At one point in time Chris Brogan had a pretty big corner on the internet. He was one of the first 10,000 or so Twitter users, one of the early adopters of blogging as a way to engage. Along the way he has advised some of the biggest brands on the planet on topics related to everything from business strategy to the proper color of demo-poop (yes, it turns out, that’s a thing).
At present he has over 300,000 Twitter followers – that’s down from millions a few years ago. That fact – that he has “only” 300k-plus followers on Twitter – is telling. And it’s a good starting point to talk through the current chapter of Chris’ life.
To say that Chris has learned a thing or two along the way is too easy, too simplistic. What Chris talks about now – who he is, what he is doing with his life – and why – hold lessons for all of us in business and in life.
This was one of the most extraordinary interviews we’ve had so far on Customerland. It’s a wee bit longer than most of our other episodes but that’s only because it was such a rich conversation. I (we) hope you get as much out of this as we did.
Full Transcript Below
Some Context …
If you know who Chris Brogan is, you probably know him as an internet impresario. Somebody who was one of the early voices for on Twitter. And somebody who kind of had an angle on all things internet for the longest time. That, that was my impression. And I’ll tell you that to my enormous discredit, I didn’t really pay attention. It, he was a, a person that I knew existed, that I knew, had some expertise, but frankly I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to. And that changed recently, about a month, month and a half ago. It happened upon a post of his on LinkedIn. And I don’t think I’m overstating this. It shook me. It shook me because of its transparency and its honesty and its humanity. And it was so unlike so many of the things on LinkedIn that I just really stopped and took notice.
So on a lark, I reached out to Chris and said, this is who I am. Your post really made an impact on me. Would you be on our podcast? And to my surprise, delight, he said yes. So what follows is, I would say, kind of an introductory conversation into Chris Brogan. It was a, a fascinating and enlightening conversation for me. And, and if you’re one of those people who thinks you understand who Chris Brogan is, or if you’re another one of those people who just has never heard of him, never followed him, let this be an introduction to a person that I consider to be one of the heroes of the internet because he’s championing and exhibiting something that I think is sorely missing. And that’s, that’s just humanity. So I hope you enjoyed this conversation. I certainly did.
Mike Giambattista:
This is Chris Brogan. You may know him. A lot of people do. I’m not gonna even try and describe who you are cause I think we’ll get into that. We’re lucky in this conversation except to say, thanks for this, because I’m really looking forward this conversation.
Chris Brogan:
Well, thank you, Mike. I’m really glad you had me along. I don’t guess as often as used to, so it’s nice to get a chance to chat with someone about things and ideas and stuff.
Mike Giambattista:
Well, there’s, there’s a big one here that I’m just dying to approach. So the way we got here was Chris wrote an article that was posted on the LinkedIn called on the occasion of my 53rd birthday or something close to that, which laid out his point in life, which was not a great one, frankly. And, and the pain of being in that place and what to do about it. And I, I was absolutely arrested by how real Chris chose to be in front of a lot of people. And especially because LinkedIn is not typically the place where people are real. We talk about it and authenticity and all those kinds of things. But Chris Brogan showed up and absolutely just blew the doors down on, you know, here’s what real looks like. So so to to, so that I can shut up now and let you do some talking would you mind just talking about what went into that post? And I’ll put a link to it by the way, below this, this podcast.
Chris Brogan:
Well, thank goodness because it could be that I would, you know, forget some important detail or something so at least people will get a chance to take a peek about it. When I post the things I do and the, and the kinds of things I post, there’s a sort of blend of two things that I’m always trying to get done. One is I’m trying to share advice that I need myself and share it with others, cuz maybe it’ll be useful. But two, I’m also trying to make some kind of lemonade out of all these fine lemons, you know, I, I think that a lot of things in life aren’t, aren’t super great. You know, they’re, they’re not bad. They’re just not super great. And so I think that there’s a lot of opportunities to be able to say, Hmm, all right, let me, let me try to share something out of this.
