aoa - jeff goins · before we went live and i was sharing with you that i followed your work early...

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EPISODE — JEFF GOINS

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:17.9] LC: Welcome to this week’s episode, today we have Jeff Goins joining us. He is a

full time writer who lives outside of Nashville with his wife and son, he’s the author of four books including a national bestseller, The Art of Work. His website, goinswriter.com has been visited

by more than four million people from around the world, he also has this cool project called The Portfolio life, it’s his podcast and he’s written to this subject a lot.

Today’s episode was really meaningful for me because when I was starting off writing and I was

struggling to identify as a writer, Jeff’s manifesto came across my desk somehow, I can’t remember why and it was so inspirational, it’s like the perfect message at that moment in time

and it really impacted me, he became a model for my writing and really had a great influence and something that I wanted to pay forward as I went into this space myself.

He was so fun to chat with, we’ve never talked before but somebody I’ve just really enjoyed

from the beginning of the podcast to the end because he’s talking about authenticity in your work all the time. So we flipped it around this time. Instead of starting with the story and then

finishing with the questions that I ask every guest, Jeff and I started with the questions because the questions really are his story.

He’s been thinking about authenticity, success and fulfillment are really the embodiment of his

work and his ideas. I had a great time, I think you’re going to enjoy this as much as I did. Thank you so much for listening, if you enjoy today’s episode, hop on over to iTunes, hit subscribe,

send me a note, have a great day, thanks for listening.

[INTERVIEW]

[0:02:03.3] LC: Welcome to today’s episode. Today, joining me, we have Jeff Goins. Hey Jeff, how are you today?

[0:02:11.1] JG: Hey Laura, I’m doing great, thanks for having me.

© 2016 Art of Authenticity �1

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[0:02:12.9] LC: I’m just really thrilled to have you on, we were chatting for a couple of minutes before we went live and I was sharing with you that I followed your work early on in my career

when I was struggling to write, came across your manifesto that I needed to embrace the writer’s life and it was really meaningful to me. Again, thank you so much for that inspiration.

[0:02:33.0] JG: Yeah, thank you for saying that, I appreciate it.

[0:02:35.2] LC: Jeff and I were chatting a little bit before the show and I have never done this

before but when I was looking in to his background and his story, I was really struck that the theme of the podcast, finding success and the life that’s meaningful is something that Jeff has

thought about, written about and lived. I thought, well why don’t we actually shifted up a little bit today?

This podcast is all about living an authentic life, a life that you have meaning and success. So I

was thinking, I heard your story and how you actually had a job in marketing and you were the director of marketing and you had kind of an aha moment and you made a big shift and usually

we stay this stories for the end but I thought, it sort of kicked off this life where you’ve been thinking about this subject so much.

So could you tell us this story? I think so many people will really relate to that nagging feeling

and that moment of change.

[0:03:31.2] JG: Sure. So the way I describe it is I had an itch that I didn’t know how to scratch, you know? Like what you’ve got — this is I think one of the reasons why my wife got married

because at 11 o’clock at night, she’ll roll over in bed and go, “Can you just itch this part of my back that I can’t reach?” I think in life, what Parker Palmer calls “the voice of vocation”, this thing

that you just feel like you’re meant to do, it could feel like that itch that you’ve got. I’m not scratching it, I tried all the things, I’m trying to work harder, successful and it’s just, it’s not going

away.

Here I am not late in life but established enough in my career five or six years into being a marketing director at really my first real job where I was hired basically as a copywriter and


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every year for five years got a promotion and got a raise to finally feeling pretty secure. I was

not in one of those positions where I hated my job, I wasn’t stuck in a cubicle somewhere. I had a lot of freedom and responsibility and I was growing a lot. I really enjoyed it and in retrospect I

realized, this is one of the worst places for you to be because if you hate your job, you now you need to change.

But if you’re comfortable and kind of content as I was but there’s this nagging feeling that’s like

just nagging enough that it won’t go away but it doesn’t bother you enough that you necessarily have to do anything about it. Then it’s just kind of easy to drift through life and that’s what I did

and I guess I’ve always been kind of self-aware and I was becoming more aware that this was a problem and so I signed up for this group coaching this like professional coaching network and it

must have been the first or second meeting we stood around in a circle and we’re encouraged to share our dreams with one another just kind of open up.

It was very therapeutic, it wasn’t what I expected, I thought it would be like people handing out

business cards and just learning tactics and it was all this kind of deep almost soul care kind of work. This one guys said, “So what’s your dream?” And I said, “Oh I don’t know, I don’t know

that I have one of those. I’ve got a job and I’m fine.” I was just really afraid and I’ve been thinking about writing for a while, it was something that I had always enjoyed doing but had

never really taken seriously.

I wasn’t an English major in college because I just thought there’s no way that I’m going to be able to get a job doing that and though I was hired to do copywriting now it was this marketing

director and I was in the place that a lot of people find themselves, I think especially in corporate settings where you get good at something and then automatically they think, “Well you should

lead other people in that thing like you should manage people now,” without necessarily going through the lessons of learning how to lead and manage people, which is a whole other skill set.

[0:06:33.7] LC: It’s amazing to me having run a business, it’s like this fatal, flawed concept that

just because you’re really good at something then suddenly you stop doing the thing you're good at and you end up managing all day.


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[0:06:45.3] JG: Right, yeah. This is a story of my life, we will come back to this theme pretty

soon. Yeah, so he goes, “What’s your dream?” I said, “Well I don’t know, I don’t have a dream,” and he said, “Really? Because I would have thought that your dream was to be a writer.” That

kind of struck me because this guy didn’t know me that well. We had met once or twice, he knew I had a blog and I kind of was doing some writing on the side but I never said, “hi, I’m Jeff,

I want to be a writer.”

As soon as he said that, I just felt something. Something moved me, I felt like something hit me in the chest and keep in mind that for years now I just had this sense that I was supposed to be

doing something more with my life and was really afraid that I was falling short of that potential and I just might drift through the next 10, 15 years right into midlife crisis.

