I am incredibly fortunate to do get to do what I do. I’m even more fortunate that I’m surrounded by amazing people every single day. And I’m tremendously thankful for all of those.

In honor of Thanksgiving here in the US, I thought it made sense to share what I’m most thankful for this year. I also thought it was worthwhile to share how those might be useful to you too.

Curious about the five things I’m most thankful for this year? That’s what this episode of the podcast is all about. Here are the show notes for you.

Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today.

Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset"

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Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 16m 53s

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Welcome back to the show. I’m Tim Peter.

What are you thankful for? As anyone who has listened to the show for a while, know Thanksgiving, which is this week in the United States, is my favorite holiday. It gives me time to reflect on what matters in my life. I just think it’s an amazing opportunity each year to take a moment for gratitude.

So I thought I’d share with you the things that I am most thankful for, the things that matter the most in my life over the last year.

But to make it useful to you, I thought I’d also share some tips on how you might think about where those items can help you in your life.

So if you don’t mind me skipping a ton of setup this time around, I’m gonna dive right in. This is episode 475 of the Big Show, and these are the five things I’m thankful for this year. Here we go.

For starters, I’m not going to break this list into work items and personal items that just feels like cheating to me. My work is a huge part of who I am. It matters so much to me, so I don’t want to give it short shift. I believe less in work life balance — though that’s important — and more in work life integration. How do you make work and life work together properly so you don’t get too burned out, but you’re also keeping yourself fresh and sharp? Right.

So with that said, let’s start with number five on the list, which is new social media experiences.

Social has been changing a lot over the last several years, and it’s changing the way I think about social media now. Not everything I’m about to tell you are new items or new ways to use social. They’re also really critical to how I do my work and how I live my life.

I don’t really go on Facebook very much anymore, and Instagram has never really been my jam. I was always a Twitter guy, at least until Elon destroyed it. What I loved about Twitter more than anything else was its lists feature, which allowed me to curate the content and insights I most wanted to see from the people I most wanted to spend my time with.

A lot of what I’ve been focused on this year is how to recreate that experience and the benefits both personal and professional, that I gained from my lists in other places. Turns out I’ve been able to do that to some degree.

The places where I’m spending my time on social these days include:

And that brings me to number four on the list of things I’m thankful for, which is how easy digital makes it to create an environment of continuous learning. And I’m gonna spend some time on this one. As marketers, our world is changing rapidly. It can be overwhelming to try and keep up with all of those changes.

I’ve talked about this before in other podcast episodes, and yes, they’re all linked to in the show notes. The toughest thing that I find is where you should learn from the, the issue isn’t content. We’re drowning in that it’s curriculum. It’s what is it that I need to know? One of the reasons I teach at Rutgers Business School is because they actually define a curricula.

You absolutely can do this too. What I would suggest is that you start with the smartest people you know, the sharpest the most up to date. Take note of who they cite, what they’re reading. Uh, their LinkedIn feeds will often give you this information. They’ll tell you about, “I just read this great book, or I just was on this fantastic podcast or learned from this specific thing.”

You can even search for their name by adding the terms “book recommendations” or “top five books” to see other sources that inspired them. And check their websites to see if they’ve shared slides from talks they’ve given her or conference keynotes. The structures of those presentations often offers an amazing curriculum of things you can learn.

If they have a blog or a podcast, go back and look at some of their earliest content. Usually the first, oh, 10 or 20 posts or so can show you where their focus lies, what genuinely matters to them.

You can also do this in a more robust way. You can identify five to seven key concepts that really matter in whatever topic you wanna know about. You know, in marketing, these might include:

For each of the concepts that you discover, find the best single explanation you can find from three different respected experts. You know, use a Google search for this. Don’t just go to AI for this, and I’m going explain why in a minute. Keep track of what you’re finding. Use a spreadsheet or use a tool to map the different ideas into categories like foundation, application and critique to help you sort out the information and stay up to date.

If you do this regularly and repeatedly, this will help you build a dynamic curriculum from a variety of perspectives that ensures you’re not just learning what someone knows, but how their knowledge is constructed, how it’s applied, how it’s evolving.

I said I’d come back to AI in a moment. You can absolutely use tools such as ChatGPT, or Gemini, or Claude, or Perplexity to help build some of the curriculum and direct you to useful resources.

But — and I cannot emphasize this enough — do not use AI to tell you the answers. Don’t do it.

