Damon Brown | How to Land The Job You Want With The Skills You've Got

Srini Rao

 Damon, welcome back to the Unmistakable Creative. You are probably one of the handful of guests who has been here, I think, almost three times, maybe more.

Damon Brown

Thank you, it's like SNL, was it the Five Timers Club? Is that what they called it? Do I get a jacket or something? Do I get a pen?

Srini Rao

Yeah, we should have a five timers club. Yeah, I mean, I think it's you, Cal Newport, Danielle Laporte. Yeah, that might be it. You're in kind of a rare group of people that have been here more than three times.

Damon Brown

Oh, man. And I mean, I.

I'm familiar with Danielle's work over the years, you know, as far as we're talking about passion. And then Kyle Newport, you know, I just interviewed him about a year ago when his book about a world without email came out for my own show, Bring Your Worth on YouTube. And I, but I've been a fan of his since deep work, like a lot of us. So thank you. That's esteemed, esteemed company. I appreciate it.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Srini Rao

Yeah, amazing. Well, we had you here when you had your last book come out. And I you mentioned it was last summer. I was thinking to myself, why does it feel like I just finished reading a book from you four or five months ago? Clearly, my perceptions of time are distorted. But yeah, I guess it wasn't the summer. So it wasn't that long ago. But when you last time, I started by asking you about your parents. But given your background and kind of what I got to know about you through this book, I want to stress what social group were you a part of in high school and what impact did that end up having?

Damon Brown

You did!

Srini Rao

on what you ended up doing with your life and your career.

Damon Brown

That is an excellent question. I'm gonna stretch it a little bit. So it kind of bled from high school to college. And my social groups were the writers. So the people who were journalists, the people who were on the school newspaper, it may be even some of the people that wrote plays because I became a journalist when I was, oh man, sophomore year.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Damon Brown

and I met my mentor, Jane Briggs Bunning, who died about a year ago. But she was like a mentor of mine who really supported me in high school, and then got me into a summer camp at Oakland University, which is right outside of Detroit. And I ended up getting a scholarship to Oakland University. It wasn't a full ride or anything, but it was pretty nice. It was good for me to get a start. And as far as the Midwest, next to Northwestern, that's one of the top journalism schools.

So I was into journalism, but then I was also really into technology. And I'm in my mid forties. So if you think about when I was in high school, it was the early nineties. And so it was when the Macintoshes started to come in. It was when people are still cutting and pasting the newspapers, a few newspaper nerds, you know what I'm talking about. And so it was this interesting period of time where you had the classics, like Jane Briggs, funding, like Kathy Dahlstrom.

Like a lot of folks that are making a big impact in the Midwest, getting into major international, in some cases, publications, writing for Life Magazine and all these things. And so you have the Old Guard, who are in their 60s or 70s, in some cases their 80s. And then you have folks like myself, who are understanding the Mac and technology and things like that. And so then you have this tech side, with the tech side,

It was me like learning how to program when I was around my eldest son's age. So I really got into programming when I was around six or seven. It was me understanding the Mac and learning how to deal with it. It wasn't Photoshop, but the predecessor to Photoshop, I think it was called PageView, you know, so all these things. And so, and you have to think about it too, where this beginning of the internet. And so you have like prodigy.

Srini Rao

Hmm.

Damon Brown

the AOL discs were starting to come into the mail, people were starting to get home computers, particularly if they were affluent, winning at ours till a couple years later. Excuse me. But you have these types of, this type of resurgence, so I was really at the nexus of that. So half the people I hung out with were nerd nerds. Like, so they were like, you know, soldering tools and they were coming up with their own programming languages and they were making video games back when you couldn't just make a video game like you.

And so I was really a merger of those two groups. What was interesting is that I had to navigate that conflict and I ended up becoming a journalism major with a computing minor. And by the time I got into, probably halfway through college, I was a features editor of the newspaper at Oakland called the Oakland Post. And then I'd also learned probably about 10 or so programming languages over the course of those 10 or so years.

previous to me hitting midway through college. And so ended up being this great nexus later, of course, because then you had the internet, then you had blogging, then you had journalism making this really strong merger with technology. But to be honest, Sreeni, those handful of years were tough because no one, including myself, saw that merger happening. All I knew was that I was bifurcated between being able to spout Shakespeare

and being able to program in Cobalt. And there was no real unison there, particularly for the people that were around me. And so that was kind of the groups that was kind of split between.

Srini Rao

Hmm.

Yeah. So, random question for you. We're both about the same age, because I remember very distinctly that time, you know, I didn't write on the school newspaper, which is something I regret. I wish I had both in high school and college. This is a totally random question. What was the very first thing you ever searched for on the internet?

Damon Brown

That is a great question.

Damon Brown

I know it was a picture of a woman.

Srini Rao

Okay, that's why I asked because I think for the overwhelming majority of guys our age, that is usually the answer. I only know this because my dad is a college professor and he had mosaic. I don't know if you remember that. That was the predecessor to Netscape and usually the people who had mosaic were academics because that's where it started in a university. And I remember my dad caught me looking at pictures of Pamela Anderson, which I mentioned earlier on the show. But

Damon Brown

Oh, of course, for sure. Yeah.

Damon Brown

That was that era, right?

Srini Rao

That was that era. You know, it really was. But in addition to that, one of the things I wonder as somebody who was a journalist who predated this era of, you know, the ability to publish the way that we do today, you know, with blogs and sort of a world where misinformation is rampant. How has journalism itself changed? Because I think that.

There's something that struck me as really interesting. I was going back through deep work this morning and Helen Newport said, prior to social media, the amount you actually had to put in the work to create information that was valuable enough to capture somebody's attention. And social media gives us sort of shortcut to that, which I think causes a lot of people to confuse attention with accomplishment. And of course you can have sort of, you know, short.

little bursts of attention for people versus creating fans for life, which I think is to me in the long run, the better strategy. But I'm just curious how you've seen the entire landscape of journalism change since that time.

Damon Brown

That's a really good question. It's a big question. I'll try to do a scene in a nutshell, no pun intended. I think the first thing is, and I say this to the people that I coach, because I'm a coach. I say this to the people that I mentor. I got my master's in magazine publishing from Northwestern in 2000, and it was such a transitional year that when I, it's a year long program.

And when I went in, the dot com bubble was going big. Pets.com was talking to the nation, all that stuff. That was in fall of 99. By the time I graduated a year later, again, it's a quick program, the dot com bubble burst and the job opportunities that I had disappeared. And so again, I was lucky, kind of like yourself, I was lucky where for someone who has hot takes on media and understanding pop culture and all those things.

I'm lucky in that I was born as kind of a bridge generation. I was able to see that. One of the things that I always share with people is that things shifted from, for lack of a better term, from the publication to the personality. And so for instance, we were talking offline and you mentioned that you used to write a lot for Playboy. I don't write for them as much, but I used to write for them a lot. I did a book called Playboy's Greatest Covers with Hugh Hefner.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Damon Brown

and that came out about a decade ago. So it used to be, while I'm getting into Playboy, that will give me credibility. By the time I started to wrap up the amount that I was writing for Playboy, because as a freelance writer, you kind of go through ebbs and flows of publications, as that season was kind of wrapping up, then it became, Playboy is a big deal because Damon Brown's writing for them. And it's not because my stature changed.

