Jason Feifer

speaker

848 appearances 6 recordings 2 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard 12 Jun

Jason Feifer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin · "I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!" · 26 Dec 2024 podcast

If you just took your answer and broke it up into concept parts, what else is there?

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?

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?

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?

And then meaning sounds pretty low.

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...

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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...

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