Imagine understanding the complexities of writing about climate change and American migration in a way so clear, it's like you're looking through a freshly cleaned window. That's the experience Jake Biddle, author of The Great Displacement, provides in this enlightening chat. Jake highlights his background, the intersection of climate change and journalism, revealing how his work has been ignited by a motivation to take action on complex topics. We track his two-year journey of research and writing, while discussing the key role humility plays in journalism.
Jake unravels the importance of curiosity, humility, and the willingness to meet people where they are. He paints a vivid picture of the mindset of value creation, placing oneself secondary to generate value in the world. It's fascinating to learn how building trust and rapport with strangers is crucial in navigating the journalism landscape. Jake's insights into taking a complicated subject like climate change and making it more comprehensible are truly inspiring.
What does it mean to leave a legacy in writing? Jake shares his aspirations for his work's enduring impact and the importance of storytelling. As a freelancer, Jake reveals that it's not all smooth sailing. The pressure of being a freelance writer, the need to stay on mission, and the power of part-time work are all part of the journey. Our dialogue ends with an exciting promise - Jake's return to the podcast upon the release of his next book. This episode is a treasure trove of insights on climate change, journalism, and leadership.
Find Jake here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jake-bittle-6a736093/
Purchase: The Great Displacement
Perform with Power, Lead with Impact, Inspire Growth
To sharpen your skills and increase your confidence, check out the Confident Leader Course: https://www.intentionaleaders.com/confident-leader
Imagine understanding the complexities of writing about climate change and American migration in a way so clear, it's like you're looking through a freshly cleaned window. That's the experience Jake Biddle, author of The Great Displacement, provides in this enlightening chat. Jake highlights his background, the intersection of climate change and journalism, revealing how his work has been ignited by a motivation to take action on complex topics. We track his two-year journey of research and writing, while discussing the key role humility plays in journalism.
Jake unravels the importance of curiosity, humility, and the willingness to meet people where they are. He paints a vivid picture of the mindset of value creation, placing oneself secondary to generate value in the world. It's fascinating to learn how building trust and rapport with strangers is crucial in navigating the journalism landscape. Jake's insights into taking a complicated subject like climate change and making it more comprehensible are truly inspiring.
What does it mean to leave a legacy in writing? Jake shares his aspirations for his work's enduring impact and the importance of storytelling. As a freelancer, Jake reveals that it's not all smooth sailing. The pressure of being a freelance writer, the need to stay on mission, and the power of part-time work are all part of the journey. Our dialogue ends with an exciting promise - Jake's return to the podcast upon the release of his next book. This episode is a treasure trove of insights on climate change, journalism, and leadership.
Find Jake here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jake-bittle-6a736093/
Purchase: The Great Displacement
Perform with Power, Lead with Impact, Inspire Growth
To sharpen your skills and increase your confidence, check out the Confident Leader Course: https://www.intentionaleaders.com/confident-leader
Hello and welcome to the Intentional Leaders podcast. We are on episode 124. This is Lessons Learned with Jake Biddle, author of the Great Displacement. Welcome to Intentional Leaders. This podcast is not just for leaders, rather for anyone who wants to make an impact on the world, professionally or personally. My passion and purpose is to provide tips, tools and resources that I've learned throughout my career working with large and small organizations, profit and non, and also as an entrepreneur. I've had the joy to teach thousands of individuals who, like you, are trying to navigate this crazy and complex world. So here's to doing that successfully and eventually. So I want to welcome Jake Biddle to the Intentional Leaders podcast today. And Jake is a freelance writer, a reporter, researcher, based in New York, and super cool thing is, he is also the author of a book called the Great Displacement Climate Change and the Next American Migration. So welcome to the podcast, jake.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1:It's my pleasure, so we are meeting for the first time. I heard of you from your very proud mother, who I work with at NRECA, and she was talking about you and I was just fascinated by your story and by the effect that you're having in your life and your leadership journeys. I was thrilled to set up this interview, so thank you for taking the time for this.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Jesus. He is very proud of me.
