Rand Fishkin on Cultivating Chill Work

Rand Fishkin is cofounder and CEO of audience research software startup, SparkToro. He’s dedicated his professional life to helping people do better marketing through his writing, videos, speaking, and his book, Lost and Founder.

Rand had a number of amazing insights during our conversation. Some of them include:

“If you are in a happy and healthy headspace and you’ve gotten lots of sleep, you can outperform even in a few minutes what you could do in hours of work” (10:15).

“Chill Work tries to prioritize that high quality, high impact time over hustle culture, total work time” (10:30).

“Even if you perfectly design your company and your business and do near-perfect hiring, you will still encounter those people-challenges as you ramp up to 100, 200+ employees” (12:20).

“This is part of the challenge for entrepreneurs in general, and all human beings, is that sometimes what feels good and right to you internally isn’t what you get externally recognized and rewarded for” (14:45).

“I would not take a company public on the NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange” (25:25).

“Tomorrow, if all of our data sources for SparkToro disappeared… we could quickly pivot and probably in 6 months have a business that provides similar value from other data sources” (33:10).

“How do we stay small, nimble, profitable, and happy for a long period of time?” (33:45).

“I wish there was more media, more awards, more recognition, more people doing interviews more celebrating, the culture of small entrepreneurship, slow entrepreneurship” (33:55).

“2/3 of venture funds will not meet their minimum bar for investment” (40:00).

“We have a very asynchronous communication style” (47:15).

“If there’s nothing on my calendar and my inbox is 0, I have no work to do. I’m going to go inside and play video games” (48:45).

“We empty our cups professionally and we have nothing left to give personally and emotionally to our partners or kids or families or friends” (50:15).

“Don’t do what I did and start a business out of college. Go work for a few startups, go work for a few companies and figure out what you like and hate” (52:25).

“Sometimes you have too mistakes for yourself before you can learn” (55:10).

“I feel like I have enough. I want to keep doing it, I love doing it, but I don’t have that hole in my chest that can only be filled with people [praising] me” (59:00).

“I have enough, but I don’t think I am enough. I would be very scared to stop a journey of self-discovery and improvement… I don’t want to ever stop that” (1:00:55).

“There’s no perfect human being. Learning and growing is core to that” (1:02:55).

“You can do anything, but you can’t do nothing and you can’t do everything” (1:03:05).

“I am deeply optimistic about a lot of the things that are going on in my general orbit” (1:13:00).

“Social media is a technological innovation similar to the printing press, or radio, or television, and societies in the past found ways to mitigate the risks of those inventions and to optimize for their good mostly” (1:24:30).

“The fact that social media is so new means that we’re that generation who’s experiencing the printing press, or the rise of radio, or the rise of television” (1:25:15).

“Not participating is not failing, it’s not giving up, it’s not weakness” (1:41:10).

Additionally, make sure to connect with Rand on Twitter and LinkedIn! You can also reach out to Rand via email at [email protected] and check out his blog!

Thank you so much to Rand for coming on the podcast!

I wrote a book called “Shift Your Mind” that was released in October of 2020, and you can order it on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Additionally, I have launched a company called Strong Skills, and I encourage you to check out our new website https://www.strongskills.co/. If you liked this episode and/or any others, please follow me on Twitter: @brianlevenson or Instagram: @Intentional_Performers.

Thanks for listening.