This transcript has been edited for clarity and checked against the available source transcript and recording. Filler, false starts, and obvious transcription errors have been corrected without changing the speaker’s meaning.
James: Hello, and welcome to Graduate Theory.
Today’s episode is a special episode. No guests on the show today. It’s me and you.
It’s been nearly six months of weekly content. We’ve interviewed thought leaders, CEOs, and various other occupations from different industries. There’s now quite a collection of people and interviews that we’ve created here as part of the show. So I thought today, what better way to mark the 25th episode of Graduate Theory than to do a bit of a review.
I want to go back and investigate what we’ve done over the last few episodes, what people we’ve spoken to, and what lessons we’ve gained from these people we’ve had on the show. People have mentioned different concepts in different episodes.
I thought, can we collate a lot of these things, put them together and deliver them in one nice package for you, the listener? And that is what I aim to do in this episode. So in this episode, what we’re going to do is go through five of the key lessons that I’ve learned so far from Graduate Theory, and I’ve summarised them as best I can.
I’ve got insights from different guests, different stories they’ve told along the way, and insights from my personal life and things I’m interested in to add some flavour and a unique take on some of these.
Before we get started today, I want to thank my pod crew—some of my friends that have been riding this wave along with me over the last six months. Joe Wehbe with the Withdrawal Wavy podcast, Luke Smith and Don Bullock and their podcast With the Chiefs, and Liam Hounsell as well, being massive support for myself over the last couple of months. I could not have got this far without you guys. Wanted to mention you all at the start, and without further ado, let’s dive into this.
So the five keys, the five lessons that I want to talk about today: we’ve got the first one, proactivity versus reactivity. Time management is the second one—how can we manage our time better? Networking as well—what is your general practice around networking and how can we be effective networkers? Trusting your gut—what is the importance of doing that? How can we do that better? What are the pros and cons of doing that as well? And finally, the fifth: personal branding. How can you brand yourself? How can you gain opportunities? What are the steps? What does it take to brand yourself?
These are the five things, and there’s been a lot of discussion on them across the episodes. Today we’re going to get into a summary, and I think this is going to be quite powerful for those of you listening. It was very interesting for myself when I was going through the content, trying to prepare this. There are some powerful lessons here and powerful anecdotes from guests as well. We’re going to explain these as best as we can, using the information that guests have provided to drive the points.
Something I’m really big on is, what are the actions that we’re going to take from this? What actions can I take and what things can I actually do? It’s nice to have these concepts, nice to have all the cool ideas, but what is the action that we’re going to take after this? That’s something Aaron Ngan says—let’s take some action on things. Everyone knows what to do, but no one actually does it. So I’m going to try and dissect these concepts and distil them down into things that you can actually do today and things that will make a measurable difference in your life.
I’m excited to share this. There’s been a lot of time invested in this podcast so far, and it marks an important period, an important point in the podcast where I’m trying to summarise a lot of what’s been said. If you’re going to listen to any episode of the show, this is the one to listen to for sure.
Let’s do it. Before we start, each of these points is going to be timestamped in the description of wherever you’re watching. You can go in there, and if you don’t want to listen to a certain part, you can use that timestamp to skip around or come back to it whenever you please.
Also before we get started, if you do enjoy this at any stage, it would make my day if you could leave us a review. If you’re on Spotify, that has reviews now. Apple has reviews. Either of those would be great. If you’re on YouTube, leave us a like, subscribe to the channel.
One of the best things you can do, folks, is subscribe to the Graduate Theory newsletter. It comes out every single week. The episode comes out, the newsletter comes out with it. It’s got my takeaways from the episode. I go through and curate the really important things that I learned, and you get that straight to your inbox. It almost saves you having to listen to the episodes. It’s quite good, and I do like the newsletter a lot. If you’re not already on there, I’d highly recommend it. Now, enough jabber, James. It’s time to get started.
Proactivity vs Reactivity#
James: Proactivity versus reactivity—this is the first point, number one.
Being proactive rather than reactive is probably one of the most important traits that I picked up during the episode interviews. Proactive guests and proactive people achieve much more than those who wait for situations to occur before acting, versus those that act before they need to. This is a critical distinction.
