How to Enjoy Your Work with Jason Silver

george grombacher 0:02
Jason silver is a multi time founder of kids and a multi time founder of companies. He gets his biggest thrills from helping moderate employees and their teams unlock a better way to work. He was an early employee at Airbnb and started in the AI business years ago, before everybody was talking about it. He is a speaker and a coach. He helps busy people solve their hardest workplace challenges. His newest book is your grass is greener. Welcome to the show. Jason,

Jason Silver 0:30
thanks ton. George, great to be here.

george grombacher 0:32
Yeah, excited to have you on. Tell us a little about your personal lives, more about your work and why you do what you do.

Jason Silver 0:39
Yeah, you know, you covered lots of it. I think the whole why you do what you do thing is a great question. When I spent a lot of time thinking about of late, you know, I I’m a type A, I think I would describe myself. I know I would describe myself as a, as a, type A. I know there are lots of people like that out there, like I, I love to achieve things. You know, that’s been true of me for pretty long time, but I feel like previously, or in general, there’s this common misconception the whole like, you can’t have your cake and eat it too, mentality, meaning you can’t enjoy yourself and be a high achiever at the same time. You know, you got to give up on one of those two things. If you’re going to achieve a lot of stuff, then you’re going to go through pain that’s going to suck, and you’ll enjoy it when you get there, or vice versa, you can enjoy it more now, but like then you have to reduce your ambition. And that equation never really worked for me, and so I’ve become really, really passionate about showing people who care about being productive and accomplishing really great things that not only like, can you accomplish those things and enjoy it along the way, but you will accomplish more when you enjoy it along the way. Like, it’s actually the fuel from for more accomplishment, not like, some fluffy thing. Like, I’m gonna go sit, you know, in a mountain and meditate and, like, not get anything in quotations done, but I might enjoy myself a lot. Like, it is the fuel, not the fluff. And I’m super passionate about this message and getting it out there, because I just feel like it’s missing from a lot of conversations these days. I

george grombacher 2:09
definitely agree. I want to dig into all that. How many kids do you have? Jason,

Jason Silver 2:14
I got two, seven and four. Both boys. They are the best because they never stop moving.

george grombacher 2:22
They they are frenetic. I too, have seven, four year old boys, so I can compare notes. I can vouch on that deal. I think it’s very clever. Multi time founder of children. I’ve never heard it put that way. So, so good work. Where did you come up with that?

Jason Silver 2:38
Yeah, I don’t know. You know, I think people, people, kind of, you have to write a bio for these things. You know, I go to write a book, which is a thing I wasn’t expecting that I was going to do, and we need a BIOS. Are usually boring. Here’s a bunch of stuff. And I was thinking, my family is very important to me. All you ever hear about is I’ve accomplished this and done this and done that. It just was kind of, yeah, I founded a bunch of companies that’s important to me, and like the founding of humans, is much harder and much more important than I wanted to get that upfront somehow.

george grombacher 3:08
Now I think it’s awesome, and I appreciate cleverness and that that certainly is all right. So I appreciate why can’t we have our cake and eat it too? Why can’t I be a super high achiever and enjoy the process and not feel like I’m sacrificing everything else in service of that achievement? And that’s your experience. You see that across the board and or, what are the problems with modern work and the modern worker? Yeah,