It's because the dynamics changed in those 10 or so years I was writing for Playboy. And so if you think about the conflict that's happening, let's just call it a war, in the Ukraine right now, are you gonna go to CNN, or are you gonna go to the reporters from CNN who are on the ground who are posting regularly on social media? I know what I'm gonna do, and I have two degrees in journalism. So, like, you know, I got Stax and the New Yorker.

I know a lot of these major publications. I write for a lot of these major publications. Even I'm going directly to, ironically, the source. And so I'd say that's the biggest change that we're kind of dealing with right now is that it's more people versus publications. That's a challenge if you're running a publication. And so if I'm pitching a publication, I'm an active freelance writer, so I'm writing for publications right now, then part of the reason why we're able to negotiate whatever pay I have,

what kind of stories I do, how I'm actually showing up for the people that we serve, is based on my stature and the work that I've done, whether it's my books, my coaching, my Ted Talks, whatever, versus this is a major publication with six million readers or six million in circulation, as we used to call it. And so they're gonna give me credibility and give me an audience for my people that I'm trying to serve, because you don't need them anymore.

So I think that would be one big dimension that I think affects people who are doing the practice of writing like we are. I'd say the second part of it, like you said, is the attention span. And we talked about ad nauseum, but it's actually getting more intense, where if you look at it, the amount of media that we're actually consuming is getting much shorter. Pardon me. Like when I launched Build From Now, which was about a year ago last time that we talked.

Srini Rao

Hmm.

Damon Brown

I got on TikTok because one of the people I interviewed some or one of people that interviewed me similar what we're doing now was saying that they're going to post some stuff on TikTok based on our interview. And I was like, oh shit. All right, well, let me get him to talk and I swear I got on there. And I think it changes every 30 seconds.

Srini Rao

Yeah, I don't even know how to use TikTok. Like we would be doing this segment.

Damon Brown

It is, and I felt like Malcolm McDowell in Clockwork Orange. You know, where it's like, you know, I have my eyelids peeled back. And now I'm used to it, but it's been literally a year. You know, and again, I'm not a spring chicken, so I'm sure part of it's me. But again, me sharing my background, like I learned my first programming language when I was around six. Excuse me, when I was around six, I learned basic.

Srini Rao

Hahaha!

Damon Brown

So that was like decades ago. So I grew up in this technology. I helped make this technology. I did two startups. The second one became one of the biggest ones of 2014. And we sold it in 2015. I'm picking up TikTok in 2011 or 2012, sorry, 2021. Getting the numbers mixed up. Last year, and I was like, it was so intense. I don't get intimidated by technology. It was just experience was so brief. And I was like, what did they just say?

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Damon Brown

What just happened? Let me rewind that, because luckily you can rewind. And so it's gonna get shorter and shorter and shorter. I'd say the third thing, which we might have mentioned it during Build From Now when we talked a year ago, but me watching my kids, and my youngest just turned six, my eldest is eight, and watching my boys, it's probably about a year or two ago, and that's why I wonder if we mentioned in the last discussion.

where they had their, they're playing with the iPad and I noticed they weren't typing anything in. And they were saying, baby shark. And they hit the button and then all the baby shark videos would come up. And I was like, wow. So part of me is like horrified where I'm like, oh my God, my baby's not gonna learn how to spell. But then, but then the second part, it's parent stuff. But then the second part though, which I got over quickly, they're great readers.

Srini Rao

Hahaha!

Damon Brown

They're fine. But the second part of it though, was me sitting there and saying, like this is how they're gonna do it. Like it's as antiquated as, you know, when our folks used to have the remote that was bigger than our heads. And like, you know, Srinni or Damon, go get me the remote. And then of course, when you had your own place, when you went to college, you know, whenever you got on your own, then it wasn't the remote anymore.

that it was something else. I think it's gonna be the same thing where that idea of typing into, sorry Google, but typing into like a search engine, that's gonna stop. That directly affects SEO and we can talk about this a lot by much, I'm trying to keep it really, really short. The modern media industry has turned itself into a knot to conform to Google's standards.

of SEO starting when Google started about 20 years ago and really getting serious about 10 or 15 years ago. Again, around the time that I was wrapping up my grad degree.

Now suddenly it's Alexa, it's Siri, it's a Cortana, I think that's the Microsoft one, always forget the name of that one. That's gonna be based on that. Just like about five or six years ago, I don't know if you remember this, some of us do where everyone decided that words weren't good anymore, and everyone, all the major media outlets online were gonna shift to video.

Srini Rao

down.

Damon Brown

And there are tons of people like me who are out of work.

And most of that was from Facebook, from Google, from a couple other platforms. It might've been Apple's news service called News. And then about a year ago, they said, you know what, words are good. And suddenly they're pivoting back to the value that the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and other publications are doing. But at the same time, these major outlets that are in some cases centuries old, have pivoted and created whole departments based on video, but a lot of that feedback

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Damon Brown

came from SEO. And so I'd say that's the third part is major media is gonna have to figure out what their voice is. Cause conforming to what the technology of today is, it's not working. Yeah.

Srini Rao

Yeah. I want to go back to the idea of the personality over the publication, because I think that there are both dark sides and, you know, good things about that. Right. So, you know, for example, right now, I think Joe Rogan has really been under the gun for a lot of the things that he's been saying on his podcast. And Vice actually did this special.

where they said podcasts are actually ripe for misinformation. And I remember I jokingly said, I'm guessing Joe Rogan is headed to jail. And my friend Gareth and I were talking, he said, oh my God, really? I was like, no, no. I'm like, that is not a fact. That is just a joke. I need to clarify that. Um, because if I said it enough, I'm like, Oh wow, people might interpret that as real and next thing I, you know, you know, I'm being accused of saying that Joe Rogan is going to jail and spreading that misinformation. Uh, so, you know, on the, on the positive side,

you know, when you have personality over publication, that means that you're no longer reliant on gatekeepers. We can, as Seth Godin says, choose ourselves. You and I have the capability of doing what we're doing right now. But on the darker side, there have been some really awful things that have come out of this as well.

Damon Brown

right.

Damon Brown

Absolutely, I agree 100% and I think that's why we need to do our own personal gatekeeping. I did a Excuse me. I did a partnership with Ted Ed which is the educational branch of Ted probably about six or seven years ago and it was a video that I scripted called how to choose your news and it's gotten really popular which kind of makes sense because I look at it like a Temperature gauge

of how much misinformation there is. But it's like a seven minute video or so animated about how you can decipher the news sources and not be so reactionary to stuff that you hear. And I've been privileged again, similar to yourself, where the amount of people that you've talked to, the amount of work that you do, the research that you do, you have a certain built-in filter. We're talking about that offline, where it's like you have a certain filter as far as your guests and other things. You have that filter built in.

