Andrew: This session is about how you can discover what you’re meant to do. It is led by Jeff Goins. He is the author of four books and a popular blog that you can read at GoinsWriter.com.This conversation and everything we’re going to be talking about is based on his book “The Art of Work: A Proven Path to Discovering What You Were Meant to Do.” I’ll help facilitate. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy, where proven founders teach.Jeff, thanks for being here.Jeff: Thanks for having me, Andrew. I love the show. I’m a big fan of Mixergy, and excited to be here.
Andrew: Thanks. You know what? The reason I was hesitating is I was looking at my beard there in the OneShot. Here, let me bring my OneShot up on my phone. Maybe I should actually trim down here. I’m trying to figure out what the length is of my beard.
Jeff: I don’t have that problem.
Andrew: No. You just shave right off?
Jeff: It just doesn’t grow.
Andrew: Oh, it doesn’t grow. I see. Okay. That is a whole other issue.
Jeff: Yeah.
Andrew: I’m glad you’re here. Because frankly, little things like that — do we grow a beard or not, do we send out this email or not — are challenging. And you’re about to show us how we can find what we’re meant to do? That’s the goal of this book? That’s the goal of our conversation?
Jeff: Absolutely, yeah.
Andrew: And you’re a guy who didn’t always have that figured out. In fact, let me just talk about one thing that I noticed here. This is an old photo of you, right?
Jeff: Yeah, very old.
Andrew: One of the things that I noticed here is — not a big detail, but a small one — you’re holding the guitar. And I heard about a time that you used a guitar to woo a girl, a girl named Lane. And I think that’s helpful for us to see one of the issues you were wrestling with. What happened with Lane?
Jeff: Yeah, I was just looking at that photo, and that’s probably from . . . I don’t know, six years ago, and I’ve got a . . . you know, and that’s the same kind of sweater. And actually . . . you know, we’ll point people to the book site. I think you show that later. But I’m wearing that same exact sweater. It’s . . .
Andrew: No way. Let’s take a look.
Jeff: Nope, the . . . yeah.
Andrew: Yeah.
Jeff: Same sweater. Oh boy. I need a wardrobe consultant.
Andrew: No you don’t. It’s working for you.
Jeff: Hey.
Andrew: Why waste time on a wardrobe?
Jeff: Classic.
Andrew: Let’s waste time . . . or let’s spend our time on things that are much more important.
Jeff: Indeed.
Andrew: I think. Go ahead.
Jeff: So one of my favorite stories to tell is about this girl named Lane that I crushed on in college. So it may surprise you that I’m in my 30s, because I realize I look — and if my voice cracks, I might sound — like I’m 14 years old.
And in . . . but when I was actually in college — which was, you know, whatever, over a decade ago — I had this crush on this girl named Lane my freshman year. And Lane was my freshman orientation leader. So she was a junior, I was a freshman. I thought it was a little scandalous to ask her on a date my freshman year. And so being the gentleman that I was, and having nothing to do with the fact that I was deathly afraid of girls at the time, I waited a good long year before I asked Lane on a date.
And so sophomore year rolls around, and I decide that I’m going to ask Lane out. And I tell my friends. I make the mistake of telling a couple of my friends, who were these, like, uber-romantic guys. And I said, “Hey, I’m going to ask Lane out.” And they’re like, “Oh, finally.”
And one of them said, “Well, how are you going to do it?” And I said, “Well, I don’t know. I just thought I’d call her or something.” And he goes, “Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, no, no, no. Dude, go big or go home.”
And I was like, “Okay. All right. Fine. I’ll go big. I don’t want to go home.” And I did what I think any well-intentioned college male with a guitar sitting in the corner of his dormitory room would do: I wrote Lane a song.
And I practiced it for probably a week. And it was, you know, this short, 90-second love ballad. And one Saturday afternoon, I felt like I was ready. I had memorized all the lyrics. I was ready to go big. I called Lane on the phone, and it rang and it rang, and then she picked up, and then I hung up. Because now I knew that Lane was home.
And so I grabbed my guitar, I raced across campus. Somebody let me into the girls dorm. And I knocked on her door, and she opened. And I stepped in with my guitar into a room full of people.
And for the . . . you know, at this point, I sort of had this decision to make. Like, do I take another step in, and risk embarrassment and rejection in front of all these people? Lane had, like, half a dozen friends hanging out in her room. You know, as you do in college. And they’re just hanging out on a Saturday afternoon. And I could do that. Or I could take a step back, retreat, say I was knocking on the wrong door or something, and probably never do it again. I just knew myself, and I knew that if I didn’t do this now, I’d probably never do it again.
Andrew: Yeah, I get that.
Jeff: So I stepped in, and I just started playing. I didn’t think about what I was doing or what people were thinking. Everybody’s staring at me, and Lane’s looking at me, and I’m looking at her. And I play this song. And the song was basically asking her to the homecoming dance. And I somehow figured out a way to rhyme the last two lines — you know, the second to last line with the last line — which was, “Will you go to the dance with me?”
And so I strummed that final chord, and I locked eyes with Lane, and she looked at me, and everybody looked at her, and then there was silence for a minute. And then she said, “I can’t. I’m sorry.”
And then something worse happened. I didn’t leave. Like, I don’t know why I didn’t do this. I don’t know what was broken in my brain that made me think, like, playing a song, getting rejected by a girl, and then, like, blending in and not leaving, and pretending as if nothing ever happened, was somehow less awkward than just doing it and leaving. But I . . . that’s exactly what I thought.
And so I just, like, sat down, you know? In a chair, and tried to join the conversation at this party that I wasn’t really invited to. And, you know, I’m just hanging out.
Andrew: That is awkward. That says something about you, that you would sing to her, and that you wouldn’t understand why you should leave, or why, frankly, leaving is not as big an issue as . . . why didn’t it work?
Jeff: Yeah. Right. So eventually I kind of excused myself, after 10 minutes of awkwardness, and Lane walks me out and says thanks for my song. And I said, “Well, I aim to entertain.” You know, as cynically as I possibly could.
Andrew: Yes.
Jeff: And it would be a long time before I ever did something audacious for a girl, or in my life. I mean, years.
And looking back on that, I thought about that for a long time. What did I do wrong? Was it the fact that Lane didn’t like me, or was it because she just didn’t know me?
And looking back, I can now understand that. Because the next time I played a song for a girl was for the woman who became my wife. And the way I pursued that relationship was very different from the way I pursued Lane. I took time to get to know her. You know, we started dating, we got to know each other. She found out I wasn’t a crazy person anymore. And then I wrote her a song, and then I asked her to marry me. Looking back on the thing with Lane, I realized I didn’t say more than, like, 100 words to her in a year.
