don't know what's

up. Everybody. This is Courtland Allen from Andy hackers dot com, and you're listening to the ND Hackers podcast on this show. I talked to the founders behind profitable Internet businesses and try to get a sense of how they got to where they are today. How did they make decisions both in their personal lives and at their businesses? What exactly makes their businesses tick? Goal here so that the rest of us can learn from their examples, their successes and their failures and go on to build our own successful businesses. This show is just one part of an online community full of aspiring entrepreneurs and founders. You confined it. Andy hackers dot com. They're also full transcripts of every podcast episode, including this one at nd hackers dot com slash podcast. Today, my guest is none other than Josh Kaufman. Josh is the author of The Personal MBA.

It's one of my two favorite business books of all time. It's kind of a bedrock of all of the business knowledge that you need to get started, and I find myself referring back to it regularly and also recommending it to other people, especially people from an engineering background who excited to start a company but may not have had any real business experience in the past, rather than just going piecemeal through his book. In this interview, we instead talk about Josh's past history, how he learned the things that he learned, what went into writing the book and how you can apply the principles from his book to starting a modern day tech startup. Josh is a smart guy. He's very kind, and I think you'll enjoy a lot of what he has to say. So without further ado, Josh Kaufman, Josh, Welcome to the show. How

you doing? I'm great, Courtland. Thanks for having

me. Thanks a ton for coming on. The show you have worked in the past is a marketing lida, Procter and Gamble. You worked as a consultant and I'm sure is a mentor to many people to help them grow their businesses. You an extremely popular blogger and essayist, and you're the best selling author of several great books, including my all time favorite business books, the personal MBA, which I tell just about everybody who's getting started with entrepreneurship that they should read. So I guess what I want to start with is who do you think you are? And where do you get off doing all this great stuff? You know what sort of the origin story of Josh Kaufman?

Oh, wow. What an intro. Thank you for that. So Ah, let's see. The story starts When I was in college, specifically my last year of college, I went to a school called the University of Cincinnati in Cincinnati, Ohio, and one of the best things about that particular job is you're not just sitting in a classroom all the time. You spend about half of your time actually working in a business. So I I spent about half of my year in the classroom and about half of my year working for Procter and Gamble, which is a huge consumer goods company. My background before that was actually in technology, so I was started school is a computer engineer, got involved with business information,

information technology. You learned a little programming, and so I started working at this big company in the I T department. At the time, the company was just starting to use websites for promotional reasons. And so I got involved in some of the company's early efforts to do a line. Procter and Gamble is, is a massive global company that makes hundreds of brands so tied crest all sorts of usually things around the home. So, you know, tied very, very large Wonder detergent, a lot of personal care stuff, a lot of beauty stuff. So I was in the company's household care division, so things like laundry detergent and dish soap The 1st 5 brands that I worked on were,

Ah, Mr Clean, Swiffer, Dawn Cascade and for Breeze, those early marketing websites. I had a hand in all of the company's what what they were doing to start experimenting with promoting these brands

online. And one was this exactly like early two thousands or nineties or

yeah, so it would have been Let me do the math. Probably 2000 to 2003 Okay. And so it was early enough that the company was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire an agency to put up in HTML and CSS. It was particular while, and part of the reason I got the job was the company wanted to run an experiment with a new website in a new country and because they were hiring agencies, they just didn't have the budget for it. I had taught myself HTML and CSS and looked at what was required and said I could do that and spent a couple weeks and and got it up and got a job from it.

At that point time that thought crossed her mind that hey, maybe they should be paying me hundreds of thousands of dollars to set up their their landing pages.

I would have really appreciated. That would have been great. So I started with the company doing technology based stuff. But you don't live very long within Procter Gamble without realizing that marketing is the hub around which the entire company revolves. And so my first full time job out of college, that was what I was doing while I was as an intern, as a co op in college, My first job out of college was as an assistant brand manager, which is based. Think like project management. It was just centralized in the marketing department, so I was doing consumer research and launching new products and talking with scientists and talking with factories and trying to build new products from scratch, which was fascinating. I loved every minute

of that. What was it about Proctor and Gamble that gave marketing such outsized importance? Is it is it because their products air risk commoditization? Or it was just like a court cultural corker of the company to just play such a high value on marketing to the exclusion of other parts?

It's kind of a cultural quirk, so the term branding was literally invented by Procter and Gamble. So the company started, If if I Get My History right, started around the period of the Civil War, making soap and making candles, they were one of the first major manufacturers to really tree marketing as as a centrally important function of the company and spent an enormous amount of time doing things like packaging and negotiating large retail placements. And when television and radio became large cultural forces, there were one of the first major advertisers. So the company spends billions of dollars every year advertising in all media, primarily TV still, but they tend to experiment with new forms of advertising relatively quickly.

That's nuts when you work in a company that's been around for 152 100 years. Can you feel the history of the company is? It's sort of, like still impinge on the decisions that are made today. Oh, absolutely. Completely remade into something new.

Oh, no. It's so everybody has an impulse to try to put their mark on something. But there's also very much the feeling of you've inherited this 100 year old brand.

Don't screw it up. Uh, that sounds like a lot

of pressure. Yeah, it was fun in a way that, like, one of my first projects, the first brand I was designed to is Mr Clean, which was actually very ironic if if you haven't seen my picture, I'm completely bold And,

uh, where you bought at the time?

No. Well, not what s. So I shaved my head about two weeks before I found out what my first

Simon's Oh, wow.

It was meant to be. So nobody at the company's had ever seen me bold. And I just roll in on my first day and I have a shaved head working on Mr Clean. Everybody's like, Oh, interesting. That's dedication. I'm just really excited. Everybody.

