Latest / Aggressively Human: For experts choosing expansion over extraction. / Making a lifetime of work legible with Jessica Abel

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Making a lifetime of work legible with Jessica Abel · Aggressively Human: For experts choosing expansion over extraction.

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome back to the Aggressively Human podcast,
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_02: where we're talking about how to take everything that you have done,
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_02: your entire body of work,
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_02: and figure out how to articulate it in two to three elevator pitch sentence lengths.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_02: I am your co-host, Meg Casebolt.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm Jessica Lackey.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_02: And I am so thrilled today to have my friend,
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_02: my colleague, my client, Jessica Abel here to join us.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_02: Jessica, thank you for being here.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: Hi, thanks for having me.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: I'm really excited to be here.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_02: Jessica,
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know where to start with this conversation because we've worked together for
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_02: so long.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_02: But what I would really love to hear from you is kind of how your body
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_02: of work has evolved over a long time as a way to do an introduction to people
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_02: who aren't familiar with what you do.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's kind of the subject of this conversation, right?
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: Career-long body of work has to somehow then become negligible.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: And so I am currently a business coach for professional creatives in particular in two areas.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: One is getting self-generated projects finished,
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: like how do you do the work that really matters to you,
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: that doesn't have deadlines and nobody else is asking for.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: And then the other half of that is how do you get paid
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: How do you make sure that work is the work that's at the center of what you're doing
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: as opposed to all the zillions of other skills you have available
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: that you probably are getting paid for also,
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: but that tend to kind of overweight away from where you want to be?
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: So how do you make sure that work is the work that you're doing?
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: How do you make sure you're getting paid In such a way that you actually have
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: the time and the capacity to do it.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what I do now.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: My background is that I'm a cartoonist and author.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so I have made many comics,
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: graphic novels since I was in my 20s and did that as my core professional identity
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: until I was in my mid-40s.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I also, through that whole period, I was...
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: Like most other artists, I was also doing a million other things.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: So I was teaching a lot.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: I taught as a professor for 25 years.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: I did professional illustration.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, like sort of gig work for magazines and newspapers and things like that.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: I was an editor for the Best American Comics series.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: So I did a lot of things.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: They were all adjacent to comics.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I found that, you know, I had no time for anything.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: I was always completely overscheduled, overworked, underpaid.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: And the core thing that I was supposed to be,
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: quote unquote,
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: supposed to be doing,
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: which is comics,
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: was always getting sucked away by all the work I needed to do for money.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what I help with now.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: So that's why it's relevant still that that's my background.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: I have this really long,
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: deep background with Being the person that I now want
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: to be helping
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: have better executive function control over all of those things,
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: like all of those things that happen to me, I don't want them to happen to anyone.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: I want people to be able to choose what it is that they're doing
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: and how they are leading their professional lives.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_02: I think this is so important because like we really are in a gig economy
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_02: and we're working with a lot of people who are not just like this is the thing
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_02: that I do, but we're multi-hyphenate.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_02: So many of us,
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_02: you know, my friends who have real jobs, I don't know how to talk to them anymore.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: I basically never had a real job like ever, so
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_02: I'm with you.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_02: Close friend who was like working in political consulting and like business consulting.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_02: And then she had to move like we're 42 and she moved jobs after being there for more
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_02: than 20 years already.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like,
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_02: how though,
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_02: how do we have people who,
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_02: you know, like, because my line of work is like, oh, I'll try this.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_02: I'll try this.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_02: I'll try this.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_02: I'll try this.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_02: And I feel like that's such an entrepreneurial,
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_02: um, And we're just like a very scrappy bunch where we go, oh, I can figure that out.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_02: I can figure that out.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_02: And then the scope expands.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_02: And suddenly you're not just doing this one thing that you're supposed to be doing,
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_02: but you also have to,
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_02: there's a reason that they call this software 17 hats because you also have
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_02: to be running the business and doing the marketing and doing
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_02: the administrative work.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_02: And maybe you hire a team, but then if you hire a team, then you become a manager.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know,
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_02: like the, the,
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_02: Number of things that we do,
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_02: it's like the smaller our shops, the more shit we have to do.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_02: Therefore,
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_02: the less time that we have to do the thing that is actually what
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_02: the shop is supposed to do.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's true.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: But I think there's also the thing that you're saying about like,
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: oh, and then I can do this and I can do that.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, first of all, I would say you, like most people.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: Your work is very consistent.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you've gone through a couple major phases in your career,
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: and I know you used to,
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: I think, be a web designer, right, or something like that initially?
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, sorry, I was a web designer.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: So you've had a huge pivot in your career,
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: but since then, you've basically been pretty consistent.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: You've offered a lot of things, but definitely under that umbrella of SEO writ large.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: Search-related stuff.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a lot of consistency, even though it feels like a lot of different things.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: But that said, there's this concept that I came up with because...
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody I know is like you.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: And when I say I work with creatives, I work with people like you too.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just people who are like me, cartoonists or something like that.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't have to be what I say, what I call like big C creatives.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: I do work with painters and sculptors and silversmiths,
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: but I also work with designers and I work with people who are consultants
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: in various forms.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: So it's all a continuum, you know.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: But the point is that all of us, especially as entrepreneurs, are idea people by necessity.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: That's why we end up where we are.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: And so there's this concept that I've come up with called cyclical burnout,
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: which is what comes of that kind of constant generation of new ideas.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: And it's kind of just the dark side of something awesome,
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: which is that you have new ideas all the time and it's fun and it's great.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: And some of those ideas...
