Alex Lieberman: The Morning Brew, Challenges, Successes, and Personal Growth

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Go to otter.ai forward slash JBSales to get your free offer and start saving time and selling more effectively today. You should schedule two hours each day to work on your top goal only. The one goal that actually matters within your business or your life, and make sure you have uninterrupted time every single day to work on that one thing. Hey everyone, welcome back to Make It Happen Mondays, where we talk about sales, business, entrepreneurship, personal growth, mental health, and everything in between with guests who I truly respect and I think make a positive impact on the world around us. And oh man, do we have a good one for you on this one. I just got off a fantastic conversation with Alex Lieberman.

Now Alex, for those of you who don't know him, he is the founder of, co-founder of Morning Brew, that he ended up selling off for I think something like $75 million. Now he runs Story Yard. And he's just got such a great soul. I met him in New York at an event we were both speaking at, and we hit it off immediately. And I asked him to be on the podcast, and he said yes to come on to have this conversation about his story. And he ended up blowing me off. And so I had sent him a package, this personalized package, about thanking him for coming on the podcast. And when he got it, he was like, dude, I have to come on now because I haven't gotten a letter like that and some of the things that I put in there that you'll hear in this podcast.

So there's a little story around personalization and the thoughtfulness around personalization in this one. But when we started talking, he puts a lot of stuff out online. He shares his journey. He's got his own podcast. And so usually I ask the origin story, right? Where you're coming from? But I already knew that. And so there was a lot of inflection points in his story that I was curious about how he handled it, what he learned from those, and how he grew from them. And that's where I brought this story from. So it talks about his origins and his family and how he got picked on as a kid, but had two parents were on the trading room floors and where he got that entrepreneurial and that grind, that bug for him.

Then college and how his dad passed away and how he started Morning Brew. And then when he sold Morning Brew and then stepped aside as CEO. So these are all inflection points in his career that we dove into. And I was very curious about his learning lessons through all of that. And so this one went a little long. I'm going to be right up front with you. I think it's more than an hour, which is rare for my podcast, but the conversation was so rich that I think you'll understand why it's worth listening to this entire thing. So I really hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Let's make it happen. Alex Lieberman, welcome to the Make It Happen Monday podcast, my friend. How are you doing?

Thanks for having me. Pumped to do this. Yeah, this was, uh, I was psyched for this one for a bunch of reasons. First of all, it was great meeting you in New York at that event. I thought that was super cool. Um, do you get out to a lot of events these days? Cause I know you're back kind of doing evangelistic stuff for the new business and everything. Do you get a lot out to a lot of them? Yeah, it's, uh, it's funny. I historically have had this story in my head that events are a huge waste of time. Um, and, and look, I think they are a waste of the time most of the time, but I think there are certain moments or like types of people where events make a lot of sense. Like for example, I think events make a lot of sense for the person who is just like the professional, um, schmoozer, like the professional schmoozer, who's able to like bop from person to person and somehow get in front of 75% of people that went to an event.

An event will always be worth it for them, but I've never been able to do that. And so I recently decided that I was going to test a theory and the theory was going to be, I will go to an event if I speak at the event. Um, because if I speak at the event, then when I message people on LinkedIn after the response rate will be way higher. And so I tested that. So I spoke at golden hour and then I DMed every single person that went to golden hour and the response rate was 70%. And so that's kind of, that's, that's kind of how I'm going to approach it now is if I speak at an event because otherwise like, it's funny, I'm reading this amazing book right now. It's called, um, the great CEO within. Okay.

And it's by Matt Mochare, who's kind of, he's considered kind of like to be one of the best executive coaches in the world of multi-billion dollar company founders. And he talks about in here, one of the chapters that I was just reading is about like, um, in the, he, he references a book called essentialism by Greg McCone. And the, the main idea of the book is you should schedule two hours each day to work on your top goal only like the one goal that actually matters within your business or your life and make sure you have uninterrupted time every single day to work on that one thing. And it's like such a simple concept. But if you actually think about how often like you are just focused on your one thing, it's like very rarely is that ever happening.

And to me, like events can be the anti essentialist thing. Like it's such an easy way to pull you from truly what that one thing is. Yeah. I could see that. I think it's, you know, for events for me, it was early days. So are you, would you consider yourself more of an extrovert or an introvert? I, I would consider myself like an introverted extrovert. Um, so I get energy from people, uh, but I definitely at after, and I leave an event and feel energized about people that I had met. Um, but I definitely do need to recharge and I'm definitely not the person like going back to what we were just saying. I'm definitely not the person that's schmoozing with everyone. Like I definitely have a little bit of a fear of just like going up and starting conversation with anyone until I feel some level of comfortability.

Yeah. As you and I are similar, it's almost like I inadvertently built my brand, I think, because I wanted people to come to me, not me go to them. Right. So it's the same thing. It's like, I'm at an event. Well, that's great. Cause then when I come off stage, people come to me, I don't have to worry about it. It's like, Hey, what's up? Whereas like, I remember the early days of networking when I first like was introduced to it, my first business, somebody was like, yeah, go to an event. I was like, what the hell am I supposed to do here? And I showed up at like a bar and everybody's in their little circles. And I'm like, what the f like? So I had like three, four beers. And then I finally was like, all right, screw it.

And I just started butting into conversations. I was like, Hey, what's up? Liquid courage. Yeah. But, but, but it's fun. You know, I would say, I don't know if you think about it this way, but I feel like for the work that you do and the way that you monetize your life and your career events make a ton of sense to go to because your product is what you do at events. Exactly. Yeah. So for me, it kind of kind of evolved. It's like, all right, this makes sense for me to be here and speaking and helping and teaching and training and all that other stuff. So, and you know, a lot of what I train also is how to run events, like how to go to an event and not be just like how to make a cold call. Right.

It's like, you don't want to be a douche. So, um, so let's, uh, let's back up. You know, I was saying as we were prepping for this, you know, I usually go through people's origin stories, but you're pretty public with about a lot of the stuff that you've done. And so if you, if we're, if you're cool, I'd love to just find some inflection points here because a lot of this stuff mirrors, you know, what you've been through in some way, shape or form, some of the inflection points I've had in my career. So I'm curious kind of where your head was at, you know, what'd you learn from it and those types of things. Sweet. Yeah. It sounds great. So you, you did a post recently where you kind of grew up in a perfect family of four.

You had a younger sister, both your parents were on the trade floors of different companies. Um, you said you didn't, you know, you, you weren't part of the cool crew as a, as a kid, right. You kind of didn't feel the love if you will. So my first question is, is kind of, is about your drive and motivation, right? Yeah. Did you, did you always have it or did you have to find it and, and where do you think it came from? Yeah, I, I definitely, um, I definitely think I always had some sort of fire in me. Um, I think that a lot of it was just learned behavior from my parents because my parents were again, both like wall street traders, super like they, they, they were just super hungry. Like my, you know, my dad was an incredibly hard worker.

Like, you know, he didn't, uh, he didn't come through like one of these like rotational programs that you get into. If you went to an Ivy league school, like he literally started as like a bank teller and then worked his way up to the trading floor, then worked his way up to managing an entire department. And like, that was just through pure grit. And then my mom on the other side of it, like she was the only woman on the trading floor, literally like one of, of everyone. And so I think it just takes like a certain level of like, you know, of just like relentlessness and just like, you know, she had to have such kind of like a, a shell and a shield up at all times to be able to deal with all the shit that you had to deal with being in a fully male dominated environment.

