Dorie Clark - Reinventing You Author | The Hidden Cost of Personal Transformation

I had a lot of visions in my 20s about what I wanted to do professionally. It took me a while to find my footing. Eventually, I ran a nonprofit and perhaps surprisingly, that actually opened my eyes to entrepreneurship. She didn't just teach strategy. She redefined what it means to stand out in a crowded world. Dory Clark has been named one of the top 50 business thinkers in the world multiple times and recognized as the number one communication coach globally. It's not really where you start, but it absolutely is about where you end up. Are you open to recognizing that this needs to be done? If you are, it actually does open up a world of opportunity. When you are reinventing, we often make a very casual assumption, we just assume, that the people who will be our strongest boosters in reinvention, which is your close friends in your family, but for a lot of reinventions, that actually is not true because your reinventions sometimes threatens their identity. A former presidential campaign spokeswoman and a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review, she teaches executive education at Columbia Business School. Her work has helped professionals all over the world build influence, amplify their ideas, and reinvent their careers. One of the really effective ways to get known for your ideas is to codify something. Sometimes we just have to wait much longer than we want for the goals that we want to achieve, but you keep at it oftentimes, it really will work. You started in philosophy and theology. You shifted to journalism, politics, and then before all of you did all of this before finding your path to business, thought, leadership. So how did these early, I don't want to call them failures, but sort of reinventions or iterations of who you are. How did they shape your approach to reinvention and to long-term thinking? I had a lot of visions in my 20s about what I wanted to do professionally, and the first one was that I wanted to be a university professor. I'd gone through and gotten my master's degree and I thought, okay, I'll get a doctor and I'll be a professor, and I ended up getting turned down by all the doctoral programs I applied to. So I had to scramble and find a plan B, and I decided that would become a journalist, which has similar DNA to being a professor. You're writing, you're reading, you're talking to people, and that was a really satisfying career for me, but unfortunately it didn't last very long, because I ended up getting laid off about a year into my career as a journalist, and because there was, at the time I thought it was a recession, but actually it was really just the start of a cascade where the news industry got essentially demonetized, and we now have about half as many journalists in America as we did 20 years ago. I mean, the numbers are so stark, so not surprisingly, I couldn't get a journalism job anywhere else, so I had to reinvent again. I worked in politics on a couple of political campaigns, which were very high profile, but Governor's race and a presidential race, but they both lost. So it took me a while to find my footing. Eventually I ran a nonprofit for a couple of years, and perhaps surprisingly, that actually opened my eyes to entrepreneurship, because I realized that running the nonprofit, if you're doing it well, you're basically running a small business, and I thought, oh, well, this is how you do it. I didn't realize there was how you do it. So I decided that it wouldn't actually be that much of a stretch to go into business for myself, which is what I've been doing for the past 18 years now. So interesting. So a couple ideas out of that. First of all, I want to understand, because I want to talk about the nonprofit and entrepreneurship, because I actually believe that most people don't treat nonprofits like businesses, and they should. That's a whole other aside. When you think about reinvention, I think that one idea around reinvention is really simple, but very hard for people. It's the will. It's the grit. It's a determination to keep reinventing again and again and again and again, because it takes a lot of energy. I mean, anytime I've switched careers and you've done it a few times yourself in the past, it's like, okay, I'm starting from scratch. Where do I even begin? And then it's a lot for people. It's a skill that when you master it, I think it's a great skill, because it really future proofs yourself. But I would say that most people defer to not reinventing, whether or not they are in a career, nine to five W tube, and they just keep doing their thing their whole life. Or even if they're entrepreneurial, they build one thing and they just want to keep building the same thing again and again and maybe they haven't exited and they build the same company again after the non-compete expires. So what is the strategy? What is the mindset? What is the hack? The skill that allows you to keep reinventing successfully? Incident really clarified this for me early on. I had just written my first book, which was called reinventing you. And I was doing this like book fair where you were signing books and things like that. And a woman came up to the table where I was at and she picked up the book and started flipping through it. And I think she didn't quite understand that I was the author because she probably wouldn't have said this if she did. But she looked at it for a minute or two and then she flung it down. She seemed to have this great animus toward it and she just muttered under her breath. Well, I'm over 50 too late for me. And I thought, oh my god, that's like the saddest thing I've ever heard. Because of course, I mean, the average lifespan of an American woman now is in their mid 80s for people who are younger, you know, under 30. It's going to be mid 90s if not more. And so the idea that you are writing off 30, 40 years of your life and just saying, well, I'm done now just seems so ominous to me and so depressing. And I thought, wow, you know, this is this is what we're fighting against. This is what we really need to help people understand. Why do you think people are so comfortable writing off 40 years of their life? I think that a part of it, a big part of it is to your point exhaustion. They feel worn down by life. And so they don't feel like they have the energy to do it. I think a lot of it is a lack of self efficacy that they feel like life happens to them and they don't have a lot of control over their circumstances. And I think what's great about entrepreneurship is that fundamentally, I mean, that mentality is almost antithetical to the idea of entrepreneurship. Like when you have an entrepreneurial mentality, the entire point is that you can influence circumstances that you can create something that didn't exist. And you know, we are not passive consumers of our life. We are people who are actors and creating movement and momentum. And I really want more people to be able to to feel that. And of course, you know, this is the ultimate, you can't lead a horse to water kind of thing. In reinventing you, I tried really hard because I had gone through a lot of reinventions, mostly not willingly, but because things didn't work out. And it felt hard to me. It felt complicated to me. And I wanted to create a resource that would make it easier for other people. But of course, the truth is if you read the book and you're motivated, hopefully it does make it easier for you. But if someone is just writing themselves off before they even engage, there's not much you can do for those kinds of folks. They have to be going into a willing already. I mean, or have, you know, there's a great quote from Nietzsche, which is a big enough why can endure anyhow. And so the truth is, you don't necessarily have to be excited about your reinvention. You know, I mean, a lot of times things are foisted upon us. I didn't love it that I was laid off from my newspaper job. I would have preferred to keep being a journalist. But I needed to pay bills, honestly. And the cheap skates that I worked for gave me four days of severance pay. So yeah, I had worked there for a year. So they're like, well, you get a year, you know, you get a week's pay for every year you worked here. So they had me work on Monday. And then they're like, well, pay you through the end of the week. Like, wow, that's super kind of you. Then the next day I was laid off on Monday, September 10th, 2001. So the next day is like the worst day in American history to be looking for a job. I don't think anybody's trying to hire right then. That is exactly right. So I just thought, okay, the things are getting real here. And I realized that whether I wanted to, you know, mourn the state of affairs of losing my job, I didn't have time to. I didn't have the opportunity to. I needed, I needed to find a way to bring in revenue. And so my reinvention process was hastened by that exigency. And I think it's, it's not really where you start in terms of your desire for reinvention. But it absolutely is about where you end up. Are you, are you open to recognizing that this needs to be done? Whether you want to or not, it needs to