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: End up being the thing that you're doing forever.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: And some of them just aren't.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: But the main thing is that when you come up with a new idea and it sort
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: of takes hold of you and you feel like you really need to put yourself
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: into this thing and you're putting all your time into it, other stuff gets dropped.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: And as other stuff gets dropped,
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: you can get yourself into a situation where you're not bringing in money or whatever
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: and you get into a real crunch.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: There's always that,
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: especially with self-generated projects,
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: you're like,
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: Going through the whole what I call creative engine cycle,
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: you go through the whole creative engine and you get to the end of it
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: and you're just like completely like you've used every neuron for this thing.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you've used everything to squeeze this thing out and make it happen.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: And then you kind of fall off a cliff a little bit.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: And at that moment,
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: that's also when you're most likely to have crises in other areas of your life
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: because you've been ignoring them because you're so excited about this thing.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so you burn out at that point because at that point you're like,
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: then you run around trying to make money and maybe you take a couple gigs
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: and you do whatever you have to do and you still haven't finished this thing
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: and it's on your mind and everything's going crazy.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: And eventually you dig yourself out of that hole and you have another idea
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: and you start the whole cycle over again.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: And the entire process happens again,
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: but that previous idea and all the other ones before that are still there.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: They're still taking up space.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: They're still saying like,
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: wrapping on your door and going like,
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: yeah, but you didn't actually finish the entire marketing plan for this thing.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: You didn't actually get this thing,
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: so there's all this stuff and it just piles up and up and up like a giant snowball.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where we run into that problem of just like,
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: Being able to make good decisions about what it is that you're going
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: to put your time into and what you're not.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: Where are you going to put that capacity you have available in order
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: to
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: please your creative self and to make sure you feel engaged and care
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: about what it is that you're doing and also make money in the right amount of time.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_02: You can put a roof over your head.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_02: You can feed yourself.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_02: You can do all of these like self-preservation tactics still have to happen.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, we can,
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_02: there are people who are fortunate enough that the creative,
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_02: the thing that brings them joy creatively is also the thing
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_02: that can pay their bills.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_02: But also for a lot of us, that's not necessarily the case.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_02: And we can find things that bring us joy in the work that pays us and
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_02: the revenue generating activities.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_02: And we can have hobbies.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_02: And sometimes we want the hobby to be something that could pay us something.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_02: Or we have side hustles.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: We hate the word hobbies, I would say.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: We're all like, no, we don't.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: I have hobbies.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: But a lot of people I work with are like, it's not a hobby.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, no, it's not a hobby.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: You are a professional in this thing,
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: even if you're not making very much money at it or any money at all.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: If you're committed to it at a professional level, you're getting it out in front of people.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: You're sharing it in the world.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: You're completely right.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of things that people want to do that really,
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: really are the core thing they want to do,
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: it's possible to make money with these things,
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: but to make enough money in the amount
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: of time you have available is just incredibly difficult.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: Then I talk about this idea of having puzzle pieces and coming up
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: with something else you can do using your skill set that you developed and
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: Because you're this amazing creative who's super scrappy,
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: what are the things you can do that people will pay for well enough
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: in little enough time that you still have time for this other thing that you want
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: to be doing?
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: So I kind of want to go back to the top of the episode.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: Meg said, okay, we're going to boil an entire body of work lifetime into three elevator pitches.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: So Jessica, tell us about You know, you're in Meg's world.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: You've gone through these lots of evolutions.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: I've heard you even on this podcast so far talk about like two
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: or three different interesting concepts.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: I totally want to talk about the finishing paradox of creative projects because
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: the finish line we think is a finish line is not actually a finish line.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: But tell us kind of like how all of this gets consolidated in your work in
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: the past couple months to make it legible to other people.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's a great question.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: So I have been working as a coach for about 10 years now.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: So teaching work I had done and translating it into initially courses and sort
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: of ad hoc coaching and then gradually
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: into more formal coaching engagement arrangements.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of my methodology for developing this work was...
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: I've done this myself.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to make something up to get students to do it.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: They do it.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: I see what happens.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: I adjust.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: I've read not every productivity book, but the big ones.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: I've read the big productivity books.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: I will say getting things done was a huge turning point for me,
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: understanding this idea of getting it out of your head.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: Just getting everything out of your head was like, that's a pivotal idea.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: So there are all these different ideas that are floating around,
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: and I'm Then translating them in my own language,
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: often kind of translating them out of business language and into creative language
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: so people can hear me and creating activities and whatever.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I started this course called the Creative Focus Workshop 10 years ago in 2015,
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: or more than 10 years ago now, anyway, a while ago in 2015.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: It was kind of a compilation of how do I get projects?
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: How do I personally get projects done initially?
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: And then immediately I'm starting to get like floods of feedback from people
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: who are involved in it about like just discussing how it landed for them.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: Like it was effective.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: People liked it, but also like, oh, but what about this question, that question, whatever.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm gathering all that feedback and learning from it, adjusting, adjusting.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: And did go through a framework development period to a couple of them in that
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: Time period.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: First, an early version of what I thought I was doing,
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: which I called the Creative 360,
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: which ended up being just kind of a piece of everything.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: And then in 2024, I developed the Creative Engine.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, no,
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: it was like 2020 I did the Creative Engine,
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: but I sort of like kept developing it after that.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: It was about 2020.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: That's when I first talked about it.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: And the Creative Engine is like the full...
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: Creative project finishing process.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: And what I'm trying to get at is that it was this bottom-up process of taking all
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: of my ideas and my little tested things,
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: throwing them out there,
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: seeing what happened,
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: taking that feedback,
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: redeveloping it, and seeing what are the patterns I'm seeing over time.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: So I had all of that.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I also then had done a marketing course.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: I'd started doing Business coaching stuff and learning how I wanted to talk about that.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: I really wanted to be able to attach time and money together into something.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: To be able to talk about the way that you have to price your work and sell your work
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: in such a way that you can make enough money in the amount of time you have,
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: which is just never on the mind of creatives.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's always like time is the fungible thing.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: Time is the thing you have always.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: Endless amounts of, which is absolutely untrue.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: Time is your most valuable resource, most expensive resource.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: And you have to use it very carefully.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, so that was what I was trying to figure out there.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: All these different things floating around.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: And then I'm in the process of changing my...
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: I was on an all-in-one platform, Kajabi.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: Had to leave.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: Did not like it.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so I was...
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: Doing a new website.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: And at that moment,
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: and had been reading Meg's writing about AI stuff,
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: and it was getting me thinking about the way that I needed to,
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: when you have a new website, there's like so much writing that goes into it.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: There's so much kind of like, how am I going to present myself?
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: How am I going to put this stuff together?
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I had been struggling for years to figure out how to talk
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: about Finishing projects and making money.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: And they're very related somehow, but I could not figure out how they're related together.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: And so even though it was like,
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: you get one more thing on top of everything else I was trying to do,
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: I reached out to Meg to work with her in her new process.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: And we had a really great call.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: And then she sent me this document, which was like, here's all the stuff.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: And she'd done all the research on everything that was visible of my work.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: And all of the things that I had said and how those things kind of did or did not interact.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: And the thing that I had been realizing through reading Meg's writing and
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: then even more so through this document was that I had worked so hard.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: I had made so many things.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: I had created three entire huge courses full of material.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: I'd been writing newsletters for 10 years plus, all this other stuff.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not that I had nothing published, because I did.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I did a book in 2017 about this.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: But the publicly visible sort of narrative of this whole phase
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: of my life was very small, the public footprint of that.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I have a lot of fans and people who love my work.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: And so it sort of was not apparent to me that that was the case.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: I had like a reasonable website and people were joining my programs and,
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: you know, whatever.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: That started to fade as I think time went on.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I was just like, what?
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: I don't really know what's going on here.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I was thinking about how do I get this out more publicly?
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so that was really a prompt for me.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: This process with Meg got me thinking about what have I made?
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: What are these things?
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I went through a process over a period of a few weeks of Going
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: through everything I could find that I've made using Claude to analyze stuff
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: and pull things out.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: And making like a master frameworks document that sort of was like,
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: what are the frameworks that I have created and the tools that I've created?