So I think there was absolutely a lot of learned behavior from them. I definitely grew up being insatiably curious. Like that's always been a through line for me, but I do think curiosity, curiosity and motivation are cousins, but they're not the same of course. And discipline is definitely not the same because I think that's what I lacked a lot of growing up is I lacked a lot of discipline. Like I even think to myself today, like, because discipline is something I'm still trying to work through. And I think it's because of the way my brain works. Like I'm naturally a creative, my brain naturally goes in 10 different directions. Right. Yeah, exactly. I'm like a squirrel. And so like when you're a divergent thinker that that makes it hard to be focused, which is like a convergent thinker.

So I even thought recently, should I just like go to bootcamp for a month? Like I've literally had that thought for myself, like just like, you know, have people like really just like kind of, you know, break me down. But I, so I think there was some part that was learned from my parents. I think there was some part, especially the curiosity part that was, um, innate, but I do think, um, being bullied growing up, absolutely put a chip on my shoulder. And I don't think I was necessarily always aware of that chip on my shoulder until after the fact, until I realized how good it felt once I was succeeding, um, thinking about what, you know, basically the people who gave me shit growing up, what they were probably thinking now, um, because yeah, like I would say from fifth grade until 12th grade, I basically didn't feel belonging.

I didn't feel safe. I didn't feel like I had a group, you know, you could just imagine like, you know, little Alex going into, you know, this private esteemed high school in New Jersey, where I felt mediocre, both in intelligence athletics, because everyone was like best in everything. It was like one of those schools where everyone was the best at their thing. I also do think, um, and this is an underrated fact that I now am thinking about as like an expecting parent is having your child be old for their grade is a huge advantage because like I was, I was about a year younger than everyone. And I think developmentally it really creates a huge disadvantage. And so, yeah, I like, I didn't feel safe.

I didn't feel belonging for let's call it eight years. And I think that did two things for me. One is like, I really felt like I wanted to prove myself. Honestly, the other thing that it did for me after that, and I know I'm fast forwarding a little bit and we'll talk about it in a minute is like when I lost my dad, I think those, those two experiences in life, it made me real, like it made me just have this feeling that like, like, what else can you do to me? Like, what else can you do to me? Like, I really do feel in so many ways that like my last 10 years of life have been easy because like the previous 15 were so hard. Um, and so when things feel like easy when I deal with like, I think things that would make people very stressed out on a daily basis, it's like, I don't, I don't feel that, like, I don't feel that stress.

Like I, I even think about in the early days of morning brew when like either like an employee would quit or an advertiser would decide to pull their $50,000 ad deal, or, you know, um, we'd send out our email to our, our million subscribers and there'd be some spam issue. And 50% of our subscribers didn't get their email, which meant we had to go back to the advertiser and apologize to them and, you know, basically give them their money back. And those are things that understandably would create stress for a lot of entrepreneurs. And I just didn't feel that like, it just was like, I always, in my head was like, it, it could always be worse and I'm going to figure it out. I love that. Hey, I hope you're enjoying the conversation so far.

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Now let's get back to the conversation. Yeah, I think again, it kind of goes back to what we were talking about before, as far as, you know, perspective on things, right? When you kind of macro out a little bit and you get your head out of your ass as far as the day to day of what's happening and all worries me and you realize, wait a minute, I got a good, you know, I got a family. I got a roof over my head. I pay my bills. Nobody died. I always say like with my out of office is always the exact same. It says, Hey, I'm not an emergency room doctor. So I'm pretty sure your email can wait until I get back. I'll see you when I get back. And that's it. Exactly. And like, it's fun. I really do. Like everyone talks about like this kind of gratitude, like people hear the word gratitude.

Like I think gratitude needs like a rebranding also, because I think people hear it and they're like, Oh, it's like, I'm about to get some like hippie dippy woo woo, like preachy talk. But I do, I do think like when you just approach life through a lens of being grateful, everything just shifts like the way that you attack problems. Yeah. Just write a few journal right here. Yeah, exactly. And, um, you know, it's funny. I can't believe I'm about to quote Jim Harbaugh, but Jim Harbaugh, who, you know, now at the chargers, uh, was the coach of Michigan. I'm a big Michigan fan and he has a few, there's the, there's a few like classic Harbaugh isms. Uh, one of them is, um, uh, let's attack this day within an enthusiast enthusiasm, unknown to mankind, which I just love that.

Like, that's what he tells his players. But the second is he always would say to his team, like, who's got it better than us. And then everyone would scream out nobody. And like, that's like, yeah, I mean, I really do feel that way. And I felt that way even in the early days of morning brew, it's like, even in the early days of morning brew, you know, my co-founder and I got to spend, we're excited about the work we were doing. We felt like we were adding value to people's lives. We, we weren't, um, we didn't feel financial insecurity at that point, largely because we just weren't spending a lot of money in New York city. And, um, you know, we, we were the captains of our own ship. Like we had this full freedom to do what we wanted.

And I think that was very much our mentality is like, of course there were difficult points, but like, we always felt like, like we wouldn't do anything different right now. That's killer. Yeah. I think that's, uh, you know, the perspective of, of that in a lot of ways, going back to, you know, your childhood growing up and kind of having that hard, I always, you know, where grit comes from, right? Do you need to go through troubling times to have grit? And I think you need to, I mean, troubling times is a relative term, obviously. And, and, you know, some people really do, some people have some, and then some people think they do. Um, but I think that you definitely need some type of adversity, I think, in order to develop grit.

I agree. I agree. I agree with that. And I, you know, it's interesting because I look at my wife and she has as much grit as me. Like she is gritty as hell and knock on wood, she hasn't had to deal with any of the adversity I've had to deal with in my life. And so it's actually, honestly, I should like try to, and I think for her, a lot of it is how she is wired. And, and I think she got that wiring from her mom and dad who are wired in this like very gritty way also. Um, but yeah, I think she's the anomaly because it's funny. I was talking to someone, someone earlier where I was like, I was thinking recently, well, when I think about being bullied, like I actually look at it with a lot of gratitude because I'm like everything that's happened in my life the last 10 to 15 years, a lot of it is the product of being bullied.

Have you read, um, or listened to Matthew McConaughey's green lights now? Oh dude, please, please, please. It's amazing. To, to Jackson hole, literally don't, don't read it. Listen to it. It's amazing. Cause he tells his story about his life. Right. So this is like, after my dad passed, I had to kind of go on a little, like I went to Sedona, Arizona and I cleared my head and, and I had him in my ear the entire time. So I had like, you know, drove down at the convertible top going and everything else. Sedona is amazing. Yeah. It's my, my daughter's middle name is Sedona. We got married. Yeah. So, um, but the cool thing is, is he tells his life story and he tells all these examples of what in a lot of people's minds could be red lights, right?

Like, oh my God, I can't believe that happened to me. But his point is as well, it's actually a green light. It might not have been a green light right then, but I wouldn't be here if that didn't happen. And so he says he actually changed my, my, and I'm glad because I used to say just like everybody, you know, everything happens for a reason. And I now, I now realize how insensitive that is, right? Can you tell me my dad died for a reason? Your dad died for a reason. I'm going to punch you right in the fucking head, right? But if you say that, if you look hard enough, there's a silver lining to almost any situation. And I look at my dad passing and as, as hard as that was, it helped me reflect on a lot of things and changed my perspective on some stuff and got my ass, you know?

