I can hardly believe it, but the Pivot manuscript is DONE! D-O-N-E, done. It didn’t sink in until after I reviewed the copy edit and made my most recent round of changes. After I turned it in, my editor told me I wouldn’t be touching the Word file again. Huh?! Are you sure you don’t need me to take just oooooone more look? Says the perfectionist afraid to let go. Nope. The next (and final) time I get to review the book, it will be printed on 11×17 pages for hand edits before the advance copies g...
Feb 21, 2016•30 min•Ep. 24
“The effort to try to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable. It is our constant efforts to eliminate the negative — insecurity, uncertainty, failure, or sadness — that causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain, or unhappy.”—Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote I read Oliver Burkeman’s The Antidote a few years after it came out, and it quickly ascended to the top of my all-time favorite books list. At one point during the most intense part of my tumultuous pivot year, I...
Jan 31, 2016•49 min•Ep. 23
“To have something (a finished recording, a business, or millions of dollars) is the means, not the end. To be something (a good singer, a skilled entrepreneur, or just plain happy) is the real point. When you sign up to run a marathon, you don’t want a taxi to take you to the finish line.”—Derek Sivers, Ask Me Anything My dad started a band called Mr. Gasoline that he ran for 25 years, and recalls uploading his Mr. Gasoline albums to CD Baby “back when Derek was still sleeping on a couch in the...
Jan 17, 2016•59 min•Ep. 22
Happy New Year Everyone!! Greetings from Tulum, Mexico where I’m taking a (solo) week of R&R with yoga, reading, and hanging out by the ocean. Gotta get myself prepped to head back to snowy NYC! I am also celebrating (and decompressing from!) ten years of running Life After College, and turning in the final draft of Pivot mid-December. After 14+ months of working on the manuscript, we are now moving on to a final copy edit and page layout this month. Read more and get my latest book and tool...
Jan 01, 2016•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 21
It’s the final countdown! Time to wrap-up the final days of 2015 then dream-and-scheme for what’s to come. I don’t set New Years Resolutions, but I do choose a theme for the year, do fun mind-mapping exercises, set quarterly targets, and hold myself accountable with mastermind groups. In today’s final Pivot Podcast of the year, I share practical tips to help you set a 2016 strategy by doubling-down on what’s working, and setting up small experiments to test what’s next. AKA, the Pivot Method! A ...
Dec 21, 2015•24 min•Ep. 20
I woke up and the room was spinning clockwise. Am I wasted? No . . . I haven’t had a sip of alcohol in weeks. Is this some kind of immaculately conceived hangover? After an hour of laying in bed hoping it would pass, I stood up and stumbled. Grabbed for a nearby wall to prop me up. I felt nauseous. Do I have food poisoning? No . . . I haven’t eaten anything different this week, or any typical poisoning potential foods. Maybe I just need something to eat . . . a bagel. That will soak up these sym...
Dec 13, 2015•23 min•Ep. 19
Get your geek on! This week’s Pivot Podcast is all about robots, artificial intelligence, and automation. How can we become more agile in an economy that is increasingly transformed by these areas? What skills and mindset will best position us for success in the future? How can you become a “robot whisperer” like today’s guest, professor Tom Guarriello? I could talk with Tom about all this for hours, but we contained ourself (for now!) in keeping this week’s episode to one jam-packed 60-minute c...
Dec 06, 2015•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 18
Don’t bite the hand that feeds you. That’s the gremlin I hear behind the slight nerves I feel about sharing today’s conversation with my good friend Nicole Antoinette. As we both hit eight years of blogging this year (ten since I started Life After College), we decided to take an honest look at the social media fatigue that sometimes washes over a life lived online. These periods of being public versus private ebb and flow, just as any creative journey will. While blogging and social media are m...
Dec 06, 2015•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 17
Did you know that just the way you sit might be causing anxiety? Or that by straightening your spine and scanning the horizon you can calm your central nervous system, just as deer in the savannah do? Stacy Sims, founder of True Body Project, is an expert on somatics, or how our physical and psychological bodies relate to one another. I had the great fortune of stumbling across her workshop in Bali when we were both there in 2013, and we have kept in touch since. 📝 Check out full show notes and...
