Jason Feifer
Appearances
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
Thank you for the dual book plug. Yeah, Jen and I wrote a book together. And that was a great project. But we also didn't then immediately start merging all of our work things. In fact, we use each other pretty intentionally in each other's work. For example, my newsletter, I have found that Jen is a great last sounding board before that thing goes out.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
So I send my newsletter out Tuesday mornings. Monday night, I read the newsletter to her. And after that, I fussed with it all week. And now I just want her to hear it and to call out anything that doesn't work. And fortunately, she hasn't heard it and been like, this thing is terrible. You should throw it away because then I wouldn't have anything on Monday night.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
But I really like that as a process. The newsletter is mine, but we share this part of it together, which is this check-in just before it goes out. I think that if you have a partner who you have some professional entanglement with, it makes it often more fun. There's more things to talk about and to do together. But you just have to know whose is what's, if that makes sense. What is whose?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
Stick around. Help Wanted will be right back.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
Welcome back to Help Wanted. Let's get to it.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
Oh, my God. Would you call him and ask him? Nicole, if you would. If you would call him and ask him, I got some questions for him. Did you think about saying something? And then also, if Nicole noticed and just wrote you and gave you what is the actual explanation, which is, okay, so just to be clear, I don't actually call him daddy.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
It was like a joke and it was from the TV show and the whole thing. Is that worse than Does that look like you're making up a story? How do you clean this up? I guess is the question. That's what I really want to know. How do you clean this up? And what is Ryan thinking? Can we call Ryan? Okay, let's call Ryan. Do you hear a hear?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
So number one, we are so glad to hear from you right now. Number two, we're going to tell you something. It's not going to be embarrassing for you. It is going to be embarrassing for Nicole.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
Ryan, I have a simple question for you. Ready? When Nicole sent you an email and introduced you to Jared, did you notice anything funny in that email?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
Well, because when Nicole noticed it, she was mortified. And then she sent me and Morgan a voice memo about it in which she could barely breathe. It was possibly the greatest couple minutes of audio I've ever heard. And our first question is, what did you think? And our second question is, what did you do next?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
The PSA, Ryan, is that Nicole had absolutely no idea that the way you list someone in their phone is how they show up in the email. That was not a thing she knew until she sent this email.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
Oh, I didn't sign up for that. All right. Well, talk to you soon.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
This is Help Wanted, the show that makes your work work for you. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
And on Thursdays, I give you one way to improve your work and build a career or company you love.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
Are you going to be able to keep it together for this one?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
So, Nicole, we have a real topic to discuss today. But before we get there, we got a real story we got to hear. I'm not going to give anything away about this story of yours. Uh-huh. But I will just tell you that I received this voice memo, which you sent to Morgan and I. We were about to play it. I happened to be sitting in a very drab airport eating a awful airport stromboli.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
And I nearly spat that thing out. Can we just play this?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
All right, we're back. How do you feel about that being heard by everybody? I...
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
Right. The mistake is telling your friends who you make a podcast with about anything that happens that's embarrassing because it immediately will go in the podcast. All right. You sent me a screenshot of what this email looked like because I couldn't quite picture it.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
Yeah, I did not know that either. This is a public service announcement for anyone who doesn't know that. So just to be clear, here's the screenshot you sent me. Imagine looking at an email, right, everyone? So first it says the subject line, which in this case is a very boring thing that says, re colon brand lift and case study.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
Yeah, it's like preparing for a big presentation and just absolutely nailing it. And then you get off stage and someone was like, there is toilet paper attached. Yeah, that's a good one.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
I could just marinate in the absurdity of this all day. But to try to make an actual purpose of this outside of just that I wanted to share it with our listeners, what's the big idea here? The big idea here is that mixing personal and business relationships, particularly romantic and business relationships, can be complicated. Because why? I mean, you tell me, because you've had to navigate...
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
this a number of times given the number of very professional and personal connections you've made through your dating life. So what's the balance? What's the thing that you have to walk?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
I have to say that feels like a really compelling question that I relate to. Can this just be my thing? Because when you have a partner who you share a lot with, including professional interests and ambitions, then there are going to be these overlaps. And some of those overlaps are great.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
But also, I think many people, as they get deeper into a relationship, they start to ask themselves, what's still just mine? What's mine and not ours? And that's been a very important part of my relationship with Jen, my wife, is we have our own things and then we have our things together. But we also do somewhat similar work in that we're both in media.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
And so there are a lot of times where things just overlap. And what's interesting is that sometimes they overlap in a way that forces a reduction of something. I'll give you a tiny example. We have a friend named Andy. Andy's a very successful writer. And we've been meaning for Andy and her girlfriend to come over and catch up with Jen and I who haven't seen for a long time.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
But at the same time, also, Andy and I had a whole bunch of work things we wanted to talk about, like newsletter strategy and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I realized, you know, if Andy and her girlfriend come over, we're not going to talk business. And I actually kind of want to. And I want to talk about stuff that like Jen's not that interested in, which is like newsletter strategy.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
So we decided to create two plans. There was week one, Andy and Julia came over and we had dinner and we talked about the things all four of us are interested in. And then literally the next week, just Andy and I got together and we talked newsletter strategy and other stuff. And that felt like a really good way to do it because- It's intentional. Yeah, it's intentional.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
You get these intersections and one doesn't subtract the other, right? It's not like Andy and I couldn't continue to develop the kind of worky relationship that we would have because it doesn't fit into the relationship that I would share with my wife. And so doing both felt really good and useful. And I think that that's where I want to make sure I'm always living in.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Call Him Daddy... At Work?
I want to share as much as we can, but I also want to make sure I'm being mindful of how some things, even things I might share, can still just be mine.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
Precisely. Exactly.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
Oh, yeah.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
I have maxed out a credit card.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
Yeah. I did a little thing where I had a 0% interest rate credit card for 21 months, but I was working full time. So I put my tuition from my MBA on my credit card, knowing that the cash inflow from my job was coming, but I didn't have to- to have interest on my debt, like with student loans, but I did max out my credit card for that.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
I think it's like a eight 15 or something like that. Yeah. Yeah.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
But again, that's great. I mean, that's incredible. That's incredible. You've beaten this down over and over, but the impact of credit is so significant on your cash outflows and the entirety of your life, what capital costs you.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
Yeah, you don't need a perfect one. You just need a good one. You'll get the same benefits as everyone in the range of good.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
Absolutely. Discuss it. First of all, it forces you to step into it. Second of all, your state already has a prenup for you. It's the laws that create my customize it. And another one for your audience, which I'm assuming based on like this discussion is a very female based post-numps are huge, right?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
Like if you are a caretaker after you're married for your family and you are putting your career on hold and your earnings and everything else that could come with the power of if you were working, but you are providing, which creates such massive value for your family entity as it is. A post-up can really help protect you in those circumstances too. Okay, I'm done.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
Writing a book sucks. I mean, like, I love it. It's there forever. I love the impact, but it's brutal.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
No, it's just ridiculous, right? Like financial transparency is not etiquette. Like you can't go, you know, return something that is like an experience. Like it's just ridiculous. That's, you know, I mean, I hear stories like that and I'm just like shaking my head. So, no, I don't stand for that. And I think it's absolutely ridiculous.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
And I don't think I think it's so important to know that people see headlines like this and have these conversations because they make for good conversation. But this is not what we're talking about when we're saying you need to talk money with the people that you love and feel comfortable about it. Right. This is a guy who is a loose cannon.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
And I think I think it's a good thing that there wasn't another day.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
I don't think it's about the dollar spent on a date. I think it is about the time and thoughtfulness intention that's applied to it. And I do see what people would say that if I'm deploying time and resources and effort, I want to think about it as like, I want it to go well. I want them to know that I'm putting something into this so that I see a personal return and happiness.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
But I don't think that has to do with dollars deployed because I think you could do a lot of creative, intentional, thoughtful dates that could actually go a lot further than just money deployed. So I do disagree with that.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
I don't like the idea of exclusion, right? Because I think you're now excluding people that have a credit score less than, which is absolutely ridiculous. I do like the idea that an app like that is probably creating some sort of transparency, right? It's allowing people to start thinking about, you know, what is a credit score and how does that apply to dating and let's be open about it.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
So I think that's good. But the idea of excluding people that have a yellow or red score, I think is a little silly, especially when you look at the full picture of finance and understand that, like you said, credit score is a piece of the puzzle, but it's not the largest piece, the most important. It's just a piece. That's all.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
And it's changeable. Like in 90 days, your credit score can go from a red score to a green score. It's so changeable.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
I don't know. I think I don't think it should be means is like what are dating apps anyway? Like it's a you're literally just swiping away to figure out if you want to go on a date. Like, I don't think that's that's like a pertinent thing to decide if you're going to have a cup of coffee. Right. I think before you get married, cohabitate and continue to move along your relationship.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
That's super important. But just like putting it in your profile. I don't know. That's weird. You see, there's a new club now in New York City that is opening and to get into the club. So it's a nightclub, right? We're not talking about a country club or anything. It's a nightclub. And to get into the club, you have to show a bank account statement with at least $50,000 in cash.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