So you mentioned that there's a lot of pressure not to screw it up on that. You're inheriting this almost ancient brand. Did you ever screw anything up while you're at Procter and Gamble?

I screwed up all the time. It was like half the job. A lot of it is. So I was working on new product development, and the fascinating thing about that is a lot of the job is going and and watching people do whatever it is that you're trying to study. So in my case I was I was literally going to people's homes and washing them, watching them off the floor and seeing what they do and what they don't do. There's, ah, super famous story, actually from tied, where a researcher went into and was what and watching them dio do their laundry and that this was back in the time of the big box of powdered laundry detergent. So the researchers saw that saw the person take a scoop of this laundry detergent, turn on the washer and then kind of swish their hand around in the water. And I asked why that person was doing that and they said, Well, if I don't swish it around in the laundry detergent doesn't dissolve in the water.

And so the researcher made a note and then then went back. Using that little tidbit of information, the company decided to launch the first liquid laundry detergent to provide some reassurance that yes, indeed, this soap is going to dissolve in the

water like you know, it's supposed to Wow!

And that that's, ah, trillion s over the lifetime of that category trillions of dollars that came from just that one little observation.

That's nuts. How do they make sense of thousands of observations of, I guess you know, seemingly similar importance when they go into the field to collect all this information

there. There's a lot of report writing that was a big feature of my first jobs. So we would go out and do this research, and then you'd also have meetings with scientists. So the scientists would say, You figured out how to do ABC new things which may be interesting and useful or may not be we don't know. And then the marketers go out into the field with consumer research experts and do surveys and all of the good, qualitative and quantitative ways that you figure out what people want need, and then the job was to basically marry those things up. And so you you have a meeting or you you do research and then a lot of the job is synthesis. So you're seeing a lot. You're hearing a lot, and then it's what is your What is your impression of the 3 to 5 most important or interesting things that came out of this particular interaction? If you do that well and doing that well in the company was was a combination of writing well and persuasively and also presenting what you found in large, high stakes meetings with people. For example, if you're trying to get a vice president to give you $10 million to launch new product,

you better have a lot of information and data at your disposal about why that's a great decision. And so it was really, for first about the college, very much a trial by fire kind of situation, just learning how to notice and observe and synthesize and write and present

in a persuasive way. It's funny that you mentioned this challenge of having to take what the scientists are able to develop and take the feedback that you're seeing from customers and the behavior saying there and try to marry these two things like you're attacking this problem from both ends and it's so similar what you guys were doing it. This humongous company, it's the same thing is that I see entrepreneurs doing, especially if they don't necessarily do too much planning in advance and they build this product. Yeah, I'm like, OK, well, I've got this product Now I've heard that I'm supposed to be talking to my customers. What? I didn't do that earlier. How do I figure out how to sort of change my product and make it fit what people want and we'll actually need and use eso? It sounds eerily similar.

Yes, time spent talking to actual or potential customers is never wasted time. You can learn a lot that way that you can't learn any other way.

So would you say that working at Procter and Gamble is kind of where you first learned

some

of the business fundamentals that you would go on to write about? And is it also the place where you first became interested and what makes a business ticket? Are you interested in that stuff beforehand.

I was interested in that stuff beforehand, so I had a little, extremely little web design business in high school that I continued into college. I had worked at a number of small businesses, and in the back of my mind, I was always interested in starting my own thing. It just didn't seem like that was the kind of thing I was supposed to be doing at that point in my life. Which is weird now that I say it looking back on that. But that's how I felt like the general progression was okay. You go to school, you get an internship, you get a job. You worked at that job, and then once you're a little bit more stable, then you start something. And so, yeah,

very much a double edged sword, like the best thing about it. Looking back on it is that having the experience of working at literally one of the largest companies in the world and doing my own entrepreneurial things over the years gave me a really good sense for what was actually universal about business. So you would say, see the same concepts in the same ideas in the same practices in the same behaviors be really important, invaluable in the largest of the large and the smallest of the small business environments, and so that when I was doing the research and writing for the personal MBA, that was very much a guide. Like, could I look at a concept in the book and say Yes, the supplies to the largest businesses in the world? And does this apply to somebody who is starting from nothing and has no structure and no customers, no funding, no anything. If it fits both environments, that was That was a really good indication that there was something there.

It's challenging for a lot of people that as an employee of a big company, it's totally possible to not get the perspective that you had. For example, you can work on a marketing team every day of your life and still not really understand what marketing really is to the businesses, the whole, because you're too far abstracted away from its overall effect on the business because you're only working on a very specific part of marketing. Maybe you're a copywriter, or maybe you do you know, maybe your programmer and all you worry about is the product. Is there any particular strategy you would advise people who were working in a bigger company to use, to try to get a bigger perspective on what's going on and to try to come away from, you know, maybe a very specific job with Rod business knowledge? Or do you think it needs to be something that you do on your own outside of working at a company?

Yeah, I think the best thing that you can do and this this is general career advice regardless of where you work. If you work for somebody else, try to get as close to the core business as you possibly can. Usually, the core of the businesses is either the part that creates value marketing, sales, the part of the delivers value or finance talk about that in the personal MBA. I call it the five parts of every business. Those are the things that allow the business to make money and to continue to operate as an ongoing concern. So usually the closer you are to one or more of those things, the more valuable you are to the business and the more options you have to either progress in the business or move on to something else that is advantageous to you, you know, First is is if you're in a peripheral part of the business, try to move yourself closer to what the core of the business actually is. The thing that really works for me in retrospect is that the position that I went to after I left I t really was that center of all concerns. So you got to see all of the parts of the business come together.