be done. And if you are, then I think it actually does open up a world of opportunity. So one, one thing that I think people will be curious about because you were saying that you were forced to reinvent yourself. But maybe I'm missing part of that story because I don't feel as if yes, you were laid off. But to reinvent yourself into a new person and a new category, why would you have not just gone back and tried to get an apply for a hundred other journalist jobs, for example? So there was a, there was something that prompted complete reinvention versus just doing the same thing again and again and again and again. Yeah, absolutely. And that was additional rejection because I understand. The main goal that I had was, you know, in Boston, it's true. If I had been super motivated, I suppose I could have applied for journalism jobs all over America. But I wanted to stay in Boston. And the big game in town was the Boston Globe. And so I thought, great, okay, I'll try to work for the globe. And they were having a hiring freeze because in the immediate post 9-11 aftermath, they froze everything. So they weren't taking on new hires. And that lasted for probably six plus months. But eventually they did come to me. And they, in the meantime, had invented a new category, which they called, and forget what it was. But it was like, you weren't an actual reporter. You were like, like a AAA reporter or something. It was just something ridiculous. There was a classification that they gave you as an excuse to pay you less money. And they said, well, would you like that? Love when companies figure out how to do that, right? Yeah, it was clever. It was clever. But my pride was too great, Scott. And I'm just like, no, I am not going to accept your crappy underpaid job. I refuse to do it. And so I ended up switching over at that point into working in politics. So I think that what you experienced at that point is what a lot of people experienced during COVID. And getting laid off from companies they thought they would never get to get laid off of. They would never get laid off from excuse me. So when that happened to you and you pursued the next thing and the next thing and the next thing, what was your personal view on career security, future proofing yourself? Did you approach the next thing with more trepidation or did you jump into it just as quickly as you jumped into journalism? How does this sort of form and shape your worldview? And I'm assuming that your worldview towards reinvention towards playing a long game towards future proofing yourself, that's evolved over time. It talked to me about some of the things that you started to even think about in your life, how you wanted to approach your next career so that this couldn't happen again. Yeah, well, you're absolutely right that after the experience of getting laid off from my, you know, really my first real job, my first full-time job, it sinks in very viscerally that jobs are not secure things. I mean, I didn't see it coming at all and then you get called in at four o'clock in the afternoon and you have whatever, 40 minutes to clean out your desk and be gone by the end of the day. And that's it. And so things really can turn on a dime and I realized that a lot in that moment. But I think that another moment that crystallized it for me, I mean, when you're reinventing, there's a lot of push pull because for many people, unless you, you know, have spent a long time really, you know, longing for this new direction, there's things that you miss about the past and you really can't get it back. I mean, this is kind of this liminal state where you know you need to move forward, but you kind of don't want to fully. And so for me, it played out with a phone conversation that I had. I was freelancing as a journalist to make ends meet after I got laid off. And so I was, you know, hoping to get hired on by the globe, you know, trying to scrape some stories together. I get paid $200 of story. So I was trying to write as many as I could. That's not a lot. Yeah. Yeah, it was a little hard to, to make rent that way, but, but I was, I was trying. But I got a call from a guy who I knew because he was a political consultant in town. And I often had interviewed him for the politics stories that I had done. And he knew obviously that I had lost my job because I wasn't calling him anymore. And he had just signed on to be a consultant for this governor's race. And they were staffing up. And he, then you do a communications director. And he reached out and said, oh, you know, would you, would you be interested in working for us? And, you know, and ultimately being the press secretary for this campaign. And immediately on the phone, I was like, oh, that's so nice of you. But, you know, no, thank you. That's, that's not for me. And, you know, he was like, oh, okay, well, you know, figured out, I'd ask. And I hung up. And I, I just sat there and thought about it for about an hour. I just, you know, sat stock still in my chair, just thinking like, wait, I had this instinctive reaction. And the instinctive reaction was, no, I'm a journalist. That's my identity. And so therefore, this doesn't fit my identity. But it turns out for a lot of us, when we're reinventing, there's, there's a lag between who we actually are sometimes in the world and how we think of ourselves. And I just, as I was sitting there, I'm like, okay, I am a journalist, air quotes. But I'm not earning a proper living. And the paper that I want to work for has a hiring freeze, they tell me they don't know when they're going to lift it. This could go on for years. This is kind of ridiculous, because the guy was coming to me with a really prime offer, with a, you know, kind of sexy campaign for governor. And I thought, you know, you're being ridiculous. You are being given an opportunity. You can't let your identity hold you back. You need to change. And so I called him back like an hour later. And I said, actually, no, I would be interested in coming in for an interview. I love that idea, because I, I also find my identity getting wrapped up in the thing that I'm building. And it, it completely, it completely, it blinds you to opportunity. So in what way did that play out for you, Scott? I think that for the longest time. So remember what before we started recording? I said, since the last company, I've tried to like build other companies. My identity has always been wrapped up in this idea of becoming an entrepreneur and building something from scratch. And technically, that's what I've done with the podcast, but I didn't equate podcasts to business because I always very much incorrectly idolize like the SF, you know, build a tech company from scratch. And I've never done it from scratch. I have joined a company as co-founder, CRO helped them grow, helped them scale and be acquired. But for me was this silly little idea that I wanted to build something a tech company from scratch. That was always what I wanted to do because the people that I looked up to, that's what they had done. And I think this plays out again and again and again in anyone's life. And it's not like listen, I've had identities that I had to let go of in the past that have allowed me to do bigger and better things. Even from a young age, I mean my identity was very different. It was wrapped up in almost what my parents did for a living. And that's what I thought I had to do. And my parents saying, you know, you should go to law school and that's what I wrapped my identity into. So when I took a different career path, that was very hard. So it's not, so you can accomplish overcoming this identity tied into your job, your career, what your definition of success is. But then it's very easy to let that thing, that identity that you just created start to consume you again. And then so yeah, so fast forward, I mean over the past, you know, five years now I've tried to build other things, nothing that successfully. So now I'm letting go of the building a tech company from scratch identity and then being okay with, well, you've actually built something that's quite successful, which is this show. So lean into that for the time being and see how far you can take it and stop building the show over here and then building companies over here because it's not serving you. But it took me almost five and a half years to figure that out. So and and I mean, it's not like it's not like I was hurting, but it still wasn't serving me optimally, if that makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's it's identities can be very useful as a motivating factor, an aspirational factor, but we have to be careful that it doesn't start consuming us or it doesn't start to become a straight jacket. Get me blind to opportunities, right? So get me blind to the fact that I could have tripled down on this that I could have, you know, time, time matters and then you only have so many hours in a day. So okay, so can I spend time trying to build a new company or think of a new product or spin up a new landing page or whatever or can I do another interview with an awesome person and we can have great conversation and that already gets pushed out to, you know, a couple hundred thousand