Being Happy, Agentic and Effective with Eric Nehrlich, Part 1

In this episode, Dan sits down with the fascinating Eric Nehrlich. Eric's journey from an esteemed position at Google to becoming a sought-after executive coach is nothing short of inspiring. 

Discover the rare blend of skills that make Eric a standout in both business strategy and personal development. Learn how a tragic accident prompted a career shift that now helps others reach their peak potential. 

Tune in to hear Eric's intriguing story and gain insights that just might change the way you approach your career and life.

Show Highlights:

• Discover how Eric secured a job at Google [04:57]
• How are business, strategy, and leadership connected? [10:22]
• Discover the superpower of simplifying things for others [13:01]
• Learn Eric’s journey of getting into executive coaching [14:43]
• Do you know incremental and non-incremental growth? [18:12]
• This is how you bring in innovation [20:11]
• Are you stuck in a cycle of limiting beliefs? [21:56]
• What drives bold career moves? [27:50]

For more updates and my weekly newsletter, hop over to https://betterquestions.co/

To learn more about Eric Nehrlich, check out the websites below: 

https://www.toomanytrees.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nehrlich

https://www.toomanytrees.com/book

Transcript:

0:10  All right, hello and welcome to this week's episode of the Dan Barret show. This is the podcast where I learned the best of what really awesome, really cool and really smart people know, as always, I'm so happy to have you here. I hope you're having an incredible week. I was super excited for this week to do this interview. So a little bit of background. This week, I'm talking to Eric narellich Now narrow like if you want to look him up, it's spelled N, E, H R L, i c h h n, e, H R, L, I, C, H, okay. Eric narlik, now, Eric, I have been a fan of Eric's for quite a while. Been a subscriber of his newsletter, reading his writing for many years now. In fact, I think I mentioned in the podcast, when I went to go do some research on Eric for this interview, I found blog posts of his that I had saved all the way back from 2017 so I've been following Eric for a while, and you may have heard my interview on this podcast with Cedric Chin from common cog.com now common cog has a members forum that I like to hang out at. They're super smart people there, and we were having a conversation on that forum about agency, which is something that I've been researching for some work that I'm doing, and so we're getting into it on agency, and I'm replying to somebody, and we're sort of, we have sort of different takes on it. We're going back and forth. And I realized, I'm like, hey, that's, that's that guy, that's Eric narlik from the blog that I've been reading for like, several years. So I was like, Hey, you're famous. Like, yeah, that's awesome. So I reached out to Eric, and I was like, you know, I would love to have you on the show. And he was kind enough to give me some of his time. Now, to give you some background on why this is super cool, Eric is an executive coach. Is dedicated to empowering high performers to become exceptional leaders, but before that, he had over a decade of experience working at Google, including six years as Chief of Staff for the Google search ads team. So of course, that has direct impact on my living, because I make living running a Google Ads agency in the rest of my week when I'm not doing this, he's a Certified International certified by the International Coach Federation as a new ventures West, integral coach. And here's the thing that's really interesting. There's a lot of business coaches, a lot of people that teach, you know, whatever, OKRs and the spreadsheet stuff, right? Super important. We've talked about that before, but Eric also brings in quite a bit of other approaches. He'll talk about parts based therapeutic systems. He'll talk about somatic awareness. He'll talk about these sort of holistic, integrated approaches to making sure that people make better decisions, that they're happier at work, that they're happier in their lives. And I found that approach super fascinating. I think it's rare to get someone who really, really, truly combines both of those different types of approach. You usually get people who, you know they gesture at one or the other. 

Eric is world class at both, and that is so rare. So Eric has a book. It's called, you have a choice. It's available now. You can find it anywhere you get books. Go find it on Amazon or whatever. It is incredible. I read the book. I took a bunch of notes for this interview, and I just came away so impressed by Eric, so impressed by the work that he does. I mean, just, I could not be more over the moon about this interview. So without any further ado, let's get into this conversation with Eric narick, which the author of the book, you have a choice as well as the author over at the website, too many trees.com let's get into my conversation with Eric now. All right, what's up? Everybody? Daniel Barrett here, and I am here with Eric narellik from so many things. We were just talking about this, like a million, million things. But the main point, the sort of main part you can go check him out at, is too many trees.com which is kind of like the centers you can get to all sorts of stuff. But we're going to talk about your book, which is called, you have a choice. We're going to talk about your course, all about becoming an effective executive. We're going to talk about so many things. I want to start though with your sort of entry into corporate life, like, sort of, famously in your bio, you sort of have this experience at Google. You were very high up in the search ads team there. That's, I don't even know if we talked about this, but my primary business is a Google Ads agency. So I was like, that's kind of like a connection there. So I want to, I want you to tell me, like, what it was like getting a job at Google at that time? Like, what was your experience? Did you know that's what you wanted to do? Like, what was young Eric thinking when he. He entered into, you know, what became an absolutely massive part of that business. Well,

