I’ve been friends with Jonathan Goodman for a while now and it’s not just because we’re both bona fide “Jonathans” and we both still collect 80s and 90s baseball cards and we’re both super jacked dads who write – although all those things are definitively true haha.
I actually started following Jon because he was sharing so many awesome ideas about fitness, entrepreneurship and writing that after a while we messaged each other with a classic, “we should probably be best pals?” line and it took.
We’ve since stayed in touch and helped workshop and support each other’s projects, including Jon’s book that just came out: The Obvious Choice: Timeless Lessons on Success, Profit and Finding Your Way.
Unlike most books like this, Jon doesn’t approach the topics from a data-first perspective like he’s preparing a power point presentation for his future talks. I don’t like those books and you probably don’t either.
Instead, Jon wrote this book from his strength as a storyteller first, then found the stories and examples and data that would fit the main ethos of the project, which is that algorithms change, humans don’t. Sounds simple, but it’s profound and powerful.
After I read the book I had a bunch of questions and Jon was kind enough to do an exclusive Books & Biceps Q&A for us. You’re gonna love this one:
ONE
FINKEL: There’s a line you have in the middle of the book that has stuck with me since I read it: “Irrational Obsession Results in Boundless Energy”
I’ve been mulling over what it means to me about writing or swimming or other niche things that I love. What does it mean to you and how should readers interpret it?
GOODMAN: Right now, artificial intelligence is taking away every single easy job, every single easy task. Our work is going to depend on our ability to choose our heart, to deliberately choose what we decide to obsess over, to accept the trade-offs that we actually can’t do that much, and then to leverage technology to augment us and supercharge our abilities to do that thing.
What I have found is that there’s really only one or two things that my natural attributes and energies point me towards. Those are the things that I can go from good to truly great perhaps even world-class at.
For me I believe that that’s writing. Long form writing. Books particularly. For whatever weird reason I’m quite happy to drag my ass out of bed at five in the morning in order to write.
With a tremendous amount of energy I feel like I could become a world-class writer. With that same amount of energy I feel like I could go from like an okay to just good YouTuber.
And so when I say Irrational Obsession Results in Boundless Energy, what I’m getting at there is to identify where for whatever weird reason the miasma of your attributes and your skills and your energies that you’re born with your wiring points you in a very specific direction and you got to go with that Now more than ever where it’s so easy to build more stuff now more than ever you need to get great at figuring out what the hell you’re not going to do.
TWO
In an earlier section titled “Removing Recklessness”, you wrote another line that has changed the way I operate day-to-day. Truly. It made me think about the low ROI stuff that we can easily slide into. The line was, “It has become very easy these days to work hard on the wrong things.”
How did you learn that lesson? Where did it hit home for you?
Perhaps the most important skill right now in a world designed to distract us, where there’s simply too much information, is filtering everything that you hear as good information or good advice. Good information is wonderful, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s good advice for you.
The example in the book, of course, is that this person on stage talking about her amazing business with funnels that funnel into other funnels and then those funnels funnel into other funnels and all of these different other businesses that feed into each other. She doesn’t have family, she doesn’t have kids, she’s still young, she’s got tons of time to do this. Maybe she will. Either way, it’s her choice.
But looking beside me at the guy sitting beside me at this conference who was three kids under the age of five, all that I can think is that he’s thinking the same thing that I’m thinking, which is “If I’ve got to do all this shit just to make a few bucks, you’ll count me out?”
None of this is downplaying the value of what she was sharing, but it’s not for me. There’s a lot of people out there in our world today that are spouting very strong takes, and they’re not necessarily wrong takes or bad takes. But I think now more than ever you have to actually go one step farther and say, “Okay, do their personal goals and aspirations match mine? Do their family circumstances match mine? Do they have the type of business or are they talking about building the type of business that I want to be building?”
And if the answer is yes, right, that’s good advice. If the answer is no, then it might be good information but bad advice.