Research shows that for the things you really want to learn, it’s far more important that you do the work yourself. As Shiri Melumad wrote on The Conversation, they did research on this, and as Shiri Melumad wrote about this research,

“The data revealed a consistent pattern. People who learned about a topic through a large language model versus web search felt that they learned less, invested, less effort in subsequently writing their advice, and ultimately wrote advice that was shorter, less factual, and more generic.”

The quote continues,

“In turn, when this advice was presented to an independent sample of readers who were unaware of which tool had been used to learn about the topic, they found the advice to be less informative, less helpful, and they were less likely to adopt it.”

When the learner used a LLM, critically, the researchers quote “found these differences to be robust across a variety of contexts.”

Now I’m bullish on the ways AI can help you learn. The key language here though, is “help you” not “tell you.”

Imagine if you owned a robot and asked it to lift weights or do aerobic exercises for you. I mean, sure, it could absolutely pick up heavier loads and it can exercise faster and longer. But your muscles wouldn’t improve at all. Quite the opposite. You would atrophy, your muscles would shrink. The same is true for your brain. If you are not doing the work yourself, you’re not learning.

One of my favorite ways to do the work, by the way, to do the learning is number three on my countdown, and that is travel.

I learn more while traveling than almost anything else I do. Why? For starters, travel exposes me to new places. I do my best to learn a little bit about the history or something cool about everywhere I go, either by reading about it a little bit or by asking folks I run into along the way. That second point is the key one for me and why it matters from a marketing perspective.

Quite simply, whenever I’m traveling, I’m talking with people throughout the journey. Those include the people I’m traveling to see, obviously.

I also usually have a chance to talk at least for a couple of minutes with Lyft drivers or hotel staff or waitstaff at restaurants, and occasionally, not too often these days, but occasionally random folks on planes or in airports.

I want to be clear, I’m super respectful when people are reading or wearing headphones or doing their very best to avoid eye contact with some person on a plane, right? Nobody wants to be that guy who kept trying to start a conversation and wouldn’t take the hint.

I also try to keep myself aware of the people around me, and I’m absolutely happy to have a brief conversation if somebody engages and the opportunity arises.

Our job as marketers is to make our customers lives better, and we can’t do that if we don’t understand people. So we need to make at least a little effort to talk to people from time to time in the wild, in the real world, not just in some controlled focus group or using, say, synthetic audiences on artificial intelligence. Those have their place too.

So much comes from just talking to people when the opportunity presents itself.

Speaking of people. People represent both the number two and number one items on my thankful list this year, and frankly most years.

At number two, are my clients and my team. Obviously, I love these folks.

I’m super thankful, as you might imagine, for the financial success that comes from having a robust client roster and from having a team that helps me keep those clients happy.

That’s not the part I like most though, weirdly. Instead, it’s that my clients give me the opportunity to do interesting work. They, that work helps me learn and grow. Sensing a theme here”

Even more important than the learning are the people themselves. There is nothing more fulfilling than seeing the work that I do and that the team does help our clients succeed, help them learn and grow, help their businesses grow. It is deeply, deeply gratifying and it’s the main reason that I love the work that I do.

I am so lucky to get to do this work, and my clients and my team are the reason that is.

Number one on my thankful list, and I kind of have to separate this out, are my friends and family. To be fair, many clients and many folks on my team are part of my group of friends and family. I’m thrilled that some clients of mine are some of my best friends too.

I could spend hours talking about how lucky I am to be surrounded by the people in my life. In the interest of your time, I’m not gonna do that today. It’s probably not why you listen to the show. I just want to say that I’m so deeply grateful for the people in my life and what they bring to me every day in terms of lifting me up and carrying me.

What I am going to do is encourage you to take a minute after you listen to this episode and let the people that matter to you know how much they mean to you. Believe me, what I say, someday you’ll be glad you did.

There is one last item on my gratitude list. That is that I’m so thankful for your support.

I’ve said many times that I wouldn’t do this show or send out the newsletter or have written my book if it wasn’t for you. So thank you so much for all of your support this year and every year. It means the world to me.

I’m going to wrap up this show quickly this week simply by reminding you that you can find the show notes for this episode at timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s tim peter.com/podcast. Just look for episode 475. And take a minute to like share and subscribe to on wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

I’ll be back next week with an all new episode of the podcast for you, but as I said many times throughout this show, thank you so much for listening.

Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity to share with you. Until next time, please be well Be safe and be excellent to each other. I’ll see you soon.

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