Jason Feifer | Editor-in-Chief of Entrepreneur Magazine on Why Rejections Are the Most Direct Route to Success

Audio Transcription

Speaker 1:
Oh, Jason, on today’s show, today’s show is going to be hot. We’re interviewing Jason Pfeiffer, the editor in chief of entrepreneur magazine. Wow. And he’s going to share with us why the person who gets rejected the most is usually the one who’s the most successful. Like when he wants to book a big time guest on the entrepreneur magazine and book them and interview them, he has to reach out to a ton of people. I bet he points out, he says, usually if he sends out 40 emails requesting somebody to work with them, usually 20 people don’t respond at all. Maybe 35 people don’t respond at all, but one or two say yes and then it’s worth it. Whoever gets rejected the most gets the most success. Absolutely. And on today’s show, Jason, fight for the editor in chief of entrepreneur magazine breaks it down for us, but not before I can expose the truth about Neil Ferguson, the man who falsely reported that 2.2 million Americans die from the Corona virus.

Speaker 1:
Good evening and welcome to Tucker Carlson tonight. One of the reasons that most of the Western world embraced unprecedented mass quarantines. This spring was doing the work of a single man, a man you may have not have heard of. He’s a British academic called Neil Ferguson. Ferguson is a professor at a college in London, but he’s also something of an international celebrity. He is best known for his dire predictions about pandemics. Ferguson seemed especially panicked by the Wu Han Corona virus. At one point he suggested the coronavirus might be comparable to the Spanish flu of 1918 the pandemic that killed up to a hundred million people on February 28th of this year. As the disease spread throughout Europe, Ferguson publicly endorsed the Chinese model of quarantine specifically. Now keep in mind that is, Ferguson spoke the words here about deceit. Videos were circulating on the internet showing police in Wu Han throwing screaming citizens into the back of panel trucks and driving them to some unspecified internment somewhere. Ferguson must’ve known that the Chinese government’s response in [inaudible] was extreme and utterly inhumane. He endorsed it anyway. That’s how serious Neil Ferguson was about this virus. One has to adopt

Speaker 2:
sort of community measures which have been adopted, particularly in places like [inaudible] and China where you try to reduce contacts between people in the community. So the sorts of measures which are important are first of all, if anybody has any sort of respiratory disease, cold, anything stay at home until those symptoms are fully resolved.

Speaker 1:
Seems like kind of a reserved academic. And all of a sudden he’s endorsing the Wu Han response leaders around the world paid attention to this. They took Ferguson’s advice and locked down their entire populations. The British government asked Ferguson to help design its quarantines as a member of the scientific advisory group for emergency. Sage Ferguson was happy to help shut down the entire United Kingdom, but it turns out he wasn’t that interested at all in participating in it personally. Today, the Telegraph newspaper reported that Neil Ferguson ignored his own lockdowns while rest of London stayed trapped in doors and deed the rest of the country. Ferguson repeatedly invited his married mistress over to his apartment for sex and then perhaps most striking of all, he was infected with the Corona virus. At the time, Neil Ferguson became sick and tested positive in mid March. We know this because he said so publicly at the time. Not long after that he invited his mistress over. By doing this, he exposed her to a deadly virus. He also exposed her husband and her children back home.

Speaker 3:
Some shows don’t need a celebrity in a writer to introduce a show, but this show does two men, eight kids co-created by two different women, 13 multimillion dollar businesses. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome

Jason Feifer:
to the thrive time show.

Speaker 5:
[inaudible]. Yes, yes, yes, yes, dr. Sing. It’s always ecstasy when you are next to me. How are you sir?

Jason Feifer:
I am fantastic. I’m fired up. We’ve got a big day ahead of us. Big day ahead of us. We have got the editor in chief of entrepreneur magazine and the host of two podcasts right here on the show with us. Jason, how are you sir? What’s up guys? I’m good. How are you? He’s a chief. That’s pretty cool. I mean a chief where he’s a chief. Are you a Kansas city fan? I come with a cool hat. It sounds like it would, but it doesn’t. Oh, that’s too bad. Well, let’s get into this editor in chief. A job you have here at entrepreneur magazine. What exactly do you do? I just walk around with a cool title and people interview me. It’s great. What do I do? I, I mean, the, the easiest way to say it is that I, I, I’m the, I oversee all editorial.