THREE
Let’s talk about when “1 + 1 = 10”. I love this. I’ve heard this idea referred to as talent stacking as well. I take it to mean that you don’t have to be the best at any one or two things to succeed, but if you can transfer a talent you’re decent at into a field where nobody is decent at it, suddenly you’re an outlier. Now you’re unique. The more talents you can stack like this, the more unique and powerful your skill set. Am I getting this right?
Yes and no. You’re getting it right in that actually it’s the range of talents, yes, and that complement each other, that compound upon one another.
What you’re missing is that you do actually need to have one thing that you’re like great at that you really focus on and then you surround that with a whole bunch of complementary skills. The nuance that’s missing with your question is that complementary skills are very specific types of skills, like juggling fire while domesticating feral kittens is pretty cool and shit but it ain’t going to do much for your success. That’s an extreme example but there’s lots of not extreme examples too, pottery for whatever.
What I identify in the book, I call them leapfrog skills or the most important complementary skills that you can add to any baseline industry-specific knowledge to explode your success in your career.
Things like an understanding of behavioral psychology, what are the common cognitive biases?
How can you make sure that you don’t fall into them and how can you use them ethically to your benefit?
Wealth, how does money work? You have to understand that, of course presentation skills, communication skills are up there and so I lay out five of them in the book but that’s the only nuance I’d add.
FOUR
I laughed when you wrote about Pedestal Tasks. I loathe them. People mistake them for mattering and announce entire threads about nonsense. You do a better job of explaining why. Where’d you come up with that term?
Yeah, I’m glad you like the pedestal tasks. The example in the book is monkeys and pedestals, and it comes from Astro Teller at Google X’s moonshot factory. The idea is that every time somebody comes up with an idea, they have to include the #monkey first.
The example they gave is: you have a monkey that you want to get to a site where Shakespeare is on a pedestal. You have two jobs:
- Try to get the monkey to recite Shakespeare
- Build the pedestal
You know that you can build the pedestal – it might be expensive, difficult, or hard, but you know that you can do it.
The unknown, the bottleneck in the whole equation, is whether you can get your monkey to recite Shakespeare. I changed it in the book to juggling fire – that’s a fun example than reciting Shakespeare, but that’s the idea behind it. So, that’s how I came up with that term, and in business, of course, you have a whole bunch of pedestal tasks and one monkey task.
The monkey task is: can you sell your stuff? Do anybody want it? That’s all that really matters in business – is can you make a sale?
The pedestal tasks are everything that we productively procrastinate with – things like buying the best recording equipment or AB testing images or trying to get trademarks or logos or any of that type of stuff that we distract ourselves with. Not that it doesn’t matter, but it doesn’t come first. Without the monkey, if you can’t make sales, none of that stuff matters.
And then, of course, I go on to talking about permission marketing and how you can get a couple of clients really without even having a business yet. The idea of generating an idea is how you get your first clients, and I walk through the whole process and proven framework for that.
FIVE
Last question, and this one is for all my B&B readers who are active on social media and see so many passive income bros bragging about what they say are Ws but with closer scrutiny is really an L. Leave us with the beauty of the Passive Income Fallacy. Put these fake “easy money” dreams to bed once and for all, dude.
This one’s just basic math to make $50,000 extra this year. If you’re selling a $27 eBook, you need 1,851 customers to make that same $50,000. Well, you need 13.8 (14) customers paying you $300/month to make that same $50k. What do you think is easier, getting 1,851 bad customers, or 14 good ones?
There’s this big movement today to try to get away from any kind of active work where you are really exchanging your time for money. I believe that if you need to scale, then that’s useful, but most of us don’t start there. Actually, a lot of the best businesses are businesses that are highly profitable and pay a lot of cash up front and don’t need a ton of customers. If you can figure out how to scale those (even if you’re scaling them with humans), like a coaching company for example, then it’s a wonderful company to own.
What I really do is break down this idea that you need to have a low-end membership site or sell really cheap digital products in order to make passive income. The best way to make passive income is the same way it’s always been the best way to make passive income – which is start whichever company kicks off the most amount of cash at the highest profit margin and then you take that excess cash and you invest it in the stock market. That’s how you invest passive income.
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