by Jenny Blake
I racked my brain for months about what business model would be most sustainable for me during the pivot I described in the introduction. Over and over I asked myself, “What is a scalable business model?” without a good answer, until one day I realized I was approaching the problem the wrong way. I needed to use my version of grounded theory to focus on others’ needs, not my business: put my ear to the ground first, then create something valuable based on what my new community at JennyBlake.me would find most helpful.
This can be a humbling experience. It means you are admitting that you do not know. It means returning to a “beginner’s mind,” as the Buddhist saying goes, releasing attachment to preconceived ideas and being open to whatever responses emerge.
A few weeks after this realization, I sent a quick two-question survey to my blog readers asking how I could be most helpful. I asked, “What is your biggest challenge at the moment?” and “What can I create for you this year?”
You can do the same thing without an audience by asking people in areas that interest you what their biggest challenges are. Companies hire employees, contractors, and consultants because they have a problem they want to solve.
The survey submissions I received were incredibly helpful. Some people were in the midst of a career pivot, others were looking for specific business tools and tactics, and others were addressing the balance and burnout side of the equation. Some challenges and requests were on my radar, but others were not, and the survey responses helped shape the projects I was considering.
Suddenly I was benefiting from the power of hundreds of minds, not just one. I could find themes and patterns, then mix in my own intuitive sense about what people might find helpful, without trying to do all the heavy lifting myself.
With the data I gathered, I ended up creating a private online community called Momentum, where impacters could exchange ideas, tools, and connections to further their creative goals—aided by my templates, courses, live workshops, and support. I created a section within it called Brilliance Barter that operates on a take-a-penny, leave-a-penny philosophy for giving and receiving feedback, where I evaluated several key elements of this book.
This process was consistent with what Brown and Fields discussed in their Good Life Project conversation. “You can create a product and then find the people and the market to sell your product to, or you can get to know a community, listen to the current conversation, and cater to what they actually need,” Brown said, adding that the best researchers and entrepreneurs “are open to the market proving them wrong, listening to what the market says is right, and then deciding whether they want to create that or not. This ultimately requires a lot of discomfort and vulnerability.”
One caveat: just listening won’t propel you into innovative mode. As Henry Ford said of getting into the automobile business, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
Investigative Pivot Listening
1. Identify your ideal audience: the people or companies that you would like to learn more about.
2. Formulate a few key questions to ask this population: Examples that work well across the board are:
What are your current challenges?
Where are you heading? What do you want to create or do next?
What does success look like? How will you know when you get there?
3. Deploy your listening tool or research method: It may be casting a wide net by creating a survey that you send to friends, coworkers, or your community, or it may be starting in a more intimate way by setting up conversations, or a combination of both. In the design-thinking community, these conversations are called empathy interviews, and refer to finding out as much as possible about potential customers’ experiences with a given topic or environment, even if you do not ask directly about your product or services.
4. Gather data and parse key themes: Whether you send a survey or meet with people face-to-face, collect all your notes in one place. What are the common threads among the responses? What are the biggest challenges for the people you care about? How might these tie in with the strengths and interests you identified in the Plant stage?
5. Identify small next steps: Based on your active listening, what next steps could you take? Are you ready to start prototyping, or piloting, a potential solution, or do you want to conduct another round of research? You might do both simultaneously—keeping up with active listening even while taking steps forward, which tends to be the most successful route by enabling the two-way conversation to continue.
Pivot Paradox: Why Ignorance Is Bliss
Some of the smartest, most self-aware people I know also report sometimes feeling the most unsure or insecure. This is the Downing effect at work. The Downing effect, also known as illusory superiority, says that the more intelligent someone is, the lower they rate themselves on the intelligence scale. The lower someone’s IQ, the higher they rate themselves. Ignorance truly is self-assessment bliss.
On its face, self-doubt might appear to be a bad thing for impacters, but there are positive implications underneath it:
You are constantly pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone, seeking knowledge from new and diverse fields for use in your own industry.
You are aware that the more you learn, the more you realize you don’t know.
You aim to surround yourself with people who challenge you. You don’t want to be the smartest one in the room, at least not most of the time. You look for symbiotic relationships where all parties bring something helpful and unique.
You are not afraid to break from the status quo, from society’s “white picket fence” ideal of success. For this reason, you may feel out of place in traditional situations. It takes courage to bust deeply embedded cultural norms.
In his 1951 book, The Wisdom of Insecurity, Alan Watts implored readers to accept that there is no such thing as safety or security, and in fact, most of the joys of human life are lovable because they are changing. “Music is a delight because of its rhythm and flow. Yet the moment you arrest the flow and prolong a note or chord beyond its time, the rhythm is destroyed,” he wrote. “Because life is likewise a flowing process, change and death are its necessary parts. To work for their exclusion is to work against life.”
