Pivot Podcast

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Book Giveaway: The Happiness Equation by Neil Pasricha

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One of my favorite TED Talks of 2016 was Neil Pasricha's How do you maximize your tiny, short life? Entirely composed of questions, Neil likes to call it the world's first TED Listen, and it's a great thought-starter about the impact we each want to make in our lives.

Watch: How do You Maximize Your Tiny, Short Life?

Listen: Want Nothing, Have Everything: The Happiness Equation with Neil Pasricha

Today I’m re-sharing my podcast episode with Neil from September, where we discuss the success trap, why advice is irrelevant, and the reason you wake up in the morning. Listen to the Pivot Podcast in the embedded player below or subscribe on iTunes, SoundCloud, Overcast, or Google Play Music. And be sure to check out the book giveaway at the end! 

"Be you. Be you, and be cool with it. There is nobody else you can be better."
—Neil Pasricha, The Happiness Equation: Want Nothing + Do Anything = Have Everything

Neil Pasricha's writing is like a cup of hot chocolate, or as he would describe it in Awesome Thing #119, like watching butter melt on a hot piece of toast. It is comforting and delightful. His latest book is about what he learned along his own roller coaster ride of reaching smashing success with his 1,000 Awesome Things blog and books, then realizing he still wasn't happy. We break down topics like The Saturday Morning Test, the three time buckets, and many more. Enjoy!

More About Neil Pasricha

Neil Pasricha is the New York Times-bestselling author of The Happiness Equation and The Book of Awesome series, which has been published in ten countries, spent over five years on bestseller lists, and sold over a million copies.

Pasricha is a Harvard MBA, one of the most popular TED speakers of all time, and after ten years heading Leadership Development at Walmart he now serves as Director of The Institute for Global Happiness. He has dedicated the past fifteen years of his life to developing leaders, creating global programs inside the world’s largest companies and speaking to hundreds of thousands of people around the globe. He lives in Toronto with his wife and sons.

Topics We Cover

  • Feeling trapped by extrinsic motivators, ever-escalating goals
  • Achieving massive success—multiple bestsellers, TED talk—then feeling trapped by the never-ending search for more
  • Overcoming compare-and-despair
  • The Success Triangle: sales, social, self
  • The Meat Grinder of marketing, stress from emphasizing sales
  • "The goal is not to be perfect, it's to be better than before."
  • What the healthiest 100-year-olds in the world can teach us
  • Ikigai, a Japanese term for the reason you wake up in the morning
  • Retirement is an arbitrary, relatively new concept; many of the world's healthiest places to live don't even have a word for stopping work
  • The Saturday Morning Test
  • Advice is irrelevant; "When we are looking for advice we are usually looking for an accomplice."
  • How he decided when to leave his job as Director of Leadership Development at Walmart
  • Why having a side hustle for so long as an author allowed him to take big risks at work and in his writing
  • Three Bucket Model of the Week: Sleep, Work, Free/Creative/Fun (56 hours each)

Podcast: The Happiness Equation with Neil Pasricha

Listen below or on iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, or Overcast:

Resources Mentioned

Check out other episodes of the Pivot Podcast here. Be sure to subscribe via iTunes, Android or SoundCloud, and if you enjoy the show I would be very grateful for a rating and/or review! Sign-up for my weekly #PivotList newsletter to receive curated round-ups of what I'm reading, watching, listening to, and new tools I'm geeking out on.

Book Giveaway

We're excited to announce that one awesome Life After College reader will receive a copy of Neil Pasricha's The Happiness Equation!

To enter to win, please answer the following question in the comments by Friday, February 3. We will pick a winner via random.org and email to let you know! Good luck!

Comment to Be Entered to Win: 
As Neil asks in his TED Talk: "What story or idea of yours might survive as a tiny, flickering light millions of years into the future?"

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PIVOT Launches Today! Unboxing + Early Highlights

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HAPPY PIVOT LAUNCH DAY!! I can't believe it's here. After three years of preparing for this moment, now the serendipity lottery tickets truly go on sale.

