hopped on a plane and flew out to Colorado where we moved in with my parents and we stayed for 18 months, which was crazy.

And we stayed that long because we were able to get them into schools out there for summer camp and then school. We couldn’t do that in New York. So we stayed. That experience changed me in many ways. But one of the ways, which is to the answer to your question, one of the ways was that in New York, when you want to see somebody, it is almost always oriented around consumption.

You meet someone at a bar, you consume a drink, you meet someone at a coffee shop, you consume, you know, you meet someone for lunch or for dinner. You’re pretty much always consuming. In Boulder, Colorado, People, people take work hikes or they’ll just, they’ll hang out, but the way that they’ll hang out is that they’ll go walk around a lake or they’ll go walk up a mountain or something.

And that was so foreign to me. It didn’t make any sense to me. And it took a long time for me to, to be willing to do it for a, for a long time. I was like, these are not my people. What are these people doing? But then I started to do it and I loved it. And I realized that like moving your body with someone, getting some fresh air, seeing something, like having a just sensory input change, it opens up ideas, it creates better connections and I have tried to replicate that in New York now that we’re back in New York to varying degrees of success. Sometimes I will suggest to somebody that we take a walk around the park and they will be so uncomfortable with the idea that we, we have to meet at a coffee shop.

Like they just don’t know how to do it, but other people will, you know, Matt. The very beginning of this road here that leads me to being an expert in residence at SPI, was in New York and we spent the day and I, I just walked him around Brooklyn. It was hot out. I was wearing shorts. He dumbly was wearing jeans.

He was like sweating profusely, but I would love that he was willing to go there. So to your question, like, what would I do with a day? I mean, look, if we, if we could like I love traveling. You want to hop on a plane somewhere? That sounds awesome. But you know, if we just have like a day, truly just a day, I would say let’s carve out some time, let’s find a great long walk and let’s see something together and exchange ideas.

And I don’t think there’s much better than that.

Pat Flynn: That sounds amazing. Let’s make it happen, man. Let’s do it. . Thank you so much Jason. Appreciate you for those who are introduced to you for the first time here today, obviously we could find you inside the EIR program in SPI Pro, but also where else can we find you?

What else can we get involved with outside of SPI?

Jason Feifer: Yeah, I appreciate that. So I’ll give you two things. So number one is that book that I mentioned or that you mentioned that we both mentioned, which is called Build for Tomorrow. It’s a guidebook that I wrote for anyone navigating change in their in their lives or careers.

You can find that audiobook ebook, hardcover. You know, everything but stone tablet, we’ll get there next. And then also I wrote the, I write this newsletter, which is called One Thing Better each week, one way to be happier and more impactful at work and build a career or company you love. And I get such personal feedback from it because I really, I pour a lot of myself into it and.

I try to help people through the stickiest challenges that everyone faces. And so I’d love if you subscribe to that. It’s called One Thing Better. You can just go to onethingbetter.email. That’s a web address, onethingbetter.email. And actually, funny enough, Pat, I’ll be, I’ll be launching a premium version of that newsletter, but everybody who joins SPI will be getting that premium newsletter included.

So you don’t have to pay an additional dime. You’re already in. So I would love if you checked it out and you’ll have infinite ways to get in touch with me through SPI, but also everyone who hits reply to one of my emails, it goes straight to my inbox and I always read everything.

Pat Flynn: Amazing. Jason, thank you so much for your time today.

Looking forward to seeing you inside of the community and all the best.

Jason Feifer: Thank you, I’ll see you there. Thank you.

Pat Flynn: All right, I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Jason, just a wealth of knowledge. I hope that we get to have a hike one day and you’ll be able to have a lot of virtual hikes with him inside of SPI Pro when we launch it later this month with the EIR program.

The SPI Pro community already exists, obviously, but we are doing a lot to make it even better and to be more active in there for you. I will be an EIR inside or an expert in residence inside of SPI Pro as well, which means you’re going to see from me weekly. I’m going to post and keep you updated on things, and have the opportunity to connect with you in a more direct manner there as well.

So if you want to check out more, go to smartpassiveincome.com/EIR. Definitely check out Jason’s stuff. JasonFeifer.com. Check him out.

Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I’m your host, Pat Flynn. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. Our senior producer is David Grabowski, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media, and a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Catch you next week!