Right. It's not a reflection of your entire wealth. There's a million reasons why it's just stupid. So I think I'm a huge proponent of financial transparency. I'm a huge proponent of getting comfortable with money conversations for education, insight, clarity, all the things. But there are so many toxic means of financial transparency that just don't at all connect to anything productive.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
That is certainly one of them.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
Oh my God, this is so stupid. I don't know what connected to that lawsuit. Obviously, I don't have enough information, but just hearing it, it sounds absolutely ridiculous.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
Never, never. I've definitely been on my fair share of bad dates, but then I file a lawsuit for distress. I mean, again, I don't know the situation. Like, you know, you gotta give context, but assuming it was just a bad date, that wasn't great. I don't know what the means of that lawsuit would be, nor my attorney, but damn.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
Love it. It's trading below its 52-week high. I own Meta. Big fan.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
Not a fan of Reddit. I think from what I remember from their stock last time, well, first of all, they're all mean to me on Reddit. Second of all.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
Second of all, I think the ROI on that stock is pretty poor last time I looked into it.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
Investor. Bullish.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
Yeah, I mean, their position, their balance sheet's healthy. They've always been a market leader. They'll continue to be. I don't think you're going to get burned with Google. If they're not at the forefront of AI, like NVIDIA is, they will be eventually. Or they'll just buy any that will be. I think they're a good place to be.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
It's scary how much the entire world economy is banking on the resource and the information that we get from this stock, but obviously they're one of the biggest players. They're driving the market. All indices are at all-time highs. As a major contributor is NVIDIA. And the big thing for people that don't know back home is like this is a good indicator of where AI is going.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
And all indications showcase that AI is here to stay for the foreseeable future. And it's advancing in ways that if you don't advance with it, you will be behind. So just even like a small thing you could do today, because that might sound overwhelming, is like just go download a chat GPT or something of the sort.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
I don't know, next email, just like copy and paste your email and just say fixed grammar. And it will do it for you. And now you're starting to embrace AI because the world's embracing it. Countries are embracing it at different speeds and companies are embracing it. And if you don't embrace it, you'll be left behind.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
Tesla, I think, is a great company, a good product. I think the leadership is extremely volatile. And as a result of that, I am bearish of Tesla.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
I was at a party in F1 Miami and he was there. And I was like, how is that guy? Everyone was dressed up. I was just shocked by his power. You know when you see people and you're like, whoa. You can just see their energy from a distance. You're like, damn. Oh, my God. It wasn't there for him. And I just couldn't believe, like, this guy, like, runs the entire world. It's insane. Anyway.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
The riz or the, just even, you know, like Steve Jobs didn't have riz. But Steve Jobs had, like, a presence where he took over a room. And most people at that level, Michael Rubin was at that party. Michael Rubin's presence, I mean, physically, very small guy. His presence is the size of the room. And with him, I was like, huh, interesting. I don't know. Anyway, I digress.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
Yeah. I mean, anytime I think you enter the discussion of money and love, it becomes like, oh, like, where do I even begin? Right. But I think in any type of conversation regarding love, there's so many hard things you have to step into. And we know that like all at the end of the day, conflict is, is growth trying to happen.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
Love it. I just think great leadership, innovative, creative, been around forever. When they're falling, they always find a way to come back. They're acquiring the right companies under their portfolio. Hulu has done amazing. I'm bullish on Disney.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
I wouldn't touch GameStop with a 10-foot pole. It's the essence of gambling in its finest form. Go to Vegas. There's massive volatility. You could have an individual that decides to speak for the first time in three years and the stock is going to move over 200x. It's wild to see, though, how individual investors could have massive impact on individual securities.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
I mean, we saw Roaring Kitty literally just put out tweets. That's it. No words, just tweets and video montages. And within 48 hours, institutions lost over $2 billion from their shorts. And it's just wild to see how retail investors, everyday investors can now come together like the minnows can literally unify and kill sharks. That's a wild thing to see. That's a big takeaway.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
Investing in game stock isn't for me, though.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
I like REITs, but I like public REITs. I like REITs where there's all information that's available. There are private REITs that are very successful. I have seen private REITs in my day, have massive issues and a lot of fraud. The idea of publicly traded REITs to me is a lot more comforting.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
My issue with Bitcoin is that it's strictly, to any economist you speak to, it's strictly just built on speculation. There isn't much of a utility and there's nothing backing it other than a limited supply and demand that is fluctuating based on the speculation of it. So there aren't many currencies in this world in which there's literally nothing behind it but speculation.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
a limited supply and speculation. You look at your United States dollar, there's the United States behind it. And so for that reason, I'm not very bullish on Bitcoin in the long run.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
Yeah, I think it's a good place to start. It's like, go think about anything when it comes to money, where it's pure form of deregulation and every economist that's out there that has had extreme historical success and providing advice that is unbiased. It's one of the only things they're unified on is that it's strictly just based on momentum and speculation.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
And we know that there is so much conflict when it connects love and money in the statistics out there. are wildly alarming about what happens when we don't discuss money in our relationships.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
Yeah, I fell for a bunch of scams. It's gotten a lot better. I fell for one scam when I was on a train in Europe and the gentleman told me that I didn't buy a ticket for the train in which you didn't have to buy a ticket for. And he had a fake POS system. And what he said was that you had to pay for the ticket plus the fine.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
And so I was, you know, I was kind of, I was by myself in a tough position, in a weird position. I just, and he had the, he had all the right uniform on and I swiped away and he got my credit card information and then also charged me for that, that fee plus ticket when there was no ticket. So I learned the hard way there.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
I've also gotten, you know, when I was in my early twenties, you know, you have to rebook a flight and you're in a rush. I Googled you know, American airline customer service didn't do my due diligence on the number. The number was not American airlines. They were faking as other American airlines. And I thought I was rebooking and re-changing my flight for a certain dollar amount.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
Meanwhile, I was actually providing a fraudulent phone number, my credit card information. And, um, I've gotten better, but where there's so many things right now where they'll tell you there's fraud, like, oh, there's been fraud on your card. Click this link to just verify it. And the link is full of phishing. So I think in general, the scams have gotten so sophisticated.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
And so everyone has to keep an eye out and just do your due diligence before you make phone calls, before you click links. And of course, before you ever provide information. And fortunately, it was credit cards, which had liability protection and all that money was returned. But yeah, crazy stuff.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
And so knowing those statistics, like 50% of couples don't feel comfortable even having conversations around money, or those that do have conversations, three-quarters of them say that it creates material tension in the relationship. That gives us an indicator that we really need to step into it at some capacity.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
No, no, no, no. I think I'm a good... I'm very good at falling on my face. I've mastered the fall on your face in like all areas of life. But I've been very good at getting back up in the mirror, seeing the bruise and be like, yeah, we're not going to fall like that again. We might fall, but it's not going to be from that way again. So... And that's kind of life, right?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
Keep getting knocked down, get picked back up, but just figure out how to avoid the future falls. So I think none of the above when I get hit on again, that's for sure.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
I won't fall that way. I won't fall on the train. I won't fall through the booking of the airlines with the wrong number, you know?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
Okay. I'll give one top of mind. It's in the book and it is about retirement. I think it's so easy to kick the can. I own a talent management agency. We work with different celebrities every day. And I try and teach them some of the financial wherewithal when these big checks are coming in.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
And it is so easy for anybody and everybody, regardless of how much income you have, to kick the can on retirement. And I think it's really important to put dollars and cents together so people can get a picture. But on average, if you want to retire today, you need to take your annual spend and multiply it times around 2025. So let's just say you spend $100,000. I'm just making a simple equation.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
You spend $100,000 a year. You're going to need $2.5 million to retire to live off that for 30 years, assuming the same lifestyle. And so what I would tell people is if we quickly bring that number down to 50,000, you now need 1.25. And so the ideology of what we're spending today does impact how much we need to save tomorrow is critical.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
So think through that and think through that aggressively and also recognize I have a full table in my book. But this is an example. If you're 35 years old, you have a household income of $150,000. To be on track for retirement, you need $330,000 saved up. If you don't have $330,000 saved up with that income under your household and that age, you have to play a little catch up.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
And so you'll have to put about 21% of your gross income away to get caught up. Now, the longer you wait, the more you have to put away. And so if you need a wake up call today, just know that the pain tomorrow or a year or five or 10 years is going to be so much more exorbitant than the small pain today of planning for your retirement.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
And so what I always say is like, when we think about money, it's just like, we initially are like, what are you making? What's your net worth? What's your debt? And it's like, whoa, slow down. Yeah.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
And the big thing is think about what goes into a vacation when you go on it for a week, right? You're planning, you got to look up restaurants, your hotel, your flights, there's your packing, who's watching the dogs, is your security on? That's for a seven day vacation, right? When we retire, it's a 1500 plus week vacation. And for some reason, we just continue to kick the can.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
So take some time, think about it, plan for it. And what you do today will really help tomorrow.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
Yeah. And it's like, well, we can have fun. Like think about, you know, when you go out to drinks with your friends or a bite to eat, like the fun conversations you have about whatever it is, maybe it's gossip, maybe it's current news or what's happening. Like you could do that with money.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
And the classic example I give someone is like, you know, if you earn or win a certain dollar amount, you get paid that amount today, like $50,000 or $500,000 or $100,000. You've got to spend every dollar. How exactly are you spending it? And just in that answer, I can learn how you prioritize money, what your relationship is with money, et cetera.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
So I say introduce fun ways to these conversations because it's hard to step in to the ones that aren't so fun, but we know we have to.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
Well, first and foremost, I think that everybody, everybody has some form of a financial skeleton in their closet. At some capacity, there's some type of skeleton that needs to be worked on. Literally from billionaires down, we all have something. So we're all there together. But the biggest thing is identifying them. And I think we live in a system where we don't experience massive pain that it