And I shared that story in the book because I think this is the way that we tend to treat a dream, or some big idea that you have that you want to share with the world. We think it’s all or nothing. And in “The Art of Work,” I talk about why I don’t think that’s the case. Why some of the best dreams take time. It’s less about taking a giant leap, and it’s more about building a bridge.
Andrew: I see. And so if you would have done this . . . if you had an opportunity to do it again, you would have spent some time getting to know her, talking to her, not just going for that all or nothing, asking for the date day one.
Jeff: Yeah. Yeah. I would have . . . you know, instead of spending that year fantasizing about what it would be like to be in a relationship with her, I should have spent that time getting to know her, becoming her friend, hanging out with her. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with, like, big, audacious, crazy leaps of faith. But I think in . . . you know, especially in the space of entrepreneurship, that we sort of glorify this as the only way to do it. Like, you have to risk bankruptcy and go all in.
Andrew: I see.
Jeff: And I’m just not so sure that’s the case.
Andrew: And we’re going to talk about this process and how it can apply to the thing.
Jeff: Yeah.
Andrew: The thing that is the most meaningful thing that we’re going to be doing in our life, what we’re meant to do. But I want to understand you. You got on this path of being a writer, and putting out books, and blogging, and getting your ideas out for the world, because of a friend named Paul. What happened with Paul?
Jeff: So a few years ago — several years ago now — I approached my boss. I was working for a non-profit at the time. I was a marketing director for this international non-profit. And it was a good job. I liked it. I wasn’t miserable. But I had this feeling . . . I was in my late 20s at the time. I had this feeling that I think a lot of people get, which is I just kind of felt like there was something more that I was missing out on.
So around that time, I decided to invest in this personal coaching program. Like, a group coaching thing. We met for a year, kind of like a Mastermind-type thing. And one of the other members of that group was a guy named Paul.
And I actually . . . I call him a friend. He’s a friend now. He was not a friend at the time. He was this random guy that I had known maybe a month. And we’re sitting around, and he goes, “Jeff, what’s your dream?”
And I was so burnt out on seeing my friends and colleagues pursue dreams, burn out, and then go back to working at Starbucks or whatever, that I just thought the whole thing was a farce. I said, “I don’t have a dream, and I just think that’s for kids. I have a good job. I’ve got a wife and a good life. I don’t need a dream. I just need to do good work.”
And he goes, “Huh, that’s interesting.” Remember, Paul didn’t know me that well. But he did know that I had a blog at the time, and he said, “I just . . . that’s interesting. I would have thought that your dream was to be a writer.”
And when he said that, like, so nonchalantly . . . and he was, like . . . he’d been through some serious therapy. He knew, like, the Jedi mind tricks to mess with me. And he said . . . he goes, “I guess I was wrong, then.”
I said, “No, no, no. Wait, wait. Yes, if I have to have a dream, it would be to be a writer. But that’ll never happen.”
And he just looked at me for a moment, and he said, “Jeff.” Got real serious. “You don’t have to want to be a writer. You are a writer. You just need to write.”
And something about that conversation really changed me. It changed my life. The next day, I got up at 5 a.m. I hadn’t done that in, I don’t know, years. And I started writing, and I didn’t stop. I haven’t stopped since.
And I learned from Paul that I think activity follows identity. That before you can go do something, you have to become someone. And the idea of the book is figuring out what you’re supposed to do with your life is really a process of figuring out who you are.
There’s this great quote by a guy named Parker Palmer, who’s an author and activist. He says, “Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I need to listen to my life telling me who I am.” And that conversation with Paul kind of opened up the process of me understanding who I was.
Andrew: I just took a pen out to write that down. I love that phrase. “Activity follows identity.” You’re saying that once you said, “Yes, I am a writer,” once Paul helped you see that you were a writer, then the activity of a writer naturally flowed from it.
Jeff: Yeah.
Andrew: And that’s what you’re suggesting that we do. Take small steps like that that get us to the path of whoever we’re meant to be.
I have a list here of different tactics that we pulled out of your book that we’re going to be discussing today. Some of them we touched on already, but we’re going to dive in deeper on them.
The first one, though, is to reflect on your life and look for common themes. And you talk about, in your book, about someone named . . . here, actually. This woman, Jody. It’s going to bring up her photo.
Jeff: Yeah.
Andrew: Why don’t we talk about Jody, and then I want to show you something that I’ve seen about her. Who’s Jody?
Jeff: Jody . . .
Andrew: And how did her friend Larry Elliott help her?
Jeff: Jody Noland . . . the book is these different stories of these different people, each of which kind of teaches a different lesson about finding a vocation. So again, if you’re listening to me and, you know, I’m 32 years old, I look like Ron Weasley from Harry Potter. You go, “Well, what does he know?” Well, maybe not that much. But these people I got to talk to when I was writing the book have a lot of wisdom.
Jody had this really interesting story. When I talked to Jody, she was a widow. She was in her late 50s. And she was really starting the thing that she felt like was her life’s purpose. And when I asked her to unpack that story a little bit, it was very interesting.
So for, like, 15 years, she worked for IBM. And then she quit that job, and she became a wife and a stay-at-home mother for about a decade, and she helped her husband with his business.
And then, kind of around the time when she was feeling like, “What am I supposed to do with my life? What else am I supposed to do? You know, I’ve worked a job, I’ve been a wife, I’ve been a mom, but I still feel like there’s something more.”
And she was thinking about that. Around this time, her friend Larry got brain cancer. And so she runs to the hospital. He had just checked into this hospital. His family . . . he had gone on a vacation in Europe, and they had to cancel the trip because he had this headache that, once they got to Italy, they did a CAT scan and realized that he had a brain tumor.
They flew him back home and brought him to the hospital. And he didn’t have much life left to live. You know, it was looking pretty bleak.
And so Jody goes to the hospital, she meets Larry, and he asks for a pen and paper, because he wants to write his daughters a letter telling them how much he loves them before it’s too late.
And Larry ends up living several months longer, but then he dies, and his girls, his daughters, cherish these letters that he wrote. Just telling them, you know, “I’m proud of you. I’m proud of the women that you’ve become, and that you’re going to be.” And then just held onto that.
So fast-foward a little bit of time. Jody’s husband gets cancer. And she pleads and pleads and pleads with him — because she saw what happened with Larry — she pleads with him to write a letter to their children. He refuses. He thinks that he’s got more time than he does. He just doesn’t want to do that. He’s sort of in denial. And then he dies. You know, the cancer kills him pretty quickly.
