Focused - 49: Panting to the Finish Line

Episode Date: June 12, 2018

Family members with employment issues remind Jason about just how far he's come; David grapples with letting go of control and working with an assistant; and Jason hands in his resignation and participates in an "exit interview" with David.

David Sparks and Jason Snell spent their careers working for the establishment. Then one day, they'd had enough. Now, they are independent workers, learning what it takes to succeed in the 21st century. They are Free Agents. Welcome back to Free Agents, a podcast about being an independent worker in a digital age. I'm David Sparks, and I'm joined by my fellow host, Mr. Jason Snell. Hello, Jason. Hi, David. It's good to be back.

It certainly is. I hope you're having a good month. Yeah, I think so. Being a free agent. Busy time, right? Busy time for you and me both. Yeah, it is. With all the stuff that goes on in uh apple land right i mean that's that's uh you know we june is very busy it's a busy time we're recording this show right before apple's worldwide developer conference once it's going to release right afterwards but jason is going to be

up to his neck writing stories at that point yeah yeah recording a little early so that's right exactly don't ask us any questions about what apple announced uh because we don't know yet but wasn't that amazing jason it was it was great to see you it was great to see you at wwdc yeah we'll see each other there but and apple announced the invisible jet that was pretty cool i didn't expect that i did wonder woman style i apparently i saw it but i didn't even realize it so yeah exactly it's been at all the events we just didn't know it either way um so uh you had a note in the show outline about the old days yeah yeah we got a lot to cover this time but this is uh this is where i wanted to start i it's just a little story i heard from a relative actually um a couple of my

relatives about how they are um going through just sort of in an update of like i was talking to my mom and she was saying oh well this person has this thing going on and it was amazing because it was like oh you know this person he's at this company that he's been working at for all these years and every year about this time there's the about like, are there going to be layoffs? And are they going to transfer people? And is he going to lose his job? And then, oh, and then, you know, I have this other relative and, you know, they may be making changes and cuts and he may lose his job or they'll transfer him or they might sell off his division to a different company and then the rules will change and all of that and you know i've heard these things all the time like some of these some of these relatives work for companies

i'm just gonna keep it obscure work for companies that um it seems like this happens every year they are like and i don't know how much of it is that this company uh that that this one person in particular works for is just a terror to work for and it's like this all the time or if he's paranoid or if uh or if other people in their family are paranoid i don't know the that level of detail but all i can tell you is it gave me one of those like uh little jolts of adrenaline like oh, oh boy, like I remember the stress. I remember the stress as an employee when rumors would fly about layoffs. And I would remember the stress of when I was a manager who knew about layoffs or was at the end of my time at IDG, I was the person who was handed a number either of people or

of money and told to cut people. Like literally you choose the people who lose their jobs now yeah and all of that kind of came flooding back to me in a good way in the sense that i am so happy out on my own not to be a part of that and that's actually what i told my mom when i was on the phone with her was i'll tell you this you know i don't get a regular paycheck instead i've got all the other you know crazy stuff I do. But I also don't have, you know, realistically, unless they all like are out to get me and are coordinating behind my back to destroy me. That's not going to happen. Like, I don't have that anymore. And I don't think about it a lot.

But this just reminded me, like, there is this whole world where you've got constant fear of whether you keep your job or not and what's going to happen. And, oh, I hear there are going to be layoffs that I don't have to deal with anymore. And I'm very happy with that. And then separately, I had yet another family member who was in a hiring process for a job and that didn't go well. And it was another reminder to me of the fact that, you know, management has its ideas. And if you if you have your way that you view the world and what how things should be done, and management thinks differently, they win, the boss wins, because the boss is the boss. And that's another thing that, again, I have to make decisions that are based on reality and where I can make money and all of those things. But I chart

my course. Like, I look at the facts and I chart my course. And if it doesn't work, it's on me, but I chart my course. And that also hit home to me. Like, oh, yeah, if you're working in an organization and you think you should go in an organization, and you think you should go in one direction, and somebody else thinks you should go in a different direction, and they're the boss. Too bad, like you literally too bad. They're the boss. And that comes to the I don't think about this as much, but it really came hit home for me when I was thinking about it this time, that it really is so valuable to me. And I've also come so far now in the almost four years that I've been out on my own. Like,