And, and so, you know, as bad as that was, it actually helped me in some ways deal with certain things in the future. So, um, highly recommend. Yeah. I, I, yeah, I love that. I'm, I'm going to, uh, I'm going to add it on, uh, to audible, uh, tonight for the trip. Um, yeah, it's interesting. There's a few things that come up there for me. Uh, the first is I, I, I've thought a lot about, and, and this, this distinction was created for me. I did this program called landmark, uh, like, uh, I don't know, 10 years ago. And honestly, you should look into landmark because it is basically, uh, I think it is like the world's greatest, like sales workshop without, but like not being branded as sales. Okay.

Um, it actually came out of a program called Est was, which was around in like the seventies and eighties, but landmark basically is like, um, it's a self-development and self-discovery seminar. Um, and one of the things they talked about in landmark was they basically created two circles and they were like this circle. It, what they did is they created one circle and they're basically like the, this circle is actually two circles. And one of them is reality. And one of them is your story. And for most people in life, our, we treat our stories as our reality. And then they basically had a drawing of two circles being separate. And it's like the most powerful shift you can make is when you have the ability to identify what your reality is.

And then separately, you have the ability to identify what your story is. Right. And so it's like using the example of my dad passing, right? The reality is my dad passed away from a stroke at 47 had, you know, uh, two or three mini strokes prior to that. Otherwise was in perfect health. And that's, that's what's what happened. The story could be, you know, um, um, it's not fair that someone who is so healthy, who works so hard to provide for his family, didn't get to see the fruits of his labor. And he spent his whole life working to do everything he could for his kids. And he never got to really enjoy that. Another story is to say, wow, I feel so grateful that for 20 years, this person was my best friend and I spent so much time with my dad and I wouldn't trade that for any other relationship in the world.

And he, while he's not here, he has through osmosis given me so many tools for me to navigate life effectively, both professionally and personally. Those are both stories. And I would say many people choose the first story, but the second story is as choosable, but you have to be aware what our stories versus reality. Yeah. That's, that's kind of, I've heard, I forget who said this, but you know, there's, and I've said this before where it's like, there's two types of people in this world. There's people that this world happens to, and there's people that this world happens for, right. And that private, you know, the previous one of all always me, my dad, like that's life happens to you. Right.

Whereas the, Hey, life happens for is like, yeah, that sucks, but look at what's happening. You know, look, thank God for this. And that shift is, it's a conscious one, right? It, it, like, you have to be conscious about it because it is so easy to get sucked down into the negative that it's in our face all day, every day. That's why they, that's why as foo-foo as it is, you know, gratitude journals, like forcing positivity is almost necessary right now. Cause if you don't, it's so easy to get overwhelmed by the negativity of what's happening. There's, and I think what, um, what I didn't understand about gratitude originally, I was like, what's the purpose of like, what's the purpose of consciously being grateful?

What does that lead to? And I don't think people realize like it actually changes your behavior. And in this book, I was just referring to the, the great CEO within, he was telling this story. I wonder if I can find it, but basically he was telling this story about if you, uh, he ran this test where he went to a number of his kids soccer games and he would, after halftime, whatever the losing team was, he would find out the name of three or four players on the losing team and he'd start cheering them on. And he would start saying like, like, you know, great pass, like amazing effort. And all of a sudden somehow the scoring of the losing team would switch. And like, they would either end up winning or making it very close in that second half.

All that was happening was like, they were unconsciously becoming more confident in their abilities. And in some ways that to me is what gratitude does. And I remember when I was going through a kind of a slump post exiting the CEO role at the brew, my executive coach kind of was trying to help me get my mojo back. And he had me say the same mantra for basically a minute every day. Um, and he told me to come up with it, something that felt true to me. And he's like, it's going to feel weird as hell to you for the first few days, but just keep doing it every day. And it was, I have the power, the ability, and the skills to create whatever I want in this world. And I did that every day for 30 days.

And what I noticed about that is the amount of negative self-talk that I had on day 30 versus day one was like, could not have been more of a stark difference. Let's say every hour I was having a negative thought about, you know, I'm not disciplined enough. I procrastinate too much. What skills do I actually have? I was having none of that on day 30. That's fantastic. It's weird how much like the manifestation and you know, all that stuff, like you start to say things. I mean, there's, there's plenty of examples of people who are just like basically convinced themselves that they can do it despite all sorts of other crazy stuff against them. You know, like Jim Carrey writing himself a check for $10 million, like those types of things.

It's like the positive affirmations, like as, as woo woo. And as foofy as that sounds like it, that's real shit, man. Yeah. And, and I, yeah. And I think again, it just, it gets misbranded oftentimes because the phrase is attached to a group of people that people don't identify with. But like what we just described is like what every professional athlete in the world does. Like if I was to talk to every professional golfer, they go through a process of visualization where before every shot, they literally see the line that they're going to hit their golf shot on the exact curvature, the exact height. And if they didn't do that, they would say like they, they would be an idiot to not do that.

So it's like what the fact that not everyone approaches life that way is actually maybe we're the idiots. Yeah, exactly. A hundred percent. I totally agree. Let's, so let's go to college. Now you went to Michigan and you went for bachelor's of business administration, financial markets and real estate. Was it clear to you just based on your parents' background that you wanted to like, that when you went to college, were you like, this is definitely what I want to do? Or were you like a lot of people like me, for instance, that just went to college to just see, okay, like what, what's going to happen here? And let me try a bunch of things out. Yeah. I think, um, I just wasn't an independent thinker.

And so I think, uh, whereas like independent thought would be like, oh, I want to go to college for, you know, to explore my interests so I can better understand what I want. I was like, my parents are my role models. They work in sales and trading. Of course, I'm going to want to work in sales and trading. I'm going to go to school to get me a job in sales and trading without ever having the independent thought of, do I think I would enjoy this sales and trading thing? Do I think I would be good at it? So of course I ended up have to go do the thing to realize I both did enjoy it and I wasn't good at it. And that's something I realized is like, I became a far more independent thinker post-college, uh, in the whole run-up throughout college.

Basically it's, I had this, just, just this tunnel vision on, and it's funny, what it makes me realize is like, when we, when we make choices in life, oftentimes our choices are based on assumptions. And the more you question your assumptions, the better. And the more that you don't question assumptions and they are large and potentially like, um, hard to reverse assumptions, it makes things a lot harder. It almost reminds me of like, um, the way they would make decisions at Amazon. Have you ever heard of like the, the one-way door versus the two-way door? Basically the way they would make decisions at Amazon is there's two types of decisions. There's two-way doors and one-way doors. Two-way doors are reversible decisions.

You can walk through the door. You can come back through the door for two-way door decisions. Jeff Bezos or the leadership team would not opine at all. They would let people make those decisions. And if they made a mistake, they'd be able to reverse them for one-way doors. That's where they would get involved because they were more irreversible decisions. And so when I think about like, what's a dangerous assumption in life or what could have been a dangerous assumption in life, it was the fact that, oh, I know I'm going to love this job in trading. And I know I'm going to be good at this job in trading because someone that I respect does the job. And, you know, luckily for me, I started Morning Brew in my senior year of college.

So I had then something with traction that was like a comparison point for me to be like, oh, wow, I'm liking this thing more. But if I hadn't started Morning Brew in college, odds are I would be in sales and trading today. I'd be doing a mediocre job. I wouldn't be happy. And I'd be starting to question at the age of 30, was that assumption true? Yeah. I see that. And I think that's, you know, I wrote a post a while back called stop doing what you're supposed to do. You know, a lot of people like they're supposed to go to college, they're supposed to get a job, they're supposed to get married, they're supposed to have kids. But when you kind of, a lot of that is based on assumptions of where things, you know, so a couple of questions for you as it relates to college, you know, there's the questions now of like the value of college, right?

