Jessica Hagy

what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Our guest today is Jessica Hagey, an artist and writer best known for her award winning blog Indexed, a feature in the creative online space.

Jessica has been illustrating, consulting, and speaking since two thousand six. Her latest book is called How to Be Interesting, and she recently produced a series of illustrations for Forbes magazine based on the classic art of War. Hi, Eric and Chris, thanks for doing this. Sure sure thanks ring me. Okay,

let's go ahead and get started. So our podcast is based on the old parable where there's a grandfather who is talking with his grandson and he says to him, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always battling. One is a good wolf represents kindness and love and peace, and the other is a bad wolf,

which represents self pity, hatred, greed. Name your poison. And the grandson thinks for a second and says to his grandfather, well, which one wins, And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So that's the premise of our podcast. So I'd like to start off by asking you what does that parable mean to you and how does it influence both your

life and your work. As far as sort of a life philosophy, I've always whenever I heard Jeremy Bentham's happiness principle, which is the greatest good for the greatest number of people is what you should do. It's sort of like a guiding humanist thought. That's what I always thought of, is like that is wouldn't doubt go with that? And so sort of thinking of what should I do? What

should I do here? It's what makes the most people happy, and so sort of guiding there is the best answer, and usually that ends up being something that's not necessarily greedy, but it's greedy in a long term way as opposed to like short term, quick quick jobs and things like that. That's an interesting We had a we had another author and musician on a couple of weeks ago, and when we talked about it to him, he his his thing,

he said, was you know, feeding the good wolf. For him was really about how did he find time to do the work or the art in this case, And we got into a conversation about how, uh, short term A lot of times it's easier to to to do with the people around you want you to do short term because that makes a short term happiness, but the long term greater good comes from pursuing that thing that is yours. And your book, um, you Know, How to be Interesting, really touches on that an awful lot about

how do you find that thing that is yours? Um, how do you pursue it despite what what other people around you might be saying, or what the the crowd is saying, And how that sort of does leave lead to the greatest good. Yeah, a lot of times it's weird. The crowd doesn't want other people to be happy. It's sort of the bitter voice rises above the really like encouraging ones so often. And I don't know why that is.

I think we hear compliments and we dismiss them, but we hear we hear an insult and it can we carry it with us for just years and getting getting through that and really thinking like what's encouraging and what's the good thing. That's really hard sometimes, but if people can do that, then it it saves everybody a lot

of hassle. That's the bad wolf being very powerful. Yeah, the bad wolf tends to get a lot of press, And I don't know why that is, because I think people like like that sort of like gossip nastiness, but that's that's not as fun even for a minute. I guess I think he gets a lot of press because he looks like Brad Pitt. I mean, it's just a parable,

But that's what I've heard. When I pictured the two wolves that you guys have, I pictured one is sort of like old and sort of like afflicted with scurvy and like in rags with a big stick and sort of like gray teeth and yellow eyes and just scowling. And the good wolf seemed really young and quiet and sort of hiding behind a tree like a little kid instead of an old man. Interesting, you were saying about the bad wolf um and those voices somewhere in your book,

and I don't I was trying to find that. I I can't find it exactly. But you talk about um, you know, working on improving your thoughts about yourself. And you have a quote that's really interesting where you say, uh and caution, this could take years. Oh yeah, that's ignoring the people who are who are nasty and sort of that old wolf sort of tone. And when you hear here nasty, where do you almost associate like a holotosis or a

sickness with it? And when as soon as you get that sense of things to sort of mix up your senses is when you should run away that that bad smell is just it almost makes it a comedic when someone is saying something to you like that and you think of it like bad breath. That sort of take could help take some of the sting away. Yeah, there's another part where you talk about you know, you've got a little one that says, just, you know, basically, do

something anything. It doesn't really so much matter. Um. You know, if you're spending all your time thinking about what you should be doing versus just doing something. Um. Sort of the old you know, as as being an entrepreneur for years, the saying is, um, you know, ready, fire, aim right.

It's it's just makes something happen, Oh totally. And I see that so much with my artist friends who have a thousand ideas and a thousand different ways to make make beautiful, wonderful, fantallistic objects and things, And if they just picked one thing and send an email to ten people, they'd be so much better off than making ten things and never telling anything anybody about any other things they did.