People say you’re either growing or you’re dying, and this is what we’re talking about here: proactivity versus reactivity. If you’re not proactive, then perhaps you’re not living your life to the fullest. As a framework for going through these, we’re going to cover a definition of what it is, an example of the trait, and then some actions to take, as I explained earlier.
If we’re going to define proactivity and reactivity, we’ve got some definitions from the dictionary. To be proactive is to act in advance to deal with an expected change or difficulty. In contrast, to be reactive is to tend to be responsive or to react to a stimulus.
Proactive: we’re acting before the expected change or difficulty. Reactive: we’re reacting as a response to this expected change or difficulty. This applies in our careers. We can anticipate what is going on in the world around us. We can seek out solutions to problems, or we can wait until the problem has arrived and deal with it.
This is one of the key concepts. Probably the most important thing that I’ve picked up from guests on the episode: they’re constantly looking for new opportunities, new career paths, new adventures, and new things to try their hand at, new things they could potentially be doing. If they’re not happy in a job, they won’t wait for permission before looking at alternatives. They don’t stagnate; they continue to progress.
This almost becomes a mindset that these people have. They have a genuine belief that they can go and get what they want. Because if you didn’t believe that, you wouldn’t even try to go out and get the things you wanted. It’s like that growth mindset idea where they believe they can improve, so they’re constantly looking for ways to test themselves.
Let’s move on to the examples. What examples do we have from the episodes? The first is from Dan Brockwell. Dan is one of the most exciting guests that I had on the show. He’s very relevant to the audience. He’s just a fantastic plug. Dan’s advice was pivotal in the process of applying for startups and even companies more broadly. When we think about applying to companies, you typically have the job board that you can get a job through, and then there’s also referrals or ad hoc introductions—you’re a friend of a friend, you get into the company that way. That is a big part of it. I think 80% of jobs are filled through ad hoc introductions. It’s really important to look at.
When I spoke to him, he said the following. I’m going to paraphrase what he said, but I’ve got the quote here.
When he was in high school, he was conceptualising with friends an app called Friends with Deficits, and they were trying to track debts between friends in different currencies. They did some competitive research and found this company called Tilt. He saw they’d solved this problem, but they had an ambassador group at uni, at the University of New South Wales.
This is Dan—he’s now proactive. He’s seeing this problem, but instead he’s thinking, what is a way that I can turn this into a win? He emails the country manager in Australia and said, “Hey, I’d love to join the ambassador group.” The country manager said, “Yeah, sure.” He joined the ambassador group, and Dan converted that into an internship where he was leading the ambassador programme with a couple hundred students across Australia.
It’s fascinating. First off, most people aren’t having ideas like that. But secondly, people who have those kinds of ideas—they’re pursuing these things. Often they don’t just see the competitor and say, “Okay, we’re done. Time to stop.” But not Dan. He’s seeing this, he’s turning it into a win. What can I gain out of this? He’s being proactive in the face of a challenge. I thought that was really interesting.
The second example comes from Warwick Donaldson. Warwick also works in startups, but he used to work in the call centre at ANZ, and he didn’t enjoy working there. It wasn’t his life’s goal to work at the call centre, but what he did when he was there: he would sit down and look at the GAL, the Global Address List, which contains the emails of everyone at ANZ. You can just email pretty much anyone.
What he would do—he was there for eight or nine months—he would email people and say, “Hey, I’m interested in what you do. Do you have time to go out and get coffee?” He worked his way through different areas—credit risk, market risk, traders, et cetera. People were really receptive to what he was doing.
I’ve found that as well. When I reach out to people, they’re receptive to what I’m doing, which is something you don’t think about when you’re not reaching out to people. He found that people were really receptive. He worked his way through ANZ and eventually found his way to the Asians at Treasury.
They said, “Hey, we’re hiring for a role actually.” And then boom, he got a job there through just emailing people and putting himself out there. He’s got this challenge that he’s facing where he’s not doing what he wants to be doing for the long term, and he’s proactive. He goes out and gets what he wants. That was great.
These are two examples of people that, in the face of a challenge, didn’t take a step back and go into their shell. They expanded and were able to take on the challenge and approach things in a really cool way and get really cool results.