Because there's so many options right now, you don't need that degree to get out there and make some money. So for those, and I've said, look, if you know what your lane is, like if you're 18 years old, and you've picked that lane, and you are clear that you want to be a doctor, you want to be a lawyer, you want to be whatever, then absolutely go to whatever that school is going to whatever debt you want to do, make sure you run the calculation. So you know what debt you're going to look like, and how much you're going to get paid, but go. But for the rest of the 80% of the world, that kind of usually is just like, ah, like, what do I do? Where, how do you, how would you position the value of college in today's world right now?

Yeah. Honestly, my biggest thing is like, I actually think I did college the wrong way. Let me start by saying that. Um, and I did college the wrong way, because I had my brain set on I need to, I needed to get this job in sales and trading out of school. So then college was literally simply a game that I had to win. And there were, there was, there was a certain, you know, it's like almost, uh, I don't know if you ever played grand theft auto on Xbox, but, but, uh, in GTA, there was always some combination of things that would unlock these like superpowers, the game of college to win it. There was this combination of things you could do and you'd win the game. The, the, unfortunately winning the game wasn't the same thing as getting the best education or getting the best experience.

And so what I mean by that, a perfect example is I knew to get my job at Morgan Stanley, I probably needed like a three, nine. There was a class at Michigan called education, education, three 62. And this was the class that everyone knew you had to write a certain number of blog posts. Uh, quality didn't matter. If you just wrote a blog post every day, you get an eight plus in the class. That would give you a four, three. And so guess what? I took education three 62 twice. Did it help me in how I think about life, the world or my career? Not at all, but it allowed me to win the game. I think, look, I think that winning the game may be okay. If you are so sure in your bones that, you know, exactly what you want to do with your career.

And you know, that the way that you're going through college is the only way to get it. Cause I would also make the argument, maybe there are other ways to still get in that career, but let's say there's no other way. Okay. I understand playing the game and, but it's an expensive game to play. It's an expensive game to play. Um, I think if I was to do college again, I would, I would go down the path that taught me how to be the deepest thinker, the best thinker I could be, because when, when I think about just like, when I think about like, um, kind of the best entrepreneurs or professionals, you know, basically they have some combination of obsessive, obsessiveness, critical thinking, extraordinary work ethic.

Um, it's like those three things. So then in my head, I'm basically like, how do you, then I'm what I'm the game I'm trying to optimize for is like, what is the path you can take in college? That's going to teach you to be obsessive. And I think it's hard to teach someone to be obsessive. The way you are obsessive is by finding something they are so passionate and curious about that obsession is pulled out of you. And you know how you don't get obsessive. It's by studying something that you have no interest in and you're just playing the game. So I think the first thing is I'd find like, I'd actually pursue a major that actually has the possibility of pulling obsessiveness out of me. The second is for critical thinking.

There are certain majors that I just think do get people to think critically. Um, like for example, I think engineering, even if I wasn't going to be a full stack engineer, I think engineering teaches you a way of thinking about problem, problems critically. The hard work one, honestly, I think, and then this is a tough one because I think most college students, again, are going to try to game the system, but it's to pick a hard major. The more you pick a hard major, the more that it will force a good worth that work ethic out of you. And then the final piece to it, when I think about who are the best entrepreneurs that I know, they are the, there's, there's two types of thinking that I think are really important.

There's critical thinking, and then there's clear thinking. And I think the best way to be a clear thinker is to be a clear communicator. Because I think you can't be a clear communicator if you haven't thought clearly about what you're going to communicate. And so then I would say, what is a path in school that forces you to be a clear communicator? And it's likely one that requires you to either present a lot or one that requires you to write a lot. The unfortunate thing is, is if you were to ask me to draw up classes or exercises that kind of create these four variables, right? Obsessiveness, critical thinking, clear thinking, and, uh, discipline, hard work. I would say there's a lot of gaps that are missing from the current curriculum in most schools.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's, I mean, that's the, that's what we're watching right now is like, I think college is also a social experiment, right? Like, I think that's where you learn how to be you in somewhat of a structured environment without your parents there with you. So I actually always look at college these days as a great social education, maybe not a great education, education, but a great social education. And I think that as far as communicating with people, clear messaging, you know, work ethic, all that stuff, those are absolutely critical. Um, so I, there's a balance here, but it's almost like I want kids to like, to first couple of years, if you don't know what you're doing, go to like a community college and just, you know, experience a bunch of stuff and then figure out what you like and then kind of graduate to the more expensive ones.

So you don't go into massive debt and get a $40,000, your job enough to be paying it back for the rest of your life. Yeah. There's also, there's something really interesting to me about, and I've been thinking about this recently to see, to think about how this idea could work in our society. But I was reading a book called mastery, uh, by Robert Green. Um, he wrote laws of human nature. He wrote, um, a few other really good books. They're, they're like social psychology books. And one of the thing, it basically, he breaks down what are the ingredients for mastery. And he breaks these down by basically studying masters in the history of society from Mozart to Ben Franklin to Da Vinci. And something he talks about is like every master had kind of an eight to 10 period of irrelevancy where no one know who they were.

They were kind of just like quietly grinding, learning and honing their craft. And oftentimes it happened in a true apprenticeship format where like Ben Franklin was working in like a paper shop. Like Mozart was like literally like under someone as an understudy, as a musician, same thing with Da Vinci. And so I don't know, there, there's this idea I have, but there, I'm just thinking about like, what would apprenticeship in modern day society look like? Well, obviously we have internships, but like, it doesn't feel the exact same. Yeah. You're right. Cause I was going to say like Northeastern here in Boston, they have their tries, they have a semester where you work, you, you learn, and then you work and then you learn, and then you work.

So you get to experience what, you know, my sister went to it and she didn't come and come out knowing exactly what she wanted to do, but she knew exactly what she didn't want to do. Right. So it's more about that experience, but I hear you on the apprenticeship, right. Piece as far as working under somebody to get that experience, I think is a big one. Um, cool. What, where did you get exposed? So you, you talked about sales, um, you know, you kind of went into the trading floor and then you realize he like, when did you get, cause you, you went down the marketing track in a lot of different ways with what you were doing with your newsletter and everything like that. So when did you kind of, when did it clarify or solidify for you the difference between sales and marketing?

And I guess, how would you, how would you describe the two as, as the relationship between the two? Yeah, it's, um, it's a really good question. And we'll start by saying this. I'm not, and I think I told you this when we saw each other in person, like I'm not a trained seller at all. Um, but I had to learn how to sell out of survival for morning brew. Like when we started the business, every, like, I mean, that's one of the first things you learn as an entrepreneur is everything is sales hand to hand combat, right? You were going to, you were going to classes, you were trying to get that, you know, and it's literally, literally it's like, yeah, it's like everything. It's like going into every class and like cold pitching a bunch of students on signing up for morning brew.

It's our first writer who, um, we had to convince to leave like a, you know, a six figure job to get a $60,000 salary at morning brew. It's like somehow convincing him to join our rinky ding startup. It's like, we raised $750,000 from investors. We hadn't made a dollar yet. And we were first time entrepreneurs who are college students. We somehow to convince them to write anywhere between $5,000 to $100,000 checks into our business. And so you just like very quickly learn that sales is everything. And I would say that for me, what I like the, the, the biggest thing I, and I'd be curious if you look at it this way, cause this is literally just me thinking about it for the first time. When I think about the difference between sales and marketing, like I guess I, I, it's funny.