It's just sort of like take something and run with it, and odds are it will be great because if you like it, somebody else will too. So tell me a little bit about how you your your creative process. Do you make yourself sit down and try and sketch out ten index cards and you find one that's good? Do the ideas come to you? Can you talk a little bit about how that works for you and maybe how

it's changed over time. Yeah, when I first started it, I was I was going to school at night for my MBA because I was working as a copywriter, and my brain was going to mush because I was just sort of over and over and over again repeating headlines and repeating sort of like cliches and wasted lines that would get approved. And I knew I needed something else because like part of my brain felt like it was

atrophying in some way. And I was taking a finance class and everything was expressed in these charts, and I was like, you can tell the whole world's history in these weird little charts. So I started jotting them down. And I had read around the same time that every writer needs a blog, so I put those two things together so I wouldn't have to write about what I

had for breakfast or how my commune went. And it just sort of took off, and over time I realized that charts and graphs are basically set in structures, and they have their own sort of visual grammar. So the is symbol, isn't it The equal sign is is the verb of being, so equals is the all of that. Then diagrams are basically sentences with conjunctions and x y x s are a causes be subject predicates. So if you can use the English language, you can use a

lot of graphs. And over time it's gotten easier for me to take sentences I hear as sentences in my head and turn them into graphs. I will say it now and it will be in the show notes. But people should definitely be going out and uh and looking

at your things. And one of your one of the favorite ones that you've done that I've got hanging on my on my wall in my office is the one that's got two circles, and one is a little one that's got an arrow going to it saying your comfort zone, and the other is the big circle that says where the magic happens. And it's that sort of, you know, constant reminder that, um, if if we spend all our

time being comfortable, nothing really special happens. And I think, at least for me and a lot of people I know, we tend to equate comfort with happiness and they are not the same thing. And I love the way you sort of diagrammed that here, And a lot of the book really seems to sort of be about pushing yourself out of your comfort zone and out of sort of um the same habitual, repeated patterns, and and finding variety in life. Yeah, I think that that diagram itself went

all over the place. And one of the things I actually thought about when I was trying to draw up that idea was the idea of inertia, which is when you start going in one direction, it's easy to stay that way. But if you think about it, when you make any one direction, you have out of three D and sixty degrees, you're taking one degree, and there are three D and fifty nine degrees that you didn't take.

And to ponder some of those every now of them, I think is not only healthy, but it's really comforting because you don't have to stay on the direction your own. You can always pivot around and spin that circle at the front way. Do you want to spend a couple of minutes and and talk through some of the key points in your sort of how to be interesting? What are a couple of the the key You've got ten steps,

you want to maybe share a couple of them with us? Absolutely, I think the most the most important one is probably the first one, which is go exploring, and people a lot of times think that means I have to quit my job and buy a boat and circumnavigate the globe and learn five languages and go to ten countries and figure out how to fall in love with people of ten different races and backgrounds and take up five different jobs. And it's so much smaller and more palatable than that.

It's that if you just sort of go outside and listen a little bit more, you'll find out so many other things. And a good exploration doesn't mean decades spent off doing something else. It could just mean ten minutes listening to a station you don't otherwise or talking to someone you otherwise wouldn't have spoken with. It's just sort of varying from what you're doing just a little bit, and it doesn't have to be painful. Okay, so that's step one. How about um, how about step seven? Give

it a shot. Yeah, that is. That is one thing I found through the Internet that is the most amazing thing. First of all, everybody has an email address. And if you can find anybody in the world, anybody you like or want to talk to or want to meet, and you can find their email address, you can connect with them almost immediately. And now you can do that with with Twitter and Facebook and all these other things, and everyone is literally fingertips away from you, and you can

find advice, help, anything from anybody in literally seconds. And people a lot of times are so afraid to do that that they don't. And when the people actually do, they get through a lot more than you think they would. So just even taking a shot and reaching out the first step is huge. It is kind of a amazing how how close everybody is. If you you at least have a shot to talk to a lot of people.

Although the person I really want to talk to, and I don't know that he's got an email address, or if he does, he probably doesn't check it very often, is Leonard Cohen' So if you come across Leonard Cohen's email address, anybody listening to this, send it my way. I'm sure you can make that happen. Yeah, he's uh. When he's not writing songs, he's often on a on a mountain somewhere meditating. But we'll track him down sooner or later for the show. Even if he just gets

a note that's like yet urging thanks for that. I mean, wouldn't that be a an accomplishment and of itself, Yes, it definitely would. Can you tell us a little bit about how this book came to be? Oh yeah, this is kind of a weird story. So I write for Forbes, which Forbes is fantastic, saying like, oh yeah, come post switch you want to think about and will help share

it with the world. So at the time, I was living in London and I was putting things together and one of the things that kept coming up was, Okay, there's only so much time in the day, and what is the best Where does the biggest business virtue that anyone can have at this point in time? And it wasn't being nice, and it wasn't being skilled, and it