I think if I so the thing that I did after doing doing product development was I worked on the polar opposite end of the business, which was actually selling the product into large customers like the Wal Marts targets Costco's Kroger's of the World, and so to. To see the very beginning like Here's what we can do And here's what people want What? What can we create? That meat that solves in need all the way to the very end of Let's negotiate with a buyer at Walmart Toe Have this on shelves nationwide, potentially worldwide. That was a really good opportunity to see every single part of the business. And if you can maneuver yourself into a position where you get to see the entire process and to end, that's extraordinarily valuable to a certain extent. You can even do this for, Ah, for businesses that you don't work in. So pull up any company that you're interested in public or private and try to reconstruct for yourself what those five parts of the business are for that particular entity or any particular product line. So, for example,

companies like Procter Gamble or General Electric or large finance companies, they have multiple lines of business. And so just pick one and try to deconstruct it into those five parts in as much detail as you possibly can. It's also a good strategy if you're an entrepreneur. So a lot of people get very excited about an idea without having that idea fully fleshed out in many ways. And so those five parts of a business become a really great checklist of making sure you're visualizing how this business is going to operate in as much detail as you possibly can. And if you can't figure out what one of those parts of the business looks like in practice. You know exactly where you need to spend your time and attention, Toe. Let that out. Because if you don't figure it out, the business is not gonna work. It's

fascinating to see how you are able to sort of move laterally with then Proctor ring able from i t. To marketing to sales and pick up all these different skills and these perspectives on how the business function from within. How did you go from doing all of that to becoming ah business blogger into eventually writing the personal N B A. What's the story there?

So, uh, the story of the personal MBA actually started a couple months before I graduated from college. So I had just received word that I had a full time job after school and I was going to be working for Brand. I didn't know which one at that point. I realize that all of the people that I was going to be working with had just graduated from a top 15 MBA program, and I'm coming straight out of 100 grabbed with with a business information technology degree, and at the time I was I was very intimidated, so I did I thought that all of these people had had knowledge and experience that I did not have. And I wanted to make sure that it did a good job in the some of his first job out of school. And so I started reading in researching. So I I spent months in in my last year of school, and I spent the entire summer after school instead of going on vacation, relaxing before before work started. I went to the library and I went to, Ah, every Barnes and Noble in the Greater Cincinnati area, looking for good business books. And so by the time I started full time it at P and G, I was feeling really good about what I knew and why

do it. That's a very ambitious approach.

Yeah, well, you it miss from the perspective of I I already had a really good job, and I did not want to quit that job and borrow a lot of money and take a couple of years to to go back to school. That was not a smart approach for me, totally. I just I wanted the knowledge and I needed the skills. And so the most direct path to getting those skills was just to sit down and study and take notes and figure out what I was doing. And some of that was I. My undergrad was in business, but ah, lot of the the materials that are are used textbooks. They're not very clear or not very concise about things that I think are both really simple and fundamental. So, for example, you can go. You can go through an entire business program at the undergraduate or the graduate level and not come away with a clear definition of what a business is and what it does, which just blows my mind.

Yeah, I just had Austin already. He has a company called Lambda School on the podcast, and he was talking about how his company teaches people at a code. And he had, ah, he was just contrasting his business, which is very focused on delivering an actual promise toe his customers, which were students, which is if you graduate and you don't get a job making $50,000 a year, you don't pay us anything. And so it aligns their interest. And he was contrasting that with sort of traditional education and how schools don't really have any obligation to ensure that you succeed in the workplace or not, because they get paid their same tuition regardless, right, S. So it's not surprising that they don't necessarily do the best job teaching you these fundamentals, because what incentive do they even have to measure to see if the stuff they teach you helps you out in the real world?

Totally. In a lot of ways, that was the genesis of the personal MBA as well. Like I figured when I started this, I figured there was. There was a 50 year old business text book written by a professor somewhere that spelled out all of these fundamentals, and I just hadn't found it yet. And so I read and researched and tried to find the best things that I could, and as far as I could tell, that didn't exist. And so it's like, Well, this this isn't important. This is something very useful that can be very useful to a lot of people. And so the personal MBA as a website started essentially out of my research notes like, Here's what I'm reading. Here's what's useful.

Here's here The things that I'm I'm figuring out as I'm doing this kind of weird, crazy project and what I didn't expect was was the traction that the idea got. It became clear reasonably quickly that there was. There were a lot of other people in the world who were interested in this, too, so that provided a lot of motivation. Teoh continue with the research and make personal MBA larger than just something that I'm doing for myself. It it's something that could be interesting and valuable to a lot of other people.

So what did that early traction look like? Because I run any hackers and it's somewhat similar. It's a website that's, you know, dedicated to helping people learn more about business and starting their own companies. And so I'm very curious. I mean, I could tell you all about the early days of indie hackers. What for you. When you first started the personal N. B. A was the kind of the key moment when you realized like this is something people really care about. And how did you know that that was the case?

Yeah, it was a combination. I was doing this back in the Stone Ages So I think this was shortly after what Google analytics acquired urchin and just, like, made their JavaScript snippet. So this wow, you could actually see Yeah, the Stone Ages. And so the two biggest things What I was looking at traffic stats from Google analytics and some other tools saying like, Wow, I am not the only one who is reading this. There are people all over the world that are somehow finding this thing and linking to this thing and commenting on things that I write. And that response was an order of magnitude larger than I expected it to be. I figured this would just be, you know, a couple 100 people would find school, and I'm doing it for myself.

It's valuable enough to keep doing just for myself. But once I saw thousands, tens of thousands of people engaging with this and raising their hands and saying, Yes, keep doing this. This is really helpful to me. That was a huge encouragement at that point.

So let's talk about the personal MBA. The book, The book, as you've talked about it, is about teaching people the fundamentals sort of sound business practices and explaining out of the overall concepts and ideas that aren't really concisely stated elsewhere. And you ended up writing this and starting your blawg after you spent months of your life poring through other business books. How did you decide that you are someone who could write a book this big and this ambitious And I mean that from a psychological perspective. At what point did you tell yourself I can do this? Where did that confidence come from?