I actually think of them in a lot of ways as like the same thing. And I think like, I think people have a perception of sales and marketing is two different things. Like, I think if you were to ask the world, the world would say sales is the process by which you try to convince someone to do something for you. I think that's what the world would say. And I think, and I think the world would say marketing is the process by which you create awareness and interest in the thing you are selling or like the brand that you have. And it's funny. I just think of sales and marketing as just kind of like in some ways, just like rebranded versions of each other that sits under to me, what I think of as the umbrella, which is storytelling.

Like I, I think of storytelling as like the umbrella above everything. Very simply storytelling is the process by which you communicate to someone, um, what you have, why it's worth their time and what they should do about it. And I think sales and marketing are simply synonymous devices that are used as part of storytelling. But I also view like if, if someone does have the view that sales is like if they, you know, they view it as kind of like the, the, the used car type sales, I would just say that like, one, you, you don't, you're not thinking you, you, it means you've never truly seen great sales. But, but what I would say is like sales is just a misbranded version of storytelling or sales is just someone who's not good at selling and storytelling is someone who's great at selling, right?

Like no one would ever look at the Steve jobs, right? Like iPhone talk, um, and say that felt like sales. Um, yeah. And so that, that's kind of, that's kind of my feeling about all this is, and, and I think like, again, I didn't go through a sales training program, but what, but what I realized worked for me in the early days is like to deeply understand what mattered to the person that I was talking to. And once I understood what deeply mattered to them, what motivated them and what got them to you to make choices with their heart, everything became so much easier. And then the second thing I realized is I'm only going to ever want to sell things that I genuinely believe in because sales becomes so much easier though.

That's dude, you're like preaching to the choir over here. I tell people all the time, if you're trying to convince someone in sales, you're doing it wrong, like straight up, you're doing it wrong. Like, and, and I don't believe you can be truly successful in sales. If you don't believe in what you sell, I think that's where the douchebag sales rep comes in. That's where the perception is, is the people that you, anybody who says, oh, they can sell ice to Eskimos. Like, fuck you. If somebody can sell ice, if they sell an ice, look, if they need the ice, then great, then fine, sell it to them, but don't just cram it down somebody's throat. And that's the perception. And I, you and I are the same, like I actually tell sales reps right now, you have to be mini marketers because a cold call right now, if you're trying to think, if you think that sales is a cold call to try to get somebody on the phone to then convince them to buy like, good luck, like don't even bother.

But if you look at it as a marketing impression, right? Where it's like that cold call, that voicemail might've listened to somebody then went to your website to take a look at what you got and then email you inbound or something like that. Now you can start to justify all these little things that we do, but you have to be a mini marketer. And I'd tell sales reps right now, if you're thinking about sales, sales is in danger right now as a profession because of how much marketing is coming down and what AI is doing to empower the buyer, if you will. So if you're not that helper, if you're not that problem solver, you're irrelevant at this point. Yeah. I mean, again, look at what we're doing with story Arb and think about like, first of all, how much outbound or cold selling have we done?

We've done zero. Of course, like we've gotten a lot of our customers through me, but it's been through me creating content that adds value to people and how they should be thinking about what great content is. Right. So it's just like always on marketing that at some point people come to our site, they fill out a demo and they move forward. But like, I would assume, you know, a listener, if they're listening to this, they're like, great, Alex, you know, that's awesome. But you have 700,000 followers across platforms. Like it's easy for you to say and do, okay, let's put that to the side for a second. A very, like, I think at the end of the day, sales is just also about effort and caring. Like, and just like, um, if you want, uh, if you want a typical results, you need to have a typical behaviors.

And so look, I think the best example of this is literally how you got me on this podcast. It's literally the best example, right? You, you invited me to this podcast and I basically blew you off. And then the timing was perfect because right after I blew you off, it was that day, I go into the morning brew office and I see sitting for me this package from John. And I look at the package and I, I wish I had grabbed it right before the podcast, but I, one of them was a coffee cup. That was a Lego block because you knew that I loved Legos. The, uh, second one was a children's book on selling because you knew that I was having a kid. The third thing that I remember is you, you basically had like four line pages of a written note to me, um, about why you were excited about the podcast and also why you pick these items to share with me.

And I was like, after I looked at this, I was like, there is zero chance I can ever blow this guy off. There's zero chance. And, and, and so it's like, I just think about how many people on planet earth would have gone through the effort to do that. And it's like, no one. And so then, and so then going back to story art, even what, even though we've gotten many of our customers through my social, I'll give you an example of how we're like winning customers that does not involve me at all. There was a CEO of a very large, uh, let's call it like B2B media business who said that they'd be interested in working with us, but, uh, they're not sure on what yet. Like they don't, they weren't sure what their exact content needs were and they'd be interested in working with us.

The, you know, the easy thing to do would have been like, you know, let's just get on a call, have a typical sales call. But what we actually did is our lead content strategist at story arm, whose job is literally to help our clients set their content strategy. She took two hours out of her day. She went through and did a full audit of this CEO's company's website, their newsletter, their YouTube channel, and basically created a one page audit of everything you're doing from a content perspective. Now, assuming these are your goals, here's what you should be doing from a content perspective. And that we're in the process of going through with them right now, but I can almost guarantee they are going to do something with us.

Yeah. It's a, it goes to the, I call it the give a shit factor, right? Like when you show that you actually give a shit, right? People ask me all the time, John, how do I get better results? I'm like, do you give a shit? Like, do you treat that person as a number or as an email that you have to send? Or do you think of them as a person who gets up in the morning, has stressed just like everybody else probably as kids, as their boss yelling at them? Because until you can make that connection, your messaging is going to be mediocre. It's not going to be authentic. It's not going to come through and it won't resonate. So give a shit. So yeah, I, the, the, the one other way I think about this, because I also think it applies to many things.

It's, it's actually an analogy I use for creating content and thinking of content ideas, but I think it applies to like standing out in sales as well, is I think of, you know, people talk about low hanging fruit and I literally visualize a fruit tree and it's like, there are low hanging fruit behaviors in life and there are high hanging fruit behaviors in life. Low hanging fruit behaviors are sending cold DMs. Low hanging fruit behaviors are setting up and you know, an eight email drip that basically says the same thing that every seller could do. The question you should be asking yourself are what are high hanging fruit behaviors? What are behaviors that you're going to have to be the person who kind of continues to scale up the coconut tree, getting to the top coconut at the top and you are sweating your face off and your arms are almost bleeding.

But by getting to that point, you know, you're the only one who's gonna be able to grab that coconut. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the problem. I think that the one thing I would say about sales and marketing is I don't think sales actually scales. Marketing scales, sales does not like true sales does not because true sales is one-to-one combat. I'm working with you. I'm trying to figure out your problems. I'm trying to understand what your need is and then, you know, help you figure it out. Whereas marketing is scale, right? So like you have your hub and spokes approach where you, you know, you went one-to-one with Morning Brew right up front, but then you started to say, oh shit, we got to get this.

There's no way we're going to grow this. So let me go to classrooms where I can sit in front of 50 business students and then let me find these, these hubs that give me access to my clients and that scale now. But how to, out of curiosity, how do you look at like kind of any of these traditional B2B SaaS companies that have, you know, I don't know, five, 10, 15,000 account exec, like if it did, if it didn't work, why would they have these people? It worked during a period of excessive, insane growth. When interest weights were low, money was free and it was a grow at all costs mentality. That worked because you could just flood the market with as much. And it was a numbers game. And these VCs just gave a shitload of money and didn't care about profitability.