wasn't being anything other than being really interesting. So sort of a tongue in cheek like, here's how to be interesting, And I threw it up on Forbes and it I put it up in October of two thousand eleven, and around New Year's a lot of people sort of latched on to be I'm going to be interesting is the New Year's resolution, which sounds bizarre, but it just started to go everywhere and people started to forward it around and share it and it got all these crazy hits,

and so then we put it together as a book and expanded on the idea and people will really run with it. And it's been it's been a lot of fun because the more I think about it, it really is. It's true, if you're not interesting, you're gonna be overlooked for pretty much everything. For um, do you want to go to lunch too? Do you want this job to do? You want to be a president of whatever country you live in? And it's a fun word, it's a loaded word. More and more it does seem that is the noise

level increases. As everybody can talk to everybody in the noise level increases. And this is nothing new. Everybody talks about this, just how you do have to find a way to stand out and how being yourself is probably the best way to do that. Um. But I think for a lot of people that still remains very challenging and even finding out who were what that is? What is? Uh? Is that process a discovery part of what you are

leading people through in the book a little bit. I think the book really sort of pokes that without directly stabbing at the idea of vulnerability, which is if you can just let what your natural inclinations are lead you, you'll be more likely to become an interesting person then if you were to sort of go with the flow and behaviors, health and sort of mask the things that sort of stand out to you while you're rolling along

in the flow of everything else. And really being yourself is a lot harder these days than you think, because so many people have this idea of what they're supposed to look like and dress like, and talk like and sound like and tweet like and everything else, and even finding a minute variation and that anymore is becoming incredibly difficult. We start off by talking about feeding the good wolf. For you was sort of the idea of the greatest

good for the greatest number of people. And I'm interested in how that how you see that tying into a lot of um, what you're talking about in the book and your work, which is really about finding out who you are and not going with sort of the crowd and the and the greatest the number of people. How does that work its way back around and being the

greatest good for the greatest number of people. When I was writing advertising, I was writing for JP Morgan Chase, and I was writing a lot of broch stores about home equity lines of credit. I was writing about how subprime mortgages are the best thing that ever happened to you, how you can get whatever you need right now if you just refinance your life, and something about that, even

before everything crashed just felt kind of weird. And even if I was getting a paycheck and doing what I was supposed to do work wise, it was still kind of sketchy. And I couldn't really articulate why it was sketchy because people would just sort of be like, it's a bank, what are you doing? And guessing at what's

more fun? Is just sharing fun ideas and being, if nothing else benign as opposed to negative out there, And at this point in my career, I get to be positive, if not benign, and I count that as a win. The one of the things that is we've talked to more people about this, it seems to come up about feeding your good off is it? It takes it takes help that um did a lot of us tend to fall into uh sort of habitual patterns or a lot of the things that you're even talking about it here.

Take a lot of bravery, encourage can you talk a little bit about the help that you get in your life, whether it be in the past or now, for people who sort of help you to feed your good wolf. Absolutely, And the one thing I have to say is more than any other venue, the Internet. And as much as you can be afraid of the Internet and the bad, sketchy folks out there, it's full of good people too. And when you reach out and you say here's me, here's what I care about, good people or will reach

out to you. And so if in if in your life you're sort of being bombarded and you're beaten down and you're sort of just listening to negative voices, there are really good people on the Internet who will encourage you and saying no, this is good, this is a good idea, this is this, this is useful, keep doing this. And at the time I started is just sort of living in this sort of miasmic bubbling blood work, work, work, go to sleep, go to school, go to work, pile.

And the Internet really gave me a sort of outlet to be like, no, this is bigger than that. You can be you can be smarter than that, you can be better than that, you can do other things and the encouragement you find from strangers can do a lot, even if in your day to day life you're sort of being beaten down and told to behave and all of those nasty things. Did that even answer the question? And I talked myself in a circle, No, it sort of did. My question following would be, did how has

that sort of finding people who are supportive virtually? How does that translate into finding people in your physical life that are that are supportive? Does that so, say, say you start from a place where maybe you don't have a lot of that, you find that sort of support on the internet or virtually? Do you do you find that over time starts to translate into your real life or your your physical life. Absolutely, There's so many people that I knew from the Internet that once I met

in person, it was just like, Oh, it's you. You're one of my best friends in the world, and I've never met you, and now I have to hug you and we have to do everything together. And they aren't just on the Internet. They're real people out there too. And you can pick up the phone, you can pick up the skype, you can get on a plane, you can go to whatever meet up or conference or crazy thing where all these people actually are, and when you

meet them, you will feel so relieved. It's insane because everybody really is everybody has a tribe out there, and all you need are two or three or four people and you're unstoppable. That's one of the things about the Internet that just I love. I mean I I I'm one of those people often talk about one of the things you can do to sort of feed your good wolf is to do sort of gratitude or think about gratitude.