Uh, came from Ah, couple places. I think the 1st 1 is that at this point, I think I was five years into reading and I was reading roughly full time, so I would work, and then I would I would spend hours and hours and hours after the fact reading and researching. At one point, I was going through multiple books a day, So I had been doing it for long enough that when you read that volume of business literature, you start to see the same ideas come up over and over and over again. And that was another clear signal that those are the important things that you really need to pay attention to. If you're gonna make this work And so I had this running list of all of the things that I kept seeing come up over and over and over again, and the list got to be pretty sizable. And so I started organizing it and trying to figure out OK, what are the common themes? That was the point where,

for example, the five parts of every business came from. I didn't find it in a book that was just a synthesis of of things that I had read. And that was the categorization that made the most sense. So what is keeping track of things like that? How the book actually came about was, um, I was I was an event in New York City with one of my friends, Todd Sanderson, who at the time was, I think, the marketing director for a large business book retailer called 100 CEO Reed. And they specialize in in essentially, bulk sales of business books to, um, the corporate market.

And so I was at this event with Todd, and he introduced me to somebody who happened to be there. Who was Adrian Zakheim, the head publisher Off Portfolio, which is Penguins largest business in print and Todd said, You should talk to Adrian on. And so we struck up a conversation and Adrian said, Well, this sounds interesting. Have you ever considered writing a book about it? And at that point was like, No, I haven't actually, but I'm willing to consider it so So that night I went back to my apartment and wrote a very long email toe, Adrian saying, Here's thanks for the conversation.

This this could be really cool. Here's what that might look like. The next day he wrote back and said, This sounds great. Let me introduce you to David mold our He's miss books and you should have a conversation. So that's how I met David David edited the book and ah, that's how the personal n became

to be. It's on a lot of ways. It was like You're building up confidence by doing your own research and acquiring all this knowledge, but at the same time having this other person who's sort of a professional in the book business just putting the idea into your head that hey, you've done enough to actually write a book. It can't be understated, and how important is to have someone like put that idea into your mind and to have the confidence in you as well.

Yeah, and that's that's the weird thing. And I think it applies to starting businesses or doing business type things in general. I think a lot of times you are prepared to start something and you don't really probably realize or get that. And so, having having an external outside perspective to say, Yeah, there is something There's something valuable here. There's something worth pursuing. There's there's something that you can do with this that you're not quite seeing yet Those opportunities and those people are very valuable.

It's funny what pushes people over the edge, eventually, who kind of thought about starting a business or maybe doubted that they could. I had another guy in the podcast, Spencer Skates, CEO of Amplitude, who graduated from college, and he was trying to figure out what to do. And then he saw all of his friends just starting companies, and he was like white. Why did they think they can do that? And then he looked at people who we thought, you know, maybe or the smartest. He wasn't successful, and, you know,

if they could do it. I can do it. I've had so many different other stories of other people who may be read an interview from a very particular person who inspired them to do something they would have done. Are, you know, listen to a podcast. It's just interesting to see what it is that gets you over that last little edge to make you do something that you otherwise would never have tried.

Yeah, I think my my favorite example in that regard is is our mutual friend Patrick McKenzie, who I think if I'm remembering the story right, he read a forum post about a guy selling skeet shooting software was like, You can write software and sell it to people for money, and that's not illegal and like, of course, it's not, but but it's for people who have no experience doing this. A lot of the things that seemed like they should be common sense. Or you wouldn't have to say it really helps to hear from somebody that, yes, this is possible. Yes, I'm doing it right now. And yes, it's working. So look

into it. Yeah, and I've got obsessed with this. Read this book SAPIENs last year, And I've been obsessed with this idea of, you know, society. Every society tells stories to people on all of us tell stories to ourselves, and we're extremely gullible. We took the believe whatever stories society is telling us in the stories we tell ourselves, even if they're not necessarily, really. And so this persistent story of I'm not good enough to start a business or I don't know how to start a business or I could never achieve this thing is something that everyone has to get over at some point in time, even if you just get over it on accident by falling into a business there a situation when you're in over your head and you have to deal with it. Kind of like you did when you when you started at your company and everyone else was an MBA and you were coming from a place of no real business knowledge whatsoever.

Yeah, SAPIENs is such

a great, but I love it. Glad you. Yeah, it's a really good

one. Yeah, I think in that he calls it Ah, shared fiction. One of my favorite parts of that book is Ah, he was actually using businesses corporations as an example of a shared fiction. There's no one thing in the world that you can point to and say This is the business. It's an interconnection of relationships and systems and processes that exists in a very real way but exists primarily in the minds of people in the world. It's a fascinating way of looking at

it exactly, and everyone comes together to sort of believe in this the shared myth and people could end up doing some great things together. But let's get back to the topic of you writing the personal MBA insurance have asked you from a psychological perspective. How do you think you could do this? But from a practical perspective, I don't even know what you would even start with writing a book this ambitious. For example, you ended up saying there are 54 parts to every business, and those are value creation, discovering what people need or want and then creating it marketing, attracting attention and building demand for what you've created. Sales. Turning prospective customers in the paying customers, value delivery, giving your customers what you promised and ensuring that they're satisfied and finance bringing in enough money to keep going and make your efforts worthwhile. So those are the five parts of every business was never a time we thought there might be. Six are seven parts. Yet every business You just weren't sure how to boil it down over some of the toughest calls you had to make to write this book.