Speaker 1:He is. I love that. You know you got to appreciate moms and their pride. All right. Where I want to start, jake is asking you about your leadership impact, and you're providing leadership on very important topic, relevant to anyone, really, but also very challenging for some people to understand. When it comes to climate change and the migration effect that you've been exploring, how did you arrive at this focus in your life and career?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I think that like a lot of people who ended up being writers. When I was a kid I just really liked to read books on the level of like Harry Potter and things like that. And I guess from a really, really, really young age like so young that I don't really remember when I started writing like I just like to write fictional stories, right, like they weren't real, they were just fantasy stories and then that was kind of the only, I guess, major talent that I was ever told that I had, right, and so then when I went to college, I grew up in Florida and I went to school in Chicago and I still wanted to be a writer. But when I went to school in Chicago, which is like a much bigger city than I had ever lived in, I just started to learn a lot about the history of Chicago and about the sort of different social problems and economic problems that Chicago had right, so obviously had a big problem with gun violence. It was extremely segregated.
Speaker 2:There were just a lot of you know sort of big social problems that people were trying to deal with and I thought that one you know useful way that I could use the talent that I had for writing was by doing journalism rather than writing fiction right, not that there's anything wrong with novels and fiction like they're really important but I thought that I could take the writing that I was doing and write about some of the things that I was seeing in Chicago. So when I left school, I moved to New York and I started trying to do that full time, more or less freelance, like I didn't have a job, which was, to say the least, difficult and certainly it made my mother was very proud of me. Now she was probably a little bit worried about whether I would be able to feed myself, which was a fair concern at the time, but really what I found was like when I was trying to figure out what is an issue that I want to tackle in journalism, what's like something I want to write about, and I found myself gravitating toward things that were really really complicated, like the more complicated the issue was, the more I seemed to enjoy writing about it, and I think that there was a big reason for that. I think I saw people around me looking at like the first things I wrote about in New York were homelessness, the housing problem in New York, and I knew a lot of people who lived in New York and they understood that there was a problem, but they didn't understand why or the details of how that problem worked, or certainly what we could do to fix it. And so I thought that one thing I could do in writing is take a really complicated topic and try to make it not necessarily simple enough for people to understand, but break it down so that people can understand it, understand what we can do about it and just understand the world around them a little better. So I did that for a while with housing, and then I kind of stumbled upon climate change.
Speaker 2:I was working on a story about housing and people who got displaced from their homes for different reasons, like they were evicted, for instance, and then I sort of stumbled upon this problem in Houston, where a lot of people had been displaced from their homes because of routine floods, and I wrote about that, not from the climate perspective, from the housing perspective, but quickly I realized that climate change was, if you were looking for, a complicated issue that people cared about but didn't really understand that. Well, yeah, that was by far an issue that a ton of people cared about. I certainly cared about it. It was big psychological concern for a lot of people that I knew it was keeping people up at night. People really didn't understand it very well, which, because it's just an unbelievably complicated topic.
Speaker 2:I thought that this was something that I could write about from that perspective, like take a complicated thing and try to break it down so that it was more intelligible and help people get a handle on what I think was a really scary thing. For a lot of people it was just terrifying apocalypse or something I wanted to help people understand it differently. Then the last thing is this problem that I was writing about in the book of people losing their homes because of climate change. That had the additional thing of people really just didn't know that that was happening at all.