So when he said that, I said, “Oh yeah, I think I would like to be a writer someday. But that will

never happen,” and I quickly came back to reality and he looked at me and he said, “Jeff, you don’t have to want to be a writer, you are a writer, you just need to write.” The next day, I got up

and I started writing at 5 AM and I didn’t stop for an entire year and that year was a life changing year of going from barely considering myself a writer to getting a book contract.

[0:08:12.8] LC: It’s so amazing and so powerful and what I really want to accentuate is that

there’s this nagging sense, right? People typically have that and I just say, “Well, I’ll work harder,” and I love that you say that because our culture has told us, “If something feels off, just

double down in what you’re doing like sweat it out more,” right? Having that coach stop you and sort of mention this other path. How would you have found that without some kind of external

view, objectivity into your life right? We sort of become like fish in a bowl in our own lives.

[0:08:48.4] JG: The most amazing part of that experience Laura is it wasn’t the coach. We’re all sitting in a group of about a dozen people and it’s just another guy in the group.

[0:08:57.5] LC: It was another guy.

[0:08:58.3] JG: He just looks over and he goes, “Hey, what’s your dream man? I’m like, “I don’t

know,” and he goes, “No, I think it’s writing.” I’m like, “What?”


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[0:09:05.4] LC: He should be a coach.

[0:09:06.7] JG: He actually does that now. It was good, he had been through a lot of therapy

and so he was really good at saying things that were questions that didn’t sound like questions but really were and he’s a good friend.

[0:09:21.5] LC: So when you decided to make that shift and wake up at five in the morning —

that’s very early — and start to write, so many people will say, maybe they know what they want, maybe they don’t but they don’t have the time. You were still working full time?

[0:09:37.2] JG: Of course, yeah.

[0:09:38.7] LC: How was that to manage both a job and starting to write?

[0:09:43.6] JG: I should mention that this was like the third incident like this. A month before I

had gone to a conference and it was like, “find your dream, go be an entrepreneur” kind of conference and I went there under the opuses of doing research for this nonprofit that I was

working for because we were considering doing a similar event in the nonprofit space.

So I was just studying the way they did the event but part of me was like, “I’m trying to figure out what I’m supposed to do,” you know? They ask you what your dream was and you filled out a

survey before you went to the conference and I said, “Don’t know.” I remember walking around and everybody had this name tags. “My dream is ____.” I put something obscure on there that

let people leave me alone, I wrote like “Storytelling Sherpa”. People were like, “What? I don’t know what that is.”

Then there was this moment at the very beginning of the conference, after sort of the cocktail

hour and everybody sat down and the speaker came on and he said, “Okay, I want to address something right away. A lot of you, we did this survey and a lot of you said that you didn’t know

what your dream was. In fact, raise your hand if you didn’t know what your dream was,” and like 60% of the room raised their hand.


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All of a sudden I didn’t feel so alone. Then he said, “Okay, you’re wrong, you do know what your

dream is, you’re just afraid to admit it and I want you right now to write down your dream on a piece of paper.” I wrote down, as soon as he said that, this word popped into my head, “writer”.

So I wrote it down, and I ran home that night, I shared this with my wife, I said, “Look, I’m supposed to be a writer, I’ve got it written down in a notebook.” She looked at me and she said,

“Are you kidding me? I have been telling you that for five years.”

[0:11:26.1] LC: Of course.

[0:11:28.7] JG: All this stuff was sort of culminating. When this guy Paul said, “Jeff, you are a writer, you just need to write.” It was the final straw, and that conversation taught me a very

simple lesson which is that activity follows identity. I did secretly want to be a writer but I didn’t know how to go do it. We talk a lot about faking it till you make it and all this stuff.

I don’t necessarily believe that but I do believe that some things you have to believe before you

become them. I’m not into like this super woo woo stuff. I knew that if I kept calling myself an amateur, I was going to act like an amateur. If I started thinking like a pro, I might start doing the

work of a pro. So I started calling myself a writer when people ask me what I did, which was very scary.

Because I didn’t want to be a liar, it forced me to do the work and get up every day and do the

only thing that I — I didn’t really know what writers did for a living but I figured like at some point in the day, they’re going to go write. So I did that at a time that wasn’t interrupting any other part

of my schedule and for me, I was a few years into our marriage, we didn’t yet have kids, both my wife and I would work, we’d come home, have dinner, watch TV, spend time together and

then go to bed.

There was this block of time from like 10 PM to 12 AM where we would watch a movie or something and it wasn’t quality time. I realized like I’m waking up every day like seven AM,

getting ready for work and we’re both kind of scrambling, rushing off to work. What if I traded one block a time for another? What if I traded 10 PM to 12 AM and I just realized, after 10 PM

like it wasn’t quality time, it was just veg time, that’s just the way it was for us.


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What if I trade that two hours for five to seven and just see what I can do? Because nobody’s

emailing me, nobody’s calling me, nobody’s interrupting me at five AM and that’s how I started writing during that time.

[0:13:19.5] LC: I want to mention, because I heard you say this somewhere that when you

started writing because now everybody’s going to look at your website and see this tremendous success and you have something like four million people have come to your blog site. You

mentioned somewhere that you had six blogs that you dropped before finding your audience and your voice is that right?

[0:13:41.0] JG: Yeah, people will — I think eight or something. I think this is the eighth blog and

sometimes people will go, “I wish I could read that writing,” and I go, “It’s out there, all the bad writing is on the internet, it’s just buried because nobody was reading it, so it’s hard to find it. It’s

out there, all those bad blogs are out there and you can go read them.”

Yeah, this was my eight blog and what would happen throughout my 20’s and I started this blog when I was like 29. What would happen for the first nine years of my 20’s is I have an idea,

blogging was really becoming a thing 10 years ago and so I go buy a domain, I’d start a blog, I do it for two, maybe three months and then I’d lose interest and move on because it didn’t

immediately take off.

When I started this blog, I made a decision that I would work on it, it would be like my one side project, would be my one hobby and I would work on it for two years before I would quit it. I was

really tired of starting things and failing at them. I brought this energy to this project that I never really had before.

