How To Monetize Your Blog With Alex Nerney
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Gone are the days when blogs are like their authors’ personal diaries. Today, blogging can be monetized just like any other business, if you know where to start. This is what health and wellness blogger, entrepreneur and adventure junkie, Alex Nerney, teaches to his community at Create and Go, a website that teaches people how to build a blogging business and make money from it. Alex also runs Avocadu, a health and wellness website that reaches over 3 million visitors yearly, as well as two YouTube channels that offer unique content in his two passions – blogging and wellness.
Joining John Livesay on the podcast, Alex shares his personal blog monetization philosophy, which puts emphasis on finding a niche and dominating the one platform where you can find the people who will get the most value from your content. He also talks about affiliate marketing and creating products and services based on what your community wants. With Alex at your side, you won’t have to burn bridges anymore to focus on your blog; he’s already done that for you!
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Listen to the podcast here
How To Monetize Your Blog With Alex Nerney
Our guest on the show is Alex Nerney. Alex is an adventure junkie and he shares with us his passion for sports, performance, taking action and not just writing captions. He said, “Actions speak so loud that I can’t hear what you’re saying.” It’s one of his favorite quotes from Emerson, so much so that he has it tattooed on his arm. He said, “Building a community and dominating one platform are the key to success.” Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is Alex Nerney, who is a highly successful internet entrepreneur running two separates million-dollar websites. It all started when Alex and his business partners quit their jobs, sold almost everything they own and went all-in on that first website. Thus, Avocadu was born within a year reach six figures. That inspired the creation of Create and Go his online business, which teaches others how to start a blog and monetize their passions. With those successes under his belt making over a $100,000 per month online, he saw the potential and started Create A Pro Website, which is a YouTube channel teaching people how to start their own website from scratch. He’s grown that company to over $60,000 a month with over 100,000 subscribers. Now he is helping other people live their dream. Alex, welcome to the show.
I’m glad to be here, John. Let’s do this.
I’m going to ask your own little story of origin. You can go back as far as you want, childhood, high school, college, whatever it was, where you got the sense of who you were, that the normal 9 to 5 was probably not going to be your world.
The most relevant place to come back all the way to would be 2010, where I had a similar experience as many entrepreneurs and many people who start in this space. I was in college at the time when I read The 4-Hour Workweek. At that time, I wanted to do something different. I felt different. I knew I was different. I had no idea what that was or would be, but that book led to opening my brain up. Thinking of the possibilities of internet entrepreneurship, trying something new, and living an uncommon life, those are the things that interested and inspired me at the time. When I graduated, I was like, “I do not want to work a corporate job. I don’t want to work a corporate life. I want to work for myself and try things.” There was a ton of failure before success between 2012 and 2015. When I graduated in 2012, I was working as a personal trainer. I was a bouncer for periods of times. I did end up working corporate for three months at a time and hated it both times. I’m constantly trying to find my way. There are lots of dark days and weird times in there. It was a big struggle in the beginning to figure it all out.
That’s important to say. I appreciate you being that vulnerable because when people see the successes and they don’t hear about the struggle or the challenges, then they can’t relate to you. There are probably some similarities from your expertise as a fitness trainer and an adrenaline junkie to entrepreneurship. Can you connect the dots for us? Are there any metaphors or analogies you have about trying to get more muscle? You have a whole very successful video about how to lose belly fat. Are there any similarities about letting go of negative thinking or anything around that you’ve been able to observed?
One of them that makes a lot of sense to me was a couple. The first is if you wanted to relate to the physical fitness aspect, you’re trying to gain muscle naturally, it takes an enormous amount of time. Most people don’t make it through what I called the poop phase where everything you do in life isn’t working. When you’re starting on a new business, you don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know anything yet. Everything you do sucks. You haven’t learned or gotten any of the skills necessary to make your work any good. You have to earn that. That’s earned through experiences, time and effort. When it comes to gaining muscle, most people gain it incredibly slowly. What happens is most people give up well before any change or any difference can happen, which is a common problem.
Another big one that I think of is when you’ve done some bungee jumping, skydiving and things like that, we can all get in our heads at times. The secrete isn’t think about it as much. The secret is to do things and to trust that you’re going to figure it out when you take that jump or take the leap. We circle back to our story in 2015 when I was struggling through all this stuff. I started a website that gained some traction. I had a serious decision to make where I was working as a personal trainer at the time and my business partner was working as a CPA.
[bctt tweet=”Find your space and dominate it.” username=”John_Livesay”]
We were deciding on, do we go all-in with this business or not? We had this moment of clarity. We’re hiking in Seattle. We are on this trail. I had this thought of, “What if we quit? What if we burn the bridges? What if we went all-in for it?” At the time, we weren’t making any money. We’re making $0 online. It was a moment of, “What if we burn the bridges and made it our only way out?” That’s what we did. We sold all our things. We sold everything. I remember I have a photo of five bags worth of stuff to our name. We quit our great paying jobs. We had some savings. I moved into my dad’s house in Seattle. We ate eggs and rice every day to save money. We blogged harder than anybody else because we had burned those bridges. We had given ourselves only one way out. It was easy to wake up and work 12, 14 hours a day while building the business and building the dream. Those are some analogies.
I’ve heard Tim Ferriss quote, The Daily Stoic and Gary Vaynerchuk about being willing to do things. When I got to meet Michael Phelps, I said to him, “Everyone says, you’re such a great swimmer because of your physique, but I’m guessing there’s something else.” He said, “My coach said to me, ‘Are you willing to work out on Sundays?’ I said, Yes. He said, ‘We got 52 more workouts in a year than the competition.’” This willingness to do something that other people are not willing to do or haven’t thought to do is a constant story I keep hearing over and over again. It’s a secret to success that a lot of people aren’t willing to do or haven’t thought that they need to do. This is a choice. Someone once said, “You could work for someone for eight hours or for yourself for twelve every day.” It’s that willingness because you’re passionate about it. If someone is thinking of starting a blog to make money, which is what your first real niche was.
Our first niche was health and wellness.
They should pick a topic they know a lot about. What are two tips you have for people like don’t start a blog on anything? Any mistakes you would tell people to avoid?
Starting any business, any blog or any website without passion, true desire and true interest in the topic, you’re going to fail. The big thing there is the hard times ahead of you, you can get through those a lot by self-motivation, watching Gary Vaynerchuk, and grind and hustle. There’s no substituting an actual, true and real passionate interest in a topic. My interest in health and wellness was something I always had carried with me. I played football in Arkansas. I’d worked out naturally on my own. I enjoy the topic. When it came down to blogging and talking about the topic, it wasn’t always in the exact same space.
Sometimes I was talking about things that weren’t as relevant to a guy like me that wanted to lift weights and get huge. It was enough of a relation and enough of an interest that kept me in it even when the times were tough. It’s important. I don’t want to scare people off into thinking that you can’t start about a topic you don’t know about. It’s not about your current state of knowledge, it’s your interest. When you build something new, you will learn as you go. I use the example, Creative Pro Website. Dale who’s the face of the channel and the videographer didn’t know much about building websites when we started out. We knew there was a great niche and a great market there. He was interested in the topic though. By building that business, he knows well better than 99.9% of people on the planet about building websites. Because he’s taught 60-plus hour-long videos on the topic, he learned it as he went.
Is there something that a common mistake you see people making when they create their own personal websites or websites to try and sell a product?
Blog Monetization: If you really want to make money, it doesn’t help to do things just to feed your ego. Always think about what other people want.
Focusing too much on themselves is the big one. I know that’s weird like a Spiderman meme where one guy’s pointing at the other guy. People come to your website, they might be interested in you, but they’re more interested in what you can do for them. The biggest business mistake most people make is they constantly are self-interested in doing things that feed their ego instead of concentrating. If you want to make money, you think about what other people want. That’s what I’d say.