Oh, my gosh. So a lot of it was where the boundaries of these concepts like, What am I going to call, like one isolated unit of concept that people need to know? Um, so that list, I think it ended up being 242 150 discreet items that I chose, and that was down from a list of somewhere between three and 400 G's. It's been a while, so I don't remember. But it was. It was a big list that I had to pare down. Part of it was based on how he was writing about it. So all all of these ideas in the personal MBA are very short. It's usually just a couple 100 words, but because I had so many of them,

I didn't know this before. I started writing. But commercial publishers tend to have ranges of word count. Where, um if a book is too big, it either becomes very difficulty or uneconomical to print and so personal MBA end up being I think it was 450 pages somewhere around there, and that was really bumping up against the limit of like, okay, anymore. And and we need to cut. From a logistics standpoint, the actual drafting process was extremely difficult for personal N b A. And and I think part of that waas the topic and how it was approaching it end the other part? Well, yeah, So the topic and how is approaching it?

I had never written a book before, so this is all new territory, and I was figuring out, as as I went along, but I didn't know what form the book and needed to be in order to do what I wanted it to do. And so I went through. The thing was nine or 10 drafts of personal MBA before I hit on the format that ended up working. And these were substantial, like, let's throw it away and start all over again kinds of drafts

and How long did this take to go from from like, you know, your first draft to finally you've got it in the form that you want.

Yeah, the the entire drafting process was two years of full time work.

That's just it's

a lot of work. Yeah, and and I can't tell like I don't Part of it was definitely the topic, but part of it is, I think, how my mind tends to write these sorts of things in general. So I went through the same process on my second book, and I'm writing my third book right now, and I'm going through the same process. So there's just a certain amount of you know what you want to say and why? What? You don't know how to see it in a way that's going to make sense to someone who is not you. And so for me, trying to get their involves a lot of let's draft it, see if it works, show it to other people, get some notes,

refine, refine, refine and then the first couple of attempts are probably not going to work. And that's okay. You just kind of build that into the expectation of what the process is going to look like and trying to get too discouraged when it doesn't work.

I thought toe a few guests in the past about the efficacy of advice itself. Namely, that there are things you can tell people over and over again until your blue in the face, and they still won't listen to. You really understand what you're saying until they go out and discover what you mean the hard way, but making their own mistakes. How much do you think that's true versus Do you think? Really, Any idea could be communicated in to talk to somebody peeling through. Where is if you just find the right way to say it?

I think you can explain to people in a way that they will understand it, and it might short cut it a little bit. And I think most of that is in avoiding common mistakes. So you know for, for example, if you're building a software company there, there's an entire list of mistakes that you can make in doing that, and knowing what some of those pitfalls are in advance is extremely valuable. It helps you remove potentially years of wasted effort in frustration. But I think the key is no matter how much material or advice or mentorship you have, nothing can remove 100% of the uncertainty in the ambiguity and the variability that is inherent in the process of making something new. You just can't get rid of it. If somebody could, that would basically be a magic money machine. And, ah,

that would be also, of course, that

I would love that. But the uncertainty and ambiguity is inherent in the process of creating something. And so no matter how much advice you you remember, pay attention to or take, there's always going to be that remaining 90% of things that

you just have to figure out for yourself. So in your book, you spend a lot of time defining certain very core terms and kind of describing how they work in a general way. That's epochal to pretty much any business. For example, with marketing, you talk about there being two parts to marketing, getting people to know that your offer exists and getting the same people interested and actually purchasing your offer. That's such a sensible way to define it. And yet every other business book that I've read is either neglected to define marketing at all, or they just have a very fuzzy, ill defined kind of description of it. Why is that? Why is it the case that before the personal N B. A. Was tough for me to find, like a single, accessible book that put a definition to so many of these terms?

I, I don't know. It still baffles may. Sometimes I think one of the things that doesn't really work out in favor of clarity and simplicity when it comes to these types of materials is actually who writes them in the first place. So a lot of business books are either written by very successful business people who have made their name in their fortune doing some very specific thing, being the CEO of a large company or we're starting a startup that's valued at a $1,000,000,000. You know, pick, pick your achievement. Those folks tend to write about what they know and what worked for them in their case, and in a lot of instances, the claim universality where that universality may not exist. So that's one big drawback. The other is, um, a lot of business books are written by academics, so people who spend more time doing research in an academic setting or teaching students but not necessarily applying what they're writing about to practical situations.

And I think in both instances there is a desire to sound smart, like the complexity of thoughts is a way to signal the complexity of their sophistication as a business person, whereas an academic and I think both of those trends very natural human impulses, both of them. But I think that lends itself to business books being way more complicated and obtuse than they really need to be. So I think if I had any advantage in writing, it was that I was really willing to go back to the absolute bare essentials of the topic. So let's not take anything for granted. Let's define everything we're talking about from the ground up, but also like not, ah, how to put it not being too concerned about sounding smart. So, yeah, let's talk about business in its most elemental form. Let's talk about marketing absolute essentials of what you need to do and not get really caught up in fancy, complicated terms. That sound interesting but don't really convey a lot of information.

That sounds like something that a lot of people might have to try very hard to do and that I think I would have to try very hard to do if I were in your shoes writing a book, especially if you're writing something that you think, Ah, lot of smart people are going to read and you want to come off your best because people are going to be judging you for your writing. They're all sorts of psychological issues with Okay, well, what can I do that self serving, and that helps me look good? What can I do that might ultimately be self serving? Because I will have written a good book, but in the short term might not make me look smart as I would like to. Yeah, and I found that not only do people want Teoh give advice that sounds particularly smart, but also I think people tend to err on the side of giving advice that's new. That's novel or interesting rather than advice. That's useful because people tended, for whatever reason, just ignore useful advice. That's that seems

a little bit boring. Absolutely It's funny you mention that one of the books that I am working on slowly in the background is actually a book that that is provisionally titled Boring Advice. And it's about all of those things that are extremely useful and we know they work, but nobody pays attention to because they sound really boring. Yeah, so is so. Yeah, there's there's definitely an impulse to Let's talk About and pay attention to the new sexy thing that sounds awesome. While ignoring all of the fundamentals that account for 90 plus percent of of your efficacy

in an area. How do you plan to get over the hump of people not wanting to read your book on boring advice? Because it's boring.

