Jeff Gothelf’s work centers around transformation, both in the digital and professional development sense. Jeff works as a coach, consultant, and keynote speaker helping companies bridge the gaps between business agility, digital transformation, product management, and human-centered design. He is the co-author of the award-winning book Lean UX and Sense & Respond, and his newest solo effort is Forever Employable: How to Stop Looking for Work and Let Your Next Job Find You.
In this episode, we talk about the importance of continuous learning, the difference between employability security and employment security, and how to cultivate the former to always be able to land on your feet. Jeff also shares his perspective on why persistence is everything—especially when it comes to showing up and getting your message out there—and how sharing your expertise is the best way to land new opportunities.
Learn how to build your personal brand to have your next job find you from Jeff Gothelf (@jboogie), author of FOREVER EMPLOYABLE. #careers #careerdevelopment Share on X
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On Today’s Episode We’ll Learn:
- How to take an entrepreneurial approach to your career.
- How to use the infinite appetite for content to your advantage.
- They key to get people to pay attention.
- How the average person can tell their story.
- How to know when to pivot or when to stay the course.
Key Resources for Jeff Gothelf:
- Connect with Jeff Gothelf: Website | Twitter | LinkedIn
- Amazon: Forever Employable
- Kindle: Forever Employable
- Audible: Forever Employable
- Seth Godin
- Gary Vaynerchuk
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Full Episode Transcript:
Welcome to Brainfluence, where author and international keynote speaker Roger Dooley has weekly conversations with thought leaders and world class experts. Every episode shows you how to improve your business with advice based on science or data.
Roger’s new book, Friction, is published by McGraw Hill and is now available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and bookstores everywhere. Dr Robert Cialdini described the book as, “Blinding insight,” and Nobel winner Dr. Richard Claimer said, “Reading Friction will arm any manager with a mental can of WD40.”
To learn more, go to RogerDooley.com/Friction, or just visit the book seller of your choice.
Now, here’s Roger.
Roger Dooley: Welcome to Brainfluence, I’m Roger Dooley. Today’s guest has an important message for all of us. Whether you are an entrepreneur or toiling away working for someone else, you’ll learn how to chart a new path to success.
Jeff Gothelf is the coauthor of Sense and Respond and Lean UX. His latest book, a solo effort, is Forever Employable. How to stop looking for work and let your next job find you. We’re in a time of great change, and Jeff will show us how to practice continuous learning improvement, experimentation, and agility to develop as individuals and build our career, or like Jeff himself, our business. Welcome to the show, Jeff.
Jeff Gothelf: Thank you so much, Roger, a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me on.
Roger Dooley: Yeah. Jeff, your message really resonated with me because some years back I had an IT outsourcing company that I had co-founded and when I was interviewing people, we interviewed a lot of people because we were always trying to find people to meet particular client needs, many would ask about job security, what kind of job security does your company offer? And in our space, in the IT business, that wasn’t really a thing that I could promise because technology’s changing, client needs vary, and to tell somebody that they’re going to definitely have a job in two years or three years or some time period like that just wasn’t practical, or ethical or truthful. But what I did try and promise them, and I did tell them was that they would have employability security, that if they came to work for our company, we would be exposing them to different technologies, different companies, different operating environments, the latest technologies, the newest technologies, and that we would offer them opportunities to train and get certifications and learn skills.
And that the fact that we couldn’t provide secure employment, necessarily, not that we were promising them insecurity either, but just that we couldn’t promise them lifetime employment the way companies used to, but we could promise them that if they ever wanted to leave, or for some reason had to leave the company, that they would be highly employable, more employable than when they joined us. So, to me, your message of being forever employable really resonates. Tell me about what that means to you.
Jeff Gothelf: Yeah, look, so I think you’re right. I think job security that’s dependent on other people is it’s going extinct. And I think that’s a risk that a lot of folks are, unfortunately, realized during the pandemic over the last year, this idea that the company will be loyal to me if I’m loyal to the company. And the reality is when the going gets tough, you’re going to get thrown out if that’s what it takes to keep the company afloat. And so for me, forever employability is a, forever employable, the book, is about achieving the state of forever employability, where you shift the dynamic of career development and progression and even job hunting to some extent, right? So normally you are the one who goes out and you have to pursue your next opportunity, whether it’s by choice or whether it’s involuntary, you’re the one chasing jobs.