I am so happy to be able to chart my own course and not have, I mean, my latter days at IDG, I was senior enough that I would try to chart my own course. And then sometimes I would be told I couldn't. But either way, you know, within the bounds of reality, of course, it's just really nice to be your own boss, to not have somebody hovering above you potentially with a scythe to reap you and get rid of your job, and to be able to make the decisions that I think are right and then just act on them instead of having to get the approval of somebody or compromise because somebody else who doesn't understand as much about it as I do has a different opinion. Super

frustrating. And I've been there before. So anyway, yeah, basically, I had a bunch of people in my family and extended family involved in things that reminded me how happy I am not to be doing that anymore. Yeah. There's really two issues when you're working for the man. The first is, is loss of information where you just don't know what the real story is. I've got a good friend that works in a small law firm and I was just talking to him recently. He was asking me, you know, if I'm still eating or not. And the, um, he was telling me, this was actually, he was telling me at his firm, uh, cause firm, because he's not the high man on the totem pole, but it's relatively small, and he gets an annual bonus every end of the year. And he told me it's funny because every year, the Monday after Thanksgiving, his boss tells him how things are really looking bad for the next year.

Every year, he gets the same speech. He says he can literally set a clock by it that the Monday following Thanksgiving, he's going to get a speech, how things are really bad. And, and in the two or three weeks leading up to, you know, the holidays, all he's going to hear about is how the firm's going to go out of business the next year, all kind of a setup for his, his small bonus that he's going to get. And then every year about February, he gets told how things are super crazy busy and they need him to work extra hours. And the problem he has, I said, well, what you need to do is you need to say,

okay, let me see the numbers. If things are going poorly, let me see, and maybe I can figure out how to help. And call their bluff, in essence. In a smaller business, you could probably do that. If you work for IBM, I suspect you wouldn't be able to. But it's that lack of information, being't be able to, but it's that lack of information that being kept in the dark. And that's scary. The advantage of working for yourself is you see everything every month and you know, you know, and that's great.

And then I think the second piece of that is loss of agency where you're in a big workplace. And just like you were saying, if somebody above you decides the direction we're going to go is some other direction, you're on that boat whether you're driving it or not. And if it sinks, you're going down with it whether you're driving or not. And one of the really nice things about being on your own is that if I fail at this, it's going to be because of me. It's not going to be because of somebody else. And I really like that. I like having that agency over myself, and I like having that information. And that is definitely one of the big benefits of this.

I mean, I think it can lead to more stress because you are entirely responsible for your future. But I think in a lot of ways it leads to less stress because because you know what's happening and you have the ability to change it. I mean, one of the things that have evolved with me in just making the show for the last few years is the way I approach and the things I focus on have changed partly because of the things I think about talking about here and, you know, just in general, more experience as a free agent. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. It's funny you mentioned bonuses and things like that. That was part of the churn that I always had to deal with too,

where there was this artificiality of the annual budgets. And I spent a lot of time dealing with budgets. And is it any wonder that I didn't like my job? And the budgets were completely artificial. They were, you know, you would, you would, you would ask for more money than you were going to get. And I mean, we have it all worked out. And I'm sure it's similar in other places. And then in February, I think our, our, our fiscal started October 1. And in February, they would come to you

and ask you to give some money back because there was always a shortfall after the holidays. And so, you'd have money basically left aside that you would pull out of your budget. And it was all artificial. And it was to allow the company to get back on what it said it was going to make. And then depending on how it was going, sometimes in February, they would ask you to lay people off. that was a good time to do it if it was looking like a bad year because what they would do is they would be able to get all of the um severance on the books for that year and they basically go down for that year and just say we're not going to make our number we're gonna we're going to go down this year it's going to be a bad year so let's let's lay off all the people

and pay them all their severance this year so that next year we won't have anybody on the books that we'll be paying and so you'd go through that cycle and then you know in in uh in june they'd start telling you okay now you need to start working on your budget and there would sometimes be layoff discussion for the next fiscal because if things weren't working out and this and that it was a treadmill like and then and then you get to you know aug and that it was a treadmill like and then and then you get to you know august and you would have the budget and then you would have and you might have to do layoffs and you might have to roll it out and it would just go like that and and on my own i know the money that i spend and i know the money that's coming in and i can manage

it and there's this huge huge amount of waste that is just not part of my life anymore. Because part of that is being in a big organization. And part of that is just having this kind of political budget imaginations that large organizations have that are not necessary when you're doing it like this. So yeah, it is funny when I'm suddenly brought back to, I get, it feels like, um, it's like almost like a minor trauma. Emotionally. I have those moments where I suddenly am like my brain starts playing back the feelings that I had that I used to have all the time when I was working at the big company. And, um, and I don't like it. I don't like those feelings and I'm relieved that I don't have to feel them most of the time. Well, you know, the funny thing is, as you were saying that I was, I was thinking to myself, I wonder if that is, you know, the holdover of the wounds and scars