Jason Feifer:
So anything that’s edit, anything that’s voice, anything that’s storytelling that runs through me in one way or another. And for that matter, I also, I, I sort of serve as like face of brand. So I do a lot of interviews. I go out, I talked to a lot of entrepreneurs, you know, I, my, my, my hope is to just be constantly in touch with and communicating with the world of entrepreneurs and making sure that the brand is reflecting what they’re concerned about and what they need. Did you grow up in a family of entrepreneurs or are you the first entrepreneur in your lineage? Uh, no. I, I gave him a, well, my dad, uh, was, uh, w he’s retired now, but he was a dentist. He had a small business person in Margate Florida at the time. Um, so, uh, so I had business around me though.

Jason Feifer:
I gotta be honest. I didn’t start in that direction. I started as a community newspaper reporter. Like to me, my original skill was that I just knew how to go out and talk to people and find stories, uh, in their lives and bring it back. And the thing I loved was that journalism was a window into that. Like, I, you could just go and people will welcome you into their lives and their world just because you’re going to write about them. It’s amazing. It’s like, it’s greatest trick in the, in the world. And, uh, and it was only later that I started to realize that the thing that I really loved was talking to people specifically about how they solve problems, how they pursued passions, how they, how they learned and grew. And, uh, and, and the world of entrepreneurs has been the most thrilling world that I’ve ever been involved in.

Jason Feifer:
And, uh, you know, and I, I am inspired every day talking to them. So how did you become the editor in chief? Did you, did you wake up one day and then hit your head on the toilet seat and have a vision? Did you, uh, know somebody to just start off at the bottom? I’d love to hear your story about how you became the editor in chief of entrepreneur magazine. Yeah. Well, I mean, the actual answer to that question is, is, is pretty boring, but, uh, which is that, but, but I have a good, I have a good other answer. The actual answer to the question is that, um, I was at a different magazine and I was looking for a change and there happened to be an executive editor opening an entrepreneur. And I, I took it, um, thinking of it as a, you know, as a great opportunity to shape a brands magazine and then the editor in, you’ve left nine months later and I made a play for the job.

Jason Feifer:
Right. But, so this is kind of boring, but here, but here’s the real answer. The real answer is if you rewind all the way back, I started out, I went to, I went to Clark university, I graduated in 2002. I had no connections. I wanted to work in magazines and I had no idea how to do that. And I took this job, tiny newspaper, Gardner news, North central Massachusetts covering nothing cause there’s like nothing going on there, right? I was like writing stories about the local diners all day. And um, uh, you know, there were the diners weren’t bad but not what I wanted to write about. And after a year I made this realization, and this honestly is the answer to your question. I made this realization that um, I could sit there in this tiny little town and this tiny little paper and uh, and write my heart out and nobody at the kinds of publications that I wanted to work at these big national public.

Jason Feifer:
Nobody was reading my stuff and nobody was ever going to call me and say, come work for us. I had to go to them [inaudible] you have to go to them every time that I tell that story, I want that music now popping in the background, you have to go to them. And so I quit and I sat in my bedroom for nine months, his tiny little bedroom in central Massachusetts next to a graveyard and whereas paying a couple hundred bucks a month in rent and I just started pitching cold pitching stories, tracking down editors, convincing them to let me write for them and I was proving to them and to the world that I could work at a higher level. And honestly that is what propelled my career. It was by not sitting around waiting for someone to come to me. It was me going to them.

Jason Feifer:
And that is, that is the thing that entrepreneurs have to do every day is get up and figure out how to go make your case. You can’t just sit around and wait. Did you pick up the phone and call people that you did not know? Well, I emailed them and then I tried to convince them to get on the phone with me. But yeah, I emailed them and I got ignored over and over and over again. And I remember the first person who ever got on the phone with me, who I, who you know, I didn’t know, is this editor at the Washington post. I was going to write for their health section and I pitched a story and um, she wanted to talk the story. I was this kid. I had basically no experience that would, that would prove that I was able to do this.