And as far as, you know, being as far as being transparent in that way or that sort of a thing, I guess what I’ve always felt is that there’s just never been a downside for me. And I’ve also, like you used one of my least favorite words, authentic. And the only reason I say that, I’ll, I’ll explain that, is because I think the people who tend to use that word, not necessarily you, but people in general who are trying really hard with that word, or giving people that advice, are often the least authentic people. I think they’re often the people that are most afraid that if I like say who I am, I’m dead. And I, I just, I’ve tried my hardest to just say, you really, there’s a, there’s a line, like you do have to, like, you can’t just show everyone where you pooped. But you can say, I did just poop. Like, it’s like, that’s the line. Like you, you, you have to kind of keep a certain level of decorum. But it, I, there’s just almost never a penalty, Mike, for telling people how you feel.
Mike Giambattista:
You know, as because I really wanna keep this about you, but it relates to me. But
Chris Brogan:
Can you talk about you?
Mike Giambattista:
Well, my history is one of becoming whoever I had to be as a situation demanded. So you know, it wasn’t till very late in life that I realized that, you know, all that shifting and changing, kinda lost myself in the process and being authentic was a, a really foreign concept to me. You know, you’d say being authentic, and I was kind of like, yeah, whatever. I don’t even know what you’re talking about. And I think there are a lot, you know, take it to a, to a business level. A lot of brands are trying to scratch their head on that topic as well. Like, yeah, the surveys say Gen Z prefers authentic branding, and what the heck does that even mean? And they’re scared to death of it. And I can kind of relate to that on a personal level. It’s scary to be yourself in front of, especially in the audience that is like LinkedIn that is built on presenting your best self. And yeah, anyway,
Chris Brogan:
Marketing, you know, you have, you have a long career, a storied career in marketing. And a lot of marketing is to say, you know, let’s, let’s pull the bad leaves off of this vegetable so that it looks good on the shelf. You know, we, we, you can’t, you can try to be authentic in, you know, something as simple as food marketing and people would be grossed out. So you have to kind of do some things. And so I think that, I think that’s one reason why it’s hard to envision because, you know, you’ve, you’ve got, you’ve been raised in a system that surely doesn’t reward anyone for being full throttle, open professionally marketing for whatever reason. It, it’s so interesting because I, I, I have, I’m sitting at this whole different role now in chief of staff where I, I work with a variety of different disciplines and I think marketing is always the most neurotic group out of the whole bunch of organization.
Mike Giambattista:
Agree. It absolutely agree with you.
Chris Brogan:
It’s crazy. So I I, I do invest some amount of time saying, look, no one besides you guys cares about this particular thing, whatever it is. Because, you know, like there, there’s a lot of people like killing each other for deadlines inside my organization. And are, are, are people who make the software that we sell don’t do that. They don’t work on a deadline schedule. They, they release code as it’s ready. And so it’s just definitely a strange world. And, and so I guess I think that I think that translates to it. And, but if you think about it, let, let’s go, let’s go back, let’s keep it pure marketing for just one second. What’s this brand? This brand is that, that guy Brogan always talks right from the middle of his belly. You know exactly what you’re gonna get with him. How unassailable am I compared to other people who are clearly protected, clearly defensive, I always come off looking better because I always come off as, as looking like, this man has nothing to hide. He will tell you the worst things about himself. And so if he says, this is amazing, you’re gonna believe him a lot more than someone who everything is amazing. So that’s, I think, a benefit too.
Mike Giambattista:
Well, true. And plus, I’m in large part Italian, so we’re given to hyperbole. Everything’s amazing. It just has to be, it’s my d n a <laugh>, so I’m reconciling that too. But again, let’s make this more about you. Your, I I’ve tried to kind of look over your history. It is really difficult because you’ve been at this and you’ve been a pretty public personality for a long time. But it, if I can synopsize poorly and summarize what I think I see y like the early part of your career, you were one of a handful of people who had kind of decoded early internet tactical stuff. You, you understood it and you, you, you understood how to communicate that. And a lot of people, myself included, needed to understand it. And then it seemed like I’m breaking this up into fa into phases, eras, epics, if you will.