[0:14:43.6] LC: Yeah, that’s so important because I was saying this to you for two seconds

before we jumped on. I’m an entrepreneur, I built a business, there’s this sense on the Internet that you work at something for a few weeks and it should just be go gang busters. It takes a

while to build an audience. How long would you say it would take somebody to get an audience of say a thousand people?


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[0:15:05.8] JG: Yeah, well I mean I think it just depends, it took me six months, my friend Brian

Harris is like a hacker at this and he helps people do it in about 30 to 90 days he says, you can get an audience of about a thousand people. It’s interesting because it takes the first 30 days to

get a hundred and then the next 30 days you can get up to 500 and then it takes about a full 90 days he says to get to a thousand. For me, it was like plotting along, it took me six months to get

78 email newsletter subscribers and then I started — I just started learning, and I started studying people who knew stuff that I didn’t know.

Then in a week I went from 78 subscribers to a thousand because I finally figure something out.

I think everybody likes to say there’s no such thing as shortcuts and that’s not true. I do think that’s some things they’re sort of a minimum amount of time you have to invest to see any sort

of fruit. Obviously there’s shortcuts, obviously some people get in to shape faster than other people. Some people make more money, way more money than other people. A friend of mine

who is an entrepreneur said it like this, he said, “Bill Gates makes like whatever it is, a million dollars a day or something absurd.” He goes like — he just like did the calculations.

My friend is a successful entrepreneur who is making thousands of dollars per day, right? He

goes, he’s just doing the math or whatever that is, “Does Bill Gates work a thousand times harder than I do? That’s impossible. He works smarter, he’s got momentum, he’s created

systems et cetera.” I failed a lot but then I also realized that in those previous failures, there was a failure of effort and it was kind of six months of slogging along before I saw any sort of

breakthrough but that wasn’t a big deal to me because if you remember Laura, I was already committed to this thing for two years. And I was like, “I’ll try this for two years and if it doesn’t

work then I’ll quit, move on.”

[0:17:08.9] LC: Yup, I think that’s such a great goal to set. What was the breakthrough moment? How did you go from 78 to that first thousand?

[0:17:16.4] JG: I wrote an eBook that we were talking about, this thing called The Writer’s

Manifesto, this is short thing, everybody was telling me you got to have something that you give away on your blog so that you get email subscribers. I wasn’t really interested in the marketing

side of things, this was my passion project, I was just writing. I kind of dragged my feet to it


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because I did want to reach people. So I was like, “My email list isn’t really growing, people say

you need an email newsletter, I got to do an dBook.”

So I just went and took an article that I had written called writers don’t write to get published, it was just about this idea that you do it because you love it and whatever comes of it is great but

when you’re sitting down to do the work, you’re not really thinking about the results, you’re thinking about pursuing your craft with excellence. I used that article and turned it into this 900

word manifesto and I called it a book.

It was an article but I put it in a PDF form, put it on my website and I emailed a handful of people, one of which was somebody who had become a friend, a successful blogger and

author, Michael Hyatt and I just emailed him, I said, “Hey, I just published this thing, you might want to share it or whatever,” and he did. I published this thing and I think it resonated with the

right audience and then I got a few people to share it.

[0:18:29.6] LC: That’s amazing. It resonated with me, so it’s a really great eBook and now you have four books, is that right?

[0:18:38.1] JG: Yup.

[0:18:39.7] LC: Mainly in personal development, the latest one, The Art of Work and this book is

essentially about finding your calling. I want to kind of back up a little bit, we’re talking for just a minute about that nagging sensation, the dream within that you didn’t think you had one but

then when you were forced to put it on paper it was like boom, there it is.

You started interviewing people about doing extraordinary work and learning about a meaningful path, but do you believe that people can access that internal voice, that dream within

themselves as simply as you did? Is that something that you think people have more room to find than they realize?

[0:19:18.0] JG: If I described it as simple, I didn’t honor the story because it was like, me

bugging the crap out of my wife for five years and just me doing what I always do, which is being restless. “I should do this and I should do this. I’m not happy with my job, I should quit, I


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should go do something else.” She’s just like, my gosh, she is the paragon of security and she

just wants steadiness and I’m the antithesis of this.

I was reading our different personalities, I’m real into the Myers Briggs and she’s an ISFJ and I’m an ENTJ. The way I describe that is we just like to tell each other what to do, it’s that J thing

like, “You should do this and you should do this.” It’s like, I was reading like the one thing that will frustrate — the one thing that frustrates my personality is complaining. The one thing that

will frustrate my wife’s personality is a lack of consistency and I’m like, “Oh my god, this poor woman,” you know?

It wasn’t simple but there was a point at which I go wow, this is like I felt like god was trying to

tell me something. It felt that strong to me and yet when I — the reason I wrote this book is because I realize people’s experiences with this are different. The reason I wrote a book about

figuring out your life’s purpose at 32 years old was I felt like I had scratched the surface of something but I didn’t understand the whole process.

I was beginning a process and I wanted to understand what I was getting into and people were

asking me questions like, “How do you know?” I was like, “I don’t know.” So I interviewed all this people and it was fun because I interview people literally from 18 to 80 and all of which kind of

self-qualified as successful in the sense that they were doing their life’s work, they had figured out what they were meant to do and they were doing it very clearly.

Some of them were making a lot of money, some of them weren’t, they were just making a living

but everybody was doing what they were meant to do. It’s a subjective thing, right? But most people you talk to go, “Oh, it’s just a job, it’s okay, I don’t know.” These people weren’t saying

that, they were saying, “I have found the thing that I feel like I was meant to do.”

When they described their stories, they weren’t simple but I did find that there were themes that kept emerging and the first theme, the first thing that’s sort of the first of like seven stages,

although this kind of overlap and it’s a messy process. I call them stages. The first one is awareness. This is the thing that I think people get hung up on the most which is like I just need

to know, I just need to have a vision and then I can go do it. It doesn’t work out that way.