Nov 29, 2015•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 16
“The explorer is the person who is lost.”—Tim Cahill I rode the high of hitting my 50,000-words-in-a-month NaNoBlogMo goal for exactly one day last week. For one day I was over the moon! I did it! I wrote almost every morning for one month, and came out with 50,000 words by the end of November. It was like running a mental marathon! Combined with my October practice of trying to write for 30 minutes each day, I had amassed 100,000 words of a book draft. For those who aren’t word nerds, that’s ab...
Nov 21, 2015•34 min•Ep. 15
Happy November! As I shared in my latest JB.me behind-the-business update, Pivot for Pivot, we have postponed the book launch from March to next September. My initial resistance turned to great relief as I realized I could actually enjoy some time off over the holidays! Read the behind-the-scenes recap for the biggest mindset mistake this move highlighted, and how I corrected course. While my editor Natalie reviews the latest draft, I spent the month of October furiously studying podcasting and ...
Nov 08, 2015•1 hr 54 min•Ep. 14
“These days we are expected to live our lives at the same time we brand the shit out of it,” my friend Stacy said to me last year. That sentiment stuck with me, and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head since. Selfies, Snapshat, blog posts, Periscope, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter—when do we get a break to simply live our lives and do the work? It can be a tough tradeoff to make—particularly to those of us who have chosen more public-facing careers—toil behind the scenes and risk obscurity...
Nov 01, 2015•35 min•Ep. 13
When is it time to wipe the slate clean and start over when you hit a breaking point in your career? How can travel play a role in the reflection process? How do you bounce back from zero when you have wiped out your savings? What makes graduate school worth the time, energy and money? How do you build a business, even when you don’t love the initial work that is coming in? How can you embrace fear, uncertainty and failure? Today’s episode features one of my closest friends, Adam Chaloiecheep, b...
Oct 25, 2015•33 min•Ep. 12
How often do you come down with a Case of the Mondays? It can be a strange feeling to avoid your to-do list on a big project when you run your own business or side hustle: if you are the one calling the shots on schedule and strategy, shouldn’t it be energizing much more often than not? However, for one reason or another, we often let fear and shoulds take-over (myself included) and suddenly find ourselves at a fork-in-the-road with projects we care deeply about. 📝 Check out full show notes and...
Oct 18, 2015•30 min•Ep. 11
HUGE thanks to everyone for all of the wonderful emails, tweets and comments about last week’s announcement for The Pivot Method. I think my emoticon-loving heart might explode from seeing so many exclamation marks in one week! As promised, I’ve recorded two very scrappy “podcast” calls for those who submitted questions. 📝 Check out full show notes and links from this episode and share it with a friend! http://itsfreetime.com/episodes/10 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adch...
Oct 11, 2015•36 min•Ep. 10
Yes, we—there is no way this would be possible without you here reading, and for that I am grateful beyond words. The Pivot Method will be published in hardcover by Portfolio/Penguin in early 2016, one of the top business and career imprints, and I could not be more thrilled! Their vision for the book blew me away, and I feel very lucky to be in such great hands over this next leg of the JB journey. 📝 Check out full show notes and links from this episode and share it with a friend! http://itsfr...
Oct 09, 2015•39 min•Ep. 9
Cyber crimes are increasing at a staggeringly multi-exponential rate. Ignorance about our devices and online security is no longer acceptable; cyber crimes affect over 1.5 million victims per day. That’s 18 victims per second, 556 million victims per year, and over 600,000 compromised Facebook accounts per day. [Source] The recent Sony hack was so sophisticated the FBI says it would have gotten past 90 percent of firms. This is not something we can afford to ignore, especially for those of us wh...
Oct 04, 2015•51 min•Ep. 8
What does it take to find your Zone of Genius and stay there? What are the key ingredients to peak performance? What are the biggest barriers? If you think of your career as a car, what are the two biggest “headlights” that help you see clearly and do your best work? How can our challenges serve as fuel for opportunity? I had the pleasure of asking these questions to Laura Garnett, peak performance strategist for Fortune 100 CEOs, in a recent interview for my Pivot book. Our conversations were s...
Sep 27, 2015•35 min•Ep. 7
For those of you considering hiring a virtual assistant in 2014, I cannot recommend it highly enough — this is easily one of the best things I did for my life and business last year. And yet, control freak that I am, I did not go down without a fight! For YEARS I had read all the books (4-hour Work Week chief among them), and knew the importance of delegating and not being a bottleneck. But each time I tried to move forward with hiring someone, I got overwhelmed, discouraged and gave up. Who to ...
Dec 21, 2014•35 min•Ep. 6