5:05  I, like, I joined Google, actually 10 years into my career. So, like, that was, it was actually the pivot of my that was that my second pivot of my career. So I've been 10 years working at startups here in Silicon Valley as an engineer, Product Manager kind of thing, and then I was had the very common experience of working at a startup that went bankrupt. And the annoying part to me as an engineer was that the engineering team was amazing. Like, I don't just say that because I was on it. Like the other people I worked with were fantastically talented engineers. We were doing amazing work that nobody else in the world could do at the time, and we've been bankrupt. I'm like, how did this happen? I don't understand. We just raised $40 million and it went away. Where did it go? And obviously, we had a CEO that was completely incompetent and made very bad business decisions. So that got me, like, really interested in this question of business and management and leadership. I said, What is going on here? Because it turns out, doesn't matter how good of an engineer I am, if the leadership is terrible. So that kind of started me on this path. And a few years later, I went to Columbia to get a degree in technology, technology management, a master's degree in technology management, which is like an MBA for tech people. And the thing that changed my life in that course was one of my professors said, if you want to understand how executives think, you have to understand the money. And he forced us to learn P and L statements, lost statements. He forced us to learn how to read the business statements and the accounting and and I had never thought about the money, because I was like, Oh, the engineering matters. So I'm getting to your question, which was when I, after I graduated from that thing, I started looking for what's next. 

And you know this, this is 2008 I'd always heard about Google. I was like, but I was I knew I wasn't a good enough engineer to get into Google as an engineer, but through my network, I heard about a revenue forecasting role at Google and then the finance department. And I'm like, I bet, if I'm the one forecasting and analyzing revenue, I'll learn to understand the money, and then I'll understand how executives think. And so I applied for the job, I talked my way into the job, and turned out I was correct. I really learned how executives thought. In fact, because it was 2008 we were sliding into the Great Recession, and six months after I started, I'm standing in front of Eric Schmidt and Larry and Sergey and the entire Google leadership team, and they're like, what's gonna happen with revenue? I'm like, How the hell should I know tell us what's happening with the world economy? Like, oh my God, but like, I was the revenue expert, so they were asking me, and like, somebody needed to know it. So it was this very interesting situation where it got thrown into these very high level business stations, because to plan for the business, they had to know how much revenue was going to come in, like, how many people can we hire? Depends how much revenue you're going to make. And I was the guy in charge of forecasting revenues, so I was the guy they were asking. So it was a very interesting experience to get thrown into the executive room very quickly for a role that I didn't expect to turn out that way. And then, as you said, like that, then, because I would now do all the VPs in charge of search ads, I eventually turned it into a leadership position as Chief of Staff for the search ads team. So,

8:13  so I want to go, I want to go back kind of to the beginning of that. There's a, at least, I don't know someone who is on the consumer side of technology or whatever, there's kind of a stereotype, right, that the engineering people and the sort of corporate people are very different people, and that their skill sets don't overlap. And that's really hard to go from one to the other, right? So, like, if you know how to code, you sort of, like, are, you know, just structurally unable to accept the fact that, like, money changes hands for reasons that isn't related to quality or anything like that, right? It's like, changes hands for, yeah, essentially make fun of MBAs all day long. You're like, Oh, those stupid dead MBAs, they don't understand anything. Exactly like, they don't get it right. And that is the same, too, right? The executives like, well, the pencil pusher nerds like, they don't get or whatever, and they're all high fiving, and I don't know what they Yeah, right, yeah. So, but you kind of, you not only made the leap, but you were also curious enough about making the leap that you pivoted like you said, right? And we'll get to your sort of later pivot into your current career as well. But I'm curious like, Why? Why you think you were able to make that jump and kind of have a foot in both worlds, so to speak? Because it does seem very difficult. Do you think it's something in the way that you sort of see the world? Or, you know, we were talking about your your newsletters, yours, refer to yourself as a generalist, and unrepentant generalist. Is it because you're a generalist that you kind of are able to kind of grasp these different ways of seeing the world? Like, why do you think you were able to make that jump? I

