‘d love to see what happened before John had grey hair. That would be really interesting to know what the difference is. Where do I look to now?
I’m very fortunate that I have a whole bunch of systems built around me. I’ve considered myself a talent scout, I guess, in the business industry. This goes back into the guerrilla marketing aspect, as well.
I believe very strongly that there are people out there that are going to be very successful because of who they are and what they are, and of certain qualities that are common amongst them.
What I have done over the years is I’ve built systems into my business and members of my team, and, for example, the Sunday Best Content List, to basically bring people to me and identify people who are going to be good just before they are, before they’re known to be good.
There’s this old adage, it’s like, “Try, fail, try, try, fail, fail, fail, try, fail, reinvent yourself, and then five years later, you become an overnight success.” If you could catch somebody in that try-fail phase and be the person to lift them up and publish them and be like, “Yo, I got you.”
Build a relationship with them. Well, when that person inevitably then becomes really successful, even they’re a lot, try getting in touch. Try building a relationship with somebody when they’re already at the top.
They don’t need anyone. They’re busy. They have lots of people trying to reach out to them, but if you’ve known them for a lot of years, but then pull backwards for you. What we do is we have members of our team basically insistence that scan the net for people just putting out good content, good material.
We have processes of just making sure we’re checking in with them, making sure we’re seeing what they’re doing. Trying to figure out ways that we can support them on the way out. No idea whether it will ever turn into anything.
You know there’s somebody who we had a call with yesterday that we might work with. You might become the head coach for one of our projects that we’re working with. I’ve known him for ten years, attended his events, his conferences always just kept in touch with him a bit, borrowing stuff when he put it out.
Send him messages, just I believe very strongly in catching people in the act of doing something great. Lot of times, it’s so easy to catch people in the act of doing something poorly and the only time you reach out or you hear from somebody is like, “Oh, you’re doing something wrong.”
“You made a mistake. You made a typo.” Now be like, “Yo, I got you. I got you. I got you. You did something cool there. You did something good there.” Be that person to identify it. I believe very strongly in never resisting a generous impulse.
If you ever feel like doing something nice for somebody, knee jerk reaction just do it. Send that message, send that coat, buy that gift card, buy that post in the key lime pie when you meet up with them in the middle of a park in New York City.
Really, that’s super memorable. I mean when we met up, I think I went visited the greatest offices. Then you and I had a coffee in one of the many concrete pubs in New York. You just walked down.
You knew that I love key lime pie. You just walked down with a coffee and a little single-serve key lime pie for me.