What is your philosophy when you’re trying to scale a business to make a lot of money? Is it have a low price point and try to get a lot of clients? Have a high price point and try to get a few clients? How have you done it?
It’s either-or. I sell low-price products on Avocadu. I sell high priced products on Create and Go. We’ve sold $27 products to $650 products. That might not be a high price for some people reading this. You might think of $10,000 products is very high priced. The philosophy on the scale is simple for me. It is what I’m doing scalable. I constantly am asking myself, am I ever going to be able to outsource this one day to somebody so I can continue to leverage things and move forward? If I can’t, I don’t do that thing. There are lots of instances where we ignore something in order to focus on the scaling.
Let’s talk about scaling. There are a lot of people who’ve created online courses, myself included, and there are lots of different ways to scale that. You can either run ads on Facebook or you can create an affiliate program where people promote your course for you and share the revenue. What suggestions do you have for people who want to scale an online course?
The two big ones are going to be a dedicated traffic driver. You need to find your space, your world essentially and dominate that. I’m against the Gary Vee philosophy of, “Do everything, be everywhere constantly in Snapchat, Twitter, Tiktok.” I don’t do that. I don’t advise that. I don’t like that. My philosophy is different. When we’re starting Avocadu, it’s a health and wellness blog. I was trying to do Facebook ads and try to do everything. I saw that one source in particular that was doing well. That was Pinterest. I decided that we’re going to spend all of our time on Pinterest. We ended up getting 300,000 organic visitors per month from that one traffic source because we were dedicated to it. It was where our people were and we were focused on it. That’s a big one because you need the traffic in order to make the sales and the conversions. Affiliate marketing is the other big one, treating your affiliates well.
Do you have a story of how you’ve done that with one of your websites? Any affiliate marketing stories?
We’ve tried different affiliate programs and affiliate plans, and there are certain ones that don’t work like ClickBank. Back in the day, we tried putting our products on there and got all these spammy and shady characters trying to sell our products. I remember going and looking at some of these sites that were sending traffic and being like, “That’s not what I’m happy with.” Later on, we made our own through Teachable and have gotten people making a good $2,000, $3,000 a month selling our courses, which has been cool to see because that’s a full-time income for a lot of people.
[bctt tweet=”You don’t have to burn the bridges, but you do have to almost have that mindset in order to succeed.” username=”John_Livesay”]
What kind of courses do you sell?
The first course we made was this course called The Yoga Fat Loss Bible. Back in the day, we had a health and wellness website. We’re getting a lot of yoga content and we were selling a yoga product that we didn’t like. It’s an okay product, but we don’t particularly believe in it. We’re like, “We’ll make our own.” That started our journey into making these courses. We made that course. I remember that we immediately went from making $5 a sale on an affiliate program to making $37 a sale. If you’re doing things in volume like I am, that leads to $3,000, $4,000 a month. That’s all the money. We made The 21-Day Fat Loss Challenge, which did way more eventually for us, where Avocadu eventually scaled to doing $20,000 to $30,000 per month.
People are buying that course to learn how to lose weight in a short amount of time. There are videos. Any other support that goes with it that makes your course different than all the other weight-loss courses?
The most important part is the community. You build a Facebook group and Facebook community. My mom is our dedicated manager. We have people who have succeeded in the course. We pay them to stay in the course and to help people along in their journey as well. Because in that community, people buy weight-loss courses. It’s not a new original thought but it’s how you treat the customer, and the community ends up mattering the most. We have those two, but then we also have Launch Your Blog Business, which teaches people how to launch a blog and get started making their first $1,000 to $3,000 a month with Pinterest traffic avalanche.
Let’s talk about the blog for a minute before we jump into the other. There’s a lot of people out there that have an idea for a blog. I know somebody who wants to do a blog and created a blog on surviving cancer that would target cancer survivors. How would someone who has blogged about their journey join, inspire and help other people who want to make the decision whether to have chemo or not? What do they get from going to your course? Is create a blog a course that people buy and that’s how you’re making money?
It’s one of the ways. We make the primary amount through affiliate marketing. A large percentage does come through course sales.
For those people reading, affiliate marketing means people are paying to advertise on your blog because you have a certain number of viewers.
Blog Monetization: Create the products that your people want by asking them simple questions.
Essentially, we’re recommending products and services and we get a small percentage of what we recommend. We recommend hosting or a theme that we use to our readers. When they go purchase that theme, we get a small or large percentage from that.
Let’s stay with this example. Someone’s written a blog about surviving cancer. It’s a topic that a lot of people would be interested in, especially if you’re going through it or know someone. How do you scale that? How does anybody find that so that you could sell a course or an affiliate marketing for it? I know you train this, but I want to give people a little appetizer to want to go find out more. What is the first step someone takes besides going to your site and which I’m encouraging everyone to do? What would be your headline that would make me want to click to go find that out besides creating a blog?
We’ve had students go from $0 to $2,700 per month in mental health issues, helping people solve anxiety and depression, and tough topics. The how-to, the steps are a little more granular and things like you find your target audience. That would be a good blog for Pinterest. You create sales centered content that will eventually lead to a sale one day. You create the products that your people want by asking them simple questions. A big a-ha for us is at the time we were creating courses, we started to ask our audience. We’re like, “How much would you pay for this? What would you like to see? What do you need from us?” That helped a lot.
If a lot of people try to change their eating when they are dealing with cancer. They suddenly go vegan or vegetarian. Maybe the blog would say, “Would you buy a vegetarian cookbook?” That’s what I’m trying to give people a little insight into creating the blog, find your audience, dominate one platform, build a community. From there, you can start to make money with an online business because the biggest mistake people make is, they don’t know who their audience is or how to find them.
A big thing too on what helps people succeed a lot is that everything changes all the time. The internet is in a constant state of flux and evolution. What we do differently is we are focused on the community aspect because the community helps when it changes. Pinterest went under serious algorithmic changes. Lauren, my business partner, was absolutely on top of editing, changing our entire course to help modify for those changes. The whole community talks about, “Pinterest is doing this. This is working. This isn’t working anymore.” That community is what helps solve those problems. The course itself and I tell anybody that information is everywhere online. You don’t pay for the information. You pay for the structure. You pay for the organization. You pay for the philosophies and the mindsets that you need to come at this to be successful. As I said at the very beginning, you don’t have to burn the bridges to be successful, but you do have to have that mindset and that state in order to succeed. Those are the things we focus on. We focus on teaching people how to be successful humans as much as bloggers.
You have this wonderful bucket list of things you’re focused on and want to do. I see that you gave a talk in front of a thousand people. Is that something you want to do or is that something you’ve done?
It’s on the list of to-dos. Unfortunately, it has to be changed and updated.
[bctt tweet=”Don’t just write captions. Take action!” username=”John_Livesay”]
There’s not a lot of people gathering around anymore.
I am getting my skydiving license very soon and that is on the horizon.
That’s a license to jump without somebody strapped on you.
You can jump without somebody strap on you while you’re training, but the license means you can go up at any time without a coach or anybody around you and hop out of a plane.
People love to repeat experiences. Some people like the adrenaline rush, some people love swimming like I do, or some people love golf. What is the thrill? I’ve met some people who skydive and they talk about how many dives they’ve done, and they keep doing it over and over again. I’ve heard other people say, “Once is enough. It was fun but I don’t need to keep doing that.” What for you is the attraction to keep repeating it?
I only got this feeling whenever I would play football at a serious level. It was the intense adrenaline dump with fear. It’s a perverse thing, but I love the feeling of being afraid and conquering that fear. How we grow and evolve as humans is that we have to do things that terrify us. That can happen physically, emotionally, and mentally. Skydiving is a very obvious one. Most people would look at that and be like, “That terrifies me.”
Some people got terrified speaking in front of crowds.
Blog Monetization: Having a community helps you thrive in the constantly changing world of the internet.