Speaker 2:I think that people understood that there were big hurricanes and wildfires and droughts, but there wasn't a lot of public information about what happened to the people who lost their homes to those events. You know, two or three or four years after the fact, and I got frustrated, frankly, about how little there was to read about that and I just decided that I would try to sort of shed some light on that in particular. So I think that, in terms of leadership, I don't think I set out necessarily to make an impact. Of course you definitely want to feel like you are, but what I mostly set out to do was help people understand the world around them better. And then other people who are in politics or activists, or they're in government or banking they might be able to make a big difference on the problem, but only if they understood it well. Right. You have to have the right premises. That was how I, and kind of still how I conceive of what I'm doing and that's been really fulfilling, yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh. Well, and you and I, before we started recording, we're talking about what leadership is and the difference between leadership and management. And when I think of leadership, I think of it as its intentional influence, its guiding people and activities, and it's going towards something important, something you value or vision. And you just described that beautifully because you said you know, I don't know that I'm a leader, but 100% you are, because you have a point of view to educate people and help them. And it sounds like the more complicated it is, the more excited you get You're done. People would run from like, oh, this is complicated, but not Jake Jake's there, like, yeah, let me tackle this bad boy and figure it out. And I think that's pretty cool because then you can influence people, because you make it more accessible, more real and therefore also, as you said, more actionable.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean I feel like people are often. They care a lot about climate change but they're too scared to try to even figure out how to do anything about it because they feel like there kind of isn't anything to be done about it. And I felt, like my view, that that's not true. But also I think it's sort of objectively true that when people have read the book or when they've read other articles I've written, I feel like they end up being more motivated, not less. So now that I meet people at parties, they say like, oh my God, that must be such a depressing and discouraging line of work, and actually it's kind of the opposite. For me. It's really cool to see people sort of get more engaged the more they learn about a topic.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because even as I was reading reviews and I still have to read your book, but I was seeing some of the reviews and people are like this is scary, gets on people's nerves and upsets them. But I think in order for people to change, sometimes they have to be upset in that way. They have to feel something they haven't felt in a way, but also know okay, what do I do about it? Because just keeping awake at night isn't helpful. But keeping awake at night and then knowing what can you do or what action you can take with that emotion, I think seems really powerful.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's definitely right.
Speaker 1:So how long did it take you to amass all that research If there wasn't a lot of connection between the homelessness and the displacement and climate change, how long did it take you to bring all that together and write this book about it?
Speaker 2:Probably about two years. Two years of doing nothing else, though, which is a lot, for I'm used to bouncing from one subject to another, to another. So, starting from scratch to the time that I turned the book in, that's probably two years, and then it probably came out a year later, so it was enough time that, by the end, I felt like I could maybe move on to another topic.
Speaker 1:Right, I don't think I'm done with this.
Speaker 2:Obviously it's still within climate change, but I said, okay, maybe I'll at least take a break from it, which I didn't actually do. That.
Speaker 1:Irony right. Why did you not take a break from it?
Speaker 2:Well, I think that a lot of reporters experience this, where once they start on a specific topic or beat and they get in touch with the right people, then there just continues to be more and more that happens and more to find out about, and you sort of can't stop because people will call you back and tell you more. That was how I was making money too, so I basically just kept writing. Now I mostly write for this magazine called Grist, which is like this environmental magazine, and it's just there's always something to say and something to do. So I never really did stop, but it was a lot of time. On that one topic, two years is a lot.
Speaker 1:It is, and you were eating along the way. Yes, yes.
Speaker 2:Yes, very well actually, because I got to travel the country to Louisiana and Texas to do the reporting and there was a lot of good food there, so it was cheaper than New York City. So yeah, I ate very well.
Speaker 1:I love that. So you spent a couple of years of your life and you've continued to focus on it, which is not surprising, because I think people also then associate your knowledge base and your expertise in a certain area. So they probably want you to continue to have a voice in this area because you are knowledgeable about it and you put a lot of time and energy and thoughtfulness into it. That's definitely so when you think about educating others in your writing and your speaking, and then you do step back and think about yourself as a leader, which you are. What characteristics do you feel like are most essential in the line of work that you're in?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think that the thing that's most important for any kind of journalist really but you know, I think, especially somebody who wants to cover, like a big issue like this is humility. And I think it's important because when you're a writer, right when I publish an article, or when I wrote this book, my name is on the book. In a certain sense it's about me because I wrote it, but in another sense it's not, you know, because that book is full of the stories of other people, hundreds of other people, and I think that it wouldn't have been possible for them to open up to me or for me to sort of tell their stories If I hadn't been, fundamentally, I wanted to learn about them more than I wanted to publish a book with my name on it. A lot of journalists are writers and a lot of writers that can have egos right, Because it's like you're putting something into the world and you take a lot of pride in it, which is understandable.
Speaker 2:But I think that as a journalist, you kind of have to be willing to make yourself invisible and really put the spotlight on somebody else and cede the floor to them, which is difficult to learn how to do when you're a writer and you're good at writing.