9:54  have a couple answers to that. I guess. I'll just start by saying I'm just curious. Like, if I don't understand some. Thing. I want to understand it. Like I was trained as a scientist, and, like, I just see something like that doesn't make sense to me. And so, like, this puzzle, like the engineers did great work and the company went bankrupt, like that, I don't understand, like, how did that happen? And that it was just this nagging thing there. I wanted to learn what happened, and that led me down this path of understanding more about business and strategy and and leadership. But I think it goes back even farther than that. If you want to get all psychological, I don't know if you were open to that. Do I want to go all side? You know, we were talking about this, I want psychological. We'll we'll keep it, we'll keep it fine for the normies that are listening to this. So I grew up so I'm Korean, American. My mom is Korean, okay? But I grew up in a very white, Christian Republican suburb of Chicago, and so I was an outcast from the start in some sense, like, I didn't look like everybody else, right? And I had to learn to fit in. And so I learned very quickly, like, Okay, I gotta understand what is going on here. How do I learn to talk about football? Because that's what everybody else is talking about. How do I talking about, how do I, like, you know, I wasn't interested in football, but, like, everybody else is so, like, I guess I'm not gonna talk about science fiction, because, like, that's not what other people are talking about, right? And I learned to kind of fit in at a very young age. And it was, I mean, in some sense, it was a survival mechanism, like I had to do it to kind of get by and be accepted where I grew up. And so I think that's part of what led me to this kind of curiosity, like, I don't understand something. It's not just like, oh, wouldn't it be nice to understand, like, It's a survival thing. Like, how do I make sure I understand what's going on here so I can understand the rules and figure out what's going on? So that that allowed me to kind of cross that, that divide to engineering and business. And it's like, people make business out to be this very complicated thing. It's not. It's really easy math, like, it's not that hard. It's just, it's more a mindset of like, oh, I don't want to think about that. That keeps engineers from understanding it. 

And once you once I was like, No, I want to understand it. It didn't take long to understand it. Like, it's not that not the concepts are not hard. It's just deciding it was important for me to understand. And so, yeah, that's kind of, that's, I guess that's how I answer your question. Like I learned early on that understanding people that didn't think like me was important, and I learned how to do it effectively throughout my life. And then that became kind of my, my superpower of sorts, of just be able to like be the one that could explain things to both sides. Sorry, one more story here. Yeah, yeah. So, whatever. So in these executive meetings, and on my team of revenue forecasters, they're all these PhD statisticians who, like, are the ones that actually run into the America model. I was, I mean, I kind of understood what they were doing, but not really. And we beat a meeting, and they, the VP would ask a question, and the PhD would answer, and the VP would just look confused. They're like, I have no idea what that person just said. And then they would look at me. I'd be like, what they're trying to say is that. And I would simplify it into VP terms, but in a way that didn't offend the PhDs, because that's the key. A lot of people can simplify, but I could, like, get the gist of it right. They're like, Okay, that's the general. That's mostly right. It's a little simplistic, but he got it mostly right. So then, like, I became this translator between the two sides, between the the scientists, the mathematicians and the executives, because I could speak both languages of sorts.

