Interview with Jonathan Fields

Nick: Alright. So we’re out here in New York. We’re actually in New York City limits. I can’t really believe this.

Jonathan: In Bronx.

Nick: In the Bronx here with Jonathan Fields of career renegade and today were going to talk about what we think makes people bold and successful in life and just kind of get your take on it. Starting out, how’d you get started out? I know you have a really interesting background.

Jonathan: I started out as a lawyer. First at the SCC and then in a large firm in the city and just burned out. I hit a point where I was working so many hours that I actually ended up in the hospital. My immune system pretty much shut down. I’d had a huge infection right in the middle of my body big abscess and I have to go to emergency surgery.

Nick: It’s no good.

Jonathan: No it’s a big wake up call. I mean when your body smacks you in the face and says something is not right you kind of have to listen and that lead me into really sort of exploring okay what do I want to do with my life that is actually where I can make a decent living, support a family in new York when the time comes and contribute to society and also really love showing up for work every day. I pretty much made a list of the things that I thought were pretty cool to do and try to figure out can I make a living doing them and most of the things on top of my list were entrepreneurship based and also health, fitness, wellness oriented. So one of the things I realized really quickly though is most people on those businesses make no money and they burn out really quickly. So I literally brought it as my mission to say okay just because most people don’t do it doesn’t mean that I can’t do it. So I was sort of on a mission to figure out how to create a better mousetrap.

Nick: Pretty cool. So you ended up starting a yoga chain.

Jonathan: First actually I left there I ended up working as a personal trainer making $12 an hour. So that was a big shock.

Nick: You go from law to personal training.

Jonathan: Six figures, $2000 Armani suits to $12 an hour wearing like sneakers and tights and running in central park. Which is a lot of fun but the money thing definitely hurt. The whole reason I did it was I wanted to spend six months understanding the industry from the bottom up cause I really wanted to know and then understanding the business model and how I would do it differently. From there I actually opened a personal training center. Grew that over two and a half years. Sold it to an investor group then the next move for me was into the world of yoga. that ended up, I actually signed a lease on the yoga studio, signed the lease September 10, 2011 which was not a good day to be signing a lease and woke up the next day with a three month old baby, a home that I own, married and just signed the biggest lease of my life for a business that I was supposed to launch in a couple of weeks after 9-11. that was scary to say the least but you know what the city was never more in need of something like that and it was a matter of saying you know what...

Nick: Reality check.

Jonathan: Yeah I had to check in and say is it really a smart thing to do with my business. Is this the smart thing to do with all the responsibilities that I had but the truth is it was still a good business idea. Yoga is still a good business idea. the city needed it more than ever and I had one of the big things was I wasn’t just opening a yoga center I was looking to do something different than I had done before and different than what was in the market cause there’s a lot of great yoga in the city but one of my philosophies is (3:39) type of thing. I don’t care how many people are out there if I find a gap or if I find a way to do it different or better...

Nick: And there’s a need.

Jonathan: And there’s a need. I’ll go straight into it. so coming from the world I came from I knew that your average 50 something year olds, stressed out of their minds, unfit, overweight like lawyer would be terrified going into the average studio that was in new York. As great as this studio were it was just you know, so the goal became to open a studio that preserved the power of their practice and lowered all the barriers to participation.

Nick: And you’ve just done the personal training thing. So you knew from the ground up what the actual need was and you knew your client because you were it.

Jonathan: And I knew also from personal training that I kept doing more and more yoga with personal training clients and eventually I had a staff with managers and a ton of other people. So it wasn’t just me training individual clients but I wanted to be sure that I was the one on the floor because I just need to understand the psychology of the market I was serving on the visceral level.

Nick: That’s very cool. You ended up writing a book called career renegade and how did that come about?

Jonathan: That was really pretty much a reflection of my desire to answer a whole bunch of questions that people have been asking me over a series of a lot of years and one of the big ones is hey I have this passion or I have this thing that I really want to do. this thing that is a strong interest but I don’t think it can make money cause everyone around me is telling me it’s just a dumb hobby, just do it on the side and what I discovered is a lot of times that just wasn’t true. That was people telling you they couldn’t do it because they could figure out how to do it and if you went about it differently. If you pursued it in a whole bunch of different ways you could actually figure out how to monetize these things. How to make enough money to live well in the world. Are you going to make millions? Maybe, maybe not.

Nick: But you do what you’re passionate about.

Jonathan: Yeah you’re doing what you’re passionate about and there’s a different number for every person. So for me I just use the term enough to live well in the world because that’s the number and it’s going to be totally different one person...

Nick: It’s relative to where you’re at.

Jonathan: One person is going to need half a million dollars here one person is going to need 50,000.

Nick: Right and some people are living in Kentucky and others are living in New York.

