The written version of this week’s episode. The podcast is the full, unedited, chaotic version. This is the good bits, organised by taking the transcript and having an AI tool clean it up.
HEY!
I was supposed to fly back to Berlin yesterday.
Instead I’m sitting on the ground in a forest in Sweden, recording this week’s episode on AirPods and a laptop camera. Changing my flight was quoted at €15, then the Eurowings website broke, so booking a whole new one cost €100. I paid it, because I didn’t feel like leaving yet.
I wasn’t going to record at all this week. The show is called Unscheduled, I can do it whenever the hell I want, and nobody would have noticed a skipped Tuesday. But I was sitting there rereading The War of Art, and I caught myself asking: why the fuck am I recording this episode anyway?
The answer turned into the episode. And I think it applies to your business as much as it does to my podcast.
The nuggets (if you only read one section, read this one)
Ideas behave like fish: you can’t summon them, you can only be out on the water when they show up. This is Rick Rubin’s framing and I’m stealing it openly. The fisherman casts lines for a chance to catch something. The fish might be there either way, but if you’re not out there, you catch nothing.
A dedicated practice matters just as much for making money as it does for making art. You have to be creative to figure out how to generate revenue. It’s the same muscle, and it responds to the same routine.
If talking is how you think, build your outlet around talking. This show is one unbroken, improvised take because talking is my way of getting ideas out. Your version might be writing or walking. Find it, then give it a slot.
Your workspace trains your brain. A band walks into a studio and creating becomes natural, because the studio is where they create. My office is set up as a place where I go to check our numbers. Worth noticing what your space tells you to do.
The content you make for other people doubles as infrastructure for yourself. This podcast is my brain dump, my idea generator, and my way of staying in touch with people without networking. Last week’s video handed me the idea for a whole new workshop.
If you’re loving a trip, check what staying actually costs before assuming you have to leave. Mine cost €100. Most people never even look.
Okay. The story.
The fisherman idea
I have a few books with me in Sweden but the 2 that I kept rechecking were my classics: The War of Art, and Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. If you listen to this show you’ll know I bang on about both of them. They circle the same concept, which is that ideas come from somewhere else, and if you’re in the right headspace you become a kind of antenna that can receive them.
Whether you believe that or not doesn’t matter, and I don’t even know if I believe it myself. It’s a useful metaphor because you can experience it. Paul McCartney says the entire melody of Yesterday appeared in his mind in one go. Chris Martin says the same kind of thing all the time. Writers say it, filmmakers say it: I was just driving, and boom, the idea arrived.
Rick Rubin has my favourite version of it. You’re a fisherman out at sea, casting lines into the water for a chance to catch something. That’s why writers sit at the desk from 10am until 1pm every day no matter what. They’re keeping the lines in the water.
And that’s why I turned the camera on today. I’ve been doing this show for almost a year now, since September, and most episodes have no specific topic when I start. Sitting down on a Monday and pressing record is me casting the lines.
I’ve felt this myself. When I was in a band and in the practice of songwriting, the songs just came. When I was writing scripts regularly in college, the film ideas flowed. Your antenna becomes more sensitive to the thing you keep showing up for.
The mustard jumper problem
Last week I told you about spending 2 days with my mentor Blake, so here’s the short version if you missed it. I went in with the goal of getting the company to 10 million a year. We were at six. By the end of the 2 days I realised I didn’t want that at all.
What Blake actually did was watch me. In San Diego I was in a great mood, excited about buying a mustard coloured jumper in a tourist surf shop, telling him how much I loved every coffee shop we walked into. Then we’d sit down to talk about the business and he’d say: whoa, your entire vibe just changed. More serious, more closed off, kind of practised and strange. He kept saying GERMAN.
When I talked about my relationship with my now fiancée, he said that’s the real version of you speaking. When I talked about the 10 million, it was the other one.
We dug into it and found the uncomfortable bit: to make AJ&Smart and Facilitator work as well as they did, I’d more or less stopped using my creativity. Like a lot of entrepreneurs, I was a creative first. I was in a band. I moved to Berlin to be a filmmaker, not to run a business. And because the business was working so well, it was really hard to get out of that mode.