Jason Silver 3:39
for that, we would probably need a podcast that goes for like seven to 10 hours, and we need to get like five or six other experts. There are a lot of challenges. And I think when you when you looked at the way that we’re working today, it it just for the most part, feels like it’s not working, you look at how many people are disengaged or burning out, or, you know, have changed jobs and now they regret it. You know, you might be working in a job that you, you you like, but still it’s, it’s taking over your life. And how do you get this idea of work life balance? And there’s always something bigger and better that you have to go and achieve. And I think these are, like the challenges. And having been in the fast paced environment of, you know, building companies and what have you there’s just this pervasive mentality of, like, enjoyment comes later. You’re doing the things you’re doing now to enjoy later. And I had a very challenging experience in my life that gave me a very visceral relationship with the idea that you may not get later, you know that might not come. And I wound up doing all this experimentation in my life to basically test this hypothesis, not intentionally at the time, I can look back now and say, Oh, I learned this thing about this hypothesis, but I tried everything differently in the way I was working. Like, is this true? How do I enjoy the journey more? And what I found is because we place so much emphasis on external achievement. As the measuring stick. We spend less time thinking about how we’re accomplishing things. And so the common rhetoric out there is like, you hear a lot of these things, like, work smarter, not harder. I don’t know what that means. I’m not trying to work dumb. It’s not on purpose. I’m not like, Hey, I’m gonna do this job. I have to do today in the dumbest possible way I can. You know, that’s not great. And then you read like, oh, find a job that you love and you’ll never work a day in your life. Cool. Go find me that person. Like, of course, I want that job, but how do I go and get it? And now I’ve become really pushing for this idea that, like, you don’t get a dream job, you practice it, but nobody teaches you how to practice right. Telling someone to work smarter, not harder, is a borderline offensive thing to tell them, because you’re effectively saying, Hey, dummy, stop doing this the dumb way do it smarter, like if I knew how I would. And the more time I spent here, the more I started to realize we we kind of confuse two words enjoyment and fun, right? And I, I’ve kind of been learning that, like they’re not to say fun is always enjoyable. Enjoyment is not always fun. And so I’m not saying every aspect of your job at all moments is going to be fun. That’s why we have the word work and we have the word fun. They’re they’re different. But if I’m like, let’s say running, and I’m at the end of finishing a marathon, which I’ve never done, but I imagine it would feel great. Probably the last couple miles aren’t fun. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t enjoy the running that you do when I think about some of the most enjoyable work experiences, it’s not like sitting and having lunch with George. It’s like that time George and I had this crazy, challenging problem, and we went on lockdown mode for two weeks work like crazy, figured it out, launched the solution, and felt great coming out the other end. Super enjoyable, maybe not fun in the moment. So how do you enjoy the process of work more? Since it’s the single biggest activity that we spend our time on, so you’re not waiting to enjoy it later, you can actually do something now.

george grombacher 7:09
I love everything about that enjoyment and fun. Those are similar but extremely different. Things. Did a great job of explaining it. I need to ask, what was the bad experience that you had?

Jason Silver 7:23
Yeah, so I was, I was building an AI company. We had raised a lot of money. We were hiring people like crazy. It was competitive, even though you weren’t kind of hearing about it as much. This was before open AI and yada yada yada. I had my first kid, young you know this, young kids, challenging, trying to deal with a startup at the same time hard. And I got a phone call one day I was from my sister. My parents were away on vacation. Uh, geez, but tough still to talk about it. But she went in for a regular checkup, completely blindsided. Doctor said you got to go to the ER, I think you need to get some scans. She called me up, told me what was happening, told me not to come. I didn’t listen to her. I went into the ER, I saw her, and it was clear. Very quickly. It was very bad, you know, she had all the doctors around her. She was getting all the scans really quickly, which sounds great, but when you are the most important person in the, you know, place that you never want to find yourself. You know, there’s something not great. I have to call my parents, who were away on vacation, make the hardest phone call in my life. You know, my my sister, their daughter, were in the hospital. I can’t tell you what’s going on. It looks like she has cancer. It doesn’t look good. The doctors seem very worried. You gotta fly home. And nine months later, she she passed away. And for me, you know, that was a big push to just, what am I doing? You know, she, she didn’t make it to 40. And the big learning over time was that I am way too over invested in the future and very under invested in the moment. And I understood that philosophically, but I had no idea how to put it into practice. You go back to like, the platitudes, be present, live in the moment. How do I do that? Like, what do I do? And out of just pure necessity, I was falling apart. Basically, I couldn’t handle everything. I was dealing with grief and a young kid and a whole lot of people that relied on me at work, and it was just like, I gotta start doing things differently, or I’m in a crash. And so I just went full. Tim Ferriss at work, let me tinker with every assumption. I’m going to work seven days, six days, three days, mornings, evenings. I’m going to try polyphasic sleep. Productivity. Hacks. More goals, no goals, only goals, like every possible thing, and over time, I. Started to slowly piece together a playbook of these things, you know, really are helping me feel better. And I’m standing here today in a spot where for a lot of years I had a lot of guilt, you know, she passed away almost five years ago, and the guilt was, I’ve never felt better about the way I’m living my life. How can it be true now than before, when my sister was alive, and so I didn’t talk about it. And now I try to talk about it a ton, because what I realized is I would trade everything I’ve learned to get her back if I could, but I can’t. And so instead, I try to share it, and it’s the best way that I think I can, you know, keep her memory alive for me, though it is, you know, challenging at times. Sometimes it comes out of my mouth like I’m telling you what I have for breakfast, and other times it’s even five years later, big breakdown.

