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Nicole Lapin
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Jason Pfeiffer
This is Help Wanted, the show that makes your work work for you. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, editor in Chief of.
Nicole Lapin
Entrepreneur magazine, and I'm money expert Nicole Lapin. So on Tuesdays, Jason and I answer the helpline and help callers solve their work problems.
Jason Pfeiffer
And on Thursdays, I give you one way to improve your work and build a career or company you love.
Nicole Lapin
And it starts now. Jason, have you ever traumatized me?
Jason Pfeiffer
Have I ever traumatized you?
Nicole Lapin
Have we ever been in a fight, in your opinion?
Jason Pfeiffer
I don't think so, no.
Nicole Lapin
Okay. In my experience, we have been in a fight. In my experience, there was a time when you were quite mad at me, and it made me very distraught.
Jason Pfeiffer
I have no memory of this. I don't know what you're talking about.
Nicole Lapin
Do you Remember? Vaguely in 2019, when I was launching my third book, I started contributing some pieces to entrepreneur.com and I had some folks who were helping me from the publisher work on pieces that were based from tips in the book. Do you have any recollection of this?
Jason Pfeiffer
No, in the foggiest way in that. And we've talked about this on the show before, that people ask me to run things to promote their books. I'm sure that has happened with you, and I know that You've written for Entrepreneur.com, but whatever this specific moment is. No, I have no. I have no memory.
Nicole Lapin
Okay. This is a specific moment where I thought you were going to rip my face off.
Jason Pfeiffer
Oh, my gosh. I don't rip anybody's face off.
Nicole Lapin
And I just have this visceral memory that you were going to hate me forever because I did something that I didn't know was wrong, but it seemed to really anger you.
Jason Pfeiffer
Hmm.
Nicole Lapin
So you sent me a note on September 6, 2019. I pulled the receipts with the subject entrepreneur.com and it says, dan, our digital director, just dropped me a line about your pieces. If you're using material from the book in a post, you can write excerpted from and the book name with a link at the bottom of the story. We just want to avoid the appearance that you are plagiarizing yourself. Thanks, exclamation point. And I think because early in my career, I was around a talent director who would send horribly mean things, but then would always write thanks, exclamation point at the bottom as if it made everything else better. And so I just interpreted it that way. And then I forwarded it to my team, and it just says, eek. So then I went into this whole discussion with myself and my team and God about plagiarizing myself, because my book I wrote every word of. And writing pieces that Plagiarized myself was very confusing to me, but I didn't want to upset you. Nor did I want the wretched, wretched things. Exclamation point, passive aggressive. In my mind only. I'd love to know if you remember this at all.
Jason Pfeiffer
I don't, but I can conjure some thoughts about where. What was happening at the time, but keep going.
Nicole Lapin
And then on October 25, you forwarded me a whole thread from your team, from Kenny.
Jason Pfeiffer
Yeah. Who was an editor at the time.
Nicole Lapin
To Dan that says, I'm rejecting this story, but since she's a vip, I didn't see this part that would've made me feel better. Wanted to give a heads up that not only did she plagiarize from articles she's published elsewhere, but she actually lifted an entire section verbatim from an article she previously posted for us. Then Dan wrote to you. Just wanted to give you a heads up in case Nicole asks about this. And then Jason says, forward to Nicole. See below. M dash problem persisting. Let your writer know she can't do this stuff. Exclamation point.
Jason Pfeiffer
Oh, my gosh.
Nicole Lapin
And I was so scared.
I was like, first of all, I'm plagiarizing. That sounds like hell to me. I would never want to do that.
But wait, there's more.
I'm plagiarizing from myself of an article that I wrote myself. But I'm like, I'm in trouble and Jason is upset and Jason is in trouble, and everybody thinks I'm a crazy self plagiarizer.