My best friend is a base jumper. The end goal is I want to go base jumping in Norway. They have this popular spot called Heliboogie, where they take you up in a helicopter up these giant cliff faces and you jump into the fjords in Norway. My friend who’s a base jumper is terrified of doing karaoke. We all come with these internal fears and weird things. The goal in life is to continually look at those things and continually conquer those things. Because every single time you do, at least for myself, I feel like I grow and evolve as a person tremendously.
It’s getting out of our comfort zone a little bit. Even taking a cold shower every day. One of the benefits besides burning fat is you’re telling yourself, “I can tolerate discomfort for a few minutes.” Does it get any easier on your 10th or 100th jump to conquer that fear?
It does. It gets normalized. I have a motorcycle and the first few times riding that thing, I was like, “This is terrifying. I’m probably going to die.” Over time you learn to conquer the fear. You learn to love the skill that you’ve gained.
I remember, when I skydived, they have you waiting your turn to jump, you see somebody standing in the doorway and then they’re suddenly gone like a magic trick and they’ve literally disappeared. I don’t see them anymore. How did that happen? They did that and they’re gone. You don’t see them falling. Your mind is tripping because you’ve never seen somebody where they are there in one second and they’re gone the next. The smell and the G-force on your face. There are many sensations. You are fully alive. That’s what I would say Is what I love most about speaking as well. When I’m in front of a crowd talking about storytelling, I’m not thinking about what my grocery list is.
That’s the motorcycle. Motorcycle involves all four ligaments. Both hands and both feet are working. You are focused on the road because everybody’s had the experience of driving on the highway and there’s some crap in the highway, you go around it. You hit that on a motorcycle, you die. That makes me want to public speak hearing you say that.
That’s the liveliness. Doing that virtually you still have to become 100% and the energy you’re putting out is different because people are on mute many times, but you still have to be completely present and connect with them in a whole another way. Do you have a favorite book or a quote you want to leave us with?
Books are great depending on the place that you’re in. My favorite quote, I’ve got tattooed on my arm. It’s an old Emerson quote. It says, “Your actions speak so loud, I cannot hear what you say.” I’m big into that. Drake said it in a song, “You spend too much time on captions, not enough time on actions.” I am 100% all-in for the people who want to do things and take action. I’m not as much into the talking and theorizing about things. It’s like, “We’ll talk for a little bit.” I’m like, “Let’s go do it. Let’s go get it.” Because in those years, early on that I was struggling and suffering, I was spending a lot of time in my head. I was spending a lot of my time on like, “The wheels were running up there.”
It’s a great way to end because you started off with “Let’s do this.” Taking action, everything from deciding to lose weight and stopping, talking about all the excuses to trying something that gets us out of our comfort zone, whether that’s a blog or skydiving. Alex, thanks for sharing your passion and enthusiasm, not just for life but letting us all feel we have a shot at following our passion and making money doing it too.
We all do. I appreciate you, John.
Important Links
- Alex Nerney
- Avocadu
- Create and Go
- Create A Pro Website – YouTube
- The 4-Hour Workweek
- The Daily Stoic
- The Yoga Fat Loss Bible
- The 21-Day Fat Loss Challenge
- Launch Your Blog Business
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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College Success Habits With Jesse Mogle
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
What do college and business have in common? In many ways, the very habits that bring you success in the former are the same habits that will help you succeed in the latter. Join John Livesay as he discusses some of these habits with professional speaker and lifestyle architect, Jesse Mogle, author of College Success Habits and host of From Sobriety to Recovery podcast. Jesse Mogle’s spent 12 years in college while battling addiction. Looking back at all those years, he reflected upon the things that he did that somehow got him through until graduation despite his condition and condensed all that learning into seven actionable principles that will help you succeed not only in college but even in your career and personal life. Listen in as he talks about the importance of a growth mindset, discipline, flexibility and the sheer tenacity to just show up, ready to receive success.
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Listen to the podcast here
College Success Habits With Jesse Mogle
Our guest is Jesse Mogle, the author of College Success Habits. He said something in the episode, “I’m afraid of missing out on the best version of myself.” He wrote a book to help not only college students but all of us figure out some principles that we can live our best life starting with having a growth mindset and then the importance of embracing discipline and taking action. The one that we talk about is not arguing for your limitations and giving yourself excuses. Jesse is known as a lifestyle architect. I think you’re going to enjoy learning from him tell you how to brand yourself and make your own best life. Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is Jesse Mogle who spent twelve years attending college and is not a doctor. However, he is a good friend and an internationally-published journalist who has worked in Singapore, The Bahamas, and Western Europe. He’s been a radio DJ, a copy editor for many publications, and the lead news anchor for a television station in Los Angeles. He’s worked with companies like Universal Studios and Disney, plus working with schools like the University of Florida and USC. He’s an avid motorcycle rider. He once traveled from coast to coast over 12,000 miles in a summer spreading his mother’s ashes in over 100 locations in 29 states. In his free time, he hikes mountains, adds to his 700 and counting concert attending, takes pictures of street art around the world and drives hundreds of miles for sunrises and eggs Benedict. He was raised on the family farm in Indiana, on the beaches of Florida, and resides in LA. Jesse, welcome to the show.
It’s quite an intro right there. I feel like we could do conversations just off of that stuff.
We didn’t even get to your new book, which is called College Success Habits: 7 Powerful Principles to Help You Excel in College and Beyond. You’re someone who embraces life. That’s what I get out of reading about your adventures. You’d love to travel. You’re passionate about life in general. The fact that you were spreading your mom’s ashes, there’s a story there that’s begging to be told. I’m going to ask you to take us back as far back as you want to that family farm or when you started college or wherever you’d like to start the story.
Where to start the story? If I look back, my family and I moved away from Oklahoma when I was four years old. From there, my stepdad was constantly getting promoted and buying new businesses. He was an entrepreneur. About every year we would move into a new school system. I would get used to meeting new friends. At a young age, I got socially-compliant with the idea that we’re going to move in a year and constantly be on the go. A lot of people think I was a military brat, having a serial entrepreneur as a father who bought car dealerships and sold them at will is the same except your dad doesn’t go to battle. Because of this, I became adept by being able to travel, move around, pack light, and go places. The older I got, the more this bug got in me.
Unfortunately, my mom got sick when I was eight years old with Crohn’s disease. That changed the entire dynamic of the family. We were able to go on the adventures that we had always talked about. Once I got older and into my teens and twenties, this thirst for adventure became my responsibility to take on it and do with as I pleased. From there, I’ve been able to live in and visit over sixteen countries. I’ve worked abroad. I’ve visited or lived in the top twenty major cities in the United States. They say you only live once. You die once, you live every day. I have this fear of missing out on my best version of myself other than many other things. Mind you, a whole sidebar to this conversation could be my 22 years in alcohol and drug addiction. I do believe you have to seize those moments in life and make the best of things. Traveling is one of the best ways to do that.
College Success Habits: 7 Powerful Principles to Help You Excel in College and Beyond
We’ve all heard that phrase, “Fear of missing out” before, but I’ve never heard anybody say, “I have fear of missing out on the best version of myself.” I think that’s key. We know there are a lot of jokes around, when people go to college, that’s when you get drunk a lot and you party a lot and all those things. You have talked about your own challenges with addiction and yet, you’re writing a book about college success. Connect the dots for us.
Twelve years in college and it wasn’t on accident. The easiest place for an addict to hide out is in college because alcohol and drugs are prevalent. No one is paying attention to the abuse that’s going on there. If you binge drink five days a week but you can still manage to get grades and stay in school, no one pays any mind to that. I believe that once I left school, I would get sober, meet a woman, get married, go straight into the American dream, which is not how it played out because my addiction graduated with me. There were those moments when I finally had to stop binge drinking, stop doing the drugs, buckle down, and get the As and Bs in order to pass and get onto the next semester, I was able to utilize a fluid mindset.