Your, what you ended up putting out publicly looked like it was much more strategic dealing with CEOs and executive coaching scenarios and trying to, to add more strategic level guidance into organizations. Again, you’ll you’ll, you’ll correct all this in a minute cuz I’m sure I’m wrong. But and then more recently it seems to be like Chris Brogan the sage of life, which kind of goes extends beyond business. And you’re probably kind of wincing when I said sage, but you have a lot of stuff to offer that goes beyond just the confines of how to get things done in business. And I think that’s what’s intrigued me most about, about what I’ve seen lately. I mean it is that at all accurate as to, you know, describing your journey?
Chris Brogan:
I like it. I think that sounds great. I started blogging way back in 1998 when they were calling it journaling. I thought blogging was super cool. I think that with, when Twitter showed up, I was user 10,202 and I was like, this is going to be amazing. See, there you go there hyperbole. I thought because this tool allows us to gate jump the way the email did 20 years before it. So in, in 2006, Twitter was the same way in like 1989 you could email Bill Gates. And so I, I did, I got on very early. I was a lot of people’s first Twitter follower as far back as when it launched. I I wasn’t there at launch. I was there in the fall of the, it launched in March, I started in October. And I said to everybody back then, they would let you dump your entire contact database into it and try to find friends.
And because they were trying for rapid growth and then like, I don’t know, a year or so later they were like, don’t do that anymore. But I was already in, so I was kind of like Tom from MySpace. I was like, your your first free friend on the platform. And I, I was like a 30 something year old child actor because suddenly everyone was like, oh, he’s the social media guy. And I was like, there couldn’t be a less delightful label to me. You might as well call me the facts marketer, you know, the, the overhead projector guru. Like it was the least interesting thing to be married to a technology style. What I kept trying to say was, it’s not the tech, it’s what you can do with the tech. It’s really cool. You can reach people in very different ways. And so for instance, I was telling like, car manufacturers, you know, guys, you could do this thing where the people who are already super in love with x, y, Z car could be the marketing, you know, and user generated content way before that was considered a thing.
And so that was, that was Epic one. I, it’s interesting cuz I’m living through Epic two of like executive coaching and all that, that it, my job as chief of staff is essentially an in place executive coach for a corporation. And I, I have a C E O to whom I report, and I have a whole group of people, this is a guy I worked with back in the nineties in wireless telecom and had been on his advisory board for a while and he just said, can you come in house? We’re we’re doing some bigger things. I really could use your help. And I protested. And he made it so that I would stop protesting. And so I came in. But the writing from the belly, I think, okay, so I’ve done it in one form or another. Like if you google like Chris Brogan and depression, you’ll find posts and videos and stuff like that from 2012 because one of the other missions I had was, I was trying to show people that you can, you could deal with clinical depression. I never say I suffer. You deal with something like clinical depression and have a career. And so I just wanted to show other people you could do that so that maybe they can model. So I think that’s epic three and two, I’m living at the same time in real time.
Mike Giambattista:
That kind of makes some sense. I mean you, you probably hear this a lot from people that you’re in touch with, by the way. I I, I checked it before this conversation and I think if I have the number right, you have something like 330,000 followers on, on LinkedIn,
Chris Brogan:
On, on Twitter. On
Mike Giambattista:
Twitter. On on Twitter, yeah.
