164. Thriving as an Introvert in Digital Marketing with Digital Transformation Leader, Dan Keldsen
In the digital marketing space, conventional wisdom suggests that the only way to be successful is to show up everywhere and shout louder than everyone else.
In other words be an extrovert or be irrelevant.
But what if you could build a system that takes advantages of your strengths and allows you to be who you are – even if you’re an introvert?
That’s what we’re talking about this week with special guest, Dan Keldsen. Dan is Chief Innovation Officer and Digital Transformation Leader at Infocap and is host of the Next Future Today podcast.
So if you’ve ever wondered how introverts can excel in the extrovert-driven world of digital marketing, stay tuned to learn how you can build systems that work with your personality & avoid changing who you are.
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Transcript
Dan Keldsen:
I was creating in public right on Twitter, and I wrote a tweet that could have easily just been an email to myself and it was something like I’m seeing the convergence of workflow and social and content management and a bunch of other geeky enterprise technology terms. It was meant, just as a note to myself, to pick up and write a blog article the next day. That night, I got a reply on Twitter from somebody who was not identified, had no visible activity on Twitter, and said that’s exactly what I’m experiencing at my job. I got a call the next morning. Hey, I’m the guy that replied to you on Twitter. I think you could really help us out.
Dan Keldsen:
I was like OK, so, and who are you, by the way? I was like okay, so, and who are you, by the way? And I was like oh, I’m Kevin Davis. I’m from Lowe’s Home Improvement, which at the time was the Fortune 42 publicly held company down in North Carolina and that turned into a multi-six-figure consulting gig that lasted nine to 12 months or so. That turned around and brought a tremendous amount of business to me, and I’m lifelong friends with Kevin. We’re still in touch to this day.
Brad Powell:
Welcome to the Standout Business Show, the podcast dedicated to helping you make a bigger difference by doing business differently. I’m Brad Powell, your standout business coach, and today we’re talking about the power of introverts. And here’s the thing in this world of digital marketing, all the conventional wisdom has been saying that the only way to be successful is to show up everywhere and shout louder than everyone else, in other words, be an extrovert or be irrelevant. But what if you could build a system that takes advantages of your strengths and this is particularly if you’re on the introvert end of the spectrum and actually allows you to be who you are, especially when you are in that shyer, introvert side of being? Well, that’s what we’re talking about today with my guest, dan Keldson.
Brad Powell:
Dan is the Chief Innovation Officer and Digital Transformation Leader at InfoCap here in the Boston area. He’s nearly a neighbor and he’s the host of a podcast called Next Future Today. So if you, like me, are an introverted expert who’s been feeling left behind in what feels like an extrovert’s world, stay tuned, because we’re going to take a look at how you can build a system that works for your personality without having to change who you are. So with that, let’s start the show. All right, dan, welcome to the show.
Dan Keldsen:
Hey, brad, that’s some pretty awesome music, is that? Who is that?
Brad Powell:
I should find out, because I get it from Epidemic Sound Like it’s a. I get all my music from this, so I should actually go look that up and say who is the band that’s playing in this.
Dan Keldsen:
Yeah, well, it’s a great way to kick off a show. So, as a musician, thank you for that.
Brad Powell:
Right, right. Well, I think musicians deserve all the credit that they can get. So, yeah, I should put it in the show notes Music by this band, because it is the show tune.
Dan Keldsen:
Yeah, exactly.
Brad Powell:
There you go, awesome. So thank you. Thank you for having me on. This is. This is fantastic. I’m sorry it took us a while several months to get it lined up, but here we are. Right, here we are. Well, that’s. You know. The nature of the beast with podcasting is that you’re making plans and often booking out into the future, and that’s just how it goes. I’m always like right now, all of my stuff is scheduled through the end of November, and so I’m already starting to look into the new year. Imagine that I want to just sort of jumpstart our conversation in this way, in that I want to know what you say to your people when you’re actually working with someone who is identified as more introverted than extroverted. They’ve been hearing the advice from people like Gary Vaynerchuk or Grant Cardone. They’re saying get out there, hustle, gary Vaynerchuk or Grant Cardone. They’re saying get out there, hustle like shout louder, you’ve got to be bigger and better and 10X everything.