Blake’s point, over and over: there’s a state I can tap into where I do my best work. The in-person event we’d run the week before was the example. And the more time I spend in that state, the more successful the business will be.
Talking is my way in
Blake is a music producer, and he gave me an example I keep thinking about. A band puts themselves in the studio because the studio is where they create. Being in that room puts them in the headspace, and creating becomes natural there.
Which made me look differently at the AJ&Smart office. It’s beautiful and it’s fun, but it’s set up as a place where we make money, where I go in and check the numbers. So since that trip, the question has been: what situations can I put myself in where things just flow through me, no blockages, as natural as I can possibly be?
One clear answer: talking. That’s the actual reason this show exists as ONE unbroken, improvised take instead of an edited thing. If I bring any usefulness or strangeness to this business that’s hard to compete with, it’s that I can turn on a camera and talk for a long time, unscripted, and sometimes something interesting comes out of it.
There’s an exercise called morning pages, from The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. Every morning you fill 3 letter-size pages with stream of consciousness writing. Not a diary entry, just a brain dump. I did it for something like 7 years, I have piles and piles of notebooks. This show is my morning pages now, done out loud. The one twist is that I need the feeling that someone might get some use out of what I’m making, or I don’t feel like making it.
And it has a load of other benefits. New people find the companies through the show. People I’d never manage to stay in touch with (I’m not the best at networking) keep getting reminded I exist because episodes keep coming out. And it generates ideas for everything else. Last week’s video about Blake is what triggered the idea for the new workshop I’m building.
The €100 decision
Quick sidequest, because it belongs to the same thing. We were supposed to go back to Berlin yesterday and I didn’t feel like it, so we stayed. I know I have a flexible life because of the business I’ve built, but I’ve been around so many people mid-trip saying “we have to go now” when they don’t. If you’re loving something and dreading the return to your day to day, at least check the price of staying. Mine was €100. That was the entire cost of not breaking the flow.
And no, staying doesn’t contradict the routine-for-creation thing, because I’m still doing the routine. Same show, different location. Sometimes a new location is exactly what knocks the horse blinders off.
What I’m doing with all of this
I’m building my first personal development workshop. It’s born from the creative retreat I ran in February, 5 days, 5 nights, full digital detox, which a lot of you were actually at. I’m trying to find the compact version of that, something people could access more regularly, plus a new layer from the Blake stuff: how do you even figure out what you actually want to explore in the first place?
There’s a V1 of it done. I’ll test it on a couple of friends first, then in September on our guides in New York. (Guides are the top level of our facilitator business. A couple of you listen to this show, and yes, you’re our guinea pigs.)
That’s why the reading pile out here is The War of Art, Big Magic, The Surrender Experiment and The Second Mountain, plus my notes from February.
One more thing that fits. I saw The Odyssey at an IMAX here in Sweden on Saturday (not 70mm, in case you’re wondering). I’m not telling you it’s a great movie. What I love is watching someone get an insane, humongous thing out of their head and into reality. Long term, that’s the goal for me too: keep growing the business, sure, but make things that are creative, weird and risky. The February retreat was a first pinch of that. This show is another attempt at it. The business content has always been a bit of a Trojan horse to get you into this other stuff anyway.
If you’re in it right now
Maybe you have a switched-off version of yourself too. A thing you were before the business worked, parked because the serious mode was paying the bills.
2 small things to try this week. Notice which topics make you playful and which ones flip you into your own version of German mode. And find one slot in your week where you sit down, cast the lines, and see what shows up. You don’t need a podcast for it. 3 pages and a pen worked for me for 7 years.
Cheers, Jonathan
P.S. This is the cleaned-up version. The full episode has the forest, the rain, a very large ant, and me completely losing my train of thought after going to get my sunglasses... If you know one business owner who’d get something out of this, send it to them.
P.P.S. If you haven’t read The War of Art or Big Magic, please just read them. I have nothing to do with either of them, I just think you should.