What's next? Although I have hypotheses, in other ways I have no clue which of my next pilots will pick up steam. And as I learned from writing this book, that is A-OK. 

I can't wait to see what bubbles up next, and for all of you to read the book—or listen if Audible is more your style :). Thank you all for the love and support along the way—I am grateful beyond words. 

The most helpful thing you can do this week in addition to social sharing: leave an Amazon review once you've read the book (and thumbs-up other reviews you find helpful). Thank you in advance!!

Early Highlights

I have had such a blast recording podcasts, doing interviews, writing articles, and ninjafying my own business systems (aka digital nesting) to prepare for the extra traffic 'round JBE digital HQ. 

Some favorites:

Here's an Unboxing video of me seeing my book in hardcover for the first time:

Me and James jamming in the studio for our podcast double-header:

Launch Week Momentum

Here are some actions that will make a big difference: 

  • Spread the word via email. Do you know someone at a pivot point in their career or business? I would love for you to send an email to anyone you know who is searching for an answer to “what’s next?” and could benefit from a step-by-step guide to figure that out. If you have a newsletter, online community or other big platform you can include the blurb in, that’s a super bonus! You can find blurb copy here.

  • I have also created a fun Pivotability Self-Assessment where people can take a short 5-minute survey to determine their Pivot Profile. 

  • Amazon review on launch day. This will be a huge help!! Reviews are a huge signal to potential readers that the book is worth their time and a very strong positive momentum/social proof signal as well. Extra credit: copy and paste your review into Goodreads if you’re on that platform too :)  

  • Super Duper Bonus: Purchase more than one copy. Either buy a book for a friend, or if you work within an organization, see if there’s budget to buy a copy for everyone on your team. If you buy 10 books, you’ll get an Actionable Conversation workshop-in-a-box for free ($500 value) to facilitate a one-hour lunch-and-learn session with your group. I’ll be doing a free webinar with Actionable Conversations on 9/8 where you can learn more about this.  

Now let's go rock this launch week!! 

I'll report back on how it all goes soon :) 

 
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Pivot Podcast Round-Up: Techno Literacy, Ego is the Enemy, Navigating a Non-Linear Universe and Standing Out

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Written by Jenny Blake We hear so much about pursuing your passion! But sometimes a passion pursues you. That has been the case for me ever since I took the Pivot Podcast “pro” by launching it in iTunes late last year, and committing to releasing one episode per week. Although it is a tremendous amount of work, I had no idea I would come to enjoy it so much. It turns out I love everything about it, from interviewing fascinating guests to audio editing and teaching myself GarageBand.

And in true Pivot form, I have come to realize it’s not a 180 from the other business activities and strengths I have: my 8+ years of coaching experience help me to be a better listener and question asker. When I was a kid, in interviewed family members for a newsletter I created called The Monthly Dig-Up. I also used to record fake news broadcasts with our video recorder. I have always loved teaching myself new technology, and audio editing is really giving me a run for my new skill money!

Today I’m sharing the last four episodes of the show, as they are some of my favorites yet. Listen to the Pivot Podcast in the embedded players below or subscribe on iTunes, SoundCloud, Overcast, orGoogle Play Music. And if you enjoy these episodes, I would be oh-so-grateful for a rating and/or review! It helps me know you’re listening, and what I should focus more on in future shows.

KEVIN KELLY ON TECHNO LITERACY, SYSTEMS THINKING, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND VIRTUAL REALITY

“If we have been living in rigid ice, this is liquid—a new phase state. We are marching inexorably toward connecting all humans and all machines into a global matrix. This matrix is not an artifact, but a process. Our new supernetwork is a standing wave of change . . . the particular products, brands, and companies that will surround us in 30 years are entirely unpredictable. The specifics at that time hinge on the crosswinds of individual chance and fortune.

. . . The Beginning, of course, is just beginning.”

—Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

I almost fainted when this week’s guest, Kevin Kelly, said yes to be on the Pivot Podcast. Kind, brilliant and the king of techno-literacy, Kevin is one of the great technologists, futurists, and thinkers of our time. We talk about how to get better at systems thinking, become more techno-literate in an ever-changing environment that fosters a constant “newbie state,” artificial intelligence, centaurs and robot whispering, virtual and augmented reality, why now is the best possible time to start a company, and much much more. I could listen to Kevin talk all day, but alas! This week’s episode is a digestable power-packed 50 minutes.

Side note: If you enjoy this episode please share it with a friend!! I am a huge Kevin Kelly fan and would love to see this episode spread its wings and fly across the listener-o-sphere :)

Be sure to check out the previous Pivot Podcast, How to Become a Robot Whisperer with Dr. Tom Guariello (founder of RoboPsych), and as I mention in todays episode, if you want to have your mind blown watch this two-minute Magic Leap video: Exclusive Footage of What It’s Like to See Through Magic Leap and the Magic Leap website homepage demo.

EGO IS THE ENEMY WITH RYAN HOLIDAY

“Is it 10,000 hours or 20,000 hours to mastery? The answer is, it doesn’t matter. There is no end zone.”

—Ryan Holiday, Ego is the Enemy

What happens when you reach previously unimaginable pinnacles of success . . . and still find yourself miserable? Listen to this Pivot Podcast with Ryan Holiday—marketing master, studier of Stoic philosophy, and author of several bestselling books. His first, Trust Me, I’m Lying—which the Financial Times called an “astonishing, disturbing book”—was a debut bestseller. His next books,Growth Hacker Marketing and The Obstacle is the Way were both published by Penguin/Portfolio, and his latest, Ego is the Enemy launches next week. Fun fact: he has the last two book titles tattooed on each arm.

PERCEPTION: NAVIGATING OUR NON-LINEAR UNIVERSE WITH PENNEY PEIRCE

“The new attention span is about scope. Time stops, everything is instantaneous, coordinated and synchronous. You can already feel the result existing.”

—Penney Peirce, Leap of Perception

I have had such a blast talking with Penney Peirce about her Transformation Trilogy on intuition, frequency, and now perception. Talk about a dream come true! Today’s Pivot Podcast is our third in the series, and we dive deep into the nature of our holographic universe, the shift toward right-brain perception, why attention is the new intention (forget the law of attraction), how to find flow in projects, and how to navigate the void after major life or work phases are complete. 

Check out our previous conversations on Intuition and Frequency, and Dreams as a Doorway to 24-Hour Consciousness.

FIND YOUR BREAKTHROUGH IDEA AND BUILD A FOLLOWING WITH DORIE CLARK

“It’s not about selling books or going on the lecture circuit or schmoozing at elite conferences. It’s about solving problems and making a difference in a way that creates value for yourself and others.

True thought leadership is a gift. It is a willingness to be brave, open up, and share yourself. It is a willingness to risk having your ideas shot down because you genuinely believe they can help others.”

—Dorie Clark, Stand Out

Last up for this podcast round-up, I’m thrilled to share an interview with my good friend and business author doppelgänger, Dorie Clark. I interviewed Dorie while writing Pivot on the big ideas from her book Stand Out: How to Find Your Breakthrough Idea and Build a Following Around It. When we’re not scrounging up interesting New York activities to try, we both love thinking about how to reinvent careers and the best way to develop and share ideas that make a difference in others’ lives.

Thank you for listening, and I welcome any and all feedback and guest suggestions for future shows!

About Jenny

Jenny Blake Headshot - Author, Speaker, Career StrategistJenny Blake is the author of Life After College and the forthcoming book Pivot. She is a career and business strategist and an international speaker who helps smart people organize their brain, move beyond burnout, and build sustainable, dynamic careers they love. Jenny combines her love of technology with her superpower of simplifying complexity to help clients through big transitions — often to pivot in their career or launch a book, blog or business. Today you can find her here on this blog (in its 9th year!) and at JennyBlake.me, where she explores the intersection of mind, body and business. Follow her on Twitter @jenny_blake.