How to Build a Career That Can Survive Drastic Change | Jason Feifer
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Why is waiting to be chosen a losing strategy?
A lot of times we think about how hard this is going to be, what a terrible road this is going to be. But most of the time, sticking your neck out just means putting in some effort without knowing how it's going to be rewarded and then enduring a lot of non-reward. And if you can do that, then you can put yourself in a position to learn. Do it over and over and over again. Fail, fail, fail, fail, fail. Eventually you will get somewhere.
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Hey guys, what's up? We're talking with the champion of change today, my friend, Jason Pfeiffer, editor-in-chief at Entrepreneur Magazine. What's up, Jason? I appreciate the enthusiasm by which I was just introduced. Hey man, we all have to do something well. Welcome to the show. Great to have you. I study all my guests and from afar, been a fan, been listening to your show. Certainly have heard of the little magazine you write. Host of Build for Tomorrow. You've got your podcast and stuff. You've done a lot of interviews. A lot of our listeners enjoy hearing that professional journey. I'd love to give everybody a little taste for yours. I started not having any idea what it is that I wanted to do, but I knew that I like to write.
I knew that as a reporter, people will just tell you stuff. It's kind of amazing, actually. You just go out and you say, I would like to interview you. And they say, come on into my home and let me tell you all the things. That was a pretty... unbelievable experience. I started as a community newspaper reporter. It was just the only job that I could get. The very, very beginning, I was at Gardner News, Gardner, Massachusetts. Tiny little paper, North Central Massachusetts, covering nothing because nothing's going on. I did it for about a year. It was a grumpy year for me because I felt I'm too good for this place. I have all these ambitions and I should be writing for the New York Times. Two things about this.
Number one, What a jerk. Because the thing is, if I was too good for that place, I wouldn't have been at that place. We need to stop wherever we are and say, what can I learn from this experience right here, right now? Instead of wishing that I was somewhere else, why don't I work towards that somewhere else by starting right now? Bloom where you're planted. There you go. That's a nice cliche. That's for a good reason. And then number two is that I, after a year, thought to myself, all right, well, look, if I'm really serious about this and I'm not just grumbling, what does it take to go somewhere else? What does it take to work at these large publications? And I realized that, well, working at the Gardner News is not going to get me there because at no time in the history of the world will somebody at the New York Times pick up a copy of the Gardner News, read the story I did on the middle school play and call me up and say, we're bringing it up to the big time.
It's never going to happen ever, ever. I needed to go to them. I quit the newspaper and I sat in my bedroom for nine months and I cold pitched everybody. I didn't have any connections. I knew nobody. And I'm writing editors of the Washington Post and the Boston Globe and the Associated Press. Eventually, I start to land stories in these publications. It takes a long time. There's a lot of being ignored. And even when I do land a story, as exciting as that sounds, I will tell you that the money that comes along with it is not that exciting. So I would bust my butt to get $500 out of the Washington Post or something like that. But after nine months of this, I had proven something. And what I had proven was I can work at a different level.
And I didn't do it by just sitting around and grumbling and expecting somebody to hand it to me. I went out and I did it myself. I went to them. And that is a lesson that I've carried forward throughout my career as I then got into magazines eventually, moved to New York, worked at a whole bunch of different magazines, Maxim, ugh.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
Why is waiting to be chosen a losing strategy?
0:00–3:42
2
What did Jason Feifer learn from starting at a tiny local paper?
3:42–8:01
3
How do self-limiting plans close off better opportunities?
8:01–12:43
4
What is the audience-first framework for storytelling?
12:43–17:03
5
Why do problem-solving stories outperform generic success stories?
17:03–25:52
6
What are the four phases of change in building a career?
25:52–27:57
Speakers
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