you have from being in that position affects your willingness to bring on additional people in what you're doing now. Do you think about that? Uh, I do. I think my, um, I think my, what I'm doing is like, I'm doing stuff stuff that is that is the stuff that I'm good at and I'm not I do work with people right I do I do bring on people but it's not in like in my business but like I work with Dan Moore on Six Colors I work with Stephen Hackett on Download I work with Mike Hurley on Upgrade I mean I and I work with you on this I work with a bunch of different people on a bunch of different projects so I I do that. It tends not to be like Jason Snell Incorporated is going to bring on a worker. Although I could do that if it made sense and it would be fine. So I don't think I'm resistant to

it. I think I'm resistant to the idea of that all of the encumbrance of, um, of overhead of, uh, budgeting and things like that, where it ends up becoming this, um, kind of ugly process, but cause, and, and quite honestly, yes, I think, and this may be leads into what we'll talk about after the first ad break, which is having somebody who is working for me versus a partner who I'm working with. I'm doing a lot of working with people. And that is a little bit different than like, than having somebody who is working for you. And maybe I am a little resistant to that. But I'm also I'm just not in a place where I feel like most of the projects I'm involved with, you know, I'm bringing myself and I'm bringing my creativity to the to the party. And that's not something I can farm out. It would be, maybe it would be different

if I had other tasks come up that I needed to have somebody else do. Yeah, I want to talk about that right after the break. Yeah, all right. Well, so we will talk about you and your assistant and some other stuff after this word from Squarespace, this episode of Free Agency S brought to you by Squarespace. We are a podcast and we have a sponsor

and yes, it is Squarespace. Squarespace is the place for you to make your next move. If you've heard of it before, here's what you should know. Squarespace lets you create a website and it lets you create it easily for whatever your next idea is. You can create a website, you can have a unique domain. They have templates, they're award-winning templates, they'll make your site look great, you don't have to design it and it really doesn't matter what you're trying to make they've got ways for you to make an online store and sell stuff on the internet you could create a portfolio for your work you could set up a blog so you can get your thoughts out there squarespace does it all all in one place you don't have to install software or patch software you don't have to

upgrade server hardware you don't even see that there's a server there. You just use Squarespace. They take care of everything else. They have award-winning 24-7 customer support. So if you need any help, somebody will be there to help you out. They let you quickly and easily register a unique domain name that's a part of their service. So you can get whatever your idea is, you can get a domain name. So you can point people right at that domain name instead of having to go to sort of like someone else's domain. It'll just be whatever your project is. And all of those award-winning templates are beautifully designed. They will help you show off your great ideas. Plans start at just $12 a month, but here's the great thing. You can start a trial without giving them a credit card or anything.

Just go to squarespace.com slash free agents. And when you decide to sign up, use the offer code free agents, you'll get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain, and you will show your support for this show. Once again, that's squarespace.com slash free agents and use code free agents for 10% off. Thank you to Squarespace for their support. Squarespace, make your next move make your next website yeah so i have a problem jason and it's that i'm a control freak it's really hard it's really hard for me and it's always been the case when i worked in a firm and i had a secretary's

assigned to me i still did a lot of my own work because I just didn't want something going out with a dangling modifier, you know, it just, you know, and, and it's not efficient. It's not the best way to do things. And as I've gone out and become a free agent, it's even more important now than ever that I rest control of my time and not do every little thing. Um, so I've been really struggling with that the, uh, the last four to six months here as I've been trying to bring people on and, and there, there'sel or an Apple script or something, a lot of times I can automate things that I would normally offload to somebody and I can do them as fast as I could offload them. Um, uh, you know, and I guess that's not really a problem, but it does get in a way if you're trying to get any kind of momentum. And if you want someone to work with you, you've got to

have a regular amount of work that they can rely upon doing or they can't afford to work for you. You have to have more work for them. As an example, I write these books and sometimes people have a customer support issue of some sort or another. They lost their download link or something didn't work. And I have an assistant email account. I can refer these to off to an assistant who can by and large manage them. But then I also have a bunch of text expander snippets programmed that answer every question nearly, but not quite as fast as I can

assign them off to somebody. And so often I will just take care of it myself. And it seems like not a problem, but it just keeps going. You know what I mean? As those things add up, they really do pile up into a bunch of time. So what I've been doing is trying to pick some topics that I can get a virtual assistant to help me with. Proofreading and editing is one that is working for me. But that is, have you ever heard the saying, was it called just in time manufacturing? I think Apple talks about it, their quarterly results off and you're building your stuff as exactly like somebody says, I need a widget and the widget