And Jody . . . that kind of . . . you know, that puts her into a tailspin for a while. But as she comes out of it and grieves the loss of her husband, she realizes, like, “I don’t want what happened to my kids . . . ” Because her stepdaughter, her husband’s daughter, comes up to her right after the funeral and says, “Did Dad write me a letter?” And it just breaks her heart. She said, “No, he didn’t. I’m so sorry.”
And she starts an organization called “Leave Nothing Unsaid,” writes a book, and now teaches workshops to people about how to do this, so that you can leave nothing unsaid, so that you can tell your loved ones exactly what you think about them.
And Jody actually teaches, don’t do this on your deathbed. Do this now. But she’s seen the power of the words of affirmation that you can give a loved one, and she’s seen both sides of it.
And what’s interesting about Jody’s story is I asked her, I said, “Did this one thing that happened to you in your late 50s, like, was this the thing? What about all that other stuff? Could you go back and just, like, not work for IBM for 15 years?”
And she said, “Oh, no. All that stuff prepared me for what I’m doing now. And if I wasn’t paying attention to what life was teaching me . . . ” And the main thing that she learned was . . . she had this great idea, and she kept telling people, “Hey, my friend Larry did this. Isn’t this a great idea?” And everybody’s like, “Yeah, yeah, that’s a great idea, but I’m not a writer. I don’t know how to do that.” And she kept, like . . . it just seemed obvious to her, and easy, and yet it wasn’t obvious and easy to other people.
And she realized, “Maybe this is a calling. Maybe this is something that I’m supposed to do. And it’s not obvious to other people, but when I tell them, they recognize it. Maybe I need to do something with this.”
Andrew: And I see her site right here.
Jeff: Yeah.
Andrew: I can see the work that she’s doing on it. But how do we use that? I feel like maybe for her it was easy to find the common themes in her life because she had these two really poignant moments, one where a father does leave a note, another where a father doesn’t leave a note. And those two points are obviously going to leave a mark on us.
What if we don’t have anything that dramatic in our lives? What kind of themes can we look for that will help us find out path?
Jeff: Yeah, it’s certainly a dramatic story. One of the things that I talk about in the book is that I think stuff happens. Like, things don’t go according to plan. At some point, something has arrested you, that’s grabbed your attention, that stops you in your tracks. And I think the people who end up finding their purpose in life . . . and I argue that you could miss it. You can . . . you know, life can be sending you signals, and you can miss out on your greatest work if you’re too caught up in how you feel, or . . .
Andrew: What are some of the things that we could look for that will help guide us?
Jeff: Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things I think you need to look at is look at pain. Like, what hurts? So we all have pain. Maybe it’s not losing a loved one. But at some point, you know, something happens, and it bothers you.
What bothered Jody was that other people . . . that she was going to have to see the pain that she saw in her stepdaughter. That she was going to have to see that in other people.
Andrew: I see.
Jeff: And so when you see something . . .
Andrew: So what’s so painful that we’re almost turning attention away from it.
Jeff: Yeah.
Andrew: Not being aware of it. You want us to be aware of that, because other people are probably feeling that pain, and maybe there’s a solution out there that’s a common one for you and others.
Jeff: Absolutely.
Andrew: All right. What else?
Jeff: Yeah. So when you’re . . . yeah, look for pain. Look at past experiences. There’s this great anonymous quote that I came across that basically says, “Everything in your life is preparing you for what’s to come.”
So Jody didn’t like her job at IBM, and she spent 15 years there, and she took her job . . . I mean, when she looked back and kind of remembered the things that she had done, she realized what she really likes doing . . . because she would do these employee evaluations. But instead of doing the typical “what have you done for me lately” kind of conversation, she would just ask them, “How is life?” You know, “How are you?”
And she realized that she was a really empathetic person, and she could help other people who maybe struggled to share their feelings — like write a loved one a letter — she could help them express that.
And so she looked at the stuff that she was good at, the stuff that bothered her — you know, the pain — and then she saw an opportunity for that. And the reality is, Jody didn’t want to do this. I mean, her husband died. She said, “I’m done,” you know? She had actually started writing letters for people. When her husband died, she couldn’t convince her husband to do it. She felt like a failure.
And then this family came and found her and said, “Our mom’s dying. We need . . . you know, we want her to write a letter. We want to . . . ”
Andrew: “Will you help us write the letter?”
Jeff: Yeah, and so . . . yeah.
Andrew: So maybe that’s the other thing. If there’s something that you’re doing on a consistent basis that you maybe are not valuing enough, that’s an indication.
Jeff: Yeah.
Andrew: So you’re saying just look for those commonalities, look for those themes. You don’t have to have two people who you care about in your life, or anything that dramatic happen, for it to set you on this path.
Jeff: Yeah.
Andrew: All right. Good advice. Let’s go on . . .
Jeff: Sure.
Andrew: . . . to the big board here, and see what the next big idea is. The next one is . . . you say don’t go in search of mentorship. Instead, find mentors who are around you. And in fact, you give us the story of Ginny, who’s someone who started every day — there’s a photo of her — started every day with this excitement and gratitude for another sunrise, and then every night she’d go to sleep, crying herself to sleep. Why?
Jeff: Ginny, Ginny Pong, the woman who would eventually become Singapore’s first full-time doula.
Andrew: Yeah.
Jeff: She was . . . she had a baby out of wedlock, and there’s a big taboo for that in Singapore. And she wanted to have the baby, but her boyfriend was giving her an ultimatum. You know, “Have an abortion or I’m going to break up with you.” Her parents — she was living with her family — she had failed her exams. She didn’t have a lot of options. They were threatening to kick her out. Again, because of this social taboo.
And so she had a tough decision to make. She was about to have the abortion, and then her aunt called her and said, “Hey, if you don’t want to do this, we’ve got a place for you.” And so she flushed these pills that were going to start that process, and she moved in with her aunt, and her aunt took care of her.
And she had a hard life for many, many years. And you can watch Ginny’s story on a TedEx video. It’s really inspiring.
But what ended up happening is, you know, Ginny has this incredible story of going from being this single mother to becoming a doula, a birth coach, and then starting a business, managing a whole team of doulas. How she got to that place is not by a plan. She was working late nights and trying to take care of a kid, trying to survive.
It’s very difficult for single mothers to make a living for themselves, make a life for themselves, in Singapore, just because they don’t get . . . you know, they’re sort of treated as second-class citizens. They don’t get a lot of special treatment. There’s these taboos. And so she was having a hard go at it.
One night, she’s talking to a friend. She doesn’t have a lot of friends, and a lot of her friends were young and partying, and she just wasn’t connecting with them anymore. She had this friend online, and the friend said to her, “You would make a good doula.” And she’s like, “What’s a doula?”
