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 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin · "I Have Too Many Ideas and Analysis Paralysis. Help!" · 26 Dec 2024
podcast
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
And that, I think, is a good start.
Help Wanted is a production of Money News Network. Help Wanted is hosted by me, Jason Pfeiffer.
Oh, I didn't sign up for that.
This is Help Wanted, the show that makes your work work for you. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine.
And on Thursdays, I give you one way to improve your work and build a career or company you love.
Are you going to be able to keep it together for this one?
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