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of named concepts,
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: a lot of,
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: you know, because I'm a big fan, always have been a big fan of naming things.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: I know it helps it stick.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: People are like, oh,
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: even if they don't remember the name themselves,
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: even the process of hearing the name is like, oh, that's a thing.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: So lots of name things, all this stuff.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: Mash it into a giant document.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: But as I'm going through the document and editing it, I'm like, oh, no, but this is that.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: This is related to this, and this is related to this.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I end up kind of weaving everything together and seeing how the core of
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: The thesis that I've been working on for the last,
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: I would say three or four years, centers around this idea of capacity.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: And capacity as a concept that is a,
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: it's kind of a,
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: it's hard to measure,
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: unfortunately,
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: but like a measure of not just your time, but also your
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: neurological capacity.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: Where are you emotionally?
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: Where are you in terms of your neurological energy?
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: What is going on in your life right now?
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: For example,
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: my next door neighbor broke his ankle and I was doing a lot of stuff
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: to help him out.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: That wasn't weighing on me emotionally,
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: but it was an extra time thing that suddenly an extra person to be thinking about.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: How much...
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: Emotional labor are you doing for your household right now?
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: Who needs you?
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: all of these different things feed into this measure of sort of capacity,
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: which fluctuates vastly day to day,
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: week to week, and especially through seasons of your life.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I'd already been talking about that a lot in the context of projects,
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: because that is the spur for very,
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: what do I want to say, structured decision making.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: Making decisions about what you are going to do and what you are not going to do.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: Like being very, very clear about what you're not going to do.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: And then on the business side,
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: I was using the same kind of basic thing of like,
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: what are you going to do and what are you not going to do?
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: And using capacity as part of what I call the ground truth framework,
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: which is relating how much money can you make per time for this thing,
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: and like how hard is it going to be and like I have this whole calculator thing
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: where I'm like, well,
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: if you did this and you have this many clients, it's going to take this many hours.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: And that means you're out of time, but you're not making enough money.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: So you have to raise your prices or do less time or whatever, different offer, blah, blah, blah.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: So it's this way of sorting through your options and making decisions based
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: on capacity in this very concrete way.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so finally, I was like, oh, this is the same thing.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: Because the thing that people come to me for in
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: the Creative Focus Workshop is frequently like,
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: oh, I can't finish my film or whatever.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: How do I make sure I finish this thing?
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: How do I make sure I have a sketchbook practice on a daily basis or that I'm writing?
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: And when I do coaching with them and I look at what they're doing,
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: the reason they're not doing that is because they do not have capacity.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason they don't have capacity is because they're working 18 jobs.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: And they're working 18 jobs because they've not thought through their capacity
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: in terms of making money.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: And so this is how I finally was like, oh, these things are the same thing.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's just two faces of the same problem of not using your capacity as a lens and
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: a tool to figure out what What are you going to do with your time?
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: How are you going to thoughtfully
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: allocate this most valuable resource you have?
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: It sounds like there's so much to unpack here.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like there's two angles to it.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_01: There's one is the how you came up with the framework and how you kind
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_01: of systematically built up your framework.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_01: Point of view across all these years and how you coalesced it through,
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_01: you know, realizing there was not a totally public body work.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_01: And then there's the part about capacity.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: So I want to maybe park the capacity thing for a second and hear more about sort of,
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_01: between you and Meg, how, how, like,
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: you know, we've been talking for months about you have to publicly put it out there.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: You have to.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_01: Show it has to travel.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_01: It has to be able to go beyond you.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so Meg, I'd be curious to get you've watched Jessica for years.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_01: How you know, how was it watching someone go from it's all here?
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's all in private.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_01: Some of it's public.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: How do I get it out and how do I distill all of this into something that's can travel?
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_01: I'm curious to get Meg's your perspective on it.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_02: I mean,
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_02: I think one of the lovely things about being a marketing person is that there are
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_02: so many different ways to market.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_02: And so Jessica for years has had like a solid newsletter that I've been subscribed to.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_02: And you had a group of people who were already advocating for you.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_02: And so you didn't have to like...
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_02: Publish to LinkedIn and go chase the social media.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_02: And you made that conscious choice to like pull back on some
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_02: of those more public broadcast channels because you already had the audience
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_02: and they were willing to pay to have the private conversations with you and
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_02: to either whether that was, you know, one-to-one coaching, workshop coaching.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_02: Like when you have the audience,
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_02: you can create for the audience without needing to create for the public.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_02: And at the same time, you were podcasting.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_02: And podcasting is such...
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_02: Clearly we love podcasting.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_02: Like podcasting is such an incredible way to get your ideas out of your head and
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_02: into the world and to get them published.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_02: But podcasting is very bad for AI discoverability because even if you put
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_02: a full transcript, I could see everything that you had created.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_02: I could see the landing pages for the courses that lived behind the paywall in Kajabi.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, oh, this is new.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_02: This is interesting.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_02: Let's stretch that.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_02: Let's parse that.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_02: Tell me more about that.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_02: Like stretch it out for me.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_02: What's in the...
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_02: I just made you like send me curriculum.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_02: Not the full curriculum, just like syllabuses of like, what do you talk about in these programs?
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_02: What are the workshops like transcripts?
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_02: I'm just like, you know...
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_02: Mining for gold I think is sometimes where we are in a situation like yours
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_02: where you've created everything.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_02: But it's been created for specific use cases or specific audiences
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_02: or specific moments in time and has not then been zoomed back on to the point
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_02: where we can say this is how it's generalized for a larger audience
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_02: and here's how it can be part of a greater conversation that can be something
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_02: that you can be found for.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I would say too, like I,
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_00: over the years, I,
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: used to do more social media and then I just stopped because it was,
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: nothing was happening.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: Soul sucking.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: It was soul sucking and boring.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_00: The podcasting was
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: an idea that didn't quite work out the way I needed it to,
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_00: but it was, you know, there were good things about it.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_00: And, but again,
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: too much time,
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: so I sort of It's not officially over,
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: but maybe I'll go back to it, but it's not like on the table right now.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_00: And blogging, I just wasn't doing, I just didn't do it for years.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I just basically did almost nothing in there.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: But I would go and visit other people's communities and, or,
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_00: do presentations like,
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: you know, I've done something for your audience, Meg, and vice versa.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_00: And, uh,
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: That was a really good way to build my audience because the second I talk
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_00: about what I do, people are like, oh my God, somebody does that?
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: I want in.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so I get people, new, fresh faces, fresh people in.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: And that felt like enough.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: And it also felt like, I think at the time, like two things.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_00: One is...
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: I did write a book
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_00: I felt like there was an argument,
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_00: and maybe I was incorrect about this,
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: about like,
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_00: is it more valuable to be writing publicly and sharing your work essentially
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_00: for free?
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, what, my e-book costs five bucks.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_00: And there's certainly people who read the book rather than joining my course.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_00: So is that what I should be putting my energy into?
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: How does that then turn into...
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: Revenue for me.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: And given my work...
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_02: I was just going to say,
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_02: and given that your work is don't spend time on things that don't pay you
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_02: if they're not fulfilling,
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_02: then why are you creating this entire body of publicly available or low-cost work
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_02: that isn't going to pay your bills,
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_02: which is going to take your time away from the things that does fulfill you?