Jason Feifer:
Uh, you know what, writing for the post and I was, I couldn’t have been more nervous. I was pacing around this little apartment. My heart was beating, my mouth was dry. And at the end of it, at the end of like 30 minutes of making my case, she basically said, you know, I’m not ready to say yes, but I’m not ready to say no. So if you want to go and prove to me that you can do this story, then go for it. And let’s see what happens. And so I went and I reported the crap out of this thing. I sent her 4,000 words for a story that wasn’t going to run it nearly that length. And she read it all and she said, okay, you convinced me and that’s what you gotta do. How many nos did you have to get? How many rejections did you have to get before you got that gig?

Jason Feifer:
Oh, I mean, you know, the funny thing is that you don’t get the nose, you get the nothings, you know the note. The no’s are great. The no means that you know that somebody paid attention and maybe we’ll even engage with you. What’d you mostly get is nothing. Just ghost things at worst isn’t it? How many things did you get? How many nothings, how many just nothing. You send out an email and just nothing. Oh, I mean, you know, in the beginning it would probably be 20 nothings to every no and 40 nothings to every yes. I mean, and these were all in, every one of those things was like a new idea that I had that I tracked down that I did some work on that went absolutely nowhere. And then, you know, the, the hit rate starts to improve as you go along.

Jason Feifer:
But at the beginning you just have to continue to believe that you have value in that you can learn and that you just have to prove it to these people and you have to think, you know what, these people aren’t like, they’re not being jerks. Although frankly, if you’re completely ignoring people, I kind of think that you are a jerk. Like I try to learn from that lesson and not ignore people, but, um, but you know, you’re up against a lot of people. You are always, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing, you’re always up against a ton of people and you just have to be better than them. And that means you have to start figuring out what is the thing that you could be doing that others are not doing. And I got to tell you the answer in every single industry that I’ve ever explored in the ones that I’ve worked in, the answers are oftentimes pretty simple things, right?

Jason Feifer:
I mean, you know, like we talk in entrepreneurship about how like trust can be at a competitive advantage. Just building trust is simplest thing in the world. But a lot of, a lot of people just forget to do it. You know, in, in like in that early days of journalism, it was like, it was like filing on time and being easy to edit and being really fast and responsive. Like once you get somebody’s ear and you prove to them that you will hustle like hell, Oh my God, they’ll come back to you every time you, you are a laser show of just knowledge bombs. Now you and, and Josh Wilson, you guys are, are, are gonna are gonna take the show to a, to a, to another level. Now prepare it, prepare yourself, Jason, for dr Zellner to interrogate you with questions that you’re not prepared for and they’re really a lose, lose situation.

Jason Feifer:
So you’re going to lose as a question to ask, cause you’re, you’re going to ask a tough, tough question. You can put them on spot and then he won’t have the answer. It’s gonna get awkward. So does he take it, take tickets down to the bottom. So excited for this. Okay. So now you’re your man, your chief. I don’t, I don’t know. I’ve never, I’ve never addressed a chief before. I was really intimidated by the way. I like to top 10. I’m the favorite. Your favorite articles you’ve written. Uh, give a skips, a couple, three examples of some really fun, fun articles you’ve written as businesses. You’ve kind of looked into some really good stories. You have a couple hot stories, a couple of top tens. Yeah. Okay, great. Uh, so the biggest problem with answering this question is that I’m probably going to go on too long.

Jason Feifer:
So just cut me off with, alright. So the things that I love, I’ve interviewed a lot of famous people. I mean right now the current cover of the magazine has Dwayne, the rock Johnson and his business partner, Tandy Garcia on it. And I did that story and I love talking to them. And the thing that they said the most that stuck with me was, um, or the thing they said to me that stuck with me the most was we are not attached to process. We’re only attached to outcome. Like they’re willing to constantly throw out how they’re doing. Things constantly reinvent. I love that. I love talking to, you know, very, very accomplished people. But I got to tell you, some of the stories that stay with me the most are the ones of small businesses, entrepreneurs who are maybe unknown, but who did something so clever and so smart.

Jason Feifer:
And so telling that any entrepreneur anywhere could just slap themselves on the head and say, Oh my God, that’s amazing. So let me just give you a quick one. Um, do you guys know that the beer, Dogfish, Dogfish brewing out of Delaware dog fish fish? I don’t know about them, but that’s just because I’m a bad person. All right. Yeah, that’s, that sounds right. Okay. Well if you were, if you were a good person to know because it’s good. It’s good beer. So, uh, so there’s, this is very innovative brewery and it’s run by a guy named Sam. And a couple of years ago I was walking around the brewery with salmon. He tells me the story, which I immediately put in the magazine because I loved it. All right? So they brought, they put out fairly early on, they put out a beer called 60 minute IPA, 6% alcohol by volume beer.