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I don’t’ think you know what your calling is and you go do it. You begin where I kind of started

with that sense of awareness. Like, “I know that there’s something more but I don’t quite know what it is,” and I love the way Parker Palmer says it, I‘ve mentioned him before, he has a great

book on this subject called let your life speak. 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.” I think that’s where the process starts.

[0:22:30.5] LC: That’s beautiful, I love it. So step one is that awareness that sense of, I mean, it

was for me, I think you and I were in parallel paths. I was in my job and there was just this nagging sense and I kept looking around at everything around me and there wasn’t anything to

point to that was particularly wrong, right? It just didn’t feel right to me.

Somebody I know said, “You know, it’s like wearing a pair of Prada shoes and you walk around, everybody says, those are incredible shoes, they’re so beautiful and you’re like yeah, they’re

Prada. How can they be bad? At the same time, they’re like giving you a blister, right? They never quite fit you and they never felt right while you’re walking around. If that awareness is the

first step? What’s the next part?

[0:23:19.4] JG: It’s interesting that you talk about shoes. I interviewed this woman and you can find her TEDx video on YouTube, her name is Jenny Phang and she was the first full time Dula

of Singapore and she describes finding her calling like slipping in to an old pair of shoes. When she did it, it just fit and in the book Jenny represents what I call the stage of apprenticeship. You

start with awareness and you move in to apprenticeship which is again I think kind of a counter intuitive step. Firs thing is you don’t figure it out, you just start listening to your life.

Second thing is, you don’t go do the thing that you want to do, you just go do something and

you learn from that experience and I’m borrowing this idea from the middle ages of apprenticeship where typically a teenage boy would go find some master craftsman and say, “I

want to do what you do. I want to paint or I want to be a blacksmith or whatever.” Then the apprenticeship would last seven years and all you just like did whatever he told you to do. It was

mostly grunt work but you are in the studio of a master and you were immersed in that activity and over time, it just became a part of you and then you’d go spend two or three years as a

journeyman.


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So you’d leave and you go tour, you go journey around and you practice your craft and if you

got good enough, you’d be able to submit a work to the guild in what’s called a master piece which is where we get that word from and if the guild liked it, they’d say, “Okay, now you can

take on apprentices and you can be a master.” This whole process took about 10 years. I called…

Today we don’t have this but I call this stage of accidental apprenticeships and what Jenny did

was first of all, she got pregnant out of wedlock and in Singapore, that’s a big taboo and single mothers have less rights to things like welfare and other social programs than like widows

would. They’re really kind of treated like second class citizen, it’s really catholic country and just a lot of taboos around that.

She got pregnant, her boyfriend said, “You need to have an abortion or I’m going to leave you,”

her parents said, “You have an abortion or we’re going to kick you out of the house,” and she’s like, “I kind of want to be a mom.” She’s 23 years old, decides to keep the baby, her parents

kicked her out, her boyfriend leaves, she’s kind of on her own, her aunt takes her in and she starts doing this — she starts working, doing this different jobs and late at night one night, she’s

Googling things, figuring out how to be a mom basically and she finds this website about natural child rearing methods because a lot of people weren’t nursing, a lot of moms weren’t nursing,

they’re using formula.

She wanted to kind of rear her child naturally. She connects with this people and long story short, she meets somebody who is a Dula and says, “You would be a good dula,” and she goes,

“What’s a dula? Dula’s a birth coach and she takes this classes and then she has her first birth or she’s walking a mother through the process through her birth plan and that’s the moment

where she said, I felt like I was slipping in to an old pair of shoes that just fit, it just felt right.

Everything Jenny did before that, so she didn’t have this grand notion of what she wanted to do with her life, she just said yes to this opportunities because he loves to grow, she loves to learn,

she’s always been interested in personal development and she didn’t just take a bunch of crap jobs, she looked for opportunities to learn and I call that accidental apprenticeship. It’s the

second stage of finding your calling.


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It’s just saying yes to whatever opportunities are available to you, understanding that you’re

probably not going to find some master or person that’s going to take you under their wing for 10 years but there’s probably somebody around you right now that you can learn from.

[0:27:03.6] LC: I love that balance because I think we’re told, go out into the world after you’ve

studied in school and then go check off boxes, you want to start somewhere and grow with the company and make a certain amount of money and get a house and get a relationship and find

your — and eventually you’ll be fulfilled and happy, right? With the career navigation and I also think in your life, it is important to spend the time to think about what you want but taking the

step to action is so important, right?

I’ve heard you say this a couple of times now but I remember when I was thinking about writing a book, I read somebody and they said, “If you're thinking about writing, get a pen.” What ways

can you try this things in the world? Because I don’t think blindly going out and trying fifty things makes ton of sense but so many people have a sense of what they want and they’re stuck in the

fear of getting started.

[0:28:00.9] JG: I love that, I totally agree. My friend Anthony Angaro calls that the false first step. We get this idea that we want to lose weight and so we buy gym membership. He goes,

“No, no, that’s not the first step. The first step is to walk around your block and see if you can do that for a week. It’s not to buy a fit bit for a hundred bucks.”

[0:28:19.2] LC: Right.

[0:28:20.9] JG: That’s just stalling. “I want to write a book, so I’m going to a writing conference.”

Start writing 500 words a day because that’s how you write a book.

[0:28:30.1] LC: Yeah or, “If I could just think of the masterpiece of my life then I’ll start,” right?

[0:28:36.9] JG: It’s a theme in the art of work and I repeat this phrase a lot because I think it’s a challenge for a lot of people and the phrase is “clarity comes with action”. We’re all waiting for

clarity before we’re willing to act and the truth is you act your way into clarity, it’s all about


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takings steps and as you take those steps, you learn more and more and you realize, “Oh I

actually need to do this, not this,” and so on.

[0:28:58.6] LC: Absolutely. I’m sort of obsessed with this point of discovering purpose right? People say, “Finding your passion is the only step and when you get to the top of the mountain

of finding your bliss, everything else will just work out,” and I think one of the questions I have for you as you’ve moved in to the successful career and you’ve got four books and you’ve got a

blog that’s so successful, is this something that you’re still navigating?

