Man of the Hour: Will Pearson of mental_floss magazine

By: Javacia Harris Bowser

You’ve probably heard of a girl crush – platonic feelings of awe and admiration that one woman has for another. Well, a friend of mine frequently uses another term worthy of placement in the Urban Dictionary – “pro crush.” A pro crush is defined by platonic feelings of awe and admiration for someone in your profession, feelings that go beyond simple respect and make you a bit giddy.

Meet my pro crush – Will Pearson, co-founder of Mental Floss magazine, which has been described as a complete liberal arts education delivered in bi-monthly installments.

While I spent my college years dreaming of one day launching a magazine, Pearson was busy actually starting one. In 2001 Pearson and his friend and business partner Mangesh Hattikudur started the magazine while they were students at Duke University; it began as a free campus publication.

“They were disappearing from the racks,” Pearson says, which told him that the magazine was well received. “Either that or some jerk was taking and burning them all,” Pearson says.

The magazine soon became a national publication and today Mental Floss, which has offices in Birmingham and New York, boasts a circulation of 150,000.

Pearson is a native of my hometown of Birmingham, Ala. When I found myself sitting next to him at a meeting for people involved in the local literary and media scenes I was so excited you would have thought I was backstage at a Beyonce concert. I played it cool, though. Maybe.

We exchanged contact information and a few weeks later I was having coffee with my pro crush, chatting with him about how he managed to become the founder of a successful magazine before he could even call himself a college graduate.

“Had we not come up with the idea when we were in college Mental Floss may have never happened,” Pearson says.

At that time in their lives, he says, their attitude was “What is there to lose?” They had no mortgages, no families to worry about.

“And we didn’t know the rules,” Pearson says. They didn’t know what one should or should not do when launching a magazine. They simply set out to create the type of magazine they wanted to read. And it worked.

“We weren’t afraid to start with something that wasn’t polished,” Pearson says.

With features on arts and literature to feed your right brain, features on science and technology to indulge your left brain, stories covering world culture, and trivia galore, the folks at Mental Floss describe the magazine this way:

mental_floss magazine is an intelligent read, but not too intelligent. We’re the sort of intelligent that you hang out with for a while, enjoy our company, laugh a little, smile a lot and then we part ways. Great times. And you only realize how much you learned from us after a little while. Like a couple days later when you’re impressing your friends with all these intriguing facts and things you picked up from us, and they ask you how you know so much, and you think back on that great afternoon you spent with us and you smile.

 And then you lie and say you read a lot.

In the spring of 2011 Pearson and Hattikudur sold Mental Floss to Felix Dennis of Dennis Publishing.  Pearson says the decision to sell a business is always a difficult one for any entrepreneur to make. Mental Floss was profitable and growing and thus there was no dire need to sell the magazine.

“You never know if selling a company is the right thing to do until you’ve done it,” Pearson says.

But he believes the choice they made was the right one.  Dennis was adamant about not changing the feel of Mental Floss and Pearson says, “It still feels like it’s very much our baby.”

Hattikudur still serves as editor-in-chief and Pearson is president of Mental Floss, Inc.

Today Mental Floss is much more than a magazine, now producing books, trivia games, t-shirts and a website that’s updated several times a day.

Before Pearson and I finished our scones and headed back out into the Alabama heat, I asked what advice he’d give folks hoping to follow in his footsteps. His answer was simple: wake up every day and do at least one thing to advance your business.

For our Man of the Hour feature we take down the “No Boys Allowed” sign and share stories of men who are doing great things in the writing world. Send your nominations for Man of the Hour to seejanewritemag@gmail.com.