george grombacher 10:46
Yeah, I appreciate that very much, and I’m really sorry that that happened. Sorry for the loss. Everything you said has really resonated so much, and we have a lot in common. When you tell somebody to just do something, it’s like Nike, that’s such a good slogan, but it’s not helpful at all. If I don’t know how to do it, then I can’t just do it. I can’t just find purposeful work. I can’t just do this. And that, that horrible experience, catalyzed you to go into the lab, for lack of a better term, and try all these different things and experiment and try to figure it out what’s going to work. And in service of that, and doing that, you’ve now created this, written this book as a how to a step by step, to help people to get that experience. Fact, faster or really, whenever they’re ready. If you could share one thing from the book, we don’t have that much time. What are, what’s, what’s a big takeaway that you said, you know, what people could could leave this conversation that I’m having with George with one thing, what would that be?

Jason Silver 12:00
Yeah, I think it’s, it’s, you know, I was hoping that one thing would be, I’ll just read the whole book to your audience right now. That’d be real enjoyable and age what? Yeah, that’s right, yeah. But I think it would be that, honestly, the idea is just like, you’re good, and by that, I mean, I’m sure there are some challenges, but we’re constantly fed this rhetoric of like, you have to become a deep expert, or do some amount of huge professional development or find some new amazing, amazing job in order for things to get better. And I think that that is untrue. I’ve seen that that is untrue. I’m proof that it’s untrue. I work with tons of people about it, and that’s why the book’s called, your grass is greener. Like the whole focus of the book is about taking the skills you already have in the job that you already have, and deploying them in a different way so that you enjoy it more. It spills over into the rest of your life. It improves your work and etc, etc. And I think the reason why this is so challenging for us is, again, because of the like, just do it like, I don’t know how I can hear you say that that’s great. And people, I can picture them sitting listening to this and nodding their heads and saying, Great. Like, you might be full of it, you know, I don’t know that I can, I can do this and the big mentality shift, and we can get into like, a specific tactic, so folks can walk away with the thing, if you’re interested, is stop thinking about what work you do, and instead start thinking about how you do whatever work it is that you need to do. And when that paradigm shifted in my brain, it wasn’t about getting more things or getting better or getting fat, it was changed the way I’m thinking about doing the work I have in retrospect. Those are the tactics that really from my lab time, my experimentation period. Those are the things that really, you know, were tried and tested true. That’s what made a huge difference. And I could tell folks right now in exercise, they could try right now. We could do it together. They could do it themselves, and then they can go and make a change tomorrow, like that’s the point of the book. Every chapter, single chat, single tactic, you can talk, you can type, you can try it.