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: Precisely.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: I was trying to escape publishing.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: Like, the publishing world sucks.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_00: Like, the publishing model sucks.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_00: Sucks!
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I know that, like...
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_00: The quote-unquote real money I've made from, say,
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: Out on the Wire,
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_00: my book about storytelling, is from talks I've done, from workshops.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I got paid for the book,
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_00: probably minimum wage given how many hours I spent on it, but I got an advance.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_00: Never earned out,
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: don't make royalties,
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: probably never will,
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: but I did for a long time get a lot of gigs as a result of that.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: Is that the life I want now?
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: Do I want to be writing a book and then get a bunch of speaking gigs and then have
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_00: that taper off after?
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: That's very unreliable.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know that I want that.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so trying to figure out wanting to write a book.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_00: Now, my intention is to write two books, is to write a book about each side of this, right?
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_00: Because I do feel like there's a huge gap and that I do have...
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_00: Like legitimately new insight into these things, these problems for creative people.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I've had that idea for several years,
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: but I didn't even like sort of make a project for it in my notion
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_00: because it was like,
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_00: is this the right thing to be spending my time on when really I need
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_00: to be making money?
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so I should be creating a program or like using my program and selling it.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_00: I should be making more launches and whatever.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_00: Which leads to then making these incredible – the amount of time I've spent
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_00: on my sales pages,
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_00: the number of times I've rewritten them,
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_00: the number of times I've gone in and tweaked the language.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I've done a lot of research.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_00: I don't do just crap out sales pages.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_00: I do all the voice of customer research and pulling all this stuff.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: So that switch,
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_00: which I'm in the middle of, Has been very
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_00: liberating in some ways, but also scary.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know what the other side of it is because I'm basically saying like,
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: okay, publishing world, I guess I'm back.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: And like, it doesn't sound great to me in a lot of ways.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_00: But on the other hand, like I feel like this is kind of all, this is what I need to be doing.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_00: Like this work needs to be in the world.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_00: It needs to be in more people's hands.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_00: Does that mean I will get paid?
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_00: I am not sure.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: I hope so.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: But...
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_02: I actually want to hear Jessica Lackey's thoughts on that too because all three
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_02: of us have written these books that maybe haven't paid out,
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_02: maybe have broken even,
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_02: but they have led to more opportunities because people will read the book,
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_02: maybe read half the book,
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_02: maybe read the introduction of the book,
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_02: maybe just support the book and then go, oh, I need more of this person.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like there's,
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_01: there's the publishing you do to expand your audience and then the publishing you do
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_01: to cement your legacy.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: And those, I put them in, in my building blocks framework.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, there's grow work and build work, right?
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_01: Like build is asset work and grow is sort of like the ongoing cadence of publishing
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_01: to expand your audience.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_01: Like is it on social media or something like,
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_01: but like,
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_01: if you go into the hole and then come out and Four years with a new thing,
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_01: like to have enough people heard about you in the interim for
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_01: that legacy creating body of work to land.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_01: And so there's always this tension between the short term things that make you money
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_01: and the publishing you have to do there and the creativity
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_01: to like get people excited to even read your long form stuff.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_01: And then there's the legacy creation work that you do.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not apparent.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_01: Well, one, like I personally couldn't.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_01: Like the shortest short form,
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_01: I couldn't do it all because like I couldn't switch between book writing,
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_01: newsletter writing and LinkedIn writing all in the same time period.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_01: Like I literally could not function doing that.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_01: But like, yeah, I mean,
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_01: I like that's where it's the trade off is like must grow the audience probably
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_01: through writing,
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_01: but also must then be figuring out how to like Do the big projects that are the ones
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_01: that cement your authority.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_01: Because I don't I don't think newsletter writing cements your authority.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_01: I think it prolongs it.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_01: But if you if you don't have something substantive,
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_01: like I don't think you become an authority through just a weekly newsletter.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe you do.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_01: But I don't know.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think you're probably right about that, that that does not do the job.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, this is a banger.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to put that in a blog.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_00: Nope, don't do that.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean,
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_00: I think that the idea that – and I think that – here's proof of your concept, okay?
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_00: So, like, as part of the Meg project, working with Meg, I'm Googling myself, right?
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_00: I'm AI searching myself.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_00: And it's very clear that I'm very searchable.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_00: I am the number one Jessica Abel on the internet for comics, right?
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_00: And the idea that I'm a coach and that I do this other work is there.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_00: If you just Google, you definitely see that up at the top.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_00: You see, you know, podcast interviews, you see my website, whatever.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_00: But if you're looking on AI,
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_00: Jessica Abel is an American cartoonist and author who blah,
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_00: blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of that comes from the base training in AI.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_00: I have a Wikipedia page.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: Not everybody does,
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_00: but as a cartoonist, there are these projects to document comics on Wikipedia.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_00: I've had a Wikipedia page for a long time,
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: 20 years, and went through this whole drama of trying to get it updated.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_00: Because Wikipedia, in case anybody's not aware, you can't just go in and edit your own page.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_00: You have to find a Wikipedia page.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_00: Who's willing to do this?
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of work to do on Wikipedia.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: There's only a few Wikipedians.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_00: So getting attention to my problems took me several months.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_02: Eventually, I was able to- And you can't just go to the Wikipedian and be like, I do this now.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_02: You have to be like, look,
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_02: here are all of the citations of the places where I can verify that I have,
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_02: in fact, done this work that needs to be updated.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_00: Importantly, not I can verify.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_02: Somebody else is verifying in- Third-party verification, yeah.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_00: In a reliable source.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_00: Is saying that this is something that's true, right?
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_00: So this was like,
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_00: I still,
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_00: my Wikipedia page is up to date basically now,
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_00: except that it really still does not reflect my coaching work.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_00: It does have growing gills on there and it does say that I'm a coach.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_00: In a basic way at the top of the page because the person was basically like,
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_00: well, you know, there's not a lot of evidence for this online.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: I've been doing this for over 10 years.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_00: There's not a lot of evidence for this online outside of like marketing podcasts
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_00: and your own website.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_00: But clearly there's like a lot of that.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's real.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_00: You're not making it up.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_00: So I'll put it in the intro.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: But there's no citable sources.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_00: There's no like, here's Jessica talking about this in an interview with New York Times.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_00: There's no...