I have two degrees in journalism, been a journalist for a long time, again, since I was a teenager. So I have a built-in filter. I think what we as creators often forget is that not everyone has that filter. And so we might not be like, I mean, you're probably familiar with this and a lot of y'all are listening probably are aware, a lot of the mistrust in the media actually didn't happen with the recent error over the past 10 years, but actually started with Watergate.

back in the 70s around the time I was born. And that was a period of time when it was Watergate as well as the Vietnam War. Let me be fair about that. So a balance of those two things where people are like, wait, we're being shown these pictures, we're being shown these ideas, but that's not really what's happening. You know, if you think about, again, the parallel to the Ukraine, there's not a lot of information we're not getting. Like if anything, it's too much information. I gotta chill out on the social media.

Srini Rao

Hmm.

Damon Brown

ditto with stuff that's going on politically. If anything, we're being overexposed to the, you know, the Supreme Court hearings and the different things that are happening, a lot of the drama, you know? And so with that shift, people become more skeptical about the media organizations, but that doesn't mean they're any wiser to filtering what the truth is. And I think we get that mixed up.

Srini Rao

Thanks for watching!

Damon Brown

It's like just because you're like, oh, OK, everything's fake news. It doesn't make you more intelligent. And in fact, you know, whether you're conscious of it or not, that makes you more likely to grasp over something that's really unverified because we need to have some type of truth of center. Like we all need it. We need to have some type of belief system. You're right. Even the deepest atheist has some type of structure as far as how they live their life. News is part of that.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Damon Brown

And so when we say everything is fake news or we don't believe anything in the media, we have to get that information from somewhere. And it might be the goofball next door.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, I think filters are interesting because filters are also a double-edged sword, right? Because you can end up in what Eli Pariser calls filter bubbles, where you end up having this very myopic worldview. So you know, I used to love Medium and now I hate it because I go there and I don't discover anything new. It's just like, oh, I've written productivity porn for years and now that's all I see in my feed. I'm like, I don't need any more productivity tips. I want to learn something new that I didn't know before.

Damon Brown

I'll leave it at that. Yeah.

Damon Brown

Yes.

Damon Brown

Yeah, and I mean, but that's under the guise of curation, right? And then that goes back to the third point that we're talking about with media, where you were almost curating ourselves to death. But media is doing it. I mean, this in a very stereotypical way, Broadway media is doing it because they believe that that's their. That's the way that they survive is by conforming to these filter bubbles, which I love that book, by the way.

but the filter bubbles that have been created by the major platforms. I think that's why it's so important, getting back to a lot of the work that I try to pass on to the people that I coach, even when I talk about in career remix of creating your own path and something that's outside of the mainstream system. For instance, like you and your team run this podcast.

So if you didn't want to have me on a guest as a guest, you didn't have to have me on. Like that's cool. I have my, I mentioned my YouTube show at youtube.com slash BrownDamon, the Bring Your Worst show every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. It was a topic I don't want to cover. I don't cover it. If I could have my own TV show, like on my own platform, I'd do that, but the closest I can get is YouTube. That's my compromise. But finding ways to...

to say your peace and say your truth in ways that...

don't have to compromise based on a bigger filter. Now you mentioned Joe Rogan earlier where there's a lot of issues that I personally have with him. And at the same time, he's the one that decided to get the bag from Spotify.

Damon Brown

You know, just like with Career Remix, it's a partnership with me and Union Square and company publishers previously called Sterling. And then the audio book is a partnership with Hachette Audio, which just came out a few days ago. Most of my previous books, at least my previous books over the past 10 years, including a couple bestsellers, I've done on my own imprint called Bring Your Worth. So you go to damebrown.net, it's all in my own imprint.

With me to sign into a partnership with Union Square and Company, I know it was a compromise. It had to be. In the end, advance, we're using their structures, we're using their PR department, et cetera, et cetera. And so that's a compromise. And so I think that's really, for me, that's going to be the interesting discussion where you have folks who want to have so-called freedom of speech, but then they want to utilize other people's platforms.

And as a founder myself, twice over, I know what goes into creating platforms. So when I talk about with media and saying that Google has a certain SEO and they keep changing it, or Facebook was using Cambridge Analytica and all that, I'm not even mad at those platforms.

because we're utilizing those platforms to get our word out. My question to the creators is, how can you actually create your own homegrown audience? Like Seth Godin talks about, your minimal viable audience. Take the long cut and not the shortcut. Because if you do that, then you can say what you want and create your own truth. Based not on filter bubbles, not based on SEO, not based on the flavor of the moment.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Damon Brown

I'm passionate about this because that's how I've created my career on purpose. And there's so many folks who try to take the shortcut, but unfortunately for a lot of them, they figured out it doesn't work. The people that support my book, support the show, support me as a coach, um, all the love that I get, which I appreciate. That's from me directly connecting with my audience, not trying to conform my particular mad ideas based on what, what might hit of the moment.

And I think that's such an important lessons for us to learn, especially right now when there are so many filters that are based on the platform that we're using versus the audience we're trying to hit.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Srini Rao

It's funny because I was just writing about that and probably it was prompted from something I read in your book where I started to just think about that. Where, you know, I said, Cal Newport talked about in deep work, putting in the work that you had to put in to create something valuable enough to capture somebody's attention. And I said that attention for your work exists on a spectrum. On one end, you have sort of fractions of thousands of people's attention.

which is uploading a picture to Instagram, getting a click, like, retweet, whatever the hell it is, or some stupid vanity metric. And then the other end, you have a substantial amount of somebody's time and attention. So I have a listener named Peter, who has literally been listening for nine years. Like, he probably can quote and reference the body of work as easily as I can. It's mind boggling, but.

Damon Brown

Wow.

Damon Brown

How many episodes is that? I was gonna ask you anyway.

Srini Rao

over a thousand at this point. Like, keep in mind, there was another blog before this called The School of Life. He's been a reader since then. And it's fascinating to look at that because I thought, you know, Peter in a lot of ways is representative of what you want in an audience.

Damon Brown

That's insane. OK, congrats. But go on.

Damon Brown

Oh my gosh.

Srini Rao

You know, like your audience should be full of Peters, really, if you want to, because one of the things I realized was as the media landscape becomes more fragmented, loyalty will become much more valuable than reach, because what you're starting to see is smaller and smaller niche audiences. But those audiences are also incredibly loyal.

So the example I always come back to is if Seth Godin died tomorrow, we would all notice. We would miss him if he was gone. If Buzzfeed went out of business, he'd make headlines, but nobody would give a shit a week later.

Damon Brown

Probably not. But they might give a shit about some of the writers of Buzzfeed. Maybe. That would be some, I mean, I can't think of any writers of Buzzfeed. No shots at y'all. I can't think of any. But, but that's kind of my point, right? Exactly. Sure, sure.