Chris Brogan:
Yeah. LinkedIn a lot, a lot fewer. And with Twitter, I mean it’s just go a as more and more and more people are leaving. Like it’s just, it’s just fewer and fewer. But it’s okay. I, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s been the weirdest thing in the world to have over 300,000 people because that’s like sort of being the mayor of a pretty good sized city. Yeah. But really dopey city, you know what I mean? Like, it doesn’t make, it’s not like I, I used to do at the height of being Chris Brogan, which is long behind me, I used to walk into like Panera and be like, do you know who I am? And everybody be like a loud man. And that would be the end of that conversation. <Laugh>,
Sponsor Announcement
Each year for the past 20 years or so, the world’s best marketers have been gathering in Chicago for two and a half days of high level learning and networking. It’s called crmc on my calendar. I’ve placed a hard hold on June 7th through the ninth so that I can be there and be a part of what’s about to happen in retail, in loyalty and in technology. You should be there too. You can learn more and you can register in the link below this podcast or you can go directly to the event [email protected]. That’s the crmc.com. I go to my fair share of events throughout the year. CRMC is my one Can’t miss event of the year. I hope to see you there.
Mike Giambattista:
Just the most recent stuff that you’ve posted on LinkedIn has a lot more life guidance to it than I see out there. And that’s super intriguing. What I mean by that, I’m not even sure except for you’re addressing topics that, that go well beyond, you know, here’s how to use the tool set and, you know, you know, those kinds of tactical things and the kinds of things that I personally think the world needs a lot more of out there. We, we need people who yeah, because of who you are, you’re willing to speak from the gut. It’s invaluable. But it’s, it’s also what you’re saying, you know, you have the, the sensibilities to, I don’t know, you know, I don’t know if you have the finger on the pulse of the people, you know, which sounds goofy as I’ve been saying it, but you know, somehow you’ve been able to address a lot of what people are looking for.
And I think right now, from my perspective, a lot of people are in pain. A lot of people are trying to figure out what, you know, how they’re navigating jobs that, and industries that are very fluid and in flux and people are coming and going and being flung left and right in jobs and, and all of the mental emotional anguish that goes along with that stuff. And, you know, I’ve got, I’ve got friends personally who are who, who have battled depression, deep depression their whole lives, and they’re going, like one in particular, I, I sent him this article and we’re talking about, he wrote, said, you gotta take a look at this. Just, just on a, on a bravery transparency level, maybe there’s something to learn here about how you, you deal with this thing that we all know is there. It’s just brutally difficult when it, when it shows up. And you know, basically what I got was a, you know, f you don’t tell me what to do, but <laugh> that’s the nature of our friendship. So anyway, I don’t know where I’m going with that other than to say I’m, I think the world needs what you’re saying.
Chris Brogan:
So, so one of the challenges with when people are kind of dealing with stuff like this is that a lot of times until you’re ready for advice, you’re not ready for advice. Like, it’s just not, it’s just not helpful. One thing I point specifically with clinical depression, which is like, there’s people who are down in the dumps or people who have had a lot of bad things happen to them. I have clinical depression. It’s like I wear reading glasses. If I don’t wear reading glasses, I can’t see it doesn’t matter how I think about seeing, it doesn’t matter if I try to get my hopes up about seeing, it doesn’t matter if other friends of mine have it worse than me in the vision department. I just need the glasses. You know, I always say to people that clinical depression’s a lot like diabetes, you need meds.
And so I take meds and it took a, there’s always a journey with depression meds because they worked differently for every different human. It’s a super imperfect science. And the only thing that ever worked for me ended up being a very experimental drug which is currently a street party drug and a hallucinogen. And so it is you know, I get it from a medical doctor in a medical setting, but you know, out on the street you could get it at a cool party if you wanted. So my point being that like, it’s just, it’s tricky. And so the things that worked for me were meds. And then I got my sleep fixed I’d, I’d gone to see a doctor a year ago, April, and he said, Hey, have you ever had a sleep study done? And I was like, no, cuz I’m pretty anti-D doctor.
And he goes, let’s try it. And I was like, sure. Cuz I was, I had had a very close friend, had a big heart scare in front of me and I was ready to go check out everything and glad I did. So I did the sleep study and they were like, you know, so a normal person, normal, average, you know, in the, in the spectrum of normal person gets interrupted within any given hour, as many as say 13 or so times become severe. So if you get interrupted 13 times in an hour, that’s severe, up to 31 is considered severe. I said, oh man, am I like close to 31? He goes, sir, you’re 71 71 times when smokes. I was being woken up from sleep every 49 seconds for about five to seven years of my life. Horrible sleep apnea. I’m a I’m a big heavy guy.