When I started to get into addiction recovery and think, “What is it that I could teach the future addicts of tomorrow in order to help them see the choices they’re making today become the habits they have to live with and contend with tomorrow?” I started diving into, “What were my behaviors when I straightened up to get the good grades? What were the principals? What were the drivers behind my behavior that allowed me to get a 3.0 after twelve years in school even though I was not the best student?” When I started making a list of all the principles and asserted to ween them out for the ones that had the most impact on me now and the ones I knew I was using then, the book came from that. That’s where the seven powerful principles manifested from was this whole thought process of what did I do then and what can I teach now?
I love this phrase, “My addiction graduated with me.” That’s powerful that we think we will outgrow our addictions or if we change status, change jobs, change cities that somehow magically that will come. I’m fascinated to talk to you about the connection between habits and addiction. Is it a habit that I tend to want to eat dessert? Is it a sugar addiction? Can you speak to those distinctions and how much of addiction is a habit if you think that is the case at all?
That’s a great question because if you like to have a dessert after every single dinner, if it’s not causing you any detrimental harm, if it’s not bringing about a negative consequence into your life, then generally I would say that you’re maintaining a well-balanced mindset around that dessert. If by eating that dessert you start to shame yourself, you go into a guilt spiral. You start to get jealous about somebody else who has a better body than you. If negative emotions come with the eating of the dessert, now you’re starting to talk about where it’s an addiction because you’re eating it and at the moment you’re enjoying it, but then you’re going to beat yourself up for the next six hours about it. That’s not healthy. When you find yourself doing that, then you can say, “Could I just not have the dessert tomorrow?” If tomorrow comes and you eat the dinner, you are craving it and then you start to shake, then you start to beat yourself up. “I only live once and I’m not going to miss out on life and seize the day.” You start to put that kind of thought process into it. Now you’re starting to create closer into the addiction.
[bctt tweet=”The choices you make today become the habits you will have to live with tomorrow.” username=”John_Livesay”]
It’s a really process. Nobody thinks, “I’m addicted to sugar.” They start to look at themselves and think, “I drink six Coca-Colas, I have two cheesecakes, and I have six cookies.” That’s a lot of sugar. If I told you that I used to drink a fifth of Jameson every day, you’d be like, “That’s a lot of Jameson.” Did you know that 250 grams of sugar a day is an awful lot of sugar? Go and measure that out. I can assure you, it looks like a big humongous pile. Now imagine that you’re consuming that every day, that is going to have detrimental effects on you long-term.
When you talk about the seven principles to help everybody excel, not just in college but beyond. Let’s tap into a few of those. What’s your favorite 1 out of the 7?
Hands down, it’s the first one, develop a growth mindset. Everything is built upon the growth mindset. When I started to write all of these out, it became the most obvious of them all. When I looked back on my history when I was going to college, I would have said I had a growth mindset because that wasn’t a trending term. When Carol Dweck, a professor from Stanford wrote the book called Mindset, she put into the lexicon this idea that there’s a growth versus fixed mindset. Once I heard that, it’s almost like somebody shone a light upon the Grand Canyon and a mountain at the same time. All of a sudden, I could see the depths at which a fixed mindset sends you. I could also see the heights at which a growth mindset could send you.
It is hands down the number one most important thing everybody needs to begin to procure within themselves. The shocking thing when people listen to me talk about mindset is, they think, “If I have a growth mindset around my education, physical fitness or my health and nutrition, that means I have a growth mindset everywhere,” and that is not the case. You think in the gym that you can accomplish anything and you approach that with a growth mindset, but then when it comes to your relationships, your partner or the way you take on new challenges at work, you could have a fixed mindset. Your growth in one area does not mean that your growth in all areas. This is something that I cannot stress enough.
I’m fascinated by that because I look at people and I say, “That person’s in great shape, but their finances are a mess or that person’s successful in business and they look like they’re going to have a heart attack any minute.” They’re stressed out, overweight, smoking and drinking and whatever. I totally concur that success in one area does not mean you’ve got everything handled. However, I am interested in your thoughts on if we are able to master let’s say the discipline we have in the gym, could we then take that to the discipline of keeping track of our calories and our exercise? Could we transfer that and say, “I’m going to be disciplined about looking at how much money is in my checking account and maybe even balancing it.” Do you think there are some transferable skills that one person can take from one area to the next?
College Success Habits: Everything is built upon the growth mindset.
The beautiful thing about a growth mindset is when you prove to yourself that you have it in one area, you can then take the skills that you learned. “Let’s go back to the gym. I’m good at the gym. I may not look like Arnold Schwarzenegger from Conan the Barbarian, but I’m good in the gym.” I’ve learned, you mentioned principle number five, is embraced discipline. If I was going to pick all of them again, how do you pick which 1 of your 7 children is your favorite? Being disciplined is one of the most important attributes to all of this because you have to turn it into a habit. You have to go in day by day if you are good and consistent going to the gym five days a week, sticking to the program, being flexible while you’re in there and learning to adapt.
You are then able to see, “I can do that there.” Let’s take that same skillset and now let’s transfer it over to my finances. There will be a learning curve, which is what everyone should expect. If your credit score is 450, but you can bench press 300 pounds, you’re not going to wake up tomorrow with an 800. It will take time and that’s where the discipline shows in. I think it’s integral that everybody sees where they’re growth-minded and then ask themselves, “Why do I have a growth mindset around my health and nutrition? What does that look like within my health and nutrition? How have I accomplished it there?” You then take that why, what, and how, you would slide it right over to your finances and be prepared for the learning curve, but also be prepared for the success that inevitably will come because you’ve already proven that you can do it in one area, you know you can do it at another. Everybody has at least one area. I don’t care if you’re doing crack and sleeping in an alley, you have figured something out and you are the expert at surviving in that alley. You can take that skill and you can transfer it anywhere you want.
The myth for people in college is once you get out of college, you don’t have to learn anything. You don’t have to read any more books. There are no more tests. You’re done. Certainly, in the business world, things are changing rapidly and new technologies, new books, and new social media platforms. You need to figure out, “Am I going to learn blockchain or not? Am I going to learn to go on Tiktok or not?” It doesn’t stop. I think your book about things that help you excel beyond college is relevant especially for a lot of entrepreneurs. I’m guessing, is one of the principles flexibility since you’ve spoken about that?
That is number six, embrace exercise flexibility.
Let’s keep the metaphor going a little bit. I remember once when I was speaking at a yoga convention and they wanted me to help the people there become better sellers of yoga mats and all the other things that they had at all the booths. I took a yoga class and I wanted to immerse myself a little bit in that world. The teacher said, “Most people either have strength or flexibility, but rarely both when they’re doing yoga.” I thought, “That’s interesting. I could relate that to the business world.” You either have a lot of ad dollars and strength to power your message, but maybe you’re not flexible on price changes in the market or a pandemic coming. You’re not flexible or nimble. What can people do to become more flexible in their life?
[bctt tweet=”Planning is priceless, but plans are worthless.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I love the metaphor that you pulled out there because you think about a company like Coca-Cola and how flexible can they be because they are this humongous Goliath in the industry versus some mom and po company that is going to be a much smaller market share. Flexibility comes from knowing that no matter what comes up in the future if you go into it with a growth mindset, you will figure out a solution. The rigidity that comes is when people say, “This is my plan. I must stick to my plan.” One of my favorite sayings is, “Planning is priceless, but plans are worthless.” You can plan all day long. You should.
You don’t go into the gym with just saying, “I’m going to work out biceps today and wing it,” and hope that you figured out. You go in with a plan. The planning is priceless, but the plans are worthless because, at any moment, some hurdles could get in the way. Now all of a sudden you have to shift because somebody’s on your machine and now you have to do another one. I can’t do this yoga pose because I have tight hamstrings, but I can do this other one that allows me to loosen up my hamstring. The rigidity comes from thinking, “I have a plan and the plan must work. If the plan doesn’t work, I’m going to freak out and shut it all down.” What are you going to do? Are you going to go home and sit in the dark?
