Why is it so challenging to say no to something good even when we know we have outgrown it? The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t. We often accept “the devil we know” for longer than we should out of fear. Hey, at least there is some security and safety in our current devil. Who knows what lurks on the other side!
24: Behind the Business: How Long Does it Take to Write a Book?
The relief started to sink in slowly, over several days, when I realized that for three years this project had taken up residence in a very large portion of my brain. Only when it was out of my consciousness did I realize how all-consuming it had been, churning in my sleep, my waking hours, my walks, and my showers.
23: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking with Oliver Burkeman
“The effort to try to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable. It is our constant efforts to eliminate the negative — insecurity, uncertainty, failure, or sadness — that causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain, or unhappy.” —Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote
22: Success on Your Own Terms with Derek Sivers
“To have something (a finished recording, a business, or millions of dollars) is the means, not the end. To be something (a good singer, a skilled entrepreneur, or just plain happy) is the real point. When you sign up to run a marathon, you don’t want a taxi to take you to the finish line.” —Derek Sivers, Ask Me Anything
21: Reinvent Yourself with James Altucher
Today’s podcast is with one of my favorite authors and bloggers, James Altucher, author of Choose Yourself and the Choose Yourself Guide to Wealth. What better way to ring in the new year than with his 55-item Reinvent Yourself checklist?
20: Set Your 2016 Strategy
It’s the final countdown! Time to wrap-up the final days of 2015 then dream-and-scheme for what’s to come. I don’t set New Years Resolutions, but I do choose a theme for the year, do fun mind-mapping exercises, set quarterly targets, and hold myself accountable with mastermind groups.
In today’s final Pivot Podcast of the year, I share practical tips to help you set a 2016 strategy by doubling-down on what’s working, and setting up small experiments to test what’s next. AKA, the Pivot Method!
19: Vertigo
18: How to Become a Robot Whisperer with Dr. Tom Guarriello
Get your geek on! This week’s Pivot Podcast is all about robots, artificial intelligence, and automation. How can we become more agile in an economy that is increasingly transformed by these areas? What skills and mindset will best position us for success in the future? How can you become a “robot whisperer” like today’s guest, professor Tom Guarriello? I could talk with Tom about all this for hours, but we contained ourself (for now!) in keeping this week’s episode to one jam-packed 60-minute conversation.
17: On Creative Sabbaticals and Social Media Fatigue
Don’t bite the hand that feeds you. That’s the gremlin I hear behind the slight nerves I feel about sharing today’s conversation with my good friend Nicole Antoinette.
As we both hit eight years of blogging this year (ten since I started Life After College), we decided to take an honest look at the social media fatigue that sometimes washes over a life lived online.
16: Stacy Sims on Somatics: Why How You Sit Might Cause Stress
Did you know that just the way you sit might be causing anxiety? Or that by straightening your spine and scanning the horizon you can calm your central nervous system, just as deer in the savannah do?
Stacy Sims, founder of True Body Project, is an expert on somatics, or how our physical and psychological bodies relate to one another. I had the great fortune of stumbling across her workshop in Bali when we were both there in 2013, and we have kept in touch since.
In this week’s podcast she shares her story of recovering from alcoholism through body awareness and movement practices. Stacy describes why if your body is holding stress—even just sitting in a certain positions that visually mimic those of tension, fear or depression—your emotions and thoughts will create a story to match.
15: Special, Not Special: How to Work Your Way Out of a Dip
I rode the high of hitting my 50,000-words-in-a-month NaNoBlogMo goal for exactly one day last week.
For one day I was over the moon! I did it! I wrote almost every morning for one month, and came out with 50,000 words by the end of November. It was like running a mental marathon! Combined with my October practice of trying to write for 30 minutes each day, I had amassed 100,000 words of a book draft. For those who aren’t word nerds, that’s about 350 pages double-spaced. Definitely cause for celebration!
And then, as predictable as ever, the crash came. THE DIP.