Fear, insecurity, and uncertainty are the price we pay for a conscious, fully awake, fully alive life. Rather than making yourself wrong for feeling fear and insecurity on the winding roads of change, honor them as the signs of a courageous life.
BE DISCERNING ABOUT YOUR LEARNING
Even with the pace of change, all hope of strategically positioning yourself for success in our economy is not lost. Instead, focus your energy on how you spot skills that are needed, particularly those rooted in your existing strengths.
In their book The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, authors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee make the point that the fundamental metrics of our economy have changed, saying, “More and more what we care about in the second machine age are ideas, not things . . . interactions, not transactions.”
According to Brynjolfsson and McAfee, there are some guidelines to keep in mind regarding what skills and opportunities to pursue to complement technology, rather than compete against it. We will see the most success and upward mobility among people who demonstrate:
Strategic thinking, ideation, curiosity, and combinatorial innovation: Humans are still much more creative than machines when it comes to inventing new products or making improvements to existing products or processes. We also have the unique ability to ask powerful questions that can lead to new solutions by combining complementary or seemingly unrelated components to create something new.
The ability to become “superstars” through reputation, platform, and leverage: If you can develop a reputation as being the best at something within y
our target market, then build a platform to disseminate your expertise or related products, you position yourself for positively disproportionate gains. Leverage refers to being able to parlay your reputation and platform into greater exposure, and therefore opportunities (we will talk more about this in the next chapter).
The ability to work alongside technology: A midlevel computer can beat a human at chess, but teams of humans working alongside computers triumph over machines.
Even still, this may not always be the case. As Geoff Colvin writes in Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will, it is futile to ask what computers will never be able to do, since the answer is most likely nothing.
Instead, we should focus on the unique value people can provide as we shift from our role as knowledge workers into relationship workers. Colvin suggests that the guiding question then becomes, “What are the activities that we humans, driven by our deepest nature or by the realities of daily life, will simply insist be performed by other humans, regardless of what computers can do?” He adds, “To look into someone’s eyes—that turns out to be, metaphorically and quite often literally, the key to high-value work in the coming economy.”
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This part of scanning is about asking expansive questions, observing what arises, discovering holes in the market, and pinpointing potential skills to develop. But the Scan stage is not complete just yet. The flip side of asking and listening is building a reputation engine that hustles on your behalf throughout your pivot and far beyond.
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If you have a one-year vision and the skills to get there but no one is around to help line up opportunities or benefit from your expertise, can you really make the progress you desire?
CHAPTER 7: MAKE YOURSELF DISCOVERABLE
How Can You Add Unique Value and Build Visibility?
Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish.
—Ovid, Heroides
BLUETOOTH IS THE MAGIC TECHNOLOGY THAT PAIRS TWO DEVICES WITHOUT ANY CABLES. Connecting two Bluetooth-enabled devices, such as your phone to your car or wireless speakers, requires making them both “discoverable.” When a Bluetooth-enabled device is discoverable, other devices can detect, pair, or connect to it.
Pairing up in the career sense works the same way. You will have an easier time navigating between career moves or clients if you are discoverable, which means putting your ideas out into the world through your own platform, or piggybacking on an existing one. Both require that you stand for something and commit to sharing your unique ideas and expertise.
So far in the Scan stage we discussed whom to connect with, and what types of skills would be most beneficial to develop. Now it is time to zoom in on specific opportunities and platform-building activities to round out your Pivot portfolio. This third Scan step is about investing your searching time wisely and getting your story straight: making your desired direction known to others, and developing a strategy that enables opportunities to find you by increasing your visibility and reputation.
DEFINE YOUR PROJECT-BASED PURPOSE
In the Plant stage, we explored the idea of purpose, a driving theme that propels your entire body of work. If you are compelled by a force that calls you toward a specific type of work or group of people, that can provide great clarity when pivoting. But what if you still don’t know what your purpose is? Maybe you skipped that section because it seemed too abstract.
For some, the pressure to define a purpose or mission statement is stifling and causes much unnecessary angst. In many cases, particularly midpivot, trying to get too specific with one Be-All, End-All Purpose causes more anxiety than anything else. So ditch it. Focus on shorter-term aims instead.
If your one-year vision is the what, or the desired destination of your next career pursuit, your project-based purpose is the why. In a world of shorter-term work, defining your why with project-based purpose will help you better sift potential opportunities while scanning, without the pressure to guide your entire life by one magical, all-encompassing statement.