What if we could change the dynamic? What if you could flip it 180 degrees and create a situation where you function like a magnet for jobs, for opportunities, right? How do we create that situation where you are continuously attracting new ways of interacting with people sometimes for employment sometimes in other ways, so that no matter what happens, whether it’s a pandemic, whether it’s a merger, or an acquisition or some kind of turmoil in the marketplace or geopolitical instability, right? No matter what happens, there’s always an inbound flow of stuff coming your way that you can then use to kind of take the next career step from there. And it’s a hugely empowering feeling when you can achieve that state.
Roger Dooley: Yeah. Well, you reached a sort of a crisis point in your own career where you said that you were overpaid, but you would be overpaid, but unemployable, if you stuck with your current path. And to me, that really kind of resonated because certainly in some professions, I think the one that comes to my mind is the legal profession. Attorneys often get to a point where they are very highly compensated. Especially if they reach partner in a firm, a bigger firm, they are making really huge amount of money, but they have no other career options. There is no career that they could shift to that would pay them anything close to that. And often they reach that point in their career and they don’t like, and obviously there are a lot of attorneys who really like the profession, having a great time and enjoy the money and make good use of it and so on.
But that is something that can happen in any profession where you achieve a certain point in that profession where you can’t easily change careers without suddenly altering your lifestyle in a major way. Now you’ve got the mortgage payments, you’ve got the kids in private schools, you’ve got this and that. I remember Thomas … the vanities, a guy who was an investment banker kind of went down the list of, even though he was making seven figures, how basically he was broke with all of the ongoing expenses that were lifestyle-related. And so this is something that you don’t have to be in that seven figure range, or even be a high paid attorney to reach that point, I think. And something to think about, particularly, when people are earlier in their career, when they can easily make that change before they’ve got massive fixed, expenses that they simply can’t change.
Jeff Gothelf: Yeah. Look, I mean, the reality for me now, while I certainly wasn’t making seven figures, the reality for me was as I was progressing through a tech career and then the tech career was designed, initially. Now, look, by design, as you climb the corporate ladder, there are fewer and fewer jobs, right? That’s the nature of… That’s kind of how organizations are structured. There are more individual contributors than there aren’t managers as it should be. And so as you start to climb the corporate ladder, you get fewer and fewer opportunities. This is particularly painful or poignant in design. So that was my original career. There are very, very few chief design officer positions, very few chief experience officers. They exist, but there aren’t that many. And so at a certain point, you’re going to plateau and it’s not going to be at the top.
It’s going to be the top of your profession. And so for me, the realization was, look, I was already working for a decent company and making decent money, managing a team, doing everything I was supposed to be doing, but my realization was, and I was seeing it happen. I’m seeing it happen to my friends, my friends who were a few years older than me, maybe a little bit ahead of me in their career progression, they were leaving their kind of mid-level management jobs voluntarily sometimes involuntarily other times, and struggling, struggling to really land somewhere and stay there for awhile. Bouncing around, took them six to 12 months to find something, they’d last nine months, and they were back on the market again.
I wasn’t willing to play that game anymore when it came to me, I had two kids, a house, a mortgage, all the lifestyle stuff that you mentioned before. And I wasn’t willing to take that risk. And I recognized that I was going to start losing that game more and more and more. I had pretty successful getting jobs up until that point, even through the first .com bubble crash and so forth, even during the recession and the financial crisis, but I was going to start to lose and I was not willing to threaten the livelihood, the lifestyle of my family for that. And so I started to be proactive about it.
Roger Dooley: Right? Well, I think there’s a kind of a double lesson there, Jeff, one is that it’s probably better to start earlier rather than later, because the later you start sort of the fewer options you have open to you, it gets a little tougher to change, take risks, and so on. On the other hand, it is never too late to start. It may just change your approach a little bit, which is I guess what you did. We’ve had Tom Peters on the show a few time and years ago, he wrote a really fascinating article about the startup of you. And in your book, you talk about the startup of Jeff. And this is basically the approach that you are describing, right? That if a person wants to take charge of their career, whether that ends up being a career in companies, working for other people or an entrepreneurial career that they have to view themselves as a startup, why don’t you dig into that a little bit?
