In a recent interview with Robert Rose, Chief Strategy Officer for Content Marketing Institute, for his Weekly Wrap podcast, I had the opportunity to share my reflection on the three things I believe have helped me achieve success in my career thus far, and what I try to employ with each new day and challenge:
Learn by doing
Grow through risk-taking
To Effectively Communicate Requires Tedious Work, Enormous Effort and Constant Humility
Read on to learn more about how these three things have been key to the success I’ve been fortunate to have thus far in my career, and life.
1. Learn By Just Doing
As I explained in the podcast interview, in my experience, the times when I learned the most were not in studying a topic in a classroom, reading an article, or discussing it with others in meetings. Rather, it’s been when I just rolled up my sleeves and did it. I remember doing my first video and having to learn how to write a video script and create a storyboard. I had no idea, until that time, how difficult creating a video was. It requires tedious, detailed work and a great deal of thought and iteration to do it well. I had a similar experience when I had to write my first quarterly conference call script for the investor and analyst audience, and manage investor communications. I had worked with media, customers, and community partners up to that point, but it was not until I expanded my role and took on the critical nature of investor communications, where the risks are higher with much at stake, that I came to truly appreciate how important, and how much work it is, to tailor your message to your audience and pay attention to the nuances of communicating to different stakeholder groups.
By “just doing”, you also learn what you love to do and where your passion really lies. For instance, a couple years after I published my book, Smart Marketing for Engineers, I found that my job had completely changed. I went from mostly working with clients to mostly speaking at events and doing business development. After a couple of years, I found I really missed working with clients. It made me realize and appreciate what I loved doing most – rolling up my sleeves and working with individuals and small teams to define strategies, set goals, execute and measure success. That could be coaching an individual to grow their leadership and effectiveness, building a marketing launch plan for a product or startup, or co-authoring a textbook, which is one of my current projects that is really, really hard but also thoroughly enjoyable and quite rewarding.
2. Grow By Taking Risks
As I consider the times when I took the biggest risks in life and career, I believe those are the times when I grew the most, learned the most, and look back on as most transformational. Growing up in Texas, it was scary to leave home and go to Boston College, halfway across the country in New England with its unique history, culture and…very cold weather! However, in my junior year, at the ripe age of just 20, I went even farther away, pursuing my childhood dream to study abroad in France (where I could not only achieve my goal to become fluent in French, but also enjoy the breathtaking Alps and ski my heart out near the college town of Grenoble). Moving to France was one of the scariest things I’ve ever done, moving a long distance away from my home, living with a family I had never met, and having to speak and read French 24/7. There were days I felt isolated, depressed, and extremely homesick. All I had was me – I had to survive. After I moved back, finished college and began my career, in those early days as I faced challenges and times of insecurity, I drew on my successful, and very happy, experience of living in France as a source of confidence to push forward, face my fears and achieve success.
It was a similar feeling when I left the comforts of my job in corporate America to start my own business. Reputationally, it was like starting over - no client cared what I had done before or what my corporate title was. They cared about their business and how I, and our team, was going to help them succeed. Moreover, I had to learn how to run a business – what prices to charge, how to manage expense to ensure we created profit, how to build a culture people wanted to join and help grow. I had to start over, reprove myself, and, with my partner, build a company from the ground up, which made me both sharp and humble.
3. To Effectively Communicate Requires Tedious Work, Enormous Effort and Constant Humility
In my experience – both work and personal – I have found that communication is mostly disappointing. I think that’s because it’s tedious, it takes an enormous amount of effort and requires constant humility, all of which are uncomfortable for most people. As Robert Rose said to me in a recent conversation, the way we communicate is really the only thing that can truly differentiate us today.
How often have you seen service companies you’ve worked with state on their websites something along the lines of “We believe communication is the key to reliable service”. In a recent situation with a vendor I hired, the company said just this and yet, their team had to ask me to resend emails they’d lost or deleted that had information they needed to reference, didn’t take notes in meetings and forgot details I later had to remind them about, and rarely proactively provided status updates on the project…I continually had to ask. None of these is hard or requires unique skills or advanced degrees. It simply requires attention to detail, being prepare and organize, and caring for the client. This has not only led to my great dissatisfaction with this particular vendor, but has also eroded my trust in their quality of work. If other clients of theirs are receiving the same level and style of communication (which is likely), we can deduce that their poor communication may ultimately be the cause for the demise of their company. I hope that doesn’t happen…they seem to be good people.
Effectively communicating requires hard work, research and organization to determine who, what, where and how you should communicate. As I shared in my conversation with Robert, I recently listened to a podcast by Wondry called Over My Dead Body about a New York City high society wedding that ended in divorce, death and murder. It was the worst possible story of a marriage gone bad that I’d ever heard. The sponsor for the podcast was a big box bedding and bath store, and their commercial during the episode, promoted their wedding registry. Wow…really? The podcast is about a marriage of great expectation that ended in divorce and murder, and yet the sponsor somehow thought it was a good idea to associate their wedding registry with this story? Hmm…if I were in charge, I believe I’d rethink that.
A Final Thought
As my conversation with Robert came to a close, he asked me to share a new acronym I was inspired to create after hearing valuable insights from him during one of our recent conversations. In that conversation, Robert talked about how important he believed it was for companies to create content that people care about vs. being a company whose content was just a bucket of resources with me-too content that doesn’t inspire, change behavior, add value or differentiate.
After that conversation with Robert, I woke up in the middle of the night and immediately this acronym came to me.
Does Your Content B.O.R.E. Your Audience?
Is it just a…
It’s now a guidepost for me, and I hope it can be for others, that as we’re creating content, we ask ourselves “Does this piece of content BORE or will it make my audience CARE?”
Does Your Content Make Your Audience C.A.R.E.?
Is it…
I wish my new acronym rhymed, but alas, I wasn’t that creative at 3am. Maybe readers here can make it better.
