The Blunder Years

This is an interview with Colorado-based organizational consultant Jeff Kinsey, who has a company called The Logos Group about 20 minutes from Boulder, CO. We talk a lot about the influx of people into Colorado, “The Note Police” at work, finding a true strategic path, and the question of what “diversity” even is -- i.e. is it racial, gender-based, or cognitive-driven. Hope you enjoy it, and we’ll be back next week.

My guest on this episode is Peter, who recently wrote a book called Honest to Greatness, which is coming out in mid-August. He actually has a 21-question “honesty quiz” on his website, which I linked in my show notes for this episode. He scaled an agency and he focuses on a coaching/consulting approach driven by honesty, which might seem like an oxymoron to some people. I’ve thought a lot about honesty at work, and in personal context, over the last few years as well. The big example in this space is probably Ray Dalio and “radical transparency,” and Peter and I discuss that here. We also talk about some research on how virtually every human being under the sun has lied in their life, but how you lie is typically a function of social class and access to resources. Peter calls honesty a “clarion call” for the rest of your existence, and I’d largely agree with that. Final quick note here: I think I hadn’t “dropped” an episode in about 7-9 days. I’m trying to get back to two per week but also balancing out the rest of my life and income possibilities, so for the 5,000 or so people who have listened to this so far and might come back, I’ll try to stay consistent with new episodes. Alright, let’s get to Peter and honesty.

This episode, my guest is Francie, who founded an online career coaching program called Terawatt. (They even have a pretty good blog.) We start this interview talking about life transitions -- her and her husband and kid spent eight years in California and moved back to the east coast last summer -- and then we get into coaching, leadership, management, and how to guide yourself through a career and find help from others. If you’re into leadership contexts, it’s a good, quick-ish (27 or so minutes) discussion. Let’s get going.

This is a conversation with my friend James, who is based “across the pond” in England. We start out talking about Brexit, and then we move into some of the problems with communication and language and persuasion and listening in a mobile-digital-first age, before getting into some generations stuff too. I think we even work Emma Watson in there. As a final quick note, I’ve got a few more episodes taped to publish, but it’s drying up a little bit, so if you think you might be interested in coming on for 25-30 minutes to talk about life, love, and the pursuit of adulthood, shoot me a message.

The guest on this episode is my friend Matt. He’s from the east coast but relocated to Denver and he’s part of the Just Be Social squad on the Twitter device, which includes a few of my previous guests on this podcast as well. Matt is a good dude, and we overlap in the sports fandom, meme fandom, and recruiter Internet ecosystem worlds. Thing is, he’s actually in recruiting and I just talk about it periodically. In this episode, we start on #BillsMafia and whether Buffalo people can have nice things (could this be the year with Brady gone?), and then we talk about housing prices, buying homes, relationships, and whether people stay friends when they stop being co-workers. Hope you mostly enjoy it!

Earlier this week, I actually got in a semi-heated Twitter exchange about the role of Instagram in everything that’s going on racially. I was going toe-to-toe with Angelica Mata, who was actually the guest on Episode 21 of this podcast. Anyway, I’m not a big fan of IG broadly, and I think the reason is that when I was on it, I was following the wrong people and brands and I was seeing a bunch of low-context virtue signaling. I’m not on it right now and I can only imagine that’s happening around race issues.

Anyway, my guest on this episode is Kenny, and he’s a creative director who began as a photographer, so we talk about Instagram and its role. We also talk about fatherhood, creativity, five-year plans, and more. We’re gonna dive in talking about concepting and briefs.

This interview is with my friend Darren, who is Jewish and from a small town in Texas that has, well, as you might imagine, not a good deal of Jewish people aside from his family. So we talk about being an outsider, understanding why others are outsiders, embracing different perspectives, online filter bubbles, and a little bit about HR and the ridiculousness of surveys (that part is towards the end). We actually taped this back on May 6th or 7th, well before the George Floyd protests, but I think a lot of the discussion resonates right now. Hope you find some value in it.

I think I first discovered the writings of Greg Satell, perhaps better known as Digital Tonto, sometime around 2015 when I was first trying to be a solo hustler. He’s an interesting dude. He was born and raised in Philly, lived all over Eastern Europe and the former Soviet block in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and ended up back about two miles from the house he grew up in. This conversation is predominantly about new ideas, technology, growth, and the accountability of Silicon Valley, but we also take a look at the Marriott-based party scene of Poland in the late 1990s. I actually taped this introduction in a WeWork -- don’t worry, I was social distancing at the time, which is to say no one was in the WeWork really -- so if you hear some background noise, my apologies. You’ll also hear my trusty dog, Samson, bark two times in this episode. And finally, I had a question about life experiences in your 30s for Greg, but befitting a conversation largely about tech, our Skype died out and it couldn’t reconnect, so I didn’t get to it. Still, enjoy this. I think ye will.

Sometimes in the weird freelance bubble that I’ve called home since 2015 or so, you randomly encounter people on the Internet who click “like” on some of your stuff, and then here and there you do a few work projects with them and can call them friends or acquaintances from afar. That’s the story with D’Nelle here, the guest on this episode. I dragged my feet a little on posting this because of other BS in my life, but it’s actually a really good conversation on defining yourself, the value of laziness, and how we’re all angry that people are not paying enough attention at a time when we’re all supposedly needing to pay more attention. Let’s get to it. We’re gonna start by talking about COVID’s impact on her business and her partner’s business.

Not everyone scales rapidly, "hyper-grows," or gets acquired by Spotify or another platform. And I think it's OK that we acknowledge the FULL spectrum of content creators, not just the bigger names. Ya know? So to hit 50 episodes on this growing-but-not-really-popular podcast, I wanted to give them a dime of encouragement. 

Why can’t we just celebrate the idea of creation and new initiatives, even if they don’t scale rapidly or make billions of dollars?

This is just a short post to make this point: sometimes it’s OK to create a small thing, or a thing that serves a small purpose and doesn’t “hyper-scale.” Not everyone needs to be Amazon, or Joe Rogan, or whatever. Some people just create little things and a few people find them and you know what? That’s OK — and we should be acknowledging those people for being brave enough to create something out in that universe, chaotic as it may be.

Related reading: Why's it all about the number? | Shrine of Big Numbers | Life, 28-35 | Too much day drinking | Joel Hawbaker episode