Number four is take action in the book. If you’re taking action, then you’re going to be flexible because you’re going to realize that no matter what hurdle comes up, you’re going to be able to hop right over it and go around it. There’s always a way around a hurdle. You have to be willing to take one step. If you want to have flexibility in your life, pick an area now, I guarantee you that something will get in your way. Something will not go right. Driving to work, a light will turn red when it shouldn’t. How can you be flexible at that moment and allow everything to ripple away?
I know for myself and other friends of mine like you who are also speakers, you go to a lot of colleges and speak. They’re not in session, they’re all learning online now and companies aren’t usually having in-person sales meetings for me to speak at. What if we did a virtual sales meeting? What would that look like? Suddenly you’re like, “I have to get good sound and good lighting instead of a home studio with a good camera and make this much more interactive digitally than it would be in person.” Maybe call on somebody in a talk, which you normally don’t do to keep people’s attention going so that they don’t require a whole flexible thing.
In fact, one of my clients said, “Can you help us not only become better storytellers but can you help us train our sales team on how to sell on Zoom?” They’ve never had to be on camera before, unlike you as a former DJ and journalist. You’ve been on camera a lot, but many people haven’t. It’s a skill that we take for granted because we’ve worked on it and been trained on it. You can’t just ask 200 salespeople who’ve never had to present to potential clients on camera to start doing it without any training suddenly. While it’s changed one opportunity, it created a need for another, which is, “Can you help us be good on camera?” I’m like, “I happened to have been on television so yes I do know how to do that.” It’s a fascinating experience if you stay flexible that some other opportunities come out of something where we instantly judge it as though this is a disaster and this is horrible. As opposed to looking for, “How can I stay flexible and maybe figure out something that people would need that they didn’t before?”
College Success Habits: Flexibility comes from just knowing that no matter what comes up in the future, you will figure out a solution.
It’s a swift pivot. Knowing you as being friends with you for as long as I have, I’m not surprised that you were able to see twenty opportunities that came quickly. You don’t get to speak on a stage anymore, which is that one thing of speaking on stage. Now you’ve got twenty things people are asking of you because you have skillsets that go far beyond presenting on stage.
What’s interesting and I would love your insights on this. Oftentimes we get ideas of things we should do, want to do, and might do. There’s a moment in everyone’s life like when you decided you’re going to write this book. It’s not your first book, you’ve written other books, or started your podcast. There’s a moment when everyone has to take action. It’s one of the principles. I remember back in September of 2019, I thought, “I think I’m going to create an online course based on the principles in my book.” There’s an internal voice that can kick in and was like “Are you sure you want to do that? That’s a lot of work. How are you going to sell this? Is anyone going to buy it?”
I was able to quiet that voice down and say, “Let’s do it and we’ll figure out how you’re going to sell it after it’s created.” Don’t overwhelm yourself and stop yourself from doing something. Now you fast forward to February, March of 2020, the fact that the course took me six months to create. It’s like a book, you don’t just whip one out in 30 days if you want it to be good, is now in demand more than ever. As part of a virtual talk, “Do you have a course our people can go through to keep the storytelling skills alive?” I could never have predicted that being something that would help me get virtual speaking gigs. I’m sure you have a story of a time, whether it’s the book you wrote or a podcast you launched. When you had a lot of reasons, doubts or fears, you didn’t know all the details of how to do something, but you still went ahead and did it. Can you speak to that?
To mirror what you brought up with your online course, I’m doing that. For the College Success Habits book, I wanted to teach myself this software where you shoot the videos and you put it on one of these sites. I’m sure you’ve heard of all of them. I’m not going to plug them because they’re not paying me, but there are sites you can put the education stuff on and then people can go register for it. I’d never done any of that. I sat down one day and was like, “Let’s do a quick seven minutes on each one of the principals, 7 for 7 and let’s knock it out. Let’s make it super simple. I’ll shoot it via Zoom. I’ll put a front card, a back card.” That was it. I taught myself this software. I reacquainted myself with the Final Cut Pro editing software. I have all the mics, I had the lighting, and I had everything all ready to go.
I’m doing that with addiction recovery stuff because I also work within the addiction recovery field. Since the college speaking gigs have dried up, the people I would normally be interviewing for my podcast, College Success Habits, are no longer in the office therefore not available. Now I’ve pivoted over to my other podcast, From Sobriety to Recovery, and now I’m gearing everything I do towards that. Luckily for me, I’ve got two different brands going. I’m like, “Well let’s build a program for people in addiction recovery.” It’s like you said, “You don’t knock it out overnight,” but certainly it’s all about taking that first step.
[bctt tweet=”There will be hurdles along the way, but if you are tenacious, you will succeed.” username=”John_Livesay”]
If anyone out there is reading and they’re like, “I want to make a program or I want to start working out.” I call it future pacing but if you start trying to look too far off into the future about what step 27 is going to look like and you haven’t even taken step one, even if you were to plan all the way to step 27. What did we already discuss? Planning is priceless. Plans are worthless. There is a 0% chance that step 27 is going to look the same as it does now when you’re standing at step one. Why even do all that to yourself? Stop. What is something you can do now? Sometimes it’s writing the table of contents for the program.
That’s how I started my first book. I wrote chapter titles on a piece of paper and thought, “What would this look like?” I remember interviewing Rob Angel, another friend of ours who created Pictionary. He said he took out a dictionary and a pad of paper and said, “I want to create a word Aardvark down because now I’m no longer a waiter. I’m a game inventor.” That’s another example of taking that first step. I talked to young college students myself and sometimes they go like, “I don’t know what I want to do for sure.” I said, “You don’t have to know.” All these people want to be lawyers and engineers. I was always amazed when I was in college. I was like, “How do you know that’s what you want to do the rest of your life?” Back in the dark ages, that’s what people did. You did one thing your whole career.
Now I say, “The job you might end up doing doesn’t even exist yet if it’s AI or virtual reality, who knows?” Get skills and be curious. What I love about your takeaway is don’t put all your eggs in one basket. We’ve heard that 100 times. Don’t make all of your sources of revenue one thing. You have two things going on and during a pandemic, unfortunately, there are a lot of addiction issues. People feel out of control and abuse is up. Unfortunately, those things that get triggered and there’s a reason that a lot of liquor stores are considered essential businesses because of people’s addiction to it. I think I can’t even imagine if they know.
Those never got shut down. Even the corner little store that sells maybe fourteen-year-old M&Ms but a lot of booze never got shut down.
If you’re a borderline, you’re functionally, but suddenly you don’t have to be anywhere. It gets a lot easier to hide those addictions. The depression that comes and all that other stuff when things are disrupted. The fact that you’re able to help people do that, it’s a testament to who you are as a person, a man and as a friend. If anybody needs your help in that area or has a college student or is a college student that wants to figure out how can I have a good habit while I’m going to college online? This book could help you prepare because that’s been hugely disruptive. A mutual friend of ours has a son that’s nineteen years old. He was telling me how sad his son was that they had to spend his birthday without his friends. As adults, we hopefully develop some emotional intelligence, but at nineteen it’s not that keen on fair. “Why is this happening to me? Even though it’s happening to everybody.” It’s still your ability to deal with disappointment. Your skills aren’t as honed as they would be hopefully later. I think what you’re doing is amazing. Do you have any last thoughts, quotes or any last principle you want to share from College Success Habits?
College Success Habits: Embody tenaciousness every day.
Number seven, embodied tenaciousness. Every day, you got to show up, step up, and be the best version of yourself. If you want to sit there and you want to argue for your limitations, you want to argue and fight for how your past somehow created this version of yourself and you had no control of it because mommy or daddy didn’t love me enough or I didn’t have enough money like my friends had. If you want to continue fighting for those limitations, congratulations. You get to keep them. It’s all yours. You can sit there and you can complain about how your life is all somebody else’s fault and it’s not your own. You can realize that while the trauma, whatever that might look like that happened to you in the past, wasn’t necessarily your fault.