george grombacher 14:09
Let’s do one. Okay,

Jason Silver 14:11
great. So I’m going to tell you the most obvious thing you’ve ever heard in your life, and then I’m going to tell you how you can do something about it. If you want to enjoy your job more, do more things at work that you enjoy, right? I’m not Einstein. It’s obvious, right? It’s simple. But then you start thinking, Well, okay, that’s true, like, Well, why am I not doing that? Okay, so the premise here is, imagine there’s a job that has to be done. On Friday, you get asked to deliver an update to your team about a project that you’re working on. Okay? And you and I are very different people. You really like data analysis and I love giving presentations. So my version of giving an update is going to be, I’m going to figure out what’s going on in the project. I’m going to make a PowerPoint presentation. I’m going to. Stand up in front of the whole team and give that presentation and tell a story and say something clever. Hopefully everyone will get the information. It’ll go great. Your version is going to be to get an Excel spreadsheet, go through all the data, write up a report, send it to the team and ask them to come to the meeting with any questions about the data that you sent. Because you really like data analysis. You have the meeting. They ask questions, you answer them, both versions accomplish the exact same job of providing the project update. But if you did it my way, or I did it your way, we would not like it and probably do it worse, right? And that’s because best practices, I think, is a terrible term, best for whom. And so what we need to do is we need to do is we need to figure out our own best practices. And here’s the problem, we don’t really know ourselves. And so here’s the exercise. Okay, we we don’t have to do it now, but you can imagine how it would go. You’re going to take out a piece of paper. On the left side of the piece of paper, you’re going to write a list. I’ll start a timer. You’re going to get, like, two minutes, right? For folks that are listening at home, you can, you can redo it, you know, 123, go. You’re going to write down a list of all the things your smartphone is great at. I love this app and that app. It’s a calculator. The browser is awesome. I can use it in my car to tell me where to go, yada, yada, yada, yada. Everything that you think your phone is great on. We use these things all day long, you know? So we have a good sense of what it’s great at. The timer is going to ding. You’re still going to be writing, but you’ll stop when you’re the timer takes restart the timer on the right side of the page, write down everything that you are great at. And if you are like 95% of people that I’ve done this test with and have done it tons and tons and tons of times. One of two things will happen. Option one, the list of what your phone is great at will be substantially longer than the list of what you’re great at. Option two, you won’t even like you’ll stop before the end of the two minutes when you’re thinking about what you’re really great at. And so why does this matter? We know more about what our phones are great at than what we are great at, and if you don’t know what you’re great at, then you don’t know how to spend more time working on the things that you’re great at. And if you don’t spend more time working on the things that you’re already great at, you’re probably not going to enjoy it as much, and you’re not going to get, you know, have as much impact. Okay? And so then what I ask people do is take the same exercise, piece of paper, open up your calendar. Sorry, start by on the left side of the paper, you’re going to write all the things you enjoy doing at work, brainstorming meetings. I like doing data analysis. I like this. I like that. Write that down, then open up your calendar and look at last week, and write down a bullet list of the things that you did, the activities that you did last week, and draw a line from the things that you did on the right to the things that you enjoyed on the left. And the most common outcome of this exercise is there are very few lines, but we don’t take time to stop and think, How am I doing my job? That’s why we just assume there’s a best practice. There’s only one way I can do this. I have a micromanaged boss. I can only go from point A to point B in this one very specific way. And so this will show you how much time you’re actually spending doing what you actually enjoy or are really great at. And if your list is short, the tactic I’ll give you, or regardless, if you want to enjoy it your job more, the tactic I’ll give you is take one thing, one single activity from the list of things you’re great at, and spend five minutes doing it tomorrow. And do that for all five days of the week the next week. And the result is you will enjoy that week at work a little bit more than the week before. And if you string together four of those weeks, then this month will be more enjoyable than the last month, and three of those months, this quarter more enjoyable the last quarter, and so on and so forth. Nothing about this requires you to change the jobs, the work that you have to do. It’s just tweaking the way you’re accomplishing

george grombacher 19:03
it. It is that easy.