kind of rolls off and it's like perfect in its ideal capacity. Like the work only occurs when there's demand for it and it's just enough to meet the demand and it's never more. It's like perfectly efficient. Yeah. And it's not sitting in a warehouse for a week or two. It's just, it comes off the assembly line into the customer. And I have been, apparently without really intending, I've been running a just in time word business where the words roll off the assembly line just in time to get published, which is not good if you want to bring in editors and people to help you get the blog site

posting managed. Usually I try to schedule like three hours on Saturday to write a bunch of posts for the week of heavy content posts. And when I do that and I can hand it off to my assistant, heavy content posts. And when I do that and I can hand it off to my assistant, the posts come out better. They get posted more regularly, but I just need to get better at making time for those kinds of things. So one of the things I've realized is if I'm going to work with an assistant, I need to manage my own time better to give that assistant something to work with in reasonable time and deadlines. The other thing that I'm kind of learning with this process is, you know, I need to do a better job of training people if they're going to do something for me. Because I'm so fidgety about the way I want things done, it's hard for me to convey them to people. I think part of it is I recognize that I'm

anal retentive. Like I want an M dash in the file name. Like I know I do, but you know, explaining that to people is a part of me that's almost embarrassed about how anal retentive I am about this stuff. So I'm, I'm, I got to get over that. And I'm, so what I'm doing to train people now is I'll, if it's somebody that's working locally for me, uh, when we have our meeting for me to train them, I actually run a screencast. Now I just run the screencasting software. And then when we're done, I give them the movie file and say, okay, here, you can go

over the whole thing again, as many times as you want. And, um, but I think I want to get even better at that. The repeating tasks, I'm going to actually produce a, a how to screencast on the way I want a post structure to be put up on the Internet and then just give it to the people. The idea being that if someone else comes in, they can use the same video. And so it's more work, of course. We always knew it's work to bring somebody on board. But if you can make it work, in the end, you get that payback.

But I have much to learn in this area i never had an assistant in all those years i was editor-in-chief i was editorial director i had vice president my title for a while i never had an assistant and partly that was because i was just i just missed the fancy time when everybody had an assistant and part of it was in in an era where you had um budget crunch and you were losing people i i could never make the decision to hire an assistant instead of keeping an editor on staff right i i never there was never a situation where i thought we have enough people working here that I can have one of the headcount be an assistant. So as a result, I never had one. But part of that is, is to that part, I was weighing

in, what would I do with one? And there were there were moments where I thought, well, there's stuff I could, I could have an assistant do. But I feel like in the bottom line, I would be like you, which is, it would be a hard thing which is, uh, I, it would be a hard thing for me to just let somebody else take care of my schedule or anything. I like, I can't really envision it. And so, um, you know, I had, I had, uh, help from somebody else's assistant with my expense reports at one point, that was kind of like the only thing that I, I offloaded. And that was nice.

Cause I was really bad with my expense reports and left them too long. But in general, I never had that experience, but I don't think it would have gone well. Yeah. And so I'm struggling with this. For instance, today, when we get done recording the show, for an unusual reason, I have to send out seven fancy lawyer letters today with registered mail and a whole bunch of, you know, tracking and stuff where in the old days, if I had a full-time assistant, that would have all been handled by that person. I've written, I've written the letters, but now I'm going to have to print them out. I'm going to have to sign them. I'm going to have to deal with the postage stuff,

which I've got more or less managed from home these days. And then I'm probably even going to get in a car, get on my fancy electric bike and go to the post office and drop them off. And my guess is I'm going to add like 40 minutes to my day that I could have someone else doing that. Now, if that was happening to me every day, uh, I would have somebody here all the time to do that. But this happens to me like once every 10 weeks that I'd have to do something like this. Um, so it's like, it doesn't make sense to have someone here every day. And so many days I'm not going to have anything for them to do. But today I happen to have some things for someone to help me with. And, um, that's part of, it's the problem of me having two different careers at once and, you know, different priorities, but, but I've really

got to get better at it. I do think that the stuff that I can still continue to improve upon is the stuff that I can have people help me with remotely, uh, like editing can be done remotely. And, uh, the legal billing now is managed by somebody remotely. So I have successfully offloaded a few items, but I haven't really made as much progress as I would like on this stuff. And I, and I'm coming to the realization as part of it, a big part of it is just me. And I, I think that's a challenge for me if I'm going to continue to make this work and, you know, keep my companies going and be able to continue to pay the rent, I'm going to have to get more efficient at that, that kind of stuff. It's funny that you mentioned mail. Cause that is one of those things where I, I could, I would totally do that except that the kind of stuff that i have to mail out like

