đĄ The Lightbulb
A daily email about monetizing your corporate expertise. Give me ~1 minute a day, and I'll help you turn what you know into your most differentiated and lucrative asset.
đ¸ Old-school networking, with visuals
I had three back-to-back nights of networking events this week â it felt like awards season, minus the red carpet. I'll be honest, as a high-functioning introvert, I donât look forward to them, especially when theyâre stacked like that, but each was with a different crowd I wanted to re-connect with, so sometimes you just have to barrel through. And I'm glad I did. A packed room is a great sandbox to test out a bunch of answers to âwhat do you do?â, and see in real-time what resonates and...
đĄ In-the-wild: "The Dip"
When a simple line graph can spur nearly two decades of conversation, youâve certainly found a powerful âintellectual headshotâ. Iâll admit, I hadnât seen Seth Godinâs âThe Dipâ before stumbling on this recent explainer video, but itâs easy to see why it continues to speak to people well after he first published it in 2007. âThe Dip,â Seth writes, âis the long slog between starting and mastery.â Paraphrasing: After youâve started something new, whether is starting a business, writing, or even...
đĄ WATCH: Talking secret sauce on The 2x2
If youâve been following along with me a little while, you probably know I see it pretty simply: If youâre a consultant going into prospect calls without visual assets: Youâll probably end up talking too much. And thatâll likely end up overwhelming your potential client. And thatâll certainly leave them worse off than where they started. Not ideal. I recently went on Lauren Wambold Patelâs podcast The 2x2 to discuss the what, why and how behind my âIntellectual Headshotsâ sprint for soloists....
đĄ Judge Judy: 'Make yourself indispensable'
As someone who used to watch Judge Judy after school as a kid, and after work well into my twenties, my ears always perk up when I hear her name. Her no-nonsense approach pulsed through every minute of thousands of episodes of her daytime TV court show - 6,280 of them to be precise. Now, I could make the point here about finding a niche and then 6,280 ways to never get bored with it. But during a recent interview on Amy Poehlerâs Good Hang podcast, she shared an even more compelling lesson on...
đĄ Very niche: A night of nesting niches
In this edition of Very Niche!, meet Paul Bannick - an author and wildlife photographer. And more specifically, a student of all things related to the North American woodpecker. Oh yes, very niche indeed. After reading a published excerpt of his new book, I was intrigued enough to attend his talk and book launch earlier this month â an evening Iâll think of as the night of nesting niches, no pun intended. I'll explain. First up, Paul is a niche expert himself. One of thirteen children (!!),...
đ¸ A picture they can't unsee
Sometimes they just need to see what you've been trying to say all along. đĄ -Wes
đĄ Very niche: Jimmy Buffett retirement living
In this edition of Very Niche!, check out The New York Timesâs recent roundup of niche retirement communities popping up all over the US. (â Free gift article) Itâs not just bingo and shuffleboard anymore. From horse lovers to arts enthusiasts to Jimmy Buffett stans, there seems to be a place for everyone as communities seek to attract the massive (and wealthy!) Boomer generation with open arms. Georgetown professor Andrew Carle points to a âBaskin Robbinsâ effect â suggesting that in every...
đĄ In-the-wild: A prolific framework publisher
If you think I make a lot of frameworks, check out Paul Byrne. Paulâs a leadership coach based in The Netherlands and heâs grown quite a library of gorgeous visuals on the topic. The first visual of his I saw was a spiralized take on a Leaderâs journey through life (above). But that was just the beginning. Scroll, scroll, scroll through his content and youâll see dozens of them: timelines, 2x2âs, Venn diagrams, bubble charts. A sea of beautiful frameworks can be a paradise for a visual...
đĄ The Mooch's 'cocktail party test'
You might know Anthony Scaramucci from his infamous 11-day stint as the White House Press Secretary in 2017. A big personality turned into a punchline overnight. But âThe Moochâ also has a pretty interesting entrepreneurial origin story, starting his own paper route as a kid, all the way to building SkyBridge Capital from scratch. He shared about his journey in detail with Ed Elson on First Time Founders this week. He touches on themes I think we can all relate to as soloists: Moving past the...
đĄ Saves are the new Likes
This is not a LinkedIn optimization newsletter, but one of their new engagement tracking features caught my eye. As of a few weeks ago (I think), you can now see Saves & Sends of your posts. The numbers will inherently be much (MUCH) lower than vanity metrics like Impressions and Likes... But theyâre also much (MUCH) more indicative of whether youâve created something relevant to your audience. And from what I can tell, a few early Saves are actually a trigger for more algo reach, far beyond...
A daily email about monetizing your corporate expertise. Give me ~1 minute a day, and I'll help you turn what you know into your most differentiated and lucrative asset.