E2A 095: Adapting and Publishing Your IP for Different Audiences with Dr. Laura Jana 

Episode Transcript

Please note: The transcript is produced by a third-party company from an audio recording and may include transcription errors.

Scott MacMillan

You're listening to the Entrepreneur to Author podcast. 

Announcer

Welcome to the Entrepreneur to Author podcast, the podcast that brings you practical strategies for building authority and growing your business. And now, here's your host, Scott MacMillan.

Scott:

My guest today is Dr. Laura Jana. Dr. Jana is a renowned pediatrician, social entrepreneur, and award-winning author of 30 plus books, including her latest, QI Skills for the Early Childhood Classroom. Laura, welcome and thank you so much for joining us today.

Oh, it's a pleasure to join you, Scott. Look, I shared a little bit about you in the intro, but could you give us your own overview of your background and what it is that you focus on today?

Laura Jana:

Sure. And I'll start by warning you, it's a bit eclectic. The easy answer is I'm a pediatrician by training.

I always tell people I come from a background of very hard sciences, math and cellular molecular biology and worked in neuroscience, which doesn't necessarily explain a good part of what I do these days. As you mentioned, I am an author, never an accidental author, more because I'm very committed to getting important ideas out, ideas that have impact. And initially that started in the world of pediatrics and then expanded into a much broader world of parenting when I worked with Dr. Spock decades ago before he passed away. Really trying to help get really good, credible information out to people who could use it, but in a very practical way. That has taken me down all sorts of paths from early literacy and early education to health technology to all sorts of things, and both at a very local level and at a global systems level. So we can get into more of the details specifically as they relate to my most recent book and my focus on, as you mentioned, QI Skills.

But that kind of gives you not a very clear background, but a sense of my eclectic background.

Scott:

Wonderful. Wonderful. So you've just published QI Skills for the Early Childhood Classroom.

The title sort of suggests it, but could you get specific about who the book is written for and what's your main goal or hope for your readers?

Laura:

Sure. And it's probably worth acknowledging right off the bat that it was a little bit of a leap of faith to lead with QI Skills, given that, as you know, I created the QI Skill framework not quite 10 years ago and really have worked hard to introduce it to the world. So leading with that, knowing that there's a whole series of applications that we can talk about, the first book in the series is the QI Skills for the Early Childhood Classroom.

And what I've decided to do, you know, the concept of Qi Skills in and of itself, which are the skills needed to thrive and succeed, or, you know, the human skills needed in an AI powered world, actually applies across a whole lot of sectors. Early childhood, education, health care, business. And initially I sat down and started writing what I, you know, most people would think of as a big think book.

What does early brain and child development and early skill development have to do with 21st century jobs, workforce, innovation, and leadership, entrepreneurial discussions? And so it was a pretty big task to take on and it's gotten a lot of traction, but what I found is that people want books that help you not only understand the QI Skills better because they resonate with so many people and they want to be able to apply them, but specific to the audience. And of course, as you mentioned, which audience?

Well, in this case, I have spent a lot of time in the early childhood sector. I owned a childcare center for 10 years. As soon as I sold the childcare center, I ended up being a strategic consultant to one of the large, very successful childcare systems in the country, Primrose Schools.

And in doing that, I wanted to make these QI Skills practical, tangible, look around your classroom with young children and help early educators apply them in that setting.

Scott:

That makes a ton of sense. And that your background as a pediatrician clearly shapes how you defined these human skills that you talk about. And you mentioned, of course, this first book focuses on early childhood, but as you mentioned, these skills have much broader relevance.

Can you walk us through why these same skills matter just as much in other areas like business, innovation, and leadership?

Laura:

Well, absolutely. And it's funny because, as you know, as you note, my background as a pediatrician who's done early education and childcare and early literacy and all these things make it makes it super understandable for people how someone like me would write a book about QI Skills for the early childhood classroom. What throws people is the second part of your question, which is when I show up at the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center or the World Bank or the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, I know that I'm a bit of an oddity in those settings. The way I've learned to explain this, and it gets right to the heart of what QI Skills are, is I happen to approach skills, skills needed to thrive and succeed in today's world, from an angle where I was involved in their foundational development. What I've learned to explain to people is that that doesn't become irrelevant as children become adults. Same skills, same world, same context.

And in fact, when I sat down to create the QI Skills, one of the driving forces behind them was, how do I help people understand we're all talking about the same skills? We all have a vested interest. And you could be a Fortune 100 CEO saying, these are the skills we need, you know, in our workforce and people are entering the workforce without the skills they need.

And I could be reading the preschool literature and talking about the foundational development and all the neuroscience that supports it in the first five years. And I kept saying, do people not see that the preschool literature reads like Harvard Business Review, like we're talking about the same thing? And then I went, oh, wait, who reads both sets of literature?