Defining personal projects, and by extension your project-based purpose, is not a trivial exercise; it turns out this process is central to our overall sense of happiness. Cambridge University professor Dr. Brian R. Little, author of Me, Myself, and Us: The Science of Personality and the Art of Well-Being, believes that when asked, “How are you?” our answer hinges on how we feel about our personal projects. He writes, “Well-being is enhanced if your projects are meaningful, manageable, and effectively connected with others.”
Nerissa Gaspay is a San Francisco–based preschool teacher for children with disabilities, including cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, rare genetic disorders, and epilepsy. She has a project-based purpose to bring more play into her classroom after seeing how much it accelerates her students’ development. One of her experiments to meet this project-based purpose is starting each day with an obstacle course. Although more traditional teachers may wonder about its merits, Nerissa’s kids love it, and she has already seen tremendous progress as a result. Her longer-term purpose is to help parents better understand and communicate with their children with disabilities, and to develop new methods for helping her students learn and acclimate to their surroundings.
Julien Pham, the physician-entrepreneur you met in Chapter 2, has a project-based purpose for his website, Startup Clinic: to connect physicians with each other so they can transfer knowledge, share innovative ideas, and help bring medicine into the twenty-first century by encouraging the institutions they work for to think like start-up companies. As someone who was born in Vietnam and raised in Paris, and grew up with a doctor dad and business-founder mom, Julien’s longer-term purpose is to connect cultures to improve communication—between medicine and technology, and between physicians and patients.
As you scan for projects that might suit you, look for the underlying project-based purpose. Why take on that work? What do you want to accomplish? Who do you hope to impact, and in what way? If someone were to send you a glowing thank-you note related to this project one year from now, what would it say?
If you are still having trouble coming up with a purpose for your next phase, simply ask: how can I be most helpful to the most people? And this doesn’t have to mean the masses. “Most” right now might be your nuclear or extended family. Or shift from thinking to doing by volunteering at local organizations that are always grateful for extra hands, such as homeless shelters, food kitchens, meal delivery services, animal hospitals, and homes for the elderly.
The one thing that has brought me peace in my most unclear career moments is rededicating myself to serving others. That’s it. It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that.
PLATFORM AND LEVERAGE
Becoming an expert and developing a strong reputation is helpful, but it will not take you very far if the people you want to work with do not know who you are or where to find you.
Developing a public-facing platform, a corner of the world from which you can share your ideas and expertise with a community you cultivate, greatly amplifies your leverage during and after a pivot. Like the pole-vaulter who uses a pole to catapult over the high bar, your platform gives you leverage to find new and previously unseen opportunities.
When I left Google, I had big plans for launching my book and online courses. But to pay the bills while working on those elements, I did one-on-one career coaching, which was 20 percent of what I had been doing in my role at Google. This ended up sustaining me as my most reliable source of income for five years. It provided reasonably predictable cash flow, I could throttle it up and down relatively easily, and I could do it from anywhere. When I decided to work from Bali and Thailand for two months in 2013, I was worried no one would want to work with me because of the unpredictability of Interne
t access or having to make our calls over Skype across time zones. But surprisingly I got the most clients in the history of my business. That was enabled largely by the platform of readers with whom I had built trust in the years leading up to my travels, negating potential distance issues.
Developing a community takes time, and strong ties will be more helpful than large stats. Whether 50, 500, or 5,000 people, it is not the size of your platform but the level of engagement that matters. This inner circle will become your best advocates, supporters, connectors, and someday, perhaps, customers and clients. Kevin Kelly, founding executive editor of Wired magazine, suggests aiming for “1,000 True Fans,” or people who will purchase “anything and everything you produce.”
Building a community and becoming a thought leader should not be about a selfish aim for fame. As Dorie Clark, author of Stand Out: How to Find Your Breakthrough Idea and Build a Following Around It, wrote, “It’s about solving real problems and making a difference in a way that creates value for yourself and others. It’s a willingness to be brave, open up, and share yourself. It’s a willingness to risk having your ideas shot down, because you genuinely believe they can help others.”
Not everyone has to become an entrepreneur, blogger, or “personal brand.” Nowadays, with social media, many people feel that they must “live their lives at the same time they brand the shit out of it,” as my friend Stacy Sims puts it. Branding, and becoming a thought leader in some area of expertise, is not going to be every impacter’s passion, nor does it have to be. But becoming an expert in your desired field—not just technically the best, but recognized and publicly known for it by generously sharing that expertise with others—will become your most powerful generator of new opportunities. Instead of feeling like you must constantly pound down doors to get hired, others will swing those doors open for you.