Trauma that happens to you isn’t your fault. Whatever happened as a child, it’s okay to admit that was not your fault, but it is your responsibility to heal it. It’s your responsibility to move through it. No one’s going to pull your ass out of bed in the morning and say, “Let’s go to the gym and I’ll lift the weights for you so it’s super easy.” No, you’ve got to do it on your own. It’s not that I’m trying to coddle anyone whenever it comes to my coaching. I am very much in your face. I’ll give people the space to complain and to be, “This is what happened to me.” That’s great. I’ll let you have your moment in the sun. We’re then going to snap you back and I’m going to be like a 1960s college football coach screaming in your face that you can do anything you want if you’re just willing to take that first step.
It reminds me of Miss Piggy from the Muppets saying, “I’m so rich, I pay somebody to exercise for me.” I thought that was hilarious because it was never something that I ever thought about. I was like, “I’m sure if somebody wishes they could pay someone to exercise for them and it would count for them.” This concept of no one’s going to come to rescue you. My whole TEDx Talk is called Be The Lifeguard of Your Own Life. I think why you and I are such good friends is we have that similar philosophy that we’re responsible for our own life, our own feelings, and our own healing. Jesse, if people want to follow you, hire you, where should they go?
First and foremost, if you go to JesseMogle.com and you go up to either College Success Habits if that’s where you find yourself or From Sobriety Recovery, there’s a little contact link you can click on, it’ll give you a registration form. You can answer a couple of questions. That goes directly to my inbox. By all means, the College Success Habits podcast is located anywhere you listen to podcasts as well as From Sobriety to Recovery. I was new and noteworthy for both of those shows on iTunes. It’s not hard to find me there. @FromSobrietyToRecovery on Instagram. I’m huge on there. I’m always there answering questions, also social media at @JesseMogle because I’m the only one on the planet.
It is not hard to find me. Google Jesse Mogle. I’ve been around the world. I have yet to find another Jesse Mogle. That is not permission to name your child Jesse Mogle. Do not take this from me. Please go to my website, click on College Success Habits or From Sobriety to Recovery, reach out, whatever it is. I call myself a lifestyle architect. I help you build the life and have the lifestyle you’ve always desired. It is one step away. It is one of my genius powers. Whatever you say you want to create, I can help you lay out the plan and be ready for some hurdles. I guarantee if you’re tenacious, you will succeed.
You’re the lifestyle architect. Thank you, Jesse, for showing us how to lay our plans out and congratulations on your wonderful book, College Success Habits. Thanks.
Important Links
- Jesse Mogle
- College Success Habits: 7 Powerful Principles to Help You Excel in College and Beyond
- Mindset
- Rob Angel – Previous episode
- Be The Lifeguard of Your Own Life – TEDx Talk
- College Success Habits
- From Sobriety to Recovery – Apple Podcasts
- @FromSobrietyToRecovery – Instagram
- @JesseMogle – Twitter
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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Data Fluency With Zach Gemignani
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Even as we get bombarded with so much data today, many still don’t know how to use it for their business. It is time to change that and start to become data fluent before it is too late. In this episode, John Livesay interviews the founder and CEO of Juice Analytics, Zach Gemignani, about the need for data fluency, learning the language of data and turning it into an empathy tool that will set you apart from your competitors. More importantly, Zach highlights the role of taking action. After all, data without implementation is wasted money. He shares the ways we can present and use it effectively in our business in providing analytics and solutions that can positively impact people most.
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Listen to the podcast here
Data Fluency With Zach Gemignani
Our guest is Zach Gemignani, the Founder Juice Analytics. We talked about the need to be data fluent. It is a language that if you can take data and turn it into an empathy tool, it will set you apart from your competitors. He said, “The last mile that people have to go to make data something that people take action from is the secret sauce.” Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is Zach Gemignani, who is the Founder and CEO of Juice Analytics, which is the company behind Juicebox. Zach is passionate about helping organizations present their data in ways that allow them to show it and not just tell it. He’s focusing on using some visualization solutions with his platform Juicebox. He focuses on advertising, media, healthcare, and research. They work with companies like Cablevision, HealthStream, and the University of Notre Dame. Zach has many years of experience in design analytics and data visualization. He’s also the coauthor of Data Fluency. Zach, welcome to the show.
John, I am happy to be here.
Our own little story of origin is quite interesting because I love the story of origins. We connected because we’re both passionate about storytelling. I work with sales teams on how to turn boring case studies into case stories. What you do is you’re turning relatively boring data into stories. That’s what made us want to connect and help clients with a combined solution. Before we get into that, let’s talk about your own story of origin. You can take us back to childhood or school wherever you want. Were you always somebody who loves numbers?
I was someone who was into math early. One of the interesting bits about my origin story comes from my parents. It helps inform a little bit about what we do at Juice and what I’m passionate about. I grew up in a family where my father retired from his job early so he could become an artist. There were a whole bunch of lessons in there for me, both around learning about art and visual representation, but also about pursuing your passion. That was an important lesson growing up for me. My mom was an educator. She’s a teacher. There were things about her passions that I’m sure I picked up in our interest in teaching people about how to communicate data better and doing that visually.
I often think that those two things tied together. As a company, Juice was founded many years ago. I started the company with my brother, Chris. We got to a point in our careers that we wanted to do something together and get out of the corporate world and strike out on our own. We knew we wanted to do something with data. He has a great computer science and data background. He’s the technologist and I am not, but we wanted to do something together. We decided we’re going to start this company. We didn’t quite know what we wanted to do, except that we wanted to do something with data. We found this passion in data visualization and around communicating data. This is a problem we saw long ago, and it’s a problem that organizations deal with still a lot these days. In fact, almost every organization we run into struggles with the fact that they’ve collected a lot of data, but they aren’t great at finding ways to present and share that data in ways that are impactful and useful to the people who should be looking at that data.
Give us an example of a company that you worked with or worked for where you see a lot of time and money is spent collecting data and the whole purpose of collecting that data was to allow management to make better decisions. Otherwise, it’s a stab in the dark of, “Should we do this or that? What do people want?” What happens when you present a bunch of data in a way that’s overwhelming and too hard to consume for top-level management decisions?
[bctt tweet=”Data without implementation and interpretation is really wasted money.” username=”John_Livesay”]
That is the standard mode. People present data in lots of charts and in complex reports. I will often go back to one of our first clients. This is where we found our passion. We were working with a client in the online schooling space. They wanted to understand better their customers and students who were unenrolling and the journey that customers were going through as they were working with this company. We had done a bunch of analysis and put together some results. I remember it was a day before our presentation to be able to share that data. At the time, we were working in my basement because we were just a startup.
Chris and I started to think about how we could share this data in a way that was going to be far more compelling that would capture the imagination of the executives. It’s hard to take a bunch of dry data, get people to understand it, and have an emotional connection with it. What we did through that night was we created an animated movie out of the data that presented how students came and left the schools, where they went, and things that happened to them. We got excited about this and we felt like this was a way to try to hook our audience and help them have more of a visceral connection with the data.
We presented that the next day a little tired having stayed up the night. We were younger then and it did have a great impact. That was the jumping-off point. That was the epiphany for me. If you can get creative with data and visually show it in ways that are going to be far more engaging, you can open up the minds of your audience so that they start to understand what’s going on with that data. That’s what’s going to get them closer to doing something about it. You need to make that human connection and that emotional connection with data.
I love what you said because it’s the same thing that I talk about, which is stories allow us to be compelling, capture our imagination, and have this emotional connection. Everybody buys products and services or changes their behavior emotionally first and then backs it up with logic. The challenge is data are traditionally left-brain analysis where decisions are made. Behavior changes are done on the right side of the brain, which is where imagination lives and all of that potential lives. You bridge that gap. I would say that what you’re doing here is the data without implementation and interpretation is wasted money.