people if not more. So why not, right? And I think that that's something that a lot of people struggle with. I think it ties into self-awareness. I'm and I also think that having people around you that can help wake you up and help you see your reality is very important. Like for example, like Gina, she's my better half, you haven't met her yet, one day you will because you're down the street. But when I get too wrapped up into the work that I'm doing, like she's a great, she's a great voice that just helps pull me out of my identity being wrapped up into the thing because she's like, let's take a look at what's actually going on in your life, what's actually working, what's actually not, and common sense sometimes isn't common. So she just makes it very clear. She's just very logical. She's like, look at Scott. This is what's going on. This is what's going right. Just focus on that and stop with all the other, you know, bullshit over here. So, but yes, it's something that I think everybody succumbs to. I think that the sad thing is that some people just don't escape it after five years. Some people never escape it their entire life. Yeah. And that's really sad. That woman who was 50 years old, she just never escaped what her identity was. And at 50 years old, even though it sounds like there was still stress and struggle in her life, she still wasn't able to pull herself out of it and see that I have 40 years plus minus left on this planet. Let's see what almost the same amount of time that I have been alive already, I can go do something else. I can completely reinvent my life and do a new thing. So yeah, it's a tough one. It's a very tough one. And how do you make sure that the identity that you have right now is serving you the best? Or is it always dangerous to tie your identity with your vocation and your job? Well, you know, you're in the tech world. So I'm sure you've heard this, but there's a great framing or formulation that they use often in Silicon Valley, which is strong opinions weekly held. And I like that a lot because I think it's great to have identities that you hold that you get excited about that you feel like are motivational in some way. I'm Italian American or I'm a husband and father or I'm a tech founder or whatever it is. Great. If it speaks to you, go all in on it, but also recognize that things change, you change, you know, holding too tightly to identities is how we get ourselves in trouble. You know, it's it's a person who's, you know, God forbid, they get divorced or their spouse dies or something like that. And then all of a sudden they don't have meaning if that was the thing that was holding them together or their startup goes belly up. And they don't know what to do with themselves because their worth was tied so intimately to that founder identity and, you know, well, who am I now? I'm nothing now. And of course, you're not nothing. You're so many things. But we need to be loosened off to recognize that it's okay. You can have multiple identities. They can change and it, it shouldn't chain us to something. What would be the hardest part of reinvention that nobody really speaks about? So the piece, you know, I've spent a decade talking about this and writing about this and the piece that keeps coming up that I think surprises people the most is that when you are reinventing, we often make a very casual assumption, you know, something that we don't really think about a lot because we just assume that the people who will be our strongest boosters in reinvention are the people who typically are our strongest boosters, which is your close friends and your family. And it's interesting. But for a lot of reinventions, that actually is not true because your reinventions sometimes threatens their identity. And so because of that, they can actually sometimes sometimes because they love you, they want to be the devil's advocate, you know, oh, have you really thought this through? This could be a terrible idea. Sometimes it's because they want that identity. They want to hold on, you know, no, I'm a lawyer's wife. I'm not a painter's wife or, you know, whatever it is. And so we take for granted that they will see things the way that we do that they'll be supportive. But we often need to treat our friends and family and it sounds weird to say, but like a constituency where we have to prove our serious ness where we have to almost, you know, show them our business plans as it were so that they understand that, you know, no, I'm not being careless with this. I'm not being casual. I'm not throwing things away. I'm really trying to be thoughtful with this new chapter. Quick question, what's your go to when you got 10 minutes before a meeting or a workout? For me, it just used to be whatever I could grab, which usually meant skipping meals entirely or just grabbing something that left me crashing an hour later because it was just full of garbage. That's why I'm partnering with Hule. This black edition ready to drink is a complete meal. So it has 35 grams of protein, six grams of fiber, 35 essential vitamins and minerals. 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If possible, sometimes it's not if they're your spouse, unless you take drastic, drastic measures, but say your friends, your family, your parents, is there a point where you have to limit your exposure because it's going to jeopardize your own reinvention? I mean, sometimes you might need to in extreme situations, but typically, what I would advise is, in this does not apply for forestry inventions. If you're laid off, people understand. You were laid off for us. They want you to get a job, yeah. They're generally behind that. But for the cases where it's more voluntary, especially if it's moving from something that is perceived as more prestigious or more secure to something that is less so, that's where you need to essentially come up with a strategy, a marketing plan. It's useful to war game. What are the objections going to be? And what are the places where your, I see an air quotes, your position looks weak, that you need to have responses for? And so, one thing that comes up a lot is, you know, well, have you thought this through? Are you serious about this? Are you going to change next week? And so, you know, people sometimes think that if someone has an idea that's out of the norm, that it's because they're flighty or they're a dilatant or something. And so, one important thing is to think about what is your consistency strategy in terms of communicating with other people. Maybe it's communicating on social media or what have you to show that no, no, it's not a passing fad that I want to become a photographer. I love photography. I'm passionate about it. This is the thing that I want to do. I'm not going to change next week. Part of it is for the people who are closest to you where this would impact it, showing that you have thought through the financial ramifications and that you are not being reckless or irresponsible with your decisions. So, it's those kind of things that I think are important. But we're talking about reinvention and another thing you speak about and you wrote a book about this is the long game. So, interesting, interesting ideas because there's ways that these ideas can even conflict to a degree, right? So, reinvention means that what you're doing isn't working. You should reinvent yourself. Long game is you stick with something long enough and it's going to work out. Very simply. So, how do you reconcile these two ideas? So, that woman who's 50 years old, she is playing the long game. Don't get me wrong. She's playing the very long game. She's playing the rest of my life long game. So, how do you balance these two ideas of reinvention and long game? So, you're absolutely right that under some circumstances, they could be viewed as being intention. I like to think that this complementary in the sense that one of the frameworks that I share in the long game is what I call optimized for interesting. And specifically, what I mean by that is. I love that. I love that. I mean, you know, we've got to our knowledge. We have one life and we need to keep ourselves engaged. And I think for a lot of people, the idea assuming that we do live to 90, you know, you're probably not going to stop work 40 years before that, right? You're probably doing some things to it either. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's been proven to be pretty bad for your mental health if you literally do nothing. So, let's say you have a career for 50 years, 60 years, which is not impossible. Normal people actually kind of get bored if they're literally doing the same thing. And so, I think the question to ask if we're looking from the 30,000-foot view about what makes a robust life for ourselves is how do you keep yourself engaged? How do you create a project for yourself that will an intellectual project that will engage you for your life? And so, optimizing for interesting is really about finding ways to seek out that learning edge for yourself. And so, reinvention, I think, is kind of a key part of that. That's interesting. So, it's not about pursuing one thing for forever. It's this mindset of always being engaged, always learning new things, always upskilling, always discovering, always exploring. Is there just to sort of go back to like that first idea, though, of reinvention versus long game? Because I think there is something there that people can learn from. Outside of the high level, 30,000-foot view of playing the long game and being engaged and just living a fulfilling life, if somebody is listening to this and they're like, okay, I get it. There are points in my life when I should reinvent myself. What is your litmus test or brometer for you should reinvent, and you should go down a new path? Is it fulfillment? Is it happiness? Is it an ambiguous KPI, or is it outside of forced? Because of course, I mean, if you're late off, you're late off. But say somebody is 50, 55 years old. They've been doing the same thing their whole life. They just feel they just feel like a zombie every single day, which I'm pretty sure that happens to quite a few of us. They are looking forward to retirement, but they don't really have plans after they retire. Should they reinvent themselves? Should they do something new? Should they just keep carrying on and find a hobby? What's the playbook to live a good fulfilling life? Yeah, so you're asking an important question, probably the important question as we think about how to really find meaning in what we're doing. I think the first answer which needs to be said is that a lot of it depends on your financial circumstances. If you are in a place where finances are really tight, you sort of need to do what you need to do. And so that's a place where great, get your hobbies, find things that you can do that bring you pleasure and enjoyment, and possibly give you new skills that you can leverage. But in the meantime, if you need to keep doing the thing to earn revenue, then do that. But assuming that we have basic needs met and you have enough of a trajectory that you can actually think about making changes and it's not going to have dire consequences, there's a framework that I share in the long game, which I call thinking in waves. And I feel like that could potentially be helpful here. Ultimately, when we think about how to determine when to make a change of some kind, I like to think of our progress in terms of learning and mastery as a series of four waves. So the first one is the learning wave, which is, you know, we start something new. Obviously, there's a huge learning curve. You're just taking it all in. You can't even know it's going on. You're just like, okay, how does this world function? You know, who are the people? How do they fit together? What am I supposed to be doing? So, you know, that's pretty clear. You're just learning how the game is played. In the middle, you have phases two and three, which is creating and sharing. And this is the place where once you've taken in enough information that you know what's going on, that's the place where you need to begin to add value of your own. Because otherwise, if you're always in the learning phase, you're not actually contributing that much. You're just, you're just sort of being as a sponge. Like, what are you, what are you there for? Like it's nice for you, but it's not very useful to your company or it's not very useful to the people around you. Once you have a sufficient understanding, you need to start sharing your perspective. You need to start coming up with with your own ideas and putting it out there. And also the, you know, sharing part is connecting with other people, building relationships and finding ways that the pieces fit together. And the act of doing those things, you know, actually becoming a proactive contributor to the environment that you're in, that's how you make yourself really valuable. And you can build up a pretty good head esteem for your career or whatever you're working on there. Then you do that long enough and it actually starts to work really well. And that's when we get into phase four, which is what I call the reaping phase. And that is where you're basically clicking on all cylinders. You are successful. You are respected. You're making good money. You know, all the things. This is, this is the place that most of us want to stay our entire lives because it feels so good. And this is the place where we feel like, you know what, the reason I've worked so hard is to get here to the reaping phase. And the fundamental challenge for us, very fallible humans, is to understand that at a certain point, we need to cut ourselves off at the trough and actually go back to the learning phase. In the long game, I interviewed Marshall Goldsmith, the well-known executive. He's been on here too. Yeah, he's great. He definitely is. One of the stories he told, which I thought was interesting, was early in his career. I mean, the way that most of us know Marshall, where he kind of came to public prominence, was, you know, he's written some best-selling books, triggers, and what got you here won't get you there and things like that. That spread his ideas and built his repute. Before that, he was just a very successful, you know, highly paid executive coach that the people he worked with knew, but the people outside of it didn't. And he told me that at that point, kind of early in his career, in his thirties, basically, his mentor came to him and said, Marshall, you're very successful. And Marshall was like, well, thank you very much. Yes. And his mentor said, you're actually too successful. You're getting lazy with your success because all you're doing is just doing client work and earning money. You need to start pushing yourself and you need to start sharing your ideas publicly because that's what's going to take you to the next level. And Marshall recalled that he actually just sat on that for several years that he didn't take action because it was so nice to keep earning money. Of course. You have people. So comfortable. Yeah. Absolutely. But he eventually realized that his mentor was right and that he was doing himself and his ideas and his legacy, a disservice. If he didn't actually take a step back from, you know, all the people throwing cash at him to embark upon a challenging and difficult process, you know, I mean, he didn't have any guarantee that his book would be successful. It could it could have been a waste of time that took him away from revenue. Instead, it worked out really well. But there is a gamble. And that's why not everybody is willing to do it. But it's really important for our growth to eventually be willing to say, you know what? I'm going to take myself back to the learning phase. Yeah. And I would assume that when you take yourself back to the learning phase, like, like anything, when you start learning something, you really don't know what you don't know. And then opportunities start to present themselves, new directions, start to present themselves. I mean, with Marshall, now he's built a massive brand and he's built a huge audience. And I actually, when I interviewed him, I think he's taking all of his knowledge and he's codifying it into some sort of AI tool or something like that. Yeah, he's big on the Marshall plot. Absolutely. What do you explore and reinvent? Like, what are you exploring and reinventing right now about you? Well, so for me, the, you know, there are lots of small ways that I try to push the envelope. But the biggest, which I've actually been pursuing for close to nine years now, is I decided that I wanted to learn to write musical theater. And yeah, and I had never done it. This was not, you know, people say, oh, you know, was it your, your childhood dream that you're reconnecting with? No, I didn't grow up around musical theater. My parents didn't know anything about it. I had gone to, you know, they took me to two musicals, like, you know, the first, I don't know, 18 years of my life. So I really was just not familiar with this genre. But I went to a show with a friend and about nine years ago. And I just kind of hit me. I'm like, oh, I need to learn how to do this. And so I was really starting from zero. So for me, this was very much a case of, you know, walking my own talk. I had to reinvent myself and starting from zero part, part of the reason also, you would ask the question, you know, why is it that people are so resistant to reinventing themselves? And a big part of it is that we get comfortable with mastery. We like how it feels to be good at something. And by the time your mid career, you probably are pretty good at the thing that that has been your main gig. And so to start somewhere else and to sort of suck to not know what you're doing to have everyone around you better. I mean, I entered this musical theater training program. And, you know, I'm like, oh, good, this is where I need to be. It's a musical theater training program. Well, I had never written musical theater. And meanwhile, like to my left is two people who are graduates of NYU Tish, you know, they had, they had master's degree in musical theater to my right is a guy who actually is a music professor at a university. You know, I mean, it's just, it's a very threatening crowd. It's a threatening crowd. Yeah. And, you know, immersing yourself in that, I just had, I literally had to