Jeff Gothelf: Absolutely. So, look, and that’s exactly the right approach. So, this is an entrepreneurial approach to your career. This is being proactive about what you’re going to do. So the question is, okay, what do entrepreneurs do? Entrepreneurs solve problems in the world. They identify a need. A need that’s going unmet, or that’s met by what they believe to be inferior solutions. And they decide that they’re going to provide a superior solution or just the solution at all. This is what you’re doing. You’re saying, “Look, I’m an expert in whatever your field of expertise is.” Project management, legal defense, whatever it is, and you’re saying, “Look, I believe that I can solve this problem better than most people. I’ve got a tremendous amount of experience and I’m going to start to create demand for my experience. I’m going to let the world know that I exist. I’m going to let the world know what I know. And I’m going to let the world know that there are other ways that they can engage with me in a clear effort to drive demand.”
And that demand initially shows up as readers of your blog posts or subscribers to your podcast or viewers to a video of you giving a speech buyers of your book. And then eventually it turns into job offers or consulting offers. And so the coaching offers, et cetera. The interesting thing here is that finding your way to the correct combination of target audience, content, format, channel, et cetera, it’s a game of experimentation of test and learn of hypothesizing running some experiments and seeing what happened? The main thing here just like in the startup world, right? The measure of success is not, did I build a product, or in this case, did I share my expertise, did I share my content? It’s did I change the behavior of the people who were consuming my product? Are they doing something differently?
In the entrepreneurial world, they’re buying your product, they’re subscribing to your startup, whatever it is. In the startup of you, kind of in the forever employable world, you’re looking for readers, subscribers, people who maybe buy a training or a class from you, they buy a book from you. They hire you to speak that type of thing. And that’s the goal. The goal is to build that demand and maintain it. And then scale that up to a point where you are supporting either yourself individually, or you’re supplementing your full-time employment with these opportunities. So that new full-time employment opportunities become very evident from that work relatively often.
Roger Dooley: So how does a regular person, quote, unquote, get going in this? Because I imagine many of our listeners are thinking, “Well, yeah, that sounds really good, but I am a marketing practitioner in a big company.” Maybe a low level manager, maybe a director, but maybe just somebody who started working for the company a couple of years ago. And haven’t gotten my first promotion yet, who wants to listen to me? I’m not Seth Godin or any of the other famous people. How does a person like that sort of transition to thinking of themselves as having insights, because everybody actually has insights that are unique to them, but how do you sort of get over that initial hurdle?
Jeff Gothelf: So, look, I believe everybody’s got a story to share. I believe that, obviously, if you’ve been working for a long time, if you’re 20 to 25, 30 years into your career, or even 15 years into your career, you’ve got experience and you’ve got expertise and you can share that and build off of that. But I call it planting a flag in the book. If you’re just starting out, and I’ve talked recently to groups of recent graduates who are 19, 20, 21, 22 rightfully so were asking, “Well, Jeff, I haven’t done anything. What am I going to talk about?” Well, you talk about what you’re going through. Hey, you just got out of school or you just got out of some kind of a bootcamp program. Terrific. And you’re now looking for work. Tell that story. You’ve got a job interview.
Tell that story. Got a job. Talk about your first day on the job. In other words, everyone’s got stories to tell, you just have to begin to share it. And the amazing thing here is, and people will immediately say, “Well, everything’s been said, Jeff, I don’t want to add to that noise. Even if I do, who’s going to pay attention to me?” The amazing thing is this, there is infinite appetite for content. Infinite. I’m convinced of it. And the story that you have to tell, nobody else can tell. I can’t tell your story. You can’t tell my story. I know why I made the decisions that I made. I know why I’ve taken the steps that I’ve taken. I know the mistakes that I’ve made and what I’ve learned from them. So you start from that.