Speaker 2:The whole time People say, like you're so great at writing, you're so great at writing. I think as a journalist, you have to forget that. And I think the other thing I mean curiosity is pretty obvious. But I think that even more than curiosity, right, like you have to be willing to kind of put yourself second or last behind everyone else. That's an important thing to do. And then I think the other thing is you have to be willing to meet people where they're at. So that's one thing that was more about like the sources, right, when I'm interviewing somebody. But the other thing is, like with the readers, you have to be willing to meet them where they're at. And that means that when I'm covering an issue I've covered droughts and water issues a lot and there's a ton of incredibly complicated lingo jargon that's used in discussing those things right.
Speaker 2:And even just the names of the federal government agencies that are involved. Most people don't know what the Bureau of Reclamation is or something, and so it'll be cool. So sometimes I'll get to talk to, like, the head of the Bureau of Reclamation and I have to remember reader doesn't A know what that is, b really care. So I have to find a way to remember what I'm trying to do, right, which is like, well, somebody else, something, and I have to remember that it's not for me, it's for them, right, and I have to write sentences that I know people will be able to read easily, like if they're on their phone or something like on the subway, and I have to remember that I don't want to bog them down with jargon.
Speaker 2:And so it's just you have to really center first the interviewee and then you have to center the reader. So it's two kinds of humility and just the desire to kind of take that extra step to meet someone where they're at, and I think that it's erasing yourself temporarily, but I think that that's what allows people to be really effective communicators in journalism and that's what allows them to kind of take on this leadership role that you're talking about in education.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what a beautiful description.
Speaker 1:So what I heard you say is those qualities that have served you very well are humility, curiosity and meeting people where they're at, and that you described that in a very interesting way around thinking about kind of erasing yourself for the greater purpose of what you're doing, and how that translates into the vocabulary that you're using, the accessibility that you want people to have.
Speaker 1:Lately, I've been doing a lot of work on mindsets and how we think about the world and ourselves, and there's a concept around a mindset of value creation that your purpose is to create value in the world and that in order to create value in the world, you have to sometimes put yourself secondary. And I think about that a lot too In my world as a teacher or a facilitator, as an educator, that I really care passionately about people learning and what do they need from me to do that? What kind of safety did they need, what kind of tools did they need, what kind of resources do they need and how do I show up to give them that? And at the end of the day, that is my purpose, and it sounds like your purpose is very much like that too.
Speaker 2:Yeah right, people sometimes talk about servant leadership, for instance.
Speaker 2:Right yeah, the idea that if you're in charge of a team, you should be willing to do the sort of most menial tasks that the team might have to do.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's not quite the same, but I think that you have to kind of have that mentality. Sometimes, if you're going into a stranger's house, sometimes I'll go to a neighborhood and I'll just knock on dozens of people's doors right and try to get them to talk to me for free. I can't pay them. I'm asking them to do something for me so that I can create a valuable thing that informs people, and I have to not only help them understand what I'm trying to do, but then just make myself available to them. You know, if they serve me a cup of coffee while I'm sitting with them, I'm going to offer to wash the dish. Some of that sounds like common etiquette, but it's just. You have to really remember that they're kind of doing you a favor and the reader is doing you a favor by reading, in a way. How can I make it up to them and how can I make it as easy as possible for them?
Speaker 1:That's really brilliant awareness on your part. Manners are one thing. Manners is like thank you, please, but you are talking about something completely different. You're talking about you showing up to create and educate and be purpose-filled, and that you know that you have to rely on other people to do that. So how do you build trust? How do you build rapport? How do you create an interaction that they can be honest and trusting of you and you're a stranger? So I think the interpersonal insight that you have to be able to do that is freaking amazing. I think a lot of people learn that in their whole lifetime.
Speaker 2:It certainly took a while, like there was a lot of trial and error involved and, like I said, I started doing this because I was good at writing, not because I was good at door knocking right. It was hard and so, yeah, there was a lot of doing it wrong, kind of realizing like why did that interaction not go well? It was probably because I didn't build that trust fast enough and do the things that were necessary to do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but even, jake, that what you just said there is looking at yourself as a continuous learner. You know, yes, you're an author and yes, you're a writer and yes, you're a journalist and researcher. And you're in the mindset of I'm going to keep learning how to do this better and I'm to reflect back on what I did or didn't do to make that situation powerful or not, and how would I do it better next time.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I think that's amazing.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Yeah, it's really important to write a whole book on that, jake.