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_00: Like you have to have that level of media attention.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_00: Fortunately,
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_00: Oliver Berkman is a friend and colleague and he's mentioned me a number of times in
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_00: The Guardian,
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_00: mentioned my work a number of times in The Guardian and also in his books.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_00: I'm cited in his books.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so that got it in there.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_00: Like that kind of put it over the top of like, this is real.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_01: Like this is true.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_00: But that's what it took.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_00: You know, The Guardian.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_00: They will not take This podcast, unfortunately, as evidence that this is a real thing.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_00: It has to be like a journalistic source.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_00: So that was really an eye opener.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: Like that was part of the whole process is like, oh, damn, like I've been doing this work hard.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_00: Like I've been working my butt off for years on this.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_00: And the only real evidence that it's true is like a few mentions from Oliver Berkman
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_00: and a book that I published in 2017, self-published, by the way.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_00: So it wasn't even like, I mean, I made the decision not to find a publisher for it.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_00: And so that also kind of diminishes the Wikipedia power.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_00: And that's number one thing AI is seeing for me.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's not true for everybody because not everybody has a Wikipedia page,
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_00: but if you have one, boy, it's going to be in the weights.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_00: That in the weights tool,
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you've looked at that yet, Meg, but like I sent this thing over.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, this is now going around.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_00: I saw it in Jane Friedman's website.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_00: Newsletter this week,
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_00: but it's like a little tool where you can search, like,
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: are you,
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_00: quote unquote,
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_00: in the weights,
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_00: the AI weights on all the different, you know, the different search engines.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm top 3% in the weights as a cartoonist.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_00: It does say one of the many search engines is like, and she's a coach.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_00: But the rest of them are all like cartoonists,
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_00: cartoonists, cartoonists, cartoonists, cartoonists.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_02: And that's really common that every single one of them is pulling different things
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_02: and like,
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_02: You had the name of your podcast that was sometimes the name of your business.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_02: So like that also got a little bit of entity confusion.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_02: We had to like disentangle.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that that happens to a lot of us where it's like I've created so much shit.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_02: Not that your stuff is shit.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_02: I created so much.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_02: And like it's hard to foreground what the most important pieces of it are.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_00: But also just like why am I not, you know, I have been in The New York Times and the LA Times.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_00: I've been in the Globe and Mail.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_00: I've been in the Guardian.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_00: I've been in all these different places as a cartoonist.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_00: I've had reviews.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_00: I've done interviews and all this different stuff.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_00: So why has none of that happened for this work?
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_00: Why have I never gotten that for this work?
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_00: And partly, I just have not put it in anybody's inbox.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_00: And it also doesn't have the...
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_00: You know, new release energy of a new comic book coming out.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_00: So there's that,
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_00: like I definitely got benefited from that multiple times,
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_00: but the, you know, really thinking like, oh, this really, that's, that's real.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_00: Like, that's a real thing that,
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_00: this is,
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_00: this process has foregrounded for me how much,
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_00: like the world doesn't know what I'm doing.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_00: And, and this is something I said to you early on, Meg,
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_00: is like the,
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_00: The process of making my ideas legible for AI is not that important in the long run.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_00: What's really important is that they're legible for people and that this process
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_00: of making all of my ideas cohesive,
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_00: figuring out how they all fit together,
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_00: coming up with very clear language to describe each thing,
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_00: definitions for each of the frameworks that I can put on my website,
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_00: all of that makes this more Accessible and legible for people.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so as I start writing,
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_00: and I have started writing new articles about old parts of my work and putting them
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_00: on my site,
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_00: and eventually in the next few months I'll probably start posting them on Substack
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_00: as well,
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_00: that opens the door then to me start pitching people I know who work in journalism
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_00: and go like, hey,
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_00: do you want to do an article about this in your legitimate publication that can
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_00: then finally create You know, come back and reinforce this reputation.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_00: And most importantly,
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_00: as you're saying,
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_00: Jessica, like the legacy work, like I don't really believe in legacy.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody's going to remember me in 50 or 100 years.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_00: That's fine.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_00: But like in the next 25 years, I would like to be part of the conversation.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_00: I would like this work to balance and, you know, integrate with all these, you
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_00: to be a counterpoint to that and not,
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: a lot of that stuff's valuable,
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_00: but it's like it's missing this huge piece of why it's not working
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_00: for creative people, for neurodiversion people, for caregivers, primary caregivers.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_00: Like, why does this stuff fall apart?
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_00: I have the answer to that.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_01: Speaking of, what's the answer?
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_01: No, I'm just kidding.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_01: No, yeah.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you know,
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_01: the work you're talking about,
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_01: sort of making it legible,
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_01: pitching it, that's like long-term work that's not writing a sales page, right?
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's not getting more followers.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't immediately get you paid.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a project, right?
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_01: This is not something you can like finish in an hour, right?
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_01: This is something that's,
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_01: you kind of talked about the work that I would imagine,
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_01: this is the type of work that adds to that creative burnout spiral.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_01: You have to finish it, right?
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_01: You have to not just kind of like,
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_01: Make the framework, as you talk about, you got to get it on the site.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_01: You can't just like make the ideas.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_01: They have to have like, you have to finish it.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_01: So tell us more about like how creative people finish the non-urgent projects
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_01: that are going to be the ballast.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's not urgent.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_01: It just tells more about how your process works on the capacity side.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, of course.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um, this is, uh, I mean, you, you highlight this.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's so important what you're saying.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's, this is just, it is the thing.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_00: It is like the issue that we're all dealing with is that this is a prime example.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_00: I haven't done this work because I've been really fricking busy.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I've not had time to do this kind of deep project until like literally right now.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and, um, So the process that I described, the framework I use, I call the creative engine.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_00: And the creative engine has four phases.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_00: And it is my firm hypothesis that every project,
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_00: not just creative projects, go through these four phases.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_00: They go through them On a daily basis, on a,
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_00: sort of phase basis,
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_00: on a life, you know, career basis, like these are the, this is what it is.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_00: So the first phase, and this is a, it's a cycle, right?
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not really the first phase,
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_00: but like conceptually it feels like the first phase is collect.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_00: So collect is when you are doing research,
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_00: you're finding out, you know, gathering materials, You're going to grad school.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_00: You're doing all the things you need to do to prepare for the thing you need to do next, right?
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_00: So the collect phase tends to be the most popular phase.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_00: It tends to be where people get stuck because the next phase after collect is decide.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_00: And this is one of the phases that most people skip.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_00: They skip decide.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_00: Decide is crucial because It is so important to consciously decide about what it is
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_00: that you are going to do out of all of the options that are created through
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_00: the collect phase.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_00: Like what are you going to do with this material?
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_00: How are you going to deploy it?
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_00: What are you going to use?
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_00: What are you not going to use?
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_00: Which of the possible paths are you going to take?