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
causes us to actually have to fix things immediately. Another example I always give is like when you have a cavity or you have a super big pain point, you have to immediately fix it. And with finance, it's not set up. It's a slow drip. It's a slow burn. And some people say like, well, what are financial red flags that you look for in relationships? I'm like,
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
If you have financial red flags, that's great. Let me just see them because we know statistically, as you said, that's 43% of married and cohabitating couples have one person that are committing, at least one person that's committing financial infidelity. So let's see the red flags. Let's understand them. Let's not blame, shame, or weaponize.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
Let's work on ways to improve them because within personal finance, with quick, quick solutions, you can see quick results.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
I mean, the problem with that is like, especially someone who's let like over a hundred million dollars in the banking system is like, that's not terrible. And in fact, every, almost every large company that does revenue of over $10 million and greater needs debt to grow. Like that can be an amazing tool to build wealth, but it's like, what kind of debt does that person have?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
The big question is why? And with those behaviors, have they been fixed? Are they going to continue to repeat? The big thing I hate about hearing headlines like that is we hear one thing and we have been trained in the finance world to immediately assume the negative connotation with it. We hear bad credit and assume all this negativity.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
There are a lot of people that are worth multi, multi, multi-million dollars and some that have terrible debt or terrible credit score. It's okay to have certain issues. Let's understand them. Let's identify them. And see if those patterns are going to repeat or can be fixed. That's it. That's it. Right.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
In my book, there was an example we had of someone who kind of had a situation that was wildly the example of financial infidelity. But she's making less than her husband. They got married pretty quickly. He said that he'll pay half the mortgage via Venmo or Zelle. And she had belief in that because she did see that he made more. So her name's on the mortgage.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
They put both of their names on the deed. And then the day they closed, the IRS owned the entirety of her home because he had all these back taxes that were due. And so I think if we don't have these conversations, if we don't step into them, we're not doing our due diligence. And guess what? She went through a divorce. She was carrying his debt.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
She ended up getting happily remarried to a really supportive guy. They together paid off his debt, the prior husbands, and now live a happy life. So that's the thing with finance. It can be fixed once identified and we need to get rid of judging.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
Man, I would say go to therapy and figure out what the real issue is, right? And we're seeing, right, the wage gap is tightening. And in my opinion, it's 100% going to flip. And this concept is something that needs to be broken into, that needs to be shattered because it is completely backwards and asinine.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
Yeah, correct. Correct. I think the short answer is, is that like good debt is any type of debt instrument that is used to hopefully support an appreciating asset of some nature. Right. We know historically real estate in the United States appreciates. Right. So a mortgage is collateralized by the home. And, you know, of course, it's more of a generalized statement.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
But in general, homes in the United States as a macro perspective appreciate that. When we look at credit card debt, credit card debt is considered a bad form of debt because you are likely acquiring assets that depreciate or have no value, which is why I'm sure all your listeners know when you tie the risk associated with any form of debt with an interest rate.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
You know, credit card debt is going to be the highest interest rate because the bank is taking on so much more inherent risk because there is no collateral for that debt that's being deployed. And so when I talk about good debt, when it comes to businesses, I'm talking about companies that are buying equipment to continue to grow. I'm talking about companies are buying real estate to grow.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
Companies are supporting their employees through a line of credit to grow. companies that are using debt to acquire other companies. So there's a lot of forms in which you can use debt as a strategy to acquire appreciating assets. And that is night and day from assets that are bought through dollars that are spent on experiences or material items that depreciate in value. Stocks, not stuff.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
I like it.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
No secret accounts. I think the biggest thing in finance, you need full visibility to everything you have and to everything your partner has, especially if you are married or cohabitating. 100% pure visibility into everything and where it goes. When you have visibility, it absolutely eliminates all gray area.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
When I think about joint accounts and separate accounts, at the end of the day, there is no cookie cutter solution for anything finance. It has to be customized. That's why I like some of these conversations could take weeks, months, even years to figure out after material, material due diligence based on everyone's circumstances and what their overall profile looks like. That being said, I think a
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
good solution. I'll give you one that I recommend in my book at Talk Money to Me. If you have a 15% to 20% income within one another, I think putting a joint account and having your own individual accounts are good, creating an amount that you can both contribute to your individual account and then operating as individual entities as well. But at the end of the day,
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
Net worth is your baseline for cash inflows and outflows. And even to go back to that earnings conversation, the amount of people I know that have less earnings than their partner but have more wealth is significant. Earnings is just one small part of the equation to building your overall net worth. And so that's why another reason to just immediately judge it is it's just it all.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
There's nothing intuitive about it.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
I think that Nick's kid is going to be set up quite well for financial success. Nick has had a ton of success. So any advice I'd give to anyone that has a newborn is, you know, before that newborn even comes to this beautiful earth, have a 529 set up.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
All the birthdays, all the religious celebrations, all the graduations and everything in between, friends can contribute to a 529, but you have to have that account set up. And it is the best way to contribute to a child's future. And as we know, time, I'm sure all your listeners are well aware of the impact of time on growth and making money on your money.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
And so making sure that you are putting money in a place where you have All your tax incentivization set up with time moving in your child's direction is huge.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
And so make sure you're consulting with the CPA, make sure you're working with an investment specialist or doing your own due diligence before you decide the investment selections in these 529 plans or wherever it is that you are saving for your child's future. But it's like anything, just like retirement, the earlier you start, the better you'll be off.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
Correct.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
Yeah, I mean, this is very prevalent with Gen Z's too, right? We're seeing right now that the credit card debt that is being amassed by Gen Z's is higher than any generation before. Obviously, inflation playing an impact on that. And I think that the problem is like, everyone knows it.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
Like you're trying to keep up with the Jones and try to keep up with Instagram, try to keep up with the Kardashians, everything. And the only person at the end of the day that you're impacting is yourself. And it's weird that finance and therapy actually connect in a lot of ways. And one thing I tell people to consider is behavioral based budgeting.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
So that's the idea of going to look at your last three credit card statements and And just pay attention to outlying purchases. You don't have to do Excel file. There's a calculator work. Just literally scan it and just ask yourself why. What was the purpose of that purchase? Are you a purple people pleaser? Are you sitting at dinners feeling like you have to pick it up or you have to buy a drink?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
Are you someone that's trying to impress others through your goods or what you're wearing or where you're going and how you're going and what you're doing? And I think through that, you can understand behaviors about yourself. And the only way that you'll be able to cure those things are by working on yourself. And so, you know, one example I always give is like, I was 21.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
I'm going through my credit card statements and I just see bar tabs that are exorbitant. And I'm like, listen, I like to have a good time, but there's no way I could drink that much. Well, Started to do some therapy within and looking at my behaviors. I was struggling with confidence. I was struggling with identity. I was in a city I didn't know many people.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
And where was that actually impacting me? My wallet and my credit card bill. I'd throw my credit card down, open a tab and say drinks on me. And so that was actually a me issue. And I think through our spending, through Gen Z's, through Try Reality Stars, trying to keep up with other reality stars. It's actually behavioral issues with us that is showing up in our spending.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Don't Let Money Ruin Your Relationship— Instead Follow These Tips from Jason Tartick
And we can learn a lot about ourselves based on how we're executing transactions with our money. And once we work on those issues, you'll see a huge impact and return on our wallets.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
I wonder what you were going to do when you would just have like, you have permission to have a break right now, Nicole. You have permission to have a break.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
Right. Can I tell you that as we were talking, I was just flashing back to this moment. This to me was the, I don't know, maybe I've shared this with you before. I can't remember. So tell me if not. When I think back on this moment of transition from not having children to having children and just like an awareness moment for me, I don't know. I don't know how to categorize this thing.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
I'll just tell you what it is, which is that I remember... Nine years ago, Jen is pregnant with her first boy. And she is like you. She's just like, couldn't be more pregnant. You know, like we were we were who knows. We were hours to days away from from the whole thing going. And we were sitting on our living room floor. And I don't know what we were doing.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
Maybe we were playing a game or something. I don't know what we were doing. And it occurred to me, and so what I said to her was, I said, everyone always says, after having children for a long time, you sort of can't remember life without them. Just because your life is just so different. It's like, what did I do with all my time? You sort of forget. And I said, we are living right now
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
at the very end of before times. The rest of our life will be divided by this moment. Life is divided by all sorts of moments, but a big one is this one. Like BK, before kids. Yeah, it literally is BK or Burger King. And so I was just like, we are at the end of the before times. And it's a strange... I didn't know what to do with that thought, but I liked being aware of it.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
You're in these seasons of life, and sometimes you only realize that you moved from one season to the next in retrospect. I don't know if people in the Middle Ages were like, we're in the Middle Ages. It's only later that you were like, those are the Middle Ages. But this is a moment where you're like, this is the... Yeah, or like the good old days.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
Like, we're in the good old days. Yeah. It's like, this is the end of before times. Yeah. And so the more immediate questions are like, will I be able to step away? Will I want to step away? I don't think I want to. Those are actually just the kind of hypothetical beginning questions of what it will actually mean to reorient your time and priorities. And everyone does this differently.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
My guess for you is... You tell me if I'm right or wrong, but my guess is that you'll probably do it a lot like I did it and like Jen did it, which is to say the kids are an important part of our lives, but we didn't drop everything to have the kids replace it. And so there's this...
