Jenny Blake
363: 🌈 Taking a Quiet Sabbatical and ...

As I round the corner into this ninth year of podcasting, after over 700 episodes today, I’m announcing a pause for both shows.

Listen in to hear what factors helped me reach this decision across time, money, energy, depressing industry articles, the pace of both shows’ growth, and mix of additional business factors that make this an important moment to pause and regroup. You might also appreciate the even deeper dive with my longtime friend (and first coach) Adrian Klaphaak in Pivot episode 360: 📦 Unpacking a Big Business Decision and Dissolving Related Doubts.

Jenny Blake
362: Setting Creative Intentions Instead of ...

“Expectations are the enemy to the creative process. Sometimes you have to let go of the known to see the unknown.”

Today I’m speaking with James McCrae, an author, poet, and meme artist based in Austin, Texas. He is the founder of 🌻 Sunflower Club, a global school and community dedicated to conscious creativity.

Jenny Blake
361: On Decision Engineering and Evaluating ...

Good decision-making is not about omniscience or clairvoyance—it's more about resilience, according to today’s guest, decision engineer Michelle Florendo. “Decision-making is harder than ever before, and it's not your fault,” Michelle says. “People feel like they ‘should just know’ how to decide.”

Today we’re talking about a framework more helpful than pro-con lists, tuning into your head, heart and gut; why the quality of your decision is not equal to the outcome—did good or bad things happen; keeping a decision journal to evaluate the quality of your decisions regardless of the outcome; and how to drop the guilt of “bad” past outcomes.

Jenny Blake
360: 📦 Unpacking a Big Business Decision ...

What happens when you make a big decision but still have lingering doubt, fear, and even despair? How do you know when a “download” from the universe is worth following, and what does test-driving a decision look like? What happens on the other side or when a pivot is taking far longer than planned?

We’re unpacking all these topics in today’s twelfth and final (for now) conversation for the Pivot x Career Pathfinder series with Adrian Klaphaak.

Jenny Blake
359: “You can’t give what you don’t have” — ...

“You can’t give what you don’t have.” That’s just one of the powerful lessons that Nataly Kogan learned the hard way seven years ago, after suffering a debilitating phase of burnout. As a former refugee from the former Soviet Union, she began her American journey in the projects and on welfare, then going on to build an impressive career as a finance and tech executive and serial entrepreneur over the next 25 years. Until she crashed at thirty-eight years old and needed to find a new way of moving forward.

As part of her healing process, Nataly began to paint when she was 40 by signing up for a painting retreat in Tuscony (that turned out to be for semi-professional watercolorists), and now her paintings are on the cover of her books—front and center as part of her bold self-expression.

Tech Trends

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254: The Practice—On Generosity, Peculiarity, and Showing Up with Seth Godin

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254: The Practice—On Generosity, Peculiarity, and Showing Up with Seth Godin

"The marketing-industrial complex has been on a tear for a hundred years to make almost everyone feel inadequate, because it's the single best way to sell you something. If that game isn't giving you joy, don't play that game.”

My next guest needs no introduction — though he deserves one nonetheless! Seth Godin is an inventor, thought-leader, contrarian, mentor, mensch, and an ongoing inspiration to so many of us. He is the author of 19 bestselling books, and this week we are celebrating his latest! The Practice: Shipping Creative Work, one that inspired me to get back on the mic after a two-month hiatus, to record this interview in early September.

Listen in as we celebrate our (almost) ten-year friendiversary and discuss a range of topics for those in the business of playing with ideas: shipping creative work even when tired, generosity and building with word-of-mouth in mind, choosing which information “rooms” to hang out in online, Tik Tok and social media tourism, and speaking to (and selecting for) the yearning of the people you seek to serve.

Although I’m at my awkward finest when interviewing my biggest heroes, Seth chief among them, I hope you enjoy this conversation on all things leadership and creativity :)

Links Mentioned:

❤️ Enjoying the show? Pivot Podcast is listener supported—consider donating to become a Pivot Insider and you’ll get access to a private monthly Q&A call: http://pivotmethod.com/insider

💌 Get my curated weekly(ish) PivotList newsletter at http://pivotmethod.com/pivotlist

💬 I’d love to hear what’s on your mind! Take the Pivot listener survey at http://pivotmethod.com/survey

🗣 Submit a question or comment for future episodes at http://pivotmethod.com/ask

🎧 Make sure you’re subscribed wherever you listen to ‘casts: https://pod.link/1054817076

📝 Check out full show notes from this episode with links to resources mentioned at http://pivotmethod.com/254

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🦠166: Homeschooling While WFH with Kathryn Haydon

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🦠166: Homeschooling While WFH with Kathryn Haydon

Pivot Insider member and creativity expert Kathryn Hayden is here to help parents “turn a difficult time into a time of possibility.” Over the past decade, she has written four books, several hundred articles, taught and trained thousands of kids, educators, and businesspeople, all while working from home and homeschooling her son, while her husband worked long hours at the office and on weekends.