Jonathan: Right exactly and for me it’s you balance that out also just with what your bigger lifestyle. I’m just telling you I’m taking my family and were just hanging out in Bali for the summer. I’ll be working for half the time when I’m there but then I’ll just be hanging out with my family and the reason I can do that is I rebuilt my career in the way, or my living around the ability to do that.

Nick: It’s key. It’s pivotal.

Jonathan: So that’s really what the book is about. I mean that is a big question that I focus on in the book.

Nick: It’s pretty interesting.

Jonathan: So anyway.

Nick: Very cool. I have a theory that most people have a secret sauce so to speak. something that they, you probably heard the saying that how you act at one place is how you act all the time in every part of your life and I think that secret sauce resonates through everything that you’ve done all the way through. Like your first endeavors to the current ones. What do you think your secret sauce is?

Jonathan: I think there are a couple of pieces to the puzzle. One is you have to not just a kind of interested and think that there is a business opportunity. Be madly passionate. You have to be like freaking driven beyond belief because even anything that is going to succeed as a business. It takes a lot of work. there is no shortcut around it and the most successful businesses even if they take off eventually they plateau and eventually they hit this crux moves, it’s a climbing term where everything is going to suck for a short period of time and that generally is the moment right before you're about to take off again but if you can’t make it through those depths you’re going to crash and burn. You’re going to give up because you’re going to hit all those suck phases and if you’re not passionate about it, that’s the thing that fuels you through those dips very often.

Nick: So how do you get through the suck phases?

Jonathan: You got to have a real genuine belief in what you’re doing and also the market you’re serving, you have to have passion for it. You have to believe that the solution that you created is real and valuable. If you’re just doing it to make money you may make a whole bunch of money but if there’s no real value behind it. It becomes empty. Say like passion, belief in what you’re doing as having really strong value and understanding of your market. You got to know just because you love doing something doesn’t mean that people are going to show up and buy it from you.

Nick: Exactly.

Jonathan: So that’s where I think a ton of people go wrong is they’ll oh I love doing this. It’s a great idea. I’m just going to pour my money into it because if I love it everyone is going to love it and they never actually go out and do the fundamental research. You could do this stuff for free online and for such a short time now and get a good feel whether people actually want to buy what you want to sell. Other secret sauce I think what you keyed in on in your question is the real thing for most people which is that you find something which allows you to exist as one person in every setting because I’ve seen people go into the blog industry. Social media is an example where they essentially create a whole different persona because they think that it’s going to serve a market need really well. That’s so hard to keep up. It takes so much emotional and psychological and physical and spiritual energy to keep up a facade and eventually it ends up eating at you and burning you out and people they figure it out also.

Nick: It doesn’t give you the flexibility to move on to your next endeavor either.

Jonathan: It doesn’t and for me the reason I blog at jonathanfields.com and not a whole bunch of other potential brands is because for the way that I’m growing my business I want the brand to be me because I write books. I open different businesses. I have different sub brands but I want everything to come back to me which means that my personal integrity...

Nick: Is the most important part.

Jonathan: Is really critical and if you’re playing a game, if you’re not able to say this is who I am, you burn that integrity and that brand pretty quickly.

Nick: Got you. So if someone was to describe you as bold, a bold individual, someone that does what they want. What would they be describing? Your personality, your ideas, the whole package or your looks?

Jonathan: It’s definitely not my looks. Rule that out right away. I mean in my mind it’s, the thing that makes, maybe me and I think everybody...

Cameraman: Just a second let me get this straight.

Nick: Cameraman is doing an awesome job. Impressive. I mean walking backwards. Huge shoutout to Derek Halpern.

Jonathan: Wohoo. So the two big things that make a lot of people bold and its things that people don’t really thing about. One is the ability to live with uncertainty. so many people like spend their entire lives in this chase for security which is just another name for certainty and the one thing that I know as an absolute certainty is that uncertainty can never be had. So you define your life by trying to chase and lock down certainty and it’s essentially defining your life through suffering cause you’re chasing something you could never have. So the people that I’ve known that have succeeded almost anything have developed the ability to actually live with uncertainty and even harness it and then you kind of add like the other side of that coin which is fear and I think one of the big things that paralyzes a lot of people is fear. Fear of failure. Fear of judgment. Sometimes even fear of success. So I think your ability to handle and literally transform fear from a paralyzing force into a mobilizing force is mission critical and your ability to take action. If you can’t live with uncertainty and if you can’t figure out how to work with fear as a fuel you can’t take action and there’s no magic to success. It’s just action on a consistent daily basis.

Nick: That’s awesome. So you mentioned that you’re going with your family to Bali. What couple of tips would you give to your children or your family and friends to be successful or to live a happy life which is I mean really that’s what were after. It’s not as you mentioned in your book it’s enough to be happy.