I haven't figured that out. Yeah, I'll let you know. But yeah, the whole like let's optimize for interesting nous and sophistication that that's where all of these buzz words come from. It's a way of signaling. I I'm a smart, sophisticated operator in this particular area and and also that you're a member of an in group. I'm part of the collection of people that know a specific area, and it's it's such a part of human communication that it's very, very difficult to take a step back and say, OK, let's intentionally not do this here. Let's optimize for being writing or saying something that that is true, that is useful on that is clear and that's it.

So you read Ah, a tremendous number of books to prepare yourself for your job and also to do research for writing the personal being and your blood as well. And you mentioned earlier reading books where people would write about, for example, their experience being the CEO of some company or other and assuming that their experience was generalize, double and useful to everyone else. Or or there would be, you know, in academic writing about theory and that maybe falsely assumed that that theory would be useful in practice. Are there any books in particular that sort of highly praised by? You know, people in the business community are start up land that you found to be tremendously overrated are the opposite books that you came across that no one's really talking about, but that were extremely well written and useful.

Oh, my gosh. Yes! Okay. So, actually, if folks are curious, I have ah list of my vacations. If you want to dig deep into a particular topic at personal MBA dot com, there's ah recommended reading list. That's the current like if you're going to read a couple books about a topic, here is the place to start in terms of, um, things that really I didn't find value, and I'll speak more in terms of category than specific individuals. But usually memoir ish books by CEOs I would just skip entirely. There might be an idea or two that are interesting,

but but it's not the kind of useful that you can't get from another, more topic specific book. I think the books that for business, for people who are interested in business, the categories of books that tend to be overlooked in a way that's not respective of how useful they are is ah so cognitive psychology and systems and engineering books. You can learn a lot about value creation, marketing and sales by reading psychology books. They're so something like influenced by Robert Sheldon, E. Favorites. Such

a great book, a book

just that whole idea of cognitive heuristics and by a seats, which is a relatively recent development. Academically speaking, you can anticipate so many things about how to market how to sell, how to manage people, how to negotiate by reading something that's not a business book. It's a psychology book, same thing with with, like books like, Um, How to Win Friends and influence people, which most people blow off because they think it sounds really corny and cheesy and manipulative. Know there's a lot of good psychology in there. Same thing with with books like Like Crucial Conversations by. Ah, was that Carry Paterson and a group of collaborators? I think it's four authors there just how to talk with people in a way that's effective in,

instead of having to have a difficult conversation and then walls and barriers being put up all around because you're not being very skillful and how you're communicating information. The same thing goes for, um, for systems books. So I think one of the big advantages that programmers and engineers have in businesses they're in business in general is that we've been trained to think about systems as a primary concern instead of something that you add to the business after you're already having major issues that need to be addressed. All sorts of things become easier when you're thinking in terms of process from the beginning, and you can build the necessary process into the business without having to blow everything up and start again. And so some general systems theory books like Thinking in Systems by Danela Met Meadows. They're just fantastic.

Yeah, I like that you mentioned systems and engineering. I was just watching a kind of a conversation the other day between Mark and Greece and thing Chris Dixon. And they're talking about this dichotomy between teaching people with business skills on Silicon Valley. Had a code versus teaching people with programming abilities. How to start a business and they were both on the side of the ladder is much better. You could you could take someone's got, like, these complex engineering skills and teach them how to sort of business at least the fundamentals in a pretty short amount of time. I'm pretty confident that I could give somebody a copy of the personal MBA and they could know nothing about business and read the book that you wrote and come away knowing like 99% of the things that they need to learn before starting in the rest. They could just learn on the job as a programmer yourself. How do you feel about your chances? It's starting a successful online business and the modern area. As somebody who has programming abilities versus somebody who doesn't.

I think it's way better to start with some type of hard core skill. Whether that's designed programming engineering law, you know, some some type of topic specific thing and then add business knowledge on top of it than to start with business knowledge and try to add a hard skill on top of it. It's way easier when you already have something valuable that you can deliver provide to people,

yeah, told angry.

I think it's the kind of thing where um and programming it is such a versatile skill. And being able to look at the business as a system is a thing that you can learn how to do in a very short period of time. That, um, I think even folks who don't necessarily have programming background, but our ableto learn how to think on a systems level. Actually, the funny story I have, ah, longstanding advise e. He's a actually started as a playwright so comes from a very creative background and found himself in a marketing job. Had all of the classic systems and processes and all the stuff. It sounds boring. It sounds not very creative. It feels very constraining. I don't know if I want to do that kind of visceral response toe. Let's let's add some,

some orderto what you're doing. I had worked with them for a while and he read the personal MBA and really got serious about implementing all of the systems and process stuff. So basically, the back third of the book is is all systems process concepts. And so he was working in marketing at a ah, what was essentially a financial firm and had always wanted to start something on the side. But he decided that OK, if I'm gonna work this job, I am going to do it as efficiently as I possibly can. The outcome of that of that investment was he figured out how to do all his work in about half the time and negotiated with his manager to keep paying him his same salary. But on Lee have to come in half the time cause he was delivering the results that they were looking for. And he had half of his week back to go to all of the creative stuff that he wanted to do without worrying about the financial aspects of doing it. It was all like, How can I be very efficient with my time and how? How can I make what I'm doing? How can I transfer that from just a one off process where I have to redefine what I'm doing every time I'm doing it to?