You start from the personal, and it’s that authenticity that starts to drive readers and subscribers. But I just want to drive this home because again, I’m teaching a workshop right now becoming forever employable workshop with some folks and they are going through this process. And one of them is, there’s a couple of folks in the class who were saying, “Listen, who’s going to pay attention to me. Is the room for anybody else on the internet, right?” Is there room for any more content? I heard this amazing statistic the other day, Roger, 6,600 YouTube channels hit 1 million subscribers in 2020, nearly 7,000 YouTube channels hit a million subscribers. And the number for half a million was exponentially larger. It’s insane, right? This is what leads me to conclude that there’s infinite appetite for content. You just have to be authentic and generous with your content and the followers and the readers and subscribers, they come.
Roger Dooley: Well, you make the point that there is always a market even for entry-level content, because I think that’s for those folks who either haven’t done much so far, or perceive themselves as not having done much, or even those who have done a lot, they may even feel, I don’t really have that sort of Seth Godin—Seth Godin could jot down three sentences on the back of an envelope, and you could probably carve them in stone because they’d be so insightful, and well-written where most of us don’t have that ability. But sometimes just showing a space through a beginner’s eye like, okay, I don’t know that much about this topic, so I will approach it as a beginner and describe what I’m experiencing, what I’m seeing, and then maybe bring in some of these experts in, and then I’d look to see what Seth would say about this.
And by doing that you can create something that is unique to you. And by perhaps mentioning some of the right influencers in your content, eventually, maybe they will be interested in you and perhaps share your stuff. That actually does happen. If you mentioned people and you bring that out and not in a way that, “Hey, I wrote this great article, would you please share it for me?” Nobody wants to respond to that. But when somebody writes an article about your ideas, then okay, maybe that influencer will decide to share it. Not every time necessarily, but things like that and making yourself known, being visible, sharing their stuff, building that reciprocity. All of that can, over time, build up and I’m sure you would agree, Jeff. It’s not going to happen overnight in most cases, but it’s a building process.
Jeff Gothelf: But look, I think your Seth Godin example is really great. You said, hey, Seth Godin can write anything. He could jot on the back of a napkin, it’d be etched in stone because it’s so insightful. He blogs every day. Every day. 7,500 blog posts so far, right? You think the first time he wrote a blog post, it would have been etched in stone. No? The fifth time? Nope. The 50th time? Probably not. The 500th time? Maybe. And so there’s a rigor there. There’s a rigor, there’s a practice. There’s work that goes into this. Gary Vaynerchuk, another really kind of super successful guy who built a content platform. And now a media empire on top of that, he’ll be the first person to tell you that when he was making YouTube videos about wine for his family’s wine business, he screamed into the ether for a year, right?
No one watched any of those videos. Right? It took him a couple years before a few folks started to actually pay attention. And that’s the key here. And this is the thing that I think turns a lot of people off is they see people like Seth Godin and Gary Vaynerchuk and whoever, super successful, and they’re like, “Oh, those guys are huge. If I don’t get that in the first three months that I’m just not going to do this.” Those guys have been at this forever. They’re just out there every day, doing the work consistently producing content on message. Is it all high quality content? It is not. And that’s really, really key to remember it. This is about quantity. And eventually quality will rise from that. Also, as Vaynerchuk likes to say, “Quality is in the eye of the reader or the subscriber”, right?
So you may hate it, but someone else may love it. I can’t tell you how many, well-crafted blog posts or videos or talks I’ve put together that have flopped and then I’ll have like an epiphanous shower moment run out and tweet something and it goes mega viral. Right? And so there’s no predicting it. And so show up every day and just start writing, just start sharing, just start recording whatever your preferred format is. But there is a recipe for this, right? The recipe is you’ve got identified target audience. You’ve got to identify a flag. You’ve got to understand how that target audience likes to consume content. Who do they listen to? Why do they listen to those folks? And then start injecting yourself into those conversations in a way that matches their expectations. And that’s a great way to start.