remind, I mean, I'm better now, much better now. But early on, I just had to remind myself after class every time I would have my little mantra, like, you do not derive yourself worth from this. You derive yourself worth from other activities. Well, so this is an interesting thought. When you explore, does that have crossover utility in the other things that you do or is it for pure enjoyment? And is there, is there a benefit to having some sort of crossover application? Very obviously, or maybe even not so obviously, maybe writing musical theater lets you think in a different way or lets you be more creative. And maybe I'm just reaching, maybe it doesn't at all. Maybe it's just a total hobby. But have you ever thought about those ideas about what am I doing on the side? Is it helped my main thing or is that not something that like a thought exercise you go through? So I'm not, I didn't start out doing it because I wanted some kind of ancillary benefit. I started out doing it for its own reason. I think that initially, and probably for a long time, you don't even know what the benefits are because they kind of become manifest in the doing. But certainly, it has caused me to think much more deeply about story structure and narrative, which is helpful in terms of storytelling and writing and things like that that are valuable in a business context. And I've met really some amazing people through musical theater. I mean, it's interesting because it allows you to connect with different people on sort of different levels. And so there are, there are people that I've met that are really cool, you know, Broadway actors and directors and things like that that I probably just wouldn't have run across if it weren't for that world or that overlap. So it's brought more interesting people into my life. It's also been technically helpful. I mean, I, a mantra that I have in terms of how do you find like assistance or people that work for you is I like working with artists and I've done this for well over a decade because it turns out they're very smart. They're very literate and they're usually underpaid, which means that they are, they're looking for work. They're looking for a good work. You know, good work is virtual. So anyway, I for over five years now have employed somebody that I met in the musical theater program at, you know, first as my assistant now is my chief of staff. And I've, you know, I actually call it the composer full employment program because a guy did my website who was a composer that I met in the program. Another, another composer was my VA sort of doing spot tasks for me. So yeah, you meet a lot of great folks that that can be quite helpful. And I mean, I don't think that if you're exploring it has to, it has to really have this cillary benefit to your main thing. But I am a big fan of combinatorial thinking and bringing in all these disparate concepts and bringing them and helping them just enhance your worldview. Outside of finding great talent to hire and great people to network with, I think that there's all these different benefits. I think that I believe that if you, if you tie your identity to one thing and you become, you know, you achieve mastery, I still believe to some degree you can put a ceiling on that mastery by not seeking out other influence and input. I think that the most interesting people in the world that you would look to and say, oh, they've killed it in their field. They've achieved whatever level of success. They are multi-dimensional, these people, human beings. They do a lot of different things, multifaceted. They all are multi-dimensional, multifaceted. They have a lot of different passions and hobbies. Yes, they are laser focused on one thing. But when you start to speak to them, they can actually, one of my favorite measures of whether or not I'll be interested in a person is whether or not you can just ask them a question about anything. And will they have an interesting unique perspective? Yeah. And it can't just be chance that the smartest people in the world could speak to you about anything and everything. And they're very interesting just to chat with. I think there's something there that probably just helps by exploring new ideas, by having passions, by having hobbies. It probably just helps with thinking process or creative process. I don't know. I'm not a scientist, but I just notice it in people. Yeah. No, I think it's true. I mean, I've always worked hard to try to be as much of a polymath as I can because I think it probably helps on a lot of levels. But a big one is just being able to connect with different people about all kinds of things. And so, you know, it irritates me a little bit. I mean, sometimes people get very righteous about, you know, the no news diet and things like that. And I understand I don't want to read, you know, 10,000 articles about Donald Trump. It's fine. You don't have to read them. It's too many. But it's also true that I think reading the newspaper or reading other sources of information about the world in the news media is important. It's powerful because you understand things. I mean, you know, if you meet somebody from, you know, from a certain country and there's been unrest, you're able to say, Oh, you know, how's your family? Like what's what's going on for you there? And the fact that you've heard of the place and you know, what's going on in the place and you can actually have a conversation is very meaningful. And there's a million examples like that. I saw I noticed it because in Canada, we are not as we are interested in politics, but not to the same degree as you see in the US. And I think what I see is I see people's identity getting wrapped into political parties and lack of exploring context and ideas outside of that main ideology that you subscribe to. It creates a lot of animosity and anger, which I don't think is healthy for anyone. And I think that we've seen that play out again and again and again. So just to be a better human being and to be a better person, it's really important to seek out ideas that are outside the realm of what you're used to, whether or not they conflict with what you believe or whether or not they're just adjacent to what you believe. But the point is like it helps you become a better person. It helps you become a more empathetic person. It helps you become a person that can understand different points of view. And like you said, and like have a conversation with somebody halfway around the world because you may not understand their circumstances completely, but at least, at least you're educated and at least you're trying to learn something that's not in your core competency. And it's not a political podcast, obviously, but I think that it's just listen, if it can help you form greater bonds with people that are literally across the aisle in politics, think about what it can do for your career or whatever you're trying to do in your life. Yeah. I mean, my favorite story about it is years ago, I was dating this woman who was like very skeptical of my self-improvement crusade. And so I was reading this book. I don't think you're a self-improvement. I think you are self-improvement, but you're very science-based and evidence-based. I mean, that's interesting that she would call you a self-improvement crusade, or she said you're on a self-improvement. That's interesting. Yeah, I mean, I think it was like anti-capitalist or something. It was the idea of the questing to improve seemed a little silly to her, but I was into it. And so I was reading a book at the time, which was called How to Talk to Anyone About Anything. I love that. Yeah, it's actually a great book. It's by a woman in Leal Lounds. But the basic idea of this book is, I love how it's laid out. I think I'm remembering this right, that basically every chapter, you know, she sort of prefaces her concept, of course, which is that if you really want to connect with people, you need to ask them intelligent questions about things that are important to them, which of course, you know, makes sense. That sounds good. So she goes from A to Z in her book. And for every letter, she picks a subject and she will give you this like five-page primer about the subject so that by the end you've got 26 topics that you've read, you know, from whatever accounting to zoology. And you now know enough. You have enough context that you're able to have an intelligent conversation. And so, you know, people are multifaceted. And so if I meet you, it's not necessarily the case that you'll have one of these 26 things, but you might. And it teaches you how to do it for other subjects. So I was out with the woman that I was dating. And we met a friend of hers. And anyway, the friend I was, you know, asking her, I'm like, so, you know, what do you like to do for fun? And I was rather taken aback because, you know, in the metro areas that I travel, this is not usually the answer. But she said, you know what, I really love, I love fishing. And my first thought is like, okay, what am I going to do with this? I've never been fishing. I have no idea. And then literally this was a chapter in the book. And I'm like, saltwater or fresh. And the woman was like, oh my