And then I wrote to the team, oh, my God, we have to be so, so careful here. This happened before, and they are very particular about plagiarizing even from yourself, which I didn't even know was a thing, and having something placed elsewhere. Can we quadruple track that? Everything in the que for them doesn't have these two issues. It is super important. And then we go into a long discussion about, we don't know, is it impossible to plagiarize yourself? And then this whole thing about, I'm not exactly sure if this is a thing, but you're really mad at me. And so my interpretation is that you are so mad at me and you are never gonna forget that I am an evil self plagiarizer. And apparently you've never thought about this before, but I think about it often.
Jason Pfeiffer
That's wild. So, no, just to be clear, I definitely wasn't mad at you at the time because I would have remembered that, but I don't remember this at all which is so typical, because I think that we probably all carry around some moment that we think was a big deal and that grew into an even bigger deal in our heads and that the other person, if they were even aware of it, had a totally different understanding of it. And wouldn't it be great if we were able to just air all those things if you could find more of those in your brain? And then you went to the person who you had that experience with and just say, do you remember this? And was this a big deal? I bet that we would all exorcise a lot of demons real fast. We would drop a lot of emotional weight.
Nicole Lapin
I need to eat a sandwich.
Jason Pfeiffer
I'm so much lighter.
Nicole Lapin
My God. And I think I've always been embarrassed to bring this back up because I thought you were so angry and disappointed in me and that you were trying to help me with this thing. But I let you down and I let all of the fourth estate down. But now we're doing it for an episode because it's good and juicy.
Jason Pfeiffer
I cannot recall a single time, Nicole, in which I was ever annoyed at you. And certainly not this, which sounds like the dumbest thing to be annoyed about. I'm going to try for your benefit and perhaps your benefit alone, because I'm not sure that self plagiarism is the thing that anybody else cares about. But because we're here, why don't we try to unpack this and maybe in doing so, we will come to some universal truths about misunderstandings. So, okay. That moment features a couple characters who are not in play anymore. Dan is still at Entrepreneur, but he is not the digital editorial director anymore. He's kind of moved on to this special project role. Kenny was an editor at the time who was working with outside contributors, and he is not there anymore. They must have been focusing on some kind of internal policy. That is not something I hear talked about at all anymore about self plagiarism, which sounds like a very silly thing, but. But I don't know if you remember, this was a whole scandal in the journalism world.
Nicole Lapin
No, but you forwarded me that article.
Jason Pfeiffer
Was it called why Did Jonah Lehrer Plagiarize Himself?
Nicole Lapin
It was. I'm sure you did forward it to me.
Jason Pfeiffer
Was it that one?
Nicole Lapin
So, okay, hold on. This one editor wrote back. I understand him not wanting to write two pieces on his site that cover the same part of the book. That was definitely an oversight on our end when putting together the next batch to send, but it shouldn't be considered plagiarism. Since it is clearly stated as excerpted from your book and no one else bought exclusive serial rights. Okay, then you emailed me this exact story, and I wrote to the team. Jason sent me this story as proof that you can plagiarize yourself from New York Magic. Jonah Lair, New Yorker writer plagiarizes himself. And then we have a whole discussion internally. I get what he's saying. Somebody wrote from my team and just read the piece. But I still think there's a big difference from what that writer did. Being paid to write original content for several competing sites and instead writing variations of the same thing with the same wording. And what you're doing, which is providing free content tied to your book that you are clearly labeling as curated book excerpts promotional content from your book. From my experience, by adding that excerpted from Lime, as we did at the bottom of each article, it should defend against any plagiarism concerns.
Jason Pfeiffer
Okay, let's give some context first, for people who don't know the whole Joan Olehrer thing. So this was back in 2012, and Joan Allaire was a very prominent journalist at the time. He was a New Yorker staff writer. I think he showed up on Radio Lab or something all the time. And he had some books that were very successful. And then it all started unraveling. There was some fact that he had made up and somebody noticed it, and then everyone just started nitpicking his work. And then one of the things that people really seized upon was that a lot of the things that he was producing contained things from other things that he had produced. So, for example, his articles would include a couple paragraphs that also showed up in a blog post from a year before that also showed up in a book that also. And that was treated as a scandal. And now I actually don't think that that would be a scandal today.