Jason Feifer:
That’s where 60 minute comes from. It’s a great beer. People loved that beer. They wanted so much of that beer and this beer quickly rocketed up to be consuming about like 70 to 80% of all sales of dog fish. Right? So you’ve got to hit beer and where do people, what do people think when you got to hit, what do you want to do? You want to maximize it, right? You want to sell, sell, sell that beer. Uh, and that’s what, that’s what that would be the natural thing to do. That is not what Sam did. Sam was concerned about that and here’s why he was concerned because he knows that tastes change, the beer tastes change and if he lets this IPA be a runaway success so that every bar and every restaurant and everywhere you go, the only time that you ever see dog is when you see an IPA.

Jason Feifer:
Well then people are gonna associate doctors with IPA and then the minute that tastes change, what is going to happen to his company? It’s going to be old and outdated. And so he did this thing that I love that was so crazy, which is that he kept sales of his bestselling product at 50% of all sales of the beer. So it was going to take off to like 70 70 80% he kept it at 50% which meant that he had lots of bars and restaurants and even Amtrak calling him and saying, we want this beer. And he would say no and they would be angry at him screaming at him, screaming on the street at him. I mean, I’ve walked around with Sam, he’s like a celebrity in Delaware. People were screaming on the street at him and you know what? He stuck with it and the reason he did that was because he knew that that would give him an opportunity to say, you know what, we don’t have this beer right now.

Jason Feifer:
I’m sorry we make it fresh but we have all these other kinds of beers. You should try these other kinds of beers and that way years later, many years later, Dogfish is not known as an IPA brand. It’s known as an innovative brand and last year it sold for $300 million and you would not have done that if he had just made it like a run on IPS for as long as he could. And that’s what I love. That’s a thing I love about entrepreneurs is that the best entrepreneurs, they will think the long game, even when it hurts. Interesting game. Even when it hurts that knowledge and knowledge. I’m going to give you a mega point, different mega points. Just give those to people I know work hard to get those. Another great story cause that was fun. Yeah, sure. I got it. I got him all day.

Jason Feifer:
Got, here we go. 90 seconds, 90 seconds at 92nd. Hot story. Okay, great. Um, a woman named Joelle creates a butter dish that can flip up and down. It’s a whatever. It’s cool. It’s a great butter dish. It’s called buttery. And she wants to do some market research. How much is it going to, how much does she charge? What kind of colors should she, uh, she put and she reaches a company and she says, how much will you charge to do this market research for me? And they say $10,000. She does not have $10,000. So what does she do? Well, she realizes so smart that she can go to an airport whenever she wants. Just buy a cheap ticket. The cheapest ticket you can find one way you never have to get on the flight. Why? Because you walk into the airport and what do you have?

Jason Feifer:
You have nothing but a building. Well, in normal times, not coronavirus times when you have a building full of people who have nothing better to do than sit around and answer questions about butter dishes. So that’s what she does. She starts going from gate one to two to three but it’s actually gets to gate eight gate one full of new people. You can do that all day. She did that and that is how she did her market research step, save $10,000 got that thing into the market. Buttery. It’s a great butter dish. There you go. You get another boom on that. I’ll give you a boom and I’ll give you a mega point and whole and a whole account.

Speaker 6:
Oh my God,

Jason Feifer:
that’s right.

Speaker 6:
Little Drake sizzle now. Now,

Jason Feifer:
uh sir. Where can people learn more about you to tell us about your two podcasts. I guess w what are the, uh, what’s the best way to find the two podcasts that you, that you record? Well, I would say any podcast platform. If you listen to podcasts and you know where to go, just go. Here are the two, I’d love you to check them out. Number one is called problem solvers. Problem solvers. That is, as you can believe, a show about entrepreneurs solving problems in their business. And then the other one is called pessimists archive. Pessimists archive is a history show about why people resist new things. Something that I think every entrepreneur should understand is why people are afraid of change. Each episode, we look at the moment that something new was introduced, like cars, bicycles, Teddy bears, novels, everything that we take for granted today, we try to understand why it freaked everyone out.