The next step is actions. What can you actually do now as a result of hearing this? Proactive versus reactive. “Yeah, I understand that, James. That’s all well and good, but what can I do now as a result of this?”
The first thing I would say is understand what an asymmetric risk is. This is important, and it’s something I think is really cool. We will take risks in life. We understand some things are risky. The easy example to give here is putting money in the stock market. There’s some risk because you might lose money, but there’s also some gain because the stock might go up and you might make money. There is some possible win and a possible loss there.
The stock market—let’s say if we had an equal chance of going up and an equal chance of going down, which it doesn’t necessarily, but if you took that as an example, that would be a symmetric risk, because the risk of it going down and the risk of it going up is the same. The likelihood you lose or gain is the same. That’s symmetric risk.
Then there’s what we call an asymmetric risk, which is where the odds are stacked one way or the other. You could have an asymmetric risk where there is not much upside, but there’s lots of downside. You could also have an asymmetric risk where there’s not much downside, but lots of upside.
The thing with networking and what these guys have done—these are examples of an asymmetric risk. It’s the best kind of asymmetric risk because there is no downside; it’s only upside. If you think about asking someone for a favour or, like Warwick was doing, emailing people and saying, “Hey, I’m interested in what you do,” and he’s got a job out of it—these are asymmetric risks because even if they said no, Warwick is still where he is. He hasn’t lost anything. There’s no downside to what he’s doing. The worst they could do is say no; the best they could do is say yes. There are only upsides. If you even wanted to call it a risk, which it probably isn’t, it just feels risky to ask someone.
In fact, there is actually no risk to doing some of these things. Understanding this and understanding the power of reaching out and this idea of “What’s the worst that could happen?"—it’s easy to say, but it’s hard to do. But if you could actually get in the habit of doing things like that, I think it’s really powerful.
The second thing: understanding what you want. Dan and Warwick both had quite clear intentions of saying, “Hey, this would be cool. How can I go out and get it?” Particularly with Warwick, he knew that he wanted to work at ANZ in some kind of markets financial role, and he’s gone out and achieved that.
Dan had clarity in his desire for internships and getting experience, and he was able to go and achieve that. Some questions to ask yourself, and these are quite deep. I challenge the listener—I challenge you to actually answer these, because I think they’re quite cool.
Ask yourself: What is it that you actually want? What do you want? If you could ask for anything and receive it, what would you ask for? If you could ask for anything and get it, what would you ask? Now that you know what you would ask for, who could you ask today to get closer to that? What could you do today to get closer to getting that?
If you can answer these questions and give yourself something to do today, then you’re one step closer to getting the things you want. It’s important to understand that a lot of what is in the way is in your head and not a real legitimate problem. Although of course those exist, but oftentimes, and I know for myself, a lot of the time it’s been a mental game rather than something I can actually do.
A good thing to ask yourself is, what would the best version of you be doing in this situation? Or if Elon Musk was transplanted into my body, what would he do in this situation? That’s a good way to get yourself out of those mental blocks.
Anyway, we’re off topic. We’ve finished section one. Proactive versus reactive. That was a great little segment there.
Time Management#
James: What we’re going to talk about now is time management.
If you do want to read this later, it is available on the Graduate Theory website. If you’re enjoying yourself so far, please go and read this afterwards. Everything is written down. Don’t feel any pressure to transcribe this yourself. All this is written down at graduatetheory.com, episode 25.
The second part of this episode is time management, probably one of the most important skills leaders must have. We’ve all got constant pressure on our time, whether it’s meetings, social activities or things we want to do outside of work. Knowing how to get things done effectively is extremely important.
Adam Geha—we had him on episode 20. He is really the pinnacle of time management. He’s got fantastic processes around this. He’s extremely disciplined with his time, and he’s got a lot to say about how we can use our time more effectively. He said, “If you are not interested in the question of how to extract maximum value from those 16 waking hours, in my view, you are not thinking straight, and you’re frankly not even on the field in terms of high performance.”
So you’ve heard it, folks. We need to get on the field. We need to take this issue seriously. This is not just some mumbo-jumbo productivity nonsense. This is what is going to separate you. This is what is going to take your career to the next level. If you can manage your time effectively, it is a skill that is going to last the rest of your life, and it is something that you’re going to benefit from every single day if you can get it down pat.