This is something that a lot of organizations don’t necessarily look at or understand, but it’s a fact of a lot of situations where companies have spent a lot of money on gathering data. There’s been a lot of investment in big data and data warehouses, and getting all that information together. There’s no value created out of that data. In fact, that data should be considered a cost up until the point that it is delivered to people who make decisions and those people start to make better decisions based on the data. It’s a concept that we’ve talked about for a long time that we call the last mile of data. It’s that last step of how do you present data in ways that are going to be easy enough for your audience to understand what it means and how it ties to things that they can do in their job?
What actions can they take based on what they’re seeing so that they can make a better outcome for their organization? It’s that last step that a lot of companies struggle with. I’ve theorized that people ran out of energy, in a way. They get the ball to the 2-yard line and they’ve exhausted the resources. If the data part of what you’re doing has been driven by a technology organization that feels like the job is done by simply making the data available, that is also not a success. We’re trying to get people across that finish line or into the end zone so that people are using that data. That’s the key.
Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication
It’s a great tweet, “Go the last mile with your data so people can make better decisions.” There’s a book called 212: The Extra Degree and it’s all about water doesn’t start boiling until it hits 212 degrees. When it comes boiling, it creates steam and the steam could move the train engine, let’s say. Many of us get all the way to 211 degrees and then we dial down the heat. This analogy holds up going the last mile. If you’ve got all this time, money, effort, and you’re exhausted, and you’re like, “It’s good enough. We got the Excel chart, let them figure out how to make this mean something.” It’s that extra degree of effort that you’re bringing.
To go back to our combined origin story and talking to you about storytelling, it’s a skillset that a lot of people haven’t yet learned. They need to learn of combining both the understanding of the data, but then how do you connect that to your audience and to people. It’s a mix of skills there that combines understanding the psychology of your audience, what they do in their job, and what does it take for them to be more successful, which is a sales attitude. If you’re in sales, it’s instinctual to understand your audience and what makes them successful. If you’re in a reporting role or a data analyst or something that is not instinctual, it ties to data visualization, which we’re experts at of thinking about what is the best way to present data, and how do you make it intuitive? It ties to the structure of storytelling. A lot of what we think about at Juice is how do we take the concepts of storytelling and bring that into how you present data?
What you described that you are turning this data from the online school into an animated movie, you were taking data and turning it into an empathy tool, which is the key to storytelling and sales? I tell my clients all the time, “Put your empathy hat on. The better you can describe a problem, the better people think you have their solution.” There’s all of that storytelling journey of painting a picture of who, what, where, and when. This is the moment in time that you took and collected the data, and then here’s the problem we discovered.
If you are telling case stories, for example, you tell the solution and then the secret sauce that’s similar to that last mile. What most people don’t use when they’re telling stories whether it’s a case story, their own story of origin, or even an elevator pitch is what is life like after these changes have been made. When you’re telling that story of the online school and seeing the animated film, they then could have empathy for the students and knew what they needed to change to keep students from dropping out or to get the students to give them more referrals, something along those lines.
You touched on a couple of things that are important themes in data storytelling. One is setting those stakes is something that people don’t do. A great story has high stakes. This is why every action movie is about how do we save the world? They’re always cranking up the stakes, but whatever story you’re telling has to matter to people. It has to connect to why is this important to you. This is something that often you’re never going to see in a traditional dashboard or some Excel report. No one’s setting up why this matters, why it’s important, and why if you make that change, something good is going to happen. We do try to incorporate that into the data stories that we created. It’s setting that stage and those stakes, and showing what actions you take. If you take those actions, what the value is.
The other piece that I love to connect to storytelling is the specifics. Data has this nature to it that is an abstraction. Data is taking a bunch of things that are happening in real life and turning those into numbers. Often, we are rolling up, averaging, or summing up those numbers in a way. You get separated from the real thing that’s happening on the ground that you’re measuring. An event that’s related to that is the COVID pandemic. We’re always talking about the numbers and how big those numbers are, but those are real deaths. We talk about 180,000 deaths in the United States. Those are real people.
[bctt tweet=”Whatever story you’re telling has to matter to people; it has to connect with them.” username=”John_Livesay”]
The ability to combine both the big picture, the analytics and the numbers, but also be able to bring in the specifics that are way more likely to create those emotional connections that you’ve talked about. It’s hard to connect to a big number, but if you bring it to a person and you have a human face on something, that’s something where you start to build that bond with your audience and they start to feel what you’re expressing through the data. One of my favorite quotes is, “Specificity is the soul of narrative.” It’s by John Hodgman, another well-known podcaster. He likes to say, “When people tell stories, you want to bring in the specifics because that’s where you do connect with people.”
I work with people all the time when they’re telling a case story of that exposition. I said, “Was this last year, six months ago? Where was it? What city are we in?” Give your client a name. Don’t say, “My client or my customer.” Nobody wants to be thought of as a customer. You don’t want to be thought of as a vendor. If you want to warm things up, give this person a name, say where they work, describe their pain point in such a way that people can see themselves in the story. That’s where the magic happens is when that empathy comes in. Storytelling allows people to change behavior without being pushy because when we tell a good story visually and with some structure to your case stories, people see themselves in it.
Imagine you’re telling another online school or even a major university that had to go online in ways they never expected before and they’re struggling to try and figure out, “How do we justify our higher fees that we have for live classes?” That is much like I’ve had to do as a speaker. What value am I bringing to a virtual keynote that might make it even more impactful than in person? You have to think like that and have that story ready to go so that if you’re struggling to justify your prices as a Harvard or Pepperdine or whoever it is.
Imagine the journey of what this person’s life is like and get specific. If you look at the data, I know a lot of major universities have people from foreign countries coming here to become educated. If that’s not possible and they have to do it virtually, the more specific we get into one person’s journey, then it applies. It’s the same thing when I work with nonprofits. I go, “Don’t tell us about how many meals you deliver. Talk about one person’s story of why they needed a meal delivered in the first place and what would happen to them if they didn’t have the food coming.”
You can zoom out and be like, “That’s happening a thousand or a million times.” You can then multiply that out and it’s powerful if you can connect that stuff to a dollar figure, so people relate to that. Those are great places to start in the stories. One of the things that I’m curious about and that I’ve been surprised by is how much bringing data storytelling can be valuable in the sales process. While we work with lots of clients who are building data products to deliver value to their customers, the customers they already have, and had this data conversation with our customers.
There are many scenarios where it feels like bringing data into the sales process in a way that ties the storytelling can be powerful. It’s the combination of telling those compelling stories of the value of what your product delivers and being able to back that up with often interactive data so that you can have a customized story that creates that foundation of like, “This is a compelling message in our sales.” There’s also this foundation, a solidity to data that some people react to. I’m curious in your experience, how much bringing data have been valuable in the sales process?
212: The Extra Degree
The key mistake most people make when they’re selling is, they start with data. For example, one client was saying, “Our equipment makes surgeries go 30% faster. That’s what we’re opening with. Do you think that’s a good hook?” That’s data. I’m like, “There’s no story there.” I zoomed out and I said, “What is it? Paint the picture. What are they doing? Without your equipment, how long is the typical surgery?” They said, “It is 2.5 hours.” I said, “If we do the math, what’s 30% faster?” “Only 1.5 hours.” You could try and make a case for the doctors. They could do one more surgery and make so much more money, but a much more compelling story was, “Imagine how happy Dr. Higgins was at Long Beach Memorial using our equipment. He could go out to the patient’s family in the waiting room, where every minute is like an hour, and tell them an hour earlier than expected that their loved one did not have cancer.”
It’s the same data point, but it’s wide and that data point matter. That’s what you’re emphasizing.