13:16  Okay, so you parlay this, this position, into position at the search ads team, sort of head of the search ads team, or, I think you were VP, Was that correct? Your VP of No, I was, I was the Chief of Staff. Okay, beautiful, okay, like the VP is running it. I'm the guy. I'm this right hand guy that does all the strategy and operations and just makes everything run all right. And so around what year are you? Are you getting into the Search Ads part of Google? I mean, I've been working, I guess. I joined as Chief of Staff in 2012 and I did that from 2012 to 2019 Okay, so what is that like? Because what I imagine is a bunch of people rolling around in piles of money, because it's like so that it's interesting, because that's early enough in Search Ads development, where it's it's kind of like what I imagine, like, when I think about Google ads, it's kind of like what I imagine is sort of that era where it's like, you know, very different than it is today. But I'm curious, like, you know, as as someone who, you know, I run Google ads for clients. I interact with it all the time. I'm always on the outside. I have no idea what the hell that Bill what it's like on the inside, what's going on. So I'm just curious, like, what was that experience like for you? I know that ultimately, just to kind of, I don't want to spoil the story here, ultimately, you made this pivot into executive coaching, partially because you found yourself getting burned out by just the corporate culture or whatever. But I'm curious, like, just the experience of being in a team, or being on a sort of product line, that is, it's so influential, just on the internet generally, such a giant, like, sort of important part of that business. It's not like you were working on, you know, the. Or whatever, some part that didn't matter, right? You're in it. So what is that like? And what were the some of the lessons you took away from that experience? Yeah, I mean, to be clear, like, it was very successful, long before I got there. Like, right now, if you came in, you fixed it.

15:18  I was, I was the hero. No, um, yeah. So, like, they had already had like, a 10 year run at that point from like, 2002 to 2012 that was, like, just as you said, dominating. Like they were making 10s of billions of dollars a year, even a quarter by the end, but by the time I joined and like, it was so good, it was so such a stream of money, as you said, that like, it was very easy to be incremental. And so that's what they had learned to do that. And ran all these experiments. Like, Oh, we did this thing that improved this by point 2% that, you know, point 2% $100 billion is $200 million like, that's, that's real money. And so, like, it was very easy to make these little tweaks and say, we're going to be fine. And my job, because I was the revenue guy was, I was looking at the bigger trends. And so when I came in, I'm like, you know, 2011 2012 I'm like, we have built our growth so far on Internet growth, and I can see it's going to level out like in 2016 we're going to hit everybody's going to have the internet, at least everybody in mature markets. So where's the growth going to come from after 2016 the answer turned out to be mobile. By the way. Turned out everybody would start searching on their phones, which was not obvious at that time we'd started to experiment with it, yeah, and but like, it was, I mean, not just me, a lot of people figured out, like, this is going to have to be our big bet. And Google did miss a step in going from desktop to mobile, which Facebook managed as well. But a lot of other companies blew that transition, like, let's say Microsoft. So that was kind of one of the big transitions that I was present for. I won't say I was responsible for it, because, like, you know, a lot of people did it, but I was one of the people like hammering the table every strategy session, like, what is our mobile thing here? Because we don't have growth unless we figure out mobile, yeah. And the other one was emerging markets. Again, not the only one thinking about that, but it was like, if, if desktop penetration in mature markets is going to level off in 2016 we need sources of future growth, and it's going to either be mature emerging markets or it's going to be mobile. And so those were the kind of big bets that I was constantly railing on about. But yeah, that was, that was kind of my role. Was the engineers were great at COVID with incremental improvements, they're like, we can figure out ways to tweak this and make it point 1% point 2% point 5% better, which is great. But you know, if you're looking five to 10 years down the road, like you're gonna need to unlock sources of future growth. And so I was thinking about that, and not that I figured out the right solutions. But like, these seem like promising areas. Somebody should be looking into this. We should be investing should be investing money to try stuff in these areas. And I made the case for that, and we did pretty well on most of those fronts. So

17:50  okay, so let's we're gonna break the chronology a little bit, because now I'm gonna pull modern day Executive Coach Eric narellik into this conversation with Search Ads era, yeah, but obviously you're, I'm curious about this question about incremental versus non incremental growth. And this is this a thing that I it kind of weaves into some of the themes of your book, which is called, you have a choice, right? It's out available. You could get it on Amazon. Everywhere you buy books, you can find this book. We go check it out. I read it. I took a million highlights. I think I told you this. I have like, 9 million highlights from this book, great, but I often fall into this trap of saying, and I'm, you know, like most people in this kind of sphere, I'm ambitious, and I like to be analytical, and I like to have a spreadsheet where I track all my stupid stuff and blah, blah. And it's easy to get trapped into the idea of 5% growth target. I want to try to raise my revenue by 5% or 10% or whatever, right? And it's always based off where you are, and it's a little bit ahead of where you are, right? Neither do it. And as someone kind of pointed out to me a couple years ago, which, which really kind of flummoxed me, in a way, they're like, that means that your sort of targets for yourself, your ambitions for yourself, are always rooted in where you're at, and you don't know what you don't know. And it could be that there's a 10x sort of whatever it is, happiness increase, marital satisfaction increase, or whatever that just you don't know to go look for it. And if you're constantly saying five, 10% that sort of traps you in that sort of incremental progress zone. So I'm curious like, how you sort of coach people through these problems? Because the incremental approach makes sense. Like you said, $200 million that's a lot of money. Like you a 2.02% improvement on something is is a big deal, but at the same time, we can lose track of what might be possible if we had capacity far beyond what we have right now. Yeah. How do you think about that problem? Or maybe even. In your own life or with your clients. Does that make sense? No, it