that would be great if i could have somebody like can you box this up and send this and take this and all of that that would be so great and uh i generally don't every now and then my wife offers to do something like that and that's very nice but uh boy that is there there are there are always things right but that's the challenge is finding it in a way that you can kind of efficiently hand that off to someone. And so often you look at what's the cost that goes into getting somebody up to speed to do it. And I think that a lot of times you end up realizing I should just do it myself because the cost is too great. Other times that's probably not true. true in fact you may even be lying to yourself about it from time to time and be like oh no no no i can i can just send for me it's like i can just box that up and send it out but i won't because i hate it so i'll just leave it there and it stays there forever right and uh and so maybe in those cases you've got to be more honest with yourself about what uh what what help you need and that you actually do need it and it actually would be more efficient even though it seems not because while you could do it you're not gonna do it i think what i'm

gonna try to do is get somebody to come by the house like one afternoon a week and just start with that you know but i gotta find the right person yeah yeah that's true too well anyway that's a challenge for me i i feel like it's something that a lot of people trying to make it go on their own have got to figure out that balance. You know, the stuffing envelopes is not the way I make a living. I can't charge clients for any of that time. And so it's basically working for free. And when you look at the billable rate I charge as a lawyer or the amount of money I make when I'm actually working on books and productive stuff for Max Barkey, I'm way overpaying somebody

to be doing this. You know, I, that's the math that you have to keep in the back of your mind. You know, if you make $200 an hour and you're stuffing envelopes, you're effectively paying someone $200 an hour to stuff envelopes. So, um, I think I want to keep that at the forefront of my mind so I don't fall into this trap more often than necessary. But at the same time, one of the advantages of working for yourself is that if you have a day that's a little slow and you have to do a little administrative stuff, but it keeps the trains running on time, then just deal with it. Yep. Hey, we've got some big news to talk about, but before we get into that,

I want to take a minute to talk about our second sponsor and that's our friends over at FreshBooks. So to all those free agents out there, you know how important it is to make smart decisions for your business. And our friends at FreshBooks can save you up to 192 hours with their cloud accounting software for freelancers that's ridiculously easy to use. By simplifying tasks like invoicing, expenses and getting paid online freshbooks has drastically reduced the time it takes for over 10 million people to deal with their paperwork that's one of the things jason was talking about earlier of why i don't need an assistant because freshbooks you just type in your time and it tracks it for you that would be something you

would hire someone for years before but not anymore because freshbooks will take care of that they've got a new notification center that's like your personal assistant. You'll always know what's changed in your business since your last login and what needs to be dealt with pronto. They also have a really cool feature where they automate late payment email reminders. Another thing that you would traditionally hire an assistant for now the computer does for you automatically. So if someone doesn't pay, it'll send a little note to them and you can customize the note to make it as friendly or as ominous as you want to say, Hey, I haven't been paid. You need to take care of that. And you can spend less time chasing payments and more time working your magic

and, you know, producing more work. And if you're listening to this and not using FreshBooks yet, now is the time to try it. FreshBooks is offering an unrestricted 30-day free trial for listeners of the show. There's no credit card required. All you need to do is go to freshbooks.com free agents and enter free agents with the space and the how did you hear about a section. So if you've got like a project you're working on now with a client, just do me a favor. Just try free agents out with that one project. Send some bills out and see how easy it is to make beautiful looking bills and see how fast your client pays. It's really impressive because they get the email.

There's a button right in the email. They just push a button. They can pay you with their credit card right away. You get paid faster with a service like FreshBooks. So go ahead. Once again, that is freshbooks.com slash freeagents and offer code freeagents in the how did you hear about it section. And thank you, FreshBooks, for all of your support of the free agents. So we got an announcement today, Jason.

Yeah, we're burying it here in the second half of the show. But yeah, so I wanted to talk about, I mean, you said it's an announcement, so now I can't like fool people with what I was going to do, which is, you know, no, no, no, no, it's good. I think that fooling people is probably not the right way to do it. But you know, one of the things that we've talked about on this show from the very beginning is about the importance of saying no, the importance of looking at your workload over time and deciding what stuff to keep

doing and what stuff to stop doing. I'm reminded of something that Jamie Newberry said a few months ago when she was on the show about, I was just, she didn't even say it as much as just sort of like mentioned it in passing, like she had this project and she just stopped doing it. And if you listen to that episode, you can actually hear me say like, how do you do that? And she didn't even really have an answer for it because I think it's just second nature to her that she's just analyzing things and saying, well, that has run its course and I'm going to move on. And this has always been hard for me. It's always been a hard thing for me. I am a person who commits, quite honestly. I take great pride in being a dependable, reliable person. And that means I am a person whose life is full