Nicole Lapin
Am I vindicated?
Jason Pfeiffer
Yeah. Well, so we're at a different time where I think a lot of people think of content as less precious maybe than they did before. I mean, I do this, Nicole, just for whatever it's worth, like, sometimes I will write a newsletter where I will pluck a paragraph out of my book and just drop it right into the newsletter because just saves me time and I already wrote it and whatever. Yeah. I think that the reason why Entrepreneur cared about it was probably because there was probably a rash of contributors who were all just kind of lazily recycling their material to try to get multiple articles out of the same effort. And Entrepreneur wanted to stop that. It also is for whatever it's worth an SEO problem where if you are publishing multiple pieces with a lot of the same content, then Google will ding you for it. And so that's probably also something that entrepreneur was concerned about. Either way, in this particular case, hearing these emails, which I do not remember at all, the best sense that I can make of it is that I was in the middle of you submitting this stuff and these colleagues of mine who were following whatever policy we had for whatever reason, and I think that I saw myself as just letting you know what was going on. I wasn't annoyed by it. I can't imagine that I would have cared about it. And thinking back on it now, I would have Stick around. Help Wanted. We'll be right back. Welcome back to Help Wanted. Let's get to it. Thinking back on it now, I would have been more mindful of how punitive this could have sounded and maybe done a better job of showing you that whatever the circumstance is, that I am not bothered by you about it. A thing that I have definitely had to do a bunch and maybe I've just gotten better at it over the years. In 2019, four years ago, I was not as good at it was making sure that whenever work and friend mixed that if there is any hiccup or any problem, that I am really clear with friend that friend and work are also still separate. And we've had this where you and I will have a conversation about some work decision that maybe is annoying or whatever. We both take pains to say, like, look, whatever the decision is, or whatever has to happen here, it's completely separate from the friendship. And I try to be incredibly mindful of that with friends. And I think in that case I probably wasn't as mindful as I have become about it. Or I could have said, hey, my team is worked up about this because there's some internal policy about not reusing material from previously published material because it's bad for SEO. And I'm sorry it's annoying, but can you have this reworded or something? Nobody's annoyed. It's just a policy thing that we've got to deal with. If I had said that, if I was just a little more explicit about it, I would assume that would have landed differently than me just passing it along. So it's a good reminder to be better about that stuff, which I think I am now, and I guess it's a good object lesson for others. You have to always, I think if you are going to mix friendship and work to make sure that the lines between Those two things are always pretty clearly drawn, and that the thing that's more important always gets protected. And to me, the friendship is always the thing that's more important. And so I'm sorry that you thought I was angry at you. I never was.
Nicole Lapin
I felt so sorry. I felt horrible because I felt like you were vouching for me, and I let you down. And I didn't even know that I let you down. And plagiarism sounds like such a scary thing.
I thought I was gonna be, like, arrested, and, you know, I don't know.
Jason Pfeiffer
Plagiarism police were gonna come and drag you to plagiarism jail.
Nicole Lapin
The Medill School of Journalism was gonna just dissociate from me forever. And so, you know when we talked in a previous episode about how you do these favors and you think it's no big deal as long as it's not too much work, I wanted it to be no work for you. The last thing I would want to do is create more annoyance or drama in your life. I was so, so careful and considerate of the fact that you did do something so nice. And you apparently made me a vip, which is a rare occurrence in my life.
Jason Pfeiffer
So add it to your resume.
Nicole Lapin
Yeah. If I ever went on LinkedIn, it would be the main bio VIP internally at Entrepreneur. So I was just mortified that somehow I caused more of an issue for you or any issue, and that I did this big, crazy, scary thing. And then you wrote to me with exclamation points. I was like, oh, my God, they're.