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
always tension about like where we're being pulled and so a thing that you will need to do in a way that you kind of never did before was to just start to draw lines and one of them was that very smart thing that you anticipated here already which is like if if you were in a house where the baby was and where the work baby was, then you're going to get pulled from both of them.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
And so there needs to be separate spaces almost so that you can give each the attention that they deserve. Actually, it was interesting because when you talked about that You talked about it really from the perspective of you're working, but then the baby needs something, so you sort of have to get drawn to the baby. But it goes the other way too, right?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
Which is that you could be with the baby, but then feel drawn to work, and so you're not fully present with the kid. But if you create an actual separation, like just the studio is somewhere else, then that's actually an interesting forcing function to be a little more present. And I'm not very good at being present.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
So I'm making things up right now, but I could imagine that drawing those kinds of lines could be very good for being present.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
Because you, you, you, you, you, I don't know. I was going to make like some sort of weird umbilical cord cut reference here, but like, you know, because you let it, you let it separate. It's so close. I know it was almost there and I don't, I don't know how to cut the cord. I'm just going to keep going with it.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
So because you separated it, because you let this work baby grow up and move into its own place. Now it can grow in ways that it never could have when you were treating it like a baby, I guess is totally right. Like totally.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
Right. Which is a really great lesson in change, isn't it? I mean, it's like what this really is, is just the very beginning. It will be the first of endless. This is like the one from before times that will then be carried over into all the decisions and after times.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
Where you're discovering that the forcing function of separating out parts of life or of having to be more intentional about how you're doing something because it now has to fit into a more complex life with a child. All of that, or as crazy making as it can be, if you think about it in a different way, those breaks are the things that allow for growth.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
Yeah, I want to hear more about that.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
Nicole, how do you feel right now? Do you want the very honest answer?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
Yeah, yeah, yeah. When you were talking about identity, I was reminded of this moment, which I'll share, maybe useful. So when I travel and do keynotes, I often do this thing where I walk people through an exercise to identify a mission statement for themselves. The idea being that we make this mistake of too closely tying our identities to the roles that we occupy or the tasks that we perform.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
So it's like, if I go around and say, my identity is I'm a magazine editor, the problem with that is it's just so easily changeable. The roles we occupy and the tasks we perform are changeable. And so if that's what our identity is, then our identity is too easily rocked.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
If I'm a magazine editor as an identity, then all it takes is one guy, Bill, my boss at Entrepreneur Magazine, one guy calling me and firing me to completely obliterate the identity. And that's a bad place to be. So I encourage people to create a mission statement for themselves where it's a short sentence.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
It starts with I, every word carefully selected because it is not anchored to something that's easily changeable. So it's the difference between I am a magazine editor and I tell stories in my own voice. And because I tell stories in my own voice, it's like I can do that anywhere. You could fire me from everything and I can still do that in any platform.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
Yes.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
You can take it anywhere you go. Yeah. Nicely done. Nicely done. So I gave this little talk as I often do. I was at a YPO event in Chicago. And afterwards, this woman came up to me. People often come up to me afterwards and they tell me the mission statement that they came up with. And it's usually stuff like, I help teams achieve greatness or I solve the most complex problems. They're great.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
I love hearing them. But this woman said something I'd never heard before. She said that she had built a consultancy, like a very successful consultancy. And then she had her first child and she wanted to be very involved in the child and raising the child. So she decided to just hit pause on the consultancy, just like...
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
Just pause on the business, pause all business, and just stay home and raise the child. And although she is finding the act of being with her child and raising her child to be very personally rewarding, it has given her an identity crisis because... She does not think of herself as a stay-at-home mom. That is just not how she identifies.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
That's not what she would ever say of herself, even though that is very technically what she is right now. And she didn't know how to manage that or how to create a coherence in that. And my mission statement thing prompted this thought. She said her mission now is... I help people become the best versions of themselves because that applies to the consulting work that she was doing.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
And it also applies to raising the child. And that was a really helpful unlock for her to see that the thing that she's doing now is consistent with the thing that she was doing before and is consistent with whatever it else that she does next. And I really loved that. And so I offer you that as a way of thinking like, This will absolutely change some way in which you understand yourself.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
And it has to, right? Because you've oriented yourself so much around work. And now there is... That's not to say that you won't do that in the future, but you will now have another thing to orient yourself around in some way or another. And so to bring those things into coherence in some way, which I'm certainly not perfect at at all, but...
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
aspire to, I think, is to give yourself a better understanding of your identity instead of shaking your identity.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
Yeah. Well, I mean, in any other circumstance, you might as well say that it is a terrible disease. Like you have a thing growing inside of you. Usually a thing growing inside of you, not a thing you want. I think that sounds bad. You know, human life. This is how it happens. We're a bunch of animals. It's really crazy.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
You know, the answer is that it just happens. you just kind of grow into it. And then also some days you also just don't shower. It's also true. You just don't, but you know, also it doesn't matter because whatever, I mean, look, I, I really liked that. That is a, that's a really cool thing. I did.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
I didn't know that you had gone through that first exercise and that you're now almost doing it in reverse. But I think that the real answer is that like anything in life, any big important thing in life. There's no way to actually plan for it. The best you can do is march into it with open eyes and open ears. And then you just kind of figure it out.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
People have asked me for advice on how do you balance this? And the answer is that you don't start by running. You start in the, well, I was going to say baby steps, but it's just before baby steps, before the baby can even take a step, baby poops. And you just work your way into it. And you end up working your way into self-discovery and you work your way into growth.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
And whatever comes next is going to be awesome. Not that you were asking for my advice.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
Well, but here's the thing. Here's the thing is like, okay, there's this podcast called The Longest Shortest Time, which I think is just the best name for a parenting podcast you could have ever come up with. The thing is that I am... I am... often very frustrated about life as a parent, but also I have an awesome life. And I think that's the thing that I'm trying to reconcile.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
I like everything that I've built here. I mean, I have a I have a great marriage and I do great work and I'm very proud of that work. And that work keeps growing and it keeps making me more money and it keeps being more satisfying. And although I am often frustrated with parenting stuff, also, I have great kids. They're great kids.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
And I can be annoyed at them, but also I spend time with them that I enjoy. And I guess that's just kind of life. Yeah.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
Like going through pregnancy just shows you like we're not elevated in any way. We're a bunch of animals doing animal things. You are beyond nine months pregnant right now, right? Like literally beyond it. Yeah, I am. We were not supposed to be recording today because you were supposed to already be on maternity leave.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
Both are true. It's like all of it is true at the same time, I think is the answer. That's the reason why I really hate the parenting talk that is all oriented around how great everything is, because it's not true. So many things can be true at the same time. I can be really frustrated by a lot of things and then also appreciate them.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
And I can say that this is a pain in the ass, but also that the outcome is awesome. All of it can be true. So it's more fun, frankly, to me and more cathartic to me when I have the sympathetic ear of a friend who can be like, yes, that sucks. It's more interesting to me to talk about the challenges of parenthood than to talk about the delights of parenthood.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
I actually find talking about the delights of parenthood to be completely boring. I never want to talk about it. But that's not to say that they don't exist. It's just like they're mixed in with all these other things. And I feel like I have to spend more time grappling with the hard stuff because that's where my... Those are the knots that I have to untie.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
Whereas the awesome stuff, we take for granted something that somebody told me at some point, and I can't remember the context, but they told me that just a remarkable thing that humans do is... that we can return back to a normal state for ourselves. If something is really exciting, it's exciting for a bit, and then it returns to whatever our normalness is.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
If something's really sad, it's sad for a bit, and then we return back to normal. We just have a good ability to do that. Yes, things can throw that off and some things are too traumatic and it's hard to get back to normal. But generally speaking, that's what we do. And I find that true for myself in basically all circumstances.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
If I'm really excited about something, it's great, but also the excitement wears off pretty soon. And even the worst things that have happened in my life, I've told myself, you will return to normal. I've seen it happen enough times that it will come back to normal and it always does. So When things are really high, I don't have to grapple with them.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
It's not like, oh, what is this highness and what do I do with it? But when I'm feeling frustrated, I do have to grapple with it because that's when I really want to return to normal. And that's, I guess, probably why if I'm to self-assess myself here, I think that's why I end up talking a lot about parenting like that.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
But the end result is the same, which is like you build your normal and the normal is the thing that matters. And in a way, that's kind of what we've been talking about here. This episode is like, what is normal? And then what is the new version of normal that you will kind of establish and always be returning to?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