God. I didn't take much, right? And we immediately had this rapport because she was so psyched to talk about saltwater fishing. And I think that it's also about like approaching conversations, like without judgment, with that, just like, with the general, like the genuine interest of getting to know that person. I mean, that's literally, so keep in mind, this is, I've thought about this a lot. This is what I have to do for a living. So I have to dive into somebody's life. And as you know, you're a journalist, you did this as well. The second you asked that question, I'm like, oh, she's good at this too. I have to make sure that I bring my A game. No, um, it's because you have to dive into somebody's life. And you have to be genuinely curious. And I think that's, I think that anybody who is a journalist or somebody who podcasts or does any of this professionally, you just go in with no assumptions. And you're just trying to learn as much as you possibly can. I think that that's a great skill for what we're doing right now. But also just in life, that's a great skill. Because I think a lot of times people go into a conversation with these preconceived beliefs and ideas and that forms their questions. And then that person puts a gate up or a wall up because they feel like they're being judged while being asked a question at the same time, which is not conducive to relationship building whatsoever. So yes, it's a very, very good skill. So as you've reinvented yourself multiple times and you've played the long game with your life and create a pursuit and sort of try new things and doing it, you live the work that you teach. Why are these the ideas that you've chosen to sort of focus on more recently? Why do you feel like in society, these ideas are so important to people? So my starting place has always been essentially attempting to solve my own problems. Which is a great starting place. Yeah, you know, it's it's it's a not unreasonable assumption that if you're interested in it, other people will be as well. But yeah, I guess it goes back to that self-improvement crusade that I wanted to crack the code on on things. So reinventing you was my attempt to sort of make sense of my career path and and foibles in my 20s and kind of finding my way into the work that ultimately proved to be my trajectory. My second book stand out the the the subhead of that is how to find your breakthrough idea and build a following around it. And we haven't even talked about thought leadership yet, which we can totally yes. Yeah, I know it's it's always so interesting. And I I was basically trying to solve that. I'm like, okay, I wrote a book, you know, that's nice. But if you really want to get known in your field, if you want your ideas to be heard, it's you know, it's a crowded marketplace. There's a lot of people out there. How do you actually break through? And I just didn't know the answer to that. And so I wanted to create an excuse for myself so that I could interview dozens of very smart people who had solved that problem so that I could attempt to learn from them. And I wanted that knowledge for myself. But also, you know, I'm not a hoarder. I was very happy to share it. Indeed is a success story partner. Now if you're hiring, indeed is all you need. Let me give you an example. If I needed to hire a new editor for this show, I'd go to indeed and be super specific. Not just can you edit audio. I'd say I need someone who's edited a conversational podcast for at least three years gets our style and knows our software. Someone who's done this before. And here's the thing with indeed sponsor jobs. I'd get people who fit that description. I'm not digging through resumes when people who've edited one YouTube video. I'm getting actual podcast editors who know what they're doing. People who've worked on shows like ours and can prove it. That's what makes a difference. 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So that topic in particular I think that's just a very difficult topic for people to wrap their head around because they never know what idea to focus on or they want to talk about absolutely everything that's important to them and I've I've wrestled with this problem myself as a creator trying to figure out like what's the topic I want to niche down on or do I want to open it up a little bit and when I started the podcast it was more niche and now it's a little bit more broad and then there's another idea wrapped into there where the people that you look at that have built large audiences now they may be a little more broad in the stuff they speak about but when they started maybe they were a little bit more focused on one particular topic and that's how they built the audience in the first place. Now I did not do a full study on it so these are just sort of ideas that are floating around in my head but when you interviewed these people in terms of building influence thought leadership personal brand whatever buzzword you want to call it what were the findings what did you find it was the most effective way to become known for one thing and galvanize people towards the ideas that you have. There's there's not necessarily one path of course but what I discovered and stand out is that there are there are a variety of different ways that you can put ideas together so that they'll get noticed and you know one for instance and speaking of a meta analysis here earlier in our conversation I was talking about frameworks that I had created and that I shared in the long game it turns out that one of the really effective ways to get known for your ideas is to codify something because there's a lot of things that people know intuitively or that they're interested in but maybe no one has actually taken the time to to wrap their arms around it and say you know it's it's this you know here's here's the acronym or here's you know here's the one two three or here's the here's the then diagram that really helps you understand it but when you do you you can't on see it you know it's like oh this explains everything and so you get quoted you you get talked about so a perfect example of this would be Robert Chaldeini the author of influence the psychology of persuasion I mean people have been interested in persuasion forever it's a it's a sexy topic everybody wants to know about it but until him no one had actually said okay if you want to influence someone there are six ways of doing it here are the six ways and once he put it together it's like oh well duh yeah that makes perfect sense but he codified it he put it together and so he gets mentioned every time people want to talk about persuasion so a second thought on that because that makes a ton of sense but does it not hurt and I'm gonna ask because you've written books on different topics does it not hurt you to a degree to every four five years switch the thing that you're focused on versus every four five years because you put out books on all these different topics now have you thought through well what if I just keep putting out an updated book on this topic and and do six books on whatever reinvention long game personal branding thought leadership implement like have you thought about that and is there is there some learnings that you discover that you can be known for multiple things or does it just get confusing yeah it's it's a great question and there's also gradations right because the books that I've written I mean they're all basically business and career books and so they're they're different but they're they're of a piece you could look at them and say okay I can see that one person would write this if you were doing a book about entrepreneurship and then a book about horse racing and then a book about you know whatever molecular gastronomy that might actually confuse people so I think the key is understanding what is the narrative thread that you are putting together to help make make it make sense for people so for instance someone who actually did do the equivalent of that is Tim Ferris he writes the four hour work week which is you know essentially a business book he then goes to the four hour body which is a health book then we have the four hour chef which layman would say is a cookbook which he I think it sort of sounds like he thinks it's a misfire and he's always like no no it's a book about how to learn it's I think a poorly titled book about how to learn but nonetheless you know he was trying to to do very different and very distinctive things but the way that he made sense of it and I think actually did a very good job in making sense of it to his audience is he identified a strand which is okay it's not that I was a business author and now I'm a health author you know I'm not whipsawing you it's actually the same thing which is about how do you attain high performance in all aspects of your life and so he found that and it was an understandable and an intelligible thread for his audience and they're like great I want to be a high performer in all aspects of my life and so that worked so I think the question is really if you if you can find that thread then you're you're golden and so that makes a lot of sense so there's a there's a through line between all