Srini Rao

Maybe. Yeah. I don't. But here's the funny thing, right? I don't know. Yeah, exactly. You see, exactly. That is my point. You and I don't know the name of a single writer at BuzzFeed. Like, that's the thing. We don't have a relationship with BuzzFeed. We all feel like we have a relationship with Seth on some level. If you read his blog, you feel like you have a relationship with him. And I think that that's what's so interesting about the personality versus publication. And I think even for publications, loyalty is going to matter.

in the future. It's not gonna be just about reach.

Damon Brown

Absolutely, and one of the things that you can't, how can I put it? One of the things that you can't create loyalty with or something that will stop you from creating loyalty is a lack of consistency. I'm kind of using double negatives here. If you're not consistent, then you can't create loyalty. And that's something that the people that I coach and I'm gonna start doing keynotes on the road starting in about a month.

I run into this a lot in the road where people are like, I want to, well, I talk about this in career remix too, where it's like, it's like, okay, I want to start this. I want to make this impact. And I want a thousand people screaming outside, you know, from my keynote and I want to have a best-selling book and all this stuff. And it's like, all right, that's cool. How many times have you written this month? No, and not to call them out. I mean, I'm a coach, so. Right, you do coach into, you know.

Srini Rao

No.

Srini Rao

Call them out. I think you should call them out.

Damon Brown

So it's not even calling them out per se. Let me use a different term. I'm really into accountability. And I'm not gonna put you to a standard that I won't put for myself. And so if you're working with me as a coach, or even if you come to one of my keynotes, I'm gonna be honest with you, where it's like I'm gonna be direct with you. Where that consistency is how it pays off. That's what it comes from. I have a column with Inc. Magazine at IncDamonBrown.com. I have 600 columns. I've done it in the, I think it's been six years.

And some of those columns are not great. But I keep showing up. You know, I've done two or three episodes with Bring Your Words Show, youtube.com slash BrownDamon, almost past a year and a half. Some of them are shit. But I keep showing up. And it keeps getting better and better and better. And again, it's not a tribute to me. It's a tribute to the practice. And if you're not doing that work.

then you're not gonna be able to show up well. Excuse me. I'd say that would be kind of like a fourth pillar, sorry for the journalism jargon, but that would be like kind of the fourth pillar of it with what you were talking about with media where we also have the idea of going viral and we can talk about that for an hour. I've had like two or three things that I've done go viral, you know, in the modern parlance. That was, those were accidents.

those are not designed. Yeah, I was gonna say, I know you can relate. You've had some best sellers, you know, it's like, you know, you know, again, I.

Srini Rao

I can relate.

Srini Rao

Yeah, those were freak-like successes, right? You know, I mean, you know, it's like Glenn Beck.

Damon Brown

Right. Someone on TV is saying, right, someone on TV you barely know was like, oh my God, this is the best book ever. You know, there's, uh, for us at with Cuddler, my last startup, it's like suddenly we're on the cover of the Wall Street Journal. It's like they're creating the cuddle economy. You can't plan stuff like that, but what you can plan is how you're going to show up. And I'm like you, like I've been in the game for decades now and I think I'm pretty good.

But I can't plan that. I'm a strategic guy. I help other people strategize. I'm a consultant. I've coached now hundreds of people. I can't plan my own shit. That's not how it works. Career remix, which came out about a month or two ago, was not on the bestseller list. A couple books before, The Bite's Entrepreneur, was on the bestseller list. Solid. I can't predict it. I can't call it.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Damon Brown

But that's what I'm concerned about with, like my nieces and nephews generation, the folks that are in like their twenties, and particularly for my kids. I was just talking to my eldest about it the other day. We can have these ambitious goals, but unfortunately the way that things are packaged, and I would blame media for this, the way things are packaged, the assumption is that you do a nice TikTok video, which is 30 seconds to a minute long, I believe. You know, you...

Excuse me, you have some type of hot take on you know, something dramatic that just happened We can think of three of them right now I'm sure that just happened and suddenly, you know, you're given a six-figure book deal Those things are so rare like point zero one percent I can name three times this happened to me and I work my ass off

So it's like, if you're not doing the work, it's not gonna happen at all.

Srini Rao

Yeah, I mean I

Oh, trust me, I think by the time the Glenn Beck thing happened, I'd been writing for five years. I was lingering in obscurity. I was publishing three times a week. I think you hit the nail on the head with consistency. And this is something I always try to tell creators. It was like media consumption is based on habit formation. All you have to do is go look at your favorite televisions before we had streaming. And Thursday night for 10 years, all of us sat in front of our TVs to watch Friends in Seinfeld. Do you think that would have happened if the writers were like, I'll just write when I'm inspired? No.

Damon Brown

The first season of Seinfeld actually didn't do that well. I'm fascinating with Seinfeld. The show itself, oh, okay. I'm fascinating with Seinfeld, and the show itself is fine, I like it. Oh, that's so weird. I have no idea what just happened. Can you hear me now? Okay, not sure what happened. But I'm fascinating with Seinfeld. The show itself is fine, but more the history behind it.

Damon Brown

And yeah, the first year or two, it didn't do that well at all. And then suddenly it's considered the greatest show of all time. But they kept showing up.

Srini Rao

Let's talk briefly about this Playboy book. I'm fascinated by this. Like what in the world made you want to do a book on Playboy's greatest covers of all time? And what is it like to work with somebody like Hugh Hefner, who is basically a cultural icon as far as creators go? I mean, he is an iconic creative.

Damon Brown

Yeah, he was, he was. And so it actually came to me, believe it or not. And when the book was presented to me, I think it was 2009, 2008, I was living in San Francisco. I was just started really in series about books. My first major book was called Porn and Pong, How Grand Theft Auto, Tomb Raider, and Other Sexy Games Change Our Culture. And I just moved to San Francisco. It was kind of my...

planning the flag, where I'm like, you know what, I'm gonna turn video games should be a pop culture pillar as much as movies, as much as books, as much as music. And that was my line in the stand. I'm like, this is gonna be the speaking for my generation. And so it didn't sell great, but it was similar to the punk rock ethic where, you know, the sex pistols.

or the Ramones, they might've sold like 10,000 albums, but everyone who got the album started a rock band. Like it was the same type of thing, where it's like a handful of folks literally got the album. I still never recouped from my advance for that, but it inspired a whole lot of folks. It's inside of museums and stuff. And so it got enough of a buzz where it got the attention of Playboy, who had already been writing for it. And it's similar to, excuse me.

It's similar to, I think it's, what's the term? The prophet has no power in his homeland. So you sometimes have to leave where you're known and do some cool shit, and suddenly you get the respect of where you're from. And it was the same type of thing where, I've been a writer for Playboy for six, seven years, right? And then Point & Pong came out and they're like, oh, okay.

And so I think that was part of it. And so through my agent at the time, actually it was through an editor at the time, I'm wrong. They reached out and they said, hey, Hugh Hefner wants to do a retrospective of Playboy's covers. I think it was for, was it the 50th anniversary? I wanna say the 50th anniversary, maybe the 60th. And so I was like, yeah, let's talk about it. So we talked about it.