So that was, that made sense. So I, they got me one of those machines that you stick on your face and it’s like Darth Vader and the air goes through and I sleep like a god. Now I, I wear an app that tells me how the sleep is going and I’m like the best sleeper in the world. Wow. A lot of my depression went away. No kidding. With, with sleep problems comes cortisol, which is a drug that we have from our primal days, which say sleep tooth tiger run away. Right? And, and cortisol holds on to fat. So the minute I got that, I lost 50 pounds almost instantly. Like I just didn’t need it anymore. All kinds of things changed. So why do I bring any of that up? Because it’s all just about me. It’s not just about me. There’s lots of people who don’t have great sleep and lots of people who haven’t gone for a sleep study and lots of people who haven’t checked out do they have clinical depression because it’s not gonna be a mood fixer, right?
You can mood all you want and you know, there are dietary things that are better for that. There are choices that you can make that are better for that, but ultimately just like glasses you need a little more. So there’s that. The other reason I write about all this is because we’re in a world now with a lot of hybrid people who weren’t used to being hybrid. The company where I work is, is a remote first company. We’ve always been remote. There’s technically some offices, we have a bunch across the globe, but they’re not, you know, no one has to go to any particular place. It’s, we’re very fortunate and privileged to be able to work out of our homes. I think that as more people came into that world in the pandemic, they did not realize some of the things they were counting on in their life.
Like social settings, like, like reinforcement from other humans, like just basic human warmth, especially if someone was single. You know, there’s a lot going on there where, you know, they couldn’t get what they wanted or maybe they counted on their business life to kind of offset their home life. Maybe their home life wasn’t their favorite part if they don’t want to admit that. You know what I mean? So Mike, there’s like a hundred different facets that suddenly fell on people, which is why I started writing about it because I thought maybe there’s some stuff I can do and, and people like your friend, I try to just sort of lay it out as advice to myself and that way it’s a little less intrusive, you know, Hey, look what this guy said about himself, and then someone else can pick up something on it. That’s, that’s another trick of it too. You know, it’s with my kids it was a trick too. You know, I’m over here eating this thing, or I’m over here reading books because my parents read like crazy when I was a kid. I’m a voracious reader. You would think my kids, you would think books are illegal. So I’m just always trying to teach ’em that <laugh>. Right? Maybe books are great,
Mike Giambattista:
Your perspective on life in business is different. It’s healthy, it’s valuable, and you know, maybe add that into the million things you’ve got on your agenda or if you need help from me, I’d be happy to help. But, but you know, amplifying the kinds of things that float through your head when you’re thinking about how to care for yourself and your family and your coworkers are uniquely good I think because it doesn’t come across as you’re trying to sell me anything. I mean, there’s any, I I’m just going back to the word that I overuse a lot, which is empathy, but it’s just, it’s the one thing I think it’s just, you know, you you care about the people that you care about it. And we haven’t even gotten into that really. But it’s clear that you’re authentic enough with yourself that and transparent enough that it translates. It translates. And I was affected. I’ve passed that article around to at least a couple of dozen people and you know, probably half of those people got back to me saying things like, I can’t believe what I just read. And I’ve got two or three people I know who need to read this because they’re dealing with such and such may or may not even have been clinical depression, but just some situation in their lives where, you know, a level of transparency and bravery was just what the doctor ordered. So
Chris Brogan:
I think that there’s something, there’s a great new movement out in the world right now talking about how representation matters. You know, and there’s all these examples of this, you know, more people of color in movies, more Asian people in movies more pick any other race besides white people or straight people in movies, for instance Barbie just introduced their first ever doll with down syndrome. And of course people with downs are like, Ooh, wow, it’s me. You know? And there’s nothing that replaces that feeling. You know, there’s nothing that that feels better than, I just wrote a post in my personal Sunday newsletter where, in which I was talking about the fact that <laugh>, I was at Barnes and Noble and I was sitting across from all the self-help books and psychology books and I was just sort of taking an inventory quickly about what are the, what’s the same about all these books?