20:03  makes sense. I'm reminded. I'll have to look it up. There's an innovation paper I read many years ago that, like, talked about innovation happens when you can't get there incrementally, like, if you can just step wise your way there, then you would just do that. But if there's like, Oh, this is impossible to do the way we normally do things, then you start trying new things. And if you've read books like, Good to Great, they talk about big, hairy, audacious goals. Like, that's why that's the whole point of these goals. If you if it's something you could do the old way, then you would do it the old way. So you have to set the goal that's so outrageous that there's no way you could do it the old way. So you have to come up with something new. And that's where innovation comes from. So I think part of this is, like you said, you have to just set outrageous goals for yourself and then be willing to take the failures to come with experiment and get to the goal. Like, okay, I have no idea how to get there, but let me try something that seems to move in that direction. And you know, you, for those that haven't read the book, the one of the one whole chapter is experiment and iterate, or experiment and learn. I think I called it, and that's what this is about. It's like, try something that feels unrelated, try something that's like a little out of uncomfortable, because that's where you'll get to learn, and that learning may unlock something that you didn't even know was possible. Yeah. So with my clients, a lot of times, I mean, lot of times, I work with my clients on stuff that actually it's pretty clear what needs to happen, at least to me, the number of times I've had talking to somebody for the first time on intro chat, and they're describing something like, so, and I'm like, so this is what it feels like to you. It's like, yes, and they're like, and here's what you're thinking. They're like, yes. How are you reading my mind? It's like, because I've worked with 40 people like you. Yeah, you're not one this week with this exactly. Yeah, you are not as unique as you think you are. So that's, that's that's kind of like, you know, the whatever. But the challenge with those people is less innovation and more, they need to break free of their own identity about themselves. They have limiting beliefs about themselves, their approach to work. So it's like, I get ahead by working hard. I get ahead by being the expert that knows the details. 

I get ahead by solving problems myself. And all of these statements are true until they're not. Because when you're running 100 person organization, if you're solving the problems yourself, and if you're all the details, you're a terrible leader. Yeah, so the very thing that got you here won't get you there. You know, the book got you here. Won't Get You There. Meme exists for a reason. So with executive coaching, it's like, it's always very clear where they want to go. It's like, I want to be a CEO or CFO or CTO, whatever it's board's board question of like, how are you getting in your own way? What beliefs are you holding about yourself that keep you from getting to that next level? And that's what I help my clients with, and that's what innovation is. Honestly. It's like, what are the assumptions we're making that we can we're making that we can break? Yeah, oh, we don't have to do it that way. Oh, if we don't have to that way, we could do this completely different thing. I mean, a great example right now. Like, I'm gonna preface this, like, I don't like Elon Musk's politics by due respect to technology, sure. And like, here's like, if we're gonna get the cost of spaceships, of orbital launches, down by a factor of 100 we need reusable spacecraft. We have to do it like, so we're going to figure out how to do it. And like everybody else decided that was impossible, we could never do it. We need triple, you know, quintuplicate safety procedures, and that's to make everything super expensive. Like, No, we just have to do it. So we're going to figure out how to do it. And like, when you see that booster rock come down, get clamped by the thing, it's like astonishing, but nobody else was willing to challenge that assumption, and that's what led to innovation. But he said the goal is reduce costs by 100x so this is what we have to do, and then we'll figure out how to do it, and we'll take some exploding rockets along the way. Yes,

