How I Built This with Guy Raz

And you had this template to kind of plug in your story using this. This is as you write the blueprint, right?

And I was also drafting an email for Malala's book proposal.

I just went deep into rabbit holes. And when you read the story of these monks in Belgium, you know, brewing with these local fruits and these Czech breweries finding these Saaz hops, I was like, holy shit, this is just as rich as a world of, you know, Fitzgerald short stories or Salinger short stories.

But at that little shop of hops, I bought the book that I first read in the library called The Joy of Homebrewing and Charlie Papazian wrote that book and it's considered sort of the Bible.

And so Charlie did a really great job in The Joy of Homebrewing of putting into layman terms the science of fermentation.

So by reading that, I had some level of confidence because his rallying cry throughout the book was don't worry, relax, have a homebrew.

Which is basically, yep, there's some serious science going on in your kitchen right now with these little single cell animals called yeast. But don't freak out. This has been happening for thousands of years. Trust the process and you'll make good beer.

I wrote a book at that time that was kind of similarly positioned.

When I sold my first book, I got an advance of $22,000, which at the time was lottery amounts of money.

I wrote a book called Your Baby's First Word Will Be DADA, because I thought it was funny because I had my first baby and, uh, I was hoping that she would say dad at first.

No one, we didn't have a competition. We didn't talk about it. Me and my wife, there was no competition, but there was one sided competition. I wanted the baby to say dad.

So I was like, whatever I could do to get this kid to say dad, dad, I don't care.

So I made this book just where it's just, you know, animal sounds quack, you know, and then the adult duck is saying, just say dad, that, you know, the baby won't say quack and the cows wants you to say dad and the calf says, uh, moo, you know, and no one says dad, dad.

And it took off and it became a giant thing. And then I started getting videos from people of their kids, them reading the book to their kids, but their kids reading it back to them. And they're saying like, Jimmy, you, you've kind of taught my kid how to read. I'm like, no, that is not. I mean, that was never the plan at all.

It's called LifePass, Drop Your Limits and Rise to Your Potential.

And I remember actually going back to my book and realizing that these tools and tips are actually muscles you have to develop to be able to say, what is my true north?

I actually talk about this at the, in the afterward of my book, how someone five years ago asked me this question, which stuck with me. He said, how does it feel that you'll never build anything as big as Classfest in your life again?

So for me, I always felt that people always ask me, how did I do this? Which obviously people can just listen to your podcast to get that. But honestly, I think especially for me being a woman of color, an Indian woman, right, I really knew I lived by a different set of rules and methodologies.

And I knew I had to give that to other people. It honestly felt like a responsibility for me to do this. The people close to me knew I operated by a different way of life and a different set of rules, and that's how I always got things done.

He plopped down David McCullough's Great Bridge, the epic story of the building bridge.

Perry Miller Odato, a woman producer made a wonderful film on Gertrude Stein in the early mid seventies called When This You See Remember Me.

When I was there, there was a new book that came out by Joan Crone and Susie Slesson called High Tech.

And they started talking about a Broadway play called Torch Song Trilogy. The play by Firestein, right? Right. By Harvey Firestein.

It's about a Jewish boy who's gay and come to reckoning with his mother is part of the play.

PBS had wonderful success with Kenneth Clark's series on civilization.

And secondly, it started a process where we managed to get a book deal, a three book deal with Hodder and Staunton.

And the advance from that, which I think still at that time, it was like one of the highest advances paid for a debut nonfiction author, really funded the rest of the business.

Yeah, it really did. Yeah, exactly. It gave us, what was it? 180,000.

And it was this idea that what are you actually going to enjoy doing for the next 10 years? Even if you don't see any signs of success, you know, what's the thing that you're passionate about long-term, not, not the thing that is just a hobby right now.

We got all his books and...

There's a whole documentary on this guy, Paul Stamets.

He's brilliant.

He's got his whole mushroom tea company and he's got a TED talks and mushrooms and documentaries on him.

He's like the mushroom kind of expert.

I remember listening to John Reed's 10 Days That Shook the World.

He told me that he would weep copiously when he listened to Edmund White read Charlotte's Web.

And we edited it. And we looked at it and we said, I don't like the way it looks. Like it's okay. No one would really bat an eye at it. But that's not the vision that we had. And we went and we redid the whole thing.

And I had wanted to assign a web design book to my students once I realized that you could put graphics on the web.

And I went to the bookstore to find a book and all the books there were only HTML books teaching how to do the coding for the web, but not barely a mention of how to do the graphics.

So I decided in the bookstore, I'm going to write this book because I've already been writing curriculum for my students.

They were focused on the techie side of the programming side. And mine was more for the visual artists and the mere mortals who want to use technology.

I still have people to this day who tell me your book is why I had a business, how I got my first website, how I got my first job.

And Bruce and I had written a second book together about color.

So the story behind the Today Show was that I wrote my first book...

And I happened to be in Florida doing a personal appearance for one of my makeup products and also for my first book.