of long-term commitments. Not only have I been married for nearly 25 years at this point, I worked at the same job more or less. I mean, I didn't have to apply for a new job for a couple of decades. I've had a bunch of projects on the internet that have gone for more than a decade, even though I was kind of the only person pushing them forward at various points. And that's like Intertext, the short story magazine that I started in the 90s and the TV website that I started in the sort of late mid 90s that a bunch of my friends wrote for. It's always hard to step away from those projects. I remember shutting down Intertext when I knew we were going to be having a second child and I'd already been kind of like trickling it down and, and, and,

uh, uh, the TV website was a similar kind of thing. Um, this is a long way of saying that I'm going to step away from free agents that I'm going to, I'm going to stop doing this show because I feel like I've kind of rung out every aspect of the process of me leaving my job. You and I talked about that a lot at the beginning. And of course, before we did the show, we talked about that a lot together. But I feel like I've talked about all of that, about the, I've gone through that process. It's nearly four years later. I kind of feel like I've reached a solid point where I'm kind of cruising right now. I'm doing a bunch of different stuff. I'm making a living. I'm doing things that are interest me. Issues do come up from time to time. But to be honest, when I think about them for this

show, they're generally just a different aspect of the same kind of issue that you and I have talked about for the run of this show in the first 49 episodes. And so, I would say that I feel like I'm in danger of repeating myself. That's the thing that sometimes people say when they step away from something and decide that they're going to make an end of it. I think the truth is more that I have been repeating myself lately and I know it. And I know that there's some new stuff in there. I've been really happy with our last few episodes. I feel like it's actually kind of a good thing to be going out with a few episodes where I felt like I did have some new stuff to say about this topic, certainly on an ongoing basis, regularly like we do on a podcast. So, I'm going to go away. And one of the nice things about this podcast is that I don't have to turn the lights out

like I did for some of my projects where I was the only one pushing it forward because free agents as a concept and a podcast is going to continue, right? Yes. Can I keep going? Jason told me it's not you, it's me. So that made me feel better. Completely, completely accurate. Completely accurate. I mean, I, I, what I just said is absolutely true. I feel like I don't have anything more to say and rather than keep showing up just to show up and, and like, I, there, there are a few episodes where I felt like I'm not really contributing. I don't really have anything new to say. And it, and it made me really unhappy to be

at that point. And I thought, you know what, this is a really good sign that I should just do something else that, that maybe this has for me as a, as a, a story of what I've learned going out on my own that I've reached the end of that. And so, it is definitely not you, David. I love chatting with you. We will keep chatting, you and I, but we may not do it on podcast form and not about this subject. But that's not going to go away. But I think that I need to step away. And so I will do that. So when Jason basically told me he's got it out of his system, it left me with the question, well, what am I going to do with the show? And I considered shutting it down as well.

But looking at it, I don't think I have it out of my system yet. I'm actually really interested in this stuff. I think the show still has more to share. And we've got a nice growing audience and I think good content. And most importantly, I feel like I still have more to say on this topic and it's something that I'm still evolving and maybe because I'm a little bit behind Jason or just my obsessive personality, but I'm really interested in this whole idea of working for yourself and making it work and making it go over time. So we're going to continue the show. Jason's not going to be here. We're going to have a new co-host. I'm going to announce that person in two weeks. She'll get

to meet that person in the next show. We're going to make a few format changes, but we're still going to have great guests. Hopefully Jason Snell will come back as a guest on occasion. Sure. Absolutely. going to have great guests. Hopefully Jason Snell will come back as a guest on occasion. Sure. Absolutely. And I'm going to move the Facebook group over to Discourse. That's exciting news as I'm kind of pulling out of Facebook. But we're going to make some format changes. I think the show is going to be good. It's always kind of good to take a new look at things. We're going to make some changes. And I'd really ask if you're listening to the show to stick with it for a little while even uh even without jason's excellent contribution i think

we can still bring you something good i think a show that has some that has a new co-host who is engaged in the material in a way that i um have have not been which is why i'm going like i think that's only going to be to the benefit of the show to have somebody who is ready to dive into this stuff, as opposed to me, who's kind of like trying to just get to the finish line, just, you know, like painting to the finish line. Well, I think in a lot of ways what's happened is you did it, you know, I mean, you had all these questions when you started, whether you could and you did it and now you're busy doing it. So I get it.