23:36  you got to be willing to take your black eyes in the process. Yeah, it does. It does strike me that I can't remember where this, this saying comes from. But I think it's an investment. I want to say this comes from somewhere in the, you know, wherever the Charlie Munger verse, the extended verse, or whatever you want to call it, but the idea of, like, if it sounds like a good idea, it's too late, right? So it's like, the whole thing, where it's like, Well, it sounds like a bad idea. Everyone thinks that can't be done. Therefore, that's where the sort of the margin is, because no one else doing it. And if you could figure it out, that's hugely valuable. I'm really curious. So in your coaching practice, and I do, I didn't want to come back to how you got to coaching, because I think that's very I want to jump on that, that the other saying that I go to all the time is, like, if you want to go someplace you've never been, you have to do something you've never done. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Okay, I've never done that before. Like, well, you want to do something new. You want to get someplace new, you gotta, gotta do something different. It's just like, and then if I'm talking to clients like, you have a choice, like, do you want to do and try something new, or do I keep doing what you do it? So

24:44  yeah, it's very true, right? It's like, you you do the same thing over and over, and you're like, I don't understand why I keep getting the exact same results every single time. So my son, every week, he's stressed out because he hasn't done his chores and he won't, can't play video games on the weekend until he does all his. Yours. He's like, I'm so stressed out. And I'm like, every week we have this conversation, like, I don't know what to tell you, you know? Like, so, okay, so let's, let's actually go back to so you're at Google, and it at some point you decide to make this decision, your second sort of big career pivot, as we've sort of outlined it here, into what you're doing now, which is this executive coaching. You've got a course on becoming a really effective executive. You've got the book. You've had this newsletter for a long time. So I'm curious, like, what brought that about? Because I do think that many, many people, when put under a lot of stress or in an unhappy situation or whatever, if they're being paid well, kind of just suck it up and push through right? And you weren't willing to do that. And you clearly have this pattern of, there's a thing I need to do. I'm going to do it right. You are willing to sort of make this change when it is presented to you. So what was that decision process like? Like, how did you make the decision to jump from a thing that, I think it's fair to say, like a lot of people in Silicon Valley probably would have strangled you to take your job if they thought they could get away with it, right? So it's like you gave that up to do something else. How did you make that decision?

26:15  Yeah, I mean, like, if I care if I was optimizing for maximizing money, there's no way I should have left, like I was the chief of staff to a rising star at Google, like I said, he went on to be the general manager of all ads, like I was set up to make a lot of money, yeah, and money isn't everything. And I had, you know, I have my spreadsheets. I've run the numbers. I'm like, I knew what my number was, and I had, after 10 years at Google, like they paid me really well for those 10 years. Yeah, I hit my number. And I'm like, well, I could get more, but for what I already own, a house. I bought a Tahoe house, a house in Tahoe with my friend. So I was like, Okay, I got, like, a vacation house too. Like, you know, like, what am I saving for at this point? Like, my retirement accounts are in good shape. Like, that's kind of the flip answer, but the real answer is, I almost died. I crashed my bike going 30 miles an hour. I broke my neck, went over the handlebars, woke up in the ambulance and was in a neck brace for four months. And you know, that kind of makes you question, like, what am I doing with my life? Just if I had died today, would I have been happy with my life? And my answer was no, because I loved what I did at Google, but functionally, my job was make Google richer. Yeah, this is one of the richest companies in the world, and my job was to continue growing the money. I mean, it's good work. It's important work. It Out funds, all the other stuff we get for free from Google, all the search results, all the like, all that's funded by what my team was doing, not my team, but the team I worked on, right? And that was enough for the first eight years I worked at Google, but then I was like, after that, I was like, I don't know if that's what I want to be in my tombstone. And when I started thinking about what was going to be meaningful to me, was going to be important to me, I realized that like helping people reach their potential, actually was what really lit me up. Like I loved helping people get unstuck and figure out what to do. And like, that turns out to be, I mean, that was kind of my job as Chief of Staff, like, helping people get unstuck, right? I was like, How do I do this? As my job getting people unstuck? And somebody said, Dude, that sounds like coaching. Like, what's coaching? They're like, they're people that coach other people, like, on what to do. I'm like, Wait, that's a thing. I can just go do that. Turns out I could. And I yeah, I did some trainings, I did some practice, and I can talk about the whole transition, but like, yeah, once it was like, that's a thing, and I realized, like, I could do it. And turned out I was pretty good at it. I figured out what I need to do to get there. And then I then the other thing that really drove the final shift was I had my first kid, and I wanted to be around. And I knew I was gonna, like, as a Google chief of staff, I was not gonna be home. I was gonna say, you're not, you're not going to that house in Tahoe very often, if you're, you know, work in the Google search ads team. That's like, kind of I