Damon Brown

through his emissary and in negotiating it. And then I went to work. The challenge with working with Mr. Hefner is that he was a perfectionist. And so we would get the book just about done. We'd send it over. By the time we got feedback, about six months had passed and there were new covers he wanted to include.

And that happened for about three years.

And luckily I negotiated, so I got paid more as things continued. So thank God for that. And we finally got it done. And then I did not meet her, but we were able to get Pamela Anderson to do the forward.

And it actually came out on the day I got married. So yeah, so it was actually the night before my wedding and my folks were having a get together and copies of this hardcover, beautiful book came in the mail. So it's like me and my bride-to-be and like my uncles and my cousins are like flipping through this book about Playboy. And it was like, great, you know, this is the next stage of life, you know?

Srini Rao

Oh wow.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Srini Rao

What?

I think that Playboy in particular is fascinating because I know that Amazon actually had a documentary series or a docudrama series about Hugh Hefner's life. And watching that, it made me look at this and say, well, this is not a pornographer. This is a media mogul at work. Like he ran it like a media company. But he apparently was revolutionary in terms of paving the way for a lot of changes in journalism. Like apparently he had one of the first black centerfolds or black women on the cover of a magazine.

Damon Brown

That's right.

Srini Rao

That really struck me. I remember thinking I was like wow this is like a really rich historical study of the media landscape I'm curious. Did you have very much interaction with him?

Damon Brown

Just through emails unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to meet him and that was that's one of those things where it's like If I can only get to the grotto, you know Right before I get married right, right

Srini Rao

Okay. Yeah.

Srini Rao

Yeah, right before you get married. Yeah, I'm sure your wife probably would have been like, yeah, no, that's not gonna happen. You're not allowed to go that. I'm thinking of that scene in Entourage where, what's his name? Ralph Macchio is like, I'm going to the mansion too, but he's married.

Damon Brown

I mean, right.

Damon Brown

It's like, no, bro, you're not going. I mean, what's nice thing is that, shout out to my long-time partner and my wife now, where I had met her when I first started writing porn and pong, and I was already writing for Playboy. So she already, she knew I was going to the Adelda Entertainment Expo and the whole thing. So she's been very supportive as far as the pop culture path. Yeah.

Srini Rao

Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, because well, that magazine in particular, I think people had always said that some of the greatest novelists in America have written for Playboy. I think Brodol, who wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I remember, was somebody who wrote essays for Playboy, which I remember reading through them thinking was like, wow, this is definitely very different than sort of, you know, mainstream porn.

Damon Brown

Oh, I can't give you started.

Damon Brown

Um.

Damon Brown

As well as like Shel Silverstein, you have obviously early favorite of mine, what's his name? Hunter S. Thompson, yeah, Gay Talese. I have a art picture of James Baldwin on my wall. He was a right for playboy. Obviously Alex Haley in the first interviews, mainstream interviews with Malcolm X, interview with MLK, which I think Alex Haley did as well. Like the list is like insane.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Damon Brown

And so I was really humbled to be part of that. And the book did well. We actually came out with a French edition, which I also have. And I love Paris and the sensuality of it. So it's a proud moment in my career. And even to get a chance to not just write for Playboy regularly, you can see me in some of the older issues in the early aughts, but also to be able to work with Hef before he passed away, which is...

It's an honor, you know.

Srini Rao

Yeah, I wonder, I guess the reason I asked if you'd work with him directly, and I think this will make a perfect segue into career remixes. What enables accomplishment at that level? I mean, you mentioned that he was a perfectionist, but what else did you learn just from your interactions with him about what enables somebody to push the boundaries of an art form to the level that he did?

Damon Brown

I'd say also, and I used to cover video game culture, I mentioned that briefly. He saw this, I saw this with Shigeru Miyamoto, who's a creator of Zelda, he's a creator of Donkey Kong. Basically, when you think of Nintendo, that's him. And I think he's just a little bit older than you and I. So he was doing, he created Donkey Kong when he was like, I don't know, a teenager. And so this legendary stuff. But I got a chance to interview him.

around that porn and pong era, I want to say 98, 99, at one of the major video game conferences. And so it was like, you know, it's like meeting Steven Spielberg. And so I'm talking with him and the main thing, of course through the translator, because I don't know that much Japanese, and I'm talking to him and one of the things he said is that, and I'm going to paraphrase, because it's been a couple of decades now, you know, he said, I don't mind delaying games because a bad game is forever.

And so he was known for delaying games and they weren't coming out on time. I felt like it was the same thing with Hugh Hefner where he's just like, listen, like this book is gonna have a Playboy name on it and we're gonna have like Pamela Anderson doing the forward and it's collaboration with you. It's like, we're not gonna half-ass this. So the perfectionism is part of it. The other part of it is being willing to delay the process until it's good. And it's like, it's important to ship things. Like you said, I'm sure.

out of your thousand plus interviews, not everyone was great. I will admit with like main column or with the other work that I've done, not everyone's gonna be great. But if you have the opportunity to make something a little bit better, then make it better. Like really as simple as that. And so many of us as creators, we succumb to the pressure of deadlines, we succumb to the pressure of expectations. We get restless and cranky, which I see a lot with my kids, because again, they're six and eight.

Srini Rao

Well, I...

Damon Brown

You get restless and cranky as a creative, and you just wanna ship it. But you know when it's not ready to ship, you know. And they're good at that. Shigeru, you know, Hugh, like, everyone that I've interviewed and connected with or worked with, they had that lever. They said, this is not ready yet. And they knew the difference between this is not ready yet, and I'm afraid to ship it.

Srini Rao

down.

Srini Rao

Yeah, that's an interesting tension. Like we could do an entire episode about that. I mean, yeah, I mean, I could write a thousand words about that very easily right after our conversation. That's probably my next blog post idea. The tension between it's not ready and I'm afraid to ship. Let's get into the book. Why this book, why now?

Damon Brown

We'll see, we'll talk about that, right.

Damon Brown

Yeah, so you called it at the top where I did a career or did a build from now. And I was like, okay, this is like, Sherwin and we've known each other for a while. So you followed my career. So, excuse me, I did the Bites of the Entrepreneur. That turned into a series, cause it became a best seller. So I did the Productive Bites of the Entrepreneur, the Balance Bites of the Entrepreneur, and then the Ultimate Bites of the Entrepreneur, which was all that previous content.

plus a lot of bonus stuff, which I'm super proud of, and I'm so glad people have taken to it. Then I did Bring Your Worth. Then I did Built From Now. And Built From Now, like, all that happened, like, let's see, the Byte Science entrepreneur came out in July of 2016. So it was about what? And there's a couple side books in there too, such as The Passive Writer, about passive income for writers, which I did with my partner, Jeanette Hurt. And so...