14: Systems, Hacks and Shortcuts for Solopreneurs
The most recent was a two hour pow-wow with my friend Elisa on all of our best business tools and tactics. Take a listen: Systems, Hacks and Shortcuts for Solopreneurs with Elisa Doucette (her awesome show notes are here). For a full systems bootcamp to get you set-up for 2016, check out the 5-Day Systems Ninja course.
13: Podcast: Upside of Being Invisible with David Zweig
David used to be what he calls “an invisible,” when he worked for a number of years as a magazine fact-checker. “If you read a great article, you never think to yourself, ‘Wow that was fact-checked beautifully,’” David said. “I had this job where the better I did my job, the more I disappeared. It was only if I made a mistake that people noticed me at all. It was such an unusual experience.”
He sought to investigate what other professions and professionals share the same inverse relationship between work and recognition, and found something interesting: there were a lot of them, across every field and industry.
These were people who were highly skilled, had developed strong reputations in their field, but who were not motivated by public recognition, nor did the public ever really consider their work at all. Consider the structural engineer to the architect, the sound engineer to lead singer of a band, the production team on a movie set, hair and makeup people for TV shows.
12: Belly of the Pivot Beast: On Bouncing Back from Zero with Adam Chaloeicheep
When is it time to wipe the slate clean and start over when you hit a breaking point in your career?
- How can travel play a role in the reflection process?
- How do you bounce back from zero when you have wiped out your savings?
- What makes graduate school worth the time, energy and money?
- How do you build a business, even when you don’t love the initial work that is coming in?
- How can you embrace fear, uncertainty and failure?
11: How to Optimize for Revenue and Joy
How often do you come down with a Case of the Mondays? It can be a strange feeling to avoid your to-do list on a big project when you run your own business or side hustle: if you are the one calling the shots on schedule and strategy, shouldn’t it be energizing much more often than not?
However, for one reason or another, we often let fear and shoulds take-over (myself included) and suddenly find ourselves at a fork-in-the-road with projects we care deeply about.
10: Behind the Book: Organizing, Writing and Gremlin-Taming
“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.”
―Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
9: Big News . . . We Have a Book Deal!! Behind the Proposal Process
Yes, we—there is no way this would be possible without you here reading, and for that I am grateful beyond words.
The Pivot Method will be published in hardcover by Portfolio/Penguin in early 2016, one of the top business and career imprints, and I could not be more thrilled! Their vision for the book blew me away, and I feel very lucky to be in such great hands over this next leg of the JB journey.
8: Cyber Security for Dummies: The Least You Need to Know with Willie Jackson
Cyber crimes are increasing at a staggeringly multi-exponential rate. Ignorance about our devices and online security is no longer acceptable; cyber crimes affect over 1.5 million victims per day. That’s 18 victims per second, 556 million victims per year, and over 600,000 compromised Facebook accounts per day. [Source] The recent Sony hack was so sophisticated the FBI says it would have gotten past 90 percent of firms. This is not something we can afford to ignore, especially for those of us who run online businesses.
Today I am thrilled to introduce you to my good friend, web strategist and performance expert Willie Jackson.
7: How to Find Your Zone of Genius with Laura Garnett
What does it take to find your Zone of Genius and stay there?
- What are the key ingredients to peak performance?
- What are the biggest barriers?
- If you think of your career as a car, what are the two biggest “headlights” that help you see clearly and do your best work?
- How can our challenges serve as fuel for opportunity?
6: How I Work with My VA: Systems and Strategy
For those of you considering hiring a virtual assistant in 2014, I cannot recommend it highly enough — this is easily one of the best things I did for my life and business last year. And yet, control freak that I am, I did not go down without a fight!
For YEARS I had read all the books (4-hour Work Week chief among them), and knew the importance of delegating and not being a bottleneck. But each time I tried to move forward with hiring someone, I got overwhelmed, discouraged and gave up. Who to hire? US or overseas? What should I delegate? How do I do it efficiently? Can I trust them?
Thankfully I gave it another go by hiring someone in October, and I’ve been hooked ever since. After just four days of working together, she became indispensable to my daily workflow.