Mad at Jason, and they're mad at me, and they're all laughing at me around the editorial tip people, you know, at hq.
Jason Pfeiffer
No, absolutely none of that is true, with the exception that you were a vip. That is true. But, yeah.
Nicole Lapin
Yeah.
Jason Pfeiffer
But also, there's a very funny thing happening here with the exclamation mark, because I don't need exclamation marks in my life, but I think that there's become a expectation that if something doesn't have an exclamation mark, it is definitely unfriendly. I feel like that's the world that we're in right now. Texts always have exclamation marks. Everything is an exclamation mark because without it, it sounds stern. So I have just come into the habit of putting exclamation marks on everything. And what you're saying is that the exclamation mark, you were reading it as passive aggressive, which makes me wonder, what on earth was I supposed to do there maybe an exclamation mark and a smiley face? But no. The answer is actually just going back to what I said before, which is explicitness. You can't over communicate something. Had I spent an extra minute writing that email, and I think the whole problem here was just that I wasn't thinking about it at all. It's not that I was thinking about it a lot and was upset. It was the opposite. It was that I was literally not thinking about it. It was just like forwarding something to you. And had I spent an extra second to think, you know, could this be misconstrued? Is there a way to just make sure that Nicole understands what's going on here and importantly understands that, like, I don't really care, then why don't I spend the extra few seconds doing that? A little earlier we were talking about how great it would be if we could all just go around and check in with each other and discover that the thing that we thought was such a terrible thing, that somebody was angry at us or we made some giant mistake, is actually a thing that nobody even remembered. But how, with just a extra moment of communication, we could have avoided the whole damn thing in the first place?
Nicole Lapin
Well, I'm so grateful and appreciative of you saying that. I really don't think you did anything wrong. I was like, I don't know how I could have handled this better. Maybe it was just a quick phone call about it, which is always a good, emotionally intelligent course of action. And the bigger lesson is that we suffer so much more in our imaginations than in reality. And I have turned many cycles over in my mind about this, and you have turned zero, absolutely zero in yours. So you weren't mad at me.
Jason Pfeiffer
I hope that that was clear. I will send you an email that says wasn't mad at you with two exclamation marks. The first one because it's the de facto, and then the second one because I mean it.
Nicole Lapin
Oh, Jason, do you think I was.
Ever mad at you?
Jason Pfeiffer
I mean, I don't think so. Were you? No. Oh, you mean, like, was I ever carrying around a moment where I was like, oh, I screwed up? No. I don't carry too many of these around with me because I'm not much of a worrier. But I'll tell you one recently that I felt bad about. I was out at lunch with a friend who is very religious, a Christian, and I actually don't have a lot of very religious friends. And also, one of the words that I say, if I am startled. Not always, but, you know, occasionally it is Jesus. Which I shouldn't. I understand that that can be disrespectful to people. But anyway, we were outside and somebody across the street had flipped closed a metal dumpster. It just made the loudest, most alarming metallic banging sound and I startled from my seat and I just said really loud, Jesus. And then we kept going. And it wasn't until 30 seconds later when I thought, I wonder if that was disrespectful to my friend and if he took it as disrespectful. But then I was like, I don't know, do I go back? Hey, remember a second ago when I just said Jesus? Was that like I didn't want to put him on the spot? I didn't know what to do, but I felt anxious about it. And then I remember like when we parted ways, that's what I was thinking about instead of the great hour long conversation we had over lunch. I don't know, I didn't circle back. Maybe I should, maybe I should text him right now and say, were you upset when I said Jesus? I don't know. I, I'm going to just not do that because I'm going to assume and I've talked to Jen, my wife, about this very moment where she said he was not offended by that.
Nicole Lapin
Yes, your work wife will also tell you I'm sure he did not care at all. He has not turned this over one cycle, one second.
Jason Pfeiffer
Yeah, I gave myself some grace on that one to just move on and that's what I try to apply to these things.