Okay, what are the parameters? What's the procedure? Here's how I'm gonna go about doing this. This is what the end result looks like. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam Done.

You mentioned also that a big part of businesses psychology, that people are sort of the underrate the importance of these cognitive psychology books and the learnings that we've picked up of the past few decades in that area. And I think that rings very true. If you think about business, it's really a lot of it is just understanding and applying human psychology at scale. Understanding how we discover new things is people in the modern age. What causes us to adopt some new things, not others. What messages resonate with large numbers of people etcetera on. You discover very cool things. Like people are primarily driven by. There needs to do things like, say, solve a problem. Yep. Eso what's cool about that? You know, human psychology is human psychology everywhere all the time meeting the lessons that you learned in business are applicable everywhere else. Are there any fundamental truths that you've learned about in business that you've applied to other parts of your life?

In what way?

Um, so good example might be we were talking before the episodes started that you are doing aikido and he traveled to San Francisco Teoh Tendon Aikido conference. Is there any way in which the you know the things that you're learning in business help you become better at aikido? Are they totally separate areas that are unrelated?

Oh, no. So it actually goes both ways so you can apply business things to other topics, and you can apply what you learn from other topics to business. Aikido was interesting because one of the reasons that I started doing it was I'm not the most naturally coordinated person you're ever gonna meet in your life and Taquito is theory. Technical and and small Changes in balance have really huge effects being able to the first time you you're trying to do aikido and you're watching somebody really good trying to figure out what it is they're doing the first time you watch somebody, it just looks like magic. They step this way and they put their hands up in the other person, falls to the ground and like That's really cool, but you have no idea how to do that. And so being able to look at a compass of were almost doing the the the systems and process thing, but in reverse, right? So looking at a complex set of steps and being able to break it down and compartment mental, eyes it and figure out OK, here's how what starts and then it goes into this part, and then it goes into this part,

and this is what the end looks like. That's a very useful, fundamental skill that applies to pretty much everything. So much so that that's actually the topic of my second book, The 1st 20 Hours, which is a book about how to learn new skills the same type of thing that you would use to analyze a business. Here's how it works. Here's how it creates value. Here's how you market. Here's how you sell. Here's how you deliver it. Here's how you manage your finances. You can use that same type of breakdown to learn pretty much anything and and learn in a very short period of time. Now the individual skills can actually teach you a lot about business, too. So,

for example, one of the lessons that I've been learning is when things tend to get difficulty, the human response is to tighten up, so your breathing is shallow. Where your muscles get tense, you are spending a lot of time thinking about what it is you're supposed to be doing, and you you spend a lot less time actually doing it right. And so aikido has for me has has been very valuable, primarily in terms of learning how to relax, under pressure to notice when the stress levels getting low, high and all of the natural physiological responses to that stress are starting to trigger and to be able to notice it in the moment and take steps to prevent it from happening or release it to get back to that point where you are flexible and adaptable and able to candle changes as they come in.

What about to your career as an author? So you essentially make a living by by writing at this point, and a lot of people don't consider, you know, writing to be a business pursuit. But it's the same fundamental situation. Is starting any other business, right? You've got a product that provides value to customers. Need to deliver it to them, etcetera, etcetera. How have you applied some of the things that you write about in some of the things that you've read about to your career as an author?

No. Oh, yes. Oh, so publishing is absolutely a business, and it really helps I. It's actually kind of funny because most people who go about publishing a book don't approach it as a business. Not at all. It's a creative project. Unfortunately, that results in a lot of particularly first time authors not being very sophisticated about how they negotiate and sell what the thing that they have spent months, sometimes years creating, they tend to make very bad deals, and it's because they don't treat it as a business they treated as a zey creative endeavor. Or there's an incredible impulse to to say, Well, I want the validation of an external party,

namely a publisher, to say Yes, this is good enough to be published If that some thing that you're trying to get Shin deal part of how you get that is sometimes accepting very poor terms from from a business perspective. So even just going in to the personal MBA and other the other book projects that that I've worked on, it really helps to come into this saying This is not a creative endeavor. This is a business. And so if I'm going to spend my time building this line of business, certain things need be true. Order for that decision to be worthwhile. You can do so. It's a little different from software in that you can't calculate something like an M R or a C V. But you can say OK, if I want the monthly revenue from this book to equal X, then it needs to sell. Why copies in all of these different formats in order to make it worth it? How am I going to do that? What is my? What are the various profit margins between print and e books and audiobooks and online courses and all of the other forms that this book might take? The way that I think about publishing in In general, are you familiar with from insurance the concept of an annuity?

Know why don't you explain

it? Okay, So So essentially think you're trying to make an investment that's going to pay you at minimum a certain amount of money every single month until you die. I try to think of books like I'm building myself an annuity, So I'm going to spend a couple of years up front, hopefully making something really good. I'm going to market that in a way that results in both, hopefully a large burst of sales up front. But I also want to have a significant number of sales over a very, very long period of time, preferably until I die and hopefully after. And so thinking about it in those terms makes it much easier to make good long term publishing decisions. So a lot of the negotiating part of publishing it is what are you giving up in terms off rights to a publisher in exchange for some upfront value in terms of ah, contractor in advance or on the flip side, if you do it yourself, What are you giving up in terms off? Sure thing.