Roger Dooley: Yeah. And I think you can also sort of move your flag if you will, as you get your content out there, see how well people respond to. I know that was my own experience. And I can also confirm what you were describing. I started writing my neuro-marketing blog back in 05′, I think. And it was probably at least three years before I got any significant traction and like another two before I got a book deal. And during that time initially there really wasn’t too much happening. I just kept writing stuff and writing stuff, but I saw that some things got more attention than others. Some drew more comments, some got more shares. And that sort of guided me as to what people were interested in. And I had started off kind of heavy on the neuroscience aspect talking about very brain type topics.
So with neural implants and things like that, and yeah, those didn’t really get too much stretch when I talked about more practical strategies that any sized business could use. That was what got shared. That’s what drew the comments. And to your point about this good stuff, not always getting traction, I wrote, I’m sure, many pretty high quality and what I thought were insightful blog posts in those early years. The one thing that got the most traction was a ridiculously short post that basically I posted five links to something on another site. And somehow that hit a big, and this was when Digg was big and it hit the front page of digg.com and it crashed my server.
And it was like, this is like the worst thing I ever wrote or the least effort certainly the least value ad that I ever did. So, you never know when lightning is going to strike and just got to keep grinding away at it, but also refining your approach because people will tell you, not come out necessarily and tell you, but you will be able to see what stuff is resonating, what stuff is saying, “Wow, hey”, as you say, I took action because of this.
Jeff Gothelf: Look, the goal here is to build an audience and it’s to build a reputation and then to give generously to that audience, the more generously that you can give, the more comes back to you. I talk about it in the book. I talk about giving it all away. And it’s the toughest thing I’ve had to learn about this. And still, there are days when I’m not super comfortable with this idea that I’ve been working professionally for over 20 years, I’ve got experience, I’ve got expertise. I feel like I should get paid for that experience, that expertise, and yet, and yet the unintuitive thing is that the more that you share, generously, the more you talk about what you’ve learned and what you’ve done and how it’s shaped, what you do today, the more opportunities come back to this. People see you as a trusted resource.
They see you as someone who can actually bring those ideas to wherever they work into whatever challenge they’re facing. And this is the thing that is unintuitive. But like, for example, if you go to my blog today, if you go to jeffgothelf.com, almost everything there is free, right? The blog posts are free. There are resources to download. There’s canvases, there’s templates, there’s videos of my keynotes, but you can watch those keynotes, they’re free. The only thing you’re paying for on my site, you have to buy the books. The books are on sale on Amazon, and then tickets to classes that I’m teaching. But you could take the video of my keynotes, and put it up in a conference room and gather the team and have them watch it, right?
And yet I get hired to give those talks all the time, these days, virtually, but before in person, it’s completely counter-intuitive. I still don’t really understand it, but people really appreciate when you’re generous and you give back to the community. And to me, that’s the key. And that’s how you have to see it, right? It’s not self promotion per se. Although certainly that is one of the goals of it, it’s giving back. You’re sharing back to a broader community than just your immediate team or your colleagues.
Roger Dooley: Sort of the Grateful Dead approach. I mean, you can buy, you can watch Rolling Stones and Lady Gaga videos for free on YouTube. You can buy their album or even probably steal it very cheaply, but people will pay a lot of money to go see them live. Now, of course, the performance by a big act is a little bit different than seeing somebody like you or me on the stage. But I think there’s still the value of that in-person experience. It’s immediate, it lets people connect with the individual. There’s an opportunity to interact in many cases before or after. There’s that chance to ask the specific question that you wanted to ask that you really can’t do with YouTube video and all these things, so people will pay for, plus there’s the attention factor. If you have a message that management wants its people to hear, they know they could just send out a link to your YouTube video on the topic.
But you’re probably going to pay much less attention to that than if you are in a conference room or these days on a dedicated Zoom call with that person they’re presenting in-person and able to interact, so you can say, “Hey, wait a minute. I have a question.” So, I think there is still value in those live performances, but I think it can for many of us, like how much stuff do you give away for free? Because I think that probably you, or I could do all kinds of free gigs every day, we could do a free gig for somebody and at some point say, “Okay, well you got to monetize somehow”, but at the same time, you can’t take that attitude that, “Wow, I am not going to help people unless they pay me.” I think you’ve got to first establish yourself as that helper, as that guide that mentor. And then some small number of people may decide to actually pay you for what you’re offering.