the work that you put out between all the work that Tim put out I actually saw you on I think you and Seth Godin I love Seth too I think you get went on his show then he went on your show but there's always this through line between all all three of you all all of your work it's business it's peak performance it's it's career like regardless depending on who we're talking about is there is there a difference in your mind between influence thought leadership personal brand self promotion oh you go go deep on the why not six area yeah yeah yeah absolutely so because everybody throws these words around and nobody actually knows what they mean very few people actually know what they mean and then it's just a very confused okay so does this mean I put you know post on Instagram or does this mean I have to write a newsletter to write a book have to go on stage or do I have to talk of my company or not talk about my company and it's just a mess so I like to like talk to people who study it yeah absolutely all right well we'll get granular so what was the first one we'll do one by one influence personal brand thought leadership self promotion you know influence is just really a kind of quantification of the impact that you're having on other people so it is as a term agnostic about how you're how you're attaining that maybe it's good you know through good quality content maybe it's bad quality content maybe you're you know as Robert Chaldeini says right influence can be a tool for good or evil right Hitler was very influential that was not a good thing so so it's saying okay lots of people are listening so then we go to thought leadership and that's actually a little bit more about more about you you know it's like balanced here because if we're breaking it down thought leadership you are you have to have followers if you are leading sort of a topology there but you can't be a thought leader if no one is listening to you so you do need an audience you do need to have some influence but you are not influencing people through like you know trashy dances on tiktok if you were a thought leader there has to be genuine ideas behind it there has to be at least some degree of intellectual heft so some people don't like the term thought leader they think it's you know icky somehow or whatever and I'm never a fan of people bestowing labels upon themselves but I think that thought leadership to me is actually a noble category I think it's something worth aspiring to because it means if you reach that goal that you have ideas good enough for people to want to listen to them so for me that's a that's a positive I like okay so then then then the last to be a personal brand and then self promotion yeah so personal brand basically your reputation how people think of you and uh yeah I think we can we can we can try to influence that but ultimately it is in the eyes of the beholder and so our goal is to try to understand what that brand is and if it doesn't match what we would want it to be to try to take action to remedy that and then uh finally self promotion is the active attempting to get noticed or to get your ideas heard and again it's it's one of those good or ill right you know you you can self-promote to it's almost like on the way to thought leadership yeah that's what you're trying to you're trying to do but it's almost like you're optimizing for the wrong thing you're optimizing for fame versus doing something impressive and drawing people to your work yeah it's like you're just pushing yourself on people right I I think there can be a neutral uh version of it but I think often when it is talked about it has a pejorative connotation you mentioned one thing about codifying an idea within the thing that you're an expert in and that helps people notice you is there anything else that you would suggest people do to find a unique sort of a unique voice on a topic outside of just codifying an idea another interesting one which I feel like is kind of counterintuitive but in the research that I did for standout pretty effective um lots of people to your point Scott say you know I don't I don't know what my ideas I don't necessarily have good good enough ideas I'm just not sure they're not distinctive enough and so for a lot of people that ends the discussion they just they say well I can't do it I don't know how to proceed but one of the things that in my studies have actually been surprisingly effective is for people to take essentially a journalistic approach to things because if you have a topic and you become the expert through talking to large amounts of people or doing a lot of research you know getting case studies and things like that eventually just the act of compiling it gives you enough knowledge enough breadth of knowledge that you become known as an expert in it and so an example of this uh which is sort of a personal example because it's a guy that used to work for me and so I took always a keen interest in his career he later left my employee and went on to graduate school in urban planning and he's become a very successful urban planner he's had his own business for 15 years he's done a great work um his name is Mike Leiden but where Mike really got his start was soon after he started his own business there was an emerging concept at the time in urban planning called tactical urbanism was just kind of this this new thing that was developing and so there wasn't a lot written about it it was kind of you know this like an emerging space sort of the way that like you know Bitcoin or whatever is now very new yeah and and you know or AI it's like you know okay this is this is a place where there are not um there's not a hierarchy of seasoned experts because we're all at the same place we're all at the starting line and so Mike saw that opportunity and said oh great okay I'm going to do something with this so he started gathering case studies about tactical urbanism and just whenever he heard of it an example he you know sort of grabbed it wrote it up put it together and he ultimately created a book I say book in air quotes because it was really like a like a PDF file and there's just you know super simple um created this PDF file with all the case studies and he put it on his website and allowed people to download it for free by doing this you know this like no cost research project giving it away for free he managed number one to ultimately land a book contract where he wrote a book and you know was paid to do it about tactical urbanism and number two almost immediately became recognized as the expert in tactical urbanism because he knew more about it than anyone else he was the guy that wrote the guidebook within three months ten thousand people had downloaded his ebook which in the world of urban planning circles is actually enormous one thing that gets brought up a lot with personal brand and I love that idea as well so that you can really own this really niche self-specialty whatever unless you unless you have a you know a group of noble prize winners and Olympic athletes but outside of that I think niching is an important piece to it um people speak a lot about authenticity in the context of personal rant still I don't think many people even really understand what it means so when you're putting stuff out there is there value to include some of your own lived experience into that content I mean with your example he didn't he was just aggregating resources and putting them on a website what is your view should you include your lived experience should you include that you're going on a vacation with your kids into your content you put out into your whatever thought leadership personal brand whatever definition you choose or is that unnecessary I think it is useful where it's relevant and in his case you know tactical urbanism if he had done a tactical urbanism project as sort of a civilian before he had become an urban planner great bring it but in in the particular case it just it wasn't justified by what was what was necessary for the project but I do think that in general you know we know we know from studies and research that people connect much better when there's a human element when there's stories behind it so if something if something is relevant you know if you're talking about leadership and you've been a boss talking about your your own experience on the front lines it it may not unless you are a super successful fortune 500 CEO that everyone is just dying to know it's probably not enough for you to just talk about your experiences a leader but you want to have a broader base of research or anecdotes or things like that but it also shouldn't prevent you from doing it it adds something to it to say yes I've experienced this myself and here's here's my story I've thought about two and like some of the content that I put out unlike so again I'm sort of like I'm the I'm the quasi successful but definitely not fortune 500 executive that has had some career success it adds color and context to what I believe but I didn't really feel comfortable making it my whole personality my whole online presence I felt that there was still something that and this is actually why I started the podcast start the podcast to bring