Jason Feifer:
And the most recent episode was Corona virus related. A little bit different. It looks at all the good that is going to come out of all this terrible because lots of good is going to come. So Smith’s archive, problem-solvers, go to any podcast platform. Check them out. Jason, I appreciate you very much for being here, my friend. You are, you are a great American. And uh, do you have a, if you had to recommend one magazine for all the entrepreneurs out there, what would be the one that’s good? Well, I really like 17 magazine. What do you guys think? You know, uh, uh, entrepreneur is a, I would say a fantastic magazine and I would read it even if I wasn’t making it. Uh, we try to, we try to make this thing not about, not about individual companies. We make it about you. We want to you, we want you to be able to calibrate your way of thinking to really smart problem solving strategies. And so everything in that magazine, my hope is that it’s just, it’s real, it’s honest. It’s about things that go wrong and then ways to make them right. So please check it out.

Speaker 7:
Jason, you sound like a beautiful man. I appreciate you for joining us. I appreciate that. All right man. You take care and have a great rest

Jason Feifer:
your day. Hey, thanks. You too guys. Bye bye.

Speaker 7:
And now without any further ado, three, boom.

Speaker 8:
If you don’t understand, you’re the one, you won’t understand why you’re being attacked. Like you’re being attacked whenever the enemy

Speaker 9:
no, it, that’s the one that is coming. He always says trap

Speaker 8:
to stop them from succeeding because they’re the ones I had to have a whole month.

Speaker 9:
Yeah, I feel the text box. I’m talking about Abraham because Abraham is the one and Abraham has to move out from his country and away from him because he was a one, so he was a misfit, a one. So he thinks it’s the same as, because he was the one, so he had to live in isolation because he was the one. So he probably was lonely because he was the one because he was the one because he was the one

Speaker 7:
city, new state. It’s going to be your grace. All the scenes that I have done, I’m grateful for what? Clean slate felt like. I was different. I ain’t ever try to pull the dope [inaudible] never make it solid as a rock. Loyalty is all I ever know. Doing what you’ve always done. They told me you can never grow compensations at the door. That asked him what I told me I got dead. Wait. So friends, I got to let them go. Sweet [inaudible] patient. I dealt with my moment. No stopping. We don’t win. This thing is emotional. What you’re going to do, we can get back it against the wall. She will stand up like a jet. But you’re going to curl up in the ball. [inaudible] try to keep this face up so you never saw this go.

Speaker 9:
And Abraham had to move out from his country and away from his kid bird because he was the one. So his with his pinpoints, it comes. He was the one. They are always on the hit list because it’s is the one I want to talk to some people that have been up on the attack to have a whole book.

Speaker 7:
The devil’s been attacking night because every time that happened there’s a blessing coming. Upset the notebook problems that you’ve taken. Dang. I had to go with crazy. Learn your sense of frontage. Remember when they cut my water off homie man, reflecting how they cut my life. Talk to God. I had to move back in with my mama Tammy feeling like the failure. That’s what life would do. Gotta get appointed grind. I had to make the right move, right my noodles every night I have something to write to. Execution is the key. Don’t tell me what you might do. Pay for from the man above. No other God is liked to. You cannot Miguel. But I promise sign saying there has been the like I am the one, we just begun this ticket clear me and clay clicking up. Y’all need to get it out to be colossal. Taking Nova when we flip it up, April

Speaker 9:
and Abraham had to move out from his country and away from his kid because he was the one so he didn’t get displayed with his kid. Folks that come see what’s the one, they are always on the hit list because he knows that he was, I want to talk to some people that have been up under crazy attack. I still have a whole books.

Speaker 7:
Yes. Bottom. Now I’m here hoping that success separate 23 years got the cracking in GE, got another kid power man account persevere. Oh cousin never haven’t taught people. I never stopped riding when the teacher’s not clear [inaudible] by the thoughts that we feel.

Speaker 8:
So you’ll stop begging for people to come into agreement with you. So you’ll stop doing polls and census and trying to get everybody to come into consensus with your vision so that you won’t be nobody to save man with your preach. Cause you already know that you got to heaven said, Hey man,

Speaker 1:
listen to the entire TD Jakes sermon grasping the moment by visiting TD Jakes YouTube channel simply named TD Jakes.

Speaker 8:
You can run in a flow.