Brad Powell:
And the poor person is sitting there going well, either I have to grow an extra head and be something totally different than what I am, or this is totally out of alignment with me. And yet there are ways to navigate, especially in the digital environment that we have to deal with these days. There are ways to do this that aren’t necessarily, you know, becoming the next Alex Hermosi.
Dan Keldsen:
Yes, exactly.
Brad Powell:
And so when someone’s coming to you and they’re saying, well, I don’t you know, like I’ll just give an example Like for me, I can go back and forth. Like there are things times when I can be and look like I’m fairly extrovert, I can be fairly confident and had lots of experience teaching and lots of experience doing speaking, lots of experience doing video, which is really my forte these days, and so people see me and they go oh, you look very calm and collected and you know, you, you got all your act together. But put me in a room full of strangers, like at a conference, and I’ll be seeing all these people like talking and chatting and all these stuff is going on. People are all excited and they’re having this thing. I’ll be. The only person in the room was just standing there all by myself going. What do I do now?
Dan Keldsen:
Yeah, you can define introversion or extroversion in lots of different ways. I think it tends to be the introversion. People label introverts as shy, which is it’s sort of true, but it’s also at least for me it’s more where do you get your energy from? And I think that’s a healthier way to look at it. So, if you like, for example, I love doing workshops and teaching, but it’s very draining for me because to have to be on and performing like that, it, uh, it just sucks the life out of me. So I I hopefully it’s because I’m giving all the energy out to the people in the workshop and delivering value.
Dan Keldsen:
But often when I you know, I do a uh, a full day workshop it’s been a little bit since I’ve done these, but when I do that, I will often go back and immediately conk out at the hotel and then travel the next day.
Dan Keldsen:
If it’s some sort of engagement where I’ve had to go somewhere, it’s just my energy is just so gone at that point that I have nothing left. Versus, extroverts tend to get charged up by being in social situations and it’s not like I don’t like you know I wouldn’t do workshops if I didn’t like doing them. But you know I just I need to know, you know, and I’ve eventually realized as an adult what gives me energy and what doesn’t give me energy. And there’s sort of a give and take that I have to balance there on what’s giving me energy in the moment as I’m interacting with people, and then bam, the light switch goes off and I’m done. And as long as I can acknowledge that, and especially if I’m getting paid to deliver a workshop, I can say look, I’d be happy to do an after hours meet and greet or something, but I’m going to need two hours after we’re done with our workshop.
Brad Powell:
I completely agree with that. I mean I’m very much the same way. I actually feel like in the moment I really thrive when I’m facilitating particularly relatively small groups and leading them through some kind of workshop type of training or experience. And in a previous life I was the program director for an Outward Bound program which was a sailing program in the Pacific Northwest, and on those programs when you went onto the field you’d be out for two or three weeks at a time and you’d be out there with a group of young people, usually somewhere between you know, late high school to early college age. And when, when I was on, I was totally on like and it was almost like 24, seven responsibility when you’re doing this day after day. And I found that when I was in the field it was almost like I became a different person, like I was energetic, I was this enthusiastic person who would just meet any challenge, you know, with a smile on my face, which was kind of the role model that you needed to play in that setting.
Dan Keldsen:
But, man, when I got off a course I needed to just go like hide away somewhere and spend like three days recovering and like I don’t want to see anybody or talk to anyone or I just need to just chill and not have any stimulus at all right, yeah, yeah, I think there’s um, yeah, those kinds of scenarios make a whole lot of sense, I think, in the, in the grand scheme of you know the, the topic that we’re going after here on. You know, like, how do you make a difference? Or how do you, how do you stand out without having to really stand out, like like, uh, gary, gary Vee or Alex Ramosi or any of those folks which I think are, it’s worth paying attention to what they’re doing, because they might give you permission to be a little larger than you would normally be, um, or you know, normally inclined to be, because we all have learned behaviors and you can. You don’t need to rewrite your personality and become an extrovert and shed your skin, but there are things that you can learn from people who may be more comfortable in situations that currently make you uncomfortable. When I was going through last night to prep for talking today, I was going through, like, what are other things that have really made an impact for me? And I was going through a long list of people and I haven’t talked about it in a while, but one of my favorite books for this kind of topic is by Keith Ferrazzi, who wrote Never Eat Alone, which I believe came out around 2005-ish, something like that, which is hard to believe. That’s 20 years ago. But here we are, keith, at the time I don’t know if it was like certified with you know Guinness Book of World Records or something, but he was effectively like the most connected person on planet Earth and Never Eat Alone, and he’s totally unlike me in almost every single possible way. He’s an extreme extrovert. You don’t get to be the most connected person in the world especially that was just right at the beginning of LinkedIn into an event that I was going to that I think was called the Collaborative Technologies Conference.