Oh, the actual act of it. Yeah. We don't report stories about the dog woke up and had a nice bowl of food and went to sleep. Yeah. We report when the dog something terrible happened to the dog. So, you know, most people have a totally good experience and then it's just not worth talking about because it was a totally normal experience.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
Yeah. I mean, I'll tell you, the story with Colin was really funny. Colin being my youngest, which was that we went in, Jen went into labor, and it was the day before my dad's birthday. And so the big question was, is Colin going to be born before or on my dad's birthday?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
Right. But just to be really, really clear before we get into this, what we're going to talk about today is we're going to talk about stepping back and what you're feeling in this moment because you... You and I, we work like crazy. And you've built this company and now you're going to take a big old break from it. And that's scary.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
And we were like waiting around and waiting around and waiting around and waiting around. And like this baby is just not coming. And so at like 1130 p.m., the nurses do like a final check and they're like, yeah, this is going to be a tomorrow baby. And so they tell us to get some shut eye because tomorrow will be a big day. And so we turn the lights off. Jen is in the birthing bed or whatever.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
And I go and like set up this terrible cot in the room. Nobody's sad for you, Jason. No, nobody's sad for me. I'm not, I do not expect anyone to be sad for whatever it's worth. It was a terrible cut. And then, uh, we go like lights out and then truly like five minutes later, there's beeping. And then suddenly everyone's rushing into the room and they're like, this baby's coming out right now.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
And then he was out. Like it was the craziest thing. And then we had a baby on Roy's birthday. No, it was like it was like minutes before. No, like you said, we ended up being the day. It was the day before he was born the day before my dad, like by minutes. And that was fine. It was a totally great experience, except that really didn't want to sleep in that car. I don't know what you're inducing.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
This baby has got to come out because I got to get off of this cat. Oh, Jason.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
Well, what are you doing? What am I doing? Well, here's. Yeah. What are you doing? What am I? I don't know what I'm doing.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
That's great. Well, okay. On that note, let's talk about the no plan is the plan for Help Wanted for a moment. So you're going to disappear. Please, please do because I can't handle the guilt of- Broadcasting live from SiriusXM.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
I mean, Jesus, given how pregnant you are, there is like a at least 50 percent chance that you're going to go into labor while we're recording this episode. So you're going to disappear for some time and, you know, discover the plan and do whatever. And I am going to do the following. I'm going to be hosting a bunch of solo episodes.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
I'm going to bring in some guest co-hosts, which can't hold a candle to Nicole Lappin, but we'll try. And we're just going to stumble our way through it until, until you're back. The seat, the seat remains warm and I'll miss you. And I'm excited to.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
Yeah, that's true. All right. You ready for it? No.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
All right. Well, before times end now, and we'll see you on the other side. So this is the end for... This is BK Help Wanted. This is it. This is BK Help Wanted. And after this will be AK. You're going to be a... You're going to be a whole other same person. That's right.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
Which is why you're here today because... So just for context, so everybody understands, the episodes with you and I that people hear every week are recorded every other week for us. We set aside a bunch of time and then we record a bunch of episodes in a row. And two weeks ago was supposed to be the last one. And then we were supposed to say, bye, Nicole, have a wonderful maternity.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
And you were like, no, if I haven't had the baby, we're going to make another recording, which is crazy, but also says a lot about how dedicated you are to your work. How is it staring down, stepping away? How are you feeling about that?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
Just to be clear, the vast majority of the time, almost all the time that people have heard you, you have been on mic in a studio, which was actually just in a bedroom in your home that you would set up as a studio. And now that bedroom is taken over by a baby. So you had to go find another place to put that microphone.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
You know, what's interesting is. this metaphor that you had has evolved because, so work was your first baby and that baby had its own little nursery in the form of a studio in your home. That's right. And then the baby had, the work baby got kicked out for an actual baby, which is forcing the work baby to grow up and to become like a work child or a work young adult. Yeah.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
And, and for a while you were like, well, but maybe they can both be babies and they can both have their own little nurseries at home. But you're thinking, no, no, no. Like this is, this is, this is actually like to have a child is in some way to accelerate or to force the evolution of the other things in your life, which, which is exactly what it's worth.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
What I have found with me, like I am, and we've talked about this, I am so deeply frustrated with, By the thoughts of how much more I might have accomplished or could do or whatever that I can't because I have kids. But at the same time, I have to remind myself that the time of my life in which I have had children, which has been nine years, I have a nine year old and a five year old.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
That time has been the time of greatest accomplishment in my life. I have built the most during that time. So even as I focus on all the things that I couldn't do, I've also done the most. And why is that? I mean, part of that is just like, if you're doing life correctly, then there should always be new things and you're growing.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
But another part of it is that I think that just having the kid forced me to put structures around my time in a way that I never had before and to be really intentional about how I'm using my time and to drop things that I enjoyed, but that just weren't as productive a use of my time. And as a result, my work has thrived. And that sounds like what you're setting up here.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
I had no idea. That was amazing. I got a lot of emails. Did I tell you that? I got a lot of emails from that episode. People were really grateful about how honest I was about the challenges of parenthood. In fact, I was just talking with a friend who lives in Montana, and I was being open about how challenging I find parenting is.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
And she was shocked because she was like, nobody in Montana would ever say something like that. And I do think it's true that in more work oriented cultures like New York, where I live, there's probably a bit more comfort with talking like that. But mostly people are not comfortable talking about it. But I think I think that it's really important.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
Like, you know, it'll be important for you as you'll find out, like parenting will be very rewarding, but also you're going to wipe a lot of asses and you're not going to enjoy any of that. It's OK not to enjoy any of that. Thanks, Jason.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
So... Well, if we rewind to the times in which we were having kids nine years ago and five and a half years ago, I, in both cases, was fully employed. Today, I have a job. A W-2 employee. if not 100% of my income, 90% of my income. That's not the case now. Now, I still have a W-2, but I also have a whole lot of entrepreneurial pursuits and make more outside than inside the company.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
But back then, it was just that. So I had just a regular paternity leave of, I can't remember how much it was. It wasn't that much, a couple of weeks. And then my wife, Jen, is... She is self-employed, but as a freelancer. So she's really like eating what she kills. It's just like project to project to project to project. And it was interesting. Jen had more thoughts and feelings on this.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
And her thoughts and feelings were that for her, work is this dual source of purpose and deep anxiety. Right. And she is always thinking about... I mean, she drives a lot of value... from her work, and she loves her work, and it's a place of passion for her. But also, she's always thinking about what's coming next, and will this project lead to another project? Am I at the end of my career?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
Jen's always thinking this way. She'll write a book, and then it'll be like, ugh, is this the last book that I ever get to write? Is this the last article that I ever get to write? So there's a lot of anxiety. So she... saw maternity leave as a opportunity to take a break from that, to just say, I have another thing to focus on, a bigger, like kind of weightier, I don't know, whatever.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
It's a more important thing. It's an actual human being. Yeah, it's an actual human being. So she was really hoping that that project of taking a break and just focusing on raising a child could eliminate some of the anxiety that she was feeling about work and just give her a break from it.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
And I think that it did in the actual break, the actual few weeks that she gave herself for quote-unquote maternity leave, it certainly did not in the long run. She still has all that work anxiety even though we have our children. But she really loved that and I think wanted to find... a moment to recalibrate from it.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
Me, on the other hand, honestly, what I did is that I used my paternity leave both times to just do other work projects. I remember I was working on a podcast five and a half years ago, a solo podcast project. And I spent basically my entire paternity leave at home when I was not helping out with the baby, just working on that thing because I don't really know how to stop.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
And I don't know what else I would do with my time.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
The beginning, the very beginning is the, it's the easiest time. I mean, you will like the, the, it's really real. The hardest part is sleeping because the baby will be waking you up constantly, but yeah, baby's just, baby's not doing much. It doesn't really require that much of your work. Like you're going to sit around and be bored.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How To Take Parental Leave When You're an Entrepreneur.... Or a Workaholic
Like I have a feeling that you will, it'll be very interesting to see what you do. Do you find other things to do? Like, like Jen, um, really committed to watching a bunch of trashy TV and just checking out and just enjoying being on a break. Whereas I didn't. I don't know how to do that. So I just worked on something else that wasn't my work.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
I love that. Tell me about the area that you're in and what you think is possible that would achieve that sentence that you just said.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
I totally get that, but let's challenge that for a second because I think it's important. Of the jobs available where you are, how many of them are government?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
I'm asking that because it's just like, what are the realistic expectations here? Because if where you are right now is tied to government and the forestry thing is tied to government, maybe that's something that you have to just accept and then say, you know what?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Even though government is a very slow-moving organism, I'm going to figure out how to do my best work inside of it because it is the work that's available. And also, frankly, you know, look...