And so she kind of goes through the classes, just, you know, curious, and then gets paired with this mother. And, you know, a doula walks a mother through a birth plan, helps them do whatever they want, whether they want to do a natural childbirth or they want drugs. Whatever they want to do, they can do that. Ginny just walks them through that.
And she said the day that she helped this woman do this thing that nobody was there to help her for. Her parents were saying, “We’re not going to help you.” Her mom was in the room when her baby was born, but couldn’t help her because, you know, her mother had had a Caesarian and Ginny wanted to do a natural childbirth. And when she helped this mother, she said it felt like slipping into a pair of old shoes. And after that moment, she knew she had found her calling.
When I asked Ginny, “Did you do this all on your own? I mean, all these people abandoned you. Who in the world helped you?” She started listing all these people, like her friend Amy, who told her that she could be a doula. Like her friend who helped her . . . you know, let her move in with her, that she could help her pay the rent and watch her kid. Like her aunt who said, “Flush those pills. We’ll take care of you. If you want to have the baby, we can support you.”
And I think what we learn from a story like that, and lots of stories, is that you can spend a lot of time going and trying to find somebody to teach you or help you. And sometimes you get lucky and that happens. Most of the time, we feel like we’re alone in life, but I don’t think that’s actually true. I think that we are all apprentices in a craft. It’s just that the mentors and masters around who can help us are sometimes hiding in our everyday relationships, as they were with Ginny.
Andrew: But Jeff, what about this. When we look for mentors, we don’t want people who are on our level and are accessible to us. We want people who are so far beyond where we are that they can help us make those giant leaps to get there. And yes, our friends can give us advice, but they don’t compare to those kind of mentors. People who are leaps and bounds ahead of where we are.
Jeff: Yeah.
Andrew: What do you say about that?
Jeff: I think that’s great. I mean, I’m a fan of seeking out people who are above and beyond where you are. I just know that I went through a season of life where I was looking for one mentor. You know, one person who was going to, like, make it all happen. And I just don’t think that’s realistic. I think you need to be looking for a multitude of mentors.
And what I mean by that is, yeah, I’ve got, you know, older men that I learned about how to be a better husband or a better dad from. And then I have, you know, friends who are 20 years ahead of me in business, and they teach me about entrepreneurship. None of these are formal mentor relationships. They’re all sort of cobbled together in what I call an accidental apprenticeship. A bunch of different relationships where you sort of, like, craft your own syllabus about how you’re going to learn.
So I’m a fan of seeking people out, but I think there’s this idea in our culture that you can just have one mentor for 25 years, you’re going to sit together and have coffee all day long, you know, once a week or whatever, and you’re going to learn all this stuff and become as successful as them. I think successful people are busy. It’s hard to get attention, you know, from one important person all the time. And I think it’s unrealistic. I think it’s much better to have a multitude of mentors, people that you can learn from in different fields, and use that to kind of create this self-education that’ll get you to where you’re going.
Andrew: All right. Back to the big board. Start by working on your calling right now, today. What is this, Jeff? Let me show you this page. This is not the prettiest page online, but it exists. It is on . . . what’s the URL that we found it on? Is it BubbleUnder.com?
Jeff: Yeah, that’s right.
Andrew: BubbleUnder.com.
Jeff: Right.
Andrew: By Martin Chamberlain. What is Martin trying to do there?
Jeff: So Martin is a senior in college right now. And all of his young adult life — you know, through his youth and teen years — Martin wanted to be a painter. In fact, he was flown out to California to feature some of his oil paintings in an exhibit. And then when his brother, his older brother, went off to college, Martin grew up in the home of a Baptist minister in Oklahoma. They had one family computer. Martin didn’t really use it. He was an artist. He wasn’t really concerned about that. He, you know, played guitar and didn’t really care about computers.
Then when his brother left, he decided that he wanted to get into web design. He started playing around with the computer. His brother gave him a book about how to design websites. And one of the websites in the book was that site right there, BubbleUnder, where basically they teach you how to build the website and make it look as beautiful as that one does.
And what was interesting about Martin’s story is, you know, he kind of exhibits this idea that you see throughout the book “The Art of Work,” which is that what you want to do and what you’re supposed to do don’t always align. Like, we think we want to do one thing, and then we start doing it, and then we realize that the thing that we’re practicing for is actually something else.
And so Martin was spending all this time as an artist thinking that, you know, I’m painting and doing all this stuff. He thought he was preparing to be an artist. And then he realized, “I’m actually preparing to be a web developer.” And now he’s dedicated. He’s got a web design company. He’s actually designed several of my websites. And he realized that his . . .
Andrew: [inaudible 00:27:01]
Jeff: . . . preparation, what he was doing with art, was actually . . . yeah, that’s him.
Andrew: That’s his current site.
Jeff: Yeah, yeah. That’s his, you know, one-page thing.
And yeah, so what he realized was that . . . he thought his calling was something out there. You know, something that he would do someday. “I’m going to be an artist someday.” And what he didn’t realize was that . . . I mean, he is . . . you know, he was 16 years old when he started a web design company, and I met him when he was 18, and now he’s 20-something, and he’s doing it.
And I think there’s this idea that we have to wait for permission, or enough experience or education, to finally live out our purpose. And that’s not true at all. I mean, here’s this kid who’s doing it, and he thought it was going to be one thing, and it ended up being something else.
And when he had this moment of, you know, what author Daniel Coel calls a spark moment, when you see something that connects with your desire and interests, he went after it. And he spent hours every night learning how to build websites.
Because, you know, you’re not going to find your calling, live out your purpose . . . it’s not just going to happen to you. You’re going to have to work really hard. You’re going to have to master that. And I think that’s one of the things we learn from Martin, is you have to practice. And practice doesn’t begin tomorrow. It begins today.
Andrew: Right. Did he actually create . . . which of your sites did he create? Where is that site? There it is.
Jeff: He’s worked on probably all of my sites.
Andrew: All of them.
Jeff: He’s done that.
Andrew: This . . . where’s the one . . . this is the one. I love this.
Jeff: Yeah, we outsourced that, actually. That was somebody that the publisher hired. But, yeah, he actually emailed me and goes, “Hey, who did this? This is great?”
Andrew: This one’s actually a theme. Sorry, he did what?
Jeff: He emailed me and said, “Hey, who did this? This is great.”
Andrew: Okay.
Jeff: But we . . . the publisher actually hired . . .
Andrew: Hard to see if there’s a theme here that I can catch. Wait, where is that? Can’t I just do a search for theme in your . . . yeah, no, it’s a custom theme. Okay.