Dan Keldsen:
At the time, this was during the rise of LinkedIn. I don’t think Facebook had hit the public yet. It was still for college students. Twitter was just really kind of getting off the ground. Twitter was just really kind of getting off the ground, and this was an event focused on how do you take those kinds of techniques and approaches and put them into enterprise settings.
Dan Keldsen:
For some reason, I’ve always been interested in enterprise technology and especially the impact on employees as well as consumers. But employees specifically, how do we make technology make your job easier? And just reading those first 20 pages, I got to that event at lunchtime Typical conference setup, you know, there were huge roundtables that sat like 12 people. Normally I would avoid those like the plague and go sit by myself or maybe with another person that was probably also trying to avoid people. But I decided, you know, based on what I just read in Keith’s book on the write-in here, I’m going to give some things a shot and sat down at a like a seven person table out of the 12 seats that were available and just started talking to people because I finally realized we had something in common, which was that we’re all at this event and we have some interest in.
Dan Keldsen:
What does this social media stuff have to do with enterprises? I think it’s not a stretch for me to credit that reading that book and putting into action just a handful there’s like 10 billion ideas in that book, most of which I would not do. But he effectively gave me permission to just take the title alone Never Eat Alone. I was like, oh well, I mean it’s the title of the book, I should not eat lunch alone, because that would be totally against what I just read.
Dan Keldsen:
But two years later that event was rebranded as enterprise 2.0. And I keynoted that event two years later and if I had not spoken up at that very first event and gotten to know people that are involved in the events and kicked off some research. That was super timely. So sometimes luck works out as well. But if I had not actually taken the advice of Keith’s book and put it into action, then I would not have keynoted two years later. I keynoted the year after that. I got very well known in that space. I didn’t have to make a big noise. I just started connecting with people and getting out of my normal shell into a larger shell, if you will, and that was perfectly fine, because then I was in among my people and that in itself gave me energy that I could then channel into different ways.
Brad Powell:
Yeah, I think that really points to there are a couple of things that introverts are actually really good at. I mean, extroverts are certainly good at the things that they do and introverts same thing, it’s just a different set of skills. And one of them, I think, is this ability to just simply connect with a single other person. With a single other person, like sitting down in a cafe and having a casual conversation with one other person. Introverts, they can be really good listeners. They can be really good people to connect with, in the sense that they’ll hear what you have to say and respond to that better than the person who’s the extrovert, who likes to do all the talking.
Dan Keldsen:
Right.
Brad Powell:
For example.
Dan Keldsen:
Yeah, right, not that extra sorts are bad Right.
Brad Powell:
And when it comes to things like digital marketing, you can channel that same kind of skill Like this is the reason why I like to do this kind of podcast thing as one of the key ways that I market myself in that I like having conversation. I like, you know, sort of following my curiosity about something or exploring a topic that I’m really fascinated by, like the one we’re talking about today, and going deeper with it with just another person, and by doing this in public, I can be myself. I don’t have to be loud and proud or shouting or anything. I can just be curious and find things out and in sharing that publicly, I don’t have to be in public. I’m just having this thing be shared in public, right, and so it doesn’t hit all the buttons that it might push against.
Brad Powell:
Oh no, I’m not comfortable in this situation. It’s actually no. I’m providing a setting where I am very comfortable and this is what I actually like to do. It’s the way I prefer to interact with the world and I can lean into the parts of me that seem my strongest, and this is where I think people who are feeling introverted can be going. Oh yeah, what could I lean into? What are the parts that I I do so for you like what? What are the ways in which that you like to lean in on the parts of you that that are most outstanding, even though they might be more introverted?
Dan Keldsen:
be more introverted. Yeah, so I um life is funny cause I, I I’ve constantly felt like I was late to things. That turns out it was really early too. So, for example, so my uh, my role around uh, 2003, 2004. So I was at Delphi group, uh, where I was at for 10 years and then we were acquired by pro systems, um, and I stayed for three years. So I had a number of roles simultaneously because I was not good at saying no to things or letting go, but I was simultaneously the CTO. I was also a market analyst, researcher for enterprise technology stuff, hence my connection to Enterprise 2.0 and all the social things that fell out of that.