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so it doesn't have to take a long time, but it does need to have real attention.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_00: And when you go through the decide phase,
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_00: then you open up the doors to being able to go into the third phase, which is ACT.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_00: And ACT is where you implement your decisions and actually see them through.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_00: And there's plenty of pitfalls in there as well, plenty of ways things can fall apart.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_00: I have sort of a sub-framework that I call the flexible container,
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_00: which is my way of thinking about how to create an infrastructure
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_00: for how you're going to finish that's based on your own needs,
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_00: your own capacity, and The way your brain works, all that kind of stuff.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_00: That's the flexible container.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then the fourth phase is reflect.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_00: And reflect is where you integrate knowledge.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_00: You look at what happened, what worked well, what didn't work well.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_00: Also very frequently skipped.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_00: And people are just plunging straight back into the next thing or trying to.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_00: And often there's a sense of things are being unfinished or you repeat
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_00: the same mistakes as a result or all these other things.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_00: So any kind of reflective practice,
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_00: quarterly review,
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_00: sort of daily,
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_00: weekly review,
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_00: any kind of thing like that,
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_00: or just kind of like project debrief,
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_00: all of those things fall into that reflect phase.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_00: And in some ways,
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_00: I think like the reflect phase is actually phase one of any project,
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_00: because when you're learning from whatever it is that you did,
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_00: that's what should influence what you're going to do next in the collect phase.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_00: But Things can kind of fall apart there,
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_00: especially if you skip it and that's where you can get that falling off
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_00: the cliff feeling and like not being able to start the new thing
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_00: because you are not really aware of like how much context switching has
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_00: to happen here.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_00: How much now that you're done with X do you need to do in terms of allowing yourself
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_00: the freedom to explore in the collect phase again instead of the finish,
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_00: finish, finish, finish, finish energy that you were in.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_02: And I think a lot of people just get stuck in the act phase
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_02: because they feel like they have to do something, do something.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_02: Doesn't matter what you're doing.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_02: You need to move the thing forward.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_02: You need to kick the soccer ball towards the goal.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_02: You need to go, go, go, go, go.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_02: But then,
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_02: you know,
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_02: if you're going in the wrong direction or you're kicking in a variety of directions
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_02: because you're just,
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_02: you haven't decided what you're going to do when you keep starting and starting
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_02: and starting, like,
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_02: That sets you back so much more than taking the time to do the reflection,
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_02: to make the plan, to decide, okay, I have this idea.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_02: It's an incredible idea.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not going to do it for nine more months.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_02: That's a hard thing to do.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_02: I just had a friend that we all know.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_02: I'll tell you who afterwards.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_02: She just got a new client who is...
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_02: Launching a book this fall about GEO.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_02: And she's launching,
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_02: or the client's launching a book about GEO in the fall because there are lots
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_02: of big five books coming out in Q1 about GEO.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, oh shit, should I be pushing my book?
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_02: Should I be doing, should I be pushing that forward?
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_02: Should I drop everything else and work on this project
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_02: that I've already told myself won't happen until Q1 or Q2 of 2027 because I need
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_02: to finish collecting.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_02: And Thinking and simmering and making decisions and getting the feedback and doing
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_02: the work so that way I can articulate the work.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_02: To your point earlier about like a book that's baked to where it could have been
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_02: in 2017 but wasn't where it can be in 2026, 2027.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_02: You know, like that part of me, that gut instinct was like, act, act, act.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, no, I'm still in collect here.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_02: And then I have to go through Decide.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_02: And I can do other things in the meantime while I'm doing the collecting.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_02: It's not like that has to be the full-time thing right now,
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_02: but I have to collect before I can act.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and you have to decide.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_00: And you have the two phases that are most skipped,
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_00: which are decide and reflect, which are also the shortest phases.
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_00: Both of them are very short, but they require capacity.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_00: They require you to take a little bit of time away from scrambling and And making
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_00: and doing and all this stuff.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_00: And like,
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_00: you have to allow yourself a little grace,
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_00: a little time to take a breath,
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_00: get some distance and think about at a meta level,
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_00: what it is that you're doing and what your intentions are.
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know,
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_00: at first you're setting those intentions and then you're reflecting on,
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_00: well, how did that go right at the, at the end?
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_00: And those,
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_00: those two phases,
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_00: and I'm doing them kind of like this because like,
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_00: that's where they fall on my thing.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, they're, they're, um,
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_00: That necessity,
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_00: that requirement for capacity is why they are so hard because we are trained
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_00: by everything in our lives to look at capacity
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_00: that we have anything we have available as like available and like just fill,
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_00: fill, fill, just jam it full.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_00: This is why I actually hate the word productivity and try to not talk about myself
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_00: as a productivity coach because,
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_00: um, I still have to use it a lot because it's the word people know.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_00: As you know, Meg, it's something that I have to do, right?
• 47:53
  SPEAKER_00: But productivity literally means how do you have the same amount of capacity
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_00: and jam more stuff into it?
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_00: How do you get more stuff out of whatever you have available?
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_00: And of course,
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_00: you can look at it different ways,
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_00: but that's literally what it means in terms of in the economic sphere,
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_00: which is just a point of view that...
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_00: Doesn't work for humans and especially creatives and people who have big ideas
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_00: and are trying to do stuff that's like the self-generated stuff.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_00: Jessica, I think I didn't quite get to the self-generated piece.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_00: So
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_00: the thing about self-generated work is that the structure of it has to be your own.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_00: Like you have to create your own structure for it and you have to
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_00: assign capacity consciously
• 48:49
  SPEAKER_00: So you're in the creative engine and the collect phase,
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_00: a lot of that can happen and does happen.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_00: That's the part you kind of end up doing and then thinking like,
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_00: I need to finish this book or I need to do this thing,
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_00: but you're still like, I'm reading them, blah, blah, blah.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_00: That stuff can happen kind of in the margins while you're doing other stuff.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_00: But what can't really happen is the deciding and the acting process.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_00: And the consistency to actually finish a self-generated project without being very,
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_00: very conscious about it and very intentional.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so what I teach there is two things.
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_00: One is the flexible container,
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_00: which is this idea of like,
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_00: essentially flexible container is a planning execution system.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I have a bunch of tools.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_00: I don't just say, make a flexible container.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_00: There are specific things that I sort of guide you through.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_00: But some things work for some people, some things don't.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_00: The container piece is very, very flexible.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's very self-invented and adaptable and anything that works is fine.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_00: The point is, though, that this is a container that has edges.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_00: It has structure to it.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_00: It has...
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_00: You know, resilience and we can kind of hold you in place and keep you going.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_00: But it's flexible so that when you take a hit from something like,
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_00: your kid's home from school sick or you,
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_00: whatever,
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_00: you need to get surgery,
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_00: all those kinds of things, like you, it can absorb that blow and keep going.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_00: Like it can just keep rolling.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so having structures that are built that way,
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_00: that are built knowing that things are going to change.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_00: So I use things like Templates for your week or your day, but there's alternate ones.
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_00: So like if you have neuro,
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry,
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_00: if you have like chronic illness or something and you have flare ups,
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_00: like you would have a template,
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_00: like a way to do your days when you were having a flare up that's going
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_00: to help you get better, faster,
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_00: get back on track,
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_00: as opposed to trying to ignore it and power through and then it takes longer
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_00: and everything's kind of like diminished, right?
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_00: So There's different approaches like that that I talk about in terms of trying
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_00: to make it flexible.
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_00: Habit building,
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_00: creative habit building, again,
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_00: in a very adaptable way,
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_00: depending on what your life looks like,
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_00: but starting with the lowest possible bar you can imagine,
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_00: like make it as easy as possible.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_00: So all of those tools go into that box of the flexible container.