Jeff Gothelf: Yeah. I interviewed Michael Bungay Stanier on my forever employable stories, video interview series, someday soon to be a podcast. We’ll see. But he’s the author of The Coaching Habit and a couple of other books as well. Very successful guy. And look, he said, “You give it all away, but you have to have a monetization strategy as well”, right? So, some kind of a sense that said “Look, I’m going to give blog posts away, resources and articles”, but if you want, like, for example, when I give a talk, especially these days, because it’s all virtual, right? If you want a copy of the slides, no problem. I want your email address. Right? So, there’s a page on my site that you go to, you give me your email address. You tell me which slides you want and I’ll send you the slides, right? And look, that’s not money per se, but that grows my email list. Right? And the email list is really the source of everything at this point. Building that as is my number one goal, because that’s a direct marketing’s, direct line of communication into people’s inboxes. And it’s proven remarkably effective.
Roger Dooley: Yeah. So talk about storytelling a little bit. That’s a key point in the book. I mean, I think our audience knows about stories and the power of stories for your brain, but how does the individual tell their story, or tell stories in a way that will engage new people?
Jeff Gothelf: Well, look, I mean, so think about the people we’ve talked about so far, right? Seth Godin, Gary Vaynerchuk, watch these folks give talks, watch them tell a story, listen to them. Not only are they smart, right? And well-researched, but they’re authentic. They’re real, they’re emotional, they’re passionate. They talk about themselves. They talk about others, they share their wins, they share their losses. They share what we did that didn’t work. And what we learned from that, how that fits into the bigger storyline that they’re trying to tell. For me personally, when I talk about storytelling and especially in the context of kind of giving back my expertise, I always, I always present my stories in a humble way. So here’s the problem we set out to solve. And here’s what we tried. Oh man, that was a disaster.
Here’s why it was a disaster. I got a totally wrong, but here’s what I learned from that. And then we try it again and oh my God, that was worse. But we learned from that as well. And then we picked it up and then here are the three things that I learned that you can do when you finish listening to my story, reading my story, whatever it is, to hopefully bypass those two mistakes that I made. So, I’m sharing authentically. It’s always with humility and for me personally, there’s always something practical you can take away from every single thing that I published. I want you to walk away from every interaction with me, whether it’s live or recorded or written to be like, “Oh, I learned something. I could try that tomorrow.” To me, that’s hugely, hugely valuable. And I pride myself on that with every interaction.
Roger Dooley: Yeah. I think there’s probably a tendency to, if you’re trying to promote yourself as an expert, not to show that humility or that vulnerability to present yourself as, “Oh, wow, hey, listen, this is my latest success story. I thought that this would work in by golly, look at these amazing results I got”, and kind of conveniently omit those things that led up to that success. But I think not only will it make you more human and more believable, but there’s value in those failures too. People want to know what worked. If I saw that you did X and it worked for you, I’d be thinking, “Well, hmm. That’s interesting. But I would probably try Y first. Maybe I will do that instead”, when you did try Y and it actually didn’t do very well for you.
Jeff Gothelf: Yeah. Yeah. That’s exactly right. And look, I teach teams this as well. When I work with teams is to say, “Look, if you’re going to try a new way of working, for example, don’t disappear into a corner office somewhere and then emerge three months later with this amazing new way of working”, right? Do this transparently so that the organization sees, well, they tried that didn’t work out for them, but they learned from it and they moved on to this next thing. It hugely increases the value of your work so much more when you’re transparent about what worked and what didn’t work. And like you said, it humanizes you and people want real stories, right? They want to root for you and then eventually cheer your success, so it’s the way to go.
Roger Dooley: Yeah. Pretty early in the book, Jeff, you talk about the importance of setting up a hypothesis or perhaps more than one hypothesis. Explain what you mean and what would some examples be for somebody who is saying, “Okay, well I think I’ve got an idea of where, where I want to plant my flag, where I want to be known as something.” Talk about that hypothesis concept.