Dan Keldsen:
And I did workshops, I did consulting and I didn’t realize I shouldn’t probably be doing all of those at once because that’s a lot of work. But to me it all connects because I like to learn, but sometimes it’s just to learn, because I want knowledge that might be useful someday and I’m interested in something. But I primarily want to be pragmatic about things. So I have called myself a pragmatic futurist because I want people. You know I’m one of the crazy ones that’s out there on the front edge and wants to identify things that could be useful to me and potentially to others, but others are maybe smarter than I am and are staying away until it’s a little more fully baked. Others are maybe smarter than I am and are staying away until it’s a little more fully baked.
Dan Keldsen:
So one of the things that I’ve always loved to do is I’ve read a lot of books, a lot more books than most people do in their lives, especially when I used to take the train and I was on planes all the time. That’s how I’d occupy my time. And it occurred to me a long time ago that, you know, I’ve read a bunch of books and I have questions of the authors that I wonder if they would be willing to answer. And I started reaching out to people and said, hey, you know, I have a podcast, even when I didn’t yet have a podcast, and I read your book and I love it and I have some questions about these things. Would you mind getting on an interview with me and I can learn what I want to learn, and then we can share it with my audience and hopefully that’s good for all of us. And the moment I did that the first time, you know it was a little scary as, as an introvert. Um, they could say no, how, how terrible would that be? You know, not that bad, necessarily so, but very rarely did people say no. And uh, as it turns out, I’ve gotten to know a lot of people that have been friends for, you know, potentially 20 years and have brought me in as a consultant, or we’ve done joint projects together or we just, you know, have some camaraderie about. You know, isn’t it a pain getting your publisher to to kick in some money to do advertising for your book, for example? Or you know what’s, what’s the latest tips on how to do a new product launch as a small business. I’ve had plenty of two-man startups of my own and it’s a challenge to get out there and put your face out there and get known, while also doing the work that’s going to get you paid For me.
Dan Keldsen:
Leveraging podcasts this started back in 2005, I believe audio-only podcasts. At the time everybody was saying podcasts are dead. It’s 20 years later clearly not true. And one of the first people that I interviewed, because I like to go really deep when I get interested in a topic and I read every sort of human, accessible book that I could find about network theory and graph theory, which is the underpinning of why does LinkedIn and Facebook and all these things work. What is that graph that connects people, which is? You know? Three-year-olds know that now, but 20 years ago nobody was talking about that. So at the time, linkedin was brand new. I was using like 78,000, talking about that. So at the time LinkedIn was brand new, I was using like 78,000, something like that.
Dan Keldsen:
And there’s billions of users in LinkedIn now and I decided I was going to interview one of the co-founders of LinkedIn, who is Constantine Kerika. I was terrified to interview him because he had a complicated name. And here I am 20 years later. I can still remember it because I was like, oh my God, if I screw that up, it’s going to be terrible. But you know, we had a great conversation about what could the potential of social networks be in the enterprise, in the world at large, and obviously a lot of things have come out of that that were true and who knows? You know plenty of things that happened that we were not necessarily looking forward to, but having that conversation with somebody who was also one of the most connected people on the planet, because that was the network that was going to connect us all on the enterprise side. That opened up all sorts of doors. Because then once I had one podcast and I could go to somebody else and say, hey, I interviewed Konstantin Gerka, one of the co-founders of LinkedIn, and they’d say who and what, what is that? But it opened up doors.
Dan Keldsen:
Hey, so you’re the one that wrote the book on network theory for normal human beings. Can I talk to you about some questions that I have? Can I talk to you about some questions that I have? And let’s see if we can stay away from the sort of math that I dropped out of calculus class to avoid, and just the practical side of it. And then the more I stacked up of, I guess, is once I became known. Then people came to me and that’s a vastly different like for me to do outreach to other people. Slightly scary less scary these days than it used to be, but when you can flip it around. So people are seeking you out. That’s a very different power dynamic and they will tend to. So people are seeking you out. That’s a very different power dynamic and they will tend to. You know, there’ll be more respect and there’s friendly sort of camaraderie laid in place, and I wrote a tweet.