So either way, I think the show is going're busy doing it. So I get it. Um, uh, so either way, I think the show is going to be just fine. I I'm actually excited. I, when I reflected on it after Jason said, you know, he didn't want to do anymore is no, I really want the show to continue. I want to be a part of it. I want to continue making it and I want to continue sharing it. So I hope everybody listening to my voice comes back in a couple of weeks. I hope you love the new co-host and we're going to, I don't really, we haven't even finalized all the format changes we are going to make some format changes hopefully to make the show for the better and and continue to give you good content but the show will always be uh you know jason will always be part of this show even if he's not here every week and i'm sure

you'll be a frequent guest as we keep things going yeah i think I think that's a good way to put it. I was thinking, yeah, sure, I can be like co-host emeritus or something. But if I've got some stories to tell and things that I've been thinking of, I am happy to come back and talk about it. And that will be a fun thing to do. But I do think that it's important that this podcast come out every two weeks and have lots of things to say. And I'm not going to be coming back every two or four or six weeks, right? And that's why I'm leaving. But if there are things that we can check in about, then I hope to do that in the future. And growing up, I was a comic book fan. And I always liked the idea of like runs of comic books where you'd say like, oh, you got to check

out this run by this writer and artist or whatever. i kind of like that i'm in number one to number 49 and then with number 50 there will be a new run a new start there and i think that's pretty cool we talked about whether i wanted to like hang around until number 50 and it's like 49 seems fine you can start with number 50 with uh with someone new and with some format changes i think that's a good i like the numbering kind of thing it's one of my favorite things about podcasts podcasts totally don't need to be numbered but i kind of love that they are because it reminds me of of that of comic books and of the sequentiality of um of that medium and this one so number 50 a new start all right now before you leave okay i'm gonna put on my interviewee hat and uh i'd like

to get some parting wisdom from you because you have been on a journey all right um it's kind of ending here with mac with the uh with the free agents but but you know share with us a few things i mean we we haven't really asked you these big questions on the show um now that you've been at it now, is it four years you've been out? Yeah, it's coming up four years. It'll be four years. I mean, I was mentally out four years ago, but I was not physically out until September of, of, of 14. So almost four years. So how is your life better and, and frankly worse than, than you expected it to be? Um, I mean, it's vastly better. My commute is nothing. I get to be more involved with my family. I, yeah, I don't even know what to say. I mean,

it is better in all those ways. I get, like I said earlier, I get to chart my own course. I am aware of how my business is going because I see it all instead of having kind of like to hope that the wind gusts in a particular uh direction in a part of the business that i don't control which is definitely what it was like before where the revenue generation portion of the business was out of my hands and so i you know sometimes i would get like a bonus based on how well the company did and feel like there's literally nothing i could do to affect that so why am i even getting a bonus it's like it was very weird so so just having all that data and having my hands on the till and having spent i would say enough time now where i i feel like

the big shift for me in the last year has been a an acceptance of i don't know how to phrase this um larger i'm sort of taking larger increments of time in terms of what happens in my work and and and that brings me it comes from confidence and it brings me confidence and my point there is that i'm not really sweating some of the smallest stuff that you could sweat like this particular job or that particular job. I'm more thinking of the big picture of, you know, things are going okay in general. There are going to be little things here and there. I'm trying not to sweat any of those. That's actually been really healthy. I'll say something that's very strange, but actually has been very healthy is when I launched one of my key parts of my, uh, my revenue strategy was sponsors on six colors. And the truth is that,

that my web advertising dried up and it went from having sponsors every week to having no sponsors. Essentially, I occasionally have a sponsor, but it's essentially gone. And I gotta be honest, having no sponsors is as easy as having sponsors. It's a slightly easier because you don't have to the work of posting the sponsors. But my point was, I was really much more stressed out in the middle where it was going down and it was spotty and I was trying to scrape for sponsors. And now i just have decided essentially that unless somebody comes up to me with money and wants to sponsor the site in which case great please do i'm not going to sweat it i just decided i'm not going to sweat it and that was a huge i basically i said that's no longer

a revenue stream my revenue stream from six colors is the members who support the site i love them and they help the site stay up. And web advertising is not really part of that anymore. And that was a big thing. So for me, getting to sort of like a place where I'm kind of cruising, where I've got like, I'm working on these projects, and they bring in this revenue, and these projects bring in this revenue, makes me feel pretty good. So that's all. Even the loss of one of the revenue streams was actually in the end good because i i'm back to sort of like understanding what is what is happening with my business so it's all i i'd say it's all uh it's all positive i don't think