Speaker 1:You know how to be interpersonally effective in a short period of time and build trust and rapport with people. I'm going to figure out what the next book will be, so maybe that would be taken a different twist, but it would be also taking a very complicated subject and trying to simplify it. That's true, that's true For human behavior and psychology. All the stuff is pretty complex.
Speaker 2:Yes, it is, it really is.
Speaker 1:So that's pretty cool. So you said the characteristic then humility, curiosity, meet them where they're at and kind of erase yourself from it. So I have a follow-up question about that, because in theory you said some people who are authors or they're journalists. It could be easy to get a big ego, oh yeah, and make it about oh, I just made a name for myself. So when you think about where you're at in your career and as you continue to evolve and get more traction and get more visibility, how are you going to prevent yourself from that piece not taking over? That's a really good question.
Speaker 2:So I think that a lot of people get into journalism because they want to affect a social change, or they want the world to be different from the way that it is, or they see something that's wrong, and I think that it's easy to get sidetracked from that. Right. I did this book tour for this book. I showed up, I wasn't doing anything down the world, I was shelling up and reading from the book and answering questions, which was fun. I think it's what you have to remember like. Well, what am I building this traction for?
Speaker 2:Yeah people see the book in the store and they know my name and they think, okay, that was a good book, maybe I'll read his next book. What's that for? What's the point of building that stature? And the point has to be so that you can push public conversation further or, you know, try to change something else or keep pushing in the same issue. And I think that you kind of have to see notoriety or like renown, as a means to an end.
Speaker 1:And it definitely is right.
Speaker 2:It is helpful for a journalist to be well known in a lot of ways. You know Bob Woodward or something who did Watergate and now he writes books on US politics. It's helpful for him to be known because people buy always buy the book right, and so that's really good for him. But like it's not cool, just to be known, you know you have to use that for something, and like it's a double-edged sword, you know, because it's, on the one hand it's very helpful, On the other hand it can lead to your ego getting big, and so I think it's like you have to have a mission, or like a vision or some kind of ultimate goal or just a set of values and priorities, or else, you know, it just becomes the goal is to be more famous.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. You described it very well that the notoriety, in a way, is giving you a platform for more education and more purposeful writing or tackling. Or tackling those challenging social issues Sounds like it's not what you want the end result to be, but putting yourself in a position even to go on the book tour. I think that's a really good example. The book tour you said you know what am I really getting from that? You're getting the recognition, so people will be more educated on the thing that you care most about. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:That's an important insight to remember yeah. You're super famous and you've got all kinds of books and accolades, and the next, bob Woodward.
Speaker 2:No, I don't think so. But even a small I mean even like not even any journalist is like it's a public facing job. You know, it's not like being an investment banker or something, unless you're like the most famous investment bank of people don't know who you are, right, and so it's like you have to have kind of like a personal brand or something. But you really have to make sure that you know, let it get out of hand. So I think that's what I said.
Speaker 1:So do you have a personal brand?
Speaker 2:I don't know Question. I think so in a sense right. Like I have a certain set of issues that I work on. I have a certain kind of article or you know sort of format that I'd like to write, like I'd like to get deep in with people and tell personal story about somebody and then use that to untangle a complicated issue. So I think I have, like I have a format that I prefer and I think that that's like the closest thing you can have to a brand without really trying to have one.
Speaker 1:Accidental brand.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the brand comes from. Like the work the work that you produce looks. You know, when people see it in aggregate, it looks like a certain pattern and that becomes the brand. But I don't know that I necessarily tried to make it that way.
Speaker 1:Yeah well, and just from again reading some of the work that you've done, the storytelling seems to be an important aspect for you. The personalization of things, making it meaningful from an individual or personal point of view, seems to be an important piece of who you are. It's like you want to not only educate but evoke that personal connection.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, so understanding their point of view very deeply and in a different way. So that sounds like the beginnings of a really cool brand, Thanks. When you think about legacy and that really does also get to brand when you think of the legacy that you want to leave as a writer and you're very, you know, relative to me, young in your career, you know. So I look at you and I think, oh man, look at the impact that you already have made. Yeah, what you can do, what do you want your legacy to be as a writer?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that this is a really interesting question. You know, I think that each time I sit down and try to write an article, it's kind of like what I said before, where I'm trying to take a complicated topic or issue of some importance and make it easier for people to understand or like help explain the significance of it to an ordinary person.