Dan Keldsen:
That could have easily just been an email to myself and it was something like I’m seeing the convergence of workflow and social and content management and a bunch of other geeky enterprise technology terms that most people had no idea what I was talking about. It was meant to, just as a note to myself, to pick up and write a blog article the next day. That night, I got a reply on Twitter from somebody who was not identified, had no visible activity on Twitter, and said that’s exactly what I’m experiencing at my job. I got a call the next morning. Hey, I’m the guy that replied to you on Twitter. I think you could really help us out. I was like okay, so and tell me more, and who are you, by the way? And I was like oh, I’m Kevin Davis. I’m from Lowe’s Home Improvement, which at the time was a Fortune 42 publicly held company down in North Carolina.
Brad Powell:
Yeah, wow Huh.
Dan Keldsen:
Okay, and that turned into a multi-six figure consulting gig that lasted nine to 12 months or so. No bid, I didn’t have to do RFPs, none of that stuff. It was hey, I’ve been watching you for nine months and I had to get legal authority to even be on Twitter in the first place, and that that totally. I was about to shut down my laptop and I just said, oh’ll post this on Twitter. That turned around and brought a tremendous amount of business to me, and I’m lifelong friends with Kevin. We’re still in touch to this day and that was 17 years ago or so.
Brad Powell:
Yeah, that’s really cool. That’s really cool, and I just want to point out that what we’re talking about really is the difference between what most people are participating in, which is the traffic side of marketing, to the other end of the spectrum, which is really relationship building side of marketing, and, again, like, in terms of the true power of the introvert is really in this relationship side. Right, you know, this is something we can really lean into and I just want to. We got a couple of comments here. Robert is saying curiosity is key.
Dan Keldsen:
He’s echoing what you’re talking about and he says big believer in practicing in public.
Brad Powell:
Yeah, Scary, but yes, when it comes to just building relationships. I mean, what you’re describing is that the way that you’ve evolved your use of your podcast from the very beginning is that well, I was able to speak that person. Whether it’s direct or indirect, they go, oh Dan must be this cool guy because he’s got this relationship with this other guy that.
Brad Powell:
I admire and that is super helpful. And then you know from that you’ve now got this platform where other people can witness it and see it and start developing. We all see people on platforms and we develop relationships with them, whether or not we’re directly interacting with them. And so the guy from Lowe’s hears what you’re talking about and goes man, this person thinks exactly the way I do. He’s having the same experience that I’m having. I need to talk to him.
Dan Keldsen:
Yep.
Brad Powell:
And there you go, and then it starts coming together and it’s really terrific.
Dan Keldsen:
Yeah, yeah, I think so, and back in the day, so I promise not all of my stories start 20 years ago necessarily. You know, the beginning of Twitter was one of the top 10 users of Twitter in the Boston. So the beginning of Twitter, I was one of the top 10 users of Twitter in the greater Boston area in the early days. Another one of the more famous people on Twitter at the time was Laura Fitton, who’s known as Pistachio. She actually lives one town over and both of our daughters go to Smith College actually these days, so go figure. But we had interacted a ton on Twitter because that was that was where everything was happening socially. I could find people that were interested in all the sort of somewhat random things that I was interested in. So we interacted a lot and I had no idea that we you know, we actually lived like three miles from each other.
Dan Keldsen:
But at that keynote that I was mentioning at the enterprise 2.0 event, before I got on stage I was checking to see if anybody was talking about me or this, this keynote on twitter and I saw that laura was, was there and she mentioned that she was actually at the event and this was a huge auditorium. Uh, in the boston convention center, just, uh, south of south station, and so you can’t see anybody in the crowd, it’s just bodies you know for for rows and rows and rows. But when I got off the stage, the first person that came towards me as I was coming down the steps, you know, sort of climbing down, after they unmic’d me and all, was laura, and even though we had never met in person, we knew each other. I was like laura, it’s pistachio, oh my god. And uh, that was such an awesome feeling because, like, I was terrified to be on stage doing the keynote, which maybe nobody else noticed Cause that’s that’s the one over the brain but, uh, like instantaneously, I was like, oh my God, and I saw that you, that you were going to be here and it’s a way, you know, I finally that was incredible, you know, and so why? You know there’s other potential relationships that came as a result of that was, it was live streamed and it was in person.