[0:29:25.2] JG: Absolutely. I mean, there are this seven stages in the process, starting from awareness going through apprenticeship, practice, discovery. Discovery happens in the middle

by the way, which I think is kind of counterintuitive. When I wrote this book I was like, “OH yeah, you start with discovery, you figure out what you want to do, you go do it, you get great at it, you

get paid and now you’re good.” When I started interviewing people, I realized what I had done was sort of sanitize my story.

I had gone back and kind of cleaned up all the messy parts and I was like, “No.” Like it started

when I was like, “I don’t know what to do and I’m frustrated and I don’t know what’s wrong and I don’t know why I’m so restless and I started scratching, I started trying to find the itch and then I

met this person and they helped me and I started doing this and I learned some things and it kind of,” — you discover it somewhere in the middle. Then there’s profession, you start getting

paid for it. Then there’s mastery and then ultimately there’s legacy.

It’s a lifelong process and the most interesting thing of interviewing people who are at various stages of that process was I asked them kind of two questions that I thought I knew the answer

to. One was, “When did you just know that this was the thing you’re supposed to do?” And I mean, probably 99.9% said, “I didn’t, I had no idea. I still don’t know that this is the thing but I

have peace, there is a tremendous amount of meaning to the work that I’m doing, I’m not constantly looking over my shoulder, worrying about what’s going to come next or what bigger

opportunity is coming, but I don’t know that I’ve landed here, I’ve just found the beginning of something really good that I want to continue to work on.” So that was the first thing.


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[0:31:06.6] LC: That’s amazing. I mean, I just want to stop there for a second because that’s

amazing. I think that is so counterintuitive to what almost anybody would think that people would say.

[0:31:16.2] JG: Yeah, I call it the “you just know illusion”. We hear this, we hear successful

people say this. We say it about love, which I think is wrong, and we say it about dreams and callings and things and people go, “How do you know this is like the thing or she’s the one or

whatever?” And people go, “Well you just know.” I just, maybe I’m like a pessimist but I find that to be very unhelpful advice.”

[0:31:41.6] LC: Yeah, well I think the thing that I push back on is when we talk about “the thing”

like say, I was an entrepreneur or now I’m writing and I have this podcast. I don’t think it’s the thing that matters as much as like you said, there’s a sense of peace and meaning in your life

that — which tells you that you’re in the right place because I think there’s many ways in which I could express myself.

It’s just that when I was in my entrepreneurship place, I was solving a lot of problems, which is

what I think I ultimately am good at but I didn’t feel that peace, I felt like I was in the wrong place. So I think what I hear you saying is doing it is what we’re so focused on. “I need to find

the job, the place, the exact book that I should be writing.” But in fact it’s that sense that’s deeper that, “I know I’m just doing what I need to be doing because I have a sense of peace in

my life.”

[0:32:37.5] JG: Absolutely, and it will be more than one thing. So the second question I ask people was like, “Well what now? Now you’re done, what do you do now? You’re kind of — do

you feel like you’ve arrived?” The answer was, “No, I feel like I’ve just begun.” This is why I describe finding your calling more as a path than a plan because a plan has a clear, “You follow

this and if you don’t follow it, you’re off target, you’re off course,” and it doesn’t — you got to get back on course, and there’s a destination.

The destination in my opinion is not mastery, it’s not becoming great, it’s not being amazing, it’s

not fame or success or people thinking you’re awesome. I don’t think we consciously make


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those our aims but subconsciously, and I’m speaking for myself, those become the aim, which is

like, “I want to be the best at this.”

[0:33:28.5] LC: Yeah.

[0:33:29.0] JG: I have a friend who is very successful entrepreneur, I said, “What’s your goal?” He said, :I want to be the best.” I was like, “The best at what?” He goes, “The best in the world.”

It’s like, “Okay, all right, cool, go for it.” That just stresses me out. But the goal is not mastery, that’s a stop in this journey. But the goal I think is legacy, it’s doing what you’re doing Laura. It’s

not just finding your own path but helping people find their path. It’s realizing that at the end of it, finding your calling is not about you, it’s about finding your gifts, finding the things that make you

come alive and then sharing them with the world and I think in some ways, we shouldn’t be measuring success by what we can accomplish, what we’ve done but rather, what we leave

behind.

I think it’s really successful life, once they’re gone, once they’re done or once they leave the place that they’re in right now whether that’s a business or they’re traveling through on a

speaking tour as part of a city, what is the fruit, what is the stuff that they leave behind? That I think is the true mark of success is your legacy. How do you multiply your influence, how do you

share your gifts in a way, not where they go, “Well she’s really smart or she’s really interesting but look what she helped us do and she multiplied her gifts.”

[0:34:55.5] LC: I love that. I love it, this should be all over like Twitter, Facebook, everywhere

right? It’s like, “Take your gifts and share them with the world and figure out how to monetize that so you can earn a living,” and I think if you can get that combination together, it’s the

greatest way to spend your time and so that brings me to this other part of your life, The Portfolio Life.

[00:35:19.5] JG: Yeah.

[00:35:20.1] LC: I loved when I heard this because if you’re a doctor, you’re a doctor, right? If

you’re a lawyer, you’re a lawyer. But for a lot of people, they have a life that is a little more, how do you say it? There’s little parts to it.


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[00:35:35.5] JG: Eclectic.

[00:35:35.9] LC: Eclectic, thank you and so — well first of all, for the audience, can you describe what is a portfolio life?

[00:35:43.0] JG: I heard this from my friend Keith and I was managing the challenges of this

new business that I had and I was like, “I guess I have a business because people pay me money for stuff.” Honestly, I was believing that sort of internet entrepreneurial lie, which is you

can get paid to exist. You can just pay to do your thing and I’m like, “Well that sounds pretty good, sign me up for that! People just send me checks for being here? Great!”