What is time management? It is the process of planning and exercising conscious control of time spent on specific activities, especially to increase effectiveness, efficiency and productivity. That is Wikipedia’s definition of time management. How can we exercise conscious control of our time? As Adam said, we have 16 waking hours every day. We want to maximise them and squeeze out as much value as we can.
Some examples of this. Adam’s episode is fantastic. If you haven’t already listened to it, it is a really good episode. In the episode with Adam, he gave many examples of things he does to be more effective with his time. He’s very serious with it. He’s got very strong boundaries around his time.
These are probably more advanced techniques than what grads need to know, but they give you some perspective on the way that a high performer treats their time. He says, don’t default to one-hour meetings; keep meetings as short as necessary. He has a predefined wardrobe, so he’s wearing the same thing every day—you might have five of the same shirts, for example. He doesn’t have to waste time thinking about what he’s going to wear.
He knows people that reverse the car in at night so they can get out faster in the mornings. He does things like brushing his teeth and showing gratitude at the same time every day, et cetera. He’s done a lot of these things to create routines in his life so that he can have more mental bandwidth to be able to do other things.
He spoke about using routines. If you’ve got routine tasks, you should have routines to deal with them so they don’t use RAM. By RAM, he means your mental bandwidth. You’re going to encounter non-routine problems and tasks that require brainpower, so use routines to handle everything else.
Another example of someone that is extremely productive and really great at time management is Penny Talalak. Penny is extremely busy, and she has her own tricks that she uses to get more done. Her first thing was surround yourself with people that are also busy and have side hustles like she does. Make sure you set your schedule using some kind of board or tracking system to track what you’re doing. Break pieces of work down into small pieces and then plan your week in advance.
These are all things that you can do today, and things that I encourage you to do to get more done in the day. Let’s talk about actions. What can you actually do?
This is a special part of this episode because I’ve been on a massive binge of Cal Newport recently. If you don’t know who Cal Newport is, he is this productivity guru—digital minimalism, World Without Email. He’s got a lot of advice for graduates and people in their early career, university students. He’s got a lot of interesting content, and he’s known as the productivity guru.
I’ve been bingeing through his podcast recently. In one of his recent episodes, someone asked him, “If you were going to distil your productivity into some steps, baby steps, what would they be?” He goes through seven, but I’ve narrowed it down to five because I thought the last two weren’t super relevant.
I’m going to paraphrase the five that he mentioned, because I think this is the game-changer for your productivity. This is what I try and use in my career and in my time management, and I’ve found it to be very effective.
The first of these five baby steps that Cal mentioned is a time block plan. Every job needs time. Using your calendar, you can allocate time for each task that you need to complete. If you get knocked off this time, you start by redoing your time and resetting your plan for the rest of the day.
I spoke about this in episode 10 of the Graduate Theory podcast, and it was this idea of—often people use to-do lists as their way to track what they’re doing and get things done. But you’ll find that if you use that, at the end of the day, you almost always have things left on the list. You never really complete the day. Instead, what you can do is say, “Hey, this task is going to take me 25 minutes,” and then schedule 25 minutes in my calendar to complete this task.
At the end of the day, if I’ve planned my day well and I didn’t finish everything, hey, I still spent eight hours working. I wasn’t able to achieve that. That’s totally fine. This idea of time blocking and converting your tasks and estimating how long it’s going to take, putting that time in your actual calendar, is way more powerful than just taking items off of a to-do list. It brings a lot more clarity to what needs to be done at a given time.
The second thing Cal recommends is a task board: a place to track what you’re doing, what is on your plate, where each task stands and any relevant notes. For each of your professional roles, use a board such as Trello, Flow or Asana. The particular system isn’t important; what matters is knowing what’s happening and having one place for that information.
For me personally, I use Trello to keep track of what’s on my plate. I have comments on my cards. When something gets updated, I have my own system for doing that, and it’s been very effective, because that means I can just return to the board, I can see what’s going on, I can see my comments and my updates on certain activities. That’s really powerful.