• 51:25
  SPEAKER_00: But then the most important thing really is pay yourself first.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_00: Pay yourself first with your time.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_00: So when you are making decisions about what you're going to do tomorrow,
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_00: next week,
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_00: whatever,
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_00: this thing that's so important to you,
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_00: you cannot make that something that gets tacked on once you clear the ducts.
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_00: Once you finish XYZ, that literally it never happens.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_00: A to-do list is never done.
• 51:55
  SPEAKER_00: There is no bottom to the to-do list.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_00: There is no finishing all the things.
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_00: There's no clearing the decks.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_00: There is no end to the things other people will ask of you.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_00: So you have to pay yourself first.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_00: That's the only way this is going to happen.
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I literally mean that by like in the day,
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_00: you know, maybe that doesn't work for you if you're not a morning person.
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_00: Like some people, they're again, flexible container.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_00: If you're Chronotype is such that late night is better for you.
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_00: Cool, fine, do that.
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_00: But for the most part, it means do the thing first thing in the morning.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_00: Even if it's five minutes, 15 minutes, half an hour, whatever it is, do that first.
• 52:33
  SPEAKER_00: Create a habit around that.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_00: Create a container for it.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_00: Create a bunch of structures that help reinforce that and create
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_00: that resilient structure around it.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_00: But make the decision...
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_00: That this is important to you and then create structure to make it possible.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_00: Make that decision that you're going to pay yourself first.
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't matter who's on your Slack, what texts you get in the morning, all this other stuff.
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_00: You've already made the decision that this comes first.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and I think that commitment to something self-generated is so antithetical to
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_02: the way that we've been raised and to the way that we have been told to approach
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_02: the work.
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_02: Because so many of us have come through academia and been told like homework first
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_02: or You have to finish the paper before you can have fun, you know?
• 53:18
  SPEAKER_02: And so that idea of doing something that doesn't please a client,
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_02: move the needle in your business,
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_02: generate the revenue today,
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_02: but it is the legacy work or it is the joy work or it is something that's fulfilling
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_02: to you that can't be qualified or quantified in quite the same way is really hard
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_02: to do.
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_00: Super hard.
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's the hardest you can possibly do.
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not even just those things.
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_00: Like those things are amazing.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_00: But sometimes it's just like I have a program I need to develop.
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_00: I have like a curriculum I want to write.
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_00: I have a sales page I want to write.
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_00: I can't sell this thing until I do it.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm so busy over here doing these things and my clients are on me all the time
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_00: and my kids are blah, blah.
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm not getting it done.
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_00: So even those kinds of projects,
• 53:59
  SPEAKER_00: which don't necessarily qualify for that, like the greatest joy, blah, blah,
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_00: If it's your intention,
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_00: if this is the thing that's the most important work to you right now,
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_00: and nobody's asking for it until it exists, it falls in the same category.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_00: Deserves priority in your literal days.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_00: Because the other thing people confuse all the time is a to-do list is not
• 54:23
  SPEAKER_00: a calendar and a calendar is not a to-do list
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_00: and you cannot put those things together.
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_00: They do not work that way.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_00: You have to make specific decisions about where,
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_00: and I'm not talking about time blocking,
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_00: but like what is going to fit into the capacity you have available.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_01: And it's always less things that Then you want someone who has like a book outline,
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_01: another book outline.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_01: And my also my body has been like, no, no, no, no, no, no.
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_01: You are shown.
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_01: You shall not pass.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so, um, and I think that's the, the, the fun part of being a solopreneur is.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_01: Being like,
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_01: I have all these things and I got to stay in the game for,
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_01: I got to stay in the game because I can do them all.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_01: I just can't do them all at once.
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_01: You can't do them all.
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry.
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_00: Over like 20 years.
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_00: Nope.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_00: There'll be more ideas.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_00: You can't do them all.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_01: I can do all of these ideas by the time I get there.
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_00: But do you want to do all these ideas?
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_00: This is what I'm saying is like,
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_00: by the time you get to the time availability of Now I can do this idea.
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_00: This may not be fresh for you anymore.
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_00: It may not matter.
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_00: There's another thing I talk about,
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_00: which is idea debt,
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_00: and you carry these old ideas with you,
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_00: get attached to them because at some point you decided,
• 55:47
  SPEAKER_00: this is super important, I need to do this thing.
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_00: And then you're fulfilling this old debt instead of actually reassessing,
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_00: re-deciding in the moment what it is that you need to do.
• 56:00
  SPEAKER_00: So the biggest lesson of capacity overall is I don't
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_00: want to end on this,
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_00: but you literally do not have the minutes in your life to do all the things
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_00: that you want to do.
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_00: So which things do you choose?
• 56:17
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's a great place to end because what's more human than that?
• 56:21
  SPEAKER_02: What's more human than having the hope that we can do more?
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_02: If we actually went through.
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_02: But we can
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_00: do more.
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_00: Like if you actually make decisions about what you're going to do, you will do more.
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_00: You will do more than if you don't make decisions.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_02: But I mean doing more if you don't sleep or doing more or pushing yourself so
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_02: that way you can complete the thing that you shouldn't be doing anyway.
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_00: That's a whole other issue.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_00: But like this thing of like that Jessica was saying
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_00: about having like all these different outlines and different projects you want
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_00: to work on.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you will finish all of those things,
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_00: but by the time you finish all those things, there'll be eight other things.
• 56:56
  SPEAKER_00: They will not all get done.
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_00: So really being very clear, like, this is what matters the most to me right now.
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_00: This is the thing I'm going to do right now.
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_00: I would put all those other things on hold.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's okay.
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_00: I may or may not get to those things.
• 57:10
  SPEAKER_00: That's also okay.
• 57:12
  SPEAKER_00: You know, just seeing that
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_00: people are so afraid to make decisions to not do things.
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_00: And for themselves and for other people.
• 57:23
  SPEAKER_00: So for other people, it's scary because you have to say no to people.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_00: And that's hard.
• 57:28
  SPEAKER_00: But the hardest no is to yourself.
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_00: And to say, no, I'm not going to do that now.
• 57:33
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe not ever.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to do that.
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I've walked so many clients to this decision point.
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_00: And every single one of them,
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_00: as soon as it's over,
• 57:44
  SPEAKER_00: and as soon as they're on the other side of that,
• 57:47
  SPEAKER_00: it's just like the incredible relief.
• 57:49
  SPEAKER_00: Of having made the decision.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_00: And the way I teach decision-making, you know why you did it.
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_00: You have all the receipts.
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_00: You know exactly why you made this decision.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so you know that it's a good decision.
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_00: You know it.
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have to go like, well, should I?
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_00: Should I?
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_00: You know that you made the right decision.
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_00: And you can mourn what you're not going to get to do.
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_00: You can mourn an old...
• 58:18
  SPEAKER_00: You can feel sad about that.
• 58:21
  SPEAKER_00: And that is, I think, an appropriate reaction to a lot of this stuff.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_00: But the relief and the freedom that comes with knowing what you are going to do
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_00: and knowing you can pay yourself first and knowing that you can finish this thing,
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_00: that is what makes creative life worth living.