Because what I really want to do is write and I’ve heard people monetizing your blog and

making money. so I got a book contract, I mentioned that happened after the first year of writing on this blog and I started working on this book and it wasn’t really life changing money but it was

a life changing experience of getting to write a book and as I did that, right around that time my wife and I got pregnant. We started planning what our life would be like with a kid.

We both worked and could not afford for her to not work and she wanted to stay home and be a

mom for at least a little while and so it became my goal to figure out a way where I could basically double my income so I could replace her income and I would just essentially work two

jobs and so I did that in the first couple of months of our son’s life and by the end of that year, so this is the second year of the blog. The first year I kind of built the audience, the second year, I

figured out how to monetize it.

By the end of it, we had tripled our household income and no longer needed either of us to work at our day jobs and so I quit my job and living the dream and I thinking everything is great and

then I had taxes to pay and people to manage and a business to run and I had books to write and I didn’t know and I felt fake at all of them. I felt like a fake entrepreneur because I wasn’t

really good at all those things or not as good as a lot of my friends who were real business owners.


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I felt like a fake author because I wasn’t writing books all the time and I was sharing this with my

friend Keith and I said, “But I like all these stuff. I kind of like the marketing and I like dabbling into business and I like writing books. I just don’t feel like I’m mastering any of them,” and he

said, “Jeff you’re living a portfolio life,” and a portfolio life I call a new kind of mastery. It is the idea that being good at one thing, that’s from the industrial revolution. That is from the age of

factories where we put people in buildings and stood them in front of assembly lines and said, “Be good at one thing because it helps the system.”

I don’t think that most people are good with just one thing. I think most people like to do a few

things and if you do one thing all day long even something fun, like writing for me, it starts to get monotonous and so the portfolio life is about finding what are my passion, skills, and interests

that I can combine in a meaningful portfolio that makes the life I live and the work I do more fun, more interesting, more valuable both to myself and to others and also, allows me to make a

living?

And I think more than ever before, this kind of life is possible where you get to have a series of different careers and various interest that you have where you get to participate in what they call

the “gig economy” where you get to wear lots of different hats and have multiple clients. I mean over half of the American workforce is now a freelancer. So this is the reality of our economy

and it’s a reality for a lot of people and I think it’s good news.

It does mean that some people are going to have to adapt and grow but the beauty is, you don’t have to just one thing and if you create a really interesting portfolio that’s unique to you, you’re

going to stand out from the competition because nobody can compete with that. Nobody can compete with my unique brand of writing and marketing and business with a little flare of

guacamole in there. You get to make this — you get to create, because it’s a portfolio. No two portfolios are exactly the same. You get to make something really interesting and I think now

more than ever before, we are rewarding those kinds of people.

[00:39:51.0] LC: Absolutely and I think not to be confused though with the solo entrepreneur who is wearing all the hats and it feels like if I admit that I am not competent at one piece of this

then I am not really an entrepreneur. I don’t really have the right to be in this space, right? So one thing I just want to clarify when you are wearing all those different hats, you’re also taking


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off some and giving them out to delegating them to other people and not trying to be great at

every single piece of the puzzle.

[00:40:22.3] JG: Yeah, that’s absolutely well said and you mentioned being a doctor, I think the truth is most professions are portfolio professions. We don’t expect that and it’s a shame like I

was talking to a minister just now and he was telling me how he spends whatever it is, eight years going to school basically. Four years in undergrad and then another two to four years in

graduate school and seminary, learning all these stuff and he says, “You know what nobody teaches you how to do? Print out the church bulletin. Like greet people after the service or even

really deliver a sermon.”

There’s a little bit of that but it’s a lot of theory and theology and I have a friend who has a doctor and he went to school for a long time to learn medicine and that’s obviously important but

nobody taught him how to run a practice or how to run a business and manage a hundred people, a hundred employees in his practice and I asked about that. He goes, “I’m a manager.”

He learned more from John Maxwell than he did in med school in terms of what he does on a daily basis.

So I think a lot of careers are portfolio careers. We just don’t acknowledge it and we do

ourselves and the work a disservice by not bringing all of our skills to the table or realizing there are skills that we need to do this job better because we go, “I am just a writer and I just need to

do this.” That is the fastest path to irrelevance in today’s economy.

[00:41:48.1] LC: Yeah and I think it’s that theory that “I just want to be the person who wrote that one sentence that will be remembered forever because it was so brilliant and so perfect”.

But that’s right. I know a lot of doctors and they run practices, they have research, they have grants, they write papers, there’s so many components to their life not just seeing patients and

so even if you’re specializing, you’re the one guy who does the open heart valve surgery and this one type of way, you write papers on that too. Yeah, everybody is doing multiple things.

[00:42:20.3] JG: Yep.


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[00:42:20.9] LC: So the idea of how do we avoid being everywhere though? How do we avoid

becoming super defused and feeling like “I’ve got my hand in 20 different pots”? How do you pick and choose one to hand something off?

[00:42:35.1] JG: Well I think the idea of The Portfolio Life is you’re not a jack of all trades but

you are a master of some and I’ve got three things that I do really well and combined those three things drive everything that I do forward and I have people that work for me. I’ve got

contractors who do stuff that I don’t even want to try to understand but I’ve realized that I can’t outsource with the kind of business that I have in the way in which I’m trying to preserve the

craft side of it.

There are certain things that I just can’t or I just won’t outsource and so for me, I don’t even switch hats. I just realized that my hat has three bills. I’m not quite sure how to stretch that

analogy, but I really like the marketing. I really like the visionary side of entrepreneurship and I like the writing and so for me, those are the three skills that I am continuing to grow and then

everything else, I either don’t do and this is an option that I think a lot of people don’t realize.

You can say no to things, especially if you own a business and you may, this may resonate with you Laura but I think a lot of people go, “Well no, I can’t do that. People, customers, clients want

this. We’ve got to say yes to it. This is what other people are telling me that I can do and this is what we have to do. This is what our customers want,” and the answer is no. You could say no,

don’t do that. I love that because it means that you’re going to do what you do even better.