Number three: Cal says to have a shutdown ritual. At the end of each day, once you’ve finished—it’s five o’clock, workday’s done—after I’ve allocated time across the day, now it’s time to shut down and make sure that I’ve left everything in a place where I know it’s been taken care of, and I can leave my work knowing that there’s no loose ends still hanging. Whether that’s emailing, leaving comments in places, making sure that things are wrapped up, that is important, because we want to have a clear separation for when is the end of the day. You don’t want to have your work life seep into your personal life. You want to have a clear end and say, “Hey, this is the end. No more.” Making sure all those loose ends are tied—whether it’s you’ve put emails in a certain place, allocated time, accounted for tasks, moved some tasks into a certain step, whether it’s moving tasks to tomorrow or whatever it might be.
Number four is having a weekly plan. What is my plan for the week? What things do I want to have achieved by the end of this week? It’s important to have that. That way you can use that when planning your week, blocking out certain times during the week to do a certain thing. If you say, “At the end of the week, I will have achieved this big project,” and you need this much time to do it, perhaps you block out three hours here and there. It helps to do that at the start of the week before your calendar starts getting clogged up with random stuff as the week goes on. People can’t just book time in there. It’s important that you take control of your calendar. If you want to have time to yourself, book out time in your calendar so that no one else can book time in there. That is something important.
The fifth part, the last part, is having a strategic plan. This is something I think is really cool and something that you can return to when you write your weekly plan. Let’s have a strategic plan for the quarter, for the half year or the year, whatever it is, whatever distance you choose. Personally, I use quarterly because it’s not so close that it’s too soon, but it’s not so far away that I can’t actually realistically see the end to a quarter. It works well with the workplace calendar.
You’ve got to write in here, what things do you want to have achieved by the end of the quarter? What are your quarterly goals? What are your strategic goals? Put them in this plan and make sure that you do refer to them during the weekly plan, when you’re planning your week, when you’re fixing things in your calendar. Make sure that you refer to this so that you can know, “Hey, this is what I’m going to achieve this quarter. This is the time that I’ve set aside to complete the tasks here.” That is so important.
Networking#
James: Number three is networking. Networking is a bit of a dirty word. But in episode one, I spoke to Joe—Joe Wehbe—and he had this to say about networking. He said, “Networking is a dirty word, but it’s one I’m happy to use because every time I think, the way to do it most effectively is just at the end of the day to become a better person.”
The way to be an effective networker is just become a better person. That’s fantastic advice. We don’t want to be a snake oil salesman networker. Nobody wants that—you will get found out. It’s best to be genuine, best to become as best a person as we can be so that we can continue to make connections and grow our careers.
Networking is this ability to connect with others. Someone that is a good networker is good at connecting with other people, good at growing their network. But we don’t want to do this in a nasty way, or you’re left as the snake oil salesman type, because you can grow your network maliciously—it can be done—but we don’t want to do that. We want to be genuine.
Some examples of this. I spoke to Joe Wehbe in episode one, and he gave a great example out of the book Give and Take by Adam Grant. In this book, Adam looks at different archetypes as networkers and what’s the most effective one to be in your career, what’s the most effective way to network.
There are three archetypes that Joe spoke to me about: there’s givers, matchers, and takers. Joe gave some examples in the episode. Takers are “what’s in it for me?” What is in it for me for me to be willing to help? Then matchers—I like traders. There’s got to be an even exchange of value. It’s like “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” It’s got to be 50/50. I’ve got to be getting something and it’s got to be equivalent to what you’re getting for us to continue. That is a very common thing to do.
The third thing is givers—someone that just gives with no expectation of receiving. Joe said he thinks everyone’s benefit is linked to everyone else’s in the big picture. But the fascinating thing is if you expand your thinking and you think long-term, normally other people’s advantages become your advantages too. That was really powerful.
It’s certainly interesting—if you think about yourself as a networker, do you expect something in return? What are you? Are you someone that just contributes with no expectation of a return? Someone who does that, someone who is a giver, is Haynes D’Souza. Haynes was a massive help for myself early on in the podcast. We had him on the show, and he continues to be someone that almost mentors me in some sense, someone that is always watching what’s going on and giving me some advice. I really appreciate him and his impact on the podcast.