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
libertarian or not everyone can agree like we're better when we have a government full of people who want to do good work right so that would be you if you so choose right and then i guess i was thinking maybe of learning a skill trade like iron working there's a lot of jobs that are
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
But wait, you just said the goal of having my own farm. Is everything that you're doing leading to that? Because you're telling me contradictory things, and I get it because this question of yours is tied up in so many other things. It's tied up in your past, in your present, in your future.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
but I just want to point out to you the contradictions of one telling me you'd be open to reskilling as an iron worker. And then also my goal is to have my own farm. You're probably not going to have your own farm as an iron worker. Maybe you can, but that would be a unique farm. So Pick these things apart for me. What is the most important? What's not? Is having your own farm a fixed thing?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
That's what we're working towards? Or is that just an idea, one of many?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Stick around, Help Wanted will be right back.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Welcome back to Help Wanted. Let's get to it. Okay, it feels like the foundational decision that needs to be made before anything else is... Do you quit farming or anything like farming? Do you quit being the kind of person who utilizes the skills that you have developed to work on a farm or anything that resembles farming? Is that the first question that you need to face?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
where my focus is you know but you don't just want to work outside is the thing because I call you back to autonomy feeling challenged feeling fully utilized and finding meaning at work right because I'm already working outside yeah so obviously that's not it yeah yeah So that's not it.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
And spending years and years or whatever it takes to master ironworking and then working on buildings in the city, I mean, that doesn't sound to me at all like it's going to fulfill these really core things that you laid out before. If you're working with an ironworking team on a building, you don't have a whole lot of autonomy. You can't change the structure of the building.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
You're probably not even going to feel all that challenge, to be honest with you, because once you reach a certain level of mastery, you're going to be repeating that skill instead of constantly reinventing something. You may feel fully utilized, or you may not, because what would be nagging at you is going to be all this time that you spent learning farming that is not being utilized at all.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
And you may or may not find meaning. Or you may tell me that in the way that working for the government bothers you, that also just building this next bank building is also not going to be incredibly meaningful for you. I think that it's helpful to pick some things that you can stay with for a little bit.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
and then figure out if there's a way to achieve greater happiness inside of them before saying, and I think it's great that you are willing to say, I'm open to anything. But the problem with saying that I'm open to anything is that you're giving yourself infinite directions to go in, which means that you're not going to do any of them. So let's narrow. So the reason why I asked you
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Is it time to quit farming? Which I know quit is a very, is like a harsh word there, but was because I wanted to see like what you're willing to utilize as the starting point of a series of decisions. And your answer was you're willing to consider leaving it.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Right. Okay. That's interesting. But What you didn't say is, yes, I have to. So let's start with this. I'm not telling you what to do, but for the purposes of the thought experiment, you will stay in farming unless it turns out to be a really bad decision. You will stay. Next, you want to do something with this skill set that you have in the geographic area that you live in.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Next, what are those jobs? And we need to start looking at those. The forestry one is great. You're talking to them about that. You've identified something that you might not like about it, but there are going to be other things that you do. And maybe you could take that job and autonomy goes up to seven and fully utilized goes from a four to five to a six or seven. And that's progress.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
So tell me now that I have made some decisions for you, which you can dispose of at any time, but tell me other things that you could do that you haven't done yet or people to talk to that you haven't talked to yet.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
You need to start experimenting. And I would start with... what feel like pretty reasoned experiments, like incremental experiments, right? Testing out the watercress farm, which also is not a thing I've ever heard of, is a much smaller experiment than reskilling as an iron worker. And the reason I'm using the word experiment is because experimentation is a liberating concept, or it should be.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Because one of the great things that drives analysis paralysis that you've been experiencing as you're sitting here looking down infinite highways in infinite directions is is that every decision that you're considering feels like some kind of large commitment, or it feels like a major shift, or it feels like it's going to set your path in some totally different direction.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Because you don't know which one to commit to, you feel like you don't know which direction to go in at all. So what happens if you just treat it like an experiment? What experiments can you run that don't require years of new work, To see if you can find situations that move you a little closer to that goal. And maybe taking a forestry job and saying, you know what?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
I'm going to give this six months. I'm going to see if I feel better about it. Maybe even... Set a goal and see if in six months you have achieved it. Here could be a goal. I've given you these four things that you want. Autonomy, feeling challenged, feeling fully utilized, and finding meaning. And you have given numbers to these things for your current situation.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Take the forestry job six months later, fill out that chart, one to 10. Did everything move up at least one or two notches? If so, I would say good experiment, right? Like good experiment. If they moved down two notches, then the experiment was a failure and it's time to do something else. But maybe that was progress.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
And maybe that means that you stay in forestry for another six months or whatever. Or maybe it means that, you know, it's time to go try the watercress farm or whatever, right? But...
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
I think that once you have some sense of exactly what you're working towards and a way to measure it in some way, then making changes that don't feel crazy but feel logical are really just going to start to expand your understanding of what you want and the many different ways you can get it.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Yeah. Or you change one factor. The problem that you have, I think, after hearing you for a while is that you have conceptually at least opened yourself up to changing every single factor in your life. And as a result, everything seems crazy. It's like impossible to figure out what to do.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
And if you think about trying to fix a computer, which I know very little about trying to fix a computer, and you probably do too, considering your line of work. But one thing that we can imagine here is that if you want to try to fix a computer, what you don't do is get your hands in and just change every damn thing every single time and see what happens. No, you change one thing at a time, right?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
You're like, is it plugged in? Yeah. Yes, it's plugged in. Okay, let's try the next thing. The next thing is, is it on? Okay, let's try that. Now the next thing, right? You do one thing at a time. And I would say that right now, it's really useful to say, okay, here are the things that are fixed.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
What's fixed is that I'm staying in the industry that I'm in and that I'm staying in the geography that I'm in. So the next thing is, what is the variable? The variable can be where I work. All right, so let's try that. And let's say that you go around and you try a couple of those and it's not quite solving the problem for you. Let's pick changing one other variable.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
What is the next variable to change? The next variable to change maybe is where I live. Maybe it's you've tapped out everything in that area and it's time to try farming somewhere else. Or maybe it's, I'm going to stay here and the variable that's going to change is the industry that I'm in.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
But like one thing at a time, because when you start changing every variable, you give yourself too many options. And there's a study I love. The study is this. These students from some university, I can't remember, you know, they're working with some professor. They set up a stand inside of a supermarket. And they pose as people who work for a jelly company. And they are doing samples.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
You know, you walk into a supermarket, you see somebody's giving out samples at a table. And they're sampling jellies. Every hour, they change the number of options of the jellies. They go back and forth between like four jellies on the table and 20 jellies on the table, right? So it's like one hour, there's four jellies that people can sample.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
The next hour, there's 20 jellies, and then they go back to four, and they go back to 20. And the result of this is fascinating. The result of this is that when there are more jellies on the table, more people come by and sample. But when there are fewer jellies on the table, more people buy. And I think you are putting too many jellies on your table.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Right, exactly. So... Thank you for rolling with my metaphor here. So right. So it's like you need fewer jellies. Who doesn't? There's not enough jelly metaphors in the day. So you need fewer jellies. And I think that we are just for the purposes of like thinking about what's next, we are taking some things off the table. Doesn't mean that they can't come back on the table at some point.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
But for right now, you got to figure out the singular change that you're going to make. And it means reducing choice. And once you've done that, I think you will see some other options that are worth taking seriously or considering, and you should try them, and you will learn something. And whatever that something is will leave you more informed about what's next than you are now.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Great. All right, so... At the very beginning, I asked you, what do you want in a single sentence? And your answer was, I want work to be as fulfilling as other parts of my life. And that's, I'm sure, still true. But after thinking about what you're going to try to do next, what's another answer to that question?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Yeah. I love that. And that's what I was hoping you would do, which is basically go from... At the beginning, you were like... Your answer was actually pretty passive, right? You're like, here are the things that work, and then there's a part that doesn't work. And now your answer is, here's what I'm going to do to try to make this part work. It's more active. Yeah.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
And that, I think, is a good start.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Help Wanted is a production of Money News Network. Help Wanted is hosted by me, Jason Pfeiffer.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Oh, I didn't sign up for that.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
This is Help Wanted, the show that tackles all the big work questions you cannot ask anyone else. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
The helpline is open. So feeling unfulfilled at work sucks because you don't even know where the problem is or how to fix it. And suddenly you start thinking, maybe I just have to throw everything away. Maybe my whole life has to change. And that is probably what drove this seven minute long voice memo that we got from a listener who is in this exact spot. You can hear it for yourself.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
We will not play all seven minutes for you, but here is just a sampling.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
You can hear it there, right? It's the panic. It's the analysis paralysis. It is the, I need to do something. So maybe I just do everything. So I invited her on the show to help her choose a path forward. Here's how it went. Melissa, welcome to Help Wanted.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
So you sent in a lot of thoughts in a lot of different directions, and we will unpack them in a bit. But I feel like it would be helpful to have some context on you. But even before that, I want to ask you something now, and then I'm going to ask it to you at the end of this conversation. And we're going to see if the answer changes. So ready? It's this.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
In your voice memo, you said a lot of things that you want. But if I forced you to answer the question, what do you want in a single sentence? What is the answer?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
That's a great answer. I love that. What are you doing right now?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
The way that you answered the question a moment ago was that you wanted work to be as fulfilling as the other parts of your life. So tell me about those more fulfilling other parts of your life.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
So wait, but why is work, which also sounds like it's very outdoorsy and work in the land and all that stuff. Like, why is that not as fulfilling as what you just described?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Right. So if I can break that answer down into a couple component parts, it's like one of the things that you really want is autonomy.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
And then another thing that you really want is to feel like you are fully utilized.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
If you just took your answer and broke it up into concept parts, what else is there?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Now, let's just use these three component parts, autonomy, feeling fully utilized, and having meaning in the work that you're doing. On a scale from one to 10 for each of these, how would you say they rank with your current work situation? So like autonomy, scale from one to 10, what do you get?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
That's pretty interesting because it depends on like you've just defined autonomy for yourself because some people would just be very happy with being left alone. But what you want is actual influence. You want autonomy to shape an organization, not just to be left alone inside of an organization, right?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Yeah. And that overlaps with the next one, which is feeling fully utilized because they're utilizing some skills of yours, but there's a lot that isn't being utilized. So what would you say, scale of one to 10, how much are you as a whole talented person with a body of knowledge being utilized?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
And then meaning sounds pretty low.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
The reason I wanted to do that was because I have a theory of work and change called the 1% problem. And the 1% problem is that sometimes we're like 99% there towards what we want. And then there's 1% that's missing. And that 1% nags us so much that it feels like the entire thing is actually broken. It's a kind of princess and the pea problem. And...