Short term money in exchange for potentially a very long term series of cash flows. And at that point it starts with some differences. It looks a lot more like, ah, SAS business. And so, just thinking through all of these things, like, What do you want the publishing business toe look like it informs what you write. It informs the types of contracts that you accept or decline. It influences the forms that the book can take or not take. It affects pretty much everything publish Approaching publishing as a business has really helped both of my books financially do much better

than the otherwise would. I think it's so hard for a lot of people to make that approach because, like you said, a lot of people come at book. Writing is sort of a creative endeavor, and the idea for them of injecting financial business decisions into that processes is anathema. And yet the publishing houses that they're dealing with our themselves businesses, and they have their own concerns in their own incentives. And so it's something that I wish you know more authors were aware of and it didn't find so like me, too, because it just it just comes back to bite them. You know, it's a reality that you can't really change and unless you, you know, sort of a shoot the publishers altogether in self published. But even then, you still need business knowledge, perhaps even more so than you do when negotiating with publishers.

Yeah, I think the biggest change, which I'm actually really excited about when I was doing the research for the personal N. B. A. I would find all of these really great books that I could not in good conscience recommend because they were out of print. And by all likelihood, people would not be ableto get their hands on one if they wanted it. And so publishing is changing in a way that I think is really great in the sense of it's becoming more more possible for a book to once it goes into print, in some form, to stay in print for the foreseeable future. There are a lot of authors who, for example, have signed a publishing contract, which usually this is getting a little bit of inside baseball. But when you sign a publishing contract with with a large publisher, you are granting the exclusive publication rights to that work,

including yourself. You can't publish it yourself. If you sign this kind of contract, you're granting rights to the publisher for your entire lifetime, plus 80 years in the US that's a really long time. Yeah, and what I've seen happen to a lot of authors is that the book does okay in the sense of, you know, maybe the publisher is happy that they published it. It did a good first run, but there's not a lot of long term. There's not enough long term interest for the publisher to make the financial decision to keep the book in print, and then the book, You might be able to find used copies, and now there's more likely to be on Elektronik version available. But for you know, the previous several 100 years of publishing, if it wasn't popular enough to do a reprint than the book would just disappear and writing a book is a lot of work, like Terrible.

Yeah, that's just tragic. The idea of somebody owning the rights to a book and then just refusing to publish it. I think any time you see a gatekeeper trafficking and prestige published through us, we're prestigious. We're the only way to get your book on the market. Go to our university, where prestigious were the gatekeeper between you in the professional world, it's Steve. Seems like a poor, a substitution for providing actual value. But I'll digress here. Let's talk a little bit about tech startups, most of the audience or people who are either working on our aspire to work on some sort of tech related business themselves. And I. Earlier I mentioned this sort of interesting situation where you could be an employee of a bigger company and work in a department like marketing sales your entire life, but not really understand how it plays into,

you know, the entirety of the business. And I think from the other perspective you could be, ah, startup founder in Silicon Valley, has raised a bunch of money from venture capitalists and do that for 10 years and come out still not really understanding anything about business fundamentals because you're starting only very specific types of businesses that didn't necessarily need to generate revenue or create something that people found valuable enough to pay for. So I think it's not a problem that only plagues employees but also people in and the start up world as well. So my question to you would be what are some of the biggest mistakes that you see, you know, the founders of tech startups making and how can they apply some of the principles that you named and talked about and personal n. B A. To do a better job starting companies?

Yeah, I think the first thing is definitely too. Educate yourself about everything about business, so So get that that broad, universal perspective. First, it doesn't take very long, and you'll find it useful at every part of your career. So in terms of value per hour invested learning something if you have any interest in start ups or entrepreneurship or business in general, it's one of the highest value uses of your time period. I think that the wonderful thing about tech startups in particular, is that they tend to be in the grand scheme of business. They tend to be smaller than a lot of other kinds of businesses, and part of the reason for that is is tech. Businesses have the ability to automate a lot more than traditional businesses have been able to. Essentially. Programming is a science of system and process.

How can we do something and essentially program our own little robot army to do it for us? Instead of hiring people? Tech startups tend to be much smaller in terms of headcount, which also is a huge opportunity. If you want to learn everything you can about business, the smaller the operation is typically the more exposure and possibility of exposure you have to all of the different parts of the business. So if you're interested in getting really good, really quick, figure out what all those fundamental parts of the business are, and try to make sure that you have exposure to every single one of them. Sometimes that is volunteering for a project. Sometimes that's a lateral move within a company. Ah, lot of of companies, including text, they get to a certain size.

Will Dio is usually called a broadening assignment. It's ah, let me go work on our customer support team for a couple weeks. Let me go sit with our sales people and see what that looks like. Any type of assignment or project where you get exposure to another aspect of the business is hugely valuable. The other thing that I'll say is side projects are a wonderful way to to make 100% sure you get exposure in experience with every single aspect of a business, because there's nobody else to do with, like you're you're responsible for everything, even just a little bit of experience trying to do marketing, trying to do sales, putting together your your profit and loss statement. Doing your accounting, doing your bookkeeping. All of those experiences, even if they're small and with with a side project, the sticks congee really low.

But experience doing those things gives you both an understanding and appreciation for all of the things that are necessary to make a successful business work. The vast majority of people in this world do not have that knowledge and do not have that experience, and so figuring out how to give that experience to yourself gives you a competitive advantage that is valuable, regardless of whether you work for somebody else or you intend to take venture capital and start a startup or bootstrap your own business from the ground and run it for cash flow doesn't matter. All of those experiences are the best possible thing that you can do for yourself.

I love every part of what you just said. Broaden your knowledge and start a side project where you get experience wearing every hat while you're at it. Like, he said, keep the stakes low. It's actually really fun toe work on something where you don't have the pressure on yourself to necessarily succeed and make a $1,000,000,000. So just go into it thinking that it's learning experience and try to do every job as good as you can. Anyway, Thank you so much, Josh, for coming on the show. I really wish I could have you on for another hour because they only got into about half of the questions that I wanted to ask you. But it was very much my pleasure having

you here. Thanks, Courtland. I appreciate it.

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