Jeff: Yeah. I’m pretty sure it’s [inaudible 00:28:56].
Andrew: But I really like the design of all of your stuff. Wait, I’m on the wrong page. Here’s one of the things I really like. Where is that? Was it this one? No. Earlier as we were talking, I was looking through your site, and . . . I like how you have your pull quotes on a page of an old-fashioned typewriter. I love that stuff.
Jeff: Yeah.
Andrew: I love your whole design sets. I love how when you take a photo to use online, it’s not just an author photo. It looks like this.
Jeff: That’s totally my wife.
Andrew: Oh, she’s fantastic. She took that photo?
Jeff: Yeah. She’s a photographer. She takes all my photos. And she, like, stylizes the shoots and everything.
Andrew: You have a really good sense of design. Even the backdrop is fantastic, too. We’re not seeing most of it, because you’re just on a computer. But in the video on your site, I was able to look behind you and check it out.
Jeff: Yeah. Thanks.
Andrew: All right. So let’s go back to the big board.
Jeff: Let’s do it.
Andrew: Build a bridge to your calling. That’s the next big idea from your book that we’re going to be talking about.
This . . . these guys . . . this family here. I’ll bring them up on the screen. They want to become social entrepreneurs in . . . is it Burundi? Is that where they want to do it?
Jeff: Yeah. The world’s second poorest country.
Andrew: Second poorest country.
Jeff: Yeah.
Andrew: All right. So that’s an ambitious goal, to go to the second poorest country to start a company there, and have it not just make profits, but also help people around them. Most people would just say, “Great. I’m going to fly to Burundi.” Or, actually, most people would say, “That’s a great idea. I’ll do it when I get a chance.” If they decide to get started, they might think, “I’m going to go to Burundi, and I’ll figure it out.”
What did they do instead?
Jeff: So when I talked to . . . their name is Ben and Christy Carlson, and those are their kids, and they run a coffee company in Burundi. And they’ve done that for the past few years now.
Andrew: Yeah. This is their website. I’ll zoom in on it.
Jeff: Yeah. The Long Miles Coffee Project.
Andrew: It looks beautiful.
Jeff: And what you have to understand . . . I mean, it’s a complex story, but what you have to understand is coffee is a commodity in Burundi, and it accounts for something like 80% of, you know, their total GDP. And yet . . .
Andrew: Wait, hang on a second. Anne Marie, you’re zipping something over there. I’m going to call it out, just so people don’t think I’m zippering something inappropriately while the camera’s on Jeff.
Jeff: Can’t see her hands.
Andrew: She’s zippering her backpack. She’s working here out of the office on her way out.
Jeff: Keeping it real. To the launchfest. All right.
Andrew: So she . . .
Jeff: Yeah, you threw me off.
Andrew: I’ll say bye. Wait, let her show the door, so it doesn’t seem like I just disappeared. Thank you.
All right. Now no side noises coming in. No zippers, no snaps, no doors.
So yeah, so you’re saying it’s a complicated issue.
Jeff: Yeah.
Andrew: It’s a complicated task. And largely because coffee’s a commodity in Burundi, and frankly, in the world.
Jeff: Yeah. And, I mean, basically these farmers are working themselves to the bones. They’re selling the coffee beans, getting, you know, a minimal charge for it. And then people are . . . you know, companies are taking these beans and then redistributing them to roasters and whatnot, and making a lot more money off of it.
So they saw this, and they said . . . Burundian coffee apparently is incredible. I mean, it’s really, really good coffee if it’s done right. And they saw an opportunity, and they went after it.
So they moved their family into this French-speaking, very poor country to pursue this dream where they didn’t speak French, didn’t really know the industry. Ben loves coffee, but he had never really, you know, done anything with this. Before this, they worked with a non-profit.
And so I asked Christy, I said, “How did you do this? What did the transition look like?” And this kind of goes back to the Lane thing. She said, “Well, we took a leap.” I said, “Great. What did that look like?”
She said, “Well, first we moved our family to South Africa, and we spent 10 years there doing leadership development with this non-profit organization. Towards the end of that 10 years, I realized I really wanted to write,” she said, “and take photographs, and Ben really wanted to do something with coffee. And we started looking for opportunities, and we saw one in Burundi, and we went after it.”
And then when I . . . we kind of, like, went back to it, I said, “So you took a leap that took 10 years.” And she said, “Yeah, well, actually it was a lot of small steps.” And there was . . . you know, there was fear, there was risk. She told me about the first day she dropped her son Miles off at this French-speaking school. He was scared. She was scared. She felt like she was throwing him out into the ocean.
But I think when we think about pursuing a dream, it’s sort of that all or nothing mentality that you mentioned, Andrew. Either it’s, “Hey, that’s great! I’m going to do it today!” Or I’m probably never going to do that.
And the story of the Carlsons moving to Burundi and starting Long Miles Coffee Project was really a truer story of transition, in that it’s more like building a bridge, less like taking some giant leap. And it requires a lot of daily work taking small steps that get you there.
Andrew: Okay. But you’re not saying 10 years is . . . you’re not advocating 10 years, necessarily.
Jeff: No.
Andrew: You’re not saying it has to take even multiple years. You’re saying you don’t have to go from an idea to starting this business in a foreign country with this big goal of changing other people’s lives. You could first say, “I’m interested in going to Africa.”
Jeff: Right.
Andrew: “And maybe I’ll take a step towards there. And as I look around, then I’ll get an understanding of what my next step is.”
Jeff: Yeah. I think most people don’t know what they want to do with their lives. I don’t know about you, but I talk to a lot of people, and they either don’t know what their passion is. They have a bunch. They don’t know which one to choose. Or they have this big idea and they don’t know how to make it happen.
And what I’m trying to say in the book is if you don’t know what your passion is, join the club. If you have a big idea and you don’t know how to make it happen, join the club. If you’re one of those special people that knows exactly what you want to do and you know how you’re going to accomplish it, and you’re doing it, well, hooray. Like, that’s great. But that’s not the rule. That’s the exception.
And the Carlsons is a great story of . . . we didn’t know what we wanted to do. We wanted to get to Africa. We wanted to help contribute. And when we got there, we realized that we really liked doing this thing, and then we started exploring and looking at these different opportunities. And then when we saw one that made sense, then we took the leap.
And really, it was about taking the next step, because they had been slowly building a bridge by basically looking for opportunities for their passion, and then listening to their lives, paying attention to what resonates with me as I’m taking these small steps, and how can I course correct along the way if I happen to go in the wrong direction?