And what they are is there’s like, there’s essentially almost countless things that they say are wrong with you. But then when you get into the table of contents at least, and you start looking at the fix, the fix is almost always the same handful of things. And so I laid out the six things that were likely the fix to what was wrong with you no matter what was wrong. And I was thinking to myself, well that’s pretty ingenious cuz the, the, the way to sell the book is are you messed up like this? Oh perfect, buy this book. And then you don’t even have to write anything particularly unique about the fix because it’s all the same things, you know? Right. <laugh>. So I thought, wow, I could really, I could write a whole book series on this info on it cause I’m an author, but you know, it’s, people say, well, so then, well one, one person wrote to me and said, well, does that mean like you’re making fun of the fact that I don’t know how to figure this out for myself?
I said, no, billions of people don’t like, that’s why there’s religion, that’s why there’s therapy. That’s why there’s, you know, recreational and medicinal drugs, you know, because we, we can’t figure ourselves out. And it is a conundrum and, and we’re always, we can always, it’s like you can’t tickle yourself. Like you can’t figure out yourself, which is why you go to therapists, you know? And so I think that one reason I write about this a little more than I used to, like I already said, one reason was cuz everyone’s just now suddenly remote workers and they didn’t mean to be. The other is that once you see yourself in something, you go, oh, and then you might, you might kind of catch it finally from the outside, which you weren’t getting from the inside. And I think that that’s way more like, should we use AI in our future marketing?
Yes. Okay. Handled, that’s like, that’s a paragraph. I could write that on a, on a fortune cookie. I guess I need to write the other part about what should you write about, you know, or, or what matters or how are you gonna convince someone to buy? I mean the, the convincing people to buy is always going to be harder because we’re always going to be more savvy. So I I think it’s a, you know, as technology is a advancing, so is human knowledge and human interaction and, and even though we can easily also make the argument that humanity is getting dumber every day, we are getting a lot more discerning every day because we want to know, do we want, you know, teal or a light blue green, you know, we’re in that world now, we can customize to the millimeter just like representation, right? We can say I like Mal, but not from Argentina and someone’s gonna agree with me. Right? I, I do, I love, I love Argentinian mal, but I’ve seen ’em from other places. Someone must be buying it.
Mike Giambattista:
Right? Right. And you know, along those lines, people’s, as technology advances, as the world advances our discernment of what we want advances and our expectations increase right along with them. So yes to all that, look, I I’m sure you have people pawing at, at you and trying to jam themselves into your schedule left and right. I’m grateful that I drew the the good long straw on this one. But if you’re willing to have these occasional conversations when your schedule permits, I think it’s, it’s the breadth of life into LinkedIn and the business world that it’s so badly needed. So, and that’s, that’s not to overhype you, you’ve probably had enough of that, but I just find extreme extreme value in the stuff you’ve been putting out.
Chris Brogan:
I’m really grateful. Hear it. And, and thanks for saying so. I think that one reason I’ve put a lot of my heart into LinkedIn lately is just because I mean, I grew up when blogs were cool, I thought blogging was great, I was really excited about it. I, like I said, I started in 1998. I had some real great length of link authority and all that sort of thing. I deleted everything. Chris brogan.com is now just a card site. And my s e o friends all went into morning. They all, they’re, it’s terrible. They’re all crying. I threw away so much Google Juice that was, you know, organic and could never be replicated by robots and SEO people. And one thing, one real benefit of that, by the way just side out is that I’ve gotten far fewer emails asking me to write, you know, stupid articles with their dumb links in them. Yeah, so grateful. So that’s all it takes.