Jason Silver 19:07
It’s simple, but not easy.

george grombacher 19:08
Yes, that is very simple, but it is not easy to do. I think it is easy to do, but whether it’s possible to do that’s that’s a choice we all have to make.

Jason Silver 19:22
That’s what it is. It’s a choice, you know. And the biggest pushback I get from folks is, my job’s too important. I have too much to do. My boss is too much of a micromanager. You know, I really wanted the book to focus on. Here are things that you have total control over, and it doesn’t matter how micromanaging your boss is, the point is, if they give you a job to be done, we spend all of our time, usually in a work setting, building a plan, and that plan tells us what things we’re going to do in what order we take no time to think about how do we want it to feel as we’re going through that? How are we. Way to accomplish these things. Should I do it with a presentation? Is it a data analysis? Is it a this? Is it a that whatever, whatever it might be, that’s why I’m talking to you right now. I had to promote this book as it was coming out. Million ways I could do that. I really love meeting new people. I love talking to them. This is a way to both promote my book while talking to people, and that’s why I’ve chosen to spend more time doing this than, you know, Google ads, which there are many people on the planet who that is the absolute best thing for them to focus on, because they’re going to love it and do a great job at

george grombacher 20:34
it. Look at you putting your put your philosophy to work,

Jason Silver 20:37
dude. If I wrote this book and I didn’t actually like give it a shot myself. It would be really, really hypocritical and hypocritical, sorry, and it’s funny. Bring it up, because it’s something I thought a lot about with the book, where you ask a lot of people, what was it like writing a book? And they’ll tell you terrible, don’t do it. And so I really tried to focus on like, I want to enjoy writing this book. And the reason why is, I want you to feel like you enjoy reading the book. Business books are boring, usually in my experience, yeah, you know. And I really tried hard to think about the reader experience, and just like I want you to laugh when I describe things in a way that you usually wouldn’t in a business book, so that, you know, when something’s enjoyable, we do better at it. It’s right there in the book. Like the book wasn’t going to pass enough for me if it wasn’t a really enjoyable read. And I was so lucky. I got to work with one of the editors from atomic habits on it, like it. He helped really, really bring the book into a spot for grain about but I, I definitely drink my own medicine. Is that the right? Eat my own dog food out of whatever the experience, drink your own bathwater. It’s right. That’s gross too. But, like, whatever it is

george grombacher 21:40
I’m doing totally gross. Well, I think it’s awesome. I think that there’s a million things I want to say about everything that you said, Because I it resonates with me so much. But I don’t need to. I don’t need to step all over everything, because you did a perfect job describing it. So I appreciate it. Jason, where can people learn more about you, just in general. And where can they get their copy of your grass is greener?

Jason Silver 22:06
More about me. You can go to the jasonsilver.com there are two other Jason silvers, a Christian rock singer and a dating coach for women. I’m not those ones. They were the it was taken so I got the jasonsilver.com you can find a book there. Best place to find the book is pretty much anywhere you get books, Amazon, or you can go to your grass is greener.com. That’ll take you to the website for the book and you can you can click through, pick up a copy. Would love folks to have a read. Would love to hear what people think you can find me on LinkedIn, but yeah, your grasses greener.com. Don’t buy it. If it looks like a gardening book, it is not that. And like I said, would love people to check it out and have a read. Excellent.

george grombacher 22:52
Well, if you enjoyed as much as I did, so Jason, your appreciation. Share today’s show with a friend to also appreciate good ideas. Go to your grass is greener.com, go to the Jason silver.com and pick up your copy of your grass is greener, and it might not be possible for you to change your miserable job into a job that you love. But why not give it a shot? Why not go through the exercise that Jason just laid out, even if you make it a little bit better, like he was talking about just five minutes a day, and I, I’ll guarantee you’re going to start thinking differently about your work. Start enjoying what you’re doing so much more with these simple little things. It doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy. It’s going to take a commitment from you. So thanks again. Jason, thank

Jason Silver 23:41
you, George, thanks everybody who’s out there listening really, really appreciate you spending time with us till

george grombacher 23:46
next time, remember do your part by doing your best. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

george grombacher 16:00
So if I want my iPhone, and my Tesla and my Bitcoin to work, we need to get the metal out of the ground.