Jeff Gothelf: Absolutely. So this comes directly from my experience, developing digital products and services. The hypothesis essentially reframes what you’d like to do in a testable way in a provable or disprovable way, with a clear measure of success that’s not the making of the content as the measure of success, but the impact that it had on your target audience. So, for example, you could have a hypothesis that says, “Look, I want to reach DIY home repair folks with five minute plumbing repair videos on YouTube. And I’ll know that it’s working when I have a hundred subscribers to my channel in the first month.” Okay. Something like that. So what you’re doing there is you’re saying, you’re saying, look, I’ve got a target audience. These are DIY home repair folks. People who like to fix things on their own. You’ve got the thing that you’d like to make for them.
I’d like to make short plumbing, repair videos for them. You’ve got a channel, you’re going to use YouTube. And most importantly, you’ve got your success criteria, right? Success criteria says, hey, it’s not, I made 50 videos this month, or I made one video this month. It’s I got a hundred people to subscribe, right? Getting people to subscribe is evidence that you’ve provided value that you did something. So, you’ve got a hypothesis, right? That’s the hypothesis. And if you don’t get that hundred, right, if you hit 12, that’s a good indication that maybe you’re in the wrong channel, the video is not valuable. You’re hitting the wrong audience, something along those lines and you can dig further into that. The nice thing about hypothesis is that then you can test them and you can test them in a very lightweight way. You don’t need to go buy a whole bunch of equipment and convert your garage into a YouTube studio.
What you can buy is a $10 tripod with an iPhone Mount or phone down on it, put the phone on it, point it at your face and start talking about the thing you want to fix. And then when you’re fixing the thing, just move the tripod and point the phone at the thing at the work that you’re doing, and then bring it back. Five minutes done, make it quick and dirty, post it, and then let the internet know that it exists. And that’s an experiment. And you can kind of see that people watch it. Do they subscribe, do they forward it. And the goal then is if people buy into this, well, then your hypothesis holds water and you can invest more in the next video.
For the next video, you know what? I’m going to, I don’t know, but I use a DSLR that I have laying around for that or something along those lines. Eventually, if you start to get enough evidence that says, look, this is the way to go, yeah, sure. At that point, convert the garage into a YouTube studio, but you want the evidence for that increased investment. And if you don’t get it well, then you pivot, you pivot the hypothesis, right? Different channel, different audience, different content, whatever it is to try to find that right combination that resonates with your target audience and changes their behavior. That’s the key.
Roger Dooley: Yeah. I think that’s something that we’re all trying to do is change behavior, Jeff. I know that as an author and writer and speaker and trainer I like it when I sell books or my work is recognized in some way, but there is nothing I like better than to hear from somebody who says, “Hey, I used this idea of yours and it really helped me or help my business.” I mean, to me, that is the greatest kind of feedback that any author or creator can get. That’s what we should all be striving for, not the number of retweets or likes or shares or views or whatever. Just some small evidence that your ideas are changing the behavior of others or producing positive outcomes for those others. That’s the reward I think we’re all looking for, yeah. We can keep on going, but I will let you tell our audience, Jeff, where can people find you online and your ideas?
Jeff Gothelf: So I’m super easy to find that’s by design. If you go to jeffgothelf.com, everything is there. Please feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, that would probably be the best way to go and Twitter as well. I spend a lot of time on Twitter as well. So between Twitter, LinkedIn and my website, everything’s there.
Roger Dooley: Great. Well, we will link to those places to Jeff’s books and any other resources we spoke about on the show notes page at rogerdooley.com/podcast, and we’ll have text and audio and video versions of this conversation there too. Jeff, thanks for being on the show.
Jeff Gothelf: Thank you, Roger. Thanks so much for having me.
Thank you for tuning into this episode of Brainfluence. To find more episodes like this one, and to access all of Roger’s online writing and resources, the best starting point is RogerDooley.com.
And remember, Roger’s new book, Friction, is now available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and book sellers everywhere. Bestselling author Dan Pink calls it, “An important read,” and Wharton Professor Dr. Joana Berger said, “You’ll understand Friction’s power and how to harness it.”
For more information or for links to Amazon and other sellers, go to RogerDooley.com/Friction.