Dan Keldsen:
So I met plenty of people that were involved in that and I had a nice long run and had a lot of fun in that industry. But building that relationship in advance, that was only online, and then, the moment that it turned into reality. It was, like you know, we don’t have to waste time catching up, because we already knew exactly what we’ve been up to, because we were all publishing in public and you know that was such a wonderful way to put myself out there in ways that maybe a younger version of me still would have stayed away from. But it was not that, you know, dangerous realistically. And it turned into a bunch of friendships that have lasted for a very long time and took me into places I never expected to be able to go to.
Brad Powell:
Yeah, well, that reminds me of a story by Amanda Palmer, who’s another local local musician. By Amanda Palmer, who’s another local musician. It was in the relatively early time of Twitter which she was a pretty avid user of.
Brad Powell:
And she found herself in introvert fashion, home on a Friday night with nothing going on and feeling like here I am, I’m home alone. Feeling like here I am, I’m home alone, I’m sitting here with a glass of wine, and what a loser. So she got on Twitter and she started talking about that Like here I am home alone and I’m a loser. And she actually made an acronym for, like the Friday night losers, you know, drinking wine at home or something like that. I forget what it was, but it was this sort of funny thing.
Brad Powell:
And all these other people started getting on and they started sharing that hashtag of the an acronym and it started trending on Twitter and all of a sudden, you had all these people who were in basically the same boat, like all these people just self-identifying like yeah, I’m an introvert, I didn’t go out on Friday night and I feel like I’m kind of a loser, and here we all are together, and they had this conversation going on and they were like bonding over this common experience and it was just so fascinating. The kind of cool thing that she did was she quickly reached out to like her designer and she hand drew a picture of a laptop and a glass of wine on a desk. You know just that. And then did the hashtag with the an acronym on the bottom as sort of the slogan, and she said make this into a t-shirt.
Dan Keldsen:
Oh yeah, nice.
Brad Powell:
And she sold like I don’t know what, like thousands of dollars worth of t-shirts, just like that, because all these people going, yeah, I want that, that’s me.
Dan Keldsen:
There you go. Mental note I need to get a designer on tap.
Brad Powell:
I want to have a brainstorm on a Friday night. Right, well, this is cool. All right. Well, we’re getting very close to the end of our time together. If there is another piece that you’d like to share that has anything to do with introverts, you know, like embracing their the way that they are and sort of going deeper with the actual advantages that introverts have, what would that be?
Dan Keldsen:
You know it’s. You don’t have to be all or nothing. If. If you pay any attention to Dan Pink, one of his books, he talks about introversion versus extroversion and ambiverts, and realistically, we can all be anywhere along that spectrum and none of it’s bad. It might not be helping you to be in whatever place you are at the moment, but maybe you can push yourself in a different direction.
Dan Keldsen:
I think the biggest key to me is to find other people that care about the same kinds of things that you do, and there’s more of them out there than I certainly ever thought was possible. I mean, I do think that’s the upside of the internet is that you can find lots of people that are at least similar enough to you, because you don’t necessarily want clones of yourself as your best friend. A little diversity is pretty useful, but finding other people that care about the same kinds of things that you do and reaching out to them in whatever way makes sense, that can be incredibly powerful. Even you know I’m a huge fan of LinkedIn and thankfully it is still a relatively safe and not as spammy as other networks. Find people that you admire on LinkedIn in your profession or in a profession you want to be and start commenting, do something to interact with that person. And if you just grab a handful of people that you think are interesting and can do that with, just pay more attention to them, get a relationship going and see where it takes you, because it might be that you can you can leverage that.
Dan Keldsen:
In my book, the Gen Z effects, I coined the term slingshotting. You may be able to take that and shoot yourself into a totally different industry that you’ve always wanted to be a part of but didn’t feel like you were qualified. I mean, I studied music at Berkeley college music and I’ve also been in boardrooms giving advice to the COO of Lowe’s on why they’re not spending enough money on their infrastructure for customer service. So I didn’t expect that to happen, but by just having that one connection it turned into an entirely different world for me. And unless you make that connection, I wouldn’t wait for it to happen, I would start trying to make them happen, and that alone, I think, is probably the single best thing that you could do for yourself.
Brad Powell:
Yeah, hear, hear. You never know. The right connection could change everything.