• 58:40
  SPEAKER_02: I love that.
• 58:41
  SPEAKER_02: Well, thank you, Jessica.
• 58:41
  SPEAKER_02: If people want to hear more about you,
• 58:43
  SPEAKER_02: if they want to come check out the new website,
• 58:45
  SPEAKER_02: if they want to read up on all of the frameworks that you're developing,
• 58:48
  SPEAKER_02: where can they find you online?
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_00: I'm at jessicaable.com and all the stuff's there or it's going to be soon.
• 58:55
  SPEAKER_02: By the time this goes live in a month, we'll have it ready right now.
• 58:57
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_02: We'll give you a chance to breathe.
• 58:59
  SPEAKER_02: I'm going to throw it over to Jessica Lackey.
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_02: Jessica, I haven't talked to you in a while.
• 59:04
  SPEAKER_02: What is Aggressively Human in your world right now?
• 59:07
  SPEAKER_01: So by the time this goes live, I will have been on my multi-city
• 59:16
  SPEAKER_01: tour.
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_01: So Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, LA.
• 59:21
  SPEAKER_01: Seattle and Portland, I know.
• 59:23
  SPEAKER_01: San Francisco, I know.
• 59:24
  SPEAKER_01: L.A.'s.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_01: Trying to find a place for brunch for like eight people was sort of a shit show
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_01: because they don't take reservations in most places.
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_01: Eights, like what?
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_01: And then also like people are like, I live in L.A. and I'm like, no, no, no.
• 59:37
  SPEAKER_01: Like that's like two hours away.
• 59:40
  SPEAKER_01: Like, all right, what does L.A. actually mean?
• 59:43
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_01: they live in Santa Monica and they live in Hacienda Heights and they live
• 59:47
  SPEAKER_01: over there.
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, y'all,
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_01: y'all like between there and there, it's like going from Charlotte to Raleigh.
• 59:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yet it's all LA,
• 59:55
  SPEAKER_01: so I will report back in a future episode that we record after the break
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_01: on how amazing it was.
• 1:00:03
  SPEAKER_01: But I'm excited to begin my multi-city tour.
• 1:00:09
  SPEAKER_01: Meg, what about you?
• 1:00:11
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, I will go deeply today, even though this isn't being recorded for all.
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_02: Today was the first day of my younger son's summer school.
• 1:00:20
  SPEAKER_02: And he is on the autism spectrum, so they don't want him to regress.
• 1:00:23
  SPEAKER_02: So we get six weeks of summer school with his regular teacher from elementary school.
• 1:00:30
  SPEAKER_02: And he gets speech therapy every day that he's there because that's what he needs
• 1:00:33
  SPEAKER_02: to not regress.
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_02: And he bounded into my bedroom at 545 this morning.
• 1:00:39
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, Mom, it's summer school day.
• 1:00:41
  SPEAKER_02: He's been out of school for two weeks.
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_02: It's not like he's really missing it.
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_02: But summer school, they get to swim every day.
• 1:00:49
  SPEAKER_02: They get to go to camp two days a week.
• 1:00:53
  SPEAKER_02: It is his Christmas.
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_02: He literally will sleep in at Christmas and not come downstairs.
• 1:00:58
  SPEAKER_02: But summer school, he is ready to go.
• 1:01:01
  SPEAKER_02: And I feel like I'm just a nerd who raised another nerd who just wants to go
• 1:01:06
  SPEAKER_02: to school all the time.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_02: But it was so exciting.
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_02: Not so much the 5.45 a.m. wake up when he didn't have to be on the bus until 8.
• 1:01:14
  SPEAKER_02: But like that joy of I get to do this thing that I love.
• 1:01:17
  SPEAKER_02: I get to see my friends like he doesn't want to go to camp.
• 1:01:19
  SPEAKER_02: He wants to go to summer school and he's excited about it.
• 1:01:22
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm going to hear all about it this afternoon.
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_02: It's just going to be really great.
• 1:01:25
  SPEAKER_02: So, yeah,
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_02: the excitement of being a kid at the end of school and the beginning
• 1:01:30
  SPEAKER_02: of school is just so freaking human.
• 1:01:33
  SPEAKER_02: Jessica Adel, what are you doing lately?
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_02: What's Aggressively Human in your world right now?
• 1:01:37
  SPEAKER_00: Well, um,
• 1:01:38
  SPEAKER_00: on the also school related front,
• 1:01:40
  SPEAKER_00: my daughter, my oldest child is going to college this year.
• 1:01:45
  SPEAKER_00: So she is at this moment at orientation, um, which is like a two day orientation.
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_00: She'll be back.
• 1:01:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's not like she's there permanently now,
• 1:01:53
  SPEAKER_00: but like, I am getting used to the whole idea of not having her around all the time.
• 1:01:57
  SPEAKER_00: Do not like it.
• 1:01:59
  SPEAKER_00: Do not like it.
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want that.
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_02: Is she close to Philly?
• 1:02:01
  SPEAKER_02: Is she close to home?
• 1:02:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um, yeah, she's going to George Washington.
• 1:02:04
  SPEAKER_00: So she's going to be in Washington.
• 1:02:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's, it's not close, close, but it's very accessible.
• 1:02:09
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, I'm thrilled for her.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_00: She's, I mean, the beauty of this is she's so excited.
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_00: She's so excited to go.
• 1:02:15
  SPEAKER_00: She's so excited about Washington and GW.
• 1:02:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, she's a French speaker and total Francophile.
• 1:02:24
  SPEAKER_00: And she's like, can't wait to get back to Paris.
• 1:02:26
  SPEAKER_00: She's like looking for ways to like do, you know, study abroad stuff.
• 1:02:30
  SPEAKER_00: And, um, Yeah, it's really exciting.
• 1:02:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's really exciting to see her on that cusp of launching.
• 1:02:41
  SPEAKER_02: So cool.
• 1:02:41
  SPEAKER_02: George Washington was my first choice school.
• 1:02:43
  SPEAKER_00: Oh.
• 1:02:43
  SPEAKER_02: And then I ended up going to Philadelphia instead
• 1:02:45
  SPEAKER_02: because they gave me way better financial aid at Temple.
• 1:02:48
  SPEAKER_02: But it was the gold star for me that I wanted.
• 1:02:52
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think I knew you went to Temple.
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_02: I went to Temple.
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_00: Cool.
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_00: Temple's great.
• 1:02:57
  Yeah.
• 1:02:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:02:58
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 1:02:59
  SPEAKER_02: Well, thank you so much for being here today.
• 1:03:01
  SPEAKER_02: Anyone,
• 1:03:01
  SPEAKER_02: if you're listening and you want to find out more about any of Jessica's work,
• 1:03:05
  SPEAKER_02: you can head over to jessicaable.com and then come back next week
• 1:03:09
  SPEAKER_02: when we will be talking even more about how to keep our businesses human in the age
• 1:03:13
  SPEAKER_02: of AI.
• 1:03:14
  SPEAKER_02: And we will see you then.