They cared far more about top line revenue numbers. And so that's what fed this whole ridiculous system that we're in right now. And I'm positioning 2010 to 2022 as the golden age of sales, at least in tech. And, and I'm sorry. And I, I train these kids and myself included, by the way, I got lazy. Like for 10 years, we've over-engineered the sales process. We, we've, we've tried to throw so much technology at it. We've skipped the fundamentals. These kids now grow up in this environment. So they don't even learn through osmosis when they're, when they're sitting in an office and, or they don't have read body language. Like you and I, like, I mean, you're a lot younger than me, but when I was first out, I mean, I was networking and I was meeting people.

And so when I said something like when I, I knew what it felt like when I first met you and I immediately pitched you and I watched you squirm in your chair, I watched you look right here instead of here. Right. I felt that, but these, but these kids coming into this new world of the remote world and limited training, they don't get that. And so we've over-engineered this and we've turned them into robots and now AI is taking over those robots. And so that's why I said, I'm actually genuinely concerned with a large portion of the sales population that grew up in that model, because now not only did they that, but they have a self-inflated worth of self-worth, right? Like they thought they were too good.

And again, I'm going to put myself in that situation. I grew my company, we were 6 million, you know, 20 employees, everything was riding high. I was on the SAS, like, this is fucking great. I've done it. And then 20, then the beginning of 2023 hit and punched me right in the gut. And I was like, holy shit. Like when I tell you it stopped on a dime, man, it stopped on a dime. Like every one of my clients was with SVB. Every one of my clients was with SVB. So it's like, uh, and I don't have recurring contracts. Like it's a, okay, you sign that you do, you do this. I mean, it was, so this, I think we're in a reckoning right now. I think this year and last year is a straight transition and we're all in a legacy model.

That's why I say sales reps need to become many marketers because the new model is you have to be a resource. You have to be a problem solver. You have to give a shit and, and you've got to punt all this, this volume shit to the, to the marketing teams and run from it, leverage it for intent and those types of things for insights, but not, not push buttons anymore because I can get a robot to do it a thousand times better than you. No, it's also interesting is that there are certain, I've thought a lot about like, um, who, it, who are the people that treat personal brand and content as like a nice to have versus need to have? Because like, I think there are certain industries for whatever reason, they've always treated personal branding and content as a need to have.

And actually I think in a lot of ways they have an advantage because of that. So an example would be like real estate for whatever reason, real estate agents. And I wonder why this is, but real estate agents, maybe it's because they have a very visual product, but like they've always valued the importance of creating content online and putting stuff on Instagram or whatever it may be to attract their clientele. I also think in some ways it's because they're an entrepreneur, like they have to build a book of business and like other comp structure is so dependent on driving results. I also think like financial advisors, it's the same thing. And so it's interesting. Yeah. I think to your point, it's just like, you're going to see this bleed over into so many other industries.

Yeah. Yeah. I think it's, it's, it's scary. That's why I tell people like, look, I play the work between the world of the give a shit factor and unconscious competence. Like I can't get you to give a shit, but if you do, I'll give you everything. And, and quite frankly, if you don't, you better be looking for another job right now, because there is no room for average at this point in this, in this industry right now, you, you have to be exceptional or else AI is absolutely going to take over your job. I know we're close to your, a couple more, a couple more questions, if you don't mind. When your dad passed away, you said that you buried yourself in work and, and kind of almost distracted yourself from what was happening at least.

Right. So when, when did the self-reflection point hit you? When did you slow down enough or recognize enough to say that happens, I'm dealing with it. And then the self-reflection hit of what does that mean for you? Was there a point where you were like, you, you had to deal with that and you couldn't run from it anymore? Yeah. Um, I think, uh, the honest answer is that I probably am going to still be like unpacking a lot of the feelings of my dad's loss for years to come. I think that, I think that's the honest answer. Um, not just because of burying myself in work. Like I think distraction is always kind of like the survival tool for people when they're navigating loss and trauma. Um, but I also, because I grew up in a, a family where emotions weren't talked about.

Um, and then, you know, this is to no fault of my dad or my mom. It just, I grew up in a family, a wall street family where like at the dinner table, we weren't taught. We net, you know, the, the question, how are you feeling was never brought up. Whereas like my wife's family, that is the first question that's always brought up. I think in a lot of ways, that's why I feel so grateful to have my wife and my, and her family, because I think in a lot of ways, it's uncovered a blind spot for me that I just want to keep like digging at and uncovering. Um, and so, you know, I think probably I'd say probably in the, the year after we sold morning brew, where I really could kind of step back and I, you know, instead of spending 60 hours a week on the business, I was only spending 20 hours a week.

I think that's when I started to think more about it. Um, and, and really my thoughts around it kind of the way they evolved is I first became aware that I really haven't thought deeply about the experience of losing my dad. Like, like at some point I became aware probably when I had time and there was more space in my head to have that thought that I haven't thought deeply about the experience of losing my dad. And then after that, the next question I had is why originally it was like, why don't I feel more deeply around it? So it was, it was a more, more of a self-critical thought. Like, why don't I feel self deeply enough? And, and I think again, anytime you compare it, it doesn't really serve you, but I start to get, try to get curious about like, well, if I want to feel the full range of my emotions, what would it look like to work, to work on that?

And so that's even through therapy and specifically a somatic therapist, I started to try to gain more awareness of, as I would visualize the experience of the night that the, the morning that I woke up to the news that my dad was in the hospital and he had a stroke and I had 14 call miss calls from every single family member. And the three hour drive back from the Hamptons where I was dead silent and then going to him and then going home at night because he was have like surgery in the morning. And in the middle of the night, waking up to a call from the hospital saying that he wasn't going to make it and remembering like my mom's panic, um, and going to the hospital and kissing my dad on the forehead and feeling his, his head being cold and saying to him that I was going to take care of everyone, replaying that story.

And then just trying to sit for a second and see where I feel things in my body. It started to allow me to get more awareness around like, oh, I, I actually do feel things. Cause I think what happens is I actually think our heart and our gut actually are the best tools that, that drive our decisions in our actions in life. But I think we live in a society where we're rewarded for our brains. We're rewarded for thinking and over intellectualizing. And I think actual feelings only last in your body for a very short period of time. And so I have found the best kind of toolkit for reconnecting brain and body is to replay stories, especially if you're a visual person like I am. And as you replay the story, just see what you notice in your body.

And look, I think I have years to go of really feeling my feelings in the way that I think I kind of like, I get that full range of emotions because I do think the loss of my dad bullying growing up in a wall street household, being a man where there's certain, um, you know, expectations around emotions. I think it did take my emotional range from like a 10 to negative 10 to a four to negative four. But I do think this awareness is at least set me on the right path. And, and, uh, again, I also think so much of this is time because after I lost my dad, a lot of the things that come up for you, like I can tell you like two of the most common thoughts I had after losing my dad were, um, why am I not crying more?

Cause I, I cried once and then I asked myself, why am I not crying more? And what that basically did is it didn't give me permission to cry about anything else. And then the second thing that would come up for me is anytime. And this is such a common one, when I've talked to people who have lost, um, someone young is anytime I would notice someone complaining about something, I would become infuriated with them. Cause in my head, I'd be like, are you fucking kidding me? Like you're, you're, you're, you're complaining about like what, what you're wearing out tonight. Like that's the thing. Um, and it never had to do with them. It was always just about what, what I was trying to reconcile emotionally.

And so, yeah, I think honestly, the biggest thing is awareness and the way you get to awareness is having space in your brain. And this is like, even why right now, like a big thing, a big daily goal for myself is I limit my screen time on my phone now, because I noticed that I didn't have space to think clearly when I spent so much time on my phone. So every day I try to keep my phone screen time under three hours, because when I do have like 30 minutes to an hour of uninterrupted, just like Alex in his brain time, like that's where the magic happens. Yeah. Yeah. I think that we all need that. And it's so obvious that the brain brain, that the phone sucks that away from us. You know what I mean?

