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.
“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.
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.
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.
“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.
I almost fainted when today’s guest, Kevin Kelly, said yes to be on the Pivot Podcast. Kind, brilliant and the king of techno-literacy, Kevin is one of the great technologists, futurists, and thinkers of our time.
Why is it so challenging to say no to something good even when we know we have outgrown it? The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t. We often accept “the devil we know” for longer than we should out of fear. Hey, at least there is some security and safety in our current devil. Who knows what lurks on the other side!
Today’s podcast is with one of my favorite authors and bloggers, James Altucher, author of Choose Yourself and the Choose Yourself Guide to Wealth. What better way to ring in the new year than with his 55-item Reinvent Yourself checklist?
Don’t bite the hand that feeds you. That’s the gremlin I hear behind the slight nerves I feel about sharing today’s conversation with my good friend Nicole Antoinette.
As we both hit eight years of blogging this year (ten since I started Life After College), we decided to take an honest look at the social media fatigue that sometimes washes over a life lived online.
David used to be what he calls “an invisible,” when he worked for a number of years as a magazine fact-checker. “If you read a great article, you never think to yourself, ‘Wow that was fact-checked beautifully,’” David said. “I had this job where the better I did my job, the more I disappeared. It was only if I made a mistake that people noticed me at all. It was such an unusual experience.”
He sought to investigate what other professions and professionals share the same inverse relationship between work and recognition, and found something interesting: there were a lot of them, across every field and industry.
These were people who were highly skilled, had developed strong reputations in their field, but who were not motivated by public recognition, nor did the public ever really consider their work at all. Consider the structural engineer to the architect, the sound engineer to lead singer of a band, the production team on a movie set, hair and makeup people for TV shows.
How often do you come down with a Case of the Mondays? It can be a strange feeling to avoid your to-do list on a big project when you run your own business or side hustle: if you are the one calling the shots on schedule and strategy, shouldn’t it be energizing much more often than not?
However, for one reason or another, we often let fear and shoulds take-over (myself included) and suddenly find ourselves at a fork-in-the-road with projects we care deeply about.