So I either say no to it or I get somebody on the team to do it or I outsource it and I think that this new era that we’re moving into, I think we’re going to see more and more people saying,

“This is my craft. I don’t have to do all these things but there’s something unique that I bring to the table that nobody else brings to the table,” and figuring out what that thing is and I think it’s

going to be a few things. I think it’s going to be you do this in this way and you bring your different life experiences and background to it and it’s just impossible to compete with because

it’s your unique ability.

I think you have to figure that out. You do that through trial and error. As an entrepreneur, I did that by doing what you’re talking about, doing everything, realizing, “Okay, I kind of hate this,”


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and I’m willing just long enough to go, “Okay somebody else do this.” But you’ve got to try stuff

and figure it out but it’s not being a jack of all trades. Hear me on that, that it really is about being a master of some and those some things are your skills, they’re your passions and they’re

the things that people value or demand from you. They’re the things that when you look at the world, you go, “Somebody needs to make that.”

I think that your portfolio is a combination of your passion, your skill and then the demand or

needs of the world and I love what Frederick Buechner says about this. He says that, “Your calling is the place where your deepest joy meets the world’s deepest need,” and there maybe

multiple joys that you have and so your job is to find, “Which of these things do I love that I can usher into the world, I can share with somebody and it’s going to meet some need,” and you

could do it — that’s a fun place to be, you could do that all day long but for me, I limit it to a few activities because I have limited amounts of time that I try to get better and better at.

[00:45:54.4] LC: Yeah, I love that. So Jeff then what, having thought about this, having written

about it, having blogged and spending all of this time, what does an authentic life mean to you?

[00:46:09.6] JG: One of my favorite philosophers I guess you can call him is a Trappist Monk by the name of Thomas Merton and he talks about the false self and the true self and he describes

the false self as a shadow and he said, “The problem is with a shadow that if you look at it long enough, if you keep it around long enough, you start to believe it’s the real thing, and the true

self is who you really are obviously. Your shadow self, your false self though is not a complete lie. It’s just a shadow of the real thing.” And where do shadow selves come from? Well, they

come from praise, they come from success, they come from ego and accomplishment and people saying, “You’re so good with this. You should do this. You’re such a good baker, you

should start a company baking cakes.”

[00:46:58.1] LC: Right and your ego is going, “I should do that,” and then your heart is sinking all the way down to your feet and just like ignoring it.

[00:47:06.4] JG: I think subconsciously what happens, it certainly happens for me is I should do

that, again subconsciously becomes I deserve this and what does it mean to live authentically? For me, it means facing the true self and embracing that instead of chasing a shadow saying, “I


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deserve that,” and so practically what that means and what that has meant for me really in the

past year because last year was this amazing year, every year in business and my wife and I have been in this business for the past four years now.

Every year we’ve grown doubled or tripled and just gone bigger and better and this last year, I

got everything that I ever thought I wanted. More money, more fame, more success and at the end of the year, I wasn’t depressed. I wasn’t like, “This sucks, this is the worst.” I was just

underwhelmed and I e-mailed a mentor of mine and I said this. He goes, “Well that’s great that you’re not overwhelmed with your success and think you’re amazing but I don’t know feeling

underwhelmed is the appropriate reaction to have.”

He says, “I think if I were you, I’d feel gratitude,” and I was like, “Oh yeah, gratitude, I forgot about that.” So the reason that I didn’t feel that way is because I was succeeding at things that

didn’t really matter to me and it didn’t matter that I made a million dollars. It didn’t matter that I had this bestselling book or whatever. Those things were nice and the ego felt really good but

deep down inside, I was like, “Huh, I still feel that itch I felt five or six years ago. What’s going on?”

Thomas Merton also says this, “Most of us are going to climb a ladder in life, only to realize at

the end that it was leaning against the wrong wall,” and I realized, “Oh boy, this is the wrong wall,” and it wasn’t like a total pivot. It was just, you’re measuring the wrong things. It’s not bad

to be successful at business but you’re probably not going to grow huge $100 million enterprise because in order to that, you’re going to have to give up some things that you don’t want to give

up because I didn’t want to be a manager.

I want to be creating things and you know that to scale a business to a certain size, you really have to give up everything including the things you’re good at and I was like, “I just kind of want

to write books and make a living and help and inspire people.” But I was like, “No, I got to this point and everybody says that I’ve got to be a CEO now and I’ve got to be this big

entrepreneur,” and I realized, “Screw it.” That’s not what I want to do and I hired a business coach to help me realize this and he says, “You’re going to have to spend two years doing stuff

that you hate so you can have this freedom to just go write books.”


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And I was like, “Okay, I’ll do that,” and then he was like, “Wait a second, do you want to do this?”

I was like, “Well I like the freedom.” He’s like, “But maybe you can have the freedom without doing this,” and I was like, “Whoa yeah, I guess I could.” I was like, “But I just thought this is

what I am supposed to do,” and he said, “Two years is not a short time. It’s not a terribly long time but it’s not a short time and do you really want to spend two years doing this?” And I

realized that I didn’t want to spend two years acquiring a skill that I never planned on using for the rest of my life.

[00:50:31.0] LC: Yeah and two years becomes five years, which becomes seven years and it’s

a trap too because where’s that freedom point really, right? It just has this horrible way of moving and moving and moving. I love that story and I think that’s so cool because you’re a

writer and a creator and some people’s dream is to be the CEO of building a business that’s growing and growing, and scaling and scaling and that was actually my story too.

I was a creator of my business and that’s the part that I liked and we got into a certain size and

I’m looking around and I’m like, “I just sit in a conference room all day long and that’s all I do,” and I literally think about Paris and those turnabouts, I was just the person directing traffic,

right? This can’t be my life and so knowing that everybody’s dream isn’t your dream and how to keep navigating and I think the thing that I hope the listeners are taking away from this story is

that you’re navigating success. It’s not just like you have success and there you are and you’re done and it’s all ice cream and puppies from there.