One of the things that I just every time I think about gratitude, I think about the Internet, it just blows me away how wonderful and amazing it is, and and how I sometimes think about what my life would have been like, because I'm a little bit older, if the Internet had been around when I was a teenager, you know, if I could have found and reached out broader than sort of the small area that and people

that we you know, that I was surrounded by. If you know, had the whole world been sort of available at that point, what that would have been like. And I do think it's really exciting, and you hear these really touching stories about, you know, people who are somewhat isolated in some way, whether they live in a small town or and they they are able to connect to something bigger themselves outside of that and the Internet it

is really transforming for them. I think for every story of bullying or titty porn or weirdness or like Chris Ansen like please sit down, have a cookie story, as you find out there there ten hundred of thousand other stories of people who were like I met my true love online. I met people who made everything happen for me online. I found my new job online. I figured out how to get my life on track online. And it's not just pixels, it's real people behind it. And

I think that's the power of it. Yeah. I think one of the in your acknowledgements you have in the book, You've got a great chart that sort of again it's going to fail trying to describe it, but it's it's basically your thanks Internet chart. You know. It shows that the more you can do more things and you can know more people as a result of the Internet. And

I think certainly that's uh, you know, that's why we're talking. Well, yeah, I mean half the time I'll get an email from somebody that's like, so, have you heard about this or do you know anybody about this? I'll be like, yes, I do, and I have nothing to do with that, but I know somebody who does, and I can play Matchmaker, and if I get to play Matchmaker once a day online through my stilly Yahoo email address, I've done all

sorts of it. What's next for you? So you've you've done this book, You've been running the this is indexed blog for a long time. What's the next next big project? Right now, I'm illustrating Sun's use art of war, which sounds very antagonistic and weird, but when you really read it, the whole idea behind it is the more you think, the less you fight, And so taking that entirely old really I am an MBA. Watched me destroy title and turning it into something a lot more thoughtful and a

lot more useful is really fun for me. So that is up on Forbes two. Less crankiness, more marveling. Right, that's your line? Yeah, I think I think there's a the whole idea of what is it bark less per more or something like that. I've seen it on bumper stickers where it's just sort of stop complaining and really think about what's going on, and you know, and it's

not so bad anyway. And the more you get on that, the better the better you feel, because I can my husband calls it my worst case scenario brain, where I can take something that's minorly irritating or awful and just spin it into Okay, this is the worst case scenario. Our house is going to implode, I'm going to die, tumor is going to spring out of my brain, everything's going to go to hell, we're all going to get arrested. And really you can just step back and say, no, actually,

it's it's going to be fine. And getting to that point is hard, but it's healthier. And so how do you do that? Because that is the that does seem to be for you know, as we've talked to people, we've sort of explored this theme that is, you know, the bad wolves big is job is that sort of internal negative self talk, whether it's impending doom or you're not good enough or all those different things. So how how do you battle that sort of day to day? Um?

Did you have you found it? Over time it just sort of goes away because you've you've sort of trained it. What's been your experience with that. I am battling imposter

syndrome every step of everything. It's always sort of you're just a fraud, and you just got away with this, and you're just lucky because somebody lint to it, and you just you just sort of got away with this, and you're just sort of this dumb person who throwing things on the internet and you're not really smart at all, and lah, and I can talk to myself into that corner until I'm just like, and even when you stack up, I did this, and I did that, and I accomplished this,

and I moved over here, and I did this and this and this and this and this. No matter how big the stack is, there's still that voice in the back of your head and saying, yeah, you're just a fraud. You just got away with it. And I don't know if that will ever go away, but you really have to keep eroding it every day. It's sort of a title thing, like the sand comes up and the sand comes out, and you just have to sort of keep plowing ahead. I don't think I'll ever be really confident

in what I'm doing. I just have to keep trying to earn what I where I am. I think we all suffer from that to one degree or the other. But in my book, you deserve all the success that you've had. So with that, we are out of time. So Jessica, I want to thank you for being on the podcast. It's been a real pleasure to have you. I encourage people to check out your work online and thank you very much, and we'll talk to you soon.

Thank you, Nate. You can find out more about Jessica and her great illustrations and our show notes at one you feed net slashed Jessica