When we spoke, he spoke about people reaching out to him. He is someone that works at Aurec. He’s a well-known guy, and people will reach out to him and ask him for stuff. He gave this advice. He said, “You’ve got to be careful when cold emailing and cold reaching out to people.” Because this is one of the things about networking—if I want to meet someone, perhaps for the podcast, I’ll email them, reaching out to someone cold. This is common, and this is something that we can all be more aware of, but there are things that you must abide by when you’re reaching out to someone cold.
Haynes says you’ve got to be very careful when you do this. There are two things that you should be careful of. One thing that he looks for is: is this person legitimate? If he says yes to what they’re asking, will they take it seriously? Will they show up on time? The second thing is, what do they want to get out of it? Why are they reaching out? Do they just want to have a coffee and get referred to a position, or do they have some actual genuine interest?
He said, when you’re reaching out to people, please be clear on what it is that you want to get from people’s time. You’ve got to be wary—people are busy. What exactly do you want? Let’s get clear on that before we start reaching out to people.
How can we get better at networking? How can we get better at this? This is a very important skill and one that it certainly pays to be better at.
I think a big part of this, and one of the angles I’m going to take, is how can we get better at reaching out to people that we haven’t necessarily met, but people that we’re interested in? That is important, similar to Warwick and Dan. Right at the start of this episode, we were talking about how they were reaching out to people that they didn’t necessarily know, or they were reaching out seeking opportunities.
Getting good at that is really important and is a fundamental skill when it comes to networking. This is something that I do for the podcast. A lot of the guests that I’ve had on the show, I didn’t know before reaching out to them and asking them to be on the show. Sometimes they’re referred, but usually they’re just people that I say, “Hey, you’re interesting. Would you like to come on the show?”
There are certain ways to do that that are effective. One of the templates that I use is from the Pat Flynn podcast. He has a podcast invite email, and it’s linked. If you want to go and look at this on the blog post, it is there.
What he does when you’re reaching out to someone cold: start with a specific praise. What is something that they’ve done recently, that they’ve blogged about recently that did well, did something recently happen in their life? Start with that—shows some interest in them personally. Then you can introduce yourself. Say who you are and what do you want from them. Then social proof. Say something about “I had this person on,” or “I know you through this person,” or whatever—some kind of proof that just shows, “Hey, I’m reasonable. I’m not just a random stranger. I actually do have something to offer here.” There is some level of proof that “Hey, I actually do know what I’m talking about.”
The next part is a plan. Let’s have a plan around, “Okay, yes, I’m interested. What are the next steps?” And let’s talk about this. Why am I reaching out? “I want to speak to you about this,” or “I want to do this with you,” or “I want to discuss this,” or whatever it is. That’s got to be quite clear as well.
Then the outcome: what is going to happen as a result? “I’m confident I can provide this for you,” “confident that we can have a great discussion,” whatever it might be. Let’s finish with an outcome. This is a template that I use for my podcast when I’m reaching out, just to have those things that say, “Hey, when I’m reaching out to someone, I want to say this, this, this, this.” First of all, because I want to be genuinely interested in this person—otherwise I don’t want to reach out to them. Secondly, I think it’s important that you treat the person, like Haynes said, with respect. We want to respect people’s time.
When I spoke to Dan Brockwell as well, he mentioned some tips when reaching out. Probably he used some of them when he was reaching out to these guys, as we mentioned in the first point. He said, make sure you include who you are, why you’re reaching out, what is in it for them. And use the following techniques: provide value. You could suggest an improvement to the business perhaps, or suggest an improvement to the app they’re building, or whatever it might be. Then have a clear ask—what exactly do you want them to do, and say it in a way that they can accept.
Dan said, “Would you be open to this?” This is what Dan said. “Would you be open to having me as a marketing intern?” No one wants to be closed off. Ask them, “Would they be open to doing this?” That is an effective technique.
Trusting Your Gut#
James: Number four is trusting your gut. What does it mean to trust your gut? Michael Gill said on the podcast that you have three ways of knowing: your head, your heart and your gut.
You’ve got to keep them all in balance. The gut is that feeling inside your stomach that you get when you’re doing something you shouldn’t be, or things aren’t going as well as they could be. You’ve got to listen to your gut. Some examples from the show: Lidia Ranieri is one such example.