28:58  actually was. That was my only escape. Like, I would just, like, get out of work on Friday night and just go drive and like, that was like, I'm just that sorry I spent my weekends. Was like, I am getting the hell out of here, but, but yeah, like, I have my first kid. I now have three kids, and, like, being able to manage my own schedule was really important to me during this time in their lives, when they were young. So okay, when did you start writing the newsletter? So I was saying, I originally found you via your newsletter, I'm pretty sure, because I remember. So we were introduced sort of through Cedric of common cog, where I just been on the show. But I was like, Oh, I know that guy. So I'd been reading your newsletter for a while. And I was saying, before the show is going back and kind of catch checking out, like all the stuff that I'd saved, that you'd written, because if blog posts had physical reality, I would be hauled off to an insane asylum. And, you know, whatever, my house would be forcibly sold to the state or whatever. Right? So the I have a lot of stuff in. There, and I was finding articles all the way back from like 2017 so when did you start writing the blog or the newsletter? Were you were you still at Google, or had you already made the jump at that point?

30:11  So the blog, I've been writing, the unrepentant generalist blog. Well, I've been writing on the internet since 1994 this current iteration of the blog has been updated since 2003 so it's 20 something years old at this point. So if you go to my blog now at the comm slash blog, or unrepentant generalist, yeah, there's posts going back to 2003 so that's been a long, long, long, long time the newsletter I started after became a coach and was trying to promote my my business. So that started in 2020 so you have been, this is the thing that I was really curious about. You've been writing, just like you said, writing on the internet. Basically, as long as you've been a professional adult, what role has does writing play in your career, in your business life? I mean, you could talk about back then. You could talk about now, but I'm always so fascinated by people who clear you clearly, very deliberately use writing, either for yourself or for your business. So like, what role has that played for you over the years? I mean, people like, the common trope is that writing is how you figure out what you think, and that's what it did for me. Like there'd be something I'd be like, wondering about, curious about, and I would try to explain it to myself in writing. My my current iteration of the blog started, actually, because you guys can't see the video, but I'm sure the behind my backdrop is like a huge bookshelf, huge wall of giant shelf of multiple books. Yeah. Very jealous, yeah. And so I was watching, you know, I was reading these books and realizing, like, six months later, I didn't remember what I wrote, what I had read. Like, I was, like, I read them, like, Oh, this is so insightful. And, like, this is before Kindle highlights and stuff like that. So, like, I would write, you know, maybe I would underline some things in the book, and then I would just forget about it. And so I started this habit of, I'm just gonna write a summary of the book when I finish it, so at least then there's something for me to remember, and like, I put on the internet, because, like, at that point, nobody was on the internet, so who cares, but it was really for me. Then it started expanding to like me, writing on all sorts of topics, whatever I was interested in. That's the unrepentant generalist part. And because this is the time when people were like, Oh, you have to, like, specialize your blog and make it like targeted to this audience. And I was like, screw that. I'm going the other way. So yeah, writing for me is, is more about my or was originally for me to understand what I thought and to track what I thought to like, remember the insights I'd had at some point so I could, you know, hold on to them like it's an expanded brain for my business. Now, writing is obvious, is my main form of marketing, like I write stuff to write about the insights I'm learning from my coaching, from my own personal development, I'm sharing them on my blog and in my newsletter to help other people. And I figure, if I help other people, they'll remember me, and then sometimes they'll ask me to come on their podcast. Thanks, Dan, there you go. See worked,

32:57  right? I bought the book. It's, it is. It's very, very different. If someone's like, Hey, you should read my book, and you're like, sure, you know, whatever. And then, or like, someone's like, Hey, I have a book out, and you're like, Oh my God, I've read 10,000 words of yours already. You know what I mean, over five years? I know you're a very thoughtful, very sort of sophisticated, as in the word I want to, want to, I'm reaching for, but you know what you're talking, right? You're not just a Yahoo. It was like, you know, like you you know your stuff. So it's like, of course, I want to read that, right? So just a completely different experience.

Hey guys, hope you enjoyed part one of this episode. Is just too good to limit to one show. Join us next week to hear the rest you.