Andrew: I feel like that’s good advice for a lot of things.
Jeff: Yeah.
Andrew: I see every year people . . . every January people come to my gym. They’re fully decked out. They’ve got the latest shoes.
Jeff: Sure.
Andrew: They’ve got outfits. They’re signed up, some of them, for a year, to make sure that they’re fully committed to working out for a year. And then by . . . I wouldn’t even say February. Mid-January, they’re done.
And I think it’s so much better to say, “I’m going to try running, and I’ll try going to the gym, and I’ll give it some time to see, do I click with it?”
Jeff: Yeah.
Andrew: You know, you don’t click with the gym necessarily. I know I don’t. I just go there to shower after my run. You don’t necessarily click with running. You want to try it a little bit . . .
Jeff: Yeah, agreed.
Andrew: . . . without fully investing in it.
All right. Let’s go onto the big board here. The next big idea is to see failure properly. See it as an opportunity for growth.
And one of the people that you talk about is a guy named Matt McWilliams. I’m going to bring up his current website so we can see his face and get a sense of who we’re talking about. There he is. The guy who’s in the upper right corner.
And here’s a guy who one day opened the door to his place, and a detective asked him for his laptop.
Jeff: Yeah.
Andrew: That’s a shocking thing to have happen to you. Why did this detective show up at Matt McWilliams’ place?
Jeff: Well, it probably wasn’t that shocking to Matt, because it was the fourth time in less than a decade that he got fired.
Andrew: Yeah.
Jeff: And in this case, he was being laid off from his current job. And he was actually glad to give up his laptop, because he had had a conversation with his wife the night before saying, “I really want to go do this full-time consulting thing that I’ve been thinking about doing, but I have a really good job.” And then the next day, this guy shows up and knocks on his door, and it was this, like, “Okay, I guess this is what I’m supposed to do, because I’m being . . . you know, my hand is being forced.”
When I talked to Matt — and he’s really honest about this — I was intentionally kind of looking . . . you know, I had my . . . I was writing this book, and I had my antenna up for stories of, you know, radical transition from doing one thing to doing something else in terms of careers. And Matt came to me, and he kind of laid out all of his successes and how much money he was making, and how successful he was as a marketing consultant.
And I said, “That’s great. That’s awesome.” And in the back of my head, I was going, “I’m not telling that story.”
And then I got on the phone with him, and we talked a couple of times. And then at the end of the conversation, he basically said in passing, “Oh yeah, I got fired from this job. I got fired from this job. My dad fired me.” “Wait, what? Your dad fired you?” And we had a couple of conversations and unpacked it.
And basically, he had this season of failure. Of trying to be a professional golfer, getting hurt, then having to go work at his dad’s golf course. Getting fired from that because he was too distracted, you know, building websites for friends on the side. Then he started a company with a friend that, early into the start-up, was making a ton of money. Really cocky. You know, would chew people out. Got fired by the co-founders that he kind of helped start the company with because he was a jerk to work with.
You know, just one thing to the next, the next, all a bunch of failure. And I said, “Matt, that’s the story. That’s the thing that people want to connect with, is this feeling of, ‘I missed it.'” As he started to unpack it, I said, you know, “Could you have gotten to where you are now without all that failure?” And he said, “Absolutely not.”
And so I think of when we . . . I think that when we think of failure, we think that it’s an obstacle that keeps you from success. We look at successful people and we go, they succeeded in spite of all the failure. Michael Jordan succeeded in spite of being cut, or making, you know, the JV team instead of the varsity.
And I don’t think that’s true. I think successful people succeed because of their failure, not in spite of it. That the failure is a means to help you find out exactly what you’re supposed to be doing. It gets you to where you’re supposed to be.
Andrew: Why? But Jeff, didn’t Matt just fail, fail, fail, fail, fail? How did that help him? Maybe you can say you can learn something from it, but I don’t even see how those failures would lead him to become a better consultant, to become a better entrepreneur.
Jeff: Yeah. Well, he would say that every failure had two things that happened. One was a lesson, as you mentioned, and the other was, he was doing something that didn’t quite work, and failure wasn’t . . . it wasn’t like, “Go back and try it again.” It was a pivot point where he could run into some, you know, big mistake, try something and go, “I’m doing something wrong here, and I need to shift my focus and head in a different direction.”
You know, so in the case of getting hurt as a golfer, they told him, they said, “You can keep doing this, but it’s going to take this reconstructive surgery.” And he was a great golfer. He won all these championships in high school and college. So he could have done that. But he said, “You know, I’m not that passionate about it. I’ve been doing it like crazy, and this is an opportunity for me to go do something else.”
And so I kind of re-describe failure as a pivot point. You know, you think about in basketball, when you’re running down, dribbling down the court, and you stop, you just run out of options, right? Because if you take another step, you’re traveling, and you’re going to give the ball over. You’re too far away from the basket. You can’t shoot.
Andrew: Yeah.
Jeff: So what can you do? You’re out of moves. Well, except for a pivot. If you have one foot planted, and you’ve got the other foot that you can kind of, like, kick around and 360 degrees, you can still move in any direction and then pass the ball down the court.
And I think there’s . . . you know, a great example of that was Groupon. They started out as this non-profit organization. They lost $1 million. And they had this great idea, like, “Let’s get people to volunteer their time around a specific need.” So they used social media to say, “Hey, let’s go give clothes to homeless people in downtown Chicago.” And everybody would say, “Okay, I’m going to pledge my time to that, and it’s going to be great.” If they got enough people to say yes to it, they’d go do it.
It failed. And they made one little tweak. The founder said, “What if we try to make money with this?” And $13 billion later, you know, it worked okay. At least for a while.
Andrew: It’s still doing well, actually, surprisingly.
Jeff: Yeah.
Andrew: I’ve been looking at their numbers. It’s still a multi-billion dollar company.
Jeff: Yeah.
Andrew: You know, Jeff, I introduced you, I think, as a writer. I should have introduced you as a speaker. You’re fantastic.
Jeff: Thanks.
Andrew: I like your storytelling style.
Jeff: Thanks, dude.
Andrew: I hope I didn’t just inhibit you and cause you to pay too much attention to the fact that you’re a good storyteller. But I like it.
Jeff: Thanks.
Andrew: I think most guests really undervalue the story, and I think that by giving examples, you really help illustrate your points. And frankly, you just remember the details of these stories so well. I’m impressed.
Jeff: Thanks.
Andrew: All right. Let’s look at the big board here. The next big point is to build and combine multiple skills. You talk in your story about this guy, his name is Jody, he’s unpacking in his new house. He is talking to his wife, and suddenly this thing that he heard from . . . I guess it was another . . . from a park ranger?