Dan Keldsen:
Yeah, totally.
Brad Powell:
I have lots of stories to tell in my own experience of things that have just shifted completely, just by some almost happy accident that happened. But, happy accident because I did something where I was willing to make myself known or seen by someone else.
Dan Keldsen:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You don’t have to go nuts, you don’t have to completely. You don’t have to public naked in public or practice naked in public. You don’t have to practice naked in public. You can just put some drips out there and see what makes some sort of connection happen. Learning isn’t always a fun process. It’s certainly not linear. It can be a little wacky, but nobody else is going to steer your life unless you do it for yourself. So do something that takes you in a direction that gives you a potential path to the future. Who knows what that will be, but if you don’t take any action, it’s certainly not going to happen.
Brad Powell:
Yeah right, exactly, all right. Well, if anyone has been hanging out with us and they’re interested in you and either exploring your help on innovation and navigating the future that we all are looking at going oh my God, what’s going to happen? The sky is falling and or they want to get ahold of your book, what’s the best way for people to reach out to you?
Dan Keldsen:
So I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. I’m happy to connect with most people, as long as you don’t immediately pitch me on something. Be a good person, make an honest connection, and I mean I accept the vast majority of connections that come my way. I’ve been on there for 21 years so I’ve gotten pretty good at sort of navigating that a little bit, but I do think it’s one of the best networks that you can be on professionally and I can’t believe that I know people who are not either are not on LinkedIn or definitely are not maximizing what it can do for them. Please reach out to me on LinkedIn.
Dan Keldsen:
The Gen Z effect. My book is 10 years old but it’s still selling, which is fantastic. To get royalty checks that magically appear every once in a while, happy to talk about topics in there. It’s not strictly about Gen Z, it’s really about it’s more of a workforce. Look at how can we sort of pull out the best of all generations and stop with a finger pointing and blaming and actually get things done. And it spreads out to the larger universe of society as well.
Dan Keldsen:
One of my favorite chapters in there is about always essentially always be learning. You know, treating the world as my classroom, so there’s never been a better time to be able to learn lots of things as deep as you want to, and I would highly recommend that you do that. Sometimes it’s good to do that when it’s one-on-one in a relationship with me or somebody else that might be a mentor or just a colleague. But whatever you do, I would absolutely recommend that anything that you’re interested in you should try to pursue getting to know more about it and see where you can go with that, because there’s a ton of opportunity out there.
Brad Powell:
Yeah, I want to echo that. I think one of the secrets to not just success, but navigating around this landscape of either you know if you’re on LinkedIn or on any other kind of social media landscape, instead of just having to be thinking about the burden of oh no, I have to come up with new ideas to post. It’s like, well, if you’re on the path of lifelong learning and you’re encountering really cool stuff, it almost doesn’t matter, like you don’t have to know it all. It’s just sort of like well, here’s the exploration I’m doing. I’m going to be like you know, indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and I’m going to bring back the treasure that I find, and or I’m going to tell you about almost getting crushed by the boulder.
Dan Keldsen:
There you go.
Brad Powell:
Those kinds of things that people like, that stuff Like it. Just you know, you could just sort of bring people along for the ride when you’re doing that and it all becomes interesting and fun, rather than this giant, oh never-ending burden that I have to.
Dan Keldsen:
Yeah, and finding other people to explore with is tremendous. To me that’s one of the most energizing things. It doesn’t have to be a thousand people or a million people, it could be a handful of people or one. Finding one person that you can have a conversation with and you can bounce ideas around, I think it’s pretty cool Because then having other people that you trust because you have seen how they present themselves in public and you can decide that they sound credible and you can research it, all that kind of stuff. But that vetting process is, I think in a lot of ways it’s much better and deeper than traditional in-person experiences, because you can really potentially really dive deep into their background and what your commonalities are and all that. But I could talk forever about this.
Brad Powell:
No, this is really good stuff. All right, well, I’ll make sure that links to your LinkedIn and maybe, if I can find your book on Amazon, I’ll link to that in the show notes. And, dan, thanks again so much for coming on today. This has been great.
Dan Keldsen:
Yeah, brad, I’d be happy to do it again. We could cover even more territory if you like. There’s certainly no end of potential out there and I’m really happy to help people unleash that as much as I can.