Lidia used to work at Goldman Sachs, but it turns out that she actually initially started her career in law. She had her first job out of university. She was working at a law firm, and she thought that she was made to work in law. She was doing it for three months. Then she knew—she had that gut feeling that said, “Hey, this is not for me.”
She told her friends and family that she wasn’t going to do it anymore, because she had that gut feeling. They were all saying, “You’re silly. You’ve got this fantastic career. What are you doing?” But Lidia pushed through, followed her gut. Then she went on to have a fantastic career at Goldman Sachs. Now she’s a coach and she’s got a fantastic career. Certainly following her gut—and she knew at that time, “This is something that is not for me. Act on it.” Acting on it is so important.
I also spoke to Andrew Akib. Andrew is the CEO of Maslow, which is a disability and accessibility startup. He said to follow your gut—follow your gut is so important. This is what he said. “The thing you’re thinking about doing, don’t just kick the can down the road and keep thinking about it. If there’s something you’re thinking about, just do it.” He said he would have started Maslow a few years earlier if he’d done this. He said, “You’re either going to start it or you’re not. You either will or you won’t. So if you are going to do it, you may as well start now.”
That was really great advice from him. He really stressed how important it was that he trusted his gut, and he wished looking back that he had done that sooner because he had that feeling, but he pushed it away. He’s glad that he finally acted on it, but he wishes—he wishes he was in your shoes, the person listening to this. He wishes he was you and he could go back and act on that thing today.
Another guest that spoke about that gut feeling was Mel Kettle. Mel was the most recent guest on the show. She had this rule—it was called the three-night rule—where she was saying, “If something is deep inside my gut and is keeping me awake for three nights in a row, it is time to act on that thing.” If it’s keeping me up three nights in a row, then it’s time to either quit the job, leave that partner, do that thing, start that channel, whatever it is. Three nights in a row—that is the warning sign. Your body’s going to tell you when things aren’t right, and this is a great rule of thumb that you can use to start acting on this thing.
What are the actions from here? I would say pay attention to your gut. I would honestly just use Mel’s rule. That was a really great way of looking at it. If something is keeping you up for three nights in a row, folks, it is time to make a decision on that thing. It is time to do it, time to start it, time to quit it, whatever it is. Your gut is super important, as Gilly said. You’ve got those three ways of knowing, and it’s important that we act on them. It’s important. Very important. Don’t be like Andrew, where you’ve had that idea for so long and you haven’t acted on it. Do it now, folks. Do it now.
Personal Branding#
James: We’ve got the last one here. Number five: personal branding.
Personal branding. This is huge. Now with the invention of modern technology, there is nothing stopping you from having your own personal brand. Personal branding is all about creating an avenue for people to know you. You want to shift from a consumer, someone that just watches, reads whatever, to someone that creates, someone that shares, someone that is known amongst the community.
We’ve had plenty of guests who have spoken on this topic, and the first one is Dan. I keep referring to him a lot of the time, but Dan Brockwell is someone that does this extremely well. The reason why—one of the reasons I like Dan so much—is that he practises what he preaches. He is someone that doesn’t just give advice. He is living that advice day in and day out. Dan has an incredible personal brand. Lots of people on LinkedIn follow him. His posts are extremely engaging. If you’re not already following Dan, I don’t know what you’re doing, but you should get on LinkedIn, get on there right now and follow this man, because he is fantastic.
When I spoke to Dan, he was speaking about the importance of a personal brand, and he was saying that an online personal brand allows you to get your story out to people in a much more scalable way. It allows people to find out who you are. He said, it’s finding out who you are, but there’s actually some twists to this. It’s actually, who knows you? Who knows you—that is powerful. Then he said, there’s an even further modification to this: who knows you for what? Who knows you for what? This is so important. Ask yourself that: who knows you, and who knows you for what?
Having an online personal brand will get you these extra shots on goal. You have access to more opportunity. You’ll be able to get into certain places. You’ll be friends with certain people because of putting yourself out there and contributing to the ecosystem of information. This can open up fantastic opportunities. Dan had offers from Google just through his personal brand, not from applying. Someone came and asked him to work at Google for no particular reason aside from his personal brand. Powerful stuff.