there's anything worse than expected to be honest i think it has gone better than expected on pretty much all uh pretty much all counts the details right like the the i'm going to start a blog and make advertising work and that's how i'm going to make my money that didn't work out but other stuff worked out and so in the end it was all fine in a way you've survived your first big pivot right totally totally and in fact have um one of the funny things that happened is as a part of that, I had to give some serious consideration to what I was going to do with my business, which, um, it's funny, you know, on my exit interview here talking about a thing that I didn't talk about. I don't, I don't generally like to talk about very specific business strategy on this show because I feel like this show is more about like, I always have wanted it to be a little more

universal than like literally Jason's business. But I will say, this is one of those cases where not only did I lose one of my revenue streams, but it made me consider like what I wanted to do next. And I made decisions about what I wanted to do. And that's what I'm doing now. I made decisions about what I wanted to do and that's what I'm doing now. And this came up because I was talking on Twitter, Neil Seibert, who does Above Avalon, which is a sort of subscription analysis site about Apple. He was talking about his anniversary doing a subscription site.

And he had some opinions about things like, you should do a subscription't, you should do a subscription site. You shouldn't give away. He doesn't believe that the hybrid approach of giving away content and having supporters works. He thinks that you should just make people pay and give them the content. And what I wrote to him was, I totally see what he's saying. And yet for me, I prefer this approach. And that comes out of me spending many, many hours considering why I was doing it the way I was. And if I wanted to do it with a different business model and deciding that

I didn't for various reasons involving my career and my visibility and where I want to post my content. And, uh, I have to say, even though it came out of a loss of income for me. I feel good about it because I did consider what my options were. I did make a decision, and it's a decision I'm happy with. Now, I might revisit it sometime, but in the end, I feel pretty good about it because I did think it through, and I did come to a decision, and that's where I am now. Whereas when I was unsure, it was more frustrating. Well, I do think that if you're going to make it work like he just keeps on moving and finding other places to go and you know nobody not everybody's going to have as an extreme an example as merlin merlin is is um a

special examinal example in that case but i think the key there is the flexibility and just being aware of that. And yes, it's absolutely true that if you, what I'm doing now is not the mixture of things that I thought I would be doing when I went out on my own, but it's still great. Yeah, I agree. And the, uh, the other thing I'd ask you is, um, let's wind back the clock to Jason of 10 years ago. You know, you're not on the verge of leaving, but maybe in the back of your mind it's on the horizon that yeah at some point maybe i'm going to get out of this gig and you know you know maybe follow the john gruber model or whatever it was at the time that you were thinking about um what kind of advice would you give that guy now that you've been out on your own a while well

the problem is that i think that i mean it's only been in the last 10 years that a lot of the stuff that we do is stuff that you could do on your own like the the one of the great things about and there are a lot of negative things that have happened in terms of the economy and jobs in the last decade but one of the great things about the internet and how it's changed things is that uh people like us who are making stuff on the internet have an ability to do that and build a business or a set of businesses around that and so you know i i guess that my advice my advice to myself of 10 years ago would be um continue to focus on the things that you like to do and that that you're good at and that you you have some unique skill at and um don't be afraid to be visible and to be seen um and uh and don't stick it don't stick in a job that makes you miserable

uh just because it is providing you with a paycheck and probably i would also say just because you have an opportunity to take a job that gives you more challenge and status and money doesn't mean that it's a job you actually want. That would be that would kind of be my advice, actually. But in terms of going out on your own, you know, it really would just be at that moment when you think you're unhappy and you need to go, you should just go. That would be my best piece of advice to give myself is that when I was unhappy in my job in, let's say, 2013 or 2012, that's when I should have gone. I should have gone once I was sure that I was unhappy and that it wasn't working out. I should not have, have fretted over it for two years.

I should have just gone. It's tough though. When you go home every day and you look at your wife and your children, it's tough. It is. But you know, what's also tough is going home every day, miserable, and they can tell that you're miserable. Yeah. Um, there's something to that.

And I realized that not everybody can do this and it doesn't work out for everybody. But in my case, knowing what I know now, that is what I would tell myself is, you know, you can do this and you will be a happier person on the other side of it. Well, I sure am glad that we were able to make 49 episodes in this first run of free agents with your wisdom and experience, Jason. We will see you back here at some point, but I'm going to miss talking to you. And we are the free agents. You can send us a feedback at relay.fm slash free agents and click on the contact link. Hold off on the Facebook group.

That's going to be changing pretty soon. We are freeagentsfm on Twitter. And I will see you with a brand new co-host in two weeks. Bye, everybody.