The visuals that could go with that could be anything. Imagine this person’s telling that story and they have an image of a clock and every minute feels like an hour. If you’ve ever been in a waiting room waiting for a loved one to come out of surgery, you know that’s the truth. That shows empathy. Who you have in your stories? That’s the real secret that we bring to the party. It is the characters that a lot of people don’t even think about. They don’t think about the patient and the doctor. They hadn’t even considered telling a story of what the patient’s family was going through. The doctor then says, “That’s why I became a doctor, for those moments where I could give good news and earlier than expected makes me a hero.” When the salesperson tells that story to another potential doctor, that doctor sees themselves in that story.
It’s bringing humanity and empathy into the equation. I’m sure people in sales struggle with that case. I might argue it’s even more of a challenge in the data world where there’s this separation. People think of things like data and they often create this separation from the people who are on the other side of that data. It is often like, “Go ahead.”
You mentioned something about interactive data. Tell me more about what does that look like to people?
This is fundamental to what we do. We have this technology platform called Juicebox, which is a self-service tool for being able to build interactive data stories, which is a more compelling way of presenting data than traditional dashboards and reports. When we think about data stories, we’re not thinking about a static collection of slides that you might be familiar with a number of charts on it. We’re thinking about giving your audience the ability to navigate through the data in a guided and narrative-driven way. The solutions that we create with Juicebox allow the users of that data to walk through the data where we’re explaining what’s going on with the data, why it’s important, all the things we’ve touched on. We are giving them specific examples. We’re also giving them the power in that interactive data story to be able to choose things that matter to them.
[bctt tweet=”When people tell stories, you want to bring in the specifics because that’s where you really do connect with them.” username=”John_Livesay”]
As the user, everyone who comes to a report or data is going to have their own needs or things that they care about. They’re coming from the perspective of, “I care about this product or this region or these types of customers.” They have their own needs. You’re trying to meet them in a place where you’re telling this guided story through the data, but the user is also empowered in that process to be able to select where they care about. The data is going to change as they select things or as they explore the data. It makes the story relevant to that audience member, which is important. You want people to see themselves in the data or see what’s most relevant to them so that they can understand what they should do about it.
CFO cares about something different than the CMO would care about.
We can argue their stories, there will often be a number of different metrics you’re looking at that are the key metrics for your organization, but a CFO is going to want to drill in on cost-related things. A CMO is going to be worried about leads that are being generated or revenue side things.
“What if we raise our price by X percent and keep selling the same? What would that do?”
You’re mixing. In our data world, we want to be able to have this balance of letting someone explore and customize based on their needs, but in a way that it doesn’t require them to be a data analyst or to be super familiar with the data. It’s a challenging balance to find, but it’s what people want when they’re working with data.
We all are familiar with Excel sheets, which allow you to change one variable and see what the differences are. If you don’t have to be the first person that manually goes in and changes it and then still looks at a chart, but can click to change one thing and then see the visuals of sales going up or down. That’s to me is more engaging than considering looking at an Excel spreadsheet, which is you’re solving a problem.
Data Fluency: Almost every organization you run into struggles with the fact that they’ve collected a lot of data, but they aren’t great at presenting and sharing it in an impactful and useful way to the people who should be looking at that data.
If you send someone an Excel spreadsheet, the chances of them opening it up and wanting to get in there and deal with it are a little low. Making your stories attractive, intuitive, and easy to get started with is important. We’re focused on the design and the user experience so that we can give people data in ways that feel a lot more like the mobile apps that we work with or the modern website experiences we have, rather than feeling like, “I’m opening up a spreadsheet. I got to go figure this out.” Attention spans are short.
You’re like a Sherpa. If you look at the data of climbing Mount Everest, you’re trying to tackle it, get up there by yourself, and you get frustrated and maybe lost even. If you’re the Sherpa who’s been up this mountain many times and knows the shortcuts, you guide them through this data. It almost reminds me of some video games that let you create your own ending. If you click on this, then that completely changes how the story ends.
To go back, I will often think about those old Choose Your Own Adventure books. A data story can be a little different than a traditional narrative that has a clear sequence and gets you to a single ending. In an interactive data story, there’s an opportunity for the reader to decide what they care about and to make some choices in the paths. It should be as compelling as a regular story, but you’re giving that user some amount of autonomy and control of what they’re seeing.
What’s where the title of your book comes from. Data is fluent. There’s a fluidity to it, as well as it being a language. Are you fluent in data as you are fluent in Spanish or something? It’s a clever play on words of thinking of it not being the solid piece of ice, going back to the 212-degree thing, that can become steam and move things if you have fluidity and understand that language in a way that encompasses visuals.
We wrote that book because we saw a lot of organizations gathered a lot of data. They’re trying to figure out how they get value out of that data. They want people in their organization to be data-driven. We hear this a lot, but organizations struggle with how to make that happen. There are a lot of skills and changes in mindset that need to occur to get to this point where you’re using that data. You’re incorporating it into how you do your work, how you make decisions, and how you talk to each other. It’s language-based. You’re trying to teach people both the language of data, but also how to express yourself using data. Talking about it with you, it’s not just about data.
People need to understand that we can talk about data-driven, but that shouldn’t mean that the data tells me something and therefore I do something. Humans are an important part of this. It’s not dictatorial. We don’t want that. We all know where that ends up. It’s the combination of being able to incorporate data into how you think and how you have conversations with clients and so forth, but bringing that human aspect into it. You are recognizing that people are driven by emotion and you need to connect to what’s important to people. All that stuff needs to be in the mix. It’s the combination and it’s powerful.
[bctt tweet=”The magic happens when empathy comes in, and storytelling allows people to get others to change behavior without being pushy.” username=”John_Livesay”]
How did you come up with the name of your company and the product?
Juice Analytics is the name of that company. When Chris and I were thinking about naming the company, we were thinking about how do you extract value from data. We had this concept of extraction and squeezing things out of it, creating the essence of it. That’s how we got to the word juice and we were attacked on analytics that people think we’re making juice. We get a lot of emails for people wanting to sell us juicing equipment.
It sharpens a lot of strange SEO outcomes, I’m sure.
The product itself that we are selling as a self-service platform is called Juicebox. That was a natural extension of taking all of our best practices and thinking about how do you tell data stories and putting that in a box so other people could use it.
Who would you say is your ideal client? Who needs this platform that when they find it, they’re happy?
It’s a broad range. There are a lot of people in organizations. I’ll give you a few examples of people who are working with data. They have an important audience that they’re trying to influence with that data and yet, they struggle with bridging that last mile. Marketing professionals and marketing analysts who are running campaigns and measuring their performance of those campaigns, the most important thing that they need to do at the end is to define what has been the impact of that campaign and how do we improve it next time. Packaging that up, extracting the message, and communicating that to the people who have the budget is critical. Whether that’s a marketing agency or that’s an internal person, that step of showing the value that you delivered and how you can do better or tune it is a common use case for us.
Nonprofits who want to tell their story of what they’re doing is delivering an impact. Sometimes, that’s done in a public way. They want to put it on their website and show that they’ve served an audience and it’s delivering a lot of value. That’s another example. Anyone who’s done consultants and people who do research, done a survey, or gathered a bunch of data, they now need to show the results in a way that is going to demonstrate the value of what they’ve done, and the messages and the conclusions that they’ve reached. We get deep into this because we talked a lot to organizations. It’s hard not to find organizations and people who at some point, don’t need to take some data that they have and have a much better way of being able to deliver that so that they can reach the audiences who should be looking at that data.
The company name is Juice Analytics and the website is JuiceAnalytics.com. The book that Zach co-authored is called Data Fluency. Do you have any last thoughts or quotes that you want to share with us?
I don’t have a quote, but I do appreciate your emphasis on creating those emotional stories. I hope that we continue to work together to learn more about that. That’s a piece that we would love to incorporate even more into how data analysts, and people working with data can make the connection to people and change their minds. It’s been a real pleasure.
Thanks for coming to the show, Zach, and sharing your brilliance.
Important Links
- Juice Analytics
- Data Fluency
- 212: The Extra Degree
- Choose Your Own Adventure
- Juicebox
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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