Pierre Leveille 16:07
Absolutely. Without it, we cannot do it.

george grombacher 16:13
Why? Why is there a Why has production been going down.

Pierre Leveille 16:21
Because the large mines that are producing most of the copper in the world, the grades are going down slowly they’re going there, they’re arriving near the end of life. So and of life of mines in general means less production. And in the past, at least 15 years, the exploration expenditure for copper were pretty low, because the price of copper was low. And when the price is low, companies are tending to not invest more so much in exploration, which is what we see today. It’s it’s, it’s not the way to look at it. Because nobody 15 years ago was able to predict that there would be a so massive shortage, or it’s so massive demand coming. But in the past five years, or let’s say since the since 10 years, we have seen that more and more coming. And then the by the time you react start exploring and there’s more money than then ever that is putting in put it in expression at the moment for copper at least. And what we see is that the it takes time, it could take up to 2025 years between the time you find a deposit that it gets in production. So but but the year the time is counted. So it’s it’s very important to so you will see company reopening old mines, what it will push also, which is not bad, it will force to two, it will force to find a it will force to find ways of recalibrating customer, you know the metals, that will be more and more important.

george grombacher 18:07
So finding, okay, so for lack of a better term recycling metals that are just sitting around somewhere extremely important. Yeah. And then going and going back to historic minds that maybe for lack of technology, or just lack of will or reasons, but maybe now because there’s such a demand, there’s an appetite to go back to those.

Pierre Leveille 18:33
Yes, but there will be a lot of failures into that for many reasons. But the ones that will be in that will resume mining it’s just going to be a short term temporary solution. No it’s it’s not going to be you need to find deposit that will that will operate 50 years you know at least it’s 25 to 50 years at least and an old mind that you do in production in general it’s less than 10 years.

george grombacher 19:03
Got it. Oh there we go. Up here. People are ready for your difference making tip What do you have for them

Pierre Leveille 19:14
You mean an investment or

george grombacher 19:17
whatever you’re into, you’ve got so much life experience with raising a family and doing business all over the world and having your kids go to school in Africa so a tip on copper or whatever you’re into.

Pierre Leveille 19:34
But there’s two things I like to see and I was telling my children many times and I always said you know don’t focus on what will bring you specifically money don’t think of Getting Rich. Think of doing what you what you like, what you feel your your your your your, you know you have been born to do so use your most you skills, do what you like, do what you wet well, and good things will happen to you. And I can see them grow in their life. And I can tell you that this is what happens. And sometimes you have setback like I had recently. But if we do things properly, if we do things that we like, and we liked that project, we were very passionate about that project, not only me, all my team, and if we do things properly, if we do things correctly, good things will happen. And we will probably get the project back had to go forward or we will find another big project that will be the launch of a new era. So that’s my most important tip in life. Do what you like, do it with your best scale and do it well and good things will happen.

george grombacher 20:49
Pierre Leveille 21:03
Thank you. I was happy to be with you to today.

george grombacher 21:06
Damn, tell us the websites and where where people can connect and find you.

Pierre Leveille 21:13
The it’s Deep South resources.com. So pretty simple.

george grombacher 21:18
Perfect. Well, if you enjoyed this as much as I did show up here your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciate good ideas, go to deep south resources, calm and learn all about what they’re working on and track their progress.

Pierre Leveille 21:32
Thanks. Thanks, have a nice day.

george grombacher 21:36
And until next time, keep fighting the good fight. We’re all in this together.