Nicole Lapin
You know, I think the bigger lesson here is something that I picked up this morning from Sam Altman who's been in the news a lot lately from.
Jason Pfeiffer
OpenAI, who just to note as we are recording this because people will be listening to it later, the whole Sam Altman was fired. Sam Altman might come back to OpenAI. Sam Altman was hired by Microsoft thing like just happened. So this is all in the news right now.
Nicole Lapin
So a bunch of clips have been surfacing of him and one that was really interesting to me, he came out and said on a panel, business is literally just bad things happening to you over and over and over again. He thinks that what it takes to be a great entrepreneur is for sure determination, but more importantly a stable nervous system, which is really, really interesting. So having determination is part of it, but being clear headed and level headed during times of stress and weird emails with exclamation points is maybe even more valuable to Become a Zen monk master.
Jason Pfeiffer
There's a lot to be said for becoming a Zen monk master. It reminds me of a conversation that I had with Chris Bosch, who is a basketball player. Yes, he is a basketball player. He's a NBA All Star. He was part of the Miami Heat team that won two championships. Anyway, I was talking to Chris about when they lost. The Heat lost against the Dallas Mavericks in, I think, 2011 for the finals. And he said that when he was thinking about what went wrong in those NBA Finals, what he realized was that the highs were too high and the lows were too low. That every game set them on fire and every loss was crushing. And what he saw in the Mavericks was every game was just a game. They were just a steadier team. They didn't have the emotional reaction the way that the Heat did, and that the reason that the Heat came back and won it the next year was because they had calibrated to that. And the highs were not as high and the lows were not as low, which I think is a version of the same thing that Sam Altman is saying. And, you know, I think that we could probably do well by applying that to pretty much every moment in our. Every moment in our days. Nicole, I think I feel confident in just giving everybody who's listening to this right now a free pass. And the free pass is, if you, like Nicole, are worried that something that you did a long time ago really upset a person and you have literally any evidence to the contrary, that evidence could be that you have talked to them in friendly terms again. Right? Like, you know, if. If you did a thing and it was terrible and it fractured a relationship. Yeah, they're probably pissed. But like, you know, if life moved.
Nicole Lapin
On, then so should you.
Jason Pfeiffer
I give you a free pass, pull it out of your wallet, wave it around. The whole thing is done. Nobody remembers it. We are all going to move on. The highs will no longer be high. The lows will no longer be low. Nicole will never self plagiarize again.
Nicole Lapin
Never fucking never again.
Jason Pfeiffer
Help Wanted is a production of Money News Network. Help Wanted is hosted by me, Jason.
Nicole Lapin
Pfeiffer, and me, Nicole Lapman.
Our executive producer is Morgan Levine.
Do you want some help? Email our helpline@help wantedoneynewsnetwork.com for the chance to have some of your questions answered on the show. And follow us on Instagramoney News and TikTokoneyNewsNetwork for exclusive content and to see our beautiful faces.
Maybe a little dance.
Jason Pfeiffer
Oh, I didn't sign up for that.
Nicole Lapin
All right, well, talk to you soon.
Jason Pfeiffer
Sam.
Podcast by Money News Network
Hosts: Jason Feifer and Nicole Lapin
Release Date: February 17, 2026
In this engaging and relatable episode, Jason Feifer (Editor in Chief, Entrepreneur) and Nicole Lapin (Money Expert) explore the workplace anxieties and misunderstandings that arise from miscommunication. Using a real (and previously unspoken) incident from their own working relationship as a case study, the hosts reflect on the emotional toll of perceived conflict, the challenge of mixing friendship with professionalism, and the power of clear, empathetic communication. Their candid conversation illustrates how fears about colleagues’ opinions can spiral into unnecessary distress—and how most of that worry exists only in our own heads.
This episode offers both catharsis and practical wisdom for anyone haunted by workplace worries—reminding us that open conversation lightens the heaviest (often imagined) emotional loads.