Right. So that was actually how I created QI. It's not a coincidence.

I created QI Skills to be a framework of skills that would be just as relatable to a preschool teacher or parent as it is to a CEO of a Fortune 100 company.

Scott:

That makes perfect sense, doesn't it? At first, like you said, it may seem counterintuitive, but it's entirely intuitive. People are people.

And if you're not developing foundational skills, well, how do you expect somebody to have those skills when they get older? But it's helpful to hear you explain it that way. And, you know, you frame QI Skills as essential for thriving in an AI-powered world.

AI is a big buzzword these days. But what are some of the biggest shifts that you see happening right now that make these human skills more valuable than ever?

Laura:

Sure. And, you know, you're picking up on that sort of the nuance of the QI Skills. You know, now, obviously, it's as of ChatGPT's release, everybody is much more familiar with AI.

But when I created this framework, it wasn't a buzzword yet, right? People weren't talking about AI. What was clear, and this is where I have the benefit of having an identical twin sister who's been in Silicon Valley doing early stage technology venture capital since the 90s, is it was very clear that something big was shifting in technology.

It had been for quite a while, but that, you know, the skills that are needed in today's world, in part, in large part, are driven by what humans do well that technology does not. So even before we could put the formal buzzword of AI on top of that description, make it nice and short, AI-powered world. But with the exponential changes in capabilities driven by technology, what we started and what I started to see, I'd look at the lists from the World Economic Forum of what are the top skills needed to succeed in today's world?

You know, and again, it was 10, 15 years ago, it was in the 21st century. Now, of course, we're already a quarter of the way in, but still holds true. And if you take a big step backwards and look at what those skills are, they're the skills that technology does not do well.

So I saw that and I saw this shift towards all of these skills representing two thirds of the skills identified as necessary to succeed by the World Economic Forum. And then I looked at it and I thought, okay, I'm going to these conferences across all these sectors, healthcare, education, early childhood, everywhere, business. And everyone's talking about them, but we don't have something good to call them.

And what we tend to do, we have a laundry, everybody kind of does, because they might say emotional intelligence or social emotional skills or life skills, character skills, all these things. And more specifically, at least kind of getting closer to it, we call them like the transferable skills, right? As opposed to, and here in true pediatrician early childhood form, I'd say, you know, the sort of three R's type of skills, the reading, writing, arithmetic, content, knowledge, sorts of skills.

Here's the thing. If you think about all of the content knowledge that you and I studied, I mean, I always say, look, it was great for me when I was, you know, in college and medical school and residency that I had a near photographic memory because I could list off, you know, I could memorize and list off a differential diagnosis for some rare disease, no problem. And it made me sound very smart.

If you happen to be the owner of a smartphone phone or have access to the internet, you are just as smart as me in that regard, because you just search for it and you get it at your fingertips. So when I framed that, and again, the QI Skills meant was meant to be, this is intuitive. People don't need me to tell them it's happening, except that I'd have to tell them and then they see it everywhere.

I said, we need something to call those skills. A laundry list does not do them justice. And in fact, even worse than that, a lot of people called them soft, non-cognitive and other skills, sort of in academic circles.

And so I sort of learned to explain to people in shorthand, calling them soft skills, if we're being honest with ourself in today's world, still does not give them as much weight and importance as if we say hard skills. And again, soft skills are really important, but we don't actually function that way yet in today's world. So soft doesn't do them justice.

Non-cognitive, well, there's a whole lot of neuroscience underlying these things. It's all happening in the brain. You can't tell me it's non-cognitive.

And then that leaves you with other. And my phrase I like to tell people is if you ever want to convince somebody something is important, do not call it other. And that's where I thought I set out on a mission.

It took me about three months. There was a serendipitous conversation involved that had to do with Star Wars. And I came up off the top of my head with the words QI Skills, but spelled QI like Chi, positive life force.

May the force be with you. That fits so well and it's so easy and so intuitive. And the last thing I'll say is and conveniently, I'd like to say I thought of this right off the bat, but I realized that as I was going through, I think I found the right name to call these skills.

They serve as the complement to what I call the IQ skills, not in a formal measuring IQ academic sense, but IQ skills representing all those other sort of hard technical coding, civic literacy, reading, writing, arithmetic skills still very important. But these are the complementary skills that have been overlooked or undervalued. And now everyone's racing towards them.

Scott:

Yeah. You know what I think would be really helpful for the audience is getting putting a little specificity behind it. Could you just give a brief overview of what the QI Skills are?

Sure. Obviously, the details in the book. So we're going to we're going to include the link to the book in the show notes.

But what are the QI Skills?

Laura:

Sure. And you know, what's kind of fun, and this was intentional, is that the names of the QI Skills are supposed to be really intuitive. And they were also meant to sound just enough Dr. Seuss like that. It kind of puts a smile on your face. And certainly parents and pediatricians and early educators can all kind of smile about it, but not so cutesy that a CEO of a big company wouldn't use the words. So here I'm just going to say the seven together and then I can give you just like a little quick sense of what each is.