Before we get into her many helpful ideas for homeschooling while WFH, a caveat: just hours after we finished recording, I read a New York Times article titled, “I Refuse to Run a Coronavirus Home School.” If you’re already maxed out with kids and home and trying to get your own work done, that article may provide much-needed solace! You have permission not to Pinterest your pandemic, as we said in episode 162.

If/when you do want some best practices from someone who home schooled for over a decade while also working from home, this episode is always here for you!

Kathryn is also a great podcast success story: she listened to the episode with Rohit Bhargava from December 2017, 75: Become a Trend Curator, reached out to him, and next thing you know his imprint Non-Obvious Guides was publishing her book, The Non-Obvious Guide to Being More Creative, No Matter Where You Work!

For a deeper dive, check out Kathryn’s Course: Work From Home With Kids and THRIVE, and this great list of online learning resources for kids from my business attorney, Francine Love.

View full show notes from this episode at http://pivotmethod.com/166 »

What’s on your mind? Submit follow-up questions for a future conversation at http://pivotmethod.com/ask

Background from our kick-off to this Pivoting Around A Pandemic series, episode 159: With so much happening daily in the world and global economy around coronavirus, we’re all dealing with massive amounts of uncertainty, pivots at work, and for many—fear and anxiety that comes with not only the health concerns, but questions around how to maintain our livelihoods moving forward.

When Momentum member and pandemic expert Dr. Michael J. Consuelos reached out to offer himself as a resource to the JBE team and the MoMo community, I jumped at the chance to record a conversation for all of you as well, which has now turned into a full-blown series:

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🦠 159: Pivoting Around a Pandemic—Maintaining Business Continuity and Caring for Self and Others with Dr. Michael Consuelos

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🦠 159: Pivoting Around a Pandemic—Maintaining Business Continuity and Caring for Self and Others with Dr. Michael Consuelos

With so much happening in the world and global economy around coronavirus, we’re all dealing with massive amounts of uncertainty, pivots at work, and for many—fear and anxiety that comes with not only the health concerns, but questions around how to maintain our livelihoods moving forward.

When Momentum member and pandemic expert Dr. Michael J. Consuelos reached out to offer himself as a resource to the JBE team and the MoMo community, I jumped at the chance to record a conversation for all of you as well.

In this episode, we discuss how entrepreneurs, leaders and organizations can transition from fear and anxiety toward calm, measured action and experiments. How can we know what actions to take? We can’t. These times require responsiveness, vulnerability, transparency, releasing perfectionism, and a willingness to be far more innovative and creative than we have in the past.

Michael and I talk about how to shift from victim to hero, how to quiet internal concerns, and small daily actions to focus on—as well as what organizations and entrepreneurs can we learn from each other during “Black Swan” events like these.

This is a wide-ranging, imperfect, in-the-moment response so we could at least start the conversation around how to maintain business continuity while Pivoting around a pandemic, primarily for people in information-based roles and industries — and both of us are open to an ongoing series on this topic if/as you find it helpful! Feel free to submit follow-up questions for a future episode at http://pivotmethod.com/ask.

Check out full show notes from this episode with links to resources mentioned at http://PivotMethod.com/159.

Enjoying the show? Pivot Podcast is listener supported—consider donating to become a Pivot Insider and you’ll get access to a private monthly Q&A call where you can ask me anything, and discuss the latest books, tools and topics I’ve shared in recent episodes. Our next session is TODAY, March 11th — with Michael as our special co-host to answer COVID-19 specific questions — I’d love for you to join us!

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146: How to Rapid-Prototype a Course

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146: How to Rapid-Prototype a Course

Creating online courses does not require huge investment in time or money. Although they certainly can cost tens of thousands of dollars to produce, with professional video editing and branding, they don't have to. In fact, my favorite way to create and launch a course is with my future students!

This follows agile design principles (check out the agile manifesto here). The goal is developing rapidly, with frequent input from key stakeholders, not building so much behind-the-scenes that what you’re working on becomes out-of-date or out of touch with what your audience and potential future students actually need.