Mike Giambattista:
I just have to ditch my SEO juice and
Chris Brogan:
Then I’ll stop getting those. I’m, you’re good, you’re good. Okay. I rank for nothing now. So but, but one reason I went to LinkedIn with it was just because that’s where people were and because people weren’t really realizing that LinkedIn’s big intent right now is to use the platform in that way. Somebody asked me, well, what happens when it leaves? And I said, do you think, you know, I don’t, I don’t write any particular place anymore. I just write. And so I’ll just write for myself or something. Or I’ll go to one of the other thousand dumb places where you could put your dumb text that no one cares about. My goal with all of it always since I was young, this is your your point about not selling. I do sell things. I just, I find that if I connect to you plenty of times, first, it’s so much easier to sell.
I’m friends tangentially with Seth Goldman, who runs Eat the Change, who founded Honest Tea back in the day and he sold it to Coke for a really good Money. He wrote a really great book about the whole experience of a graphic novel actually about the experience. And then Koch not too long ago, a year or two ago, just said, ah, we’re gonna stop selling Honest tea, which set off something in their, their contract agreement that said he can now sell an iced tea again. So he is like, okay, I’m gonna sell an iced tea. So Seth reached out to me and, and like five other people hey, I don’t know, make this dumb video about us drinking our iced teas or whatever. And I was like, I’m in, I’m ready. You know, how you get there with everybody in the world is you, you just do things for people a lot.
You know, I’ve done lots of things for Seth. Seth has done things for me. Seth gave me incredibly valuable advice that I would not have received from any other kind of person in any strata that I would’ve had to pay a great deal of money for. And he just gave it to me free. I think that we, we get that one wrong a lot. We, we, we start with what’s in it for me? Or we worry about, can I be, you know, reciprocal like child dini’s books? He’s not wrong. What Chaldini says, he’s a good guy too. We’ve talked a bunch. But, but what one way to do it, not his exact direct way, one way to do it is just keep doing for people so much that, you know, when the time comes, you make an ask. They’re like, oh man, I, how would I ever say a no to this
Mike Giambattista:
Person? Right, of course. Yeah.
Chris Brogan:
But, but don’t, but don’t count for that. Don’t build for that. Just, just build with abundance and then as, as the need arises, it, it’s like I sit around in a garden full of really ripe, ready to eat fruit instead of a bunch of seeds that I better either plant or eat or I’m in trouble.
Mike Giambattista:
Great analogy, great analogy. But I think you just basically ruin the marketing careers of, you know, a good, a good chunk of marketers out there who, who are tasked with like their goals in business life are to, you know, plant seeds rather than sit there in, in a big garden of right fruit.
Chris Brogan:
I mean it’s, it’s, it’s hard. I one trick with marketing too is the, the career means that you have a certain set of, particular set of skills, as Liam Neeson would say. You have a particular set of skills, but if you don’t work at a place where you love what they sell, you’re, you’re gonna already be behind the wheel, right? Because you’re, you’re gonna be like, well, here I am being a marketer for these dumb things. I’ve never approached any role that I’ve had. I mean, I, I ran my own business for about 19 years so that, so I could have that choice to it only say yes to the things I thought were interesting. And even then I would have the craziest times. I I, I got excited in General Motors. I really wanted to promote a particular Cadillac, you know, model that they had going.
And they brought me in and they were like, let’s talk about Buick. And I was like, I feel like we got this wrong. I mentioned this particular Cadillac and they were like, well that’s not what I need to sell. I need to sell these Buicks, those Cadillacs sell themselves. And I was like, well then don’t bring me in. Like, I’m not, I’m marketer, I’m a mark, I’m a guy who really likes Cadillac. And, and I think that for a lot of elements of business, I mean look, we have to make our money, we have to do our thing, we have to work where we work. And I get that all and not anybody’s like, man, I can’t wait to sell toilets except me. I love toilets, I love poop. I think using that whole part of my gastro intestinal system is amazing. And I had a conversation with some people from American Standard Toilet because they said, I can’t believe you talked about poop on stage. We gotta talk to you. And I was like, this is my dream come true <laugh>. And you
Mike Giambattista:
Heard it right there.