Jeff: Yeah. Right.
Andrew: What was it that he heard that set him off on this new path in life?
Jeff: So Jody was a financial consultant at the time. He was working with a bank. And he had moved out to Washington. He’s from Illinois. He’s from my home state. And he had moved out to Washington and, you know, married this woman, and they were helping somebody move.
And he always loved parks. Ever since he . . . he was a business major in college. Ever since he took a trip out to Washington, went to a place called Deception Pass State Park. And he would say that . . . you know, I use this word “calling” a lot. He says, “Sometimes places call to us. Sometimes being in a location, you just feel this resonance in your soul that says, ‘This is what you’re meant to do.'”
He felt that as a college senior at the state park in the state of Washington. And years later, he feels this same sort of sense when he’s talking to his friend and he’s going, “We just heard there was an opening for a park ranger. You should check it out.”
And he had to go study. He had to spend a year of studying for it. And then he went and pursued his dream, moved cross the state, you know, had his family kind of follow him later. And he got to fulfill his dream of being a park ranger, at least for a little while.
Andrew: And then what happened?
Jeff: And then he started a family. And he . . . I mean, you have to understand that Jody loves parks. I went to Washington. He drove me . . . we spent an hour driving up Mount Spokane, which is this mountain in Washington. And he’s just telling me story after story, because he used to work there as a park ranger, and he’s just telling me all this stuff. This is years after him not being a park ranger.
And what happened was he realized that he had to choose. Because being a park ranger is a very demanding job. You know, you live on the facilities. If anything happens, they radio you or whatever, and you have to go respond.
And during the time Washington State Parks were doing a lot of layoffs and downsizing, and a lot of guys were losing their jobs. And Jody was just realizing, “I have to decide, am I going to keep pursuing this or . . . and kind of not see . . . you know, see even less of my family? Or is this something that I need to kind of let go of for a season?”
So he let it go, and he’s now a business consultant. And the really interesting thing about him, and the cool thing about him, is that his story’s not done. But he has this podcast now called the Park Leaders Podcast, and it’s basically a podcast for park rangers. And one of the guests that he had on recently was his old boss, who was sort of his mentor.
And he . . . you know, Jody was just saying, “I miss being a park ranger.” And his boss said, “Don’t, because what you’re doing right here is . . . if you love parks, Jody, what you’re doing right here is doing more for the industry than you ever could as a park ranger. And so I know it’s hard to not be out there every day, but your expertise as a businessman . . . ”
Because he spends a lot of time on this podcast and working with other park rangers now. He helps them understand that they don’t have just one job. Like, they have a bunch of different jobs. They have to understand business and communication and leadership. It’s not just driving around and making sure people aren’t breaking the law, or that there aren’t, you know, trees on the road or something. It’s a portfolio type of job. You have to have a lot of different tasks and skills.
And so he’s beginning to realize that maybe I wasn’t just . . . maybe I wasn’t called to be a park ranger at all. Maybe I was just called to parks in general. Maybe the calling, the thing that I’m supposed to do, is bigger than I realized, and all these things that I’ve done in the parks, out of the parks, working for a bank, working for a business, maybe all of this combined in a portfolio is really what my calling is about.
And as he’s embraced that, his life has become a lot more fulfilling, as opposed to thinking he’s just doing one thing.
Andrew: That’s a good point. It kind of . . . it’s really easy to look back and say, “I really wasted those three years by not doing this, and I gave everyone else a three-year head start on me because I was doing this other thing.”
Jeff: Yeah.
Andrew: And you’re bringing up a good point, which is often that those three years, or the time that you spent doing something else, often helps make what you’re doing now — even if it seems different — helps make what you’re doing now so much better.
Jeff: Yeah. There’s this great quote that Robert Green, author of a book called “Mastery” and many other great books, he says the future . . . I mean, this is a book about mastery. About, like, mastering one skill. He says, “The future belongs to people who can take a few skills, unique skills, and combine them in interesting ways.”
And I think that’s absolutely true. The days of you doing one thing, and doing it really, really well, and getting paid a ton of money, are over, I think. You have to take a skill like writing and combine it with technology, or a skill like speaking and combine it with humor. I mean, you have to combine skills in an interesting and unique portfolio that’s going to help you stand out.
And I think it’s also the most fulfilling way to live. Because we’re not just one thing. We’re multi-faceted people.
Andrew: Onto the big board for the final point, which is to make others the focus of your calling. And you had a period in your life where you had money in the bank, you had good savings, you actually didn’t feel motivated. What was it like when you weren’t feeling motivated?
Jeff: So I quit my job. I spent all this time . . . I was a writer. I had sort of this blog. All I wanted to do was get published. I thought, “This is what I’m supposed to do.” I got published. I made $6000 off of my first book contract, so I was, like, rolling in it. You know, not really.
And then my wife and I got pregnant, and I . . . she and I were talking about whether or not she was going to go back to work, or whether or not she was going to stay home and be a mom for a while. And we could not live off of my salary. We could not afford to do that. And so I wanted her to be able to do that. She wanted to do that. It was not possible.
And so I got really tenacious about, you know, finding time in the margins of life — early in the morning, late at night — and I started building an online business. And I built this online business helping other writers do some of the things that I’d done. Start blogs, get published, and start making money online.
That became wildly successful. You know, you talked about, does it have to be 10 years? It doesn’t have to be 10 years. I started my blog, and I wrote on that every day for a year. And then the next year, you know, as we were sort of counting down the months until it was baby time, I was . . . like, that was the clock counting down on me to make enough money that we could replace my wife’s income.
By the end of that year, I’d replaced my wife’s income, replaced my income, replaced my wife’s income again, and then mine again. I mean, I think we tripled our income that year.
Andrew: Wow.
Jeff: So it kind of became this no-brainer, where my wife quit her job, and a few months later I quit mine. Which was a really cool experience, because I went to my boss, and I thought he was going to be disappointed, and he was, like, waiting for the conversation. Because he just had seen all this stuff happening in my life, and he saw how excited I was, and he goes, “Man, I’m so proud of you. You need to go do this.”
And so this was a really cool transition. So I was like, “This is it.” Like, “This is the finish line.” March 31st was my 30th birthday. April 1st, I was a full-time writer, entrepreneur. I was doing . . . I was living my dream.
And very quickly, I got depressed, because I did not have a reason to work. I didn’t think I did. Like, I always worked as a means of making a living. And my wife told me around that time, like, “We’re set for the year. You don’t need to make any more money this year. We have enough to live on and then some.”