It fills that gap and boredom is a thing. Boredom is a good thing. You know what I mean? Cause it gets your brain to stretch a little bit in a few different areas. I know we're up on time here. I had so many more questions for you, man, but this was, this was great. All right. Quick, quick ones here. So you started morning brew after your dad passed, right? Yeah. And you said you, I was reading something. You said you started it cause you were bored. Could you explain? And so I guess the question I have is this is, did you start it with a goal in mind, right? So you went and got funding, you got all this other stuff. So this kind of leads to, are you an evolutionist or are you a goal setter in the sense that you did something cause you were bored and you were like, all right, I got to figure this out and it kept going.

And then it turned into something. And then, so could you walk me through just kind of that mentality there? Cause I think a lot of people are like, Oh, I need to be a goal setter and I need to can be crystal clear on what I want. And I don't think you need to in some cases. No, no. I actually think with every business that I've started, even StoryArb, I wasn't crystal clear on what the ultimate path was. Like even just using StoryArb as the example, the initial thought I had for StoryArb was like, I've had a lot of opportunities created by me creating content on social. What have I helped other founders and executives create content on social? That was like, that was all that was in my head.

There wasn't a whole lot going on. The other, other than that, it was just a monkey with symbols. And, and then I learned like, then the way it evolves is I tried that out, had a lot of learnings. One of the learnings is that like most founders or executives don't have like kind of the patience that it takes to build out their brand. So they quit after five months. It's not a great business to have where people quit after five months. And that's why we evolved it to like, now we do full stack copywriting subscriptions for any content needs that a business has. And I wouldn't have been able to foresee that at all. When I was starting the business, similar thing with morning brew, like the original idea, I wasn't like, Oh my God, like if blue Bloomberg, wall street journal and CBC had, you know, had a child and that child resonated with younger generations.

That's what we'd build. It was never that it was, I am bored. I, I want to force myself to stay up to date with the markets so that I don't graduate from school and then like have no idea what's happening as I start my job. And I was talking to students and they were like, we think that like business content is dog shit right now. Like that was it. And I was like, okay, this kind of sits at the intersection of it can fill my time. It can keep me up to speed with the markets and I can try to create something better for students. That's where it started. And then like, that's why it's like, to me, actually one of the most fun parts about business. And maybe this is just my style. Like I know there are some people who are far more thoughtful and like have, have gone through the entire idea maze of exactly what, how they get to a billion dollar company.

And it's just not how my brain works is like, I see this opportunity directionally. There's something that pulls my heart and my gut towards it. I start working on it. Then data points come to me, whether it's replies from subscribers, whether it's people reaching out saying, Hey, can you add this person to your list for story? Or it's like, you know, people saying, Hey, you've been helping us with executive social, but can you help us with our newsletter and our website copy? And then as you hear these things, actually, I think one of the best skills is to just discern what is important data, what's not important data, because probably of like the hundred points of information you get when you start a business, only like three of them really matter.

So the real skills, figuring out what those three are and what are you going to do about it? So would you say, what, what would you say your superpower is as far as like, if you were to pick one, is it to be able to distill like a bunch of information and kind of see the stuff that matters? Is it to like, where would you say your superpower sits when it comes to being an entrepreneur business? I, I think, yeah, I think it is creative thinking and storytelling. Like those are my two things. Like if you, if you gave me a prompt, how are you going to, how are you going to make noise about StoryArb such that anyone who we want to care about StoryArb, for them, it's going to feel like they just keep showing us, seeing us show up.

It's like, no matter where they look, they see us show up. The way my brain works is I can figure out how to make that happen. And then storytelling, like how I can get people to want to say yes, without them feeling like Alex Lieberman told them to do something. Love that. Awesome. Then you had two last ones here. Uh, you sold morning brew and you speak about these on your podcast in great detail. So there was the selling of morning brew, but then you said stepping aside as CEO was harder. Um, hardest part of your life, harder than selling the business. How much of that was ego driven? Um, versus you just trying to figure out what was right for you at this point. Cause, cause they're that going to work for somebody else after working for yourselves for so long is, is part of like, okay, I just sold my company.

Now I got a job. Um, and that's one inflection point, but then there's the, I'm not, this isn't my role. Like it's, you said a couple of times where you just realized like your partner was actually doing the CEO stuff and you were doing some other stuff. So that self-reflection part of it. Um, how much of it do you, from your perspective was ego versus just like, yeah, the other stuff, I think. Okay. I think it was almost entirely ego. I think at the end of the day, like we have like base human needs and those human needs have never changed. They've just like evolved a little bit as the world's gotten a little bit more sophisticated since we were like, you know, banging sticks against stones.

And I think, so it's like, what are those needs? It's like, we want to at its core, it's, you know, it's survival and it's reproduction. And in survival, it is what does survival back in like, you know, a hundred thousand years ago was we wanted to feel, we felt like to be able to survive, we needed a group that we were a part of that we could feel protected by against predators. And so what I translate that to in, in our lives today is like, you know, we're not trying to fend off. Um, we're not trying to fend off like a saber tooth tire tiger, but we're trying to fend off the feeling of rejection, the feeling of not being loved, the feeling of not being important, the feeling of not being enough.

And so I think when I stepped out of the CEO role, it wasn't just the act of stepping out. It was the way in which it happened. All of the things that I think translate to a feeling of survival today, like my, you know, fight or flight, like most primal reactions were happening. And so I think I felt like a failure. I felt like I didn't grow as the CEO of the business. And that means I had failed as an entrepreneur. Um, I felt like I didn't know. I felt like I wasn't skillful, skillful or smart, which meant that I wasn't important or loved because if I was skillful or smart, I would have been able to stay as the CEO, keep crushing it, stay in the business. I felt like I didn't belong. I felt like I no longer belong to the entrepreneur group because I'd proven I wasn't valuable.

And I felt like so much of my identity was attached to being an entrepreneur. I didn't know what other group I belonged to. And so I think the 12 months after that, we're really trying to calm my reptilian brain from not feeling like I could survive in my current state. Yeah. Dude. Yeah, man. Shit. I relate to that in a lot of ways. Um, what, um, last question, how'd you get out of it? How'd you get out of your kind of depressed state, if you will, and questioning self-worth and all that stuff. Cause I think a lot of people right now, and let's go back to the analogy I was saying earlier, there's a lot of people I think over the past 10 years who had an inflated, you know, ego on because they were super successful at a time where it wasn't.

And I think a lot of them are coming down to reality saying and questioning. And, and, and I know this, my peers in this industry, right? I crushed it for the past 10 years and now I'm questioning, was I really that good or was it really just the fucking market. Right. And, and, and so how do you, how did you get out of it to get to that comfort zone? And I know you said there's still a lot that you're trying to think through and you still have, you know, some of the stuff that you're dealing with, but what was, what did you go through? What was the process you went through to try to really get yourself back on track? There's a few things that come to mind. One is, um, getting an executive, executive coach was super helpful for me because he helped me again, get back to a place of gratitude and also to, to understanding deeply like what my zone of genius was.

And, and, and, you know, zone there's, um, basic, I, I, it's, um, I don't know who originally created zone of genius, but it's, it's such a good framework that I think just everyone should know basically bringing up the diagram. So basically there's, there's four zones. And, um, so I'll just go through them quickly. Zone of incompetence are things that neither bring you joy and things that you're not uniquely good at. So you suck at it and you don't enjoy it. If you're spending time in your zone of incompetence, uh, not, not great. Um, then there is zone of competence. So these are things that bring you joy, but you're not uniquely good at, like you can find people that are as good as you at the thing.

