This is Help Wanted, the show that makes your work work for you. I'm Jason Pfizer,

editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur magazine.

And I'm money expert Nicole Lappin. On Tuesdays, Jason and I answer the helpline and help

callers solve their work problems. And on Thursdays, I give you one way to improve your work and build a career or company you love.

And it starts now.

Hey, Nicole, do people ever slide into your dms or send you an email and are casually just, hey, can I get 15 or 30 minutes of your time?

Yes, totally. And in a totally non-sexy way, I never get like sexy DM's lips that are like, hey, let's hang out. It's always hey can I pick your

brain or some work thing. Do you ever say yes? Hey yes stranger I will totally hop on the phone with you.

No. Not once, not ever. You and I are both on intro and so if it's

something that needs to be a personal finance consultation like a question about how to write a book or something like that I

recommend that they go book sometime. Yeah intro is a place where people can pay for your time and my time instead of just

asking for the time. So I I get a lot of these. I also almost never say yes because I don't

know if it's going to be a good investment of my time. I don't know what's going to happen in the next 15 to 30

minutes. And so I started to do this thing where I would ask the person to just explain what they want to talk about in the DM.

Hey, I don't have the time, but why don't you share

what you want to talk about by DM?

I would say 95% just tell me that they want

some kind of coverage in Entrepreneur magazine.

It was like, oh, I'm glad I didn't get on the phone for 30 minutes of that.

And sometimes they want to talk about some other random thing.

Anyway, it's like a really good filtering device,

but every so often,

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