It was about seven, eight books within like six years. And I was like, okay, Build From Now, I laid it out on the floor, you read it, it was the last time I talked about that, I never talked about it before. I'm like, okay, let's see what happens next. And I'm about to start promotion for Build From Now, and I get a call from Now, Union Square and Company. And they're like, hey, we worked together before, in fact, Union Square, in their previous incarnation,

actually published the Playboy book. So it's like a full circle moment. Hadn't worked with him since then. So it was about 10 years before. And they said, hey, we appreciate the stuff that you're doing. We wanna do a book that's really gonna speak to people that are going through the great resignation. And we feel like you're the person to do it. And I talked with them and I'm like, I'm tired. Again, like eight books in six years, I'm like.

I don't know, man, during a pandemic. And I got little kids at home. Like, I don't know. And then I realized, number one, I worked with them before. So it was a level of trust that, again, all my other books I just mentioned were all independent. So I have my own imprint. Like, I am my own publisher. So it would take a lot for me to kind of work with someone else, to be honest. Number one, we worked together before, and it went well.

Damon Brown

excuse me, but the second part of it was me realizing that these were people that I hadn't served yet. And I can give the very long version of it, but the short version of it is that each of my books that I just mentioned hit a certain group. The Byte de l'Entreneur is one two-page chapters to help someone who's in the thick of it trying to manage their life and their career.

Bring Your Worth is for people who don't know where they're going and aren't sure if they can bring their full selves to their career. Build From Now is us looking at the wreckage, perhaps from a pandemic, perhaps from some other challenges that we have and saying, I can build from now and create based on these four resources that we have, focus, agility, time, and energy.

Each of those books has like a message. It's very focused, it's intentional. It's part of my coaching practice. It was strategic. I realized I had not talked to the people that had nine to five.

at all. I was talking to people who had already quit their job, people who had a side hustle, people who are full-time independent, had never had a real job such as myself. A lot of y'all could probably relate. I was talking to all y'all, but I wasn't talking to the person that said, wow, this job sucks. And I'm stuck here. What am I supposed to do? I never addressed them. And so I realized that they were worth it.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Damon Brown

the average person, because I think that's the average person here in America, I had not served them. So that's what the book is. Me serving them and saying, okay, this is what you can do. You don't need to quit your job right away, but there are steps you can take to build a career rather than just having a job.

Srini Rao

Okay.

Let's talk about those steps. You open the book by saying, going to school for several years and paying hundreds of thousands of dollars meant an if not an exponential ROI, narrowly defining your skill. To focus on a specific outcome makes sense when specialty not versatility is king. The best career opportunities today though didn't exist yesterday and identifying too closely with the medium instead of the message is a quick way to make dollars make sense when the career path guarantees a return on yourself.

Srini Rao

What you say in the opening of the book is going to school for several years and paying hundreds of thousands of dollars makes sense when the career path guarantees a return on investment if not an exponential ROI. Narrowly defining your skill to focus on a specific output makes sense when specialty not versatility is king. The best career to opportunities today though didn't exist yesterday and identifying too closely with the medium instead of the message is a quick way to make yourself extinct. I think this is about more than careers. This is about how we educate people to.

Damon Brown

Absolutely, and I'm not surprised you picked that quote Because we've talked a lot Exactly like

What you're building is a toolbox. You're not building a structure per se. You're not building a foundation per se. You're building a toolbox. So, I interview people on my show. When I interview people on the show, that's the same skillset that I use when I learned how to interview people and write an article, you know, decades ago. But it's also the same skillset I use

when I'm talking to a potential coaching client and I'm interviewing them, even though it's a conversation, I'm interviewing them to see if we'd be a good fit.

It's the same energy. It's the same tool. And so I think that's where we need to go. Because YouTube could disappear tomorrow. Hope it doesn't, I like YouTube. But it could disappear tomorrow and my show would be on another platform by Friday.

Like it's, but that energy, that's the same for everything. That feels obvious to me, but it's obvious to me because as Brene Brown says, I've been out in the wilderness, I've been in the arena. So I'm not afraid of those changes because that's what my career has been built on. I have a master's in magazine publishing. How many people read magazines today?

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Damon Brown

Like, so, you have to be able to adapt. Or more importantly, create, understand the skillset that you're building versus being committed to the title of it. Excuse me, I talk about this very briefly in the book, I think, where it's like the title of saying, I am a general manager. This is my title. This is my pay. This is who I am. I drive this car. I drive X amount of...

miles I have this lunch. And then suddenly, as we were recording this two years ago, suddenly you're not a general manager anymore. Suddenly you're not driving anywhere. Suddenly you're not going those 2.2 miles. Suddenly you're having lunch at home with your family or by yourself. And so our identity, we feel like, is shattered. But the skill sets that we had as far as being a general manager, of course, are still there.

It's just the premise is different. That is a microcosm, a wake-up call to, like you said, education to our entire lives.

Damon Brown

But we have to not tie it to the title and the structure. We have to tie it to our own worth and our skills that cannot be taken away. If you're fired from your job today, that would suck. But are they gonna take your skills too? They gonna take away your ambition too? Is that going away with the badge? Of course not. But we tend to not always think about that part of it. There's a gap there. I'm trying to fill that.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Srini Rao

So let's talk about this transition from your zone of excellence to your zone of genius. You say the stuff you're good at, your zone of excellence is your comfort zone. It's the shore, though it may not feel like it. That's the danger. The stuff you feel most alive in, your zone of genius is out there. It's so original that you have to take a risk to fully show it.

Damon Brown

Absolutely, that's actually from, from Gay Hendrix, one of my favorite authors. He talks about it in the book, The Big Leap. I recommend it every time I, has he, oh my God, I need to listen to that episode. I'm a fan boy. He's fantastic, I love his work. And I'm getting into his new work now. But The Big Leap, classic, I've quoted it several times in my books over the years.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm. Also been a guest here.

Yeah, twice actually.

Damon Brown

And one of the, I think one of the ways that you realize that you're growing is that you start to feel uncomfortable. That doesn't mean that you're not at ease or that you feel like you're in danger, but more like you're doing something different and something new. And I talk about this, in fact, I think I might mention your analogy with the shoreline in there, where if you're trying to catch a wave,

If it's already cresting, it seems safe. But by the time you get on the wave, it's gonna be crashing. But if you start to see stuff emerge, it's literally a risk to say, you know what? I think this is where the current's going. I'm gonna start to paddle that way. And then it starts to grow and you're already there. And you ride it. I think that's the difference between the two.

and we tend to mistake that temporary safety and security, let me rephrase that, we tend to mistake that security for safety, but that actually doesn't fit. That doesn't give us the security that we need. What's actually security is growing in ways where you think the world is going. That's real security.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

So one of the things you talked about, which I really appreciated, was this idea of overoptimism, right? You say that overoptimism poisons the well. You believe your success is right around the corner, so you compromise your health and balance in ways that are suitable for short-term success, but never bother to update your ideas based on new data and circumstances. Let's talk about that, because I think that there is this sort of, almost to a fault, default narrative, follow your passion mantra that perpetuates self-help books.

graduation speeches, self-improvement seminars, and often to me that is a recipe for poverty and people follow their passion to their detriment.