It's me, we, why, will, wiggle, wobble and what if. Now, again, it's meant to put a smile on your face. It makes sense.

They're not complicated, because what I was finding is in this space, when you look at all the research and all the different people in the different sectors kind of hovering around this space, someone can tell you the five defining features of emotional intelligence or social emotional skills or whatever. And you literally 30 minutes later can't, I can't remember all five of them off the top of my head. There are three defining features of executive function skills, which, by the way, is a very neuroscience term, but super convenient when you're speaking to business leaders and you say conveniently named executive function skills.

But that's where even those three defining features are a little hard to hang on to. When I've done a presentation, 20 minutes, 45 minutes, whatever it is, at the end of it, what I find is most people can remember four or five out of the seven QI Skills right off the top of their head. And if I give them sort of an essence of what the missing skills were about, they instantly know the name.

They don't have to go look it back up again. So that's the sort of laundry list. Here's how simple they are.

Let's take the first one, me skills, self-awareness, self-control, impulse control, focus, attention and identity, sense of self. OK, so that's really intuitive. It does tie in really closely to an area that's really important in foundational development, but in adulthood as well, which are the executive function skills.

And so basically, me skills are being in control of your own thoughts, feelings and actions. And what we know, tying this to early childhood, is that and most people aren't aware of this, is that the executive function skills, the stop, think through your actions, kind of take in all the information and make good decisions about what might happen if you do X, Y or Z. That most rapid rate of development of those skills happen between the ages of three and five.

Now, I always feel the need to add for anybody listening who might have an 8, 10, 12, 18 year old. We also know they don't fully develop until the mid 20s, sometimes even late 20s. And I'm pretty convinced I know a couple of people where they never fully developed.

Right. But if you take that now, here's where I'll just give you an example, just so it's very concrete for people. Here's what I was realizing.

There was a whole lot of discussion about how the world of work was shifting. You know, I had connected with Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, and read his manuscript for the book, The Startup of You, talking about how we're all going to be much more in control of our own professional careers. You're going to be the your own boss.

Hence the name, The Startup of You. Treat yourself like a startup and you're out and doing all these things. And so I was like, wait a second, we're saying the same thing, right?

The world is shifting towards this. We're all much more in control of our own thoughts, feelings, actions. We go out and we do project based work and we do our, you know, things.

So then I went and I looked and I found Peter Drucker, who anyone in the business world knows, mostly because he was known for making predictions about the future of business and being right about it, big predictions. But I also get to chuckle because usually you don't find pediatricians quoting Peter Drucker. And what I what I did was I said, listen, Peter Drucker said that while the 20th century was the era of business management, the 21st century is going to be the era of self-management.

And then I say, and in my world of early childhood, a good self-management day is when no one bites their friends. Right. Because biting is the bane of everybody in early childhood's existence.

And it takes impulse control, which happens to be one of the defining features of executive function skills, which don't have much development and then undergo their most rapid rate of development, ages three to five. And I would say, and that's how you get from Peter Drucker and the world of work shifting to the first five years in the development of executive function skills in like one concept.

Scott:

Amazing. Shifting gears a little bit to the writing side, how did how did you find the process of writing?

Laura:

You know, I'm always careful who I say this in front of. I actually was not born to be a writer. And it's not the writing process that I actually enjoy as much.

And, you know, now I get lumped. I've got enough books that people think that I love writing books. I love ideas.

I love ideas with impact. And I certainly am motivated once I figure something out to help make sure I share that information with other people, which sort of keeps guiding me down this path of I need to put it in a book and get it out in the hands of people. So the process, you know, what I've found, I've toyed with a lot of different ways of writing books.

You know, I've got a couple published by the American Academy of Pediatrics when I helped them launch consumer publications. I've written a children's book for the autism awareness campaign for the CDC. Right.

And then I've worked with a big New York publisher and I've worked with Grammar Factory. What I have found is that I, I love having both the support to get the book out there, good form and all, and in a way that people will like and is going to be very approachable. But I also have a very healthy respect for how many books that are good, like really good content don't get out there.

So the process of writing the book itself, I find frustrating only in that sometimes people aren't as committed to some of those ideals as I am, like whether it's get it out quickly or it's going to take too long to get it out there, making sure when it's edited that the people who are editing it actually know what my intent is and understand the nuance. Because as you know, now that we've worked together very closely, I kind of take every word seriously. Like there's the nuance to it and the importance and there's all this stuff behind it distilled down into really simple, practical ideas.