in other ideas from people that have achieved way more than I've ever achieved in my career because I wanted to bring in some other perspectives and I thought that would actually serve the audience better um but yeah I also found that when I include a little bit of my story the content does quite well so it's a balance it's always a balance and I also think that yes if you're not a fortune 500 CEO or you haven't built the next Netflix or the whatever it's it's not going to be like your story is going to make it you know on the front page of whatever pick a paper but I still think that people who are comfortable talking about their own experiences and their own story I think it's actually very rare on social so it actually does stand out even if it is not uh doesn't matter how you measure success but a billion dollar company that you built I think that it it it makes you more human and I think that that's actually something that people really resonate with and then if you talk about not only your story but the things that didn't go right and it adds an element of vulnerability which I also like I think that helps as well absolutely yeah have you started to include in your books lived experience to or are you still focused on like I want to extract from all these wise people around me and have you noticed a difference in how different type of content is is received by your audience so in the long game which is my most recent book I put in much more of my personal experience than I ever had before it was it was actually interesting because for me it's been a learning journey because since I got my start as a journalist and everybody gets imprinted by their early training and in journalism you know straight news journalism we're not talking about opinion pieces it is considered really gauche to include yourself it's like no you are not the story you're not important here you need to write a story about what other people are doing uh it's it's a form of narcissism to put yourself as a journalist in the story don't do that and so for my for my first book for reinventing you I submitted a draft to my editor and he's like so you reinvented yourself right and I'm like well yeah and he's like how come none of that's in the book I'm like oh oh I'm like you think people want that he's like yes and so I had to like take another pass at it because it hadn't occurred to me to do it and and I felt very uncomfortable so I didn't I didn't probably do it enough so it's over the course of the 10 years that I've been writing books that I have begun to flex that muscle more do you find that the more you lean into it the bet like the it's a net positive reaction from the audience absolutely yeah I mean people people really like to learn through stories I mean I know I know that I do um I think that we always have to keep the the north star in mind that if it's too much just about about you period it can tip into narcissism but if you are telling a story in service of a point or in service of a purpose that will be useful to other people then that is something that I think a lot of people connect with what are you working on next what what is the next book that you're going to put out that we're also going to have a second podcast about when it comes out amazing amazing well I'm I'm still working it all out but actually speaking of getting comfortable writing about myself I'm working on a memoir project oh my goodness okay so you went all the way in yeah we're all the way in exactly so it's it hasn't it hasn't been sold it hasn't been published it's uh it how many books is this done this would be the fifth one yeah but uh but yeah look forward to come and back what would be one last insight some last words of wisdom that you want to leave the audience with so what I what I would say Scott you were asking earlier about what it takes to sort of play play the long game and to take the the long-term perspective especially when of course as humans we are always being grasped at by the short term and you know all the all the emails you have to answer and all the meetings you have to go to origin important or feels like origin important fires you have to put out exactly and so how can we stay focused on the on the long-term long enough to actually see three see things through to working because you've been doing the show for years now right I mean if we had stopped you in month three or in month six and said you know hey how's it going you know not great not great yeah early on it you know it just it just takes a while for almost everything to gain traction and so I think the thing that I would most want to leave your audience with is the metaphor that I like to use is that when we are embarking upon a long-term project and something that something that matters something is important to us in a lot of ways it's like going into a dark tunnel and the problem with this tunnel is that no one tells you how long it is and it could be a hundred feet it could be a hundred miles and you just don't know and so it's very easy for people you know even even people close to the finish line to get discouraged and to quit because they say well you know how long is this going to go on and it can be challenging and so for me one of the key values around playing the long game is understanding that in a lot of ways it's a it's a matter of courage it's a matter of character because it's saying regardless of the outcome this matters to me enough to try to do it and I think there's something really noble about that and it's something that I would like to see more of and encourage more of in the world where can people connect with you so where do you want to send them social website we didn't even talk about your newsletter that you put out okay so where should everyone go and connect and sort of learn more if they want to read more of your work all of that well thank you if folks are interested in the newsletter which I do put a lot of literary care into Forbes said it is it is the the kick in the pants that you need that's good yeah yeah that's maybe you are a little bit self-help then that that sounds like a self-help newsletter nothing wrong with that that's right have it in space no fly fishing though I don't talk about that uh but uh but yeah folks you get it at dory clerk dot com slash subscribe and uh and my website dory clerk dot com I've got I have all the articles over it and for different places there is more than eight hundred by now that I've done over the past decade for Harvard Business Review for Forbes for entrepreneur etc what would be that one piece of advice you'd want to tell your younger self build an email list yeah yeah exactly start sooner that's not fair another piece of advice all right yeah we start tactical um but yeah philosophical I um you know I think in a lot of ways when we're talking about about life lessons I mean we there's there's there's a reason that I've written the books that I have you know these are the topics that sort of obsess me a little bit and I actually just uh I got married last month so just congratulations yeah thank you very congratulations yeah so you know first first marriage took took me quite a while and uh we're all going for one like I mean like it doesn't always happen but that's fine take as long as you want yeah that was my philosophy that was my philosophy but um yeah the the story that that stands out in my mind is that like 20 years ago I was with a friend we were we took like a day trip together and she's this very kind of woo person and we were walking around the downtown and she saw a psychic and she's like oh my god a psychic let's go to the psychic and I was like okay let's go to the psychic and uh and so my friend went in and got her reading she's like oh that was so good that was so profound and I went in and got my reading and I I remember walking out of there I'm like oh my god this is the dumbest thing I've ever heard this is ridiculous but whatever whatever made my friend happy so I I literally forgot what the psychic told me and so probably five or six years ago I went back to this town where my friend actually was now living and she started telling me this story and she says blah blah blah my psychic and it reminded me I'm like oh my god do you remember that time we went to the psychic here she said that woman is still my psychic I she was so good I've been going to her ever since I'm like are you kidding she's like I'm like wow I thought my reading was like so off and she starts laughing and she and I'm like what and she's like well you remember what she told you and I'm like no I actually don't even remember what she told me and apparently what the psychic told me according to my friend is it will be a very long time before you find a partner oh my goodness she was right that's a very ambiguous open-ended statement and whatever but still that's amazing that's right so I would say part of my secretive success is literally blocking out negative messages that's one but also but also I think it is true that you know sometimes we just have to wait much longer than we want for the goals that we want to achieve but you know what you keep you keep at it yeah oftentimes it really will work