Eric and Aiden as well—I spoke to them in episode nine. We spoke about mental health and careers, but they had some great things to say about personal branding. In their book called The New Job Code—that was their book that they wrote—they had some great things to say about personal branding as well.
Eric said, “When I was close to graduating, I had a mentor at the time, someone that I’d sought out.” Some advice that this mentor gave him, which he took two years to act on, was to build something, to create a visible identity, or something that you could be known for outside of your role, because it gives you confidence and it requires that you build skills to create that thing. It means that you’re visible.
Eric and Aiden said the same thing: they wish they’d started doing something like that earlier. It’s these things that people wish they started doing earlier that you have the power to do today, folks. You have the power to do that today. Get amongst it and start doing some of this stuff.
Adam Ashton—he has a podcast called What You Will Learn, a book summary podcast. They read books—him and his co-host, who’s also called Adam. They read books and they give this summary. He had a really interesting insight into why you could start to create something that wasn’t necessarily so much pressure. If you are someone that’s creating, it’s hard to go from zero to one. It’s hard to think of new ideas. It’s hard work.
He had some really interesting insight where he said a good middle step between consumption, which is the zero, and creation, which is the one—zero to one. He said the middle step between consumption and creation is curation. This is what they went with for the podcast, so that they’re learning, and they’re curating the books so that they read a book and capture the knowledge from the book and then release it. It’s not like they’re creating something completely new, but they’re curating what’s already out there. That enables them to be effective and efficient creators without necessarily having a lot of the effort and the mental energy. It takes a lot of effort to create something completely new. Curation is a really good way to get started.
What actions can you take? What can we do now, folks, to start our personal brand? Many people don’t have some kind of personal brand. They haven’t really made many steps to start creating something like this. I had some questions here. What can you ask yourself to start doing something like this? What steps can you take to start creating?
Some of the questions I have here: What am I interested in? What are you interested in? What do I tell people about? What are my conversations about? What do people ask me for advice about? If I was a YouTuber, what would my videos be about? If I had a Substack, if I was a writer, what would I write about?
If I was a writer, what would my writing be about? If I was a YouTuber, what would my YouTube channel be about? What am I interested in? What do people come to me for advice about? These are all great questions to get the ball rolling and things that—you know, “Hey, I forgot about this. I could write about that.” This is the stuff. Start doing something, start contributing something.
A great example of this is myself. It’s important to remember that people who now have some kind of public image, whether it’s Dan or people on this podcast, or myself included—they at one stage did not have what they have now. They started from zero. I’m an example of that too. No one really knew who I was, and I’ve gone out there and started contributing. I found an area that I was interested in, and that was: how can we empower and grow young people’s careers? That’s what I’m doing. I’m trying as best I can. In doing that, contributing to the knowledge that is around and adding my little touch onto the world.
We can all do it. You will have that place where you can add some value to someone, and I think that’s really cool. I’d highly recommend that people go out and start doing this. Step out and share your abilities with the world. Be proactive—I think it’s so important.
Close#
James: We’ve been chatting for a while now. You’ve done well. You’ve made it this far. Thank you so much. You’ve listened to me for nearly an hour. Thank you so much for putting up with me this long. I really appreciate it, and I hope that you found some value in this podcast. We’ve gone through a lot.
We’ve gone through a lot, to be honest. If you did miss it, if you want to recap some of the content that we’ve covered, all this information you’ve heard is in text format on the Graduate Theory website. Please go there, find what it is you’re looking for, and you can reread it. Do whatever you want. It’s all there.
Share this episode far and wide if you did enjoy it. It would mean a lot to me. Like I said at the start of this episode, please review the podcast on Spotify. Review it on Apple Podcasts and subscribe if you’re on YouTube. Wherever you are, please subscribe to the Graduate Theory newsletter. You get emails—episodes like this direct to your inbox—and it comes with my takeaways. It’s not just the episode. I go through, I analyse the episode, find some key parts that I thought were really insightful, and I add them to the newsletter. Get on that, subscribe to that.
Thank you again for listening. It really does mean a lot to me. If you’re still listening, email me, let me know what you thought. My email is [email protected]. Go there, send me an email. I’m happy to chat to anyone that has any thoughts.
Thanks again so much. We’ll see you around.