Damon Brown

I would agree. So I think and I talked about this way more in depth in the book.

Damon Brown

My passion includes, I love seafood. I could eat seafood all day. I'm originally from Atlantic City. I live in Las Vegas now. There's actually really nice seafood here. But that's my passion. Like I could eat seafood all day. Like it'll be the one thing that'll stop me from being a vegetarian.

How is that serving anybody? I'm serving myself, but how is that serving anybody? It's not. And so I think that's the missing piece. When, you know, shout out to Angela Duckworth, when folks talk about grit, when folks talk about back to Daniel Laporte as far as, like, you know, passion and so forth. I think it's also important to bring up service. How is it serving other people?

I love having intense, in-depth, one-on-one conversations with people. I always have, since I was way younger than my kids. It's in my DNA. I come from a family of storytellers. You know, we'll pour a cup of coffee and then sit there and talk all morning. It drives my wife nuts because she comes from a different type of family. But it's like, you guys haven't moved yet? It's like, no, we're telling stories. That's a natural part of who I am. Me being a coach?

is me listening to other people's stories. Sometimes sharing my own, you know, as a sense of brotherhood or sisterhood or to give them a bridge, but mostly it's just listening to other people's stories and the narratives they're telling themselves. That's separate, that's separate than me just wanting to tell stories and hear stories. So my passion is stories, narratives. What story are we telling ourselves? What the hell is coaching, right?

but understanding the narrative of what we're telling ourselves and how we might want to change that narrative to get to where we need to be. If I wasn't given that in service to other people, then it wouldn't matter. I'll just be telling stories and hearing stories. So it's not just the passion part of it. It's the application of that passion. The best way to apply that passion is through service. What are people asking for? I talk about this in Career Remix, I think, in one of the later chapters.

Damon Brown

where I had no intention of being a coach. And then I started doing keynotes when The Bytes is Entrepreneur became a bestseller. I put myself on the road, self-funded, but it was a lot of fun. When I started making money, it was better money because I didn't have an agent or anything. You know, back to DIY aesthetic. And I would do the Q&As, which I love Q&As, obviously. It taps into something. And then people would come to me afterwards during the book signing and say, hey, can we grab a cup of coffee?

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Damon Brown

And I'm like, I don't think so. Either I'd be like, I'm married, or I gotta get out of town, or whatever. You know what I mean? Whatever. It didn't make any sense to me. And after the fourth or fifth time, I realized they were actually asking to be coached. And I was like, oh. So I put everything in the books, and I just did a 45 minute keynote, and I had all this Q&A, but they want something that's more tailored. Maybe something private. Because what maybe, as I learned as a coach later,

maybe whatever they're dealing with, they don't wanna say it during a Q and A. You know, the coaching clients are going through some deep shit, as we all are. So I'm hearing some stories and respecting that privacy of it. And so I started coaching with them and it became, now it's a big part of my income, a big part of my business, and a big part, frankly, of my identity, even though it's kind of contrary to what I said before, but you know, I still identify as a coach.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Damon Brown

But that step was from people saying, I want to be served in this way. I didn't say, I'm gonna serve you in this way. They said, no, Damon, we need you in this way. And I listened. I'm passionate as hell about coaching. I could talk all day and listen all day to people. It's a strength of mine. But it wasn't until the people said, we need you in this form, that I started my coaching practice. That's the difference I found.

Srini Rao

Let's talk about what you call the fallacy of extremes. There's something that you said here in the book that really struck me. It's probably the quote that I liked the most. This is my favorite quote from the book.

Big risk, big reward, no pain, no gain, go big or go home. In America, we've been indoctrinated into a culture of extremes. Having a little success or creating slow and steady growth doesn't fit the narrative. It isn't as celebrated as say the man who bet everything and lost it all, he just went for it, or the woman who risked her life for a now successful startup owe the dedication. But what if they weren't actually painted in the corner? What if they even subconsciously chose to be reckless? It's not as ridiculous as it sounds.

of extremes, there are three big reasons why we fall into the fallacy of extremes. It forces us to take actions, it makes us feel more dedicated, and it absolves the burden of having to decide it all. Expand on that.

Damon Brown

Yes, yes, yes. I'm glad you pulled that out.

Damon Brown

Number one, when there's a survivor's bias, which I know you've talked about on your show, where the people that, I write for Inc, so they're part of that, but the people that are on the cover of Inc, Forbes, Fortune, whatever, hot new magazines out now too, they're the ones that made it. They're the ones that went into bankruptcy, were at $40 in their pocket. I just read about one of them yesterday. Excuse me, they have $40 in their pocket, and now they're...

you know, they have a unicorn startup worth $5 billion. Like that happens. But there were like, I've met a lot of them that didn't make it. So number one, we have this glaze where it's like, oh, that's how you make it. It's like, no, that's actually the, to go back to the survivor's bias, the original theory back to World War II, I believe, those are the planes that made it home. The other planes that got shot in a certain way, they didn't make it at all.

So you're getting it mixed up. Like this is a small fraction actually made on the cover of Ink Magazine. Most of them that take frankly that stupid kind of risk, they didn't make it at all. That's why you never heard of them, right? So I think there's a survivor's bias part to it. I think the other part is that.

Consistency is way harder than intensity. Like way harder. Myself included, I struggle with this all the time. I'm that guy where it's like, oh okay, I'm gonna do this show three times a week. Let me go and record 30 episodes in a row. And so I'll be set for this quarter. Like that's the way I naturally think. So I'm not even pointing fingers. I can talk about it because I live it every single day. That sounds way better to me.

when I'm talking to you about it. I'm like, oh yeah, I'm just gonna knock it out. I'm gonna do this all nighter, I'm gonna kill it.

Damon Brown

But me like saying, you know what? I'm gonna do a couple shows today, get them set for the week, and then at the end of the week, I'm gonna do more shows for the next week. And I'm gonna do it again. That does not sound as sexy at all. Not as motivating either. But it kind of gives you not only the opportunity to take care of yourself.

and your entire life, but also gives you the space to actually strategize and think about what you're doing. I think that's one of the things I'm talking about in Career Remix, one of the underlying principles is that as much as the pandemic sucks, I've heard somebody saying the pandemic was good today and I was like, no, let's be clear, it sucks. But one of the benefits of...

is us recognizing and having to make a pause. When you go to the fallacy of extremes, you're stopping yourself from pausing. Maybe because you're afraid that if you pause a little bit that you won't follow through. Maybe you're so afraid that you have to rush through it so you don't have to think about your insecurities. Maybe you're just used to powering through things instead of actually taking a balanced view of it.

Maybe all the above. I've been guilty of all those. When things slow down enough, though, you can actually strategize your next move. The problem I have with the great resignation is that, I think it was last June, July, 6 million people quit their jobs.

How many people had a strategy? How many people employed a coach like you or I? How many had a runway, or even know what a runway means as far as having money tucked away so that they would have a week, a month, six months to find out where their next revenue source was gonna be? How many of them had side hustles or were already grooming themselves for something bigger so that when they quit their job, they can go full time into whatever that thing is?