And I was like, “What am I supposed to do?” And she says, “Well, you can do whatever you want, I guess. I’m going to raise your kid. You do whatever you want.”
And that was, like, the worst thing that I could . . . that someone could tell me, is you can do whatever you want. Because I didn’t know what I wanted to do, and I didn’t realize how important work was.
So I had this weird crisis of purpose. Like, what am I supposed to do with my time if I don’t need to work? And I did the four-hour work week thing, where I just worked a few hours a week and I was, like, watching TV the rest of the time, and screwing around, and hanging out with friends. And it was fine, but I realized I need to work. Like, I need to do something, and I need to have something to work for that’s so much bigger than me.
And around that time, I met a friend who told me that . . . he goes, “Jeff, I stopped working for myself years ago.” And he was an entrepreneur, and so I knew that he understood it.
Andrew: This is Stu McClaren.
Jeff: Yeah. That’s Stu.
Andrew: Yeah. Here he is.
Jeff: Yeah. [inaudible 00:50:46]
Andrew: [inaudible 00:50:46] There he is. This is from his Facebook page.
Jeff: Yeah. So Stu told me that . . . he said, you know, “I kind of struggled with that, too, when I started making frankly more money than we needed or knew what to do with.” And then they took . . . his wife asked him to take a trip. His wife is a teacher.
And they took this trip to Kenya, and he just saw . . . you know, he didn’t . . . it wasn’t this, like . . . he wasn’t pitying people or feeling sorry. He just saw, wow, like, education make a big difference. Education creates an opportunity, and we’re in this community where there just are no schools. Kids cannot get the same kind of opportunities that I was born into, because there are no schools.
So he came back from that trip, and he realized, “I’m not going to . . . this isn’t about me. I’m going to work to build schools in Africa.” And he and his wife started this awesome charity doing just that.
And every day Stu goes to work not to make more money or fund his retirement. Partly because he’s been so successful that he doesn’t have to worry about that, and partly because he knows if I’m living just for that, it’s not enough. It’s not enough for him, and frankly, it’s not enough for me.
And that was permission for me to realize that I need to work not just for myself. I need to work for the joy of working. You know, the value of doing stuff that’s contributing to the world. And for being part of something that’s bigger than me.
And I would argue that we all need that. That we’re not actually searching for happiness, you know? Victor Frankel would say that we’re not looking for . . . we’re not looking to be happy. We’re looking for a reason to be happy. We’re looking for meaning.
And I think work is the best way. Having meaningful work that you do, that you contribute to the world, is the best way for you to find meaning and a life that has purpose.
Andrew: And for you, that had to do with Mumbasa, Kenya.
Jeff: Yeah.
Andrew: These women there. Who are the women?
Jeff: So about a year ago . . . well, two years ago, I talked to a friend of mine who had started this non-profit called Know Think Act. And he told me about these projects that they were working on. I was like, “Okay, yeah, that’s great.” You know, people hit me up for money, and it’s fine.
And he just kept . . . he’s like, “That’s cool, man. No pressure.” He says, “I just think it’s an interesting story.” And he just kind of, you know, kept sharing every once in a while. And I was like, “Okay. Tell me more.” He just started telling me more about this story in rural Kenya, really outside of Mumbasa, about this community, this leper community, that he had kind of stumbled upon in his travels.
He had basically taken a trip to Uganda years ago, and just kind of accidentally started a non-profit really helping local African leaders kind of create development programs locally.
So in Mumbasa, there is this camp called Blessed Camp. It used to be called Tumbe, which means, you know, “place where the forgotten people go.” Because what it is is it’s a squatter camp for lepers. These people who have leprosy would go to this leprosy clinic, and then they would . . . the leprosy clinic actually closed down, and they would just stay there, because their families wouldn’t let them come back home.
So you have this camp of hundreds of people, lepers, you know? And there are these women there that needed a place to make these handbags and these uniforms. And my friend came to me and he says, “We need to do this. Would you like to be a part of it?”
And it was, like, a $10,000 project, you know? And we had just had a really successful launch of one of my online courses, and I said, “Yeah, I want to be a part of that.”
And so we did that, and it was great. And then just last year, I went there, and I walked around this camp, and I was shaking, you know, these people’s nubs of hands, feet, and seeing it. And I go into the workshop where these women, on a Saturday afternoon, with their babies on their backs, you know, in their little sacks or whatever, they’re sewing. They’re sewing these handbags and these uniforms. And then they go into the market and they sell them.
And I asked the local leaders there, I said to, you know, the guys kind of running the operation — it’s really a pastor and a couple of his friends — I said, “What’s going on here?” And they said, “Well, we’ll take these bags. We’ll sell them.”
And I said, “You know, do you . . . ” I felt like I knew some stuff, right? Because I’d been running a business for, like, a year and a half. I was like, “What’s your profit margin?” Like, I’m going to stump these Africans, because they don’t know anything, right?
And they go, “Oh, our profit margin is this, and our overhead is this, and we try to limit it to that.” And I said, “How much do the women get to keep?” He says, you know, “Once we pay for all expenses, they get to keep everything. And if they make more, they get to make more.” And I was like . . . I was stunned. I was amazed.
And they sat me down and showed me this five-year plan about . . . you know, because they’re getting some funding from this American non-profit, and they have this five-year sustainability plan where they’re going to start doing . . . you know, creating more products, doing organic gardening so they can go sell these organic fruits and vegetables in the local market.
I was just stunned. It was amazing.
Andrew: I saw the YouTube video of you . . .
Jeff: Yeah.
Andrew: . . . looking at it. Is this it?
Jeff: Yeah. All the sudden, I went from feeling like I had done something good to being grateful, honored to be a part of something that was so much bigger than me. And that’s what . . .
Andrew: And that’s what you’re talking about. Taking it outside of yourself . . .
Jeff: That’s what I think we ought to be working for. Yeah.
Andrew: . . . to increase motivation.
All right. I think we were just talking over each other, but . . .
Jeff: Okay.
Andrew: But I think we’re saying the exact same thing. Make others your focus, make them the focus of the calling, and it becomes a more motivating experience.
Jeff: Yeah.
Andrew: These are just a few ideas from your book. Anyone who wants to follow up . . . I actually recommend they check out your main site, which is GoinsWriter.com. And right now you’ve got a link on there where you’re giving away the book for free, and along with it, people can get a PDF of the book, not just a physical copy. They get a workbook, a community, and so much more. And that will be linked to from your site.
Thanks so much for doing this.
Jeff: Thank you, Andrew. It’s a pleasure, and I hope it helps a lot of people.
Andrew: It was great to talk to you. Thank you all for being a part of it. Bye, everyone.