[00:51:34.6] JG: Yeah, love puppies, love ice cream, when you put them together, kind of

messy. You asked what does it mean to live an authentic life and I just think it means that you are asking yourself a few questions, “Is my ladder leaning against the right wall? Or am I going

to get to the top of this thing and go what am I doing?” And I think a really good question to ask is, “Okay I’m on wrung 32 of the ladder, am I telling myself, will I be happy when ____, I’ll be

free when, I’ll be satisfied ____?”

Or am I saying, “This is a cool ladder. I am loving the view and I can’t wait to the next wrung, this one is pretty good.” I don’t love all the hoopla about contentment, you just need to be

satisfied with everything that you have. Some people, myself included, are ambitious. They


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aspire, they want to go do new things. I want my business to grow. I want to reach new people

and make more money and create new things, but I want to do it in a way that feels true to me.

And so the first question is, “Am I on the right ladder?” A good measure for that is just, “Are you enjoying the view right now?” It doesn’t mean that everything is perfect but if you’re saying,

“Things will be better when ____,” like you said that “when” just keeps moving up into the future and then secondly, I think it’s an important question and ever since I was in that group coaching

network, I’ve done this about quarterly, I think you just have to ask yourself and people who know you the question, “Is this me?”

Do you see me being my true self or am I doing things and you’re going, “Why is he doing this?

That’s not really what he does and that’s not what I know of him,” and a couple of times a year, I just e-mail. They know it’s coming, I e-mail or text 10 friends and I go, “Hey, I’m doing that sort

of self-reflective thing,” and I just ask them a few questions. “What am I really good at, what do you see that I’m doing that I should keep doing? What should I stop doing? What thing am I not

doing that I should be doing?”

And it’s an amazing process because I always realize, “Oh no, I’ve been chasing something because I felt like other people I respect and admire are doing this even though we’re very

different people and so I have taken that on as an expectation of myself,” or I stop doing something and I don’t know why I stopped doing that and I need to start doing that again and I

think that’s what living authentically means. It means understanding that you have a true self and a false self and that doesn’t mean successful and failure. It means you can succeed in a lot

of different ways but the worst thing in life is not for you to fail but to succeed at the wrong thing.

[00:54:04.9] LC: I love it and you spilled into the next question and the final question is are the daily practices and habits. So you call some friends and ask them on a routine basis, is there

anything else that you do to keep that center point and check in with yourself?

[00:54:19.0] JG: I make breakfast for my son every morning, at least for now I do and I did this last week and I was making breakfast and I was contemplating, scaling this business, knowing

what I needed to do. We drew out this work chart and had all of these salary plans and I had


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four department leaders that I had to hire and they’re going to have to build their teams and I’m

just thinking about all of these stuff and I’ve gotten some advice from some friends recently.

I am looking at my son and I am thinking about this and I am starting to text people and just realizing that what is this going to require of me and that I’m not going to love it and I’m doing it

so that my life can be free two years from now and I’m like, “I don’t know, it feels pretty good like now. The bills are paid, we don’t have any debt, it’s not like I have to hustle to get to some

place,” because I respect that and we’ve had seasons of life where we had to do those kinds of things.

To make sacrifices to get out of a tough spot but I’m like, “I don’t want to run a company. I just

want to make stuff and work with cool people,” and so making breakfast for my son every morning just keeps me grounded and it used to be my writing time and now, I write later in the

day and I just begin my day realizing that every decision I make does not just impact me so I do that.

[00:55:39.4] LC: I love it. I made breakfast for my son every single day and it was always

pancakes.

[00:55:45.3] JG: Yeah, I love that. Yeah, daily practices. I write every day. Writing for me is a three step process. So throughout the day, I capture ideas. I save them in a tool called Evernote

and then usually in the late morning before lunch, I spend a couple of hours writing, taking something out of that idea folder and writing about 500 to a thousand words for it. I save that,

then usually I edit a piece of existing writing. That’s a process that I call the three bucket system.

My job is to just move pieces of content from one bucket to the next from the ether to the idea bucket, from the idea bucket to the drafts bucket, from the drafts bucket to the edits bucket and

those are all different pieces, so I’m constantly just like moving different pieces forward in the process and then I’m home every day by five with very rare exception to that. If I’m not home at

5:05, my wife is like, “Where are you?” And I usually leave the laptop.

This is a new thing since kids. We’ve got two kids and somebody asked me what has changed since having kids and I said, “I don’t work at night anymore at all.” I have an office about a mile


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away from our house which is just close enough that if there’s an emergency, I can go to it but

it’s just far enough away that at 9:30 at night, I’m like, “Oh I should get on my laptop and mess around and I’m like, “No, it’s a mile away forget it. I’m just going to talk to my wife or watch

Netflix.”

[00:57:08.5] LC: That’s awesome.

[00:57:09.5] JG: So I leave the laptop at work usually and that’s it. I make breakfast, I write every day, I do phone calls and stuff in the afternoon, almost always eat lunch with somebody

else. I love being around people. Working for yourself can get lonely so I have to work social time into that and I’m home by five every day leaving the laptop in the car at the office.

[00:57:33.2] LC: I love that detail because these little things like not bringing your laptop home

can really change the quality of life. Jeff, if people are looking to check you out, find out more about your books, your blog, your podcast, where can they find you?

[00:57:48.6] JG: Well thanks Laura, this was great, you’ve been great. One of the most fun

interviews I’ve ever done. Thanks for asking such thoughtful questions, I love your show.

[00:57:55.6] LC: Oh thank you.

[00:57:56.7] JG: I am honored to be a part of it. You can find all my stuff at Goinswriter.com. My last name is Goins with a G like Goins with a G or as I’m told in middle school like groins without

the R, sorry to put that on the show but now you’ll never forget it, Goinswriter.com.

[00:58:14.8] LC: That’s awesome. Well, thank you. It has been very meaningful to me. Like I said, you really influenced me that perfect moment when I was struggling to identify as a writer

and I did start walking around and said, “I’m a writer” to all my friends so I appreciate all the great work you do and thank you for coming on the show.

[00:58:32.7] JG: Thank you, it’s my pleasure.

[END]


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