Speaker 2:But then I think, legacy, like, do that over and over again. And a lot of the things I write are very time sensitive, right, so it's about something that happened yesterday and, like in a year, it might not be quite so fresh as it is today, but I think that overall, right, when you look back on your work, you want something that endures or that people would read in the future. You know you don't want all your writing to be only relevant on the day that it's. Journalism is often called, like, the first draft of history. That's what people call it. This is what we were saying about history, like on the day that it happened, right, but it's not history because it's only makes sense kind of in the moment. So I think that ultimately and this is not something I've really acted on yet, but I think ultimately I would like to do work that would endure a little more right With that, you know, even in 50 years or 100 years would still help somebody understand something about the world that we live in. And so maybe to a certain extent, the book kind of does that, because it talks about, you know, what the consequences of climate change were in like a specific period of time. Right, I always say that I turned that book in in November of 2021 and now it's August of 2023.
Speaker 2:In the time since I turned the book in, I probably could have written another version of it, based only on things that have happened since then.
Speaker 2:It could have been filled with, like a completely different set of things.
Speaker 2:Some of what I wrote is obsolete and it's just like when we do the paperback it won't be in there because it's no longer true and there's, like you know, maybe a problem was solved and maybe, like, a person that I was writing about has since passed away or their problem no longer exists, right, like.
Speaker 2:So I have to update. So I think what would be really cool is to try to do something that would last longer and that would be more like a sort of more enduring way of explaining something, some big fact about the world that we live in, right? So, like I think that one constant in the book and stuff of that sense is like just the relationship between human beings and the natural world is just like an extremely complicated and fraught relationship, obviously, and I think that something that could memorialize that or that could make a deeper commentary on that would be really cool. So, yeah, I think just producing something that will stand the test of time is like a good way of thinking about, I think, one's legacy as a writer, in distinction from just the best way to do journalism today, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, that was very eloquently put. It's interesting to think of it from a time sensitive what's happening today, what's happening tomorrow. And even we rescheduled this podcast because I think the first time you were like bad weather got to go, you had to be somewhere, right.
Speaker 2:That was exactly that.
Speaker 1:That is your world and absolutely it's a really interesting way to think of the evolution of the topic you're writing and how much it is going to continue to evolve.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:How do you step above it and look for something that would be more enduring? That would be interesting, yeah, what would that look like?
Speaker 2:One of the most famous books about the environment is called the Silent Spring. It's by the spreader named Rachel Carson. It's about DDT, which is like a chemical that bleached into the world in the 1960s, and that's a book about a specific problem that isn't really that much of a problem anymore, like DDT was. It was gotten out of the water by the government because, in part, of Silent Spring. But even though that problem has been solved, I can go back and read that book and it still tells me something about how the world works. It's a very, very important document of the evolving relationship that human beings have with the environment and that industrial society has with the environment and the trade-off. We have so many amazing things in the developed world thanks to industrial chemicals, but also there's really negative consequences, right. So that is a really enduring document and it would be really cool to try to do something like that. You know where it's just going to last, even though it also had a relevance in its own day.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so even though the issue is past, the impact of that issue coming to the surface and what it changed after that sounds like that was the important piece that you'd like to be able to replicate.
Speaker 2:And the lessons of the book are still relevant today, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Speaking of lessons, I think of these podcasts as lessons learned. When you think about going from Chicago to New York and that transition and just thinking of yourself as a journalist and writer, what advice would you give to people today who are thinking about that as a career and who think of oh, I'm going to go to New York and I'm going to go on and do these great things? Because that's what you did and you brought it to life.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a really good question.
Speaker 2:I think that when you're starting, the curiosity is probably the most important part. If you can't find something that just holds your interest, it seems like it would hold your interest forever. Like you don't get bored after reading about it for hours. And we're talking about it for hours. When you go to the restaurant with your friends, you want to like kind of talk to your ear off about it, even though you know they probably don't care.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a really, really important thing to have, and if you don't have it, it's hard to force it. It's hard to force your way to becoming a journalist or a writer if there isn't something that you really want to write about, as opposed to just wanting to write period right. The only other thing I'd say and this doesn't apply to me because I never did it, but like I have many, many peers who sort of found the same path as me I think a lot of them saw taking part-time work in, you know, like a restaurant or like someone who's like a parking garage attendant that I knew. Yeah, like a lot of people saw that as kind of like admitting failure.