And I can't cut things like people sometimes try to cut things out. I'm like, you don't understand what I'm saying if you're cutting that out. So my most recent experience, which would be working with Grammar Factory, you know, has been a very pleasant experience because I feel like the ability to move quickly on an idea that I think needs to get out there in people's hands and to get it out to the early childhood world, but really quickly thereafter, getting it out to parents and to business leaders and in each of the different sectors was really important for me and motivating me to even write them in the first place.

Scott:

Yeah. You know, I think what you shared is probably very inspiring for a lot of our audience who maybe haven't taken that leap of writing their first book or getting their first book out there, because, you know, I think a lot of people don't view themselves as an author, but they can really embrace the idea of getting their ideas out there in the world. So I think your example and how prolific you've been in terms of getting your ideas out into the world is very inspiring.

What advice would you have for somebody who kind of embraces that philosophy of getting ideas out into the world, but hasn't yet taken that leap to write?

Laura:

You know, I think most people are familiar and certainly if anybody is sort of in a business professional sense thought about this, most people are quite aware that it's very few and far between that you find somebody who's really good at everything in the entire continuum involved in something like putting a book out there or starting a business or doing research and then getting it out, you know, deploying it into the real world in a company form and then scaling it.

Right. So we are very used to this idea that you get somebody or an organization to help you with the parts that are not your strengths. And even if you have strengths in certain areas, I mean, I've got some splinter skills that are kind of interesting that you'd never think.

But I always hear myself and my husband in my head saying, is that really the best use of your time? Right. Yes, I can do some coding or yes, I can create a website or yes, I can and do these things.

But what about the things that I'm much more uniquely positioned to do and should I be spending my time on that? So to answer your question more directly, it has been so helpful to say I can offload a whole bunch of the stuff that I know needs to be done and I don't want to write a book if it's not going to get out there and it doesn't look good or doesn't look professional. And that's where finding, you know, in this case, in terms of writing a book, finding I mean, there are people like Grammar Factory out there who basically let you do what you want to do, but it doesn't have to take up all your time.

You can basically say, here's my ideas, help me shape them, package them, do whatever. But as you know, I'm a little particular about certain things. So I said, Scott, I want you to do this, but I already want to do that.

Like, I'm going to do this part. You do that part. And oh, by the way, I want you to get it out really quickly.

I mean, as everyone knows, AI is changing the world very quickly. So I probably have a self-imposed sense of urgency that others might not have because I feel like it's going to change by the time the book gets out with, you know, finding the right fit for me has given me the ability to say, listen, I can get it out there in a really timely fashion. And that's the other piece is I think of books as glorified or I have hopefully with, you know, what we're doing together.

It gets more traction in terms of actually selling books, because that's where I'm really excited about all the offerings that Grammar Factory has. But I, a long time ago, decided books, if you think of them as glorified calling cards, the books I've written, some have sold really well and some have sold, my publishers weren't necessarily happy with the sales, but they served really useful purposes for what I was trying to achieve, whether it was through book sales or something else. In this case, the ability to do both, get ideas out quickly, get them packaged professionally, hopefully be able to get, you know, some, some, you know, revenue generated from that, but also the accomplishment of getting the ideas out quickly is really valuable.

Scott:

Yeah. You know what I find really fascinating about your topic is there's, there's urgency in terms of the pace at which the world is moving and the relevance of the skills that you're talking about, while at the same time, they're foundational and evergreen and, and, you know, they're, they're not going away anytime soon. So that, that's a really interesting dynamic.

Laura, where can people go to learn more about you, the, the QI Skills work that you do or to just get in touch?

Laura:

Sure. Well, the best place to reach me directly is through my website. So drlaurajana.com, it's very straightforward. I am working very quickly because I have to keep up with the speed with which you've gotten my books ready to get out into the world, working very quickly on my QIskills.com. Website to get that updated because as you know, not only did we get the QI Skills for the early childhood classroom, ready to go and out there into the world now, but it also is available in ebook, audio book. I actually recorded a whole set of videos for a 45 minute online introductory course to QI Skills, and now it's on me, right?

Like I'm the right one, but I am putting those together. That's where it will be found both on my website, but also on QIskills.com. And until that's all up and polished, people can just message me directly on my website, since I do a lot of speaking and consulting and things.

So I keep tabs on that pretty closely.

Scott:

Good. Well, we'll make sure that we put all of the relevant links into the show notes. So it's very easy for people to access.

Laura, thank you so much for joining us today. I've really appreciated your time, your insights, and the thoughtful way that you shared your experience with us. It's been so great having you on the show.

Laura:

Well, thanks so much, Scott. And I'm just going to say it one more time. I've really enjoyed my Grammar Factory experience working with you too, because this has been great and I'm excited to see where it goes next.

Scott:

Oh, wonderful. Well, thank you so much.

As we wrap up this episode of Entrepreneur to Author, remember this. Now is the time, time to write, time to publish, and time to grow. I'm Scott MacMillan. Until next time.