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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, I want to hear more about that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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