Damon Brown

I would say a fraction. That's why I wrote career remix. And I think for a lot of them, it's not too late. But eventually the money's gonna run out. Eventually the needs are gonna outstrip that impulse to quit your job. And eventually that reality is gonna hit. And I hope that my book can catch a lot of these folks before it gets too late for them.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Srini Rao

Let's finish this up by talking about networks and community, because I think that you made a very interesting point about networks by saying that your job is not your network and you need to develop both an internal and external network, one tied specifically to your job career field and one tied to the adjacent areas. This is not optional. And you know, reading that made me realize that if it really came down to it and I needed

Damon Brown

Yeah.

Srini Rao

of having built this show is a massive network.

Damon Brown

I think you'd be okay, yeah.

Srini Rao

I don't think it's going to come down to that. I mean, hopefully it never does. I would be a terrible employee. As always, joke, I would either be fired on day one or promoted by the end of the first week.

Damon Brown

You know what? I'm in the same boat. I understand.

Srini Rao

So yeah, let's talk about that. Like, why is that important? Because I think that this is something I have been trying to emphasize over and over as we're trying to get this creative accelerator off the ground, is that you really, honestly, you cannot do this by yourself. There's just no way. Scott Belsky had this great quote in his book that said, no creative project can survive off the energy of one person. And I can tell you this, even as a writer, there are a lot of people behind the scenes who make this possible.

Damon Brown

Yeah.

Damon Brown

Mmm.

Damon Brown

Absolutely and I and I think and I love Scott Belsky's work too, but yeah exactly you're like I Mean if we want to excuse me, there's a specific part that I think is really important to what you said there's an inner network and an outer network, so your inner network as I talked about in the book is I'm in this particular organization. I have this job I know Pam is an accounting so I can talk with Pam and she'll make sure that all the checks get cleared Everything's organized

particularly if I send her a coffee with took two sugars and a little bit of cream. Like that's precise. That is a network. And I remember it from, you know, when I had a temporary jobs when my freelance was low, right after grad school. And other times I was in organizations where people felt you could feel their chest puff out when they were saying, oh no, you want to talk to Sam over there. This is how you talk to Sam. It was so much pride in that.

Which is beautiful. Like as an observer, I was like, wow, you know this organization well. But then some of those folks end up believing in the organization. Some by choice, some not by choice. And suddenly it's like your network is atrophied. And that's, I think that's me, I'm being kind about it. You don't have a network anymore. I talk about this in a lot of my previous books, particularly, I think it's The Ultimate Bites as an Entrepreneur, I talk about this a lot where.

I was a long time journalist and then I found out my first startup called So Quotable. And I had some issues with it that I needed help with, so I needed a lawyer. And before I started So Quotable, I was the West Coast Silicon Valley correspondent for the New York Post. And so this is when Steve Jobs was still alive. I was up in Silicon Valley. And so, you know, when the iPhone launched and all that, like I was the main person covering it.

But in that, I connected with lawyers, I was doing research into IP, because there was some IP issues with iPhone, all these other things. So when I turned around and actually needed a lawyer, my network gave me four excellent ones. And they were like, pick one. And I interviewed like two of them, and I was like, okay, you're the one. And he's still my lawyer to this day. Like, but that was from creating that network that wasn't bound to the New York Post.

Damon Brown

That network was mine. And so I stopped writing for the New York Post. I still have my network in San Francisco. Like that's a good example of that, where it's like, number one, it doesn't keep you bound to the job. So you need an outer network. That's one. But the second part, which is what you alluded to as far as finding a job or your next career, is that it allows you to have a more diverse community and people that connect with you.

One of my favorite lines in career remixes, I don't know a whole lot of broke CPAs, but I know a whole lot of broke artists. And it's not because CPAs make a whole lot more. I make a decent living as a creator. You know what I mean? So it's like, I make enough to like help take care of my family, my family's fed and all that. So it's not like the chosen profession. It's just that most artists are hanging out with other broke artists and no one knows how to do accounting.

If you're a broke CPA or you have much, much money in the CPA, you have other people in your network where you went to school at or whatever, the firm you work at, that will make sure you're okay.

Us as creators, we don't lack inspiration, but I know a lot of lawyers that are not inspired right.

But that's because they're not surrounded by people who cultivate inspiration or diverse opportunities or diverse experiences. They're hanging out with other lawyers. Of course they're just gonna talk about the law. And I love my lawyer friends, no offense to them. But it's like, if you diversify who you connect with, then it actually enriches your resources. So that's why, excuse me.

Damon Brown

That's why I have like a really good lawyer. That's why I like My Accountant is on Point. You know, it's because of the diversity of the community that wasn't connected to Playboy, to the New York Post, to any of the publications I've written for. That's my network, my community, and they go with me no matter what's going on.

Srini Rao

No. Amazing. Well, you and I could probably talk for three or four hours considering we've been friends for the better part of seven or eight years. There's probably more and more here we could dive into, but in the interest of time, I want to finish my final question, which I know I've asked you before. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

Damon Brown

I gotta go from what we talked about earlier, it's consistency. You can't manufacture unmistakable. You can't reverse engineer unmistakability. What you can do is show up consistently.

and then other people will say, wow.

And your best response is to say, oh, you like it. I'm doing my job.

Srini Rao

Amazing. Well, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us again and share your story, your wisdom and insights with listeners. I've learned so much just talking to you and I love that, you know, your conversations with that you and I have are always so thought provoking and make me think a lot about everything. Where can people find out more about you, your work, the new book and everything you're up to?

Damon Brown

Yeah, thanks, Rainey. I feel the same. My headquarters is dambrown.net, so you can get everything me on there. If you wanna get the books directly from me, from the Bites of the Entrepreneur all the way to the recent one, bill from now, you can check it out there. I can sign copies for you, all that stuff. I also have swag, so it's t-shirts and mugs and all that stuff. I love having passive income sources as well as empowering other people and giving you the opportunity to support the crafts that...

that I do that you really like. So it's also feedback that you're able to give. Also I have my YouTube show at youtube.com slash BrownDamon. It's the Bring Your Work show every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, 1130 a.m. Pacific Standard Time, Vegas time. And I'm talking about the same stuff that you and I have been talking about for the past hour and a half. So it's that kind of vibe. So there's that. And then Career Remix, get the gig you want based on the skills you've got. It is available everywhere as.

as of a week ago, including audio. And I'm super proud of the audio book. We actually did it, my first professional audio book, did it downtown Las Vegas. That's the nice thing about having a traditional publisher. I was actually in the booth, felt like Jay-Z. And it was a wonderful, intense experience. So I'm very proud of the audio book. But get in whatever format you like. And oh, and come to damebrown.net. I have a speaking engagements happening in Michigan. I'm going to Ted in a couple of weeks up in Vancouver. So I'm...

Knock on wood, doing some good traveling safely over the next month or two. I look forward to seeing some of y'all on the road.

Srini Rao

Amazing. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.