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
I wanted to put this to you, and this might not apply to you at all, but I'm voicing it so that you think about it, which is like, is this situation, it's not good for you. It's not perfect. You shouldn't stay there forever or maybe even much longer. But I'm curious about when you step back and you look at all the things that it does provide you, and then whether or not
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
There's a way to leverage what you're doing there or the connections that you've made there to fill in like the 1%. Like, do you need to hit reset and try some totally different random thing? Or is a lot of the structure of this environment actually working? It's just that it's the wrong farm. It's the wrong challenges. It's the wrong people. but it's like almost there?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Or do you need to say, you know what, screw it. I just cannot work on somebody else's farm. This is a hundred percent problem. And I like have to start my own thing. It's the only way in which I will have these things.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
As you're talking, there's an interesting little ecosystem of challenges that you're grappling with. And one of the big ones that I think we need to address before we address anything else is what in your world actually needs to stay the same? Because you just told me, for example, that you don't want to move again, which is fine. Moving sucks.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
And you have found, like when I asked you the things in your life that are going really well, the thing that you described was your living situation. You really love it. And so giving that up would be a huge bummer. But, you know, you have to know in any situation, like what is fixed and what is variable.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
Because that's going to impact not just the next decisions, but also maybe how you come to think about those next decisions. So is that fixed? Should we proceed and should you proceed as you're thinking about what's next with that your living situation or at least where you are is a fixed thing? We're not going to change that or is that changeable?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
And the things that you want in your work are that you're going to want some autonomy, you're going to want to feel challenged, fully utilized, although you're saying you are up for some reskilling, so that could be a kind of different utilization, and you want to find some meaning. Can you go through a little exercise with me, which is, can you come up with a sentence.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
It starts with I, and it should be really short. And every word in the sentence should be carefully chosen because it is not subject to change, but that this describes the thing that you want to be, or the thing that is your mission statement of sorts. I'll give you an example from me. So throughout my career, I have been a magazine editor. I've been a newspaper reporter, podcaster.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
But I have found that the challenge with creating identities around any of those descriptions is that all that stuff is really changeable. You know, like I could get fired from a magazine and then I am not a magazine editor. And so if my identity is I'm a magazine editor, then I don't know what to do. So I came up with this sentence for myself. And the sentence is, I tell stories in my own voice.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
"I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!"
And the reason I like that is because stories gives me incredibly broad latitude. It's anything. What is the thing for you? What is the mission statement? The sentence that starts with I, that has words that are really specific about you, but also aren't easily changeable.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Exactly what I had in front of me. Okay, perfect. This is why we work well together. Okay, yes. So that's exactly correct. Let me just read this to you. And for context, my newsletter, for those who haven't read it, my newsletter is about a thousand words. And it's usually broken up into three or four sections.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Sections are just, you know, it's like a big header that makes it a little easier for you to feel like you know where you are in the newsletter. And so this is the beginning. This is what I think of as the opener for a newsletter that I just published. The headline was How to Prevent Miscommunications. And here's how it starts. You're being misunderstood today.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
You shared a great idea or made something wonderful or told someone something and they are confused, unimpressed, maybe even annoyed. Now you're upset. Why don't they just understand? But here's the problem. You started in the wrong place. I fall victim to this all the time, including here in this newsletter.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
So today I'll share some of my own stumbles and a powerful two-step exercise that will make your intentions and ideas clearer so everyone understands you. So that's the opening. And then it goes on, the thing that you see underneath that is the first header for the first section, and the header says, first, my own mistakes, and then I tell a little story about how I screwed up.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
So, okay, now we've established that. Questions?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Yeah. Okay. A couple of things. Number one, as a young writer, I loved stem winders. I loved the idea of like starting in some random place and building with some narrative and eventually getting to the point. I thought that was really fun. And as a consumer, I sometimes do enjoy that style if someone's really, really good at it.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
The only person right now who I can think of that's really good at it is the host of this podcast called 60 Songs That Explain the 90s Colon the 2000s, which you must listen to. It's fantastic. And it always it takes for like it takes like 20 minutes to get to the point of the podcast. He's such a good storyteller that it works. But generally speaking.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
It's a terrible, terrible way to open something. And the reason for that is because people are very busy. And especially if you are serving any kind of business audience, those people are really utility oriented. They want to know what they're going to get from this because they have very limited time and they have too much coming at them all at once.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
And the only things that will survive are the ones that are clear in value. I have this concept that I wrote about in a previous newsletter, which I call the first question. The first question is the first question that anybody asks about anything. And that question is, is this for me or is this not for me? They're always asking that. I mean, think about it. You are asking that.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Every time you encounter anything in the first couple seconds of this episode of this podcast, you were like, is this for me or is this not for me? And then, you know, Morgan said something that answered yes. And that's why you're this far into this episode. But, you know, could it could have gone the other way? People might have been like, I don't care about newsletters. And then they're out.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
So when somebody opens my newsletter, the first thing I want to do is identify why this is for you, which is why I open by stating the problem, which in this case is you're being misunderstood. Now, you don't have to do it exactly like that, but I do think that it's really important to be as straightforward as possible so that people appreciate value. You had asked about structure.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
I do it for a couple of reasons. Number one, I do it because I want the newsletter to be an easy read. I don't want anyone to ever feel lost in it. I know that a lot of people are reading it on their phone while they're on the go or on the toilet or who knows, you know, there's a lot of distractions. So like the format is basically this, it opens like that.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Then it steps back and it tells some kind of story. Sometimes it's about an entrepreneur. Sometimes it's about me. Sometimes it's some, some interesting psychological study. And then it applies that story to you. and your problem, and then it gives you some kind of exercise, a couple questions to ask, something to do, and then it just kind of takes it home with a big idea thought.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
I repeat that every single time. It's because the world is full of so much noise that you have to create signal for people. And you do that by being repetitive, but useful. And so I created a structure that was useful for my reader, but also very useful for me.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
I know now every single time, once I have an idea for what the newsletter is, I basically just need two things, three things, I need three things. I need to know what problem am I solving. I need to know what compelling story or anecdote illustrates it. I need to know what the exercise is. And once I have that, I can sit down and I can write the newsletter.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
This newsletter now only takes me, I mean, people email me and they're like, you must work on this all week. No, the answer is it takes me about an hour and a half to write the newsletter. And then I like futz with it and polish it. My wife reads it and gives me feedback. But like the actual writing of it is like an hour and a half.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
And that's because I have set this formula up and therefore I know exactly what I'm doing and I know what I need to do. And that makes writing so much easier.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Oh, yeah. How do you even describe that? Well, Matt has a deep background in building companies, mostly digital companies. He was the CEO of Smart Passive Income. Now he's building a whole bunch of different companies, some of which I'm involved in. He's just one of those guys that builds a lot of things and knows everybody.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Oh, yeah. Yeah. That you know what? That was funny. I think that's a great prompt for a dinnertime conversation. I have all sorts of answers like, you know, this thing that you've like wanted to do forever, but you haven't done. But I've actually tried that in a couple of spaces. And most times people don't have an answer to that. But you did.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Okay. So the mission statement exercise is a way to feel grounded in a time of constant change. So many of the things that you do or that you identify with or that you think you're good at are things that are very easily changeable. And so it's helpful to anchor yourself into something that won't change, to find the thing that does not change in times of change. And so
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Anyway, what I tell people to do is to come up with a single sentence that starts with I, and then every word is carefully selected so that it is not anchored to something that's easily changeable. The example that I always give is it's the difference between me saying I am a magazine editor, which is very easily changeable.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
All it takes is one phone call from my boss at Entrepreneur Magazine saying you're fired, and then I'm not a magazine editor. So very easily changeable. Two, I tell stories in my own voice, which is not changeable. Stories can happen in any format, in any medium. In my own voice is me setting the terms for how I want to operate at this stage of my career. So for you, it could be,
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
I solve the most complex problems. I help teams achieve greatness. Whatever it is, once you have that clarity, you realize that anything that changes in your work or life is just a new opportunity to do the thing that you already do best.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Yeah, okay. Global warming, that's a problem.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Things that people are just not going to do.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
There are parts of it I like. There are parts of it I don't like.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
What I like is that you have a point of view. and that you are approaching it in a way that feels relatable and useful to an audience. I think that's great. I like that you have identified that you have a specific approach that differentiates you in a market. What I don't like is how complicated it is.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Because I don't think that you can actually sustain doing a different kind of experiment on yourself every week in a weekly newsletter. I think you will burn yourself out instantly on that. It's too much work. I think you need to find ways to produce a newsletter that really don't take you that much time. Because putting together news, look, consider the experience of a newsletter for people.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
It's pretty short. People are going to open it. They're going to read it once. They're going to likely delete it. Some people tell me that they save my newsletters, and that's cool. But it's a pretty... It's like an experience in aggregate. It's about building a long-term relationship with people.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
So each newsletter should be good, but you shouldn't pour a full week's worth of personal experimentation effort into each newsletter. You will run out of topics too quickly, and you will burn yourself out. I'll give you an example of something that is... much smaller in scale, but takes this same sort of approach of distilling academic information to something that's useful.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
There's a guy I know named Thomas who has a newsletter called Science Says. And it's very simple. Each week, he finds some academic paper on marketing where they're studying like You know, if you put the price above or below the product in an advertisement, which drives sales more? But these things are buried inside of complicated academic papers. And so he makes it simple. He just...