Chris Brogan:
They had demo videos where they have to flush fake poop. And so they asked me the question, what color should we use though for the fake poop? It could be any color. And I said, well have, have feminine hygiene products taught us nothing. Clearly the poop should be blue. And okay, okay we’ll go with blue. Cuz they also could get pretty realistic. And I was like, nobody, yeah, no, besides ab me thinks that would be cool. So but but there it was, right? Like there was the merge. And so people try to tell me, well I can’t market the thing I love or I can’t work at the job where I think it’ll be cool. You can or you can choose to work to make your money and not put your heart and soul in it. Which is fine, you could do that as long as you set up that kind of heart and soul stuff somewhere else in your, in your life system. And I guess I’m trying to help people figure that stuff out too cuz a lot of people just feel like you can’t possibly work on something that’s really cool or all those influencers tell you that you can just live your dream and go work on exactly the thing you wanna work on. But there has to be some there, there and there has to be some reason to work there and there has to be some way you can make money off of the part you’re interested in or it’s not good advice.
Mike Giambattista:
Yeah. But so I gotta ask, what was, what was Seth’s million dollar advice to you?
Chris Brogan:
Oh it was, it was, it was so specific that it’s not that interesting but it was, it was about it was sort of about time stuff, you know, because we get time run sometimes or we will a lot of times with consulting. For instance, if you think I’m going to so the way I love to consult is the opposite of the way consultants love to consult. I like to get in, do the thing, get out. And so I was approaching this business idea that I had with that same mindset. I was like, Seth, I feel like I could get in, do the thing, charge probably this and then get out. And he goes, nobody wants that. He goes, they want like probably three quarters of your time, so they want nine months of your time. And I said, okay baby, you know, nine months is a baby. He said, yeah. He goes, you gotta turn this person around, give them nine months. And I was like, oh. Cuz in my mind I was thinking three months I was thinking one quarter start to finish, he goes, do you think anyone’s gonna have a significant amount of change for the amount of money that you want to charge in three months time? And I said, I thought so until you asked me the question, <laugh>. That’s right.
You know, it’s like when, when you know your other half says something like, are you wearing that out? And you think, yeah, I
Mike Giambattista:
Would. Of course not.
Chris Brogan:
But now <laugh>
Mike Giambattista:
Just trying it on to see that I don’t wanna wear it. Yeah, exactly. Oh
Chris Brogan:
Man. Yeah. That’s how it, well
Mike Giambattista:
We’re just, we’re just literally scratching the surface of, of 10,000 topics that are all interrelated and I think are super important and I’m gonna try hard to get back on your schedule again. Cuz I, this is, you know, you talk about making a decision to do what you want for a living. This is what I wanna do for a living. I want to talk to people who have an angle on life that’s important and, and push that out there. So with that, thank you.
Chris Brogan:
I think there’s value. I think, I think if as we start to find some of the people who are less connected in some way or another too, I mean that’s topic for another time. I launched at the very start of the pandemic, I realized, oh wow, I’m not gonna be doing any keynote on any stages soon. I should do something to entertain myself. And so I launched I started podcasting in oh five, but I’ve had one, I always shut ’em down really fast. And I did one called, well it started as I forget what I called it and then I called it catch up and then I eventually renamed it the Backpack Show. But when I launched the Backpack Show, I had one real important mandate. I didn’t want to talk to a whole bunch of straight white male marketers cuz you know, that’s us.
Sorry. I know. I wanted to see, you know, let’s go find some other people. So I went for indigenous people, people of color, people, L G B T Q. I went, I went looking for voices that don’t get as represented. And it changed my world. It changed my world because I got to bring voice to a lot of people who weren’t necessarily getting asked onto a lot of shows. And I got to just talk about things that were different than what was my normal Bailey Wick. So I’m grateful you let me on to talk with you. And I also think that anytime we get a chance to go and find interesting voices out in the world we’re so lucky.