Jonathan: Money definitely matters but the truth is the happiest people that I know or the most fulfilled people, happy is like a loaded word these days are the ones who focus more on relationships than stuff. so I think that is a really big thing for us to start to focus on like not how much I might accumulating or acquiring but how many amazing, really rich relationships do I have in my life. That’s the stuff that really makes everything come alive and that’s everything from who you work with, who you work under, who you serve, to the people in your personal sphere and your family. That’s one really big thing and also you asked me for two so second one is don’t trust conventional wisdom. To me conventional wisdom is the collective propaganda of a whole bunch of people who have either tried and failed at something very likely because they haven’t tried in a way which would work or never actually had the balls to try in the first place. Passing on their belief that you can’t do something to you and when you understand that it lets you reframe and say you know what this is really just somebody telling me I can’t do it. so who the hell are you to try and figure it out and then you start to understand, you know what maybe they’re right and maybe they’re not but the only way I’m really going to know is if I just go out there and try it myself and a lot of times when you really are vested in that you go out and you try it and you’re willing to do it ten different ways to see if you can make it work. You’re capable of doing stuff that everybody else says you can’t be doing. So don’t buy in to conventional wisdom. It’s not the end of the road. It’s just a test.

Nick: I like that. I said something that I believe firmly and it’s everyone has a unique group of experiences that has brought them to exactly where they’re at right now. So everyone has a unique opportunity. Are there any tips like for you, you had a unique opportunity because of your background. Are there any tips you would give to people whatever they may be in fishing, golfing, any sub niche. Is there anything you would offer them to chase what would make them successful and their passion?

Jonathan: Figure out with a lot of clarity who you want to serve and understand, that’s the thing. You’re not looking to like say, who do I want to take money from? Who do I want to market to? You’re figuring out who do I want to serve? Who’s kind of problem that I can solve? You can’t get paid unless you’re serving someone’s problem and that’s where I think a lot of people go wrong. So who can I serve? What’s their pain point? What problem can I solve? If you can’t figure that out you can’t make money doing anything and then also look for the gaps. So in that niche that you’re talking about. no matter if you’re a fisherman or you’re a knitter or whatever it may be start with yourself and say what needs do I have that aren’t being met and then broaden out from there and say maybe more people have this same needs. Look for the gaps, ask who you’re going to serve and solve problems. Create legitimate solutions to big problems. Last thing is talking about problems; the closer you can solve a problem to the point of maximum pain the bigger the business opportunity there is. so look for that point and if there’s a way to solve it in a big powerful way as closer to the point of maximum pain, that’s where you want to go.

Nick: Okay cool. So is there a way that you would say to identify that maximum point of pain. It’s going to be different in every situation. There is no hard and fast rules but do you have any quick and dirty rules?

Jonathan: I mean first thing is just identify the existence of a market. Is there a big enough group of people and then it’s a lot of asking questions. it’s basically starting with your own thing .like we say where’s the pain point for me and at what point along the line does it get more painful. To use a medical world as an example. If you have a solution where everybody knows sort of in the health care world or in the wellness world that it’s really hard to sell prevention. It’s really easy to sell cure and the reason is because prevention is so far away from a person point of pain most of the time they don’t even realize they’re in pain. It’s happening inside somewhere and it hasn’t manifested yet. They just won’t buy into it but if you actually get somebody where they’re in whatever horrible thing or whatever struggle they’re going to through has manifested and its staring them right in the face and you can really help them that’s the point where the greatest opportunity lies. I don’t want to seem like its being opportunistic. I’m saying you can really solve somebody’s problem and actually help them that’s the place where you don’t have to. It’s much easier because the convincing part is done. The circumstances is doing the convincing. You basically it makes it easier to just show up and say I can help you.

Nick: That’s good. Didn’t I see you tweet I think who can I help today?

Jonathan: I do that every morning. That’s my first tweet on twitter is good morning everybody. Who can I help today and people are funny because people always tweet back to me. I always get people saying either why are you doing this or how many people really take you up on it and I help people every day and the truth is I do that more for me than for anybody else. How awesome is it for you to start your day and just know that immediately the first thing you can do is just help a couple of random people you have no connection with. Little things, whatever it is that you can do. It’s the coolest way I think you can possibly start your day. I mean other than hanging out with my daughter and my wife. It’s pretty cool too but then the next thing go and do that.

Nick: Right. That’s very cool. So what the next moves for you?

Jonathan: A couple of big things for me. I actually just sold my next book to a new publisher. So I’m pretty psyched that were diving into that and that will be a 2011 release.

Nick: Congratulations.

Jonathan: Thanks man and I’m continuing to build jonathanfields.com. Really working on building out that brand in social media brand. A broader move very likely into more speaking and a stronger focus on human performance, creativity and marketing as sort of this trifecta where I’m really focusing a lot of my energies right now.

Nick: Very cool. Well I appreciate it.

Jonathan: My pleasure.

Nick: Thank you.

Jonathan: Thanks so much.