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
brings out the biggest, most important piece of information, quickly summarizes the main points of the study, gives you some actionable takeaway. I find it very useful. It's a great distillation of insights that are otherwise trapped inside of academic journals, and it's great for marketers, which I'm interested in. I feel like you could probably do a version of that.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
There's got to be all sorts of interesting science out there about the climate that could be made useful for people without... consuming a full week's worth of your time. And also, look, you also, one other thing, you have to, especially when you're starting a newsletter, you have to guard yourself against the dispiriting experience of not that newsletters are hard to grow.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
And if you get like a, you know, if you get a 40% open rate, you are killing it. So you're not going to reach that. You're not reaching that many people. And so if you spent like a full week, not eating meat and like chronicling everything and putting together this like loving thing, and then very beginning, like a hundred people read it, you're going to be like, screw this. I hate this. Right.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
So you've got to do something that's just lighter for you and lighter for your audience. But I like the starting point that you have. And I think that there's a lot to build from there.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
I can because I've spent a lot of time thinking about it. Each week, the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, which is me, gives you one way to be more successful and satisfied and build a career or company that you love.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Yeah. So my newsletter has gone through three phases. And then I have spent a lot of time iterating inside of each of those phases. So let me give you the quick rundown. The newsletter began as The Pfeiffer Five, which is a terrible name.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Yes, that is before your time. That was a terrible name. And the idea was simply that each month I would send out five things that I found useful. And it was called the five for five because my last name is Pfeiffer and there were five things. Terrible, absolutely terrible. Because it didn't communicate anything about anything.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
It set absolutely no expectations for why you should sign up for this thing. And then the cadence at monthly, you forgot that you even subscribed to it by the time the next one showed up. Then it became Build for Tomorrow, which was the name of my book and I thought would also be the name of my newsletter. And the book is about change.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
And so I thought I would make the newsletter about change, how to navigate change, how to thrive in times of change. But I found that to be too abstract, too difficult to write to. And also, you know, change is like a thing people deal with, but it isn't a thing that people wake up in the morning saying, I need to read about, you know? Mm-hmm.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
So then I rebranded it as One Thing Better, which is what it is now. And my thinking behind it was people get too many newsletters and they get too much information inside of those newsletters. It is a deluge inside of a deluge. And... I know that if you give people 10 things to do, they'll do zero of them. Instead, why don't I orient this newsletter around a promise?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
That promise is that every time you read this, it will be simple. It will be straightforward. It will be one thing that you can do. It feels very manageable. I was dealing with the problem of I speak to a broad audience. I think that newsletters actually have an advantage if they speak to a very specific audience. I speak to a broad audience. So that was my way of approaching it.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
And then how did I get to that line? Each week, one way to be more successful and satisfied and build a career or company you love. Honestly, the answer was... that I kept changing the words in it in response to things that people would be most responsive to in the newsletter. I eventually found that people like the idea of success.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Newsletters that were in some way or another about finding satisfaction, finding happiness, finding calm, seemed to really resonate. I still always... have the impulse to change this language.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
But I think the best thing that you can do is put something out in the world, see how people respond to it, try to identify the language that they use to describe why you are valuable to them and start using that language back to them.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
Okay, so my answer is pretty hyper-specific to me, but I think inside of this answer is something that's really useful to everybody, so let me just tell you what it was. The Build for Tomorrow version of this newsletter, so that was the second iteration of the newsletter, coincided with me getting this incredibly sweet deal from Facebook, which I dragged Nicole into as well.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
So Nicole got this sweet deal from Facebook too. So the sweet deal from Facebook was that they were launching a competitor to Substack. For those who don't know, Substack is like the leading... free newsletter tool that you're supposed to monetize with subscriptions. So in other words, you don't have to pay to use Substack. You do have to pay to use some other tools like Kit or Beehive.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
These things have a cost associated with using the product. Substack is totally free to use. They hope that you will create a paid version of your newsletter and then they'll take a cut. And they had been... To launch, Substack had been paying creators to use the product.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
So they would find some popular blogger or something, and they'd be like, hey, we will pay you $200,000 a year to put your newsletter on Substack. So when Facebook was creating a competitor to Substack... which was called Bulletin, they started calling people like me and basically making that same offer. They were like, we will pay you gobs of money to just use this product.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
And that was pretty good. They were offering a lot of money. So I said, yes. And then I said, oh, you should talk to my friend, Nicole. I bet she would like your money too. And so that's how that happened. So I took this deal and I rebranded my newsletters, Built for Tomorrow, and I started getting paid by Facebook. And a couple of really interesting things happened. Number one was...
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
The way to grow on Facebook at that time was to write a newsletter that could be promoted inside of Facebook News, which barely exists anymore if it does at all. But back then, Facebook's attempt at being something of a news aggregator. And so they would surface your newsletters inside Facebook News. So that created this incentive to write newsletters that would show up in Facebook News.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
which were very different from the kinds of newsletters that were really good to readers as they showed up in inboxes, right? Like I had a different audience in mind. I was writing differently. And so my newsletter would grow only when it showed up in Facebook news.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
And when Facebook eventually killed that product and I was out in the cold with nothing but my money jacket from Mark Zuckerberg, I started to think, what works about this newsletter? And I realized that the only time in which I got any feedback or I heard from audiences or I saw any growth in this newsletter was when it showed up in Facebook News. Otherwise, nothing was happening.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
And the reason I tell you this story, the reason I think this is relevant to you, even if you don't get a bunch of zuck bucks, is because you have to have the right incentives in order to build something for your audience. So you need to be out there in the cold. You need to be able to see and feel what people respond to and what they don't respond to.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
You need to live or die by whether or not people really genuinely like and care about and want to read and share the thing that you make. And if you are not seeing that, no amount of... like paid growth or partnerships or whatever can get you to escape the death spiral that that will be. So I really liked actually getting kicked out of this Facebook thing and having to figure it out on my own.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
And what I realized was I was not being something that people were excited about. and the newsletter was not growing organically by itself. And I stepped back and I thought about why. And I thought, if I subscribed to this newsletter, I would not know what in the hell it was. Just like day in, day out, this newsletter shows up. I don't know what this is. I don't know why I'm getting it.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
I believe, Morgan, we do a good job of this on the podcast that we make, but I don't know how explicitly we ever think about this. So here's a formula for media that that you inherently know, but that you need to apply to your newsletter and that everyone should apply to everything that they make.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
The formula for media, whether you are just thinking about this for your own Instagram channel or a newsletter that you make or anything, the formula for media is the right combination of predictability and surprise. That's it. So predictability, it has to reliably deliver upon something that people want and they know how it adds value to their lives. Surprise.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
They don't know what you're going to say next. If you get that balance wrong, if you are too predictable and therefore too boring, or if you're too surprising and it's just like every week a newsletter shows up and it's like, what is this? Why are you writing about that now? That's bad. People will tune out. I needed to figure out what can I do that really lives in that.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon
I need to establish a promise. I need to pay off on that promise reliably, but I need to do it differently and surprisingly each time. That is what took me away from the old formula and forced me to come up with something that would actually resonate.