Side Hustle: Leaders in Tech, On and Off the Clock (Part 3 — Evette Cordy)
By: Yoko Senga
Tags: Authors, Innovation, Side Hustle, Women Leaders, Leadership

Did the business (Agents of Spring) inspire the book or did the book inspire the business?

The book is really a culmination of the work and a conceptualization of the work I’ve been doing for the last 20 years. But the spark for the book came at the end of 2016 when Troy and I went to NY for the Fast Company Innovation Conference. I’ve always wanted to write a book. I’d had a crack at a book nearly 10 years ago which never eventuated. At that conference, I attended an intimate session with the CMO of Sonos, as well as sessions with IBM and a number of design and innovation agencies, and the word I kept writing down was “curiosity” — that was a key ingredient to all of their successes. But even before then, I had been commissioned by a client to run a “Curiouser and Curiouser” workshop and I had run a fully curated 2-day workshop on Curiosity so I had already started applying the mindset with clients. I woke up in the middle of the night one night and was searching domain names and thinking about what the book would be called. And that’s when I started thinking about actually writing this book — who do I need to talk to and how do I make this happen?

You said you tried to write a book 10 years ago. What was different about this time compared to the last time?

The book I was going to write…I did write 30,000 words. It was about running and pregnancy. The mistake I made back then was that I just wrote. I wrote stories and I was trying to be interesting and never really sat down and had a plan. I didn’t use my own process! What’s my plan? What problems do people need solving? What are the ideas I want to communicate? What are the stories that I have to share? The key difference this time was that I engaged an editor — someone who had worked with a number of business authors; someone who could help me structure my thoughts. She made it so much better in terms of the process, and the outcome — there were so many things I hadn’t thought about the first time and she helped to play a coaching role in the process.

So you made a commitment to yourself to write this book — but you’re also trying to run a business, trying to be a good mother, a good wife, get your runs in — how did you balance all of that?

I wouldn’t say that I balanced anything. It nearly broke me. There was a point in the process where I thought “I don’t think I can finish this”. I would get up at 5:30 some mornings to write. Or we’d go and visit my parents on the weekend and I’d sit in the car typing the 4-hour car ride to their place. Or Troy had a weekend away to visit his cousin in Sydney, and he took the kids and I had a whole weekend…a WHOLE weekend to write…and guess what? I produced nothing!!! Every week I had to deliver 4,000 words to the editor. Every week, if it was due at 10am, I’d be sending it to her at 9:55am because I’d somehow managed to jam it into my week. In my acknowledgements in the book, I wrote, “it takes a lot of pressure to produce diamonds” and I definitely felt that pressure, but I’m also really happy with the result. The book did come at a cost in terms of time with the kids. They’d say “Mum, haven’t you finished writing that book yet?”. It was difficult and I don’t think it was sustainable. The writing process took about 4 months of intensive writing with some rewriting of chapters and editing at the end. It wasn’t easy.

What did “success” for this book look like to you?

I didn’t have an expectation of what success would look like for this book. You can walk into any bookstore in Australia and buy or order a copy. Or you can order it from our website. I didn’t have an expectation of how many books I needed to sell for it to feel like a “success”. But I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how well it’s gone. I didn’t write a book to become rich from writing a book. I didn’t write a book to become a full-time writer. It’s a side hustle so I don’t want to be discarding all the other work I do. If I did, I’d be bored! I write content and do podcasts and have more speaking engagements now because of the book and it has definitely given everything else I do some credibility so that’s great. But it’s not my ambition to become a full-time speaker or a writer.

I saw that you have an endorsement from Seth Godin. How did that happen?

When I was writing this book I had thought to myself, how do people get Seth Godin to endorse their book? I went to his site and saw that it said to send him an email and that he would answer all his emails personally, so I thought why not? So it was a Friday night and I’d had a glass of wine to give myself a little confidence. I sent him an email with the subject, “Are you curious?” and sent him a chapter of my book. He wrote back within 5 minutes saying he couldn’t promise anything but that he would take a look at the book when it was finished! It was about a month later that I sent him a finished copy of my book and I sent him an email with the subject line “Are you still curious?”. The next morning, he had already read it, written back and had challenged some things in my introduction. I, of course, was thinking “Oh my God, he hates it!” so I sat on his feedback for a little bit. Eventually, I made some amendments and sent it back to him. The next morning he had written back and sent me a testimonial for the front cover of the book! I know that some people are going to read it and dislike it and that’s ok. But it was pretty cool to have an endorsement from Seth Godin.

How has it helped your primary job, as Co-founder of Agents of Spring?

It’s been great for bringing more credibility to the consulting work that we do. It’s like an expensive business card. Giving clients a copy of the book…there’s a sense of value and credibility that comes with that. I’m keen to explore how to take it further. One idea is to take it into an experiential online program and another avenue I’m thinking of is to create some curiosity experiences around the world.

What do you think writing this book has done to progress you as a leader in this space?

I don’t want to call myself a “thought leader” — that’s not what I want to be known as. But it’s built confidence and credibility in talking about innovation.

Now that you’ve finished this book, how has it changed your life?

Writing this book forced me to hold a mirror up to myself, and made me more self-aware of my own strengths and weaknesses. A curiosity mindset that I struggle with the most is the zen-master — allowing stillness and to be in the present moment. It is something that I have to work hard at every single day. For example, I’ve set myself a target this year to read 52 books, forcing a habit of stillness into my daily life. I’m also more comfortable being more vulnerable when I’m speaking in public or with a client, whereas I wasn’t in the past. In writing this book, I put myself out there and showed the inside of my brain and that was hard for me. I have a lot to say and I used to be more hesitant about putting it out there because…people can be nasty. Writing this book was a very vulnerable process and it’s definitely made me more open to putting myself out there.

So you’ve completed this side hustle. You’ve published the book and it’s out there. What do you think is going to be your next side hustle?

I definitely want to write another book. I have a few ideas in my mind. One is in the creativity space. The other one is on the Shit Bird. In the innovation process, one of the things that gets in our way is the Shit Bird. It’s your inner critic that sits on your shoulder and shuts down your creativity or thinking before you’ve even verbalized it. Or it could be the external Shit Bird — have you ever been in a meeting and sharing an idea when a Shit Bird walks into the meeting and shits all over it? You see the Shit Bird a lot and it gets in our way of innovating. I have this idea for the book where you flip through the pages and see the Shit Bird shitting everywhere. Just a working idea at this stage!