Thriving Through Change in Business and Life Through Pivoting With Mike Lazear

Pivoting in life and business can result in growth. The thing is, making decisions on it is challenging. Moreover, knowing the right time to make changes in our path is quite difficult. How can we be able to confront these uncertainties that lie ahead when we decide to pivot our directions to change? In this episode, I talk with Mike Laezer, Founder of Astrology Wolf. We discuss how pivoting in business and life can lead to new paths and growth. With Mike's experience, he highlights the importance of trusting your guts, intuition, and facing your fears to overcome problems ahead. Additionally, he points out to follow our intuition for career pivots, even if the path is unclear. Join us to learn how to pivot with the expert! --- Listen to the podcast here: Thriving Through Change in Business and Life Through Pivoting With Mike Lazear Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you all about pivoting, because what we all know about really building anything, whether it be founding a business or starting something else on your own, is that you need a little bit of stick-to-itiveness. You need to stick to it, you need to not give up right away, because it is not an issue of instant gratification as so and so our culture is right now. However, there are times when it does become time to pivot, whether you need to find a new way to promote your business, try a new business, or just try something new in general because the time has come to move on. And one of the challenges that we all have is when is it time to move on and when is it that you're giving up too soon? Today, my guest is Mike Lazear. He is the founder of Astrology Wolf and also the founder of a business he recently sold, 515 Media, to talk a little bit about all the pivots he has made in life. --- Mike, welcome to the program. Hi, thanks, Stephen. It's good to be here. It's good to have you as well. Now, obviously, you've done a lot of pivoting in your life so let's just start with your story from the beginning. When did you first decide that you wanted to found your own businesses as opposed to what I usually describe as living by the script? Yeah, thanks, and it's so funny because when I actually did start my first real legitimate business, I wasn't even necessarily trying to do it. I had always wanted to before I went that direction in my life sort of live more independently and I had this whole thing of like if I could find a way to just have enough time to do as many creative projects as I could and not have to spend all my time earning a living and it felt like it was almost an obstacle or a problem to solve so that's kind of what got me first into it. When I graduated from the University of Minnesota, I had a degree that didn't really have a lot of translatable skills with the bachelor's, I was a psychology graduate. So, I was always interested in programming, computer stuff, got into that. I took some courses at Portland State, mainly HTML, CSS, and I got a job out there working for a really great company called One Economy. They're wonderful, but I don't think they exist anymore. Oh, that’s too bad. The area where I worked, I don't even remember exactly what happened but a bunch of us got laid off kind of at once and I had started kind of getting my own clients doing web development, doing frontend coding, CSS, HTML. This was back in the days too where CSS was kind of a newer thing and I was learning — when dev is a lot more complicated today. It certainly became that way. So it was sort of by accident. I just was getting so many clients that I was kind of frantically looking for another job and I'm like I'm actually making enough now where I can almost see this just continuing. Then I started thinking about my dream of not having to go to a nine-to-five and just do what everyone else is doing. I’m a pretty freedom-oriented person, like I like to have my space and creative freedom to do what I want to do in life, like I think a lot of probably members of your show feels that way. Before I knew it, I was getting more work than I knew what to do with and I started hiring help and I had a business but it was not quite as intentional as I wish I could claim at the time. You talk about these creative projects that you wanted to do. So when this business started rolling, were you able to do these creative projects? Did it solve that initial problem in your head? I thought it would. There's this myth that when you own a business and you have all this free time, I’ll be able to do whatever I want, I can work a little bit in the morning and then have some tea and go golfing and go climbing but it really doesn't work that way so I was very busy. So, I kind of kept going and going and trying to replace myself in the business by hiring developers and hiring designers and that was a big part of the process early on. But then I realized that was also creating more work for myself so this sort of elusive dream of having all the time in the world to travel and write and do game design and all the stuff that I'm excited about seemed just as elusive when I had my own businesses when I was working nine-to-five when I was in my 20s and so there's this idea that we have that we can somehow create our way out of this through different types of structures of working, and I do think that if you get into business, you have a better shot at it, depending on what you do at creating that life where you have more space to be yourself but I learned a pretty hard lesson, actually, and that's that there's no automatic solution to it. You have to kind of keep trying things and seeing what sticks.Share on X At least that was the case for me. Yeah, and it sounds like it's a case with a lot of people as well in this world. We got so accustomed to instant gratification, post your Instagram photo, all of a sudden, you have 36 likes, 120 likes, whatever, however popular you are, and that dopamine in your head happens pretty instantly. But one of the things that, I think it’s Simon Sinek that points this out about how some of the most important things in life, establishing a career or establishing good relationships with people do not fall into the realm of instant gratification, they do not fall into the realm of that dopamine fix, you have to show up day in and day out, and in some cases, especially with figuring out these deep issues about how to live a life that truly aligned with who you are, it takes trying a few different things. And so you had that business and then you continued on trying some different things. I did, yeah, and one of the most amazing things that's happened to me recently is I’ve sort of come full circle and realized that, you talked about dopamine and the whole, oh, instant gratification, I think that I was almost trying to, with that business, create a solution to a problem that I saw in my life where, “Oh, I would only — I would feel good if only I had all the time in the world and be creative,” was sort of the message that I was telling myself subconsciously. But the reality was, it's interesting, if you put the sort of love and energy into, like if I had put that into the business and treated that as sort of my creative flow and freedom, maybe I could have done more of the design myself and been proud of it and found a financial way to sell it rather than just outsource everything, so it was almost like I was trying to create more time and creative freedom for myself by not doing the creative stuff that — it was weird. I had kind of psyched myself out and thought that I was creating my own problems. To move forward, I think on that and what you were saying is, now, I have kind of come full circle. I sold my business last year. I started trying a number of different endeavors. I have some time that I bought for myself from the sale the business and now I'm doing — so Astrology Wolf is one of the biggest projects I'm working on. I'm actually an astrologer. I've been doing that since I was a kid. My mom used to teach me how to read the stars when I was young, I was like seven years old. I think kids, their capacity for language learning is at its highest when they said when you're seven, eight, nine or something so instead of me learning something useful like French, I learned astrology. Astrology is useful. But only lately, I've been like, I really enjoy, people have always kind of come to me for readings, it was a side hustle for a while and now I'm just really enjoying it, building Astrology Wolf out and offering, I'm going to be offering some courses and workshops coming up in the next few months and I give readings, I have regular clients. So that's sort of a new endeavor. And the second thing I've been kind of getting more into is partnering on some design projects and this is where it's kind of come full circle. I sold my business where I was running a company basically where we hired designers and developers in my web development business and now I'm actually finding myself drawn to trying some of it myself because I have a lot of design background and I'm enjoying it, like doing little side projects, and so what's actually happened is I'm starting to — I'm like, wait, I've actually reached the point I always wanted to reach, I can do these different things, I can work at it, there's work involved, and I didn't need to create all this free time and space necessarily to do it, it was always right there. And so that sort of was the big lesson I think I've learned to this point. Now, with creating this free time and space, was escaping the nine-to-five, the type of regimen which I know is becoming a little bit less prevalent now, especially post pandemic with some of these remote jobs, but was escaping that rigid “we expect you to punch in at this time,...