Speaker 1:Oh.
Speaker 2:Like that. They couldn't make it work, they couldn't get a full-time income from writing. I think the reality is it's very, very, very, very, very difficult to get a full-time income from writing just because of the economics of journalism. And if you really think it's important that you should do it and you have something you want to write about, there's nothing wrong with taking part-time work if it enables you to pursue a question that you're interested in or, like, say, something that you think is important. And I think that, for a lot of reasons related to millennials and like just the way people see that kind of work, people sort of integrate. They think it's kind of a plan B. I think it would have been helpful for me to have that kind of work. It would have made me more financially stable, probably allowed me to pursue the things I wanted to pursue faster. I never ended up having to do it, but I could have, you know. So that's just the sort of, but the curiosity is probably the most important point.
Speaker 1:When I heard you say, though, it's curiosity about something that you were passionate about.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I think about that with leadership, and I've been in the leadership space for so many years and I just went to a conference, a learning conference, in May, and I just couldn't wait to know what I was going to learn. And even from there, all the books that I got and all the learning that that is a passion of mine and it's hard to shut that off. And it sounds like for you too. Finding that passion and you don't want to shut it off and being able to find something like that, that brings you that sense of purpose or ability to educate people, I think is is terrific.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, like I do think the best journalist and the best writers, they do it compulsively right, like they want to know more, and you know people always talk about going down a rabbit hole. That's like one of the most common phrases that you hear in journals from your peers, like, oh, I'm going to rabbit hole on this. That is a really, really important instinct to cultivate. It's hard to manufacture it, you know, and so you kind of have to say to what provokes that in you and follow that, rather than try to do it from the reverse and say, well, what would be a cool thing to write about? Or like, what would be the easiest thing for me to write about. Like you kind of have to follow your interest and that's really important.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So what's interesting is? You just said two things that were almost reversed from what people would perceive. One is that part-time work the perception is I'm admitting failure as opposed to I'm doing this, so I get to pursue what I want to pursue and I get to eat and live.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that's not a failure.
Speaker 1:It's a process of the process and the experience of getting the joy of what we do.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:The second thing that you said that I think was so important is people perceive rabbit holes as a bad thing and you're thinking no, rabbit hole means you're going down to a place where you find a lot of value and benefit and the rabbit hole is like the great part Right, where a lot of people perceive that as negative, like, oh man, get out of the rabbit hole. It's like, no, I want to be in the rabbit hole. Right Alison Wonderland saw that in the rabbit hole Right. How cool was her experience.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and yeah, right. Yeah, I think that with the part-time work thing, it's just, you know, that's the only way that it's possible in many circumstances and so you can't deny it. You have to be willing to do that and like it's okay and it's not a bad thing really, and then, yeah, like you have to, you have to see obsession and fixation. You just see that there's really good parts of that, right, like there's really there's something really productive and awesome about that.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and I think that just did a session recently on stress and anxiety and the kind of. But the message is the same If you aren't stressed or anxious about something, it means you don't really give probably a crap about it. You know, you're kind of in this apathetic state of like who cares? But a little bit of anxiety and stress can be a really good thing and a powerful thing for movement and action. And so yeah, Jake, will you promise to do another podcast when you do your next book and when you become rich and famous and you're doing those tours all over and you're on TV and the second coming of Pablo Dorn, I certainly promise If that ever happens.
Speaker 2:Yeah, regardless, when I do the next book, I will, I will definitely come back.
Speaker 1:Okay, I would love that this just been such a joy, and it's unusual for me to interview someone that I don't really know or that I haven't connected with beyond, you know, your mom or the proud mama situation. But I do appreciate your willingness to share all of your energy and your passion and your insight, and I was excited to read the book and now I can hardly wait to get it.
Speaker 2:Oh, thank you so much, that's really nice.
Speaker 1:I really appreciate it, so thank you for your time.
Speaker 2:Thank you, it was great to be here.
Speaker 1:Check out Jake's book on Amazon. Get it, read it, be fascinated and educated. I can't wait for his next one.