And, and that's where like people can really end up in kind of like a pit in their career because they may not escalate a lot because like they're, they're enjoying the work, but they're not exceptional to the work. Then there's zone of excellence, which are things that you are uniquely good at, but don't bring you energy or joy. Again, people get sucked into that because they get in a different way. They get rewarded for the work, they get promotions, but they're not actually enjoying it. And then zone of genius are the things that bring you joy and, um, you are uniquely good at it. And generally it's like a few things. And I think by going through that exercise, what it made me realize is the second, the second chapter of being a CEO.

So first chapter of being a CEO is being kind of like the, um, the product builder in chief. Your, your sole goal is to build a great product and find product market fit. And the, the skills required to be great in that first chapter really lined up with my zone of genius. Like it was so clear, creativity, storytelling, uh, customer and problem of obsession, um, et cetera. Chapter two is company builder in chief. And this is like where you're literally, you're building the infrastructure for the company to build, go beyond a single product. And that when you look at what is required of a CEO in the second chapter for building a company, it is strategic planning. It's building out an, uh, executive leadership team.

It is managing leaders. It's a resource allocation. Like how are you going to spend the money in the company? And when I looked at my zone of genius, like 0% overlap. And so, so in a lot of ways, like, it started to make sense. Like, of course, of course, I didn't like that, that role. And then what that also brought up for me is it brought up for me a story that I treated as truth, which is the story that I had was to be a successful entrepreneur. You had to be like the captain of a ship, you know, you start the journey and you go down with the ship or you go into the sunset. And like, I always had this idea of like, you know, Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk from idea to IPO, like that is success.

And so when I had awareness of that story, that's what gave me the ability to change the story. So that was the first big thing was working with my executive coach, finding my zone of genius. The second was having a conversation with my co-founder Austin at this point, probably eight months ago, eight, eight to 12 months ago, where I, I brought up, it was like a two hour phone call. And I basically told him my story that I had of me as a CEO and what he thought of me. And I asked him, tell me how much of this is true. Don't hold anything back. I want to know your, your specific perception of everything that happened. And I basically walked through it basically. And what he basically shared is like, there was some overlap, which was that once we got to a certain point in the business, my skills did not lend themselves as well to running the business.

But then there was a whole part that I just like wiped from my memory, which was like the first five years of the business were like my creativity, my storytelling, my grittiness, and my scrappiness that the business would have, would not have happened without that. And I think because I was so focused on my story of being inept in chapter two, that I fully forgot about chapter one. And so I think that conversation with Austin, basically, I kind of call it like truth finding. When you, when you don't know the truth and you have this story and this story is really provoking and knowing the truth could be really illuminating, go find the truth. And then the final piece was, as I got clarity around my zone of genius, I started getting back into it.

It's why I built story art. It's why I'm working on building new ideas because that did two things. One is it created a little bit more separation from morning brew. So I didn't have to constantly ask myself every day. It's like this weird thing where I'm close to the business, but I'm not running the thing anymore. It feels shitty, but it also got me spending my time, 80% of my time within my zone, which gave me a ton of energy. Well, that's awesome, man. All right. Last question. Uh, what excites you most about having a girl? Cause this is your first kid, right? Yeah. Yeah. Not, not dealing with a P flying on the wall. Um, yeah, that's a bonus. That's a bonus. Um, I, uh, I don't know everything.

Like, I just think, I, I think, honestly, in so many ways, like while I, while I did envision having a boy, I think what, um, originally, because I think oftentimes we just envision what we are like. I envision myself, but at the end of the day, like what I'm most excited for is like, it actually are the things that are irrespective of gender, which is like, we spend so much of our lives trying to be more like children. We spend our lives trying to be carefree, to look at the world with wonder, without judgment, deeply curious, playful, and creative. And that is a child's default setting. And so to me, like on one hand, I'm so excited about having a child because to me, I believe it is like the greatest gift I can give to the world and the greatest responsibility and job I'll have.

But I am selfishly also so excited about how much I can learn from like, you know, a little Yoda. Yep. Oh, there's no question. Like it's a, it's a, it's amazing seeing that reflection, seeing them and then being, you know, macroing out and be like, man, the way they look at it is so much more beautiful than the way everybody else or the way I've been looking at it. Right. Cause they're, they're, they're born curious, right? They're constantly looking for things. So it does kind of, again, let's full circle here. Give you, give you perspective on a lot of stuff and, and gratitude is, is in your face every day. So, uh, I'm excited for that journey for you, man. Cause it's an awesome one. Yeah.

It's an awesome one. I, I had the same thing. I kind of thought I wanted a boy and then I had a girl and I was like, Oh man, this is awesome. Now don't get me wrong. She's 13 years old going into, you know, the fun years. So it's a bit of a fucking holy shit now. Uh, but, uh, but it's still incredible. So congrats again, by the way. Awesome. And we'll look, uh, tell us a little bit more about story arb. Also, um, I think it's what experience camps for grieving children. We could little plug for that and a few other, like where, where can people find out more information? Talk to us, uh, where people want people to go. Yeah. So, um, you know, my main hustle right now is story are very simply.

We, um, offer copywriting subscriptions for businesses, everything from newsletters to company, social white papers, to landing pages. We, we do it all for you. And we have literally the best writers on the internet working full time at story arb. I will allow nothing less. And I've gone through 3000 applications in the last 30 days to make sure what would happen. Uh, so that's story arb. You can go to storyarb.com experience camps is a nonprofit I'm involved in. It is, it started as sleepway camps for grieving children who lost a sibling, a parent, a family member, and now it's growing into being the number one, um, nonprofit for grief period. Um, I'm super grateful that I'm on the board and, uh, I think there's a really bright future ahead.

And unfortunately grief is kind of like the one thing that is unavoidable for everyone. And so I'm super excited about just the impact it can have. Otherwise have a podcast called founder's journal for entrepreneurs. And you can find me on, on all of the social channels. I love it. And for everybody, all this stuff that I was bringing up that I got most of this from the founder's journal, uh, cause Alex does a great job at just talking directly to how you've switched the format now though. Now it's an interview format. Cause it used to be, you just speaking directly different components, but you've re rebranded or re restructured it a few times. All right. Yeah. Basically the show now is I interview a founder on their one superpower.

So we were talking about zone of genius before. Basically it's, we take one thing that is within a founder's zone of genius and we go super deep on it. Nice. Love it. Awesome. Well, Alex has been absolute pleasure, man. I really appreciate you coming on and, uh, wish you all the luck. I don't, I know you don't need it, but, uh, you know, you're doing some great stuff out there, man. Thanks so much, man. Thank you for having me. Yeah. And everybody else, hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. And like I always say at the end of all these podcasts, go out there and make somebody smile today. Cause no matter how bad your day's going or how bad you think it went, make somebody smile and you know, you had a good day and the world needs a lot more of that right now.

So thank you all very much. And I will see you on the other side. Hey everyone. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did with your support and our incredible guests. We're one of the top sales podcasts out there right now. And I can't thank you enough now to keep the momentum going. It would mean the world to me. If you could go and leave a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform and share some of your favorite episodes with your network. Also, I am super excited to be launching my new newsletter where I'll be sharing everything I know and everything I'm learning along the way while I'm out there selling every day, just like you go to j barrows.com slash newsletter to sign up today.

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