I this episode, I break down all the details on how I love launching and creating courses. You can also read a summary of the steps on this page of the Pivot website.

Check out full show notes from this episode with links to resources mentioned at PivotMethod.com/146.

Enjoying the show? Pivot Podcast is listener supported—consider donating to become a Pivot Insider and you’ll get access to a private monthly Q&A call where you can ask me anything, and discuss the latest books, tools and topics I’ve shared in recent episodes.

Our last call of the year is coming right up on Friday, December 6!

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142: Creative Economy Lessons from “The Great Race to Rule Streaming TV”

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142: Creative Economy Lessons from “The Great Race to Rule Streaming TV”

Given the “mutation of television’s DNA” that reporter Jonah Weiner describes in his fantastic New York Times Magazine article, The Great Race to Rule Streaming TV, there is much we can learn about where the creative economy is heading, how to stand out, and how to Pivot your own creative projects.

This article is so juicy—so jam-packed with insights into where TV is heading that parallels publishing, podcasting and product creation—that I couldn’t resist jumping on the mic to do a point-by-point analysis of how they might apply to our own creative projects in this experimental episode.

The article—and what we’re going to dive into together—spans a fascinating swath of topics that I’ll help unpack. Everything from prestige content versus quick bites, hyper-abundance and the atmosphere of plentitude, infinite possibilities, unpredictability, celebrating fringe, “great-ish” and the golden age of good enough, quiet time meetings, licensing versus original content, hoarding, the great reclamation of content, perceived barriers to entry, and preserving storytelling.

If it goes well, and you’re interested in these topics, I can even invite Jonah to a follow-up interview for the Pivot podcast. :)

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122: Digital Minimalism with Cal Newport

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122: Digital Minimalism with Cal Newport

What are the hidden costs of digital clutter? How can we counter screen addiction and phantom phone vibrations? We explore these topics in this episode with Cal Newport as we discuss his new book, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World.

Cal Newport is a familiar voice on the Pivot Podcast and back by popular demand! On our first episode we discussed deep work—the increasingly important deliberate practice of focused work, especially in a world of cognitive junk. Now we turn to digital minimalism: applying a just enough mindset to our personal technology, freeing ourselves from the overwhelm, distraction, and “fear of missing out” side effects of the always-connected world. Or as Cal quotes Bill Maher from May 2017: “Likes is the new smoking . . . Philip Morris just wanted your lungs, The App Store wants your soul.” 

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75: Become a Trend Curator + Non-Obvious Trends for 2018 with Rohit Bhargava

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75: Become a Trend Curator + Non-Obvious Trends for 2018 with Rohit Bhargava

"The secret to predicting the future is to get better at understanding the present."
—Rohit Bhargava, Non-Obvious 2018 Edition: How to Predict Trends and Win the Future

I've always been fascinated by futurists and trend spotters (turns out the latter is a myth). How do they see trends coming before the rest of us? What are they doing to sift through the noise to extrapolate a clear signal of where things are heading? Turns out, true to the Pivot Method, that the key to predicting the future lies right under our feet: we just need to get better at understanding how to spot ideas, capture them effectively, and sift through them.

Enter this week's guest, trend curator (What's that, you ask? You'll find out!) Rohit Bhargava. I'm super excited to help us all get a jump on the new year with a conversation about how we can all become better trend curators and apply Rohit's Haystack Method: gather idea hay first, then sit down to find the needles or key themes. We also had fun diving into 7 of his 15 trends for 2018 more closely; our combined list includes: lightspeed learning, approachable luxury, human mode, touchworthy, truthing, enlightened consumption, and manufactured outrage.

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43: Humans are Underrated with Geoff Colvin

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43: Humans are Underrated with Geoff Colvin

What can people do that computers never will? According to Geoff Colvin, that's the wrong question. It is futile to ask what computers will never be able to do, since they are accomplishing new, previously unthinkable feats at an astonishing rate. Instead, we must ask what it is that humans will insist continue to be performed by other humans? 

The answer lies in the shift happening as we speak: from a knowledge economy to what Colvin calls the relationship economy. We also talk about his first book, why talent is overrated (and the two qualities you can cultivate instead). I hope you find this conversation as fascinating as I did! 

 

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18: How to Become a Robot Whisperer with Dr. Tom Guarriello

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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.

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8: Cyber Security for Dummies: The Least You Need to Know with Willie Jackson

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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.