034: Jason Feifer - How To Balance Creativity With Your Career

The Nathan Barry Show

Jason Feifer is the Editor in Chief at Entrepreneur, an American magazine and website that carries news stories about entrepreneurship, small business management, and business.

He also hosts a podcast called Build for Tomorrow, and he is the author of a forthcoming book titled Build for Tomorrow, Not for Yesterday.

Jason is a unique blend of individual creator and polished corporate employee, so he offers a balanced perspective on work and content creation. In this episode, Jason and Nathan discuss:

• How to package your work
• How to pitch your content and get press as a creator
• Time management for creators balancing full time careers

Links & Resources

• Entrepreneur
• Boston Magazine
• Men’s Health
• Fast Company
• Maxim
• James Burnett
• Marc Andreessen
• Pessimists Archive: @PessimistsArc
• Louis Anslow: @LouisAnslow
• Andreessen Horowitz
• Joel Weber

Jason Feifer’s Links

• Personal site: jasonfeifer.com
• Jason’s Podcast: Build for Tomorrow
• Jason’s forthcoming book: Build for Tomorrow, Not for Yesterday
• Jason’s Instagram: heyfeifer
• Jason’s Twitter: @heyfeifer

Episode Transcript

Jason: [00:00:00]
You make the thing that you want to make. You believe in it, and you don’t give up on it, and you spend years doing it. And if you’re good at it, and if you were right that this was a thing that was worth making, people will find it because good really does rise up. It happens slowly, but it does happen.

Keep going.

Nathan: [00:00:23]
In this episode, I talked to Jason Feifer. Jason’s the Editor in Chief of Entrepreneur. And we dive into a bunch of different things.

One, how he splits his time as an individual creator and, you know, running a very successful, very popular magazine. How he blends those things. He’s got a newsletter, he’s got a podcast, he has several podcasts. He’s working on a book, all of those things. So how he prioritizes his time. All of that.

The monthly cadence that he works on, I found really interesting. We also dive into how to package your work. We talk about why he changed the name of his podcast and the research that went into that. Then finally we wrap up by talking about PR and how to get press as a creator, how to think about pitching each individual publication, the work that you need to do to actually get covered a lot of good stuff.

So let’s dive in.

Jason, welcome to the show.

Jason: [00:01:15]
Thank you for having me.

Nathan: [00:01:16]
So I want to dive in, you’ve got two very different things going on. They’re actually, I mean, they’re closely related, but, two different worlds, you know, with everything you’re building on your own audience. And then of course, as Editor in Chief of Entrepreneur, I’m curious just how you spend your time, as I would think the Editor in Chief is a very time-consuming thing. Then you’re building an audience. You’ve got two young kids, you know, you’ve been doing it all through a pandemic. And so I’m curious what, you know, what a day or a week looks like, in Jason’s life.

Jason: [00:01:51]
it looks like panic. It looks like absolute mass panic. That’s how I feel. Panicked. Okay? So first I’ve made this, I made this realization a couple, more than a year ago. I can’t remember when this took place for me, but I realized that I needed to maximize how my brain works, like work with my brain.

Right. Which is to say, when am I best at doing various things? And then let’s make sure that I’m doing those things at that time, because if I can write a full, like 2000 word story, in, let’s just say two hours, which sometimes I can do, that’s going to happen in the morning. If I try to do that at 5:00 PM, it’s going to take four to six hours.

So why on earth would I waste my time doing tasks when I’m not primed for them? So I clear out the for if I can manage it up to noon, but that’s almost impossible. So really can I safeguard the first hour and a half of my day for writing? And then what I do with that hour and a half depends upon the needs that are most present for me.

So for example, sometimes it’s writing a magazine story. Sometimes it’s writing a chapter in my book. Sometimes it’s writing a podcast script and this is dictated by the deadlines that I have. And then the rest of the day, I’m trying to manage everything that needs to be managed. I’m answering a lot of questions.

I’m getting on a lot of calls, but I will, Oh, I, if I can. If I can do it, which I can’t always do, but I can do it. Then I will not book anything back to back. I will always block out like a half an hour in between. And that’s because things are coming at me and they’re coming at me for lots of different projects.

And it’s hard. You can, you think that you can switch gears really fast between one project and another one company in another, as I’m sometimes doing, because I have my own company and then I’m also working with Entrepreneur and I mean, I, I mean, I’m employed by Entrepreneur. and so I need that time to make those shifts.

And the days that I hate the most are the ones, well, first of all, where I lose that time in the beginning, but also where I’m back to back and I never have time to catch up on any of the inbound because that’s when I’m working late into the night.

Nathan: [00:04:13]
Yeah, that makes sense. Are there other things that you’ve found? Right. So writing in the morning is something and I can absolutely relate to that where like 3:00 PM. Nathan is, he’s actually just legitimately terrible writer. He wants to do anything, but Write, are there other things that you’ve found of like blocking off days of the week to focus on.

You know, one activity or one business or anything like that.

Jason: [00:04:35]
I don’t, I have too many constant demands to be able to block out full days. I would love to be able to do that. So instead, I tend to think about things in terms of goals for a week. So I know for example, here’s, here’s an example. I know that my Build for Tomorrow Podcast comes out on the last Thursday of every month and it’s a monthly show, which I know is not a great cadence.

Yes, yes. I’m aware, but it is such a deeply researched, highly produced show. It is, it is a months worth of work that goes into every episode. And for reasons that we can discuss I’ve decided that that’s okay because the. Ultimate goal of a podcast. Isn’t always just to have a bazillion listeners of the podcast.

Sometimes it can se...